Part Two 3 страница

“The nouveau moi,” she said, with the very beginnings of a satirical bow.

“I’m not wearing the right clothes,” I said. I was in loafers, black corduroy pants, and a pale green shirt I had to wear with the sleeves rolled because of a stain on the cuff.

“No, don’t worry. I’m dressed for later, not for dinner.”

She took me to a bar called Pete’s Tavern, which O’Henry used to patronize. On the short walk over, Ann pointed out other literary landmarks—the apartment building where one of the editors of The New Yorker lived, a small carriage house once occupied by a novelist I’d never heard of, and the former home of Washington Irving.

We sat at a booth in Pete’s. A thirty-ish-looking man with thin black hair nodded at Ann from the next table and Ann nodded back, evasively. The waiter was a young Italian wearing fancy tight trousers, a body shirt, pointed shoes, and an old apron. He said hello to Ann and asked, with what seemed to me a touch of irony, “You thirsty or what?”

“Oh, always, Carlo, always,” Ann said. “Bring me a glass of your cheapest Scotch and your coldest water.”

The waiter looked at me. “I’ll have the same,” I said.

We finished our drinks, asked for two more, then ordered broiled chicken and a bottle of white wine for dinner. Ann talked about a wine tasting she’d been brought to at the Essex House a few weeks before, commenting on the incredible prices of the wine and the hysteria of the well-appointed patrons as they crushed forward for free samples of rare vintages. “They were like desperate pilgrims competing for blessings,” Ann said. Then she raised her glass and I raised mine and we clicked them together with an exquisite ping that somehow went right through me.

“I’m nervous about tonight,” Ann said.

I nodded, thinking she meant it was because of our reunion.

But she went on: “This fellow I’m seeing later. I have this bleak feeling that he’s another dead end. It’s a little embarrassing to talk about, but I think it’s absurd to keep it a secret. I mean how goddamned hard it is for a woman who isn’t young but who feels young to put together any kind of decent, satisfying life. Younger men are seldom interested in women my age and I know I don’t look a minute younger than I really am—but the things I’m interested in and what I’m capable of put me outside of the men who are of a more suitable age. It’s a total mess. And I suppose I’ve been, well, I don’t know what to call it, getting around, yes I think that will do, getting around more than I should. Tonight’s gent is an NYU professor and he was born three days after me. But his wife left him a year ago and he’s very shaky. He takes so much work. I think of him as my part- time job.” Ann drank quickly and I kept pace; somehow a second bottle of wine appeared on our table.

“Do you have a girl now?” she asked.

“No. I sometimes see a girl, but it’s nothing. It’s just for company.”

“You don’t sleep with her?”

I shook my head.

“Or with anyone else?”

“No one. I want to be with Jade. Being with someone else would be giving up.”

“That’s so simple-minded.”

“I don’t care.”

“And hopeless.”

“No it’s not. And even if it was…I don’t have a choice. My feelings haven’t changed.”

“I wrote a story—or tried to—about the first time you two made love. But it’s much too compromising to submit anywhere. I came very close to sending it to you a few months ago. I don’t have anyone else to show it to.”

“Not Jade?”

“Oh no. She’d never forgive me. Maybe Hugh. But he hates to read my stuff. He says it depresses him.” She called to the waiter. “Carlo? What time is it?” It was eight thirty. “We have a little more time,” Ann said to me. “Would you like me to tell you the story?”

I nodded.

Ann smiled. “You’re not even thinking, but I’m going to take advantage and tell you anyhow. You’re not allowed to interrupt me, either.”

“I won’t.”

“OK,” said Ann, pouring wine into both our glasses. “It was a Saturday. Early June, 1966. Hugh and I had been out—a rare occasion, as you probably remember. We didn’t have friends and we were always too broke to treat ourselves to the standard entertainments like restaurants and shows. We loved music but the only concerts we heard were those free ones in Grant Park, sitting on an old Army blanket under a few smudgy stars with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra fiddling like mad about a half mile away in the bandshell. But this night, your night, Hugh and I had gone to a party on Woodlawn, thrown by an architect who was one of Hugh’s classier patients. A pot party, as we used to say. Thanks to you, we were both smoking like pros, so we managed to get very high and hold our own—even though everyone was younger than us. Everyone was always younger than us, it seemed.

“There was a lovely rain falling by the time we reached home. I found you two in the living room, listening to the radio. You both were in jeans and Oxford blue shirts—you were in the stage of dressing like each other. You sat on the floor, both of you, and a fire was going in the fireplace. Jade in particular was wrapped in the orange and blue light. I remember thinking: Jade reflects the light and David absorbs it. I was still feeling the lovely euphoria of the party and the grass and the two of you looked unbearably beautiful. I stood in the living room grinning, shaking the rain out of my hair, and wanting, I must admit, for you to guess I was stoned.

“Enter Hugh, looking as pensive as a monk in a spiritual crisis. He was wearing his gray suit, the one that was an inch short in the sleeve. God, wasn’t he the handsomest man? Shame there wasn’t money to dress him properly. Whatever you might have thought of him, Hugh looked like a hero—his hair the color of buckwheat honey and his beautiful eyes the color of a bluejay in the sun. But he was no pretty boy and certainly he wasn’t chic. His features were broken, but in a good way; he looked like one of those rare men who know right from wrong. My war hero. Well, you read them, the stories I wrote about Hugh when I was in college. Loving Hugh, and even betraying him, made me more a part of my times than ever before—or since. He never spoke about being a war hero and hardly ever complained about what he took out of that prisoner- of-war camp. But that night, that night of the party on Woodlawn—maybe it was the grass or being with fifty people, all of them younger than us, but Hugh couldn’t shut up about his war experiences, like an old man in a VA hospital. He didn’t so much talk about his heroism as the discomfort, the fear, and the injuries. Maybe he wanted us to organize a charity ball in his honor.

“Anyhow, in comes Hugh, still feeling mighty herbal. Jade turns and gives him a ‘Hi Pappy’ with much more nuance than any fifteen-year-old girl has a right to.”

“Then Hugh started in on us about having a fire going,” I said.

“That’s right. He was furious you’d made a fire and you knew no one but Hugh was allowed to work the fireplace but you pretended to be so bewildered. ‘I’m in charge of the fireplace,’ Hugh said. He thumped his chest—his gestures were so basic. A real man. He made no attempt to hide the nature of his complaint. He didn’t say it was June and too late for fires; he didn’t say we were almost out of wood; he didn’t even mention you guys forgot to put up the screen. He was at the end of a long, loose night and you know he always had a taste for the bare, unpleasant truth—little embarrassing admissions were Hugh’s hidden chocolates. So there he is, flat-footed and red- eyed, saying, ‘I don’t like people making fires in my fireplace. The fireplace is the one thing in this goddamned house that I’m completely in charge of.’”

“Jade said we were cold,” I said.

“And Hugh said you should wear gloves, or sweaters, or go someplace else.”

“He was staring at me when he said that. He meant I should go someplace else. Home.”

“Oh, I’m glad you said that, David. I always wondered if you noticed things like that.”

“Of course I did.”

“I’m glad. It seemed you didn’t.”

“Then I said I would leave after the fire burnt out.”

“Yes, searching for your advantage and pressing it at the same time. You two did a little more clumsy emotional fencing—you were a lot less agile than you imagined, you know, David—and at one point Hugh put his arm around me, the way men on dates will suddenly make physical contact when they think you might be getting bored. Hugh warned you to be quick getting home and then he and I walked upstairs. God, I loved that house at night, when the windows were black and the children were asleep.

“I turned on the reading lamp on my side of the bed and Hugh asked me if I planned to stay up. I was reading The Wapshot Scandal and I wanted some time with Cheever and some time to think. My mind was blown from being with so many people and I needed to regroup. Hugh slipped into our enormous bed wearing his shorts, a signal that he was insulted I’d chosen to read. His way of saying I was unworthy of intimacy. I asked him what was wrong and touched the elastic band on his shorts beneath the blanket. He inched away. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he said and how I hated to hear his poor injured voice. He turned over and folded his hands over his big chest. He hardly had any hair under his arms and his chest and belly were as smooth as Sammy’s. ‘I’m lonely around you,’ he said. And I said, ‘I’m a lonely person. It’s contagious.’ But what I was thinking was Oh go to sleep, please go to sleep so I can have fifteen minutes alone.

“Hugh started reviewing the people at the party but he was yawning too and I relaxed. I knew it wouldn’t be long. Somewhere in there, I heard the front door open and then close and I assumed it was you, making your exit. Then I heard Jade come upstairs and go to the bathroom down the hall and I assumed she was preparing for bed.”

I had a powerful impulse to stop Ann at that moment. I remembered myself opening and closing that door, with Jade at my side and both of us giggling like the children we still half were, and creeping back to the living room certain our sound effects had been foolproof. And I remembered taking off my shoes and my shirt as Jade went upstairs, thinking to myself that I would never be so immense and would never forget an instant of that night, and being so right.

“I fell asleep for a few minutes,” Ann said, “with the book on my belly and the lamp on. But suddenly I was up, as if a shadow had passed over my face. I heard noises from downstairs. I clicked off the lamp and listened. Twittering floorboards. Squeaks and ticks that seemed more purposeful than the simple breathing of the house. I wonder what I thought it was. Did I really think a thief had found his way into our house? And if he had, what would he take? The magazines? The radio? My chocolates?”

“Stop, Ann,” I said, finally. “You’re getting too…”

“Close?”

“No. Strange. You’re hurting me.”

“This shouldn’t hurt. You remember it all anyhow. I’m telling you what I remember. I remember being in my bed and hearing noises from the downstairs of a house that I don’t live in anymore.”

Her eyes were bright, alert, but she didn’t seem to be using them. They shone like those lights people leave on in empty houses to fool burglars.

“I slipped out of bed and put on my robe, that blue-quilted robe, a winter robe but it was all I had. In one of Hugh’s dresser drawers there was an old hickory-handled buck knife—one of his many many boyhood souvenirs—and I thought I’d grab it in case I needed to stab someone. What a laugh. I was making no noise at all, less than a cloud, floating through the bedroom, into the hall, onto the landing of the stairs. It was more like an acid high than marijuana. I could see everything. I had the night vision of an electric cat. The ripples in the wallpaper, the scratches on the banister, everything.

“Including you, the both of you.”

“Please don’t, Ann,” I said. I could feel her dismantling my memory of that night, tilting it, enlarging it, until it was no longer mine.

“Oh stop, don’t be so damned squeamish. There’s nothing in this that’s going to hurt you. And you know there’s no one else to tell it to. Are you embarrassed? You explode like a bomb in the middle of my life and you’re embarrassed? I didn’t get very close, you know. I was much too surprised, and scared. I only made it halfway down the stairs and if it wasn’t for the fireplace I might not have even known you two were making love. I saw Jade’s hands on your shoulders and the tops of her knees, the way they were raised…”

I lowered my head onto the table and my arm knocked over my wineglass. Ann righted the glass and continued.

“But the thing I noticed most was your clothes. They weren’t strewn all over the place. They were nicely folded. Which meant you both knew exactly what you wanted and didn’t have to pretend to mindlessness. Oh, I was so touched by that, you have no idea. I honestly was.

“So up I went and crept back into bed. You never knew I was there. Isn’t that so?”

I raised my head. My eyes felt fifty degrees warmer than the rest of my body. I reached out for Ann’s hand. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sorry? What for?”

I shook my head. “For everything. For being at your house that night, making too much noise, making you see us. I don’t know.”

“Then listen to me, if you are. And think of me getting into bed with Hugh after seeing you and Jade downstairs. I was shaking and my mind was a tornado. I moved so close to him and God did I feel bad he hadn’t stripped down because I would have given a lot to feel his nakedness just then. I didn’t want to be alone. But you see I must have been radiating desire. Because suddenly Hugh stirred. His snoring stopped and he turned toward me and his eyes were slowly coming open. I touched his smooth, smooth face and he kissed me and when he kissed me I held my breath and I heard the floors squeaking downstairs. Hugh put his hands between my legs and that certainly finished the job of waking him up. I felt ready. For him. We’d been making love for eighteen years and we knew each other’s signals like high-wire acrobats—only we were low-wirers and we weren’t acrobats. Anyhow, I said I’d be right back and Hugh smiled because this meant I was going to put in my diaphragm. I walked across the bedroom and down the hall to the bathroom, listening for you two downstairs, and trying not to, and feeling slightly crazy and close to tears.

“And the bathroom was freezing. I was naked and shivering and those glass shelves Hugh put up looked to be bursting with the life of my family—deodorants and foot powders, shampoos, bubble bath, brushes and combs, Stimudents, a plastic frog, those hand-muscle flexers Sammy liked to squeeze when he soaked in the tub. It all looked so immense and beautiful; I stared at it with my mouth open, like a miser gawking at his gold. I never felt that way about the family; I wasn’t in my normal mind. My diaphragm always was on the second shelf, next to the shampoos, and there it was, as always. Encased in a maroon plastic pouch. I zipped it open, and my heart flipped out. My diaphragm was missing.

“I wasn’t confused over this, at least for not longer than a moment. I remembered hearing Jade going to the bathroom earlier and I realized that she’d gone and taken my diaphragm. Before you came along and relations got a little strained between me and Jade, we used to talk about how alike our bodies were and I suppose she figured what was good enough for me would hold the fort for her. And you, Jewish-radical-rock-and-roll-pot- head, you didn’t even have the brains or the cunning to carry a Trojan in your wallet. God, David, even Sammy was carrying a rubber around, and he was eleven. Look, I was proud of you, even if you were too stupid to plan. At least you were both too steady to risk her getting knocked up. Good for them! I thought, like a ruddy camp counselor. Yet I had to wince. Quite a world of difference separated my battle-weary cervix from Jade’s. It must have hurt like hell and done her no good at all. I mean it was obscene, hilarious, but mostly it was pathetic. I zippered up my little case and then I felt a flash of resentment: how dare she assume I wouldn’t be using my birth control! I ran the water over my hands, dried my hands, and I was trembling with the cold and the damp and from everything I was feeling. I made my way back to bed, wondering what I’d tell Hugh.

“If I’d told him the diaphragm was missing, he would have wanted to know why, and then there was every chance of him thundering down the stairs and doing something about it. And maybe that would have been the best thing. Don’t think I don’t often wonder. If I’d let Hugh in on what I knew about you two, I mean right from the beginning, then maybe everything would have been different. Maybe he would have chased you out of the house. Maybe he could have organized his feelings better when you slowly started moving in with us. He wouldn’t have had to wait until it was too late to take control and then suddenly become a father figure and ban you from our house. Then, it was too late, but that night if I’d told him—who knows what would have changed? But all I thought about was the preciousness of what I’d seen, the two of you holding each other in the corny glow of the fireplace. I wanted that memory and I wanted it to myself. I didn’t want Hugh charging down the stairs. I wanted Hugh to make love to me.

“Which is what he did. We made love and I risked getting pregnant, just as you and Jade made love without any useful protection. What a night of risks! How the souls of the unborn must have hovered over that old house, waiting for the act of inception.”

“I wish she had gotten pregnant that night,” I said and then, surprised by the sound of my own voice and surprised at what I’d said, I let out a sob and covered my eyes. The room was moving, not with drunken abandon but slowly, as if the room really was moving, through space and time, as all things of course do but which only mad people see.

“I’m sure you do,” said Ann. “But that’s your story and this is mine. It changed everything, that night, everything I believed about making love and Hugh. Because it was never complete, you know. I never ever came and mostly I never got close. Only when I masturbated, but never with Hugh. And of course I blamed him—blamed men, not just Hugh, but the boys I slept with before him and when he was away making the world safe for democracy, all of them, and myself too, but Hugh, mostly I blamed Hugh. For being too small, too fast, too eager, too gentle, too selfish. What difference does it make? I didn’t even try. But that night, I was on fire. And the image of the two of you downstairs burned behind my eyes. Oh God, I was pornographic, moving beneath Hugh and knowing that beneath the two of us were the two of you. I knew I was going to make it and I’d never be able to blame Hugh again because he was perfect. He wasn’t doing anything different; I don’t even know if he was fully awake, but he was perfect. There was no hurry. I knew I was going to come. My legs were turning to water and stone at the same time. For the first time in my life, I was truly indiscreet.”

Abruptly, Ann was silent. She finished the little bit of wine that was left in her glass and then took mine, but it was empty. She looked exhausted. A slight film of perspiration made the powder on her face look porous. For all the fineness of her features, the straightness of her posture, and the persistent delicacy of her gestures, she looked like an abandoned middle-aged woman in a dark warm bar, known by the bartenders and the waiters, short on cash, lonely, garrulous, and letting go.

“There’s a simple law,” she said, leaning forward on one elbow and tossing her napkin onto the table. “Whenever you tell the truth, you’re also confessing. No confession, no truth.”

The waiter had probably been watching us, waiting for a drop in Ann’s intensity. He was at our table now, clearing the dishes and making a point out of checking if any wine had been left at the bottom of either bottle.

“Coffee, dessert?” he said. He was looking at me.

“What time is it, Carlo?” Ann said.

His hands were filled with our dishes but he turned his wrist so Ann could read his watch.

“Oh. Ten to ten. I’ve stood up my date.” She looked worried, even a little scared, but then she said: “Good for me! I haven’t stood anyone up since I was sixteen years old!”

We walked back to her apartment on the chance that her friend was waiting. When we were beneath the awning in front of her building, Ann said, “I’ll faint if he’s still here,” but I couldn’t tell if that would mean joy, surprise, or disappointment. As for me, my own preferences lay buried beneath fatigue and a familiar, yet exhausting, self-envy: the boy who had lived through the evening Ann had described at Pete’s Tavern still reigned within me, but, increasingly, he was not me. While I still believed the self who had made love to Jade that night was my best self, it also existed as a kind of younger brother whose exploits, whose flights of ecstasy I was condemned to admire with a kind of brittle, helpless awe.

“Well, he’s not in the lobby,” Ann said. She was walking with a very faint wobble. Every once in a while she touched my arm, as if to right her balance, but there was a shyness in those touches that made each of them noticeable. There was no doorman in sight. Ann opened the door and glanced once over her shoulder. It disturbed me that the habits of caution were now second nature to her. I’d always thought of her as being so safe.

I was feeling lopsided from the wine as well. In the elevator—we stood very far apart—I said, “When we first started smoking grass we never would drink and we put down people who did.”

“That’s when we were Puritans,” Ann said.

“We were Puritans?” I asked.

“Now we’ll do anything to get through a night. You know, I don’t know why I’m going up to my apartment. There’s no chance that my friend’s going to be awaiting my return. He’s not the type—that’s the kind of thing you’d do.” The elevator stopped; the doors hesitated before sliding open. “We should be out somewhere listening to music,” Ann said.

The hallway was empty, silent. I was a little disappointed her friend wasn’t waiting in front of her door—I would have liked to see him. But my principal emotion was relief. I wouldn’t be sent back to the Hotel McAlpin right away.

“I suppose I should call him,” Ann said, as she let us in. We walked to the front of the apartment and I sat on the sofa while Ann opened her telephone book to find her friend’s number. The sight of that book and knowing that Jade’s number was in it agitated me, but by now I’d been agitated for so long and in so many different ways I was scarcely able to notice it. “One ring,” said Ann, tilting the phone an inch from her ear so I could hear the ringing as a distant purr. “Two rings. Three rings. And…” she hung up the phone. “Free.” She reached into a kitchen cabinet and brought down a pint bottle of tequila and two of those thick, narrow orange-juice glasses you see in old- fashioned diners. “The cleanest of all alcohols,” she said, placing bottle and glasses onto the table. She sat in one of the director’s chairs. “And the most psychedelic. From whiskey comes dreams, from tequila comes visions. It’s liquid hashish.” She poured a modest, reverential amount into both glasses, picked up hers and left mine on the table.

We drank quite a bit of her tequila. Each time she poured some, Ann screwed the cap back onto the bottle, giving it a good hard twist as if she were going to be storing it away for months. I didn’t know if this gesture reflected her material caution or if it was a self-teasing game played by someone with a drinking problem. We also smoked a joint of Ann’s grass—specially grown for her in Vermont by Keith, using top-grade Colombian seeds—and I suppose if she’d had LSD or mescaline on hand we would have taken that, too. It was eleven in the night and the more familiar we became with each other the more solemn and mysterious our connection felt.

“Are you still a fledgling astronomer?” Ann asked me.

“I guess not. I’m just in college, finally. I studied a little astronomy when I was in the hospital but there was a limit how much I could get on my own. It’s complicated.”

“Oh, I know.”

“Sometimes I think I’ll still be an astronomer. But mostly I don’t think about the future.”

“Jade used to be so enchanted with you and your astronomy. She really did believe that you were going to name a star after her. I, on the other hand, didn’t believe in it for a minute. I thought you were taking her to the Planetarium just to have a place to feel her up and not pay for a movie ticket.”

I felt something touch my arm. I looked down but it was just the nerves ticking at the surface of my skin. When I looked back at Ann, her eyes were hazy and a high, warm color was in her face.

We were silent, totally, almost unendurably silent.

Ann poured two more drinks. She smiled and said, “I knew you’d sit in that chair.”

“How?”

She sipped from her glass. “Because you knew I’d sit on the sofa and you don’t think it would be safe to sit next to me.”

“Safe?”

Ann nodded. Her lips were pressed tightly closed, narrowing her face and deepening the lines at the corners of her mouth. “Sit next to me,” she said. “I want you to.”

I didn’t say anything, nor did I move.

“I think about you,” Ann said. “All the time. I return to my thoughts of you, my memories, my ideas, like a secret vice. You’re my hidden imported chocolates. Hugh used to have these old, I mean really old pictures of naked girls he picked up in Europe during the war, and he kept them—who knows? Somewhere in his underwear drawer. He had a yen for those pictures, even with a wife and a houseful of kids. They were his private sex life. After a tough day or a disappointment in the sack with me, he’d fish out those pictures. Never in front of me. Part of the thrill was sneaking it. It was like a kid and his rag-tag security blanket, but much sadder and more desperate, because the older you get the more sad and desperate everything is—not more serious, mind you, but more irrevocable.” She took another swallow of tequila, a longer one, almost emptying the glass. “I’m rattled,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m talking about.” She closed her eyes. “And it feels so good.”

“Ann,” I said, leaning forward and raising my voice to drown the pounding of my heart and the dark frantic sloshing of my blood, “you have to tell me if Jade—” I stopped; anxiety coated my eyes and I looked at Ann as if through the far end of a telescope. She was shaking her head.

“Sit next to me,” she said. “I don’t want to sit here all alone.”

I stood up. It was like wearing someone else’s glasses, those thick spectacles that flash rainbows when the sun hits them from the side. My legs were long and stringy and my head was a balloon nuzzling the ceiling. Ann was a perfect miniature curled with remarkably human expectations on a sofa rendered in all its simplicity.

Yet when I sat next to her she was as large as ever, even a shade or two larger.

“The only things I regret,” she said, “and the only things I’ll ever regret are things I didn’t do. In the end, that’s what we mourn. The paths we didn’t take. The people we didn’t touch.”

That’s not true, I thought to myself, but I could barely feel my thoughts. I experienced my consciousness as a drowning man sees the shadows on the surface of the water.

“You seem frightened,” Ann said.

I nodded, but thinking of it now I realize that nod could have been taken to mean anything.

“I made love to a young man,” Ann said. “Younger than you. Not long ago. He chewed his nails. He was thin. He wore a white muslin shirt from India, see-through. I seduced him. Very expertly, if I can be allowed…” Her voice trailed off and then she glanced quickly at the black windows, as if she’d seen something. “He was terribly thin and terribly gentle. It was like making love to a butterfly. Too gentle. I hardly knew he was with me. He left in the middle of the night. It was like an erotic dream, except for the little half moons of fingernail in my bed the next morning.” She took my hand. The gesture was neither slow nor sudden. It was like someone engrossed in thought picking up a familiar object and absently feeling its weight, its texture. She skimmed her thumb along the side of my hand. “Are you terribly soft and gentle and careful when you make love, David?”

I waited in silence, hoping something would happen that would make none of this true. The scent of Ann’s perfume rushed toward me, as if she’d just put it on. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Of course you know. It’s absurd for you to be shy. Not at this point.”

“What point?” I said. “I don’t know what point we’re at.”

“We’re at the point where I’m asking you if you’re one of those terribly gentle lovers. And we’re also at the point where we say anything we care to. The mere fact that you’re here, David. For so many hours. We’re at the point where we admit the only reason we’re together is we need someone whom we hold nothing back with. Right now, David, I’m admitting that to you right now.”