My name is Dinah, which means “judgment.” My parents, Adelaide and Frank Sachs, returned to the traditional names for their children. I have a sister named Leah and a brother named Seth. Now these names are fashionable; my married friends have children called Joshua, Jonah, even Obadiah. Thirty years ago our names set us apart and gave us an Orthodox aura that was at odds with our parents’ determined atheism. But there we were, marginal, victims in grade school of the fascination certain kinds of Jews hold for Yankees. I learned early that I was to them some finer self, some more focused version of what they tried to be. They yearned for my historical sadness and intelligence. I yearned for their self-control and the inherited lawns where they had parties. I went to the parties—there wasn’t anything that could be called anti-Semitism. It was more like the tension between the sexes; I was other, mysterious and full of power. Leah felt it too. She’s married to a Swede, so it kept ahold of her. Rocked in that cradle of uniqueness by those blue-eyed boys, what protection could I have against Asa when, twenty years later, I looked up from my desk to find his huge head blocking my view?
Childhood was pleasant enough, judging from what my friends have told me of theirs. If my father preferred looking through his microscope to playing with us, I didn’t blame him. He would park me, the eldest, in the reading room of Widener on Saturdays, with a stack of books on black magic (at eleven, my ambition was to be a witch), while he roamed the periodicals for the latest cellular breakthroughs. He must have made the journals himself occasionally—how else does one get tenure at Harvard?—but he was, and is, a small and dusty man, slightly vacant in his social interactions. He had none of the luminosity of his more famous colleagues who sometimes turned up for dinner. My mother was secretive. She had a room where she withdrew and did unknown things. Leah and I turned the furniture upside down and played Queen of the Castle while Seth burbled in his bassinet. My mother was probably tired of children and just sat in her room quietly reading Jane Austen. We didn’t miss her. We were safe—we had enough to eat, each of us had a room with dire threats against trespassers posted on the door, we had bicycles, we had each other.
When I was thirteen I turned against witchcraft, having had a series of nightmares based on the activities of a wolf society in London that claimed membership of more than two hundred English werewolves (I had read about it in a book published only two years before, hence the nightmares), and took up the opposite sex. I dropped library research in favor of field work. I have been studying my subject for decades now, but it remains mysterious. Maybe, as my mother suggested when I was nineteen and my career had become clear to her, it isn’t a topic worth devoting your life to.
“With all your gifts!”—the slogan of Jewish parents everywhere. But all three of us drifted. Most academic children do. The more successful the parent, the vaguer the child. We were lucky to have dusty, muddled Frank as a father. Leah has made a successful marriage, whatever that is, after an unpromising three years at art school. Seth earns a lot of money writing about how to program computers, and spends it on blondes, inevitable blondes, in restaurants without prices on the menu. And I, in my own way, am continuing my father’s investigations into the origins of life. He doesn’t see it that way, I know. But isn’t the soul as vital as the gene? Doesn’t it bear scrutiny? Isn’t the search for the Yankee soul as thrilling as Watson’s hunt for that helix?
The male Yankee soul, that is. Asa’s soul. I’ll be honest. Until I met Asa I was merely amassing general data on males. I had found out that: They are hard outside but not always hard inside; they treasure women who make them laugh; they can change their personalities under the influence of a kiss received in a dark hall, a parked car, a side street. Some smell good, and for these I have an interminable lust; some smell odd—not bad but unbeddable—and make me nervous, as though we were not the same species.
Asa’s smell (the fragrance of a beautiful man) is what I miss the most. I first smelled it three days after I had begun work at the magazine, when he leaned over my desk to hand me some papers, and the clarity of that mixture (rough, unfiltered cigarettes, fresh shirts, warm skin of a blond) alarmed me. My head snapped up to stare. He was in his persona of the happy, handsome man. Blue shirt, sleeves rolled up for the warmth of afternoon, gold and brown hairs shimmering on his arms, paper between his brown hands. Who was he? I remember sorting through the names and faces jammed into my head on the first day and coming out with the wrong answer—Roger Rowell, the editor. I didn’t care if he were the janitor or the publisher, he was mine. I looked into his eyes; they were flat and awesomely blue, empty, receiving nothing. It was like looking into a portrait. Then he smiled and showed his crooked teeth, tinted with nicotine but well formed and healthy-looking. His eyes stayed blank through the smile. He put the papers on my desk and the movement agitated the smell, which surrounded his body like a halo, so that another gust of it came toward me. I had to shut my eyes. Like a virus his smell entered me and changed my cells, slowly, over years, until they craved only that smell, which was their oxygen.
The details. The names. The furnishings. It has a small staff, the magazine, and occupies a small brick house on a Cambridge side street, between a cobbler and a used-bookstore. Discreet gilt letters on one pane of the glass-paneled door identify it; I’ll go one better and leave it nameless. Five of us acquired and edited the issue quarterly. The magazine verges on the scholarly. Roger and Asa like to think it is scholarly, but they know better. It keeps the sort of lawyer, doctor, or politician who regrets that he didn’t get a Ph.D. slightly informed about a number of topics of no intrinsic interest to him, such as the newer understanding of fertilization in ferns or the controversy over the publication rights to T. S. Eliot’s letters. As an endeavor it always seemed to me second-rate and fuzzy in outlook. But it was a grand place to work.
It was grand because Asa was there. To be all day in the presence of someone you love—I spent more time with him than Fay did. And it was a vital group, full of argument and feud, alignment and camaraderie. When an issue had just come out, we stumbled down the long mahogany halls like sleepwalkers, as if we had caught Asa’s perennial drowsiness. There was time to quarrel about the content and layout of the next issue. Every combination of duos ate lunch together, discussing the characters of the other three. Whispers and confidences gave the workday a grade-school flavor. As publication drew near all this stopped; we became almost a unit, twenty arms and eyes focused on one objective. Almost, because Roger, the editor, thrilled to tight deadlines and inevitably slacked off at the penultimate moment in order to feel the full rush of adrenaline at the ultimate moment, when everything was due at the printer the next day and one article hadn’t been written. Then he would take off his shoes and pad along the oak floor to the bathroom, where the claw-footed bathtub held competing periodicals, which he would read while sitting on the toilet—why? Revving himself into a frenzy of competition? Boom! Back to his typewriter, the article clattering out, a taxi coming at eleven at night to take the manuscript to the typesetter—we suffered under his mania for what Sally called “a photo finish.” “We are working at an insipid quarterly,” she said over one of those postissue lunches, “but Roger is the editor of the Daily Planet.”
Sally was my confidante, my level-headed adviser, my mischievous encourager, my occasional doomsday prophet. Her views on my affair with Asa were always slightly out of sync with mine. But she held them firmly and told me every one. “He’s not interested in you. He’s got everything he wants and anyhow, he’s barely interested in anything,” she said one day, after his smell had been mutating in my bloodstream for more than a year. A week later she announced, “You’re exactly what he wants. What forty-one-year-old man wouldn’t want a beautiful young woman fawning over him?” Was I really fawning? “You look at him with a smirk on your face; you just can’t get that expression of satisfaction off your puss,” she answered.
“He smirks too,” I said.
“More fool he.”
We had these conversations in the fall. September was a hot, gold-and-umber month, and the warmth continued, supernaturally elongated beyond anybody’s memory, into the start of November. On Halloween Asa’s white cuffs were still rolled up to his still-brown elbows; he was still walking home at twelve-thirty to eat lunch on his back porch and maintain his tan. The vanity of middle-aged men—he knew his tan hid the broken veins in his cheeks and the scotch-spread of his nose.
On November 10, it snowed. I remember because it was the evening before my birthday. It was a high, blue, fluffy snowfall, leavened with warm air, rising a full foot on top of the piles of oak and maple leaves that edged the streets. I walked to work in the middle of unplowed streets, a thirty-year-old. I felt doomed, and irritated at feeling that because it was so predictable. But the snow seemed like a lid on life, the way turning thirty seemed. The world had stopped; it was just a static replica of itself, preserved in coldness. I was chilly and sad in my office, looking at gray papers in the milky light of a snowy day.
What was disturbing me more than anything was an erotic dream I had dreamed about Asa that morning, just before waking. It was so vivid (his tawny limbs moving against my white sheets, his smell saturating the pillows and my hair) that I had woken entirely excited. And in one of those flashes of insight that come between sleep and true waking, I had wondered why I was wasting my time on this impossible mission. For I was by then completely occupied in my siege of Asa’s heart. I was set up in front of his fortified self with enough rations, in the form of obsessive thoughts and endless desire, for years. Nobody else interested me. What a way of putting it—I didn’t even register other men on my eyeballs. They were grains of sand on the beach, and Asa was the ocean, an unplumbed blueness in which I was determined to swim. So I sat at my desk, still dizzy from my dream and half hoping he wouldn’t walk in to say good morning as he always did, because I thought I might jump him and wrap my legs around his waist and push him onto the floor—and so forth. Of course, at the same time I was waiting for him, so that I could quickly graft the three-dimensional Asa onto the remnants of my dream and have a private swoon as I sat at my desk. My birthday present, wrested from him in secret.
He must have had a busy morning, because he didn’t appear until almost eleven. He sat down in the chair opposite my desk—my interview chair, we called it, joking, for none of the women interviewed anyone. He crossed his arms and pushed himself back with his feet, so that his chin rested on his collarbone and his eyes were level with mine.
“I had a dream about you last night,” I blurted. I often blurted things at him. He caused me to become overvivid, tensed until I was nearly parodying myself. I sensed that what drew him to me was my foreign approach to life. Foreign from his. I talk more than he, and about things he wouldn’t discuss, and I cry, and embrace people when I’m happy. I found myself exaggerating all this with him, in response to some need of his to have it exaggerated.
“You did?” He shut his eyes and lifted his chin. “I had a dream about you too.”
This was so stunning that I was momentarily quiet. I stared at him. He was smiling at me and nodding slightly, or maybe his drowsy head was wobbling.
“What was it?” I asked. My pulse was so noisy I was sure he could hear it.
“Oh, I’m not going to tell you. But it was full of warm, loving, tender feelings.” And he looked at me with what he thought was a loving, tender gaze. It wasn’t; it was an unmistakable grimace of lust and it made me panic. If he was going to capitulate this easily I would feel cheated. I was set up for a long fight, and I suppose I wanted one. I wanted the obstacles to be proportionate to the prize. At that moment, when I had been at the magazine barely a year, he was still my superior, my married boss about whom I had sexual fantasies. I hadn’t separated him from his function. I couldn’t see him simply as a man. So this evidence of his susceptibility to me, though thrilling, was too early. I began blurting again.
“I dreamed we were in a kindergarten, all sorts of kids running around, and there was a fire—was that it? Something—and I couldn’t find you, then I saw you on the other side of the yard and I ran to you.” I paused. “I ran up to you and right into your arms.” I said this softly. I didn’t look at him.
When I did look up he was still staring at me with his “tender, loving” look. We sat like that, staring, until Sally passed by my door on the way to her adjacent office. Asa heaved himself out of my chair and slinked into the hall.
“Goo, goo, goo,” said Sally. I could hear her through the wall. Asa was halfway to his office, and as he’s somewhat deaf he couldn’t have heard her. Nevertheless it worried me. Now that the moment was over, it took on the slippery feel of fantasy. His desire seemed like something I had conjured up or talked him into. Sally’s teasing heightened my sense of having manipulated the situation, making me believe I had something to hide from him and worried that he would “find out.” If he thought I was plotting love attacks and, worse, checking my strategy with Sally, he might resist me to teach me a lesson. “Shut up,” I said, loud enough for her to hear. I put my head into her office. “He’s still walking down the hall.”
“Oh, he’s deaf,” she said. Then she laughed. “What was all that goo about?”
“Erotic dreams. We were trading erotic dreams.”
“Terrific. What was his?”
“No details. It was full of ‘warm feelings.’ ”
“He’ll say anything to you.”
At first this pleased me; yes, he would say anything to get my attention. But Sally had meant it dismissively, and, as I sat at my desk and pretended to work, I decided that he was just flirting with me. He would say anything because nothing mattered; it was all fantasy. Whereas for me it was real, a concrete advance. I was one yard closer to the ramparts. I jumped up and went into Sally’s office.
“But I love him,” I said. I was standing in the middle of the room and staring at her. She was the only person to whom I could say it. She had been that for so many months that some of my love had rubbed off onto her and I saw her as beautiful and precious. I wanted her to say, “I know,” or “Of course you do,” or anything that would make me feel my love was accepted. She had become a figurehead to whom I offered my gifts. But she wasn’t one, she was Sally who’d been at the magazine for too many years, who was trying to get her work done, who was tired because her job was harder than mine and she had a child at home.
Simultaneously she was a Jewish woman who ought to be sympathetic. She’d married a Yankee rather late in her life, a man named Dickie Dana, and had thereby become a cousin of Asa’s. They socialized a little; the Thayers invited the Danas to the Cape for a weekend every summer and the Danas had the Thayers to dinner once or twice during the winter. Asa borrowed tools from Dickie, who had a collection of saws, chisels, plumb lines, routers, even a miter box left to him by a black-sheep carpenter uncle who had built himself a cabin in Vermont in the twenties and died there in the sixties, during a winter so cold his body was frozen—wrapped in frozen sheets and blankets—by the time he was missed in town, which was only overnight. This uncle’s habit (his name was, I think, Faneuil Dana) had been to ride his tractor into town every morning and take coffee with three other old farmers in the donut shop. They missed him. They finished their coffee and took somebody’s truck into the woods to look for him, a few boards in the back in case they needed to make a coffin. They didn’t bother to bring a Band-Aid, or even some brandy. Arrogance, or a morbid acquiescence? They used his tools to put the nails in.
Dickie had told me this story the night I met him, and it was obvious that he relished it, as a story. As I came to know him better, I began to understand some of its appeal—the studied eccentricity and need for solitude were qualities he had also inherited from his uncle. More important was the element of foresight, which I labeled acquiescence. For Dickie, this certainty the three old fellows had about what they would find in the cabin was delightful. “They knew!” he kept repeating, leaning across the table in his drafty dining room. “You see, they understood what had happened. And they were prepared.” Dickie was trying to prepare himself for death as well. We must, and he’s past sixty, but he has moved his perspective somehow, as though he’s looking back at life from the other side. He’s healthy, he looks to be in his late forties, and he spends his time “tidying up,” “sorting things out,” stripping himself of unnecessary objects and thoughts. He has some money, some old Yankee money, and Sally works.
What struck me about this story—and I think of it often, in connection with my research—was the cold. The cold outside, the cold living in the shack when no one else could live in it, the cold old men in the unheated truck bumping through the woods without a word. I hear Asa saying, “Oh, I don’t feel the cold.” They all say that. Do only Jews have skin and nerves? Sally and I spent ten minutes every morning discussing how cold we were, which parts of us were almost frostbitten on the way to work. Dickie stands on the front porch in January wearing his bathrobe, saluting the gray, rigid day with his naked chest. Are they made of stone?
That morning, when I stood expectantly beside the file cabinet containing the manuscripts for the previous issue, waiting for Sally to sympathize and tell me Asa’s secrets, she instead put on a very good performance as a stone Yankee.
“Mmmmmm?” she said, not raising her head from Fowler’s. “Mmmm.” A well-bred invitation to get out.
So I got out. I shuffled back to my office and I resolved to declare myself to Asa. I wanted to confront him with what he was doing, which was making me fall in love with him. I wanted to move it away from fantasy and into reality. As long as neither of us admitted what was happening, it could continue. I was going to jeopardize everything, possibly, for the sake of flesh. I couldn’t bear all the goo, the sidelong looks, the whispered comments during editorial meetings, the hand on my shoulder as he passed me in the hall, unless I had the substance. What I meant by the substance was the food of his flesh, his arms and face and back to lick and smell and twist myself around. I was willing to give up the flirtation if it didn’t progress.
I was not. I was not willing to give up anything—but I was sure I would succeed. I felt his heat; he was and remains the only Yankee man who smolders. Maybe it was simply lust, even after these years of him I don’t know, but he was warm with it, flushed from it, and I trusted that. I wanted to make a bonfire, at first. I made one, and then I wanted something else, a well-planned arrangement of kindling and a backlog, that would burn for years. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Sally, on the day I turned thirty, was past forty. We might have been sisters, and it would have been difficult to say who was the older. We are both small, dark women with smooth skin that doesn’t wrinkle. Only her laugh reveals her age; it is sad, knowing, and short. I haven’t learned enough about the world to have the sense of sorrow that curtails laughter. I don’t have many clues about what made her sad. Perhaps getting what you want is saddening. Dickie too had been married when she’d met him.
I miss her and Dickie. Dickie was enthusiastic—ecstatic, actually—about my prospects with Asa. “He needs you to wake him up. You are a goddess, you will drag him into the waters with you,” and so on. Then, gazing into my eyes, which I suppose reminded him of Sally’s eyes ten years before, “I’m jealous of him.” There was much of this while I was plotting my attack. They were my aides-de-camp; they knew the territory better than I did, and spread the maps out for me, and fed me dinners while I raved about my strategy. But when Asa kissed me, that black March evening when the world turned inside out, a barrier went up between me and the Danas. I had moved into another sphere. I was Asa’s satellite, not theirs. I didn’t need their maps because I had hard, inside information. I knew how he tasted, the sounds he made when I touched him in ways that he liked, the way his face looked when he was lying down. They knew what he and Fay had for dinner, and how much Julia’s school cost, and where Asa banked his paltry salary. So we became estranged, in a civilized and subtle way. We had used each other up. I was too loyal to Asa and too single-minded to provide them with the tidbits that might have kept their vicarious interest up. And they, out of some other loyalty, perhaps to Fay, or perhaps just to the institutions of stability, were unwilling to give me ammunition for the next challenge, which was making Asa mine.
Besides Sally and me, who shared the duties of proofreading, copyediting, and organizing the flow of papers from typesetter through editor to art director, there were Roger Rowell, the editor, in his socks, and my enemy, Adrian Françoise Jessel. Adrian Françoise was Asa’s assistant, which meant that her duties were not well defined, and that meant she put her nose into other people’s duties. Her nose was long, pale, and refined; she was a long, pale, and refined-looking young woman. She had beautiful hands and tapered ankles and wrists. She was nearly a foot taller than Sally and I were, and had a number of inches on Roger and Asa as well. Like most tall women she slouched, but she moved quietly and deftly. She could be rummaging through my files before I heard her coming. That is to say, I never did hear her coming. What gave her presence away was postnasal drip, which made her sniff.
Adrian Françoise wasn’t always my enemy. She evolved into my enemy. Competition for Asa put the finishing touches on a foundation of distrust and mutual incomprehension we had been building for about a year. We didn’t have the same style, and we didn’t have much charity for each other’s ways.
To begin with, I couldn’t bear her name. Adrian or Françoise would have been bad enough, but being compelled to say them both—and she did compel that. “Hello. I am Adrian Françoise,” she said to me on my first day, giving equal weight to both names and pronouncing them without a pause in between. She had a suggestion of a French accent, more a deliberateness of intonation than any distortion of vowels, and that also bothered me. I felt that it was affected. I was sure that Adrian Françoise could speak normal American English if she chose to. She probably couldn’t, but she provoked that sort of thinking in people. It was Adrian Françoise who dummied up the more boring articles that Asa didn’t feel like dealing with, and she would come to me to check the changes she had made to lose or gain lines. Hers were never intelligent changes; she had a gift for torturing language. She was adept in using the passive. After I’d been there for a few months I started changing her changes, or making them before she got a chance to. That led to arguments over the cheapest way to lose lines. Adrian Françoise was also responsible for approving the composition bill and arguing with the typesetters (Asa being too well-bred to like dealing with money), and she had her eye on the penny.
“That change will cost $3.25. Do you really think it’s necessary?”
“I guess not,” I said lamely, for about half a year. Then I changed my mind.
“Yes. It’s wrong as it stands.”
“Then why didn’t you change it in manuscript?”
“Well, I just missed it, or Sally missed it.”
“Ohh. Mmmmm.” Adrian Françoise could say “mmmmmmm” in an extraordinarily vibrant way, owing to postnasal drip.
And so we had a permanent state of war over lines. I would change a line or two on the galleys, she would catch the galleys before they went back to the typesetter and delete or diminish my change, I would reinstate it on the page proofs, and she would appear in my office holding a grimy Xerox she had made of my misdeed and say, “I see you made that change …”
“What change, Adrian Françoise?”
But this sort of stuff is neither evil nor remarkable. More noteworthy, actually quite astonishing to me, was that Adrian Françoise went through our desks. She didn’t only read everything on top of desks and hanging from bulletin boards, she went deep into drawers, into envelopes under pads of paper where one’s paycheck stubs were, in the file farthest back, where one had little notes written by—well, in my case, Asa. It was Sally who figured out she was doing this.
“Aff [we called her this to save time, since we discussed her a lot] is going through my desk. She’s probably going through yours too. So watch out,” said Sally one grim December morning.
“How do you know?”
“I mentioned I wouldn’t be in on Friday and she said, ‘Oh, right, you’re going to Chatham.’ The only way she could have known that was from looking in my private calendar, which I keep in my right-hand drawer, in the back. I mean, you’d have to paw through the whole drawer to find it.”
“What did you say?”
“I was so stunned I just nodded. I’m taking my calendar home. Nothing’s safe here.” Sally was stacking and unstacking her dictionaries and style manuals in an attempt to impose her will on something. “No fucking privacy.”
“Not a fucking bit,” I agreed. I loved the way Sally said “fucking.” I often egged her on when she was irritated, just to get her to the point of swearing; it took a lot to make her swear, but once she started she was impressive. She said “fucking” as though it were spelled with seven initial F’s. “But,” I continued, “you don’t really have any secrets in your desk.” I was thinking of my collection of notes from Asa. At that point they were entirely innocent: “Please see me about American history article, I need to lose a paragraph.” “Where are book column galleys?” “Can’t find manuscript we were discussing this morning, do you know where it is?” That sort of thing, not very steamy. Still, my keeping them was suspicious, and Adrian Françoise was smart enough to see that, if she’d found them.
“I want my private life to be private,” snapped Sally. “I don’t want somebody checking up on my movements, when I’m having lunch with whom, what kind of crackers I have in my drawer, for Chrissake. I can’t stand it. I want to wash my desk.”
I took Asa’s notes home that evening, and worried for a while over whether Aff had seen them. But she treated me no worse and no better than before, so I forgot about it. I continued to stuff my paycheck stubs into the back of my drawer, and to leave money among my pencils, and generally to behave as though I had no secrets either. Maybe I wanted to catch her out somehow.
Still, the desk incident occurred after the erotic-dream exchange, and Adrian Françoise, with her hypersensitivity and snoopiness, didn’t miss the flirtation between me and Asa. I think it was in January, at the start of the decade, that our relations took on an edge that at first puzzled me. She began turning up in Asa’s office when I was there. She was frequently sitting at my desk, in my chair, when I arrived in the morning, as if to declare herself a licensed snooper. Our arguments about lines got worse; she once turned on her heel (Adrian Françoise actually did things that I had hitherto only read about, such as turn on her heel and wring her hands) and stamped out of my office in the middle of my explanation for why I had decided to make a certain change. Then one day Asa called me on the intercom when Aff and Sally were in my office to tell me that Harvard radio had started their Mozart Orgy, and that I should listen. We (Asa and I) were Mozart fans, and much of our flirtation consisted of discussions of music and the trading of banal rhapsodies over Mozart, which were just disguises for rhapsodies over each other. “He’s so elegant,” I’d say, staring at Asa’s immaculate shirt. “So delicate,” he’d rejoin, his eyes on my arms and neck.
“The Mozart Orgy’s on,” I said, returning the receiver to its beige cradle. I turned on my radio.
“Was that Asa?” asked Adrian Françoise.
“Yup.”
“Oh. He tells you, and then you tell us?”
“Yup,” I said. I looked at her. “That’s right.” I felt like rubbing it in.
“Well. We must listen,” said Aff. She made it sound like a duty. She rose, smoothed her straight skirt, and went to attend to the music.
“She’s jealous,” I said to Sally. “That’s it, she’s in love with him too.”
“No. She loves him. You’re in love with him.”
“Big difference.”
“There is. You know that.” Sally had a trick of saying “You know that” in a sly, co-conspirator tone of voice that made me feel part of an elite. “Why shouldn’t she love him? He loves her. Because of her he’ll never have to cast off another manuscript about whale migration, or write another letter to the Bettmann Archive. She makes his life wonderful, and he rewards her with money. So she loves him.”
Money. Women who want money don’t work for second-rate, quasi-academic journals. Nonetheless, Sally was sure she was getting a raw deal. She had been there three times as long as Adrian Françoise, and she was older, with a family to support (Dickie’s money was enough to maintain him in the style to which he was accustomed—scotch, lots of novels, raw hamburger for dinner, a month in Chatham at the family estate; it didn’t cover dentistry or new tires or school clothes for Honor). Adrian Françoise made a good deal more money than Sally did. And it was as Sally said, because Asa would pay anything to get certain things off his mind and desk. Sally and I only insured that the magazine came out on time, without errors. Somebody had to do that, and people were trained to do that. Until Adrian Françoise turned up, nobody knew that there was such a thing as a person who would do unpleasant tasks efficiently, even with relish. Oh, Adrian Françoise was crafty. Her snooping and powers of observation had aided her in finding out all the things Asa hated doing and learning how to do them.
For Asa was the man with the money. He may have been too well-bred to want to deal with it, but he was capable of dealing with it, which was more than could be said of Roger. So it was to him that we applied for our raises, with our little tales about rent and oil prices. We didn’t get them. We got cost-of-living increases: 3 percent, 4 percent if our performances had been diligent. Two weeks before he kissed me, he gave me a raise—an actual raise. Twelve percent. I didn’t tell Sally.
It’s almost grotesque, isn’t it? It’s such a seedy story. Were it not for the setting—the office shaded by elms, the eccentric, colorful characters, the challenging and intellectual nature of our work—this could be a story whispered in the corridors of a textile mill at the turn of the century. The boss, the young employee, her charms, his wily ways. She left in disgrace.…
I left because I couldn’t watch him stomping on his heart and mine. That’s all he was doing in the end. He loved me—he still loves me. I know love when I feel it, and I felt it from him. It warmed me through and through, to the coldest February-chilled marrow of my thigh, the secret cells in my blood. But sometimes it doesn’t matter whether people love each other or hate each other.
I may have been born to love him—I’m sure I was; loving him was easier than eating or sleeping—but he was surely born to stomp on my heart. He was better at that than at loving me. He loved me because I was exotic, foreign, incomprehensible, and for those same reasons he justified expelling me from his life and mind. He is a member of a ruling class, and rulers must have subjects; but it’s been more than a century since his aristocracy held power, so as a group they are softening, degrading—and these are mortal sins, for Yankees. Therefore, every opportunity to be upright, harsh, cold, and granitelike must be seized. And to temper that, there must be some nobility, some selflessness to prove that they have the right to be the ruling class. So I think Asa conceived of me as his colony; he protected me and nurtured me initially, then withdrew sternly, leaving me to fend for myself and congratulating himself on his honorable relinquishing of power. His word had been law (after all, who decided when we spent time together and how much time we had?), but he was not a tyrant; he knew when to loosen the link.
Is that what he thought?
Was he merely a coward, afraid of being caught? Were the half-truths and scurrying around Cambridge at lunchtime too much for him? Was it Fay, with her brown eyes looking into his every night? “You don’t know what marriage means to a man like that,” Sally said many times. “He loves comfort so. He’s been married forever. He’ll never give it up.” I refuse to wonder if he loved Fay more than he loved me. What good can asking that question do? Not even he knows the answer. There can’t be an answer. It’s a question, really, of how he wants to live, and he has a way of living. It’s his, his dogs, his oak thresholds, his history with her.
Even now I can’t stop making excuses for him.
Adrian Françoise loved Asa and he was indebted to her. He treated her with a perfect, warm politesse he never extended to anyone else. They mythologized each other: She considered him a handsome benefactor and overburdened man of refinement whose welfare she was tending; he considered her an angel, a model of good-tempered efficiency, an unemotional woman. I’m sure that in her deepest sleep Adrian Françoise had locked limbs with Asa, but she didn’t know it. She never turned up in his dreams—I know because I asked him. I was jealous of Adrian Françoise, probably because I never bothered being jealous of Fay.
(“Oh, Dinah,” said Asa, “she’s so unjuicy.” And placed his palms on my breasts. We had just gotten up from bed, at two-thirty in the afternoon, and stood naked, admiring each other, tracing the lines of sweat and liquid on each other’s thighs.)
Their mythology created problems in the office. It made Asa ignore her bad habits and unwilling to hear about them. Sally took him out for lunch to describe the desk rifling. His response was, “Tell her to stop it.” To me he said, “What can I do? What am I supposed to do? Should I talk to her?” This in a tone that pleaded with me to say exactly what I said, “No, no, darling, that wouldn’t help.” I said that because I didn’t want a confrontation between them, for Adrian Françoise had gone crazy on the trail of our affair.
Of course she knew what was happening; everybody did. Sally knew because I told her. Roger knew—I’ve always wondered if Asa told him, bragging. He knew and he took to leering at me. One day he came into my office to ask me the generic term for a woman with whom a man is having an affair. I took up the challenge. “A mistress, Roger,” I said with equanimity. “That’s what I thought, but I don’t like the way it sounds. Isn’t there some other word?” Roger wasn’t in the habit of coming to me for help with his problems. I stared at him. “Courtesan,” I said. “Paramour.” I watched him turning a bit pink. “Popsie.” “I guess mistress will do,” he mumbled, and padded back to his office. Charlotte the receptionist knew: Her lunchtime scorecard of people’s ins and outs frequently read, “Asa & Dinah?” Entries for others read, “Roger 2:30.”
Adrian Françoise was torn between wanting to prove it and wanting to pretend it wasn’t happening. As our passions expanded, her eavesdropping and desk rummaging became more frenzied. At the same time, the expression on her face became fixed. There was a film over her eyes. When Asa and I went out for lunch together, which, after our kiss, we did once a week, Adrian Françoise would snag us at the top of the staircase to ask Asa questions that didn’t need to be asked, and her face would be entirely clouded over with self-imposed confusion. She’d look from Asa, wearing his glasses and buttoned into an overcoat, to me, similarly buttoned, tapping my red boot on the carpet, and mystification would fairly leak from her eyes. But there was an urgency and determination in the way she kept us standing there, slowly unwinding her series of questions, wrenching from us a nugget of our most precious element, time.
Adrian Françoise did not know where to stop. She asked me lots of questions. First they were questions like, “Why did you and Asa have lunch last week? Were you discussing the new layout for the book feature?” To which I replied, succinctly, “No.” Then she tried to be my supervisor, which technically she was. “Are you having some problems at work that you’ve been discussing with Asa? Is he giving you trouble about money? Maybe I can help.” These sorts of questions soon gave way to trap questions: “Where is Asa this morning?” “When is Asa coming back from lunch?” “Is Asa taking Friday off to go to New York?” “At the dentist, two-thirty, yes,” I would answer. I was bragging, but she had provoked me. Then she started to follow me around. She even told me she was doing it.
“I have to pick up some tickets for the Kurosawa film tonight, I’ll stop by your house,” or “I’ll walk you home, I have to go to the post office.” What she wanted was to catch Asa. He came to my house every day after work to neck with me. We spent months inching our way to bed, as if we were fifteen. He kissed my shoulders for one month and kissed my breasts through my blouse for the next month. At five-twenty he turned the corner of my street wearing his glasses, carrying his briefcase, head bent—ashamed, hiding his features? Up the stairs, the dangerous wait, exposed, until I answered the bell, then avalanches, earthquakes, everything disintegrating as we devoured each other in the hall, me pushing the door shut behind him, both of us alert to Cambridge poised behind the maple panels. “Was that Asa Thayer going up those steps?” Perhaps we were the only people who cared. No, Adrian Françoise cared. I knew she dawdled at the Brattle Theatre, reading the schedule slowly as she walked down the street, waiting for Asa to walk by. I don’t know whether she ever satisfied herself by seeing him.
By the time she was doing this I felt safe, because Asa was guilty too, and that restrained her from overstepping all the bounds. She might, in a sanctimonious panic, have called Fay and started babbling, but the fact that Asa was compromising himself stopped her. He had failed her by becoming susceptible to me. Earlier I had feared her. When I lay on my sofa and thought about him on short February afternoons, I thought also of Adrian Françoise and how she was sniffing out my passion, how she would sniff it out before he did and tattle to him and jinx my chances. I could see her standing beside him, in his swivel chair, smoothing and smoothing her straight skirt, saying I was unprofessional, I was using sexual tactics to improve my position at the magazine. And you see, I didn’t know what he was feeling then. I didn’t know he was as infected as I. She terrified me.
Yet, with all the fear—and I feared not only Adrian Françoise but Fay, and Roger, and everybody on the street who could surely read my lunatic passion in my face—and the certainty that he would not acquiesce, I had just the opposite of these, and I was happy. I had a thousand moments of contact and exchange to fondle every evening, and I had the secret of his nascent soul. That was a secret even he didn’t know. I knew it was the key to him. I knew I’d press against him and warm his soul into being, and I knew nobody could resist an opportunity of such hot, cosmic dimensions, not even Asa.