American Romantic

by Ward Just

  That left the manila envelope, a government-issue envelope of heavy paper, the flap fastened by a string wound around a dime-sized cardboard wheel. In black type at the upper left were the words “United States Department of State.” It looked to be years old, the paper creased and curled with handling. He placed the envelope on his desk and stepped to the sideboard and poured a glass of whiskey, adding ice and a twist of lemon. The time was six p.m.; the pale afternoon sunlight had vanished as darkness gathered. The French residence next door was ablaze with light, another reception. In the driveway the chauffeurs were gathered around an idling Mercedes smoking cigarettes. Harry watched them a moment, then switched on the desk lamp and opened the envelope. Inside were letters, dozens of them, addressed to May Huerwood, poste restante. He looked at the postmarks and discovered that the most recent date was the summer of the year before. The correspondence stopped there. Harry was in no hurry and glanced now at the stamps, Thailand and India, South Africa and Senegal, Holland and Austria, three from Canada and two from the United States, four from Russia. The smaller the country, the gaudier the stamp. There were no return addresses, unless the five-figure blocks carefully written on the back flaps were a kind of address. Harry took a few of the letters in his hand and fanned them as he would a deck of cards. The ink was blue, the writer’s script a professional-quality cursive. It had a feminine look, script from a girls’ boarding school of his youth, Emma Willard or Foxcroft, all loops and flourishes, loosely composed. Harry sat at his desk and looked at the contraband, settling himself before starting to read. The second thoughts he had about May’s diary did not apply here. He chose a letter at random, noticing at once that some of the spellings were British. But that was consistent with the Anglophilia of American boarding schools. I heard a rumour the other day that you and Himself are bound for Oslo. Be sure to bring your woolies . . . Harry looked at the ceiling, pensive, and took a slow swallow of his drink, the scotch going down so smoothly he barely tasted it. But the jolt came quickly. The letter was signed “With love” and carried a signature he did not recognize. The scrawl was hard to decipher, the loops and flourishes collapsing into a long horizontal line. Harry knew right away that May’s correspondent was no schoolgirl, sentences rolling on about Oslo and its phlegmatic inhabitants, not forgetting the savage winters and interminable summers, the sun setting sometime around midnight and rising thirty minutes later, an Ibsen world of nagging anxiety and gloom, nothing at all like cheerful raucous sensual sentimental ruined Africa. Would you like to join me in Luanda? Something about the forced cadence reminded him of a young attaché in Africa who looked after things for the Belgians. May saw him at parties. May liked him. He was young—well, they were all young, but this one was in his twenties, elfin, a good-looking boy who drove a green Karmann Ghia. He had come to the residence a few times, once at the annual Fourth of July reception where he wore a goofy red-white-and-blue hat that fell around his ears. He carried a title. Count? Baron? One of the two. Very popular with women was Andres, a dilettante diplomat, here today, gone tomorrow. He was unattached, amusing, a bon vivant. Andres was usually turned out in bespoke summer suits and bench-made shoes, a Borsalino hat and a little yellow hankie in the top pocket of his jacket. Harry had taken an instant dislike to him.

  May said, Oh, come on, give Andres a break.

  Harry said, He’s a poseur. Not a serious man.

  Well, she said with a laugh, that’s true enough.

  Playboy, Harry said.

  He doesn’t have much to do here, May said. So he fools around.

  I think he dyes his hair, Harry said.

  He does not, May said.

  Gotcha, Harry said, but he did notice May’s quick response and the answer that followed.

  Anyway, May said, he’s leaving soon.

  Where to?

  France, May said. He’s going to work for a bank, one of the French ones. The idea is, the bank wants to set up facilities in underdeveloped countries. Andres assesses the political climate, how stable it is, how reliable, and how corrupt. He calls himself a security consultant. Risk, reward. Can we give him a going-away party?

  Why not, Harry said, thinking as he said it that the Belgian was on to something.

  So she had another life, a long-distance life from the look of the postmarks. Harry had not suspected anything, least of all with the Belgian twit. He looked at his glass, empty, and moved to the sideboard to fill it, taking his time. There was no rush. He looked again at the letters, rereading bits and pieces of them. For the most part they were travelogues, accounts of journeys to Asia and Central America, the Middle East and Africa. Evidently he loved travel for its own sake, the hotels and airplanes, meetings with businessmen and foreign correspondents, those in the know. Andres did not have a high opinion of those in the know and on the make. He had a lavish expense account. The hotels were all of the five-star variety, and when he arrived somewhere he was always met by a driver with a limousine.

  Somewhere along the line he switched jobs. Now he was working for an insurance company, assessing threats, attempting to read the future. Here and there were the five-figure codes, usually at the end of the letter. It took Harry a moment to get beyond the schoolgirl script, incongruous in the circumstances. Letters home to Mom. We just beat the pants off Foxcroft in lacrosse. Harry stacked the letters on the desk where he sat glumly in his chair drinking scotch. How could he have no idea? He blamed his incuriosity, though he had not always been incurious. That was a latter-day phenomenon that commenced roughly around the time of his sixtieth birthday, though he had never counted suspicion as a virtue. This business appeared to date from Africa after they had lost their little girl. They were both distraught, not themselves. They were careful with each other. Harry was often away but never more than a night or two, and it was one of those nights when Zoe came to his bed and remained there until dawn. When he woke up she was gone, and a week later he learned she had been transferred to the coast, Dar es Salaam. He forgot about her, but a few years later when he and May were living in Washington, Zoe called him at home. What’s up? How are you doing? Can we meet sometime? Without a word he hung up the telephone, waiting a minute to see if she would call back. But she didn’t, as he was certain she wouldn’t. Who was that? May called from the kitchen. He said, Wrong number. And that was that, except the memory of her was with him once again. Zoe was a product of disobedient high-stress environments where the rules were made up as you went along. She was a free spirit, her good cheer infectious. Also, she was fearless, traveling without escort to the most dangerous parts of Africa. She loved her work and she loved what could come after work. She lived by the statute of no entangling alliances. She slipped out of his bed as easily as she had slipped into it. Wasn’t that fun! Much later she married Axel Brown, Harry’s solid and dependable aid administrator. Axel called her the Sally Bowles of the Bush. Their night together those many years before seemed to Harry a moment of no consequence, a kind of reward for them both at the end of a discouraging day, all too common in the work they were called upon to do and the place they were called upon to do it in. Still, something lingered, because when she called that night he did not say, Good to hear from you, Zoe. What’s up? How are you doing? Not at all. He dropped the telephone as if it were radioactive. May knew it, too, looking at him strangely as he returned to the kitchen to toss the salad.

  Wrong number? she said.

  Somebody selling something, Harry replied.

  From the parts of Andres’s letter that he read there was no mention of a specific rendezvous. He decided to ignore the five-figure codes. May’s was apparently an epistolary romance, at least after the Belgian had left Africa for his career in finance. Harry wagged his finger at her photograph on the desk, a gesture of reproach. She smiled back at him from poolside in Sfax, the water so blue, the sky pale white. Her skin was a golden tan, her hair bleached by the sun. Her mouth was parted slightly and he remembered her saying something when he snapped her picture,
one of her straightforward Vermont endearments. He smiled at her and winked. She said it the instant he took her picture and then she asked for the camera and made one of him, waiting until she got the look she wanted. The photograph was in a frame in their bedroom. The colors had faded over the years, the water not so blue, his skin a washed-out white. However, the rest of him was the same, his broad shoulders and sandy hair, his capable hands, his half-smile, in the distance a minaret. He remembered the call to prayer.

  All the embassy residences they had lived in came equipped with a study. This one was unfortunate, a formal space with heavy furniture and leaded-glass windows, in shadows at all times. He had never felt at home in it, using it mainly for personal correspondence and bills, now and then a nap. Sometimes May would drop by in late afternoon bearing a plate of marzipan cakes and a pot of tea, and after the marzipan and tea a leisurely tumble on the long davenport, a slow-motion tumble until slow-motion became insupportable, the conclusion raucous, May’s high shriek that, he swore, only an animal could hear. Afterward he would tell her what he was up to, personnel problems, difficulties with the government, both his own and the one he was accredited to. My struggles, he said with only a little sarcasm. The last conversation they had, Harry admitted to weariness. He said to her, We have been at this so long, you and I, that I seem to meet myself coming around the corner. Different personalities, same problems. At those late-afternoon times he felt they were alone in the world, the experience so dense and private that he was loath to describe it.

  He said, I’m losing interest.

  She said, You’ll never give it up. Never in a hundred years.

  Don’t be so sure, he said. There’s a time for everything and maybe it’s time now to think about something else.

  May looked at him doubtfully and said, That time is past. It’s been past for a while now.

  He said, Pessimist.

  The next day, she was gone before he was awake. But she was there with him now. She lingered in the dark corners of his study and in the air itself. He could smell her perfume and hear her voice, the words run together like an unfamiliar language, fluent but unintelligible, their meaning obscured. He did not know if she was smiling. Her face was turned from him. Surely she could read his thoughts, understanding that he saw himself now as a soldier on a worn-out battlefield at twilight. He thought of Othello’s words at the end of his life: I have done the state some service . . .

  He wished she had disposed of the diaries and letters herself. They were her responsibility. But that task had fallen to him and he decided to delay a minute more, allow his emotions to settle. He was not himself. Nor Othello. He was in the eye of an invisible storm, unable to move safely or make a decision. He made himself another whiskey, a strong one, avoiding the photograph only a few feet away. Harry sat at the big desk and looked at the letters with their colorful stamps and returned them to the manila envelope one by one, closing the flap, winding the string around the cardboard wheel. Night had closed in for keeps and he felt May’s spirit withdraw from the room, leaving him alone at last. Alone and half drunk, he said to himself. He glanced at the correspondence on his desk, three letters that required his immediate attention. But they would have to wait awhile.

  He knew that from time to time for the remainder of his days she would appear in the shadows, the smell of her body, the lilt of her arcane accent, a trace of the north country in every line, her wink. Harry took another swallow of whiskey and felt things go down another notch. A tap at the door caused him to pause but, listening hard, he decided the tap was imaginary, a trompe-oreille. He realized he had made a pun.

  I made a pun, he said aloud. How do you like it?

  But the audience was silent.

  Harry sat a while longer, sipping whiskey and contemplating a future that refused to take shape. The tide was ebbing. He had the idea that there were rules somewhere and that if you followed the rules things would come out all right. He thought about that, wondering where fear came in, fear of the known and fear of the unknown, fear of capricious gods rolling dice for their own amusement. And without warning your world turned upside down. No logic to it. Your world was no longer familiar. Instead, he heard mysterious taps at the door, surely a warning, but of what? His desk lamp cast a wan light, shadows dim at the edges. The clock on his desk was fast. He had a meeting in the morning but could not remember what it was about. Finally, having exhausted the other possibilities, he dropped the manila envelope into the burn bag, waiting for a signal, any signal at all. But what he heard was the dull thump of the envelope as it settled. He was alone in the room and all he heard now was the heavy north wind rattling the shutters. He tried to imagine life without May Huerwood but was unsuccessful. That was Rule One. Rule Two was to press on. Even so, he could not bring the future into focus. He could not see its shape, and so he touched the CD button to summon the German Requiem, which did bring a measure of comfort.

  In Washington, they gave him a comfortable office and he easily settled into the routine, the senior staff meeting at nine a.m. sharp, his own assistants gathering in his office at eleven. The in and out boxes were arranged just so, east and west on his desk. Read the cable traffic after lunch. He filled the bookshelves with old favorites. Miłosz was there, along with Koestler and Kennan, the poems of Poe, the five-volume life of Henry James, Bismarck’s Gedanken und Erinnerugen, Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up, many others. During the slow afternoon hours he would take down a book and read an excerpt before dozing off to the hum of the air conditioner. All in all, Harry thought, a pleasant way to spend the day.

  The Department was in a state of unease because the Secretary was contemplating a reorganization, and in any reorganization there were winners and losers, and the strategy of the senior staff was to move cautiously, leave no stone unturned until the next election when a new Secretary would take office and then—well, the stones would be passed on to the new chap, a fat filing cabinet full of stones, and so many of them too heavy to lift. In any case, the senior staff would be gone by then, into retirement or the public sector, Harry among them. He rented a row house in Georgetown within walking distance of the Department, though often enough he drove his car or took a bus, a question of his feet. Harry was in at nine and out at five unless there was a crisis that spoke to his own experience. But there was only one of those, and it was cleared up in a week. One day rolled into another and almost before he knew it he had accumulated leave time and thought he would take a break and visit his father, his first visit in more than six months. No one objected. Take as much time as you need, Harry. Everyone deserves a holiday from time to time. We’ll soldier on.

  Harry flew to La Guardia and rented a Chevrolet convertible to drive to Salisbury through towns familiar to him since childhood. Kent, Cornwall Bridge, West Cornwall, Lime Rock. The afternoon light fell beautifully from a clear sky. The hill towns had not changed much. The lawns were tidy, the houses middle-aged and older, well maintained behind rail fencing or low stone walls. They were comfortable houses with porches and gardens, here and there a youthful mansion, surely the object of derision from the squires. If they had wanted a Hamptons house why didn’t they build it in the Hamptons? His father had told him that the mansions were popular with people in the entertainment industry, who tricked them out with tennis courts and Olympic-sized swimming pools and, in one instance, a seven-hole golf course with a resident pro. Can you believe it? The entertainment industry people were strange. They were not dangerous but they were often foulmouthed. The children were foulmouthed, too, and spoiled. Well, his father said, they were here today but they would be gone tomorrow. They were people who were always moving on, you see. Harry drove slowly as he reacquainted himself with the landscape and the small towns. There were horses everywhere in the fields and that put him in mind of May. He stopped once near Lime Rock to watch the horses cavort in the fields. A lithe equestrienne was exercising a jumper and the way she moved her head and body remind
ed him of May. Harry leaned against a rail fence and watched the girl, wondering all the while why he had been so against retiring to Connecticut, and then a BMW station wagon thundered by at high speed trailing loud music, a teenager at the wheel, and Harry’s wondering ceased. When the girl completed one of her jumps, she raised her hand to give Harry a jaunty wave and he called back, Bravo!

  When Harry arrived, his father was waiting for him in the Adirondack chair near the stone wall where the dogs were buried. He was engrossed in a book. The season was late autumn, the trees nearly bare of leaves, the weather unseasonably warm. The old man gave him a bear hug and a kiss on the cheek. He said, You look tired. Have you lost weight? He was in fine spirits and excellent health, save a little of this and a little of that: arthritis and indigestion, failing eyesight. Harry glanced at the open book next to the Adirondack chair, Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral in large type. The old man was full of surprises.

  He had arranged Sunday lunch as in the old days. Many of the Sunday regulars were still alive, causing Harry to inquire if there was something auspicious in the Connecticut water. Of course Congresswoman Finch and her doctor husband were long gone but well remembered. Mr. Wilson had been gone for a decade. But the Candlesses were there, he with a walker, she with a cane. Despite the walker, Jimmy Candless maintained the bearing of a brigadier general. The widow Born, she of the diamond business, was still a consultant to the Fifth Avenue shop. The brothers Green had long ago sold their concern on Wall Street but continued to trade on their own account. When Harry asked if they had a strategy, they hemmed and hawed until the widow Born said, Oh, for God’s sake, you two, tell him. Buy and hold, they said in one voice.