Martin looked over at me, confused. Why?
I like the way it sounds.
Tick. And again, tick.
I thought I’d want to share him with my friends, but we instead retreated to privacy, opening our stories over suppers and walks, incubating an intimacy I began to guard like someone with knowledge of a diamond trove. He’d gone some time without a woman in his life, a result of having his nose in his work. And also a general confusion about what women his age wanted (he said, as a group, they seemed worried). As a result, he hadn’t gone on a date in over a decade, and his last dates were convincing disasters.
On these first weekends, on our travels, we’d stop in little towns, read the grave markers for the revolutionary soldiers. Martin would go into the Woolworths or the dusty little corner stores and come out with his triumphant purchases: a book of cut-out animals, a pack of soap-bubble pipes, a die-cast milkmaid carrying her pails, an old velvet ring box with a stain of tarnish on the inside and no ring. Or else a paper bag filled with lemoncream snacking cakes (which he could live on), a fragrant peach at the bottom for me. He’d make me things from what he found. The milkmaid ended up in the ring box: you lifted the lid to find her lying on a bed of hay, the pails and the iron bar removed, so she lay there, succulent, her arms outstretched as she awaited her lover. The animals from the mobile were pasted on the inside edges of the box: lion, otter, viper, elephant.
Strange assortment of beasts for a barn, I said.
They’re code.
I stared at it until I figured it out. Then dragged him to the floor, out of view of the windows. Maybe this was in Albany. Maybe that beautiful inn we found at Allen’s Hill. I look back now and that life seems like pins in the map I was making.
We spent the rest of the summer and into the fall living like this. And I’d come back to campus full of the stories of an increasingly exotic life, pulling out a new artwork made for me, or increasingly, as time went on, keeping it to myself. To our friends, Molly and I started to seem like different people, like we’d moved up with the juniors. We stayed in Obreshkove over the summer, and in the fall, with many of our sophomore year moved on to other dorms, or even other universities, we became the grand dames of the house, treated with a kind of distant fear or respect. I’d leave on Friday and she’d have the place to herself for whatever recent conquest was going to take up her weekend. (To her credit, some lasted longer than a weekend, but rarely did they go as long as three or four.) Our Sunday nights were spent decoding our weekends, flopped on the sofa in our gowns, smoking cigarettes and eating the sandwiches no one ever requested. So we’d sit, sometimes with a glass of wine, going over what had been said, what it meant, new revelations, sensual progress. My stories were of going down one road, and hers were of detours. Mine, constancy; hers, change.
Don’t you get bored? she’d say, and I’d tell her not at all. In fact, the more time I spent with Martin, the more it seemed as if nothing could be more complicated than being with just one person.
Don’t you get tired, I asked her, talking about favourite bands and favourite movies? You don’t get much past that, I imagine.
She laughed slyly. I get far past that. It’s when they shut up that the fun begins. I’m just playing the field, baby. I’m taste-testing.
But once in a while, that hurt she’d showed the night she cried in her room crept in.
Maybe there’s something missing from me that you’ve got, she said one night. Your guy sticks around for it.
You push yours away, I said. You let them all know you’re not serious.
Her eyes went dark. I don’t tell them. They just know, Jolene. They sense that thing that I don’t have.
What is it, then?
If I knew …, she said, and I started trying to move the conversation off the thin ice. I didn’t know how to help her. How can you help someone name an absence? The truth was, though, I felt it as well and didn’t know what it was, or what to call it. It just made me cautious. So I took care not to harm my friend with my own happiness. This was why I made certain that Martin and I spent our weekends away from the dorm. While at Bard, he and Molly never met, although his gifts to me — found things, little boxes, tokens — filled our house.
I thought what I had with Martin inoculated me against disaster, or at least the kind of unfathomable loneliness Molly seemed to suffer from. Martin had already addressed our age difference, dismissing it, as I had, as an inescapable detail. I’m not giving up a chance at happiness because it looks strange to some people, he’d said, sensibly. (He was not always sensible. It was not the topnote of his personality. If I had to say what was, I’d say it was a quality of attentiveness. Attentiveness and its corollaries of daydreaming, a hatred of disorder, wariness.) Sometimes in the silences between talking, a solemnness would enter between us, and I’d be tempted to ask what was wrong, but I wouldn’t. It was part of this vigilance I understood, obscurely, to be how he liked to be in the world. Plus, I didn’t want my peace disturbed, and I knew averting my attention from such formless auguries was how to maintain it. I was learning about who he was, bit by bit, taking it in and settling it among the other details until a picture of a man who had overcome sad beginnings emerged. His first ten years had been years of incremental losses; he’d been sick, his mother had moved away, then they’d been forced to leave home and go overseas to keep the family together. Many of the middle years I knew nothing about, thirty or so years in which he might have been married, divorced, been crushed by love, escaped death, considered other lives. That would come later, I thought, I would fill in those spots later.
My own beginnings, meanwhile, surrounded me still, and this disparity between us (I had no missing years) sometimes crept up on me and made me feel that I was falling in love with a pair of book-ends. But I loved him. I loved him, and I knew the edge of happiness in his life was unfamiliar to him, and I wanted to protect it. He would lie in my bed on the last nights of his visits (he came twice a month for long weekends by the beginning of my senior year) and tell me he wished we already had years of shared life behind us. He longed for a common past. So someone else has a copy of it, he said.
An emotional archive with me as curator.
And me as yours.
I like that, I said. And we continued to learn the other like explorers expanding their maps of the known world. I didn’t know, at that age, that those kind of maps have no north, no true north.
II.
JEWELLERY BOX, 1957. 6" X 4" X 4" BOX CONSTRUCTION. WOOD, FOUND OBJECTS, MECHANISM. ALBRIGHT-KNOX MUSEUM. A CHILD’S JEWELLERY BOX, WHEN OPENED, REVEALS A HALFALLIGATOR, HALF-BALLERINA TURNING UNDER A PARASOL.
A YEAR AND A HALF LATER, I’D FOUND A GOOD JOB teaching English lit at Indiana University, one of the most beautiful universities in the country. It sat on an expanse of rivers and greens; tall shady chestnuts, poplars, and oaks formed a canopy over the centre of it. Martin and I had settled into what we both quakingly called a relationship. Once in a while we even slept together without making love. We also fought occasionally (like a real couple, I caught myself dizzily thinking), mostly over things that one thought was more important than the other. Some aspect of manners or habit; a disagreement of fact, something taken the wrong way. But it was hard to fight with Martin. He had a polarity that bent conflict away from him; he preferred to give in or postpone; he rarely saw a disagreement through to the end. And in this way, I usually prevailed, winning by default. It was an uncomfortable process for me. I wanted to lose. I wanted him to care about something so much that he had to take it away from me, had to convince me to give in. The only area of our lives where this obtained had to do with who visited whom. He always came to Bloomington; I never went to Toronto. I’d bring it up persistently, trying to gnaw away at his reasons, or at least to understand them.
Not this again, he’d say.
I have next Monday and Tuesday off. I’ll take a bus on Friday. We’ll have three whole days.
No, Jolene.
You have to.
Why do I have to?
Because I’ll be very upset if you refuse me.
He’d sit down. Perhaps he’d be eating a slice of pie I’d made. Wearing one of his bulky blue sweaters. (I tend to remember, among other things, his clothing. Maybe simply because I kept a lot of it for a long time.) There’s nothing for you to see in Toronto, he’d say. It’s a boring place, my apartment is dark and dusty, and I don’t see a lot of people.
But you have some friends.
Yes. Acquaintances.
And you don’t want me to meet them?
How about if I bring a couple of them down and they can meet you here? You can all have a drink together and talk about how lucky I am.
You’re not being very nice.
Look, Jolene. I like there being one place in my life where everything is perfect, and that’s here. There’s you, and this house, and my little workshed that you built for me —
You’re welcome.
Yes, thank you, and I like to have it to look forward to. When I know I’m coming down to see you, it makes the days much easier for me.
Then why don’t you move here?
Because I’m used to being alone. Most of the time. I’m slow this way, Jo. You know that.
I’d usually start crying around here, feeling hopelessly confused. I was so special to him that he had to stay away most of the time and didn’t want me to visit him where he lived. Are you ashamed of me? I’d ask.
No, he’d say firmly. I love everything about you. But I don’t love everything about me, and I just want to bring you the best parts.
I want them all, though.
This is most of me, Jo. Please try to be happy.
And he’d win. That was the one fight he’d always win.
I hadn’t seen Molly since graduation — good intentions come to their usual end, or so I told myself — but we’d kept in contact, sending cards for birthdays and Christmases, talking occasionally by phone. I kept meaning to invite her to Bloomington, but it was hard coordinating our three schedules, and the fact that Martin and I continued to live in separate countries made our long weekends something I was reluctant to share. But now — it was the fall of 1989 — the Bergman, the main gallery on campus, had purchased an artwork from Martin, and it was to be unveiled in a presentation ceremony. It seemed to me I was already sharing him with a crowd for that weekend, and one more wasn’t going to make a difference. Molly was elated and within an hour of the invitation she’d called back to say she’d purchased her bus ticket (Molly shared with Martin a terror of flying). She said she had to work the next day if she wanted to finish a case she was preparing; so it was twelve hours together, full stop. We’ll make it feel like a week, I said, and when I hung up I felt a thrill of anticipation.
There had been times when we’d been roommates when I felt I’d been holding up an end of a bargain I’d never really signed on to. Outwardly, her sociability made her seem invincible, but privately, I know she burned with worry about herself. I was pressed into duty to keep those fires low, something I only realized after we’d been apart for a while. And yet, without Molly’s example, I doubt I would have had the confidence I needed to connect with Martin. I just used some of her skills differently than she used them. It’s funny, I’ve always found that the thing you admire most about someone is often the thing that gives them the most trouble, although in small, learned doses, it works wonders for you.
No one would have believed Molly was a lonely girl, but she was. And I, fairly shy by comparison, was filled up by one person. It turned out to be a deep difference between us, one that made me anxious. It is impossible not to harm someone with your good luck if they lack it themselves. But once I’d gotten out into “the world,” I looked back on it and her with some admiration. What I struggled with was external mostly. My mother’s death. My father’s grief. (That I would have thought these things external points to how aware of myself I was in those days.) Molly fought herself and grew. It was a deeply loveable quality in her, and I did love her. So I was excited, although nervous, to see her again. The nerves passed right away, though: when she came off the bus in her long grey coat, her face just as I remembered it — grey-rimmed glasses framing bright green eyes — my heart leapt up. I ran forward and we collided in a hug.
I pulled her over to where Martin was standing, sheepish and grinning. He offered his hand, and she let go of me to shake it. A mock handshake, like they were businessmen. Then she pulled him to her and she hugged him too. She stepped back and fumbled in her giant shoulder-strap purse and passed us each something still in its bag. I took a light summer dress out of mine. I hope you haven’t changed shape too much, she said. Hold it up. I did, and its diaphanous fabric caught in the wind and wrapped itself to me. It’ll fit, she said, delighted.
Martin’s bag contained an old watch. The face was partly melted, the glass over it bubbled and frozen in a warped pattern. A raised green crust swirled over the metal band. I found it scuba diving, she said. A couple years ago. I thought of you when I saw it. I thought maybe it was the kind of thing you’d like to have. For your work or something.
It’s very eerie, he said. It’s wonderful.
I thought you’d love it. I just kept it hoping one day we’d actually meet! Look, she said, touching the melted glass. It’s like it went down on a burning ship and this is the only thing that survived.
He hugged her again. This is very thoughtful of you, he said.
We brought Molly back to the house and the three of us sat outside in the afternoon sun. She kept looking at me and shaking her head, like she couldn’t believe it was really me, and we found ourselves laughing excitedly, nervously. Martin went to wheel out a makeshift wetbar, with a bucket of ice and some of what he called cordials. Molly and I tried to remember all the strange cocktails we’d once invented. Four O’Clock Aftershave was one of them: blue curaçao and crème de menthe. Disgusting. Or the one with all the transparent, almost tasteless liquors in them: gin, vodka, and Everclear (more a cleaning fluid than an alcohol). We’d named it Silent Creeping Death. A touch of cassis made it palatable; an eggcup’s worth was enough to render a person insensible. We’d employed it in the seduction of various members of the debating team (the score there was Molly 4, Jolene 0 — I had a problem with dosages, which is to say, I kept falling down drunk). The three of us settled for beers and sat in the slow, wavy heat blinking at each other. The willows shaded us a little from the late sun, their huge branches a summery balm. Molly, used to the humidity of New York, found the high blank heat of the Midwest almost unbearable. She sat fanning herself with a hand, her skin glistening.
My god, what do you midwesterners do for relief?
Stay still, I said. Take showers.
I can’t imagine getting used to this.
It must have been a steamy twelve hours on the bus, I said.
Thirteen, Molly said. It was a little sticky.
They have lovely air conditioning on airplanes.
She shuddered. It’s thirty below up there, and that’s just one way it can kill you.
I’m with her, Martin said, and they shook hands. Anyway, you get used to this, he said. It’s almost what I grew up with. Well, except that it was cold and it rained all the time.
You never told me he was funny.
Oh, he’s funny, I said. Wait till he has a second beer. He juggles too.
We finished our beers, opened more, and talked a little about everything, books and magazines recently read, movies missed, and so on. And then I had a strange thought: what if one of them knows something about the other that they’re not supposed to know? I tried to recall all the conversational indiscretions I’d made in speaking with one or the other at various times. What did Molly know that she oughtn’t? Martin? I was suddenly paralyzed with the thought of whatever that thing was, being introduced innocently into the conversation and the ballooning silence afterwards.
Molly asked him, Do you live d
own here now?
Oh geez, he said, no.
I turned to him with my eyes narrowed. Whaddyou mean, ‘oh geez no’? I said. Tell me again what would be wrong with living down here, Martin.
Molly glanced back and forth between us, mouth pursed. I should change the subject.
Nooo … I think he should tell us what he means.
I live in two places, he explained to Molly. In Toronto, I’m alone and I do my work. Down here, I’m with Jolene.
And you do your work, I said. I pointed to a ramshackle building at the back of the lot. And yes, he said, I work here too. In fact, I work in both places and I love Jolene in both places, but it’s only in one that we’re together.
That’s sweet, said Molly.
But I’m banned from Toronto, I said.
You’re not banned.
He’s always telling me what I wouldn’t like about Toronto. His apartment has no bathtub. The city is cold.
In the winter, you mean?
No, said Martin. Well, yes, but what I mean is the people aren’t as friendly up there.
I wouldn’t be going to accept the key to the city.
He stared hard at me. His expression said, Any reason why you’re doing this right now?
Just because, I said out loud.
Fine, he said. I come here because I love getting away from a place I hate being in to one I love being in. And it isn’t true the other way around: you love Bloomington, you’d hate Toronto, and there’s nothing to do up there. So I come here. I go to all the trouble of coming here.
I want to come to Toronto.
Fine, he said, raising his arms a little off the armrests. You’ll come, then.
I pulled my head back a little, astonished. When? I turned to Molly. You’re my witness.
I don’t think I better get —
Whenever you want, said Martin.
I jumped up and made him shake hands. You heard him, Molly. He said whenever. You heard him, right? I leaned down to him. Remember, you just said whenever.
Martin Sloane Page 4