There it was. In the dark middle of the night, with Paula’s amiable body curled into his side, he confessed that this perfectly ordinary situation left him numb. To be compelling it wanted the dramatic context: the invisible audience, the betrayal, and the guilt.
Martin squeezed his eyes shut in dread. A vision of himself, such as the Spirit of Time Future brought to Scrooge, took shape in the dark: not dead but doddering, ludicrous, contemptible. He had loved—truly loved—Alice for ten years, Paula for five; soon two and a half, one and a quarter ... Geometric progressions were swift; he knew perspective. A week, a day, an hour. The nightmare vision sharpened. He saw himself as part of a relay race, a human baton. One after another, his exhausted partners passed him ever more frantically to fresh replacements and retired to observe from the sidelines. Only he was condemned to remain in the game until he dropped. He felt the abyss opening up, and his body gave a great shudder.
But as if somewhere the gods had a drop of mercy left for him (or were not quite finished with him yet), sleep came to his rescue. In the morning he felt better. He studied himself in the mirror, shaving: still presentable. Gray, but firm-fleshed. No jowls. Clear eyes. Thank heavens he was not a drinker—in a man his age it always showed. The terrors of the night evaporated in the steamy bathroom. He resolved, as soon as this group of paintings was done, to arrange somehow for him and Paula to live together. Or at least to spend more time with her.
He began, half unawares, to stare at women on the street again, women of every age, class, race, and shape. When he was invited to parties or openings, he brought Paula along if she could make it—a new and unequivocal pleasure; but when she couldn’t, he would strike up conversations with other attractive women. It was amusing to see if the old charm still worked, like digging out and oiling an old baseball glove. Only to stay in practice: use it or lose it, he remembered his uncle and his racetrack cronies joking, and at fifteen he had thought them pathetic. Since he disliked the chitchat of parties, he would invite these women off to a corner for a real talk, or out for a drink, away from the clamor. Once or twice dinner afterwards. But never anything more. Oh no, not again, he cautioned himself. Never mind ethics: it was simple self-preservation. He was, after all, merely satisfying a peculiar little need (less fortunate men were doomed to tie women up or dress them in leather—give thanks for small blessings), adding a little harmless spice to a life now so above reproach it was practically ... well ... bourgeois. And he was an artist, was he not?
At one of these gallery parties he was introduced to Jess. Martin had read her articles—she was one of the few decent art critics around.
“So you’re Jess Masters! Let me tell you, I’m an admirer of yours. You’re extraordinary! When are you going to cast that discriminating eye in my direction?”
“Your turn will come, no doubt,” she said pleasantly, not visibly jarred.
Well, here was a woman!
They stood among a crush of bodies and voices. Martin bent closer and touched her arm.
“Look, let’s go sit down over there. Okay? We have a lot to talk about.” With her this was a risk, he knew. But she did follow him to a quiet nook, where soon they were arguing about de Kooning and everyone after, interrupting, piling challenges one over the other like zestful children piling hands. Her mind was fleet and keen, piercing impatiently through surfaces to the impulse beneath. It was not airy cleverness, either; she was fertile; she knew things. How long since he had talked excitedly like this, and to a woman! Martin felt a twinge of disloyalty. Of course he had learned so much from Paula, all about instinct and calm and the harmonious life, but ... From Jess he was learning something tangible.
She was elegant at the gallery, in a sleek dark green dress belted at the hip, glittering with chains and bracelets, so Martin was surprised, the first time he visited her SoHo loft, to find her girlish, in jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt, and barefoot (narrow feet with a high arch, he noted; also Morton’s syndrome, second toe longer than the big toe—this he had learned from Paula). The loft was filled with boys’ paraphernalia—bat and glove, barbells, a bicycle; prints lined the walls; there were Indian rugs and large pillows, and on the butcher-block table, a bowl heaped with purple plums. Given her rigorous judgments, Martin had imagined her surroundings would be austere. That they were not suggested indistinct but intriguing possibilities. From behind a closed door came a thumping. “That’s my son, Max. He’s learning to play the drums. I can ask him to stop if it bothers you. I’m inured.” “No, no, that’s quite all right.”
As a rule Martin found his two days a week quite enough of New York. But to talk to Jess he made the trip. (The second time, he was stopped for speeding.) She loved to unravel everything dark and tangled in the light of reason, whether the subject was serious or the frivolous gossip they laughed over extravagantly. Often their thoughts traveled identical paths, all the same premises taken for granted. And Jess’s enthusiasm—its particular mix of fervor and drollery—matched his own, so that listening to her mellow voice, Martin had the faintly delirious sensation of looking in a human mirror. On the street, she might suddenly stop walking mid-speech, the pressure of an idea claiming all her physical energy. When he did this, Paula would wait in puzzlement or take his arm to get him moving again. Jess even hailed buses with his imperious gesture, as if commandeering them for her private use. At last he had met his match!
After about a month Martin invited her out one Saturday to see what he was working on. Paula was away on tour in North Carolina. Since Jess loved to eat he fussed over a lunch of steamed mussels and avocado salad—she always appeared so blithely self-sufficient, so little in need of anything he might offer. His efforts were rewarded. She said it was the first decent meal a man had made her in a long time, but added, lest he grow smug, that the competition was a sorry lot. After she looked at the paintings they walked along the beach. It was a warmish day in November. At the water’s edge Martin showed off his skill at skipping stones, and they even tossed a ball back and forth for a while. To his relief, a flaw.
“You throw just like a woman, from the wrist. You’re a sight.”
“I know. I’ve been told before. It’s hopeless.”
“Nothing is hopeless. You just haven’t been taught. Come here.” He took her arm and made it circle in a wide arc. “Throw from the shoulder, with your whole weight behind it. The whole arm, don’t be lazy. That’s a girl. Push from the back.”
She was an apt pupil. In a few minutes she was throwing yards farther. “Hey, I never could do that before. Thanks!”
Martin, exultant, gave her a quick, one-armed hug. “We’ll make a mensch of you yet. Next time we bring along a bat.”
Back at the house they had a drink—but only one, Jess said. She had to drive home.
“If you’d like to stay on awhile,” he said with hesitation, “we could go out to dinner later. There’s a good lobster place nearby.”
“That sounds lovely, but I can’t. I promised to go with Max to see Aliens.”
They stared at each other, then burst out laughing. As she left, Martin gazed in through the window of her dilapidated yellow car. “Till next time.”
“Goodbye, Martin. Thanks for everything.” She zoomed off with an indecipherable grin.
He was confused. She had been in his house, they had had four hours together, and he had acted with a restraint that left him feeling musclebound. Jess must be baffled, if not laughing up her sleeve. It was Paula causing all this confusion. Must he deny himself for her sake? He had been denied so much already. ...
He visited Jess a few days later. Paula was still away and Max was out at a drum lesson—quiet for once. She was fixing drinks, wearing her jeans and sweatshirt as usual, when he came up from behind and put his arms around her. She turned quickly but didn’t retreat. Martin smiled and held her close for a richly triumphant moment before he kissed her. Jess looked more amused than aroused.
“Aha!” she said. “I had begun to wonder.�
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So she wanted a tone of comedy. Very well. “I’m a Jewish intellectual. I have to think things over.” He kissed her again. She seemed to soften in his arms, and slipped her hand inside his shirt.
“And I thought maybe you just wanted an article out of me.”
He drew back. “Good Lord! You didn’t really think that I—I would see a woman for that!” He was genuinely appalled.
“I was only teasing, Martin.” She reached her arms around his neck. “Resume what you were doing.”
He had determined in advance not to let fogs of guilt plague him, but as they lay entwined afterwards he muttered, “Oh God, I can’t do this.”
“But you already did.”
“I mean I’m incapable of this. I’m torn apart.”
“You seemed capable enough. Are you allergic? Wait, I know. Anhedonism.”
“This is no joke, Jess. Really.” He told her about Paula. Naturally he had mentioned her before; he had—with a sickening sense of his own treachery—presented Paula as an old friend with whom he had a warm and intermittent sexual liaison. Now he winced at that version and gave her the truth.
“I see.” She had moved across the bed as he spoke. “You might have thought of this before.”
“I did! I agonized for weeks. Why do you think it took me so long to—”
“You might have thought of me, I mean. Or do you like having one in reserve? Like a backup system.”
There was a long silence. Jess got out of bed and put her clothes on. “Let’s eat something. I have a meat loaf.”
While they ate they got into a heated discussion of the work of Gregson, a conceptual artist whose bare compositions Martin despised. Jess behaved as though they had never been in bed, and Martin followed her lead. As he was leaving she relented and gave him an intimate grin. “I think I’ve figured out why women like you. They sense the presence of others. There’s a feeling of camaraderie. Sisterhood.” She kissed him, with a gentle shove towards the door.
But he wouldn’t keep away. He dreamed of spending the rest of his life with her (despite the pounding of the drums). It was inconceivable that his interest would flag—everything about them together was so right. Jess loved him too, she confessed. “And I hate it. You’re part of someone else. This is disgusting. It reeks.”
Hearing her lurch into despair, Martin felt tortured. He had done this to her, brought her down to his level. By possessing her he had shattered that splendid self-possession.
They dragged on through the bitter winter and into the spring. The pleasure, Martin assumed, must be greater than the pain. He taught Max how to box and cook and skip stones. Meanwhile he saw Paula as usual, but there were moments when he could not look at her face, whose serenity reproached him for the commotion he would soon cause. If she suspected, she said nothing. She was in Alice’s place now, haunting Jess’s bed, dimming his joys. Martin was worn out. He hadn’t enough time for his work. Sometimes on awakening he wasn’t sure which bed he was in. The flowered pillowcase he could glimpse from a slit in his eye, that was Paula’s. The hard mattress on a wooden board—Jess’s. And when his arms stretched out to empty space—his own, at home.
It could not continue. Surely he had learned something from Alice’s slow death. He could redeem his life. “It’s not fair,” he told Jess in bed, one night late in June. “She needs me. That’s all there is to it. I’ll sacrifice myself.”
“A martyr! What next?”
“Please be serious. You know I’m in torment.”
“Yes, I know who you’re sacrificing too. Okay, if she needs you then go to her. You’re probably right. Here, put on your pants and go.” She began tossing his clothes at him.
“I don’t mean this minute. Jesus Christ, you’re so literal.” It was two-thirty in the morning. “I mean needs me in general.”
“I don’t understand in general. I only understand specific. If she needs you she needs you. Go. Here. Here’s your socks, here’s your shoes. Do you need a subway token? Oh, she’s away, I forgot. Clever timing, Martin.”
“Would you calm down? You’re a hellion, do you know that? Get these shoes out of the bed, they’re getting it filthy. I’m only trying to say, if Paula had any idea of this—”
“You bastard, of course she knows about it. You think she’s dumb, don’t you? With all your devotion, you ain’t got no respect. Well, listen, she’s probably lying awake right now, knowing what you’re doing. And take your hands off me—you don’t have to do it while I talk about it! Big-shot stud! You complain about Gregson, so stingy in his work, but look at you! It’s how you live! You think you love women, but all you really love is yourself, seeing yourself. My God, it’s not even selfish. Without them you wouldn’t have a self!”
“Stop, stop! I don’t want to hear any more!” He rolled over with his face in the pillow and yearned for instant death. It would serve her right, too, a big hairy naked corpse in her bed.
“Listen,” he said the next morning. “I was up all night thinking. I’m going to tell her this time.” He had promised to spend a week with Paula in Vermont, where she had rented a cottage. May would be there too—her first trip east in a year. “When you see me next week I’ll be finished and we can start leading a normal life.”
Jess kept brushing her hair in front of the mirror with brisk strokes, as though she hadn’t heard.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you believe me?”
“Whether I believe you or not is immaterial: Only don’t come back here unless you’ve made your choice. I mean it.”
In the thick summer heat, Martin shivered.
VII
The rain was persistent. Martin sat down on a plastic chair in the terminal and watched people enter, dripping, shaking water from their umbrellas. Outside, it would be dark by now: in a few moments he would be out there hailing a taxi to Jess’s. First he would rest for a while. It had been a trying week.
Not the first few days, when, in glorious sunshine, the three of them had gone swimming and canoeing and, to indulge May, even ridden in a chair lift over the mountains. May’s skin was sleekly tan now and she walked with an easy West Coast swing, yet from time to time the ingenuous child flickered behind the sophisticated manner. In the evenings they sat drinking tea while she regaled them with stories of her dancer friends in San Francisco. Paula listened proudly. Martin too, as if he had had a share in raising her. For hadn’t he sat around the kitchen table helping her with logarithms, explaining articles in the newspaper, supplying words for the crossword puzzles? “Seven-letter novelist starting with D, author of An American Tragedy? ... Nine letters, Martin, a prince of an anarchist, starting with K?” He had given more than she asked, supplied all the history. In a small way, he could claim she was his.
Caught up in the family, he almost forgot Jess. Or rather her image performed an odd dance in his head. At night she receded nearly to the vanishing point, as he and Paula gloated over May and made love much as in the old days. Then in the morning she would loom very close and large. He put the ordeal off. This was a vacation, after all, the days long and full of light. He wished them longer, wished they would never end. If only it could be the present forever—Jess in abeyance far away, Paula contented, May young and eager, and he himself harming no one. But by the fifth day he was heavy with anxiety. He lay down after dinner and Paula came in to ask if he was feeling all right.
“Yes, fine.”
“No, there’s something. You might as well say it. I think I know, anyway.”
“You do?”
“If it’s all over, I wish you would tell me, Martin.”
“What a thing to say! It’s not all over. With us, it could never be that.”
“But as far as, like, the day-to-day, it’s over, right?”
“No. I just thought ...” Martin paused because it hurt to breathe. The weight on his chest was crushing. He was too old for this, his heart ... “I thought it might be best if we ... saw each other a little less.” It was out! H
e had done it! Immediately the pain in his chest eased.
“A little less?” said Paula in her serene way. “We don’t see each other that much as it is. I really don’t think I want that. I think I might want ... well, more or nothing at all.”
More ... ? More he could not give her. But the prospect of nothing at all was suddenly devastating. How could he forsake her—she was a haven of peace, she was so familiar, she needed him. ...
“I can’t ... I can’t ... A strange and terrible thing was happening. He could locate no words. He couldn’t locate a thought, a wish—there was only a dark clot in his head. Time stopped, leaving him wedged in its warp. When he tried to swallow, his mouth was as dry as a desert. An eyelid twitched. “I don’t know. I can’t—I don’t want to end. ... I can’t face that.”
“But, Martin, it’s not really fair, you know? Why should I live that way, when I know you’re involved with someone else?”
He started to cry. “Don’t do this to me!” It was all unexpected, all awry. “Please. Think it over.”
For the first time since he had known her, she seemed quite without pity or solace. “I’ve thought and thought. I didn’t like to say anything when I wasn’t sure, but now ... What do you expect me to do?”
“All right.” He composed himself. “I understand your position. This is not the end, though. Not so fast. We’ll have to talk about it in the city. Maybe I’ll ... I just don’t know.”
She didn’t object when, hours later, in the middle of the night, he reached out for her. Martin tried to recover his old ardor. Maybe, in the end ... But it was impossible: her responses were muted those last few days, her love-making elegiac.
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