NEAR THE END OF what the schedule called the welcome get-together, two women—summer dresses, charm—stood at the foot of the solemn Arts and Crafts staircase where he was seated higher up, mostly in shadow. That could have been me his silence fell on: I had wanted to approach him, and had held off because all I had for a first thing to say was I love your work, and I had no second thing. Brightly, the women took turns talking in the face of his eclipsing wordlessness. This is you in real life? I said to him in my head. The women at the foot of the stairs were older than me, in their late thirties—close to his age, then, and whatever was going on with him, they looked like they could handle it, and this was a relief, as if being his adoring reader conferred on me the responsibility to protect us all from any wounding or disillusioning outcome. But they were fine. Unless they let it show that they were hurt, his silence could be construed as distractedness or even, attractively, as brooding, and who gained from letting his rudeness be recognized for what it was? Not him. Not them. They might feel the need to maintain appearances if they were going to be his students in the coming week, as I would not be, having been too broke to enroll before the last minute, and too full of doubt about whether I wanted criticism. I didn’t get to watch how the stairwell thing ended. A boy came up to me, and I made my half of small talk: New Mexico, yes as beautiful as that, no never been before—what about you, five hundred pages, that’s amazing. Throughout I was troubled by an awareness of semifraudulence; his confidence was so cheerfully aggressive that mine flew under his radar. The full moon would be up before long and if I wanted we could ride across the bridge on his motorcycle, an Indian he’d been restoring for years—parts cost a fortune. There was a night ride across the bridge in his novel and it would be good to check the details. Long day, I said—the flight, you know?
Enough students were out, in couples and noisy gangs, that I didn’t worry, crossing campus. True about the moon: sidewalks and storefronts brightened as I walked back to my hotel, followed, for a couple of bad blocks, by a limping street person who shouted, at intervals, Hallelujah! On the phone my husband told me a neighbor’s toddler had fallen down an old hand-dug well but apart from a broken leg wasn’t hurt, and he had finished those kitchen cabinets and would drive them to the jobsite tomorrow, and our dog had been looking all over for me, did I want to talk to him? Goofball, sweetheart, why did you ever let me get on that plane? I asked our dog. When my husband came back on the phone he said Crazy how he loves you and So the first day sucked, hunh? and They’re gonna love the story. Sleep tight, baby. Hallelujah.
Though I hadn’t done it before, the homework of annotating other people’s stories was the part of workshop that appealed to the diligent student in me. The bed strewn with manuscripts, I sat up embroidering the margins with exegesis and happy alternatives—if someone had pointed out that You should try X can seem condescending, I would have been really shocked. At two a.m., when the city noise was down to faraway sirens, I collected the manuscripts and stacked them on the desk. They were not neutral, but charged with their writers’ reality the way intimately dirtied belongings are—hairbrushes, used Band-Aids—and I couldn’t have fallen asleep with them on the bed. Where, in Berkeley, was his house, and was he asleep, and in what kind of bed, and with whom beside him? Before I left the party I had sat for a while on his step in the dark stairwell. All I had to go on were the narrators of his books, rueful first-person failers at romance whose perceptiveness was the great pleasure of reading him, but I felt betrayed. Savagely I compared the ungenerosity I’d witnessed with the radiance I’d hoped for. How could the voices in his novels abide in the brain of that withholder? The women had not trespassed in approaching, the party was meant for such encounters. Two prettier incarnations of eager me had been rebuffed, was that it? No. Or only partly. From his work I had pieced together scraps I believed were really him. At some point I had forsaken disinterested absorption and begun reading to construct a him I could love. Think of those times I’d said not His books are wonderful, but I’m in love with him. Now it was tempting to accuse his work of inauthenticity rather than face the error of this magpie compilation of shiny bits into an imaginary whole. He had never meant to tell me who he was. Nothing real was lost, there was no fall from grace, not one page in his books is diminished, not one word, you have the books, and the books are more than enough, the books will never dismay you, I coaxed myself. But the feeling that something was lost survived every attempt to reason it away.
The days passed without my seeing him again, and besides I was distracted by an acceptance entailing thrilling, dangerous phone calls from the editor who had taken the story, whose perfectionism in regard to my prose dwarfed my own. Equally confusingly, my workshop wanted the ending changed. The ending had come in a rush so pure that my role was secretarial, the typewriter chickchickchickchickchick-tsinging along, rattling the kitchen table with its uneven legs; now I couldn’t tell if it was good or not, and I needed to get home to regain my hold on intuition. At the farewell party in the twilight of the grand redwood-paneled reception room hundreds of voices promised to stay in touch. At the room’s far end, past the caterer’s table with its slowly advancing queue, French doors stood ajar, and two butterflies dodged in, teetering over heads that didn’t notice. They weren’t swallowtails or anything glamorous, but pale, small nervous slips dabbling in the party air, and my awareness linked lightly with them, every swerve mirrored, or as it felt enacted, by the consciousness I called mine, which for the moment wasn’t. After a while they pattered back out through the doors. Then there he stood, watching them go. And maybe because rationality had absented itself for the duration of their flight, what happened next felt inevitable. I stared. His head turned; when he believed I was going to retreat—when I, too, was aware of the socially destined instant for looking away—and I didn’t, then the nature of whatever it was that was going on between us changed, and was, unmistakably, an assertion. Gladness showered through me. I could take this chance, could mean, nakedly—rejoicing in being at risk—I want you. Before now I’d had no idea what I was capable of—part of me stepped aside, in order to feel fascination with this development. But did he want this? Because who was I? He broke the connection with a dubious glance down and away, consulting the proprieties, because non-crazy strangers did not lock each other in a transparently sexual gaze heedless of everybody around them, and he wasn’t, of course he wasn’t, sure what he was getting into. If I hadn’t been so happy to have discovered this crazy recklessness, no doubt I would have been ashamed. As it was I was alone until he looked up to see whether he was still being stared at, as he was, greenly, oh shamelessly, by me, and he wondered whether something was wrong with me, but he could see mine was a sane face and that I, too, recognized the exposedness and hazard of not breaking off the stare, and this information flaring back and forth between us meant we were no longer strangers.
We spent the night over coffee in a café on Telegraph Avenue, breaking pieces off from our lives, making them into stories. At the next table two sixtyish gents in identical black berets slaughtered each other’s pawns. Look, I told him, how when one leans over the board, the other leans back the exact, compensatory distance. When I recognized what I was up to, proffering little details to amuse him and to accomplish what my old anthropology professor would have called establishing kinship—We’re alike, details matter to us, and there will be no end of details—I understood that delight, which had always seemed to belong among the harmless emotions, could in fact cut deep. It could cut you away from your old life, once you’d really felt it. The most fantastic determination arose, to stay in his presence. At the same time I understood full well I would be getting on an airplane in—I looked at my watch—five hours. He, too, looked at his watch. Our plan was simple: not to sleep together, because that would make parting terrible. We would stay talking until the last minute, and then he would drive me to the airport, stopping by my hotel first for my things. I didn’t have money for another ticket and couldn’t miss my early-morning flight.
He left it till late in the conversation to ask, “You’re, what—?”
“Twenty-four.” I stirred my coffee like there was a way of stirring coffee right.
“What’s in New Mexico?”
“Beauty.” I didn’t look up from my coffee to gauge if that was too romantic. “The first morning I woke up there—in the desert; we’d driven to our campsite in the dark—I thought, This is it, I’m in the right place.”
Another thing he said across the table, in the tone of putting two and two together: “The story that got taken from the slush pile, that was yours.”
A workshop instructor who was a friend of the editor’s had spread the word. “Someone”—the moonlight motorcycle-ride guy—“told me, ‘It’s lightning striking, the only magazine that can transform an unknown into a known.’ Not that I’m not grateful, I’m completely grateful but what if I’m not good at the known part.”
“Why wouldn’t you be good?”
“Too awkward for it.”
“You’re the girl wonder.”
That shut me up: I took it to mean that instead of complaining, I should adapt. I was going to go on to hear a correction encoded in other remarks; this was only the first instance. “You’re chipper this morning, kid”—that was a warning whose franker, ruder form would have been Tone it down. “You look like something from the court of Louis Quatorze” meant I should have blow-dried my long hair straight, as usual, instead of letting its manic curliness emerge. When he would announce, of his morning’s work, “Two pages” or “Only one paragraph, but a crucial one,” I heard, “And what have you gotten done? Since your famous story. What?” I understood that I could be getting it all wrong, but I couldn’t not interpret.
Those first charmed early-summer days he put on his record of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, which I had never heard before, and taught me to listen for the snatches of Gould’s ecstatic counter-humming. When I was moved to tears by Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” he didn’t say Where have you been? He played Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You.” He sang it bare-legged, in his bathrobe, while making coffee to bring to me in the downstairs bedroom. One morning, sitting up to take the cup, I asked, “Do you remember at the welcoming party, you were sitting in the stairwell and two women came up to you? And you wouldn’t say anything?”
He needed to think. “Esmé and Joanie, you mean. They just found out Joanie’s pregnant. Try getting a word in edgewise.”
My stricken expression amused him; he said, “You have lesbians in New Mexico, right?”
It seemed easier to make a secret of that first, accusatory misreading of him than to try to explain.
I hadn’t caught my flight. Instead we made love in the hotel room I hadn’t wanted him to see, since I had left it a mess. “Was this all you?” he asked, of the clothes strewn everywhere, and it was partly from shame that I lifted his T-shirt and slid a hand inside. When we woke it was early afternoon and my having not gone home became real to me. My husband had a daylong meeting that prevented his picking me up at the airport—at least he was spared that.
Where he lived was a comradely neighborhood of mostly neglected Victorians, none very fanciful, shaded by trees as old as they were. His place was the guest cottage—“So it’s small,” he cautioned, on the drive there—belonging to a Victorian that had tilted past any hope of renovation. In its place some previous owner put up a one-story studio-apartment building, rentals that, since he disliked teaching, provided the only reliable part of his income. His minding about precariousness (if it was) was embarrassing. It was proof that he was older. Even if they could have, no one I knew in New Mexico would have wanted to use the phrase reliable income in a sentence about themselves: Jobs were quit nonchalantly, security was to be scorned. With the help of an architect friend—a former lover, he clarified as if pressed; and never do that, never renovate a house with someone you’re sleeping with—all that was stodgy and cramped had been replaced with clarity and openness, as much, at least, as the basically modest structure permitted. This preface sounded like something recited fairly often. The attic had been torn out to allow for the loft bedroom, its pitched ceiling set with a large skylight, its wide-planked floor bare, the bed done in white linen. The white bed was like his saying reliable income—it was the opposite of daring. No man I had ever known, if it had even occurred to him to buy pillowcases and sheets instead of sleeping on a bare mattress, would ever have chosen all white—my husband, for some reason I was imagining what my carpenter husband would say about that bed. Sleeplessness and guilt were catching up with me, and there was the slight feeling any tour of a house gives, of coercing praise. I was irritated that in these circumstances, to me costly and extraordinary, the usual compliments were expected. “Beautiful light,” I said. The narrow stairs to the loft were flanked by cleverly fitted bookshelves, and more bookshelves ran around the large downstairs living room, off which the galley kitchen and bathroom opened, and, on another wall, doors leading to his study and the guest bedroom that would be mine, because, he said apologetically, he couldn’t sleep through the night with anyone in bed with him—it wasn’t me; he hadn’t ever been able to. Was that going to be all right? Of course it was, I said. I sat down on the edge of the twin bed. I can get the money somehow, I can fly home tomorrow. Even as I thought that he sat down beside me. “When I think you could have gotten on that plane. I would be alone, wondering what just hit me. Instead we get this chance.” In that room there was a telephone, and he left me alone with it.
He had his coffee shop, and when he was done working, that’s where he liked to go—at least, before me he had gone there. Time spent with me, in bed or talking, interfered with the coffee shop, and with research in the university library and his circuit of bookstores and Saturday games of pick-up basketball, but for several weeks I was unaware that he, who liked everything just so, had altered his routines for my sake. From the congratulatory hostility of his friends I gathered that women came and went—“Your free throw’s gone to shit,” said Billy, owner of the shabby, stately Victorian next door whose honeysuckle-overrun backyard was a storehouse of costly toys—motorcycles, a sailboat. “How I know you have a girlfriend.” I would have liked to talk to someone who knew him—even Billy, flagrantly indiscreet—about whether my anxious adaptation to his preferences was intuitive enough, or I was getting some things wrong. Other women had lived with him: What had they done in the mornings, how had they kept quiet enough? One was a cellist—how had that worked? His writing hours, eight to noon, were nonnegotiable. If he missed a day his black mood saturated our world. But this was rare.
The check came, for the story. Forwarded by my husband, who I called sometimes when I was alone in the house. “You can always come home, you know,” my husband said. “People get into trouble. They get in over their heads.”
The house was close enough to the university that, days when he was teaching, he could ride his bicycle. Secretly I held it against him that he was honoring his responsibilities, meeting his classes, having conversations about weather and politics. My syllogism ran: What love does is shatter life as you’ve known it; his life isn’t shattered; therefore he is not in love. Of the two of us I was the real lover. This self-declared greater authenticity, this was consoling—but, really, why was it? The question of who was more naked emotionally would have struck him as crazy, my guess is. But either my willingness to tear my life apart had this secret virtuousness, or the damage I was doing was deeply—callously—irresponsible.
By now I knew something about the women before me, including the Chinese lover whose loss he still wasn’t reconciled to, though it had been years. I stole her picture and tucked it into Middlemarch, the only book in this house full of his books that belonged to me, and when he admitted to not liking Eliot much I was relieved to have a book which by not mattering to him could talk privately and confidentially to what was left of me as a writer, the little that was left after I was, as I believed I wanted to be, stripped down to bare life, to skin and heartbeat and sex, never enough sex, impatient sex, adoring sex, fear of boredom sex. The immense sanity of Middlemarch made it a safe haven for the little insanity of the stolen photograph. Whenever I went back to Middlemarch, I imagined the magnanimous moral acuity with which the narrator would have illumined a theft like mine, bringing it into the embrace of the humanly forgivable while at the same time—and how did Eliot get away with this?—indicting its betrayal of the more honorable self I would, in Middlemarch’s narrator’s eyes, possess. But I didn’t go back often; sex and aimless daydreaming absorbed the hours I would usually have spent reading, and when I went up to the loft, I left the book behind—I didn’t want him noticing it. He had a habit of picking up my things and studying them quizzically, as if wondering how they had come to be in his house, and if he picked up Middlemarch there was a chance the photo would fall out. If I fell asleep in his bed after sex he would wake me after an hour or two, saying Kid, you need to go downstairs. On the way down I ran my fingers over the spines of the books lining the stairwell. If you opened one it would appear untouched; he recorded observations and memorable passages in a series of reading notebooks.
My scribbled-in Middlemarch stayed on the nightstand by the twin bed, and I had hung my clothes in the closet, but that didn’t mean I felt at home in the room, with its dresser whose bottom drawer was jammed with photos. What did it mean that this drawer, alone in all the house, had not been systematically sorted? Near the bottom of the slag heap was an envelope of tintypes: from a background of stippled tarnish gazed a poetic boy, doleful eyes and stiff upright collar, and I wanted to take it to him and say Look, you in 1843, but that would prove I’d been riffling through the drawer, and even if he hadn’t said not to, I wasn’t sure it was all right. His childhood was there, his youth, the face of the first author’s photo. Houses and cities before this one. His women, too, and I dealt them out across the floor, a solitaire of faces, wildly unalike: I wanted to know their stories. No doubt I did know pieces, from his work, but here they were, real, and I would have listened to them all if I could, I would have asked each one How did it end? When he was writing he would sometimes knock and come in and rummage through the pictures, whose haphazardness replicated memory’s chanciness. As with memory there was the sense that everything was there, in the drawer—just not readily findable. Disorder is friendly to serendipity, was that the point? When he found what he wanted he didn’t take it back to his desk but stayed and studied it, and when he was done dropped it casually back into the hodgepodge. If I opened the drawer after he’d gone there was no way to guess which photo he’d been holding.
There were things that happened in sex that felt like they could never be forgotten. Recognitions, flights of soul-baring mutual exposure, a kind of raw ravishment that seemed bound to transform our lives. But, sharing the setting of so many hours of tumult—the bed—and tumult’s instruments—our two bodies—these passages lacked the distinctness of event and turned out to be, as far as memory was concerned, elusive. And there was sadness in that, in coming back to our same selves. By midsummer, something—maybe the infuriating inescapability of those selves, maybe an intimation of the monotonousness sex could devolve into, if we kept this up—caused us to start turning sex into stories. Sex with me as a boy, the one and only boy who ever caught his eye, a lovely apparition of a boy he wanted to keep from all harm, but who one day was simply gone, sex as if he was a pornographer and I was a schoolgirl who began, more and more, to conjure long-absent emotions, tenderness, possessiveness, even as the schoolgirl became more and more corrupt, telling sly little lies, the sex we would have if after ten years’ separation we saw each other across a crowded room, sex as if I had just learned he’d been unfaithful to me with one of his exes, sex as if I was unfaithful, the sex we would have if we broke up and after ten years ended up in the same Paris hotel for some kind of writers’ event, a book signing maybe, and sometimes it was his book and sometimes it was mine, sex with me in the stockings and heels of a prostitute, with him as a cop, me as a runaway desperate for shelter, with him as a woman, with the two of us as strangers seated near each other on a nightlong flight.
These games always began the same way. Ceremonious, the invitation, somber and respectful in inverse proportion to the derangement solicited. What if you are. What if I am. We never talked about this, and though either could have said Let’s not go there, neither of us ever declined a game described by the other. The inventing of parts to play was spontaneous, their unforeseeableness part of the game’s attraction, but a special mood, an upswell of lurid remorse, alerted me whenever I was about to say And then after forever we see each other again. In these scenarios where we had spent years apart, the lovely stroke was our immediate, inevitable recognition of each other—not, like other emotions we played at, a shock, not a wounding excitement, but an entrancing correction to loss. All wrongs set right. And we look at each other. And it’s like—
While he wouldn’t drink any coffee that wasn’t made from freshly ground Italian dark roast (which I had never tried before) and he had a taste for expensive chocolate, he seemed mostly indifferent to food and never cooked. What had he done when he was alone? Was it just like this, cereal, soup from cans, microwaved enchiladas? Should I try to make something—would that feel, to him, to me, ominously wife-y? He liked bicycling to the farmer’s market and would come back with the ripest, freshest tomatoes. He taught me to slather mayonnaise across sliced bakery bread, grinding black pepper into the bleeding exposed slices before covering them with the top slice, taking fast bites before the bread turned sodden, licking juice from wrists and fingertips, the tomatoes still warm from basking in their crates at the farmer’s market, their taste leaking acid-bright through the oily mayonnaise blandness, the bread rough in texture, sweet in fragrance. There was at least a chance he’d never told any other lover about tomato sandwiches. After weeks of not caring what I ate, I had found something I couldn’t get enough of, and as soon as I finished one sandwich I would make another, waiting until he was out to indulge, and it didn’t matter how carefully I cleared away all traces of my feast, he could tell, he was quick with numbers and probably counted the tomatoes.
Really the little house was saturated with his vigilance; there was no corner I could narrate from. When I went elsewhere, tried working in a café (not his) for example, it was as if the house was still with me, its atmosphere extending to the little table where I sat with my books and my legal pad and my cup of coffee with cream and two teaspoons of brown sugar stirred in, and even the music in the coffee shop, which should have had nothing to do with him, caused me to wonder whether he was thinking of me and wanted me to come home or whether he was relieved to have an afternoon to himself, and whether the onset of irritation was inevitable in love, and if it was how people could stand their lives; but look, everyone at the tables around me was standing their life, and I had more than most, I was in love. With him, and that was extraordinary, it was surreal—naturally it required adaptation, but I ought to rejoice, day by day, in the revision asked of me, I ought to get a handle on my moods. Two hours had passed; I gave up trying. He was sitting with Billy on Billy’s front steps and greeted me by saying, “Everest redux.” Billy said, “Can I have a kiss for luck? Leaving for Kathmandu early in the a.m. Oh and forgot to tell you”—turning to him—“Delia’s going to house-sit. I don’t want to be distracted on the icefall by visions of Fats”—his skinny, hyper Border collie—“wasting away in some kennel. Only good vibes. Last year when I got up into the death zone I hallucinated my grandmother.” Deepening his Texas drawl: “ ‘Time you git back home.’ Actually one of the Sherpas looked a whole lot like her. Brightest black eyes. See right through bullshit, which you want in a Sherpa or grandma. I lied a lot when I was little, like practice for being in the closet. So, Delia. Fats loves her. So, she’ll be staying here.” He said, “Always smart not to leave a house empty,” but I knew Billy was curious if I would show that I minded, because Delia was his most recent ex, the lover before me, and thinking only good vibes, right, I said, “Fats will be happy,” and kissed Billy on his sunburned forehead.
I gave up on the coffee shop but when I tried writing in the afternoons in the guest bedroom, sitting up in the twin bed with a legal pad on my knees, he would wander in and start picking up various objects, my traveling alarm clock, my hairbrush, and I would drop the legal pad and hold out my arms. Maybe because he was becoming restless, or was troubled by what looked, in me, like the immobilizing onset of depression, he talked me into going running and that was how we spent our evenings now, on an oval track whose cinders were the real old-school kind, sooty black, gritting under running shoes. If there had been a meet that weekend the chalk lines marking the lanes were still visible, and the infield was grass, evenly mown, where he liked, after running, to throw a football, liked it even more than he ordinarily would have because football figured in the novel he was writing about two brothers whose only way of connecting with each other was throwing a football back and forth, and he needed the sense impressions of long shadows across summer grass and the Braille of white x’s stitched into leather to prompt the next morning’s writing. When he held a football his tall, brainy self came together, justified. Pleasantly dangerous with the love of competition, though all there was to compete with at the moment was me. When he cocked his arm back and took a step, tiny grasshoppers showered up. The spiral floated higher, as if the air was tenderly prolonging its suspension, and took its time descending. The thump of flight dead-ending against my chest as I ran pleased me. He had trouble accepting that I could throw a spiral, though he might have known my body learned fast. I couldn’t throw as far, and he walked backward, taunting for more distance. Taunting I took as a guy-guy thing; my prowess, modest as it was, made me an honorary boy, and was sexy. One bright evening as I cocked my arm back he cried Throw it, piggy! Shocked into grace I sent a real beauty his way, and with long-legged strides he covered the grass and leaped, a show-offy catch tendered as apology before I could call down the field What?, but I was standing there understanding: piggy was a thing he called me to himself, that had slipped out. In my need and aimlessness and insatiability I was a pale sow. How deluded I had been, believing I was a genius lover no excess could turn repellent. The next morning I woke up sick, ashamed that wherever he was in the house he could hear me vomiting, and when I said I wanted a hotel room he told me a tenant had moved out from one of his units and I could have the key.
These studio units, five of them, occupied the shabby one-story stucco box that stood between his house and the street. Flat-roofed cinder block painted a sullen ochre, this building was a problem factory. Termites, leaks, cavalier electrical wiring. With his tenants he was on amiable terms, an unexpectedly easygoing landlord. The little box I let myself into had a floor of sky-blue linoleum—sick as I was, that blue made me glad. The space was bare except for a bed frame and mattress where I dropped the sheets and towels he’d given me. The hours I spent in the tiny bathroom were both wretched and luxurious in their privacy; whenever there was a lull in the vomiting I would lock and unlock the door just to do so. Now he is locked the fuck out. Now I let him back in. Now out forever. After dark I leaned over the toy kitchen sink and drank from the faucet. It was miraculous to be alone. There was a telephone on the kitchen’s cinder-block wall, and as I looked at it, it rang. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. I slept in the bare bed and woke scared that my fever sweat had stained the mattress; it was light; that day lasted forever, the thing sickness does to time. His knocking woke me; he came in all tall and fresh from his shower. Having already worked his habitual four hours. First he made the bed; with the heel of his hand he pushed sweaty hair from my face; I was unashamed, I could have killed him if he didn’t make love to me. “I’ll check in on you tomorrow,” he said. I barely kept myself from saying Do you love me. Do you love me. Nausea helped keep me from blurting that out; the strenuousness of repressing nausea carried over into this other, useful repression. “I’m so hungry,” I said instead. “Can you bring me a bowl of rice?” In saying it I discovered that the one thing I could bear to think of eating was the bowl of rice he would carry over from his house. I needed something he made for me. When I woke it was night. Cool air and traffic sounds came through the picture window, and seemed to mean I was going to be able to live without him. Now and then the phone began to ring and I let it ring on and on. Sometime during that night I went through the cupboards. I sat cross-legged on the floor with a cup of tea and ate stale arrowroot biscuits from the pack the tenant had forgotten, feeling sick again as I ate. It didn’t matter that I knew that very well, and even understood it; the bowl of rice was now an obsession. It seemed like the only thing I had ever wanted from him, though in another sense all I had done since staring at him that first time was want things from him. In the morning while it was still dark he let himself in—of course there was a master key—with nothing in his hands, and when we were through making love he said, “You’re going to bathe, right?” Then I was alone without a bowl of rice, cross-legged on the kitchen floor with the cup of tea I’d made and the last five arrowroot biscuits, locked deep in hunger, realizing that because the hunger felt clear and exhilarating, with no undertow of nausea, that I was either well or about to be. I called and made a reservation on a flight to New Mexico that had one seat left.
When the taxi pulled up before dawn he was sitting on the curb, his back to me, a tall man in a child’s closed-off pose, ignoring the headlights that shone on him. Against black asphalt the hopping gold-gashed dot dot dot was the last flare-up of his tossed cigarette. I thought, and came close to saying You don’t smoke. He stood up and said, “I won’t try to stop you,” and it was another blow, not to be stopped.
In the novel he wrote about that time I wasn’t his only lover. House-sitting next door, the narrator’s sensible, affectionate ex affords him sexual refuge from the neediness of the younger woman he’d believed he was in love with, whose obsession with him has begun to alarm him. Impulsively, after the first time they slept together, she left her husband for him. How responsible did that make him, for her? He understands, as she doesn’t seem to, that there’s nothing unerring about desire. At its most compelling, it can lead to a dead end, as has happened in their case. This younger, dark-haired lover keeps Middlemarch on her nightstand, and riffling through the book one night while she’s sleeping the narrator finds the naked photograph of the Chinese woman whose devotion he had foolishly walked away from and he thinks, I could get her back. She lives not very far away, and I would have heard if she got married—people can’t wait to tell you that kind of thing about an ex. Here the novel takes a comic turn, because now he needs to break up with two women, his house-sitting ex, likely to go okay, and, a more troubling prospect, this girl inexplicably damaged by their affair, turned from a promising actress whose raffishly seductive Ophelia had gotten raves into a real-life depressive who hasn’t gone on a single audition. He needs to rouse her from her depression, to talk to her frankly, encouragingly. A tone he can manage, now, because of what he hopes for. Tricky to carry off, the passage where, tilting the picture to catch what little light there is, he falls in love—the novel’s greatest feat, also the one thing I was sure had never happened. I don’t mean the novel was true, only that the things in it had happened. The likelier explanation was, he’d gone into the guest bedroom while I was out. Farfetched, his coming into the room while I slept—why would he?—though I could see why he wanted, thematically, the juxtaposition of sleep and epiphany, and how the little scene was tighter for suspense about whether the dark-haired lover would wake up.
Twelve years later, on our way home from the funeral of a well-loved colleague who had lived in Berkeley, two friends and I stopped in a bookstore. Between the memorial service and the trip out to the cemetery the funeral had taken most of the day. Afterward we had gone to dinner, and except for the driver we were all a little drunk and, in the wake of grieving funeral stiltedness and the tears we had shed, trying to cheer each other up. Death seemed like another of Howard’s contradictions: His rumbling, comedic fatness concealed an exquisite sensibility, gracious, capable of conveying the most delicate illuminations to his students or soft-shoeing around the lectern, reciting In Breughel’s great picture The Kermess. If Howard’s massiveness was bearish, that of his famous feminist-scholar wife was majestic, accoutred with scarves, shawls, trifocals on beaded chains, a cane she was rumored to have aimed at an unprepared grad student in her Dickinson seminar—My Soul had stood—a Loaded Gun, David said; Josh corrected, My Life, with the affable condescension that, David’s grin said, he’d been hoping for, since it made Josh look not so Zen after all. Josh was lanky, mild, exceedingly tall, with an air of baffled inquiry and goodwill I attributed to endless zazen, David sturdy, impatient, his scorn exuberant, the professional vendettas he waged merciless. It was David I told my love affairs to, and when I had the flu it was David who came over, fed Leo his supper, and read aloud. Through the wall I could hear David’s merry showed their terrible claws till Max said “BE STILL!” followed by Leo’s doubtful Be still!
That evening of the funeral one of us suggested waiting out rush hour in the bookstore and we wandered through in our black clothes, David to philosophy, Josh to poetry, me to a long table of tumbled sale books on whose other side—I stared—he stood with an open book in his hand, looking up before I could turn away, the brilliant dark eyes that had held mine as I came over and over meeting mine now without recognition, just as neutrally looking away, the book in his hand the real object of desire, something falsely assertive and theatrical in the steadiness of his downward gaze that convinced me he had been attracted to me not as a familiar person but as a new one, red-haired now, in high heels, in head-to-toe black, a writer with three books to my name, teaching at a university a couple of hours away, single mother to a solemn, intuitive toddler who spoke in complete sentences, light of my life, though he wasn’t going to get to hear about my son, wasn’t going to get a word of my story, and in the inward silence and disbelief conferred by his not knowing who I was there was time for a decision, which was: Before he can figure out who he’s just seen, before, as some fractional lift of his jaw told me he was about to, he can look up and meet your eyes again and know who you are, before before before before before before before before he can say your name followed by I don’t believe it, followed by I always thought I’d see you again, look away. Get out. Go. And I did, and though behind me where I stood on the street corner the bookstore door opened now and then and let people out none of them was him. Person after person failed to be him. He hadn’t known me. I had known him—did that mean I had been, all along, the real lover? What we had should have still burned both of us. If it had been real, if we had gone as deep as I believed we had, he could never have failed to recognize me. After a while my friends came out carrying their bags, and David told me, “This is the first time I’ve ever seen you leave a bookstore empty-handed, ever,” and we pulled our gloves on, telling each other taking a little time had been a good idea, and our heads were clear now, and we could make the drive home. Of course, that was when he came out the door—long-legged, striding fast. Pausing, fingers touched to his lips, then the upright palm flashed at me—a gesture I didn’t recognize, for a second, as a blown kiss—before he turned the corner.
“Wasn’t that—?” David said.
“Yes.”
“Did he just—”
“When we’re in the car, you two,” Josh said. “I’ve got to be at the Zen Center at five in the morning.”
“The day before, he told me his biggest fear wasn’t that they wouldn’t get all the cancer. His biggest fear wasn’t of dying, even, though he said that was how his father died when Howard was only nine, under the anesthetic for an operation supposed to be simple, with nobody believing they needed to say good-bye beforehand, and now that he was facing a simple operation himself, one nobody dies of, he couldn’t help thinking of his father. No. His biggest fear was that he’d be left impotent. Of all the things that can conceivably go wrong with prostate cancer surgery, that was the most terrifying.”
“What did you say?” Josh asked, from the backseat.
“ ‘Most terrifying?’ I’m wondering why it’s me, the gay boy, Howard chooses to confide in about impotence. Because my whole life revolves around penises? I’m a little unnerved, because, you know Howard, his usual decorum, where’s that gone? But I want to be staunch for him, I love this man. And he says, ‘Not for me. If it came down to living without it, I would grieve, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. For me. Whereas for Martha.’ ”
“ ‘Most terrifying,’ ” Josh said. “I’m very sorry he had to make those calculations.”
“ ‘Martha can’t live without it.’ ”
“You were right there,” Josh said. “You reassured him.”
“Of course I reassured him.” David checked Josh’s expression in the rearview mirror. “But it’s not something I imagined, that the two of them ever—or still—”
“Or, hmmm, that she could be said—”
“You idiots, he adored her,” I said. “That’s what he was telling David. Not, ‘My god, this woman, it’s unimaginable that I’ll never make love to her again.’ But ‘How can she bear the loss.’ ”
Josh took off his tie, rolled it up, tucked it in his jacket pocket, and then handed his glasses forward to me, saying, “Can you take custody?” I cradled them as cautiously as if they were his eyes. Once he was asleep, David said, “That was him, wasn’t it?”
I told him what happened. “After I’d gone he must have stood there thinking, But I know her, I know her from somewhere. Then he gets it—who I am, and that I’d walked away without a word. Which has to have hurt.”
“It’s generally that way when you save your own skin—somebody gets hurt.”
“Even hurt, he blows me a kiss. That makes him seem—”
“Kind of great,” David said.
“Wasn’t I right? Walking away?”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” David said. “There’s no problem with a little mystery, in the context of a larger, immensely hard-won clarity.” He yawned. “I’m not the idiot.” He tipped his curly head to indicate the backseat. “He’s the idiot. Did I reassure him. Fuck. I’m the most reassuring person alive.”
Oncoming traffic made an irregular stream of white light, its brilliance intensifying, fusing, then sliding by. I held up Josh’s glasses and the lights dilated gorgeously. I said, “You know why we’ll never give up cars—because riding in cars at night is so beautiful, it’s telling stories in a cave with the darkness kept out, the dash lights for the embers of the fire.”
“You don’t have to tell me any stories,” David said. “I’m absolutely wide-awake.”
I didn’t sleep long, but when I woke he was in a different mood.
“You know, his novel,” David said, “—the one about you—is that a good book?”
“If you like his voice it’s good.”
“On its own, though, is it?”
Mine wasn’t exactly a disinterested reading, I said. The style is his style, and like all his work it moved right along, but the novel overall felt tilted in the narrator’s favor, and it would have been more compelling if he had made the dark-haired lover—
“You,” David said.
—okay, me, but I really am talking about the character now, who is all shattered vulnerability and clinging, the embodiment of squishy need. If he had granted her some independent perceptions, even at points conflicting with his, made her more real, more likable, then her realness would test the narrator’s possession of the story, and cast some doubt on the narrator’s growing contempt. If it’s less justified, more ambiguous, then his contempt isn’t just about her and how she deserves it, it’s also about him and how ready he is to feel it. If it’s not so clear that he’s right to feel what he feels, then everything between them gets more interesting, right?
“That’s a sadder ending,” David said. “The way that you tell it.”
“I wasn’t thinking it was sad,” I said. “I was thinking it was—better.”