A Bigamist's Daughter

by Alice McDermott

  But that’s not what he wants to hear; certainly not what she’d planned to say.

  She tells him she met her first lover at a peace rally.

  Again he turns to look at her. “Were you active?” This like an embarrassed intern checking on last night’s bowel movement.

  When she says, “Not really,” he seems relieved. “Neither was I,” he says. “We did take over the cafeteria at Andover once, but I was a bit too young for most of it.”

  “Wasn’t everyone?”

  He shakes his head, staring beyond her. “Christ, it was a vital time. There’s been nothing like it since.”

  She smiles at him, feeling thwarted.

  “It was really a Renaissance of sorts.”

  She nods.

  “I often wish I’d been old enough to participate, either in the protests or the war itself.” He sips his brandy. “Nearly every great writer has had some war experience to draw upon.” He sounds wistful. She feels forsaken. “I’ve even thought of basing my next novel on my father’s experience in World War II. He was in Navy Intelligence. He’s got great stories. But I’m afraid that research will never replace actual experience. Not when you’re dealing with war.”

  She nods again, sipping her brandy which burns her tongue and nose and settles like hot iron on her stomach. A nightcap before a blazing fire had sounded so appropriate she’d forgetten that she usually avoids brandy.

  Tupper lowers his voice. “But you were saying?”

  She looks at him, a little startled. She suddenly wonders if her own stories can compete with the shot and shell and bombs bursting in air of his next novel. “I was saying.” She pauses, mysteriously, she hopes, and looks down at the shadow of flame on the floor between them. Already she has made two false starts; what she tells him now must hold him, must have meaning and significance and whatever it takes to compete with Navy Intelligence. Must make her, indisputably, part of it, the bright young editor. He will know her worth by the ending he finds within her.

  “I was saying that maybe my father wasn’t the only bigamist figure in my life.” Her voice is a whisper and she pauses again to discover just what she’ll say next. She looks into the fire, feels it on her face. “I suppose my first real lover, the man I lived with for a while, could be called a bigamist figure too.”

  She feels him watching her but he says nothing and she continues to watch the flames. “He was tall,” she whispers, trying to begin. “And good-looking, extremely good-looking. The kind of good-looking that makes other men shy …” She feels herself approaching the subject as if it were a long-imagined reality finally seen. The way a soldier in a movie, returning home, might approach his own front door. Walking slowly at first, breaking into a run. “He was arrogant too. And charming.”

  He charmed her, she tells him, the first night she saw him, in a bar outside Rochester, her senior year at college. He was with another woman, a beautiful woman, and even in the dark, they seemed to glisten—both of them—as if they’d just stepped out of a sauna or had spent the afternoon rubbing each other with baby oil.

  She had long, strawberry-blond hair and very fair skin. He was darker, with thick hair and light eyes. They were both very tall. She always carried a red rose, twirled it between her fingers, dipped it into her beer, brushed it against her lips, his lips. They always stood in the same place, leaning against a wooden post between two booths, whispering to each other in a way that made her feel that whatever they had to say was inconsequential, only an excuse to put an open mouth to the other’s skin.

  “They were there every Friday night for nearly two months, and every Friday night I was there too—watching them.”

  The first time she saw them part, she says, it almost surprised her. They seemed so joined, she almost expected even their physical separation to be somehow incomplete, like a photograph that can’t be split fully in two because the man’s hand will appear bodiless on the woman’s shoulder or her arm will remain wrapped in his, and the first night they failed to return she felt a sad, hopeless kind of disappointment, as on a clear night with no moon. She broke up with Jeff, the boy she’d been dating, and slept with no one else all that year. With them in mind, she tells him, she began to see something pathetic, even unworthy, in all other pairings.

  “Strange,” he whispers, but she shakes her head.

  He had charmed her. Charmed her so that all other men were diminished in her eyes, so that she moved through those months she didn’t see him as if in an aura of light, unable to see anyone clearly, but vaguely aware of a certain, peripheral beauty, the certain knowledge that soon she would see him again.

  “I’d never felt anything like it before or since,” she says, and, effectively, her voice drops, almost with fear. She feels that slow, lovely, even sexual stirring of final revelation, unveiling. “After I graduated, my mother moved to Maine and I moved to the apartment in Flushing. I found a job with a paper company on Park Avenue. My official title was Gal Friday, but I comforted myself with the fact that paper was the staple of publishing which, along with social work, advertising and professional fund-raising, was something I’d said, in college, that I’d like to get into. I’d been there about a month when I saw him again.”

  He was sitting on a short, concrete wall outside an office building on Madison Avenue. He was leaning back, his elbows propped on the concrete planter behind him, and he was watching the people walking by so intently, she felt sure he was waiting for his girlfriend. Although she’d already had her lunch, she went into a coffee shop across the street and took a seat at the counter, where she could watch him through the window and the traffic. He was wearing a beige suit, his tie was pulled down, his collar opened. Because of his thick mustache, he seemed to be frowning, and she imagined how his face would change, light up, when he spotted the girl, her yellow/red hair shining in the sun.

  But a few minutes later, he simply stood up, stretched, and then, straightening his tie, walked into the office building behind him.

  She drank none of the coffee she’d ordered, but when she raised the glass of water to her lips, she saw her hand was trembling.

  She began to take her lunch hour at the same time every day, and, as long as the weather held, he was there. He would arrive at about a quarter to two, smoke one cigarette, watch the people walking by, and then, at two o’clock, get up and go into his building.

  Once she saw him return from lunch with two other men, and, after chatting with them for a while and then shaking their hands, he turned and sat down on his wall, smoked a cigarette, watched. He was twenty minutes late returning to work, she was fifteen.

  “A man of routine,” Tupper says.

  She nods.

  “And then?”

  She pauses, runs her fingers over her lips.

  It had been a long, boring morning. It seemed years between nine and ten and another six months between ten and eleven. She was filing, trying to play games with herself that would make the time go faster. She slowly counted out what she thought was five minutes and then glanced at the clock and found only two and a half had passed. She tried to remember, scene by scene, line by line, last night’s episode of Barney Miller, but got to the end of the show in a mere six minutes. She imagined Bill (although she didn’t know his name) in his office three blocks down, smoking a cigarette, giving dictation, stroking his thick mustache.

  When lunchtime finally came, it seemed nearly anticlimactic, as if being assured that all mornings do eventually end was somehow disappointing.

  Outside, it was a bright day, terribly hot; the sun glaring off the buildings and the sidewalk made her dull headache suddenly sharp, painful—the way a bright light turned on in the middle of the night is painful. Instead of going into the coffee shop, she bought a can of soda from a street vendor and sat on the stone wall, just where he usually sat. She closed her eyes for a minute, trying to relax her face. She didn’t want to be squinting when he saw her.

  He arrived with his coat off, his shir
t sleeves rolled up, but the sun allowed her only a brief glimpse of him, in the moment before he was absorbed by the bright electric blues and yellows and greens. He sat on the wall, further down, on the other side of the planter, and lit a cigarette, bending into his cupped hands. He flicked the match out into the street. She heard him sigh, saw him lean back, and she stopped thinking about herself.

  “Excuse me?” Her voice was small. She changed it. “Excuse me?”

  He peeked around the planter. His face was serious, but pleasant.

  “You’ll probably think I’m crazy, but were you ever in the Golden Door, in Rochester?”

  He smiled a little and his eyes went from her knees to her face. “Yes,” he said. “Plenty of times. Do I know you?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.” She shaded her eyes with her hand in order to see him better. “You just look somewhat familiar.”

  His eyes combed her again, head to knee this time, and then he put his cigarette in his mouth, biting it, and moved down the wall, close enough for his shadow to fall over her face. His eyes were terribly bright. “How familiar?” he said, smiling. And when he leaned closer to hear her reply, she felt as if he’d pressed his palm into her stomach, low, and that all her pulses had gathered under it.

  They began to meet like that every day: fifteen minutes on the concrete wall in front of his building while he smoked a cigarette and she drank a soda.

  The strawberry blonde, she learned, was Sarah, the woman he’d “been with” for the past two years. She was a nurse, just graduated from the University of Rochester, and the two were now living together in Forest Hills. He’d gotten his master’s in engineering from RIT two years ago and had spent every weekend last year upstate with Sarah.

  He spoke her name as, she has since discovered, so many men speak of their wives: without drama or emotion, as if he were simply naming the floor he worked on or the subway he rode home. Much later, when she tested him about what he remembered of their early days on the wall, he told her that he alternately felt she was either infatuated with him or totally bored. She had told him in one of their first lunchtime meetings, lying to offset what might seem to him the imbalance of Sarah, that she was seeing someone regularly (she used Jeff’s name and description for the lie) and Bill said later that knowing she had a boyfriend confused him when it came to figuring out just what she wanted from him. It didn’t occur to him that Sarah could have been equally confusing to her.

  At the end of August, they finally agreed to meet one evening after work for a happy hour and hors d’oeuvre supper at a small bar on Fifty-first Street. He seemed to know everyone there. Men and women came to him from across the dining room, along the packed bar. He laughed easily with them, getting serious only when he introduced her, as if she were some puzzling coin he had just found in the street. She ate nothing, drank heavily. She supposed that being with him in a dark bar, with his arm around the back of her chair, his eyes going to hers while someone else spoke, their thighs always touching, she should have felt like Sarah, slim and beautiful; should have felt she had somehow usurped her, won out.

  But instead she felt, once again, that she was watching him: that he was far away, in another corner, across the street, for his nearness—the faint laugh lines around his eyes, the large, round nose, the slight, bluish shade of a beard that brushed his white collar—seemed somehow unreal, unearned, as if she was merely watching him through field glasses or on a videotape. As if touching him was still an impossibility.

  She got very drunk. Leaving the bar, she stumbled and nearly fell, and he took her arm, laughing, and insisted he take her home.

  On the way to the subway, just around the corner from their concrete wall, he turned her around and kissed her, putting his right leg between both of hers so that she stumbled again. He bit into her lip, pressed her into his thigh. With anyone else she might have called such a kiss awkward, pawing, but with him she called it passionate.

  She thought of lovely Sarah with the single red rose.

  They took the train to Sixty-third Drive where his car was parked, and then he drove her to Flushing. She didn’t turn on the lights when they came in, but there was enough pink light from the window for them to see their way to the bed and for her to watch him as he undressed.

  She told him she loved him. Not because she was drunk enough to be excused for it in the morning but because he was rough and his beard was harsh and he bit into her in a way that made her feel her flesh would snap. Because the pain somehow jarred the phrase from her.

  She woke when he leaned over to kiss her good-by. He was fully dressed, with his shirt unbuttoned and his unknotted tie draped around his neck like a priest’s scapular. Her room was just getting light and she was somewhat disappointed, even offended, that he was dressed and ready to leave; as if she’d thought that once she brought him home, he’d stay forever, like a stray cat.

  “Sarah,” he whispered, “gets home at seven.”

  He kissed her again. His face was drawn, tired, darkened by his beard. “I’ll see you at lunch.”

  So she’d gotten what she’d wanted, what she’d dreamed of. After he left, she lay in bed, repeating the phrase to herself. She had wanted something and she’d gotten it. There. Finished. But even as she thought this, she imagined him driving down the road, onto the Parkway. The sun would just be rising. There would be little traffic. When he got home he would let himself into their apartment, shower, get into their bed, rubbing his arms and legs against the sheets to quickly make them warm. An hour later he would raise his head from his pillow, wearing a smile she had not yet seen, and welcome beautiful Sarah back to their home. All of her time with him shaken off like a dream. Not finished. Not ever really begun.

  She slept no more that morning but took a shower and dressed carefully. She rode the subway to work with more pleasure, expectancy, than she’d ever known and as she climbed the steps to the street, she felt an ache, a tightness in her groin and her thighs and low in her back, as if, she thought, she already had some part of him held inside her; bound by muscles and tendons, by her own tissue; as if there was something her body was learning to accommodate, straining to hold.

  “You truly loved him?” Tupper whispers, his voice almost reverent.

  She nods. “Yes. I loved him very much.” She could be Ingrid Bergman.

  They are silent for a while, their heads bowed. Her tale has done this to them.

  “Do you know the story from mythology?” he asks. “About how man and woman were created as one being, joined, androgynous, but that Zeus, seeing that they were arrogant, split them in two. And ever since the two halves have searched to find each other, to be joined again?”

  She watches the fire. “I’ve never heard it.”

  “It almost seems that’s how it was, with you two.”

  She nods. Between the logs, the embers are red hot, glowing. She thinks of all the stories that have been told around fires: stories of hunts and battles and ancient ancestors, stories of undying love. She thinks of all the facts that have burned while the stories were getting told. “Yes,” she says again. “It was almost like that.”

  “And when did you go to Buffalo together?”

  She licks her lips and tastes the residue of brandy. “That winter. He was transferred and asked me to come along. He’d left Sarah by then.”

  “And you lived together?”

  “Nearly two years.”

  “It was unhappy?”

  She looks at him. Even in the light of the flames, he looks pale. Or maybe just pale in comparison. “We were very happy,” she says, as if he has missed some essential point. “I loved him.”

  He leans closer to her, looking both curious and sly, like a detective, not quite sure, but, yes, perhaps, coming across some clue. A critic slowly recognizing some false turn in the plot. “Then what happened?” he asks.

  She looks at her glass. “It didn’t work out.”

  “Why not?” He
moves closer to her, hot on the trail. “It all sounds so perfect. And you say you loved him. You lived together, so I presume he loved you. What went wrong?”

  She raises her glass again, feels the warm path the brandy makes through her. The flaw would be to say she left him. Despite his beauty, despite her love, despite the fact that he alone was her mythical other half, she left him. It is a contradiction that the story cannot bear.

  “It was just one of those things,” she says, knowing he’ll want her to do better.

  “Another woman?” he whispers. “Did he meet someone else?”

  She looks at the fire, hears the wood snap and hiss. To say that she left him denies all the rest; but to say that he left her, he was wonderful and he left her, implies no contradiction.

  “Was it Sarah?” Tupper whispers. “Did Sarah come back?”

  She raises her head and nods once: Anne Boleyn signaling to the executioner, crying “God Save the King!” “Yes,” she whispers. “Sarah.”

  He touches her arm. “I’m sorry,” he says and his voice is filled with pity and love and, although she suspects not for her, a certain respect. “He was no bigamist then,” he says, leaning back. He seems relieved. “He was too loyal. A bigamist would have known how to keep you both. He would have made both of you his wife and kept you both.” He smiles and leans to kiss her thigh. “His loss.”

  She looks down at him and then suddenly lies back, the room tangibly cool behind her, the rag hearth rug beneath her somewhat damp. Her story will not do. It is, for him, without significance, without nobility. Tupper stretches out at her side. She closes her eyes. Listens for some other sound, something from the house, the barn, the road outside, even the ocean. But there is only the sound of the fire, like a slow, faraway wind. The sound of his breath. For the past hour their two small voices had been all there was to hear, and now, she thinks, it’s as if they’d never spoken. Now there’s nothing. Now she could tell the story again, tell it differently, change the names and the places and the outcome (What happened? We married and he thrived. What happened? I grew tired of hard winters. What happened? He died in Wisconsin) and there would be nothing left in the air to contradict her. Nothing of the first story that could bend or shape the second or the third. Only he could point out that certain details had been changed. And it would be his word against hers. The air could not testify, and no evidence could be found. They are, after all, two strangers, in a stranger’s home, in a town where no one knows them.