In Heaney’s poem, he and his wife are in London on their honeymoon. They’re in the subway, late for a concert. She’s running ahead of him, buttons popping off her coat, and he follows, like Hansel in the fairy tale, collecting the buttons.
This is how the poem ends:
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons
To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.
When Heaney taught at Harvard, his wife stayed in Ireland, raising their children. He flew home every six weeks. A good husband, a smart man—no scandal is attached to his name.
Seamus and Marie Heaney were married for forty-eight years.
Damned if I’ll look back.
Chapter 32
Blair never changes her password: our daughter’s name and date of birth. I hacked into her Barnard account, saw she had no morning appointments, and headed uptown. Only at her office door did I falter. Blair’s decrees versus my need to talk to her: Think, or act? Confront and correct, or let it be?
In one motion, I knocked and entered.
Blair looked up. Not horrified. Not pleased. Stunned. Paralyzed.
“So I was in the neighborhood …” I said, and the line came out just as light and frothy as it did when I rehearsed it.
“You broke the rule. You’re a … violator.”
“I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”
“My, we are … jaunty for a man who’s misplaced his wife.”
“I’m guided by an old blues line,” I said. “My woman’s gone but I don’t worry, ’cause I’m sitting on top of the world.”
When I scripted this conversation, Blair responded with something that would have led to more banter. And in my script, we’d continue playing verbal tennis until I said, “What the fuck are we doing? Let’s call it Thanksgiving and break out the champagne,” or she said, “You big lug, get over here and kiss me.” But I’d apparently worn out what little welcome was available—Blair transitioned to a look of exasperation, the kind seen often in television commercials that depict husbands as well-meaning idiots: Men! Whadya gonna do with them!
“May I?”
Not waiting for an answer, I took the visitor’s seat. And—I couldn’t help it—gawked.
Blair at her desk, with a cardigan thrown over a buttoned-up blouse. My idea of a centerfold—well, if there were a magazine called Smart. There are many more conventionally beautiful women, but Blair has that rare appeal: alertness, a shine in the eye, what my mother would call “sparkle.” This is why, when we met, it wasn’t difficult to pry Blair from her boyfriend. He didn’t really care what she thought, read, wondered about. I did. I still do—all these years later, as much as Blair now seems to think that all I want to do is fuck her, I believe that’s a distant second to wanting to lean over and press my head to hers, as if I could download her clarity.
The phone rang. Blair never had her ears pierced, so every phone call during business hours requires her to pluck a pearl clip-on from her right ear and set it on the desk. A gesture out of a 1930s movie. Intoxicating.
“Give me … ten minutes,” she said, and hung up.
“You look great,” I said. “As ever.”
Blair was having none of that. “Why are you here?”
“Ten minutes?”
“What, exactly, have you come here to say?” And she checked the time. She wasn’t kidding. So be it.
I had an appeal both emotional and logical scribbled as talking points on a card in my pocket. I couldn’t remember a word I’d written. My head was as empty as a banker’s conscience.
“I am not making sense of the world,” I said, and then I lost it. “Things are out of control, except for the husbands of my clients, who have so much money they have—in their offices, anyway—the illusion of control, though of course if their personal lives were in control, I’d know about them only by reading about them in the business section, but of course their relationships are ridiculous and insane and in no way in anybody’s control … and I—know-it-all lawyer who sees the absurdity of their lives so clearly and is nothing but wise about relationships—am living alone, ankle-deep in terror, and …”
“David, you’re babbling!”
Was I? Apparently. And on the verge of veering further out of control.
Blair sat back. This short play performed for an audience of one was pushing her into herself. At any moment, she could withdraw from personal involvement and watch me as a critic.
I pressed my fingertips to my eyes. What did I see in the darkness? Random moments, a mash-up of people, in no chartable sequence. Clients. Blair and Ann. Childhood moments. And then faded, then brighter, an image of V, motherly, serene. Her voice, from afar, words I’d never heard her say: “You are loved more than you can ever know.” And I believed I was.
Precious seconds passed. I didn’t care. I could say almost everything in a minute.
“Sorry. Just not used to being in a room with you,” I said. “Let me do this as a lawyer. One, I do wish to lose myself when I’m in bed with you, but forgive me, I thought that was the point, and not just for me. Two, I know you think the world’s biggest drug problem is testosterone—and I agree; I make my living fighting it—but I am not some testosterone-crazed sex addict. Some women want houses and diamonds hanging on the Christmas tree—that’s not you. So I’ve given you what I can. What I thought you valued. Myself. And one of the best ways to give myself to you—to show you how much I love you—is sex. Maybe I didn’t present that love in the best form, maybe I’ve tracked you like a bloodhound, but I’ve held nothing back. How many husbands can say that? Three, I am feeling like shit. You are too. Shouldn’t that tell you that we are deeply in love? And that we can work this out?”
Silence. Then Blair, in a whisper: “Please go.”
A knock at the door. “Dean Watkins?”
“Just a minute,” Blair called out.
“I thought we had more time,” I said.
“No, you thought you’d make me as miserable as you are.”
“Sorry if I hit a nerve,” I said.
From outside the door: “Dean Watkins, I can come back …”
Blair scribbled a note and pushed it across the desk: 5:00.
I pocketed it without looking at it. Whatever worked for her.
The young woman outside Blair’s door was texting madly. I wanted to tell her that her problems were the inconsequential troubles of youth and not worthy of the dean’s attention, but she had a fresh face and a smile off a cereal box, and I saw laughter in Blair’s immediate future. And I felt alone beyond alone.
Chapter 33
Cold. Drizzle. Dusk at four thirty. In my head: the Mamas and the Papas singing about New York’s brown leaves and gray skies and how much better it is in Los Angeles.
Walking from the subway, I turned up my collar. Even on a bleak afternoon, it was so much more exotic in Morningside Heights than on Central Park West. A rainbow neighborhood: college kids from everywhere, women in burkas, the occasional public intellectual. The plaque on an apartment building announcing that Gershwin wrote “Rhapsody in Blue” there. The crowlike cries of the peacocks from the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. A bistro across from the cathedral—a film crew could cheat and call this Paris.
And the cathedral. An old haunt, a memory factory. Two decades ago, when I was broke at the end of the month, Blair and I went there often to hear choirs before going across the street for pizza.
The cathedral is the world’s fourth-largest Christian church. From the doors to the altar, it’s six hundred and one feet—as they say, two football fields and a football. You can si
t and watch someone pray from a distance, and she won’t even know you’re there.
Funny what you think about when you’re watching your wife on her knees in prayer.
I am a lapsed Jew, son of a clan that has total allegiance to Israel, less to a synagogue. Eight nights of presents happened in our home, but not fasting or two sets of dishes. With the Greenfields, achievement trumps faith. And there I’m golden: In three generations, I took us from shtetl to summa. Then this Nice Jewish Boy made it to Manhattan, made a career, made a name, made money. And made a marriage. To a shiksa, of course. My parents forgave this; the birth of the golden grandchild washes away all sins.
Blair comes from church people. Her father passes the collection plate; her mother cooks for the homeless. Dean and Deaconess Watkins raised their kids in the church and in the groups the church sponsored. Choir, Girl Scouts, candy stripers—all the good-girl check marks. It was inevitable that Blair would trade Iowa for New York and marry a Jew. It was equally unsurprising that she’d go to church when she felt the need.
What does she pray for? I used to ask her. She’d never say. In the cathedral, I’d guess she was praying for guidance, declaring herself clueless to her god. That stiff spine in her office? An act of bravery, Little Big Girl stamping her feet, fooling no one. Here, in a sacred space, Blair was a supplicant, not a princess.
If I knew how to pray, I know what I’d pray for: Blair. The terms wouldn’t matter. Only the homecoming. But I was too agitated to pray, so I moved a few rows closer and watched Blair.
Could the most beautiful woman in the world be a woman in prayer?
For a few years, for some stupid reason I no longer remember, Blair and I didn’t celebrate our birthdays. One frigid birthday night, I felt the absence of joy, and because it was a Friday and the Met was open late, we walked across the park. Nearing Fifth Avenue, we enacted our ritual: a few puffs and then, like communion wafers, breath mints.
We often joked: birthday in Paris. We’ve never made it. So we’d go to the rooms of nineteenth-century French paintings and pinball around until one grabbed us. Blair was partial to Monet’s cathedrals. Summer heat shimmered in those pictures, stone seemed not quite solid—there was more going on here than admiration for the buildings. I was partial to Manet. Not for the nude women—what shocked Parisians in the 1860s wouldn’t get a second glance from a sixth grader now. I liked his portraits—women and children on the balconies of their apartments, his family in the garden.
Neither of us knew that Manet had made a series of religious paintings. We’d spent hours in this room, but we’d never noticed his Dead Christ with Angels. That birthday night, buzzing, we did.
In this painting, Jesus has a halo, but it’s small and faint. He isn’t the son of God—this Christ is a dead man. The wound and the stigmata couldn’t be more real. You know that Jesus bled, that the blood had congealed, that the blood had crusted.
I’d never considered a mortal Christ. I don’t think Blair had either. So the painting rocked us. Blair especially. “All my life I’ve been told, ‘He died for us,’” she said, “but I always moved beyond that, to the rock being rolled back and the Easter eggs and the joy. The death part was just preamble. And here … here, it’s everything.”
In Manet’s painting, two angels mourn Jesus, and they see what we do: a corpse. There’s no hope of resurrection. As I sat in the cathedral, I knew why I’d flashed on that painting: I expected to feel what the angels did. But there was no agony on Blair’s face. Whatever she’d been looking for, she’d found. The morning’s tension had been replaced by serenity. She was breathing in, breathing out, waiting for me.
I walked to her row and took a seat beside her. She didn’t look up, but she took my hand, resting her fingers on my wrist. And there we sat, for several minutes, her knowing how she felt, me in the dark but not caring, not worried, because my life had funneled into this moment, this amazing woman tuned to my pulse.
Blair took her hand away and stood, buttoning her coat. I followed her out of the church. The rain had stopped. Leaves were pasted on the street. The lights made Amsterdam Avenue look like a set for a commercial.
“Pizza?”
“Too nostalgic.”
“Beer?”
“One.”
Chapter 34
The bar on the corner was a student hangout. Clever notices in the window. Formica tables. Scarred chairs. It was early, so no students were playing electronic games or shooting pool. There was no waitress. I carried beers. The peace I’d felt in the cathedral had passed; my hands shook.
Fifty blocks and a million light-years from Per Se, here was our past, coming around again.
“So,” I said.
My king’s pawn.
“So.”
Her queen’s pawn.
I asked for this meeting. Mine to begin it.
“Doesn’t this feel like a first date?”
“Worse,” Blair said. “Like we were fixed up.”
“Funny. I’m sure I’ve seen you naked.”
“Just that one time.”
Two could play this. And two had, often, over the years.
“How was it?” I asked.
“Memorable.”
“We should do it again.”
“We should.”
“How about tonight?”
“David … please. We can’t joke our way out of this.”
Chastened, I nodded.
“Something has become clear to me about us. Our marriage feels intense because we have this fierce romance, but we’re skating. We live on the surface. We never fight. We’re the envy of everyone we know—the happy-all-the-time Greenfields—but then Jean comes along, and … well, you know.”
We turn away from intimacy? Hide from each other? I didn’t see it.
“And it’s not just in our marriage, David—it’s in our work. I spend my days in a cloister.”
Not an admission I’d ever heard Blair make. But it was the truth. A decade and change ago, when the Internet was in full roar, Blair decided she’d had enough of eighty-hour weeks at Goldman and took a job at Yahoo. It came with a rich package: big salary, stock options, and the promise of a steady ascent. In a year, she was a vice president. One morning, out of the blue, she was ordered to fire four people. No reason was given, but Blair understood right away that the selection wasn’t random. These were her most senior, oldest, highest-paid staffers. The Internet bubble was bursting, so the company needed to run lean. Blair agonized but didn’t protest—she had that foursome off the premises by noon. And then, near day’s end, someone from human resources showed up and fired Blair.
At that point, she could have found a job in a company run by decent people. She didn’t. And now it seemed that she was a lifer at Barnard.
“And you, David … you always try to represent wives. You keep your distance from the world of men.”
“Correction: the world of power.”
“Men,” she repeated. “Men freak you out.”
Was this so? This was a new idea. I needed to think about it.
“Look at me, David.”
I did as instructed.
“There’s one more thing we need to get right—the sex thing.”
She owned the moment. I kept silent.
“When we started going out, you told me a story. In college, there was a girl who didn’t want to date you, just sleep with you—a perfect relationship when you’re twenty. One night you took some kind of drug together. I remember your words: ‘Our orgasm was alchemy. One moment we were locked together, then we became a single being, and then … poof! No bodies, no names. We had disappeared.’”
“Your memory is scary.”
“Well, you’re a quotable guy. My point …” Long pause. “Those things we’ve done in bed lo these twenty years? I now feel you did them for you. Yeah, you
want me to come, and come big, but it’s so my orgasm obliterates you. Sex isn’t connection for you. It doesn’t bring you closer; it takes you away.”
Another new idea.
“You might ask yourself if someone or something hurt you very badly before I came along. Or if being alive is so painful for you that sex—and only sex—offers a safe way out.”
Painful? More painful than this? Not possible. Then that feeling passed, and I felt … exposed. What Blair had put out there wasn’t pretty, but it was plausible—no, it was probably true.
Sex is my refuge. But for all the years of our marriage, that wasn’t an admission of guilt; it was a badge of pride. I’ve never once felt I needed to stand up in a church basement and announce, “I’m David, and I’m addicted to sex.” That just wasn’t our story. I liked sex, and Blair liked sex, so we had sex, a lot of sex. I thought we were, compared to so many, the lucky ones. What I hadn’t grasped: In marriage, good sex is a gateway drug. But instead of forging ahead to a kind of love so rare I couldn’t even imagine it, I’d declared victory at the first gate.
“I have … work to do,” I said.
“We. We.”
She reached into her bag and removed a book.
“I’ve been seeing someone,” she said. “A therapist. This afternoon, he gave me this. I marked it.”
She put the book on the table. A hand on my shoulder.
No kiss good-bye.
“This was good,” she said, and left.
I picked up the book.
Milan Kundera. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. A page had been turned down and a passage marked:
Every love relationship is based upon unwritten conventions rashly agreed upon by the lovers during the first weeks of their love. On the one hand, they are living a sort of dream; on the other, without realizing it, they are drawing up the fine print of their contracts like the most hard-nosed of lawyers. O lovers! Be wary during those perilous first days! If you serve the other party breakfast in bed, you will be obliged to continue same in perpetuity or face charges of animosity and treason!
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