Sometimes Otto’s interest in a client extended beyond the reason that had brought them together. Sophie did not know what particular qualities attracted him; he was not inclined to analyze his own feelings or those of others. He was not inclined to wonder why he liked someone or to talk about what kind of people he thought they were. If Sophie suggested—her voice increasingly exasperated—that so and so amused him because he was unpredictable or naïve or an expert in an obscure field of inquiry (the evolution of amusement parks; black magic in New Orleans), Otto would nod and agree, all the while keeping his finger on the paragraph he had been reading in a book or newspaper. The client was invited to one small dinner party, and Otto would have an occasional lunch or drink with him; that was all. A few lingered on, not close friends, but a little more than clients. Such a one was Francis Early, who had been referred to Otto by a publishing company he represented. Francis himself was a publisher of sorts. His purpose in coming to a lawyer remained ambiguous. If it hadn’t, Otto, who detested all divorce litigation, would probably have rejected his “case.” Francis’ efforts to resolve his matrimonial problems were not energetic. Mainly, he seemed to want to talk about them. Mrs. Early, with her three children, remained holed up in Locust Valley, Long Island, and refused to reply to any legal letters. When Francis phoned her to request she co-operate—at least in the formalities needed for a legal separation—she complained she was having difficulties with the coal furnace; he hadn’t given her the right instructions for banking it at night, and when did he intend to have oil heat installed, as he had promised to do several years ago? When Otto phoned her, she muttered, “You go to hell, too!” and hung up.
Francis had left her twice before. The first departure was the one that should have stuck, he told Otto, when there was only one child. Ultimately, Otto gave up any pretense that there was anything for him to do for either of them. Since Francis had a small apartment near Otto’s office, they had lunch together now and then.
Francis maintained an office, once the second floor of an opulent town house, on East Sixty-first Street, where, beneath a ceiling of carved plaster that looked like soiled meringue, he published books on gardening, wild flowers, rose horticulture and treillage, along with a line of paperbacks on how to start a collection of butterflies or stamps, sea shells or antique cars, these latter, he said, the nearly exclusive source of the money which enabled him to publish the former.
Sophie had met him the evening she and Otto had gone to see the French National Theater’s production of Andromache. She had been aware of a special animation in herself attributed with some truth by Otto to the fact that he would have to wear earphones for the English translation while she could sit there in her bilingual authority. But the more generous truth was that she loved Racine, she loved Jean-Louis Barrault and the adamantine glitter of professionalism of French classical theater productions. She knew, too, that the evening would have a salutory effect on her, for a day or two at least, all that compressed intensity thrusting against her dreaminess; her nebulous preoccupations, qualities which, when he was irritated by her, Otto called somnolence.
Walking up three flights of stairs after a gaudy dinner at a French restaurant, they found Francis waiting for them in front of his door. He was smiling.
He gave them cognac, setting out glasses within easy reach, arranging tables and chairs, speaking all the while, affably and humorously, of the other tenants in his building and his bachelor efforts at housekeeping and, just before he sat down himself, placing on Sophie’s lap with easy familiarity a small book of silhouettes of New England wild flowers. His voice was light, rather high, shattered almost comically now and then by a smoker’s cough, through which he continued to talk until he ran out of breath. His solicitousness was like an endearment; there was a curious touch of precocity about it like that of an overly conscientious child.
Sophie observed the charred edges of the table where he ate. He must deposit his cigarettes there while he cooked a chop for himself at the three-burner stove. An unwashed frying pan balanced on the edge of the drainboard. There were books heaped on tables—he said he would put up shelves when he had the time to bother—and dusty Venetian blinds at the two windows which faced the street, a couch, some cane chairs, a print of an Edvard Munch engraving on one wall. The door to a tiled box of a bathroom was ajar, and Sophie could see shaving articles laid out neatly on the toilet-tank top.
Otto seemed almost frivolous to her that night, as he bantered mildly with Francis. There was a mysterious character to their apparent liking for each other. But a mystery need not be complex, she thought. Perhaps it was some simple thing that made them comfortable without troubling them with intimacy. Otto didn’t have close friends. The long association with Charlie Russel had, even by then, begun to be disfigured by a kind of sullenness between them. Otto had begun to think about Charlie, and what he had said to Sophie expressed a growing contempt of which, she thought, he himself had been hardly aware. The very qualities he had once admired in Russel became the focus of his disapproval. What he had once described as Charlie’s warmth and generosity, he now spoke of as impulsiveness and vanity. In a way, Sophie supposed, Otto had defined his own nature by contrasting it with his old friend’s. They were a good combination, he had always thought. Where he was inclined to be rigid, Charlie was flexible; where he was literal, Charlie was imaginative. “Christ, he’s always spilling food on his clothes,” he had reported to Sophie one evening. “Just the way he did when we were in college. And I used to want to be like him! I hated myself for being so damned neat! I thought it showed spiritual meanness…to be so fastidious.” So the erosion had begun.
There was a man in California, a doctor, with whom Otto kept up a lively correspondence, although he rarely saw him unless there was a medical convention in New York. Sophie had thought him a cold man on the one occasion she had met him; flatulent with country-squire theories of aristocracy and political postures to match. Yet Otto spoke of him with respect, even with fondness.
Perhaps Otto liked Francis because he was so unaffectedly friendly. He was touching. Pleasing.
“I don’t know a thing about nature,” Sophie said, looking through the book he had given her. “I don’t know the name of any bug or tree or wild flower.”
Francis was at once concerned, thoughtful. “Jean, my wife,” he said, “is indifferent to the things themselves, but she does know the names of everything. It’s a peculiar mind…that kind. It catches her up, though. She only reads to form opinions and then she can’t remember what she’s read, only the opinions. I would guess you’re quite different.” Sophie was vaguely flattered, although what he meant by different she didn’t know. Still, she was a little uncomfortable; the flattery was not only ambiguous but in poor taste. But she herself had been disingenuous. She knew the names of many plants and insects and flowers. Why had she offered him false ignorance? To flatter him? Or had he, by placing his book in her lap with facile geniality, irritated her? And had her assertion been made not to show ignorance but indifference to his concerns? They had both been crooked.
They drank brandy and listened to Francis talk about his work. He enjoyed, he said, the benefits of anonymity; he was such an unappetizing bite that no big publisher bothered to eat him up, and he was free not only to publish pretty much what he wanted, but because he stayed strictly away from fiction he escaped the awful exigencies of fashion. He did his little bugs and plants; the natural world was a thousand times more bizarre and interesting than human society. With a charming smile, he described the manner in which a certain larva managed to insinuate itself into the brain of a songbird in order to complete its metamorphosis.
“Did you like him?” Otto asked later as they pressed through the crowded lobby into the theater.
“Yes,” she replied. “He’s nice, very nice.”
“I don’t know that he’s nice. I would say he’s heartless, really. It’s odd. You see how…courtly he is, almost old-fashioned. He affects a large tolerance of the world, he remains cool, he keeps out of it. I think no one can really be like that—either you’re dismayed and baffled or you reduce everything to aesthetics or politics or sex sociology or whatever. But Francis—and by heartless, I don’t mean he’s hard—has an absolutely impenetrable surface, although he appears to have none at all. He doesn’t take me in, yet I like him. He makes me feel cheerful.”
It was, for Otto, a very long dissertation. Sophie looked at him in surprise. He handed her the program he’d just been given by an usher who was, at the moment, gesturing impatiently at their seats. They edged past two men wearing embroidered silk vests and turned down the seats.
“I’ve never heard you go on so about anyone,” she said.
“That’s why,” he replied. “Because I like him and I don’t see why I should.”
“But are they really going to separate or get a divorce?”
“I don’t think so. He’s always going out there to see her. He says she’s a realist. I think he means it as a complaint. Maybe it’s the way he says it, with that confiding grin of his.”
“Maybe he loves her.”
“Love? I don’t know about that. In fact, that’s where his heartlessness really shows up. He wants to win. No matter what he says, I think she threw him out. Oh, he’s very dependent on her…she’s one of those organizing women, I’d guess, sounded tough to me on the telephone, very tough. There’s plenty going on between them all right. He sits up there in his shabby old office and she takes care of the world.”
“I wonder why she threw him out.”
“I only suspect that. I’m pretty sure he’s going to get back somehow. He told me he worries about the neighborhood children coming in to visit his children—they might break something she loves or use her special soap.”
“Her soap!”
“English soap. Pears, he said. He’s full of peculiar details like that.”
She held out to him the earphones for simultaneous translation. “Do you want these?”
“Why imply I have a choice?” he grumbled, and took them.
Despite her concentration on the stage, the first act was somewhat marred for Sophie. Someone had dropped their earphones in apparent discouragement and left, and the tiny flat voice of the translator continued to pick shrilly at the air. The ushers didn’t find the earphones until halfway through the play. During intermission, Otto, looking sleepy, wandered off to smoke a cigar. Sophie remained in her seat, aware that the program was slipping off her lap, but curiously inert, as though the cessation of the play had left her with nothing to think about, nothing to do. But just as Otto came down the stairs to their row, she sat up straight, clutching at the glossy edge of the program, thinking so intently about Francis Early that she lost the play until its penultimate moment.
A few weeks later, Sophie arranged to meet Otto and Early at the Morgan Library to see an exhibition of plant and flower drawings. At the last minute Otto called home to say he could not make it.
Long after Francis had returned to Locust Valley, his Munch engraving tucked under an arm, carrying a box of books by a wash-line cord, Sophie wondered what would have happened if Otto had not left them alone together. The answer depended on her mood. But she was unable to deceive herself when it came to recognizing the differing impulses which brought them both to Francis’ studio couch. For him, she might have been one of a number of others. But for her, he could only have been himself.
She was thirty-five, too old for romance, she told herself as they got into a taxi on Thirty-ninth street and Madison. He gave his address. They faced forward rather stiffly. She read the cabdriver’s license number and memorized his name, Carl Schunk. They didn’t speak. Once Francis took her gloved hand in his and a tremor passed over her and her mouth went dry.
She had, then, an anguished foreknowledge that she would be a long time missing him. But a moment later she forgot; the intensity of her feeling for him obliterated everything except itself. She recalled as in another life, his saying that his wife knew “the name of everything.” Had his voice been plaintive? She had not listened cannily enough to understand, and it might have helped her now. But what if he had been plaintive? What if his tone of voice had revealed an unalterable attachment? What did she care for Jean, for the house in Locust Valley, the three children, for history, for Otto, for her own past, for what was to happen?
They had been looking down at a glass case, he talking somewhat pedantically about photoengraving, when he had looked at her and smiled. Then he saw that her dazed glance was fixed upon him; he flushed. She saw his blood rise, flooding his neck and his face. He took her wrist in his hand and said, “Oh!”
What she felt then had surely been rapture. He had recognized all at once the violence of the emotion which possessed her, and her gratitude for that recognition obscured for a little time that recognition was the only provision he carried. Her wrist had twisted in his hand, her fingers had reached up and caught his shirt-cuff, then touched his skin. When, years later, she tried to recall the exact sound of his voice, remembering with a certain painful joy that it had been she who had evoked that startled flush, that involuntary “Oh!,” she drove herself into despair. The voice would not come back; she could not hear it.
Not long after his lecture near the glass case, Sophie lay next to him on his couch, her head half off the edge, drowsily contemplating her clothes piled up on a cane chair. By lifting her head an inch, she could see his face, so pale now, so mysterious.
She had not ceased to think about him since that evening in the theater. What had recently happened between them on the knobby mattress was as inextricably bound up with her first view of him as it was with the tension which had tightened around her throat like a garrotte, breaking at last into the plangent silence of their undressing, then extinguished by the hasty violence of their embrace. Only now, his thin leg rolled off her thighs. She was moved by the air of transience and neglect in his room, by the smell of dust and lemon—perhaps some lotion that he used, or perhaps two lemons themselves on a table. Light seemed everywhere at once. Passionate endearments rose to her lips, but she didn’t speak them. It was not shyness that kept her silent. She tried to force from her consciousness the painful apprehension that the room, except for her own presence, was empty. “Francis?” she whispered. He coughed, one arm reached across her breasts toward a small table, where the fingers found a cigarette, a book of matches. Then it was withdrawn, the momentary warmth of his skin increasing her awareness of the chill that was spreading over her flesh. “It’s all right,” he murmured. It did not seem he was even speaking to her.
He stroked her arm. Gradually there appeared on his lips that familiar, winning, congenial smile.
On the telephone, they sometimes talked about love. Once, she heard an extraordinary excitement in his voice; she thought she had him, and suddenly freed from the presence of a shapeless and terrible weight, the unlovely issue of their love-making, she spoke without shame of her feeling for him. But when they met again, nothing seemed changed.
But she had her secret hoarding; seeing him as he searched for her in a bar where they met and where she, as usual, was early, watching him as he made coffee on his stove, noting with intense pleasure his long thin back, his slightly stooped shoulders, his sharply drawn profile as he turned from time to time to say something to her.
Later, during a time when there was no room in her thoughts for anything but remorseless obsessive recollection, a perverse desire to debase the tenderness she had felt for him led her to insist to herself that it had all been a kind of fatigued middle-aged prurience. And how she had grown to hate that amicability which had once given her such pleasure! It was a shirt of mail, an expression of his unalterable detachment. Behind it lay his life’s desolation, his disappointment in himself, his failure with his wife, his real resentment at his hole-in-the-wall company and his self-contempt for his effort to make a virtue out of limitation. Yet he couldn’t seem to help himself—even his bitterness was somehow turned to personal profit. It added to his mystery; it gave his smile an elusive sadness, and it was an element in that quality he had of always recognizing the real meaning that lay behind people’s words, as though his soul attended in the wings of a theater, ready to fly out and embrace them in universal awareness.
She had once bought him a radio. She had given it to him in its cardboard box and while he undid the staples, she had smiled happily because he had said he must get himself a radio one of these days, because she had anticipated him and gotten him what he wanted. He accepted it gracefully; his voice was touched with admiration—he admired thoughtfulness—and with the suggestion, the merest suggestion, that as a rule no one bothered to give him a gift, no one troubled, not that he minded. He was just one of those men who were not given things.
A week later when Sophie came to his room, he had another radio. He had been astonished, he said, when one of his writers, a warm-hearted lady naturalist, had simply sent it to him. It had FM, police calls, God knows what. It was leather-covered and very swank and powerful. “I can get the world,” he said. Sophie extended her hand toward the radio but didn’t touch it. What had he done with hers? Thrown it out the window?
She would like to have smashed the new radio on his dusty parquet floor. She smiled instead. She didn’t know how to violate that mutual smile of theirs. It was miasmic. It stayed on her face while she undressed. It would not go away, and she bore it home with her, a disfiguring rictus.
Only a few weeks after their affair had begun, she suffered powerful interludes of scorn in which she saw herself to be a fool, the fool. Her shifting judgments on herself revealed to her how her involvement with Francis had shoved her back violently into herself. In allowing himself to be loved by her, he had shown her human loneliness. Yet she had never looked better; the whites of her eyes were as clear as a child’s, her dark hair was especially lustrous, and although she didn’t eat much, she seemed to be bursting out of her clothes, not because of added weight so much as of galvanized energy. Strain, she thought, became her, tightened up her face which was overly plastic, lightened her rather sallow olive skin. She didn’t have a moment of repose, thinking, thinking, thinking about him. She grew arrowy. “You look like an arrow,” he said. She had raced to meet him, touched his arm, felt—through jacket and shirt sleeves, even, it seemed, through his flesh—his being draw away from her. Her heart gripped, dropped. He kissed her eyebrow. She inserted her hand between his trousers and his skin, feeling the small high buttock. He laughed and told her a story about a glass worm, how it could be sectioned, and the sections would survive. They drank a glass of white wine. Absently, he touched her ear lobe. She stood up. He backed her against a wall, pulled up her skirt. She tried to anticipate him. He pressed against her, suddenly turned away, showed her a new book on ferns. She heard the zing of a coin as it rolled out of his pocket and hit the floor. On the couch, he knelt above her, looked down at her body with sharp unimpassioned curiosity. He couldn’t control a fit of coughing; it rattled her insides, traveled up through belly and stomach and chest. She was outraged that he could make her laugh at that moment. But she couldn’t stop laughing. They fell off the bed. Her bones weren’t such young bones, and they hurt. “I must give up either smoking or fucking,” he said. The gray return was before her. It was unthinkable to leave him. Sometimes she took a taxi. She rode home seeing nothing, her mouth slightly swollen, her cheeks rosy.
It was clear when he had had enough, more than he had ever wanted. He asked her, did she imagine, had she ever imagined herself on a stage? Why did he ask that? Oh, he didn’t know but sometimes the way she spoke, held her head, her emphasis…“You mean, histrionic?” Well…not exactly.
Then, one late afternoon, he told her he had to go back to Locust Valley. He had to find out what had really gone on in that marriage. If he didn’t, how would he ever make another relationship?
“Relationship?”
“I can’t marry someone else until I know more about what happened between Jean and me,” he said.
“Someone else,” cried her inner voice.
He no longer referred mildly to his wife. When he spoke of her, his face grew creased, he looked away from Sophie at some object in the room, the bar, the restaurant. He went to see his children more frequently. He phoned Sophie an hour or two before she was ready to leave the house to go to meet him, and said something had come up. He couldn’t see her that day. Next week perhaps.
The last time she rose from his couch, she thought for a single astonishing moment that she was covered with blood, and that the blood was the outline of his body on hers.
What would her life have been if they had gone on together? If she had been that “relationship” he spoke of? It didn’t matter. That they would have tired of each other, gone trundling down the worn ruts of sexual boredom and habit didn’t matter. She had chosen him at a late moment in her life, when choices were almost always hypothetical. It was a choice out of time.
“He’s gone back to Locust Valley,” Otto said one evening.
“Who?” she asked foolishly and in anguish.
“Francis has gone back. He’ll stay this time, I think.” And then he said, “Something of a phony.”
“I thought you liked him.”
“I do. He’s a very appealing fellow. But I think he’s a phony. He can’t help himself.”
Had she finally suffocated Francis? Had he straggled back to Locust Valley because stale air was better than none at all? But what did she know about the air in Locust Valley? And was love suffocation? Yet she could not expunge what she now knew. It was commitment, not even choice, just commitment, and against that rock everything broke, resolutions and desires, words and presumptions. No struggle she could envisage could have torn him loose from that commitment. It didn’t matter what his wife was like. It wouldn’t, she thought, even have mattered if he had loved her, Sophie.
“What are you thinking about?” Otto asked. It was, from him, an unusual question. Sophie flushed. “Marriage,” she said. He smiled, a simple, somewhat abstracted smile.
That they should be sitting across from each other in the same way they had sat for so many years and that the habitual intimacy between them could have suffered so wrenching a violation without there being evidence of it, was harrowing to Sophie. If, all these months, she had so ardently lived a life apart from Otto without his sensing something, it meant that their marriage had run down long before she had met Francis; either that, or worse—once she had stepped outside rules, definitions, there were none. Constructions had no true life. Ticking away inside the carapace of ordinary life and its sketchy agreements was anarchy.
She knew where she had been, she thought. Where had Otto been? What had he been thinking? Didn’t he know anything? She looked at him a long time across the table. He did not seem aware of her observation. He was eating a dish of applesauce she had made that afternoon. The spoon clanked softly. There was the lemon-flavored smell of apples. Otto rolled up the corner of his rumpled napkin with his left hand. His eyes, when he glanced across at her, gave back no reflection of what he saw. His forehead was faintly furrowed, his shoulders bent.
He was beginning to speak about the war—a client’s son had phoned him to find out what his legal rights were if he declared himself a conscientious objector. Otto refused to talk to him when the boy said he’d like to come and rap with him.
“But you know what rap means, don’t you?” she asked.
“Only accidentally. What if I had spoken to him in German, making the fatuous assumption it was up to him to understand me?”
“But he needed help! What does it matter how he asked for it?”
“I told him to talk straight to me. He said ‘Wow.’ That jelly word! Wow, wow, wow…what dogs say to the moon. Then he said he dug me, but he was simply doing his own thing in his own words, and I asked him where the fuck it was written anyone was supposed to do their own thing?”
“Oh, Otto!”
“Oh, shut up!” he shouted, and he shoved himself back from the table and left the dining room. Only a moment after, she had to make an effort of memory to visualize his expression as he had sat there. In anger, he had shouted at her and left the room. But the look she had seen on his face had not been one of anger but of bafflement; the look of one who can find no reason for his affliction.
Sophie did not see Francis until six months later, when he phoned her unexpectedly one day at noon. They were to meet for a drink. He was standing at the bar, reading a book, wearing glasses. “Hello,” she said. Her hand reached out to touch his arm, then she withdrew it. “Sophie,” he said.
They sat at a small round table, their knees entangled until he turned his chair away. They talked about the book he was reading, a record of Sir Leonard Woolley’s excavations in the Turkish Hatay near Antioch. It was his new interest, he said, preclassical history. And how was she? And what was her new interest? She looked well, he said, thinner, and she smiled, yes, yes, she was thinner than ever. She noted he was wearing glasses now. For reading, he said. The silences between them were a kind of sleep; her eyes tended to close unless she heard his voice. He had coarsened a little, she thought, but she only asked him if he had put on weight.
Perhaps he’d never quite lose that fine fair look about his uncluttered face, that limpidity of expression. It was only a vestigial grace, she told herself, that had survived through adaptation, and been tainted by it.
She told him she’d not been too well. She did not say she had suffered an irreversible loss. Instead, she began, somewhat hesitantly, to catalog her ailments, fatigue, anemia—but saw and was quelled by some suggestion of irony as he listened to her. She could not have said in what it consisted, the faint smile, his narrowed eyes, the slight shift of his body. He put her into a taxi. She looked back through the cab window at him. He was not looking after her but was peering into the window of a shop.