Beep. “Dr. Bernham’s office calling, to remind Mr. Rostov of his appointment tomorrow, three p.m., for a cleaning.” Beep.
Whirr, beep. “Mr. Rostov, Mrs. Wallace at Ludovic’s calling. That’s two tickets you haven’t picked up. You must consider, Mr. Rostov, that others might have wanted them. Many people decide at the last minute, especially if they need only one seat. And it’s more than three weeks since Walpurgis Night, Mr. Rostov. I hope all is well with you?” Beep, beep, beep.
“…on the anniversary of Kafka’s birth.”
Silence.
I went out, I came in, I ate and slept, I made my decisions and laid my plans, I changed my mind and my plans. The only fireworks I saw were those that made their lonely way up into the sky above the horizon of buildings outside my window on Independence Day. It seemed to me that I didn’t know myself and that I might never have. It seemed to me that I had let myself make a terrible mistake.
34
Alexis Rawling Mondleigh
A woman seated on the stoop of an Upper East Side New York City townhouse could be anyone. She could be anyone dressed in a long terra-cotta skirt and forest-green blouse, her brown hair held back by a broad ribbon of the same colors, her round arms bare and tanned and her face cupped in her hands, as if she were tired after a long journey. Suitcases waited by the door, a pair of them.
Alexis looked up. She stood up, smoothing her skirt. She didn’t smile. “Gregor. You’re here. I thought…”
“I thought for a minute you were Miss Sarah,” I admitted, and took a deep breath. “You look well, Alexis.”
She didn’t answer.
“Very Italian,” I said. Then I came to my senses. “I didn’t expect you back until—”
“Aren’t you going to let me in?” she interrupted.
“Of course, I’m sorry. You must be tired. I’m almost packed; I can be out in under an hour. I’m sorry, Alexis,” I said. I took the house key out of my pocket and gave it to her, so I could pick up the suitcases. I handed her the little sack of toiletries I had been out to purchase. She didn’t move. I stood holding the suitcases. “If you’ll get the door?” I asked her.
She unlocked the doors and held them for me. I put the suitcases down at the foot of the stairs and went along to the kitchen. There were just the breakfast dishes to be washed, just an overnight bag to be packed. I had reserved a room at the Gramercy Park Hotel. I should have left a day earlier: I’d known I was just staying on.
“Gregor.” She had followed me.
“I’ll be just a minute here, Miss—Mrs.—”
I felt stupid. I’d been stupid. I was caught out in my own stupidity.
“Gregor, stop that.”
I turned off the water.
“Look at me.”
I looked at her, ashamed.
“I’ve left him. Theo. In Paris.”
She waited.
“Did you hear me?”
“I think so,” I said. “Maybe you should repeat it?”
“I’ve left my husband, left Theo. He’s in Paris. Or that’s where he was last night.”
“Why?”
It wasn’t what she expected me to say, but I had to be careful not to presume. I don’t know what she saw, watching me the way she did.
“I’ve got to admit, I hoped I’d find you…oh, drunk and unshaven, or something.”
I was sorry to disappoint her. “I gave myself two weeks.”
“It’s been four.”
“Almost five.”
I didn’t know what to say. There was no reason to presume she had come back for me. To me.
“Two weeks until what?” she asked cautiously.
“Alexis, just let me get these dishes into the dishwasher, and I’ll pour coffee—and—” And what? I didn’t know. I just knew I’d be better able to deal with it over a cup of coffee. I was afraid, of course.
“You aren’t making this easy for me, Gregor.”
“I’m sorry,” I said sincerely.
“Or are you trying to make it easy? To let me down easy?”
I bent to pull out a tray. “No,” I said. “But this is his house. His kitchen. You’re his wife. It doesn’t seem right—”
She thought for a moment. “All right, I can see that. I understand. Should I take my suitcases up to your room?”
“No.”
I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what to do. Everything I said came out sounding like what I didn’t mean. I made up a tray and she followed me up the back stairs, carrying the coffeepot.
I put the tray down on the writing table. My own suitcases stood ready by the door. She set the pot down and went to stand by the big window but didn’t look out. She looked around the room. “This is really nice, Gregor, and big too.”
I poured out two cups of coffee.
“You’ve got the best view in the house, don’t you?”
“Mr. Mondleigh is a good employer.”
Her blouse fell softly from her shoulders, and the skirt hung in gentle folds. The effect was plump and delicious, like a peach. The window framed her, so that the sky began at her shoulders.
“Theo was angry,” she said. I gave her a coffee cup. I didn’t sit down either. “At me. Thanks. Humiliated too, of course.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him—Well, first, that it wasn’t going to work. I thought that was pretty clear, because it was clear to me and I don’t know anything. There’s a lot more to love than sex. I know, it’s a cliché.”
“The cliché might be an underrated manner of speech.”
She was too involved in what she wanted to say to mock me. “And I didn’t want to love him, to be able to love him. That’s what I wanted, to not be able to. I didn’t give him a chance. Poor Theo, and yes, I’m ashamed of myself. But I did tell him about you when he asked me why. He said things were going great, and maybe he thought they were, maybe he didn’t know? So I told him there was someone else.” She challenged me, “I could have done it, you know; I could have stayed with Theo.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” I said.
“Why were you afraid?”
“Because—you know, he’s not a bad man. In fact—”
“And he was trying. Whenever we weren’t doing anything, a museum, or seeing a sight, nothing scheduled—if there was any danger we might have to talk, I think—he’d send me shopping. And everything kept reminding me of you.”
“We never went shopping,” I reminded her.
“And the sex—You know, Gregor? It’s always sex, always the same. But, Gregor? I didn’t know you loved me, until Theo made love to me.”
I didn’t want to hear about it.
“You didn’t tell me,” she said. “Why didn’t you? You shouldn’t have just let me be so stupid. I am so sorry, Gregor.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I should have known right away. And I guess I did. I should have told him right away, but…That’s why it took me so long. Did it take me too long? Are you sorry to see me, Gregor?” she demanded. “What is it? You can tell me the truth. You owe me that.”
“Sorry?” I set my coffee cup down; it was rattling in its saucer.
“Well, you haven’t…or anything.”
Not because I hadn’t felt like it. Not because I hadn’t wanted to. “Alexis, what I’m feeling—I could explode, spontaneously combust, like in Dickens. All this time, I didn’t know if you had any idea. Or if you had any idea, if you’d do anything. Have the nerve to, be foolhardy enough to—You are such a mystery to me, I never know.”
She needed it clearer. “Then you aren’t angry?”
“Not angry. Not displeased. After knowing every minute of every one of these long days how different it would be if you were with me? Really there, here, present, not just remembered. Or imagined.”
“That’s almost as good as drunk and unshaven,” Alexis said, her voice shaky but her eyes, under that Renaissance forehead, shining.
> “We aim to please.”
She was still puzzled, and she had every right to be. But I wanted no danger that later either one of us would think that I had taken advantage of her.
“Does Mr. Theo know—?”
“Who you are? Yes. He needed to be convinced; he didn’t just believe me. Then he said—Well, in essence he said I was letting myself be taken advantage of.”
“Taken in,” I revised.
“Because I don’t know anything about you, he said.” She was speaking as carefully as I was, now.
“And you said?”
“What could I say? I don’t, I don’t know anything about you, not the way he meant it. And I love you.”
I jammed my hands into my pockets and locked my kneecaps. “Will you get a divorce?”
“Oh yes. There’ll be no difficulty about that.”
“Will you marry me?”
It was the question. I couldn’t put it more clearly.
“You mean, marry you on your terms. You mean keeping my money. Putting it in both our names.” She took a breath and admitted reluctantly, “I don’t like it, Gregor.”
“For what it’s worth, I do entirely love you.” The plain truth.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” And smiled, as if she had as much riding on this as I did. “That’s all right then. But Gregor?”
Her tone of voice warned me.
“I want to live your real life too. First. For a while, a year or two. And I mean the really real one, not this sham.”
“This sham?”
“Pretending you aren’t what you are, as if you were ashamed.”
I’d never thought I might be ashamed, but when I thought of it, I could have laughed. It never does to underestimate an intelligent woman. And for all her compliance and kindness, generosity, and courage too, the woman was above all intelligent.
“We could hire out as a couple,” she suggested.
“You can’t do that. What can you do?”
“Don’t underestimate me, Gregor.” I’d made her angry.
“It would be a waste. Of your education, your mind, your abilities.”
“No more than yours,” she countered. “Just so that we can start out really together,” she said.
“You mean,” I worked it out, “starting out equal.”
“Will you?”
I wasn’t the only one allowed to make terms. I played for time. “Those colors, that outfit—”
“Do you like it? It’s sort of Etruscan, I thought.”
“I was thinking Renaissance, but you’re right.”
“And flattering,” she said, without vanity.
“Very flattering. You look…not naked but…the way you look, naked.” I didn’t know who I thought I was kidding, hesitating like that. “All right, Alexis. I think you’re probably right.”
“About what?”
“No more sham life. The real one, for the two of us.”
She put down her coffee cup. “For a romantic, who’s been proposed to twice, I have to say it’s been a disappointing experience.”
“Has it?” I was giddy with it all, as if I had just won Wimbledon a second before, just played the winning point, and was just beginning to comprehend my victory. “Then”—and I fell onto my knees before her, in the time-honored tradition—“Alexis, dear heart, I’ve been helplessly in love with you since I first saw you, reeling down Sixty-Second Street, quite drunk—”
“I was not,” she protested. “Tipsy but not—And you didn’t, either.” But she was laughing too now. “I’d better take what I can get. Get up, Gregor, and—”
I had her in my arms before she could say any more, and she had me in her arms. Memory and imagination, even the poignancy of dreams, they are nothing like the flesh itself. Reality is the most poignant dream.
At the end of the long, satisfying kiss, “Yes,” I said. “Now, we’d better get going.”
“All right.” She wasn’t even surprised. She didn’t move out of my arms.
“I’ll finish packing, we’ll rinse out the coffeepot, get these cups into the dishwasher. We have to see your parents of course.”
“We?”
“We,” I told her, firmly. I stayed within her arms, looking down at her face.
“They’re in Connecticut.”
I laid it out patiently, probably grinning like a fool. I felt like grinning. “We’ll take a cab, rent a car, then drive out to see your parents. In Connecticut.”
“They might not be too pleased,” she said.
“I’m prepared to like them, Alexis, because they’re your parents. But I don’t think their disapproval would cast much of a pall on my day.”
Alexis loaded the dishwasher while I put a message on the machine. “You have reached the Mondleigh residence. If you will leave your name and number, your call will be returned.” Alexis held the doors while I carried our suitcases down to the street. The phone rang. I was occupied punching the code into the electronic alarm and didn’t answer it. Out in the street, Alexis had found a cab. She and the cabbie were loading suitcases into the trunk. I hesitated just inside the door.
“I don’t understand, Mr. Bear,” the familiar voice said. It came down the hallway as if the woman herself were in the kitchen, speaking. “Does it mean you’re coming back? I don’t need a Paris nightgown, you silly bear, you know I don’t. Just call me, whenever. I’ll be here.”
35
Reality
It wasn’t until I took the exit from the Merritt onto the Hutchinson River Parkway that she asked, “They didn’t really mind. Do you think?”
“They were too shocked to know what they thought.”
“Until you told my father why you looked familiar to him.”
“He’ll adjust,” I promised her. “We’re just an old story, the heiress and the chauffeur.”
“Don’t be cynical at me, Gregor.”
“That wasn’t cynicism. It was nerves,” I admitted.
“Really?” She turned her head to look at me. I kept my eyes on the narrow roadway, the trees rushing by and winding curves and late-morning traffic hurtling toward the city. “You didn’t seem nervous. You never seem nervous.”
“We are none of us what we seem,” I warned her.
“What do you have to be nervous about now?”
I could have told her, but I didn’t. Because until you’ve claimed your prize, you don’t even understand how much you have to lose. If I’d told her.
We were across the Tappan Zee and I had failed to take the Palisades Parkway exit before she spoke again. “Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“Pittsburgh,” she said. Well, she was right, or near enough. “I thought—You said you’d left home. If it’s been fifteen years…”
“I never had anything to go home to before.”
“And now you do?”
“Now I do. You.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Yes it does.”
“I don’t understand you,” she said.
“Do you mind?”
“No, but don’t you?”
“You know,” I said, signaling and then turning off onto the Garden State, “it’s asking an awful lot, asking to be understood. As if it weren’t enough to be loved.”
I’d silenced her again. I didn’t try to talk.
Eventually, we entered the Jersey Turnpike. I passed her the ticket and she stuck it into the visor over her head without a word, as if we were an old married couple. “All right,” she said. “The money is a problem,” she began.
I didn’t argue. No money is a problem, lots of money is a problem, and anything in between is a problem.
“I want to use it for…useful things. There are plenty of good causes, making loans to start small businesses, to women and blacks and Hispanics—people banks won’t loan to. Employing the homeless—there are all kinds of ideas out there—and the arts too. Not all of it, and not an absolute gift, but the income…Gregor, you don�
�t know how much there is. Or do you?”
“How would I?”
“You could look it up. You didn’t, did you?”
“No, I took you on appearances.”
“But can I? I mean, can we?”
“How much of it do you want to give away?”
“Use. I said use,” she said.
“Not the exact number, just percentages.”
“I thought, maybe half.”
“Would that be enough to establish a trust?”
“A foundation, you mean?” She thought. “A minor one, maybe.”
I considered this. “Before or after taxes?” I asked. “Half before or after taxes?”
She started to laugh. “I haven’t thought it out; I’m not in a good position to negotiate details. It’s not easy to use money well.”
“If we did start a foundation, that could be your work,” I offered her.
“Work?” She thought about it. “Yes, it would be, it could, couldn’t it? I think I like that, Gregor. Gregor? I am so glad—”
“So am I, Alexis,” I promised her. “So am I. Have you thought about prisons?” I asked.
“I don’t think it’s possible to establish private prisons, Gregor. They’re not like libraries.”
“I mean, a study of penal systems. Because jails are not only terrible places, they’re also ineffective, which may be the worst thing about them.”
“You haven’t been to jail, have you?”
“I told you I wasn’t a criminal.”
“I know. I remember. But I think you were always very careful about what you said.”
“Very careful,” I agreed.
From Trenton to King of Prussia I had doubts and anxieties. Alexis, I thought, had doubts and fears. I didn’t blame either one of us.
“Anyway,” I heard myself say, “you can’t get married until you get divorced, so you’ve got time to change your mind.”
“I don’t usually change my mind,” she said. I waited, giving her the chance. “I’ll marry you today, if you want.”
“That’s bigamy,” I protested.
“That depends,” Alexis said, “on whether you choose the starry law without or the moral law within.”
“That’s Kant,” I protested again, and I laughed.
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