GABRIELLE, AS A NEW mother, is bewildered and seeks a way out of her bewilderment through the language she learned at school, a language that sounds out of place in the park among the baby carriages, where we sit in the shade. She says that having been an English major, breathing in stories day and night, encourages the dangerous tendency to think of your own life as a story. No, better still, a novel. Of course, she adds with a meaning glance at me, the tendency is not limited to English majors. It afflicts people with a certain organizing sensibility, people who expect that the structure of the universe will reflect the structure of the mind.
They used to call God Author of My Being, I say.
Ah, yes! But note, nota bene (she smiles at her own pedantry, her eyes momentarily alight behind the tinted aviator glasses, amber to match the copper of her newly cropped hair), how that author is distant and all-powerful. He’s got a whole library. I meant each person as the author of her own being.
(Nota bene, she uses the feminine pronoun whenever she can, before it was popularly taken up, with the sweetly optimistic notion that a mountain can be removed grain by grain.)
Well, I guess we do act according to a script at times. It can’t be helped, I respond lazily, and rock the carriage for her with my foot.
I’m not talking about a script, Lydia. A script is dialogue spoken in a particular setting. And a play moves single-mindedly towards a denouement. But a novel, the sort of novel one could imagine one’s life to be, at any rate, appears to meander, with a ragbag of concerns. Also—as she talks she gazes up at the sky, shielding her eyes: will the weather stay fine for the baby?—also a novel has commentary; no matter how absent an author tries to be, it contains its own interpretation. A novel is an attempt at interpretation. Your life can’t be. That’s why the tendency is dangerous. You try to direct your life along the route of beginning, middle, and end, but actually life has a sprinkling of beginnings and middles and ends all the way through, not in the right order. This—she looks at the carriage containing Roger—is a beginning but it’s also an end of something. You try to see a cluster of major themes moving along, developing and elaborating, but actually in many lives the original themes die out or become sublimated (absently she flexes and points a foot, the way she used to do when she was training to be a dancer); new ones arise out of nowhere. Plus we never escape time, and real time is so dull and even, like a fox-trot. A novelist can treat it whimsically, make it fly back and forth or stand still. We never escape flukes, politics, weather. A novelist makes her own flukes when she needs them, and her own weather. It’s a matter of control, she says wistfully. She peers into the baby carriage, sprays a few drops of milk from the bottle onto the back of her hand. If I ever wrote a novel, she adds, I wouldn’t bother trying to hide the fact that I was in control. And rocks some more. Roger was conceived in foam—she and Don had volunteered to test a new brand in the interests of science, part of a research project at his hospital.
I am one of those people she meant. I saw myself as a character, growing and changing as they say characters must in order to seem real. I would have allowed for inevitable setbacks—no character evades those—but on the whole it was to have been a cheerful novel, comedy not tragedy. (Would anyone write herself a tragedy? Perhaps, but not me.) A lifetime of purposeful effort crowned by fitting rewards. The novel was imbued with that deepest and most treasured of middle-class notions: that life should, and would, reward good behavior.
School came to an end. For almost two years I shared an apartment in the West Nineties with Gabrielle. During most of the first year Victor was away in Europe looking at paintings—he had relaxed his rule about not using his parents’ money to make the trip. After he returned he would call me every couple of months. We would meet for dinner in chummy places where they let us sit for hours. One of our favorites was Simon’s, because it had an immense suit of armor in the entryway and in one of the metal hands rested a heap of chocolate-covered mints. Victor pointed out that we chose the same sorts of things to eat, as if that were proof of affinity. What we chose were bloody steaks and shrimp and pasta dishes in winy, garlicky sauces, bitter greens doused in vinegar, pecan pie without the whipped cream. Whipped cream was too insubstantial. We ate greedily and talked about our work. Sometimes he asked to see my hands. He said he was interested in what all that practicing did to hands. I spread them on the table, palms down. “They are changing,” he said. He examined the fingers, knuckles. “They look like hands that do something. Know something.”
“Let me see yours.”
His hands still had flecks of paint around the fingernails, and still looked older than he did. The lines were more pronounced; there were calluses and rough patches, and occasionally a small red diamond where the skin was scraped away and raw flesh exposed. He didn’t bother with Band-Aids.
We were not lovers. We played a peculiar game of advance and retreat, with infinitely small, guarded moves. He considered that he had made his major move over two years ago in that bar near the unfinished cathedral: he was still waiting for a straight answer. I hedged, while we both went out with unimportant people whom we never discussed. I had the premonition that our becoming lovers would be an act of closure, that this phase of my life, not a very happy phase but one of curiously suspended potential, would come to a swift end.
He was drawing and painting all day and working in a bar four nights a week, as he had promised or threatened to do, a bar in the East Thirties that served suburban commuters in business suits juicing up for the trip home from Grand Central, and later in the evening, local drinkers. On weekends he went to the galleries, and read, and cooked enormous soups that could last for a week. “And what do you put in the soup?” “Everything I can find. It is an immense, thick, and variegated soup.” He didn’t accept any more money from his parents. I thought that was foolish. “If my parents were rich and wanted to give me money so I could spend my time learning to paint, I would take it.”
“Have your parents offered you any money?”
“Well, yes, a little.”
“But you would rather dash around town with four jobs at once, accompany the dance classes and do the children’s theatre, et cetera, et cetera. So what’s the difference?”
“There is a difference. My parents don’t have that much to spare. And accompanying dance classes is not making drinks in a bar. I give them bits of Mozart sonatas. Prokofiev is very good for modern dance. I improvise. I’m a great improviser. So it’s not a waste of time.”
“I keep my eyes open. It’s not a waste of time either. It’s the same thing.” He poked a fork into the crust of his baklava. Despite the immense and variegated soups he was thinner than he had been in school, almost gaunt, and yet his face was becoming less abstracted. Less secretive too. It was clear now that what I had taken to be critical disdain was simply untiring vision, eyes taking apart the world. The impatience I had sensed around the mouth was simply the wish to see through solid objects into what Matisse, he told me later, called their signs. I enjoyed observing him. I felt close to him now, though still wary. I could imagine us continuing our indulgent dinners every two months, comparing notes on our progress, indefinitely. Although after two glasses of wine I might begin to imagine him leaning close to me, and closer, as in those excruciatingly slow erotic approaches in old movies. But I would stop myself like a child covering her eyes at the scariest, most exciting part. I liked living with Gabrielle and going out on and off with undemanding men I didn’t care much about. I told Victor how sometimes Gaby and I sat up at night and talked. He groaned. “Still schoolgirls. Don’t you think I can talk too?”
“Well, but I like the idea of the apartment, also. You’ve seen it. It’s nice, isn’t it?”
“Very nice,” he said mockingly. “Very, very nice.”
I was in haste to live, to arrive at life itself instead of preparing. But I needed money. I worked at Schirmer’s off Fifth Avenue four afternoons a week. The other clerks were young musicians too; we talked shop and gave each other leads on jobs, and during quiet spells sat in the listening booths with the new recordings. I got the accompanist work through Gabrielle, at the studio where she took classes every evening. Daytime she was a simultaneous translator at the UN, through her father’s connections. And I had what Victor called et cetera, et cetera: the Children’s Theatre, the Golden Age Club. I even played hymns in a Greenwich Village church Sunday mornings. Weekdays I got up at six and practiced in my nightgown for four hours, agonizing over whether or not to enter competitions as others were doing. I didn’t feel myself a soloist; I had never liked being alone in a large space. I was an ensemble player, the kind of musician who comes to fullest life in a group, and I was happiest in the trio I had formed with Greg Parnis and Rosalie: we played at community centers, weddings, fancy parties, for a hundred or so dollars an afternoon. Rosalie was always late and frazzled because of three young children, but when she sat down with her cello it was worth the wait. And Greg was enterprising—he hunted up the jobs.
I was in haste to live, and yet everything I did felt suspended in an ether of tentativity. All impalpable, all potential. I had no patience with process. I envisioned real life as a fixed point of arrival, Evelyn on top of the dune at last, waving her arms triumphantly like a semaphore: Here I am! I was beset by fits of irritation and I read gloomy writers to give my irritation the firm grounding it lacked. In my purse was a depressing little quote from Schopenhauer about endless striving and the impossibility of true satisfaction. When I was feeling most impatient I took it out and read it with a perverse spite. Gabrielle scolded me. She refused to listen to Schopenhauer and sent me out to free concerts. I came home exalted and inspired. Until the doubts began again. What exactly was I preparing for? How to go about it? I looked at middle-aged people with wonder. Completed, their entelechies all unfurled, they had no questions in their lives, only solid answers.
Victor asked me, the second spring after I finished college, to come see his forty-five-dollar-a-month apartment on East Twenty-first Street. I hesitated, which amused him.
“Leery of men’s apartments, Lydia? You spent half your junior year in that apartment.”
“That was the year I was all mixed up. I’ve reformed.”
“I know what it is. You’re afraid you’ll have to marry me, now that I’m poor.”
“I thought I was supposed to like you better first.”
“Oh, you like me well enough. Look, this isn’t a come and see my etchings kind of thing. You should know that by now. I really want to show you what I’m doing. I come and hear whenever you play, even if it’s Oklahoma in deepest Queens.”
He was right. I went. The apartment was in a bleak neighborhood, not slummy but quietly desolate, and the name V. Rowe, neatly printed below the mailbox in the downstairs hall, was shorter and simpler than its neighbors. The large room where he worked was freshly painted white, but the rest of it—kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and hall—was the color of coffee with a few drops of cream. The kitchen contained one brown folding chair at a square table with a white porcelain top, the kind of table I remembered from my grandmother’s house, when I was a child and it was wartime. The linoleum on the floor, supposed to look like red bricks, was pockmarked and curling at the edges. Apart from the minimal amenities, he had done almost nothing in the way of decoration. I would have thought an artist needed more visual thrills. And except for that one large windowed room, the place seemed hung with gloom, a gloom not created by Victor—he was never a gloomy person—but left behind by dozens of cramped, wretched families. Or so it felt to me. He was oblivious to the legacy of gloom; he said the apartment did not depress him in the least. It was more space than he had ever called his own, and he possessed the only key. That was thrill enough.
The small kitchen window faced another small kitchen window some five feet across a dingy airshaft. On that neighboring window was a tan curtain with a knotted fringe, between whose halves I could glimpse a table with a mottled top like the cover of a composition notebook. It held a potted geranium, a jar of Maxwell House instant coffee, a box of Rice Krispies, and a white flowered mug. Victor said an old woman lived there, and at eight sharp every morning she watered her geranium from a jelly glass. The window in the bedroom looked out over a half-empty parking lot, and his living room, or studio, windows faced a narrow concrete park where old Italian men in black jackets were playing a sober but joyful game of bocce. We stood at the open window—it was a warm twilight in April—and watched the balls bump into each other and roll about. Victor said he had figured out the rules of the game from watching so long.
He offered me a beer but I reminded him that I hated beer, so he gave me ginger ale instead and showed me drawings. Dozens. No more abstract blobs pushing each other around. There were drawings of the old woman across the airshaft, frail and angular in a cotton housedress that hung loosely on her bones. Her fine hair was in a knot. He had drawn her watering her geranium, eating her bowl of Rice Krispies, wiping her table with a rag. There were drawings of the Italian men playing bocce. Their bald heads and the bocce balls were akin and offered up lovingly, like Cezanne fruits. There were drawings of the parking lot—empty, with one car, with five, with many, yet always looking faintly bereft. Some cars had dents in their fenders, a couple had flat tires. I understood then that he worked with what was at hand and made much of it. The drawings were respectful of the significance of each thing, not reverent. They were truthful and without pretension, except for one of the old woman wiping her table. That one’s sinuous lines seemed to romanticize penury in a way I didn’t care for. What I found beautiful was how he treated each object with equal attention. There was no hierarchy of priorities, no background sketched in or merely suggested. The folds of the dish towel hanging from the handle of the old woman’s refrigerator were drawn with as much care as the lines on her face. Except for the one, they were calmly celebratory, a triumph of attentiveness. I told him so. I said I liked them infinitely better than the blobs, and he smiled gratefully and kissed me lightly on the lips. I began to have one of my fantasies where we approached each other slowly, slowly, as in those movies, but he said he was starving, let’s go out and eat, there was a good Italian place on Eighteenth Street.
After we studied the menu intently he reached out for my hand and this time completed the gesture, clasped it with fingers interlocking. We sat that way for a time. The food was brought but we ignored it for once. I was aware of the entire surface where his hand touched mine—the heel, the warm hollow of the palm, the press of the fingers—and from that clasp, as though it were captured in one of those optical toys that multiply and ramify a segment of space into a world of spaces, I could imagine the whole surface of his body and how it would be. Like finding the other half, as in the myth I loved in the Symposium. I didn’t want the other half just yet. There was something equally tantalizing about being incomplete.
He looked at me in that piercing way that made me lower my eyes, but I didn’t withdraw my hand. “So come back with me. Bring your piano and your toothbrush. It’s about time, isn’t it?”
“I’ve got to figure so many things out. I’m in limbo. About work, I mean, what to do next.”
“I’m talking about love and you’re talking about work. You can work all you want.”
“If I just had a firm footing ... I’d get distracted.”
“That’s ridiculous. You weren’t distracted back when ... you know.”
“That was different. You’re different. It would be the end of something, I know.”
“Yes, the end of this stupid—” But he disciplined his temper, let go of my hand and smiled. “Do it the hard way, okay.”
“I’m afraid of making a mistake.”
“I would not be a mistake.”
Oh, the arrogance of him. I thought love had to shake a person like an earthquake, but I was quite calm. A friend was another self, too easy, too comfortable. Slip right into it.
He gave a raffish tilt of the chin and dug into his saltimbocca. “You’ve lost all your nerve. It’s a pity.” Cutting, but I thought he was wrong. I thought it took nerve not to give in.
Lately Gabrielle had a strange, almost indifferent air about her dancing. The head of the company at the studio had told her that in a year or so, if she kept on, she might get to do small bits in performances. I was elated—real life!—but she was cool. She had a distraction. Don was a resident in orthopedics, and on his free weekends he took Gabrielle to dinner and the theatre. Formal dates, I teased. She told me, after the first date, that he had lived in a fraternity house at Amherst. “A frat house! Really, Gaby.” She smiled as if I were a child who had missed the point entirely, and murmured that it wasn’t important. Don was tall, though not as tall as Victor, and competent-looking; his smooth longish blue-eyed face had an ingenuous charm, glowing as if recently splashed with aftershave. He was nothing like his ingenuous face; he was sharp and even sardonic, though well-meaning. A pragmatist, a man who would go far, operating with brains and efficiency within defined boundaries. Even as a resident he had the assured, paternalistic manner of full-fledged doctors. I had to admit he was attractive, but, “Smooth and ordinary,” I said when she asked. I never repeated it because the dates continued week after week.
When she was not quite ready, I, like the mother, made conversation with him in the living room. “And how is your music going, Lydia?” He crossed his impeccably trousered legs and leaned back on the couch, arm stretched across its upper rim, face fresh and expectant. Questions like that made me want to kill—how unlike Victor, who wished to see what was happening to my hands. But for Gabrielle’s sake I said it was going well and asked politely how his orthopedics was going, and if he found that facetious I thought it no more than he deserved. When she entered the room he rose to his feet, a graceful unfolding, and radiated adoration.
They were all slipping into it. Esther had married Ralph, purveyor of the ocean, soon after college. Nina was engaged to a fellow graduate student at Princeton. And Evelyn! Towards the end of her junior year abroad, six weeks before she was expected home, came that letter announcing her wedding in June. We must come. Rene would send us the tickets and we would stay at his house. My mother phoned me from Hartford. My father was not accepting any tickets from a Swiss banker. “What do you think we should do, Lydia?” Since I had finished college she had taken to asking me for advice as if, with the degree, I knew something she didn’t.
“We’ll go,” I said firmly. “But Daddy’s right. We’ll pay for our own tickets.”
And so I spent a swift, baffled week in Alpine greenery, among oak furniture, leatherbound books, and objets d’art. Evelyn! My nighttime companion! Would she whisper secrets to him in bed at night? He was in his middle thirties, ruddy, exquisitely dressed and mannered, but I could not picture him appreciating the secrets of a girl like Evelyn.
I was spoiling for a fight and hadn’t the heart to fight with Evelyn, who was sublimely inscrutable. In the ladies’ room of the airport in Geneva, going home, I said to my mother, “What do you think he has, a gold-studded prick?” I would have been pleased had my mother threatened to wash out my mouth with the soap she was about to squirt into her hand. But she tilted her head sideways, pursed her lips, and shrugged, lifting her free palm eloquently to the ceiling as though I had expressed her thoughts to perfection. It was a new vision of my mother.
On the plane, while my father slept in the window seat, I thought I might try for another. “What do you think of this, Mom? Listen. It’s about wanting things.” I read her my quote from Schopenhauer. “‘The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied. Further, the desire lasts long, the demands are infinite; the satisfaction is short and scantily measured out. But even the final satisfaction is itself only apparent; every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one; both are illusions. ... No attained object of desire can give lasting satisfaction, but merely a fleeting gratification; it is like alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive today that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow.’”
This time she looked as though she would have liked to wash out my mouth. And then she sighed—she had a wonderful, encompassing sigh for the mystery of it all—and patted my hand. “They have some very nice magazines to read if you’re so desperate. All you have to do is ask the stewardess.”
Two months later Gabrielle married Don, as I had known she would the minute I said “Smooth and ordinary” and saw her eyes bright blue and green with hurt.
I drank too much champagne at their wedding dinner at a French restaurant in an East Sixties brownstone. It was the sort of restaurant that had no sign outside denoting its existence and no prices on the calligraphic menu, but did have a silver medallion hanging from a heavy chain around the neck of the wine waiter. Gaby seemed very much at home in such surroundings; the more I drank, the more there grew in me a subversive notion that those four years in the dormitory and two years in the apartment, she had been an impostor. Maybe Evelyn was an impostor too.
Victor was not. Back in the empty apartment I phoned him, first at home, then at the bar.
“Hi. This is a surprise. I didn’t even know you had the number.”
“I know how to use a phone book. What are you doing there on a Saturday night?”
“Filling in for someone whose wife is having a baby. Watching a movie about the Titanic.”
“I called to ask if you want to come over. If you can desert the ship.”
“Is something the matter?”
“Does something have to be the matter for you to come over?”
“Of course not. But for you to invite me. I get off at midnight.”
“I’ll wait.”
I knew I ought to drink coffee or take a cold shower, but I sat on the living room couch in a stupor. In my head blossomed images of the wedding—Esther holding hands with Ralph, Nina and her fiance from Princeton clinking glasses, Gaby’s dress, ivory with seed pearls. The images floated around, divagatory and surreal. Hypnagogic, Esther told me later when she was in social work school, is the word for that lush phantasmal quality of our thoughts on the verge of sleep. I moved in and out, listening for the doorbell.
He was dressed in an old denim shirt and tan chino pants, as he used to dress in college. I stared. The clothes made him younger. The intervening years might never have been. Kids again, and he was flirting with that rare lanky grace, one of a kind.
“Are you planning to ask me in, or don’t you recognize me?”
I moved aside. “I’m sorry. Come in.” It was so easy.
He put his arm around me. “What’s the matter? You’re all pale. And you’re thinner. We haven’t had dinner for a while.”
“It’s nothing. I’m a little drunk. I’ll make some coffee. Is instant okay?”
“Sure.” He followed me into the kitchen and watched my very slow and careful movements. “Why are you all dressed up? And you cut your hair. It makes you look like a boy.”
I shrugged. I couldn’t fix the coffee and converse at the same time. We stood waiting for the water to boil. “Hey, do you know I can play the harmonica? Since I last saw you.” He pulled one out of his pocket and played snatches of songs: “Camptown Races.” “This Land Is Your Land.” “Auld Lang Syne.” And the theme I loved from the “Trout.”
“That’s terrific. All by ear?”
“Yes. I remembered the ‘Trout.’ Are you touched this time? You’re supposed to be.”
“Well, I’m surprised.”
“Come on, Lydia, after midnight on a breezy August night when you’re drunk, you’re allowed to be sentimental. I won’t tell anyone.”
“I am touched.” I kissed him lightly. I swayed, and we laughed because it was so clearly not passion making me sway.
“I’d better pour it,” he said.
We drank it on the couch. “Listen, I don’t mind saying I’m touched. The reason I didn’t want to say it is I wanted to say what I had to say first. So you wouldn’t think it was because of anything you said. It’s on my own. Do you follow me?”
“Barely. Come here and lie down.” He pulled me over to him, with my head in his lap. “I think it’s time I took advantage of you.” He started to unbutton my dress. “What a nice dress. This blue is right for you.”
“Wait.”
“Wait?” He laughed. “It’s the middle of the night, Lydia. You’ve obviously been out with some guy and got slightly looped and then you felt lonely. So you called me. Now what for, am I supposed to think? Okay, I’m not above that sort of thing.”
“That’s not the way it was at all. All wrong.” I sat up. “Do you still want to marry me?”
“Yes. But less and less as time goes by, frankly.”
“Oh God. Do you have to be so frank?”
“It’s still a lot.”
“All right. I say yes. I do. I mean, I will.”
“Just a second. Why all of a sudden?”
“I want to, that’s all.”
“You just broke up with someone. You got ditched.”
I shook my head. “I wouldn’t do it like that.”
“No? What if you change your mind when you sober up?”
“I won’t.”
“But you don’t love me.”
I looked at him. For one instant I felt sober. “I don’t know, I might. I will, anyway. I promise.”
“Ah, that doesn’t sound so hot to me.” He got up and walked around the room, running his finger nervously along surfaces. He might have been checking my housekeeping abilities. “Why should I, that way? I could get over you. I just haven’t tried.”
“Oh Christ, Victor! You pestered me all this time. Didn’t you think I was paying attention? So okay! But first go ahead and—what did you call it?—take advantage of me. I mean, we ought to see if it works, shouldn’t we?”
“If it works! Oh, you’re too much. Ought to? All of a sudden I ought to?”
“You wanted to a minute ago.”
“’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, baby. But the way you say it makes me nervous.”
“That’s two of us, then. Well, go ahead and drag me to the bedroom by my hair.”
“But you have no hair left.”
I touched my bare neck. “I forgot. By an arm, then.”
“What about Gabrielle? Is she going to walk in? Or is she out somewhere with that bone person?”
“Gabrielle?” I pulled him by the hand towards my room. “You are nervous, aren’t you? No, she won’t walk in. Anyhow, I’ll close my door.”
Victor looked around the bedroom. He had been over before, but never in my room. I knew how he liked to examine places at length. My room was brightly disorderly, a graduate student sort of room, with Madras curtains, a Cezanne landscape, a piano, all my college books still alive with the aura of having been recently read. “Victor, you can study the place later.”
“You are in a hurry.” He put his arms around me. Every gesture he made was slow and attentive. His touch was less ardent than curious. It was wonderful, far better than I had allowed myself to imagine, but another feeling was even more powerful. He kissed me. “I’ve never seen you in this sort of hurry before.”
“Because I’m going to pass out very soon.”
“Lie down, then. What a seductress you turn out to be.” He lay down next to me.
“I should tell you something.” I could hear my own slow voice drifting peculiarly above my body. “Gabrielle just got married.”
“Really? To that doctor? ... Oh yes, you mentioned something about it last time.”
“Yes. That’s where I was all evening. That’s where I got drunk. It’s only fair to tell you.”
“Fair?” He sounded puzzled. “Okay. I see.” He didn’t see yet, but I couldn’t explain any more. He unbuttoned the rest of the dress and took it off me. I shivered. “Chilly?”
“Yes. Pull up the sheet. ...Victor, I’m very sorry. I can’t stay awake, even for you.”
I thought he might be angry—he certainly had a right to be—but he only smiled. Maybe he was glad of the delay. He folded the dress neatly over a chair, and the last glimpse I had, he was at the bookshelf, looking for something to read.
It was pitch dark when I woke. I sensed someone there and got rigid with terror, then I remembered. “Victor?” I whispered. He touched my face. It was an unknown hour, and in the dark I felt I was seeing him. He was not the composed and bantering man I knew in daylight. I had never made love with someone who loved me. I found something out. I found out how a woman might be content to do nothing but tend her body and her surroundings—an extension of her body with a particular domestic appeal—content to wait in a vague mist of anticipation, for an hour of being made to feel like this. She could become a happy machine, greased and used and satisfied once a day, dormant and amorphous the remaining hours. Of course I couldn’t take this seriously. Only a ripple of atavism—but it left a faint wake.
He turned on a lamp. “I want to see you. I could look at your face forever and never get bored.”
“It’s not so beautiful.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. I mean all those very distinct lines and planes, all the declivities. It changes from moment to moment—there’s always something happening.”
“Oh.” That was an artist’s eye, not a lover’s.
“Don’t worry. I also like it in the regular way.”
I looked at him too, naturally at his body—young women are insatiably curious about men’s bodies—but mostly at his face, which I had never seen so transparent since the day we first talked in that bar on Amsterdam Avenue near the unfinished cathedral, and I asked myself, could I face that face and body all the years to come, accept whatever unknown meannesses they hid, whatever seeds of unforeseeable change and drift, circumstance and accident, they might endure or provoke, and despite all, keep welcoming him home and in me? I thought I could. I didn’t know, still, if all that added up to love. I had loved the making love, but that was not it. Perhaps the brimming willingness I felt, the admiration, and the desire already returning, with an exponent of time, added up to love. There was no ready-made calculus for this. I was so rapt in thought I missed something he whispered.
“I said, are you happy, Lydia?”
“I have never been this happy.”
He wanted to make love again but I said, “There’s something else I want to tell you, so my conscience is clear. So you won’t think I’ve played any tricks.”
“You’re not pregnant?”
“Oh no.”
“Don’t give me any confessions, then. At least not right now. I don’t expect you’ve been a nun. Neither have I.”
“What a cute nun you would make, Victor. No, it’s nothing like that. It’s that Gaby and Don are going to live in the apartment.”
“This apartment?”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“Don has a place up near P & S, but it’s two tiny rooms. It’s really not possible for them. They were going to try it, but this place would be ideal. Except Gaby didn’t want to put me out. She’s very noble about things like that. But I insisted. Otherwise they’d both have to move, and this is rent-controlled, and she was the one who first found it, and it’s so nice ...”
He was running a questioning finger back and forth over my lips. Over my words, as they spilled out.
“So Lydia winds up homeless.”
“Yes.”
“I get it.”
It was a while till he spoke. “Lydia, if what you would really like is for me to help you find an apartment and rent a U-Haul and move your stuff in, I’ll do that. You don’t have to sleep with me for that.”
“No. Now I want to live with you.”
“Now? As opposed to when? A half hour ago?”
“Victor, I don’t know myself any more. Now, that’s all.”
He rolled over onto his side with his head propped in his hand, and stared at me. I wanted to hide, or weep—there was such distrust in his eyes, but the same longing. I wanted to tell him that Gaby’s wedding, the baffled week in Switzerland, all my uncertainty and confusion, my impatience with waiting for life to happen, had nothing, nothing to do with my phoning him at the bar—for they didn’t seem to any more, now that I lay next to him. But I wanted also not to tell any lies; he never did.
“You can move in anytime.”
“Thank you.” I had to turn away. “The truth is, I don’t know how to be alone. I need to be part of something.”
He took my hands away from my face. “Look at me. When you said before that you’d never been this happy, was that true, or was that also convenient?”
“True.”
“I have to take your word. What is your word worth?”
“If I tell you, it’s still my word. Please.” I pulled him close to me. I was afraid. “Let’s not talk about it any more. It’s splitting hairs. Don’t you see how I feel about you here and now? Can’t you trust that?”
“It’s not true that you don’t want to play tricks. You want to play them and then get credit for winning straight anyhow.”
“But you won, Victor. You wanted me.” I sat on top of him and moved around till he was inside me. He didn’t help, just lay still. I had to say something to make him trust me again. It was crazy that I felt free enough to climb on top of him but not to honor him with the truth. If only I knew it. “That first conversation we had, in the bar. Remember I said it was your show and your script, and you said next time it could be mine? Remember?”
He closed his eyes and nodded.
“Well, so can’t we leave it at that?”
It was a perilous moment, so close it was burdensome, so peeled we felt raw. So this was how it might be—we would scratch away each other’s surfaces. There wasn’t time to wonder if we wanted that, simply because it was impossible to stay still any longer. In the midst of it he stopped and pulled me down close to him. “But if you come to me this way, and I take it, then you must never leave, do you hear?” I nodded.
And then there was a moment when I longed to say, I love you, but I held back. People say things at those moments and aren’t judged by them, everyone knows that—things like, You must never leave—but I felt this night could bear no more ambiguity. I would have to wait, for the luxury of saying that truth, till a moment when I was quite cool and he was quite sure of it anyway. That was the price.
The Greek Atomist Leucippus believed that every event in nature is inevitable, a result of the movements of certain groups of atoms in conjunction with other groups of atoms, and could we but be privy to the laws governing those movements we could understand and trace the inevitability of everything. It seems to me now, though, that none of it was inevitable. We engineered it together, this conjunction, over a period of three years. It didn’t have to be, he would surely have gotten over me, while I consciously chose to fall in love when it suited me, which is not to say I fell any the less; none of what came later had to be, either. We engineered the whole thing: out of an abrasion of wills and desires and affinities, we ourselves set in motion the movement of atoms, and with each of the million not inevitable but careless choices we made we narrowed the path, moved the atoms closer to their point of collision. All this we did in love and ignorance, trying to write our lives as best we could. For I never stopped feeling we were entitled to a good life. Leucippus believed that “Nothing happens at random; whatever comes about is by rational necessity.” What necessity? Why? Why did our love necessitate what it finally did?
Esther was divorced after Ralph’s breakdown and her miscarriage, her auto accident, and her visit to her senescent mother who asked if, despite all, she was happy. “If you’re happy, then I’m happy too.” And then in 1975, in the lingering wake of a Vice-President turned out of office and a President forced to resign, when the country was led by a man who had trouble delivering complex sentences extemporaneously, who innocently embodied a triumvirate of confusion, optimism, and righteousness, she remarried. How we marry! Our grandparents were forced to marry for convenience; our parents married for love. In the therapeutic seventies again we married for convenience, psychic convenience, to “satisfy needs”—quite different from love since love, in the long run, is rarely convenient. Her new husband’s name was Clyde Powers.
“Clyde Powers?” said Victor when I showed him the invitation that had arrived in that Saturday morning’s mail. Victor was not yet forty; those big bones and flat belly stood him in good stead. Even at moments when his intransigence pained me, I could still look at him with a primitive pleasure. “Clyde Powers? That doesn’t sound like anyone’s real name. Isn’t it the name of that fellow in An American Tragedy?”
The invitation was a large glossy folded white card with a black-and-white photo of the nuptial pair covering the entire front. The smiles were beatific on faces pressed cheek to cheek and framed by halos of hair—Esther’s fair and frizzed, Clyde’s dark, long, and lank. Each head was crowned with a ring of daisies. Clyde looked some years younger than Esther, who was thirty-seven. His face was narrow, with small, avid, but unlit eyes. His lips were the only appealing feature—full and beautifully curved like a bow—but square little teeth spoiled the smile, and the wide gap in the upper row gave it a raunchy look. He was bare-chested except for a chain around his neck from which an obscure abstract pendant hung—it resembled the dove of peace but seemed to have excess wings, and it nestled amid copious hair. Esther was bare-chested too. You could see the beginning of the curve of breasts, but there, to my relief, the photograph was cropped. One daisy hovered fetchingly over her right eye. She looked luscious and hypnotized. Clyde’s stubby fingers clutched the flesh of her shoulder as if for balance.
Victor opened the card and read aloud. “‘Esther Brickman and Clyde Powers. Holy Matrimony. June 8, 1975. Please come and share our feelings. SAVE Community, RFD No. 2, Pinecrest, New York.’ SAVE?” He looked at me across the kitchen table—not the white porcelain table at East Twenty-first Street; we had come uptown to space and bright rooms and colorful streets. “What is SAVE?”
“Turn it over.”
“‘SAVE. A self-help community of like-minded sharers united in Selfhood, Awareness and Acceptance, Vital Energies. Derek Holbrook and Clyde Powers, co-leaders.’”
“Let me see that,” said Althea, raising her eyes from A Wrinkle in Time. Althea, sophisticated at nearly twelve, liked to pretend she was a third adult in the family, and often sat drinking coffee with us weekend mornings. “‘Selfhood, Awareness, Acceptance, Vital Energies.’ That should really be SAAVE. Like an ointment.”
“Well, whatever it is,” I said to Victor, “we really must go.”
“Save the date,” Althea chirped, making us both groan. Victor raised one eyebrow in the droll and skeptical gesture he knew would make me laugh—he looked like Vincent Price haunting a house, especially since he had a beard now, grown during a fit of depression over his work. No one had wanted it and a critic called it derivative. If life was barely worth living, he said, shaving was worthless. After a while he had a show, sold a few paintings, and the feeling passed. The beard remained, for vanity.
We drove out to Pinecrest in Don’s green Volkswagen bus which had taken our two families on countless Sunday outings over the years, with cries of When will we be there? erupting from six kids in the back. This time Gabrielle was missing—away for a month in France, showing the children to aging relatives. Nina sat up front with Don, George in back with Victor and me. It was the sort of day believed perfect for a wedding, but our spirits were not balmy. Don steered with an indolent thumb at the bottom of the wheel. “Does anybody know what this person does for a living?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Nina said in her lady professor’s voice. “Right now his work is running the community, or commune, I guess I should say. He used to be a rock singer with a group called The Ramrods, but apparently there was something wrong with their vibes. Spiritually, not musically. He’s also training to go out and run these, uh, self-evaluation gatherings, at which people save the good parts of their pasts and discard the bad parts, in order not to waste their vital energies brooding. That’s one reason it’s called SAVE, you see. Also, breathing properly is very important.” She breathed herself; it was more of a controlled sigh. “He was married before, to a singer too. His wife ran off with another woman, I think.”
“How do you know all this?”
She lowered her sunglasses and peered round at us from above them. “I spent a weekend there.” The lady professor pose was gone; a sly urbanity replaced it. Nina was protean.
“A weekend? Then maybe you can tell me how to go, because I think we’re lost.”
“I took a bus. My car was in the shop. Sorry.”
“You never even told me,” I said. “How was it?”
“It didn’t go terribly well. They told me I didn’t relate enough. I said I was only there for a weekend, but that didn’t seem to matter. Everybody watches everybody—do you remember Candid Camera? It’s bad to show hostility. No, maybe it’s good to show it, I forget, but in any case it’s a crucial issue. Also, to be concerned with politics is bad. I was trying to make conversation—I mentioned something about whether Ford could ever get elected on his own steam, and they said if we all worked on ourselves the state would take care of itself. It’s a farm. You’ll see, they milk cows and make butter and cheese. The cheese is not bad.” She took off the large sunglasses and turned to me with her special look of despair well under control. “I would say the cheese was the best part. The women bake bread but it seemed underdone to me. I don’t know, though—I’ve gotten used to ethnic bread in the Village.”
“It was nothing like the Pythagorean Brotherhood, I gather?” Zestful spiritual communion. Mathematical studies. Now and then, the music of the spheres.
“Nothing like it. I tried to take a walk in the morning but they asked me to stay and dish out granola.”
Victor said, “It’s not going to be so funny when she phones in hysterics. I remember the last time.”
“It is the easiest thing in the world to mock an experiment,” George said. “I think you’re all just jealous that this sort of thing came into vogue when you were too old to enjoy it.”
“That’s not true!” They all laughed at my vehemence. Maybe George was right. I had spent the sixties dealing in diapers and pureed food, listening with passion to the radio accounts of revolution at Columbia, longing to be on the barricades. No matter what the dispute, simply to be in it, to be with and together against. Those were my buildings being captured and countercaptured, and I was not much older than the rebels. But I had one kid in kindergarten and one in nursery school and a third growing inside. Rocks were flying. I stayed home. “I’m not too old,” I snapped at George.
“I for one am not jealous.” Don let the bus steer itself for a few seconds while he tried to relight his pipe. “There’s no need to throw out the baby with the bath. I managed to run the antiwar program at the med school quite nicely without behaving like a gypsy.”
“Modesty, Don, was never your strong point.”
“Well, and what of it? I got the job done when no other teacher would risk it. Here.” He gave the pipe and matches to Nina. “Would you do this for me, please?”
“Incidentally, Clyde Powers is not his real name,” Nina said with the pipe between her teeth. “His real name is Barry, or Barney, maybe, Weingrad.”
Victor raised his eyebrow at me in the leering manner. “What did I tell you?”
“Oh, all right. Did you try to talk her out of it?” I asked Nina.
“Of course not. She seemed very happy. I didn’t think I had any right to interfere. Aren’t we a little old to tell each other whom to marry?” She lit the pipe and gave it to Don.
“In the case of Esther, I don’t know. ... I wonder if she’ll change her name too. Remember Esther was the only one of us with the patience to get through Being and Nothingness? To go from that to SAVE!”
“It may be because of Being and Nothingness, not despite it.” Don smiled appreciatively, as he always did at his own jokes.
“Bad faith. Remember how for a whole month she lectured us on bad faith? The forms bad faith may take are infinite. Denial of your own identity. Denial of the motives for your actions. Denial of your true situation in the—”
“Oh shit, Lydia, I just missed what might have been our turnoff.” Don pulled over to the side and got out his map of New York State. “We are lost on our way to being saved. Hey, do you know, this must be skiing country. There are pictures of skiers all over the map. I bet in January this road is crammed with buses.”
We arrived, eventually. A half-hidden sign led to a winding, branching dirt road, and from there on, the invitation was spiked to trees like blazes along a forest trail. We left the car in a pasture designated as a parking lot and walked through bristly grass towards an adjacent meadow where a group was gathered. George was doubtful about the scattered cows gazing at us with dusky, somnolent eyes, but Nina, who had grown up in farm country, assured him cows were not predatory. “Just leave them alone and watch out underfoot.” One black and white cow accompanied us all the way to the wedding.
It was a set from Oklahoma. The women wore long skirts and bright, frilled, high-necked blouses—hybrid offspring of pioneers and European peasants. The men were dressed as cowboys, in fringed vests, plaid shirts, and boots, except for one man in a shiny black suit and black string tie, who was carrying a Bible. Victor, ignoring my advice, had perversely chosen to wear one of his two suits, the one that made him look like a stockbroker, even with the beard.
Esther rushed to greet us with hugs and kisses, rosy and aglow in billowy organdy, a wreath of daisies in her hair. She looked wonderful.
“I feel wonderful too. I have all my energies going for me, finally. Do you like the dress? Lillian made it for me, by hand.” She pointed to an obese red-haired woman with a naked infant in a sling on her back. “Lillian went to Barnard too, but a few years after us. She was a math major but she wasn’t happy with computers. She does all our clothes, so we can avoid the whole consumer trip.” Her father would have been pleased: she was not being seduced by the offerings of capitalism. “Wait right here. I want you to meet Clyde.” She brought us Clyde, who was exactly like his photo, except that his hair was clean today and tied back in a rubber band. Clyde looked long and steadily at each of us in turn, clasping our hands in both of his. This took a while. The SAVE emblem, that abstract design of a possible bird with a superfluity of wings, was tattooed on his right forearm in blue. “It is a real pleasure to know you,” he said in an easy, midwestern accent. “Esther has spoken so much about you.” He wore a red cowboy shirt with a small charging bull embroidered on the front pocket, perhaps by Lillian; as his chest rose and fell with conscientious deep breaths before each sentence, the little bull appeared to be charging off the shirt, at us. “I hope you’ll all get into our reality while you’re here, and allow yourselves to experience the ethos of SAVE, which is something real unique. We try to dig out and bring forth our root feelings of caring and sharing without blocking—”
“Clyde,” Esther interrupted, “why don’t we introduce them to some of the others.”
“That’s a good idea, Esther.” He led us around to various members of SAVE, who greeted us with pats and strokes. Nina was generally taken to be paired with Victor, which was understandable: she was dressed in a white linen suit and silk scarf, as befitted the consort of a stockbroker. One graying man slipped his arms around their waists and patted their hips. “Have you people attended our SAVE gatherings or are you just friends?”
“These are old friends of mine, Phineas,” Esther explained, gently withdrawing his hands. “And you remember Nina Dalton.”
“Ah, yes. You were shy about your hostilities. Well, that’s all right. Have no anxiety. We’ll help you all get in touch with the deeper participation levels.”
“Thank you,” said Victor. “We’re a little thirsty after the trip, actually ...”
“Oh, of course. I’m sorry,” Esther said. “There’s homemade apple cider over there on that table, and some rum punch too.”
A man with a very long, wide white beard like Walt Whitman’s came up to Nina and took both her hands in his. “I believe I’ve seen you here before. I am interested in you. I am interested in the kinds of feelings that must be straining to emerge, since you appear so put together. What’s your trip?”
“My trip?”
Victor was tugging at me. “Let’s go over there. I want a drink.” We left George hovering protectively near Nina and the Whitmanesque man. Don, already at the bar, handed us each a glass. Victor examined his suspiciously. “What is this stuff? I want a real drink. Especially if I have to get in touch with myself at the roots.”
“It’s not too bad.”
Victor sniffed it, drank it in one gulp, took another, and placed a hand flat on my breast. “I am interested in you. In the root feelings that are straining, I mean, all those vital saps and so forth. Your deepest participation levels.”
I brushed his hand away. “Look, as long as we’re here, would you please ...”
“Well, if you don’t want to get in touch with your vital energies, I’m going off to, uh, relate to others who do.”
I stayed with Don. I was hearing, as I often did, the soothing voice of Professor Boles. Empedocles, reconciler, doctor as well as mystical poet ... He too sought the roots—fire, air, water, and earth—from which the earth proliferated like a wondrous plant. He did not need to dig up the roots, though, in order to appreciate the plant in its infinite variety. Poking at the roots destroys the living plant; Mr. Wilson, back in the garden at the brown house, warned Evelyn and me about that.
“Do you think there’ll be anything to eat, Lydia?”
Don sounded so plaintive that I laughed. “Of course there will. Do you see those women with the checked aprons, carrying buckets and pots? Their role is to prepare the feast. It will contain lots of home-baked bread, plus there will be sprouts. Every kind of sprout you can think of. Cheese, vegetables, lots of salads. It will be very good, as well as good for you.”
“But I feel like oysters. This kind of thing makes me feel like eating oysters.”
I nodded, and we stood companionably silent. Don was not an exhilarating person, but he had many placid, Nordic virtues: He could keep his feelings to himself; he would never behave in an embarrassing manner; if any of the Saviors wandered over to talk he would listen politely. I realized I had grown very fond of him over the fourteen years. Maybe Gaby hadn’t been mistaken after all.
“It also brings out my worst impulses,” he said. “Reminds me of what I did to Mr. Dooley when I was in college.”
“What did you do to Mr. Dooley?”
But he had no chance to tell me. “Please assemble, please assemble for the ceremony.” The tenor voice of the minister in the black string tie. With the Bible tucked under his arm, he clapped his hands for order like a dancing master. Nina and George and Victor drifted back.
“That guy with the Bible is Derek Holbrook, the other leader,” Victor whispered to me, “but that’s not his real name. He changed it from Joe Rossino.”
“How do you know?”
“He told me. They don’t believe in books. The Bible is just for show, because some members aren’t emotionally ready to give it up at weddings. It’s called a transitional object, like a baby’s blanket.”
“Come on, you’re making this up.”
“No art, either. Music is okay, but they prefer to compose their own. Like in The Republic, you remember. Artists from the past inhibit the flow of vital energies. The past does not exist. Dead. Life begins anew each day. If you’re hung up on memory it means you’re into death, which is of course not good.”
Gradually the guests formed a large circle around Derek, Esther, and Clyde.
“Sex is not more than twice a week,” he breathed hotly in my ear. “The vital energies, you know. Once is even better, if you can manage it.” He put his arm around me. “We could kidnap her. They wouldn’t prosecute. Law is repression of individual vital energies. Not that they’re anarchists; they just don’t relate to government.”
The black and white cow that had ambled through the festivities mooed loudly, which silenced the crowd.
“Dearly beloved.” The ceremony began.
Derek explained that weddings at SAVE did not follow the traditional format, which had originated in a long-dead age and thus had no relevance to the needs of Clyde and Esther. Weddings at SAVE were a celebration of openness and awareness, which meant going around the circle asking the guests to state their feelings on this occasion. In that way good feelings could be exposed and maximized and bad feelings evacuated, leaving the vital energies to flow creatively from their roots, without hindrance. He would begin with the bride.
Esther must have been prepared. With just the proper degree of warmth and reserve she announced that she was very happy, she loved Clyde very much, she was grateful to all the friends who had come to the wedding, and she hoped she and Clyde would continue for a long time to be good to and for each other.
I turned reflexively to Nina and found her clever, doleful eyes waiting for mine. We exchanged a glance of pride and relief, as when an unruly child performs well in public. Women’s colleges do foster a certain adaptability. Esther could also pour tea admirably, which might win her praise in SAVE’s kitchen, where she would no doubt be spending a good deal of time. But her composure made me shiver. In college when she read Descartes she vowed to believe only what she had proven for herself. “Nothing on faith!” And we had laughed at her.
It was Clyde’s turn. He disengaged his arm from Esther’s and rubbed his hands together, the gesture of a man about to dive into a feast. “As I look around me on this wonderful day,” he said, looking around him, “I see old faces and new ones, faces from the past and faces from the present. And yet they are all sharing in the one reality that is right now, which is all we have. That and our own energies, our needs and gratifications.” Esther’s face was beginning to show the signs of heat and weariness. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and cleared her throat softly. “I want to say that on this occasion of my wedding I feel I am getting in touch with and reaching into a deep part of myself I have never reached before, and which will yield more and more awareness and energy.” With each deliberate breath the little bull on Clyde’s shirt lurched. “I’m glad to have Esther to share this exciting awareness with me.” He grabbed Esther’s hand and raised it high above his head like a prizefighter accepting the championship title. People applauded. Behind me George moaned.
A wispy girl of about nineteen with hair like straw said a wedding out in the pastures with the cows made her feel close to nature. A dark man in mirrored sunglasses and overalls said he felt happy for Clyde since Clyde was his friend and he loved him, but at the same time he had to acknowledge he was sexually attracted to Esther and therefore experiencing some envy; he hoped he would be able to overcome those feelings but if not he hoped they could all get together sometime and talk about it. Esther turned pink while Clyde nodded judiciously like someone making a mental note. The next speaker was convinced from his own experience that marriage could be a trap; he advised Esther and Clyde not to become emotionally dependent but always to preserve their own spaces. Esther’s face was all earnest attention (perhaps what SAVE called “openness”), so unlike the morning Professor Mansfield asked her to adopt the sensibility of another age and suspend her judgment. “I will never suspend my judgment!” I could still hear the fierceness in her voice.
“We’re not getting any sharing from the people in back,” said Derek. “How about you, Vic? You were just telling me you needed to learn the language of feeling.”
“God, you didn’t!” I jabbed him.
He nodded. “You don’t get all that information for nothing. I’m afraid I’ll have to pass,” he said out loud. “I can’t learn that fast.”
“There’s no passing at SAVE. We share whatever is in us.”
“Well, then, on this unusual occasion I feel ...” He paused and his silence felt ominous, especially with all the rum punch he had drunk.
I took his arm. “Please don’t. Just wish them good luck or something. As a favor to me.”
“I wish you both a long and happy life together,” said Victor. “And may your hopes in each other be fulfilled.”
I breathed. George volunteered that he felt hunger and thirst and sexual desire and he wished they would move along with the ceremony so he could at least get something to eat. The SAVE members tittered. That propitious savoirfaire doubtless came from the numerous marathons George had attended, studying experimental therapies.
Derek called on me. I said that Esther was one of my oldest and dearest friends, and since she seemed so happy, I was happy for her. Neat, honest, more or less—I congratulated myself. Then I remembered her mother—“If you’re happy, then I’m happy”—and I wanted to die of shame and remorse. Esther did not give any outward sign, though. She went on smiling the same modest, composed smile. Her liberal education served her well.
“I think we’ve had a pretty full expression of the ongoing feelings here,” Derek said. “Is there anyone I missed, before I go on to the mutual vows?”
“Yeah, you missed me.” It was a pale, bedraggled young woman in baggy jeans, standing disconsolately on the outskirts of the circle, her arm around another woman. They might have been sisters.
“Why, Floral, certainly. Please go ahead.”
“Yeah, well, I’m glad of the chance to say what I feel on this occasion. I’m not sure why Clyde invited me—I never thought I’d see this place again after we split up—but as long as I’m here ... I sincerely wish Esther luck because you’re going to need it, Esther. Clyde is a person who is only into his own need to be told how terrific he is. Anyone who doesn’t do that, he gets rid of. Also, he can’t take the slightest criticism, like if you say he hung a picture crooked he thinks you’re hostile and trying to castrate him.” Floral’s voice was extremely low and hoarse. I couldn’t imagine her as a singer. She coughed as she spoke, a curt, stifled cough that barely interrupted the flow of words. “As far as a wife, forget it. What he really needs is a slave. I know he goes around saying I walked out on him, but it was the other way around. I was the one who wound up in the hospital on lithium, and if it hadn’t been for Susan I wouldn’t be standing here right now. And believe me, I’m not saying any of this out of jealousy or because I want him back, God forbid, but I wouldn’t mind getting back some of my records that he took, especially the Janis Joplin and the—”
“That’s enough! Shut the hell up!” Clyde shouted. “You’re as crazy as ever and you’re not going to mess up—”
“Don’t you tell me what I’m going to do! We’re not married any more, remember? I’ll talk as long as I damn—”
Clyde lunged through the crowd. Floral’s friend Susan tried to pull her away toward the parking lot but Floral shook her off and braced herself to receive Clyde. Some of the SAVE members caught him by the arms. He struggled to get free. Everybody was shouting. “Let him get it out!” “No, keep her back!” “Hold him!” “Get the fuck off of me!” “Violence is cathartic if you really get into it!” the man with the Walt Whitman beard roared. There was a bunch holding Floral back too. “Dumb dyke!” Clyde shouted at her. He got one arm free and swung at a man restraining him. Another man swung at Clyde and missed. Factions pushed and shoved; the wedding was a brawl. But it quickly dissipated. Susan pulled the reluctant Floral off in the direction of the parking lot, and the SAVE people broke ranks and smoothed down their cowboy outfits. The next moment their smiles were back in place, and they were patting and stroking each other to maximize the good feelings. I thought again of Empedocles, prophet of Love and Strife. “Now one prevails, now the other, each in its appointed turn, as change goes incessantly on its course. ... Interpenetrating one another they become men and tribes of beasts.” He called his time the Present Age of Strife, “a land without joy, where bloodshed and wrath and agents of doom are active; where plagues and corruption and floods roam in the darkness over the barren fields of Ate.” “‘I wept and mourned,’” Gaby had read to us years ago, “‘when I discovered myself in this unfamiliar land.’”
Derek was brief; the incident that had just occurred would be evaluated later, he said, at the evening meeting. As he pronounced Clyde and Esther man and wife the group took up an unmelodic chant whose syllables refused to congeal in my ear as words. It reminded me of the early computer music the professors at Columbia were experimenting with back in 1958. To this wail, Clyde took Esther in his arms for the customary kiss. He kissed her long and with a show of passion, forcing her to arch her back and neck the way Charles Boyer used to do to his heroines in the movies, a position I was sure must be hard on those muscles, delicate since the whiplash she suffered in the auto accident years ago when her first marriage broke up.
Nina was wrong about the bread—it was excellent.
“Do you have to go so soon?” Esther asked.
“Yes, we’d better. It’s a long drive. The sitter ... Come into the city for a weekend. We have more room now.”
“I’ll see when I can get away. Listen, I’m really glad you all came. I appreciate it. I know it’s not your kind of thing but ... It’s really okay. It’s going to be fine.”
“Of course it will,” said George. “Congratulations.” And he kissed her sweetly good-bye. I kissed her in bad faith. Nina offered Victor the front seat in the VW bus so he could see the countryside better—it was a soft amber and rose twilight. He and Don took off their jackets and ties and speculated, in a quiet, desultory way, about what kind of deal had been made when Ford pardoned Nixon. In back we were silent. After a while Nina rested her head on George’s shoulder and they held hands. So this would be another of their sporadic nights together. To cheer them up, as she once explained. Yet now that I thought of it, those nights were not always on depressing occasions; they were really rites of passage. They made love for weddings, births of children, the time Nina got tenure at NYU, Esther’s divorce, George’s setting up a private psychotherapeutic practice, the openings of Victor’s shows every few years, some of my concerts, a party for Gabrielle when the cast was removed from her broken leg. They prolonged the good feelings, smothered the bad ones. Something like SAVE. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but Don was telling Victor the story about Mr. Dooley. It seemed Mr. Dooley was the boss of a messenger service where Don worked with a bunch of kids the summer he was eighteen.
“What an old bastard that guy was! Like something out of Dickens. We decided to take revenge. He had this big black cane, and when he left it in the office during lunchtime one of us would go in and saw off an eighth of an inch. Only every few days, though, so he wouldn’t notice. He had a funny look once in a while, but he never figured it out. It was terrific. He didn’t know why the world felt a little more askew each week.”
“What a sweet boy you must have been,” Victor said.
“No, I was, actually. He just brought out the worst in me.”
“So what happened?”
“He fell getting into the elevator and broke his ankle.”
Mr. Dooley and his cane became a hypnagogic image, and I slept.
“Lydie.” Nina nudged me. “Wake up. We’re in the city. We’ve decided we need a drink.”
We were parked in front of a bar in the Village, not far from Nina’s apartment. Victor phoned to check on the children, and then we all settled in peacefully, for though we were sleepy and glum we were not yet inclined to part. George, never much of a drinker, which he attributed to his Judaic upbringing, asked the waiter for a glass of seltzer. “Not club soda. Seltzer. Do you have it?” He was in luck.
“Comfort me with seltzer,” George said, “for I am sick of love.”
“Tell us the seltzer story,” Nina urged. “We need it.”
“Oh, I’ve told you a dozen times.” He took her hand and kissed it gallantly. “Aren’t you tired of it yet?”
“No. Are we?” She looked around.
We were not, so he told us once more how, when he was a small boy in the Bronx, every fourth Wednesday morning at seven-fifteen a seltzer man would ring the bell and he, being up and dressed for school, had the job of letting him in, giving back the box of empties and accepting the box of fulls, while his father and his two uncles puttered around, shaving, dressing, saying their morning prayers with a special mention of the Jews in Germany and Poland, and fixing breakfast. “He was a huge man with a huge belly, and he carried a long wooden box with ten bottles, two rows of five, on his right shoulder, plus two extras in his other hand. I thought it was marvelous, how he kept the box balanced up there with one hand. I thought he must be the strongest man in the world. And the bottles were so beautiful—blue and translucent, with blue bubbles inside, because they had been jiggling around on his shoulder all the way up in the elevator. They had chrome squirt tops. He carried it all the way down the hall to the kitchen, with me following him, and when he set it down on the floor he always let out a great groan and said, ‘Well, my lad, how many this time?’ It was always twelve, every month, but each time he said, ‘How many?’ and I said, ‘Twelve, please.’ My father had told me I must say please. Then he took a deep breath before he lifted the box of empties, and I followed him back down the hall. And then my uncle, the senior rabbi, would come to pay him at the door and make polite conversation—my uncle believed in treating every person he met with equal regard. But he never seemed to grasp that while he was chatting on about the weather, and the war, and the rationing—wasn’t it a good thing they didn’t ration seltzer?—and so forth, the seltzer man was carrying these ten heavy bottles in the wooden box on his shoulder, plus the two in his other hand. The seltzer man was very polite too, an Irishman, I think, and as soon as he could get a word in he would say, ‘Righto, well, I’d best be on my way.’ At supper they would always let me squirt the seltzer into the glasses, and when they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said a seltzer man. Even now, I must say, I still have these fantasies ...”
The waiter brought the drinks and George drank his seltzer with zest. Don downed his martini very quickly. “Tell me something,” he said to George. “What is the difference between those people in Pine-crest and what you do? No offense, of course.”
“Of course.” George, master of tolerance, smiled, the way Charlie Chaplin might smile at William Buckley. “The difference is that I don’t attempt to evade the human condition. Freud was right, you know. There is no remedy, there is only alleviation. The remedy is death.”
“I didn’t know you were a Freudian,” I said.
“Well, not in all the particulars, no. But fundamentally ... Look, nowadays there are the saviors, and then there are the repairmen. Freud would have hung in with the repairmen, I’m sure. That way you keep some self-respect, professionally. I’m like the guy you call in to fix your washing machine. You know it’s going to break down eventually, but meanwhile you want to keep it running as best you can for as long as you can, get the worst kinks out so it can do its job. Saviors scare me. There are enough built-in dangers around.”
“Excuse me.” Nina got up. “I’m going to stroll home. It’s been a long day, and I am still not saved.”
“I’ll walk you. It’s dark.” George got up too. I always found this absurd pretense of discretion very touching. “Good night, good night.” Kisses and handshakes. Still full of energy, he took her firmly by the arm and led her away.
“Off to consummate the marriage,” said Victor morosely. “That’s nice.”
“It’s funny what weddings do to people,” Don said. “I mean even good weddings. I had a patient once, a young woman with a case of hysterical paralysis. She couldn’t move her legs, but there wasn’t anything organically wrong. It started a couple of days after her wedding. All she could tell me was that she had danced and danced till she was ready to drop. At first she thought it must be a charley horse.”
“So what did you do?”
“I sent her to a shrink.”
“And?”
“Oh, eventually she walked. Everything worked out all right. She even became pregnant.”
“Remember when Gaby broke her leg? That was pretty soon after you were married too.”
Don looked at me keenly. “Gaby was thrown off a horse.”
“I remember. But still. She had ridden all her life. It was only a few months before she was supposed to join the company.”
“The horse was galloping, Lydia. It took the fence all wrong. It sometimes happens.”
“Yes. But dancers break things all the time and then they go right back to dancing. You of all people know that; it’s half your practice.”
“She had to stay off her feet a lot. She got pregnant.” He smiled with appreciation.
“It’s not a laughing matter.” Foam, good Lord. But I held my tongue.
“You know, Lydia, you wanted her to be a dancer more than she wanted it herself.”
“Maybe. Maybe.” But he hadn’t known her in college. All those nights, all that flexing, pointing, arching, dreaming, the passion in it. Did she widen the space between her thighs to a hundred eighty degrees just to take him in? Sure, things changed, lives changed, and we all needed our children, if only to affirm the roots, seeds, growth, and flowering of the universe. But beneath that were supposed to abide earth, water, air, and fire, unchanging. Most especially fire, the wanting and the striving. What happened to douse hers?
Don ordered his third martini; Victor and I got coffee. I suddenly felt obnoxious, spoiling for a fight as I had in the airport in Geneva after Evelyn retired to the mountains at twenty. “Why do you guys think they used to bind the feet of Chinese women?”
“Wasn’t it supposed to make them more attractive?”
“Discipline,” said Victor. “So they’d take small steps, literally and figuratively.”
“Ah, Victor, you’re so poetic, my love, it’s beautiful. Did you learn that in CC? No, I’m sorry, you really are. All right, but in practical terms, they bound their feet so they wouldn’t run away. Ask any girl—she doesn’t have to be educated to know that. Ask Althea. You ask Cynthia, Don. Your patient was well-trained, that one who got paralyzed. These days we bind our own feet.” I got up and stalked to the bathroom. I glimpsed them looking after me, bewildered—poor guys: what did we do this time?
When I came back they were laughing and horsing around, Don with the defiance of a man who has been unjustly scolded and is getting good and drunk in return.
“Sick as hell anemia,” he was saying. “You wouldn’t believe what people report that they have. Fireballs in the uterus. Jesus.”
“What in the uterus?”
“Just true medical tales again, Lydia,” said Victor. “Forget it, you wouldn’t approve.”
Don put his head in his hands. He had stopped laughing. “Smiles of Gentle Jesus.”
“What?”
“Spinal meningitis. In Appalachia, when I was an intern. The mother said he had Smiles of Gentle Jesus.” He looked up; his face was drained of color. “I had to watch that kid die. I still remember his face from seventeen years ago.” He took another gulp of his drink and shuddered.
“Don’t have any more, come on. This is no good. Have some coffee.” Victor pushed his cup over to Don, squeezed my leg under the table, then took my hand.
“What a day. God, I wish Gabrielle would come home. I’m a mess alone. I can’t even match my socks. Well, no, of course I can. I mean, I just miss her. I haven’t seen my kids in three weeks either. I miss those sullen adolescent faces.”
“Enough. It’s time to take you home in your little green bus,” Victor said. “I’ll drive. We’ll get a cab from there.”
“I’ll drive,” I said. “I’m sober and I’ve never driven a bus.”
“Oh,” sighed Don, drinking some more. “Poor Esther. The crazy reasons we get married.”
“You seemed quite sane, as I remember. You went about it very methodically, bringing her flowers, taking her to the theatre, all dressed up.”
“It was lousy, being a resident then. Besides all the people crippled and dying, we had to work round the clock. We didn’t know enough to organize for better conditions. You remember what it was like. No one thought of protesting. They have it much easier now.” He swallowed the last of the martini. “We, on the other hand, longed for a little comfort. And she was oh so comfortable.” He winked lewdly.
“In all these years we’ve never seen him like this,” I said to Victor. We laughed, holding hands and gazing at Don.
He set down his empty glass sharply. “How did you two happen to get together?”
“Us?” Victor turned to me with that raised eyebrow again. He was really overdoing it. “Oh, we got married because you and Gaby got married. Isn’t that right, Lyd?”