by Sarah Blake
He and Len shared a tiny apartment at the top. The place was as spartan as an army barrack, but through a door just outside their apartment were the stairs to the roof. There was no deck or railing, just a flat tar-paper expanse, and no one else in the building ever seemed to use it, so they got used to thinking it was theirs. Up there they watched the lights of their adopted city rise in a ridge against the night sky, northward to Midtown, or dwindling down westward in the direction of their childhood to the dark river, across the green fields of New Jersey, across Pennsylvania and the flat expanse of Ohio to Chicago, where the two men had met as boys in a grammar school marked equally for its teachers as for the sometime brilliance of its pupils. Levy had been seated next to Pauling that year, as the M’s, the N’s, and the O’s had all been placed in the other third-grade classroom.
Their friendship was as unthinking and as familiar as the coins in their pockets, each of them knowing without seeing by heft and size just how much they had. They had found each other that first day, the P and the L in 1939. Together they could believe the world was theirs for the taking, if they concentrated with both eyes open. Not half-shut, as it seemed his father’s were. Stay smart, his father said, stay low—you’ll get there.
But where? Reg had gone through Abernathy High on the South Side of Chicago, sailed through the classes with Len alongside, and graduated fourth in his class. Where will you get, he wanted to ask his father, if here is all there is?
He had never asked, and his father had never answered, but when Emmett Till’s body had floated onto the national news, that poor wrecked child’s body—a black boy from Chicago who had wandered into the wrong set of eyes—Reg knew there is what his father would have answered. This far and no farther.
Fuck them, Len had telegrammed Reg. Fuck that. It had always been clear to Len that but for an accident in geography and time, the two of them would have been dead or in chains. Reg was used to this simple clarity and relied on it. They had been friends so long Reg did not think of himself without Len. Every day of his life since that first day when they had met and taken stock of each other with the rapid assessment of children—friend, not friend—Len had been right there, the face Reg had looked for to check himself. Reg was black and Len was white, but together they were neither. Or rather, together they were both. They were each other’s shield. And Reg knew, without having to say it, that Len saw what he saw, Len went through with Reg, alongside Reg, the hurts, the slights, the silences. Len saw him. The loneliest four years of Reg’s life had been the four years at Harvard, which he referred to as “the Exile.”
The apartment was empty and still, all the windows pushed wide open to catch any breeze from the river. There was a tiny kitchenette, a living room, and a separate bedroom they outfitted with two beds, each pushed squarely against the opposite walls.
He took the Polaroid from the White Horse out of his pocket and pinned it next to the others on the living room wall. Shedding his jacket and rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, Reg went to the icebox and pulled out a cold beer and held it to his forehead. Then he rolled it along the back of his neck and slowly down each forearm before opening the beer and taking a swallow. He went into the bedroom to change out of his shirt and tie.
The yearly letter from the Lowells leaned against the bottom of the mirror on his dresser. He took it and went to sit on the bed, pulling off his shoes, tossing one and then the other across the five feet between the beds. They hit and bounced off the side of Len’s to lie on the ground.
Right where they would trip him. Reg grinned with satisfaction.
He unbuttoned his shirt, picked up the envelope, and ripped it open. The familiar card in his hand covered with Mrs. Harold Lowell’s careful blue script tilted just to the right asked him again, as it had every year since 1953, to please consider coming to visit them on North Haven. We would be, she encouraged him, so pleased if you would accept.
He took off his shirt, stood, and opened the closet door, the motion stirring its own breeze. The Lowells had taken an interest in him long ago, when he had first arrived at Harvard College in 1949, a Higginson Scholar. Mrs. Lowell had found him pressed up against a wall at the back of the Lowell House Opening Day Cocktails and, holding her hand out, had introduced herself as Sally Lowell.
“Reg Pauling,” he had said, taking her hand and shaking it.
“Good.” She looked straight at him. “You have a nice solid grip. You’ll be fine.”
“Good to know.” He’d nodded back at her with a stiff smile.
The heat of the day still shimmered in the black tar when he emerged from the stairs onto the roof. Len stood at the far end, looking south toward the tip of Manhattan. His familiar heft always worked on Reg as a kind of landmark: wherever they were, there he was, larger than most, the place in any room where Reg could fasten his eyes.
“It’s like crossing the goddamned Sahara up here.”
“Hey.” Len turned around, greeting him. Reg came to stand at the end of the roof.
The river stretched silver in front of them. It was dinnertime, and the clatter of dishes escaped through the open windows to the two men. There was the barest hint of a breeze. The city below them burned bright and hot, and the steady noise reached up to them standing above it, like the pulse of a heart buried somewhere unseen. The single line of a jet plane crossed above.
“How are you?” Len asked after a while.
Reg nodded. “You?”
Len pointed to his friend’s chin. “I was thinking about how soft it is right there. On a girl. Soft and hard.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
Len smiled. “I met a girl today.”
“Uh-huh.” Reg glanced at him. “And what did she look like?”
“She was a girl in a sleeveless blouse with a big pocketbook, and a sister.”
“And?”
“And she tipped her chin at me.”
Reg chuckled. “You’re sunk, man.”
“Yeah?” Len grinned, flicking his cigarette off the roof. “Maybe so.”
Fourteen
EVIE PARKED THE car three blocks from their apartment and started walking home. Paul should have landed and cleared customs by now. If he’d made good time, he’d be home.
Early in her freshman year, and swept up in the feminist winds of the late 1970s, Evie had decided to take Milton, her mother’s maiden name, for her own, over the objections of both her mother and grandmother. “How very hurtful,” Kitty Milton had said, frowning, “to your father.” “He won’t mind,” Evie insisted. And indeed, when she’d told him finally, the look he gave her was nearly approving, as if it were apt somehow to have her own name. Anyway, it had nothing at all to do with her own father. It was a blow at the patriarchy: she would be Eve Milton, full stop. She had not counted on the fact that a name like that would draw ironic comments from classmates and professors on the first day of every class throughout her years of undergraduate and graduate course work, except in the discussion section for African American Poetics led by a graduate instructor, Paul Schlesinger, whom—perhaps because of his silence, or his stare, or both—she fell in love with and married.
“He’s watching you,” a girl in that class had said matter-of-factly during finals week. “He’s been watching you all semester.”
“No, he hasn’t.” Evie had smiled. But she knew he had.
A specialist in James Baldwin and the poetics of race, Paul’s inner life was spent in books, and she used to imagine them stacked in his head like ladders along a wall, leading to high windows. He had read everything, it seemed, and had an idea about everything he had read. More, he could spin the web between what he had read and what had happened in the supermarket, or what he had heard on the radio. Dylan, the Dreyfus Affair, the troubadour poets, “A Season in Hell,” it didn’t matter. One pressed on him, and his thoughts sprang open in sentences that climbed easily into paragraphs. The world was all there. Generous with his students and unsparingly honest about his own weaknes
ses, he was, it was generally agreed, a great teacher, a marvel.
Two days after the grades were filed, he had called the phone in the hallway of her dorm. “It’s that grad student,” the girl who answered had mouthed, handing her the receiver. And in the silence on the phone for those seconds before he spoke, Evie decided.
“Hullo, Evie,” he began.
“Yes,” she said, “whatever it is. Yes.”
They came together cleanly, swiftly, as if they’d each been waiting for the other to appear. They understood each other, knew each other without discussion, though he was a Jew from the outer boroughs, he’d tease, and she was from one of those families who’d bought Manhattan for shells. Not true, she’d protest, smiling. But true enough. Theirs was a table others wanted to sit at, and did, long and late into the night. Their coupling was proof positive of the heady democracy of the land of ideas, and proof too (she thought) of how far she had sprung from home.
When Evie first told her parents Paul’s name, her mother had blinked.
“Schlesinger?” she repeated quickly. “He’s Jewish?”
“Yes, Mum.”
Joan had chuckled, her eyes on her daughter, a deep helpless chuckle that rose up and circled in the air between them, though Joan put her hand over her mouth, but it was too much; she dropped her hand, helpless in the wave of laughter that poured out of her.
“For god’s sake, Mum. It’s not a joke,” Evie said stiffly. “You couldn’t be more insulting if you tried.”
“No.” Joan opened her eyes, trying to still the laughter. “No, of course it’s not a joke. It’s not at all a joke.” She paused. “I just never saw this coming.”
“Well, welcome to the twentieth century,” Evie returned acidly. “We’re all in it together.”
“I don’t care how many degrees you rack up,” a friend of her father’s had said, waving his fork at her at a dinner party, “how much money you make, or how many chances you take to make good—none of that matters. It all comes down to getting the right girl. That’s the secret to the whole thing. That’s the secret to success.”
And Evie did not point out the question he begged, though she was the first girl in eight generations of her family’s men to walk through the gates of an Ivy, albeit Yale. Evie had smiled at him and nodded, as though they were co-conspirators. It’s getting the right girl. She did as she had been brought up to do with older men. She agreed.
And went ahead and married Paul Schlesinger.
In their first summer, they shared a single room in a group apartment with two desks pushed against opposite walls and the mattress on the floor under the only window. They worked in utter quiet until they couldn’t bear it, and one of them would turn and break the line between their desks and they’d move to the bed between. Their quiet back then had been full of desire, even when they moved to bigger places and worked in separate rooms.
And at the end of the days, they would talk. Talk with a future in it. Talk with the push behind it, talk that would lead them through dinner and into the night. They finished doctorates. Began teaching, had Seth. Bought an apartment, won tenure, were known. The years rose and sank down. They worked at home, and still in the middle of a morning, she would look up and see him standing in the doorway of her study.
She needed him, she realized as she rode the elevator back up to their apartment that evening. He’d been gone too long. The old woman crossing the street just now, Seth turning on the steps of the library, her mother returning morning after morning in the dream—life in all its pieces, going on. She needed him to help her see it all clear.
“Paul?” She stood on the threshold, listening.
“I’m in here,” he called from his study.
He had his back to her, intent on tacking up a block of photographs on the corkboard above his desk. He had returned with his work done, and well done, she could see.
“Hey.” She stood in his doorway, smiling.
“Hey.” He turned, looking at her, and smiled back. His dark hair was silvering, but his jacket hung on his body as carelessly as it had when he was in his twenties, giving him the look of an athlete, when in fact he’d done nothing but read all his life. She went to him and he pulled her into his arms and she relaxed against him. He smelled of the plane and the long ride, and then underneath that, he smelled of him. The room disappeared. She pressed herself closer.
He stiffened, as if her touch reminded him of something, and carefully pulled away.
She looked up. The storm that crossed his face was violent and swift.
“Paul?”
“Listen.” He thrust his hands into his pockets, looking down.
“What?” she asked, a little frightened. “What is it?”
The buzzer rang.
“What?” Her eyes widened. “What’s happened?”
“There’s Daryl,” Paul said.
“Daryl? Why?”
“He called me when I was in the cab. I told him to come on over.”
“But you just walked in the door.”
“I know.” He softened. “But I wanted to show him these—” He pointed to the photos he’d been tacking up.
“The stumble stones?”
“Yeah.” He nodded.
The buzzer rang again.
“Coming,” he called.
Evie stared at the spot where he had just stood and then fixed on the rows of pictures on the wall behind, a little dazedly. What had just happened?
“Hello, darling,” Daryl Norton greeted her in the doorway, holding a bottle of wine.
One of the ruddy blond boy-men who grew like weeds all over the United Kingdom, Daryl had fled to the States in his twenties, where he could become the charming, sardonic, English bloom—an exotic in the hothouse of the graduate school where he and Evie had finished their degrees. He had been one of both Evie’s and Paul’s most trusted sparring partners, willing and able to shred any scrap of pretension in a new idea. The “Daryl draft” was the pass they made at an idea before anything was put on the page.
“Hello.” She tipped her cheek for his kiss, still unsettled.
“Daryl brought Chinese,” Paul called. “Let’s eat now. I’m starved.”
Daryl vanished from the door.
There was nothing to do but follow him down the hall to the dining room, where Paul was pulling steaming containers from the bag and putting out plates and glasses and chopsticks. He appeared to her electric with fatigue and excitement. Daryl drew the cork out of the bottle, and the three of them sat. The windows were pushed high against the June evening.
Evie sipped her wine, her eyes resting on Paul at the other end of the table as she took the plate he’d filled for her. Daryl asked one question, then another, and after a few minutes, Evie joined in. And they were off.
Still, she watched him, catching glimpses of him as if through trees in a wood. They had fallen back into their usual patter, their banter familiar, the poking their connection. But there was something different tonight, something new. An added heat, a swiftness, as though he rappelled off her on a thread too hot to hold, looking at her and then away, a man dropping swiftly off a cliff. Just then he was listening intently to something that Daryl was saying, his head tipped as though there were music beneath the other man’s words. It was a posture he took, she knew, both when he was listening hard and when he was hardly listening. The tipped head, the nod, the eyes resting on the speaker proved irresistible, working like a mesmerist to draw people out. She could see he wasn’t paying any attention whatsoever to Daryl just then, that he had retreated under cover of the other man’s argument to some spot to think in his head.
And it used to be that the line between them tightened just in these moments, when she would catch sight of him listening in a room with others and knew where he was in his head, when no one else did. He would nod and pause and then turn to find her with his eyes, and it was as hot and immediate as if he’d put his hand on her heart.
She watched him now, a fa
miliar stranger. He did not look up.
“And what’s on Professor Milton’s clothesline these days?” Daryl turned to her equably, through with Paul. “I haven’t seen you all month.”
Hazel’s skepticism in her office that afternoon rose to mind, and Evie flushed, pushing back against it.
“The end of my people, the last of the four hundred,” she tossed. “A little monograph, tentatively entitled The Twilight of the WASPs.”
“Your people?” Paul looked at her.
“Kidding,” she said.
“Four hundred what?” Daryl asked, undeterred.
“Families of Old New York, the ones that fit in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, and on the pages of The Social Register.”
“Now, there’s a title,” Daryl remarked. “Downward from the Astor Ballroom.”
“But who owns half of an island in Maine,” Paul observed. “So, not so far down.”
She frowned. She hadn’t been serious with all this. Why had he brought up Crockett’s?
“That none of us can afford—” she deflected. “Who knows how long we’ll be able to keep it. It’s an old rackety-packety house on a rock in the middle of the ocean.”
It was her habitual way of discussing the Island, with a practiced, wry disaffection.
“You know you don’t believe that,” Paul said. “You’d never say it if you really thought you were going to lose it.”
“But it’s a real possibility,” she said, looking at him, “since only one of my cousins makes any money.”
“Still,” Paul observed, “somehow there is always an aunt Maud, or a great-uncle Jonathan who dies just at the right moment, releasing a tidy sum.”
“It’s true,” she nodded, flushing. What was he doing?
“The Miltons bought it for fifteen hundred dollars eighty years ago,” Paul explained. “One of these New England kingdoms where lobstermen drop off the lobster like milk in a crate every other evening. A vast hunk of rock so beautiful that no one can let go.”
