“I probably would have suffocated them.”
She stared at the floor. In profile, the lines of her face were still clean and young, after ten years. “Maybe. Well, yes, I guess so.”
She didn’t have to agree so readily! “You would have revived them,” he responded gallantly, then paused. “Why? Do I suffocate you?”
“It’s not your fault you’re so large and ...” Her hand was stretched out, palm up, but no word came. “Maybe any woman would be insufficient.”
“Insufficient! You were all I ever wanted. And still.”
“Mm-hm,” she said abstractedly, and slid off the stool to look at the paintings. She had a new nervous gesture, he noticed, pushing her hair off her forehead with both hands, fingers outspread. “These new ones are good. Mysterious. Kind of like latter-day Madonnas, aren’t they? They’re better than anything you’ve done in years.”
Martin grew hot. He realized he was blushing like a girl.
He understood women well enough to know it would be incumbent upon him, after the operation, to show her that it made no difference. Easy enough: to him it made no difference whatsoever; he harbored no old wives’ superstitions. No, it was not the presence or absence of any organs that governed his desire, but that gradual shrinking of the spirit. In truth he felt more sorry for himself than for her. What was she losing but a mere lump of flesh? While he had given her his soul in trust, and instead of nurturing it she had starved it.
As he sat in the depressingly plastic waiting room with an atrocious painting of a dancing gypsy girl on the wall—what imbecile’s idea to hang it in a hospital?—the idea that there could never be children now for him and Alice struck for the first time as a material reality. Nevermore. Like an attic door flying open, it released a rush of memory and speculation. What might it have been like, how might his life have gone, had he not met her at the American Library in Paris and been captivated by ... what? By her appreciation of him. He thought of the women he had known during that boyish jaunt through Europe and before, back and back into the past like road markers sliding off a rearview mirror.
From the very beginning, with all the neighborhood girls he had managed to cajole into bed, he had been courtly and gallant, as courtly and gallant as a teen-ager from an inner-city slum could know how to be. Once, a girl had cried out loud, gasping, and Martin stopped short in panic. Maybe he had hurt her, maybe there would be blood. “What is it!” “Oh God,” she moaned. “Don’t stop.” That was how he learned that women might have a personal, noncharitable investment in sex. Once he knew, the fact and the lore surrounding it fascinated him. He was not shy about asking girls questions, and so became a virtuoso. It pleased him to please; it pleased him more to give help to the needy, to girls who had no idea what they were capable of, or to girls who knew but needed a little more time. Of his time and efforts he was unsparing.
How these needy girls had evolved into the sources of inspiration, how his exertions had become sacrificial offerings to the laps of goddesses, was a transsubstantiation even Martin, with his vast learning, could not have explained. He only knew it had to do with art. And that Alice, more than any other, had offered the lure of transformation. He had first watched her bashful face pass through the stages of knowing to finally turn abandoned, and all the times he had made love to her since, or desired her only to be turned away, that progressive image had roused him. It was an image of incomparable voluptuousness, to which he was indispensable.
Now from all their straining nothing could ever spring, and as she lay being eviscerated he thought again that somewhere might be a child of his. Girl or boy? He hoped it was nothing like that lurid gypsy on the wall. The idea engendered no real curiosity or hope, though. What could he hope for? Rather, it opened onto a vista of possibilities—not only all the women there had been but all the women there had not been, trailed by all the possible children. At every nerve ending he sensed the abundance out in the broad world. The doctor who came to tell him Alice was stapled back together found Martin bemused, adrift in transcendent realms, like a youth who has heard the call of the spiritual life.
Still, he strove to do what was right. When Alice came home he hovered over her like a mother, he brought her chocolate turtles and reassured her of his love.
“I know. I know you do,” she said wanly. “I just want a little time to myself.”
A few months passed. “Alice,” he whispered, and caressed her as he used to. “Let it be over. It’s long enough.”
She felt limp in his arms, and distant. Unfair. Nonetheless, he groped for words befitting the occasion. “It’s good to have you in my arms again.”
“You look so sad,” Alice said in her clever, doleful way. She stroked his hair, beginning to go gray. “My Knight of the Woeful Countenance.”
“My Dulcinea,” Martin replied obligingly, though as he said it he recognized she was hardly a Dulcinea. He was the street urchin her charmed eyes had once idealized. No wonder he was rejected.
The following month a critic saw his new work in a group show and singled it out. A gallery in New York was interested. As Martin looked his last at the two paintings bought by a nearby museum, it occurred to him that Tracy should be having her baby right around now. She had dropped out of school after Christmas and he had not seen her since. But he hoped all went well—he felt a familial concern. Before long there was a one-man show. He worked feverishly. He was thirty-six, not too old for a fresh start. He traveled, giving lectures, showing slides, showing himself. Everywhere he was such an excellent showman that even without the paintings his charm would have left indelible impressions. Happily, though, he was no charlatan but the genuine article: an artist, with an artistic temperament.
III
A new era dawned, in which Martin became a personage. At each gallery opening, at each university he visited—those trips replete with parties and every variety of chicken dinner—was some woman he knew he might effortlessly possess, and often did, parched and deserving as he was. He was not without scruples or discrimination, would not become one of those middle-aged fools who break the hearts of mere children. They were all so skinny and boyish nowadays anyhow, besides which, a grown man could hardly talk to them. No, give him a mature woman with a fullness of spirit any day.
But he was ravaged by guilt. He thought of his marriage vows, his attachment to Alice, his dependence—for admittedly he was dependent. Was that a crime? She was, after all, his wife, and he needed her, when he returned from his wanderings, to greet him with her cool equanimity, to ask how things had gone at the shows or seminars, to sit up late over cups of honeyed tea, never commenting on his infidelities though it was hardly possible she could be ignorant. The enigma in this friendly civility—did she know, and if she knew, how could she not speak?—kept him attached. So that with the others, after the first rush of arousal his spirit would falter. One of his great-grandfathers had been a rabbi back in the Ukraine, his mother had told him. He had always felt, faute de mieux, a half-mystic connection to this rabbi—it was the closest thing to an artist his family had ever produced. Now Martin imagined he felt the genes of the rabbi stir within him in revolt and disgust, reminding him of what the decent life was. His spirit would falter, but luckily not his body. For was there not a morality to seduction too? Could one lure a stranger and then desert her midway? Manners were morals, and Martin was a lover of extensive courtesy, until he rolled away clutching a pillow, isolated in a fog of oppression.
When he had had his fill he resolved to give up these ways. This was not the man he was meant to be. Even his work, which by now was praised indiscriminately, seemed to him to have lost texture and to subsist on a surface brilliance. It was only love of a woman, of every plane and arc and fold of her body, every cranny of her spirit, that could open the subterranean chambers.
“Alice,” he whispered in bed. “I’m going to change. It’s not too late for us, is it? Say it’s not.”
“Of course it’s too late. It’s bee
n too late for years.” She closed her book, though.
“No! I’ve never loved anyone else.” Moments passed. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Why are you suddenly interested in me, Martin? Is the work not going well?” Her finger still marked her place.
“Interested? I’ve always been interested. You know I’m interested in everything in the world.”
“Yes, and it’s your world, isn’t it, your little garden to drop in on now and then. It’s all arbitrary with you. Like God. Who knows why he giveth and taketh away? But I’m not one of your creatures, you see.”
He, playing God! When he was the humble supplicant, pleading for salvation at her hands! Yet her words did not pain him so much as that thorough calm. He had listened to similar complaints, but they were made in heat and truculence, and never so sharply formulated; he had to hand it to her for that, even as he lay stunned and aching.
“You don’t even care anymore, do you, Alice? ... Do you? Tell me, for God’s sake!”
She shut her eyes as if pained. “I have to get up early. A publisher’s calling from Madrid.”
Then he grasped it. She must have someone else, God knows for how long now. How had he never thought of it before? Occasionally some woman or other had asked about his wife. Do you have an “arrangement”? Does she have someone too? He had always said, with conviction, Oh no, she’s very involved in her work. An extraordinary woman. Not once had he made a derogatory remark about Alice to any woman he slept with, or to anyone at all, for that matter. Such was his loyalty. While she, all along, like a snake in the grass ... That she might prefer solitude he had managed to swallow. But this! Panic broke through his skin in a cold sweat and he pulled the blanket closer.
“Are you saying you want me to leave?”
“Not really. We get along all right. I like watching you, and you like to be watched.”
His blood eased. She did need him. Maybe he was imagining it all, exaggerating as usual, yes. He could show her. ... Summoning his resources, like calling in the diverse troops, foot soldiers, light artillery, cavalry, Martin advanced with cunning on the supposedly impregnable Alice, first setting her book down on the night table, careful not to lose the place. Afterwards he held her close and murmured in her ear, “It isn’t so, all you said, is it? Please.” She appeared to be sleeping. Her lashes were glistening. A moment or two later she rolled over and curled up, her back turned.
IV
Martin’s life became a quest for love. He bypassed ephemera with only a glimmer of regret, for he was pursuing something higher, spiritual. There was a French woman who taught chemistry at a private high school in New York City, where Martin now held a tenured position at the City University. Twice a week, on the days of his classes, he would spend the night at her Brooklyn Heights apartment and return to his house on Long Island the next morning. Françoise was a woman of firm and inflexible character: though she was divorced and had two children she struggled to support, she refused any help he offered. If he would divorce his wife and marry her ... But this way, no, merci. He listened attentively, but Alice preyed on his mind. She was losing weight again and having dizzy spells. One does not desert a sick wife. He did not even need the genes of a rabbi to tell him that.
When he and Françoise made love, the image of Alice hovered over the bed. Françoise sensed her presence and could not abide it. Several times she actually stopped in the middle and fetched a pile of test papers to correct. At last, after almost a year, she declared she had to think of herself and her children, her future. Martin was dismayed that a woman he had chosen could be so pragmatic. She could not love him in “the old high way of love” (Yeats was Alice’s favorite poet), where no obstacle could keep kindred souls apart.
“Well, then ... ?” Françoise gave a shrug.
“But think,” Martin pleaded, at his wit’s end. “You’re so logical and scientific. Measure. Which is greater for you in all this? The pleasure or the pain?”
She was a luscious, plump, dark-haired woman with great green feline eyes. She was sitting cross-legged in her red flowered armchair, wearing a black satin Chinese robe he had given her, her breasts spilling out the front. It flashed through Martin’s mind that he must keep that image of her, in case it should be the last.
“The pain. I’m sorry.”
He suspected he had not really been in love with her at all, for parting hurt less than he expected. Quite soon he was distracted by a woman he had noticed during the waning weeks of the Françoise era, a secretary in the admissions office at the university, also divorced, with three children. All the women he was drawn to, Martin couldn’t help observing, were mothers. He liked visiting and finding the children rowdy and ubiquitous; as he bantered with them he grew excited by the prospect of soon snatching their mother away, locking the bedroom door against them and seeing her transform from mother to lover, possessing her in a way they would never know. The new woman, Peg, was not beautiful at all. She was tall and thin and moved gawkily—her jutting hips and elbows banging into furniture—and was the most sexually aggressive woman he had ever known. It was she who first suggested they have lunch, and in the restaurant pressed her leg against his. Martin could hardly believe it. His approaches were generally executed with a careful and gracious decorum. “You’re far worse than I am,” he moaned in bed. “Eat oysters,” she advised. “You know what else might work? Sara Lee apple crumb.” The latter she ate in bed, a habit he didn’t care for. Alice never ate in bed, nor did she leave clumps of hair in the bathtub. Nonetheless something rapacious about Peg’s lanky, small-breasted body made him avid. Together they would careen into a world where only flesh and sensation existed; all traces of who they were, and where, were forgotten.
But then at the awakening, the same oppression, the same withdrawal. Peg raged beside him, calling him names. Why did she even bother with him, he was only a stupid old clown who would soon be too feeble to hold a paintbrush, not to mention screw. These were moments when he almost felt the pain was greater than the pleasure, and he understood, to some small degree, what Françoise had meant. At home in his studio, he labored over ungainly images of dislocation and imbalance. When critics called the work startling and original, he decided it was worth the torment.
He discovered she was unfaithful. She would bring home virtual strangers and not even bother to cover her tracks. “Why shouldn’t I? What do you want me to do when you’re with her—knit you a codpiece to keep it warm? You can drive a person insane, you know? All that wild talk about South Sea islands, then I don’t hear from you for days.”
“All right, all right, I’ll tell her. Tomorrow.”
But when he was away from Peg and could think clearly, he knew it would be foolhardy to leave Alice for a woman like that. She would betray him; she was mad; and when she tired of his body she would cast it aside the way she peeled off her clothes in haste and kicked them across the floor.
After a year and a half she exchanged him for someone else. He was in physical agony, had never felt so battered and ready to die. Sexual memories taunted him like furies. Feverish, he thought of escaping into the depths of the Sound. Once he went so far as to drive his car to the water’s edge, where he grew lost in dreams of his boyhood; when he awoke with a start he wondered why he was there, and drove home. Alice would find him huddled at the kitchen table and would stroke his hair, nearly gone over to gray now.
Months later, when it passed, he was empty and lightheaded, as after a fast. He moved more slowly, his shoulders drooped, and he no longer searched for love. Still, there were women everywhere, and he would sit up talking in bed till the late hours, getting to know all about them—he continued to find so many so interesting.
He never stayed with them long; if he saw they were falling in love with him he extricated himself as best he could. With all his precautions, in some cases he left grief behind him, but what was he to do? He had not forced himself on them. Far from it. And maybe it
was only right that a few should suffer, to offset in some small measure the suffering he had undergone at the hands of his mother, and Alice, and Peg, as if there were a great communal balance sheet of suffering to be rendered at the final judgment. Martin was not proud of such feelings, yet didn’t the best of disciples sometimes doubt, or wish in vain that vengeance were theirs? Only the untried kept a pure faith.
Sometimes he would glimpse a woman on the street who reminded him of Peg, or of Alice in earlier days, and he felt such acute longing that he would have to follow her for several blocks. His heart fluttered, he stumbled with vertigo, fantasies roiled in his head. He never made any attempt to catch up or to speak, and later, sitting on a park bench to calm his blood, he would fear that he was in his dotage, though he was only forty-five.
Once, on the crowded steps of the Metropolitan Museum, he came face to face with an old lover. She was graciously polite, even warm, but Martin could tell she had not forgiven his defection. Was she one of those to whom he had sworn eternal friendship? If only he could remember exactly how he had dropped out of her life, he might say something mitigating or soothing, but alas ... Everything else he remembered vividly. He remembered that though her manner was crisp and lively, in bed she was enchantingly languid. So often they were contrary to the way they appeared. Peg’s public behavior was rather severe. Françoise, for all her luscious looks, tended to be phlegmatic, and his own proper Alice in her day, well ... All this was fascinating, but right now, of no avail. He knew this woman so well, her every expression and mood, the tone she used for each degree of personal connection, that he could have charted on a graph precisely where he stood in her feelings, precisely where the axis of love and the axis of resentment intersected. It was that very knowledge of her that she could not forgive, he well knew, a knowledge painstakingly acquired only to be interred. He sympathized with her veiled disgust; it disgusted him too, that glimpse of his heart as a rank, unvisited graveyard of intimate and varied data about women, once-precious relics, neglected and moldering.
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