Asa at fifty still dreams, but not of Dinah. At least, not often. Afternoon sunlight still finds a resting place at his feet on the desk. In his thoughts his feet walk the beaches of the Cape and the dimmer, dusty New Hampshire roads. The older he gets, Asa has noticed, the more he counts on summer to awaken him from a deepening winter slumber. It’s as if he’s turning into a bear. And so, bearish, he ambles warm paths that stretch into the infinitude of his imagination, shade whenever he wants it, beach roses at his side. Several long walks are needed to finish an article. They refresh him with their timelessness: He has no particular age while walking, and no sense of how many minutes, in the world of the office and the chair, they occupy. Enough, though, he figures, to warrant a discreet alarm system; he has installed a precarious lamp on a table outside his door, which wobbles and rattles at anyone’s approach. He is amused that he’s done this. Ten years ago he would have tried to cure himself of such serious woolgathering.
After nearly eighteen thousand days, Asa’s life is peaceful. He has long since “gotten over” Dinah and returned his attention to his real life. But he does have another well-worn path to walk, which leads him back to all of that. He keeps it in his bottom drawer, beside a pint bottle of whiskey for emergencies. Not that he considers these two items as having the same value or effect. The whiskey rounds the edges; the hundred pages of his past sharpen them, clarify where the liquor soothes. Yet both seem to him on the order of vices, necessarily hidden. The occasional imperative to have a drink is slightly shameful, a lapse in good taste at the least. As to the other, it’s hard for him to say what secret weakness his need for it reveals. But a few times a year—usually at the moment when the season changes, when winter first bites the soft heel of autumn, when drowsiness first overtakes the growth of leaves and they hang, fat and still, on the giant, ancient Cambridge trees—he opens what he thinks of as “his book.”
And in her version of his life he has stopped looking for clues to himself. The first reading—years ago now—was a series of shocks: How could she know this, how not understand that; where had she gotten that idea? Most of all he’d wondered if that was, in fact, himself, the way he wondered about the oddly familiar, oddly repellent person in a tweed jacket reflected in storefront windows. He understands it now as a love poem of which he is only the accidental inspiration. Yet to be the subject, in some sense, of such a thing never stops surprising him and, though he is embarrassed to admit it, flattering him. He knows there is nothing flattering about it. He knows it is not even about him. But to the same degree as his features were once, to her eyes, contained in those of an angel in a painting he’s never seen by an ancestor he never knew he had, so is his face discernible here. He is the model and he has the model’s secret pride.
Asa is proud of something else these days as well. Over the last years, to make a little extra money, he has been writing articles about gardening for another magazine, also genteel, also tempered by dilettantism, more elegantly housed than his own magazine in a brownstone on the other side of the river. These articles are to be published as a book. He has conversations with an editor over tepid lunch in the Back Bay every six weeks; he will make even more money and, the editor assures him, a name for himself. Both the sum and the extent of his fame will be small, but Asa hasn’t expected either. There will be photographs of his own and his favorite gardens. As an old hand in publishing, Asa knows the cost of color plates and is impressed. In fact, the plates more than any other aspect of the whole business have convinced him he is a success.
So one version of himself will appear in print. Asa believes in print. Print is not only the reality of his working day, it is a firm reality in itself. It endures, it is final, it is true. He does, in some way, still take soundings on life through literature. And he has resisted the middle-aged tendency to retreat to biographies. This year he has been rereading Hardy. Rather, reading Hardy, as The Mayor of Casterbridge gulped whole in one weekend at sixteen with Return of the Native for dessert the next week had been his entire exposure. Sometimes he shuts the book he’s reading and looks at it, wondering that so much can be inside such an unprepossessing object. Other times he runs his fingertips across the pages to feel the letters; he has old editions, bought secondhand, cheap in broken sets.
But “his book”—her book—will never see print. He knows that now. When he first heard of it, when she told him about it in the Chinese restaurant, he feared Fay confronting him with a not-cryptic-enough dedication page, Roger smirking behind his desk, Cambridge abuzz again—for didn’t Cambridge abound with romans à clef, whose demystification was the stuff of dinner parties?
Once a week they had gone to a Chinese restaurant in Central Square. Between a cut-rate shoe store and a Burger King, behind a plate-glass window opaqued by the old, the sad, the poor who waited at the bus stop, they ate pan-fried dumplings, beef with bean sauce, strange-flavored chicken. In lucky weeks they got a booth. By the cashier, carp swam in a muddy tank, round and round and round, as their conversations had begun to go round and round.
“I’m writing a book,” she said, “about this.”
She nodded. “Well, you,” she said.
“Have you changed the names?” he asked, and felt a fool.
“Of course,” she said.
Their dumplings arrived and they ate. On that day they were not in a booth, so there was no handholding, no leaning across the table to see each other close and breathe each other’s air. His rules: In retrospect they seemed both futile and mean. But what if someone had …
“Asa,” she said. She so rarely addressed him by name that he swallowed his dumpling too quickly. It, or its shadow, lay like a rock in his throat, the sensation conjuring tears that were, on the whole, appropriate to his situation.
“Do you think you’ll have another affair?”
He harrumphed to gain time and to urge the dumpling downward. “After you, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know.” She seemed so much, he could not then—or now—imagine embarking on it again.
“Have you thought about it?”
“Yes.” A lie. He thought about it. Then, “I don’t think I’m suited to it.”
“No, you aren’t.” She assessed him. “But in some way—”
“I won’t.”
“Satisfied your curiosity about it?”
“It’s not that.” She shortchanged him somehow with this.
Then she was laughing, and the dumpling moved on, and she said, “Well, if you do have another, have it with me.”
“Not that this one’s over,” he ventured, as much to soothe himself as her. “What is this book?”
“It’s not really about us, it’s more about you. But it’s probably not about you either.”
“When will you finish it?” He was being conversational, but she went silent, sad, muffled by some rock of her own.
“I don’t want to finish it,” she mumbled.
“Then string it out,” he said, easily.
“I’m terrified of finishing it.”
How little he had given her. The burden of all she wanted, which was all he couldn’t offer, pushed him to offer the only thing he had: more of what wasn’t enough. “Finish it in the spring,” he said to her. “That’s a good time for beginnings.”
“Beginning what?”
“A new life.” And so committed himself to six more months of adultery.
In return, she put his fears of exposure to rest. “Remember when I went to Washington in the summer?” He did. She’d been away from work for three days. He’d missed her and had peace. “I went to Dumbarton Oaks. Have you been there?” He had, but only nodded. Whatever it was she was telling him, he was not going to interrupt with the rhododendrons of Dumbarton Oaks. “Above the entrance to the courtyard there’s a beautiful pediment with a Greek inscription, a long inscription. I wanted to know what it said, because the courtyard was lovely, peaceful, and the doors were lovely, and the pediment—well, I went to find a guard, to see if he could tell me what it said. But on the wall opposite the courtyard I saw a card with the translation. It read: ART IS FOR MAN A HAVEN FROM SORROW. And it cheered me so. I hadn’t known how sad I was, I think.”
It was this therapeutic aspect he addressed when he asked her, from time to time, how the book was coming. For her part, Dinah was kind enough to say it was going well. It was still unfinished when she left—or so he has always assumed. She didn’t give it to him until the next winter, and she had left, as agreed, in the spring.
It was late, late in the year when she called. The earth had frozen already and rang out under his feet when he walked to work: the hopeless month between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“I have something for you,” she said on the phone.
He feared it was a Christmas present. She’d given him two, and two birthday presents as well. He’d never given her anything. He dawdled on his way to the restaurant despite the cold, or maybe in hope of numbing himself further. He had by then achieved a blankness that, in moments of lucidity, he worried would be his permanent state.
Dumplings, spicy fish, rice for two; the moment had come to look at her. She looked the same. “Is that a new ring?”
“Asa, I’ve had this for fifteen years.”
He did suddenly remember trying it on one summer afternoon and laughing because it didn’t fit even his little finger. “Oh, yeah.” He wanted a beer. Which was worse, forgetting or finding that wisp of memory?
“You’re so unobservant,” she said.
“Don’t hold it against me.” He raised his teacup. “Here’s looking at you.” He was, by then, able to more easily. It was true, she looked the same. “You never change.”
“It’s only been six months.”
“I love the skin on this fish. Crackly.” He realized she would think he was “avoiding” something.
But: “Very good,” she agreed, and they discussed what seedlings were in his basement and Roger’s latest unwritten article and how she was finding the free-lance life. He thought they might get through it without—what? Acknowledgment. And the longer they did, in fact, maintain their banal interchange, the safer he felt looking at her, enjoying her cheek and how it met her lip, the ivory of her sweater against her darker ivory neck, her hand clumsy with the chopsticks.
“You don’t know how to use those,” he told her. He realized she had always used them wrong. He moved to position them correctly for her. The sensation of her skin against his was so familiar that it was as if a landscape from boyhood were spread before his eyes. Her hand lay quiet in his. I’ve had a good life, he thought. He showed her how to cradle the sticks in the hollow between her thumb and forefinger; her hand was soft and pliant, and the whole time their skins brushed against each other he felt the warmth of his life surrounding him.
Then fortune cookies. “Why are they always like this? ‘You have a good head for business.’ ” His was, “A friend asks only for your time and not your money.”
“At least yours is true,” she said.
“So what do you have for me?”
“What I wrote.” She took a folder from her bag. “I wanted you to have a copy. After all, it’s yours in a way. So here.” She pushed it across the table.
They parted on the street, quickly, because it was cold and they didn’t know how to say good-bye. They settled on an awkward hug made more ungainly by their coats and gloves. “Merry Christmas,” they told each other, and “Let’s not wait so long next time.” Then they walked off in opposite directions.
It was a slow afternoon at work. The magazine had been put to bed the week before, and the pile of articles on Asa’s desk was only thicker than it had been before he got caught up in the mechanics of the last issue. A profile of a physicist whose work he didn’t understand; an article on weather; a photographic essay on East Africa. And on top, something by Dinah. Two-thirty. He cleaned his waxing machine. Three-ten. He discussed inside-cover advertising possibilities with the sales manager over the intercom. Three-twenty. He shut the door to his office. He put his feet on his desk and began to read.
It made him queasy, no doubt about it. He kept fighting the urge to stop. At the same time he was fascinated, because he saw himself there—but then again, not himself, a ghost or duplicate. The queasiness came from the way he felt shuttled between recognition and confusion. Several times he said out loud, “But it wasn’t like that.” And it hadn’t been; surely he hadn’t been such a wimp. Or was he then, and even now, and had she detected it? But he hadn’t had anything to do with Reuben’s girlfriend, who wasn’t unlike Jo, surprisingly. He’d had a few ideas, maybe, but not … he had to keep reminding himself that this was a book. Or something, he didn’t know exactly what. At any rate it was not his life history written down by someone else. Except that frequently it was.
How had she deduced that about the Breughel print? She must have seen it at the office Christmas party he gave two years before. But to make the leap to this piece of his adolescence—the one true tragedy he’d ever been involved in—was remarkable. Had he said something that gave her a clue? He poked his memory, but it seemed unreliable to him after the incident of her ring. Without her to prompt him, he might as well erase everything that had gone on between them. He saw himself, on the page and in the past, brooding at that picture as at a votive portrait. Perhaps, he thought, we are actually transparent to those who love us.
Six o’clock on a December evening; he was the last person in the building. At home Fay was lighting a fire for his welcome. She loved him too. There he was, in his warm, handsome office, holding a story written about him by a woman who loved him. All he had lost through death and neglect, and caution, and his damnable moderation—he did not think of it. Unassailable in his happiness, his luck in having received so much, he walked home through the night.
All these years, Asa has been too caught up in whether his book is “true” to know if it is “good.” He has never even considered it from this angle. By now it is history: part of his life, an artifact he possesses. And though only a typescript, it, like Ovid and Hardy, is final and eternal.
As is Asa. Granite Asa, his substance does not change. Why did I think it could? If I could take an aerial photograph of Asa’s rocky landscape, perhaps I’d find a new curve in a stream or a pile of stones freshly tumbled from a cliff—some slight evidence of my passage through the scene. But, reader, I can’t get far enough away. I have never been able to. Asa is always in my middle distance at the least. I have held him closer and known less, but as yet I can move him no further from me.
Late at night when I look out my windows I see an apartment building. It is six stories high; behind it is Asa’s house. I can’t see Asa’s house. For years this has frustrated me. Likewise has my inability to penetrate the lace of the branches that overshadow the Common, beneath which he walks to and from work each day. But I have come to realize that with nothing between us I was unable to see him. And so these physical impediments bother me less. They state the truth, which I am learning how to know.
I know who changed. I know whose soul awakened. I know whose blood these pages fanned to fire. I am sure of these things. For the rest, it is only hope, the whole world balanced on a straw. But on that straw we stake our lives and, heedless, we go on.