Theo was an administrator. A Ph.D. in American history, he worked in the office of an HMO serving three counties. He’d come out of school at a time when the demand for historians was low. Now it was better, but he was ensconced, earning a big salary. At night he read history and lapsed—if it was late, if he was alone—into reveries where he engaged in conversation with those high-born architects of the postwar world he so admired. He imagined drinking with Dean Acheson. “And what’s your advice, Theo, should it come to pass …” Then he would rouse himself and go and check the doors to be sure they were locked. Sometimes, with the others sleeping, haunted by sudden fears of conflagration, he’d test the smoke alarms, press the lever that forced them to emit a high beep. He always laughed, ruefully: that’s my soul talking, that beep.
Anna, his wife, had her own business, breads and desserts that sold briskly in local delis. She worked at home, in the big kitchen, with a special permit and a part-time staff of two. Sometimes he’d surprise her in the middle of the day, find her with sweat on her high forehead and a soiled apron. “Get out of here! Don’t look at me like this!” she’d shout, her voice sounding like she’d only left Brooklyn the week before. What he couldn’t tell her—there were usually others around—was that he wanted to lift the apron and have her against the counter. Her breasts, unsupported beneath the sweatshirt she wore, looked rounder, and the smell of dough and cornmeal was an intoxicant. She’d been a dessert chef when they’d met, he a graduate student working as a busboy in the same restaurant. At night when the place closed, the staff would gather at the bar, drink shots of Sambuca. She led the drinking, a big, self-confident Italian girl, large hands and feet, wide hips and a red gash of a mouth: could he have her? A lowly busboy, he hesitated at first to approach. But she laughed at his jokes. One night in February, they parked on a cold hill. He prayed for help from someone. God. He wasn’t at all certain he could manage it with a woman so seemingly sure of herself. Afterward, there was light from the streetlamp and he studied her face hard. Who was she, really? She’d turned a degree from Barnard into a $150-a-week job making glacéed pears. She was afraid to live too far away from home, a huge Italian family, all girls. She squeezed his big shoulders and took him to her house. “I’ve always gotten along good with the Jews,” her father announced. Even now, at parties, she considered it no insult to her integrity to describe herself as mostly his wife. “Anna,” he’d interrupt, “you have your own business.” “What do I do? I make cream puffs.” She was like a boy then, a tough waterfront thug. Anyone looking at him looking at her would read adoration.
But if that were so, why was he spending three afternoons a week in the bed of a spindly blond woman whom he did not care for, a woman with no furniture; a woman whose life, when he looked up from the bed at her surroundings, seemed like it could be wiped off the face of the earth with the flick of a dustrag?
There was no easy and obvious causality; as a former historian, he rejected it. Tremors started deep in the earth, but people were always examining their own piddling actions for points of origination. “It’s because I am really two,” he would say to himself, whenever the question of cause came up, and though this was not a terribly satisfying answer, it was as far as he could get.
The affair—if you could call it that—had begun in the midst of a wet, slushy January. A sudden thaw had filled the streets with puddles, and the sky was perpetually low; in such weather, everyone looks for something. Their offices were on opposite sides of a partition, easy enough to develop a sensitivity to one another’s moods. One day, the woman was feeling low, in the midst of a third divorce; kind Theo suggested a drink. They chose a working-class bar, with the television running. In business suits, they looked out of place, but Theo liked these surroundings, an escape from the usual. At the beginning, he drank martinis with too much vermouth in them. “Order Bombay,” she suggested, worldly-wise, “and tell them to make it dry.” He had the sense that the air of stopped life that existed in this bar was the result of something very dramatic that had recently happened, from which the waitresses and patrons were all recovering. Over drinks, the woman told stories of her last marriage. He nodded his head, sympathetic but cautious. It was amazing to believe this woman had endured what she claimed to have endured. If these stories were all true, why didn’t she break?
It became at first a weekly, then a twice-weekly occurrence, drinking in this roadhouse, among couples who drank and didn’t speak and looked perpetually exhausted, the women especially. Next to this, his own homelife seemed bright and sparkling and clean, a beacon. This began to have all the feeling of an affair, with none of the mess. Often in his imagination he felt the impulse to crush the woman’s shoulders in a thick embrace, to test her softness and her give, but he only did this in his mind, and congratulated himself that there was no need to do it in reality. He loved Anna. And then once, in the parking lot, the woman burst into tears, apropos of nothing—they had been saying good-bye to one another, making a silly joke, and tears had sprung to her eyes. He hugged her. It had begun to snow, a swirling mass in the air. He seemed so big, so large to himself. This was nothing, he thought, to hug a woman.
But after a time, it became impossible to think of anything else. Nothing would have been easier, or more desirable, than to take her in his arms again, but no chances came his way. He was certain she had no interest in him except as a receptacle for stories of the three thugs she had married. At times, it became difficult to keep his hands closed around the stem of his martini glass, or to prevent himself from looking at her in a manner that would give away his growing sense of agitation. Even after he left her, her presence remained with him, rode beside him as he drove home in the car, became his companion as he stayed up reading; he thought of it as a hot line of some substance resembling mercury running from just below his throat down to where he ended. “It’s just desire, that’s all,” he said to himself, and when he said it, said the word desire, it seemed a small thing, something he could be expected to manage. Too often, though, the rest of his life was conducted like a thing he wished to rush through, the quicker to land once again in the brown, cracked leather seats of the 999 Lounge.
She began offering up hints, veiled and puzzling, phrased in a manner she thought of as fetchingly ironic but which he only found annoying. In fact, there was very little about this woman of which he could approve; he had even come to sympathize a little with the Polish software salesman who had, until recently, made her life such a torment. Still, when she uttered the words “I like men with black hair,” that line of liquid within him rose to a bubble. She had glanced at his hair after she’d said it; did that mean she was speaking of him particularly, or merely noticing, and with even a touch of surprise, that he happened to possess black hair himself?
One day in February the HMO newsletter, a monthly publication, featured a photograph of the office staff. By four or five inches the tallest, Theo hovered above the others, looking pale, and tilting slightly to the side. “So this is how I appear,” he thought when he saw it, and touched his own face. This man in the photograph made him ashamed. His hair had become like a woman’s, overly coiffed, as though in danger of taking wing. His eyes seemed foolish, off center, too eager to please. Yet each of these elements that disturbed him he could trace to a specific choice: he had, indeed, chosen to have his hair cut that way, had requested the stylist, in an excess of vanity, to do this and that. No one had come and descended on him and taken over his body; something else had done it. “You looked ridiculous in that photograph,” the woman had said at their drink that afternoon. And then she had laughed, at this other, official version of him, and it had reassured him somehow.
Finally, things came to a head. They were standing one afternoon in the parking lot beside her car. There was the feel of false spring to the day, the sudden elusive lightness of March. He didn’t want to go home just yet. The clouds were striped with pink and everywhere dirty snow was melting. The parking lot of the 999 was
unpaved gravel; smoke was being emitted from a thin pipe in the roof.
Theo stared into her car at a row of tapes in a box. What did she listen to on the way home? He peered closer into the window, trying to see. She was standing on the opposite side of the car, in a black coat with the collar turned up. Her little head peeked out of the thick collar like a cap too small for her. The day was affecting him in fanny ways; he felt the desire to dance, to run, to puff out his chest and spread his arms. But everything he could imagine doing would look silly, here in the parking lot. Suddenly she seemed his friend. He told her his desires and she laughed. “Go on and dance, no one’s looking.”
And when he didn’t, but looked at her as if to explain why this was impossible: “Well, come into the car, we’ll pop in a tape, you can pretend you’re dancing.”
He stepped in. The car was new, and smelled heavily of upholstery. She placed a tape in the chamber, turned up the volume, and soon there was a woman’s voice, husky and plaintive and at the same time advertising its own self-reliance. She sang about being in a bar and not wanting a certain man to come around. There was something that must have seemed comical in the intensity with which Theo listened, because the woman laughed at him. At the same time, she sang along, and he watched her eyes fasten on these lyrics as she sang them. Apparently, this was a real world, a world in which women sat and waited and hoped, and did not recognize, or seem troubled by, the transience of their own existences. He felt like his father in this reaction, a man who had known only a thick world, loyalty and family and self-denial. “Please don’t come through that door,” the woman sang, and he hung on her every word. He had re-created his father’s world, then been unable to live in it. Some boy was pounding his way out, insisting on his prerogative to sit in cars with careless, hard-drinking women, claiming his right to the thin world.
“So, is it ever going to happen between us?” the woman asked when the song was over. She giggled a little bit afterward, as if she were only half serious, or wanted to appear so.
He reached out to touch the knob on the cassette player, as if to lower the music, to hear her better. There was a thudding in his heart that made him worry. He took her tiny hands in his own. The veins were blue and stood out. How did the blood get anywhere? It was as if, in this moment, she were frail enough that she needed him just to allow her to live. Then another song came on and he half-listened, and remembered that this was a woman who’d had three marriages and knew how to take care of herself. A former husband had once poured a bottle of beer over her head and she had slugged him. The same man had, at another time, suggested that a kielbasa keep them company in bed. He was in an absurd situation. Then her lips came to his and something else was momentarily true. She was really quite wonderful. He felt for her, and her body made the lithe, adaptive movement of an infant being lifted. The smallness of her face stunned and excited him. He said something, with his lips closed against her forehead, and did not know what he said. Still, he felt incriminated by it, as if it were the words that had escaped, and not the kisses and the embrace, that marked this moment in time and space. He thought if he could catch the words as they bounced around the car and call them back, then nothing would have happened. There followed a moment of extreme confusion. He looked out the window and saw a school bus pass. It was empty, but after it had gone he swore to himself he’d seen his daughter’s face pasted against the window, staring out.
II
In the months afterward, when the difficulty of his situation began to creep up on him, he once or twice tried to lighten it by calculating that if Anna were an absentminded shopper, and asked him, three days a week, to stop at the supermarket after work and pick up a few items, the time spent in such a task, given traffic and the lines of shoppers he would have to endure, would be roughly comparable to his time spent in the woman’s bed. So instead of buying tomatoes and toilet paper, he was satisfying a woman. But it was rare that he was able to think this lightly of it. Mostly, he saw the affair in darker terms, and though it was true (perhaps) that he’d been seduced, he understood that something kept him in it that was neither innocent nor powerless, but that had its own reasons for wishing things to remain as they were.
He had a secret life; that was the nub of it. But then he’d always had one, even before the woman had giggled and offered herself to him. The fact was that something in him had always resisted the separate enclosures of his life as husband, as father, as administrator: in his view, they added up to less than a whole. The missing chink was secretive and had to be sought out. It was what got him out of bed after lovemaking with Anna, got him down into a chair and into conversation with Acheson, with George Marshall. Some voice inside him emitted disapproval of what he was, what he had become, so that even in the intimacies of his marriage, the one place where he might have expected to be free from it, he was frequently bad-tempered, and harbored private suspicions as to his adequacy as a lover. He kept a part of himself back, and even in the most ardent conjugal embraces it became a difficult thing for him to say, “This is entirely me.” Instead, he had the sensation of taking leave of some responsibility, as if for a child or a dog, while retaining the vaguest suspicion that, once the embrace was past, he would have to go and locate his lost charge.
In the midst of silly, mean-spirited domestic battles, it was all the more vivid: a higher agency of his would claim, “This sort of thing won’t happen once I become a historian again.” And still, there was no chance, and he knew there was no chance of that happening, and made not even the slightest inquiries as to the possibilities of its happening. It had become a metaphor for all he couldn’t accede to, that was all, a metaphor he saw and recognized but still could do nothing about. And he felt something pitiful in the fact that when an opportunity arose to act on his secret yearnings, it was only another woman, that most conventional of lapses.
He was fortunate at least in believing his situation uncomplicated by love. Love he retained for Anna, who existed for him, whatever his hesitations, in a separate room, to which he brought offerings of what he considered immense respect, which was the same thing as thinking of her in sanctified terms. She was too good for him, while the other woman was not good enough, and it amused him to think he was probably most himself not in the company of either of them, but in the car, shuttling between them.
As the months went by, he continued to be baffled by this other woman. She seemed to care most deeply about her own car, which was always immaculate, and was frequently running it into the shop so that certain barely detectable knocks and faulty rhythms could be adjusted. The accumulations of her thirty-nine years came to less than could fill a room: a bed, a couple of stuffed chairs, some books, and a bureau. Once, she showed him a scrapbook containing photographs of her youth: a skinny child, blond, moonfaced mother, father here and there, without continuity. There were pools, backyards without trees. She’d grown up in west Texas, and the landscape was like Giant: her parents, spiky plants whose roots did not extend below the topsoil, seemed always about to disappear into the vast unmanageable light. All right, so not everyone was Jewish, but he retained the sentimental belief that everyone at least had parents who were big and crowding; from the photographs, it seemed this girl had always been given nothing but room. Three husbands, all of them crazy in some way, had cut out on her. She laughed and said, “I live for love,” mocking herself. But he believed her. This life seemed to suit her; she swam in it and did not complain.
And if there was no love, there was something else: the sense that she held, in her knobby little head, a key to his undiluted potential. Perhaps he was fooling himself in this—what potential?—but there were times, in bed with her, that he caught glimpses of a second existence, played out along clearer, less muddled lines than the first. It was not the buried historian he was discovering, but something more basic. He liked this. Liked, as well, the fetching way she had of moving about her own kitchen, her hair cut short, genuinely and boundlessly affectionate toward h
im. That these scenes should be occurring while a baby grew in Anna’s belly, he refused most of the time to admit. A first pregnancy you pay strict attention to, but it was his sad observation that a second, or—God forbid—a third, lacked the power to deeply compel. So he made his peace with it, allowed it to rumble at a distance, a storm that may or may not threaten.
Then, one Sunday near the end of May, Jacob pushed his way down and out of Anna’s body, a week sooner than they’d been told to expect him. He appeared before dawn, in a room barely lit, with red skin mottled like a leper’s. The birth came as a reminder of something. He hadn’t remembered Leah’s birth being this violent, but Anna disagreed. You forgot. There was all this fallowness, the planting and the agonizing spadework of birth classes and cribs taken out of storage—you wanted to nap during much of this—then suddenly a tear in the soil and some obscene growth poked its way out. These calmly rhythmed and sleep-inducing domestic acts—for wasn’t the siring of a child in marriage essentially that?—really did have their roots in a savage world. Standing there, holding Jacob, beside a sweating Anna and several red-faced nurses, Theo felt a sufficiency unlike anything he’d previously known. And of course now, he thought, even while trying to push the thought away as unworthy of him, he would not need to see the woman anymore. Not now. Those futile, pasty afternoons in her bed seemed, from this vantage point, watery, diluted, a stream too weak to hold life. Later, when they gave Jacob back to him, clean and wrapped, a small mummy who could barely raise his eyelids, Theo retained trust. A new child was all he needed, would reveal all there was to know, to keep him in place, keep him focused. He went home and took Leah out to eat, apologized for not fathering another girl. “You’ll get along just fine,” he said, not believing it. The act of begetting a male child now seemed to him ungenerous, if forgivable. Clearly, he’d done it for himself.
Country of a Marriage Page 11
