His Wife Leaves Him

by Stephen Dixon

  Why’d he take so long to call her? A week, maybe a day or two more. Thought about calling her every day during that time. Three-four times a day. What’s he talking about? Five-six times a days, some days more. Had his hand on or near the receiver lots of times while thinking about dialing her number. Picked up the receiver a few times to call her but put it down. After a couple of days of doing this he knew her number by heart. The number eventually also became his number when he gave up his apartment and moved in with her. He still knows it though they haven’t lived in what he always called her apartment for years. 663-2668. Lots of sixes, so that could be why it was so easy to remember and it’s stayed with him this long. They loved that cheap spacious rent-stabilized apartment overlooking the Hudson, but were evicted about fifteen years after they moved to Baltimore for not occupying it often enough. Some New York City law which a landlord can take advantage of if he wants. They didn’t fight the eviction. Would have cost too much and they would have lost. He dialed the first part of her number several times but stopped and hung up. Or stopped and held the receiver awhile, thinking if he should go on with the dialing, before hanging up. At least twice he dialed her number and hung up after the first ring, and he thinks the second time after two rings. If this were happening today—if he’d only just met her and was thinking of calling her to arrange a date—he wouldn’t let the phone ring even once before he hung up. She’d probably, living alone—in other words, all their personal circumstances would be the same but it’d be 2006 instead of 1978—have caller ID and she’d be able to call back and might say something like “Excuse me, I don’t recognize your phone number and no name came up with it on my cell phone screen, but did you just dial me?” He’d heard her, from the next room, do that once after, he assumes, she looked at the cell phone screen and didn’t recognize the number that had just called her. The only other time, though—at least while he was around—she didn’t call back and said something like “Maybe that ring was a mistake, but if that person does want to reach me, he’ll call again.” With him, when he once called her from his office at school and had to hang up after the first ring when he suddenly realized he was late for a meeting with his department chair, she said “Hi. Did you just phone me for any reason and then decide it wasn’t important enough and hang up? Whatever it was, I thought I’d use it as an excuse to chat with you, even if nothing new or interesting has happened to me or our sweet little baby since you left the house.” Either she heard the phone ring those two times he dialed her number and then hung up, or she wasn’t home or was in the bathroom with the door shut—she once said she always closed it when she was on the potty, even when she was home alone—or some other place in her apartment far from the phone—at the rear of the kitchen by the service entrance and pantry or putting the garbage out by the service elevator—and didn’t hear the phone. The one phone she had was in the bedroom, at the opposite end of the apartment. Soon after he moved in he convinced her to have a phone extension installed on the kitchen wall so he wouldn’t, if he was there, have to run to the bedroom to answer the phone. “I hate missing calls,” he said, “and it could be good news.” He never spoke to her about his hesitation in calling her. Hesitation? Fear. He was actually afraid of what he might lose, or not gain, so “fear” used loosely—anyway, if the conversation went badly on his part. If he sounded like an idiot, in other words. On her part, who cared, long as she agreed to meet him. No, that’s not altogether true, but go on. It would have been different if he had felt sharp and confident and other things like that. But those seven to nine days or however long it was he didn’t call her he felt weak, vulnerable, nervous, worse, every time he picked up the receiver or sat down on the bed next to the night table with the phone on it or even approached the phone to make the call. He doesn’t know why he didn’t tell her why he took so long to call her. Yes he does. At first he thought—very early on in their relationship—she’d think he was a bit silly and even immature having had those anxieties about calling her, especially for a guy who, judging by his looks and maybe his recounting certain experiences—when he got out of college and so on—was obviously, if he hadn’t already told her his age, about ten years older than she. He also didn’t want her to think he had had any doubts about calling and seeing her. But after a few weeks of knowing each other—meaning, once they really started going together—he thought she would have said in response to his what-took-him-so-long confession, something like “Why the worry? If I gave you my phone number or the way to get it, that had to mean I was willing to meet you, at least for a cup of coffee.” But by this time he didn’t see any point in telling her, or would tell her or speak about it only if the subject of what took him so long to call came up, and even then he might lie or skip around the truth. “I’m not ready yet,” he thought after her phone rang once that first time, and he hung up. “I’m still not ready yet,” he said out loud the next night or night or two after that, after her phone rang once or twice and he hung up. “What will make you ready?” he said. “Just feel ready. But so far the whole thing’s making me crazy. Look at me. My stomach hurts. I’m sweating. I’m talking to myself. I’m still talking to myself. I’ve got to call her already, but I’m still not prepared for it. How do you get prepared? And you’re just dragging it out, substituting ‘prepared’ for ‘ready,’ when you know they mean the same thing. Like I said: Get prepared. Be ready. You have her number, so call and relax and let her phone ring and don’t hang up. Do not hang up. Even if she doesn’t answer the phone, you were at least ready for her to.” Wait a minute; didn’t he talk to her a little about it? Not about how he got her number. It was a while later. Weeks, months. By now they were a couple, being with each other almost every night. Most days he’d work in his apartment, then around five or six or seven he’d walk uptown to her apartment, usually along Broadway, which was livelier and had more to see than Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues, or take the subway or bus. If it was raining hard or the sidewalks were icy, he always took the subway or bus. They were eating dinner in her apartment; duck, he remembers, which she cooked in a rotisserie her godmother had given her years before. She put down her fork, seemed deep in thought, then said something like “I was thinking. Maybe you don’t remember this. By the way, meat wasn’t undercooked? I’m relatively new at this kind of cooking, and have only used it once before because it makes such a mess.” “No, it’s good,” he said, “just right, perfect. You did it like a real rotisserie pro, and I’ll do all the cleaning up. You cooked, I’ll clean.” “It’s okay, I don’t mind. I hope you didn’t think I was complaining. But clear this up for me. How did you get my phone number to call me the first time? I’m glad you got it, of course, but did I give it to you on the street or did you get it from Pati or some other way on your own?” “Oh, boy, your memory’s getting to be as bad as mine. That could be what happens when you spend a lot of time with me.” “I don’t need that,” she said, cross, stern; she’d never come even close to acting like that to him before. He said “Sorry, I didn’t mean it as a slight. Truth is, I don’t know how I meant it. It was a stupid remark, if it was said without my realizing why it was said and what I meant by it. My apologies, honestly. Please accept them. Damn, our first disagreement or whatever you want to call it—where I made you angry at me—and all my fault. But not important, right? I hope not. You gave me your last name and the spelling of it and told me to look for it in the Manhattan phone book—that you were unique. You didn’t say that; I added it.” “So that had to mean I was willing to meet you for coffee or something simple and short like that, and we’d see how things went from there. But why didn’t I just give you my phone number rather than make you work for it? That wasn’t right,” and he said “I don’t think either of us had a pen and there was nobody around at the time to borrow one from.” “You, a writer,” she said, “who as far as I can tell has never left your apartment or mine without a pen and something to write on—never even gone to the toilet for any extended length of t
ime without a paper and pen,” and he said “Maybe you were in a rush to get to wherever you were going—I know you once told me but I forget what that was—or wanted to put me through some serious test on my pursuance of…of…Jesus, why do I get hung up on big words and long rambling sentences; probably the phony in me. In a nutshell: maybe you wanted to see if I’d make even that little effort to try to contact you. No, that’s not you. I don’t know why. Another thing that’s not important, do you agree?” Suddenly he has to pee. Can’t wait, either. Gets up, squeezes his penis to keep from peeing, rushes into the bathroom and sits instead of stands because the seat was down and he’s tired and he had a lot to drink tonight and most of it strong stuff and he feels a bit woozy, so thinks he might fall. Sitting down, he pisses a little on his thigh and the floor. This sudden urgency to pee is beginning to be a problem, he thinks. Something to do with his prostate? Worse? He once had prostatitis, more than thirty years ago, before he met Gwen. Only symptom was a few spurts of blood coming out of his penis one or two days, scaring him but there was no urgency to pee or anything different in his peeing, and he took some medicine for it a friend with the same condition had some extra of and it went away. He’s not going to call his doctor about it. If it continues, he’ll tell him at his next annual checkup. Or maybe he’ll put that one off—it was scheduled months ago—till next year, and maybe he won’t even go in for one then. He’s sick of doctors. Now that’s a funny expression. But he doesn’t want to see any of them. Saw them enough with Gwen, and all they seem to do—he knows that’s not all of it, but it seemed so with her—is put you through a slew of tests and medications and refer you to other doctors. Doesn’t think they did much for her but tire her out more than she already was as he dragged her from one doctor’s office and lab and imaging center to the next. Besides, this sudden urgency to pee could be from his drinking and maybe also, as sort of one thing setting off another, remembering Gwen mentioning the toilet in that business with his pen. It could also be his age, where he’s increasingly losing control of his bladder, just as his father did when he reached seventy or so, with nothing to do about it except pee more frequently though without waiting till he feels the need to. Prophylactic pees, once every other hour and a couple of times where he’d have to get up at night, so he wouldn’t have to run to the bathroom and wet his pants or his thighs and the floor. Or it actually could be his prostate, enlarged or inflamed or even cancerous, but the hell with it. Once you get to around his age, he’s read in a few newspaper articles, that kind of cancer is very slow growing, and the treatments for it could end up doing more harm to the body than leaving it alone. He thinks he’s got that right. Finished, no more drops or dribbling to come, he wipes his thigh and the bottom of his feet with wet toilet paper and then the part of the floor he peed on. Before throwing the paper into the toilet he checks the water for blood, is none, and goes back to bed. One thing he has to remember, he thinks, is not to become hypochondriacal. He’s bound to get sick one day, that’s a given, but for now he’s fine, not to worry, let him just have a little healthy time to himself. But what’s he going to do with his life from now on now that this whole thing is over and he’s really alone? In the morning. What is it, he thinks, resting the back of his head on the bed’s two softest pillows, that makes him want to sleep on his right side or at least start off in that position, rather than on his left side or his back? He never thought about this before? Thinks he has and that he even discussed it with Gwen, but forgets what he came up with. Oh, sure: the back’s easy for him to explain. It’s impossible for him to fall asleep that way. For thinking, okay. He’ll even get on his back in bed—either of his sides is no good for this—in the afternoon, not to nap but when he has a problem with something he’s writing and wants to work it out. He hasn’t written more than a couple of pages since Gwen died, and these over and over again. But when she was alive he used to say to her—she’d usually be in her study, working at her computer—“I’m going to take a break and rest awhile, so try to answer the phone, all right? I’m turning it off in our bedroom.” He’d take the paper out of the platen, cover the typewriter and put a paperweight or sea-polished stone he got off a beach in Maine or something heavy like that—the petrified wood his older daughter brought back for him from the Painted Desert—on the manuscript pages he was working on, and lie on the bed. The right side because, of course, that’s the side she ninety-nine times out of a hundred went to sleep on. Like him, before he had to do it for her, she turned over to the left side sometime at night. It was much easier for him to fall asleep if he could hold her or press up to her from behind. Her left breast. Both breasts. Left buttock. His hand between her thighs. So there’s his answer, no big deal, and he can’t imagine having discussed it with her. At the most he might have said something like, when they were lying in bed once, “I love holding you like this when we go to sleep. Don’t change it; stick with going to sleep on your right side.” He remembers she did once say she preferred falling asleep on her right side not only because her face faced open space, making breathing easier, rather than him and more bed on the left side, but also because she knew he liked to hold her when he was going to sleep and because she liked him to. “Otherwise, falling asleep,” she said, “one’s so alone.” So it’s obvious why, after twenty-seven-plus years of sleeping with her that way, why he still starts off on that side. And also…no, he was going to say it’s as if she’s still there sometimes, but he never feels that. Anyway, just a thought. But getting back to that first phone call, how do you get prepared to make a call like that, he thought, when you’ve little confidence you’ll come out sounding okay and you very much want to see this woman again? As he thought before: you don’t prepare yourself; you relax. You dial her number and wait for her to pick up and if she does, you say hello and your name and maybe where she knows you or you know her from and then jump right in talking about something you think will interest her. You might even say, not right away though, that old as you are, and you don’t want her to think you’re ancient—“Well, you know I’m not”—you still get a bit nervous and frazzled calling up a woman for the first time. Not that you call that many; you’re not saying that. In fact, to be perfectly honest, you could say, you haven’t called a woman for months, for a first time or one you know for a while. No, maybe that’d be too honest, he thought, and she’d think there was some hidden motive in his saying it. That he was trying to seem like someone he isn’t: right up-front, no hidden motives, and so on. Oh, he doesn’t know what. Instead he could say “Not that I do it regularly, calling up women, I want you to know, or calling up anyone. Phones were just never my best form of medium. I’m much better talking directly, with no, whatever you want to call it, interconnecting medium. There’s that word medium again,” he’d probably say if he said all that, “confirming to you, I’m afraid, my difficulty in talking on the phone. I wasn’t always like that, I want you to know. As a teenager I was a regular chatterbox on the phone with my friends and girls my age, infuriating my father, I can tell you, as he was pretty tight with money. Or maybe he was just being realistic, since you paid, I think, a dime a minute for a local call then, after the forty or fifty free minutes a month the phone company gave you.” But he wouldn’t even say that. Going into personal family history and his youth too soon, and most of the other stuff he’d sound silly saying and he’d get flustered trying to get out of it. Best: keep it simple and relatively quick. You’re relaxed, you’re ready, you dial and if she doesn’t pick up, you call again an hour or two later, still relaxed and ready, and if she doesn’t pick up then or the next time you call that night, you call the next day, and so on. But she has to pick up some time, unless she’s away, and even if she is, she’ll come back, and when she does pick up, you say “Hi, how are you?”—if she has been away, that’ll be his excuse for not having called sooner: he tried, her phone didn’t answer, he suspected she was away and decided to give it a few days—“it’s Martin Samuels, fellow you met at Pati Bro
oks’ party the other night, or should I say, in the hallway outside it, by the elevator.” Or better: “Hello,” or “Good evening”—no, too formal; just “Hello, it’s Martin…Martin Samuels, guy you met the other night in the hallway outside Pati’s party, both of us waiting for the elevator that didn’t seem to want to come. Did we ever figure out what the delay was all about? Anyway, how have you been?” and maybe, with her help, since he’s never been much good at initiating things to talk about on the phone, especially with someone he barely knows, the conversation will take off from there or just proceed naturally if maybe a bit awkwardly, but get better as it goes along. She might say something like “I’ve been doing okay, thanks, and you?” but the point is to get her to talk a little about herself and what she’s been doing so then he could respond to it. A new movie or museum show she might have seen that he’d seen also and they could talk about it, or if he hadn’t seen it—more chance of that with a movie, since he never goes to them alone—he could say “I’ve heard about it” or “read a review. Is it worth seeing?” Or he could try to come up with something else to get her to say what she’s been doing lately, he thought. Teaching. “How’s it going? I’ve never taught anything but junior high school for the Board of Ed for six years. Mostly per diem work, which wasn’t too awful because you just come and go in different schools and rarely see the same surly and sleepy and sometimes sweet faces for more than two days in a row. But for a year and a half I was a permanent sub, teaching language arts to eighth graders, the worst and most dangerous job I ever had, and believe me, I know: I once drove a cab here when drivers were being robbed and bumped off regularly.” If he did say that—maybe he wouldn’t say the cab part—he’d just be trying to bring her in and keep the conversation going—she’d probably say something like “What made it so bad?” “Knots in my stomach going home every day, and weekends ruined thinking about going in to teach Monday. And twice, a knife, pulled on me in class, and I had to physically disarm the kids, leading to the mother of one boy complaining to the principal that I ripped the kid’s sweater when I threw him to the floor and I’d have to pay for it. And one time I was going down the subway entrance after school and my least favorite student called me to look up and dropped a brick on my head. You probably saw the ugly scar my hair doesn’t cover up anymore because of my receding hairline.” He’d mention his growing baldness? Even in jest, why allude to it, possibly giving her more reason for turning him down? She already must think he’s a lot older than her. He’d more likely just say “which left a long scar on my forehead you might have noticed. Not so bad. My head’s full of them, most of them much smaller and on the sides where they don’t show, from when I was a very active but clumsy boy. I had that student suspended”—if she asked what happened to the kid, and if she didn’t, he’d just tell her—“and feared for the wholeness of my head for the rest of the school year, especially when he was let back in school after two weeks though not in my class.” She might ask why did he continue teaching if it was so bad? and he’d say “Money. At the time it was the best I could do and the long summer break gave me time to write. Not that I ever stopped while I was teaching, but did much less of it. But enough about me and my occupational hazards and adversities.” That’d be a good line if he got the chance to use it and it didn’t feel forced. “Tell me about your teaching. I want to know what it’d be like standing in front of a class without losing my voice every day shouting the umpteenth time for quiet, or not having to turn around every five seconds when I’m writing something on the blackboard, to prevent another head-cracking object thrown at me.” Then he could ask, if she didn’t bring it up, what are some of the books she uses in class and then talk with her about one of them he might have read—chances are always fairly good for that—or say he hasn’t read them all or maybe any of them, but one particularly he’s wanted to read, or if he’s read it, reread. “What’s a good translation of it,” he could say, “or maybe there’s only one? Wouldn’t I love to read even a semi-serious novel in the original foreign language. I’ve tried, in German and French, but couldn’t get halfway through them without going to the bilingual dictionaries a million times, even with Simenon and Remarque.” So, plenty of things to talk about. Her thesis and dissertation—what were they on? She could then say that would take too long to explain on the phone, and he could say “Then let’s meet. I’d like to hear about your work and what you’ve written, and if you’ve done book reviews or published some of your scholarly work, maybe I could locate them. I’m always interested in the art work and critical writings and such that people I’ve just met do.” He can be such a bullshit artist, he’s thought lots of times. Maybe less so now but plenty then. But whenever he is he tries to do it in a way where he doesn’t seem like one. Here, he’d just be trying to get over the early humps of his first call to her. Maybe, he thought, he should just say to her, without anything else about her teaching and writing and nothing about his, “I’m curious who some of the writers are that you teach, or did I say that the other night in front of Pati’s building? Even if I did—it sounds like something I’d ask because I’m always looking for something new to read—we talked for so short a time, we couldn’t have gone into it very much,” and then see where the conversation goes from there. If he does refer to his teaching and writing—even if he told himself not to, he could find himself doing it—should he slip in how, in his one free period a day in those schools, he used to, with a fountain pen, edit and then rewrite repeatedly, and never without making a change or two every time he rewrote the page, a couple of pages of a short story he was working on at the time, while the rest of the teachers in the teachers’ lounge were grading papers, writing lesson plans, napping, eating, smoking, talking, reading a newspaper, playing cards. It’d be a good anecdote, he thought, and again, without pushing it and if he could fit it into the conversation smoothly, give her an idea how committed he is to his writing. That he never leaves it home. In other words, if she asks what he means by that or he feels he needs to explain it or elaborate, that he always takes it with him, physically or in his head, so long as he has a copy of the original manuscript on his work table in his apartment in case the part he takes to school gets damaged to the point where he can’t read it or lost. And when she does answer the phone and they talk and the conversation goes well or lags a little but sort of reaches a certain time limit for a first call and he says something like “With all your teaching and other activities, you must be quite busy and I’ve taken up a lot of your time, so I should come right out with it and ask if you’d like to meet for coffee or something one of these days—tomorrow or the next day or whenever you’re free,” what could be the worst thing that could happen? She says no. But no with an explanation that does something to his stomach. She’s seeing somebody. Not only is she seeing somebody but it’s somebody she feels quite strongly about. She’s sorry she led him on. She probably wouldn’t say that. At the time when she gave him her phone number—“You mean, how to get it,” he’d say if she said that, and maybe say it a bit angrily, and she might say something like “Whatever way you got it—I wasn’t completely aware how deep my feelings were for this man.” She probably wouldn’t say anything like that either. She’d probably think she doesn’t need to explain. After all, they barely know each other, they only talked briefly, this is their first and probably their last phone call, so who is he to her? She’s not even sure about his name. Is it Martin Samuels? Samuel Martin? Oh, she’d know his name all right, he thought, but as a joke to herself it could be what she’d think. Lots of people, when they first meet him and some awhile after, have called him Samuel or Sam. Instead, she might say, if that she is seeing somebody what’s stopping her from meeting him for coffee and possibly also that she doesn’t want to lead him on, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.” If he said “Is it because you’re seeing somebody that’s stopping you from meeting me for coffee and also perhaps you might think you’d be leading me on?” she’d probably just say
she’d prefer not going into it. Or just—after he asks her if she’d like to meet him for coffee one of these days or even a drink—she’s sorry, she doesn’t think so and she’d rather not go into why, but it was nice meeting him even so briefly, maybe she’ll see him again at one of Pati’s parties, and this time at the party and not after they leave it. “She gives so many of them,” she could say, “and always one on her birthday, or has since I’ve known her, but where we have to promise not to bring a present.” “Yeah,” he’d say, “she already told me to set aside that date. An easy one to remember: Lincoln’s birthday,” and she might say “Darwin’s too—Pati told me that.” “Same here,” he’d say. “That’s the only reason I know and I’ll probably always remember it.” “Well,” she’d probably then say, “goodbye,” and hang up. Anyway, bad as he’d feel if she turned him down for coffee, or a drink at the West End, let’s say, which is just up the street from where she lives, on Broadway, he can only find out what her answer will be by calling her. But if she told him how to get her number, which is the same thing, really, as giving it, then it had to mean she intended to meet him, other fellow or not, at least for coffee, and to continue what he thought, and she might have too, was a fairly good conversation for a first one, at the elevator, in it and on the street. They did talk in the elevator, didn’t they? he thinks. More than just that business about pushing the floor button, or was that just in one of his dreams tonight? But the butterflies in his stomach, and they’re flying around now like fighter planes, he remembers thinking and writing down someplace and coming upon sometime later and thinking “What was in my head at the time to want to write down such crap?” are telling him something. What? Something. But what? That he really doesn’t want to blow this. He knows, he knows. So attractive and elegant and dignified, he meant to say, and seemingly good-natured and probably high-minded and obviously smart. He knows: whatever you do, don’t blow it. For how many future chances will he get to meet a woman like this? And he wants the whole works with one: sex, love, marriage, children, and the chances of getting all that, let’s face it, are fading. He’s losing his looks and hair and back teeth and is only minimally successful in his writing after almost twenty years at it, and the prospects, though he is being published by small places and in one recent big place though at the bottom of its list, seem slim of ever living anything but skimpily off it. And he has very little money saved and only a small amount of royalties owed him and no job possibilities to speak of and it doesn’t look good he’ll ever have them: applied the last five years to he doesn’t know how many English and writing departments, college and a few New York City private high schools to teach writing and, if he has to, a little contemporary fiction with it, and not one of them bit. Not one even asked him to be interviewed for the opening or wanted him, when he suggested it, to send his one and then two and then three published books. And a couple of them said, so many more must have thought, they’d never consider anyone who didn’t have an advanced degree in literature or creative writing no matter how great a teacher and writer he may be, “and I’m not saying you are,” one of them added, “though in all probability you could be. I’m unfamiliar with your books and have no idea what you’re like in the classroom and was simply being hypothetical,” and he doesn’t know what other kind of work he can now do. Certainly not bartending or waiting on tables again or subbing in public junior high schools. So what would he be bringing to a relationship at forty-two? Though she might have found him halfway interesting and even physically appealing to a degree and maybe intelligent or whatever positive things she might have found him when they first met, on the phone with her, since he’ll feel some pressure to perform and because of that will have a hard time trying to act naturally, she could easily think him dull or too self-absorbed, or self-conscious, or something, but fake. And just being nervous about calling her up and speaking to her and afraid of blowing it, he might say the wrong thing or a series of them and turn her off. Something dumb or trite or silly or truly stupid and then try to apologize or alibi his way out of it and get himself in even deeper. And would she agree to meet what she was beginning to believe was a silly or stupid man even once? Would he with a silly or stupid woman even once? he thought. He might. No, he wouldn’t. He’d think nothing good could come of it. Going to bed with the woman that first date? After all, if she’s silly or stupid or let’s just say not very clever, she’d probably be more persuadable, so there’d be a better chance. That used to be enough, but not anymore. He feels too lousy about it after. That he’s being totally dishonest, done something wrong, hurt the woman, convinced or tricked her into doing something she didn’t want to or intuitively knew not to and now thinks less of herself, and so on. And she’s a woman, this Gwendolyn is, who could probably get just about any available man she wanted, so he’s saying if he acts like a sap on the phone, why would she want to meet up with him? Though maybe she’s not as intolerant of people as he is, or so quick to pass judgment, is more like it, besides sensing his nervousness and making certain adjustments for that. After talking with people for a minute or so or a little longer, he often thinks he knows what they’re like—silly, stupid, vapid, nothing to say, no original thoughts, uninterested in anything serious he is—and he sticks with that opinion. She, on the other hand, might think—she somehow seemed like this—that everyone’s good for at least one conversation over coffee or a beer—well, maybe with her not the beer; but something he ought to try thinking himself, since he can be so rigid with people. That’s not the word he wants, but he knows what he means. You can learn a lot about a person, and thus, people in general, that first and maybe only talk: hopes, goals, background, life history, so on, so on. Where the person’s been, what the person’s done, and everything that goes along with it, whatever he means by that. Maybe no conversation, or few, between two people can be so wide-ranged and packed tighter than the first one if it’s long enough, hour or two, especially if they’re eager to get in almost everything that interests them or think the other person will think interesting and makes them look good, something he doubts very much she’d do and he has to watch out for in himself if, and he should be so lucky, it ever comes to that. It’d be interesting, though, to find out what she really thinks about what he thought she might—that everyone’s-good-for-at-least-one-or-two-hour-long-conversation, etcetera. For all he knows it could be close to what he guessed. And his hopes and goals and such, if they do meet and she asks? She’s a part of them, that’s for sure, but of course not what he so soon would want to express. Talk about scaring her off fast. He’d just be matter-of-fact, not give away anything as to what he’s been thinking about her, talk seriously about his writing and where he wants it to go and that if some college, preferably here but almost anywhere in the States if that’s all he can get, would give him a break and look at his list of publications and the New York State writing fellowship he’s gotten and not just his lack of any postgraduate degree, he’d like to start teaching, for the income and time it’d give him to write, and other things in his life—“To be honest, eventually marriage, children. I’m already past forty, so you understand, but not to rush into anything, just to have these things.” And after an hour or so and they’ve finished their coffee or she, tea, and maybe a refill—well, you don’t usually get a refill of tea unless it’s already in one of those small teapots that sometimes comes with the cup or mug—and start to leave—he’ll pick up the check even if she insists he don’t and she’s had something, for him, expensive with her coffee or tea. He’ll only have coffee and if she says something like “You’re not having anything to eat?” he’ll say “Not hungry, thanks,” although he might be but knows once she orders a sandwich or some other food like that and he’s intending to pick up the check, that he really can’t afford more. Or maybe he’ll do this—ask her if she’d like to meet him again—in front of the coffee shop, for that’s what he thinks it’ll be if she agrees to meet him a first time, someplace simple—and just pray, maybe ev
en hold his breath; in other words, hope very hard she says that important second yes. She does, he thought, he thinks he’d begin to believe that maybe they’d started something, for why else would she agree to see him again? Would talking about his fairly prestigious writing fellowship be too much like boasting? Not if he says it in a way where it doesn’t. For instance: The fellowship, and this only if the subject or it comes up or something closely related to it, enabled him for the first time in his life, and he’s been writing for around twenty years, to do nothing but write for a year. More than a year. He managed to stretch the fellowship money to a year and a half before he had to look for work again. His most productive period too, though he won’t say this to her, at least not yet, on the phone or if they meet, because that would really be boasting: forty-two short stories and a rewrite of a short novel, and most of those stories eventually got into one magazine or another and some of them into his first two story collections, while the novel is still making the rounds. Actually, he had another writing fellowship, but he doesn’t know if he’d want to talk about it, again at least not yet, even if he had the chance. Certainly nothing to do with boasting. He got it years ago, an academic fellowship, and he had to uproot himself to California at some expense to take advantage of it and about a third of the fellowship money went to the tuition of the once-a-week graduate writing seminar he had to take and he felt the criticism he got in class from the other fellows and graduate student writers set his writing back a year. Just about all of them and one of his two teachers, though they referred to themselves as coaches, hated his work, and the other teacher or coach thought he showed some promise in the short story form but none in the novel and that he was going through the obligatory experimental phase almost every serious writer in his mid-twenties does who’s been reading Faulkner, early Hemingway, Kafka, Borges and Joyce. Anyway, what he wants now, though, and he wishes he hadn’t set himself up for such a big disappointment if he doesn’t get it, he thought in his room about a week after they first met, sitting on his bed fully dressed, first week in December he thinks or last in November, for Pati’s party was right around Thanksgiving, either day after or before, holding the receiver so long the dial tone went dead, determined not to stall anymore but to call her right now or sometime tonight and if she doesn’t answer, he remembers thinking, not to wait around to call again but to go out for a short walk, maybe stop in someplace for a coffee or beer and call her from there or after he gets back home, is for her to say after they’d talked awhile about various things and he then asked her out some day for coffee—no beer: that could be the second date if the first went well—“Yes,” or “Sure, that’d be nice,” or “I don’t see why not,” or “Why not? What’s a good day and time for you and we’ll see if it jells with my own schedule? Let me get my appointment book,” but something like one of those and they work out where and when. Just imagine, he thought, if it came out like that. After he hung up the phone he’d go “Whoopee,” and make a fist and slam it through the air and maybe shout “Yeah, yeah; goddamn it, you dood it, you done dood it, you imbecile; it’s working,” and be all smiles and maybe have a shot of vodka from the bottle in the freezer or a glass of wine just to calm himself down and then go out to his neighborhood bar for a draft beer and hope his friend Manny was there—he usually was around this time; it had become his weekday nighttime hangout, first stool nearest the door if he could get it, under the shelf with the television on it and by the payphone, where he got and made calls—if when he reached her was the first time he dialed her and she answered and he hadn’t already been out for a short walk. Oh, forget it for now, he told himself or might even have said out loud. He thinks he did. “You’re still too nervous. You can call later if it’s not too late. Or tomorrow. But definitely no later than tomorrow if you don’t call tonight, around this time or late afternoon, the likeliest times, you’d think, other than early morning—and you don’t want to call anytime in the morning; that’d seem like you were desperate to reach her—when she’d be home. But again, not too late if you call at night. No later than ten, maybe ten-thirty, but not a minute after that, and probably, because your watch might be slow, no later than a few minutes before. People get uneasy when they get calls later than that. You do, anyway—a little uneasy: your mother suddenly sick or hospitalized or worse, for instance?—and she might. You can see her hearing the phone ring and looking at her watch or a clock and wondering who could be calling this late and what could it be about. And later than ten-thirty, she might be preparing for sleep. Or she might be tired after a long day and want to get to bed and be in no mood to talk. She might even be in bed or soon going to be with some guy, a boyfriend or just some man she finds attractive and likes to sleep with. You hope not. Come on, what you really hope for is that you become that guy—the boyfriend, though you’d take the other for as long as you both wanted it and it could always lead to something deeper—and you never know. You can look at what you’re giving off in a different way than you did before. You’re actually still not a bad-looking guy and she never has to see that you’re missing most of your back teeth, and you’re built well, tall, not much blubber. Okay, you have lost a fair amount of hair and nothing you can do about that, certainly not comb it over. But you’ve got brains and a sense of humor and you are a serious writer and published—there are plenty of serious writers your age who can’t even say that, or not published in so many places—and it’s happened with a couple of women as beautiful, or almost as beautiful as she. Give it time. Whatever you do—all this, of course, predicated on her agreeing to that first meeting—don’t push it faster than it should go. You think you know what you’re saying there. If all works out, it could end the way it did with the two other beauties, but better, and one of them—the other said she’d never marry you, when you raised the possibility; being married once was enough, she said, just as her one kid was all the children she wanted: that living together till either one of you lost interest in the other was as far as it could ever go—you were even engaged to, only time you were engaged, and came weeks or months away from marrying her, when she broke it off. Why? Some bullshit excuse that was nowhere near the truth. Their different religions and also that she didn’t want to get tied down so young. She was how old? Twenty-five or twenty-four. Twenty-four, spring of ’61, and you were a few months older. Maybe in the future, she said. Truth is, she didn’t love you that much, nothing like the way you did her, and she didn’t want to come out with it because she didn’t want to hurt you. And when you grabbed her shoulders and shook her back and forth and screamed for her to give you the real reason she was breaking it off and admit she was getting rid of you for good, she told you to get your things together—she hadn’t planned to ask you this soon, she said—and leave her apartment because she was afraid you were next going to hit her. ‘I could, I could,’ you said. But enough; no more talking to yourself out loud or at least not to go on so long with such chatter. Bad sign. Of what? Of the obvious.” Anyway, it’s not like he has a problem. He’s not crazy, in other words. Talking to himself out loud isn’t something he does regularly or has ever done, far as he can remember, at such length before. He was just horsing around, so what’s the harm?—nobody was here to listen. And the butterflies—butterflies and horse, he thought; anything to make of that?—are gone. Went when he decided not to call her just yet and maybe not even till tomorrow. So maybe that’s why he talked out loud to himself so long. To get his mind off the call he knows he’s going to make. Something like that. He remembers slamming the receiver down fast after one or two rings the two times he dialed her entire number. So there’d be no chance she’d answer the phone and hear him putting the receiver down without saying anything. He thought she’d be alarmed or concerned in some way if she heard the slams. But he thinks he got the receiver down before she’d be able to pick up the phone. He just didn’t want to get caught. Caught how? She wouldn’t have known it was he slamming the receiver down. She might have guessed, though, may
be not the first time but the second—a wild guess, maybe something to do with the nervous and erratic way he thinks he acted with her by the elevator and then in it and later on the street and also that someone ringing and quickly hanging up twice in so short a time in one night, and the chances are pretty poor it could be two different callers, would seem less like an accident than only once would be—that it was he and wonder, if she was right, and it increasingly looks like she is, she might think, why he didn’t stay on the phone. Butterflies in his stomach at speaking to her? she might think. She’s so beautiful and desirable that it’s probably happened, and she’s aware of it, with other guys when they first called her for a date, he bets. If she asks, when he does finally call her, did he call her twice before or twice in a row last night and hang up after the first rings—it was just so unusual, she could say, and she thought, for some reason, it might have been him—he could say it wasn’t, this is the first time he called, or he did call those times she said and he hopes he didn’t upset her, and then give an excuse. Suddenly had to go to the bathroom and she might say “Twice?” and he could say “Yes, unbelievable as it might sound—and I don’t have a health problem with it, by the way—twice.” “Why didn’t you call back after?” she might say, and he wouldn’t know what to say to that, or not right away, so some other excuse. He’s good at excuses, or usually. He’s a good liar, is what he means. Probably has something to do with being a writer, or what helped him or steered him into being one. “I suddenly—just after your phone started ringing—got an idea for a story,” he could say. “I’m a writer, you see—I don’t know if I told you that night we met—fiction, only—so an idea for a story involving several phone conversations, though not one with you, and wanted to write it down before I lost it, and hung up. I figured I could always call you back later, but a good story idea, when I lose it I usually lose it for good. I hope you didn’t mind, hearing the ringing cut off. And I was right. Wrote the idea down, then started on the first draft of the story right after—somehow got caught up in it—and I wrote the entire first draft in one sitting and it’s a story I like and that stays with me, so after I finished the work I was working on—a short-short that took much longer that I thought—I started the first draft of the new one and will work on it till it’s done.” “I can understand your hanging up for that,” she could say, “but why did you hang up a second time without waiting for me to answer?” “Did I say I hung up twice?” he could say. “I guess I did. Well, to be honest, and it wasn’t something I thought quite right to talk about in our first phone call, but the first time I hung up—getting the story idea was the second—occurred when I all of a sudden had to go to the bathroom. I have no medical problem with it, you see. I just waited too long.” “What’s the story about,” she could say, “other than involving several phone conversations?” He could say “Oh, I’m very bad at summarizing my plots—they always come out sounding idiotic and trite—but I’ll give it a try. It’s about a writer, pretending to be a customer, who phones several bookstores in town asking if they have his newly published book. Saying things like ‘I think I have his name and the title right—anyway, it’s supposed to be an exceptional novel.’ Or ‘I tried getting it at a bookstore closer to my home but it was all sold out,’ etcetera. None of the seven or eight stores he calls carry his book or had planned to and most of them hadn’t even heard of it. Maybe all of them hadn’t heard but they just didn’t want to admit it. His aim, or course, was to generate interest in the book and increase sales. What he finds out, though, is that his novel, far as interest and sales go, is pretty much a flop, which will hurt if not kill his chances of selling his next novel to the same publisher. Not to go on too long about this, most of the salespeople he speaks to on the phone say they can special-order the book for him and have it in the store, depending on its distributor, in a matter of days. To the first one he says something like—to the others he just says ‘Don’t bother’ or ‘No thanks’—‘Yes,’—and all this will change a little to a lot in the final draft, since I do more than one of them and am always changing the text—‘Yes, please order it for me—I wish the bookstore near me had suggested that—and I’ll drop by in a few days to pick it up,’ which he had no intention to. And this woman, or maybe it was a man—doesn’t matter—asks for his name and phone number so she can call him when the book comes in, and he says ‘Actually, I’m going to try some other stores to see if one of them has it, because I want to start on it right away,’ and so on. You get the idea.” He also thought in his apartment that night when he was debating with himself whether to call her now or put it off another day, maybe he’s blowing this way out of proportion and she’s really not right for him and same for him to her, so why bother? He was also worried—but didn’t he go over this before? He’s almost sure he did but forgets what it was he thought. Anyway: worried he’ll sound like an idiot on the phone with her and he won’t have anything to say, and he can’t just come right out and say “Like to meet for coffee or a beer sometime this week?” without saying much of anything before. And he’ll hem and haw and then probably apologize for hemming and hawing and maybe even admit he’s a bit nervous speaking to her—now all that he’s sure he went over before in his head. And she’ll probably ask why, or she could, or she might not say anything but she’ll certainly think it and already have formed a not very positive opinion of him and maybe think him, which he can be at times, a little goofy and juvenile and even somewhat dumb. By then, she might want to end the conversation, what little there likely is of it, because it was obviously going nowhere and she was getting tired of it and has things to do and it was getting late, and say—just come right out with it, since she has no interest in him so has nothing to lose—Did I really tell him how to get my phone number? she might think during or after the call—that she doesn’t think it’s a good idea their getting together, if that’s what he called for, and she can’t imagine, she could say, any other reason for his call, and it was nice speaking to him but she has to go now and then say goodbye and hang up, maybe not even waiting for him to say goodbye. No, she’d wait. And she wouldn’t be so blunt. Way he reads her he’s sure she’s never rude and is usually very polite and would never slight or say anything that would hurt or anger him in any way, if she could help it, and she would know what would. But isn’t most of how he imagines the phone conversation would be, going too far? First of all, surely he could talk and act on the phone much better than he’s depicted himself here. Secondly…well, he forgets what that was. Anyway, he might be nervous or anxious on the phone with her, or maybe not, but he’d be able to control it where it doesn’t show. Answer this, though: why’d you think she might not be right for you despite your wanting to call her so much? The possibility of your not being right for her you’ve already gone into, you think. Physically; intellectually, perhaps, and maybe even the age gap. Forget the “physically.” You can see her—again, just something about her you quickly picked up—dating and even sleeping with, if she thought highly of the guy enough, homely, intelligent and artistic men. Scholars and talented poets. Architects who read, and the like. But the first question you asked? And there’s those times when you’re feeling worst about yourself and don’t think you’re right for any woman, but that always passes. Who doesn’t have serious self-doubts? But answer the one about her not being right for you. I don’t know. Yes, you do. I just can’t this moment come up with an answer for it. Yes, you can; don’t worm your way out of it. Her looks. Was she really all that good-looking? Oh, come on. First you think she’s gorgeous and then you don’t think she’s that good looking? I didn’t say she wasn’t. I was just wondering if I saw right. I did have a little more than a little to drink that night. Also, my eyes are bad and my glasses are old and I need a new eye exam and lenses, so I could have mis-seen what I saw, for want of a better expression or word. “Mis-seen” isn’t either, right? Stop it. She was pretty, very pretty, maybe beautiful, maybe even drop-dead gorgeous, besides being excepti
onally pleasant, gentle and bright. Pleasant and gentle, yes, but that could just be good manners. But how can you tell about her being so bright, for you know I wouldn’t want to go out, over a period of time, if it ever came to that, and same with sleeping with, with someone who wasn’t, not necessarily “exceptionally,” but very bright? The way she spoke, her look. The words she used, and other things: her voice. Maybe she’s too smart for me, then. Did she seem that way? No. She just seemed smart, learned, quick, articulate, and probably very bright, and interested, from what I could make out—I forget what it was, but it was something—in some, maybe many—no, we didn’t talk long enough for me to say “many”—of the same things as me. Literature. She teaches it, must have spent years at a very high level studying and writing about it. She has a Ph.D., said so at the elevator. But you know these academics. No, what? I never really got along with them, and for some reason the women more than the men. There was Eleanor, years ago. No Ph.D., just a master’s in English literature, not that I’m knocking it with that “just.” I barely made it out of college and never wanted to go further. Actually, not so. In ’58, couple of months after I graduated college and exactly ten years before I met Eleanor and twenty before today—those ten-year intervals could be significant, although in ’48 I was in seventh grade—I started an M.A. in American lit at Hunter and lasted all of three weeks. Walked out of a class in bibliography—one of my two courses—other was in pre-or post-colonial or -Columbian literature—remember, this was twenty years ago—still open to me because I registered so late. Left in the middle of the class, in fact, with the professor saying to me as I gathered up my books and stuff and headed for the door, “Yes?” and I saying “I’m sorry, this is just not for me. I was either naive or stupid enough to think that going for a master’s in literature, we’d just read and talk about what we read, and after class, sometimes with the teacher, go out for coffee or beer and talk some more about our books and all sorts of things.” No, I didn’t say that, but wanted to. Also, what a pedant I thought he was and that I can’t, because of the technical language of his trade, understand half of what he says. What he actually said to me was “Mr. Samuels, is it? Class hasn’t been dismissed,” but I just left the room without saying a word. But Eleanor—second woman I went with, although she was the first, whose thesis was on some aspect of Dickens’ work. Windows, I think, and doors. “Oubliette.” I never heard the word before and don’t think I’ve seen it since. Good in bed, though she needed a lot of pot to get that way, but unattractively coarse and stingingly frank and aggressively self-serving and insufferably smug. Enough adverbs for you? I usually don’t use them other than for “obviously” and if “probably” and “possibly” are adverbs. Boy, what she would have done with that. “Hey, buddy, let’s get to it,” she once said. “You only helped me get one orgasm, while I helped you get three.” I didn’t have three but couldn’t convince her, so had to perform when I was spent. I told her this can lead to a heart attack and she said “Rubbish, you’re too young.” The second and third orgasms she referred to were continuations, separated by silence for a few seconds and then accompanied by the familiar noise, of the only one I had. But an example of her smugness? “Oh, you didn’t know Dickens died before he was sixty? You must not have been paying attention in your high school English class.” He did die that early? It’d seem with all those lengthy novels and book-length travel journals, he had to have lived well into his seventies and never put his pen down till he dropped. No, under sixty, but not by much. Funny, she mentioned high school, because that was the only time I liked Dickens. The abridged Tale of Two Cities. I memorized and used to declaim when I was alone and nobody could hear me the “It is a far, far better thing and place,” etcetera, speech, from the ending. But as an adult, I didn’t much care for Dickens. All those masterpieces I thought weren’t. A good storyteller, if you like stories. Today I’d say MFM: made for movies. In those days, for reading tours. Written too quickly, with little re-examining and revising, and some of the most contrived situations and resolutions and initial encounters and final partings imaginable. Or that’s my take on his work, but I could be wrong and he did write meticulously and go through multiple revisions, but to me it didn’t come out that way. Two carriages going in opposite directions, each containing a member or members of the main cast, passing each other without recognizing the other at dawn, usually while crossing a moat. Maybe I’m exaggerating. Also, I don’t know what funny names do to you, but they don’t make me laugh. I once said some of this to Eleanor, and did she blow up. “You should be a quarter as good as Dickens,” she said, “an eighth as good, even a sixteenth, in any page from all of his books, but with the literary conventions of your own century. Even if you adored his work you’d probably say otherwise, simply to rankle me. Anything I’m good at and devoted to, you put down.” That true? No, I admired a lot of what she did, particularly how fast she read and got her ideas down, and went out of my way to praise her. Just when it comes to literature and what I like, I don’t fool around. I break off a twig, chew one of its ends to a sharp point, dip it in ink and draw the line. What that means and where it came from, beats me. “Blood” for “ink” wouldn’t make any more sense, or not to me at this moment, but it does sound more serious and dramatic. But I’m not much for the unconscious or accidental supplying some of my original ideas and thoughts, creative and otherwise. I think I meant something there that’s connected to what came before it. What’s the word for a mind that’s going? It shouldn’t be for a guy my age but sometimes it seems like it. Anyway, he never got along for very long with academic women—women who teach literature in college and have one or two advanced literature degrees—and he probably won’t with this Gwendolyn or Gwen. Why? He’s already spoken about some of her more positive qualities: pleasant demeanor, good looks and speech, soft voice and quiet smile, and she seems to have similar interests as he and an even disposition and a terrific mind. So, what’s not to like? as his father used to say, though he was talking about other things: money and schemes to make it and getting things for free. She seemed a lot different than Eleanor and Diana, his other Dickens scholar. They were okay, he’s not really complaining about them, and they certainly had a lot to put up with in him—he doesn’t want to go into it but there were many things he did to them that were wrong—though they could be a bit stagy and stiff and too often cold and hard. It didn’t seem she could be any of those, especially cold and hard, or if she could it’d be rare, short-lived and justified. How can he tell? He can’t, little time he was with her. Then why’s he saying it? Probably to give him more reason to call her or ward off reasons not to. Did he make any sense there? he thought. Does anything he say make any sense? He used to, almost all the time, but maybe he was mistaken. Maybe meeting her and wanting to call her so much and see her again has made him more unsure of himself than he typically is. What else? What else what? Her, about her. He liked the way she was dressed. Simply, good taste, muted colors. Small matter, but it does say something about why he was attracted to her. He likes his women—now that’s funny; his—not to dress stylishly or ostentatiously or expensively, and nothing she wore seemed that way, or to wear something or have on some adornment that calls attention to herself and you think she only put it on because it does. Again, is he making himself clear? he thought. He knows what he wants to say but is having trouble saying it clearly in his head and he for sure would have even a worse problem if he had to say it out loud. It’s late, or it’s not so late, so maybe it’s just been a long day, but it’s something, so don’t worry about it. But he doesn’t want—a thought he knows he’s already had tonight—to call her and have his words dribble out uncohesively. Incoherently. Unintelligibly. Un-or incomprehensibly. He’s not joking with himself: suddenly he doesn’t know. And right now if he had to decide on only one to use, because two or more if he said them to someone might seem like showing off, he couldn’t. Couldn’t decide. But to illustrate something he touched on before—cloth
es: Eleanor wore what to him were ridiculous hats and wool caps made in Guatemala and Morocco and Peru and enormous metal necklaces, maybe from the same places—she had family money and was a world traveler—that clinked when she bent over or walked. And Diana, who grew up “dirt poor,” she said, “and made it all the way through grad school, unlike some of your previous girlfriends, entirely on my own,” had a new hair style or cut every other month, it seemed, some of them he thought unflattering and made her intelligent face look a little silly. “What do you think?” she’d say. “You haven’t said anything.” “About what?” and she’d say “My hair; you noticed. So, out with it. Is it the disaster your face says?” and he’d have to hedge or lie. “I don’t know what was wrong with the last one, and all these different stylings must come at considerable expense, but this one’s nice too.” Gwen had beautiful straight hair, worn simply. “Worn” the right word? Oh, there was another Dickens scholar. How could he have forgotten her? Also had her long blond hair up when he first saw her and he also wondering how far down her back it’d fall. Or he thinks he wondered that about Gwen at the party. Sharon’s almost reached her waist. He likes long hair on women. All the things they can do with it. Loves it when he’s on his back in bed and the woman’s on top and leaning over him and her hair would cover his shoulders and head—this only happened with Sharon and Gwen—blocking out the light. And if not Dickens, then at least Victorian literature, and a Ph.D. also, so her studies, and possibly her teaching, had to include Dickens. California, Bay area, thirteen years ago. Got along with her just fine for about a year—in fact, as smooth a relationship as he ever had till then…never a disagreement between them till she broke up with him. Then he went berserk, smashed a glass on the floor, pounded the wall with his fists, called her a whore and a liar and a bitch who’s just been leading him on or stringing him along but doing crap like that to him since they met, and even threatened to hit her. Saw her three to four times a week—usually she drove to his place because her husband, who she said had no trouble with her romance with him—“He’s had his own sweeties, one he really flipped over, and he above all hates hypocrites”—worked at home. Then she wanted to have a child, and to be sure, for genetic reasons, who the father is—“It’s very important medically, you know, and if he ever separated from me, for financial support”—and because she wanted to conceive soon as she could and then lead a normal family life—“I know I must sound like an utter bourgeois on this, but when it comes to my own child, out comes the hidden traditionalist in me”—she couldn’t see him again except if he wanted to meet from time to time for coffee and just to talk and to see how big her up-till-now tiny belly can be. Before he went crazy that day, he said calmly “Divorce him and marry me and have a child. I’ll never cheat on you, I’ve been wanting to get married for years and start a family, and you love me more than you do him.” She said “No, I don’t. What made you think that? You’re a sweetheart, but you come in second. And for my marriage to end, my husband would have to divorce me. But he likes the way things are and doesn’t mind adding marital fidelity and a baby or two to them. Besides, he’s a successful writer, so has the means, while you’ll be struggling for years.” Met her at a health-food co-op in Berkeley. Diana he was fixed up with by a friend in New York. Eleanor he also met at a party in SoHo, but so far east it might be called something else. Sharon was behind him on the checkout line with three items in her hands: an unsliced loaf of millet bread, a can of inorganic garbanzo beans and a square chunk of tofu in a little plastic bag tied with a tab and almost filled to the top with water, like the kind one carries home a goldfish in from a pet store. Remembered how the bag always stunk from fish feces when he opened it. How’d he get the fish into the bowl without the feces? It was so long ago. When he was a kid. He gave them names. One was “Goldie.” The fish kept quickly dying, never lasted more than a few days, so he must have done it several times before giving up on owning a fish. Probably emptied the bag out into a container of water first and then picked the fish up with his hand or a net and put it into the bowl. “If that’s all you have,” he said, “—even if you have more”—he was immediately attracted to her as he was to Gwen—“go in front of me. I’ve got a lot more than you.” She said “No, thank you. I’m in no hurry. And what I have is hardly weighing me down.” “Put everything on the counter then,” and she said “The water could spill and I didn’t bag the bread.” “Of course,” he said. “I should have realized that. I don’t know what’s making me so dense, but you’re right,” and he couldn’t think of anything else to say and she looked away from him, so he turned to the front. Outside the store, he tied and retied his shoes, waiting for her. When she came out, same three items in her hands, he stood up and patted his pants pockets as if he were searching for his wallet or keys or just wanted to make sure they were there. Then he looked at her as if he had only just noticed her and said, “Oh, hi. Just thought I lost something, but as usual I didn’t. Wait a minute. None of my business, but you going to carry that bread home or to somewhere, not in a bag?” She said “I have a bag for it in my bicycle but forgot to bring it in with me,” and she unstrapped one of the saddle bags on a bike in a bike rack in front of the store, got a paper bag out of it and stuck the bread in. “So you slice it each time?” he said. “With a breadknife,” she said. “The loaf always falls apart when I do it that way, even with a breadknife, which is why I get it sliced.” “It stays fresher unsliced,” she said, “and will stay even fresher if you put a few raisins in the bag.” “Raisins?” and she said “Take my word. Try it.” Then she put her three items into the saddle bag, the tofu wedged between the beans and bread and something else holding it straight—a rolled-up hand towel, it looked like—so it wouldn’t move around and burst or spill. “Very ecological,” he said. “I should do more of that. I try, in other ways—biking instead of driving if it isn’t raining hard and the distance isn’t too great and if there isn’t an enormous steep hill along the way, since my bike’s only got one speed, unlike yours—but I never thought to bring my own bags to a store. I’m afraid I’ve only used them for my garbage till now.” “That’s putting them to good use,” she said. “You’re being ecological by not buying garbage bags, which would probably be plastic.” “I suppose. But what if I first used the bag to carry home goods from a store and then used it for my garbage?” “You could do that. Doubly useful. What an odd conversation this is.” “Well, you get into things, you never know where you’re going to go, but we’ll get out. Unfortunately, I’m almost inherently discursive and digressive. My father, by the way—am I holding you up? I shouldn’t say that, because I’m enjoying the conversation,” and she said “I’ve got a few minutes.” “My father was practicing ecology or environmentalism or whatever the right word for it is, long before most people, it seemed. But more out of thriftiness, which I’m sure came from his family being very poor when he was a kid, than saving the planet or preserving it a few years more than the global experts were giving it because of our planetary profligacy, I guess you can call it. As an example, and he’s retired now and disabled and quite sick so he no longer does this, every day for lunch he took a sandwich to his office wrapped in the same wax paper he used for the entire work week. That is, if it didn’t get too messy or tear, and by the way he wrapped the sandwich and refolded the paper after he used it, he made sure it wouldn’t. He probably would have used it the following week too but had no place to keep it over the weekend. My mother I know wouldn’t have allowed him to stash it in the refrigerator someplace because if anyone saw it, it would just seem too cheap, and if he kept it out for two days the paper would stink and parts of it maybe rot by the time he used it again Sunday night. Same routine with the paper lunch bag he carried the sandwich in, if it also didn’t get too greasy or start to come apart. Folded the bag carefully along its natural seams after taking the wrapped sandwich and paper napkin and that day’s whole fruit out of it—apple, orange, tangerine, etcetera. Napkins he used came
from the dairy cafeteria he treated himself to lunch to about every third week, maybe also to restock his napkin supply. Would grab a couple of handfuls out of the dispenser and stuff them into his jacket and coat pockets. Where he kept them at home I don’t know, but he took me to lunch there once or twice and I saw him do it and figured out that’s where his never-ending supply of napkins came from.” “Outside of the napkin part, she said, “it seems he knew what he was doing, reusing what other people indiscriminately throw away.” “I guess, but I’m not certain, though I like your idea of looking at it in a good light. When I was growing up, though—even till about five or ten years ago—I saw it the way my mother did: that he was cheap. But to really exhaust the point and also to see this segment of my father’s life, since it is sort of a story, to the end and then I’ll stop, though I’ll stop sooner if you want me to, he made the sandwich right after dinner, or right after he smoked his cigar after dinner—wouldn’t allow anyone to do it for him—usually from a few slices of that meal’s meat leftover. If it didn’t look like there was going to be any meat left over, he saved a slice or two already on his plate and made the sandwich from that. What I’m getting to here is that if he only ate half the sandwich the next day, he brought the other half home with him, or whatever was left of it—even meat and bread scraps—in the same wax paper and bag he took the sandwich to work in and gave it to our dog, no doubt, in his mind, to save on the dog-food expense and, looking at it the way you do, to cut back on waste. He certainly didn’t do it because he liked the dog. He called her ‘public nuisance number one.’ The only thing I can think of now working against taking the sandwich half and scraps home is that it gave the wax paper and lunch bag one less chance of surviving the entire week. After the dog died from something she ate—it wasn’t from the sandwich but something she managed to claw out from behind the stove—I don’t know what my father did if he didn’t eat the second half of the sandwich, and there had to be times he didn’t, since he never brought it home. Okay, that should do it, and did I go on? This is the classic tale of a stranger telling a stranger his family history and life story, but much more than she bargained for or ever wanted to hear.” “No, I didn’t mind,” she said. “I kind of liked it. You’re a funny guy. And I bet everything you said was intended to be funny, so a successful funny guy. So, not only amusing but interesting, your delivery and material, in a sort of time-capsule way. What was your dog’s name?” “Penelope. I named it before I even heard of Homer. I must have got the name from a character in a comic book, which at the time was all I read for diversion. Anyway, enough of me. I’d like to shut up now. You might think that impossible, but I’m really not much of a talker and don’t know how I got started rattling on so much. I’d much prefer hearing some of your life story and family history, but over coffee if you have a few spare minutes. More if you have more but a few if that’s all you can spare. I’d also like to know what you meant by my delivery. But could we do that?” Please, please, he was thinking, and she said “I don’t see why not. My bike’s safe here even without a lock—the co-op manager once told me they never had a bike stolen—and what little food I have won’t spoil. To save time, should we go to the snack bar they have here?” They went back inside, split a warmed-up buttered corn muffin and had herbal tea, his first. She ordered it for herself and he told the counterperson “I’ll have one too,” since the store had no regular coffee—not even in pound bags on the shelves—just grain coffee, which he didn’t like. He thought he spoke more articulately and his mind was clearer and he said more intelligent and clever things when he drank caffeinated coffee with someone, at least when his was real coffee and black and strong. That was then; not today and not for years. Now he doesn’t think it makes a difference, with or without. He’s become somewhat inarticulate and often unintelligible, when he was almost never that way, and gets lost in what he’s saying or breaks off his speech in the middle of a sentence because he forgets what point he was trying to make. There’s a long word for it he always forgets. Starts with an A or O, he thinks, and when he finally remembers it, he forgets how to pronounce it. What happened to him to make him like that? Age; again, loss of confidence and resistance to doing anything new or to change. Not that so much or much of it at all, but just things repeating themselves. Page after page, section after section, novel after novel, and so on. Same job and same workers at work and same bed and same newspapers and same news and same things to eat and drink and clean up and same dawn. Wait, what’s he missing? Gwen getting sick, that changed things, but ended up being the same day-to-day tasks taking care of her. Ah, why worry about it? He’s not worrying, just thinking. But to get back. And why’s he going on so long about Sharon? Could be because she reminds him of Gwen so much, more than any woman he’s been close to. The quietness and education and intelligence and serenity and sense of humor and modesty and the way she smiled and spoke and her soft voice and the soft features and other soft things and that she always had a book with her and read a lot of poetry. Both also wrote poetry. Sharon, he later saw, published some of hers in literary magazines and may have even had a book or two of her poems published, while Gwen never sent hers out. “It’s not that I fear rejection,” she said, when he said if she doesn’t want to do it, he’ll send them out for her, he knows the market. “They just never seem ready.” Maybe he can put together a collection of her poems, he thinks, with help from a poet friend of hers and the kids. Might take some doing, retrieving them from her computer, but the kids are probably whizzes at that. Also, how he met her. No, not even close, so why’d he think it? Gwen was by the elevator, after his eyeing her at the party for so long and she a few times catching him doing it, though she denied it. Sharon on the checkout line, when he looked around, as people waiting to be taken care of will do on lines, and saw her for the first time—she was looking around too and didn’t for several seconds see him looking at her—and was instantly, he could say, as he was with Gwen when he first saw her, attracted to her. That didn’t happen to him with many women, maybe just those two. And Terry, actress he saw almost every day for a couple of months—his first real girlfriend, really, meaning the first one he went with a while and also slept with—till she fell in love with an actor she was doing a love scene with in acting class. Her he also first met at a party—New Year’s Eve, vast West End Avenue apartment, enormous tall paintings on the walls and smaller ones leaning up against the bookcases and chairs of elongated male and female nudes by the mother of the guy who gave the party, same day or day before Batista fled Cuba and Castro’s forces were filtering into Havana for the final takeover of the island. He was elated at the news and then disgusted soon after when the revolutionaries, no doubt on Castro’s orders, or maybe not, but anyway he didn’t stop them and it went on for weeks, began lining up police and suspected Batista sympathizers and such against walls and shooting them. And Frieda, but should he really count her? He was sixteen, she fifteen, when he went with his friends to a dance at her all-girls’ private high school on the Upper East Side and first saw her, dancing the Lindy, he thinks, with another girl in the gymnasium turned into a seedy nightclub. She looks like a model, he thought, so beautiful and slim and dressed so well and sophisticated looking. “Hands off,” he told a couple of his friends who were also admiring her. “She’s mine, or at least give me a clear shot at her before you horn in.” She was the first girl he was in love with. It never came to anything, and he never told her how he felt but knew she knew by the way he acted toward her, other than for a number of dates, all but two of them on Sunday afternoons and a Jewish religious holiday during the week and one big long kiss at her apartment door at the end of their second and last evening date and a few French kisses in the Loew’s 83rd Street movie theater. Just “Loew’s 83rd” did they call it? He said on the phone weeks after she stopped going out with him “Didn’t those kisses we did mean anything?” She said “I don’t want to hurt you any more than I may have, but I’m new at it and was just practicing.
” He went over to her and said something like “Hi, I’m Martin and I wonder if I could have the next dance,” and she said “I don’t see why that couldn’t be possible. Jessica.” “Hi, Jessica.” “It’s actually Frieda, but I’d like it to be Jessica.” They danced several dances in a row. He was surprised no other guy cut in on him, and told her so. She said “Oh, I’m a very unpopular girl,” and he said “Tell me another one.” She seemed to be having a good time with him—laughing and joking and whispering something in his ear he couldn’t hear—and he found himself falling for her. She had a nice smell about her—carnation or something. It didn’t seem like perfume or cologne—not as strong—so probably from soap. Wherever it came from, he thought, it was intoxicating, as they say. He imagined sitting in a movie theater, her head on his shoulder, and he was smelling that smell. When the Charleston was announced over the loudspeaker as the next dance, he said “Darn, I don’t know how to do that one. But my aunt, who tried to teach me it, was one of the six original dancers in the George White’s Scandals to introduce it to America.” She said “You’re making that up,” and he said “I swear,” and put his hand over his heart. “We can call my mother right now—it’s her sister—and ask her,” and she said “Okay, I believe you. It’s not a man’s dance anyway—you don’t have the legs for it. It’d be like a man dancing the cancan. It’s my favorite dance, though—I’m so glad it was brought back—so I’m going to dance it with my best girlfriend, if you’ll excuse me.” He said “In case my friends suddenly drag me out of here, can I have your phone number?”—she had her own phone, in her bedroom, something he’d never heard a girl her age having—and called the next night for a date and she said “Thursday’s okay, but it’ll have to be an early night; I don’t want to be too tired for school Friday.” They went to Radio City Music Hall. Took the Broadway bus down and then walked the two blocks to Sixth Avenue. But a cab back because he didn’t want her to think him cheap. Weekday afternoons and all-day Saturdays he worked as a delivery boy for a catering service and was making enough money to pay for everything that night, even the candy at the theater’s refreshment counter. “Should we go in for a snack someplace?” he said, after the movie, but she said it’s getting a little late and she should get home. The movie was Rhapsody. The leads were Elizabeth Taylor and Vittorio Gassman and another young well-known actor at the time whose first name was John. She suggested they go to it. “So, what movie would you like to see?” he said when he picked her up—they’d talked about going to one when he called her up for the date—and she said “First things first—this is a family ritual,” and she brought him into the living room and introduced him to her parents and younger sister and the live-in housekeeper. He didn’t think he’d like the movie when she described what it was about—a conservatory and music competitions—but wanted to please her, and ended up loving the movie because of the music in it. He’d never before heard any part of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto and Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, he thinks it was, or maybe it was Rachmaninoff’s second—both were his favorites for a couple of years, the Rachmaninoff a while longer—and a few days after he saw the movie with this music, he bought long-playing records of them. He played them in his bedroom so much that his father came to the door and said “Do you think you can play something else, and lower?” “You ought to be happy I’m listening to this kind of music—I’m the only one of my friends who does,” and his father said “I am—we all are. This is a big change for you, but you’re busting our eardrums. Turn it down now.” He was sure that buying the records and listening to them so much had nothing to do with his feelings for Frieda or anything else with her, other than that he probably never would have seen the movie if it hadn’t been for her and maybe not got started listening to classical music so early. After their cab pulled up in front of her apartment building and he pulled out his wallet, she said “Will you at least let me pay for this ride? I do have money, you know.” He said “No, tonight everything’s on me, not that I’m trying to give the impression I’m a big sport. Can I see you to your door?” and she said “It’s not necessary. I know my way home from here.” “Think we can go out again sometime?” and she said “Call me and we’ll see. You might change your mind by tomorrow and not think it such a wonderful idea,” and she kissed her fingertip, put it on the middle of his forehead and went to her building. So far, he thought, as the doorman opened the door for her and said something and tipped his cap, it seems to be going okay. What’s with the finger on the forehead, though? He’ll wait a few days, or just two, at the most three, even if he doesn’t think he’ll be able to hold out that long—he’ll want to know—before he calls her. Doesn’t want to make her think he’s too eager. But maybe that’s a good thing with her. She’s different in almost every way, so who can tell? He walked home, which was approximately—for how do you measure it, he thought: Eighty-first to Seventy-fifth and three, no, two long sidestreets and two medium-length ones and the much shorter one on Seventy-fifth between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway—fifteen blocks away. Did Gwen, he thinks, when he first saw her at Pati’s party, remind him of Sharon? Doesn’t think he thought of the resemblance and similarities till now, hard as that is to believe. Length and color and texture of their hair, though Sharon’s a bit coarser. Was that because she shampooed less? She said shampooing your hair every day or every other day, as most women do, injures if not kills the hair follicles, so she did it no more than once a week and a lot of brushing. He forgets how often Gwen shampooed, but he doesn’t think it was more than twice a week, and also lots of brushing. Blond eyelashes and eyebrows, where you had to look closely to see if they even had them. Sparse pubic hair, although it might have only seemed sparse because the color was so light. Lots of differences too, of course. Both liked to make love and usually let him do it when and how he wanted to. “Can I come in from behind?” “Sure,” both would say, maybe in different ways, and get on their knees. “Could you be on top this time?” he’d say, and both, in different ways, would say they don’t mind, and he’d get on his back. Both let him know early on in their relationship that anal intercourse wasn’t something they’d ever let him do, so don’t try. He asked Sharon why, “not that I ever thought of doing it with you or any other woman,” and she said “Because that’s where my shit comes out of. And no anus, no matter how meticulously it’s wiped and washed, is ever entirely clean.” He didn’t ask Gwen what her objection to it was, but did say “Not to worry. I never did it that way and don’t plan to. If you ever do find me approaching or touching or even penetrating that hole with my prick or finger or any other part of me, it’s because the room’s dark or I’m a little sloshed or very sleepy or both and I’m not conscious of what I’m doing, and it’s a complete mistake.” He now assumes her objection was for the same reasons as Sharon’s, or it could be she let some guy do it to her once and it hurt. Actually, he now remembers Sharon saying once “Is this all I’m good for with you? I know it isn’t, but sometimes I’m not sure. But I’m not here ten minutes and you already want to drag me to bed? If you are intent on doing it, and you know I always give in to you because I know you’ll be miserable and petulant and other unfortunate behavior toward me, please be quick. In no way am I in the mood now and nothing’s going to make me, so you can skip all the preliminaries.” Maybe she didn’t say all that. Of course, she didn’t. He could never have remembered it from that far back, or even remembered it word for word if she’d said it two days ago, but she said something like it and he thinks she said it more than once. In fact, the first time she said it—this he particularly remembers because no one had ever referred to him in this way before—she spoke about what she called his “abject impetuousness,” which is a real problem in their relationship, she said, but not fatal. She said she hates doing something she doesn’t want to do, and hates herself for allowing him to get her to do it. Gwen, he still thinks, never said anything like that when the circumstances were similar. For instance, when he, all of a sud
den and related to nothing that came before it, started fondling her. Usually both her breasts from behind and sometimes he’d sneak up on her and do this and a few times under her shirt and bra. Or he had that look that he very much wants to make love even if he knows it’s the last thing on her mind, and he can’t wait till later when it might be a better time for her. Or maybe he forgets. Almost thirty years together, she must have. If she did, he’s sure she put it in a way that was milder or gentler or more lighthearted or good-natured, or whatever the word he wants but can’t seem to come up with now, than the way Sharon said it. He even thinks he remembers Gwen saying, when he suddenly fondled her from behind, “What a goof you are.” “Goof?” he thinks he said, and he thinks she said something like “Yes; goof; you. It’s goofy, sneaking up and pouncing on me when I least expect it and frightening me, like some guy in his young twenties would do, not that I want you to stop the fondling part…just warn me,” and he thinks he remembers her turning her head around to the right, while he was still behind her, so they could kiss. And what about when either of them wanted to make love and he was the one who wasn’t in the mood for it or was involved in something else—writing, not reading—and didn’t want to be disturbed? Can’t remember Sharon ever doing that. That right? Thinks so. They either made love when he wanted to and she went along with it, not always happily, or when they were in bed, ready for sleep, had probably read awhile because each of them always took a book to bed—even when he just lies down to nap, though a little less so since Gwen died—and turned off their night table lights around the same time, though he usually read a few more minutes than she—didn’t want to read any longer, even if he really wanted to, because she might be asleep when he turned off his light and she didn’t like to be woken up to make love—and almost immediately turned to each other in the dark, if she wasn’t already turned to him expecting what was to come next, and started touching and kissing and other things to each other. If she drove to his place—they both lived in the Bay Area but about an hour’s drive from each other—she always stayed the night. With Gwen he was the one who took a book to bed. She once said she reads more than enough during the day—student papers and books and journals she reads for pleasure or class or research—and anyway she knows she can’t read five lines in bed without her eyes closing and book dropping out of her hands. So she just got in bed, and if he was there she said “Goodnight, sweetheart,” always “Goodnight, sweetheart” or “my love,” and he gave her a little kiss, she shut her light off or, if she was facing him, he reached over her to shut off her light, and pulled the covers up over her shoulders. Then, when he was done reading, he’d shut off his light and maybe start making love to her, or lie for a while in bed thinking about other things—maybe the book he was reading—before he thought about making love, and she then would start making love to him. He knows he’s contradicting himself here with some of the things he’s saying about Sharon and Gwen, but that’s because he’s remembering things—he thinks it’s because of this—he hasn’t remembered before or not for many years. Back to Gwen, though: there were plenty of times—he’d guess a hundred or so—she came into the room he was working in—here or in their first house or in the apartments in New York and Baltimore they once had or the cottages in Maine they rented every summer for more than twenty-five years—1979 to the last summer—and would say “Like to take a break?” Or “Excuse me, I hope I’m not disturbing you, but would you like to take a break?” Doesn’t think he ever refused, other than if he was sick, and then he probably said something like “You know me, I’m always up for it, but I’m just not feeling that well.” But if he was feeling sick, would he be working? Depends how sick he felt. Or maybe he didn’t ever refuse her, even when he wasn’t feeling well, and he probably said something like—just to warn her—“Sure, or I’ll try. It might cure whatever’s ailing me.” Not that but something else. “Maybe it’ll make me feel better. If anything, making love with you would do the trick.” A couple of times he remembers her saying, after she came into the room he was working in, “I know you weren’t feeling well before. But do you think you feel well enough now to take a break?” Other comparisons and similarities? Sharon liked going down on him, Gwen not so much. Both of them, though, didn’t much like his going down on them, something he loved doing, but usually put up with it. Fact is, he thinks Gwen only did it to him—other than the times he couldn’t get or keep it up and she said “Maybe I can help”—when he pushed his penis near her face or swiveled his body around so his groin was near or over her face while he was going down on her and she felt it her duty or something to do it or just didn’t want to deal with him if he made a fuss. But he wouldn’t have made a fuss, so what’s he talking about? He doesn’t think he ever pushed either of them to do anything they didn’t want to at the time. To Gwen, if he saw she didn’t want to do it—she’d push his penis away—he would have said something like “I understand; maybe some other time.” He remembers even once saying “But you aren’t ruling it out forever, I hope,” and she said no and he said “Thank goodness.” Gwen had bigger breasts than Sharon, Sharon a narrower waist, slimmer tummy, thinner legs and smaller rear, more flat than Gwen’s round, and they were about the same height though Gwen, he’d guess, was about ten pounds heavier. He just now remembers the time Gwen was in a hospital bed at home—she slept in one for around two months—and he was about to turn her over on her back and sit her up and help her into her wheelchair then, he thinks, and start the morning going. Instead, possibly because he’d been thinking of making love to her before he even went into her room or it had something to do, which it never had before or else he hadn’t ever acted on it, with his exercising her legs and feet in bed and massaging her shoulders, he lowered the shades in his older daughter’s room where the hospital bed had been set up—Rosalind was living away from home and her bed had been temporarily dismantled—and unzipped his pants and took his penis out of both flies and stuck it through the bed rail—doesn’t know why he didn’t lower the rail and drop his shorts and pants, maybe because he didn’t want to give her the chance to say “What are you doing?” and pulled at it till it reached her mouth. She didn’t object. She even smiled, as if she thought his doing it through the rail was funny or from her angle it just looked funny. He did say, when he got it by her mouth, “Is it all right?” and she nodded. She kissed it a few times and maybe—yes, definitely; it only happened once like this and he remembers it clearly—put her lips around it a short while and then said, still holding it, “Why don’t you get in bed with me?” and he said “Wouldn’t the marital bed be better?”—he actually used the word “marital,” maybe the first and last time that way—“but we could do it here if you don’t want to be transferred so much. I’ve never done it in a hospital bed, have you?” and she said “Don’t be silly; come on, get in.” He took off his clothes, put the other bed rail down, turned her all the way over on her side so there’d be room for him, got in bed and stroked her from behind and probably kissed her neck and shoulders and back, said “Think we need any gook?” and she said “No, I’m ready,” and he lifted her right thigh a little—she was still a lot paralyzed on that side, which was why her doctor and physical therapist wanted her in a hospital bed: so her legs and back could be raised and lowered and she could be exercised better and there was less chance of her getting blood clots and bedsores—and stuck his penis in. After it was over for him he said “That was very nice; thank you,” and she said “I just wish it had gone on longer. But since I wasn’t expecting anything like this happening, I’m happy,” and he kissed her back and she kissed the air. So, anything he left out? Both: long graceful necks, bluish green eyes, Gwen’s with a bit of yellow in them, maybe just flecks; very pale skin that would burn under the sun, so they rarely exposed their faces to it without a brimmed or peaked cap on and a strong sun block for the other uncovered parts of their bodies that might burn, slender fingers that played Chopin and Schumann and Schubert and Brahms, and Gwen th
ose short pieces by Satie: Gymnopedies, he thinks they’re called, or close to that. He never heard Sharon play but she told him some of the pieces she’d learned or was practicing then and that if they were ever at a place where there was a decent piano and nobody else was around—it could even be her home, she said, which he never set foot in—she’d play for him. Gwen he heard hundreds of times before her first stroke. If she was playing an entire piece, not practicing one, he usually stopped whatever he was doing to listen till she was finished, even if he was working in another room, and later would sometimes say “I love to hear you play, something I know I’ve told you, but I mean it.” She had a piano given to her by her grandfather when she was twelve and which they had moved from their New York apartment—they didn’t move it to their Baltimore apartment because they still had the New York one then and would stay in it often—to their first house in Baltimore and from there to this one in the county. Before that it had gone from her parents’ apartment in the Bronx to the one on West 78th Street and then to her own apartment on Riverside Drive. Actually, to two of them in the same building: She moved from the rear to the front. Gwen tried to get back to the piano after that stroke but got frustrated and disgusted with herself for playing so clumsily, she called it, because she was using two fewer fingers, and stopped. “My instrumental soulmate, dead,” she said. “Not even Maureen plays it anymore after her last, what she thought disastrous recital so long ago. Oh, a run of tinkles every other Thursday when the cleaning woman wipes the keyboard down. You ought to take up the piano and give some life back to it. It might also calm you down.” Sharon and he talked for a while that first day. While they talked, or while she was talking, he thought something like, as he did with Gwen the night they first met, “Jesus, she’s beautiful and so refined and delicate and obviously smart. Can I pick that up in just a few minutes? You bet I can. My ideal woman; I’ve finally met her. Now if it can only work out.” He looked at her left hand when it was on the table—did the same with Gwen from a distance at Pati’s party—and there was no wedding band or any other kind of ring on it. One of the next times they met he said to her, holding the fingers of her left hand—so this had to be after they started sleeping together—“Been meaning to ask. How come no ring?” She said her engagement ring, which had been her husband’s grandmother’s and was a big gaudy diamond in a garish setting and always too big for her because her finger kept shrinking, so she was glad to be rid of it, she sold when they were down to their last nickel—“You know graduate-student couples.” And the wedding band she lost in a washing machine at a Laundromat and never got it replaced, maybe the one thing her husband really minded about her. “‘If I wear one,’ he said, ‘you should wear one too, even if we don’t exactly adhere to our marriage vows.’ But I like to have my fingers free, and without one it’s easier to pick up guys like you.” He also remembers the times—not as many times as she did it to him—he’d go into Gwen’s study or wherever she was working and say—the kids had to be out or napping or not yet born—“Like to take a break?” She usually said “Sure,” but if she felt she didn’t have the time right then she always said—he doesn’t recall her ever not using this expression—“I’d like to, but can I take a rain check?” Later, if he was still interested in making love or his interest, if he can call it that, had been renewed, he’d say to her—in her study or better if she was in the living room or kitchen or better yet if she had just lay down for a nap in their bedroom—no, if she had the odds are she would have said “I’m going to lie down for a nap. Care to join me?”—“Think I can take advantage now of that rain check I gave you?” and half the times, he’d say, she said something like “I don’t see why not.” He already remember this tonight? If he did, he forgets. But it’s a nice memory and it’s made him a little excited, which is okay, not that he’s going to do anything about it. He’ll save that for another day, when the kids aren’t here and maybe with a magazine with nude women in it, if he’d have the guts to buy one. Doesn’t see himself choosing one off a stand and going up to the salesperson—especially if it was a woman or there was somebody on line behind him, again especially if it was a woman—and paying for it, but he might have to. As far as playing with himself till completion, how many times would he say he’s done it since he first went to bed with Gwen? Twenty? Thirty? And he thinks mostly when he was on tour for a few days to a week with a new book—only happened twice—and another time teaching at an out-of-town summer writers’ conference for two weeks, something he hated doing but Maureen was on the way and they needed the extra money. Of course, also when he first started teaching down here and for two years she stayed in New York and taught—they weren’t married then, or were, at the end, when she was already pregnant with Rosalind—but he used to train up to be with her for three days almost every week. And he did, he now remembers, spend at least one night at Sharon’s when her husband was at a girlfriend’s house and it was understood between them that when he did that Sharon could have her lover over, but what he’s getting at here is did she play the piano for him? He thinks she just made dinner for them and they went to bed and he left before eight in the morning so he’d be gone—this was also the understanding between them—before her husband came home. “He’s an early riser,” she said, “and he likes to get at his desk before nine. That’s one reason I haven’t let you sleep here before. The other is, I never liked the idea of sharing his bed with you. Too peculiar, and I’d have to change the sheets twice.” He asked Sharon that first day if she was a graduate student at Berkeley. “I mean, you look young enough to pass as an undergrad, but by the way you speak and the subject matter, I suspect you’re not.” “Was,” she said. “I got my master’s there.” “Did you go further?” and she said “All the way.” “What was your thesis on?” and she said “If you mean the dissertation for my doctorate, I’m still writing it. My master’s thesis was on Boris Pasternak and cats.” “Seriously?” and she said “Animals in Pasternak’s poetry but mostly cats. I was lucky to get away with it. My thesis advisor was a young new hire who had a crush on me. I led him on a little till my thesis was approved.” “Where’d you get the idea?” and she said “If you mean for my thesis topic, it was inspired by a visit my boyfriend and I made to Pasternak’s dacha at Peredelkino.” “So that’s how you pronounce it,” he said, “accent on the second syllable? You must speak Russian, then,” and she said “Just Russian poetry. But you’ve heard of Peredelkino,” and he said “Sure; I love Russian poetry. All poetry, but twentieth-century Russian poetry the most. No, that’s not true. I love early twentieth-century French poetry better, or as much, and some post-World War I and II German poetry, particularly when it’s written by a Czech or Romanian.” “I won’t ask who they are because I think I know. But not English poetry?” and he said “English, American, Whitman, Housman, Berryman, all the men, but I was talking about poetry in languages I don’t fully understand or understand at all, and excuse me for that stupid joke about men. I really didn’t mean it the way it could be interpreted. Could you recite a Pasternak poem for me? Any Russian poem. I’d love to hear one in the original. Pushkin. Mayakovsky. Ahkmatova and Mandelstam. They were good friends, no?” “I’m able to recite lots of them. I studied with a teacher of Russian poetry who had us memorize fifty Russian poems. She said it’d come in handy if for some reason we didn’t have a book on us to read and were waiting a long time to go aboard something or for it to arrive. In other words, we’d have this whole anthology in our heads—but I don’t want to. It’d draw attention, and Russian poetry can’t be recited quietly.” “Could you whisper the translation of one to me?” “Please, no more of that. I’ve already expressed my disinterest.” “Tell me about your visit to Pasternak’s dacha. You met him?” Wait a minute. If she got her master’s from the Russian department, why would she then go for her doctorate in English literature? He must have it wrong. Is he thinking about some other woman he knew? No, he’s sure he’s not. It’ll come back to him. That’s it:
she went to Stanford for her doctorate because her mentor at Berkeley switched to there and she wanted to stick with him and he helped get her a good financial arrangement, or was it U-Cal at Davis or one of the other U-Cals, and her connection to Dickens was his influence on the nineteenth-century Russian novel, or the reverse. It was so long ago. Forty years. She must be around sixty-five by now, if she’s still alive. She developed a serious kidney disorder he learned from a mutual acquaintance of theirs, and something was also wrong with her blood. He thinks those are the two things. She had two children with her husband, got her Ph.D. and taught awhile, he doesn’t know what or where or if it was a tenure-track appointment, and then had to cut back her teaching to two courses a year and then one because of her illness. He was told all this around twenty years ago, in a letter, and it was the last he heard about her. The mutual acquaintance died in a motorcycle accident a year or two later, his wife wrote him, or sent him without comment, as she must have done to a number of long-time acquaintances and friends who didn’t live near them, a photocopy of his obituary in their local newspaper, and her husband was the only person he knew who knew Sharon. He can’t recall the name of the guy or how he came to know him, though he knows it was in California. Sharon should have had his child. That’s what he wanted then: for her to get pregnant by him and leave her husband and marry him. Of course it was a stupid idea. He had no money saved and just a temporary department-store salesman job and was making nothing from his writing. But she took him seriously and said—what did she say?—she said for any of that to happen, Bill, his name was—her husband’s—would have to leave her first and start a divorce, something he said he was never going to do. He liked things as they were, she said, and deep down, “in spite of our crazy errant marriage, I know he loves me more than a little and he knows I love him enough to stay with him. Surprisingly and perhaps unbecomingly traditional as this might sound to you, although I don’t think it would if you were my husband and Bill were you, a vow is a vow and sacred to me, the one about till death do you part.” This was when Sharon and he were still sleeping together and seeing each other about twice a week. “But tell me about your visit to Pasternak’s dacha. You met him? He was still alive?” “He died in 1960,” she said. “We were there in ’61. We were both seniors at Michigan State, part of a very select group of American college students studying Russian language and culture in Moscow for a month. It wasn’t my idea to go to Peredelkino, it was my boyfriend’s. He was also interested in Pasternak, but his prose. I was reluctant to even get off the train there. I thought it too pushy—too American—to just barge in like that, and pleaded with him to turn back right up till the time he knocked on the door.” “What you were on must have been part of the rapprochement between the two countries, and when there were various cultural and people-to-people exchanges. I remember. I was a reporter in Washington in ’59, when it all started.” “Right. So, he sort of forced me—grabbed my hand and practically dragged me to the house—and I’m glad he did.” But he’s confused again. If she was a college senior in ’61, then the earliest she could have got her master’s at Berkeley was ’62, so it’s unlikely she could have been writing her dissertation in ’65, isn’t it? Doesn’t it take at least three years to get through all the coursework, especially in literature? It took Gwen even longer than that before she started writing her dissertation. She got her B.A. in ’68, her M.A. in ’69, and he thinks she completed and defended her dissertation the year before they met in late ’78, or maybe that same year but at the beginning of it. Maybe Sharon was only sketching it out while she was still doing her coursework, hadn’t even got a word down, just ideas. Though maybe it is possible to finish the coursework in less than three years—it might depend on the program—and writing the dissertation could take, if you work on it day and night, a year or two, but not if you teach, as Gwen did, lower-level literature and humanities courses for two or three years after you finish your coursework and spend a year on fellowship doing research abroad. You’d think he’d know more about it, having taught at a university for twenty-five years, though mostly undergraduate writing courses, and being married to a Ph.D. Just, the subject never came up with Sharon, or not that he can remember, and up till now he thought he knew. As for Gwen taking so long to complete her Ph.D., she said it was pointless rushing through it. The dissertation, which she wanted to be a book for the common reader as well as academics, would suffer, and the prospects were slim there’d be a teaching job in New York or the surrounding area when she finished it, and New York was where she was determined to stay. Besides, she said, she had other things to do: writing essays and poetry and traveling and just lots of fun living. Of course, getting married and divorced when she was a grad student and having an abortion and the emotional toll that took slowed things down too. “My husband thought having a kid so early would bring our studies to a standstill and I just didn’t think he’d be a good father.” But Sharon: “The old servant of Pasternak’s opened the door,” she said. “His two sons were there, Boris and Leonid, and they graciously asked us to come in. They served us tea and cookies. After a long conversation about art and music and literature, all connected to their father—are you really interested in this?” and he said “You bet. I love personal accounts and anecdotes about serious writers. Go on.” “They invited us to stay for dinner, but we had to be back in our Moscow dorm by nine or we could be thrown out of the country the next day.” She said she first got the idea for her thesis topic when Pasternak’s old cat—his favorite—ripped one of her stockings with his paw and knocked her cookie off her plate. “They told me he wanted us to be talking only about him and his contribution to Pasternak’s poetry. Later I learned the cat used to follow Pasternak when he visited his mistress in this same community, and was the principal muse to him, even more so than his mistress and wife.” After about an hour, she stood up and said “This has been very nice and you’ve been patient in listening to my blather.” “I told you,” he said, “I love such blather. Like to meet again? I sure would, in other words. Can I call you sometime?” She said she was married, so it wouldn’t be a good idea. “It would if you were interested in me,” he said. “But you’re married? I’m surprised that didn’t come up.” “It did, but you must have chosen not to listen, or you’re not being entirely honest with me.” “Honestly, I’m being honest, and we’d only meet for some more literary talk,” and she said “Oh, yeah. I’m sorry, but I really have to get home. My husband expects me and he worries. And he’s doing the cooking tonight and I’ve got the tofu.” “One big chunk will do for the two of you?” and she said “He’s probably already diced and sliced the other ingredients that he’ll cook with it, sort of a stew.” “You both vegetarians?” and she said “Please,” and they went outside, she put out her hand and he shook it and she got on her bike and he headed for his car. He forgets how they paid for the pastry they shared and coffees, or she, tea. And their names? Surely they must have given them. What a waste, he thought, watching her ride off, admiring her body from behind—her rear end looked plump on the bicycle seat, which it didn’t when she stood—and which he would later tell her he thought, after they’d begun sleeping together: “Not of my time, a waste, but, because I was so quickly attracted to you, that you were married and wanted to stay faithful.” “I did want to,” she said. “I’d already had too many affairs since I got married. Not many by your standards, perhaps: just two, but one too many. The first was partly to try it out, because everyone, including my husband, was doing it. And by telling Bill I loved the man, which I didn’t, to see how much I could hurt him after some real dirty things he did to me. I found out I couldn’t hurt him or make him the least bit jealous, so broke off the affair. No loss; my affairee was inept and dull and I didn’t like his conversations. The second was also a dreadful stupid mistake, in a different way, but full of love and tears on my part, and lasted. My partner was sexy and exciting and intellectually energizing and metaphorically flicked his cigarette ash
es on me. My first broken heart.” Was the one-too-many her mentor, he thinks, and must have thought then, and the reasons she followed him to whatever university he switched to and why he helped her get such a good deal at it? She never told him who the two men were and how long the affairs lasted because, she said, when he asked, she wanted to keep that part of her life secret from everyone but her husband. “We even, in fact, wrote it into our marriage vows: to promptly tell the other the truth about everything seemingly important to the marriage we’ve done, no matter how bad.” He next saw her on the main street of Palo Alto, which now makes him think that her mentor had switched to Stanford and that’s where she got her doctorate. So maybe she had finished all her coursework by the time he met her, and maybe in two years, not that he ever heard of it, though that doesn’t mean anything, and now only came to Stanford once a month or so to do whatever a doctoral candidate has to do for her department once she’s done with her classwork—take her orals, attend a lecture by a prominent visiting professor in her field, meet with her dissertation advisor, and so on. Otherwise, he thinks he would have been with her more, since he lived in the next town over from Palo Alto. He knows that the deal she got at whatever university she got it from was over, where she didn’t have to teach for her department for two or three years. Oh, he’ll never remember it completely, no matter how hard he tries, so give up. It was in the afternoon, a beautiful spring day: bright sky, soft breezes, the air smelling of flowering fruit trees. He was on his way to pick up his typewriter at the typewriter repair shop on the street. Saw her walking, couldn’t believe his luck, because he had thought about her a lot, and came up alongside her and said “Wow, this is a coincidence, bumping into you after just a few weeks,” if that’s how long it was—it was a short time, though, that he knows—“unless I’ve been following you. I haven’t. Nice to see you again,” and he put out his hand to shake but she didn’t take it. She looked puzzled and he said “Martin Samuels”—if they had given their names the first time, and even if they hadn’t—“from that Berkeley health food co-op? Tofu and herbal tea?” “It’s not that I didn’t recognize you and from where,” she said. “It’s what you said about following me. You make such odd remarks and bad jokes; forgive me if I’m being too frank.” “No, I like it, and you’re right, it was odd and my humor does tend to fall, from time to time, flat. Unfortunately, it seems a habit I can’t seem to break, but I’ll try. In order to change the subject and get the focus off me, can I ask how you’ve been? What are you doing on this side of the bay? You bike all the way? People do.” “No, I came here as you’d expect me to: I drove.” “So, another odd remark on my part, right?, though maybe not as bad.” He doesn’t remember if she said what she was doing in Palo Alto. “But I think my explanation why I keep saying these odd and sort of inane things is, one, I’m not odd but I can be inane and dumb. And two, I’m probably—I must be—and maybe here comes another of either of those that I’m going to regret but I’ll say it anyway—nervous speaking to you. Yes, that’s something I should’ve repressed. I had the time to; I caught myself before. But I’d already started it so thought it was too late to stop.” “So, why?” and he said “Did I think it was too late to stop?” and she said “Better we drop the subject. You did explain yourself sufficiently, although I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. Your nervousness is kind of charming. I can’t remember ever making a man nervous before with just my presence.” “How else, then, could you have,” he said, “if you don’t mind my asking?” “When I crossed the street against the light, but with someone who didn’t want to, and cars were coming. And when a man I didn’t know was crossing the street against or with the light and I nearly ran into him with my bike.” “So it seems only on the street,” he said. “Look, I was on my way to pick up my typewriter at the repair shop there, but would you like to step in someplace for coffee?” and she said “Sure, I’ve time.” “You don’t think—no, I won’t say it; I’ve cured myself for today.” “I’d shoot for much longer than that, because you don’t want to ruin what could be a good thing. For the time being—and please don’t try to squeeze out of me what changed my mind—we’ll avoid talking about him, okay?” “I live in Menlo Park,” he said, “—very near here. Do you live in Berkeley?” “I thought you already knew I did.” “Like to, instead of a coffee shop, have it in my small modest flat? I also have crackers and cheese and different kinds of teas.” “Flat?” she said. “How cozy. Sure, I’d go for that too. Give me the address and directions—you can just tell me and I’ll remember—and I’ll drive there.” “Think I should get my typewriter first? Don’t want to stop the momentum, but why should I go back for it when it’s right here, and I’m going to need it later?” She walked him to the typewriter store, then he gave her directions to his building, said he’d meet her out front and walked her to her car. “Volvo,” he said. “All the latest safety features. It’s the car I’d expect you to drive.” “I know I’m breaking my interdiction about talking about him, but it was a decision, buying this car, my husband and I made together after considerable research. That’s what married couples do. It’s fun.” They had tea and crackers. “I’m sorry, I’m very hungry,” she said, “so I’m going to have to eat your last cracker, unless you want to split it.” “I should’ve stopped for lunch food on the way here,” he said, “but I didn’t want to keep you waiting. I thought you’d leave.” “I wouldn’t have,” she said. “If you were delayed I’d know it was for something you thought important and that was probably related to me. What we first should have done was go for a snack someplace. That’s what I was about to do when you saw me on the street. The conversation we’re having now we could have had anywhere.” “I forgot, I’ve wine,” he said, and poured them each a glass. After he finished his, he took her glass out of her hand—“This could be considered rude of me, taking your wine away without asking you,” and she said “I’ve drunk enough and I know what you’re about to do and it’s okay.” They kissed a few times. When he started to feel her up, she said “Some other time. I don’t want to do everything in one or two days.” “So you think something’s started?” and she said “Yes, I think something’s started.” “I have no love life; do you, or not much?” and she said “I can see why you might think that about me but it isn’t true. In any case, could you please get your lips over here? Make it one that lasts my entire drive home, and then I go. Unlike you, if this isn’t an anomaly on your refrigerator’s part—I took a peek inside—ours is always stocked with good food. Maybe one day you’ll come by and I’ll make you lunch.” Then, about a year later, or maybe a few months earlier than that, she said…But he suddenly remembers something about her that he thought at the time characterized her a lot. It also relates to Gwen. They were making love and she was unusually tight down there, and he stopped—he was behind her—and said “This must be hurting you. I know it’s a bit uncomfortable for me,” and pulled out. “I don’t think you’re producing the required amount of vaginal juices, and I’m not saying it’s your fault. I probably entered you too early.” She said “Do you have any lubricant for it?” and he said “No, nothing.” “Just spit in your hand and smear it around in me,” and he said “I don’t think I could. Not only unsanitary but I think too sloppy.” “Then I will, if you want to get on with this,” and she spit in her hand and put it inside her vagina and they resumed making love, he thinks with her now on her back. “See, it works,” she said. Once with Gwen when they were making love—this was before her first stroke but after her menopause, or however you say it—she was also very tight and she said “I could use some of my K-Y jelly. Would you get it for me?” He said “You know, you can just spit in your hand and use it as a lubricant,” and she said “What a thing to suggest. My own spit? Inside my cunt?” and he said “Then I could spit in my hand and do it. It’s not dirty, and I doubt you need much.” “Even worse, somebody else’s spit. Sweetie, I know you don’t want to get out of bed—the room’s so cold and the flannel sheets a
re so warm—but please get it and also put some on your penis,” and he did and squeezed some more on his fingers and rubbed it around her vagina for longer than he needed to and they resumed making love. “Much better,” she said. “Thank you.” After her first stroke, when she had trouble using her hands and she started having frequent bladder infections, they always had specimen jars and a tube or two of surgical lubricant around—they still are on the bathroom shelf—in case he had to catheterize her to bring a urine sample to the lab or to empty her bladder. They always seemed to know when she had a new infection, sometimes just by the urine color or smell, and a visiting nurse had taught him the procedure. So then, about nine months after they met, or maybe it was a whole year, Sharon called and said “I know you don’t expect me today, but I don’t want to tell you what I have to tell you on the phone.” He thought she’s pregnant and she’s sure the baby’s his. She came over, they kissed at the door, and she said “You’re not going to like this, or maybe you will. Who knows. After putting up with me so long, you might be relieved.” “You’re breaking up with me,” and she said “It’s a little scary, because it’s not as if we’re an old married couple—“and he said “How often I know what you’re going to say. It wasn’t hard this time. Your face and how you prefaced it.” He knows he’s gone in to this but this is a more accurate account of what he did and she said. “Bill and I have decided to have a baby—we’ve already begun working at it. And because we don’t want there to be any uncertainty who the father is. And also for the sake of family harmony and marital fidelity, which he promised to observe if I do, and of course for the emotional and mental well-being of the child—” “‘This is the last time we can meet, except, if you wish, sometime in the distant future for the occasional coffee and good conversation we’ve always had and to catch up on what we’ve been doing and me to tell you all the cute and funny and endearing things my baby’s doing.’ No chance. If we’re breaking up, let’s do it for good; that means starting right now.” That’s about when he got really angry. “You fucking bitch,” he said, and other names. “Leading me on, dropping me off, kicking me in the ass, then a swift boot to my balls. Just get the hell out of here.” Angry at her for the first time, he thinks. He doesn’t think they ever once had a spat. He was always saying “Anything you want, fine by me.” “What bullshit this is; what stupid things you’ve got me saying.” Banging his hand against the wall, but an open hand, not his fist. That he did with Terry when she called off their engagement five years before—“I need more time, I feel I’m rushing in to this too quickly”—“No, no the whole thing’s over; don’t tell me”—and he broke two fingers. Doing all that. Tearing at his hair. Kicking over a chair. First she tried to calm him down. “My dear friend, I’m so sorry.” “Friend? Friend? Well, nothing’s wrong with that, I guess, you bitch.” “All right,” she said, “maybe that was the wrong word. But truly, if I had known you were going to act like such a crazy lout, I would have told you all this over the phone or in a letter.” “You should’ve, you should’ve,” he shouted. “For then I wouldn’t have had to see your rotten face.” She looked frightened—maybe it was the change in his face, that he now looked violent, or he’d raised his hand to her—he forgets—but she left. “Wait,” he yelled, running after her into the building’s hallway. Maybe that’s when he said “Stop the production; let me be the father. I’ll be a better one than Bill because I want it more and you’re guaranteed I’ll be faithful. Okay, I know why not. But you’ve forgotten whatever you kept here—a change of clothes, some books. And at least, if no kid, let me have one final fornication. I’ll even put on a condom if you have one,” but she had long been out of the building and was probably in her car and driving away, thinking what an asshole he turned out to be. That was the last time he saw or spoke to her. Several months later—Did any of the other third-floor tenants come out? Doesn’t think so. But if one had, he would have been so embarrassed. That night he thought he should write her an apology for all the awful things he said and for frightening her, and he thinks he wrote a few drafts of one over the next couple of days but never sent it. Several months later—oh, he doesn’t know how long; may have been a year or more—he got a letter from her. Or maybe it was a birth announcement—no, she wouldn’t have done that—but something in a regular number 11 envelope, so another reason it couldn’t have been a birth announcement: they come in their own envelopes. Her return address was the same. At the time he thought he knew what the letter would say and do to him and tore it up without opening it and dumped it in the paper bag he used for his garbage. Later, he was sorry he’d torn it up and went to look for the bag in the building’s trash cans outside—he was going to put together the pieces—but it had already been picked up. He thought of calling her—if Bill answered, he’d immediately hang up—saying he got her letter and accidentally lost it before he could read it, or maybe he’ll tell the truth—“I got anxious as to what might be in it and didn’t want to get hurt or feel guilty all over again”—and would she mind very much telling him what it said, but knew it’d be the wrong thing to do. Something like this happened with Gwen the summer after they first met. She also said she has something to tell him he won’t like. They’d just driven back from the cottage they rented in Maine for two months and were sitting in the car, double-parked, in front of his building. He thinks the car belonged to a friend of hers, who was in London doing research for his dissertation. He’d thought she’d driven him there to drop off his things—knapsack with clothes, typewriter, books, manuscripts and writing supplies—and then they’d go to her parents’ apartment a few blocks from his—the doorman would watch the car while they brought up her parents’ two cats, who’d spent the summer with them, and say hello and then go to her building and he’d help her in with her things and two cats and later they’d go out for dinner, or because they were tired from the nine-to-ten hour trip, get takeout and he’d stay the night at her place. He opened his car door and she said “Don’t get out just yet.” She told him she has a bad feeling about him and their relationship and wants to end it before he gets even more involved. “‘Want to’? Meaning you haven’t completely decided on it?” and she said “No, I’ve decided; completely.” “Oh, boy. Can you give me specific reasons why? I know we’ve had a couple of bumps this summer, but that shouldn’t be too unusual, since we never lived so close for so long, and I thought we worked them out,” and she said “I already told you…the strongest reason yet: my gut.” “So it’s not someone else—the guy whose car this is?” and she said “You’re not listening. I’m sorry. Nobody else. You’ve been my only lover the past nine months and the only man I was in love with till sometime this summer when I began to have my doubts about us, and now it has to stop.” Years later, and he thinks he spoke about it again to her just a few years ago, he said “That time you dropped me for a while early in our romance—I like that; romance. You know, when we’d driven back from the Spengler Cottage and you left me at my door? What was the reason? I was always a little confused by it,” and she said “What I told you that day in the car.” “And that was…?” and she said “A very strong gut reaction that turned out to be wrong. Anyhow, it worked out for the better. I found out how much I missed you. It could be that for any relationship to last it needs a breakup that feels real. That sort of fits in with what Grace told me: to have a long good marriage it helps if you had a bad one before.” “So where does that leave me?” and she said “You had serious relationships that lasted twice as long as my marriage to Richard. You were even engaged once and came within a hair of getting married, even if you only knew the woman for half a year.” “Terry,” he said, “and eight months total. She broke my heart twice. First time after two great months, when she suddenly dropped me for another guy, whom she married in a few weeks and divorced in a year. And two years later, when we hooked up again, got engaged too fast and she broke it off after six months. Plus, I forgot, one night thrown in when I got off the ship from France and
was on my way to California, three years after she broke off the engagement. So, eight months and a day. Because she didn’t love me, to be perfectly honest, though she never said that. What she said the first time was she didn’t expect me to be so hurt. What she said the second time was to make it easier for both of us we shouldn’t see each other for a while and, yes, she probably is going to start seeing other men if she meets any she wants to. What did I know. I was a kid. Do you still love me?” That was the first time he said that to her, and then as a joke between them or some kind of ritual or annual verbal renewal of their love he would say the same thing at dinner on their wedding anniversary, even when the kids were with them, and they mostly were—“This is a serious joke between Mommy and me,” he explained to them once about what he was going to say—and she said “You know I do, very much,” and he said “I do to you too, very much, more than ever, if that’s possible,” and he kissed her and at the restaurants after he asked it and they gave almost the same answers each time, he would always take her hand nearest him and kiss it. They usually sat next to each other when they went out to eat with the kids or friends, and always the last two years so he could help feed her if she needed it or hold her glass to her lips or pick the food off her she might have spilled or had fallen off the fork he’d brought to her mouth. He acted calmly in the car. No anger, no words he didn’t mean or would hurt. He could see there was no changing her mind by talking about it and he felt they were finished for good, that she didn’t love him or even like him much anymore—she didn’t say it; her face did and he wasn’t going to ask it because he thought he knew what she’d say—and that would make him feel even worse—and he said something like “Well, if that’s the way you want it, then that’s how it has to be. Not the way I want it, that’s for sure, but what can I do? Nothing. So know I’m not going to phone or write, or anything,” and she said “I appreciate that.” “Then, so long, then,” and he choked up a little, his neck tightened, and he said “That’s because”—pointing to his throat—“I’m going to miss you,” and she said “Thank you.” “Ah, what am I talking for? Words not only fail me but are useless.” He started for his building, then slapped his forehead and said “Where am I going? My things.” He went back to the car and she smiled and said “I was wondering. All of yours in the trunk?” and he said “Yeah.” She gave him her keys, he opened the trunk, got his things onto the sidewalk and gave her back her keys. “Bye, cats,” he said through the back window to the cats in the carriers on the seat. “I’m going to miss you guys too. Oh, the key to your place,” and he got it off his key ring and gave it to her. He started bringing his things into his building’s vestibule, didn’t look at her again or say goodbye, and she drove off. He wanted to look at the car going down the street and then thought Why? He got everything upstairs in two trips—as always, manuscripts and typewriter first. He thinks he also said, after she said “I appreciate that,” “I’m not going to be a nuisance,” and she said “Good.” He didn’t call or write her. Doesn’t think he even thought to, and felt if she called or wrote him it’d be over some practical matter: money he might still owe her for the rent and utilities for the cottage, for instance, or car expenses coming back. All the things of his he had in her apartment he took to Maine with him and brought back in the car. She had nothing of hers in his. She didn’t have a key to his apartment because she didn’t come to it much and when she did he was either with her or there. But the first night he called. He thought, after wanting to call her for about a week, this is getting ridiculous, and so on. What’s to be afraid of? And wait too long—well, this would never happen but something like it could—she won’t know who he is and he’ll have to go through the whole awkward scene of reminding her. Call, and if she agrees to meet, they’ll meet and he’ll see where it goes from there. He knows he’ll want something to—to start with, another date, where he’d be a little more confident—but if nothing does he just has to accept it. Look, you’re past forty, he told himself, and if they meet for coffee, or whatever they meet for, and she says she doesn’t see the point of their meeting again, or however she puts it—tactfully, he’s sure—and he feels he’d be wasting her time and inviting disappointment on his part to call again for a second date because it’s obvious she doesn’t want one and she isn’t attracted to him or feels there’s any chemistry between them and so on—that he isn’t even interesting, she could think—he shouldn’t get upset as he always does when this happens. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if she called him. Dream on, lover boy. Although women have—a few, and not for many years—when he didn’t call them and even for a first date, but not women he wanted to see. Oh, yes: Terry. “You said you’d call. Change your mind? It’s okay if you did; I won’t shoot myself. And I’m not going to give the lamebrained excuse that I thought you might have lost my phone number,” and he said “I swear to you. After what you said about reading my play? I practically had my finger in the telephone dial when you called.” She said “You’re an unconvincing liar, but that’s okay too. Next time I see you I’m going to give you some basic acting exercises in it. We still on?” Why hadn’t he called? He forgets—nervousness, possibly; maybe for the same reasons he didn’t call Gwen till that night—because she was certainly worth calling: smart and quick and natural and funny and already successful as an actress—good part in a Broadway hit—and a beauty too. With all that going for her, why’d she call him? He was also smart—not overbright, just smart—and considered good-looking and he still had all his hair. And maybe she found him interesting, or at least literary—he tried to get that across to her in the two or so hours he was with her the night they first met—and potentially compatible: he wanted to be a playwright then and had told her he’d written several absurdist, or unconventional was the word he used, short plays and was working on his first full-length one. She said “I want to be the first one to read it. Promise me that. I also might be able to get it a stage reading, which I bet would be a first for you.” No reading. When she dropped him the first time after two months, his play still wasn’t finished. When they hooked up again two years later, he was only writing fiction and didn’t show his plays to anyone because he thought they all stunk. But there has to be a half-dozen Martin Samuels in the Manhattan phone book, he thought, and maybe another half-dozen M. Samuels, so he didn’t think this Gwendolyn woman would even try. Does she even know he lives in Manhattan? She could call Pati for his phone number—Pati has it, or would know how to get it, since she called him to invite him to her party—but she wouldn’t do that either. She just didn’t seem the type to ask a friend for the phone number of a man she only met briefly at the friend’s party or to call a man for a first date when he didn’t call her for almost a week after he said he would, even if only for coffee one afternoon, but he could be wrong. No, he’s not wrong. She had the look of someone who’d think if he’s interested in me, and it seemed he was—why else would he want my phone number?—he’ll call; if not, no big loss. But he could really use—oh, brother, could he, he thought—and be very agreeable to a new relationship that showed signs…well, signs of something. That could become steady and promising and deep and so on and lead to all sorts of good things, because the last three were busts. Actually, the first of the three, Diana, went on for a while—almost four years and was pretty good at the beginning—but then, a year and a half ago, she ended it and moved into her own apartment with her daughter. She was fooling around long before that with two or three other guys, even while they lived together for more than a year. She’d just stay out all night or come back to their apartment very late when she said she’d be home much sooner—always when her daughter was with her ex-husband for the weekend—and say she didn’t want to talk about it, “so stop talking about it; it’s my life, my business, maybe my mistake,” so it wasn’t as if he didn’t know by then their relationship was going nowhere. And a few months before their sublet was up and they separated, she didn’t let him have much sex either. He said once,
after she said “I’m sorry, I’m too tired,” and pushed his hand away, “I guess you get enough of a workout with your paramours.” She said, “What a stupid dirty crack, but I’m going to answer it anyway. Yes, I suppose I do; yeah. Though I still, from time to time, like doing it with you. You’re here, you haven’t moved out, which I’ve suggested you do in spite of the hardship it’d be for me to pay the full rent, and you’re a skillful lover when you’re not rushing. So if I’m feeling hot to trot on my own stimulus or your hand suddenly feels good on my thigh, which it didn’t just before, why not? You know me: when I feel like it I help myself to what others might push away, even sometimes when I’m filled up. Is that enough of an answer or do you want more?” “No, I’m satisfied. But you don’t want to put out for me a little now? I’d wake up in a better mood,” and she said “Goodnight, or does one of us have to sleep in the spare room?” Why didn’t he move out when she gave him the opportunity to? The apartment was in the Village, a part of the city he always wanted to live in. And it was luxurious and spacious compared to what he was used to—he had his own writing room—and his share of the rent was less than what he paid for his last apartment. And she was pretty and intelligent and she and her daughter were for the most part easy to live with, and when they did make love it was very good. But the woman about a half year after her, Karyn—she was right; they never would have worked out. She was just a kid—around ten years younger than Gwen, whom he met several months later—and different than he in so many ways. She didn’t read fiction, for instance—said she never liked it. Always found the plots and characters shallow and absurd and the language and dialog windy and unreal. “Always?” he said. “Yes, always.” “That’s ridiculous, “ he said, and she said “That’s what you think. But what would really be ridiculous would be for me to read your work”—he’s never encouraged anyone to—“because I know from the outset I won’t like it and because I am the way I am I’d have to tell you.” She loved biographies and other books about visual artists and art history, though she wasn’t an artist or studying to be one or an art historian; she was about to enter her first year of law school. Great big beautiful body and sweet face and always a long ponytail. When she told him—they were having lunch at a restaurant near where she worked—that she’s been seeing another guy—a med student—and it is getting serious, so she’s going to have to stop seeing him—he started to cry. “Martin,” she said, “what’s wrong? You know yourself there was never anything between us. It was more lust than love—a lot more; there was no love—and who cries over that? You liked me in bed and I enjoyed you. So we were just sex partners, till something better and more fulfilling came along—and it has for me; I’m sorry—servicing each other’s physical needs. Look, I gave you crabs this summer, you remember that? Sent you the medication for it at that art colony of yours, something you wouldn’t have forgotten because it must have burnt the skin off you as it did to me. But my point is that if we were really serious, would I have been screwing the guy who gave it to me, who’s not the one I’m seeing now, same time I was screwing you? Please, stop crying. They know me here; I come in a lot.” He said, “You’re wrong; I loved you,” and she said “You’re lying, just so you can get me in bed again. But you can’t, and I don’t believe your crying anymore. You never loved me and I never loved you. Once more, and if I have to, again after that, till it sinks in: we were pals with mutual interests, culturally and sexually, but that’s all. And the age gap—two days shy of it being exactly twenty years—is enormous and insurmountable and would still be enormous twenty years from now.” He said, “I know it. What the hell could I have been thinking?” “You wanted young meat; what else? Come on, let’s go; I have to get back to my books.” She signaled for the check, looked at it and said “Fifty-fifty again?” and put some money on the table. “I’ve included my share of the tip. Be as generous as I was, because you made quite a little scene here.” He pushed the money back to her and said “No, I’ll pay and you go.” She got behind him, kissed the top of his head and left. He stayed seated. Didn’t want to leave right away and possibly see her on the street as he walked back to his apartment. The waiter came over and said “Everything all right, sir?” and he said “Yes, thanks; I’ll be going,” and sat for another minute. Then he put the money for their lunch on the table, plus two dollars more of a tip than he’d normally give, and left. Never spoke to her again after that. Three years later—he was teaching in Baltimore and coming, during the teaching weeks, to New York for long weekends with Gwen—he bumped into Karyn’s best friend on the uptown Broadway bus. He had visited his mother and was on his way back to Gwen’s. He asked how the friend was and then she asked how he was and he said “Couldn’t be better. I’m getting married in two months.” “That’s right,” she said. “I heard about it from Karyn.” “How’d she know? I’m not in touch with her and I haven’t spoken to anybody who is.” “I don’t know, but she knew and she told me she couldn’t be happier for you…that you no doubt met the woman of your dreams.” Then she said “Karyn also got married, to an Italian count she sat next to on a plane going to Italy. She left law school after two years and is now living in Milan and New York and trying to have a baby. The man’s much older than her and wants to have a baby now before people think he’s the kid’s grandfather. But there seems to be an obstruction in both fallopian tubes that will need corrective surgery, and she says even that might not work.” “I’m very sorry, really,” he said. “We also want to have a kid right away, and because of my age I can empathize with her husband. Next time you speak to her, please give her my best.” Why did he get so upset at the restaurant? He must have seemed like such an immature jerk to her. There was some affection between them—he liked her and doesn’t know why she denied even that; maybe to make the break easier for them both—but never any love. He knew, as she said, it was only a relationship for the time being, so why the tears? It might have had something to do with being rejected repeatedly in so short a time and that this was happening when he was past forty. First Diana, though he knew that was coming. Then at Yaddo in August he fell for a married woman about five years younger than he. A beautiful intellectual and respected poet and very lovely person and she must have, he remembers telling another writer, the best body of any woman poet around. “It’s good, it’s very good,” this older poet said, “and she’s tall—must be five-ten in flats—and she carries her height well. But her body, splendid as it is, isn’t the supreme. I know we’re talking like two old lecherous idiots, although you started it so I’m not going to take any of the blame, but you’ll have to find out for yourself whose body that is.” They played Ping-Pong a lot in the colony’s pool house, she usually barefoot and in a two-piece swimsuit and beating him with a terrific serve. She also, in the outdoor pool, tried teaching him how to swim more efficiently and with less splashing by cupping his hands and not raising his arms so high out of the water and taking a deep breath and dunking his head every other stroke. And she let him quickly kiss her a few times at a bar she drove them to and later in her car and then one long one that same night at her bedroom door, and he thought he was in, but she wouldn’t sleep with him or even let him rub her rear end or touch her breast. “What’s the point?” she said. “You’re nice, interesting, etcetera, but nothing special to me. If I’m going to risk my marriage and earn the enmity and disrespect of my two boys by getting involved in an adulterous affair, I’d want it to be profound and inescapable and hair-raising and foredoomed. As for a single night? I don’t do those things. So no more smooching; not even hand-holding. Let’s just be friends. Deal?” They stayed friends after they left Yaddo, exchanged letters and their books for a while, had lunch twice when she came to New York to give or attend a poetry reading and take in some theater, all while he was seeing and then going to be married to Gwen. “An infatuation at first,” he explained to Gwen, “but an untroubled harmless one. I’ve had a number of those, but never again. To think I could have been instrumental
in busting up her marriage. What a selfish scumbag I was. To me, now, doing that is sacrilegious. Boy, have I changed since I met you. I love it.” Then she got very sick—Robin; no, Roberta. She didn’t say with what but did tell him in a brief letter that she was almost too weak to write any poetry now but very short poems and haikus. “From now on I’ll have to keep my correspondence down to only my closest dearest friends.” He called her a few weeks later to ask how she was doing and she said “Awful, dreadful, frightened, so no more phone calls either. Takes too much out of me and it’s a struggle just to hold the receiver. If I come out of this, I’ll let you know. Otherwise, my friend, this is the end.” For a couple of years he wondered what became of her: if she survived, if she died. He didn’t think it right just to call someone who might know her and ask. Then he had an idea and wrote the new director of Yaddo if she knew what had happened to Roberta. An assistant wrote back saying “The director told me to tell you that as far as she knew Ms. Snow was happy and healthy and busy writing poetry. She was when she was a colonist here last year.” He just realized he could ask one of the kids to go online to see if they can find something about her, but some other time. The third, or fourth relationship, and it couldn’t even be called that it went by so fast, was with a woman about four years older than Karyn. Nadine, sometime in October, last woman he slept with or even went out with before he met Gwen. Doesn’t remember much about it and has no memory of her body other than that when she slipped off her shirt or he took it off for her she had no bra on and had big breasts, which surprised him because when she had her shirt on it seemed she had almost no breasts at all. Next morning he even wondered if he had come. She said he did, but she might have said that so he wouldn’t try to make love again to come at least once in her—“Not spectacularly, and mine hardly reached seismic levels either, but I’m not complaining since you were so inebriated I was grateful you didn’t throw up on me.” “Oh, I couldn’t have been that bad,” and she said “Worse. Feel your side of the bed. Maybe it’s dry now, but after we were done you lost control of your bladder for a few seconds and wet the sheet. You don’t remember grabbing yourself and slipping on the floor? Also from the pee; I had to clean it up. Because this is only a single bed I didn’t feel too comfortable all night sleeping so close to you.” He was a writer in residence for a week at an Ohio university’s creative writing department. He read the fiction of graduate students and upper-level undergraduate writing majors and in a private office had twenty-minute individual conferences with them about their work. There was a huge coffee urn and a hot water dispenser in the office and enough paper cups and tea bags and accessories to serve all the students each day, plus a large tray of doughnuts and sweet rolls. She was a first-year graduate student and by far the best writer he read. Cute, too, a word Gwen hated when he used it to describe an older person’s looks. Frizzy red hair, wire-rimmed granny glasses, bright blue eyes she kept squinting and straining to see with, little pointy ears, freckles and snub nose. So her face he remembers a lot, and though her torso was long, he now thinks she had short thick muscular legs, but he could be imagining that. He was immediately taken with her when he escorted one student out of the room and said “Nadine Hanscom?”—he had a list of conferees for each afternoon and the times they were supposed to see him—and she got off the floor, where she’d been sitting, put her book into her knapsack, adjusted her glasses, which had fallen down her nose when she stood up, and came into the room. “Mind if I shut the door?” he said. “I’ve something to tell you I don’t want the others to hear.” She said “Shut it but don’t lock it, please,” and he said “Never thought to.” She sat across the desk from him. He offered her the beverages and pastries. She said she only drinks uncaffeinated herbal tea and eats nothing with sugar, but she will take a cup of hot water with a lemon wedge in it, and helped herself. When she was settled he said “You say in your cover letter that these three stories are new and haven’t been workshopped or seen by a teacher,” and she said “You’re the first to read them.” “Then tell me, and I’m going to be very hard on you now, how in God’s name did you come to write so well? You’re a budding literary genius, the next who-knows-what. I hope they gave you a full tuition waiver, sizable stipend and a teaching assistantship if not your own undergraduate fiction-writing class, because you could have got in at the top of any graduate writing program in the country. That’s my opinion, at least, not that I ever taught in any; I’m here strictly because of my three books and lots of published stories. But you, if you have a book-length work of fiction or are deep into one, could very likely have a book contract by the time you graduate. Wouldn’t that make your department happy. You’d be a walking ad for it. Anyway, if I were your teacher I’d take a hands-off policy to your work. I’d say ‘Don’t even come to class if you don’t want to. Just write, let me see it solely for the pleasure of reading it but not to steer it here and there or to critique it line by line.’ From what you’ve shown me you’re miles ahead of your peers, miles—well on your way,” and he gave her back her stories. “I hope, with what I said, I haven’t offended you or made you feel bad in any way,” and she started to cry. “Good,” he said, “I finally got a smile out of you. What’s with you—why so serious? Jesus, I can’t be telling you anything new, can I? Because you must get praise like this all the time.” She said “Now and then my teachers and fellow grad students have said kind things about my work, but nothing like this; though more often they’ve ripped it apart.” “The students I can understand—they’re competitive and you’re winning, making them question, when they come upon a natural, what the hell they’re in it for. As for your teachers, they’re either jealous of your talent—I kid you not—or have some misguided or misguiding notion about teaching writing. Or maybe their intentions are good and they’re holding back in their praise because they don’t want to take that drive to succeed out of you—you know, because you’re already partly there—so early in your career. But to me it’s ridiculous they wouldn’t just say how good you are. You don’t seem the type to let it affect you adversely. Have I gone overboard, based on reading only three of your stories? No. Don’t tell them I said this—I might want to come back here—but just use them for helping you get a first-rate literary agent and book and magazine editors interested in your work and what magazines to send to, which should be the highest-paying serious ones first, and things like that. When a young writer’s starting out, he has to be a bit selfish and aggressive. Wrong advice? Maybe. But if they can’t or won’t help you, get my address from your chairman—tell him I said it was okay—and write me and I’ll give you some leads. I’d give you the name of my agent if I were able to get one.” She said she was taken aback—actually used those words: “Really, Mr. Samuels, or should I call you ‘Professor’?” and he said “Call me by my name, ‘Martin,’” and she said “I couldn’t do that so fast. Wasn’t raised that way. But honestly, Mr. S.—that’ll be my compromise for now—I’m taken aback by what you’ve said. I’ve never been this complimented on anything I’ve done, and as a result I’m thrilled…overwhelmed…I’m obviously at a loss for words—deeply appreciative at what a professional writer I respect said about my work.” “You deserved it, every word of it, every word. So, it seems I’ve run out of things to say. Although I could go on in detail as to what I liked about your stories so much, which would prove to you I wasn’t making all that stuff up to get out of reading them,” and she said “That’s all right; I couldn’t take anymore. It’d stop me writing for a week.” “We still have ten minutes left. Like a refill on your hot water and lemon? We could also cut the conference short. But that might make your friends in the hall suspicious I’ve nothing much to say in these conferences and that I’m getting paid for doing very little—or we could talk about other things. Let’s do that.” He asked her about her family, what her parents do, where she grew up, what college she went to, degree she got, how long she’s been writing—“I doubt it can be more than twenty-five yea
rs, which is what I guess as your age”—she said he was right—and what writers she likes, “and don’t say me.” “The chairman had a published story of yours put in all the grad students’ boxes. ‘Violet,’ from On and On. So we’d be familiar with at least one of your fictions, he said, and that if we wanted to read more there were many copies of the collection in the campus bookstore. I liked the story but I don’t think it’ll influence what I write. Maybe the collection will, though, which I intend to buy.” “No, don’t buy, don’t read me, don’t get influenced; go your own way. And what the heck did he choose that story for, out of all the ones I’ve published? It could be the worst story in the collection. Possibly the worst story of mine I let be published. But I still must have thought it had something or I would have torn it up. Ah, you never know. More advice from me is don’t throw away the ones you think aren’t up to your best. Sometimes your fiction is better than you think and it takes other people to tell you. That you might not like the work for personal reasons—it reminds you of some person or experience you want to forget. Though that might be another example of my not knowing what I’m saying. There was a previous one, wasn’t there?” Around then he looked at his watch or a wall clock. “I guess we gotta end this,” he said. “Our time’s more than up. It’s been fun, talking to you about things not entirely related to your writing. Getting to know somebody, in other words. It was a nice break.” She got up and said “First of all, thank you for everything. Secondly, you probably won’t want to do this. You’ve read plenty of our work the last two days and there’re more to come. But there’s a reading tonight of graduate poetry and fiction writers I’ve been asked to invite you to. It starts at seven, never lasts more than an hour and a half, and that’s with an intermission and post-reading chatter, so if you have other things to do after, there should be time. And the readers always provide exotic snacks and foreign beer and good wine—that’s part of the bylaws of the series. And your being there would be a real treat to all of us. An older adult. Oh my goodness! For we never get our teachers to come or any audience but undergraduates and ourselves. Say yes?” and he said “Sure, why not? And I’ve nothing doing tonight. After these conferences are over I was going to go for a run, shower, have a drink—I brought my own—and find some depressing place to have a depressing dinner alone at, most likely the school cafeteria, for they serve beer, right?” She met him at the reading. “Martin, Martin,” she called, “over here,” pointing to the seat next to hers she was saving for him. She’d come with another graduate student and introduced them. Charlie, or Jackie, his name was, said “This is an honor, sir. I’m a fan.” “Oh nonsense,” he said. “Nadine must have put you up to saying that.” “Did not,” she said. “In fact, listen to this. Before either of us even knew you’d been invited here for a week, I saw him reading one of your books.” “A story in The Paris Review,” Charlie, he’ll settle on, said. “A story, then, but quite a coincidence.” “Did you read the story too?” he said, and she said “I didn’t, and I don’t know why. I know I wanted to by what Charlie said about it, but he had to return it to the library, I think, which could be why I thought it was a book. What was the reason?” and Charlie said “I loaned the magazine to someone who wanted to read the Cheever interview in it, and it was my personal copy, not the library’s, and I never got it back.” “Well,” he said, “one story can’t turn anyone into a fan, unless it’s ‘The Dead.’” “I read another story of yours in another literary quarterly,” Charlie said, “but I forget the magazine’s name.” “What was the story about?” and Charlie said “That I also forget. I know I liked it. I’m sure it’ll come back to me by the time we have our conference Thursday.” “Was it in a recent issue? Antioch Review? Story Quarterly?” “Neither. Like The Paris Review, it was from far back. I got it off the magazine table in the Writers’ Room we have here, but I don’t think I told Nadine about it. But it’s still here if she wants to read it and nobody’s stolen it yet.” He didn’t like any of the work read, but after each of the four readers finished, she turned to him with the look “So what did you think?” and he tightened his lips and nodded or smiled and gave a thumbs up. He had a beer or wine during the intermission and a couple of cheese on crackers and some grapes. After the reading several students came up to him and wanted him to sign the photocopies of his story the chairman had distributed and said things like “Thank you for coming. It’s great you could be here.” One said “I hope Nadine didn’t have to threaten to break your arm to get you here,” and he said “Not at all. Lots of talent here, which I knew there’d be from the manuscripts I’ve read so far. As for the poetry, I’m no expert but I thought it was terrific and clear—able to be understood, for my poor brain, first time around.” He said to Nadine and Charlie “Can I buy you guys dinner and a beer someplace? I’m starved.” She said “The refectory in this building is still open and has authentic Sicilian pizza and other delicious goodies and tap ale and beer.” He still didn’t know what she and Charlie were to each other. No touching or endearments or loving looks or coy side glances, so he guessed just friends, or else they had made some agreement before not to show anything like that. When they were at the dining hall table and Charlie had excused himself to go to the men’s room or to make a phone call, he said to her “Nice young man. Are you two serious?” and she said “Oh, God, no. I wouldn’t be even if he didn’t have a steady boyfriend. We share the rent and give close and sometimes ruthlessly honest readings of each other’s works.” “He’s still a nice kid and clever and intelligent, so I bet he’s a good writer, though I haven’t read his stuff yet.” “He’s the best, and an ideal roommate. Super cook and housekeeper and bill-payer—all the things I’m weakest at—and he doesn’t smoke and respects my privacy, and is there when I need him when I get frustrated or sad. We’re like a very compatible married couple who don’t sleep together, although he, and not because he’s gay, is more the wife. You’ll see. He’s going to be a major writer of gay fiction. He holds nothing back.” “I’m looking forward to reading him. Listen, can I be frank with you?” and she said “Gay fiction repulses you.” “No.” “You want us to go off together, to dance in the moonlight.” “Close. Is there any way we can be alone? If you think this is inappropriate of me to ask, please say so.” “Just tell Charlie you want to be alone with me and he’ll leave.” “I couldn’t say that,” and she said “Believe me, he’d love to see something happen between us. He’s all for young writers having interesting and different experiences to write about, he’s said. I don’t write that way, but he does, and it hasn’t seemed to hurt him. And he’s having his lover sleep at our apartment tonight, so he’ll probably want to get away soon anyway.” Charlie came back and she said “Martin and I want to take a walk together and talk,” and Charlie said “Fine, I was through here, but first let’s scarf down the pizza and beer. James is waiting for me and I want to come to him half-stoned.” They walked a little around campus—she showed him a lake—and talked about he doesn’t know what—his life, hers, writing, writers, her writing program, books—and then he said to her “They’ve given me a room in one of the dorms for a week, but for guests of the university, so a bit spiffier than the ones for students, I’m told. Would you like to see it?” and she said “Does that mean you want to sleep with me? Or are you just bringing me there to show me how well the room’s appointed in comparison to a typical dorm room?” and he said “I’m sorry; I’m being careful. I didn’t know how else to put it. Yes.” “All right. Just wanted to know what I’m in for. And it sure beats going home and hearing Charlie and James through the walls, discreet as they’d try to be, whooping it up for a couple of hours. And you seem like a gentle sane man, not a masher or intimidator or kinky loonybird like some of the male visitors to our program I’ve heard about.” “Any names?” and she said “No, so you can count on complete tactfulness from me, unless I’ve gauged you wrong. But you know you’re quite a few years old than I, but not preposterously older,” and he said “I
considered that as a reason for not asking but decided to go ahead with it anyway.” “You look much younger than Charlie said you are, even with a receded hairline and your sideburns turning gray. You must be very healthy and exercise a lot and eat well—flat stomach, muscular arms, no lines or creases except in your forehead, which I romantically think all serious writers eventually have, because it comes from the deep thinking while they’re writing. You’d be my oldest partner by about ten years. How about me? Will the age difference be the greatest you’ve had?” and he said “There was one not too long ago, who was around three years younger than you. This past summer, if you want to know, and my last before you. She dumped me.” “Everybody gets dumped at least once. You? Someone who’s forty-two and has an eye for women has probably been dumped a lot and also dumped a lot of women too. Knowing, though, there was someone younger than I with you makes me feel better about this, for some elusive reason. Was it another guy or just the age difference?” and he said “Both,” and she said “No doubt he was a lot younger than you too. That must have hurt.” “And look,” he said, “I didn’t choose that my last two women be so young. It just turned out that way. She came over to me at an art opening. And I came on to you today,” and she said “I’m not saying anything. But we should get moving, Martin.” “Can I have a little kiss to start off with? I hate asking but it’d seem a bit awkward or cold, going to my room without so much as holding hands or rubbing noses first,” and she said “Let’s wait till we get inside and the shades or blinds or whatever they have in that grand room are down. This campus is excessively monitored and patrolled, supposedly for our protection, so our innocent kiss might get reported. I’m doing this to benefit you more than me, in case you really do want to come back.” “I like you,” he said. “You’re smart and beautiful and considerate and on your toes,” and she said “Well, thank you, kind sir. I said a lot of nice things about you too,” and they went to his room, he had a couple of drinks while she washed up, and they made love. Later in the morning he said “Despite my many mishaps last night, which I swear to you I was unaware of till now, but I’m glad you told me about them, may I see you again? I have three more days and I can even stay the weekend in a hotel, if they kick me out of this room on Saturday.” She said “You can see me, but not for sleeping with. Once was enough.” “Please, I promise to be on my best behavior, and no more drinking or just overdrinking, which I think is what did it to me last night.” “The other thing,” she said, “is that what little there was between us is over, and I think our friendship, or the potential for it, will also be over if you persist in wanting to screw me.” “Look, just give me a chance to change. I have to read manuscripts now, but later we can have dinner, you choose the restaurant; it’ll be nice. Just so long as you don’t rule anything out,” and she said, “I’m reluctant to say this, but feel I have to, that you are, as you continually make clear, pathetic,” and he said “Maybe I am; and maybe I’m an asshole too, if that’s not what you meant. But that doesn’t mean I have to always be pathetic, and what I did last night was the exception. I’m cured.” She stared at him and shook her head as if he were even more pathetic than she’d thought, and he said “Okay, what I just said was stupid. I’m hungover; not the best of excuses, but I’m not thinking of talking or even listening right. But I’ll be better. I’ll get rid of the manuscripts. Don’t tell your friends I’m doing it so fast. And then we’ll meet before my conferences, and talk and everything is ruled out,” and she said “No way. And don’t phone me or try to meet up with me. I made a huge mistake yesterday and I apologize for my complicity in all of this and helping to bring out the worst in you. I know there’s a better side to you, from what I encountered in your office and what everybody’s said. Just, you’re a little oversexed, which makes you do foolish things,” and she rubbed his knuckles, faked a smile, said to herself “Did I leave anything? No,” and left. What am I doing to myself? he thought, getting into bed pretty well loaded that night. No more very young women, that’s for sure. You got the hots for one, jerk off. And why do I get so damn sad every time a woman says she doesn’t want to see me or sleep with me anymore? This one. What were my feelings for her? She was bright and a terrific writer and outspoken and cute. Frizzy hair, button nose, those glasses and knapsack. And very independent and sharp. But was I in love? How could I be? Attracted to a lot I liked about her, that’s all. And seventeen years younger? But when she’s still in her mid-twenties? You got her in bed, that should have been enough, so why go out of your head after just one time with her? She was right; you were pathetic. Pathetic with Karyn too, that time crying. From now on, an older woman, one much closer in age to you, and don’t jump into bed so fast. Never works. Well, he did with Diana—five or so hours after they met they were making love at his place—and that one went on for years. But give things like this time. And for a change, maybe one who’s Jewish, since—no, he’s not kidding, but not religious Jewish—since that might have been in past relationships—not with Nadine; never came up; doubts she even knew he was Jewish and it was all so quick—a problem too. The different backgrounds, culture, other things. Someone—he’s talking about the future—who knows what he’s referring to and doesn’t have to have him explain it when he makes a Jewish joke or remark and wouldn’t be put off if he exaggerates or overacts in a Jewish manner or accent as Terry and a woman he lived briefly with in California and a couple of others he saw from time to time were. And maybe even a woman who was brought up in New York, which’d mean they’d be coming from, like the Jewishness, and sharing even more things that were the same. Also, no woman who already has a child, even if she’s separated from her husband or divorced, but one still young enough to have kids. And a woman who’s built something like Karyn and Nadine. Sure, the body of this woman probably has changed from when she was their age if she’s five to ten years younger than he, but one with full breasts, a nice-sized rear, thick sturdy thighs, even chubby, but no small or thin body like Diana’s and Eleanor’s and the woman in California he lived with and he thinks Terry’s, except for her chest, although she was so long ago he mostly forgets. He wants a big strong body that can take his. So let’s see, he thought, what’s he have so far? An attractive Jewish woman from New York who’s childless but can still have children and who isn’t more than ten years younger than he and is of course intelligent and cultured and personable and gracious and good and so on, and stacked. Two years later he got a letter from Nadine, forwarded from his old address in New York. It was shortly after he started teaching in Baltimore and when he and Gwen had been together for almost that entire time, other than for when she broke it off and they didn’t see or speak to each other for a month or two. She used to say “two.” He’d say it was even less than one. “Isn’t it in your journal of that year?” he once said, and she said “To my great sorrow, since they had in them how and when we first met and, other than for that episode, our first wonderful year, I can’t find ’78 and ’79.” In her letter Nadine asked for a blurb for her first book, which was coming out in six months. “I hate asking this of you,” she said. “I remember you telling my friend James and me—you practically spit out the words, you thought the blurb practice was such sham and bunk—that you never asked a fellow writer for a blurb in your life and you never will. That’s all well and good if you happen to receive, as you did, quotable prepublication reviews for your first book, but in time to be put on the back of the book’s cover, something my editor doesn’t want to chance. She says that blurbs from other writers and prominent personalities are essential for a first-time published novelist. So I plead with you to consider what I don’t think is an unfair request from me, seeing how you were once so positive to my work. You helped me with that encouragement and praise more than you could ever know—I still walk on air when I recall our office conference—and my novel is short, really just a long novella, and clearly written and shouldn’t take more than a few hours to read, and you may even like it. Thank you in advanc
e.” He wrote back saying he still is against giving and receiving blurbs and he especially doesn’t see how an enthusiastic endorsement from a nobody writer like himself could help a book. It might even hurt it. Readers of the jacket copy, when they look over the book in the bookstore, will think how good could this writer be if she had to go to the bottom of the blurb barrel to get one? If I were you I’d only seek out blurbs from writers and critics with big names and hefty stature. No ‘prominent personalities,’ though, which I assume doesn’t mean famous writers who can’t keep their mouths shut about anything and so whatever they say is suspect, but talk-show hosts and celebrities like that. They could only help sell rubbish to undiscriminating readers, which I’m sure your novel is anything but.” She wrote back that she doesn’t know any other writers but the teachers she had in her grad program and they’re even less known than he. “Please reconsider. What will my publisher think if I can’t get even one blurb? And in some ways I feel I deserve one from you. And if the book’s a hit—stranger things have happened—you get your name and two of your book titles under your blurb. (P.S.: I didn’t think of that; it’s what my editor told me to tell you.)” He didn’t answer her; didn’t know what to say. Now he thinks it was lousy not to blurb her. He could have praised the book even if he didn’t read or like it. She was generous to him—let him screw her when she probably didn’t want to but knew he wanted to a lot—and she was really a terrific young person, while he acted like a pig, so what would have been the harm? His principles messed with? Come off it. He’s given plenty of blurbs, starting from around two years after she asked him for one. So many in fact, for former students of his and writers or their editors or publicists who sent him requests out of the blue—maybe they thought he’d be an easy mark when they noticed how many he gave—that he stopped giving them because he couldn’t come up with anything new to say and was repeating himself to the point where a blurb from him wasn’t worth anything anymore. She sent him an inscribed copy of her book soon after it was published: “Just thanks.” There were three blurbs on it from writers he’d never heard of, nor was he familiar with their book titles and literary awards. From the jacket copy and the forty or so pages he read and the rest he skipped through, her novel was about a fifteen-year-old Midwestern girl and her family and friends and wealthy suburb during a very hot and boring summer in the fifties. Then she’s deflowered by a much older motorcyclist passing through, who’s almost pistol-whipped to death by her father and the girl ends up being transferred out of her local public high school to an all-girls’ boarding school on the East Coast. The novel seemed written more for sophisticated younger readers than adults. The plot, despite the closing fireworks, was uninteresting and a bit dreary, and the writing was only so-so—certainly nowhere near as exciting and adventurous and even original as it was in her short stories from two years before. He wrote back saying how much he liked the book and how well written it was—“You were right; I breezed right through it”—and wished her lots of success with it, which he said he’s sure she’ll have, and a few weeks later sent her an inscribed copy of his new story collection: “Best always and with continued admiration for your work.” She didn’t write back thanking him for it. Her book got a short review in the New York Times Sunday book section: “An auspicious debut.” He never saw another review or mention of a book of hers or anything else she may have written or about her in the next twenty-five years or heard from her again. With her, too, he could have asked Gwen or one of his daughters to search her name online. He was curious but he supposes not that curious to find out anything new about her. Sometimes when he was in a bookstore he looked at the front fiction tables and then the shelves for a book of hers. The only one he saw, a few years ago, was her first novel without its cover in a used bookshop in Ellsworth, Maine. So those were the last four or five women he was in love or infatuated with or just slept with or wanted to before he met Gwen. Call her, he told himself the night he finally did call. What’s to be afraid of: If it’s not that, then what is holding you back? Went over that. So go over it again. That she won’t want to meet you the first time you ask her to on the phone? That could be part of it, though he knows that’s the way it can go. What are the other parts? Too many busts with women lately? Said it already: yes. Afraid of getting serious? A little. Deeply and mutually involved? That, too, but it’s also what he wants most. Because the short time he was with her—he doesn’t see how he could know all this, but feels very strongly he does—she seemed to have everything going for her that he liked and he’s probably putting too much hope on something happening between them. So, longer he doesn’t call, longer he keeps his hopes up, ridiculous as he knows that notion, or whatever you want to call it, is. But something could happen. Not setting you up for a letdown, but you’ve got to give it a chance. If nothing happens, or not the way you want it, don’t fall to pieces again. You’re through doing that. I’m not going to say it, but you’re going to act like a man. So call, goddamnit, call. Pick up the phone. Get your finger set to dial. Don’t waste your time looking for her number, it’s in your head. If her phone’s busy, try again. She doesn’t answer, call back later. If she has an answering machine and it comes on, tell her who you are and you’ll call again soon. And you will. But now call or you know, or it could quite possibly be so, you’ll never do it and, boy, will you forever regret it or for a long time to come. Because you’ll always think something could have happened with this woman of your dreams if you had only called. And what’s the only way to find out? That’s right, so call. He picked up the receiver. “I feel nervous,” he said. Well, what’s so wrong with that? “It’s not too late?” Looks at his watch on the night table. No, time’s just right: not too early, not too late. Now dial. You’ve come to the end of your stalling. And if you hang up while the phone’s ringing or right after she picks up, I’ll kill ya.