HAPPY FAMILIES ARE NOT all alike; possibly, unhappy families are not all unhappy in different ways. Phil and Althea left for the summer. The next day, I began by studying the couple sitting opposite me on the downtown bus, some fifteen years older than Victor and I, in advanced middle age. The woman, a protruding-bone type, looked hollowed. She had strong wrists with long narrow hands, rather like mine, that clasped and unclasped jerkily. Her face was layered with make-up. Her stiff hair was artificially streaked, as though someone had emptied a bag of feathers over her head. She sat taut in the stifling heat, a bird of prey, while beside her sat her quarry: a smallish man who appeared to have recently shrunk, with waxen cheeks and wavy white hair that had a yellowish tinge. His face might have been mobile and expressive once, but it expressed nothing now except the most sullen indifference. Her face expressed much—irritation, scorn, most of all fear disguised as imperiousness. Words, in an unexpectedly rich and full voice, poured wetly from her red lips as from a pitcher.
“I don’t know whether to have the wine or the champagne. If I have the wine I don’t know whether to have red or white. They say white goes better with chicken, but it’s not a hard and fast rule. I’ve served red with chicken and no one ever complained. I think I’ll get the red on the way home. More people like it. It goes down easier. Champagne is too good for them in the first place and secondly it’s expensive. Well, maybe in the long run not so expensive because they drink less of it. Still, it makes everything seem so elaborate. I don’t want it to seem over-elaborate. Besides, you can keep what’s left of the wine but you can’t save champagne.”
She was glossy and animated, expensively dressed, but he was shabby, in loose dark pants and worn shoes. With effort he prepared to speak: breathed, swallowed, wet his lips with his tongue, raised his head but not in her direction. “Get the champagne.” An asphyxiated voice, an accusing weariness.
“The champagne?”
The champagne? I was surprised too, after such cogent reasons. He didn’t look like the sort who would want a party to seem over-elaborate.
“Yes, the champagne. Why not?”
“All right, all right. Champagne. If you say so.” The right side of her mouth stretched over in the direction of her ear, exposing the row of molars, then snapped back into place as if on a rubber band. Twice. Pause. A third time. A tic. She sighed and her chin rose bravely again. Again she poured from her pitcher, and I drank, enthralled. “I have two kinds of salad, the potato salad and the bean salad. I have the potatoes all boiled, I just have to chop in some onions and peppers and add the dressing. I’ve still got to do the bean. I could use some help with the bean.” Was there the faintest trace of coyness, supplication, desire in that imperious voice? Something sexual, a reminder of intimate times, when they had asked things of each other and received? He didn’t commit himself; a meager nod. “So what do you think, should I use more of the red beans or the white? I think the white taste better.” Tic.
“But the red,” he brought forth slowly, “are more colorful.”
Ah, an aesthete. A painter?
“The red it is then. Makes no difference to me. I have three chickens. Six legs. A chicken only has two legs, but the way they behave you’d think they expected them to have more. Everyone expects a leg. Did you ever notice? Especially Tom. It never fails. He grabs it. Well, I don’t want him to have a leg this time. Let him see he can’t always have exactly what he wants, like we owed it to him or something. Why should he always be the lucky one?”
He laughed aloud, one sharp “Ha,” quickly over. It was impossible to tell whether he laughed at the prospect of Tom’s not getting a leg, or in appreciation of her cunning, or in contempt of it, or at chicken dinners, parties, expectations in general. “You could buy an extra package of legs,” he said.
A crowd of boisterous teen-agers entered and stationed themselves between us so I couldn’t hear her response. I got off never to know what they were planning for dessert, though I was wildly curious. I was curious to know everything about them: what accidents or inevitabilities had brought them to such a pass. Whether Tom might be their grown child, and at what age he had started grabbing chicken legs. Could the other guests be their grown children too, maybe, safely traveled to adulthood, coming with wives and husbands and little ones? Oh, give them all legs! That’s what my mother would have said. What the hell, let them enjoy themselves. Buy as many extra legs as you need. For Tom, above all, because he wants them so badly.
I worked all through the summer, and I traveled day and night, accumulating distance. Luckily our local buses are nothing like the futuristic kind that killed them. No, the older city buses, especially in warm weather, are open and airy and sociable, intimating long living rooms with picture windows and posters on the walls, a motley collection of guests. The motion, in fits and starts, is reassuringly dinky. Up in my neighborhood, which is like a town unto itself, new arrivals often spot a familiar face and rush over, in the manner of people at a large informal party. I half-expect the driver to get up and serve cold drinks. Strangers strike up conversations and exchange personal data. Occasional arguments erupt, conflicts of race or generation, but once in a while it is old ladies fighting with zest over an empty seat. The spectators listen eagerly, sometimes take sides. Everyone is engaged, silent or vocal. I am not lonely. I am part of a rapidly changing community. I glean, like Ruth in an unfamiliar land. No more dreams of classical order and harmony. Observation, empirical evidence, are the thing. I want to learn how ordinary people lead ordinary lives, something I have forgotten.
It was hot. People wore as little as possible; the buses were display cases for skin of all ages and colors. The weather drew out those who stay indoors in harsher seasons, old people with death in their eyes, pregnant women, mortality ripening in their bellies like juicy melons, cripples, amputees, and countless of the harmlessly deranged. The ex-mental patients who live in the neighborhood took to the buses as I did, their fantasies in florid bloom under the nurturing sun. The woman I had seen unroll a cylinder of paper towels to make a pillow to cry on climbed aboard early one morning, in much better spirits now, wearing a short red dress and high-heeled shoes, her shaggily cropped hair three shades of yellow. Addressing the empty seat beside her, she offered a running critique of the movies playing in the revival houses along Broadway. “Now, take Guys and Dolls. They don’t make movies like that any more. What a cast! What a score! And that Marlon Brando! Sings, on top of everything else. Who ever suspected? There, my friend, is pure unadulterated what we used to call sex appeal. Believe me, he asks me to go to Havana overnight, I’d have my toothbrush packed in a second. I know a good thing when I see it and I saw it last night. And yet they say in real life he’s a bastard. Tant pis.” It was good to see her feeling better. Nor was there anything very crazy about what she had to say, either. It happened Nina and I had seen Guys and Dolls that week too and made similar comments afterwards, licking our ice cream cones and giggling like schoolgirls. Except the companion this woman giggled with was invisible.
She said her good-byes and made her exit. As I watched her strut into Dunkin’ Donuts I glimpsed from the window a much younger woman, a pretty woman wearing a businesslike dress and old blue sneakers, pushing an empty baby stroller briskly up Broadway. My heart began to race. Poor thing. Really crazy lady, this one. Her baby gone and still she pushes the empty stroller. There but for the grace of God ... Give thanks, Lydia.
I had to get off the bus and sit down in an air-conditioned coffee shop. Time stopped; I felt sick. Because the young woman, as I well knew, as any local habitué would know, had just left her baby at the day care center around the corner and was no doubt rushing home to deposit the stroller, change her shoes, and get to the office. A case of Ockham’s razor, pure and simple. Esther, who said she observed the world from the windows of buses, found disappointment at the hands of nasty men. Perhaps you only learn what you already know.
But I drink a Coke and recover, and the summer moves along. One day scorches into the next; I stay alone and manage. I appropriate a room at the school and practice there. Preparing for the faculty concert series in the fall, for the “Trout” concert at Lincoln Center, the tour in November, I am virtually never home. That is one way of learning to live alone. I don’t neglect myself “healthwise,” as Don warned. My ankle is too irksome for running in the park, as George suggested, but I swim in the midtown health club where my neighbor Sam is a lifeguard. Under his boyish, awed gaze I swim so many laps that when I return home I am too bemused to feel very keenly how empty it is. And I sleep well in the empty apartment, but rarely in the big bed he left me. Only when the heat is intense—since that privileged bed comes with benefit of air-conditioner. Now and then I meet friends in public places. Lots of movies. No more reunions. I don’t shop or cook. Burger King, Pizza Parade, Aram’s Falafel, Blimpie, Sabrett’s frankfurter stands—like a teen-ager or a bag lady, I have become a connoisseur of junk food. No masochism trip, this: I was never a gourmet—it all tastes fine to me. So long as it fills. How are you? Nina and Gaby ask. Are you looking after yourself? and I say, just fine. The children are fine too. Phil writes short uninformative letters weekly. I am pleased to find him literate—he has never shown me his school papers. He says he is bored and has not yet saved anyone from drowning. He’s saving his money, though. He doesn’t mention his father. My chum Althea phones collect from East Hampton. “How’re you doing, Mom?” How’re you doing, with a special lilting inflection, holdover from going out with Darryl. I hope she remembers the calculus he taught her as well. “I’m doing fine, dear. How are you doing?” She gives excited rundowns of famous names spied half-naked in the surf, and quotes in amazement the cost of summer rentals. “I’d love to have a house on the beach someday. Do you think I’ll ever be able to afford it?” “Sure. There are plenty of cheaper beaches.” She is brief. Clambakes on moonstruck sands call to her. Bronzed lifeguards. Althea, don’t forget, birth control is the thing! I restrain myself, say it only twice. The second time she is understandably miffed.
My new chamber music group is going fine too. Twenty-odd amateur pianists and string players from five boroughs want to learn to play ensemble music under the guidance of Irving and me. Irving is behaving himself and coaching the strings brilliantly. He keeps his mouth shut about the pianists, thank goodness, for I have admitted a few who really aren’t ready for the exigencies of classical trios—young housewives with babies, so eager for an evening’s distraction, and my heart goes out to them. We meet Tuesday evenings at the Y across town, and naturally I go by bus.
The two spectacled women across the aisle are what my mother used to call “settled” and I never was. A bit younger than I, late thirties, plump, pastel polyester and sensible shoes types. Nothing more ordinary. How I crave the ordinary, all the more since I cannot seem to find it. Everything I glean seems to have a warp in it. I want to penetrate the ordinary, master it, like a rapist. I listen to these prospects with criminal intent.
“And how are the little curies?”
“Oh dear. Oh dear. There’s something wrong with both of them. The little one had so much trouble with a disc, she just lies in the playpen all day. And the big one just had a lump removed from her breast three days ago. I’m waiting for the biopsy.”
“Tsk, tsk. How old are they again?”
“Nine and seven.”
Nine and seven! Lump in the breast? Lies in the playpen all day? What hath God wrought this time? Yet the mother sounds so cheerful, speaks up so loud and clear. Inner resources. A moral exemplar.
“And how old is yours?”
“Mine is just five. Still in the prime of life.”
“To tell the truth I’m more worried about the little one. She doesn’t even stir when I come into the room any more. I’m taking her to the vet tomorrow.”
I got off and walked the rest of the way, in a hot dusk that became a hotter night. The group broke up late and I was grateful for living’s offer of a lift home. He pulls up in front of my building and sighs mournfully, as he has done often since his wife’s death. She was a few years older than he, close to seventy.
“It was a good idea, this little group,” he says, patting down his hair. “I wasn’t so sure at first.”
“I had a feeling they were out there. It’s not so easy to find people to play with if you’re not professional. And everyone loves it. We can keep it going in the fall. Get woodwinds and horns, make a real thing of it.”
“What an entrepreneur.”
I laugh. “Good night.”
“Good night, Lydia dear.” He kisses me on the cheek as usual, and God almighty, lingers an instant. Testing: will I turn my head? Well, I simply refuse to believe this. I move off. I will pretend it did not happen. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe I am becoming one of those hungry women who see overtures everywhere.
“Thanks for the ride, Irving. See you Thursday.”
In the apartment the phone was ringing.
“What’s the idea of changing the goddamn phone number? What the hell are you up to? First the lock and now the phone. And I can never get you in. Where are you all the time?”
“Will you stop shouting, Victor? I just this second walked in. Hold on a minute.”
I turned on the air-conditioner in the bedroom and took off all my clothes. I stretched out on the big bed, my side. “I didn’t change the phone number. The phone company did it.” I explained about Miss
Fosdick and the technical reasons. “They called in May, right after you left. They said then that it would be in a few weeks, but as you see they didn’t get around to doing it till a couple of days ago.”
“Why didn’t you protest?”
“I tried. It was no use.”
“It doesn’t feel right. I was used to that number.”
“You’ll get used to this one too. Or so she said. How did you get it, anyway?”
“When you dial the old number you get a funny click, and then a computer voice gives you the new number.”
“Well, that’s something, at least. Then I won’t have to fill out all those postcards. They gave me about a hundred postcards to send people.”
“Oh, were you planning to send me a postcard?”
“Actually I forgot about it. I’ve been very busy and I don’t ever call here. I’d better let Althea know. She’ll get scared when she hears that voice.”
“Did you have a key made for me yet?”
“I keep forgetting. The kids are away, Victor. It’s only me. Is it so crucial that you have a key?” He paid half the rent, but he would never say that. Leave me for the pillowy embrace of a mother, yes, but never stoop to mention the rent.
“Do I need to explain?” He turned ironic. “I get the distinct impression you’re shutting me out.”
“I didn’t do either of these things on purpose, I’ve told you! Shutting you out! You’re the one who left. Don’t you remember?” Is she Circe? Does she cloud men’s minds?
“Every word you’ve spoken to me in three months has been shutting me out.”
“Well, what did you expect? You can’t be here and not here at the same time.”
“You know I’d be back in a minute if—”
“Don’t give me conditions!”
“Conditions! When I was there, you were not. That’s why I’m not.”
“This is getting too metaphysical for me, Victor. I’m only a piano player.”
He was silent so long I thought the line had gone dead. “You are the most exasperating person I’ve ever known,” he said finally in a weary, tamped-down voice. It was like the voice of the shrunken man on the bus. “I sometimes wish I’d never started with you. But we did. We have unfinished business. I’m not through with you.”
“No?” I asked quietly. The air in the room was more comfortable now. I raised my bare leg and did the exercise Don had shown me for my ankle. “I don’t want to play Walter and Griselda. What more do you think you can take away?”
“Lydia!” The sound bruised my ear; I moved the phone a few inches off. “I didn’t take those children! Those were my children too! What is wrong with you?”
I imagined he could see me, lying there all exposed. I pulled a sheet over me. “All right, I know. I know. I’m sorry. Only you started with her right before it happened. What’d you have to do that for?”
“It had nothing to do with it! You said so yourself. It’s insane to think so. Primitive.”
“I understand that. It just feels all connected. What I meant was your timing. If you hadn’t done it right then you wouldn’t have had such an easy place to go.”
“That’s how it was. I can’t undo it. Look, we could try again, Lydia. We could try to—”
“I don’t go for all this trying. It’s a lot of bullshit. This is how I am. Take it or leave it.”
“You stubborn bitch. I would have gone anyway. I’m not afraid to be alone.”
Ah, that was a low blow. I was a bitch, we both knew that, but he was supposed to be a gentleman. I hung up and fell asleep with all the lights on.
The next day the mercury hit nearly a hundred degrees and clung there for a week, a waning, heavy August. I didn’t mind the heat; it was deadening. To avoid the phone I stayed out every evening, and twice when it rang at midnight I didn’t answer. It was the first week since he left that we hadn’t spoken. Tuesday I got on a half-empty bus to go to the chamber music group, followed by two bearded men in their forties, in need of showers, dressed in limp white shirts with short sleeves hanging loosely around their arms. Not very nice arms, flabby, pale, sparse hairs. Professors of philosophy, that was soon clear from their talk of fall courses and schedules, and they set me wondering where Professor Boles might be now, and was her hair still flying with enthusiasm for the pre-Socratics? Did she still linger on obsolete cosmologies with only poetic value to recommend them?
“I’m going to try to prove to my seminar in ontological problems that death is not as bad as we think. Not something to be so dreaded, I mean. Simply as a demonstration in logic.”
“Oh yeah?” The other fellow blows his nose in a crumpled handkerchief and looks incredulous. “How do you propose to do that?”
“Well.” He warms to his task, rubbing a palm against his knee. “First I’ll describe some real situation and get them to agree that it may be worse than dying. Physical torture, say. Concentration camps, shipwrecked with wild animals, whatever. They can think up their own—everyone has nightmares they’d rather die than live through. They’ll begin to see it relativistically, as an option among others. Rational acceptance is the first step.” His accents are so self-congratulatory, his eyes so glazed and recessive, focused on the inner void. He outlines a series of logical steps whereby death becomes quite tolerable, indeed preferable to much else. Aren’t the “negative” aspects of death—he calls them loss of consciousness, fear of the unknown, cessation of life, separation from loved ones—aspects we accept more or less readily in other situations: sleep, travel? (Except cessation of life. That we don’t accept so readily. But he skims over that one.) He has obviously not read Freud on the instinct of self-preservation: the organism will fight off all obstacles to its survival so that it can die in its own way, in its own time. Not Eros over Thanatos. Just a kind of dumb, stubborn endeavor to persevere in one’s being.
The other philosopher has been listening with interest, nodding from time to time. His eyes and nose are red and runny, probably hayfever. I have been listening with interest too, yet neither has taken the slightest notice of me, which on top of their conversation is insult added to injury; after all, I am a reasonably attractive female of their generation, skimpily clad. “Nonetheless,” the allergic one says, “you’re going to find people hard to persuade.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. You haven’t taken into account the limits of logic. It’s beyond logic. So how are things going with Tina?”
The first one smiles evilly. “She’s gotten me to agree to go to a shrink for marriage counseling. I don’t think it can do any good but I figure, this way, when I leave, I won’t have to feel so guilty.”
The friend probes the caving-in marriage. He tries to get the first philosopher to put aside logic and state his “feelings.” The two philosophers have been affected by the 1960’s and the women’s movement to the extent that they are aware of its having become socially chic to acknowledge and articulate feelings. They try, but their efforts are hapless. For one thing, the first philosopher doesn’t seem to know where his feelings are located. As his friend inquires, he looks around vaguely at his fingernails, his feet, his briefcase. “I only know the situation is completely untenable,” he concludes.
Is it? Is it one of those many situations to which death is preferable? Have you thought of using it in your course? I bet I could logically demonstrate that even this untenable marriage is preferable to lots of other situations, but I too would be ignoring the limits of logic.
I got off and walked past the Metropolitan Museum, open late. There on the steps, serenading the evening crowd with violin, viola, and oboe, were three students from the music school. They were doing Vivaldi, and not badly, given the heat and the country-fair atmosphere, with hawkers of food and crafts their competition, and some yards off a white-faced mime cavorting with a hoop. I bought an ice cream and sat down for a moment to listen. They were ebullient. They exuded what Irving was always growling about, joie de vivre. I must remember to tell him; he would be pleased. The listeners were happily ensnared, their faces softened in the fading light. It was very much music of the daylight, tossing up its last gallant strength like a shower of fireworks. Yes indeed. This was a situation to which death was definitely not preferable. The violinist caught my eye and winked. I waved—I could have kissed them all—and threw a few quarters into the waiting violin case before I went on.
The heat was so heavy, with thick purplish clouds beginning to move in from the east, that only the most dedicated, the most in need of distraction, came to play chamber music. Our regular cellist was on vacation and a student was filling in. Irving’s violin was as mellow as ever, but his temper was menacing, like the weather. He said little, but his sighs at every breakdown or false start were sufficient. The less able pianists faltered, while the best of the lot, a conceited, mustached young doctor who solemnly removed his beeper at the opening of each session, swore at the cellist, who had trouble keeping up a prestissimo. I found myself soothing the one and rebuking the other like a nursery school teacher; it was ludicrous. The last to play was one of those young mothers not ready for ensemble work. She stopped and started a sprightly Mozart third movement half a dozen times. At the end Irving rested his violin on his lap with tangible relief.
“Mozart is a wonder,” he announced to the group of ten. “The resiliency of genius. No matter how he is mangled, he cannot be totally destroyed.”
The woman’s eyes filled with tears as she retreated. Even our young cellist Freddy’s eyes widened.
“You did better than last week,” I told her firmly. Ah, supportive. “Everyone’s hot and tired tonight. What you need to do at home is count with a metronome. Now right here, for instance, where the others join you, you have to wait two whole measures after the chords before you pick up the theme. Listen.” I signaled to Irving and Freddy and we demonstrated. I had meant to do only a few bars. But a wonderful thing happened. The piece took off like a kite in a breeze; lyrical as well as sprightly, it lightened the night’s oppressive heat, living’s face lost its look of pain; the wound in his ear was healing. When we came to the first natural stopping place he raised an eyebrow, I nodded, and we went straight on. It was a moment of grace, too good to stop. Freddy grinned and kept up. The others settled back in their chairs. We were loose and hot and we indulged a bit, made it witty and a jot more tender perhaps than it should have been. There was a redemptive quality to our playing. The young woman had mangled it, and we were redeeming it. Everyone is redeemed tonight, Victor said at that Seder the April before last. Everyone, the wise son and the simple, the beyond simple, even the contrary. I had a fleeting vision of all thirteen of us at the table, sloshing wine and laughing, and it didn’t make me sad. It was like a distant photo preserved under glass. It made me play more willingly now, for this moment that would take its place among other graced moments. The piece was strenuous, and yet the pleasure I felt was easeful, as when I swam hard against the wind on that cold day in June. Midway I heard the click of the door and sensed heads turn. The custodian sometimes came around entreating us to close up shop; he could wait five minutes. Irving did a long and splendid run of sixteenth notes; I echoed him and felt like laughing out loud. It was the kind of performance we dream of, yet so often happens spontaneously, in small rooms before small groups, as this music was meant to be played. When we were done the students clapped and cheered and began meandering out. I turned. It was Victor who had entered in the middle, not the custodian. He stood at the back looking damp and hot in old jeans and sneakers, and thinner than when I last saw him, at Althea’s graduation. I braced myself for the fury but nothing came. I went over to Irving.
“You’re incorrigible. Don’t do it if you can’t take amateurs. This is my group and I won’t have them intimidated.”
“All right, all right. Don’t get so excited. Didn’t we do nice there? That was something, eh?” He patted my cheek. “Go, sweetheart, your husband’s waiting.”
Victor came up to the front and we stared. There was no ordinary greeting, kiss or handshake, quite right for us. I was stunned, seeing him, and still wide open from the music.
“It’s funny,” I said. “I just had a thought about you.”
“What thought?”
“Oh, I don’t remember any more.” I moved off to get my things. I didn’t even know how to speak to him. “What’d you come for, anyway?”
“It’s pouring. I thought I could give you a lift home.”
“You came all the way uptown to give me a lift?”
“I’ll tell you in the car. Come.”
On the main floor we found ourselves jammed in a tight crowd. A conceit had just ended.
“What is a fugue?” a woman beside us asked her companion. “Is it a flat? Is that what it is?”
“No,” the man said. “A fugue is ... I think a sort of a shadow.”
“You could tell them,” Victor whispered.
“A shadow is not bad. It is something like a shadow.”
He laughed and took my arm. The car, he said, was around the corner. He never carried an umbrella. We ran—I forgot about my ankle—and got soaked. Inside, I shook out my wet hair.
“I’m sorry about the other night,” he said. “I really thought you had had the phone number changed. I didn’t mean all those things I said. I tried to call after that but you weren’t in.”
“Is that why you came? To say you were sorry?”
“Partly. I wanted to see you. See how you are. Our phone conversations are, uh, less than satisfying. And at the graduation there were seven hundred other people. You were marvelous in there just now. I’ve missed it.”
“Yes, it was a great moment. Let’s get going. It’s late.” We drove a few blocks, then turned into the park. The smell of drenched leaves and grass filled the car. The silence was painful and I switched on the radio. Rain for several days was predicted. “Tropical hurricane Boris,” the announcer said, “has been downgraded to a tropical depression.”
“Did I hear right?” Victor asked.
“I think he said that tropical hurricane Boris has been downgraded to a tropical depression.”
“I thought so. That is a poem, isn’t it?”
“Yes, what? A haiku?”
“Or Auden, maybe?”
We looked at each other. Seven months ago we would have laughed, or touched. He switched off the radio. “That show in November is on after all. I’ll manage to get the stuff finished.” His hands were tight on the wheel and he was staring straight ahead.
“That’s terrific. I’m glad you got back to it.”
“Some of it is work I had from before. Some new.”
“What’s the new?”
He stopped for a light but still didn’t turn to me. We were in the middle of the dark park, alone. “Rooms. No people in them, but lots of windows, trapdoors, fire escapes. Odd things left lying around. There’re a few with staircases in funny places. They’re different from what I was doing before. You’ll see. Will you come?”
“I don’t know. It depends on when in November. I’m going out of town with Rosalie and Jasper. I’m not sure of the dates.”
“I’ve never put on a show without you.”
“Well, you may have to. I’m certainly not going to be an adornment at your opening, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I’ll come if I can. I’d like to see them for my own sake.”
He drove on without speaking.
“All right, am I supposed to ask how you’re getting along, Victor? Is that what you want, what you’re waiting for? Is that what people do in these situations?”
“I don’t know what people do. I wouldn’t even know how to answer.”
“So long as you don’t tell me anything about her.” No, don’t even mention her name. Although now that it appears you’ve had nearly enough of whatever she offers, I can grant that she has a name: “Dorothy.” I think of her that way, in quotes, someone I can’t quite believe in, can’t take seriously. She is not the issue. Any intelligent observer could safely conclude that in Dorothy’s carpeted field Victor’s needs are not satisfied, or are very likely oversatisfied—he never enjoyed being mothered. Dorothy will be a delayed casualty of the crash. How disaster spreads its net for victims.
“I wasn’t about to. You know she’s not the issue.”
“So much the worse for her. I gather she’ll be getting the short end one of these days?”
“I’ve never used anyone badly like that before. I always had contempt for men who did. Esther’s men, you know. But meanwhile she’s ...”
“Happy,” I finished for him. “You always did that well.”
“I meant I haven’t misled her. She knows what it’s all about. Do you think I’m a total bastard?”
“I wouldn’t say total. You have mitigating circumstances.”
He parked in front of our building. “Lydia, what I want is a few friendly moments. Would you give me that much?”
“All right. I’ll make an effort.”
“When exactly is Althea getting back?”
“In a week. She had a great time. I think she was going out with a blond lifeguard.”
“She leaves pretty soon after that. What is it, two weeks?”
“Mm-hm.”
“I promised to drive her up.”
“So I heard.”
“She was planning to take a bus but I just couldn’t—Would you have let her take the bus?”
“No. Not yet, anyway. If you hadn’t offered to drive her, I would.”
“So will you come, Lyd?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“What’s the point? I can say good-bye at home. I’m not sentimental. And then there’s that long trip back.”
“With me.”
“Yes.”
“I need to talk to you. Be with you.”
“You know where I live.”
“Ah, I see. All or nothing.”
“That’s right.”
“You were the one who said no conditions.”
“I don’t see that as a condition. It’s how we lived before. Your way, in fact.”
“And if I moved back what would you do?”
“Look, this is idle talk. If you wanted to be with me you’d be with me.”
“I mean, how would you be?”
“Not on probation, Victor, I can tell you that much!”
No flash of anger ever alarmed him. He smiled in a bitter way. “But I have no key. Did you have the key made?”
“Oh Lord, I forgot. Honestly. It keeps slipping my mind.” We sat for a few moments, listening to the tinny sound of rain on the car.
“I happened to be in Simon’s the other day with a few people from the gallery. It looks exactly the same. They still have that suit of armor in the entrance, and the chocolate-covered mints. Do you know, for some reason we never went back there, after that time ...”
“Please don’t.” I remembered that dinner too, when I said let’s try again, all the stages I missed, we’ll do better this time, and he ordered a steak dripping blood. With it, all the perfumes of Arabia. We went home and had Alan. The memory hung there, enveloping us.
He took my hand. He kissed me. I didn’t move.
“You used to like when I kissed you.”
“I still do.”
“We don’t have to sit here in the car like teen-agers,” he said.
“You have a hell of a nerve.”
“Do I? It doesn’t feel easy asking as if we just met. You’re my wife.”
“Oh. I would not have known. So what does that mean, I’m your wife? Easy access?”
“Don’t play politics. You know exactly what I’m talking about. I planned to spend my life with you.”
“Yes. I remember when you staked your claim. You ordered beer for me without even asking if I liked it.”
“All right, I’m sorry about the beer, Lydia. Most people like beer. There’s a statute of limitations for even more serious crimes.”
“It’s not the beer. You expected me to feel what you felt, to want you the way you wanted me. Because you wanted me.”
“But you did,” he said innocently.
“So then how did all this happen? You wanted me but you left me. I know it happens every day, but I can’t fathom it. You still want me, but you’re somewhere else.”
“You make it sound so simple. Of course I want you. But it was so precious to you, your private tragedy, you couldn’t show it even to me. You made everything about us seem superficial. Fragile. Like fair-weather friends.”
“Well, maybe you were right to leave, then. Obviously we were fragile. Maybe we would have done even more terrible things to each other. I saw a couple on the bus last month who reminded me of us. I mean how we might become—they were older. Something awful must have happened to them along the way, too, and they had destroyed each other. Or maybe it wasn’t anything awful. Just the usual attrition. I don’t trust my judgment any more.”
“What do you mean? What were they like?”
“Just a couple planning a dinner party. Nothing out of the ordinary. Only the way they looked and spoke was chilling. I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.”
“Tell me what they said.”
“What for?”
“Because. Because I like the way you remember every word verbatim and play it back. How do you do that?”
“It’s just the ear.” Clever Victor, courting my vanity. Last time he coaxed me into a story it was bedtime pornography—what was it like, with George? I wasn’t very good at that, but I could be good at this.
“Come on, Lyd. I was always your best audience.”
I fell. I told him how they looked, and repeated their talk about champagne, bean salad, and chicken legs. I started out in earnest but before long I was camping it up. “Oh, I left something out. With the bean salad, she asked him whether the red or the white beans should predominate.”
“Life is full of hard decisions.”
“It really wasn’t funny. It was eerie.” But I was smiling too, and I noticed my hand resting on his arm. I had done it unawares, out of habit. “Why should we be any different? Wait, I’ll give you a little test. Do you think red or white beans would be more effective in a salad?”
He assumed his deadpan, meditative air. “That would depend on what you aspired to effect.”
“Attractiveness. Appeal. Good taste.”
“Well, the white ones taste better but the red are prettier.”
“You see? That’s about what he said.”
“That doesn’t prove anything. Maybe he was a painter too.”
“This is all very cute, Victor. But the fact remains you’re spending your nights with someone else.”
“I sleep at the studio, usually.”
“Come on, that’s not the point, where you sleep. You know hell hath no fury and so forth.”
“I am the one scorned, Lyd.”
“Oh, let’s drop it. We sound like Althea and Darryl when they broke up. Look, you want to talk about them, right? Okay. There’s something I can’t for the life of me figure out.”
“What?” He shifted eagerly in his seat and reached for my hand, but I lit a cigarette. Even this small display frightened me. The dimensions it could take: my grief and his poured into one pit—we could drown in it together.
“That night, about a year and a half ago—it was winter—she had to make up an experiment to weigh air and I couldn’t think of one? I was going out to rehearse, do you remember? I told her to ask you.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, the question is, how do you weigh air? I always meant to ask.”
Victor smiled, not bitterly this time but with a terrible poignant sweetness. If that was what came over him when he summoned up his children, I wasn’t sure I could stand it. It was purer, more distilled than what came over me. “I told her to weigh a jar filled with sand—there’s not too much air between grains of sand. Then weigh the sand alone. The difference is the weight of the jar. Once you have that, you weigh the empty jar—filled with air, that is—and you can subtract and figure out the weight of the air. It’s very tiny. You take the measurements of the jar, and do some arithmetic. Weight per cubic inch.”
“How did you work that out?”
“I don’t know. I thought about it for a good while. It’s not very rigorous but it’s probably the best you can do without lab equipment, beakers and rubber tubing and water and all that. It’s a pretty stupid assignment to give a kid of that age to do at home, but you know those open classrooms.”
“And did she do it?”
“Yes. Alan had a jar of reddish sand that he took as a souvenir from Colorado on that trip, and we borrowed Patricia and Sam’s baby scale. They still had it from Samantha—this was before Bobby was born. It’s a balance scale. It was such a small weight we could hardly see it on the scale. Air is very light, you know.”
“Thanks. I just wanted to know.” I opened the car door. “Good night.”
“Hold it! Wait a second!” I ran towards the building. “Lydia,” he shouted out the window. “Come to the show! Remember, I’m inviting you.”
More than I was presently doing for him, was implicit. I raced to the dark apartment. Our pride, his mother had said, was insane. But it used to be for the world outside. Now we had turned it on each other like strobe lights that make you flinch in their glare.
I locked the door behind me with the relief of someone pursued. I couldn’t afford to talk of how Vivian learned to weigh air. She was airy herself, and her breath, which the Eastern religions say is spirit, was sweet. It was cooler now after the rain, and when it was cool I slept in Vivie’s bed. That was the saving grace about living alone. I could sleep in her bed. That was what got me through the summer nights. When the children came home I would smooth out the bed, erase all evidence of my body having lain there.
I stripped and fell onto her bed and listened as the remains of his voice faded. Talk to you. Be with you. Want you. Older snatches: Your face, Lydia, I could look at forever. ... I could die in you, it would be all right. Don’t ever fall in love with anyone else. Promise. You must never leave. Ah, that one was a joke. I shivered. My eyes throbbed, and a procession of colored streaks and blobs drifted by in the dark. I pulled the sheet around me and curled up against the wall like a mole, hiding from desire. The sheets smelled stale. I didn’t care. He complained that I cleared out their things too hastily, but he didn’t know I never took off the sheets. These are the sheets she slept on and they smell stale. Very soon I will have to remove them; they cannot stay here, rotting, forever.
If I really wanted him back perhaps I should have been more diplomatic? “Supportive?” Ah, no, I would stay alone forever rather than stylize my feelings to get him. No modern arts. No fashionable methods from the guidebooks on how to live. How to talk, how to listen, how to “communicate,” how to “share your feelings,” how to love—how to screw, that is: lying down, sitting, or standing, as it pleases you, my sweet, so long as I get mine. If I want him back it’s as we were. I want the distance and the closeness zipping in and out like a yo-yo string; I want the frankness and the inability to compromise, and the passion born of radical identity—at the root—like seeking like, twining us. I want that raw scraping at each other as diggers scrape at treasure lodes, to excavate the Victor in me, the Lydia in him, till we fall apart exhausted, sated but not finished. That dig is never done. No, no fresh start on wholesome premises for me. I am all grown up. If I can’t be my unregenerate self with him, I will manage without him.
I have learned to manage without him. Stripped. No man for the night, either. I had dinner with that friend of Don’s. I did it to please Gaby and Don; friends must be permitted to help. They gave me this amiable businessman in a many-pocketed suit, who confided over an expensive French dinner his two ongoing goals in life: to make lots of money and to please a woman beyond her wildest dreams. (“Take a woman to the moon” was the expression he used. It was no crude offer, merely part of the curriculum vitae.) I muttered something about getting and spending we lay waste our powers and he looked puzzled. What sort of commerce could I have with such a man? My babies gone, that is my business, the sweat for my daily bread. If Victor came back we would have to talk about them. He is so right. Only I fear catharsis may be overrated.
I have learned to manage, but oh yes, he can return when the time comes. When one of us has drunk enough gall. He used to say I tasted like salt and wine. I am still young; I would like to hear that again. (Not the moon; the earth will do.) He can return, this is where he lives. He was my brother, the companion of my youth, and by that handle it could be borne, not by the handle of his injustice, or mine. He can have me; I’m not afraid of that any more, and I never felt my body was something I needed to be stingy about. It doesn’t run out, like salt or wine. I don’t see how I can let him have my pain, though. That I am stingy about. It is my capital and I live off the interest. I don’t want to part with a drop. No one can taste that, or even find the place I hoard it.
But he will, sooner or later. He will hunt till he finds the place, and suck it out and swallow, and then I will be more in him than ever and he will like that, since he is not afraid of taking in what life lays at his doorstep.
I will have to listen, with whatever forbearance I can muster, to his love affair. For he is also not a man who can use people badly with impunity. And whom can he tell but me, the companion of his youth? It was a mistake, he will say. How could I have done it? She is a person too. And I will be understanding. Forgiving? No. Understanding, yes, not forgiving. Only don’t let him turn hangdog and contrite. It was his presumption I loved. His good-natured arrogance, the pleasure he took in his powers. His certainty that life must be good to him because he was worthy. God, he loved them so.