Six

Nothing like seven days on the high seas for thinking things over. I boarded the Benvenuto Cellini at Genoa to the music of a little brass band and a hundred weeping families. After checking my cabin (no roommate: a good omen), I went directly to the Tourist Class dining room, where a sailing party was under way—champagne for everyone.

I entered expectantly. A whole shipload of new people; an international atmosphere. I sat at a table with only one other woman, old and evidently married. She nodded to me, then spent her time engaging a soft-spoken engineer from Brooklyn on her right and a Milanese exchange student on her left. There was something reminiscent of an old movie farce as we made our own introductions and nibbled at plattersful of French hors d’oeuvres.

“You have been in Italy long, signora?” asked the student from Milan, noticing my ring. He was on his way to Bowdoin College.

“Only a few months, I’m afraid. Not nearly long enough.”

“Perhaps someday you will come back,” he said, raising his glass. He had those deep, long-lashed Italian eyes.

“Oh yes,” I smiled, already pained to be going home, “I’ll drink to that.” In that tinkly atmosphere, all Italians were once again charming.

An hour later I finished off a last glass of champagne and went to the Purser’s Desk to sign up for second sitting. I wanted my meals to be long and leisurely. With a weekful of parties in every public room, and me the best-looking female passenger I had seen so far, I knew it would likely be a pleasant crossing. But I wanted more than that. Since this brief ocean voyage would be my last taste of freedom before I surrendered in New York a second time to a loveless marriage, I wanted one last dose of love.

By the time I married, I had been in love up to my chin. For a whole year I’d wallowed in it, waking up and licking it off my fingers like a child gorging itself after Hallowe’en. But even without Mrs. Alport to tell me, I knew it wasn’t nourishing enough to live on, and I didn’t choose it for my daily diet. As the philosophers implied, love was the frosting that made life delicious, not the stuff of sustenance. I made a “sensible” marriage instead.

I hadn’t really wanted to marry at all. I wanted to make something of myself, not just give it away. But I knew if I didn’t marry I would be sorry. Only freaks didn’t. I knew I had to do it quickly, too, while there was still a decent selection of men to choose from. Dr. Watson might be right about personality not hardening until thirty, but old maids started forming at twenty-one. I was twenty. The heavy pressure was on. In years I was still safe, but in distance I was borderline. I had finished college and started graduate school. The best catches were being picked off while I was educating myself right out of the running.

I had altered my ambitions once for love; I didn’t dare do it again. My first love, philosophy, still claimed me. Now I had to choose a mate who would share me with it. That ruled out Prince Charming.

After a lot of careful thought I chose Frank. Not that he was perfect—no one is. But I was fond of him, none of his parts were missing, and unlike all the other eligibles I knew, he seemed willing and able to make a little room in his future for mine.

Franklin Raybel was in the History Department at Columbia, studying Modern European History. He had a perfect name for a title page and a graduate fellowship, which meant he probably had a good future. It was an important point for me, because if we were both going to be teaching, my husband would have to be able to get a job at a university large enough to accommodate me, too.

Like me, Frank was a Midwesterner sufficiently threatened by New York to need fortification. From Gary, Indiana, and twenty-seven, he had come farther and further than I. I would have preferred someone from the Philosophy Department, but my Columbia classmates all treated me either as an interloper or an anomaly. “So you’re the dish I heard about; I was hoping I’d get into a class with you,” they said. In my seminars no one ever listened to a single word I said without grinning, and then as soon as I had finished they’d all return to their heated disputes as though I had never spoken. They treated me a little better than they treated the older woman in the department, at least acknowledging (after class) that I existed. But it was still a terrible comedown after Baxter College, where my classmates had listened to what I had to say and Alport had encouraged me.

Those Columbia classes were all the more disheartening because in them were held the headiest discussions I had ever been privileged to sit in on. Theses and antitheses, arguments and counterarguments, premises and conclusions ricocheted off the walls and exploded midair above the mahogany conference table in brilliant illuminations. After only a couple of weeks of classes, however, I felt so intimidated, and then stupid, that I didn’t dare participate. I just did my reading and tried to look as though I considered all that disputation beneath me. I chose obscure minor figures to write my papers on, hoping no one in the seminars would know enough about my subjects to ridicule me. And on weekends when the philosophers invited me to their parties, instead of sitting dumb and pretty through their snappy talk, I helped their girlfriends from other departments (English, Teacher’s College, Barnard) serve the food and coffee that kept them going at each other till two a.m.

“How come you’re studying philosophy?” my colleagues would ask me over beer with bemused smiles. “Do you really want to get a Ph.D? Do you really expect to teach?” The way they asked their questions, I knew better than to answer yes. I quickly learned that there was only a handful of teaching jobs in philosophy in the country—all coveted, all for them.

“I just like philosophy, that’s all,” I’d answer. “I don’t know what I’ll do with my Ph.D. Maybe I can work for a philosophical journal. Maybe I can teach in a finishing school.”

Franklin Raybel spared me such questions. He talked too little to talk down. Sitting in Riverside Park of an autumn Sunday afternoon, we read the poetry of Yeats or Donne together, equally moved. As philosophy was considered a “harder” subject than history, Frank allowed that I might be serious, even awarding me a certain respect. He once listened to my explanations of Leibniz which, he later told me, he was able to repeat to advantage in his own department. He was gentle and noncommittal, permitting me to select our movies and set the time for our meetings; he gave me his favorite books to read and picked me the last buttercups along the Hudson where warm Sundays found us walking.

“Loves me, loves me not, loves me, loves me not, loves me,” he said self-consciously, stripping a buttercup of all five petals.

“No, silly,” I laughed. “Buttercups will always come out ‘loves me.’ You can only get the truth from daisies. Buttercups tell you something else.”

“They do?” he asked surprised. “What?”

“Whether or not you like butter.”

He looked dubious.

“Really,” I assured him. “Hold them under my chin. Closer.” I thrust out my chin invitingly and closed my eyes. “Now—is my chin yellow or not?”

He tipped my jaw up with his index finger and kissed my mouth. “Yes,” he whispered.

“That means I like butter. Now let me do it to you.”

I took the bouquet from his hand and held it under his chin, brushing shamelessly against him. His only trouble, I decided, was shyness.

“Well?” he asked, his eyes half-closed.

I shook my head. “I’m afraid you definitely don’t like butter. That means we’re probably incompatible,” I concluded with a pout.

“Flowers can lie,” said Frank, and daring to push them to one side, kissed me again.

To find out the truth of it (and because I had a paper due and would not go home to Baybury) we spent Christmas vacation in an off-campus room of a friend of his. Compatible? Let me say we were not incompatible. I craved appreciation. The better I fucked the more he liked me, inspiring me to put on an ever better show. I could see from how cheerfully he brought in Chinese food for us to eat in the room and how eagerly he introduced me to several of his friends that he was pleased to spend the time with me. I was pleased too: there were worse sensations than being wanted. But I didn’t expect him to come out and “love” me. We had hardly ever spoken personally.

“How can you say you love me? You hardly know me,” I said, turning down the phonograph to hear his first shy declaration. I was quite surprised. Even in Baybury, where strangers had not uncommonly declared their love in mash notes or anonymous phone calls, I was always surprised.

He told me quite plainly how. “You’re the first girl I’ve ever known who was smart and beautiful,” he said. “The pretty girls I’ve gone out with have always turned out dumb, and the ones with brains have never been more than good friends. I can’t help it,” he confessed, “but I know I’ll never love a girl who doesn’t have both.”

So! He considered me exceptional, appreciating my best aspects, and at the same time revealed himself innocent and honest—good qualities in a husband. If, as the poet says, only God can love one for oneself, at least Frank didn’t try to play God. A true liberal, he would likely respect his wife and treat her well.

I investigated. “What are you thinking about? Truth, now.”

“You really want the truth? I happened to be thinking about your resemblance to a certain painting by Boucher of Mlle. Morphy, who was a favorite of Louis XV. … Don’t misunderstand,” he added, “I mean your looks, not your character.”

He knew I’d been no virgin—knew, in fact, I’d had an unfortunate affair with a married man—but he liked to think of me as an innocent led astray. As to my professed belief in free love, it was fine if I were involved with someone like him, but dangerous if I were involved with someone as unscrupulous as Alport. He overlooked it as he overlooked my dashing across the street against every traffic light: antics of impetuous youth.

Between Christmas and intersession I examined him closely. If there were ten good reasons to marry him, why then I would do it! On Ash Wednesday, while people in churches repented, I stayed in my dorm and made a list.

Ten good reasons, and besides, it was time. We’d each be getting what we wanted.

“If you really love me so much,” I sprang on him over spring vacation, “then why don’t you want to marry me?” A sly question, worthy of my fellow philosophers.

He reached for his cigarettes, stalling. But he fell for it.

“What makes you think I don’t?”

“Well, do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s get married.”

“Well …” He hesitated, but I knew I had him. “Okay.”

I waited while he nervously lit a cigarette; then, handing him an ashtray and blowing out his match, I said softly, “How about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow! We can’t tomorrow! It takes time to get the license and everything.”

Oh, he was squirming.

“As soon as we can get the license, then.”

“In the middle of a semester? Why not wait till summer? What’s the big rush?”

“No rush exactly,” I said. “Just, if we’re going to do it ever, we might as well do it now. There’s no reason not to. When in doubt, do it!  ”

“But what about our families? This is crazy. I’ve never even mentioned you to my parents.”

“Is it their life?” I asked contemptuously. “It’s ours! Would you let your parents influence you? They should be happy to be notified.”

He could certainly have said no if he’d wanted to. I couldn’t force him to say yes. He could have composed his own list of pros and cons.

“Look,” I said, with a hint of impatience. “It’s not as though we were planning to have a family. We’ll ask for cash instead of wedding presents and live on that, and we can both work summers till we get our degrees. If it doesn’t work out, we can always get a divorce.”

How could he dispute my logic without seeming small-minded? Magnanimously, he succumbed.

“Okay. Everyone will probably think we’re mad, but if you want to, we’ll do it.”

We kissed. I was positively high.

“You crazy adorable little girl,” he said, warming to the notion. “Shall we call our parents now?”

“Remember,” I warned, “once we tell them, there’s no going back.” (If he says yes three times, it must be true.)

“I know.”

We go to the phone booths at the back of the dorm lobby to call. He calls first. I listen to him tell his mother (my mother-in-law!), smiling wrinkles into the corners of his eyes. He hands me the phone. “How do you do, Mrs. Raybel, this is Sasha. … We really just decided this very minute. You’re the first person we told. … We’ll let you know just as soon as we know. Mother.”

Then I put in a call to Baybury Heights.

“Mom? Guess what? I’m getting married.” I can just imagine her face! “To Franklin Raybel. A graduate student in History from Indiana. … This coming weekend at City Hall, if we can manage it. … No, darling, of course not. Really, nothing like that. I’m getting married ’cause I want to. … Yes, really-really. … Oh, Mother, you’re so silly. … You’ll meet him and see for yourself.”

I cover the mouthpiece and lean out of the booth to kiss Frank. What a nice gentle husband I’m getting.

“Well, Mom, aren’t you going to wish me luck?”

Dear Sasha,

Just a note to offer my personal congratulations on the completion of what was obviously your thesis. The incorporation of outside intelligences is what this family needs badly, and my personal feeling is that you have likely done well. Lots of luck, and my best to your husband.

Affectionately,

Uncle Bob

Dear Sasha,

I knew all that talk about never getting married was just a cover. However crazy you behave sometimes, underneath you’re a sensible girl. And why not? You come from a sensible family. I look forward to welcoming Franklin into our family. It will be nice to have a brother, and maybe someday a nephew.

Love,

Ben

Almost immediately, the habits of matrimony took over. I had used my dime-store wedding ring for the City Hall ceremony, but when it began to tarnish and itch, I gave in and bought a gold ring, the cheapest we could find. We stayed in our respective dorms for about a week, then moved into a rooming house together off Riverside Drive. To avoid confusion, I changed my name on my graduate records to Mrs. Franklin Raybel. Did I only imagine the philosophers treating me with a new respect?

Except on weekends when we went out for Chinese food or heated Chef Boyardee spaghetti dinners in the communal kitchen (our room came with “kitchen privileges”), I continued to eat in the dorm where, with no refund forthcoming, my meals were paid for. But we studied together evenings, taking a break to walk down Broadway holding hands and returning to sleep in the same bed. No more sneaking around; no more blind dates; no more wasted hours on the telephone; no more lonely Sundays. I brewed us real coffee for breakfast, using the coffee grinder someone had sent us for a wedding present. We drank it in our room with doughnuts from the A&P, and on Sundays we’d spend half the day in bed reading the New York Times together. It was a pleasure to snuggle up at night to another body; it was a pleasure to be married.

One day, not long after we had moved in together, a large envelope arrived in the mail from my mother. In it were a few late congratulations that had been sent on from Indiana, and two copies of a clipping from the Cleveland Post. The Women’s Page announcement of my marriage. The copy, though embarrassing, was the usual so-and-so, daughter of so-and-so, marries so-and-so, son of so-and-so; the couple will reside in New York City. The shocker was the large reproduction of my high school graduation picture which accompanied the article. The reporter must either have remembered me or have checked back into old Baybury yearbooks; for there under the picture, in boldface type, was the caption: sasha davis, former baybury heights prom queen, weds graduate fellow at columbia.

I was overcome with shame. Frank had never seen a picture of my other self. Even I hardly recognized her with those shiny cheeks and that eager smile, those long thick lashes and carefully tousled hair. Had she said “cheese”? Was that Joey Ross’s Keystone pin on her sweater?

She was someone else, not me. The picture was a gross distortion, at once too lovely and too crude. Studio pose, magazine lighting, years past. I tore it into tiny pieces and flushed them down the hall toilet, grateful Alport would not see it, grateful Frank was not home. (“Gee, Sasha,” Frank would say, focusing from the clipping to me, “You mean I’m married to a Queen of a Bunny Hop?”) But when I went back to our room and saw the second copy mocking me from the table, for some reason, instead of tearing it up, I folded it carefully into a square and deposited it with the rest of my past (my scholastic aptitude scores, my list of lovers in a secret code, my childhood poems) in a manila envelope I kept hidden among my sweaters. There was really no decent hiding place in my new life; I would have to rent a post office box for mailing things to myself.

A little later Frank returned from his class. “Any mail?” he asked.

“Nothing much,” I said, pouring us each a cup of freshly brewed coffee. “Just some more greeting cards from your relatives.” I wondered if the lie showed. My mother always said she could tell when I was lying. Something I did unconsciously gave it away. Like Pinocchio’s nose suddenly growing.

“What do you mean, my relatives?”

“Your Indiana relatives.”

“Then what’s this big envelope from Cleveland doing here?” he asked.

On our wedding day I had promised Frank grudgingly that I would not sleep with anyone besides him, though I’d made it clear that the promise was against my principle of free love. Now, hoping to throw him off the track, I exploded with a terrible precedent.

“What is this, an inquisition? Can’t I even get a letter from my own mother without your thinking I’m having an affair? That envelope is what the cards came in.”

Frank said nothing. Instead, he punished my outburst with a withering look and a perfectly pronounced French couplet the meaning of which I didn’t understand.

“What does that mean?” I snapped.

“Oh, never mind,” he said, satisfied to have made me ask. And with a sigh he picked up his book and withdrew.

It was our first quarrel. It set a pattern for all that would follow, and of course there would be others.

When we went to bed that night, Frank said, as calm as an afterthought, “Sasha, you’d better understand right now, if I ever find out you’ve been unfaithful to me, I’ll divorce you on the spot.”

Though I wanted to be a good wife, from the beginning I found it impossible to subdue my desires. I was in fierce competition with my husband, though Frank, completely absorbed in his own studies, was probably unaware of it. He believed he had married an impulsive girl, even a supergirl, but not a separate, feeling woman. He was years ahead of me at Columbia, and though I read faster and studied better than he, I had too far to go to catch up. He was the darling of his department; I was nothing in mine. Though we had agreed to study like fury till our money ran out and then take turns getting jobs, at bottom we both knew it would be he who would get the degrees and I who would get the jobs.

After the summer we took a cheap one-and-a-half-room apartment on West 108th Street. Together we built bookshelves of raw boards and stolen bricks, and slept on a Hide-a-Bed we bought at the Salvation Army Store. But once we were settled into our appropriate young-married quarters, Frank withdrew behind his glasses into his studies, and that whole year we never had one genuine conversation. Though Frank was a live-in husband, we were more like roommates than man and wife, and I had never wanted a roommate. Even during supper when we might have talked, Frank turned on the evening news, reserving his words for the young men in his department, with whom on weekends he never tired of discussing department politics.

I began clipping recipes from the Sunday Times. I cooked Mrs. Fielding’s Texas Chili, Boeuf Bourguignon (I & II), Creole Jambalaya, Coq au Vin—all in quantity, as Frank let his single friends know they were welcome for dinner on weekends. We always had a wide range of homemade whiskey, too, since a friend who worked in a Bronx hospital gave us 200-proof lab alcohol by the gallon. We diluted it by half, flavored it with a shot of name-brand booze, poured it into reclaimed bottles, and defied anyone to tell it from the real thing.

I enjoyed those Saturday nights. Frank took visible pride in me then, showing me off and openly admiring my cooking. Not one of those tyrannical husbands to criticize his wife before his friends, he called me endearing names in baby talk and sat beside me on the sofa stroking my neck or my knee over coffee. Even after they fell into shop talk, while I cleared away the dinner dishes, he would send me affectionate glances for everyone to see. Sometimes his aroused affection carried over into bed on Saturday night when, after all the ashtrays were emptied and the paper cups thrown away, after his spectacles were deposited on the night table and my diaphragm retrieved from the drawer, he would roll on top of me to make love and tell me how happy he was to have me for a wife.

Franklin Raybel’s Favorite Chicken Suprême Tarragon

Stuff chicken breasts (skinned, boned, and halved) with tarragon, salt, pepper, parsley, lump of butter; secure with toothpicks; dredge with flour. Brown in butter on both sides. Add chopped shallot or a slice of onion, a whole clove garlic, tarragon, white wine, chicken stock, a soaked dried mushroom. Cover. Cook forty-five minutes, turning once. Remove breasts to a hot platter and keep warm. Reduce sauce and add two tablespoons heavy cream; cook to proper consistency. Add bits of butter at the end. Spoon sauce over breasts, dust with parsley. Serve with green salad and rice.

Cucumbers in Lime Dressing

Marinate an hour or so: sliced (or diced) cucumber in: juice of one lime, sugar, seasonings, diced (or grated) onion. Chill. Serve cold with curries.

My first job after the wedding money gave out was as a bookkeeping machine operator in a Wall Street bank at sixty dollars a week. As Frank forbade me to be a waitress, and I dreaded being a salesgirl, there was little else for a twenty-one-year-old nontypist to do. Without typing I was chronically “overqualified.” Without typing I couldn’t even wangle interviews for the jobs listed in the Help Wanted Female section under College Grad, nor could I apply for the non-typing researcher, editor, or “trainee” jobs for which I supposed I was suited, listed under Help Wanted Male.

My bookkeeping machine (Burroughs F212) was formidable. I named her Trixie. The work was taxing, but I liked the precision of it and, eager to master her, found a certain excitement in striking my balance at the end of each day. Until our debits and credits balanced exactly, until every decimal error had been discovered and rooted out, Mr. Calley, the department supervisor, would not permit his girls to go home. After my last deposit had been entered and the last check deducted, I would extract the subtotals, totals, and grand totals the machine had been storing up all day, push certain magic buttons, let the circuits run, and with suspended breath wait for Trixie to end her calculations and reveal in a small window on her face and printed on the record on her back two numbers which, if I had posted everything correctly all day long, would exactly, digit for digit, match. Even my disappointment when the numbers differed was exhilarating.

At first I was slow in balancing, never passing a day without error. Sometimes it was seven o’clock before I descended into the West Side IRT subway station with my book in hand, and almost eight before I surfaced again near Columbia. But by attending to Trixie, setting myself records to beat and techniques to master, I gradually improved my performance until I was as good on my Burroughs as anyone. And as though the suspense were not intoxicating enough, the clattering of fifty cumbersome calculators all totaling at once in a single room provided me with a sense of solidarity against disaster I had never before felt in New York City.

It was broken only by a fifteen-minute morning coffee break, when I made eyes at New York out the window, and a precious solitary hour for lunch. At lunchtime I explored the caverns of Wall Street, thrilled that I, Ohio-born and twenty-one, was living among skyscrapers and traditions. I saw where the Stock Exchange had been scarred in the twenties by anarchist bombs; I ate hamburgers with college educations. I heard actors rehearsing in lofts, saw pushcart markets, tasted Indian curries and baklava, listened to choruses singing Bach in Trinity Church at noon. When the weather was fine, I took a sandwich to Battery Park, on the very tip of Manhattan Island. There, watching the ferries and tugs and cruise ships passing in the harbor, I fancied myself a boy joining one of the crews sailing off to Jamaica or Barbados or even the distant source of all mental and sensual goodies, Europe. When the weather was foul, I sat in the lounge and read my book, still hopeful of one day knowing everything. Only at night when I returned to Frank who, having polished off yet another tome toward his degree, was ready to help me out cooking our dinner in time for the news—only then did I know that neither would happen.

Not that Frank was to blame. Hardly. I had no doubt he felt almost as bad as I that I was no longer a student. Hadn’t he married me half for my brains? No, I alone was to blame for being too tired to study at night and too distractable to read anything but fiction on the subway in the morning. And when I wanted to go to the movies in the evening or walk in Central Park on a weekend afternoon, Frank was too much the gentleman to allude to my lapsed ambitions. He intended no invidious comparisons as he said, “Look, I’d really rather stay home and work. I’ve got too much reading to do. But why don’t you go on without me? You’ll relax, and I’ll be able to use the time.” I felt guilty even asking him to interrupt his work, and didn’t blame him for wishing me out of the way. My restlessness was not the easiest thing for a scholar to live with.

So I went off with a neighbor, or a friend from work who lived in the Village and introduced me to pot, or alone. And sometimes, in the huge Grant’s Cafeteria on Broadway, or in the back section of the Thalia Theater, where I sat watching foreign films—sometimes I looked around for Prince Charming, just in case he too happened to be out alone catching a breath of air or taking in a movie.

“Miss Raybel? Or is it Mrs. Raybel?”

“Mrs. Raybel.”

“Mrs. Raybel, it has come to our attention that you are a college graduate,” said the personnel manager, an elderly gentleman dressed by Brooks Brothers.

What could he want? Mr. Calley, the bookkeeping department supervisor, patting me kindly on the rear, had assured me, sending me down here, that I was not to be fired.

“In that case, we are going to offer you a promotion. We are prepared to transfer you to the Foreign Department at a starting salary of seventy-five dollars a week,” he beamed.

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Translating.”

I swallowed my surprise. French, my only foreign language, had always been my worst subject. “Translating what?” I asked.

“Letters, documents, letters of credit.”

I knew I couldn’t manage it, but the raise was substantial. “What languages?” I asked.

“You’ll translate from all the languages into English. French, Spanish, German, Italian. Not Chinese,” he smiled.

I nodded. What difference did it make whether I was unable to translate from one language or many? “My German may need a bit of brushing up,” I offered.

“Oh, don’t worry. You’re a college graduate. You’ll pick it up,” he said. “We have some real foreigners up there to help you out. How’s your typing?”

Real foreigners. Spanish sailors with bearded lips; Italians; German philosopher-refugees. “Pretty good,” I lied, praying to be spared the humiliation of a typing test.

“Fine. You can start on Monday, then. Report to me first thing Monday morning, and I’ll take you up to Foreign and introduce you around.”

“Thank you.”

“Good day.”

We shook hands, and I returned to Bookkeeping to say goodbye to the women in the department and try one last time for perfect on Trixie.

At a party over the weekend I became acutely sensitive to the ubiquitous married we:

“We love Indian music.”

“We were shocked to hear about Artie.”

“We thought from the review we would love the new production of Whim, but we walked out at intermission, we found it so bad.”

When Frank used it about me, I shouted before everyone, “Speak for yourself!”

It puzzled him, because the statement in which the offending word occurred was unobjectionable; in fact, true. But I felt misrepresented by it anyway. Trapped, suffocating in that abysmal we.

I lasted less than a month in the Foreign Department. A flirtation begun with the man at the next desk (a Wharton graduate on the Executive Training Squad whose assistant I was) ended abruptly when he was transferred to another branch. Once he was gone, I was ashamed of ever having taken up with him, even for a lunchtime diversion.

Nothing was working out. Frank had bought me a five-language commercial dictionary at the University Bookstore, and I studied German by listening to the Threepenny Opera sung in the original German. The singer, Lotte Lenya, the composer’s extraordinary wife, became my new inspiration. I bought all her records. Most of her songs were about a prostitute, Jenny, who refused to be trampled on. “Wenn einer tritt, dann bin ich es”—“if somebody’s to do the stepping, it’ll be me.” After work and the dinner dishes, I would sit listening to her songs, following the record jacket translation of the lyrics, memorizing Lenya’s strange inflections. Sometimes I was moved to tears singing along with her, sometimes to fury. Even Frank peered suspiciously over his glasses when Lenya and I sang the one in which Jenny gets to decide who in the city shall be spared and who shall be killed (a fantasy twice removed, and doubly safe). Kill them all, says Jenny—alle! And when the heads roll, she says Hoppla!

But it was the wrong German for the bank, and even the dictionary was of little use. The job turned out to be a typing job after all, and they were bound to discover I couldn’t type. I wondered if they would fire me before I quit, or if I would just stop going in to work one day. The prospect of being fired was depressing, but there was unemployment to collect if I stuck it out. I didn’t care; it was time to start exploring another section of the city anyway.

When Frank learned that he was to receive the coveted Haversham Ellis History Fellowship for the following year, he broke precedent and called me at the office.

“Hey, that’s great, Frankilee!” I said, using his mother’s diminutive.

“How about celebrating?” he said. “I’ll meet you downtown after work.”

It was an assistantship, far too prestigious for him to turn down. But it hardly paid enough to live on. Come September it would be his turn to work and mine to study according to our master plan, but that was obviously out of the question now.

I maintained a firm silence through both martinis, concentrating on the bartender’s art. For me to be anything but supportive was perverse. I could certainly not be so selfish as to act out my “neurosis” and sabotage what was going to be an exceptional career. Self-destructive, too, since Frank’s success would carry me up with him. If I could not be content with his success, the least I could do was wait, or state my terms. After all, I was still young. (Young!) My turn was coming. There were many dissertation widows at Columbia: none of them complained.

I tried to be gracious as we moved to a booth to map out our future. Publications and professorships, sabbaticals and grants to study abroad. The gates were open. Applying for the right grants with care would get us anywhere Frank chose to go.

“I hope you realize,” I said at last, for the record, “I’m not moving out of New York City for any professorship, except maybe to Europe.” I chastised myself for my failure of enthusiasm, but I no longer cared what Frank thought of me. Bitch? Okay. I could just see myself pouring tea at, say, New England University. Sasha Raybel, faculty wife.

“Don’t worry,” said Frank with his wry condemning smile, “no one would dream of asking you to make any sacrifices.”

Job hunting was the same as the year before, only I was a year older. In the employment agencies where I took typing tests and hopefully filled out forms, there were more pretty girls than I had remembered. Too many; New York, so glamorous and promising, was a tough city.

Every night, returning home jobless, I brushed my hair one hundred strokes and took long hot baths to soak the filth out of my pores. I thought I would never soak clean.

“Face cream?” taunted Frank. “What kind of a job are you looking for?”

I didn’t know what kind. My singular assets were worthless without experience behind them. Besides, they were already slipping. I needed my looks. What was Russell’s Paradox again? What was Plato’s doctrine of the soul? I drifted off into sleep each night trying to remember, except when Frank, claiming his due, left his own books early to join me in bed. If I could, I pretended to be already asleep when he came in, but more often I received his odd hurried thrusts, matching his rhythm and milking him quickly with affected groans and sighs so he would turn over the sooner and let me dream in peace.

“Guess who.”

It was a voice from the dead. “Roxanne!”

“Right. Glad to see you’re still passing tests.”

“Where are you?”

“At Penn Station. We’ve moved to Fort Dix in New Jersey, and I’m just in for the day. Want some company?”

“Do I! How are you? Do you know how to get here?”

Frank looked up from his book, keeping his finger on the spot of the page where he had left off reading, while I explained who it was.

“Very nice,” he said. “I’ll go to the library after she comes and leave you two girls alone. You probably won’t want me around anyway.”

I ran around emptying ashtrays and straightening up. I wanted it nice for Roxanne. I was ashamed to introduce Frank to her, who had known Alport.

“I brought you some poems from the sticks,” said Roxanne in the doorway as though it hadn’t been years since we’d seen each other. She looked strong and beautiful. She hadn’t aged a day, not even with childbirth. We had both let our hair grow long and abandoned lipstick. I wanted to hug and kiss her, but we didn’t touch.

“Come in. This is Frank.”

She handed me a long envelope and gave a shy hello to Frank. “I’m glad to meet you,” she said. “You probably won’t like my poems, but you’re welcome to read them too.”

“I’d be glad to read them for you. Sasha has spoken of you often. I’m due at the library now, but I’ll be back later. Please excuse me.”

I couldn’t wait till he was out the door, he embarrassed me so. Due at the library!—like an important book.

“Quick. Tell me. Have you left your husband?” I asked Roxanne as soon as he’d left.

“Not yet,” she said, “but I’m preparing my escape.” Her hair fell delicately over her pale cheeks. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “Once my Sasha starts nursery school I’m going to look for a job. Meanwhile, I’ve made up a résumé and I commit at least one act of attrition a day.”

“Attrition?”

“Sabotage.”

“What kind of sabotage?” I asked, pouring us some coffee. Roxanne smiled her old inward smile that spoke of a certain pain.

“All kinds. There’s no end to what you can do if you just attend to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“First there are the dailies: mismating the socks, scorching the favorite shirt, not hearing him when he talks to me, over-Accenting the scrambled eggs. You wouldn’t believe what a mere first lieutenant can demand to be served for his breakfast, and every course presents a new challenge to the ingenious homemaker.”

She was in marvelous form, though I didn’t believe a word she said. Frank would have called her “shrill.”

“But besides the dailies, there are the specials,” she went on, dissolving sugar in her cup. “Sometimes I read him recipes out loud when the ball game’s on, rub his nose in it. I used to leave dirty diapers in selected spots. And once,” she said, her eyes lighting up, “once when he and his buddies were going fishing, I put a raw egg in his lunchbox instead of a hard-boiled one.”

She spoke with such glee that I began to suspect it was true. “What happened?”

“To me? Nothing. I played innocent. But you should have seen Whit when he came home.”

Later, after lunch, she showed me snapshots of my namesake, a curly-haired blond with Roxanne’s faraway look.

“Why are you still living with him?” I ventured.

“No money,” she said plainly. “Can’t leave till I can come here and get a job. Can’t get a job till I can do something with Sasha. If I left now, I know I’d wind up in Virginia with mother. But don’t worry, I’m preparing. I don’t intend to spend my life stuck on some foul army base. No,” she leaned back on the sofa and looked around our drab quarters, “this is where I want to be. New York. Columbia. Free.”

I felt sorry for her, imagining her alone and divorced. In her shoes, I thought, I would have made do. That was the main reason I intended to have no children. But to have no husband either? Perhaps she could get another husband. It seemed unlikely with a child to raise—what man would put up with someone else’s child? It was a wonder how strong Roxanne was, given her handicaps. I wished I had the guts for such risks. I admired her more than I pitied her.

At last I opened my own old wound, telling her about Alport’s wife and how I happened to get married.

“At least you have a husband you can respect,” said Roxanne. “I don’t think he likes me much, but then he didn’t marry me.”

I knew what she meant. Everyone had the same response. “You have to forgive Frank for being so formal,” I said. “It’s just his style. People usually think he’s judging them, but really he’s just shy. Even with me. He hardly ever opens up.”

But by then I knew Frank’s silence wasn’t shyness at all. He simply had nothing to say to me. Roxanne saw in five minutes what it took me almost a year to discern: he disapproved. Of her, and of me too. I had long since stopped being exceptional. When he did speak it was usually with a smug wit that put one instantly on the defensive or else in affectionate mindless baby talk. His silences themselves were accusations. He came across like one’s father, making one want never to hang up one’s pajamas or clean up one’s room.

“Well,” said Roxanne, with a pensive smile, “it’s probably better to have a husband who never opens up than to be stuck with one who never shuts up.”

After several weeks I finally landed a receptionist job in a trading-stamp company on the East Side where I was supposed to sit alone in a large plush room on the executive floor and screen out undesirables without offending. Desirables were to be entertained. By memorizing a rogues’ gallery of executive photographs, I was to distinguish the faces of the million-dollar customers from the mere thousand-dollar ones and know whom to serve coffee or a highball, and whom to get rid of. The job required tact and paid eighty dollars a week. The executive assistant who hired me said, “I like you. You’ve got class written all over your face.” I was not permitted to read on the job (“it doesn’t look nice”), but on the other hand, no one ever asked me if I could type.

I spent the long hours between customers picking my cuticle and daydreaming. I played games with myself, guessing what sort of man would walk in next. When the elevator opened and a customer came in, it was a little event. I liked some of them; I felt awkward with others. But with each one, million-dollar, thousand-dollar, or just messenger boy, I was obsessed to know if he thought me desirable. I began to devise little tests for finding out. But no matter how clever the tests, I never could be sure. I kept outsmarting myself with my subtle criteria.

In a desperate attempt to defy my limitations and know the unknowable, I made an ultimate test. Was it diabolical or just an extension of my job? I went to bed with a customer.

He was a heavy-set, middle-aged highball-drinking customer from my own Midwest who, out of admiration or inattention, took me for a New Yorker. He came into the office late one morning, leafed through several Time magazines and Fortunes, and was still waiting to see my boss at lunchtime.

“Have lunch with me?” he asked.

“Why not?” I answered. He reminded me a little of Mr. Winograd. Both had hair growing out of their ears and both were millionaires.

We went to his hotel, only two blocks away. No one broke the Muzak as we rode up in the elevator. I looked straight ahead at the light moving behind the floor numbers. 12. 14. 15. 16. So this is how it’s done, I thought. I wondered how he had known I was willing to go to his room.

He put the do not disturb sign on the door handle and turned the key in the lock. Then he gave me a big smile.

“Do you have a contraceptive?” I asked, embarrassed. I thought: I’ll have to get a diaphragm for the office.

“Sure thing,” he said, grinning. “‘Always be prepared,’ is my motto.” He took a condom out of his wallet and held it up. “See?”

We undressed, fucked, and dressed again. “I hope you’ll excuse me,” I said, checking my face in the mirror. “I’ve got to get back to work now.” I was sorry there’d be no one to tell.

“What about your lunch?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about that. I never eat lunch.”

“That’s not good,” he said, shaking his head with paternal concern and tucking a bill in my coat pocket. “You should eat.”

I didn’t peek at the bill until I got back to the office. The mere thought of it lying there in my pocket was exhilarating enough. All the way back, my heart pounding in time with the clicking of my heels on the pavement, I kept thinking: if he thinks I’m beautiful it will be twenty dollars at least. Twenty struck me as a very large amount. But of course, with my enormous capacity to trick myself, I might actually have been setting what I knew to be a low price just to save my ego. Like the excuses I had given myself for my mistakes on Trixie. I was never able to devise a thoroughly unambiguous test.

It was a fifty-dollar bill. I was jubilant. I looked in the mirror. I am beautiful, I thought.

But when my customer came back from his lunch a couple of hours later and acted as though he didn’t know me, I was quite as uncertain of how I looked as I had been in the morning. There was really no way to tell.

“How do you do? I’m Dr. Webber. Please sit down.”

I sank into a deep leather chair opposite his large desk. The room was soothingly dark, but even so, I couldn’t look at the doctor. Or at the motel-modern pictures on the wall, or at the family photos in a silver frame, or out the shaded window. I focused on the telephone.

“Perhaps you would like to tell me what made you seek help?”

With those pictures and that voice how could he possibly help me? But having an answer ready, I decided to use it. “I think I’m frigid,” I said. It came out softly, as though I were on the verge of tears. Nevertheless, I forced myself to look at him as I said the word.

He was grey and slim, with a goatee. Younger than he sounded. I had an urge to curl up on his lap.

“I see,” he said. He matched the fingertips of his left hand with those of his right, leaned back in his own leather chair, and contemplated the digital connections. Looking down his nose that way made him seem cross-eyed. “How old are you Miss Raybel? Or is it Mrs. Raybel?”

“Twenty-three. Misses.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” smiled the doctor. “You’re very young. I can think of no reason that you can’t be helped.”

“Really?” I could think of several myself.

He got out a long pad and, poising a pen over it, asked me quietly, “How long have you had this condition?”

“I guess always. Though I didn’t know it until recently.”

“I see,” he said writing. I fancied him jotting down, always. He looked up. “You have never had an orgasm, then?”

Had I? I squirmed with embarrassment. Couldn’t the doctor tell without asking me? Wasn’t that what they were trained to do?

“I don’t know,” I said. Did it count, I wondered, that Alport could kiss me to joy? “Anyway, not through intercourse.”

I didn’t know which embarrassed me more: my confession, or my choice of the word intercourse. Impossibly equivocal.

He watched me, waiting. I was grateful for the darkness. I knew I was expected to continue, but I didn’t know what to say. The more I wanted to please him, the more impossible to speak. I counted the holes on the telephone dial and was astonished to find ten, one for each of the sins I had come to confess.

“How long have you been married?” he asked at last, helping me out. Such a considerate doctor.

“Three years.” I thought he would write down three and give me respite, but he didn’t. He waited for me to proceed as deliberately as I waited for him to produce the next question. At last, thoughtfully fingering his beard, he leaned back and said kindly, “Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself, Sasha?”

Of course I was licked before I even started. I had never been one to explain myself. The very things I needed to confess, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even select a vocabulary. Intercourse was out. Fucking? Relations? Having sex? Fornicating? Sleeping with? Going to bed with (even if there were no bed)? Each was wrong in its own way.

“I find it difficult to talk,” I started honestly, “about my problem.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “Talk about anything you like. Anything at all.”

But each thing I thought of to say was sure to convey the wrong impression or strike a false tone. I tried to think of something both intelligent and shocking, something telling and rare, something to make this doctor know that I was not, in Dr. John Watson’s memorable words, just another ordinary “quacking, gossiping, neighbor-spying, disaster-enjoying” neurotic frigid woman—a textbook case; but I could not. I said nothing.

At last Dr. Webber interrupted my interminable silence to announce the session nearly over, time to arrange for appointments and fees. “What does your husband do?” he was careful to ask.

“He’s the Haversham Ellis History Fellow at Columbia this year,” I said, instantly ashamed of the pride in my voice. “I’m a receptionist,” I added for penance.

Mother had offered to help with the bills, but I didn’t mention that. I hoped the fee would be low enough that I wouldn’t be forced to turn tricks at lunchtime, which might further damage my psyche.

Finally we settled on a fee. A bargain, considering. The doctor waited as I put on my jacket. When I finally left through the larger of two mysterious doors, I wondered if he was observing my ass, and if so, what he thought of it.

More parties, more contempt. It was enough to make one cynical! In Columbia waters I had to swim carefully to avoid being caught in the net laid for nonconforming traffickers in capitalism. I had worked in a bank, then in a trading-stamp company: clearly suspect. Unless I was careful to denounce them (yes, even Trixie), I was sure to be judged guilty. As to my other activities, reading poetry on the subway was the certain mark of a dabbler. Starfish were as unacceptable at Columbia as they had been in Baybury Heights. Like the Ugly Ducking, I seemed always to be swimming in the wrong part of the bay.

Again, I surmised the safest mode was silence. As more of our friends took advanced degrees and wives, I camouflaged my reading matter in plain brown paper covers and withdrew further into myself. A closet dilettante, biding my time.

I was seeing Dr. Webber regularly, Mondays and Thursdays, after work, and though I tried to do what was expected of me, I found myself talking about everything except what really mattered. In fact, it was by observing what I was unable to say that I discovered what really mattered: whether or not he found me beautiful.

I was frantic to know but could not bring myself to ask. Even if I could someday manage the question, how would I make him answer it? And if he should miraculously answer, how could I know he was telling the truth? I couldn’t even ask him if he thought me pretty, an easier, an almost innocent question, and one common courtesy would dictate he answer yes. But like one obsessed, I could not ask. (Aha! he would have said had he known my obsession, why do you want to know?) Instead I tried to captivate him. I concocted dreams with secret messages for him to decode. I drenched him in anecdotes and plied him with metaphors. I gave him my favorite poems to read. Leading him to the well of my beauty if he’d happened to miss it, I told him of my various conquests and seductions, exaggerating to inspire him to drink.

“It’s interesting,” he observed, “that the only man you say you loved is a father, as old as your own father, and forbidden to you by the mother, his wife.” He ended on a question mark, hoping I would pick up the thread. But I wouldn’t. I found his tiresome moralizing silly.

“I loved Alport before I knew he had a wife,” I said. “I’ve been to bed with older married men with more children than he. And not for love.”

Sometimes I rebuked him for the genetic fallacy: taking cause for value—which only proved to him that he was probably “on to something”; and sometimes, planting my profile smack in his line of vision, I penalized him with silence.

I would wait, smoking cigarette after cigarette, until he came up with a question. Usually it was, “I wonder why you are feeling hostile today?” or else it was his second-favorite conversational gambit:

“What about Frank, your husband?”

“What about him?” I would return. My husband, like my marriage, bored me, as, no doubt, I bored him. We no longer had any life in common. He was full of no’s and don’t’s while I liked to think I lived by yes and do. Frank did nothing but study during the week and see his friends on Saturday nights. He varied neither schedule nor sentence structure. The baby talk he had always used for addressing me in public he now used in private as well. Deceiving him had led me to avoid him, and since being in therapy exempted me from his sexual advances (“I’m still frigid, Frank, so don’t touch me”), our contact was minimal.

“You hardly ever mention him. Don’t you think that’s rather … uh … unusual?”

And then I told him once again that, not believing in romantic love and finding my husband sufficiently tolerant of my idiosyncrasies to permit me a modicum of freedom, I considered my marriage satisfactory. Apart from the sex, of course, which was my own problem.

“And Frank? Does he consider it satisfactory too?”

“He doesn’t complain,” I snickered. It was wrong of the doctor to call him Frank and take his side.

“Don’t you think he knows about your … uh … activities?”

“Oh, no!” I was shocked. “Do you think I should tell him?”

The doctor said nothing. I knew my “activities” had no bearing on Frank. They might have, if I ever pursued them for love. But I never did. Frank, however, couldn’t be expected to understand that. A conventional fellow, he would feel himself wronged and required to do something if he knew.

“What do you think, Sasha?” Dr. Webber asked, enigmatically stroking his beard.

“I think it would upset him terribly to know, and I’m really not out to hurt him, whatever you think. It would mess up all his plans. He’d probably feel obliged to leave me.”

The doctor nodded. He seemed to like that speech better than my other one, the one in which I weighed my own ten reasons for leaving Frank. That one made Dr. Webber break all his principles and actually give me advice:

“If I were you, Sasha, I wouldn’t make any drastic changes right now while you’re in the middle of analysis.”

He seemed to feel that the known was better than the unknown, another man would prove no better for me than this one, and a crazy nymphomaniacal penis-envying castrating masochistic narcissistic infantile fucked-up frigid bitch like me was lucky to have hooked any man at all.

Actually, Dr. Webber seemed less interested in the practical questions surrounding my marriage than in the theoretical. Over the months I had been working painstakingly at getting him to reveal his premises, but with little success. Until one day, while I was discussing a dream I’d had the night before, a chance remark I made caused him to reveal his entire theory.

That night I had dreamed a chess game in which I, a plain red pawn, had so yearned to reach the eighth rank and become queen that I had refused gambits, squandered opportunities, betrayed my team. Alone and unprotected, I went on trying for queen despite certain defeat.

“What does being queen mean to you?” asked the doctor, suppressing a yawn.

I couldn’t tell him about the Bunny Hop. Knowing I had once been considered beautiful might prejudice his own answer to the question I still hoped one day to ask. “The queen is the most powerful piece on the board,” I answered. “She outdoes everyone. She can move almost every way there is to move.” It was rich with symbolism and also true.

“The most powerful? Is she more powerful than the king?” he asked with an insinuating smile.

Either he didn’t play chess, or he was after something. I went along.

“In the world a king may be more powerful, but in chess the queen is more powerful. That’s why as a little pawn I wanted to be a boy and as a woman I enjoy playing chess.”

I was pleased with my answer, but nothing like Dr. Webber. I could tell by the way he sat up and began to scribble that he was through yawning for that session.

“Can you think of what the dream might be saying?” he prodded.

I considered. Frank had applied for a Fulbright for a year’s study in Germany. I was excited at the prospect of going abroad, but apprehensive as well; perhaps the dream took on that dilemma. As I was about to suggest something along those lines, Dr. Webber, impatient to share his revelation, leaned forward, reading from his notes.

“Even as a little pawn you always wanted to be a boy. Yet you long to be a ‘queen,’” he said. “You have ‘betrayed your own team’—your own nature?”

Dr. Webber’s crude “hints,” which I had always felt free to pursue or let lie, now came thickly. He was like a prompter, trying not to be heard, yet unwilling to let the lines be lost and the play ruined. The more I ignored his interpretation, the more certain he became.

Didn’t everything, he asked, reduce for me to queen versus king? My belligerence, my seductions, my willfulness? Did they not all point to a profound conflict within my nature? Was I not always attempting to conquer where I should yield? Take where I should give? Did I not identify with my father instead of my mother? Were not my very ambitions (to be a lawyer! a philosopher!), my rejection of maternity, my fantastic need to excel, my unwillingness to achieve orgasm—were they not all denials of my own deepest, instinctive self—my feminine self?

I had never before seen Dr. Webber so animated, not even when he was advising me to do nothing rash. I felt the time had come to plunge in and pose my own question. Catching him off guard in an expansive moment seemed my best chance of getting a truthful answer. After all, self-knowledge was what I was paying for.

He was still waiting for me to agree when, as casually as I could, I said, “Do you think I’m beautiful, Doctor?” If I could learn the truth about myself now, it would be worth all this painful analysis.

Dr. Webber pounced on the question. “Why do you ask?” he asked.

“I don’t know, I just wondered,” I said, looking intently at the telephone and mentally dialing a number. He was impossible to pin down; already I was sorry to have asked.

He examined me closely while my cheeks went red and my hands went damp. Then he said, “We have just come to an important—a breakthrough!—discovery with this chess dream. Even if you don’t acknowledge it openly, unconsciously you do acknowledge it. You ask, Do I think you are beautiful? You mean, Do I think you are a woman? Don’t you see? Yes, Sasha, I think you are a woman. I know you are. Now you must begin to accept this in yourself.”

In his enthusiasm, he sounded positively Viennese. He was clearly too wrapped up in his breakthrough to spare a thought for a poor red pawn like me. My spirit sank as I realized I would never get a straight answer to my question.

He ranted on. “There is nothing the matter with you, Sasha. You are no ‘freak.’ You are exactly what you were born to be, if you will only open up to Frank and let yourself.”

It was all so unfair. I was his patient, my father was helping to pay for his vacations, and yet Dr. Webber seemed again to be taking Frank’s side. I began to cry.

“Yes, Sasha, I have no doubt now that you will soon achieve orgasm on the deepest, most fulfilling level. Cry, go ahead. You are on the threshold of woman’s greatest fulfillment. You are at last beginning to feel. Yes, cry. Feel. When you are fully able to do that, you will be able to give yourself totally to your husband and have that blissful union with him you long for.”

I stopped listening and blew my nose. My skin would be blotching. I sensed my time was up, though Dr. Webber was too engrossed to his theory to notice. Well, perhaps he wouldn’t notice the blotching either, or the clouds of skin puffing up around my eyes. As I put on my coat, I heard him say,

“—quite certain that someday you will even feel deeply enough to think about having a family.”

I turned to leave.

“Not yet, of course,” I heard him say as I neared the door—I was nowhere near ready yet—but someday, when I wanted to.

There was nothing to do on shipboard but drink brandy in the bar or snuggle under a blanket on a deck chair rolling with the great waves and try to read until the next meal. Now the next meal would be the last.

This homeward voyage was different from the outward journey. Back then when the waves rocked the ship I had struggled to keep my balance. That voyage was to have described the largest of the concentric circles on which I had been expanding my universe since that first train ride through the Adirondacks back in the forties. Stuffing the sleeves and pockets of all my clothes with a year’s supply of Tampax (Regular and Super) in case the remote corners of Europe were unsupplied, armed with a select list of people to look up in all the cities of my choice, I had gone to plot my future, rising early each morning to play shuffleboard and participate in the drama of the morning sea.

And now? The concentric circles were shrinking. My future was doubling back on itself. The seven days at sea (like the summer in Rome, like the year abroad) had come and gone with the salt spray, leaving only a residue of abandoned plans. From Genoa I had written Roxanne of my return, swearing her to secrecy. “Don’t tell Frank I’m coming,” I wrote, and lapsing into our old idiom: “In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” But with no one on board to save me, it was clear even before we sighted the Statue of Liberty standing catatonic in New York’s filthy harbor that I’d be living with Frank again that very night. End of the journey. Unless …

“I’ve been watching you. Do you mind if I talk to you?”

At last! I looked up from my book.

It was the soft-spoken engineer from Brooklyn, seven days too late. I had hardly noticed him since our brief introduction at the champagne sailing party; we had evidently signed up for different sittings.

“Why should I mind?” I said. He had a gentle, a respectful air.

“You’re always so preoccupied when I see you up here. I’ve been afraid to intrude. But since we’ll be docking in a few hours, I figured it was now or never. My name’s William Burke, in case you don’t remember.”

It was a straightforward, low-keyed pitch. I smiled at him.

“You must be eager to be getting home,” he said, looking off at the deep waves. From out on the ocean we all called it home, no matter how we felt.

“Not really,” I confided. “I’m actually dreading it. In fact, I have a strong impulse to stow away some place on board and go right back to Europe. What about you?”

He looked straight into my eyes. “My impulse,” he said softly but without the slightest hesitation, “is to follow your impulse.”

The sentiment, so softly expressed, was enough to trigger the appalling flow of lust. I lowered my eyes. It took so little. However often it happened, I was always unprepared; abashed to discover that so-delicate mechanism reacting despite me.

A confused shout and a rush of passengers to the rail came to my rescue. People began hugging one another and leaping around like children.

“Someone’s sighted land,” said William Burke.

“Do you see it?” I asked.

“No. But then, it’s not what we’re looking for, is it?”

Again. Sinking stomach, confusion. How crudely my body behaved. “We’d better go down for breakfast,” I said, not really wanting to leave the deck but desperate to say something. Why hadn’t he come forward a week earlier?

My chivalrous friend touched my elbow and led me down.

We exchanged addresses. “Maybe we can get together in the City,” said William Burke.

“You know, I’m married,” I answered, liking my candor but loathing my message.

“Oh? Where’s your husband?”

“We’ve been separated,” I said, trying to salvage something. “He’s in New York. We’re going to try to work out an arrangement.”

“Well, if you do, perhaps he’ll join us for lunch, then.”

Not until much later, on the dock awaiting customs inspection, did we see each other again—far too late to be of any use. Once I got home I would have to behave myself—or else what was the point of going back? Indecision was unpardonable at this late date. Anyway, I had tried it alone and failed. From under our respective letters, B and R, we waved to one another; after that I avoided looking over at him.

“Anything to declare?” asked the customs inspector. I wasn’t prepared for declarations. He looked from my two suitcases to me and back again. Since Spain, my two bags contained all I possessed.

“Nothing. Six packs of Bleus,” I said, opening my purse. He gave me an indulgent smile and chalked my bags without examining them, leaving me free to re-enter New York.

I looked quickly around the cavernous dock. Afraid Frank might be lying in wait for me. No one in sight.

With a last gesture of independence I avoided the redcaps and lugged my bags outside myself, but I knew I hadn’t the muscle for an independent life. The taxis and trucks were speeding along Twelfth Avenue exactly as they had before I left. Everything was exactly the same—as though I didn’t exist. No matter how grand my schemes or fanciful my ambitions, my year abroad hadn’t dented the universe.

I hailed a taxi, gave the driver Frank’s address, and headed uptown to the mate, as the saying goes, I deserved.