I SPENT AN HOUR SEARCHING AROUND TOWN FOR Michael, and then I checked the entrances to the thruway and the parkway, to see if he was on his way to New York. Finally, I drove home, wondering if he was already there and, if he was, whether he’d given Olivia the letter Nadia Tannenbaum had sent me. I wanted Michael to be there, but a stain of self-interest spread over my feelings, obscuring everything delicate in their design. There was a kind of undeniable convenience in having a chance to tell Olivia myself—but tell her what? I feared her reaction, her retribution; more than any other thing I feared her unhappiness. No matter how I told the story of my half-year affair with Nadia, no matter how sorry I was, Olivia would still rage, she would still weep, and she might even leave me.
Our house was two miles away from the center of town, on Red Schoolhouse Road. The red schoolhouse itself was gone; the road had been paved, widened, a double yellow line painted down the entirety of its three miles of curves. This was not the chicest spot in our little river town. Our flight from New York was a couple years too late to get in on the bargain prices. We had no view of the Hudson, no rolling fields, no caretaker’s cottage, no princely privacy. Our nearest neighbor had a stone elf on his lawn and an aboveground swimming pool with a water slide—perfect for those sunset parties when the Whitmores “boogied” with their computer-programmer pals and got hammered on Canadian beer. They liked to drink Labatt’s, and the private joke of their set was “Gimme another Labattomy!” On the other side of our house was an old farmhouse, slowly caving in like a mouth without teeth, lived in by two obese, suspicious brothers, who floated bottles on their pond and shot their necks off; the bottom of the pond was a foot thick in broken glass.
I pulled my dusty Dodge into the driveway and sat there for a moment, surveying my property. (I must have sensed my moments of repose were numbered.) The house was a beauty, a hundred and fifty years old. Its Protestant provenance impressed my tradition-loving, status-hungry, anti- Semitic father, he who married my Jewish mother and tormented her for his failure to become a working actor, while she fled from him, first into melancholia, then into catatonia, and finally into death. “Fine house, Sam, really first-rate, I’d live here myself,” he said, after surveying it, carefully, walking around the place like some martinet, with a walking stick, wearing a tweed hacking jacket, an Irish woolen sweater, green rubber boots. It wasn’t even that fine a house. It sat on a six-acre lot, three of them lawn, three of them marshy, a singles bar for raucous red-winged blackbirds. Yet it was not only the first house I had ever owned, it was the first house I had ever even lived in. I pushed the mower up and down the lawn, chanting “Mine, mine.” I carried a picture of the house in my wallet, along with snapshots of Olivia, Michael, and Amanda.
I climbed out of my car and walked toward the house. Smoke poured out of the chimney. Ordinarily, Olivia making a fire was a good sign—a few logs in the hearth, a soulful wet kiss, a heightened sense of humor, that sort of thing—but today it wasn’t what I wanted to see. I was hoping Olivia was not at home—after all, wasn’t it Saturday? Weren’t there auctions to attend, yard sales to scour, brittle-boned widows to fleece?
I mounted the stone steps to the front porch, and before I touched the door Olivia opened it for me. She peered questioningly at me. Had she had a premonition that her son was not entirely safe? Was she suddenly one of those Psychic Moms who wake with a gasp in the middle of the night at the very moment their soldier son falls dead on some besieged beach on the other side of the world, a woman in some pseudonymous quickie about ESP which I had not yet been reduced to writing?
Nervously, I kissed her on the cheek. She had such nice bones, lovely perfume, a little tug of glamour in every gesture.
“I’m sorry about this morning,” she said, pulling me into the house. “I know how excited you feel when the sun comes up. Do you still feel that way?” She offered so much of herself through sex, it still made her blush.
“Is Michael here?” I asked her.
“No, that’s why we have a little time,” she said, still caught up in her erotic agenda. She wanted to make us close. Maybe she’d been standing at the window, watching the dandelion rain.
“He’s not here?” I moved away from her, closed the door behind me. The opportunity for our being able to fall into each other was already past.
“No, and neither is Amanda. She’s got a play date at Elektra’s house. She may even spend the night.”
“Elektra is a creepy little brat,” I said, and then realized, from the way Olivia was looking at me, that I sounded insane. Elektra, in fact, was a mousy little born-again kid in a gray jumper.
“Sam!” said Olivia, with mock admonishment. In fact, she liked that semi-Tourette aspect of my conversation— she came from a household in which words were carefully measured, and every now and then my verbal recklessness tickled her.
I put my hands up in a gesture of surrender that was meant to be a little funny, and as I did the phone rang. We had a telephone right near the front door, on a little oak table, above which was a beveled mirror that held in its wavy surface the reflection of our pineapple-patterned wallpaper. (It was Michael who first noticed we had furnished our house as if it was the set for “Father Knows Best.”)
I grabbed the phone immediately. “Hello?” I heard the anxiety in my voice and cleared my throat.
“Sam! It’s Graham.”
Graham Davis was my literary agent; he had never before called me on a weekend.
“Graham, I can’t talk to you right now,” I said. “Can I call you back later?”
“Oh.”
“Soon.”
“Well, actually, I’ll ring you later, if it’s all the same.” Graham claimed he was continually hounded by crank calls—breathers, hang-ups—and he was selective about to whom he gave his home number.
“Okay, fine,” I said. I hung up and looked at Olivia, who regarded me with some amazement.
“That was Graham Davis?”
“Yes.”
“You just brushed him off.”
“What of it?”
“It’s odd. I mean, really, it’s good. You always seem so anxious to hear from him. You complain about how long it takes him to return your calls.” She smiled, as if I were some desperate little schmuck who finally discovered his own personal dignity.
“Look, Olivia,” I said, “Michael should be here and I’m worried.”
“Sam,” she said. She had long before adopted the policy of discounting much of what I said. She liked to take about thirty percent off, except during quarrels, when I was marked down by half.
“I had a conference with Pennyman and when I came out Michael was gone.”
“So? Maybe he just went out.”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Did you look for him?”
“Yes. He could be anywhere.”
“He’s probably in town.”
“He hates town. In a world filled with things Michael hates, town is particularly loathsome. What if he’s taken off again. Oh, Christ! I should never have moved him out here.”
“You didn’t. It was a family decision—and I think a good one. Your taking responsibility like that is just arrogance.”
“Then I’m sorry.” I wouldn’t have minded a bit of marital discord. It would have made me feel a little less miserable for having recently spent six months in and out of Nadia Tannenbaum’s bed. I readied for the battle like a certain kind of soldier, looking to it for protection from vaster anxieties.
“Let’s just give it a little time, all right?” said Olivia. She came from a family that, unlike mine, did not take everything irregular as the harbinger of total catastrophe. Her childhood was a series of close calls. Pets mysteriously took sick and the next day were back on their paws again, tails flicking. Fevers spiked and vanished, wrists were broken but it could have been worse. Olivia’s parents were academics, but their vacations were vigorous (hiking the Appalachian trail, biking through Scotland, a pilgrimage to Mexico to see the spot where Leon Trotsky was murdered) and their sabbaticals were downright dangerous (a Land Rover trip across Africa, six months in the Andes). Olivia had learned equanimity, she believed in Gaia, the name J. E. Lovelock gave to the entirety of creation, which he postulated was in a constant state of self-repair, and which would ensure that life on the planet continued, no matter what.
I went out again to look for Michael. Up and down the streets of our town. Nothing. I wanted to go into my office and try and figure out which of Nadia’s letters he had, but, as yet, I did not dare.
When I returned home, we still had the house to ourselves, and we spread out as far from each other as we could get. After years of living in each other’s pockets inside that walk-up on Perry Street, the relative spaciousness of a real house was quite a luxury—but, perhaps, a costly one: we could now spend hours, even days, virtually ignoring each other.
Olivia, who was still taking Michael’s not being home as an absence, while I was more and more convinced it was a disappearance, went upstairs to a room where she kept track of her wheelings and dealings in the antiques trade. I poured myself a Scotch and water and sat in the small room on the north end of the house, in which the previous owners had installed the husband’s dying father, and which was now my office. “This is where the magic happens!” I liked to say to city friends who came to see us, throwing open the door with a flourish and waving my hand toward the low-ceilinged, ten-by-ten room with a schoolboy desk, a swivel chair, an old IBM typewriter, and metal file cabinets.
Over the months, Olivia had bequeathed me the occasional antique, and by now my office was looking more like a study—the schoolboy desk was replaced by a wormy Colonial tavern table, the green wall-to-wall carpeting had been torn up and replaced by a chic threadbare Oriental carpet, an old Shaker butter churn stood in the corner, useless and decorative. Next to my writing table were a couple of tiers of lawyer’s bookcases, the kind with the lift-up glass fronts, which held my birthday present from Olivia a few months before—leatherbound copies of my first two novels, the ones I still sentimentally thought of as my Real Books.
I picked up Stops Along the Way, the novel I wrote right before meeting Olivia, in which I gleefully cannibalized my own New York childhood, describing the damp, evil- smelling apartment I was raised in on the outskirts of Greenwich Village, and my sister Connie’s wild, ultimately self-punishing sexuality, and my brother Allen’s doggedness, planning his every step just so, in a lockstep toward dentistry, a pot belly, and a wife and five kids. Connie was called Denise, Allen was called Barry, and my father, Gil, was called Heinrich, a.k.a. Henry. All I did was move everybody up a letter; I didn’t care who made the connections. I wanted them all to see themselves. I burned with the possibility that my novel would create a kind of Truth that would sear them, and me, too. And so I presented my father and his job at the United Nations and his night life as a failed actor, a man longing to impersonate others, to play a role, to be given a part, but denied at every turn, the song he longed to sing cut right out of his throat by an indifferent world—a world that saw him for exactly what he was: charmless.
But the real focus of the novel was my mother, Adele, whom I moved a letter back and called Zora. I described as a young man what I could not prevent as a boy: her long punishment for her husband’s misery and her self- effacement that became self-erasure. Her soft voice getting softer, her body, face, eyes—all becoming softer and softer, until she became, as Mayakovsky would have it, a cloud in a housedress. We watched it happen; we looked away. Gil felt blocked from the stage by a conspiracy of crass, conventional Jews, and Mother was Jewish. He held it against her, terribly. And everything about her: her thick dark hair, her taste for herring, Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, her affection for him—he detested her adoration, her loyalty. It struck him as weak-minded. “Opposition is true friendship,” Gil used to say, though now that he was in effect a gigolo, he had probably changed mottoes.
I loved Stops Along the Way; it moved me, made me proud, and, really, the world had not treated it badly. It did not jog the planet from its customary orbit; there were no ads for it plastered on the sides of the Fifth Avenue bus. But it had been well reviewed, welcomed; it had evaded the death ray of silent indifference that kills most first novels. But it didn’t make a dime. I had worked on it for three years and it scared me to think that, financially speaking, I would have had more to show for it had I been selling my plasma on a bimonthly basis. It was through Stops that I met Olivia, which I knew even then was a greater reward— if what I was really looking for was Fate’s pat on the head—than a check in any amount; but she got pregnant so quickly that the reality of having to make a living became even more acute, which is to say oppressive.
I wrote a couple of quickies after that. The first was An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Pro Football, which furnished our third-floor walk-up on Perry. Then I wrote Crystal Death, about the health hazards posed by table salt, and that helped pay for Michael’s birth and layette.
I often think about the ejaculation that started all of this. I am certain which one it was. We had been at a party, downstairs in our building, in the apartment of Ira Schuster, who had been such a sweet friend to us and who looked so virtuous in his gray suits and blue shirts, with his prematurely graying beard and dark eyes that registered the regular setbacks he suffered as a lawyer in the public defender’s office. Ira not only drank to frightening excess but caused others to drink as well. They’re called “enablers” nowadays, but back then we just thought of Ira as a good host; everybody got hammered and danced sweatily to old Edwin Starr records. Afterwards, Olivia and I stumbled up to our apartment, kissing and pawing at each other as we ascended, and by the time we let ourselves in Olivia had unbuttoned my shirt and her kisses were so warm and enormous, I could feel myself tumbling through them and into her: I felt she could swallow me body and soul, and I wanted her to. We undressed, we tore the blankets off the bed, because even though it was winter we were sweltering. The foreplay was over. We both wanted me inside of her; it seemed like an emergency. There was nothing fancy about it. I knew even as that ribbon of protein was pumping out of me that Olivia would get pregnant.
Often, I would rehearse suggesting to Olivia that we, as the phrase goes, terminate the pregnancy. We could not afford a child. I wanted her to myself. I despised fathers and I dreaded becoming one. But I said nothing of the kind. We took the infant Michael home from the hospital and sex and sleep were never the same. Michael howled like a pack of wolves in the wilds of his own colic. Olivia and I began quarreling: in those days, acrimony was the only exercise we gave our hearts; bickering took us through the paces that had once been led by love.
And then our families descended upon us. Olivia’s parents, Sy and Lillian Wexler, flew in from Chicago, and brought so many baby presents they had to take separate cabs from Kennedy. Olivia’s sister, Elizabeth, who had been interested in me for a moment and through whom I had first met Olivia, had moved out of New York shortly after Olivia and I were married but came in from Ohio, where she worked in the admissions office of an experimental college and where her job was to make people admit things, or so Olivia used to joke, in those prebaby days when a sense of humor was as free as the air. Next to arrive was Olivia’s brother, Stuart, from whom she hadn’t heard in two years, since he had moved to Houston to manage a hotel and had gotten involved with a Messianic Jewish cult. He deemed our union a mongrel marriage, but nevertheless news of Michael’s birth sent him hightailing to Manhattan—all those Old Testament tales of who begat whom had made him a soft touch for procreation.
Our apartment was bursting with learned, argumentative Wexlers. Sy and Lillian were still tenured at the University of Chicago; they hung out with a lot of brilliant ex-socialist intellectuals, and their analyses of everything from Allende to the politics of nineteenth-century utopian Zionism were delivered with bite and sarcasm. Even the La Leche League was subjected to the rigors of the Wexlerian intellectual style—a style built on the assumption that the world was full of vanity, stupidity, and darkness, and that even those who would want to do good were lured into destructiveness by their own incomplete thinking.
When the Wexlers were exhausted, the Hollands came to relieve them of their adoration duties. My brother, Allen, came in from Massachusetts, looking as sleek and prosperous as a big, happy otter. Making a fortune filling teeth, he brought Michael a gag present of two pounds of white chocolate. He had already fathered a child, and he was pompous with his sense of having survived numerous domestic trials. When he held Michael, he slipped on a surgeon’s mask, and when he gave me an (unasked-for) lesson in diaper changing, he quickly put on a pair of rubber gloves. Connie, for her part, was tearful, leaning over Michael’s bassinet, weeping freely, the way people do when they are completely alone. She was between marriages, infertile, in her own mind doomed. At thirty, she looked fifty. She wore tight clothes despite getting heavy; she had puppet lines around her mouth; her eyes looked wounded, offended; her hair was colored the yellow of an old man’s teeth. “Hello, mister,” she said to Michael, through a vibrato of melancholy, like some poor old broad in a piano bar, “welcome to the good times.”
There was a brief interval of time—a half-day, or it may have been just an hour—when Connie, Allen, and I felt pleased to be with each other, enjoyed the camaraderie of veterans from a distant war. But then Gil arrived, unfresh from a fact-finding mission in Panama City—he had by now been promoted to a rather responsible position in the UN Office of Economic Development, though he knew nothing of economics, cared little about industrialization or demographics, and, in fact, more or less despised Third World peoples. He was haggard, hollow-eyed, unshaven, gassy from the Panamanian cuisine. He came to us straight from the airport, blew in right past Connie, whom he hadn’t seen in at least two years, nodded at Allen, whom he had seen a few months before at a conference at MIT, slapped me on the back, kissed Olivia, and then rubbed his hands together and said, “Bring me my grandson.”
Having a child might not have been so unsettling if only other people in our circle of friends had children, too. But this was before my generation’s procreative panic, and every writer, editor, sculptor, lawyer, tennis instructor, architect, music teacher, reporter, computer programmer, and Buddhist we knew was childless. I wrote, and made enough to keep at it full-time. Olivia at that time was putting together a folk art catalog for the Manhattan Museum. She wore beautiful dresses; we ate out whenever we chose to. Life was dinner parties, gossip, worries about careers and money, plans for holidays, sneering remarks about the President. It had all seemed (if not perfect, then at least) fine. It was what I had wanted all along: an apartment in the Village, a wife who loved me and believed in me and who, in those early days, was avid for me, mad. I had art, I had love, I had the name of an importer who sold wines from the petits châteaux for half of what they fetched at Sherry- Lehmann.
But now all I had was a child. He loomed over everything, casting his shadow. Life, at least our life, was too fragile to survive the onslaught of Michael’s needs—his cries, his rashes, his sleeplessness, his abhorrence of having his diapers changed, his little stuffed nose, the narrow nostrils plugged with green, his eyes glittering with panic as he tried to howl and breathe through his mouth at the same time.
Our apartment looked like a dive within weeks. We were too tired to clean, too annoyed to even pick up after ourselves. And now we were dominated by his things. The mobile of rubber rabbits vaporized our books, the aqua-and- yellow rattle disintegrated our KLH stereo components, the Snoopy pacifier turned our wine to vinegar, and the bassinet curled the Brassaï prints right off the wall. And then came the diaper pail, white and plastic. For all its environmental awareness, it obliterated our Pakistani prayer rug, rusted my Olivetti, canceled my subscription to The New York Review of Books, it opened the window and scattered Olivia’s folk art notes, and then extinguished every candle, candelabrum, candlestick, and, of course, every candlelight dinner.
Now, fifteen years later, the evening lay before us, unsettling in its emptiness, challenging us to turn all this free time into a romantic renaissance. I poured another Scotch and, as I made my way back into my study, I listened for any signs of movement, like a thief in my own house.
The coast was clear, and I slowly closed the door, actually (and utterly) fearful that Olivia might hear the click of the lock’s mechanism fitting into the housing of the frame and, like some creature in a horror story, come whooshing down the stairs.
I opened the bottom drawer of my desk and carefully lifted out the manila folders in which I stored the various reviews my books had received. The folders holding the reviews for the books written under my own name were plumped up by other reviews and articles that held even passing references to me, such as: “Steadfastly refusing to discuss the reprint, movie, or foreign rights deals that have surrounded his latest book like so much plush velvet,— chose to steer the conversation back to his favorite writers, a crew that includes writers as wildly divergent as Cervantes, Charlotte Brontë, and Sam Holland,” and (one of Olivia’s favorites) “Not since Sam Holland’s A Natural and Unnatural History of My Wife has a writer so passionately misunderstood what makes his spouse tick.”
Beneath the folders of my real reviews was another, this one holding notices garnered by the various books I wrote under pseudonyms. (To call these the products of my “false self” would be, I think, merely fanciful, a little sprinkle of existential pixie dust on the rather plain business of staying alive.) These for the most part came from magazines that catered to the specific market to which the book itself was pitched. And the reviews were, as a group, glowing—yet what an eerie glow: the luminescence of swamp gas spreading its methane blush against a hot black sky.
At the bottom of that drawer was an old oversized envelope, in which Graham had, more than a year ago, sent back a proposal I had worked up to do a book called Patricide. “As your agent,” the note had said, “I must concentrate on such a book’s lack of commercial appeal. But as someone who would like you to think of him as a friend, I must also say that the half-joking, half-hellfire tone of the whole thing made me rather uneasy.” The old proposal and Graham’s note were still in the envelope, but now there were several other sheets of paper as well, and these were the few letters that Nadia Tannenbaum had sent to me during the course of our affair and in its immediate aftermath, letters that constituted her reviews of Sam Holland as Lover, letters that I was too sentimental, too vain, and, it now seemed, too fucking stupid to have thrown away.
I hadn’t thrown them away because, in some sad, weakened way, I wasn’t finished with them. I read them when I missed her. I read them when Olivia sneaked off to bed and turned off the light without even saying good night to me. I read them when I thought about friends with whom I had started off as a young man and how they had gone on to write books that were reasonable, respectable, friends who had secured teaching positions or quirky little jobs at foundations, or were writing scripts and chasing after actresses on that aptly named Sunset Strip, where the change from day to night becomes something lewd and commercial. I read them when I felt life was a race I was losing— losing to others, to time, gravity. I read them often.
Dear Sam,
I feel like Lazarus, raised from the dead. What an idiot I’ve become! I’m already an hour late for work and here I am in my apartment, twirling around, singing with the radio. I never expected to feel happy, not ever again. And now you’ve given me a happiness that so far exceeds any happiness I have ever felt—I mean it blows every laugh, sigh, and orgasm right out of the water….
I did not know how to throw something like that out. And the others were of the same genre—the once-lonely woman catapulted into the sensory tumult of life by some tomcatting husband, lured by passion deeper and deeper into a hopeless love.
I quickly looked through the letters because I knew it was time to rid myself of the mimetic device through which I could dependably plunge myself into those days, those weeks, those shuddering, sweaty beds, those long dinners and silent walks—all of it impossible, wrong, finished.
Nadia, though young, was a widow—a fact that I very much wanted to believe saved our liaison from the stereotypical older man-younger woman scenario. She had married her college sweetheart, a rich boy from Napa Valley, but he had drowned while hang-gliding on their honeymoon in Bali. Nadia carried her tragedy like a single perfect rose. She was willowy, dark, with straight black hair as thick as a broom, and deep, secretive eyes. She was full-breasted, narrow-waisted; there was something a little too perfect in her beauty—it was a beauty that, had it not been for her wound, might have become merely pretty, like those doodles schoolgirls make on their notebooks while they daydream in class. (Actually, I made those doodles, too, which may explain all of my subsequent difficulties in life.)
As a young widow, Nadia lived in a group apartment in San Francisco. She had an affair with a Chinese baker; she tried to become a nature photographer, spending long, eucalyptus-scented days in Muir Woods, waiting to be moved. But the waiting saddened her, as did the technology of making a photograph—the chemicals, even the click of the shutter were depressing. Everything saddened her. She missed Leo. He had died perfect in her mind.
Then she had an accident. She was in a cab that lost its brakes on a downhill plunge on Geary Street and banged demolition-derby-style into a dozen parked cars before coming to a stop. Her back was viciously wrenched. Her old Chinese boyfriend introduced her to an acupuncturist, but it did no good. From there she made the rounds from chiropractors to physical therapists, massage gurus, aroma therapists, faith healers—this was San Francisco, after all— and finally gave in and sought some conventional Occidental treatment in the person of an elderly German doctor named Frieda Manheim, who gave her massive doses of muscle relaxants that made poor Nadia so rapturously depressed she tried to kill herself. Pills.
News of Nadia’s condition reached Leo’s family and they were decent about it. Recalling Nadia’s ambition to become a photographer, they put her together with Leo’s Aunt Lorraine, who owned a stock-photo service in New York, one of those places with a library of a million or more images, which they leased out to advertising agencies, chambers of commerce, magazines, textbook publishers, and the like.
Nadia was put to work cataloging a recent acquisition of European photos from the twenties and thirties, bought from a Connecticut collector who had stored the old photos with shocking carelessness. The name of Aunt Lorraine’s company was International Image, Inc., known in the trade as III, or Triple I. Their offices were on East Twentieth Street, just eight blocks from my publisher’s office, and after I wrote Visitors from Above, my editor sent me to Triple I to find suitable and affordable pictures for an eight- page photo insert.
Their offices were well lit, immaculate, but the walls of fireproof metal files lining the walls made the place seem like a morgue—open a drawer and find where the waterfalls are buried, open another for six hundred and ten renditions of the Eiffel Tower. My publishers often produced topical books on the cheap, and they had a long-standing (that is, wholesale) relationship with III.
When I went over to begin searching out pictures of flying saucers, I was helped by Aunt Lorraine, Lorraine Wasserman, stout and smartly dressed, with a frank, calculating air, a small mouth, stylish shoes, a whiff of Dentyne in her smile. I sat in her office and explained to her the sort of pictures I was looking for. I was particularly interested in finding some illustration of a MIB—that is, a Man in Black, one of those supposed intergalactic disinformation specialists who are said to pay ominous, unannounced visits to those who have spotted extraterrestrials and to threaten them with…I don’t know…evaporation, atomization, some kind of spacey punishment. Of course, there were no actual photos of the MIBs, just crude drawings that made police composite drawings look like portraits by Sargent. But I thought we might fake up a MIB, perhaps by using some other picture of a moody figure wearing a dark suit.
“Men in black, men in black,” mused Lorraine, twiddling her Mont Blanc pen and then, suddenly, staring at her fingernails, as if someone had mischievously painted them red while she slept. “You want priests? We got thousands of priests, but mostly they’re either praying or playing with children, and the feeling I’m getting is something a little spookier. Maybe an exorcist kind of thing?”
Just then, Nadia came into Lorraine’s office. I noticed her, utterly. There was no intention behind it, just a fierce and total attentiveness.
“I found something,” she said, her natural reticence for the moment overcome by the tremendous excitement of just having found a little-known Brassaï photograph, of considerable artistic and monetary value. When Olivia found a little treasure in her antiques-rustling gig, she usually got a high color in her face, as if she had just raced up several flights of stairs and then quickly downed a cup of scalding tea. But Nadia’s Mediterranean skin remained opaque, as cool as terra cotta. The tone of her voice wasn’t one of celebration but self-justification, as if she had proved her own value, or at least her lack of complete valuelessness, to Lorraine.
Lorraine frowned, indelicately. The charitable impulse that had motivated her hiring Nadia had by now run its course. “Not now, Nadia,” she said.
“Sounds like a musical—a little twenties revival,” I said, feeling obligated to cover Lorraine’s bad behavior. “Not Now, Nadia!” I said again, moving my hands in some lax approximation of a chorus girl’s gestures.
Nadia smiled. It was the smile of someone who appreciated my effort to smooth over the situation with a little humor, someone who would be able to forgive me—for being less charming than I appeared, for being selfish, for lacking some essential energy I needed to catapult me out of the deep glassy groove into which my life had settled, and to forgive me as well, and most importantly, for the large sin that lay at the center of me, a sin that dominated me and which I could not, nor would ever be able to, name.
The next morning I awoke, wild with yearning and guilt, after spending the night in a dingy, beige midtown hotel, thinking of Nadia. (This is, I confess, an inexact use of the word “think”: I pictured her, speculated upon her, imagined, and ravished her.) I read for an hour and then showered with fanatical care. The telephone on my night table rang, and I answered it with my hair slicked back, a skimpy towel wrapped around my middle.
It was Olivia, just calling to say hello. It was not her usual behavior; she generally liked our brief separations— “little mental-health breaks,” she called them—and she wasn’t fond of the telephone. But we had parted on bad terms—even the very next day, I couldn’t remember why— and she was showing me a kind of mercy by ringing my room.
“I miss you,” she said.
“You do?”
“Please, Sam, don’t milk it. Anyhow, Amanda’s right here.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“She wants to say hello.”
Mandy got on the phone. She sounded shrill and uncertain, as if I were very far away and she had no idea when I might return. Remorse over my night of psychic unfaithfulness barked like temple dogs within me as I pictured Amanda and Olivia in our humble, cheerful country kitchen. I told Amanda I loved her, reminded her to pay attention in school, have fun, et cetera, and then asked if I could speak to Michael—why have but two arrows pierce my scheming heart when there was a third in the quiver? Mandy didn’t answer, just passed the phone back to her mother.
“What’s up?” asked Olivia. My petulance a few moments before had turned her off.
“I was just asking Mandy to put Michael on.”
Silence.
“How long have you been living here, Sam?” she asked, at last. “Michael goes to school at seven-thirty.”
“Oh, right.”
“‘Oh, right.’ That’s it?”
“What do you want? I forgot.”
“You forgot. This is what I do. This is my life. When you forget, or pretend to forget, it’s just a way of saying you think my life is crap.”
“Oh, Christ, Olivia, do we really have to do this? Remember when we used to say our family seal should read, ‘In Each Other’s Arms or at Each Other’s Throats’? Well, it isn’t charming anymore.”
“It was never charming, Sam. You’re the one who can’t bear normal life. You’re the one who is addicted to crisis.”
And so forth. It was just a low-level skirmish, no big deal; marriage is full of them. But as I kept up my end of the match, I realized I was experiencing a certain lifting of my spirits. Olivia was making it easy to justify my night of dreaming of Nadia and whatever was about to happen later this morning. I welcomed this unpleasantness; I could use it like a blade to cut the cord that tethered me to Olivia and home.
When I arrived at III, Aunt Lorraine was waiting for me. One of her employees had found some fascinating Air Force photos of strange airborne objects, recently declassified, and she wanted to give them to me personally.
“I really appreciate your getting into this yourself,” I said. “But I hate to take up any more of your time. Why don’t I work with that woman named Nadia? I think that would be a lot easier.”
Don’t look away, I told myself. Just keep your gaze right in her face.
“Are you sure?” she asked, smiling. She had a faraway look in her small violet eyes, as if she were already thinking of all the long-ignored little tasks she could see to in this sudden space of open time I had granted her.
“If I need your help, I’ll be sure to find you,” I said. I liked the way that sounded: smooth, confident, worldly. This love affair, not even beginning to begin, was already doing me a world of good.
Most of my memories of flirtation and courtship were from my adolescence, when courtship was fraught with anxiety, awkward silences, mistimed lunges in which my lips ended up on the nubby upholstery of a hastily vacated sofa cushion. But I was older now; I was married. It was like playing poker when you don’t mind losing a few hundred bucks—the cards just seem to come to you.
I worked that day with Nadia. I allowed my hand to brush hers as we passed old photographs back and forth. I rolled up my shirtsleeves and let her see my slender, muscular forearms, the very best part of my otherwise fading physique. I talked casually about my wife, took out wallet- sized snaps of Michael and Mandy, though I didn’t show the one of Olivia, because it made her look so pretty and I didn’t want to frighten Nadia off.
After the first morning’s work, I took her to lunch. I made her laugh. I talked about how I had moved out of New York for the kids’ sake (leaving out how I couldn’t afford to live here any longer) and then the shock of finding how much my kids hated living in the country. I knew how to tell this story so it wasn’t so pathetic. I could make it funny; I’d been telling it to city friends for a year, and it had evolved into a satire on the hopelessness of good intentions, a kind of post-yuppie Mr. Blandings. Yet with Nadia I made the move to Leyden what I dared not make of it with older, savvier friends. I tried to turn it into an opportunity. There were stories in that river town, ghosts of old Dutch settlers; there were eccentrics, unsolved murders, natural wonders that made the heart leap. She believed me; she believed I could write about these things. She saw something in me, something of value. And then, even though we had begun to run out of conversation while we waited for our camomile tea, I asked her if she wanted to have a drink after work and she answered with a shrug and said okay, and her gesture was so casual and her “okay” so soft that it made me think she would have said yes to anything.
I did not rush things. My sense of deliberation was not merely tactical. I was mortally afraid of committing adultery. I was afraid of detection. I was afraid of falling in love, of her falling in love with me. I did not want anyone to be hurt; especially right there, in the beginning, the idea of anyone suffering pain because of my errant emotions made me want to slit my wrists.
Yet I did not want the flirtation to end. In a way, I needed to flirt with Nadia much more than I needed to go to bed with her. I craved her attentiveness, that sensitivity to nuance and gesture you get when things are just beginning, when the ear ransacks every word for a hidden meaning.
At the end of the week, I invited Nadia to Leyden. “A country weekend,” I said to her. “It’ll do you a world of good.” (I worried about her, ostensibly; I was older, compassionate.) And then I added, “Olivia and I promise not to quarrel while you’re around.” I faulted myself for saying that: it was so obvious, so coarse—I had been expertly flicking little smooth pebbles into the pool, and that last lob was a brick.
We took the train up together from Penn Station. The tracks ran along the river, and the water was a mirror full of clouds. I sat Nadia near the window; she rested her long, narrow feet on top of her black canvas bag. A sack of woe, I thought, in a moment of prescience. I pointed out sights along the river: a nesting place for swans, a ruined castle once owned by a munitions king, the Vanderbilt house. I was chattering away, trying to transform myself from suitor to tutor. I loved talking to her.
“What is it like to be married for such a long time?” she asked me, as the train neared Leyden.
“Tricky,” I said. “You can so clearly see through each other that you in all decency must stop looking, and then when you stop looking the person changes, and then you’re living with a stranger.”
“My parents were always so happy together,” she said. “My dad ate only fruit and took about fifty vitamins every day, just so he could be vigorous for Mom. They made love all the time. The foil wraps from his condoms were everywhere. Sometimes he’d just put his spoon down in the middle of dinner and look at her. And Mom would make this funny fake scream and say ‘Oh no!’ Now, half the girls I know, they can’t even get their boyfriends to touch them.”
“I’m from the past,” I said. “The deep past. And we men from the deep past would never dream of turning a woman down.”
“Because she might be the last one?” Nadia asked, smiling.
“No, because it might hurt her feelings.”
Olivia met us at the station. Nadia sat in the backseat and Olivia conversed with her, glancing continually at Nadia through the rearview mirror, as we made our way home. I saw in Olivia’s eyes that she was studying Nadia. Olivia had, or knew of, no reason to distrust me, but I hadn’t quite realized how beautiful and profoundly sexual Nadia was, until she was in the car with Olivia and me. As soon as we arrived at the house, Olivia recruited Nadia to accompany her to an estate auction in an old house along the river, a peeling Victorian that had been the home of a woman called Bonnie Beaumont.
“That sounds like the name of a young, beautiful woman, with her blond hair braided up in a French twist,” I said. “Or she runs a chic little shop at Lexington and Eighty-first.”
Olivia looked at me strangely. Calm down, her eyes said.
“Bonnie Beaumont died at the age of ninety-three,” said Olivia. “Her chic days were behind her, if they ever existed. But she had some good rugs.” She turned to Nadia, who was listening to us, with her back against the kitchen counter, her thin arms folded over her breasts. “I work for a guy who runs a string of antique stores called Past Perfect. I can spend up to five thousand dollars without calling for his okay.”
Olivia and Nadia got home in the late afternoon; I was frantically trying to prepare a brilliant dinner. I wouldn’t let either of them come into the kitchen.
“The Texans were there in their goddamned pickup trucks,” Olivia said, throwing herself heavily into a wing-back chair. “They bid up everything. They don’t have the slightest idea of what anything is worth. They just know what they want. It distorts the market.”
“You got your rugs, though,” I said.
“I paid too much.” Olivia looked queasy, as if realizing everything in her life was a little bit off.
Nadia sat holding a cup of tea with both hands. She looked sleepy, melancholy; she was dressed in a loose- fitting sweater, checked wool pants. In fact, she looked rather dowdy, which managed to excite me—I took it as a disguise behind which she hid the rich, radiant fact of her desire.
“It was so sad, seeing everything she owned being sold,” said Nadia.
“She doesn’t need it any longer,” said Olivia. “And she died without a will, just debts.”
Nadia took to the children. They responded to her youth. She rode bicycles with them; together they discovered an old hemlock in our three acres of woods, a gnarly old tree perfect for Amanda to climb—I had never climbed a tree in my life. They raked leaves, played chess; she braided Amanda’s hair.
“She’s sweet, isn’t she,” said Olivia, as we lay stone still in bed that night.
“Who?” I asked, acutely aware of Nadia’s presence in the guest room down the hall.
“Oh, please, Sam.”
“You mean Nadia? I’m sorry, I was drifting.”
“I’ll bet you were.”
I looked at Olivia through the corner of my eye. She was propped up on one elbow; her satin pajama top hung far from her body; moonlight caressed the breasts that had fed my children. She was jealous, and my heart reached out for her, as if waking from a long hibernation. Could this have been the point of bringing Nadia home? Had what I been seeking been this edge of worry in my wife’s voice?
“She’s okay,” I said. “Her life has accrued more tragedy than her character can bear. She staggers beneath its weight.”
“Why don’t you say things like that about me?”
“Because they’re not true about you. She’s a widow, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yes. And so terribly needy.”
“What’s wrong, Olivia?” That was the trouble with living outside the truth: you had to pretend to such stupidity to maintain your position.
“Why did you bring her here? And why are you having insights about her?”
“Shh. She’ll hear you. Anyhow, I thought you were enjoying her. The kids are.”
“They love her, we all love her. But she’s in love with you. How old is she, Sam? Twenty-two, twenty-four? I’m sorry I can’t be twenty-four, Sam. I’m sorry I can’t pretend to know nothing about men, or life, or you.”
“I think she’s older than that, Olivia. I think she’s quite close to thirty. That’s not so much younger than you.”
A silence. Then Olivia grabbed her pillow and the top blanket and said, “I think you must be so unhappy that it’s driven you insane.”
It was not really inspiration but mere instinct that made me grab for her before she was out of reach. I pulled her back onto the bed. I kissed her mouth, her cheeks, her eyes. She wanted me to. She returned my kisses with hunger, avidity; to be kissed that way by a wife of so many years was like making time run backward. When we made love, she cried out with pleasure in a way she hadn’t allowed herself to do since Michael was old enough to be curious about sex. She might have been summoning it forth because she knew Nadia would hear, but the element of premeditation, that little twist of artifice, only made it sweeter.
That was on Saturday; the next Wednesday, I made love to Nadia. She had sublet an apartment on West Twelfth Street, not far from where Olivia and I used to live and, in fact, in a building where an old friend of ours still lived. Nadia had a studio apartment, just one room, with bare floors, cinder-block-and-pine-plank bookshelves, Hindu and Buddhist art on the walls, a window with a back view of the brownstones across the way.
“I never thought I’d be living like this,” Nadia said, as she handed me a brandy poured into a teacup. We had worked late, seen a movie at a nearby multiplex. “I thought I’d be married, teaching somewhere, have a baby or two.”
“Teaching? Teaching what?”
“I don’t know. Poetry. Meditation. Whatever.”
“I think you’d be a wonderful teacher,” I said.
“You think so?”
“Yes.”
“I think you could learn something from me,” she said.
“What?”
“How to care about yourself, and not ever, ever dislike yourself.”
After a long silence, I finally managed to ask, “How long did you and Leo live together before you married?”
“For a while. Then we had a big fight. He used to speak to me so disrespectfully in front of his friends, like he wanted to make sure they understood that he didn’t take me very seriously. He was a real motherfucker when it came to things like that. He always had these plans. He wanted to design furniture, or do landscape architecture. But he never did anything, not really. And he took it out on me, his frustration.”
“So what happened after the big fight?”
“I was going to go to New Mexico to study with the Hopi Indians. I was putting my name and number on the ride board at the Co-op when he came and got me and talked me out of it.”
“Study what with the Hopi Indians?”
“How to live.”
She abandoned the safety of the rocking chair and sat herself next to me on the sofa. My heart began to race, and I thought: I would not be here if I were a success.
“I came to New York because I didn’t know anyone here,” Nadia said. “I wanted to disappear.”
“I thought you knew people here.”
“And then I met you.”
She took my hand, turned it over as if to read my palm, and then with great ceremony—was this a Hopi thing?— bent her head and planted a solemn kiss on the crisscrossed lines of my fate. The kiss was dry but somehow grew moister, which was a little confusing until I realized she had parted her lips and now pressed the tip of her tongue against my hand. No, I wouldn’t be here if I were writing the book I had meant to write. I would never have even met her if I hadn’t been sent to find pictures for my spaceman book, and I never would have needed her if I had been living the life I wanted. My life had shrunk, it was smaller than Nadia’s apartment, and I wanted to punch a window into the wall, to breathe, to see how other people were conducting their lives.
“If I don’t make love with you tonight, I think I’ll die of unhappiness,” I heard myself say.
I was full of desire to be with her, but, in fact, that first night Nadia was a mild and meandering lover. Sex was a séance in which the object was to bring forth her pleasure from the spirit world. She received me on her side, with her head propped up on one hand, like a Persian on a sofa. She moved away from my thrusts, as if afraid of pain. She kept her eyes open; I could not tell what she was looking at. Somewhere along the way it struck me that I was having one of the very worst sexual experiences of my entire life.
Nadia was immense inside, oceanic. She touched me lightly on the back of my head. I felt myself wilting. I thought of Moses throwing his staff onto the ground and having it turn into a slithering snake. I began counting my thrusts, timing them to the beat of the Marvelettes singing “Don’t Mess with Bill.” My sharpest experience was the nagging guilt, the sense of irreparable wrongdoing. While I tried to make love to Nadia, I ministered to this guilt by telling myself I was hurting no one. I even dredged up the times in which Olivia had said in anger that I should find another lover—those early-morning encounters really brought out the worst in her. Still, the guilt banged away inside me, like a shutter in an upper room.
And then, suddenly, darkly, mysteriously, the guilt disappeared, the shutter stopped banging, it fell from the house and was lost in the bloomless forsythia, the house was quiet, the universe was hushed, and I became exquisitely aware of this stranger, this struggling soul, this fragrant woman beside me, and it was then, as if she knew that my thoughts had finally fastened upon her, that something caught hold in Nadia, too. She gripped me tightly with her free hand and pushed me onto my back, holding me so I wouldn’t dislodge from her, and now she was astride me, animated, her once-dreamy eyes flecked with madness. A minute later she had an orgasm and roared in my face with such intensity that it was all I could do to keep from laughing.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked, looking at me through the net of damp, dark hair that hung over her face.
“I don’t know. You’re awfully nice. You really are.”
“Did you come yet?”
“No big deal.” It was her house; I wanted to be a polite guest.
She touched my cheek apologetically and got off of me and onto her back. Her pubic hair was abundant, luxuriant, and combined with the darkness and prominence of her nipples made her look somehow anthropological, an idol made for sex rituals. She guided me into her, gripped me tightly; the night shook in its hinges; and when I embraced her, I further surprised myself by whispering, “That was wonderful.”
She asked me to spend the night, but I didn’t dare, and I went back to the sterile safety of my hotel on Fortieth Street. I thought Olivia might have called, but there was no message from her. As I fell asleep that night, I vowed I would never sleep with Nadia again. I slept soundly, dreamlessly, satisfied, but woke at dawn and was downtown at her apartment twenty minutes later.
A week later, a letter from Nadia came to the house. She’d read my first novel and wanted me to know how wonderful she thought it was. “It was so sad, and so funny; I heard your voice in it, too, which was sort of neat.”
“Poor girl,” said Olivia, reading over my shoulder.
“Why?” I was startled; I hadn’t heard Olivia come up behind me. “There are funny parts and sad parts. What’s your problem? That she said ‘neat’?”
Olivia frowned briefly. She had efficient gestures and expressions; she could flick them like levers in a voting booth.
“I read that book, too, Sam. I loved it, and you.” Then she looked more closely at me and an expression of wonder lingered over her face. “Are you trying to relive those days? Find some girl to fall in love with you all over again, just the way you’ve already been fallen in love with by me? The object of life is to move forward.”
“Toward what? Failure? John Retcliffe books? Death?”
“Leave her alone, Sam.”
“Oh, come on. Do you ever have me wrong! I don’t see how you can live with someone for so many years and get him so wrong.”
I watched her as she left the room. Her words cauterized my feelings about my new mistress, and it seemed just a matter of time before they disappeared.
Yet the cooling of my feelings mixed with the heat of Nadia’s produced a dense emotional fog and, sooner rather than later, I wandered into that fog and stayed with her for six months.
I had already told Nadia we should stop seeing each other, had even managed to stay still and unresponsive as she wept against my chest and said she knew it would happen, and that of course it was what we must do. But then Olivia, in the spirit in which she calculated how many years of sleep my early-morning amorousness had cost her, figured out how much birth control she had pumped through her body—in the form of gels, foams, pills.
“I’m not going to do this anymore,” she said. “I’m too old to pour that stuff in me.”
“You want to use condoms?”
“No. They irritate me, and they’re not even safe.”
“So what are we going to do? Have oral sex for the rest of our lives?”
“Haven’t we had enough sex?” Olivia said.
“Have you?”
“I want you to have a vasectomy,” she said.
“Fine,” I said, feeling aggrieved, martyred—yet the snip might be just the limited, symbolic punishment I needed to get back into the marriage.
The next day, Nadia called me at home, blue, lonesome, just wanting to hear the voice of the one person on the planet who knew what she was going through.
“So what’s going on with you?” she asked.
“The usual. I’m getting a vasectomy.”
“You are? Why?” She sounded truly alarmed.
“Olivia—”
“Don’t you know how dangerous they are?”
“They’re not at all dangerous.”
“There’s a huge increase in testicular and prostate cancer among men who’ve had them. I was just reading about it in the Times.”
I was silent. I had the distinct yet dizzying sense she was saving my life.
“I’m coming into the city.”
“So.”
“I want to see you.”
“We can’t.”
“Yes, we can. You’re saving my life.”
I craved her. More than that, much more, I fell in love with her. The sexual awkwardness took care of itself; in fact, our night life became sleek. The rituals of betrayal became somewhat commonplace. The exertions of leading a double life agreed with an aspect of my soul that preferred tumult to knowledge: being two things is like being nothing in particular. Like a born-to-lose gambler, I liked to spread my bets.
Our ending was unremarkable. She grew tired of being my mistress. I was exhausted by my own lies. She told me someone had come to work, a man, unmarried, of the proper age, who seemed to like her. A few days later, she said he had asked her to dinner and I said she should go with him and she struck me hard across the face. I held the hand that struck me and kissed its fingertips.
“You never planned for things to work out between us,” she said.
“I never said they would. Did I?”
She sent me away; she didn’t call and neither did I. Every once in a while, she sent a note. It was as if we had met traveling and promised to stay in touch.
I held these letters in my hand and looked through them. I must throw them away, I thought. I listened for Olivia. I paged through the letters, wondering which one Michael had seen. Nadia’s final letter had been ferocious. All of the others had been written in her plump, schoolgirlish hand; this last communication was scrawled in a cramped, collapsing script.
You made me love you. No, no, you fucked me, you just fucked me. I have never been treated so shabbily in my life. I have heard about men like you but this is the first time I have been defiled by someone so callous. And I loved you, Sam. I still love you. I gave you my heart. Do you think that was easy? I gave you my one and only heart, my precious God-given body and you used my cunt as your toilet. Oh, I hate you, how I hate you, and your precious wife and those children and their oh so very uninteresting little problems….
And this was the letter that was missing—the one that Michael, wherever he was, had in his pocket.
At around eight that evening, I went down to fix myself another drink. Olivia came down. Her denim-blue eyes were red. At first I thought she’d strained them repairing a quilt, but then I looked a little closer and realized she’d been crying.
“Okay, now I’m really worried,” she said.
The telephone rang and I bounded out of my chair, sloshing my drink. Naturally, we both thought it must be Michael, or someone with news of Michael, but in fact it was Graham Davis calling back. He was calling from a bar or a party. I heard music, laughter in the background—it made me long for Manhattan.
“Oh good, I’ve got you,” said Graham. Telephone calls were a pivotal part of his life, and he discussed their placement and completion in exceedingly dramatic terms. “Now see here, I’ve only got a few moments, but there’s something you have to know.”
“What is it, Graham?”
“I ran into Ezra Poindexter at the Vertical fitness center this morning. He’s as thin as a whippet, but with all these muscles, for God’s sake.”
“Thanks for the information.”
“Ah yes, I didn’t think you’d get through the weekend without knowing how fit your publisher is looking these days.”
You could never throw Graham off track with a sarcastic remark; he was always prepared for mockery. He was unserious about everything except money, about which he was reverential.
“What is it really, Graham? This is sort of—” I looked at Olivia and shrugged apologetically.
“It’s about Visitors from Beyond, Sam.”
“Above.”
“Sorry?”
“Visitors from Above.”
“Oh, isn’t that what I said? Well, no matter. The point is it’s selling, Sam, and selling like mad. Ezra’s going back to press on it. They’re running off—I hope you’re seated, Sam, and that your serving tray is in an upright position— they’re running off a second printing of fifty thousand copies. What was the first printing, anyhow?”
“I don’t know.” Yet I did. It was seventy-five hundred copies; I just hated to say so.
“I can check when I get to the office. I think it was something in the seventy-five-hundred range. But who cares? It’s flying out of the stores. Sam, I sense some very serious money here.”
I went silent. I felt as if I’d just bitten into a rare delicacy and didn’t know whether to savor it or spit it out.
“You must come in first thing Monday,” Graham said. “We’ll meet at my office and then we’re going to meet Ezra and discuss how to maximize this whole thing. Oh, thank you, love, that’s brilliant.”
“What?”
“Sorry. Someone just handed me a drink the size of a fire plug. Okay, Sam, I better ring off. If I’m not in my office Monday promise you’ll check the hospitals for me. Cheerio!”
I hung up, wondering if Graham said “Cheerio!” back home in London or if it was merely part of his stateside persona.
Olivia was staring at me.
“I think we’re about to get rich,” I said to her.
“I think we have to start looking for Michael,” she said, not quite simultaneously, yet a little before I had finished what I was saying, and so I wasn’t sure if she had heard me or not.