Magnetic Field(s)

by Ron Loewinsohn

  “This is amazing,” he said. “I wouldn’t have recognized you in these. And these two don’t even look like the same person.”

  “I know.” She was smiling, nodding her head. “That’s what makes me good. I can do any look the man wants. The only thing is I can’t do stockings and some kinds of really high fashion, because even though I have a long torso, my legs aren’t long enough.”

  “Aren’t long enough? They reach all the way to the floor, don’t they?”

  “Right.”

  In one picture she was wearing a one-piece bathing suit cut down to her navel, her arms pulled back and up, her hands behind her head, her bosom lifted and firm. In another she was lying on her side, wearing only a lacy bra and bikini panties. “Lingerie pays more,” she said, “because it’s harder.” In the next she was wearing a see-through blouse, her nipples plainly visible through the cloth.

  “How would you go about putting together a portfolio like this?” he asked her. “Do you have to pay a photographer or what?”

  “Oh yeah, most of the time. But I’ve walked into studios and talked with photographers and gotten them to shoot me. I’m good. I’m a good model, and they know it’s to both our advantages, so they say yes. I got the best fashion photographer in San Francisco to shoot me for nothing. Sometimes they say no, but I just leave them my card and tell them, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way, but here’s my card, because I think you may want to call me again in the next few days after you think about it. I think we could work very well together.’ And they do.”

  She was looking at him directly head on. What photographer would resist the chance to call her? Her dark blue eyes were fringed with thick lashes. She believed in herself absolutely. Her mouth, her lower lip, was full, and made her look both sensuous and vulnerable.

  “I’ve only been doing this four months and I’ve been in six ads and one fashion spread. I’ll be on a magazine cover in Japan. I’ve signed to do some TV commercials. Photographers like to work with me. They know I’m good because I’m really uninhibited about my body. I know I’ve got a gift? and it’s up to me to develop it. And I knew I had to do it now, while I’m still supple. If I had waited till I finished school, it would just have meant two more years that I couldn’t be earning what I think I can. The sky’s the limit in this business. I could make a hundred thousand a year. I mean, look at Lauren Hutton. Look at Cheryl Tiegs.”

  Daniel looked at her. Her nose was just on the verge of being too long. This monologue of hers might have been pathetic, as pitiful as a twelve-car model railroad in the window of a hardware store—a token of reality attempting to will itself into standing for the whole shebang. But somehow she affirmed herself. Her own belief in herself made her incandescent. She’s perfect, he thought, incredible.

  “My agent loves me because I’m absolutely mature and dependable. Some of these girls will get sent out on a job and they won’t even show up. But I’m always there early enough to do whatever makeup the man wants me to do before we shoot—if he wants me to be ‘real wholesome’ or more like ‘high fashion’ or ‘young executive.’ I do all my own makeup, so I don’t need a makeup man. I didn’t think I was mature enough before to handle the pressure and the rejection. But I sure am now, absolutely professional.”

  “Why do you want to go putting such a stress on maturity?” he said, smiling. “You shouldn’t be in such a hurry to be mature. Why don’t you stay young for a while? Enjoy yourself—”

  “Oh, I enjoy myself. But I’m going to make it too, and you’ve got to be mature for that. You can’t let things that get you down interfere with your professional life. That’s what I mean. I want to be absolutely professional. Like, last week I had this huge fight with my boyfriend just forty-five minutes before I had to leave for a shooting in Tiburon. I took a shower, did my hair, got my makeup stuff together and got there—on time.”

  “Why did you mention your boyfriend just then?” he asked, still smiling.

  “What do you mean? That’s the way it happened.”

  “You were giving me an example—why that example, the one with your boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know, it was just the one that came to mind.”

  “You wouldn’t have mentioned him just to sort of let me know you have—or had—a boyfriend?”

  “It was just the first thing that came to mind, but—”

  “You wouldn’t have let me know about the boyfriend because you were concerned I might make a pass at you?” He was still smiling, leaning back in his chair. She was smiling too, but she was less at ease now. “Were you concerned I might make a pass at you?”

  “Well—”

  “Would you be disappointed if I didn’t?” She was beginning to color just a little now. Her skin, the skin of her face and down her neck, was incredible. “Would you like to have an affair with a married professor?”

  She smiled and said, “I just called to get back in touch with you and let you know how I was doing. I— You asked me to have lunch—”

  “Well,” he said, taking out a pen and paper. “Here’s my card, because I think you may want to call me again in the next few days after you think about it. I think we could work very well together.”

  In Bremen, Indiana, they stayed at the Hoosier Lodge, where Danny saw his first Amish people driving a buggy down the highway. In the morning, shaving, David thought of Daniel and how he had shaved every morning in the house with Annie during the past two years while he was having the affair with Connie. What did he think as he shaved the face he saw in the mirror? This man is loved by two women? This man keeps two women happy—forty-five and going gray as he might look? This man is enjoying his life? This man is a liar?

  You had to get out of the house to have an affair and you had to cover your tracks, which meant you had to tell lies. The lies had to be convincing, yet have all the air of thoughtless talk, and they had to be consistent, the whole story hanging together. The lies had to be packed with details—times of day, names of people and places, specifics of money spent and change left—yet they could not put on too much of an air of prefabrication. They could not sound like alibis, which of course they were. In these alibis you could get away with some use of actual people known to Annie, but unless you were ready to enlist those people openly—and Daniel had kept the whole business secret from everyone for two years—you had to keep that sort of thing down to a minimum. And that meant you had to begin inventing people with whom that time was spent.

  Getting away during the daytime was no problem: the structure of anyone’s day has any number of vacant spaces that aren’t even apparent from the outside, and so aren’t even questioned—between classes or afterward. Getting home half an hour late, or even an hour, could always be blamed on traffic. But how to get away in the evening, or even for a whole day? Daniel thought of teaching some evening courses, but then he would have to explain what he had done with the money he earned from them. He began to check out the Evening Division Bulletin. The courses had to have some plausibility for him, yet be absolutely uninteresting to Annie. “I was talking to Grierson today—you know, the librarian—and he was telling me how more and more research stuff is being computerized for better access. Like, all the articles on Hemingway that discuss food. The Evening Division is offering a course on beginning programming on Wednesday nights.” “McDowell is offering a Philosophy of Law course on Thursday nights—Theory and Structure of Criminal Law. Sounds like fun, do you want to sign up with me?”

  Then these courses would have to be peopled with students and with an instructor who was identifiable by a repeated mannerism, like a character in Dickens. Within the classes rivalries would break out, personality clashes would develop, young kids would put the make on each other or fall in love. “This couple is really cute. They really think their whole thing is a big secret, that nobody knows.” He found he even had to do some research, to learn enough computer jargon to convince a person totally outside the field. “McDowell” was very dry, ver
y remote. “Very straight. Right wing—N.R.A., anti-abortion, the whole shmeer. Cadaverous, with a big beaked hook nose on him like that, like Dick Tracy. But also very sharp, you know, like Buckley, complete with the eyebrows that go up and down like that—‘I mean, really.’ ”

  One day, he did meet Grierson in the library. The man was carrying an athletic-equipment bag with a squash racket sticking out of it. “Where do you play?” David asked him. That night he told Annie he wanted to play squash. “Running is great, and I like it that we do it together, but it doesn’t feel competitive enough. It doesn’t have enough of an edge.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Quien es más macho, right?”

  “Oh yeah, what the hell.”

  Three afternoons a week he ran with Annie up and down the hills of Dolores Park, and two evenings a week he “played squash” at the Telegraph Hill Athletic Club. It was perfect because now he only had to invent two or three squash players and snippets of their conversation and maybe some scores and a few details—“He always plays to my backhand, tight up against the left wall, and I always end up hitting my racket against the wall. But I’ll get him.” The sport justified the shower he took to wash Connie’s perfumes and cosmetics off, and it let him claim to be exhausted if he felt like it. If he’d been drinking or smoking with Connie, he could always say he had gone and had a drink afterward or had a couple of tokes in the car on the way home.

  “You sound like you’re getting pretty good,” she said one night when he’d been going on about his game. “I’d kind of like to watch you play.”

  “Annie, it’s a men’s club. But if you want to learn I can switch over to a co-ed club.”

  “No, it sounds too indoorsy. But don’t let those gay guys get too chummy in the shower.”

  “They pretty much keep to themselves.”

  The challenge became not only to prolong his times with Connie, but to make those times routine to Annie, so that they were accepted without question. Taken for granted. And he found now that he needed that extra time, and felt that Connie needed it too. Not just to fuck, but time before making love, and afterward, or just to be together without fucking at all, an evening in front of the fireplace, or watching TV, or going over her portfolio. And it was during one of these evenings when they were sitting on the rug with their backs against the couch, watching the rooms the fire made and the shapes moving around within those glowing rooms, that he let his head fall back in the fullness of his feeling, let his head fall back and feel the nubby fabric of this beautiful girl’s couch on the back of his neck (the pressure of her thigh against his), and looked up at the stippled white ceiling with all those bits of sparkly, mica-like specks all over it. For a long moment he forgot the girl, so absorbed was he in feeling the distance between the top of his head and the wall on the other end of the room, behind the couch, feeling the volume these walls enclosed, the pictures Connie had hung on them, insisting that the apartment become part of her life, the wall she hung her pictures on. And yet the walls had been here long before she ever saw the place—the rooms laid out and named—living room, dining room, bathroom—insisting on their function, oblivious to her. They would be these rooms to anyone. But they were Connie’s, he thought, feeling actually petulant and realizing as he was doing it that he was kicking his foot out once, sharply, as if stamping.

  “Hunh?” Connie had said.

  “Nothing,” he said, squeezing her shoulder. But the thought bothered him enough that he found himself letting himself into her apartment one afternoon when he knew she was in L. A. on an assignment. He walked slowly through the apartment, standing for a long time in these rooms and areas, every one of them, slowly turning his head and even turning his body this way and that. Connie’s living here had not gone deeper into the apartment than her choice of the paint and the wallpaper. But these alone—and the furniture she had chosen, and the pictures, the candlesticks from Mexico, the spoon that said NEW JERSEY on the table in front of him, the small plastic syrup bottle in the shape of a bear still standing on the kitchen counter where she’d left it this morning—all the barely perceived details of her life mutely proclaimed her presence, which now he felt as a buzzing charge filling the air of these rooms. He lay down on the rug in the living room, tasting it with every pore of his body.

  That night he told Annie how excited he was about the prospect of going fishing with some friends of Lyman’s. Four days in the foothills of the Sierras, up in Calaveras County but beyond the Mark Twain country. It was a remote canyon. You had to have a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get in there. You took the jeep to the top of the ridge, at about seven thousand feet, and then you hiked down thirty-five hundred feet in a matter of some four miles. It was a tremendously steep grade, and you were carrying forty- or fifty-pound packs and walking in dry streambeds where the loose rocks were always threatening to break your ankle. Then you had to ford the Mokelumne, still carrying your pack, and sometimes it was deep enough and fast enough to knock a strong man on his ass. “I don’t think it would kill anybody but you’d swallow a lot of water and get banged around on some rocks pretty well before you got back on top of things.” Perfect.

  He invented the landscape. “The slope going up to the ridge is easy. They’re like mountain meadows covered with this miner’s lettuce? It’s a big plant that looks like a cross between a cabbage and a philodendron. Then when you start down into the canyon itself you realize you’re in ski country without the snow. The trail goes right past the top tower of the chair lift. The trail down is grueling but it isn’t dangerous—except I guess you could break an ankle. And it would be a bitch carrying you out of there if you did.

  “The campsite itself is a dream: a white sand beach at the foot of a rock outcropping that goes up twenty feet or so. And right on our front doorstep is a good-sized pool. Albertson has gotten a couple of twelve-inchers out of there, but I’ve never had any luck. A thousand feet or so upstream the river comes out of a hole in the mountain like a fire hose, and this enormous granite apron is spread out at the foot of that cliff, and the water has been damn near polishing it for about five million years. Right there it’s all spread out, it feels like it’s going ninety miles per hour but it’s so clear—it’s only two or three inches deep, just like a moving sheet of water that never stops flowing over that granite.”

  He invented the men he went with. He took men he knew and gave them different names and took them up to the mountains with him. “Duncan’s trip is rattlesnakes. His idea of machismo is pinning a rattlesnake with a forked stick and then snapping pictures of him with his free hand.” “Walking through the woods with Black—he says, ‘I’ll catch up with you.’ He pulls a wad of toilet paper out of his pocket and waves it at me, saying, ‘I’ve got to stop here and vote.’ I love it.” “And when we get to Davidson’s studio to pick him up—this is like seven a.m.—he’s standing in front of a canvas tacked on the wall, painting away like a madman, except that he’s got no clothes on—not a stitch. Anselm takes one look at him and says, ‘Pretty kinky!’ And Davidson looks at him and says, ‘I can explain everything!’ ”

  One day when he had just “gotten back” from one of these fishing trips, Annie asked him, in all seriousness, “But don’t you ever catch any?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve caught—you know, a fair amount. I mean, I don’t have the kind of experience these guys do. But we have them for dinner right there. Do you think I’m Ernest Hemingway?”

  “Why don’t you bring some back, and we can have them for dinner here?”

  When he “got back” the next time, he said, “Here you go. I brought back my whole catch.” And then he plopped the two rainbows on the kitchen table. They were still lying in their Styrofoam tray and wrapped in plastic from the Safeway. They both had a good laugh over it. Annie said, “Figuring gas, equipment, food and liquor, those two trout couldn’t possibly have cost more than fifteen or twenty dollars a pound.”

  In Iowa City they stayed at the Ironmen Inn, a pla
ce that looked like the Führerbunker, the walls plastered with old news photos from the heyday of the local football team. Was it the University of Iowa or Iowa State? One had a football factory and the other had a writing factory, and he could never keep straight which was which. Danny loved it—the place had an enormous indoor pool with a Jacuzzi attached—but it was a mistake. The motel was miles from town, and they had to eat in the Ironmen Room. As they grumbled over dinner, Danny said, “Well, look at it this way: the pool is open twenty-four hours.”

  As David was showering before dinner, he thought how pleasant it was going to be being back in their own house. Just the smallest luxury, like knowing where everything is, or actually liking the pictures on the walls, pictures they had chosen instead of the “Utrillos” outside that might have been painted and sold by the yard. Being in the house that was their own, where they had their lives, was such a deep pleasure, one he had never expected himself to claim, or to savor this way, in anticipation, remembering how he could sit in his studio “composing,” but leave the door open so he could hear Jane noodle around on the piano on some old Billie Holiday tunes. Then maybe Danny would come downstairs and just happen to have his harp in his pocket, so he would chip in. As he soaped himself, he wondered how he could make more time for that sort of thing when the fall term began and both he and Jane had to start their teaching schedules again.

  And then there was Daniel. David had always assumed that Daniel was simply a part of that music that made up his life. And yet he must have simply not been there so much of the time when they’d been together these last two years. Out to lunch. It challenged the hell out of anybody’s belief that internal states manifested themselves in external signs. Had he really loved both women, so that he got some kind of satisfaction with either? There must have been times when he was with Annie—hell, when all four of them had been together—that he would have given almost anything to be quit of this whole scene, to be with Connie, where he was not required to continue this exhausting pretense, living this fantasy of someone else’s devising—marriage, dinner parties, concerts, plays, weekends in the country. Amusements for the middle-aged middle class. They went to a prize fight one night at Kezar Pavilion, which was pretty pathetic, pretty boring as a fight—except for the beer-swilling redneck behind them who kept yelling, “Make him bleed!” He’d been enjoying it, why couldn’t they? Amusements for the middle-aged who wanted to go slumming, David thought as he worked the shampoo into his scalp.