Acquainted with the Night

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  I denied that Harriet Gross died. I shredded the news and cast it out my mother’s kitchen window. “But I’m sure I told you,” my mother said. I denied that too. Later, of course, I remembered.

  I denied that she had told me because I was horrified and embarrassed to admit even to myself that I could forget such a piece of news. For in the intervening years I had actually thought of Harriet once in a while and wondered what she was doing.

  Harriet’s family and mine spent the summer in the same dull mountain resort, her family because her father worked as handyman for the owner, my family ostensibly for pleasure. Her family’s quarters were off the main path, at the back of a low building of attached units. To get to see her I had to climb through thorns and brambles, and I felt like a Victorian lady of mercy bringing baskets of goodies to the slums. In fact their rooms were as spacious and well-kept as ours, and identically furnished. We had very little in common, Harriet and I. We picked berries together, and watched our team’s baseball games, and raided each other’s refrigerators.

  When we were very small girls we caught salamanders together in glass jars with air holes poked in the covers. You had to go out after a rain, along the dirt road. The tiny orange creatures hid there, where the dirt met the shrubbery. We picked them up by the tails and watched them wriggle, then dropped them gently into the jars, which had a half inch of water in them. I suppose they died there, after a while. One afternoon my only salamander died on our way home. He lay inert at the bottom of the jar, bright bright orange, but all the life had gone out of him. Harriet said he wasn’t dead, though. She lifted him up and laid him in her outstretched palm to let him dry in the sun, and soon, a miracle, he began to move again and inch up towards her wrist. “Here,” she said. “He’s okay. He was just sleeping.” I was very grateful, and suddenly felt that Harriet was, perhaps, special in a way I could not name.

  One thing we did have in common, later on, was not being paired off with any boys at the resort. It is a mystery how these random pairings and exclusions come about, but I imagine in our case it was because I was awkward and bookish and Harriet was unattractive. Her hair was stringy and brown, her face was oily, and she was quite thin. She had prominent shoulder bones and poor posture.

  What saved Harriet’s self-esteem was her father. He loved her, as my own father used to say, to excess. He took her along for company from one bungalow to the next on his fixing missions, praising her goodness to all he met. He was gruff, in overalls, always in need of a shave, joking, curly-haired, a wizard with bathroom pipes. “No dope,” my father said about him—the highest compliment. Harriet’s mother, a well-meaning woman whom nature mistakenly burdened with the face and manners of a witch, scolded and screeched, but Harriet laughed kindly and said, “All right, all right, Ma.” Deficient in mind, she managed to cook, clean, clothe her child, and get by. “For that,” my mother said, “you don’t have to be a genius.”

  The only things I found unpleasant in Harriet were her voice and speech. She was nasal, a bit whiny, and ungrammatical besides. She had a limited vocabulary and a New York accent. I sought Harriet out daily, for she was the most unthreatening person in the universe, in addition to her other good qualities, but I always wished she could learn to speak better. Then I would think, in her defense: with a mother like that to guide her, it’s a miracle she speaks as well as she does.

  When we were about thirteen Harriet and I began to see each other winters in the city as well as summers in the country. I discovered, after all those years, that she lived only six blocks away. We attended the same junior high and high school. I brought Harriet home and introduced her to my friends; she brought me home and did the same. Her friends and my friends formed a social club that met every Friday night. We went frequently to Radio City Music Hall and the Ice Palace, and we wore navy-blue jackets with white satin lettering across the back. There were naturally differences between her friends and my friends. Hers were not smart in school, took shorthand and typing, cracked their chewing gum, smoked, had pierced ears, and went further with boys. Mine were in special progress classes, spoke grammatically, read books, played the piano, overate, and with boys did nothing below the waist. We were mutually fascinated.

  That is all about Harriet herself. Loved by her father, liked by her peers. In the few years between high school graduation and death she led, I am quite sure, an ordinary life.

  The second time my mother told me Harriet Gross died in childbirth I lay awake at night enumerating the reasons why Harriet’s death was unfair:

  She was too young, my age, and not ready to die.

  No one should have to die giving birth.

  No one should have to die of another’s poison.

  She was the only comfort of her worthy father, whose wife didn’t do much for him.

  Her husband would be wifeless.

  Her baby would be motherless.

  Mortality in general, like city air, is unacceptable.

  But as I rolled over and over in my mind these seven reasons, like smooth round marbles, I kept coming back to the first. I couldn’t escape it. She was my age, of my age, my age, not ready to die, and I fell asleep with that song in my head.

  That night, I resurrected Harriet in my dreams. A grown woman in her early thirties, she was presiding over a small cocktail party in her living room. Still unobtrusive and quiet, she had transformed her indistinctions into a gentle, reliable charm. The mousy brown hair was a dark blond, with the sheen of frequent washing. She was impeccably and elegantly dressed in a green wool suit and white ruffled blouse. The skirt swirled softly around her knees. Her face was the same, but without the shine: she had learned how to use make-up. Her lipstick was the same shade as mine. Green eye shadow echoed the green of her suit. Ease had replaced the lankiness. Harriet moved among her guests, offering trays of oyster canapés, stopping here and there for a low-voiced remark, a warm, intimate smile, a tilt of the head to show she was listening.

  It was clear that only good things had happened to Harriet.

  Her living room was modestly but nicely furnished, with soft green carpeting, soft chairs, soft lighting—nothing tacky. Like mine, it had a view of flowering trees and a river. A print of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte hung on the wall. Harriet moved through her room as if it were a larger body she lived in; I felt she could have moved through it blindfolded.

  Her daughter appeared for a moment to get a snack, and was introduced. Harriet put her arm around the shoulder of the tall, thin blond girl, and drew her close. The child was bony, but would be beautiful after puberty. Her features were fine and sharp; her voice chirped in a nasal twang. Stuffing a cheese and cracker sandwich into her mouth, standing barefoot in her short plaid skirt, she let her eyes move serenely over the guests, contented and accepting.

  I, too, was tall and slender and blond, with well-washed hair, and I wore green. I accepted a drink from Harriet and she sat next to me on the arm of the couch. Her voice was low and pleasing, her diction perfect, her facial expressions the mirror of inner and outer harmony. She was well-satisfied with life. She asked polite questions about my life since we had last met, which I answered obliquely. I didn’t want to talk about my life but about hers. I wanted to ask Harriet how all this had come about, how she had contrived to make this gentle, benevolent life happen to her—perhaps she might help me as she had once before with the salamander—but I didn’t get the opportunity. A telephone rang; she left to answer it. She waved to me with a ringed hand on her way out, as if to say, I’ll be right back, and she was ringed in sunlight streaming through the window.

  I woke in the dark and thought, But Harriet Gross is dead. Then, Harriet Gross is not dead. I deny the death of Harriet Gross, and will deny it as long as I live.

  GRAND STAIRCASES

  I KNEW A MAN once—it was like having a disease. He was my disease. Also the wonder drug that relieved it. I felt grand whenever I had my fix, which could be simply his bountiful presence in the r
oom, his voice—he was an inspired talker—but terrible coming down after. The worst of it was, he didn’t seem to know the pain he was causing. At least he didn’t like to hear about it, naturally enough. Moments when it strained at the leash and I had to let it loose, he would change the subject to something more entertaining. He was a gifted subject-changer. In truth there was no telling how much he knew. For all the bounty of his talking, he had certain remote, inaccessible chambers of secrecy. And he was smart. Like an idiot savant, smart enough to be dumb when he needed to.

  One night in my kitchen, after it was officially all over between us, I was telling him in a mild way, over the remains of dinner, how bad he had made me feel, sexless and ugly and dull and at times almost evil, when I had been used to seeing myself as just the opposite, as very like him, as a matter of fact. He made me feel that way because he resisted me. First he stalked me and afterwards he resisted. Not from any perverse strategy, I don’t think. He felt he had a reasonable position to defend. He was trying to be faithful to an architect he was in love with, but alas she was away in Eastern Europe for six months, studying grand staircases of the eighteenth century. It was during the second month of her absence that we met. I began as his friend and confidante. He would tell me how much he missed her, loved her. He obviously needed to tell this to someone and I didn’t mind, then, being the one. He showed me her picture. Well, there was nothing wrong with that either, at that point. More and more he sought me out, more and more he talked about her. He had the idea that she was some sort of goddess or perfect being, that she would save him, I’m not sure from what, from everything in life men require saving from. I should have known enough to be wary—when men talk to women at length about their earlier women ... But soon we were talking about many other things as well, hours at a stretch like adolescents, telling everything we had ever done or thought or felt. And I let myself drift. I didn’t dream of diverting his love from the architect: he seemed a type I could never fall in love with, hale and hearty, good-humored (until I discovered this was only the facade; behind it he was glum and introspective, just what I liked). Though I suppose I was a diversion, in the other sense.

  Later on, when we were together every evening, he still talked about her, but less. After all. I remembered the picture and her alleged supernatural appeal. She was pretty, a little prettier than I but not all that much. She looked gentler perhaps, yet who can really tell from a picture? I wondered what enchantment she possessed that I lacked, and decided after much wondering that more than any magical quality it was her having been there first, at a more propitious moment. A couple of things he told me about her I found funny, for example that she cut out recipes and pasted or typed them on five-by-eight cards to be filed alphabetically in a metal box, but I knew the one thing I must never do was laugh at her. That would be sacrilege. Not that she was any more laughable than anyone else—a couple of things about everyone are funny. I found her interesting actually, orphaned young, jolted in and out of foster homes and so on, which was probably why I first listened. Though it may have been the way he saw her and told about her that made her interesting. He had that transforming power; ordinary things would pass through his mind and come out lustrous. Sometimes I went to movies or read books he had described and found them less vivid than I expected; then I realized it was all in his telling, the enthusiasm and the play of mind, those grand and undulating ascents.

  I was picking at the crumbs of the excellent brownies he had brought for dessert and telling him in a friendly way how he had made me feel, without bitterness or accusations, because it was all officially over between us, the torments, the pulling together and pulling apart (his pulling apart), the endless shuffling over whether we were to be just friends or lovers as well (whether our being lovers would destroy him as the decent moral being he claimed he was trying to be), and if lovers, serious or frivolous lovers, and if serious lovers, serious enough to disrupt the course of each other’s lives ... for there was always his true love who should not suffer any more jolting; all over too was the trying to remain friends in spite of it, that was no longer in question since meanwhile, apart from the shuffling (or maybe because of the revelations it entailed), we had become best friends, better friends, we agreed, than most people could ever dream of being to each other; we were friends of the blood and of temperament, we could not cease talking or listening, our words some honeyed elixir passed from mouth to mouth, and we thought and felt alike on nearly every matter except the matter of us, where I could not accept why such rare consanguinity shouldn’t make us the best of lovers as well, but then I was not at the same time on an erotic pilgrimage and so could not appreciate his dilemma, nor the well-organized architect’s imminent return from Eastern Europe to continue the work of his salvation from I was never quite sure what. Unexpected and puzzling events like me, perhaps. For after he made love with me, he said, he was in torment, but at those moments I could not be terribly sympathetic. Had it not been for her, I would think, there would be none of this torment and no need for salvation from it. I could not accept myself as a source of torment: I too had always thought I was trying to be a decent moral being, and such beings do not cause torment, or so I thought. Much as I disliked hearing about his torment, I knew his revealing it was a kind of testimony to our friendship. Not all lovers are such extraordinary friends; conceivably not even he and the architect, which might have contributed to his torment; it may be, though I would rather not think so, that the two conditions are mutually exclusive. And sometimes it was indeed as if we were two sets of people, a pair of wretched lovers and a pair of benevolent friends who discuss their tormenting lovers over long and homey dinners. Yet with all my complaining I never used so strong a word as torment. It seemed, too dangerous, as if that word like a gust of wind might blow down our fragile little structure, a house of cards compared to the grandiose structure he had built with the architect, I gathered.

  But all that was over now and we were just friends, as they say. Because he kept turning up, hungry, bearing tributes of food, even after she came back with her wealth of information on grand staircases of the eighteenth century. He said we had something special, I occupied a special place in his life, he even loved me—this he brought out with difficulty—and would hate to do without me though he remained deeply in love with the architect.

  My telling him how he had made me feel made him very uncomfortable—for he was, to some extent, the decent moral being he aspired to be; I don’t wish to give the impression he was heartless, not at all, the problem was the opposite, he indulged in an overextension of the heart—so uncomfortable that he got up and washed our dinner dishes sitting in my sink, just for something to do. This was not one of his more inspired changes of subject; still, it had its merit. He was a man who took the initiative around the house, never an exploiter. The shapers of feminist doctrine would have approved of him, domestically, at any rate. I leaned against a counter near the sink and watched. Over the running water he said,

  “It’s funny you should be telling me this. You should really be telling someone else these things about me, someone who could take your part wholeheartedly and give you some satisfaction.”

  “You have a point,” I said. “But it’s so convenient. You know the situation. I don’t have to fill you in. And besides, you understand me better than anyone else.”

  “True. It’s because we are true friends, aren’t we?” He looked up from the sink anxiously. He was always anxious about this, always wanted reassurance of my friendship and my good opinion. Maybe he feared that someday he would turn up as usual and I would not wish to see him. He knew that would be perfectly logical. Maybe someday I wouldn’t.

  “Yes, yes, I just told you so. Listen, we’ll pretend we’re talking about someone else, that it’s some other man I’m complaining to you about.”

  “That’s a little hard to do when I know that other man is me.”

  “Just pretend. See what you can come up with.”

&n
bsp; “Okay.” And he sighed heavily. “Okay, I’ll try.” We went into the living room. I sat in the easy chair with my feet up on the coffee table and he lay down on the couch with his hands locked behind his head, as he always did. It was a couch we used to make love on, in the era when we were making love, and inevitably when I saw him lying there I could not help recalling that era. On the couch or else the floor right below, partly under the coffee table unless we took the trouble to push it aside, but it was marble and very heavy. The couch was not especially comfortable as couches go, and floors in general are not. ... But often when it happened it would happen fast and there was no time to spare to get up and walk to the bedroom. It would happen so fast because he had been resisting the impulse for so long, hours maybe, floating high on words, being the best of friends, resisting exactly this happening, and then all of a sudden—he might even be getting up to say good night and priding himself on a virtuous evening—he would have no more resistance. Or maybe it was a game he liked, a private spiritual battle where till the very last moment the outcome is touch and go. It was not my game, but then lovers do play separate games. And maybe he would be thinking about the traveling architect all through it, but I never asked. Not that I didn’t feel free to, but I was afraid of hearing the possible truth, the complexities of it—how I might have been standing in for her like an understudy giving so fine a performance the audience almost forgets its disappointment; or more likely how the architect and I both in body and spirit might have been merging and unmerging in his mind in some far subtler way like chemicals or, better still, representations of the real and the ideal, each of us partaking of both but in different aspects, with now one and now the other of our images advancing to the foreground and receding; and, most of all, I was afraid of how interesting he would make it sound—it was painful enough already. For afterwards he would hate himself and not be too enamored of me either, since I was the provocation, merely by existing. But he knew too it wasn’t entirely my doing and so he’d feel guilty for turning away; between his guilt towards the architect and his guilt towards me and whatever others dragged along from the past, he had constructed a nice cozy little cell of guilt where he could be all alone after his indulgences, which is perhaps what he really wanted. Of course it was not always like that; thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise, as in Wyatt’s famous poem of love and rage, twenty times better, naked in my chamber, something in that vein; many times we even made it to the bedroom, but that was mostly at the beginning. Later it was as if, given the time it would take to walk to my chamber, he might change his mind.