Jake Barnes gives our coats to the chicly bored coat checker. Jake is wearing a Brooks Brothers gray suit, blue Oxford cloth button-down, and an old Harrovian tie. I know them all—Eton, Windsor, Charterhouse. Seamus taught me, buttonholing astonished students and demanding they doff what they had no right to don. Yearly he writes a protest letter to the Harvard Coop equating the selling of these ties to the awarding of a Harvard diploma to anyone with twenty dollars and ninety-eight cents. This, all the while celebrating his working-class origins. His Irish poet, man of the people, Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan bullshit. He is in fact embarrassingly bourgeois, his grandfather having made a pile in enameled toilet seats.
But I give Jake Barnes the benefit of the doubt. He is just unpre-possessing enough that I’m sure he chose that tie for its colored stripes oblivious to the connotation of privilege and old-boy networking. Though when he orders a martini I’m not sure, so meticulous is he in instructing the waiter about the degree of coldness, the virtues and deficiencies of the olive versus the lemon peel that I can only think of James Bond’s shaken but not stirred and how I’d much prefer Sean Connery. He smiles sweetly, however, when his martini and my kir arrive, and I think that he is probably nice but pompous in the way of short insecure men. We all have our hang-ups, I decide, though at that moment I can name only a dozen of mine and none of Louie’s.
“So,” Jake Barnes says with a smack of his lips.
“So,” I say with a click of my tongue.
“So, I had a cancellation this afternoon and sent my secretary to B. Dalton for The Sun Also Rises. I finished it right before I left to come here.”
“You must be a fast reader.”
“Sure am. I took a speed reading course. I can cover two hundred pages in under two hours.”
“I’m impressed.” Actually I am. How bad could someone be who in the middle of a busy day rushes out to do homework for a blind date. Harriman must have been extremely flattering about my eyes.
Jake Barnes leans closer toward me. “You do have exceptional eyes,” he says now, his own eyes squeezed into a squint. He looks like those cartoons of Mr. Magoo I used to watch in Old Town before the regular Saturday matinees.
I feel heat rise to my cheeks. At the next table a couple are toasting each other, elbows interlocked. The woman’s champagne glass is ringed with lipstick kisses at the top. “Well, they work fine. I mean I can see perfectly well. Did you like the book?”
“I did. I thought Lady Brett was a good character. And given my namesake it was hard not to identify with his plight. Maybe a little dated. All that drinking and lost generation stuff. Not that I read a lot of fiction. Mostly history, biography, an occasional John le Carré.”
“I like John le Carré,” I say, “especially the George Smiley ones.” Most of which, I do not admit, I haven’t read but have watched on Masterpiece Theatre or was it Mystery?
Jake Barnes grins. I settle back relaxed. Things are not going badly, considering. We talk of books, writers, favorite teachers although both of us have been a long time out of school.
“Funny,” Jake Barnes says now, “but nobody has ever pointed out this business of my name before. And I’m nearly forty.”
“It is strange. It’s not like you live in a backwater.”
“You know my mother went to Smith. I’m sure they were reading Hemingway. I wonder if she knew.”
“It’s hard to believe she’d name her son after, you know, someone who was impotent.”
“In spite of her education, she wasn’t exactly up-to-date. She even hid away a book of Rubens nudes in case I’d become “over-stimulated.’”
I laugh.
He laughs. His laugh is high-pitched, slightly hiccupped but seems genuine. “Maybe she just didn’t get it, like when you first read Hemingway, and never figured out exactly what his war wound was.”
“Probably,” I agree. I look at his hands, which are walled around the base of his martini glass. They’re small, the nails like a baby’s cut straight across. Red hair sworls his knuckles and the bottom finger joint. I think of Louie’s hands, his fingertips, the poetry they tap out against my bare goosebumped flesh.
* * *
We eat upstairs in front of a window where all of the Public Garden lies beneath us looped and braided with light. Jake Barnes studies the wine list as if he’s about to take a test on it. I study my menu, frightened suddenly that I’ll pick out the wrong answer among the multiple choice and, worse than failure, will miss out on something truly ethereal. Who knows but this might be my only chance at Biba. I don’t picture myself coming here with a friend. Or horning in on one of my mother’s dates. What’s between me and Louie has nothing to do with food. Louie wouldn’t like this place, I suppose, looking around at the satellites of beautiful people, of the obsessively stylish or the conspicuously rich. Or would he? What would he think of the wine list, the offerings of sweetbreads or truffled pâtés? Perhaps a person who has tasted pansies or merely contemplated a plateful of them would be beyond surprise.
“Have you decided, Katinka? I need to figure out whether we want a white or a red?”
“I’m paralyzed. Afraid I’ll make a mistake.”
Jake Barnes shakes his head. “Whatever the choice, you’ll make no mistake.”
Too bad that isn’t true of life, I think and make my choice.
When our appetizers arrive, Jake Barnes, in Boston and in Paris, is eclipsed. Unlike my time with Louie, here all of my attention turns to the food. I stuff myself with bread, pâté, dumplings with three different sauces, lamb of a color so delicate, a texture so velvety I nearly weep, Brussels sprouts such to redeem all Brussels sprouts for eternity. The wine arrives. Jake Barnes swirls it, sniffs it, holds it to the light, examines the cork, the label. He takes a little sip. He grins. His chipmunk cheeks puff up as though they’re stuffed with nuts. His wisps of hair weave a little red corona around his head. “What a wine,” he says. “A Brunello di Montalcino, 1985.”
I smile. “The year I graduated.” I frown. “The year I wed.”
“Marriage,” he says.
“Marriage,” I say.
“You don’t approve of marriage?” he asks, his voice taking on an edge.
“I do,” I say. “At least in the abstract. I have friends happily married. My own parents were right out of Father Knows Best.” And my mother, I tell myself, with not even beginner’s luck, will probably be just as happy the second time around.
“Zenobia and Harriman seem to have a fine marriage. What do you think?”
“I’ve only met them once.” I picture Zenobia’s high intelligent forehead, Harriman’s impeccable white cuff. “But they appear well matched.” I picture Max, his sack of flour, his wise and funny face.
“Perhaps we can go out with them sometime.”
“Like on a double date?” I laugh. “I don’t think I’ve used that term since I was a freshman at Old Town High.”
Jake Barnes laughs. “It is ridiculous. For dinner, then, the four of us.”
So there’ll be another “date.” I’m not happy, but I’m not displeased either, I discover, taking my emotional pulse. Jake is nice enough. The dinner is sublime.
“I’d like to marry again,” he says now. “To have a child.”
“Me, too. Someday. I’m speaking generically, of course,” I feel obliged to point out. “I mean I don’t have anyone in mind.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
Which bothers me—does that mean he’s glad to hear I’m not checking him out as a future father of my child or that he’s glad there’s not another potential future father in my life which means what—that he’s in the running? that he’s not?—my brain feels addled by food and wine and its own inadequacies. Perhaps I need one of Arthur Haven’s syllogisms to figure it out. I am just starting to set this up—if (A) …—when Jake moves on to Seamus, who was already a legend at Harvard, it turns out, when he was at the Law School.
I don’t say too much. Maybe bec
ause Seamus is flat on his back. Or maybe because Seamus gave me his job. But it feels disloyal to be telling this small un-Hemingway stranger stories about Seamus’ matted hair and Ian Fleming paperbacks. “We weren’t compatible” is what I say.
“Understandable, given the vast difference in age.”
“And that wasn’t even our biggest difference,” I announce though I’m at a loss to name our biggest difference.
Fortunately Jake Barnes doesn’t ask but offers up the sad tale of his wife, Laura, whose progression from feminist to radical feminist to man-hating feminist covered the eight years of their own incompatible marriage. She kept putting off having a baby because it would interfere with her postdoctoral work in molecular biology. She sacrificed molecular biology for her biological clock when she met Harriet, who owns a women’s health club where Laura climbed the ladder to head masseuse. “And now she’s pregnant,” Jake exclaims. “Artificially inseminated. She and Harriet are both going to be mommies—that’s how they announce it to the world. It’ll be Harriet’s turn next year. Turkey baster babies!”
He looks so miserable in spite of the wine and the wonderful food that I switch the topic to his work, what any young lady well brought up in the art of gentle conversation with the opposite sex knows how to do. He’s a real estate lawyer and, like Harriman Slade with his taxes and reverse triangular mergers, is off and running. What is it about lawyers, I conclude from my scientific sample of two, and the way they love to talk? And what a language they use, mortgages and liens and mergers and syndications, easements and quitclaims, theretofores and heretofores and it is my understanding that … Jake Barnes’ little eyes crackle and beam and his red-haired hands shape skyscrapers and bungalows, shopping centers and condominium complexes in the scented air above our plates.
And because he, too, is well brought up in the art of gentle conversation with the opposite sex he asks me about my writing. He doesn’t raise an eyebrow when I tell him about my stories in back issues of Running Bull and Gypsy Moth Review, of my commercial breakthrough with Playgirl magazine. He doesn’t look unduly impressed when I tell him I’ll be teaching at Harvard next term. He’s the kind of man who expects to be surrounded by published writers and dwellers in the ivory towers of academe. And to his credit, he doesn’t say “I’d write, too, if I had the time.”
We order a sampling of all the desserts and a brewed decaffeinated coffee each. A chocolate orgy, I decide, is almost but not quite as good as sex. When we are finished, I’m so full I nearly have to walk sideways down the stairs. He drives me home in a fancy car with buttery leather seats, German I think; I am not up on cars. There are no parking spaces within two blocks of my apartment building so he double-parks next to the super’s pickup truck. He turns on the hazard signals, which remind me of those neon lights in movies which flicker the letters bar or café through the windows of cheap hotel rooms where lovers spend illicit nights.
“Please let me pay your cab fare to the restaurant,” Jake Barnes says.
“Absolutely not,” I state indignantly and leave it at that. What would he think if I told him I took the T. Would he offer to reimburse my eighty-five cents? Pay extra for the pain and suffering of my being called an ugly bitch? Would he admire my thrift? Would he despise it?
“Then would you be insulted if I walked you to the door? Laura, my ex-wife, would have thrown a feminist manifesto at me.”
“I’d be delighted,” I say. I am feeling gracious, relieved. Because of the double parking, I don’t have to ask him in. This is a real first date, I think, with all those rules, those Old Town rules, attendant upon it. There is security in the predictable.
He comes around to my side to open my door. Which isn’t easy because the super’s truck with its peeling paint and rust spots, its dented fender and splayed bumper and its tangled chrome like barbed wire makes quite an obstacle course. We sidle out of the car careful to keep our coats away from rust stains and sharp protuberances. On the stairs to the front door, he shakes my hand, then leans over and kisses my cheek. His lips are cold, slightly chapped. “I’ve had a good time,” he says.
“Thank you for a wonderful dinner,” I say.
“I’d like to read your stuff,” he says.
“I’ll send you some stories.”
“No need for that,” he says. “Give them to me when I see you next. And I’ll bring along a copy of my article on tenancy by the entirety from the Journal of Boston Real Estate. Good bedtime reading. Better than a nightcap. Guaranteed to put you to sleep.”
“I doubt that,” I lie politely.
“You’re just being polite.” He laughs. “As soon as I work out this dinner with Harriman and Zenobia, I’ll get back to you.” He gives a little wave and trips just slightly on the bottom step.
6
Thursday. Tonight’s my first writing class, and it feels worse than the first day of school in seventh grade. Will they like me? Will they hate me? Will I make a fool of myself ? Will yesterday’s slang fall from my lips and brand me forever as a nerd? Do they still use the term nerd? Am I wearing the right thing? What is the right thing? And isn’t there something funny about my hair? I have laid out five different outfits five different times. What combination of wool and plaid will make me look intellectual but not arrogant, mature but with-it, pretty but not cute, interesting but not intimidating.
Finally I play it safe and pick various layers of black. These I wrap around me. I check the mirror and have more than a moment’s hesitation. I look either like a Sicilian widow mourning three sons lost in internecine warfare or like a college girl of the fifties inhabiting coffeehouses and trying to be bohemian. What do real writers look like anyway? The backs of book jackets flash before me: Edna O’Brien in Chanel, Ann Beattie in Levi’s, Muriel Spark in nononsense tweed, Joyce Carol Oates, silk dripping from her bird-boned wrists. Even if, in an Arthur T. Haven syllogism, I can look like a writer and ergo be one, I’m still not sure which model comes with the guarantee. I unwind my widow’s weeds and choose dark green corduroy.
For the umpteenth time I sit at my desk and go over, for want of a better phrase, my lesson plan. Faithful Georgette has mailed me a copy of Seamus’ so-called syllabus, which seems to consist mostly of illegible scrawlings about voice, point of view, and something called narrative integrity. I have no idea what narrative integrity means except the term appears as a leitmotif in Seamus’ notes. Narr. Integ. Re. Dubliners, Seamus has scrawled. Georgette has written her own note to me on the top. Her handwriting is small and cramped. The O’s are flattened. Not the round bold ones I learned through the Palmer method and Miss Drinkwater’s ruler cracked across my knuckles in Hannibal Hamlin Grammar School. “Dear Katinka,” Georgette writes, “you are a Lifesaver. Love from Seamus and Georgette.” I spent a while trying to decide if I was a Cryst-o-Mint or Bit-o-Clove. Then I moved on to the meaning of Georgette’s “Love.” Was that a word with narrative integrity? If that note were mine, I’d close with “Sincerely” or at the least a “Very truly yours.” But I give Georgette credit for a greater generosity of spirit than my own. Besides we’re not exactly the strangers that “Sincerely” suggests, both having had intimate congress with the possessor of the damaged disk.
I shuffle Seamus’ papers around. Maybe he wrote this syllabus when he was in pain. I take a deep breath. I am in pain. It’s only first-day-of-school stage fright I remind myself again. If I can move beyond my terror the course doesn’t seem that bad. I’ll have eight students. They’ll submit their own stories, which they’ll read aloud and we’ll discuss. If we don’t have enough material I’ll fill in with John Updike or Alice Munro. We’ll have conferences; they’ll rewrite. I’ll re-read. I’ll talk about writing—voice, point of view, narrative integrity. I’ll be brilliant, is what I tell myself.
I’ll be terrible is what I feel. Fortunately, I’ve had the sense not to blurt out the news of my first class. Except for the generic “I’ll be teaching at Harvard next semester” that I dropped casual
ly before Jake Barnes and the man at the photo developing place who demanded my work number, I haven’t told a soul. I have this death wish mentality I need to fight against, a tendency to reject myself before others can reject me. I once sent an agent half a novel and a few stories that, I explained, I wasn’t sure about. “If the author doesn’t love her work,” the agent wrote back, “why should an agent even want to look at it?” These days I try either to express confidence or keep my mouth shut.
“What’s new?” my mother asked on one of her Sunday night regular-as-clockwork calls from poolside.
“Not a thing,” I said, my mouth a prison warden to my words. I didn’t tell her about Harvard. I didn’t tell her about Jake Barnes. It was too early. Harvard could fire me; Jake Barnes could dump me, and then I’d be eating crow instead of one of Biba’s specialties. “How’s Arthur’s bikini bathing suit?” I asked—oh clever conversational ploy.
“Too small,” she confessed. “I’ll have to buy a larger size when we get home. Speaking of which,” she added, “we decided to extend our stay another week.”
“Good idea,” I said. “Prolong the honeymoon.”
“It’s not a honeymoon. Not technically.”
“I’ll never tell.”
“Katinka, dear, you always make a joke.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what your father would have thought of me, the president of the Old Town branch of the American Association of University Women, living in sin. And in Jamaica yet!”
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