“He’ll forgive him, eventually,” he said.
“I know, and I want that, I really do. But enough—I came out to get away from myself for the night. How’s Martha?”
“Great.”
“And the two of you?”
“Never better.”
“You’re lucky.”
“You don’t need to tell me. Though we still don’t see enough of each other. One of us always seems to be on the road. I thought with Will in college now, we’d be doing more things together, but we’re not. I think she’s felt so landlocked during all our kid years, and me on the road so often, she’s making up for lost time, doing a lot of travel writing. And I’m glad for her.”
By the time their plates had been cleared, Sally reached across for his hand and said, “I am so loving being with you, I don’t want this to end.”
“Neither do I. Eau de vie?” He smiled at her.
“Hell yeah! Old times, old friend.”
He felt a sudden urge to kiss her. Why? To say “Thank you,” to say, “I love you, old friend.” To say exactly this. He just smiled.
When the drinks arrived, Scott said, “Why did you leave?”
“Where?”
“Paris.”
“Oh. That. Do you really want to go there?”
“Kind of.”
She exhaled heavily and looked away, clearly not wanting to go there. She sipped from her glass, turned back to him. “I couldn’t bear it anymore. And I hate good-byes.”
“But not even a note?”
“Scott, I was in love with you—in love, and told you so—and you were in love with someone else.”
They both paused to take the smallest of sips of eau de vie.
“Whatever happened to the two of you anyway?”
“Me and Cat?” He cleared his throat. “We broke up during my senior year.”
“Happens, doesn’t it. Anyone after?”
“A lot of girls, a lot of sex, but no one special. Not till after I graduated and met Martha.”
They were comfortable in the interstices of the conversation. But he still wanted to be back there, back then.
“Where did you go?”
“You mean in Paris?”
“Yeah, we still had one more night together.”
She squinted as if trying to remember. “I’m pretty sure I just went to the airport and hung out for thirty-six hours. I was pretty blue.”
“I’m sorry, Sally.”
“One of the borders of my life. I crossed over it. Scott, I’m so happy to be reunited.”
“Me, too. I’m here for you always. I’m a call or a text away.”
She smiled softly.
When the bill was presented, Scott grabbed it. When she moved for her purse, he said, “I’ve got this. I want to.”
The air remained warm, almost balmy. When they turned right on Hudson, she slipped her hand into his. When they reached Perry Street, she let his hand go.
“Here you are.”
His place was midway down the block. They stood face to face. He didn’t want to leave her and she could see this, could always see him.
“I don’t want to leave you either,” she said.
“I’ll walk you home,” he said.
She stared up at him, those hazel eyes he knew so well so long ago. Slowly, she reached to take his hand in hers. She squeezed it. She looked into his eyes, her lips parted, but her teeth clicked shut together. She waited. He waited. She said, “Or.”
“Or?”
She squeezed his hand and tilted her head slightly, just a twitch, in the direction of his apartment.
Scott closed his eyes. He breathed deeply, exhaled. “Sally.” He breathed again. “I can’t.”
She looked down and said, “I know. It was just a thought.”
“I just can’t,” he said again.
She let his hand go and turned to walk. He walked beside her, took her hand and she let him.
“Just to the High Line, okay?” she said.
“The High Line. By yourself.”
“It’s lovely at night. And it will probably be crowded because it’s such a nice night. I love the High Line.”
They walked in silence until they reached the steps up to the elevated railway-path-turned-park. They stopped and faced each other. She held his cheeks, brought his face to hers and kissed him on the lips. Neither too short nor too long, a slow count of three, just long enough for the memory of their mouths together to return to him. She stared into his eyes. “Stay in touch, you.”
“Of course I will, Sally.”
She smiled gently, turned, and ascended the steps in her long black dress. He watched her until she disappeared.
*
He’d had meetings all the next day and a flight home early the following morning. Work pressed in, endless emails. He coaxed Martha into taking Friday off to spend an afternoon together, a visit to the art museum, a long lunch. Sex when they returned home. A light soup dinner and a movie.
He wasn’t able to email Sally until Saturday.
“Dear, dear Sally,” he wrote. “Just a short email to tell you how much I loved dinner, loved being with you, loved talking with you. I know you’ll make it through this patch. Call me or write any time. I know I have to return in November—I’ll be in touch then and maybe you can take me to dinner.”
He stopped to think, sighed, shook his head, then signed it simply “Yours” and clicked SEND.
He did not hear back.
When he wrote before his November visit, he did not hear back then, either.
*
The following September, Scott felt he needed to get away, and he planned to stay in the Perry Street apartment for the month. Actually he moved his flight up, owing to a new tension at home, and arrived before Labor Day, despite the city heat and smell. He moved into what he thought a good writing routine. Up at six, coffee and a poached egg on toast with the Times, followed by a long walk along the High Line, then back to the apartment to write. He would write until late afternoon, then read the New Yorker or a novel, then take another walk on the High Line. As the days passed, he found himself checking his watch more and more frequently. He knew he was drinking too much and had made 5:30 the absolute earliest he could have the balm of a cold, strong cocktail at one of the bars along Ninth Avenue. Sometimes he’d finish the High Line early and walk the blocks between Ninth and Tenth Avenue, slowly, peering into shop windows and checking his watch, but he always had a cocktail in a public place where he could be around people.
“Edward?” Scott said.
Edward Adams turned on his barstool to regard Scott, and Scott knew he was not mistaken when he saw the mole above the right eyebrow. Edward pushed his Clark Kent glasses high on the bridge of his nose. “Scott Carpenter. Sally’s friend. It’s been a long time since the only time we met.”
“My word,” Edward said, standing. “Hello.” He held out a hand.
Scott had at 5:30, this mid-September evening, chosen the Gaslight, just south of West Fourteenth Street, to have his cocktail. He came here most frequently. He liked the light crowd, the wooden bar. It comforted him.
After they’d shaken hands, Edward said, “Would you care to join me?” Scott was so surprised at chancing on Edward that he hesitated long enough for Edward to say, “I completely understand if you don’t want to.”
“No, no,” Scott said. “I’d like to, actually. Thank you.”
Sitting, and ordering his Manhattan—his preferred bartender, Alan, would have known the usual, but Alan was off on Wednesdays—he wondered if he should broach the topic and decided he would. “As I’m sure you can imagine, I’ve been wondering what happened. We only heard Sally’s side. A year ago July I saw Sally. She was angry.”
“And rightly so,” Edward said. “Or, rather, understandably so.”
Scott’s cocktail arrived and the two men touched glasses. Edward’s short, clipped hair had grayed considerably, but not completely, and it made him appear,
in his gray seersucker suit, older than he was, but dignified.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“I fell in love,” Edward said.
“You fell in love.”
“Still am.”
“You’re still together?”
“Mind you, it was not something I sought. My bad behavior was a result of this. I couldn’t handle all that was happening. I was very unhappy. Being in love was miserable because I loved Sally so much, because she’s so wonderful—difficult, but wonderful. I drank to dull the … the … the agony. Prescription pain meds. Anything I could find. But I couldn’t blot it out completely, much as I tried. Until the accident. Did she tell you?”
“Yes, the bus.”
“I could have died.”
“Yes.”
“Since I didn’t die, that bus probably saved my life.”
“Indeed.”
They drank.
Scott said, “I’ve been trying to reach Sally, but she won’t respond. I even went to her apartment but the doorman never gets an answer.”
“Not surprising. She’s better but quite changed.”
This news so dispirited Scott—changed by the divorce?—that he took an extra big swallow of his Manhattan. His head spun slightly.
Then he turned to Edward and said, “Edward, please. How did it happen? How did you fall in love, in your circumstances? Were you unhappy with Sally? Was that it?”
“No, not at all, I loved and still love Sally. She could be a handful, but no, I was completely content in the marriage. The job was the issue.”
“So, how does it happen?”
“How is easy.” Edward studied Scott’s face. “What I can’t tell you is why. I imagine every case is different. Or maybe it’s all the same, some chemical response. Is there something specific you’d like to know?”
Scott turned away, sipped his Manhattan, took a breath, and said to the shelf of liquor bottles, “My wife has been having an affair for a year. I found out a couple months ago.”
“Oh, dear,” Edward said with genuine sympathy, sympathy Scott hungered for as much as for the evening cocktail. “I’m so sorry.”
Edward rubbed Scott’s back and kept rubbing it until Scott turned to him. Even knowing him as little as he did, Scott knew that physical affection was not something that came easily to Edward, and this touched and comforted him.
Edward said, “It’s hard business, I know.”
Scott sighed. Yes. Hard business.
“How did you find out?” Edward asked.
“My wife, Martha, she told me. The wife of her … lover discovered the affair. The wife forced the issue. Threatened to call me herself if Martha didn’t do it. She actually did call me to confirm that Martha had come clean.”
“Interesting,” Edward said. “If you don’t mind my asking, because I’m curious about these things, how did the wife find out?”
“It’s kind of funny, actually, if anything can be funny anymore. The wife was going through the mail and opened a letter from the Greenbrier resort, addressed to her and her husband. It was a note from a staff member thanking them for their uncommon generosity and hoping they’d return to the Greenbrier soon.”
Edward nodded and said, “And the wife had not been to the resort.”
“The resort about which my wife was writing a travel piece? No.”
“Mmm,” Edward said. “Where do things stand now?”
“We’re working on it. We may make it. I don’t know. Even if we do, it won’t be the same. It’s pretty damaged.”
“Yes. I understand. But we move on. We have no choice.”
Scott sighed.
They sipped in silence.
“So, again,” Scott said, somewhat desperately. “How did it happen? For you. I’m trying to understand it all.”
“That I fell in love with a performance artist ten years my junior who has purple hair and a stud in her lip?”
Scott chuckled at Edward. “Yes, that.”
“It’s so fascinating,” Edward said. He rubbed his chin. “I saw her daily for, for forever. She works at the Starbucks across the street. Across from Chelsea Market.” Edward pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. “Where I always got coffee. I found her cute, but I find a lot of women cute or beautiful. We’d banter each day, and we got to know each other through my ordering different items. I remember trying to make sense of all the odd concoctions they offer. I mean, too many choices!”
Scott smiled and said, “Do you remember the crackers?”
Edward paused, but then said, “I do remember getting crackers with you.” He paused to think of it, and the slightest of grins twitched once at the corners of his mouth. “That’s funny.” He nodded, then turned to Scott. “She made me laugh. That was kind of it. The way she described the coffees and teas and whatnot. I almost always left laughing, happy, lighter. And then when I lost my job and was trying to figure out what to do with my life, I’d spend a lot of time in there. Because I couldn’t bring myself to tell Sally I’d been let go—too humiliated, too scared—I had to go somewhere all day. They have Internet there. Sally hates Starbucks, so I knew I was safe there. And then I started drinking, more out of boredom. At the end of the day, I’d have a cocktail at Pastis, until it closed, then here. And I was in here one afternoon and in she walks.”
“She being?”
“I’m sorry. Miranda. She’s meeting me here soon. I can introduce you.”
“Really? I’m curious to meet her.”
“One afternoon I was in here and in she walked. She’d just gotten off her shift and she said, ‘It’s you!’ The sound of her voice. It was like a melody.” Edward, normally so dry, became almost dreamy, Scott thought. “Like when you hear a song you instantly love. I asked to buy her a drink, she accepted, and we sat here drinking for two hours. Laughing. I remember just laughing a lot. And then there was a long silence between us because we were kind of talked out but didn’t want to leave. And I kissed her. And she kissed me back.”
Edward leaned back and exhaled toward the ceiling in a way that seemed to Scott uncommonly emotional for Edward. “Scott, this is a cliché, but it was like a drug. It was as if I’d been injected with sodium pentothal or whatever it is they give you that makes you so happy that you’ll tell anyone anything. It just washed over and through my whole body. I was euphoric.”
“Right here? In this bar?”
“In these very seats.” He paused, narrowed his eyes. “Actually those seats down there, but yes, it happened here. We were climbing all over each other, making a spectacle of ourselves, actually. But her hands in my hair. The smell of her skin. Someone actually told us to get a room. I think it was the bartender, and I believe he was serious.”
“Did you?”
“No, I was expected home. I ultimately had to leave. And a good thing. Imagine if I’d been seen! Making out with this younger woman with purple hair. We have all kinds of friends in this neighborhood. I run into people I know here all the time, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I stumbled home, euphoric. And when I woke up the next morning to shower and put on my fake suit, or rather the suit I didn’t need, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I went to the Starbucks, and she wasn’t working that day and I was beside myself. I walked all day long. Then, unable to bear it, I got horribly drunk and was mean to Sally and Arthur. I mean, we weren’t great even in good times. Sally’s depressions deepened. But, anyway, I was waiting for Miranda when she got to work the next day, and she saw me on the street and she literally started running, and she leapt into me and wrapped her legs around me. She’s tiny. We hugged and kissed and, well, it was pretty clear what was happening. And I gave into it.”
“And here you are.”
“And here I am.”
“Fascinating.” Scott decided to have another. Edward declined. Martha had not spoken of euphoria or drugs, though she wouldn’t, would she? She would and did mention boredom and loneliness.
“Edward, I need to fi
nd Sally, I need to get in touch with her. Is she okay?”
“Well, as I said, she’s better but she’s different.”
“What do you mean, better?” Scott said, not hiding his irritation.
To which Edward, as if to a dim client, explained, “Well, after the … the attempt, things changed. There was an ‘anoxic injury’ in medical parlance.”
“Attempt? What attempt?”
Without emotion, Edward turned away from Scott to face the bar, though he lost some of his color. To his reflection in the mirror he said, “You don’t know.”
“Know what?”
Edward shook his head and softly said, “I just assumed you had mutual friends, and that you’d know from one of them.”
“Know what?!”
Edward turned to Scott. “Sally tried to commit suicide. Tried, mind you.”
“When?”
“A year ago?”
Scott raced in his mind back one year. He said, “I need to know when exactly.”
“I found her, so I know exactly when. It was the day after I moved out.”
“How? Pills?”
“A utility knife. Sent Arthur to a friend’s, said I was to be contacted to pick him up the following day as I had weekend custody. She swallowed a bottle of aspirin. Ran a warm shallow bath, water not deep enough to drown in, just warm enough to keep the blood flowing. Then she made three vertical cuts along each wrist.”
Scott turned away, his heart hammering against his chest.
“It’s remarkable that she lived. I wasn’t supposed to go back to the apartment that day. The reason I stayed—I didn’t want to stay there, but Sally had become so erratic I was worried about Arthur, I wanted to make sure Arthur was taken care of. At any rate, I’d forgotten my wedding band. I never wore the wedding band, but I was sentimental for it, nonetheless, and I did want to retrieve it from the back of the bureau we shared in the bedroom. The bathroom door was open. She’d cut her radial arteries. She wasn’t conscious. I called 911. They said if I’d walked in five minutes later, she might easily have been beyond saving. The water was still warm. So she clearly wanted to end it. They also said if I hadn’t known her blood type, she might have died. She’s type AB and they were able to infuse her in the ambulance.”
In Short Measures Page 34
