About a week or so later, Nick had decided, despite his subtle discomfort, to accept the invitation, his objections—although they weren’t really that—laid aside. That morning, by peculiar coincidence, Campbell thrust at Nick a handful of color photographs of himself and Faith on an almost empty beach. He had about him a faintly proud, uxorious air, as if he had said, “How do you like my beautiful wife?” Nick, nodding and smiling, as people will, looked through the photographs of the couple, both in swimsuits, both smiling disarming smiles. There were photos of the two of them together, embracing, mugging, wading in the surf; and shots of Campbell and Faith, each alone. She was very lovely, precisely the sort of young wife who would live, or so Nick thought, in some old New England house, no doubt one that her family had bought the young couple as a wedding gift. She was tall and slender, with a nicely formed, lithe body, long straight hair, glossy rich in the rich sun of the rich beach on which they were relaxing or “cavorting,” was the odd word that came to Nick unbidden. But in one photograph, which made Nick, in quick reaction, pull his head sharply back and raise his eyes to Campbell’s, then look down again, Faith stood, unsmiling, looking directly at the camera with what seemed an almost painful sexual intensity. Her hands were cupped beneath her breasts, which were half-out of her bra, in an offering. She was, Nick thought, Nick knew, offering him her breasts, and herself. This glaringly erotic image had been specifically made for him, of course it had. It had been posed by her and by Campbell for him! As he looked up again, Campbell, blushing to his hairline, was reaching for the pack of photographs, embarrassed, nervously laughing, reaching and saying something, saying, “Oh, hell, Nick, I didn’t mean for that one to be—it’s, you know, it’s, I’m sorry. It’s personal.” And he took the photographs back.
All right, so Nick thought, perhaps, it’s “personal,” but it was in the pack, part of the group, not removed for their own pleasures or uses. He was meant to see it. Campbell’s wife was audaciously offering him her body, he was meant to see her breasts, her sensual frown, he was meant to want her. He saw again the soft shadows that were the areolas of her nipples, she might as well have bared herself, for God’s sake. Nick knew, for certain, that Campbell wanted him to fuck his wife. And what would he do? Watch? Nick saw her slender fingers cradling her breasts. This is what Campbell wanted, but did Nick? He decided to wait and see if a weekend visit would come up again.
It did come up again, within a day or two, accompanied by a squeeze of his arm and a kind of maudlin testimonial to Faith’s expectations of his visit: Campbell was “afraid” he’d been “giving her an earful” about Nick. “Anyway,” he said, “I think we could have a hell of a lot of fun.” The photograph was not mentioned. Tomorrow, Nick thought, he’s more than likely to bring in a picture of his wife naked. He didn’t really believe this, nor did he by now believe that Campbell wanted him as a partner in a sexual adventure; he had come to accept Campbell’s assertion that the beach picture was indeed meant to be private and to stay private. He was, or so he told himself, getting a little weird. So he decided to tell Campbell that he’d try to get up to visit on the next weekend or the one after that. On that very day, as if scripted, Campbell brought in another photograph of Faith, this one taken, he was clear on this, especially for Nick. There she stood, sweet and obscene, pouting, in flower-print panties and white high heels, at the side of a king-size bed, an iced drink in one hand and the other curved lightly into her crotch. Behind her was a Boston Museum of Fine Arts poster of an Odilon Redon flower painting that echoed her insubstantial underwear. “Faith wanted me to give you this,” Campbell said. “Even though I wasn’t sure, you know … about it.” He colored slightly. “You, right?, understand?”
Nick was nonplussed, to say the very least, by this, nonplussed and silenced, but aroused and tempted as well. Still, the new image of Faith, rather than pushing Nick into inviting himself to their house, pushed him back into procrastination. He was, as remarked, tempted, but repelled as well—it was all too eager and sweaty. And to complicate and blur matters, there was no way for him to know whether Faith had any notion of Campbell’s use of the photograph—of either of them. One might cynically say that Nick, at this point, could not or would not believe that this glorious woman knew that her husband was pimping her face and body, since he was half in love with this discreetly exhibitionistic phantom. It doesn’t really need to be said, but the very things that aroused and inflamed Nick were those that made him apprehensive and uneasy. He was no sexual innocent, and had his fair share, as it is said, of amorous adventures. But there was something just slightly off with this particular situation, something that lay just out of sight. And yet—there was Faith, or at least her image, waiting. Am I crazy about this woman I’ve never seen? Yes. Is she being offered to me like a whore? Yes. Why? I don’t know. Does she know or is she ignorant of her role? Who cares? So he simmered and stalled, half-witted with desire.
Campbell somewhat melodramatically pretended exasperation at Nick’s delay, but he was, in truth, deeply annoyed. Nick imagined him wondering “what else can I do?” But within a day or two, Nick proposed a tentative date, subject to change, oh yes, for his visit. From that very moment, Campbell said nothing more about Faith, nor did he bring in any more photographs. It is, by the way, to be noted that Nick had simply kept what he thought of as the “flower girl” photograph, and it joined the beach picture—which Campbell had silently left under Nick’s blotter pad—in his desk drawer. Neither of them mentioned this. Nick would, now and again, and against his better judgment, slyly look at the images that he had by now laid imaginative claim to, but Campbell pretended not to notice this. At any rate, he made no comments. As an indication of Nick’s shaky state of mind at this time, it’s pertinent to remark that he would not permit himself to take the photographs home, for that, he tortuously believed, would suggest the perverse. On the other hand, it had occurred to him to ask his estranged wife to accompany him on his suburban visit; or to tell her that he was in love again; or to send her copies of the photographs with an enclosed message of vile triumph. After these chimeras passed, he was half-certain that Campbell had turned him into an idiot.
Campbell, to repeat, did not mention Faith or the weekend or how lovely the cool evenings were on the lawn that looked down across dense woods to the river. He stopped “selling” the visit, and was careful not to say anything that might unsettle Nick. He had his plans, although they were more like hopes, as we’ll see. He did not know, however, the extent to which Nick was by now enthralled—besotted—by the images that he had memorized. As far as Campbell knew, the photos were erotically promising to Nick, suggestive of Faith’s “enlightenment,” as he might have said. But Nick, following the sad, trite script that is known by heart to half the world, felt a vast, contemptuous resentment of Campbell, who not only knew the breathless delight of sleeping with this Aphrodite, he had certainly and lasciviously subjected her—this adoring and trusting woman!—to his, to Nick’s gaze. This blithe contradiction held that Faith had bravely offered her body to the unknown yet noble Nick because she knew that she would immediately love him; but also that she was the unwilling subject of a lewd experiment that forced her modest self to be ogled and sullied by a stranger, the depraved Nick. He almost, but not quite, thought of Faith as the victim of “a terrible fate.” You see how addled he’d become. That Campbell had been changed into a rival for his own wife’s affections, her imagined sexual enthusiasms, was a notion that Nick never allowed fully to assert itself. It was—he knew this—absurd even to think of this woman whom he “knew” by means of two stiffly posed photographs, taken and revealed for reasons that were still obscure, and perhaps specious. Yet he could feel her breasts in his hands.
About a week or so before Nick’s promised visit, Campbell’s manner subtly changed. Perhaps that’s putting it too decisively; it’s enough to say that Nick caught him, on a half-dozen occasions, staring at the wall, an expression of wretchedness, a kind of bereft gl
oom, on his face. Nick stifled his anger: how dare he mope around with the beautiful and gentle Faith awaiting him on the beach, at their bedside, half-naked and shamed in the role of sexual victim that had been dishonorably urged upon her? But the coming weekend visit would remedy all, and if love had to be painfully extruded from the vulgarity that Campbell had created, that’s what would, what must be done. It’s quite probable that Nick, certainly, and Campbell as well, were on the edge of an imbecile eroticism. As for Faith, no one knows, or knew, with any certainty, just what she was doing—if anything—in this shabby drama. She waited, did she not?
One afternoon, glum Campbell told Nick that he and Faith had quarreled “hurtfully” a week earlier, over something that was petty and inconsequential, but which served to awaken the hidden angers and, well, disappointments in their marriage. He’d left the house, bought a pint of vodka, and driven to a little pebble beach on the river. He sat on the hood of the car, drinking and smoking, hating Faith and his marriage, his “fucking charity house,” as he put it, envying Nick’s separation and freedom. The rest of his story was rushed, fragmented, elliptical, and told with his face partly averted. A young man had driven up in an old coupe and parked next to Campbell’s car. He looked like a college student—maybe high school. They’d talked about women and shared the vodka, and Campbell told him of the quarrel with Faith, to which the young man said that he’d just broken up with his girl, who was nothing but a fucking whore bitch. He opened Campbell’s fly and his own, and they kissed and fondled each other, and then the young man knelt in front of Campbell and sucked him off, although Campbell said, in a whisper, “he mouthed me,” while masturbating himself to climax. Then he said good-bye and smiled in the darkness—Campbell could see his teeth—and drove off. When he got in, Faith was asleep, just as well, God! What was wrong with him? He’d never tell Faith, never, he didn’t think, some things just can’t be told. He looked at Nick with a fake rueful grin that said “but I can tell you, can’t I?” Nick shook his head in what could have been disapproval or chagrin or both.
Well. There it surely was. Campbell was letting him know, with a glancing candor, why he wanted Nick to visit. His convenient, halting tale—true or not—was a confession of his desire for Nick, who thought, with scorn, that Campbell didn’t have the nerve to make a straightforward pass at him, but had to use his wife as a lure. All right, you son of a bitch! He’d go up to their house, he wanted Faith, didn’t he?, he was beginning to dream about her. So he thought then; but later in the day, it became clear to him that Campbell would get what he had schemed to get from the beginning if he visited. That would never do! Rather than fend off Campbell, or worse, listen to him speak of his desire and devotion, for an entire weekend, he would give up Faith. So crazed was he that he actually thought this—that he would “give up”—give up!—a woman who existed only in Campbell’s occasional remarks and two small images. He wasn’t so demented, though, as to think that she would be crushed by his sacrifice.
On that Friday, he said that he’d have to cancel the weekend, something about his goddamned wife and her shyster lawyer and a division of things that they’d bought and been given for their apartment, they had to meet and talk and do this and that and this and that; on and on he blathered hysterically, while Campbell listened in silence.
Now that this crisis, if it may be called that, had been temporarily resolved, or shelved, a hint of normality was restored to their relationship. It was not as it had been, and they most often ate lunch separately, while their after-five strolls and drinks became rare. All references to a weekend in Connecticut disappeared from their conversation, and Faith may as well have never lived. In the careful politeness of mutual embarrassment, they silently conspired to pretend that no invitation had ever been made to “the Campbells’,” or, if one had, that it could not have been “seriously entertained,” as they say. For that matter, there were no photographs of Faith in existence, certainly not in Nick’s desk drawer. Perhaps there was no Faith, no wife at all. Their friendship, of course, was over, and though they still worked well together, they had few conversations that were not professional or centered on public events. So the late spring and summer passed.
In late September, Nick told Campbell, in his capacity as Nick’s superior, that he’d received a job offer from a firm in Chicago, and that he’d accepted. His divorce was almost settled, the final decree a week or so away, and, well, he was giving his two weeks’ notice. There may truly have been a job in Chicago, but it’s not important. It’s possible that Campbell began to say, “What job?!,” but that, too, is unimportant. His face, despite a castor-oil smile so false as to be grotesque, went bone-white, so that he looked, for a few seconds, like a corpse, or, more hideously, like a theatrical version of a corpse. When there was but a week left until Nick’s departure, they managed to have a celebratory farewell lunch at a little bar that served sandwiches and hamburgers to the midday office drunks. It was, not surprisingly, a disaster, unleavened by office gossip or old jokes. Just as they were leaving, Campbell, riding on three martinis and a few beers, demanded that Nick return the “very very personal” photographs of his wife. He seemed angrily humiliated, as if Nick had inveigled him into showing him the photographs, as if he had been blackmailed. In the office, Nick gave him the pictures and Campbell roughly folded them in two and stuck them into the pages of a paperback on his desk. “This is a stupid rotten novel!” he said, belligerent and put upon.
On Nick’s last day, he packed up his few things and said that he’d be leaving a little early, what the hell. Campbell got up from his desk as if drunk—perhaps he was drunk—his face pulled into a sneer, and half-lurched, half-lunged at Nick to hold him by the forearms, the shoebox with its odds and ends held in Nick’s hands awkwardly between them. He didn’t look at Nick but stiffly bent forward and tried to kiss his mouth, missing but wetting his chin. His eyes were wide and slightly out of focus. Nick stepped away from him and said something like “Come on, Campbell!,” and walked out of the office and to the elevators. Campbell was a few steps behind him and when he reached Nick he motioned to the stairwell. “Please,” he said. “Just a … please?” Nick, absurdly, looked at his watch, then followed Campbell into the stairwell, where he had slouched against a wall, looking at his shoes. Then, as if he had rehearsed, which he may well have done, Campbell begged Nick not to leave just yet, to come and stay with him—and with Faith—and with this articulation of his wife’s name he looked into Nick’s face and grinned. He knew, he said, he knew that Nick liked, well, was attracted to Faith, the photos, he said, those pictures of her. Then he stopped, simply defeated. “I love you,” he said. “I love you.” He began to wail very quietly, his hands folded high on his chest in a classic yet ridiculous pose of misery and loss. Nick’s face was flushed with anger and pity and, who can tell, perhaps with desire. “I love you, I love you!” Campbell said, blubbering now, and he put his arms clumsily around Nick’s waist just as the door opened and a janitor, carrying a bucket and mop, stepped onto the landing. Momentarily taken aback by the sight of these two flustered young men, he stood uncertainly, then, as they pulled apart, realized what he was seeing, and smiled a knowing smile, a smile that said he understood and that it was all right with him.
GORGIAS
Invisible Door
I once had a friend, a dear friend, who, I believed, or was led to believe, had betrayed me, profoundly and completely. Even now, years later, I can’t bring myself to make known the circumstances, the facts, as I then perceived them to be, of this betrayal. That these circumstances, these facts, were, I discovered, malicious inventions created by another man for his own mysterious reasons, did not remedy or ameliorate the estrangement and bad feeling they—no matter how preposterous—created between me and my friend; his putative betrayal, that is, might as well have been actual. The notion that time heals or erases such aberrations and their dolorous effects has not, in my experience, been the case; on the contrary, time makes co
ncrete and salient all initial agonies, missteps, misunderstandings, and bitterness. It takes a spectacularly willful, almost herculean courage to destroy, even to soften these ugly petrifactions, after which, and at best, there is nothing left of feeling but rubble. It is better to interiorize the waste and regret than to attempt its amelioration. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
The third party I’ve mentioned, the malign, the famous meddler who stalks through so many shabby stories, had been a partner of mine and my friend in a small, ultimately unsuccessful specialty-printing business we had begun together—although the failure of the business was not, I’m fairly sure, a factor in the creation of his elaborate system of lies, painstakingly developed to convince me of my friend’s perfidy. It’s enough to say that he did his work well, and had, I suppose, the pleasure of seeing my friend and me sundered, quite wrenchingly disjointed in mutual anger and bewilderment. Friendships that collapse in this way attain to a kind of mean perfection, a hateful balance of irreconcilable integers, each of which is, or most certainly becomes, a treasured wound. I was hurt, surprised, and puzzled by the enormity of my friend’s acts; he was astonished by my abrupt decision to end our friendship. My action and his reaction were gestures sadly predicated on a corrupt syllogism, the major premise of which might have been phrased: “If a man I have no reason to trust tells me that a friend has betrayed me, I’ll sever all ties with the friend.”
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