IT WAS A COLD DAY in the Carolinas, drizzling rain that seemed to hang in the sky, that barely seemed to fall. The trees were bare, the mountains hazy in the blue distance, the landscape opened up all the way to Virginia. It was a big day for Anna Hand. It was the day she decided to give up being a fool and go back to being a writer. She called her editor.
“I want a contract. I can’t stand it anymore. I’m going back to work.”
“For a novel or a book of stories?”
“Stories. Stories will do.”
“Are you all right?”
“May I have the contract or not?”
“You are spoiled rotten. Do you know that?”
“I want it today.”
“You’ve got it.”
“Good. I’m hanging up.”
“Wait a minute. Are you all right?”
“I will be. I’ve wasted ten months of my life. Ten goddamn months in the jaws of love. Well, I had to do it. It’s like a cold. If you leave the house sooner or later it happens. Anyway, I’m through. Call David and get something in writing for me, will you? I’m hanging up.”
“Call me if you need me. Anna, listen to me a minute. If you need me, call me.”
“For ten months every meaningful or true thing in my life was a secret. Can you believe that? The main part of my life was secret and the junk was public. Imagine living like that. Try to imagine it, Arthur. Imagine living that way.”
“Was it my fault? Did I do it?”
“You contributed. You were there. Well, I’ll have you something by September. Something really good.”
“What’s it going to be called?”
“ ‘Light can be both wave and particle.’ To make them think. If they can’t think they can’t be my readers.”
“Don’t get cynical.”
“I am already. I’m cultivating it.” She hung up the phone and went upstairs and into her small old-fashioned kitchen. The cupboards were bare. There was nothing on the shelves but some protein powder and crackers and several kinds of tea and four different brands of instant coffee. She put some water on to boil, thinking of her father. It’s a wonder I could love anyone at all, even for ten months, she decided. Even a married man who was doomed to break my heart. Even a redhaired married baby doctor who looks like my twin brother.
She stared out the window at the hills, thinking of the places she had been. She had been in Stockholm and London and Zurich and Rome. In Boston and Seattle and New York City. Now she was home. Now she would find the pieces of herself, take herself back from the world. But I do not exist without the world, she thought. All of them are part of me. Quanta exist in the set of all existing quanta. They go in and out of existence as part of the whole. Still, they are discrete. Figure it out. Start with the tribe.
She closed her eyes and thought of her family. There were so many of them, wild and unpredictable and always getting married and having babies. Four brothers, six nephews, twelve nieces, a hundred cousins. Only Anna was childless.
The day before she had stood in her brother’s living room watching her beautiful fourteen-year-old niece practicing a dance for her school variety show. “LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD,” Madonna was coming out of four speakers. “I’M LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD AND I AM A MATERIAL GIRL.” The beautiful niece stopped after the chorus and held out her hands toward her aunt. She was a shimmering hopeful girl, smiling a wonderful fourteen-year-old smile. She spread wide her long white fingers. “I’m going to be throwing dollars all over the place while I do it,” she said. “I might get some printed up.”
Anna smiled back. She was not offended. Poor nieces and nephews. They were living in the material world, surrounded by cars and sweaters and swimming pools and shoes and jackets and coats and shirts and toys and equipment.
This particular dancing niece, however, looked as if she might survive. “I love you,” Anna said. “I think you’re great.”
Now she was in her kitchen making coffee and looking out the window. Her old corduroy robe was belted around her waist, her feet were in ski socks, her hips were thin and hollow from living in the city. She giggled, did a little dance of home. I’m back, she decided. I’m going to work and I’m not giving another interview of any kind or letting anybody take another picture of me. Fuck it, I’m taking that goddamn phone and putting it in the shed. I’m never answering that goddamn phone again as long as I live. She turned around and read the notes pinned to her refrigerator.
Fuck doubt, press on.
Serve the whole.
She poured a cup of coffee, added sugar and cream, stuck some chocolate mint candies in the pocket of her robe, and went into her office. It would be many hours later before she remembered it was her birthday.
The married man, she decided, unwrapping one of the mints. I will tell the story of the married man. But how to plot it? How to make it happen? How to make it live? How to move the characters around so they bruise against each other and ring true? How to ring the truth out of the story, absolve the sadness, transmute it, turn it into art?
How to do it from the start, as the poet said. Notice everything. The stain on the ceiling. The way the candle burned all night that last night he slept with me. Scott Joplin on the stereo. “Solace” and “Red Flower Rag” and “Jasmine Blues.”
The married man had made love to Anna as if there were no tomorrow. “It’s like cancer,” she said to him, rolling over to feel his chest against her breasts, then back again to feel his chest against her back, keeping an eye on the clock. Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers, he had actually said that to her one night. She had written it on the mirror, thinking it would make her stop loving him.
Great swamps of sentimentality stretching out in three directions behind her. In front the sea of cliché, above, the maudlin skies, nothing to breathe, not a molecule of air that hasn’t carried a million love songs from one radio station to another. Dance with Me, I Just Called to Say I Love You, Sail Away to Key Largo, Yes, It’s Me and I’m in Love Again. Love Letters Straight from My Heart. We need Madonna, Anna thought. We need anything we can get. Anything anyone can teach us.
The married man had entered Anna’s life at a party given by her editor in Brooklyn. A dinner party with rare roast beef and triple chocolate cake and cold spinach soup. Anna had arrived late. Her plane had fallen from the sky over Washington and made an emergency landing in New Jersey. For seven minutes the DC-9 had fallen from the sky at a severe angle of descent. Anna had breathed through an oxygen mask and wondered if she would die on impact or live to feel the skin burn from her body. The Assumption, she had been thinking. Little Easters, Coming Over Jordan, Calvin Street, Psalm and Dream, Mariana. She chanted the names of her books. She saw her unfinished manuscripts lying on her table and the new one that was put to bed in Boston waiting for the fall. Then the plane leveled off and made its bumpy landing.
“You never thought of God?” The man beside her at the dinner table unfolded his napkin and placed it on his lap. It was five hours later. Anna was sitting at her editor’s dinner table. Her editor’s gorgeous actress wife beamed at her. Her editor’s good-looking blond son poured the wine. They were so glad she was here. So glad she was safe. The tall redheaded baby doctor was unfolding his napkin across his knee and asking if she had thought of God. His hands were beautiful and clean and freckled, like her own. Anna stared at his freckles. Ever since she had gotten off the plane her vision had been very intense, everything standing out in brilliant demarcations and colors. The tablecloth, the wine-glass half full of red wine, the baby doctor’s freckled hands, his immaculate fingernails, his freckled nose. His hair, the exact color of her own. She smiled at him. She believed she had known him forever.
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe in God. I believe in man.”
“Hmmmm,” he said. He smiled deeper into her face, completely caught up in her. It occurred to Anna that the whole table must be watching them. It was too thick. She shook it off.
“I’ve never entertained the idea of God in my life. When I was a very small child the idea seemed ludicrous and stupid and I never believed it no matter how many hours I spent on my knees at the Episcopal church. I didn’t trust the ministers. And I didn’t like the idea of hell and I never put my money in the collection plate. The only thing I hated worse than ministers were the men passing the collection plate.” She paused, then went on. “I did find out one very interesting thing on that plane ride. I discovered it’s all right to die if you’ve done your work. I was saying the titles of my books over and over to myself.” She looked at her editor. He smiled back. “Anyway, I said the titles of the books over to myself like a mantra, then I regretted not having children, then I was ready to die. It was all right. It really was. It seemed all right.” She sat back. The baby doctor was still entranced. Well, he could take it or leave it. The whole thing. The wide brow, the scary, flaky intelligence.
“We never had children either,” the baby doctor said. “My wife always wanted to adopt a child but I wouldn’t let her.”
“Oh, you’re married,” Anna said. They all laughed. Her editor’s son caught her eye. They began to talk of other things. The party wore on to its conclusion. The baby doctor asked if she would share a cab and she said yes. She was full of wine and at four o’clock that afternoon she had seen her death so she took the baby doctor off to hear jazz in the Village and later she took off her raincoat and then her dress and took him to bed. So it began. It was everybody’s luck that his wife was out of town.
“It’s a good thing I learned my lesson about married men years ago,” she said, sitting up in bed, watching him dress. The light was coming in around the edges of the drapes. It was a tall, old-fashioned hotel room. She had stayed there with both her husbands. Now she was here with this married man. This freckled, redheaded baby doctor, with his lanky bones and long, clean, immaculate freckled hands and his surprising libido and his gentleness. “I can tell you’re a married man,” she said. “Because you know how to make love. I have a theory that the only way to learn to make love is to be married a long time to one person. I’ve been meaning to do a piece about it if I ever get time.” She pulled the bedspread up around her legs, settled her elbows on her knees, looked nice and normal and balanced and uninvolved. He buttoned his pants and zipped them up. He put on his tie without looking in the mirror. He was looking at her.
“I’ll call you later,” he said. “Where will you be?”
“God knows. I could be anywhere. I’ll probably go by my agent’s or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s my favorite place in New York City.”
“I want to see you tonight.” He sat down on the bed. He put his hands on her feet. His face was as clear and unmasked as one of the two-year-olds he treated. “I’m going to fall in love with you,” he said. “It’s already happened. It’s already too late. Don’t look away. You feel it too. I know you do.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m forty-five years old. I don’t do this, Anna. I don’t cheat on my wife. This is brand-new.”
“Well, I cheat on everyone,” she said. She rolled off the side of the bed. She picked up the red silk shirt she had been wearing the night before and put it on. She stood before him with her gorgeous legs, playing it for all it was worth and denying it at the same time. “And I’m not having an affair with a married man. That is that.” She moved into the bathroom and began to brush her teeth, talking around the toothpaste. “If you want to take me out to dinner, get a divorce and call me up. I’ve done that already.” She spit out the toothpaste and wiped her mouth off with a towel. He had followed her. He was watching her. “I love myself too much to have an affair with a married man.” She began to floss her teeth. “Stop liking me. I don’t want you to like me.”
“I can’t get a divorce. She’s mine. I love her. I take care of her.”
“Well, that’s your life then, isn’t it?” She pulled the dental floss out of her teeth and threw it into the sink and went back into the room and opened the drapes and looked out on Fifth Avenue. “What a city. I tried to live here once but it didn’t work. I might try again. A friend offered me an apartment for next winter. Where do you live? In what part of all this.”
“Near the park. You could come see me if you go to the museum. You could come by my office and see where I work.” He was offering her everything he could think of. He had never in his life wanted anything as much as he wanted this woman to see him again. It made no sense and he didn’t try to make sense out of it. He wanted to know everything she had ever done and was going to do. He wanted to talk to her for hours, ask her a million questions. He had read the books before he met her and seen the photographs. She was more than the sum of the parts. She was so soft, so easy to reach. He stood away from the bed with his hands at his sides waiting for her to dismiss him.
“It wasn’t even all that good,” she said. “I’m not very good at making love anymore. I don’t get excited like I used to. I think I’m bored with the whole thing.”
“It was good.” He put his hands in his pockets.
“Yes,” she said. “It was good.” He sat down on the bed and took her back into his arms. He held her there. “Anna, please see me tonight.”
“All right. If you put it that way I will. I shouldn’t, but I will.” Then he took off his clothes and made love to her some more and then they were really in for it.
They went to dinner in a small restaurant on Madison Avenue. Afterwards they walked around the city talking of their pasts. Nothing they said now made any difference. Now it was too late for words. Now they were caught up, trapped, held. She took him to a bookstore on Madison Avenue where people knew her and kept her books in the window. She wanted it seen. She wanted it validated in the world.
He took her to his apartment and showed her where he slept with his wife. The apartment was white and green, like a greenhouse, the apartment was desperately cheerful.
“Where is she?”
“She’s visiting her mother.”
“When will she be back?”
“This weekend.”
“Good. I’m leaving Saturday.”
“When will you be back?”
“This winter, but not to see you. This is only for this week.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“Of course I mean it. You’re married. You couldn’t even spend the night. To hell with it. It makes me mad to even think of it. It’s terrible. It’s the worst thing anyone can do. The worst and stupidest and most tragic fucking thing a woman can do. I am not going to do it.”
“You are doing it.”
“I’m going to stop.” Then she took off her coat and made love to him in his wife’s bed.
“Why did we do this?” she said later.
“Because the unconscious calls the shots.”
“Not in my life it doesn’t.” She got out of bed and began to put on her clothes. “It’s two days old and already we’re crazy. Well, it isn’t going to happen to me. I spent five years of my life on a married man and I’m never doing it again. The last time I married a perfectly nice human being on the rebound and ruined his life. I don’t want this. I’m bailing out before it’s too late.”
“It’s too late now. It’s happened.”
“No, it’s not. When I’m gone it will go away. I’m going to get a plane reservation and leave tomorrow. I’m getting out of here.”
So Anna flew back to the mountains and it was nine months before she came back to New York City and it had done no good. The minute she saw the redhaired baby doctor it was exactly the same. Nothing had changed, not a freckle on his hand.
“It’s life,” he said. “Abundance, largess. You can’t turn this down.”
“It’s a lot of bullshit,” she answered. “If you like me so much, get a divorce.”
“I love her.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe me. I want you to believe that so you won’t get hurt.”
“I’m already hurt. You’re going to ruin my life for five years. It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. It’s worse than the last time. It’s like a groove I’ve worn in my brain.”
“Come go to the park with me. Come see the castle they’re redoing.”
“It’s not your fault. I’m not blaming you. I’m not blaming it on anyone. And I don’t want to see the castle. Then I’d never be able to see a goddamn castle without thinking of you.”
“It’s my fault.”
“Maybe it is. Goddammit, I was married and I got a divorce so that the next time I fell in love I’d be free to live with whomever I fell in love with. I’m not married. I’m free. Or whatever wiggle on space our small amount of freedom in the world consists of. Randolph says it’s a wiggle in the petri dish. Maybe he’s right. I was free until I fell in love with you. Until that plane fell from the sky and reminded me I was mortal.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you aren’t. You love it.”
“Go to the park and see the castle.”
That is how it went between them in the fall and winter when Anna was in New York City to have a reward and a change of scenery to liven up her work. The worst part was making sure the redhaired doctor was suffering as much as she was. She wanted him miserable. She thought she had every right to lie in bed and send him terrible messages across the city and hope they kept him up all night and made him drink.
Where was will in all of this? the married man wondered. He was waiting for a traffic light. It was raining. A dark evening in the rain. He was driving along Fifth Avenue. He turned on 65th into the hospital parking lot and gave the car to an attendant. He went into an office and called her apartment but the line was busy. Who was she, after all? he wondered. This woman who was doing this to him. With her short red hair as thin as a child’s and her four pairs of glasses and her legs that fell apart beneath him as if there were no bones in them. “Don’t read the books,” she had told him. “Promise not to read my books.”
It was a quirk that he never admitted he had read them. He had read them all before he knew her and one weekend he read them all again. Not that he learned anything from them. Not that they had anything to do, really, with the hand that lay across his leg or face or hand. He was not sleeping well.
Anna walked through the Metropolitan Museum of Art and stood for a long time before the half-built replica of the Parthenon trying to find some solace in the cold wisdom of the Greeks. She had been crying and it was certain that before the day was over she would cry again. She examined the gods on the frieze, in their passions and their furies. The furies, she decided, I am being pursued by the furies for wishing his goddamn wife was dead. To hell with it. I’m going out and buy some clothes or read a book or get drunk. That’s it. I’ll get drunk and get thrown in jail and he’ll have to come and bail me out.
She left the museum and walked down to her favorite bookstore, a place on Madison between 81st and 82nd. Her friends were behind the counter. “How’s it going?” they said. “How’s life treating you?”
“Get me some books,” she answered. “I need all the books I can carry. I need some books like a victim of the plague.” They loaded her up with books to read, thinking she was suffering from fame.
Thirteen blocks away from where Anna was trudging home through the city carrying her books the married man removed the needle from the baby’s aorta and closed the incision. He wiped the blood from the arm. He handed the sponge to his assistant. He took off the great microscopic glasses and laid them on a table and looked down at the small thing that had been an eight-month-old baby boy until a moment ago. He gave an order to the nurse and walked out to the sink and pulled the gown off and washed his arms and got into his shirt and tie and suit and changed shoes and went out into the waiting room to tell the family. He waited with his hands folded while the mother consoled the father and the grandmothers held each other and the brother pulled the magazines down off a table. It was seven-fifteen in the evening of a cold wet December day. She would be gone by the time he got there and besides, she had told him not to come to her apartment or call her on the phone.
“You did what you could,” the father said. The father patted his arm. The father looked into his eyes. “I thank you for trying.”
“We don’t get to keep them all,” he told the father. “No matter what we do. I wish it wasn’t so.” What difference does it make? he told himself. What the fuck difference does any of it make? They ought to let the sick ones die at birth. Like the Swedes. Dip them in a bucket of cold water and the ones that lived got to live. To hell with it. He took the man’s hand and removed it from his sleeve. “I have to be somewhere where someone needs me. I’m sorry I can’t stay.”
“It’s all right,” the mother said. “It’s not your fault. There was nothing you could do.” He made his escape before she began crying again. Walked out the side door and across the street and the parking attendant got out his car and he slid into the driver’s seat and began driving aimlessly down Fifth Avenue, then around the park, then down Lexington, then up Madison to 72nd. He parked the car illegally before a brownstone and got out and walked to her building and went in and rang the bell. “Please see me.”
“Come on up. I look like hell.” She was right. She did look like hell. She had on a white sweatshirt and some warm-up pants and a pair of white socks and her hair was flying all over her head. “What are you doing?” he said.
“I’m writing. What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Yes there is. Tell me.”
“It’s nothing. Nothing anyone can do. I miss you. That’s the main thing.” She went over to the fireplace and began to wad up pages of newsprint and throw them into the catch. She threw in four or five wadded-up pages, then added a whole section, then put two logs on top of that. She struck a match and the mess miraculously caught and began to flame. “This wood’s incredible,” she said. “I think they pump lighter fluid into it. So,” she turned back to where he was watching her. “Sit down. Why did you have to see me if nothing’s wrong?”
“I lost a baby.”
“That’s nice.”
“Have you had dinner?”
“No.”
“Go out with me.” She poked at the fire some more. It blazed higher. She left the room. In a minute music came on. “I’ll order something from the deli,” she said. “I don’t want to get dressed. Fix a drink. I’ll set the table. Go on, let’s play house. We’ll be married people. You’ll come home from a hard day where the babies die and I’ll be groping around in an old sweatshirt and what the hell, we’ll make a fire and eat and make love and go to bed and sleep and get up ready to face the world again. What do you want? They have some pretty good lobster salad if you like it.”
“Anything will do. That’s fine.” He went into the dining room and poured a glass of scotch and carried it back to the sofa. He sank back against her embroidered pillows. She went to him and sat on her knees on the floor. She ran her hands up his legs and lay her head on his lap. “I love you,” she said. “If that matters.”
“It matters.”
“We’ll eat,” she said. “Then we can cry.”
He spent the night. The next day was Sunday. They lay in bed all morning. They listened to the radio and made love and only cried once. They looked at each other and they were crying and they didn’t talk about it. What good does it do to talk about crying?
“We could go for a walk,” he said. “We could see if my car’s been towed away.”
“You’ve got a car?”
“I had one last night.”
“Would you let me drive it? I haven’t driven a car since I got to New York City. I need to drive a car.” She was laughing now. “You don’t have a tape deck, do you?”
“I think there’s one. I’ve never used it.”
“Oh, God, that would make my day. If I could drive around New York listening to music I’d get well. I keep thinking this goddamn depression isn’t about you at all, it’s about missing my car.” She was making up the bed and talking. When she was happy she looked sixteen. Then, suddenly, she would look her age. This year, for the first time in her life she sometimes looked old. She would pass a mirror and see it and it made her curious, as if it were some stranger she was observing, something far away and foreign to herself. Now, chattering and pulling on a pale blue sweater, she seemed sixteen and not a day older. She tucked the bedspread in around the pillows. He went into the next room and called his wife.
Anna listened. She had forgotten he was married. She had broken the first and most important rule she lived by, to always know exactly where she was and what she was doing. It was the ground of her existence, the stand she made. As long as I know exactly what is going on and who I am, she told herself. As long as I don’t lie to myself or to them. As long as I know. As long as the cards are on the table. As long as I call it by its name. Now, here, in this old apartment in this cold city on this dark cold December weekend, she had forgotten.
Adultery. Pandora’s box. You open it and all the furies come flying out, jealousy, rage, pain and sorrow, all the shades and furies of the world. They flew out now, lit upon the dresser, laughed down at her from the sconces and the chandelier.
He came back into the room. “Let’s walk in the park,” he said. “I’d like so much to walk with you.”
The car was there but she didn’t want to drive it now. They went into the park which was filled with people in bright scarves and gloves. They walked for a while, then came to rest on a bench beside a statue of a Polish general on horseback.
“Will you leave her?” Anna said.
“I can’t. What would she do?”
“Well, that’s that then. Let’s get some breakfast. I’m starving.”
“I can’t leave her.”
“Don’t talk about it anymore. I don’t want to hear it. Shut up.”
That was the absolutely last time. When she said good-bye that afternoon she meant it. Still, there were obligations to be met. It would be three more weeks before she could leave the city. She began to dream of home. She dreamed of her grandfather’s farm, the long fields of milo and wheat. She dreamed Philip’s wife was in the middle of a field of wheat. Crows were all around her on the ground. She was feeding the crows from her hand. She was so gentle, so real. At least I never saw her, Anna thought. At least I was spared that.
That afternoon she ran into them at the Metropolitan beside the Greek and Roman statues. They stopped beside a huge black marble statue of a hero. The woman was very thin, very pretty, with alabaster skin. A cashmere shawl around her shoulders. There were introductions. The Greek hero looked down at them, holding his arrows and his bow.
“Have lunch with us,” the woman said. “Phil has told me so much about you. We’ve loved your books. Do have lunch.”
“I can’t today,” she said. “I’m researching something. For an article.”
“In antiquities? I used to know a bit about them. What are you writing?”
“Oh, nothing very interesting. Just research. I’m sorry I can’t stay. It’s good to meet you. I have to go now. Good-bye, Philip. It’s nice to see you. I mean, thank you. I’m sorry I can’t stay.” She escaped and went out into the sunshine and began to walk as fast as she could with her hands stuffed down into the pockets of her coat. Fists of hands, she was thinking. A fist of a heart. Yes, they were right to think it is the heart. It knots up and beats against itself and takes your breath away. Breathe, walk, run, as fast as you can down this cobbled street.
Museums went by, people in thick coats and bright Yankee hats. Anna walked all the way to 120th Street. The knot began to slacken in her breast. She stopped on a corner where a man was roasting chestnuts. His blackened jacket and his blackened face belonged to another century. A crow lit upon a bench. The sun fell between the buildings. Fuck love, she said to herself. How dare he do this to me? How did I get into this? Where am I? What on earth am I doing? It’s too goddamn much. I won’t stay in this town another day. I’m going home. This time for good.
There is a way to organize this knowledge, Anna decided. To understand what happened. This love affair, this very last love affair. In a minute I will get out of this bed and begin to understand what happened. I will pick up the telephone and call Arthur and then I will begin to write the stories and they will tell me what is going on.
I will create characters and they will tell me my secrets. They will stand across the room from me with their own voices and dreams and disappointments. I will set them going like a fat gold watch, as Sylvia said. I am in my house on the mountain and I will call Daniel and Judith and Matthew and Will and Ginny and Jim. I will gather my tribe around me and celebrate my birthday. There will be champagne and a doberge cake from the bakery that Cajun runs on the highway. Yes, all that for later. For now, the work before me, waiting to be served and believed in and done. My work. How I define myself in the madness of the world.
Anna rose from the bed and turned off the electric blanket and picked up all her clothes and threw them on the closet floor and went upstairs and opened a brand-new box of 25-percent cotton bond and set it on a table by her typewriter. She pushed her hair out of her face and began to write.