“That’s a comfort to me, at least,” I said.
“One of the little quote unquote literary magazines printed a story of mine last month. But no money. Enough glory to stuff a hummingbird, but they didn’t even refund my postage.”
“Still,” I said, “it’s great to be published. What magazine? Do you have a copy? Let me see it.”
“No. I don’t want to. It’s not a very good magazine. I don’t know why I sent them a story. And it’s a terrible story. I did it all wrong. From now on, once The New Yorker turns a story down I’m going to either redo it or throw it away. They publish stories that are written the way I want to write.”
“I’d still like to read the story.”
“But I’m not going to show it to you. I don’t even know if I kept my copy of the magazine. They send one copy, by the way.”
“Can you at least tell me what it’s about?” I asked.
“OK. You finally asked the right question. The title of the story is ‘Meyer’ and it’s about you.”
I felt a nervous laugh hatch at the top of my throat but I held it down. I suppose I thought she was just making fun of me, but Ann’s only form of deception was omission. I covered my mouth with my hand, sick with triumph, electric with hope.
Evening. Ann asked me if I wanted to go out for supper.
“I’ve got a date at nine thirty,” she said. “But it’s decidedly not for dinner. I never invite men over to cook for them.”
“I’ll buy you dinner if we go to a place I can afford,” I said.
Ann left me in the front of her apartment while she went to her room to dress. Though the apartment had only two real rooms, her bedroom was separated from the front by a long hall and I felt quite alone. I paced. I looked through one of the hanging prisms in the west windows, trying to catch the flat red rays of the sinking sun. I looked at the books in her shelves, noticed her compact little stereo set and her two dozen records: Vivaldi, Bach, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, the Fauré Requiem. The small table in front of the sofa had a few issues of The Village Voice and an old paperback copy of To the Lighthouse. I tried to absorb the facts of that room. Who was she when she’d chosen that little Chinese flowered rug? How had she come to purchase those distinctly non-Butterfieldian director’s chairs? Where did she sit when she read my letters? Where did Jade sit? Did human presence leave a kind of dust in its wake? Did the sound of Jade’s voice hang like little threads of spider weavings in the corners of the high ceiling? Were strands of her hair curled beneath the sofa cushion? If I were a bloodhound or a werewolf, wouldn’t I be able to taste her presence, drink it in through my omniverous sense organs, even if it had been months since she’d last breathed in this room?
In my pacings I passed the small kitchen. A beige telephone was on the wall and hanging next to it a blue leather book. I stared at it for a moment, without quite knowing why, until I fully realized this was Ann’s address and telephone book and that within it was undoubtedly Jade’s whereabouts, waiting to be memorized like the combination of a safe. I reached for the telephone book but thought I heard footsteps behind me. I stopped and turned—but there was no one behind me and the apartment, though humming with the noise of the city, was innocent of footsteps.
“Be with you in a minute!” called Ann from her bedroom. A new politeness (engendered by the anxiety of bachelorhood? I wondered).
“Take your time,” I said. I occupied one of the wobbly director’s chairs, and crossed my legs. All ready when you are, C.B.! The punchline of my father’s favorite joke. But in my parents’ set they weren’t called jokes: they called them “stories.” More dignity in a story. This particular story was about the third-string cameraman in a Cecil B. DeMille spectacular, and when Arthur delivered the All ready when you are punchline he laughed so eagerly, so instructively, squinting his dark brown eyes, raising his wild eyebrows, and as often as not coughing up the vapors of a half dozen Pall Malls. Oh gentle geezer!
Ann had changed into a floor-length peach and purple dress, turtle-necked and sleeveless, with a zipper up the back. The material was satiny and the pattern looked like those pictures of crystals taken by an electron microscope. Her hair, shoulder- length and absolutely straight, was parted girlishly in the center. She wore dark blue eye makeup, lipstick, and small gold earrings done to resemble the smiling, beneficent sun in a medieval woodcut. She looked at once spectacular and strange, cheerful and uncomfortable.
“The nouveau moi,” she said, with the very beginnings of a satirical bow.
“I’m not wearing the right clothes,” I said. I was in loafers, black corduroy pants, and a pale green shirt I had to wear with the sleeves rolled because of a stain on the cuff.
“No, don’t worry. I’m dressed for later, not for dinner.”
She took me to a bar called Pete’s Tavern, which O’Henry used to patronize. On the short walk over, Ann pointed out other literary landmarks—the apartment building where one of the editors of The New Yorker lived, a small carriage house once occupied by a novelist I’d never heard of, and the former home of Washington Irving.
We sat at a booth in Pete’s. A thirty-ish-looking man with thin black hair nodded at Ann from the next table and Ann nodded back, evasively. The waiter was a young Italian wearing fancy tight trousers, a body shirt, pointed shoes, and an old apron. He said hello to Ann and asked, with what seemed to me a touch of irony, “You thirsty or what?”
“Oh, always, Carlo, always,” Ann said. “Bring me a glass of your cheapest Scotch and your coldest water.”
The waiter looked at me. “I’ll have the same,” I said.
We finished our drinks, asked for two more, then ordered broiled chicken and a bottle of white wine for dinner. Ann talked about a wine tasting she’d been brought to at the Essex House a few weeks before, commenting on the incredible prices of the wine and the hysteria of the well-appointed patrons as they crushed forward for free samples of rare vintages. “They were like desperate pilgrims competing for blessings,” Ann said. Then she raised her glass and I raised mine and we clicked them together with an exquisite ping that somehow went right through me.
“I’m nervous about tonight,” Ann said.
I nodded, thinking she meant it was because of our reunion.
But she went on: “This fellow I’m seeing later. I have this bleak feeling that he’s another dead end. It’s a little embarrassing to talk about, but I think it’s absurd to keep it a secret. I mean how goddamned hard it is for a woman who isn’t young but who feels young to put together any kind of decent, satisfying life. Younger men are seldom interested in women my age and I know I don’t look a minute younger than I really am—but the things I’m interested in and what I’m capable of put me outside of the men who are of a more suitable age. It’s a total mess. And I suppose I’ve been, well, I don’t know what to call it, getting around, yes I think that will do, getting around more than I should. Tonight’s gent is an NYU professor and he was born three days after me. But his wife left him a year ago and he’s very shaky. He takes so much work. I think of him as my part- time job.” Ann drank quickly and I kept pace; somehow a second bottle of wine appeared on our table.
“Do you have a girl now?” she asked.
“No. I sometimes see a girl, but it’s nothing. It’s just for company.”
“You don’t sleep with her?”
I shook my head.
“Or with anyone else?”
“No one. I want to be with Jade. Being with someone else would be giving up.”
“That’s so simple-minded.”
“I don’t care.”
“And hopeless.”
“No it’s not. And even if it was…I don’t have a choice. My feelings haven’t changed.”
“I wrote a story—or tried to—about the first time you two made love. But it’s much too compromising to submit anywhere. I came very close to sending it to you a few months ago. I don’t have anyone else to show it to.”
“Not Jade?”<
br />
“Oh no. She’d never forgive me. Maybe Hugh. But he hates to read my stuff. He says it depresses him.” She called to the waiter. “Carlo? What time is it?” It was eight thirty. “We have a little more time,” Ann said to me. “Would you like me to tell you the story?”
I nodded.
Ann smiled. “You’re not even thinking, but I’m going to take advantage and tell you anyhow. You’re not allowed to interrupt me, either.”
“I won’t.”
“OK,” said Ann, pouring wine into both our glasses. “It was a Saturday. Early June, 1966. Hugh and I had been out—a rare occasion, as you probably remember. We didn’t have friends and we were always too broke to treat ourselves to the standard entertainments like restaurants and shows. We loved music but the only concerts we heard were those free ones in Grant Park, sitting on an old Army blanket under a few smudgy stars with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra fiddling like mad about a half mile away in the bandshell. But this night, your night, Hugh and I had gone to a party on Woodlawn, thrown by an architect who was one of Hugh’s classier patients. A pot party, as we used to say. Thanks to you, we were both smoking like pros, so we managed to get very high and hold our own—even though everyone was younger than us. Everyone was always younger than us, it seemed.
“There was a lovely rain falling by the time we reached home. I found you two in the living room, listening to the radio. You both were in jeans and Oxford blue shirts—you were in the stage of dressing like each other. You sat on the floor, both of you, and a fire was going in the fireplace. Jade in particular was wrapped in the orange and blue light. I remember thinking: Jade reflects the light and David absorbs it. I was still feeling the lovely euphoria of the party and the grass and the two of you looked unbearably beautiful. I stood in the living room grinning, shaking the rain out of my hair, and wanting, I must admit, for you to guess I was stoned.
“Enter Hugh, looking as pensive as a monk in a spiritual crisis. He was wearing his gray suit, the one that was an inch short in the sleeve. God, wasn’t he the handsomest man? Shame there wasn’t money to dress him properly. Whatever you might have thought of him, Hugh looked like a hero—his hair the color of buckwheat honey and his beautiful eyes the color of a bluejay in the sun. But he was no pretty boy and certainly he wasn’t chic. His features were broken, but in a good way; he looked like one of those rare men who know right from wrong. My war hero. Well, you read them, the stories I wrote about Hugh when I was in college. Loving Hugh, and even betraying him, made me more a part of my times than ever before—or since. He never spoke about being a war hero and hardly ever complained about what he took out of that prisoner- of-war camp. But that night, that night of the party on Woodlawn—maybe it was the grass or being with fifty people, all of them younger than us, but Hugh couldn’t shut up about his war experiences, like an old man in a VA hospital. He didn’t so much talk about his heroism as the discomfort, the fear, and the injuries. Maybe he wanted us to organize a charity ball in his honor.
“Anyhow, in comes Hugh, still feeling mighty herbal. Jade turns and gives him a ‘Hi Pappy’ with much more nuance than any fifteen-year-old girl has a right to.”
“Then Hugh started in on us about having a fire going,” I said.
“That’s right. He was furious you’d made a fire and you knew no one but Hugh was allowed to work the fireplace but you pretended to be so bewildered. ‘I’m in charge of the fireplace,’ Hugh said. He thumped his chest—his gestures were so basic. A real man. He made no attempt to hide the nature of his complaint. He didn’t say it was June and too late for fires; he didn’t say we were almost out of wood; he didn’t even mention you guys forgot to put up the screen. He was at the end of a long, loose night and you know he always had a taste for the bare, unpleasant truth—little embarrassing admissions were Hugh’s hidden chocolates. So there he is, flat-footed and red- eyed, saying, ‘I don’t like people making fires in my fireplace. The fireplace is the one thing in this goddamned house that I’m completely in charge of.’”
“Jade said we were cold,” I said.
“And Hugh said you should wear gloves, or sweaters, or go someplace else.”
“He was staring at me when he said that. He meant I should go someplace else. Home.”
“Oh, I’m glad you said that, David. I always wondered if you noticed things like that.”
“Of course I did.”
“I’m glad. It seemed you didn’t.”
“Then I said I would leave after the fire burnt out.”
“Yes, searching for your advantage and pressing it at the same time. You two did a little more clumsy emotional fencing—you were a lot less agile than you imagined, you know, David—and at one point Hugh put his arm around me, the way men on dates will suddenly make physical contact when they think you might be getting bored. Hugh warned you to be quick getting home and then he and I walked upstairs. God, I loved that house at night, when the windows were black and the children were asleep.
“I turned on the reading lamp on my side of the bed and Hugh asked me if I planned to stay up. I was reading The Wapshot Scandal and I wanted some time with Cheever and some time to think. My mind was blown from being with so many people and I needed to regroup. Hugh slipped into our enormous bed wearing his shorts, a signal that he was insulted I’d chosen to read. His way of saying I was unworthy of intimacy. I asked him what was wrong and touched the elastic band on his shorts beneath the blanket. He inched away. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he said and how I hated to hear his poor injured voice. He turned over and folded his hands over his big chest. He hardly had any hair under his arms and his chest and belly were as smooth as Sammy’s. ‘I’m lonely around you,’ he said. And I said, ‘I’m a lonely person. It’s contagious.’ But what I was thinking was Oh go to sleep, please go to sleep so I can have fifteen minutes alone.
“Hugh started reviewing the people at the party but he was yawning too and I relaxed. I knew it wouldn’t be long. Somewhere in there, I heard the front door open and then close and I assumed it was you, making your exit. Then I heard Jade come upstairs and go to the bathroom down the hall and I assumed she was preparing for bed.”
I had a powerful impulse to stop Ann at that moment. I remembered myself opening and closing that door, with Jade at my side and both of us giggling like the children we still half were, and creeping back to the living room certain our sound effects had been foolproof. And I remembered taking off my shoes and my shirt as Jade went upstairs, thinking to myself that I would never be so immense and would never forget an instant of that night, and being so right.
“I fell asleep for a few minutes,” Ann said, “with the book on my belly and the lamp on. But suddenly I was up, as if a shadow had passed over my face. I heard noises from downstairs. I clicked off the lamp and listened. Twittering floorboards. Squeaks and ticks that seemed more purposeful than the simple breathing of the house. I wonder what I thought it was. Did I really think a thief had found his way into our house? And if he had, what would he take? The magazines? The radio? My chocolates?”
“Stop, Ann,” I said, finally. “You’re getting too…”
“Close?”
“No. Strange. You’re hurting me.”
“This shouldn’t hurt. You remember it all anyhow. I’m telling you what I remember. I remember being in my bed and hearing noises from the downstairs of a house that I don’t live in anymore.”
Her eyes were bright, alert, but she didn’t seem to be using them. They shone like those lights people leave on in empty houses to fool burglars.
“I slipped out of bed and put on my robe, that blue-quilted robe, a winter robe but it was all I had. In one of Hugh’s dresser drawers there was an old hickory-handled buck knife—one of his many many boyhood souvenirs—and I thought I’d grab it in case I needed to stab someone. What a laugh. I was making no noise at all, less than a cloud, floating through the bedroom, into the hall, onto the landing of the stairs. It was more like an acid high than mariju
ana. I could see everything. I had the night vision of an electric cat. The ripples in the wallpaper, the scratches on the banister, everything.
“Including you, the both of you.”
“Please don’t, Ann,” I said. I could feel her dismantling my memory of that night, tilting it, enlarging it, until it was no longer mine.
“Oh stop, don’t be so damned squeamish. There’s nothing in this that’s going to hurt you. And you know there’s no one else to tell it to. Are you embarrassed? You explode like a bomb in the middle of my life and you’re embarrassed? I didn’t get very close, you know. I was much too surprised, and scared. I only made it halfway down the stairs and if it wasn’t for the fireplace I might not have even known you two were making love. I saw Jade’s hands on your shoulders and the tops of her knees, the way they were raised…”
I lowered my head onto the table and my arm knocked over my wineglass. Ann righted the glass and continued.
“But the thing I noticed most was your clothes. They weren’t strewn all over the place. They were nicely folded. Which meant you both knew exactly what you wanted and didn’t have to pretend to mindlessness. Oh, I was so touched by that, you have no idea. I honestly was.
“So up I went and crept back into bed. You never knew I was there. Isn’t that so?”
I raised my head. My eyes felt fifty degrees warmer than the rest of my body. I reached out for Ann’s hand. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sorry? What for?”
I shook my head. “For everything. For being at your house that night, making too much noise, making you see us. I don’t know.”
“Then listen to me, if you are. And think of me getting into bed with Hugh after seeing you and Jade downstairs. I was shaking and my mind was a tornado. I moved so close to him and God did I feel bad he hadn’t stripped down because I would have given a lot to feel his nakedness just then. I didn’t want to be alone. But you see I must have been radiating desire. Because suddenly Hugh stirred. His snoring stopped and he turned toward me and his eyes were slowly coming open. I touched his smooth, smooth face and he kissed me and when he kissed me I held my breath and I heard the floors squeaking downstairs. Hugh put his hands between my legs and that certainly finished the job of waking him up. I felt ready. For him. We’d been making love for eighteen years and we knew each other’s signals like high-wire acrobats—only we were low-wirers and we weren’t acrobats. Anyhow, I said I’d be right back and Hugh smiled because this meant I was going to put in my diaphragm. I walked across the bedroom and down the hall to the bathroom, listening for you two downstairs, and trying not to, and feeling slightly crazy and close to tears.
Endless Love Page 20