by Alon Preiss
Daniel looked back at her, and sweat dripped into his eyes.
Suddenly the path veered back into the woods, which presently opened up on a clearing. A stream turned into a small waterfall that ran over smooth granite into a clear mountain pond. Now Daniel didn’t feel like an adventurer; the pond was filled with campers, Japanese tourists with their children, 50-year-old Midwestern women in one-piece bathing suits. Young boys slid along the granite and yelped when they hit the water.
Daniel and Susan sat by the side of the pond and ate their sandwiches. “I wish we’d brought our bathing suits,” Daniel said. “I’m too hot. I wish I could just jump in.” Susan said that this would be a good spot for a memory, and Daniel asked her what she meant.
“I read a book that said when you remember something, your memory isn’t really of the event itself,” she said. “You’re really remembering the way you told someone about it, or the way you wrote it down, or even just the way you thought about it. If you don’t pass it on or somehow record it, the memory doesn’t pass from short-term into long-term. That’s why you cannot remember anything that happened when you were a baby. Babies lack speech, and so they cannot form memories.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“This would be a good place for a memory,” she said again. “A false one. At this little pond, we snuck back in the middle of the night. It was very dramatic – we risked our lives scurrying up the side of that mountain, turning our flashlights on only every once in a while, worried that a forest ranger would find us.” She spoke more in a whisper now. “When we got up here, we swam naked in the moonlight. Then we made love on the shore, and we fell asleep in each other’s arms, and woke up as the sun rose up over the mountains.”
He slung an arm around her, kissed her gently on the cheek.
“And when you go back to New York,” she said, “just call me once, and say, The part I liked best about the trip was swimming naked in the pond in the middle of the night, making love on the shore and falling asleep in each other’s arms, and I’ll say, Yeah, that was the best part. Then, we’ll bump into each other when I’m forty-five, or something like that. And it’s all we’ll remember about this trip. That great midnight adventure. And you’ll think: I never did such things with my wife. And it will be a wonderful memory.” And, she added, it would fill him with regret.
And suddenly she was very sad. She was here only for that memory, for a good memory of Daniel, a goodbye filled with longing, to write a Casablanca ending to her ridiculous love story. And this was all she could hope for, some small element of romance and heroism, a new ending not filled with bitterness and anger.
When they reached the top of Half Dome, coated in sweat, and stared down at the panorama of green beneath them, sitting on the hard granite of the top of humanity, all she could do was berate herself. Divorcee, unemployed adulterer – as the wind tossed her back and forth, teetering out over the edge of the canyon, she realized that Daniel would be gone the day after tomorrow, and those words would lose their subversive appeal.
On the way down, she fell into silence. Daniel asked her what was bothering her. She said that nothing was bothering her, except his prying questions. Silence for a while, then Daniel asked whether it was the heat. Because, he added, the heat would abate soon enough. It was five in the evening, he insisted, and the heat would be getting better. She said that it wasn’t the heat; it wasn’t anything. She just wanted to be quiet.
“It’s a weird thing,” Daniel said, “that we haven’t seen each other for years, and now we’re climbing down the side of the mountain, and we have a few miles more to go, and you insist on being completely quiet, for no reason at all.”
Susan’s brow knitted. Daniel stopped, held onto a tree to keep himself from sliding down the mountain, which was becoming gradually steeper.
“Why can’t we just enjoy each other’s company in silence?” Susan asked crossly.
“That would be fine,” he replied, equally crossly, “if I got the sense that you were enjoying my company.”
A family of nervous hikers scurried past them and vanished around the bend.
“What is the matter!” Susan exclaimed. “You need applause every moment of the day?” She beat her fist against a tree. “You can’t force someone to be happy, Daniel!”
“Do you want all this to end in yelling and anger?” he said, keeping his voice down.
“It didn’t need to,” she said. “You didn’t need to push me.”
He walked up the hill, close to her. “I’m leaving tomorrow. You live in California. Maybe we will never see each other. Why is that so hard? Can’t you even pretend to be happy during our last hours together?”
“Why should I pretend something like that, Daniel? Why should I pretend that our last hours make me happy? Why should I have to pretend anything?”
That night, Susan lay silently in bed, on her back, and Daniel sat out on the front porch, coughing, chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking warm white wine left over from the day before. She could hear him lighting another cigarette, then a quiet pop as he opened a new bottle of wine. He coughed, then he cursed. Shit, she thought he said. Bleeding again.
When she finally fell asleep, her dreams were abstract, blotches of black and brown swam across an angry green sea, and unseen crowds muttered in the distance. She woke up every once in a while, watched Daniel breathing in the moonlight. Then she would plummet back into dreamland, but it was always the same thing. At three in the morning she awoke, and the anger was gone. She put a hand on his forehead, nibbled on his earlobe and whispered, “I love you, Daniel.” He whispered, “I love you too,” in his sleep. He did not attach a name to the sentiment; to whom, she wondered, was he speaking, in the depths of his sleep? Maybe, she thought suddenly, to me.
The next morning, the sun woke them at six, and they lay around together, having forgotten about the previous evening’s fight. Finally he said, “I hope this isn’t the last time we see each other,” and she said, “I hope so too.” She pecked him on the cheek, and she wanted to tell him that she loved him, and that he was a dopey, exasperating old man. At seven, she volunteered to pick up breakfast, and he said that was a good idea. She dressed and headed out the door.
She walked along the dusty path to the cafeteria, but soon she could see that the line stretched out to the car-park. She waited for a minute or so, but too many campers needed their morning coffee. Daniel could wait for his coffee, she thought. She turned and walked back, under the shadow of Half Dome.
She got to the door of the cabin, and she heard Daniel talking softly. Saying gentle things, I love you, I miss you so much ….
Susan did not mind Daniel saying those things to his wife. This was part of their charade.
This was what she enjoyed, spending time with Daniel, sleeping with him, climbing to the tops of mountains with him, rolling about naked with him ... knowing the terrible act of deception they were committing against his wife. So she understood that Daniel said such things to his wife, she didn’t mind that. In fact, she enjoyed the idea that Daniel might call his wife, swear that she was the only woman for him, the only one … Susan did not mind the words themselves. She minded his tone of voice. She minded his subterfuge. He was supposed to be tricking his wife, not tricking her. And when he told her wife how much he loved her, he wasn’t supposed to mean it. Sincerity was for her, Susan; lies were for his wife.
Daniel said goodbye, and Susan walked into the room, letting the door slam behind her. Daniel whirled around. He stood in the middle of the cabin in his underpants, the cabin phone in his hand.
He waited to hear what she would say. She waited for the words to come. “Don’t look so frightened, Daniel.”
Daniel nodded, caught his breath. He hurriedly dressed, unable to defend himself half-naked.
“I think what bothers me about that conversation,” Susan said finally, “is that you did it so secretly. You got me out of the cabin then ran to the phone.”
He sat down on the bed.
“Why didn’t you just tell me that you had to call Natalie?” she asked sharply. “I realize you have to call your wife. When a man is committing adultery, he has to call his wife once in a while and lie to her. I understand that completely. Why couldn’t you have just said that to me?”
He glanced up at Susan, then looked at his hands.
Susan walked over to the bed and put a hand on his arm. “Do you believe all those things you said to Natalie?”
He couldn’t tell anymore, he said. Not now, anyway. Not today.
Again, Susan and Daniel stopped speaking to one another. But driving back to San Francisco, past the fields of dried grass glistening like gold in the early morning sunlight, the mood in the small car again warmed, little by little. By the time they arrived in the darkness-shrouded city, they were laughing together, singing along to old songs from the 1970s on a compilation tape Susan had bought for its novelty value.
They parked a few blocks from her building and walked back through the chilly night air, wrapped in each other’s arms. In her house, they ordered a delivery of Indian food, which they ate out of the cartons, sitting on the floor of the living room, then they slept together on the mattress in the middle of the bedroom. Later, when Daniel thought of Susan and his last night with her, he recalled that her joking use of the word “adultery” had suddenly ceased.
The next morning he awoke at dawn, after only four or five hours of sleep, dressed, and walked around Susan’s neighborhood. The wind from the bay howled through the empty streets, leaving his hair damp and tangled. He passed by those Victorian row-houses on Steiner Street, suddenly familiar, though Daniel wasn’t sure why, bright, loud and garishly orange and blue beneath the looming horizon of post-modern San Francisco’s deadly gray office buildings. He stopped and stared for a while. Could he actually leave again? Could he actually fail to propose marriage together a second time? He wanted to leave his wife and be with Susan forever, he really did. And so he marched back to her house, his stride firm and resolute.
When he walked through the open door, Susan thought he looked uncomfortable, as though he couldn’t wait to get back into a suit, to return to the office or his apartment on some high floor in some beautiful building, to the bed in which he sometimes slept with his beautiful wife. Daniel cleared his throat. He reached down to pick up his suitcase, then he stopped.
“I can’t think what to say,” Daniel muttered.
She smiled, looked out the window, not at him. “Say goodbye, Daniel. That’s not beyond you.”
Daniel nodded. Now she looked back at him, and she saw the depth of his sadness. She looked away quickly.
“Would it be stupid ... you know,” he said. “Stupid for me to say that if you ever go back to New York ....” His voice trailed off feebly.
Sitting there on the floor, not looking at him.
“I will never return to New York,” she said. “I remember too many things. My father ... you ... almost drowning in a swimming pool. Stuff like that.”
Daniel slammed the front door shut, fell loudly to his knees, put his hand below her chin and forced her to face him. She looked deeply into his eyes, trying to find the real Daniel, the one no one ever saw, the one hidden behind the layers of dead skin that had stuck to him over the years.
“Susan,” he said, voice trembling, and it was, she recognized, a false tremble, but one he deeply wished to feel ... he longed to stay and fly with her into the sun, he said, hurtling to Earth a month or two months or two years later, bereft, empty, having lost everything, his wife, his little life, his career ... that was the best choice: if he were to leave, return to his home, he would spend his life seeing Susan on street corners, her smile in magazines, hearing her laugh in hotel lobbies, only to spin around anxiously, excitedly and find .... He and Susan were cast adrift in the middle of a flat and green-gray ocean, on a little boat that burned in the mid-day heat, just burned out-of-control, flames rising higher and higher, until ... “Oh for God’s sake, Susan, let’s get married!” Daniel said insistently, then, quoting from a book he had once read in Ivan’s shop (a little book with a yellowing cover from which Ivan would sometimes read aloud, shouting above the murmuring when the shop became full and stuffy-hot and really alive with ideas), Daniel said: “I am ready to bleed willingly and joyfully.”
As he spoke, Daniel at first felt that he had some cause for optimism. Susan listened to him, and she was nodding. But then she seemed to stop herself, consciously crushing everything she was feeling. Even were she to say yes, he would never go through with it. He must have known this, but he would deny it. He would go back to New York to tell Natalie – Tell her by phone, Susan would insist, but she would ultimately give in, out of basic decency – and then he would give Natalie a little more time, just for her to finish a painting, or a few paintings that she needed for a show, or just until he could convince her to have an abortion, or something. And that was why Susan would never agree to his plan: she knew how it would all end, and he knew that she knew, and therefore his newfound promises of love and commitment were no-risk. She scoffed, a loud bleat of a laugh.
“Jesus Christ, Daniel,” she said. “ ‘Goodbye.’ That was your line. Such a simple line. You muffed it.”
But her voice cracked, just when she needed to sound most apathetic. She was not unmoved, and she could not hide that.
“I hate this,” she said softly, not looking at him. “Men who will leave their wives only for another woman. Leave your wife because you want to leave her, don’t play your life like the stock market.” There it was, a new reason: she was rejecting him not because this was what she wanted, nor because she did not love him, but because it was a decision conscience dictated.
He made another argument to try to convince her, a line even less convincing than his purplish remark about the fiery boat, and it seemed to have an effect opposite to that intended. Instead of melting into his arms, Susan hardened, her resolve now impossible to shatter. “I’m going to go out for a while,” she said. “Maybe for a few minutes, but maybe for a long time, for weeks. When I get back, I just want you gone.”
She almost left the room, but hesitated. Then, as though to seal their fate beyond doubt: “There’s someone else, Daniel – I love a man named Joren.” The name rang in his head: Joren. If she really wanted to leave, he could simply crush her will, steamroll right over her. But if it were another man, he was powerless. And then she swept out of the house, the door slamming shut like Ibsen.
But he really did want to marry her. He sat on the mattress, not even moving. Cars drove by the window, honking and shattering the early morning silence. Then a picture in his head: Susan, her old apartment on the Upper West Side, years ago, at ten in the evening. He remembered some smell in the apartment – maybe she had cooked something for him, and he’d only realized it just now, five years later. Had that delicious smell been for him? Thank you Susan, for cooking something for me, all those years ago, whatever it was. Her face had been so happy when he’d arrived. He remembered crying with her, hugging her, the two of them crying. Her warmth, tears dripping on his shirt Her body shook, her voice sobs and hiccups, sad little tics: I thought we would be in love forever. That sounded nice, didn’t it? Wouldn’t it be nice to be in love forever? Hadn’t he spent all these years dreaming of being in love forever, of being in love with her? He saw her little body shaking.
I love a man named Joren. It was a lie, wasn’t it? Such a bald-faced lie – it was like crying on his shoulder, hopeless, hollow.
He struggled to his feet, ran out the door and down the stairs. Outside, in the chilly dawn, he looked north, then south. He squinted across the street, into the park. He thought he saw her yards in front of him, walking north up a steep hill. Dust from the cars swirled around him; one grazed him as he scurried across the road. Susan momentarily passed behind a tree, then reappeared. He shouted out her name, but the wind blew it away. More people were all around him, coming out of their
apartment buildings and walking toward the little cafés, or coming back from breakfast. He pushed, but a gray ocean of people flowed over him, overpowering him. He pushed some more. A man elbowed him, one cursed in his ear. When at last he had a clear view, Susan was gone.
He walked the streets for a few hours, went to have lunch, spent a few hours staring out at the boats on the bay. At around nine pm, he went back to her house, but Susan had not returned. Her bags, still neatly packed from the trip, were beside the mattress. Susan had been sucked up by the crowd. She had dissolved.
To Susan, adultery was no longer a word that shocked. She knew that now she wanted nothing more than to be an adulterer, to die locked forever in a passionate, adulterous embrace. Adultery meant love, it was the underbelly of love, something she had to tolerate in love’s name. The passivity of marriage was love’s antithesis; true love was the blood red maelstrom of revolution.
Decades later, Emmett, a sad widower, filled with fantasies, would spot Susan’s daughter on the street and think, What a beautiful young woman. He would not know that this was the daughter of his brother’s ex-lover. He could not know that Susan’s beautiful daughter was the child of meaningless adultery, accepted without hesitation by her very, perhaps too understanding, sterile husband. Had he known, the woman would have lost her loveliness. How could her life be separated from the act of betrayal by which she had sprung into being?
To Emmett, adultery was not even a fantasy, it was a forbidden word. After he first spotted Katherine in 1984, he willingly submitted to the concept of eternity. She held all power in their marriage; her strong will guided them. She had found him a magazine job he’d lacked the vigor to hunt down on his own, and in some hidden way, perhaps his one act of initiative – his, as it turned out, well-advised assault on a shriveled partner at Johnson & Tierney – was secretly planned by Katherine. A hypnotic suggestion here and there, perhaps. At any rate, Emmett had known unconsciously that his act of mild violence against the partner would not result in Katherine’s leaving him, but his continued employment well might. How could he have done such a thing? Because it had been surreptitiously approved in advance by his wife.