Seven

“Who’s William Burke, Sasha? We’re invited to a party,” said Frank, examining the invitation.

“Burke? I don’t know. A party? Let’s see.”

I had been back less than two months, but it felt like years. Frank and I each had new jobs—he teaching at N.Y.U., I clipping and filing in an ad agency. We had a new apartment, spacious and rent-controlled, with a freezer compartment for me and a study for Frank. But though we had vowed to “try harder” and “start again,” our hearts weren’t in it.

The formal invitation was from someone named Hector Crockett announcing a party for “friends and associates” of him and William Burke, to celebrate their partnership in a new business firm. R.S.V.P.

“He must be the man I met on the ship coming home.”

“A business party?” sneered Frank. “Did you take up with a businessman?”

From a matrimonial dead end a party is at least a place to turn around. “If it seems like slumming to you, I’ll be glad to go without you,” I returned.

The day of the party, I bought a new dress—a black silk sheath I’d been seeing in the window of a little shop on Lexington Avenue—and against all my principles, desperate to be new, I had my hair done in a beauty parlor, molded into a smooth French twist. Though Frank scoffed suspiciously at my primping, when we set out in the snow for the subway he took my arm with the old pride.

We were both a little intimidated when someone opened the door and invited us in. I was wearing clumsy galoshes over my elegant Italian shoes, and did not know whether to leave them outside or take them in. I’d never before seen East Side bachelor quarters, though I’d been working in New York offices for years. A new country, only blocks from work. A bar in a corner, fashionable people, white furniture, flowers.

Hector Crockett introduced himself, and Frank told him what we were drinking. As I took off my coat, aware of my hair twisted artfully on my head and my first resort to mascara, I sensed new possibilities. Was this party perhaps a bonus from my genie? One extra last chance?

William Burke was carving turkey in the dining room. As soon as I saw him, I took Frank over to introduce them.

“Hi there. I’m so glad you came.” He clasped both my hands as though we were dear old friends before retrieving one of them to extend to Frank for the ritual male handshake. “Glad to meet you,” he said. “I’ve heard about you.”

“How do you do, William?” said Frank.

“My friends call me Will,” he smiled, “or” (to me) “Willy.”

The table was spread with ham, potato salad, seeded rye, gherkins and olives. Frank popped an olive into his mouth, then asked awkwardly in the donnish voice he reserved for inferiors, “What sort of business are you starting?”

“It’s a consulting firm. Computer systems. I suppose your wife told you I’m an engineer. Hector’s the brains of it; I’m only a technician. Hector says it’s the coming field. You should really ask him.”

Hector approached with our drinks. “Are you the Franklin Raybel who wrote that piece on the German Question for Intersection?”

Frank’s eyes lit up. “Yes.”

“I’m glad to get a chance to talk to you,” said Hector, swiveling Frank around; and in a moment they disappeared as though by prearrangement.

As soon as they were gone, Willy started to feed me turkey. First he took a perfectly carved slice of breast, rolled it skillfully around a gherkin, and slipped it into my mouth. “Surprised to hear from me?” he asked.

I swallowed the turkey, my heart tripping, then rolled one for him. “Very.”

Then he rolled another for me, and I for him, until it seemed an improper way to carry on.

My antennae picked up Frank in a corner keeping me under secret surveillance. I excused myself. For the next hour I stayed out of the dining room so Willy wouldn’t think I was looking for him, but at the same time, I tried to stand where I could be seen.

It was a good party, even though I was too self-conscious to enjoy it. The records were mostly old jazz and blues—Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, Hector’s specialty I later learned. There was a man there who had programmed a computer to play chess, and a woman who had tended bar in Paris, and a lot of funny stories going around to which I paid less attention than necessary and laughed overlong.

Once, a little before midnight, I walked into the kitchen for ice and unexpectedly came upon Will there. I behaved like a child caught at the cookie jar.

“Oh! Excuse me!” I felt myself flush.

A sprig of mistletoe hung only three feet away, at the entrance to the dining room, but nothing came of it. Hastily I got my ice and retreated out the same door through which I had entered.

I flipped through a pile of records for something to do.

“Soothe me with your caress, sweet lotus blossom,” bellowed Jimmy Witherspoon to Omer Simeon’s clarinet. “Even though I know it’s just a fantasy—”

“What’s a lovely thing like you doing off here in a corner?” asked someone as though I were single and available.

A couple we had known years before at Columbia walked in late in the evening. They were old admirers of Frank. “What are you doing here?” they asked me, and “How was Europe?”

“You look sensational, Sasha,” said the husband. “Travel evidently does more than just improve the mind.”

“I love your hairdo, Sasha, I love your shoes,” said my enemy his wife.

“Where’s Frank? I hear he’s teaching downtown now.”

“He’s around here someplace,” I said scanning the room. And then suddenly I caught sight of Willy Burke laughing his big, good-natured laugh in a corner with a pair of women I didn’t know and I wanted to leave.

Frank was sitting bored and superior on a sofa. “Let’s go soon, okay?” I said.

“I’m ready to go any time you are,” he answered with that indifference he tried to pass off as accommodation.

After we found our coats and galoshes, we approached Hector and then Willy for goodbyes.

“It was good to see you again,” said Willy. “Maybe we can all get together for lunch one of these days.”

“Sounds great,” I said. Frank beside me smiled his all-suffering smile and turned to the door.

That night before going to sleep I put a net over my hair, hoping to preserve the professional French twist one day more. It didn’t work. I must have had torturous dreams, for when I woke Sunday afternoon, hairpins were scattered on my pillow and my hair was undone. Hearing Frank typing in another room, I surmised we wouldn’t be going out that day anyway. I took the rest of the pins out of my hair, piling them on the night table beside me. Pulling the covers over my disheveled head, I retreated into sleep, sorry I had awakened.

Each time the phone rang in Clayton Advertising’s “research library,” where I sat with two women named Joan clipping competitors’ ads from magazines, I rushed to answer it. For three days it was only the account executives demanding instant information. “Hi, doll. Get me a list of all the urban markets in Illinois with over 35,000 population. And hurry. I need it before two. In triplicate. That’s a good girl.” But on the fourth morning—a cold, wet Thursday—it was he.

“Sasha Raybel? This is Willy Burke.”

I was already smiling when I picked up the phone, hoping it would be he.

“Does your name have a C in it?” he asked jovially.

“No. No C. How did you find my number at work?”

“I have my sources. I’m calling to ask you, are you free for lunch?”

“Today?”

I wanted to say no. I had expected to have some notice. I knew I didn’t look the way I had at the party, and he would be disappointed. There were weekday circles under my eyes and other imperfections. I had on a coarse white turtleneck perpetually dirty at the cuffs, and my hair, pulled carelessly back, was tied with a shabby scarf. A ghastly quarter of a century old. Nevertheless, feeling that itch it was hypocritical to deny, despite my qualms and vows, I accepted.

“I’m free. But I don’t have much of a lunch hour. From twelve to one exactly.”

“I’ll pick you up in the lobby of your building at twelve sharp. So long, lotus blossom.”

We sat across from each other in one of those little restaurants too elegant to hire waitresses, where the waiters recite the menu and place on each table a basket woven of pasta filled with pommes soufflées. The headwaiter knew Will and was so discreet in overlooking me and my wedding ring that I figured he was used to such lunches.

“If you put yourself in my hands, I’ll see that you have a delicious meal,” said Will.

“But can’t you see I’m already in your hands?” I answered coyly. However shabby my sweater, I could still use my eyes with the old bus-stop swagger.

We flirted outright over a martini. (“Do you usually have lunch with married women?” “Hardly ever. Do you usually go to lunch with single men?” “Never.” “Then shall we make it our secret?”) Until quite unexpectedly, staring deep into the hole in the olive in my second drink, I saw straight through to the inevitable end and wanted to leave.

“What do you want with me?” I asked with an impermissible seriousness.

“I? Why, to enjoy you,” answered Will.

His answer, appropriately airy, made it worse. I was sick of affairs; I had grown old being enjoyed.

“Let’s enjoy this lunch and then forget it,” I said, straining for levity. But even that was presumptuous, for he had not yet suggested anything more than one lunch. Squeezing the universe into a ball, I had lost my appetite.

“Don’t be silly. I expect to be waiting for you in the lobby of your building tomorrow at noon.”

“Well, don’t,” I said. “I really don’t want to see you again.” Oh God, a voice inside reproached me, must you women always get so serious? And on a first date, too?

“You seemed to be enjoying yourself well enough until approximately two minutes ago. What happened?” He looked puzzled.

“Nothing.”

It was too absurd for me to sit there pouting. Martinis were the end of me. How could I explain that I was only a fake adventuress?—a nice girl who wanted all or nothing.

On Will’s face was the same incredulity I had seen whenever I’d tried to say no. Jan Pulaski had had it, and Mr. Winograd, and Leonardo, and others I couldn’t remember. It was a look that made me feel obliged to sleep with any man who had taken the trouble to buy me a cup of coffee.

Suddenly an unexpected insight lit up Willy’s face. “Why, you’re the poor little rich girl. Your trouble is you’ve obviously never been pursued. So lovely and so neglected. Well, lotus blossom,” he announced, breaking into a confident smile, “get ready for a new experience. I am going to pursue you.”

The next day when I arrived at work, on my desk was a slender green bud vase sporting a single long-stemmed American Beauty rose. (“Hmm,” quipped one of the account men, “did the rose come in on the breakfast tray?”) The note beside it said, “see you at lunch.” Will wouldn’t reveal how he managed to get it there, or how he sneaked in the fresh rose each succeeding week. “I have my ways,” was all he would tell.

We lunched that day on roast beef sandwiches Mr. Romance brought in a paper bag. We ate them on a stone bench in Rockefeller Center where, touching knees, we scintillated like the lights on the giant Christmas tree, toes tingling with cold and lust.

“I’ll be here at five to take you to dinner. First, champagne cocktails.” He grasped my arm firmly as we walked back to my office.

“Not tonight,” I laughed. “I have to go home after work.”

“Why?”

“I have a husband waiting for his dinner, remember?”

“Do you want to go home and cook his dinner? Rather than eat with me?”

“No.”

“Then why do it?”

Though it was my kind of argument, I had no answer. There had been reasons for my return to Frank across an ocean and a continent, but at the moment I could barely remember them. (I had tried to explain them to Roxanne. “I fell in love in Spain. Love, beautiful sex, everything. I was even trying to figure out how to make it last. But then I got sick and everything collapsed. I had a terrible scare. I could get sick again. Or get fat. It was an awful discovery. Now with Frank, whatever happens to me, he’ll just have to take care of me.” And Roxanne had answered flatly, “You’ll never get fat.”)

“Come on,” urged Willy. “Call him up and say you’re not cooking tonight.”

So glibly said. Blow my setup for sex and a dinner? “That’s easy for you to say. You have nothing to lose.”

“Neither have you. Not if you trust me.”

Trust him—it was a luxury so hazardous it was the last thing I would do! “I could even lose my job if I keep getting back late from lunch,” I said as we entered the Advertising Building lobby and I saw the clock.

“Quit your job. Come work for me. I’ll teach you all you need to know about the programming business.”

“I did manage to learn a thing or two before I met you,” I snapped. “You act as though you’re the first man in my life. Actually,” I said, trying to deflate him as I entered the elevator, “if you get that far, you’ll be my thirtieth.” I rounded to the nearest ten, hoping to match his audacity.

“As long as I’m the last,” he smiled.

Late that afternoon I received a phone call from Western Union. A telegram. be in lobby at five everything arranged. It was signed, number thirty.

I left work fifteen minutes early that evening, running all the way to the subway. Elementary tactics: One must flee in order to be pursued, I remembered from junior high.

“You’re early,” said Frank.

“Sorry,” I said, “I had a headache and wanted to beat the rush hour. But don’t feel you have to drop everything just because I’m ahead of schedule.” I was in no mood for rote conversation anyway. “Go on and finish what you were doing. I don’t mind.”

“Perhaps I will, then,” said Frank politely. “Actually, I have a tough lecture tomorrow, and I’ll probably be working late tonight. I’ll do a little more now, then take a break at six when the news goes on.”

I cooked smothered pork chops that night; I remember chopping the onions. Each morning before leaving for work I set to thaw our nightly meat purchased and frozen on Saturdays, and that morning it was pork chops. I remember feeling ashamed to be crying even though it was only from chopping onions.

For once I was glad Frank turned on the news at dinner. With my mind in a turmoil of traitor thoughts I was glad to be relieved of our matrimonial pleasantries. Later, after the news, while I was doing the dinner dishes with Frank off in his study again typing out his lecture notes for the following day, the question suddenly intruded on my mind, What am I doing here? and again, as in Europe, I could think of no answer.

I had not asked that question since I had returned from Europe full of fresh vows. But of course even the best intentions change nothing. After Frank and I had each taken new jobs and moved into our new apartment, after he had presented the “German Question” and I had cooked the new European recipes for our old friends, we were approximately where we had always been. Many of our friends had moved up a rung on the familial ladder while we were abroad: the single ones had married, the married ones had reproduced; only Roxanne, living divorced in a Grove Street tenement with little Sasha and working as a secretary in a publishing house, had moved in the other direction. Otherwise, it was the same scene as before. The men discussed exams administered instead of exams suffered, the women spoke of recipes instead of restaurants, the students at N.Y.U. were younger than the ones I remembered from Columbia, but it was the same empty life, stretching as far as one could imagine in both directions.

“How can you go through life just preparing for your old age?” Roxanne had asked me. She had climbed out of a bad marriage through a messy divorce, and with a baby besides. How could I hope to make her understand?

“Listen, Roxanne,” I had answered her, “the men I went out with in Europe only cared about one thing. One told me that was what he’d gone to Europe for, to get laid, honest to God. They told me about their unobliging wives and the loves they’d left at home—I was just a last resort. Which makes me think I’ve already entered my old age.” Nothing new to Roxanne. “To tell you the truth,” I had even confided, remembering the unmentionable clap, “I wouldn’t mind living the rest of my life without sex. It’s not such a big deal. Lots of people live without it.”

“Those people,” Roxanne had answered caustically, “have got God, or politics, or somebody else.”

Somebody else. I finished the dishes and put the pork chop bones outside to rot, but the question kept returning. What am I doing here?

I threw in the dish towel and telephoned Roxanne.

“Do you think I could spend a night or two with you? I can baby sit if you want to go out.”

“What happened? Did you and Frank have a fight?”

“No, no fight.”

“Of course you can come here.”

I went into the bedroom and packed a bag. Then I put on my coat and walked back to Frank’s study.

“I’m leaving,” I said from the doorway.

He looked up over his glasses, surprised. “Leaving? Where are you going?”

“To Roxanne’s.”

“What for?”

“For good.”

He did a double take out of an old movie, then stood up and thrust his hands in his pockets. “You’re leaving for good?” I nodded.

“But why?”

“That’s the wrong question. The question is, why stay? There’s nothing for me here. So I’m leaving.”

He began walking back and forth in front of the typewriter. “Nothing for you here? What about the apartment? What about me? I love you.”

“You do not.” It all sounded vaguely familiar, like snatches of an old play. “You don’t even know me.”

Frank nervously lit a cigarette. “Your trouble is,” he said, puffing himself up into his classroom stance, “you don’t know yourself. You’re one of those pathetic people who squander their lives not knowing what to do with them. What a waste you are. Nothing satisfies you.”

I didn’t want him to start calling me the names again. But I couldn’t resist saying, “Maybe you can suggest something interesting for me to do with my life, Professor? Paint perhaps? Pursue a hobby?”

“It’s your own choice, baby. If you were willing to do something, to have children like normal women—”

“Then,” I cut in, taking one long stride into the hall, “it would be a lot harder for me to leave you!”

(Normal women. “You look perfectly normal to me,” Roxanne had said, scrutinizing me the first time I had visited her after my return from Europe. “What do you mean?” I had asked. “Your letters were very confusing. So high, and then so low. From the way you described yourself, I really thought you’d been disfigured or something. And then Frank told me you’d got sick and gone crazy.” “Crazy!” I had gasped. “A man thinks you’re crazy if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with him!” We had laughed over that, but it was true.)

“I’m sorry I said that,” said Frank following me to to the door. “Please don’t go.”

“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you would want me to stay? We have no life together. You know you’ll be much better off without me.” I was uncomfortably aware of Frank’s lecture waiting to be typed. It was getting late. “I’m sure there are women around who would be happy to be your wife and have your babies. But not me.”

“Don’t be obtuse.” He shifted out of focus. “It’s you I want.”

I knew better than to ask why. I’d heard it before. It was his problem now. I picked up the bag again. “I’ll give you six months before you find someone else.”

“And just how long,” he asked archly, turning his pleas to accusations, “will it take you to find someone else?”

“I’m not looking,” I answered equivocally.

I opened the door. Even though I was leaving, I felt guilty to be consuming so much of Frank’s good working time on my personal problems. “You can call me at work if you need to. I’ll be in touch with you.”

Downstairs I suddenly realized I had forgotten to pack my diaphragm. I pushed the elevator button for our floor, rode back up, and let myself quietly into the apartment. Down the hall in the study I heard Frank already typing away. I tiptoed into the bedroom and slipped what I needed into my purse, then left again without disturbing him.

I didn’t tell Willy I had moved out. Whatever I might have said, he would certainly have thought I’d left Frank for him, and then he might never have called again. When I found myself being steered by the elbow through the Advertising Building’s revolving lobby door as though to an ordinary midtown lunch and instead into Willy’s Chevrolet waiting at a hydrant, I wondered if he had found out anyway.

“Where are we going?” I demanded.

“Don’t worry, someplace nice. Leave everything to me,” said Prince Charming and headed west across town into the crush of Christmas shoppers. “Don’t count on going back to work this afternoon, though.”

On the West Side Highway I discovered Prince Charming was a maniac driver.

“At my office they fire people who take long lunch hours,” I said half-heartedly. Ladies in distress were supposed to protest only up to a point.

“You don’t have to worry,” said Will, looking more frequently at me than at the road, “I’ll take care of you.”

There was nothing to do for self-protection but keep my foot poised over an imaginary brake and think positively. I was too nervous for a true adventuress.

The Harlem River was the northern boundary of the world to me, so when the Henry Hudson Parkway crossed the Harlem into the Bronx, I stopped wondering where we were. I was out of my element; for all I knew, the next stop was Canada. It was a terrifying drive on those icy highways, but as the old saying has it, at least I knew I was alive.

We speeded along in silence, cutting a wake of white through the barely plowed roads. I tried to remember the condition of my underclothes as outside, sunlight glinted off icicles.

An enchanted region. If the Hudson River was the moat, somewhere lay a castle. Up past the shimmering Tappan Zee Bridge, at last, I spotted the redwood motel suspended on top of a mountain.

“There?” I asked.

“There.”

“With Manhattan full of hotels, you pick a motel up some icy mountain,” I teased.

“You could walk out of a Manhattan hotel,” said Will, leaning over to kiss me.

Our tires spun as we climbed toward the craggy top where a dragon waited to be slain.

In the dining room facing across a chasm into distant snowy woods, we ate our lunch. Rather, we faked lunch. For even after two fast martinis to steady our knees we were too nervous to try the impressive shrimp salads the waiter placed before us.

“I can’t,” I said, looking at it regretfully.

“I can’t either,” said Will.

He signed the bill with a room number ascertained in advance, and wrote in a tip. The waiter smiled. Will held my arm as we proceeded slowly down the corridor with admirable restraint to our room.

I was wearing a perfectly simple black wool dress that zipped up the back, and my hair was pinned in a sort of bun. In those waning years of the fifties long loose hair was a secret to be revealed only in the bedroom. With such ceremony as Rapunzel might have shown, I drew the pins slowly out of my hair and shook it loose over my shoulders while Will bolted the door. Then I stepped down out of my shoes.

“My love,” he breathed, taking an awkward step toward the center where I stepped to meet him. No witch intruded. He wrapped me in his arms and kissed my eyes and mouth with princely grace.

The largest wall of the room was a picture window. Outside, snow was falling heavily. It would feel strange to make love in the bright light before the open woods; nevertheless, retrieving both my hands, I lifted my long hair off my neck and presented Willy Burke with the zipper.

I had always considered independence and commitment mutually exclusive options. I had gone for independence in marrying, but now I was ready to reconsider. With Frank and without him, my independence had proved illusory, not to mention boring; in fact, I suspected I was already suffering from emotional rickets.

Could it be that I’d been living by a mistaken premise? An excluded middle? Was it possible that the poets, and not the philosophers after all, had the right of it? I had sought ten good reasons to marry and ten again to leave; but maybe one compelling reason was enough. My husband’s profession had made little difference to me. Maybe commitment would make more.

Now, if Willy Burke were as devoted as he claimed (“All I want, Sasha, is to make you happy”), there was still time to switch my bet. It would take a large risk and an act of faith, but theoretically, at least, it could be done. Four years to thirty, the game wasn’t over yet.

Weeks before the first buds of spring Willy and I moved into a tiny two-room Village sublet on Perry Street. Paying my last respects to independence, I insisted we split the rent (too high for me to manage alone), but in everything else we attempted to become what Willy called “one person.”

“Reading! With me home? Close that book!” said Willy, bursting in on me with an armful of quivering sticks.

“What are those?”

“Quince.” Aping the prophets, he announced they would spring to life before my eyes if I only had faith.

“Those sticks?”

“Buds, flowers, fragrance, seed—just wait.”

“Like us,” I laughed, closing forever my book.

“Like us.”

It was a risky business, this commitment. People had been known to die of it. There was always the chance that Willy, invariably late, would wind up a no-show; the possibility that after I had given up my apartment, my salary, my swagger, my cool, my wicked eye, he would turn out his pockets with a sheepish smile, head for the door, and leave me with nothing but dregs of wine and ashes of roses pressed between the pages of some abandoned book.

But I determined to risk it. I had scoffed at romance through the entire five years of my first marriage, resisting all pressure to adjust. And what had it got me? Sneers and lies. Now, I was starting from scratch, five years behind everyone else, without even Roxanne’s resources to live alone. If there was to be a second time, it had to be radically different. If Will was the man, and his style Romance, well, it would be a refreshing change from the indifference I was accustomed to. Between the champagne cocktails and the flowers, there might at least be some fun in it.

My dearest darling Sasha,

Your father and I were stunned to learn you are getting a divorce. Even before I opened your letter something told me it was going to be bad news. What can I say, except to tell you how much we love you and how truly sorry we are?

From the time you entered your teens I have worried about how you would manage. You had a difficult and painful adolescence, always full of surprises. But I never for one instant lost faith in you. Even in the worst moments I believed that if we just gave you your rein and loved you, eventually you would justify our trust and settle down. You were always such a fine, clever, and basically considerate child with all the potential of a devoted wife and mother, capable of making someone truly happy. Though I was surprised when you chose to marry Frank (at last I can say he never seemed to me really worthy of you), still I trusted your good judgment.

And now it’s to end in divorce. I constantly ask myself: where did I go wrong in raising you? What did I do to make you wind up unhappy? Lord knows I tried my best to be a good mother.

If we had been a little wiser, maybe we would have known how the wind was blowing. When you wrote you were going off to Spain without Frank, I said to Abe, this is not right, though I would never have dreamed of saying it to you. (Maybe I should have.) If you had only had children, this tragedy might have been averted. Without a sense of purpose and responsibility even the cleverest woman is bound to be unfulfilled. Dearest, there is nothing that cements a marriage like children. In fact, when we offered to help pay for your psychiatrist, it was in hopes that you would come to want a family. But it was not to be.

Well, what’s past is past. I am sure you will marry again and make a wise choice. You are fortunate to be young enough for a second chance. (I know a young man right now—the son of an acquaintance of mine who lives in New Jersey—who would probably be delighted to meet a girl like you. Let me know when I may send block2 your address.)

Now to other news. I am happy to write that your brother Ben has just opened a new branch of his store, this time in Medina, Ohio. That makes it a real chain, and of course, we are terribly proud of him. With Marnie pregnant again (and little Michael ready for school—can you believe time goes so fast?) it is almost too much good news at once. It would be awfully nice if you could find the time to drop Ben a note of congratulations. He has always been so fond of you. After all, you are only a year apart in age. Even now he seems as much concerned about you as we are.

Your father wants to add a few words, so I’ll close now,

With all my love,

Mother

Dear Sasha,

As a lawyer I think your announced decision to let Frank sue you for divorce is hasty, if not downright foolish, and I urge you to reconsider. For the time being you must be very careful with whom you are seen in public and where, for until you are legally separated or finally divorced, your husband still has rights. Even though you and Frank are living apart, your character can be damaged and your settlement jeopardized if you are indiscreet. It may not, as you claim, matter to you now, but it does matter to the world. For this and other reasons, it will matter to you eventually, whether you recognize it or not. Better for you to divorce him. Think it over.

We would be very happy if you decided to come back to Baybury. Your room is still here, and it is such a long time since we’ve seen you. We always miss our little girl, but especially now. We are frankly uneasy thinking of a beautiful girl like you living alone in New York City.

Let us know what you decide.

Love,

 Dad

Another letter to hide, another piece of me to lock in a drawer for solitary contemplation—perhaps in the nightmare hour each evening between the time I arrived home from work and the time Willy, armed with flowers and excuses, appeared for dinner.

W.B.’s Favorite Veal Scallops Marsala

Marinate wafer-thin slices of veal in marsala, garlic, pepper. Precook mushrooms in butter; season. Sauté veal in butter; add mushrooms, basil, strained marinade. Just before serving, squeeze in juice of one lemon, sprinkle with parsley. Serve with noodles.

Hollandaise Sauce for Asparagus

Melt one stick butter. In blender put three egg yolks, two tablespoons lemon juice, salt and pepper. Cover and blend for an instant. Turn to low speed, uncover and gradually add hot butter. Yield: three servings.

We went at our thing with a vengeance, prepared to turn inside out to change. Loyalty was our credo. Not content to stand bare before one another like ordinary lovers, we stripped off secrets, then skin, as though we hoped by mingling our innermost nerves to become one flesh. Each observation one of us made became the other’s illuminating insight; each casual metaphor became the other’s poem. Believing words could bind, we found it impossible to give promises enough.

“Promise me we’ll never spend a night apart.”

“I promise. Swear you’ll never glance at another man.”

“I swear.”

By Schubert and candlelight we drank perfectly chilled white wine, dipping artichoke leaves into a single bowl of melted butter, then slipping them into one another’s mouths. We drank café filtre out of our own tiny porcelain cups, bought for Valentine’s Day. By shamelessly juggling history we discerned that despite a world of striking differences, we had in fact been born for each other, all it took was faith.

“Always,” we whispered, and “forever.” Until midnight or so, when Will turned me on my side, set the alarm clock for more love in the morning, and tucking his knees behind mine to make us like a pair of spoons stacked in a drawer, snuggled us off to sleep.

The ride from the new Cleveland airport where Ben picked me up in his Bonneville sedan through the periphery of town was jarringly disconcerting. So much new. “But where’s Clark’s? Is that another Halle’s?” I asked. Ben, proudly proprietary and with no sense of loss, pointed out now a new shopping center, now abandoned corners. The broad, once deserted Route Eighty, where we had had our “chicken” races in high school in souped-up Fords and where the boys had driven us to neck, was now lined with neon drive-ins, car lots lighted like Christmas trees, glass motels. Ben too—bigger, flashier.

Once we ascended the hill into Baybury Heights, however, everything was magically the same, as if some fairy had cast a spell. Pungent autumn leaves raked into piles on tree lawns, rock gardens separating driveways from next-door lawns, basket hoops on garages with nets torn from overuse, folded evening papers carelessly tossed on welcome mats by some ambitious new version of Ben—all preserved. I held my breath so as not to disturb it.

“Before I drop you off, Sash,” said Ben, lowering his voice conspiratorially and slowing the car as we turned onto Auburn Hill, where I had been pantsed, “there are a couple of things I think you ought to be aware of. The folks are really very upset about this divorce, more than they’ll show. Mother’s done a lot of crying. I’d appreciate it if you try and act normal. For their sakes.”

“Normal! You’re kidding, Ben. This is 1958—millions of people get divorced. It’s not an abnormal thing to do nowadays!”

“Calm down, will you? I’m not saying you’re abnormal, honey. Personally I couldn’t care less. I happen to think getting divorced may be the smartest thing you ever did, though it’s none of my business. Myself, I never thought Frank had the balls, if you’ll excuse my language, to handle you, and personally, I don’t see any reason for a couple to stay together if they don’t have kids. For my money, you can live any way you damn please, you can be a prostitute if you like, it’s your own business. But the folks are kind of old-fashioned, that’s all. Let’s face it, this is a conservative town. I’m not saying you’re abnormal. I’m just saying, try to stay off the subjects that might upset them, that’s all. ’Cause they’re understandably a little shaky about you. Living alone in New York and all.”

“I told you, I’m not living alone.”

“Listen, Sasha, it’s your first visit back in what? Five years? So why not try to make it nice for the folks? I mean, you don’t have to mention the guy you’re living with.”

I held my tongue. In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. Ben looked at his watch.

“If you can manage till after dinner when I bring over Mamie and the kids, I’ll take your bag in then. I promised to see a salesman at the Baybury store and I’m already late.”

Why argue about who carries the bags? Why disturb the universe?

“Sure, Ben. See you later. Sorry I held you up.”

“It doesn’t matter, hon,” Ben laughed. “This time I’m the customer, and the customer’s always right.”

I stepped out of the car onto the sidewalk. So many more cracks to avoid treading on than I remembered. So few unmarred surfaces. Slowly I walk up the front path through the red Baybury leaves. They rustle like music, smell like incense. It is almost twilight. Mother will be in the kitchen whipping cream for Ben’s hot chocolate, expecting him to return any moment, cold and ravenous, from his paper route. Then she will go upstairs to “freshen up” for Daddy while Ben and I stretch out on the floor before the radio with our secret decoders ready for action. Exactly on time, he’ll come in, puffing a bit from the hill and after a little tease present Chiclets to me and Ben. He’ll brush my hair out of my eyes and tousle Ben’s as we—whispering, “Shhh!”—move in closer to the radio. “Now what do I smell for dinner?” he’ll say sniffing at the air playfully. If it’s before six, he’ll get no players, but if it’s six or after, Ben and I will throw him off the track with transparent subterfuge. “I sure hope it’s not liver!” Finally he’ll settle down in “his” chair, open the evening paper Ben ceremoniously presents to him, and send us off with a kindly, “Okay kids, I’m going to look over the paper now. Call me when dinner’s ready.”

I push the bell. Chimes ring in the hallway. I feel a chill run through me, knowing how warm and light it will be indoors. Tonight someone has already taken in the evening paper. The porch light goes on over my head. They have heard me. The same chimes, the same light they had installed in 1938 to replace the ones that had been ripped out by the vacating occupants. “Why’d they want to do that? What good could it do?” my father had asked sadly, discovering every window in the house broken and every light fixture demolished on the eve of our moving in. “Why would anyone want to do a thing like that?”—shaking his head. Who? I had wondered. Why?

The house, like all the houses in the neighborhood, had been a Depression bargain, bought cheaply from a bank that had foreclosed on some unfortunate’s mortgage. We were lucky to be able to buy it, my father said. But like every Depression treat—even the ice cream cones with double cups, four scoops, and chocolate sprinkles, all for a nickel—our luck was someone else’s loss, our treat someone else’s hunger. And even the miraculous hummingbird in the hollyhocks behind the house—at whose expense did she come to us? What would I have to pay?

Footsteps, and now the door. My face, still tanned from the summer, feels split like the sidewalk. I pray she will know me, even as for an instant she looks and hesitates.

“Sasha! Darling Sasha! Come in! Abe—where are you? It’s our Sasha!”

In a rush of joy she hugs my shoulders and kisses me, cheek at a time, then both together, demolishing time and distance. “Abe! Abe! Come down!” And to me: “Come inside. Give me your coat. Let me look at you.”

There she stands, gentle, aging, still beautiful. How strange that I should have to bend down to kiss her. “But didn’t you expect me?” I ask. “It was Ben who dropped me off.”

“Yes, I knew you were coming. But expecting you isn’t having you. Oh, Sasha, I’m so happy you came. You look so lovely, so sophisticated. Why, you’re skinny as a reed, and I’ve put on all this weight.” She touches her hand to her generous bosom in a gesture of hopeless apology.

What can I say? If the sample of my urine Willy took to the lab after dropping me at the airport stimulates a frog, this talk is all gross irony.

“It’s the dress, maybe, mother. I always weigh the same.”

But at once I realize my skinniness is there only as an ideal, and quickly I take my cue. “You look beautiful to me, Mom, you don’t look heavy at all. You still glow, you never change.” We reserve this kindness for each other, and partly out of sympathy, partly out of love, we almost believe in it.

“She’s right, you know,” says my father coming in and throwing one arm lovingly around each of us. “You really are quite as beautiful as you ever were; you look like a girl.”

My mother and I both smile awkwardly, looking away, not quite sure which of us he is complimenting, not quite wishing to know.

“Still negative? Are they sure? Shit, Willy! Then why haven’t I got my period?”

“I can’t exactly say, but I’m sure there’s a reason.”

Maybe a mustache again or the clap? Oh no! Must my body pay every time I fall in love?

“You can go to your doctor and find out as soon as you come back to New York. I’d have thought you’d be glad it isn’t positive.”

“If it were positive, at least I’d know what to do about it. I’m so sick of this! There is never a time when someone I know isn’t suffering over a fucking missed period! It’s disgusting! Anyway, I don’t even have a doctor.”

“We’ll find you a doctor.”

“I hate doctors.”

“For Christsake, Sasha, don’t worry. Don’t I always take care of you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m going to get you out of this one too. You just have to have a little faith in me.”

“What did you do last night? It was practically unbearable here without you.”

“Went to a movie.”

“Alone?”

“With Hector.”

“What are you going to do tonight?”

“Go to a movie.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Another movie.”

“Do you miss me?”

“What do you think?”

“I think I’m going to come home and see.”

“I think that’s a splendid idea.”

• • •

“Aren’t you going to the club with Ben and Marnie? Don’t you want to meet some young people and see some of your old friends?”

“No.”

“Let her alone, Laura, let her do what she wants,” said my father. “If she wants to be different, let her. She hasn’t changed a bit.”

I withdrew into a book as I had always done—only this time I went gingerly, encumbered by recollections. All my early tutors were still here, quietly waiting on the bookshelves to be singled out and posed a question. It seemed years since I had asked one; my time to question had passed. Dipping again into Aristotle and Watson was like the first drag of a cigarette after years without smoking. Dizzily, I pondered again my childhood puzzle of which one to take to a desert island.

On my brother’s block I bumped into Sally Harris, a childhood friend. Her face was worn; it was a shock to see her. (It shouldn’t have been; we were all closer to thirty now than to twenty.)

“Sally Harris?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Sasha. Sasha Davis.”

For a moment we stood scrutinizing each other. She had more lines near the eyes than I, none around the mouth.

“Of course! Sasha! But your hair is so long now!” she said. She still wore hers short, as we all wore it in the high school yearbook. “I’m Sally Colby now.”

“Buddy Colby?” I asked.

She nodded, giggling. “How long is it since I’ve seen you? I remember the class predictions: you were going to be a lawyer. Did you make it?”

“No.”

She looked too hastily at my hands. “You’re married too, of course. Do you have any children?”

“No. Do you?”

“Oh yes, we have three. But you will, you will,” she said generously.

We eyed each other, comparing. “You really haven’t changed a bit!” we lied to each other.

She recited who had married whom, and how many children they had.

“Joey Ross? Who did he marry?” I inquired.

“Joey? He married a girl from the West Side. Martha something. I don’t think you’d know her. Sweet girl. It turned out she couldn’t have any children, so they adopted a couple. A boy and a girl.”

“What does Joey do now?”

“We don’t see them much. I think he’s still in the shoe business.”

Things were more or less as I remembered them at home. Upstairs I went from room to room touching things as though they were alive. The woods in the back had shrunk and I could see from the window in my mother’s room that the treehouse was gone. On the wall over my mother’s dressing table (even more crowded with jars than when I had lived here) all the photographs had been carefully rearranged. Color photos of Ben’s children indistinguishable from baby pictures of us; all the graduations; generations of weddings; Ben in a football pose, me at the pool. The pictures of Frank had been discreetly removed, but there were several Frank had snapped of me in Europe.

I was pleased with how little I had changed in the photos. Surprised, too, considering that never, not even in my prime, had I photographed well. Even the face in the mirror was passable: if there were creases lurking, they hadn’t surfaced yet. Perhaps, I thought, I ought to consider cutting my hair again; short hair had always been so becoming.

My mother walked in, made-up and dressed. “Do you like my rogues’ gallery?” she asked. She was wearing an expensive pajama set, and her skin had the pink smell I remembered. Had she dressed for me? When I was a child she had always, even in the midst of vacuuming or doing the laundry, put on a girdle, stockings, and a dress just to run out to the store.

“Quite a collection here,” I said.

“Yes. The family keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

I thought of the parasite perhaps even now clogging my womb, like the Kotex clogging the toilet, the monthly nightmare: How, oh how, to get rid of it? At the bottom of all my bad dreams was one or the other, an overflowing toilet or a bloodstained chair. I wondered if my mother still menstruated, if she and my father still made love—if they ever had.

“Is it your perfume or powder that smells so nice?” I asked.

“On me? I don’t know. I use both.” She began opening bottles for me to smell.

“Do you really use all this stuff?” I asked.

“From time to time, yes. What do you use?”

“Nothing much. Sometimes a little mascara.”

“And nothing at night?” She looked alarmed.

“No.”

“You should use something on your skin at night, Sasha, you really should!” She lowered her voice. “When a woman gets past twenty-five she should think about her skin. Things change so rapidly if you don’t take care.” As she spoke her hand fluttered to her throat, where make-up is useless. “I never go to sleep without putting some of this on my face.” She held out a bottle to me, an offering. “And for a woman my age, I still have a remarkably good skin. Want to try some? It feels very good. Go on, dear, take it with you. You’re leaving today and the stores are closed; I can always get more.”

I had been so proud of her beauty. And now to see her reduced to this, hooked on medicines, careful of light, trying to warn me of what was coming. I wanted to put my arms around her, to hug and console her. Perhaps the weakening of the senses of the aging is an adaptation for survival. Perhaps we grow weak in the eyes and hard of hearing the better to preserve our illusions.

Roxanne told me about a way to abort myself with a speculum, a catheter and syringe, sterile water, and a friend. (Not till months later did I learn it could be lethal.) “There’s nothing to it. I’ve done it twice myself. You just have someone squirt a little sterile water into the uterus, you wait, and in a few days you abort.”

“What if you don’t?”

“Then you do it again.”

When I told Willy, he hit the roof. “Are you kidding? That’s insane! We’ll find a proper doctor to do it, thank you.”

“But Roxanne’s done it three times,” I said exaggerating. “She says it’s easy.”

“Just thinking about it makes me sick.”

“Come on, Willy. You’ll help me, won’t you?”

“Not that way. I’m going to find you a doctor.”

Roxanne knew an intern whom she got to do it at his apartment in the Bronx. He pulled all the blinds and locked the doors while she boiled up the instruments.

“What a tight little twat you have,” he said as Roxanne directed a flashlight between my legs. Each leg hung over a kitchen chair instead of being fitted into stirrups. I was ashamed. “It’s a pleasure to work on you after the gaping smelly cunts that come into the hospital. If you could see them, you’d never want to have children.”

“What do children have to do with it?”

“Believe me, having babies wrecks your plumbing. Now hold still a second. I don’t want to hurt you if I can help it.”

An instant of pain, and the catheter was in. “I wouldn’t want to have children even if it was good for my plumbing,” I said flatly.

“Don’t you like kids?”

“I love kids. Other people’s.”

“Hey, will you relax? That’s better. Don’t you have any maternal instincts?”

“I have an instinct of self-preservation.”

“You’ll feel different when you fall in love. That’s when they all want their babies. Now hold very still one more sec. Here comes the water.”

“But I am in love.”

“I doubt it,” he said.

It was a familiar line, about love and babies. I’d been bucking it all my life. If it were true, as the scientists claimed, it would be smarter to live without love. The only power a woman had against a man was the possibility, never more than problematical, of leaving him; with babies even that defense vanished. No; plumbing aside, maternity was vulnerability itself, sentencing a woman at best to the plight of Mrs. Alport, and at worst to grubby isolation.

Sensation without pain, I felt the liquid enter me. “When I’m in love,” I told him, “I rely on my convictions.”

The very night I decided to try out my mother’s lubricating skin lotion (“What’s that godawful smell?” said Will as I got into bed. “Just some face lotion.” “Well for Christsake, Sasha, can’t you go and wash it off? You smell like a filling station!”)—it was that very night, sometime after midnight, that I awoke with unbearable cramps. I was exploding, coming apart at the seams. I rolled around and doubled up and moaned.

“What’s the matter? Sash?” asked Willy in his sleep.

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

I thought it was food poisoning or appendicitis. Then at last I felt I had to take an enormous crap.

“Where are you, Sash?” called Willy, feeling me absent from the bed.

I sat on the toilet and pushed and pushed. Then out it popped, my first baby.

I looked down. It was suspended over the water in the toilet bowl, swinging from my body, its head down.

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh Willy!” I cried. I covered my mouth and screamed.

A nightmare. I looked again. It hung there like a corpse.

“Willy, please! Come quickly! It’s a baby!”

I couldn’t understand what was happening. I had thought at two or three months it would still be a fish with gills, or a tadpole. But it was a real baby, with a human head, only blue.

“Oh God! It’s hanging here! Please help me.”

“Now listen, Sasha,” Willy was saying softly, “you’ve got to pull it out of you.”

“Did you see it?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a baby, Willy!”

“I know honey, but you’ve still got to pull it out.”

“Oh I can’t.” I was all atremble.

“You’ve got to.”

“I can’t.”

It was too awful: the first baby I produced in this world I deposited like a piece of shit straight into the toilet.

“Try darling. Pull it out. Trust me.”

At last, I pulled it out of me and dropped it into the water. It had always lived in a liquid medium. I couldn’t look at it, my own child. I flushed the toilet. Then I dissolved on the bed in a shudder of tears and afterbirth.

“It was a baby. I can’t believe it. It was a baby,” I moaned. Will stroked my back as I wept and bled.

“Do you think you’ll be all right for a few minutes while I get the car? I’m going to take you to a hospital.”

“I’m all right,” I sobbed. “I’ll get blood all over the car.”

“Fuck the car,” said Willy.

“I’m all right,” I repeated. “I don’t need to go to a hospital.”

“Do as I tell you!” he shouted.

When we got to the hospital, a doctor prescribed three kinds of pills and a bed in the maternity ward.

“Don’t leave me here, Willy. I don’t want to stay here.”

“Don’t worry, honey, I won’t leave you.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but you’re not permitted on the ward,” said the nurse. “You can visit tomorrow.”

“What are you going to do to her?” Will asked the doctor. “Can’t you do something now so I can take her home?”

“Can’t do anything till tomorrow,” said the doctor.

“Why not?”

“I’ve ordered some pills to control the bleeding, and antibiotics and a tranquilizer. If she’ll stop with the hysterics there may be a chance we can save your baby.”

“But there is no baby, doctor,” said Will. “She miscarried.”

The doctor looked skeptical. “You sure?” he asked.

“Of course I’m sure. I saw the fetus myself.”

“Did you bring it with you?”

“Bring it? No!”

The doctor shrugged and turned away.

“It’s flushed down the toilet,” said Willy frantically.

The doctor shook his head. “That’s really too bad,” he said. “If you’d brought it with you we might be able to clean her out tonight. But if she’s not hemorrhaging and there’s no fetus and I do a D-and-C at three a.m. with no one from the regular staff around, I could get into a lot of trouble. You understand. I wish I could help you out—”

“Take an X ray,” said Willy desperately. “You’ll see there’s no baby inside her.”

“We can’t take an X ray.”

“Why not?”

“An X ray might damage the fetus.”

At the end of that winter my divorce came through. Though I had sometimes talked of staying single (“Why do we need the paper? We’ve got our love”), it wasn’t a week before I was carrying red roses to City Hall, already knowing the next step.

Babies.

Why? For the very reason I had refused them in the past: babies could bind.

The abortion, though we seldom spoke of it, had exposed my bluff. I had demanded it in the name of independence, yet ostensibly I had renounced independence. If my commitment to Will were serious, the best way to prove it was by making a baby. Without a career, I no longer had a reason not to. Willy expected it, poets encouraged it, it was part of the package. And as a job, motherhood seemed to offer more possibilities of advancement than the Clayton Advertising Agency’s research library.

“Make it a good wedding, won’t you?” said Will winking at the J. P. “The last one was just practice; this one is going to count.” We wanted all the cement we could get to make it stick. Flaunting our devotion, we proselytized for second marriages. I was twenty-seven: unless the rust of my life had wrecked my plumbing, I had three years left to change. And Willy, a ripe thirty-one, had the rest of his life to help me.

We never celebrated our wedding anniversary, arbitrarily determined by the date of my final decree. Instead, at least till our second child was born, we celebrated the anniversary of that season we met, replaying those days like the album of a favorite show, complete with costumes.

“Don’t ask questions, just try it on,” said Will, presenting me with a large box from Lord & Taylor. “I saw it in the window and had to buy it for you. It’s like the dress you were wearing at Hector’s party that first night in New York. You were so beautiful I couldn’t take my eyes off you. Go on. Try it on.”

As usual, Willy was right. It was like, but better made than, the one I had bought for the party. It was perfect for the occasion. Starting with champagne on whatever liner was moored in the harbor (a fifty-cent donation to the Seaman’s Fund would get us on board), progressing to turkey and gherkin and Jimmy Witherspoon at Hector’s on the first Saturday night of each December (with me in a black silk dress), we repeated the steps of our marathon. Our first lunch together at the restaurant with the pommes soufflées (I in my off-white turtleneck), the American Beauty roses, our first champagne cocktail at the Monkey Bar (same sweater), our miraculous chance meeting at the Museum of Modern Art where, lunching in brown wool with Roxanne, I had spotted Will sitting alone across the room watching us. (“Is that him?” asked Roxanne. “Yes.” “He looks all right, but you’d better be sure.”) And then finally our first embrace at the Motel on the Mountain in Tarrytown, New York, in the other black dress that zipped up the back. Precisely three days before Christmas, only months after I had resigned myself to a life without love.

“Goodnight, I love you,” said Willy every night, molding us into spoons. And though I had said the phrase to others out of courtesy or caution, now for the first time in my life without feeling sly or dirty or bad, I too could affirm before closing my eyes, “Goodnight, I love you.”