VERTIGO

Michael’s affair with Beth had been going on for three years, since 1975. During this time, Michael’s wife, Joan, had had a second child and decided to go to medical school. Michael could feel his life settling around him: he had started a family, his wife a career. But nothing had felt settled inside him since the afternoon when, coming back in a taxi from a promotional lunch, he had reached out his hand and traced the line of Beth’s smooth white neck, and she had closed her eyes and raised her chin high above his hand, opening her throat to his touch.

Beth was married, too, and at intervals she and Michael would confront each other. One of them would be severe and distant, announcing the end of their affair. The affair did not end.

Beth handled publicity for the books Michael edited. They saw each other daily, and he waited for her to appear in his doorway. In three years he had become brazen. He wrote imaginary names on his calendar: “Baker” scrawled across Thursday afternoon was Beth in a borrowed apartment, or in a hotel room. Michael met his secretary’s eyes easily when he left the office. His voice was firm when he asked for a room at a hotel, no hint of luggage in his hands. Michael sometimes wondered if affairs were like marriages, if in seven years he would become bored with Beth, oppressed by the thought of making love to her. But after three years it seemed there was no end to it.

Standing now in front of his desk, Beth smiled at him. She was pale, though it was midsummer. She had thick red hair, and did not tan. She wore black, a black skirt and a long-sleeved black shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, and showed her long, soft forearms, the skin on the inner sides of them pale and glimmering. The shirt was open at her throat. Her breasts lay just beneath the thin cloth.

“This group is done,” Beth said, putting down a file of folders. “This group has problems. When would you like to go over them?”

Her eyes were so clear, so untroubled, that sometimes Michael could not believe that she remembered the subterranean life they shared. It enraged him. She enraged him. He wanted more of her than he could get.

“Right now,” said Michael. “Lois, would you mind very much getting us two cups of coffee?”

When the door shut behind his secretary, Michael leaned forward, over his desk, and took Beth’s upper arm in his hand. He squeezed it as hard as he could. Beth watched his face intently. She made no sound. She waited for what he would do. Michael would gladly have killed her; his desire felt like rage. He took his hand away but his eyes stayed on her. They watched each other’s faces, sunk at once into their secret, all sound from the outside world gone. They were standing like this when Lois returned with the coffee. She must have known; Michael ignored this.

Michael had found them an apartment, belonging to a friend whose family had moved to the beach for the summer. That afternoon he took Beth there for the first time. It was on the Upper West Side: large and dreary, with a faint sour smell. Coming into the apartment, Beth moved uneasily through the unfamiliar rooms.

“Are these great friends of yours?” she asked. She was staring at the wallpaper: blue feathers on a musty tan ground.

“Yeah, great friends,” said Michael. “I chose the wallpaper. Come here, would you?”

But Beth drifted farther, inspecting the rooms as if she were thinking of subletting. Michael waited in the front hall, impatient. The bedroom was to the left, but Beth vanished into the string of irrelevant rooms to the right. Michael followed her, pushing open a door and finding himself in the dining room. It was large and dim, with a battered oak table and chairs, a dusty rug underfoot. Beth was not in it. Michael started across the room to the door beyond, and in the quiet of other people’s rooms he found himself walking gently, almost tiptoeing across the rug. The chairs were pushed untidily in to the table; there was an air of unrest in the room, of unknown life that went on there. He was an intruder, his business there was illicit. An uneasy guilt hovered over him, but he ignored all this, looking for Beth. It was this concentration that had gotten him through the last three years. Like a tightrope walker he had moved high above the world, above the shattering flatness that would break him if he fell. He had not wavered, his eyes fixed on Beth.

In the swinging door that led to the kitchen was a small glass panel: now, suddenly it framed a face. Sun came into that corner room, and in the window the face was radiant. Michael, standing in the dusty shadows of the dining room, saw the face cut off, lit up, severely framed. The sudden, silent apparition was unexpectedly frightening: the face was both strange and familiar to him. In the moment while he stared at it, Michael lost his bearings, his balance. Vertigo overtook him: why was he here, in this strange apartment, in this dim room heavy with other peoples’ lives? With horror Michael recognized the face: Joan’s. His wife was here. Fear rose in him. He was not ready, his children would be lost to him.

The door swung silently open and he closed his eyes. Beth brushed past him, still remote, preoccupied. He followed her, awash with relief, his balance restored.

Beth found the bedroom and stood still in the center of it. The bed was poorly made, and the nubbly bedspread dragged on the floor. Beth stood with her hands in the pockets of her jacket; she did not look at him. Michael circled her with his arms, breathing in the smell of her. He closed his eyes, sinking. Moving his head slowly, he touched her face with his mouth, not kissing her. “Beth,” he whispered, feeling her face with his mouth. “Beth.” She did not speak or move, her hands were still in her pockets, but he felt her begin to receive him.

Their love-making mimicked rape. Michael held her hands over her head, his fingers circled her throat. The marks he left on her skin looked painful. He wanted to consume her.

At five o’clock Michael called his office. “Hi,” he said to Lois, his voice businesslike. “I’m not going to make it back after all. This thing went on longer than I thought. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Beth lay naked on the bed beside him. Along the line of her forehead her hair was dark and thick with sweat, her throat was slick with it. He touched her throat and frowned.

“Oh, damn,” he said, “I’d forgotten. No, I’ll have to come back down for it. That’s all right. Thanks, Lois.” He hung up. “I forgot a manuscript. There’s a meeting on it first thing in the morning. I’ll have to go back for it. Want to come? I’ll drive you home afterward.”

It was a poor offer. It would make Beth late, and for what? They were saturated, they could use no more of each other.

“Yes,” Beth said.

They were driven to risks: once Michael, sitting at his desk, had pulled her blouse open across her chest—she was not wearing a bra—and taken her breast in his mouth. No one had come in, but there was no reason for this, it was midmorning.

They took showers, sharing the same soggy orange towel. Beth remade the bed, looping the bedspread again along the floor.

Driving back downtown, Michael asked, “Will this get you in trouble, being late?”

Beth shook her head. “He won’t be home until eight.”

“What’s he up to tonight? His secretary?” Beth’s husband was not faithful to her.

She did not look at him. “Tennis lesson,” she said.

“Ah, the tennis lesson,” said Michael, in his W. C. Fields voice.

“Don’t,” said Beth.

When they got to the office building, Michael left Beth in the car. “Wait right here,” he said, “don’t get a ticket.” When he came out with the manuscript Beth was in the driver’s seat, watching for policemen.

“Get out of there,” he said, opening the door. “Next thing you’ll want to be on top.”

They headed onto the East Side Drive. Once on it, the noise of the traffic became a steady blur, and Beth had to raise her voice to make Michael hear.

“When you were inside, getting the manuscript, I thought, why don’t I just leave?”

“And,” said Michael, “why didn’t you?”

They never used the word love to each other, they never planned anything longer than an afternoon.

Beth leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. “I can’t do this anymore,” she said, “We have to stop.”

Michael drove fast into an emergency pull-off. He slammed on the brakes. They were in a tiny niche off the highway. Iron fencing separated them from the walkway along the East River, which was filled with the spreading, dramatic light of evening. The car stopped so suddenly that Beth was flung forward at the dashboard. She turned to Michael, her eyes alarmed. He opened her blouse, his hands fast and angry. She watched his face. He leaned over and kissed her skin: it was pearl-colored, like the light on the water. On one side of them ran the stream of traffic, swift and constant, on the other was an intermittent pulse of joggers. Beyond them was the steady flood of the river.

Beth closed her eyes. Michael pulled her skirt up to her thighs and put his hand beneath it. What he found was his. His hand insisted, Beth yielded, lying back against the seat, her eyes shut. Neither spoke until Michael said suddenly, desperately, “Get up! Get up!”

He pulled at her blouse, her skirt. In the early summer evening, the lowering sun reflecting itself in the shimmering wash along the river, there was plenty of light for the man leaning in the window to see those parts of Beth that Michael had exposed for himself.

“Need any help?” the man was asking before he had quite seen them, angling his head down into the open window. It was Larry, a salesman from the office.

Michael leaned forward, draping his arms over the steering wheel, trying to shield Beth’s painful struggle with her clothes.

“No, thanks,” said Michael.

“I thought you were in trouble,” Larry said, mortified. “I always stop for a Porsche.”

“No,” said Michael again, “thanks.”

“Well,” said Larry, paralyzed, “I’ll be on my way.”

“Right,” said Michael, pushing his chin up into the air, as though this were a kink he could work out. Larry’s face, broad, summer-brown, vanished from the window. Michael heard the car start up behind them. It slid past them into the traffic and was gone. Michael and Beth were silent. Beth finished with herself, though she still looked rumpled, not right. Michael put his hand on her hands, lying in her lap.

“I’m sorry,” he said gently.

Beth shook her head and smiled at him. “It’s all right,” she said. It was not, he could see that, and her attempt at reassurance touched him. He pressed her hands.

“Well,” he said, but could think of nothing more. She shook her head again. She looked damaged. He started the car and pulled slowly out into the traffic.

They did not speak until they had gotten off the Drive and made their way across town. On a side street near Beth’s building Michael stopped the car. By now it was dusk; shadows and darkness were growing in the city from the ground up. Above them the tops of the buildings were still radiant, with a hot sunset light. But their car was already in shadow, and anyone passing would have difficulty seeing them, in the dusk. There was nothing now to see, in any case—they sat far apart, each leaning against a door, as though they had been scalded.

Michael leaned toward her and slid one finger up and down Beth’s smooth forearm, but she did not stir.

“Don’t feel bad,” he said. He would have liked to take her in his arms and blot out that moment, but it had spread, and sunk in.

“It’s not that, you know,” Beth said, her voice flat. She did not look at him. Michael dreaded what she would say, and took his hand back.

“When I stand outside my door, looking for my keys and wondering if Jack is already home, I want to throw up. I feel like something loathsome. Jack always kisses me hello, and if I’ve been with you I pull away from him as though I had a disease. I’m terrified he’ll be able to tell, just from looking at me. I can’t remember how I act normally, what it is that I say when I haven’t come home from making love with someone else. What is it normal wives say, people who aren’t lying? Sometimes when he makes love to me I start to cry, and I’m terrified he’ll notice. I lie still, and lift my chin up so the tears will run into my hair, and not down my cheeks where he’d see them. It seems so terrible to live like this. I think there are only so many things he’ll believe, and I don’t know how long the list is.”

Past them on the sidewalk a woman came by, neat, trim, with high-heeled shoes and carrying a briefcase and a bag of groceries. She walked unhurriedly down the block toward Park.

“I know you’re going to say what about Jack’s affairs. But it doesn’t seem to make any difference to me. I mean about how I behave. I feel as though my life is being poisoned, and I’m the one who’s doing it. I can’t do it anymore.”

They sat without talking in the car, while the street around them darkened. Michael stroked her arm, trying to believe that this was the last time he would do it. When she got out of the car he watched her walk along the sidewalk, trying to memorize her walk, her body. But it looked no different to him. Aside from the sick feeling in the center of him he could not believe anything was different, that there was a reason to memorize anything.

Driving home along the sidling, urgent stream of traffic, the roads slipping in and out of one another, the Major Deegan curving into the Cross County, the Cross County yielding to the Hutchinson, he was aware of himself, inside the tiny, private interior of his car, lit by the intimate lights of the dashboard. Somehow he carried, protected, this frail, small sense of himself, through the strangeness of the rushing world outside, through the shifting, darkening landscape around him.

Larry’s face in the window stayed in his mind, sickening. What were the chances of its being someone they knew? But it had been three years. They had used up their odds.

When he got home Joan was at the kitchen table, in front of a pile of catalogues. Neither of them said hello.

“Where are the kids?” asked Michael.

“They’ve been in bed for hours,” Joan said. She did not look up.

“What are all those?” Michael asked, setting down his briefcase.

“Medical schools,” said Joan. “I have an interview on Monday in New York, at P and S.”

She looked up at him. Michael wondered if he had ever thought her pretty. She had a square, bony face, thick glasses, a solemn mouth. Beth’s pale, wistful face appeared in his mind, a painful flash. He wondered how often this would happen.

Joan touched the white streak that flared, illogically—she was only twenty-eight—through her dark hair.

“I’m going to dye my hair,” she said tentatively.

“What are you talking about?” Michael asked.

“It makes me look old. They don’t want older women.”

“You sound like a hooker, for Christ’s sake,” said Michael. “When you have an interview at Mt. Sinai are you going to have your nose fixed, to look Jewish, or what?” He waited. “That’s the stupidest goddamned thing I’ve ever heard of.”

Joan looked away from him, smoothing the streak down. It had been she who suggested, finally, unexpectedly, that they get married. Michael had been ready to give the whole thing up, she had seemed so distant, so unresponsive. They were sitting in a diner in Northampton, late winter, of the year they both graduated, 1970. Michael was stirring his coffee and thinking about the drive back to New Haven, when Joan said, without warning, “Are we going to get married, do you think?” She smiled as she began to speak, then swallowed, and her voice trailed away painfully at the end. Michael looked up and saw that her eyes were full of terror. He had been so touched, by her terror, her awkwardness, her boldness, that he had said, without hesitation, “Yes.”

He had thought, after that, things would change between them, that Joan would start to trust him, to unfurl. It had never happened. Joan was still remote, and when the children were born she began to blame Michael for everything. If her car didn’t start in the morning she called Michael at his office, not the garage, and if the cat was sick she called Michael, not the vet. If a child was sick she didn’t call Michael, in fact she wouldn’t speak to him when he came home at night. She seemed to have a mysterious stockpile of resentment, mysteriously growing. Last Christmas her only present to Michael had been a paperback set of Doonesbury cartoons. Not wrapped, it was still in the paper bag from the stationery store.

“Thanks,” Michael had said, smiling, holding it up like a prize, “this is great.”

“Oh,” Joan said vaguely, “I meant to wrap it.”

“No, no,” said Michael, “it’s really great.” He turned the book this way and that in the light, as though a certain angle might catch it like a prism, transforming it into something gleaming and wonderful.

He memorized moments like this, he played them over in his mind. Can you blame me? he could ask.

Now, in the kitchen, Michael stared at his wife angrily. “What are you talking about, for Christ’s sake?” Joan got up and left the room without speaking. There were now whole groups of days that went by when they did not speak, except in front of the children.

Michael took off his jacket and loosened his tie. The stove was cold, Joan had saved him nothing for dinner. Alone in the dim kitchen he pitied himself. He opened the refrigerator and confronted the sudden flood of cold light and vivid colors: the red and white on the milk carton, the bold blue lettering on the mayonnaise jar, the syrupy red of the ketchup bottle. The brilliant paraphernalia of his family’s life, chill and remote to him.

Michael poured himself a glass of milk and sat down at the table, pulling out his manuscript to read. He drank; the milk was sweet and cold in his throat. Admission entered him in a cool, smooth surge like the milk: he was destroying his wife. She could not withstand his anger. The passionate rage Michael felt for Beth he felt too for Joan, but without the desire. And the rage he felt for Joan was pitiless. Her blaming of him was nothing compared to his blaming of her. He set the empty glass down on the table. A thin film of milk colored the inside of it. Tiny air bubbles slid silently down the sides of the glass, gravity asserting itself. Michael thought of the tightrope feeling, the sense of miraculous suspension through belief. He had kept himself up in midair for three years, and Beth, too, just by ignoring everything else, including the laws of physics. It was over, and he felt ashamed, as though he had been behaving like a willful child: pretending there were no such things as laws.

Michael opened the manuscript box and began to read, laying the pages in a neat stack on the table as he finished them. He read carefully, and by the time he was through it was very late.

He pushed his chair farther back and put his head down on the tablecloth. He felt the tablecloth, faintly rough against his cheek, the slight rasp of fine crumbs against his skin. The house was very quiet. He thought of Joan in this house, moving through the rooms when they had first come to look at it. The empty spaces had been alien. Michael had felt nothing for the place; the walls were dirty gray, the wood floors were scratched, and in the children’s rooms there were dark squares littering the blank walls, where posters had been Scotch-taped up. He followed Joan from room to room, wondering if they would take the house.

At the window in the upstairs hall she had paused.

“What kind of tree is that?” she asked the real estate agent, turning. Michael had seen her face, the light from the outside falling in a smooth wash, brilliant, fresh, after those gray walls. He had felt delight in her question: it was one he would not have thought of. There were parts of her he did not know, and he sensed her expanding behind him. This will be fun, he had thought.

The agent had told her: cherry. Joan turned to Michael and smiled, faintly. Whatever this was, it was private between them. It will bloom, she had said.

The day it had first bloomed—four years ago—she had called him at the office.

“You should see that tree,” she had said.

“What happened?”

“It’s a cloud, a white cloud, resting in our garden.”

Her voice had been silvery, excited. Michael had smiled into the telephone.

“Good,” he said. “Great!”

Now he turned his head on the table, propping his cheek on his forearm. He was too tired to get up. He opened his eyes and looked around the dim kitchen. The change of angle made the room disorienting, askew. He remembered the time he had had an inner ear infection, and Joan had driven him to the doctor’s office early on Saturday morning. He didn’t dare drive himself, his balance was gone.

Walking across the parking lot, the mist rising in steamy clouds from the blacktop, the trees cold and dripping, Michael had felt the ground tip smoothly beneath him, his feet had jarred unexpectedly, horridly, against the pavement. He stopped, tipping. Anything might come next to him, anything at all: cosmic night.

What had actually happened was that Joan, without speaking, had put her hand with great conviction around his elbow, her other arm across the small of his back. She had walked the rest of the way across the parking lot with her body pressed against his, making her balance his, holding him in a gravity he could trust. He had not realized that she was so tall, as tall as he, almost. And strong: he had not realized that she could support him.

Michael stood up slowly at the table, pushing his chair gently back. He leaned over the table, his head down, his weight propped on his knuckles for a moment before he straightened. He stood still, feeling the house quiet around him, the night outside the black windows. The noises in the kitchen intensified: the hum of the refrigerator, and the beat pause of the clock. He stayed motionless at the table—what was he waiting for? He thought he felt himself swaying slightly, but could not tell. He could not tell if it was the solitude, the hum of silence, deepening in his head, the black shadow, the lateness of the hour.

He concentrated, willing himself out of his dim hypnotic state. He stared at the windowsill above the counter, focusing hard, daring it to tilt. On it, in measured placement, were the four hand-painted mugs: Michael and Joan on the ends, Mark and Kate in between. Michael narrowed his eyes at the mugs, focusing hard, trying to tell whether or not he was swaying, whether or not he was solid. He willed himself to be solid.

As he left the kitchen, Michael turned out the light, and, as he moved through the house toward Joan, he darkened each room as he passed through it.