A grizzled older man he has never seen before, sitting in the velvet arm chair in his living room, introduces himself in a mild voice as an aggrieved father. The man’s mildness temporarily assuages B’s sputtering outrage.
–How did you get in here? he asks. No friend to the inordinate security apparently necessary to living in New York City, B nevertheless has always taken the requisite precautions.
–I’ve come to you to ask you to stay away from my daughter, the man says. If you have even a shred of decency, which is your reputation among my sources, you’ll do as I ask.
–I hardly know your daughter, B says. Anyway, which one is your daughter?
–Just give me your word that you’ll stay away from her, and there’ll be no recriminations. I have a disgraceful temper, but I have always considered myself a fair man.
–Whatever you say, B says, eager to have his apartment to himself, though as soon as he’s offered his accord, he feels repelled by his own cowardice. –I mean, in all likelihood, you have nothing to worry about from me.
–I’m just asking this one thing, the man says, looking up at him with blind eyes. –One thing is all I’m asking of you. He points his cane in B’s direction. You won’t grant me that one thing? The intruder lumbers to his feet and taps his way to the door. –A curse on your head, he says, an eerie smile on his thick lips as he works his way out of the apartment.
Fifteen minutes later, B gets a silent phone call. B conjectures that the father has told the daughter (Gloria M?) that he won’t be dissuaded by threats from his determination to see her. His stance, he imagines, has encouraged her to call. He says, –Hello, twice, his enthusiasm compounding itself, while imagining in the inescapable silence her unspoken message. —I’m glad you called, he says to the void. Then B suggests meeting her for breakfast the next morning at a hippie pancake place called Tofu Forever. Before he can suggest a time—he is thinking of suggesting 11—his silent caller hangs up the phone.
At this point, he notices the flickering red light on his answering machine and he pushes the playback button to check out his messages. There is only one and it is from a woman apologizing for not keeping her appointment with him at the Brass Bar. A case of cold feet, she says. Also, her former live-in boy friend had returned.
If the one who left the message was the one he was supposed to meet, then who, B asks himself, is Gloria M? Given his infatuation with her, B may have willfully evaded the obvious. Clearly, she is not any of the women he talked to on the phone and certainly not either of the two he had arranged to meet. Their meeting, it is clear to him now, was some kind of fortuitous misunderstanding. B, whose loneliness and horniness remain unabated, feels temporarily blessed. So, undaunted, even spurred by the father’s warning, he goes to Tofu Forever to keep the appointment he had made (or had not made) with his silent caller. After three coffees, nursed and untasted, and a concomitant passage of time, he resigns himself grudgingly to another situation of terminal misunderstanding. A weight of loss, chronic since childhood, revisits with renewed intensity. When he gets up to leave, he discovers an even stronger disposition not to move and so he sits down again. Another half hour passes with characteristic haste. He daydreams, remembers the last time he was in love and the last time he fell out of love. It seems like a hundred years ago and also like yesterday.
A sense that someone is staring at him brings him back from the world of fleeting memory to the unchanging moment. When he looks up what he notices is the nervy Cassandra staring at him through the glass in the front door. There seem to be six or seven women standing alongside or behind her. One, though it is probably a trick of the light, seems to be shaking her fist at him.
A white-haired man, apparently the owner of Tofu Forever, comes over to his table, says he doesn’t want any trouble in his place. –Why should there be any trouble? B asks.
–You know, the man says, making the slightest gesture with his head toward the door. The group of women standing behind Cassandra seems to have tripled in number in the intervening five minutes between glances in that direction.
–It’s all a misunderstanding, B says. Nevertheless, he follows the white-haired man into the employees bathroom behind the kitchen and climbs through an open window into a courtyard.
–Be careful, the owner calls after him. That’s a mean-looking crowd.
Not sure which way to go, he climbs a fence into the adjacent yard, exciting some fearsome barks from an unseen dog. He goes from backyard to backyard, shimmying up and down fences, trying to outflank the crowd of women. He falls only once, tearing his pants in a minor way. The last backyard leads to a narrow alleyway, which he follows to a street apparently around the corner from the entrance to the restaurant. He looks both ways before emerging. His sense of direction askew—even in the best of circumstances it was never wholly reliable—B starts in one direction then changes his mind and goes off in the other. He has only to peer around the corner to see that it is the right choice he has forsaken for the wrong one. So he turns around again and runs two blocks without looking back. Out of breath, he takes his chances and veers into a bar that has a similar under lit dark-wood ambience to the Brass Bar. This place could be its clone.
Out of perhaps unnecessary precaution, he takes the farthest vacant booth from the door and is about to take a seat when he notices a familiar figure seated, her hand in front of her face, across the aisle from him. She doesn’t look up when he slides into the booth facing her. B starts to say the same thing several times, an acknowledgment of his pleasure in finding her again.
At some point, she slips her hand across the table into his, only to reclaim it the moment he catches her eye. An uncharacteristic shyness ties his tongue in knots. Stammering the request like some backward teenager, he asks her for her phone number.
She writes on her napkin, holding it up to him: –I have no phone. What for?
–You need a phone so I can get in touch with you, he writes on his own napkin and passes it to her.
When she smiles at him—her smile a rare event—B tells her a few of the things he’s imagined himself saying. This is out of character for him. It is not B’s habit to announce his feelings directly. The thought, for B, the felt unspoken, has always for better or worse sufficed. The news of his interest in her (his passion, his affection) seems to disturb rather than delight. She seems to shut down, withdraws more deeply into herself. The more she retreats from him into the abyss of self, the more impelled B is to make contact. The way he does it is to tell her who he is, which he does by retailing anecdotes about his life that do him no credit. He wants her to see that his fallibility matches hers.
For starters, he tells her about the breakup of his first marriage, stuff he has never told anyone before. How, just months after his first child was born, he had walked out on his wife. Well, not exactly walked out—he had told her he was leaving, feeling it the honorable thing to do—but then he had left the state (they had been living in California) without leaving a forwarding address. He sent money for the first year, monthly sums, whatever he could afford. But then she moved and neglected to send him the address and his checks came back like boomerangs through no fault of his own. He had been very young, too young to know what to do with a child, the pregnancy an apparent accident, though his suspicions had been that she had deceived him by not putting in her diaphragm after telling him she had.
Even so, his behavior was regrettable. He acknowledges that now. His urgent need to get away a kind of madness or childishness. Now, years later, he sometimes wakes in the middle of the night aware of having lost a child he may never find.
And that wasn’t the worst of his mistakes with women, only the most unforgivable. His third marriage broke up because he discovered his wife was having an affair (with her therapist of all people) and he couldn’t forgive her, wouldn’t. Not that she ever asked to be forgiven, not that she even stopped the affair even after he confronted her with what he knew.
After a few min
utes, Gloria gets up, indicates through gesture (a single tear leaning from her eye) that she has to leave.
–How will I find you again? he asks.
Her answer is to hurry away, her long coat trailing like a shadow along the ground. She flees, he follows. He wants, needs, to see where she goes. To keep her continually in sight is security against never seeing her again. After a few blocks of this regimen, she turns around and returns to him, assaulting him with a hard push in the chest, sending him backward into the unexplored landscape of surprise.
Stumbling backwards, B chooses not to fall. The moment his equilibrium has been reestablished, he holds out his hand to his assailant. Gloria M slaps at it violently and misses, B impulsively pulling back, an unthinking gesture he immediately regrets. Hit me if that’s what you want, he wants to say but censors.
Gloria stands facing him with inchoate fury, her face red. He tells her that he loves her as if that alone were missing from their dialogue. Unable to find her memo pad, she writes on his cuff, –I never want to see you again. Can’t you understand that? In his time, he has understood more difficult things than that; he has seen through the opaque, has read between the lines, has made intuitive sense of unparaphrasable language. The unknown has often lingered like sadness at his fingertips.
B rereads the note on his cuff, straining for another way of making sense of its text. This isn’t the first time he’s been rejected. But it always seems like the first time, doesn’t it? As he walks away, he consoles himself with the notion that her unqualified rejection of him is only words on his cuff. When he gets home, his neighbor, a woman of uncertain age—the one with the plaintive dog—intercepts him in front of his apartment and tells him that just a few minutes ago, a small army of women were waiting in the narrow hallway for him. –You just missed them. I hope it wasn’t anything too important.
–You know how it is, B says, you innocently throw a stone in a well and the reverberations go on for the rest of your life.
–Is that a fact? the neighbor says, rolling her eyes, slipping into her apartment and closing the door.
In an undoing mood, B puts all the letters he got in response to his ad in the waste basket and burns them. It takes awhile and the residual smoke hangs on afterwards, plaguing him. The smell of smokey perfume, with a charred subtext, lingers. In the bathroom, with the window open, B, looking for something to read, entertains the text on his cuff. The thing is, it has faded (or it was the left cuff and not, as he remembered, the right) and he checks the other cuff and then the other. Gloria M’s rejection note has vanished. Is that a positive sign, he wonders, or an indication of a different problem altogether?
He writes a poem, or the beginning of one, called “Undoing the Past.” His thesis is, that contrary to the received view, not only can the past be undone, it is undone, despite the usual desperate attempts to hold on to it like a secret truth, all the time.
In a short month, he has fully recovered from Gloria’s loss and is back at his job teaching creative writing at one of the branches of the City University. He has stopped drinking temporarily, has even gone to an AA Meeting, though more out of curiosity than acknowledgment, sitting like an eavesdropper in the back row. An unexpected contentment holds him in its grasp.
One day he writes a story about a writer like himself, thrice divorced, lonely and horny (sometimes horny and lonely) who takes an ad out in a Personals column of a local magazine. In the story, the writer meets an apparent blind woman (he is never wholly sure she is blind) to whom he is unaccountably drawn. He pursues her recklessly and loses her. She distrusts his ardor, is unable to believe anyone would want her the way he professes to want her. At the end of the story, months after he has given up on her, there is a knock on his door in the middle of the night. He knows even before he answers the door that it is the blind woman and that she has decided to accept him but that—the passage of time perhaps responsible—he has only the dimmest recollection of his once all- consuming passion for her.
Even as he opens the door, even before he sees her, he makes a decision as to how to proceed. He will pretend that everything is as it was, that he still loves her to distraction. It is, as he sees it, the only honorable choice allowed him. He faces her, as the story ends, with words of endearment on his tongue and disappointment—the sadness of irrecoverable loss—on his unseen face.
VI. LOST IN EROS
1.
It was not what B expected or imagined, not even one of the featured attractions of his idle hopes, which is what he said after the fact to anyone who would listen in defense of his behavior. He was not one of these older men who out of denial and God knows what else pursued much younger women. That had never been his game. He had simply, without premeditation, during a reading in Seattle, found himself turned inside out by someone—a woman, a girl really— who happened to be thirty plus years his junior.
This girl had come up to him after his reading, carrying three of his books, asking if....The story doesn’t bear repeating. Asking if he wouldn’t mind—her shyness was exquisite—if it wasn’t too much trouble....The completed sentence was a tacit collaboration between them. –You want me to sign your books, is that it? he asked. I’d be honored.
–They’re your books, she said. I’m just their reader.
She opened the top one—A Fictional Autobiography—to the title page, and handed him a pen. He asked her her name, which seemed to fluster her. –I just want to know how to inscribe it, he added, embarrassed by her embarrassment.
–It doesn’t matter, she said, then mumbled her name, turning her face away. It sounded to him as if she were introducing herself as ‘anyone’. She was not beautiful, perhaps almost beautiful, her face too narrow, her features wayward as if at some point they had taken a misguided turn. Her eyes were an astonishing shade of green.
He poised the pen over the page, waiting for further instructions.
She had straight pitch-black hair, which she wore down her narrow back like a waterfall. She was neither tall nor short. Her gestures had an unaffected elegance. He signed the books with willed deliberation, hoarding his time with her. It was unavailing. In a moment, she was gone, leaving his life irrecoverably, walking away like a diminishing shadow toward the door.
He did what any infatuated 54-year-old author on a book signing tour might do; he left his post and followed her out the door.
When he caught up with her she seemed unsurprised at his presence. –Are you off on some urgent call? he asked. Something life and death?
She shrugged, wrinkled her brow in exhaustive thought. –Why don’t you join us for drinks after the signing, he said. I promise I’ll be quick. I’ll use both hands and sign two books at a time.
–Is quickness such a virtue? she asked, chewing on her lip. She took his hand, fetched it from his side, and swung it carelessly between them. –I don’t really drink.
When he told me about it, that spontaneous gesture, the swinging of his hand in her odd girlish way, he said it was like the sealing of some terrible bargain between them. He took one long hopeless longing look back, waving his head in desperate negation like a fighter quitting a bout because he no longer had the heart for unrelieved punishment.
He went back with her to her place, which she shared, as it turned out, with a bearded man (with a small pony tail) about her own age. Penelope, which was the name she had obliquely refused to give him, introduced him to the guy in residence. She called him PT.
B was gracious though disappointed, while PT registered surly indifference. The place was small and skanky with a soupcon of extremely marginal charm. Two plants, some posters, a drawing of Penelope, some Chianti bottles with candles in them. Tempted to leave, B wanted to get some kind of take first on this other relationship. Perhaps they weren’t lovers, perhaps it was something else, an arrangement peculiar to people of that age in this time. He invented two or three almost acceptable scenarios.
When B left, babbling some incoherent excuse about having
to get back to his hotel by a certain time, Penny caught up with him before he reached the next corner.
–I don’t want you to take away the wrong impression, she said. PT and I are just going through the motions.
What motions were those? he wondered. –Of course it’s none of my business, B said, which made her almost smile, a minor flaw in an unrelenting sadness. –I appreciate your telling me this anyway. B was not ready to confess his infatuation.
Penny looked over her shoulder, shrugged. –You’re not jealous of PT, are you? Please! Don’t disappoint me. She shuffled her feet, her bright face full of unacknowledged language.
A sudden unreasoning impulse overtook B. —Come with me, he said.
He saw that she was tempted. –Come with you where? she asked, amused and skeptical.
New York, B thought, but that wasn’t what he had in mind when he blurted out his feckless invitation. –How old are you any-way? he said.
–I’m 20...well I’ll be 20 in less than a month, she said. Look, I don’t know what you want. If you want to be around me, is that what this is about, you could just hang out in Seattle for awhile, couldn’t you? The possibility held him in its grasp for five prolonged minutes.
B flew back to New York that night on his scheduled flight and was met at Kennedy by a former wife who had maintained a longstanding officious interest in the vagaries of his life. It was a mistake, he knew, to confide the inexplicable attachment that occupied him like a demon, so he avoided talking about Penelope through the appetizer course of their dinner at Orso’s. B was not a man to keep secrets forever, his heart a readily available, much-read book.
While waiting for the main course, he mentioned his inappropriate attachment, making as little of it as tiresome obsession allowed.
The former wife, raising her eyebrows and smiling broadly, said, –Wouldn’t it be simpler to just put a “kick me” sign on your back?
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