by D. W. Buffa
Her eyes flashed, then retreated behind a cryptic smile. “Are you suggesting that the only way to hide a secret, the only way to conceal something you don’t want to share, is with a lie?” She lifted her chin a bare fraction of an inch, just enough to invite me into the game. With a quick toss of her head, her eyes flashed once more. “Haven’t you heard, young Mr. Antonelli, that ‘silence speaks louder than words’?”
“Young Mr. Antonelli?” I was older than she, but the way she said it, the soft laughter in her voice, gave a hint of a feminine wisdom that made me feel she knew things about me I was still far from knowing myself.
“You mean the difference between lying and not telling the truth?” I bent farther across the table. “The lie that sounds more convincing because it’s never spoken out loud?”
She lowered her eyes to the glass she was stirring, smiling quietly to herself.
“Is that a line you read somewhere in a book, some novel you read—one of those things you make a point of memorizing because you think it might be useful sometime?” Her eyes lingered over the glass. “Isn’t that what young men do, the ones who are trying to make their way in the world—rising from humble beginnings to become something useful and important, famous, and of course rich?”
She raised her eyes. The smile had changed into something uncomfortably close to a smirk. An instant later it was gone, as if she had reconsidered, decided that she had made a mistake, said what she had not really meant. The color in her cheeks deepened. She bit the edge of her smooth polished lip.
“I didn’t… I shouldn’t…” She was not used to apologizing, and now, when she thought she should, she did not know how. Angry with herself, she turned toward the far end of the table. Browning, leaning first one way then the other while he carried on two conversations at once, was waiting for her, beaming at the disconcerted look in her eyes.
“Are we going somewhere for dinner?” she asked in a voice that immediately stilled the other conversations at the table.
Browning glanced at his watch and then, the smile still thick on his mouth, shook his head at how quickly the time had passed. He waved his arm for the waiter and pushed away from the table.
“That would be wonderful,” he announced, gazing at each of his guests; “but I’m afraid the party has to end here. At least for us,” he added, glancing at me for a moment before he turned his attention back to the others. “While the rest of you are here—or wherever else—having a good time, Antonelli and I are having dinner with a very dull man—a lawyer, wouldn’t you know—to discuss a small legal matter that I’m sure I’ll never be able to understand.”
The look in Joanna’s eyes suggested that she had expected something else, though it seemed less a question of disappointment than convenience: If she had known, she would have made other plans. As Browning and I were leaving, I heard her making her excuses when the others asked her to stay with them.
“She likes you,” said Browning with an encouraging look as we left the restaurant and headed up the street. “I know her. I can tell.”
There was a taste of something burning in the still, heavy summer air. The broiling heat rolled off the sidewalk, rising up in the shimmering diaphanous shadows of a desert mirage. My mouth was dry; my face had begun to glow under the throbbing light of an enormous reddish sun. All around me the brick buildings looked burned black. The sky had turned to ashes, colored by the fireball behind.
“She’s working here in New York. At J. Walter Thompson—advertising. She has her own place.” He chuckled as he began to walk faster, oblivious of the heat. “And she’s gorgeous—don’t you think?” he asked, aware that I had not said a word. He stopped and waited until I caught up. “Is something the matter? Why are you going so slow? She say something that depressed you?” asked Browning with that same knowing grin.
He returned my smile with one of injured innocence. “Sometimes I’m just not very good at getting out of things.” He shook his head at his own announced incompetence. He seemed genuinely sorry. “I shouldn’t have done that, but I did have to go. I had sort of said something about making a night of it, but then the other thing came up and…”
He was staring down at the sidewalk, thinking about what he had done. But it was over, and there was no use dwelling on what could not be changed. He straightened his shoulders and gave me a distant, friendly glance; letting me know, I suppose, that it was all right: that if I knew all the circumstances I would not think him guilty of anything more serious than a small, well intentioned lie.
“Well, if we’re not having dinner,” I asked, hurrying to keep up as he renewed his rapid pace, “just where are we going?”
He stopped dead in his tracks. The reddish tint in his cheeks was suddenly redder still.
“God, how stupid of me. I… I have to meet someone in the Village. I didn’t think…”
I put my hand on his shoulder and looked into his embarrassed eyes. “It’s all right,” I assured him, holding back a grin. “I’ll have dinner with that lawyer by myself—just in case I ever see Joanna again and she asks.”
He gave me a grateful look and turned to go.
“She hates me, by the way,” I called after him. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t much like her, either. Did you think I would?” I asked, laughing into the oppressive everywhere heat.
Browning tossed his head and twisted around without slowing a step. “No, you’re wrong. About all of it,” he added with a laugh as he quickly moved away.
I watched him for a while moving like an eager schoolboy down the street; moving faster, I thought, the farther away he got, as if he were afraid that whomever he was meeting might not wait. There was nothing for me to do but go home. I thought about taking a cab, and even stepped out into the street, ready to raise my hand to signal the first one I saw, but then I remembered the way she had looked at me, that trace of condescension I had been far too sensitive to miss, and I thought without reason or logic that I had something to prove, not to her, but to myself. I did not need anything, certainly nothing she could give. Let her go around with her fast, free-spending friends, riding in dark limousines, silent and aloof, and if they did take a cab ride felt proudly democratic. I did not need money; I could always walk.
The place I lived in in Manhattan had been arranged in a typical tortured New York way. The sister of a friend of mine, another member of our law school class, had a small one-bedroom on Twenty-sixth Street between Lexington and Third that she was willing to let me have for the two months of summer at half the rent she paid if I paid the cleaning lady who came once a week and if I promised to water the plants. My friend’s sister had graduated from UCLA or USC—I was never sure which—and she had a job with one of the auction houses. She had a month’s vacation, and she was taking an additional one, unpaid, so she could travel around Europe with an unhappily married artist who was searching for inspiration and thought he might find it with her.
I had been here only two weeks, and it felt like two years. I did not know anyone in New York, and after this evening I was reasonably certain I never would. Browning was leaving, or at least I thought he was; but even if he had changed his plans and decided to stay, I had the feeling I would not see him much. The days in the law firm where I was clerking were endless, a long pilgrimage into questions of law that had no answers other than the kind that were written by angels on the head of a pin. If I had ever had any doubt about becoming a criminal defense lawyer, a summer spent dealing with estates and conveyances was guaranteed to teach me the virtues of murder. The strange part was that the lawyers I worked for actually liked it, and thought I would too after I had spent enough eighty hour weeks to see the logical precision with which things were properly done. Every day I slaved at the assignments they gave me, which meant, of course, that I was expected to spend nights and weekends, too.
I did not mind so much the brutal, sultry heat; it gave me something to think about beyond whatever I was going to have for dinner before I sat
at the table and started to work on the brief that Mr. Dowling wanted by the end of the week. Moving slowly, each step an effort in the debilitating heat, my head bent low to avoid the white blinding glare, I did not notice her until I was half a block from the building.
She was standing in the shade of the awning, looking idly down the street the other way. By herself, without anyone to talk to, her face had lost that animation by which the mask we show the world changes with our need. She was lovely, pure and simple, with fine fresh skin and eyes that seemed vulnerable and even, I thought, a little lost. It was as if beneath the rapid glance and the sharp-eyed stare; beneath the quick, dismissive smile, the sudden toss of her head; beneath all the masks and gestures, it was all an act, an act that at least sometimes she wished she did not have to play. I crossed the street, hoping to take her by surprise.
Joanna saw me coming out of the corner of her eye. A smile crossed her mouth like a fugitive running away. She turned and faced me with a cool, appraising glance. My collar was wrung with sweat; my white dress shirt slithered around my chest. My eyes were tired and filled with harsh particles of dust; my hair, sopping wet, was crawling down my head. She started to laugh.
“Would not spend a dollar on a cab. Doesn’t surprise me. Not after what I’ve heard,” she said, leaning her shoulder against one of the black metal awning supports. She crossed her ankles and held her hands together in front of her, watching me with gentle, teasing eyes. “I’ve heard all about you, you know. How you work all the time; how you never go out; how the way to get you to do anything is to suggest that it’s something that maybe, just maybe, you can’t do. And so because it’s too hot to breathe, you decided you had to walk.” She bent her head to the side, a whimsical look of utter certainty in her eyes. “Is that about right? Is that what you decided to do and why? And remember,” she added, lowering her chin in a way that told me she was about to invoke something from our very brief past, “the only allowable lie is the one you don’t tell out loud.”
I suddenly remembered where I was supposed to have gone. It must have shown, because when I started to speak, she placed her fingers over my mouth and said, “Better not.”
“‘Better not’?”
She tossed her head, but not like before, with that lightning quick, measured contempt, but with an easy careless laugh. “Tell the first lie of your young life.”
It was there again, that same suggestion of something somehow foretold, written out without my knowing, but already read from start to finish by her.
“I knew you weren’t having dinner with Thomas and some lawyer; I know he was just using you as a convenient excuse. He does that—he’s always done that: invented excuses that don’t exist. He does it so well I think sometimes when he says it he actually believes it’s true. It’s not his fault, really. In a way, I suppose it’s even nice. He has such trouble telling anyone something he thinks they don’t want to hear. So who is he off with this time—some girl he met at school?”
She said it casually, but she could not quite conceal an interest and a hope that I might tell her what I knew. I did not know anything, really; but I did not tell her that. I did not tell her anything, and she seemed perfectly content to let the matter drop.
“And because I knew you weren’t going to dinner with him, I thought you might like to go to dinner with me.”
I wondered where I could take her. If I took her to the kind of place she was used to I would be broke for a month.
“I’m having dinner at home, and I thought you might like to join me,” she went on as if she had an answer for each hesitation she read in my still-too-guileless eyes. “No, I’m not cooking,” she added with a cautionary laugh. “My parents’ place. I’m always expected,” she explained with a deliberately enigmatic look. “Especially when they don’t expect me at all.”
She brushed a strand of light brown hair away from her eye and stepped away from the pole. She stood in front of me, her feet close together.
“Don’t you think it’s the proper thing to do—meet my parents—before you try to get me into bed?” She was laughing with her eyes, but at me or with me, I could not tell. “You know how awkward it can be when you wait and do it later—I mean meet the parents after you have already known the girl—that way, I mean. You know what I mean. Wouldn’t you feel strange and guilty, as if you were lying about something, though of course that something would never come up?” She put her hand on my shoulder, teasing me, taunting me, trying to find that first sign of embarrassment as if it were some prize she had to win. “This way you meet them with a clear conscience, knowing that you never have, and maybe,” she said, drawing back just enough so I could see the full extent of her proud, provocative smile, “just maybe, never will. Now why don’t you shower and change and then we can go.”
The Van Renaesslers lived in one of those fine old gray stone buildings somewhere in the sixties or seventies on Central Park West. They were older than I expected, in their mid to late fifties from what I gathered; though her mother looked younger, and her father older, than that. They had the look of people comfortably settled, without ambition for anything more than they had. The walls were covered with gold-framed paintings of artists famous and dead, going back from the French Impressionists to the Italian Renaissance, and even further back than that. There was the absence of pretension, an easy familiarity that made me feel like someone they had known for years, an invited guest, instead of a stranger brought unexpectedly to their door.
“I wanted you to meet him right away,” said Joanna with a mischievous look in her eye. “I’ve fallen completely in love with him. We’re going to be married day after tomorrow,” she announced breezily as she plucked a piece of chocolate candy from a dish; “and we’d like you to be there if you can. City Hall at ten.”
Her father nodded wisely, and then, shaking his head at this, her latest antic, turned to me. “I can say with a certain authority because I’ve known her all her life— which isn’t to say I’ve ever understood her—that marriage to my daughter would be the greatest mistake of any man’s life.”
“You don’t believe me!” she pretended to protest. “But I am in love, madly in love with Joseph—Do they call you Joe?—and I can’t live without him and I’m going to marry him in two days whether he bothers to ask or not. Now, can we eat? I’m starving.”
I was a frequent guest that summer in the spacious Central Park West apartment of Arthur and Millicent Van Renaessler. At least once a week, usually on the spur of the moment, Joanna would decide we ought to drop by. They were always glad to see us, and I think that after a while they began to assume that Joanna was actually serious, perhaps not about marriage, but about me. I had the odd sensation that not only did they not disapprove but that they felt for some reason a certain relief. Her father in particular seemed to go out of his way to offer encouragement by showing me that there were not any serious obstacles that would prevent his daughter and me from taking things as far as we wanted them to go. It was all very subtle, but even I could not fail to understand what he was driving at when he would remark in that wonderfully understated way of his that an old friend, someone with whom he had gone to school, had mentioned just the other day how difficult it was becoming to find any talented, eager young men. And, oh, yes, did he mention that this friend of his was one of the senior partners in one of the two or three most important law firms in town? When I told him finally that I was pretty certain I was going to return to Oregon when I finished law school and open a practice of my own, his gray eyes fairly glistened as he told me how much he had enjoyed his only visit to the Northwest years before and that he could not think of a better place to live.
“My father is always trying to marry me off,” remarked Joanna in her breezy fashion when I tried to kid her that her father seemed to think she would be much happier in Portland than she had ever been in New York. She watched me with a teasing smile that was less teasing than it looked. “I told them the first night we met—
remember?—that I had fallen madly in love with you. I didn’t tell them—and I still haven’t told them—that you’ve fallen madly in love with me.”
If we had been in a restaurant, or sitting on one of the benches in the park, somewhere quiet where time belonged to us and questions came with answers and the only thing spoken was the truth, I am not sure what would have happened, what I would have said, but I would have said something and our lives might have turned out much differently than they did. It was the end of August and we had spent some part of every day together, and every time we said good-bye I could not wait until I saw her again. I did not know if I was in love with her, and for that I was a fool; because the only reason I did not know was that I had been in love before. It did not feel the same way: It was not nearly so all-pervasive, so all-consuming. I thought of her, looked forward to her, but I thought of other things as well. I was not smart enough to understand that what I felt about Joanna was closer to what you should, and that it was different when you were grown up than what it was like when you were still really just a boy. If I had had to tell her what I thought, things might have surfaced that, because I had not had to talk my way through them, were not yet clear in my mind. I started to say something, though I am not sure what it was, when Joanna’s eyes grew wide with excitement and she grabbed me by the arm.
“There he is!” she shouted into the deafening noise that had suddenly taken possession of the room. Moving through the crowd of the basement ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel like some shining golden eagle, John Lindsay, running for mayor, was on his way to the podium to greet a thousand new volunteers.
“Isn’t he gorgeous!” cried Joanna with a starstruck look. “Isn’t it wonderful! Isn’t New York the greatest place there is?” She was clutching my arm, smiling into my eyes. “Tell me you’ll come. Tell me that after next year, after you graduate, you’ll come here, to New York, to Manhattan. You’ll love it here—I know you will. It’s the only place there is.”
