I don’t know why it fascinated me so much, this story he wouldn’t tell me. Maybe just because I was jealous of Reuben. Reuben was part of Asa’s mythology—he may have been Asa’s mythology in its entirety. When Asa spoke of him his voice was sad, but his face was aglow with the memory of events that had shaped his character and colored his life. What I wanted to know was how that had happened and what, precisely, had happened. I was able to piece together some of the events, but that was only half of it.
Whatever Reuben had meant to Asa, I was sure of one thing: He had planted a seed that had come to blossom only with me. Twenty-five years of dormancy. When I’d met Asa, when he’d leaned over my desk and perfumed my environment, he’d been asleep. I woke him up. That was what I intended to do and I did it. Then I began to see that what happened between us was the duplication of something that had happened long before. Like the past it was nipped in the bud, but it was Asa nipping, not Fate.
Asa had certain predictions about the course of love. They had to come true or he would be adrift. It was the same for me—but my predictions were entirely different. When I looked at him I predicted that we would lie in each other’s arms or I would die. I was right. He, on the other hand, predicted that after we lay in each other’s arms, our love would die. He was right too, about himself. And he believed this because of Reuben.
I wish I’d known I was just the reincarnation of a bad blond boy, a method of completing a fantasy he had no desire to make into an abiding reality. “This is an interlude, dear,” he said to me early on. I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to know anything about him that didn’t fit into my predictions. I kept myself in the dark.
Paradoxically, my very misconception of Asa was my safety. I could retreat into misinterpretations of things he’d said to me, comforting readings of looks he’d given me. The idea that he’d ever loved me was astonishing enough to override any new astonishing information, such as that for the fifth day in a row he would not be coming over after work to make love on the sofa or, if he was daring enough, the bed. The bed was reserved for lunchtime. On the sofa, at five-thirty, he could tell himself he’d been carried away; walking all the way to the bedroom was too premeditated for the evening visit. So he would not be coming, hadn’t come yesterday, most likely wouldn’t come tomorrow—what did I care? I remembered when he’d come every day.
What I never considered was how things had changed. I didn’t want to think about what had happened between May, when the sight of me was enough to take his breath away (I’d heard him gasp when I walked into his office), and November, when the illness of his dogs, the social obligations imposed on him by Fay (Chamber of Commerce dinners, third cousins for cocktails), or simply his own bad temper fortuitously occupied him between five and six-thirty from Monday to Friday.
The truth was that from the moment we’d become lovers he’d stopped loving me. And it was that specific—we’d “done almost everything” on my sofa during the course of our first spring without diminishing his feelings. On the contrary, the more we poked and prodded each other through and around our clothing, the more entranced he became. We developed techniques for producing orgasm through kissing alone and would torment and satisfy each other this way. I don’t know how we did it. It had something to do with anticipation and denial, no doubt, but it was also a genuine method. Irreproducible; even with Asa, it never worked after we’d been to bed.
After we lay down, everything became topsy-turvy. In private he was my lover. In public he was wearing a blue shirt and a dark-blue tie and talking on the phone. We would rise up from bed in the early afternoon and eat lunch in the sunshine and discuss, as lovers do, our favorite pastimes. “I think I like being on the bottom,” he’d say. Fifteen minutes later, passing me in the hall at work, he wouldn’t even look at me. Who was he aiming to fool if not himself? Everybody at the office was accustomed to our glances. This sudden sobriety between us was more noticeable, and more of an announcement, than an increase in flirtation would have been.
How deeply I didn’t understand him! On no information at all, I had decided that sex would bind us together. I thought that for a man like that to take off his tie and his shirt and put his body against mine would be so startling that we would share an extraordinary secret: the private world where he was naked and delighted. I would be a witness to the discarding of all his formality. I thought that the passion permitted by his dropping his clothes on the floor would be equal to the formality of the clothes. I was right, but I didn’t think it through. I didn’t see that once the clothes were on him again, the passion, like a garment with a particular purpose, would be folded away until the next time.
When we were still only kissers and not, technically, lovers, he would touch me in his office, in my office, in the twists and turns of the mahogany staircase. He was as foolish and reckless as I was. It seemed I had opened him up with touch. And I admit I was disappointed to find him so easily reached. Was he just a sensualist whose soul could be tapped by a finger on his cheek? I wanted to capture the heart of a man whose heart was buried deep; what glory in a prize available to anyone with soft hands?
After we became lovers my disappointment faded. He was again the Unapproachable. His foolishness of the kissing months was gone; he retreated into the stiffness that had challenged me originally. I looked at him walking down the hall and tried to remember him in my arms. It was like trying to resolve the two images of a binocular incorrectly positioned for my eyes. And the unlikeliness of those two truths coexisting, along with the surety that they did, was my deepest happiness. He was unhavable—and he was mine.
What made Asa love me was my capacity for inventing him. I conjured up an idea of him that was an idol we both could worship. I had enough information to imagine him, unerringly, as the person he had wished to be twenty years before. If he was silent it was because his thoughts were too complicated to express; if he grumped around the office it was because he knew life ought to be better than life currently was. By reacting to his hidden emotions, I convinced the two of us of the depth of his deepness and the heat of his heat.
I wasn’t wrong about him. If I’d been wrong he would never have loved me. But I wasn’t exactly right, either. I was off the track in thinking he was as he desired to be. He genuinely wanted passion and danger—from himself and from life—but he had neither. My presuming the existence of his fantasy self made life difficult. For a while he played along with it, but in the end he had to admit it was hopeless. I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted my blood-red Yankee. He just wanted peace. He wanted to stop living in somebody else’s fantasy, forgetting that it had been his as well.
That’s what I don’t forgive. I could never have imagined this Ur-Asa without him. He gave me all the raw material for the spells I put on him and the incantations I mumbled at his blue back descending the stairs, and then he acted as though it were my fault that he had to live up to an impossible standard.
Asa, of course, did not invent me. Partly he was busy basking in my notion of him; partly my forthrightness left little room for speculation. He didn’t need to translate me because what I said to him was unequivocal. I said, “I love you,” and “You are the most delicious human in the world.” His version of authorship was to list my qualities and marvel at them. “You’re so, so—Italian.” This, as we both knew, was a code word for Jewish.
What Jewishness meant to him was access to passion. He envied me that. I insisted that he could have passion, that my Jewish love would teach him how. But Gentile passions are reserved for moral issues, so the passion I aroused in Asa was ultimately a passion to do Right. And doing Right meant relinquishing me.
So there began the discrepancies. Between what he said and what I heard, between what he felt for me and what I felt for him, between how our office-mates thought of us and what was really going on, and, springing from that, between my reaction to secrecy and his: He wanted to maintain it, I wanted to blast it open. I thought if everybody knew, he’d leave Fay
. In the end everybody did know. But I thoroughly misunderstood him. He had his own standard, one not fixed by public opinion. He was anything but amoral. Amorality was reserved for the Jews, like me and Reuben. We could be victims of our emotions; he knew what was right.
Toward the end there began to be discrepancies within me. I told myself that were he to leave Fay he would have proved himself untrustworthy and I wouldn’t want him. I can’t tell if I believed this. As I said, I became more like him, and this was a sentiment redolent of stern Yankee gobbledegook. On the other hand, it was true that an Asa who would ditch Fay and the dogs was no Asa I knew.
And the biggest discrepancy of all was between what we were and what we perceived in each other. Who did I love? What man was it who in my dreams and in the long vibrant winter evenings alone on my sofa I had kissed and awakened, feeding my images with conversations about layouts conducted in the fluorescence of the office? Whose eyes superimposed themselves on Fay’s during dinner, halting his descriptions of his day at work? Can human beings love each other? Must we always love an image we’ve labored over secretly, never love the living soul with all its mire and murk?
Asa Observed
Asa at fifty still dreams, but not of Dinah. At least, not often. Afternoon sunlight still finds a resting place at his feet on the desk. In his thoughts his feet walk the beaches of the Cape and the dimmer, dusty New Hampshire roads. The older he gets, Asa has noticed, the more he counts on summer to awaken him from a deepening winter slumber. It’s as if he’s turning into a bear. And so, bearish, he ambles warm paths that stretch into the infinitude of his imagination, shade whenever he wants it, beach roses at his side. Several long walks are needed to finish an article. They refresh him with their timelessness: He has no particular age while walking, and no sense of how many minutes, in the world of the office and the chair, they occupy. Enough, though, he figures, to warrant a discreet alarm system; he has installed a precarious lamp on a table outside his door, which wobbles and rattles at anyone’s approach. He is amused that he’s done this. Ten years ago he would have tried to cure himself of such serious woolgathering.
After nearly eighteen thousand days, Asa’s life is peaceful. He has long since “gotten over” Dinah and returned his attention to his real life. But he does have another well-worn path to walk, which leads him back to all of that. He keeps it in his bottom drawer, beside a pint bottle of whiskey for emergencies. Not that he considers these two items as having the same value or effect. The whiskey rounds the edges; the hundred pages of his past sharpen them, clarify where the liquor soothes. Yet both seem to him on the order of vices, necessarily hidden. The occasional imperative to have a drink is slightly shameful, a lapse in good taste at the least. As to the other, it’s hard for him to say what secret weakness his need for it reveals. But a few times a year—usually at the moment when the season changes, when winter first bites the soft heel of autumn, when drowsiness first overtakes the growth of leaves and they hang, fat and still, on the giant, ancient Cambridge trees—he opens what he thinks of as “his book.”
And in her version of his life he has stopped looking for clues to himself. The first reading—years ago now—was a series of shocks: How could she know this, how not understand that; where had she gotten that idea? Most of all he’d wondered if that was, in fact, himself, the way he wondered about the oddly familiar, oddly repellent person in a tweed jacket reflected in storefront windows. He understands it now as a love poem of which he is only the accidental inspiration. Yet to be the subject, in some sense, of such a thing never stops surprising him and, though he is embarrassed to admit it, flattering him. He knows there is nothing flattering about it. He knows it is not even about him. But to the same degree as his features were once, to her eyes, contained in those of an angel in a painting he’s never seen by an ancestor he never knew he had, so is his face discernible here. He is the model and he has the model’s secret pride.
Asa is proud of something else these days as well. Over the last years, to make a little extra money, he has been writing articles about gardening for another magazine, also genteel, also tempered by dilettantism, more elegantly housed than his own magazine in a brownstone on the other side of the river. These articles are to be published as a book. He has conversations with an editor over tepid lunch in the Back Bay every six weeks; he will make even more money and, the editor assures him, a name for himself. Both the sum and the extent of his fame will be small, but Asa hasn’t expected either. There will be photographs of his own and his favorite gardens. As an old hand in publishing, Asa knows the cost of color plates and is impressed. In fact, the plates more than any other aspect of the whole business have convinced him he is a success.
So one version of himself will appear in print. Asa believes in print. Print is not only the reality of his working day, it is a firm reality in itself. It endures, it is final, it is true. He does, in some way, still take soundings on life through literature. And he has resisted the middle-aged tendency to retreat to biographies. This year he has been rereading Hardy. Rather, reading Hardy, as The Mayor of Casterbridge gulped whole in one weekend at sixteen with Return of the Native for dessert the next week had been his entire exposure. Sometimes he shuts the book he’s reading and looks at it, wondering that so much can be inside such an unprepossessing object. Other times he runs his fingertips across the pages to feel the letters; he has old editions, bought secondhand, cheap in broken sets.
But “his book”—her book—will never see print. He knows that now. When he first heard of it, when she told him about it in the Chinese restaurant, he feared Fay confronting him with a not-cryptic-enough dedication page, Roger smirking behind his desk, Cambridge abuzz again—for didn’t Cambridge abound with romans à clef, whose demystification was the stuff of dinner parties?
Once a week they had gone to a Chinese restaurant in Central Square. Between a cut-rate shoe store and a Burger King, behind a plate-glass window opaqued by the old, the sad, the poor who waited at the bus stop, they ate pan-fried dumplings, beef with bean sauce, strange-flavored chicken. In lucky weeks they got a booth. By the cashier, carp swam in a muddy tank, round and round and round, as their conversations had begun to go round and round.
“I’m writing a book,” she said, “about this.”
“This—us?”
She nodded. “Well, you,” she said.
“Have you changed the names?” he asked, and felt a fool.
“Of course,” she said.
Their dumplings arrived and they ate. On that day they were not in a booth, so there was no handholding, no leaning across the table to see each other close and breathe each other’s air. His rules: In retrospect they seemed both futile and mean. But what if someone had …
“Asa,” she said. She so rarely addressed him by name that he swallowed his dumpling too quickly. It, or its shadow, lay like a rock in his throat, the sensation conjuring tears that were, on the whole, appropriate to his situation.
“Do you think you’ll have another affair?”
He harrumphed to gain time and to urge the dumpling downward. “After you, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know.” She seemed so much, he could not then—or now—imagine embarking on it again.
“Have you thought about it?”
“Yes.” A lie. He thought about it. Then, “I don’t think I’m suited to it.”
“No, you aren’t.” She assessed him. “But in some way—”
“I won’t.”
“Satisfied your curiosity about it?”
“It’s not that.” She shortchanged him somehow with this.
Then she was laughing, and the dumpling moved on, and she said, “Well, if you do have another, have it with me.”
“Not that this one’s over,” he ventured, as much to soothe himself as her. “What is this book?”
“It’s not really about us, it’s more about you. But it’s probably not about you either.”
�
��When will you finish it?” He was being conversational, but she went silent, sad, muffled by some rock of her own.
“I don’t want to finish it,” she mumbled.
“Then string it out,” he said, easily.
“I’m terrified of finishing it.”
How little he had given her. The burden of all she wanted, which was all he couldn’t offer, pushed him to offer the only thing he had: more of what wasn’t enough. “Finish it in the spring,” he said to her. “That’s a good time for beginnings.”
“Beginning what?”
“A new life.” And so committed himself to six more months of adultery.
In return, she put his fears of exposure to rest. “Remember when I went to Washington in the summer?” He did. She’d been away from work for three days. He’d missed her and had peace. “I went to Dumbarton Oaks. Have you been there?” He had, but only nodded. Whatever it was she was telling him, he was not going to interrupt with the rhododendrons of Dumbarton Oaks. “Above the entrance to the courtyard there’s a beautiful pediment with a Greek inscription, a long inscription. I wanted to know what it said, because the courtyard was lovely, peaceful, and the doors were lovely, and the pediment—well, I went to find a guard, to see if he could tell me what it said. But on the wall opposite the courtyard I saw a card with the translation. It read: ART IS FOR MAN A HAVEN FROM SORROW. And it cheered me so. I hadn’t known how sad I was, I think.”
It was this therapeutic aspect he addressed when he asked her, from time to time, how the book was coming. For her part, Dinah was kind enough to say it was going well. It was still unfinished when she left—or so he has always assumed. She didn’t give it to him until the next winter, and she had left, as agreed, in the spring.
It was late, late in the year when she called. The earth had frozen already and rang out under his feet when he walked to work: the hopeless month between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Asa, as I Knew Him Page 13