THE DEJECTED or enraged lover can’t slam the door in Manhattan anymore and say, “I’m leaving.” It takes months to find a place to go to. Mark never would have left me as easily as he did if he hadn’t had Lila’s apartment to go to. And I knew Sean had spoken with much bravado when he said he’d find a place for himself in twenty-four hours after I told him Mark was still on my mind. He’d have been lucky to find even a sublet in that many weeks.
I agreed to let Sean use the keys my brother had turned over to him, as long as he kept looking for his own place and paid half the rent for the time he stayed with me. He had begun working full time on the set in Astoria and could easily pay me half. What I liked about having Sean in my apartment was that he felt temporary. Mark had always felt permanent and for seven years I had liked the sense of permanency, the way I liked carved marble. But Sean sat around in the morning, sipping coffee and reading the real estate section of the Times or follow ing up leads on sublets from the Voice before he’d take off for the set. And I knew that anyone who sat around reading the real estate ads had to be temporary.
When I told my mother that Sean was going to live with me until he found a place of his own, she said it was fine with her, but I could never tell my father. “He’s seventy-five,” she said. “He couldn’t take it.” I think it was my mother who couldn’t take it, but there was something to fear in my father’s wrath. In his office, for example, I’d seen him yelling many times at whoever made the latest error. He was an exacting and precise man and never yelled at an employee if an error cost less than a thousand dollars. But at home he didn’t exercise economic constraints and his temper could be sudden, irrational, and volcanic.
On the phone my mother concocted elaborate strategies in order to protect my father from the fact that Sean was going to live with me for a while. “Why can’t we just tell him?” I asked. She had just told me what hours of the day Sean should not answer the phone.
“No, no, he wouldn’t understand at his age. It would kill him.” My mother gasped as I pondered whether or not I was going to kill my father.
“How do you know he couldn’t take it?”
“He was an old man before you were born. Nice women didn’t do that sort of thing, especially not women who are still married!”
“Mark’s living with someone . . .”
“He’s a man.”
“Mother, that’s a double standard. I refuse to accept that.”
“Darling, I just want to protect him, that’s all.”
I knew I had fallen into the wastebin of lost children. I was suddenly no better than Renee, who went wild in the streets of San Francisco, not to mention suburban Chicago. I was no better than my brother, who had managed to keep himself one step above being a juvenile delinquent. “What am I doing wrong?” I asked my mother, knowing that I was doing everything wrong.
She spoke soothingly. “You and I know you aren’t doing anything wrong, but he won’t. And you know we’re planning to visit you in a few weeks. It would be such a blow. He had such high expectations.”
“He hasn’t done so badly on paper. Renee is married to a dentist and does have three legitimate children, and Zap is on his way back to medical school.”
“We all know that, dear, but just don’t tell him, O.K.?”
A few weeks later Sean, forgetting he wasn’t supposed to answer the phone late at night, picked it up. “Oh, excuse me,” my father said, “I must have the wrong number.”
“You want to talk to your daughter, Mr. Mills?”
“Yes, I do. Who are you?”
“My name is Sean Bryant and I’m living here for the time being.”
“Oh,” my father said. That was the sum total of his reaction to my living with Sean.
My father was building a housing complex near Hartford, so a few weeks later my parents stopped in New York when my father had a meeting in Hartford. They stayed in town two nights and Sean joined us for dinner on the second night. The dinner he ate with us had the relaxed atmosphere of a job interview. To begin with there was a shooting on Canal Street and police cars streamed up West Broadway as we strolled toward the restaurant Sean had selected. My father, who in the past year had grown rather heavy, chased along West Broadway after the police. “Do you believe that?” he said to us after the police cars disappeared around the bend. “A shooting.”
“Dad, this really is a nice part of town. See, look at the galleries. It was just a fluke.”
But he was obsessed with the shooting. How far away had it been? Was the killer still at large? Had anyone been robbed? Fatally injured?
“Oo,” Mom said. “Look at the pretty shops. I just love those antique blouses.”
“SoHo is filled with antique clothing stores, Mrs. Mills,” Sean offered. “After dinner we can shop, if you like.” My mother smiled a somewhat retarded smile at Sean. She didn’t really want to window shop. It was her tactic to talk about some banal detail of daily life to get my father’s mind away from his favorite subject—man’s impending doom.
“We should’ve eaten near the hotel,” Dad went on. “Plenty of good restaurants right around there. I’ve eaten in some terrific restaurants in this city. Years ago, but I bet they’re still wonderful. The Four Seasons, Le Pavilion.”
“I remember when I came to New York in 1935,” Mom interrupted. “Or was it 1934? That was when I had a date with that darling doctor who worked at . . . what’s the hospital near the Bowery?”
“Lots of good hospitals in this city,” Dad went on. “If you’re going to get sick, I say this is the city to do it in.”
“Bowery Savings?” Mom looked questioningly. “Is that a hospital?” We told her it was a bank. “Oh, I don’t remember, but he was a resident somewhere.”
“Did you say you were here on business, Mr. Mills?” Sean tried to land on a subject that would interest my father enough to take his mind off the police chase.
“Well, we’re just signing contracts right now on some new housing complexes we’re doing the engineering for.” He stuck his head around the corner to make sure the killer wasn’t coming. “I hear your crime rate is way up in this city.” He used “your” as if we were somehow responsible. Maybe he thought it had something to do with Sean’s beard; he’d been unable to hide his disapproval of it when they met.
“We have our problems here,” Sean said. “How’s Chicago? Do you do much building there?”
Their voices drifted off and I walked with my mother. She and I are built alike. We’re both tall and slim, though I have my father’s dark eyes and auburn hair. When we walk together, we always drift into stride. She was still back in 1935 or 1934.
My father and Sean had reached the little French restaurant, where you had to bring your own wine. “I’m going for wine,” Sean said.
“How do we get a cab out of here later?” my father asked. “Maybe we should call one now.”
“It’s not difficult to get a cab, Mr. Mills,” Sean said, not sounding terribly reassuring.
While we waited at the table for Sean to come back, my parents assessed him. “Seems like a nice boy,” my father said.
“He’s thirty-four, Dad.”
“Fought in Vietnam, huh?”
“No, he was a radio announcer.”
“Very cute,” Mom said. “Reminds me of that actor . . . what’s his name? Sam Watertower. Is he Jewish?” My mother kept a long list of famous Jews: Fagin, Marx, Christopher Columbus (why else did he leave Spain in 1492?), Lenin, Hitler, Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Spinoza, Christ, Clifford Irving, Leonardo da Vinci, Kafka, Gershwin, St. Paul, Disraeli, Dinah Shore, Sandy Koufax, Freud, Sammy Davis, Harry Houdini, and Levi Strauss, the tailor.
“I don’t think he’s Jewish, Mom.” I thought for a moment, then felt the need to add “Mark wasn’t either.”
Sean returned with two bottles of wine and a bottle of champagne. “Thought we’d celebrate your father’s business deal.”
“Oh, who’s going to drink all that stuff?” Dad said. “One bottle’s all we need. Don’t waste your money.”
It was downhill from there. Dad’s soup was cold and Mom’s drinking water was hot. Dad said the floor of the restaurant was sinking. The fish, they were certain, was frozen, not fresh, as the waiter had assured them, and neither could believe the prices. Dad sent back every course but dessert, and Mom just picked at her breast of chicken with three kinds of mustard, saying it was “all right. Just a little tasteless, that’s all.”
“Don’t order the trout,” Dad said. “Too many bones. Get stuck in your throat and kill you.”
“Dad, they won’t kill you.”
“You’d be surprised. You’d be surprised, the stories of people gagging to death in restaurants because of fish bones. I know a doctor who performed a tracheotomy on the dining room table with a kitchen knife on his own little boy. You’d be amazed.”
Sean was a little confused. I could see that. He had wanted to make a nice impression but he did not know what to discuss. Mortal accidents, old loves, the destruction of the world, were the only suitable subjects he could come up with.
“So what do you think of the economy these days, Mr. Mills?”
“The economy? I want to enjoy my dinner, son.”
“Debbie tells us you’re an actor. That must be exciting,” Mom said.
I reached into a pouch of my purse to powder my nose and started to pull out my blue diaphragm case. It felt like my compact, and I wasn’t looking down. Fortunately, Sean noticed what I was doing; he reached across and pushed my hand back into my purse, under the pretext of holding it. He smiled at me. “Actually I work as an assistant director, right now. I was working in front of the camera but what I really want to do is direct. Of course, everyone wants to direct. Hollywood is filled with people who just want to be directors . . .”
My heart pounded. What if, my God, what if I’d taken out my diaphragm and powdered my nose? Maybe they wouldn’t have noticed. Maybe they would have gone right on talking about doom and destruction. But this is terrible, I thought. I am sitting in a French restaurant with my parents, my lover, and my diaphragm case. My mother said it would kill him. I pictured my father, seeing me powder my nose with my diaphragm, then choking on his veal scalloppini. I examined the knives and wondered if I’d be able to perform the tracheotomy.
“It’s just horrible,” Dad cut in. “I read the other day that sixteen people have killed themselves because of the Russian roulette scene in that film The Deer Hunter.”
“That’s who you remind me of,” Mom said. “What’s his name.”
“Can you imagine?”
“Please, Howard, don’t get all upset. You’ll spoil your dinner. He hates violence. He gets embarrassed at sex. I think the last film we went to together was The Sound of Music.” My father stared sadly at the tablecloth. “You can’t go anywhere with him.”
My parents had never had what you’d call the ideal marriage. Actually I believed everything was all right until November 1963, when my mother sobbed as President Kennedy was buried. As the nation mourned, she declared it was the end of America and she wanted to see the country before we went completely to pot. My father wouldn’t go with her and he refused to let her go alone. So, instead, she packed a small suitcase for herself and moved from their bedroom into the guest room. She laid out all of her make-up on the dressing table to let everyone know how long she planned to stay. By day our father acted as if everything were normal, but at night, when he thought we were asleep, my father, Howard Mills, such a pragmatic and exacting civil engineer, tiptoed down the hall and pleaded with my mother to come back to bed.
Zap, Renee, and I were amazed at how tenacious she was. How she could open the door to the guest room just a crack, enough to tell him how utterly absurd he was, how utterly bored she was with him, complaints over the details of daily living when the world around them was falling apart. She resisted his pleas and entreaties until at last she broke his spirit and made him give her what she wanted. Marge Mills would have made a terrific horse trainer.
In fact, she had a scheme. One day after sleeping by herself for almost a year, she told him she’d come back to bed if he’d give her a thousand dollars with which to take a trip across the country. He gave her the money and she bought a two-hundred-dollar Greyhound “America the Beautiful” bus pass, the kind that lets you get on and off wherever you want. The rest of the money she put into traveler’s checks. She got as far as San Francisco. In San Francisco, she balked and, in a moment of weakness, called home. My father hopped the next plane and brought her home, thus ending the closest thing to adventure she’d ever know.
The summer my mother took off for San Francisco was the summer when it all fell apart for me, or when it all began for me, depending on which way you look at it. It was the summer I caught my brother and Jennie in the drafting room. It was the summer Renee left her underpanties on a neighbor’s rosebush and the summer I watched my father languish for love. If my mother wanted adventure and never found it, my father wanted love and never got it. My father, I feel certain, in the depths of his ill-tempered soul, is a passionate man. I’ve always believed that behind the explosions, the rage, the need to send food back in restaurants, to chase after shootings, lurks a man trying to keep the lid on things. I am afraid I take after him.
When we left the restaurant, my father said, “Can we drop you off somewhere, son?”
Sean didn’t know what to say, but I cut in. “Why don’t we all go back to my place and have a drink?” My father didn’t want to because he had meetings all the next day, but Mom convinced him there were cabs on Columbus Avenue. The subject of where Sean lived or should be dropped was discreetly forgotten. Once we were uptown, Sean and Dad went to mix drinks. Mom and I sat on the sofa in the living room, waiting for them. “So,” Mom began, patting my hand, “we’ve hardly had a chance to talk. Sean’s very nice. Your brother likes him. But I guess you’re still up in the air about Mark.”
“Oh, I’m not up in the air. I mean, I saw him twice recently, but I don’t want to get back together.”
Her eyes lit up when I said I’d seen him twice. “Well, you’ll see. You know, a marriage, that’s not something you should give up lightly.”
I was getting annoyed. “Who gave it up lightly? I didn’t leave. I wasn’t unfaithful. I was here waiting for him to come home at night. You make it sound as if I’m the one who walked away.”
“You don’t have to get all upset about it. I just made a simple statement. I can make a simple statement, can’t I? I’m upset, too, you know, that you broke up. We’ve hardly discussed it, but I felt just terrible.”
I felt a little as if I were being sabotaged. “What am I supposed to do? Go take him back from the woman he lives with?”
My mother stood up. “I wonder what’s taking them so long?” She started walking away. “Should we go and see?”
What was taking so long was that my father had cut his finger trying to get the electric can opener to open a can of tomato juice. “What’s taking so long?” I asked cheerfully.
“I cut myself on this goddamn can opener. I don’t know why you don’t buy the kind we have.”
I looked at my father’s finger and at the opener. “You probably used it wrong.”
“Used it wrong? I haven’t been around for three quarters of a century without knowing how to open a can. Tell her, Marge. Believe me, I know how to open a can.”
“I’ll finish the drinks,” Mom said.
“Naw, forget the drinks. It’s too late. Let’s go.” We wrapped my father’s finger in a bandage and went for their coats. My father sat for a moment in his overcoat with his thumb held up in the air. Then they got up to leave. “Can we drop you somewhere, son?” Dad said again. Sean declined. “Oh,” my father said, thus coming to grips with the fact that Sean really did stay with me.
After they left, Sean more or less collapsed on the sofa. “You were terrific,” I told him.
“My God, that’s amazing. Are they always like that?”
“Oh, not always.” My parents were often like that when they were upset about something. Right now they were upset that Sean was not the man I married.
The month of October was idyllic, only I didn’t know it at the time. Sean stayed with me and the two of us set up house. We knew it was temporary, so we moved into domesticity with comfort and ease. What was wonderful about October was that Sean wanted to see Manhattan the way a tourist sees Manhattan. He wanted to go to every museum, every gallery. He wanted to buy chestnuts in the park and stop at F.A.O. Usually we went out alone, just the two of us. He’d pick me up at the office in the evenings with the Times and the Voice under his arm and pretend he’d been looking for an apartment. I knew he was looking for films he wanted to see. His work schedule was erratic that month, so he had plenty of time to find things for us to do.
One morning Sean went with me up to that section of the Bronx known as Fort Apache. The Arthur Hansom film he was working on, called Minor Setbacks, took place in Bedford-Stuy. It was the story of two Italian boys who grow up in the slums. One leaves, goes into advertising, and marries a wealthy but dumb girl from Manhattan. The other stays behind and marries the former girlfriend—a bright, sensitive woman—of his friend.
Sean wanted to take a look at some slums, so I invited him to come to work with me. We went to the site of a new commercial revitalization project, and together we walked through bombed-out, rat-infested, barely standing shells of tenements.
We stood in a pile of rubble and I told Sean my plan. I wanted to take five of the buildings in that square-mile radius, completely renovate them, turn them into commercial and office space and single-unit dwellings. The plan was to encourage young, single professionals to move uptown. I pointed to a parking lot that I wanted to turn into a playground. I pointed to a factory building, gutted by fire, that I wanted to make into artists’ studios. And then there were five other dwellings that I planned to renovate for low-income family dwellings. “You see,” I explained, “what I’m trying to do is break down the one-dimensional quality of these neighborhoods. I want an economic mix to bring up the standards of the neighborhood in general, without raising rents . . . Oh, it’s all very complicated but I think it can work. It’s a new concept in urban design, that’s all. The City Council thinks I’m mad.”
Sean began to laugh. “Young professionals living up here?”
“Well, that’s part of it. It would help the housing crunch, diversify communities without raising rents. The important thing is to keep rents stabilized. I’ve worked it all out . . .”
He put his arm around me. “You know what I think?”
“Is it going to upset me?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think I’m falling in love with you.”
I rolled my eyes and walked ahead of him through a pile of beer cans. “Don’t,” I said. “I’m not ready.”
“Don’t worry,” he said from behind me. “I’m not either.”
Sometimes we’d walk in the evenings through Little Italy or SoHo, and Sean would talk to me about his life. He’d skipped his senior year of high school and gone to Yale when he was seventeen. Before he left for New Haven, he fell in love with a girl. The only writing he did his first year at Yale was to that girl back home. He was kicked out of Yale and drafted. His parents, good Irish-Americans, told him he had to fight, but the army was more merciful. They knew a performer when they saw one. For fifteen months Sean worked as a communications expert in Vietnam. He kept writing to the girl while she was falling in love with someone else.
When he got back home Yale gave him one more chance, and he graduated with a degree in drama. “I swear, the only drama I’ve ever had in my life has been on the stage or in front of a camera. I’m a very boring person.” In Vietnam he never saw the war. He only heard it and heard about it. “But once I saw a tiger,” he told me one night as we walked around Washington Square. “I swear to God. I’d gone into the jungle by helicopter to interview some soldiers. I was fifty miles from where there was any action but I was scared out of my mind. Usually they had this guy from Time who went into the bush to report, but he had a cold. I was scared shitless. After I talked to the soldiers, I walked back to the helicopter through this thick bush. All of a sudden, I see this pair of green eyes staring at me and I know it’s a goddamn tiger. So I just stare at it and it goes away. But that was the scariest thing that ever happened to me in my whole life.”
The night Sean told me he’d seen a tiger in the jungle, he told me he’d found an apartment in the West Village. For some reason, those two facts had the same impact on me. They filled me with fear and disbelief.
I think I was particularly surprised he’d found an apartment because we’d spent the day strolling through a cold autumn Manhattan, arm in arm, in our pullovers, stopping for cappuccino to escape the cold. It surprised me because we had gone back to my place after he told me about the tiger, gotten into bed, and made love better than we’d ever made love. I think in part we made love so well because I hadn’t been thinking about Mark or Lila for a while. I’d hardly been think ing about hurting them, and the rage that had been in me for so long was subsiding. It was really the first night, that night after he told me about the tiger, that our lovemaking wasn’t onesided. And afterward, I lay in his arms, glad as if this was where I really wanted to be.
That was when he said, “I found an apartment and I’ll probably move out on Monday.”
“You did?” I sat up. “I didn’t know you were still looking. I thought you’d stopped looking a long time ago. I thought you’d just stay here while you finish the film.”
He cleared his throat. “Didn’t you want me to get a place of my own? Isn’t that what I’ve been doing all these mornings, trying to find an apartment?”
I found myself whispering, to my own amazement, “Don’t take it.”
“I’ve already signed the lease.”
I know enough about contracts from years of living with an attorney to know they can be broken with some financial loss and I knew that a man who graduated from Yale knew this as well. I got out of bed, went over to the sofa, and sulked. “You can break it.”
Sean stumbled out of bed and sat down next to me. “I don’t understand you. What do you think I’ve been doing for the past six weeks? I told you I wouldn’t stay here past finding somewhere else to live. I’ve got a one-year sublet and I don’t want to lose it. And besides, you’re still married, which doesn’t matter that much, but you’re still in love with the man you’re married to. Any fool can see that. So what if I take the apartment? It’s not going to change anything. We’ll still be together.” He wrapped his arms around me. “It’ll hardly change a thing.”
It changed everything, though the change would be slow in coming. I helped him take his things down to the one-room studio that had been sublet to him by a homosexual couple. I sat in the kitchen, where Sean was taking things out of boxes. “I don’t get it,” I said. “You just come and stay a couple of months and now you’re going away. You can’t walk into someone’s life, then walk out.”
Sean sat down on the kitchen table. “Deborah, I don’t understand you. Do you always drive men crazy? I’m not walking out of your life. To the contrary, I am moving downtown because we’d agreed I’d do that, but we can still see each other just as much as you want.”
“It’s a long subway ride. I’ll never see you.”
“I’ll come uptown. Besides, I’m taking you to dinner tonight. It’s our anniversary.”
“It is?”
“Yes, we met five months ago. I thought we’d celebrate.”
That evening we went to dinner at Kelly’s and then to a place called Ralph’s on Grove Street to listen to music. Ralph’s is a tavern with decorations on the walls commemorating holidays. Tinsel from Christmas, turkeys from Thanksgiving, New Year’s balloons, shamrocks, Easter bunnies. We arrived early and ordered our first round. Joe Barry, the black man with the slicked-back hair who played a fairly good blues during the week, was already at the piano, and slowly the bar was beginning to fill up.
I was in a nostalgic mood and wanted to hear “As Time Goes By,” but I was too embarrassed to make such a request. Sean got up and whispered something into the ear of the bartender, Steve. “Oh, yeah?” Steve said. “How long?”
Sean held up five fingers.
A few moments later Joe played “As Time Goes By” and Steve came over with a free round. “Anyone who’s been together five years deserves a free round.”
“You told him we’d been together five years?” I asked Sean. He shook his head. He’d just said “five” but hadn’t specified the measure of time. As Joe sang “It’s still the same old story,” Sean wrapped his arm around me. He sang into my ear and licked my earlobe with his tongue. I curled up close beside him. The tinsel that stretched across the room sparkled. Joe Barry’s slicked-back hair sparkled. The Easter bunny glistened in the mirror on the opposite wall. Steve’s starry earring sparkled. Steve’s white teeth smiled at us. Joe Barry had the bar toast our fifth anniversary. “Let’s hear it for them, folks. They’re together five years and look at them. Still going strong.”
I snuggled closer to Sean. The bar was now full of New Yorkers who paid tremendous rents and scratched out their livings, who opened a can of soup at night and ate alone. They all looked at us, smiling, filled with envy. The single people wished they were in love the way we were; the married people wondered how we’d done it.
Sean pulled me closer to him and whispered in my ear, “Act like you’re crazy about me.” But at that moment I didn’t have to act. The meaning of life, so simple and clear, was suddenly obvious to me and I was happy. I was crazy about him. I knew what it was to be completely happy.
The next day we broke up. It was a cold Sunday in New York and we’d spent the night at his place on a mattress on the floor. In the morning Sean decided he had to do some laundry, so we took all his clothes over to Suds-’n-Duds, and while I was separating whites from colors, he struck up a conversation with the woman folding sheets next to him. “Didn’t you just move in?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah. I thought I saw you in the building.” She had beautiful corn-blond hair and was the kind of woman it might be difficult not to notice, but it bothered me suddenly that he had noticed her, since he’d moved in only the day before.
“I just got here from the Coast myself.” She was an actress, doing something at Circle Repertory. “You’ll have to come down for a drink some night. I live on Six.”
“Oh, I must be just above you then.”
“Oh, yeah.” She giggled. “Do you have your mattress on the floor?”
After she left, Sean noticed I was a little too engrossed in the magazine section. “Hey”—he nudged me—“what’s up?”
“Nothing,” I said, feigning indifference.
He sat down beside me in one of those little green plastic chairs. “You in your spin cycle again?”
“You could have introduced me.”
“Introduced you?”
“To that woman.”
“I don’t know that woman. I really didn’t think about it.”
I put down the magazine. “Look, if you want to see other people, it’s O.K. I understand. You aren’t under any commitment to me. You can do whatever you want. But I just don’t want any surprises. Just let me know, all right?”
“You’re nuts,” he groaned. The wash was ready for the dryer and Sean took it and flung it in. He took the magazine section and started to read about Ronald Reagan’s acting career. I hate it when someone takes my section of the paper, but I didn’t want to argue about that. I settled into Arts and Leisure. Sean put down his article. “I am not planning on dating anyone else. I will tell you if and when I want to do that.”
“Why don’t you just tell me now? I’d rather know right now and get it over with.”
We folded the laundry in silence and headed across Sixth Avenue. “I’m sorry if I was rude,” he said as we approached his building, “but I swear I just didn’t think to introduce you to her. I just met her myself.”
“Well, you’ve found a place of your own. Now you can do whatever you want. I don’t care who you see. It doesn’t matter to me.” I was shouting.
We reached his building and I handed him the wash I was carrying. “I’m going home.”
“O.K., so go home. Get on the subway and go and spend the rest of the day by yourself. Go home and sulk and think about everybody who has wronged you.”
With that he got in the elevator, pushed the button. I watched him go up. I watched the lights above the elevator as they blinked, like the lights on the switchboard in my father’s office, those distant stars, saying things I’d never understand.
Somehow we patched things up, and the next weekend we flew to Nantucket because Sean wanted to get away. Winter was setting in and the island was almost deserted, except for islanders. He said it was the best time to go. We stayed at the Coffin House, whose name left a chill in me. During the day we put on parkas and bicycled down empty roads toward empty beaches. We walked on the cobbled streets and toured the whaling museum, which was about to close for the season. Sean had never been to a whaling museum and he liked it. He liked the history of harpooners, the classifications of whales. He liked the huge skeleton of a sperm whale that hovered over our heads. He liked the stories of the sea and he liked learning that the cobbles on Main Street had been ballast in the ships returning from England after they’d dropped off their cargo of oil from the bellies of the great whales. We went down to Cisco Beach, where the lookout used to be in the days when you could still see the largest mammals in schools on their way out to sea.
On the cold beach Sean shouted, “Thar she blows,” but we both looked out across the ocean and we saw nothing at all. The only sound after he shouted was that of the endless, rolling sea. That night we ate cheeseburgers and shoestringers at the Brotherhood and drank hot buttered rum. After dinner we walked the cobbled streets, thinking we heard footsteps behind us. Sean told me that it is said that in November, after the tourists leave, the ghosts of old whalers, lost at sea, feel it is safe for them to come home and that sometimes you can hear them pacing, as they wait for their friends and their ships to come back.
Our room at the Coffin House had a fireplace in it, so I decided to make a fire. Sean sat down in one of the large reading chairs with a copy of Moby Dick he’d bought that afternoon. After I got a small fire going, Sean looked up. “That’s nice,” he said, reaching for a poker. “If you push the logs together a little bit more”—gently he prodded the logs—“you get a better fire.” He closed the empty spaces and the fire blazed.
We had been reading for a few minutes in front of the fire, each of us in a large armchair on either side of the mantel, when Sean said, “Hey, listen to this passage.” He leaned closer to me and read to me from Moby Dick:
. . .We safely arrived in Nantucket. Take out your map and look at it . . . a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background . . . Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don’t grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles . . . that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time . . . that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander show-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed . . . that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sand turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.
“So what.” I glanced up at him from a map of cranberry bogs I was examining. “It’s obvious Melville had never been to Illinois.”
Sean looked puzzled. “Illinois? Who cares about Illinois? I think it’s a beautiful passage.”
“I care about Illinois. There are amazing things in Illinois. I love the Midwest.” I tried very hard to think of images as magical about my home state as Melville had found about Nantucket. It is true that Lake Michigan has none of the dangerous threat that the Atlantic has, that meat cutters don’t evoke the romance and glamour of the long-gone whalers, that the flowing prairies have none of the mystery of the cranberry bogs, that the streets are asphalt, not cobbles from the ballast of ships, that travelers don’t book months in advance to go to Peoria.
So why did I feel the need to argue with him? Why couldn’t I just say, “You’re right. Illinois is boring.” Instead I had to say “And what about Abraham Lincoln and Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway? What about the Museum of Science and Industry? The Art Institute . . .”
“Good night,” Sean said, getting up, closing his book, and crawling into one side of the big feather bed. “I just thought it was an interesting passage. I wasn’t trying to make a federal case.”
“I think you were. I think you were attacking my home state. I think . . .”
What did I think? And what was I doing? A kind of gloom came over me. A gloom that hadn’t come over me in a while. An inexplicable urge to thrash out and destroy whatever it was that came near me. I got into my side of the bed and turned out the light. In the darkness near the french windows, I saw the shadow of panthers, which came to me in the night the way Sean’s tiger came to me. I saw the dark, sleek body of the woman who’d taken my husband away. I felt her as a moving presence in the room at the Coffin House. She was what stood between me and the world. Lila means night, and she came over me as the darkness came over me. She was a cat that hadn’t been declawed. And she was Illinois. Even the letters of her name—the i, the two l’s—reminded me of Illinois.
If childhood had become synonymous with gloom, if what had been familiar to me was now some dark, obscure foreign place, it was because of her. If some great wall had been constructed, keeping me away from the rest of existence, keeping me away from Sean, it was a wall I’d constructed to contain my hatred of her. The light from the fire cast shadows on the wall, animal-like shapes, and it was as if she were right with us, taunting me. Sean reached across and touched my breast but I pulled away. “Please don’t touch me. I don’t want to be touched,” I said.
Outside the waves crashed. I could imagine whitecaps, cold frigid water. Oh, God, I was cold. I was suddenly very cold. Sean perched his elbow above me, like some wave about to break over me. What fool comes to Nantucket at the end of November, I thought to myself. Just a few dead whalers, I knew was the answer. Sean spoke to me with the flat voice the first mate uses when he thinks his captain has gone mad. “Pray tell, what is the matter?”
I didn’t want to start over. I didn’t want to try again. It hadn’t been all bad. That’s what was the matter. It wasn’t all bad. Zap could walk away from Jennie because they’d never really shared anything, but Mark and I had had good times—those late-night suppers, sipping wine. Early-morning hikes in Montana. The time I broke my arm in Mexico and Mark told the doctor, “Now listen, this arm is very important to me.” And that priest in Jerusalem who told us Christ was betrayed by a kiss and a kiss isn’t for betrayal. Mark had agreed solemnly. A kiss isn’t for betrayal.
I wished it had all been bad, except it wasn’t.
I snuggled against Sean. “I’m tired. Let’s just go to sleep.”
When I woke in the middle of the night, the fire was out and I was colder than I could ever imagine being cold. I shivered and looked around. The doors leading to the widow’s walk were ajar. I threw on my parka and went to close the doors. But just as I was about to close them, I saw a figure, cloaked in some kind of a shawl, gazing in the direction of the sea. It was a dark, shapeless form and it seemed to be grieving for some thing it had lost. I zipped up my parka and the figure turned.
I went and stood beside Sean, who had taken a quilt off the bed. He was standing, looking out, where I imagined widows had stood, waiting for their men who would never return, women who’d lost the only ones who really mattered to them, blank stares on their faces, unwilling to come away from the sea, a breed of women that didn’t exist any longer.
I put my arm on his shoulder. “Bad dream?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t been asleep.”
“What have you been doing?”
He shook his head again. “Watching you sleep. I’ve been wanting to wake you.”
I tugged on the blanket. “Can I get in?” He opened his arms and let me slip under the quilt with him. He wore a thermal top and sweat pants. As I slipped under the blanket, I felt him go tense, as if he didn’t really want me near him at all. He was shaking very hard from the cold. “Why did you just push me away before you fell asleep?”
“I had some things on my mind.”
He was shaking very hard. “Like what?”
“Well, I was thinking about Lila and Mark.”
Sean wouldn’t look at me. “Look, Deborah, I really care about you, but I don’t think I want to go on with this. I mean, it’s not very much fun for me.”
It was odd, because when I crawled under the blanket with him, I knew he had in some way stopped wanting me. I found myself suddenly feeling panicky. “Listen,” I said, “I think I could love you. Maybe I do love you. I know I care about you. I just need more time . . .”
He shook harder. “I think you don’t know what you want and I’m not sure I want to wait around to find out.”
Who can really grasp the fine mechanism of wanting another person? But it seems some of us are destined to want others when they don’t really want us any longer. And then there are those who expend enormous amounts of energy in making ourselves loved, only to lose interest the minute we are close to achieving our goal. I always thought I could be counted among those who wanted the people who wanted me. But at that moment on the widow’s walk, looking into a freezing sea, I wasn’t so sure, because I was aware for the first time that perhaps I really wanted him and for the first time he really didn’t want me.
We stood together, teeth chattering, and I realized I probably could fall in love with him if I could just get rid of my rage. But here on this island of lore, this island that had been the scene of Melville’s dream of a great chase, his dream of revenge, my own fury came surging back at me. I knew times were different from when men had ventured forth on whatever romantic adventures awaited them while their women waited with one eye out to sea. I knew that once I had fallen in love with innocence and faith, and from now on I would set out in fear and mistrust. I knew that I was now in pursuit of the object of my own anger, blinded by that anger, and that I lived with the same passion and doubt that had driven Ahab after a white whale. And I knew that in a sense you had to be a little like Ahab to have your white whale in the first place.
I persuaded Sean to come back to bed, and we made love gently until we drifted to sleep. Perhaps things would have been all right between us if he hadn’t dropped me off at my apartment the next night, when we returned to the city, instead of spending the night with me. “Look,” he said when the cab pulled up, “I’m very tired and I have an early shoot in the morning. Why don’t you stay here and I’ll see you tomorrow night?”
I argued that I’d go up with him to his place and stay there, but he was adamant. “I need some time alone; that’s all.”
When I walked inside, a strange terror overcame me, a kind of terror I’d never really experienced before. The terror of the person who is alone, the terror of the single person. It took me a moment to understand that my shortness of breath wasn’t from climbing the stairs. It was from being alone. I phoned Sally but she wasn’t home. I tried other friends and talked to their answering machines.
And so, in an impulsive moment I’ve since lived to regret, I called Mark, not so much because I wanted to talk to him as because I wanted to know he was still out there. As I dialed Lila’s unpublished number he’d given me at the Echo Inn, I knew I’d hang up when she answered and that would be that. But when Mark answered, I said hello. When he told me Lila was out of town, I asked if he would come over.
Mark never loved me more than when I was flat out with the flu, and he could tell on the phone that somehow I was desperate. It still amazes me how I can plan routes and paths for millions of people, how I can organize their lives in ways they never dreamed, and still make such a maze and muddle out of my own.