LIKE AN OMEN of good tidings, the weather changed a week before Leila’s return. A new, cool wind began to blow, blowing the heat wave out to sea. Almost overnight, there was an autumnal feeling in the air. The large sailboats docked on the north side of the Seventy-ninth Street marina began sailing away one by one for their winter ports. Leaves on the trees in Riverside Park changed colors. And then one morning, I saw through my living room window a small contingent of geese flying south over the Hudson in a lopsided V formation. I opened the window and the wind blew their ghostly cries into my apartment.
I fussed for a couple of days getting the apartment and myself ready for Leila’s arrival. A happy time full of happy anticipation. Leila was arriving on Wednesday and since Maria wouldn’t come to clean until Friday, I cleaned the apartment myself. I vacuumed. I changed the sheets and pillowcases on the bed in our bedroom. I put out new towels and washed the old ones. I bought flowers for the dining room table. While cleaning the mirror in the bathroom, I was struck by my own reflection. I looked so happy that I had a hard time recognizing myself.
In addition to getting the apartment ready for her homecoming, I had a homecoming present waiting for her. I had that sign, held up by the limo driver with her name on it, framed at Lee’s frame shop on West Fifty-seventh Street. I added a couple of words above her name with a black Magic Marker, trying to duplicate the style and size of the letters in her name. The words I added were the ones that would be used in her first screen credit: AND INTRODUCING.
I made a point of not being at home when she arrived. I stayed in my office until late in the evening and even called the doorman of my building to make sure Leila was there before rushing out of the office and getting a cab.
I just felt like doing it this way. Going home, having her there already, was my homecoming present to myself.
I unlocked the door to my apartment quietly and stepped inside. Almost instantly, I caught a scent of her perfume. Maybe it wasn’t perfume at all but just the scent of my apartment being inhabited, not empty as I had left it this morning. A wonderful feeling that life was in progress and that I could partake of it.
Was this, I wondered, what home meant? That all I had to do was announce myself, and life, as if by magic, would begin?
“Is anybody home?” I called out.
She ran out of my bedroom like a run of good luck. That’s what she looked like to me. Arms spread out. Lips parted. Smiling and screaming her head off as she ran toward me. She launched herself like a broad jumper from at least five feet away and literally flew into my arms.
How I managed to catch her, why I didn’t topple over like a bowling pin when her body hit me, I’ll never know. In a long sedentary life devoid of athletic accomplishments, this was my one Olympic moment. I caught her. I staggered backwards, but I caught her and held on.
She was thrilled with the framed sign, my homecoming gift to her. Thrilled with the words I had added above her name. She walked around the apartment saying, “And introducing, Leila Millar,” in a variety of ways. A couple of times she introduced herself to me. “And introducing, Leila Millar,” she said and extended her hand. I shook it, as if meeting her for the first time. “I’ve heard so much about you,” I told her. “And who are you?” she asked. “Saul,” I said, shaking her hand, “Saul Karoo.”
She had changed her whole hairdo while in Venice. Its texture. Its color. The brown was now a bleached light brown, almost blond in places. Knowing her aversion to direct sunlight, I knew that it wasn’t caused by the sun.
Her hair was shorter, rounder, bouncier. She had bangs halfway down her forehead.
She looked younger. Almost like a coed strolling across the campus. Almost like a complete stranger.
She was either nervous or overflowing with some newfound exuberance, it was hard to tell which, and easy to mistake one for the other.
When she brushed her teeth, she did it with vigor, humming along.
When she sat down, she sat so quickly that the bangs billowed off her forehead.
When she got up, she almost jumped to her feet.
And when the telephone rang, she had to restrain herself from running to get it, as if forgetting for a moment that she was in my apartment.
We didn’t have sex for the first few days. It was as if she was too nervous or too exuberant, or, as happened one evening, too ticklish for sex. What we had, instead, was foreplay, which properly speaking wasn’t foreplay but an end in itself. The way she looked, the sound of her laughter, the way her eyes narrowed when she smiled, it all made me want to kiss her. Not just kiss her but bother her with kisses the way one might be impelled to bother with kisses an irresistibly lovely child. I bothered her often in this way. We played at love. We made a game of it. I chased her around the apartment like some would-be monster. She ran, screaming for help, until I caught her. And then I kissed her and kissed her until she became ticklish and squirmed and wriggled out of my arms, laughing, screaming for help again. It reminded me of games I used to play with Billy when he was just a little boy.
On this particular night, thanks to many little signals sent by Leila and received by me, I know that we are finally going to make love again. I come out of the bathroom, having showered in preparation and anticipation.
Leila lies there naked on my bed. She is watching me coming toward her. We’re both completely undressed, but she is naked. Her nakedness is so complete that in comparison to her I feel fully dressed, dressed in my past, in my plans for Pittsburgh, if nothing else.
She watches me.
I don’t know where to look. She is so naked, so white, so wide open.
The lights are on. She likes to have them on when we make love. I don’t. But since she likes to have them on, and since I love her, I leave them on. It’s not the lights I mind so much. It’s just that I don’t know where to look when I see her like this.
Her openness, her nakedness, is too much for me, and, since it is, it ceases to be openness. It becomes something else. Her eyes, for example. They’re so open (as she watches me) that they’re not telling me anything. They’re not like an open book but like a book open to every page at the same time. They’re so open that they’re telling me everything. Absolutely everything. But it’s impossible for me to comprehend everything that she’s telling me. It can’t be done. So the effect of her openness on me is exactly the same as if she were hiding something.
It seems unnatural to think it, but openness of this kind seems like the ultimate camouflage.
It’s not a thought I like to have while walking toward the naked body of the woman I love.
There is no time to analyze the thought and its implications. Things have been set in motion and I am committed to the lovemaking at hand.
When I kiss her, I shut my eyes. I now see nothing. I feel enormously relieved. I keep on kissing her.
We talked to Billy on the telephone every few days, with me on the phone in the kitchen and Leila on the extension in the bedroom. There wasn’t any set rule about doing it like this, but it always worked out that way.
Our conversations were essentially banal gabfests and very enjoyable. There was no agenda or form. It was just talk. Life at Harvard. The classes he was taking. The ones he liked. The ones he didn’t. An inevitable allusion or two to the premiere of Leila’s movie in Pittsburgh. Billy asking Leila if she was getting nervous and Leila replying, “What do you think?”
There was something very enjoyable about these telephone calls. The three of us on the line at the same time. The electronic togetherness of it. The rotation of talking and listening.
But there was also, or came to be after a few of these conversations, a strange, and totally unwarranted reaction on my part. Whenever I dropped out of the conversation for a while, to light a cigarette or simply out of courtesy, not wanting to monopolize the conversation, whenever I just sat there in the kitchen and listened to the two of them talking, I had this uncomfortable feeling that I was eavesdropping on them. I wasn’t, of course. They knew that I was there on the line with them. It was just banter. Back-and-forth banter between the two of them. Telephone tennis. Talk about what kind of tuxedo Billy should rent for the premiere. Traditional or modern. Talk about Leila’s dress for the premiere and her excuses for not having bought one yet. Things like that. It wasn’t the content of their banter but the quality of their voices that made me feel uncomfortable, like some smarmy wiretapper overhearing a private conversation. To rid myself of this unpleasant feeling, I wound up butting into their conversation even when I had nothing to say. Just to remind myself that all three of us were on the line at the same time.
For the premiere, my old tuxedo—it had been hanging undisturbed for a year—was cleaned and pressed and encased in a plastic dry-cleaning bag in my closet. When I showed it to Leila, she seemed genuinely, almost childishly thrilled at the prospect of being escorted to the premiere of her movie in Pittsburgh by “two dashing men,” as she called Billy and me, in formal attire.
She had never been anywhere where men wore tuxedos and women wore evening gowns.
The buying of Leila’s dress for the premiere proved to be a minisaga in itself.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she agreed with me. She really had to buy something special for the occasion. “One of those once-in-a-lifetime dresses” was how she described it.
We spent hours discussing the kind of dress it should be. We talked about colors, fabrics, styles. We even consulted several fashion magazines for “ideas.”
But she made no actual move to go shopping for it. Tomorrow. She would go tomorrow.
“I promise,” she said.
But tomorrow came and went. And the day after tomorrow. She seemed weary of the subject when I brought it up again.
No matter, I decided. Even if she didn’t buy and wear a special dress, it would be fine. The nature of the event that awaited her was guaranteed to enshrine the occasion as the single happiest night of her life.
And just when I gave up on the dress and the whole image of the three of us in formal attire, she fooled me again.
The dress she wanted was a bridal gown, but a modern, nontraditional bridal gown. There was in fact nothing particularly bridal about it except for the nature of the shop in which it was displayed. But perhaps that was what had caught Leila’s eye in the first place.
It was mid-calf in length and slightly longer in the back than in the front. In another era it might have been called a cocktail dress. It was white. White satin, or some such fabric. Sleek. Shiny. Possessing one of those textures that seem impervious to stains. I could easily imagine a glass of red wine spilling on that dress and the wine beading up, rolling off the fabric without leaving so much as a trace behind.
“What do you think?” Leila wanted to know.
“It’s wonderful,” I said.
“You like it?”
“I love it.”
She lit up with joy, as if I had validated her inspiration.
The dress had to be fitted. There were supposed to be two fitting sessions, but I think Leila contrived to make it four. She loved going to her fittings. At those times she was delighted with everything. With herself. With me. With life. My plans were that after Pittsburgh I would buy her designer dresses on a monthly basis so that she could go to fittings the year round.
When the dress was done, the manager called and offered to have it delivered. Leila didn’t want it delivered. She wanted to pick it up herself. But then she made no move to do so. A day went by. Two. Three. Finally, the day before our departure for Pittsburgh, I managed to mobilize her into action. We would both go and pick it up. She consented, but put off going until late in the day. It was Thursday and fortunately the store was open late. We arrived at eight thirty, half an hour before closing time.
They offered us a choice of box or bag. Leila didn’t care. She just shrugged.
“A bag,” I said.
The manager nodded and bowed, as if complimenting me on my discerning choice of container.
We walked out (the manager escorting us to the door and holding the door open for us) with me carrying the plastic bag slung over my shoulder.
Fifth Avenue was fairly deserted. It was that in-between time in New York. Those dining were already in restaurants. Those going to concerts and shows were in theaters.
A steady breeze out of the northwest blew in our faces as we walked slowly uptown. An occasional gust, when it came, parted the bangs on Leila’s forehead.
A jogger ran past us, but it could have been youth itself. One of those achingly beautiful creatures (male or female, I couldn’t tell) running with such ease that he or she couldn’t be bothered with making contact with the earth.
We turned west on Fifty-seventh Street.
No, she didn’t want a cab. She felt like walking.
“Accompanied or alone?” I asked her, in that disgusting bon vivant tone I knew I shouldn’t use around her but sometimes found impossible not to.
“Please don’t,” she said.
I lit a cigarette.
We stopped outside the Coliseum bookstore on Fifty-seventh and Broadway because Leila stopped. She stood there looking at the books in the window, as if she had no intention of ever moving again.
The books on display were the usual crop of bestsellers, so I couldn’t understand the cause of Leila’s apparent fascination with them.
“Must be nice,” she finally said.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, she sighed, “you know. The whole thing. Going to college. Having a roommate. Walking across the campus. Talking about this and that and feeling smart.”
I had no idea what made her bring up this topic now. I could understand how someone like her who had dropped out of high school could think of college in such romantic terms, but it seemed completely incongruous to be talking about higher education while staring at those bestsellers in the window. But then maybe she wasn’t really looking at those particular books. Maybe it was books in general, the sight of so many books, that reminded her of all the gaps in her life.
“I didn’t think going to college was all that wonderful,” I said.
“Sure. And millionaires don’t think money’s everything either,” she said, without looking at me.
“Nothing’s everything,” I wound up saying, with only the vaguest notion of what it was I wanted those words to express.
“Have you read Flaubert?” she asked.
I almost laughed. It seemed like such an outlandish question for her to ask.
“Do you mean Gustave Flaubert?” a nasty little pedant in me couldn’t resist inquiring.
She looked at me, her face wrinkling with worry. It was clear she thought that there were many Flauberts and that I knew them all.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The one who wrote what’s supposed to be the best book there is.”
“A novel, is that what you mean?”
“Yes, a novel. What did I say? Oh, yeah, I said a book. A novel. I meant to say a novel.”
“What made you think of that now?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged, wiping her bangs.
“It’s a toss-up,” I told Leila, “which is the best novel ever written, Madame Bovary by Flaubert or Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. There are those who think that Madame Bovary, because of its relative brevity and precision, and the merciless pursuit of its theme, is the better of the two. However …”
I could have gone on like this for quite a bit, and I did. In the end, Leila decided that she should read both of them. The store was still open and we went inside.
I knew the layout of the store well and where to go to find the books we wanted to buy.
There were clearly printed signs, like chapter headings, for the various sections in the store. HISTORY. BIOGRAPHY. RELIGION. SCIENCE. PSYCHOLOGY. FICTION. LITERATURE. TRAVEL.
Something came over me as I strolled through the store with Leila toward the subsection of the Literature section called Classics. Maybe it was just the memory of the many bookstores and libraries of my life. A semi-vertiginous sensation caused not so much the store to spin as my mind to whirl inside my head, forming a little whirlpool of books, in the center of which I saw, as if in a vision, a tiny speck of total clarity.
If God were now to reveal Himself, along with a handful of uncontestable truths, almost all these books would vanish.
The Philosophy section would be gone.
All the books on religion would be taken off the shelves.
Goodbye to physics and astrophysics. Goodbye to science and the Science section. A handful of truths from God would render all the books on science ever written totally superfluous.
The Travel section would remain.
The great books, the great works of art concerned with the great questions of life, would vanish, because the great questions would no longer exist.
There would be no role for humanity and civilization if truth were to reveal itself. It was as if mankind were a biologic response to the absence of truth.
If I were God, I thought, I wouldn’t have the heart to appear now. Not after all these books and millions like them had been written. No, I wouldn’t have the heart to appear at this late date and say: Here I am. I have come to tell you the truth and make superfluous the centuries you spent searching for it. No, if He were truly a loving God, He would stay away. It was too late now.
The tragedy of the poor lonely God who had waited too long to appear overwhelmed me. There He was, somewhere out there on the edge of the ever-expanding universe, getting farther and farther away from us, receding from us at the speed of light. There He was, with His handful of truths for company. And here we were, down below, guessing at the truth, trying to answer the great questions that confounded us because even the clues we had were wrong.
How to explain the love I felt for all mankind at that moment? The sense of tragic futility that bound me to every living being with ties closer than blood and brotherhood. And my heart went out as well to the lonely God above, who could not return to make things right without undoing man in the process.