In the elevator she thought of her husband, and thought of him again while she waited for the young man to unlock the door of his room. But as much as she tried to conjure him in concrete form—as much as she tried to imagine the palpable pain she might cause him—she could only think about him in abstract terms, as though her own actions were simply a fiction, a cinematic illusion thrown up on a screen, and he an audience member delightfully enthralled at the drama. She had always suspected her husband of sharing equally in the longings of her childish heart, and now she could not imagine him being upset at such a tiny thing as this. He would laugh, she thought. A young man luring her to his room with Martin Chuzzlewit. He would laugh.
What a joke! He would never stop laughing.
It was impossible to tell how she felt. When she tried to look inside of herself, all she saw were tangled things shifting in and out of focus.
Once inside his room, he offered her a glass of water, and she accepted. To grab hold of something might keep her hands steady. She was aware of her own swallowing—suddenly all throat and stinging breath.
He sat next to her on the edge of the bed and leafed through some of the pages of the Dickens book. It struck her at that moment that it was possible, even likely, that his interest in her was purely academic—and so, suddenly embarrassed by her own girlish fancies, she stood up abruptly and dropped the water glass on the edge of the bureau, where it shattered.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said.
“No problem. Hold still,” he said, taking her by the hips and moving her away from the broken glass. Then he was down on his knees, delicately plucking the shards of glittering glass from the carpet and placing them in the upturned palm of his right hand.
An offering. Those fingers, priest-soft and steady. He could cup in his orchestral hand the broken and the treacherous.
When he stood up he was right in front of her—and everything stopped. The look in his eyes said that he had forgotten what he was just doing. Then he spoke.
“There’s one thing,” he said. “One thing I want to tell you.”
“What is it?”
He spoke slowly. “Your article on Nathalie Sarraute. I think you’re wrong about her. She’s a romantic.”
That’s when he kissed her. And he was right about her article. And he kissed her. And he was right.
The glass shards he must have put down somewhere, but she could not remember that part of it. It was only afterward that all the proper lenses suddenly clicked into place—and everything came into sharp focus.
“Oh my god,” she said. “I don’t even know your name.”
She was lying in the bed trying to make herself as small as possible under the sheets. He was leaning back in a chair at the foot of the bed, looking at her.
“It’s Ted.”
“Ted what?”
He told her.
“Oh Jesus. Fine. My name is Anne Sexton.”
He squinted his eyes at her. Then he sifted through the clothes that were on the floor and from the pocket of a pair of pants he brought out a conference badge with his name on it. He held it up as proof.
“Great,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s just great.”
He sat back down silently at the foot of the bed.
“Stop looking at me,” she said.
Then, later, riding down in the elevator, she said, “You don’t understand. I’m not someone who does illicit things.”
“Come back tomorrow.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“It’s not about being illicit.”
“What is it about then?” But immediately upon saying it she realized that she didn’t want to know—and was grateful to him for not answering.
“Come back tomorrow.”
And he put his hands on her.
She wondered what it would be like to see her husband. She was sure he would be able to see it on her, like a haircut. She tried to think of things she would say in response, but she could only keep saying I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry under her breath. Yes, he would know. He knew her better than anyone.
And then she tried to be angry with him. It was partially his fault. She wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t left her alone. Or, no, it was because they had argued on the plane ride out here. If they hadn’t argued, then…Eventually she was angry with herself for trying to blame him. It was a while before she realized her anger was just old-fashioned panic.
By the time her husband was there, right in front of her, she was tied up in miserable knots, and her stomach hurt.
He said, “What’s the matter?”
“My stomach hurts.”
He put his hand on her cheek. “Why don’t you go up to the room and lie down. I’ll get you something to take.”
“No,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Really, I’m okay. Let’s just go have dinner.”
The rest of the night he was concerned about her stomach. She hated how easy it was to lie to him.
So the next day she told him she was going to some sessions, and she met the young man again. Since she had already betrayed her husband once, she wanted to find out what it was exactly that she felt for this Ted Hughes—because she feared that it was something rather than nothing. And she knew that if she didn’t try to articulate that feeling, to expose it and name it, she would always think of it as lost treasure—something that her husband would never know he wasn’t offering her. It wasn’t fair to him. She would get to the bottom of this feeling. Held up to the light, it would look frail and small and common, she was sure of it.
But after her second day in the young man’s room, she was only less sure of everything. He was like a complex, ephemeral thing, a fleeting notion, that abstract quality of beauty marbled with ribbons of masculine menace and hunger.
Standing in his shower, she heard his voice coming from the bathroom doorway. She peeked out from behind the curtain and saw him leaning against the doorjamb with no shirt on, his hands in his pockets and his eyes cast down distractedly.
“So can I ask you,” he said, “where it is you’re going back to the day after tomorrow?”
“Why?” she asked. But he didn’t answer. She let the water pour over her body, and she tried to get inside it. She thought about being wrapped up in an envelope of warm water. “New York,” she said finally.
“That’s a coincidence.”
“Oh no.” Tucking herself into the water. “Don’t think…,” she started, but then she realized she didn’t know what she wanted him to think or not to think.
“You know what I like about New York?” he said. “Everywhere you go, it looks like someplace somebody has a memory of. If you think about all the street corners that mean something to you because you met someone there…” His voice faltered, as though he were considering something else for a moment. “Or all the stoops of buildings, or the restaurant windows, or the museum steps. And that’s just your experience, you’re just one of a million people. There are memories everywhere.”
She had stopped trying to put herself inside the water and was now leaning against the tiles, listening to his voice. But then he was quiet for a while, and when she pulled the shower curtain aside to see him again, he was no longer there in the doorway.
His voice, his hands—these things stayed with her.
And that was why, afterward, she waited in the lobby for her husband and paid no attention to all the men whose gazes lingered over her.
And when Binhammer came and said, “So, Ms. Lewis, did you enjoy your afternoon among the erudite?” she dissembled.
The next morning, she told her husband to come meet her immediately after her session. She told him that she was tired of listening to papers, that she would rather see San Diego while she could.
So that was it—a failsafe termination was the way she looked at it. Even if Ted Hughes were there at her panel, even if she felt tempted—she had made it impossible for herself to do anything about it.
And, in fact, Ted Hughe
s was there. The conference room was half full with unsmiling academics waiting for the panel discussion with the weary acknowledgment that they would most likely be disappointed. She said hello to the other members of her panel, keeping her eyes on the door. He came in late, after the session had already started, and sat at the back—his eyes alternating between looking at her and looking at nothing.
After the session he was waiting for her in the hall.
“My husband is meeting me,” she said.
“We just can’t—” she said.
“I’m not someone who—” she said.
“There’s no way this can—” she said.
She had worked out in advance a hundred different logical arguments about why they couldn’t see each other anymore. But he didn’t fight her. When she was done talking, he simply asked for her phone number in New York, and she gave it to him without thinking.
Before she left, she said, “I like what you said. About New York. That was…I liked it.”
And he reached out to her with one of those hands, but she was already turning away, and she kept on turning.
At the end of the hall she saw Binhammer walking toward her.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“Who?”
“That guy you were talking to.”
“He was just someone who liked my paper.”
“The way he was looking at you, I think he liked more than your paper.” He smiled. He liked it when other men found her attractive. It was one of their regular jokes. “Good-looking too. Did he ask for your number?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, looking up at him. He was such a good man.
“And did you give it to him?”
“Of course.”
She wanted to tell him everything, but she didn’t know where to start. She didn’t like to imagine what look he would give her—and the thought that whatever the look, it would be a part of every look he ever gave her again.
I have done something, she thought. Oh my god. I have done something.
“Can we go?” she asked.
“Sure. Does your stomach feel bad again?”
“No, I think I just need to eat.”
When they walked out into the San Diego sun, she felt faint and clung to his arm. But she soon recovered, and they walked three blocks to an outdoor café where she picked at her food and sipped iced tea through a straw. He made jokes, and she laughed at them. After lunch, they continued to walk, and he said he wanted to buy some sunglasses so that he could have a pair of sunglasses from San Diego. So they went into several shops until they found a pair he liked—and then they sat on a bench in a small park and watched everyone else walk by. They were impressed, as you are more likely to be when you are in a foreign place, by the masses of anonymity.
Two boys ran by, and one cried, “How come you did it, Marshall? How come?”
When the sun started to go down, they got up from the bench and walked back toward the hotel; they spoke to each other the whole time, never running out of things to say. And pretty soon they became part of the anonymous crowd, and you couldn’t tell them apart from anyone else.
chapter 9
Two weeks later, back in New York, Binhammer sat on the couch gazing at the back of his wife, who was in the other room typing—or trying to type—revisions on an article she hoped would be published the following year, and he knew, knew with the fearful instinct that in another place and another time might have driven a man to physical acts of violence or passion, that something was wrong.
It was just past eight o’clock in the morning, and he had opened the blinds so that every corner of the apartment was saturated with light. Outside, the air was infused with the stillness characteristic of weekend mornings in the city—the dormancy of a great machine being shut off for a mandatory period while all its gears are checked for wear.
He looked at his wife, through the doorway, hunched over in front of the computer with a mug of coffee on the desk beside her—and he looked out the window at the tops of trees and tops of buildings and tops of lampposts. And he looked back at his wife.
There she sat, still and cramped, as someone might who was trying to fold herself out of existence—her hands not even on the keyboard but holding her elbows. He could not see her eyes, but he knew that they were focused somewhere beyond the computer screen.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, trying to modulate the fear out of his voice. He did not like to see her like this.
“What do you mean?” she said, half turning. Her face was now in profile, and she bit her lower lip—something she had a habit of doing when she was put on the spot.
He wasn’t sure what he meant, so he didn’t say anything more.
She, however, seemed to take his silence as more accusatory than perplexed. When he didn’t answer, she turned full around to look at him face-to-face. That was when he first saw the small flickers of desperation in her eyes. He recognized them as a plea, but he could not tell what they were a plea for. It was true: she still possessed a great deal of mystery, even after six years of marriage.
He wondered, briefly, how long men remained explorers in the terra incognita of their wives’ minds.
Then she turned toward the computer, and he was looking at her back again.
“I think I did something,” she said to her screen, her voice like a crystal bowl crazed with hairline fractures and ready to come apart. “I think I did something—”
He suddenly felt queasy. He wanted to go to her, but her breakability made him feel clumsy. In truth, he didn’t care about what she might have done—he just wanted that shivering quality in her to be gone.
The story came out in fragments, sharp little splinters:
“There was someone. He. I didn’t know what to do. It’s not about. I mean, there’s nothing. And I couldn’t stop thinking about. It was something that happened. I was afraid. And I didn’t know how to stop it. And then there was you. You are so good. So good to me. I didn’t know what to do—I didn’t know what to do.”
He looked out the window. Too bright. It felt like there was white everywhere.
“When?” he asked.
“San Diego,” she said.
There was white in his chest and in his head. There was cotton in his ears.
“Twice,” she said.
He stood, everything inside him bent double, all his clenched purple viscera, and went into the bedroom and shut the door behind him. “Goddamn it,” he said, voice rising. “Goddamn it, goddamn it.” On the bed was something, and he grabbed it and threw it against the wall. It fluttered to the ground—her copy of The Woman in White, and it must have struck at the very edge of the spine because it left behind a half-moon dent in the paint that he would cringe to look at over the years they were to live in that apartment.
Then he froze. The gesture—so mundane, so unworthy of a literary life. He suddenly thought of himself as a character in a book. He imagined discussing this scene in one of his classes, with his girls. “We expect him to be furious here—after all, his wife has just admitted infidelity. But look, look at his response: sympathy, understanding, goodness. See, anger is—it’s old-fashioned. It’s boring.”
He went back into the living room, where his wife had moved to the couch.
She wept openly now, her body shaken with spasms. She tried to look at him, in his direction, but she seemed unable to. He thought about that, about the fact that at this moment his wife was able to look at anything in the world but him.
He remembered being a child, coming into the kitchen where his mother was hunched over in front of the sink, her hands gripping the edge of the counter. When he had come around to the side of her, he could see she was crying. But when she noticed him, she turned her back and swept her palms across her eyes. Then she busied herself in the refrigerator, telling him she had to make dinner now and didn’t have time to play—not allowing herself to meet his gaze.
Now, to his wife, he said, “Listen. Stop crying. We’ll fi
gure something out. I mean, there has to be something we can…Stop crying.”
For a while they sat there not talking.
There was anger, yes, a smoldering anger—but there was something else, too. A need to subdue the panic of the moment. A need to be superior to this scene. An unsettling calm in the face of calamity.
He went to the corner to buy coffee for them. He also bought bagels, but neither of them ate. He kept looking out the window because it was the only action that seemed to let him think properly.
Then they decided to go for a walk in the park.
“Do you want to take a jacket?” she said as they left.
“No, I’m fine,” he replied. “Thank you.”
They walked a long time along the winding paths, and sometimes they stopped to sit at a bench.
“Just twice?” he asked. “Only twice?”
She bit her lower lip. “Once more. When we got back here. He lives here. Just once more. And that’s when I told him we couldn’t anymore.”
For a while he didn’t want to touch her, and then he couldn’t bear seeing her sitting there all folded up into herself. He put his hand on top of hers, and she looked grateful.
They walked some more and talked as they went—they could not seem to stop talking now—and when they came to the Metropolitan Museum at the eastern edge of the park, they went in. There was a special exhibition of a French expressionist painter, and they stood in front of one painting depicting a row of houses on the far bank of a river. There were only two human figures in the painting, and they were tiny in the distance. You would have missed them entirely if you hadn’t been looking for them.
She said, “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“More beautiful than Matisse?”
She looked at him, trying to read his tone.
“More beautiful than Fitzgerald?” He smiled. “More beautiful than Fellini? More beautiful than Stravinsky?”
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