V
When Martin returned from the upstate college where he met Paula—her dance troupe performed opposite the gallery showing his paintings—Alice told him about the lump in her breast. He was dazed by the rhythmic recurrence of events, life grinding in cycles (love, cancer) as though it had but a limited supply of plot. She had noticed it a while ago, she said, but had waited to speak until the doctor was sure. In a manner quite unlike her, hesitant and tremulous, she asked if he wanted to feel it. He didn’t want to, but to refuse would be more horrible still. She opened her blouse and offered her breast, showing him the place. He felt it right away, like a berry deep in the flesh. His fingers recoiled but he forced his hand to remain. He was unsure what to do. He made a gesture like a caress. She stepped back and buttoned her blouse.
“God,” he said. “Well, when?”
“Tomorrow.”
‘Tomorrow!”
The sooner the better. The doctor had urged an even earlier day, but she had not wanted to spoil Martin’s trip, or to shock him with a note in an empty house. Tears came to his eyes as she recounted all this in her even way. Even, yet teetering on some brink. Martin led her to the sofa and they sat down. He realized that touch of her breast had been a farewell, and felt a surge of regret and loss. One flesh, the Bible said. Then shame crept over him. Men used the word “possess” for a woman’s body, but ultimately ... no. The word stood for all the advantages of possession, none of the liabilities. It would be her loss. He had not really possessed her in years, if ever. If they were truly one flesh he could feel the loss without shame at his feeling. Who was she, then? In one of those instants when reality threatens to appear as brutally as a graveyard lit by lightning, Martin strained to see her, huddled on the worn sofa, as a being distinct from himself, but it was too arduous. His imagination shrank back.
He turned with relief to a more practical thought, of Paula. He had promised to call her. Of course it would be out of the question to see her this week, perhaps for several weeks. And he felt a surge of regret and loss over that too, like a distorted echo.
Alice started to cry and Martin murmured the suitable words until she was calm again.
“Do you feel any pain? Do you want to lie down?”
“No, I feel all right. I’m hungry, but there’s nothing around. I haven’t shopped since you left.”
“Let’s go out to dinner. How’s that?”
“Lobster.”
“Terrific.”
“My last meal. Don’t they give condemned men whatever they want?” She tried to laugh.
“There’ll be lots of lobsters in your future, you’ll see. I’ll even bring them to you in the hospital if you want. Remember last time I smuggled in a pizza? Nothing is more difficult to conceal than a pizza.”
“Last time,” she repeated. “What next? What can they take after this?”
“Oh, Alice, don’t think that way. Defy it. Go change and make yourself beautiful. Life is still good. It is!”
She smiled wryly, her cheeks damp with tears. “They’re cutting off my breast and you’re telling me life is beautiful. You really think so, don’t you?”
He nodded gravely.
“You’re lovable, you know. A lovable jerk.”
He beamed like a small boy being appreciated, and for the moment he felt fulfilled again. This was the closest they had been in years. A bitter notion, but what was any pleasure, without a dash of bitters? “No.” He put his arms around her. He had almost forgotten the feel of her shoulders, square and firm. “Not a lovable jerk. A holy fool.”
“Better stop while you’re ahead, Martin. This is one show you can’t steal.”
Alice’s recovery was slow. She shuffled groggily through the house in an old bathrobe, and could sit for hours over a jigsaw puzzle of a Rothko painting, adding four or five pieces a day. All the time Martin tended her, his thoughts kept straying to Paula.
She was a dancer. At the reception where they met she had moved lithely through the crowd with a radiant calm. Martin saw her as a descendant of Isadora Duncan, only less dramatic, less self-important. He had not seen her perform, since he was at the time giving his own performance in the gallery, but he felt he knew exactly what she would be like. Watching her, he would know the long-awaited descent of peace.
He had told her all this in a late-night coffee shop, and she had smiled and said it was hard enough to do it, let alone theorize about it, but in any case it sounded lovely. She had crooked teeth, and with each smile they became more endearing; they gave her face an ingenuousness that made him want to protect and cherish her.
Martin did most of the talking that night. Painting was his life, he told her. As he spoke the words, he hoped they were true, for there was something about Paula that repelled myth-making. No doubt his life might be viewed less favorably. Yet wasn’t everything he had done ultimately in the service of art?
Paula mostly listened and nodded. She hadn’t heard of him, she confessed, her blue eyes apologetic. She had so little time to keep up; dancing was terribly demanding, especially at her age. Thirty-seven. “A kid,” Martin chuckled. That was ten years younger than he. Hardly indecent. She had danced ever since she was a child, she said. Halfway through college she left to get married, and soon after had a baby daughter. She had been very happy with her husband, a civil engineer, but he was killed in a plane crash five years ago. These facts she offered shyly, as if a famous artist might find them of scant interest.
Quite the contrary. He was glad she had never heard of him. He had had more than enough of those who had. He loved her single-mindedness, her instinctive dignity. Her happy marriage, that sweet bondage granted to only a few, drew his reverence. Beyond that, she was a mother, and he was enchanted by the tender way she spoke of her daughter, sixteen and a dancer too. Martin envisioned the daughter as a more innocent version of Paula, the same erect body, muscular yet soft and sinuous, the same lush fall of black hair with glossy bangs reaching to the eyebrows, the same olive skin and wide mouth.
“What’s her name?”
“May.”
“How lovely. I’d love to meet her.”
Paula only smiled.
“Will I have a chance to, do you think? Will you invite me over so I can see where you live, what it’s like, what you have hanging on your walls?”
“Oh,” she said, abashed, “it’s nothing special. Just the two of us in this four-room apartment, and we go about our business.”
Martin was rapt.
“What about tomorrow? We can meet for breakfast and then take a walk. Are you leaving too? Maybe I can drive you back.”
Paula laughed at his grandiose gestures, his voice reverberating in the deserted place. “Thanks, but I have another performance tomorrow night. And I’ve got to get some rest.” She stood up.
“Oh, I wish I could be there. But ... I can’t.”
“I guess your wife is expecting you. ... Look, maybe we’d better say goodbye now. It’s been a lovely evening.”
“Nonsense! This is very important. Three-fifteen, my God! Come, I’ll drive you to your place.” He took her firmly by the arm. In front of the white clapboard inn they exchanged a long look, and he leaned over to kiss her lightly on the lips.
“Martin, you must meet people everywhere you go. I ... I don’t live like that.”
“I know. I understand completely. That’s why it’s so wonderful. Till tomorrow. And sleep well.”
He watched her walk up the flagstone path. In a filmy summer dress and sandals that laced around the ankles, she was like a mirage receding into the night.
The next morning they ambled on the outskirts of town, then kissed goodbye lightly again. He wouldn’t disturb her stillness, not till they were both more than ready, when she would shed layers of calm like veils. He could practically see it, a mesmerizing dance. Underneath, perhaps even in the height of passion, there would be a still center: he would drink from it and be renewed. Saved. But first he would savor the desire,
hold it on his fingertips like a bubble, in all its delicacy and iridescence.
After leaving her he sped south towards home and Alice, stirred by the poetry of his discretion. Yes, Paula was assuredly not the sort to be rushed. But Martin rarely rushed in any case; rather, he bided his time discreetly until he could be sure of a favorable response. Instinct always told him the moment. If instinct hung back, he did not make the attempt. Or if he waited long and patiently enough, he might be relieved of the responsibility altogether—they did it. He was more sinned against than sinning, as it were. A few women had even kidded him about that diffidence. His interest, they said, was evident, but ... “You force women into making the move for you, you big lazy lug.” Valerie, he believed that was. “Ah no, love. I’m shy, underneath.” “Shy! Don’t make me laugh, Martin! You’re a tease!” She was wrong. He was shy, somewhere inside. Paula would understand. Her appearing in his life could be a sign of grace, pointing the way to those hidden regions. Even in his paintings, there might come a hush, a reticence, all the epicurean joys of quietude. Luxe, calme, et volupté. Only Paula, alas, would not appreciate the allusion (as Alice immediately would).
He would revisit these thoughts over and over, like a child rereading a beloved book, while Alice slept heavily beside him. For months, till she recovered her strength, he mesmerized himself with anticipation of the new era.
The four-room apartment was nondescript, as he had been warned, but its plainness only made it a more perfect setting for Paula, who was unconscious of her great worth. Her daughter. May, also lived up to Martin’s fantasies, a lissome girl who resembled her mother, though not quite so tall, a good girl in the old-fashioned way, well-mannered, who made her bed unasked and telephoned when she would be late.
“What a dream of a child. Do you think it’s upbringing, or are some people just born serene?” Martin wanted to know.
“Born,” Paula said. “I don’t think I did anything special.”
“You both have it and I don’t.”
“But you have your talent.”
“Well, so do you.”
“Performing isn’t the same thing.”
“Are you saying the artist has to be a tormented soul? That’s a cliché, Paula. There were countless ones who weren’t. Rubens, Van Dyck, Monet, Matisse. Duccio, I bet, was not tormented, but of course that was a different age. Lots of them were monks. Then again there’s Vermeer—you’d never think it, would you? And Van Gogh.”
Paula had drifted off to water her plants. Well, it didn’t matter. He was getting to be an old bore anyway. She was so beautiful, wearing just an open long-sleeved man’s shirt, and that curve of her wrist as she tilted the pitcher, nurturing ... In the slant of buttery morning light on her head and shoulders, she looked like a Vermeer herself.
Twice a week, when he came to the city to teach, Martin would stay overnight with Paula, who rearranged classes and rehearsals to free the time for him. Those evenings he enjoyed the domesticity he had always dreamed of. Often they would all three be in the kitchen, fixing dinner or reading the paper or playing Hearts. May did her homework at the kitchen table—Martin was sure she enjoyed having a man around, poor kid, to have lost her father so young; now and then she would ask him for help with history or trigonometry, or for difficult words in the crossword puzzles to which she was addicted. He would think, This is real life. Ordinary family life. It even pleased him to be irritated by the way May peeled the Styrofoam off soda bottles, slowly, in long curling strips. But of course Paula was not his wife, and May, however fond of her he grew, was not his child, and this was not his home. When Paula gave May grocery lists for the weekends—food to be eaten without him!—Martin suffered pangs of exclusion. May danced in a school production of Carousel one Saturday, and as she and Paula relived the evening at the dinner table, chortling over backstage anecdotes, he felt such a sense of emptiness that he had to walk out of the room.
Paula had friends he had never even met. Martin would have loved to talk far into the night with a bunch of dancers—despite his gray hair and the wearied slump of his shoulders, he was still interested in everything. But she said their evenings together were precious, they had so little time. Finally she admitted she felt uncomfortable, being with a married man. ... She had never intended it. It was happening almost before she knew it. A married man with a sick wife, she added in a whisper.
“Please, my darling, don’t torment yourself over it. It’s not your doing. It has nothing to do with you.”
“I don’t see how you can divide things up like that. It has everything to do with me.”
“If it weren’t you it would be—” Martin stopped himself in chagrin.
She did not talk of giving him up, though. No question of that, by now. No question of Martin’s leaving Alice either, nothing to be gnawed over and spit out, as in the era of Peg. Alice was not well. She had never regained her full strength after the operation, and though the doctors with their scans reassured her, Martin could see the wasting. If nothing else, he thought miserably, he had vision. Fading, she turned to him. Too late, she wanted to talk, to spend the time remaining with him. When, silently and hesitantly, she touched him in the night he made love to her, but what he had once yearned for he could do only with pity, and he felt wretched after. What she felt he never dared to ask.
How different from the quality of wonder and luminescence in his love for Paula! And yet he suspected that the wonder existed by virtue of the desolation he felt with Alice, just as the wonder of light exists by virtue of darkness. Even at the extremes of pleasure, when all boundaries seemed to fall away, Martin sensed a pall of darkness. Another presence. He knew then that beyond their marriage, their history, and her illness, something adamant and irreducible soldered him to her. Once, he had chosen her, and so he chose her still. To forsake her would be forsaking the rightness and power of his own will. That he could not do. That would be a denial of his deepest self.
VI
There came a time when Alice needed radiation treatments. The same as five years ago, only worse: it had crept everywhere. This time she did not offer him her breast to feel for the lump. She sank into a solitude. Martin took her for the treatments and did everything there was to do for her, while she looked on, mute. With her thinness, her eyes had become amazingly large; he had the eerie feeling that they saw into him, tracking his every quiver. With contempt? he wondered. Or with pity. Longing, regret? Once, as they were returning from one of her treatments, he dropped his keys at the front door; the ring snapped and they lay scattered on the step, Paula’s among them. As he knelt to gather them up he felt her looming above him, her eyes drilling into his bent back. “Why are you looking at me that way? What do you see? Are you thinking I’m clumsy?” “No,” she said. “Not at all. I’m not looking at anything at all.” It was true, he realized: she was not watching him, she hardly saw him, she had no further interest in him. It came over him with a deathly chill that he was not and had not been for a very long time the center of her life. The center of her life was herself, and she was watching inward.
When Alice died he called Paula and said, “I need to be alone for a while.”
“I understand. Take all the time you need. I’m so sorry. Really, I am. I know what she meant to you.”
How could she? It was such a secret, pernicious thing. He brooded on it as he stalked the empty house, not so much grieving as flagellating himself. Why had he not let her go when there was still time? She had not been strong enough to leave him—and in a fit of candor he cursed his power over women, wished it shorn away like Samson’s—but he could have been strong enough to give her back her life. Instead ... He tried to conjure scenes of their early days, to feel the balm of genuine regret, but the memories were static pictures, postcard views of Paris, refusing to come to life. There was nothing, nothing. It was all vanity. Even this self-loathing was vanity, for who was he to think of giving and withholding life?
After two weeks, for relief—even m
ortal sinners deserve some relief, Martin told himself—he went to Paula. They made love, and he wept. He stayed with her for a week: every night they made love and every night he wept, till it was clear he was trying even her saintliness, so he returned to his empty house. He fell into his old patterns, spending two evenings a week with Paula when he came to the city to teach. The rest of the time he worked. A fierce energy inflamed the paintings, a series of tangled bodies. He could hardly wait to finish each one, to see what he had done.
“What now, Martin?” Paula asked after a few months. It was late at night and they were sitting at her kitchen table, eating cherries. May was all grown and gone, twenty-one, living and dancing in San Francisco.
“What now, what?”
“Well, you’re alone now.”
“Not really alone.” He reached over and stroked her cheek.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes. But I’m not ready to do anything yet.”
“You’re not ready?” She sat up straighter.
“No.”
“I don’t understand. I thought when ... you know.”
“I need some time, Paula. The work is going so well, I can’t have any disruptions just at this point.”
“Disruptions?” She leaned her head back, as if offering her throat to a blade.
“I’m sorry. My darling, you’re everything to me. Don’t you know that?” He leaned over to embrace her, but she got up and walked away. “Don’t. I can’t bear it, Paula.”
“Please don’t touch me right now. Just leave me alone.”
He stood by, pained and unable to help her. There was a little mound of cherry pits on the table. He cleared them away, then dried the dinner dishes and put them away, got into bed and lay in the dark by himself.
When they made love now, there was an absence. Alice had deserted him, and alone with Paula, he was bereft. Some nights when he stayed over, Martin simply lay wakeful, restless, ever so slightly bored. This was natural, he reasoned. Longtime lovers must have spells of boredom. He was fifty-one years old and entitled to a rest—God knows he had nothing to prove in that department. He watched old movies on television; Now, Voyager he found comforting. Nor was there anything unnatural or clandestine anymore about their being together. The genes of the rabbi dozed in apathy, unperturbed by Bette Davis’s tribulations. Yes, a perfectly ordinary situation.
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