What Asa had said to me was, “I had a boyhood friend who died.” This was in passing, in the middle of a conversation about friendship. “Who?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s dead.”
“I know.”
“His name was Reuben. He had an accident.”
“When was this? What kind of accident?”
“Oh, it was ages ago. We were teenagers. He was climbing something and he fell.”
“What?”
“What?”
“What was he climbing?” Sometimes conversation with Asa was impossible. He would retreat into stupidity and I would have to spell everything out for him.
“He was climbing the Mystic River Bridge. What do you want to know all this for?”
“Don’t you want to know things about me and my life?”
“Sure.” And his face settled into the expression of lust that he thought was affection. He was capable of affectionate feelings, but these produced a worried expression, as though it hurt to feel them. “I want to know everything.” He put his hand on the back of my thigh and slid it down to the dip behind my knee. We were in his office; in a week he was going to be forty-two. He didn’t want to know anything about me except how my breasts fit into his palms. We were still in the kissing stage.
“So?” I said.
“Huh?” He had gone behind his cloud. Was it purposeful or inadvertent? Maybe he was hung over. I examined his enormous eyes: bloodshot, but that wasn’t unusual. Still, they were puffy underneath and he smelled of witch hazel, which, being slightly alcoholic, gave me the impression of booze by association.
“Are you asleep? Tell me the story.”
“I was up too late,” he said. This was his euphemism for having drunk too much the night before. He picked up a pencil and pressed the eraser to his lips. He had a habit of caressing inanimate objects in my presence. He would fondle his ruler, stroking it up and down, press paper clips to his cheeks, tap himself on the head with his magnifying glass. I enjoyed his displacement; it was I he wanted to press to his flesh. A year later I was reduced to being jealous of his tools. “You kiss the ruler but you won’t kiss me!” I said to him three weeks before I left my job. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he responded.
But this day, when he put his pencil to his mouth, I was bold and we were enough in love so that when I moved it and put my lips there instead, he kissed me back. The pencil fell on the floor. I tasted him—shaving soap at the corners of his mouth, his coffee, his Lucky—and sighed. He sighed too. It was morning; hours would have to pass before we held each other.
“So what happened?”
“He was a daredevil. Very good-looking, one of those boys who’s the natural leader of the group. I worshiped him—I guess.” The pencil, retrieved, was tapped on his chin while he pondered whether he had, actually, worshiped. “He was Jewish,” Asa said, looking sidelong at me.
“Did he look it?” I asked.
“What’s that mean?”
“Joke,” I said. “Go on.”
“He was an extremist, always pushing himself. Anyhow, he was doing this crazy thing, climbing this bridge, and he fell off.”
“Were you there?”
“No. I chickened out at the last minute and stayed home looking at pornographic art with his father. His father had a hell of an art collection.”
“What was he like?”
“Who?”
“Reuben.” I kicked the leg of his desk.
“Oh, I don’t know. We were such kids. He wasn’t a very nice person, I suppose. I don’t know if I’d like him now.”
“But you liked him then?”
“I was crazy about him,” he said. He said it with the same tone he used to say “You’re a marvel,” or “You’re extraordinary,” or any of the other things he murmured to me at odd moments passing me in the hall.
“What wasn’t nice about him?”
“I think he was manipulative. Also, I think he was immoral. Amoral? Which do I mean?”
“How do I know?” He was always asking me what he meant. “Immoral means evil. Amoral means lacking a sense of right and wrong.”
“Amoral. That’s just what he was.”
Then his phone rang and I went back to my office. It took months for me to extract that story from him. And there’s a lot he never told me. I had to extrapolate and invent. When he said, “Then we went on some cockamamie break-in to the museum because Jerry wanted to look at a painting,” I had to supply the painting, the pebbles on the roof, the state of his mind.
I don’t know why it fascinated me so much, this story he wouldn’t tell me. Maybe just because I was jealous of Reuben. Reuben was part of Asa’s mythology—he may have been Asa’s mythology in its entirety. When Asa spoke of him his voice was sad, but his face was aglow with the memory of events that had shaped his character and colored his life. What I wanted to know was how that had happened and what, precisely, had happened. I was able to piece together some of the events, but that was only half of it.
Whatever Reuben had meant to Asa, I was sure of one thing: He had planted a seed that had come to blossom only with me. Twenty-five years of dormancy. When I’d met Asa, when he’d leaned over my desk and perfumed my environment, he’d been asleep. I woke him up. That was what I intended to do and I did it. Then I began to see that what happened between us was the duplication of something that had happened long before. Like the past it was nipped in the bud, but it was Asa nipping, not Fate.
Asa had certain predictions about the course of love. They had to come true or he would be adrift. It was the same for me—but my predictions were entirely different. When I looked at him I predicted that we would lie in each other’s arms or I would die. I was right. He, on the other hand, predicted that after we lay in each other’s arms, our love would die. He was right too, about himself. And he believed this because of Reuben.
I wish I’d known I was just the reincarnation of a bad blond boy, a method of completing a fantasy he had no desire to make into an abiding reality. “This is an interlude, dear,” he said to me early on. I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to know anything about him that didn’t fit into my predictions. I kept myself in the dark.
Paradoxically, my very misconception of Asa was my safety. I could retreat into misinterpretations of things he’d said to me, comforting readings of looks he’d given me. The idea that he’d ever loved me was astonishing enough to override any new astonishing information, such as that for the fifth day in a row he would not be coming over after work to make love on the sofa or, if he was daring enough, the bed. The bed was reserved for lunchtime. On the sofa, at five-thirty, he could tell himself he’d been carried away; walking all the way to the bedroom was too premeditated for the evening visit. So he would not be coming, hadn’t come yesterday, most likely wouldn’t come tomorrow—what did I care? I remembered when he’d come every day.
What I never considered was how things had changed. I didn’t want to think about what had happened between May, when the sight of me was enough to take his breath away (I’d heard him gasp when I walked into his office), and November, when the illness of his dogs, the social obligations imposed on him by Fay (Chamber of Commerce dinners, third cousins for cocktails), or simply his own bad temper fortuitously occupied him between five and six-thirty from Monday to Friday.
The truth was that from the moment we’d become lovers he’d stopped loving me. And it was that specific—we’d “done almost everything” on my sofa during the course of our first spring without diminishing his feelings. On the contrary, the more we poked and prodded each other through and around our clothing, the more entranced he became. We developed techniques for producing orgasm through kissing alone and would torment and satisfy each other this way. I don’t know how we did it. It had something to do with anticipation and denial, no doubt, but it was also a genuine method. Irreproducible; even with Asa, it never worked after we’d been to bed.
After we lay down, everything became topsy-turvy. In private he was my lover. In public he was wearing a blue shirt and a dark-blue tie and talking on the phone. We would rise up from bed in the early afternoon and eat lunch in the sunshine and discuss, as lovers do, our favorite pastimes. “I think I like being on the bottom,” he’d say. Fifteen minutes later, passing me in the hall at work, he wouldn’t even look at me. Who was he aiming to fool if not himself? Everybody at the office was accustomed to our glances. This sudden sobriety between us was more noticeable, and more of an announcement, than an increase in flirtation would have been.
How deeply I didn’t understand him! On no information at all, I had decided that sex would bind us together. I thought that for a man like that to take off his tie and his shirt and put his body against mine would be so startling that we would share an extraordinary secret: the private world where he was naked and delighted. I would be a witness to the discarding of all his formality. I thought that the passion permitted by his dropping his clothes on the floor would be equal to the formality of the clothes. I was right, but I didn’t think it through. I didn’t see that once the clothes were on him again, the passion, like a garment with a particular purpose, would be folded away until the next time.
When we were still only kissers and not, technically, lovers, he would touch me in his office, in my office, in the twists and turns of the mahogany staircase. He was as foolish and reckless as I was. It seemed I had opened him up with touch. And I admit I was disappointed to find him so easily reached. Was he just a sensualist whose soul could be tapped by a finger on his cheek? I wanted to capture the heart of a man whose heart was buried deep; what glory in a prize available to anyone with soft hands?
After we became lovers my disappointment faded. He was again the Unapproachable. His foolishness of the kissing months was gone; he retreated into the stiffness that had challenged me originally. I looked at him walking down the hall and tried to remember him in my arms. It was like trying to resolve the two images of a binocular incorrectly positioned for my eyes. And the unlikeliness of those two truths coexisting, along with the surety that they did, was my deepest happiness. He was unhavable—and he was mine.
What made Asa love me was my capacity for inventing him. I conjured up an idea of him that was an idol we both could worship. I had enough information to imagine him, unerringly, as the person he had wished to be twenty years before. If he was silent it was because his thoughts were too complicated to express; if he grumped around the office it was because he knew life ought to be better than life currently was. By reacting to his hidden emotions, I convinced the two of us of the depth of his deepness and the heat of his heat.
I wasn’t wrong about him. If I’d been wrong he would never have loved me. But I wasn’t exactly right, either. I was off the track in thinking he was as he desired to be. He genuinely wanted passion and danger—from himself and from life—but he had neither. My presuming the existence of his fantasy self made life difficult. For a while he played along with it, but in the end he had to admit it was hopeless. I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted my blood-red Yankee. He just wanted peace. He wanted to stop living in somebody else’s fantasy, forgetting that it had been his as well.
That’s what I don’t forgive. I could never have imagined this Ur-Asa without him. He gave me all the raw material for the spells I put on him and the incantations I mumbled at his blue back descending the stairs, and then he acted as though it were my fault that he had to live up to an impossible standard.
Asa, of course, did not invent me. Partly he was busy basking in my notion of him; partly my forthrightness left little room for speculation. He didn’t need to translate me because what I said to him was unequivocal. I said, “I love you,” and “You are the most delicious human in the world.” His version of authorship was to list my qualities and marvel at them. “You’re so, so—Italian.” This, as we both knew, was a code word for Jewish.
What Jewishness meant to him was access to passion. He envied me that. I insisted that he could have passion, that my Jewish love would teach him how. But Gentile passions are reserved for moral issues, so the passion I aroused in Asa was ultimately a passion to do Right. And doing Right meant relinquishing me.
So there began the discrepancies. Between what he said and what I heard, between what he felt for me and what I felt for him, between how our office-mates thought of us and what was really going on, and, springing from that, between my reaction to secrecy and his: He wanted to maintain it, I wanted to blast it open. I thought if everybody knew, he’d leave Fay. In the end everybody did know. But I thoroughly misunderstood him. He had his own standard, one not fixed by public opinion. He was anything but amoral. Amorality was reserved for the Jews, like me and Reuben. We could be victims of our emotions; he knew what was right.
Toward the end there began to be discrepancies within me. I told myself that were he to leave Fay he would have proved himself untrustworthy and I wouldn’t want him. I can’t tell if I believed this. As I said, I became more like him, and this was a sentiment redolent of stern Yankee gobbledegook. On the other hand, it was true that an Asa who would ditch Fay and the dogs was no Asa I knew.
And the biggest discrepancy of all was between what we were and what we perceived in each other. Who did I love? What man was it who in my dreams and in the long vibrant winter evenings alone on my sofa I had kissed and awakened, feeding my images with conversations about layouts conducted in the fluorescence of the office? Whose eyes superimposed themselves on Fay’s during dinner, halting his descriptions of his day at work? Can human beings love each other? Must we always love an image we’ve labored over secretly, never love the living soul with all its mire and murk?