What He's Poised to Do: Stories (P.S.)

by Ben Greenman

  “You’re an asshole,” she said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Off the table.” I hung up the phone. My hand was cramped from clutching it so hard. I opened it and closed it experimentally. My wife was not home. She was working late. That’s what happens when you are a lawyer for a publishing firm and the other lawyer in your department has a child and decides to work from home and then, as the months go on, to hand over enough responsibilities that it becomes clear that the rest of the responsibilities will soon follow. You—if you are the remaining lawyer, if you are my wife—step into the breach. You stay late. You go to the office on Saturdays. You explain to your husband that the two of you are happiest when you are working—you at your office, he at his property-management firm—and you remind him that when the two of you had too much time on your hands, a kind of restlessness infected the marriage. “Our conversations then were an invidious reminder of how poorly we were addressing our own needs,” my wife once said. She leaves me notes in the morning when she leaves, and I put notes on top of her notes when I go to sleep. We communicate through these documents: the primary, the secondary, the others. This is why I am happy writing a letter to your letter. I have years of training in these matters.

  Dear X,

  Why did I let you believe that my wife was home when she was not? Because it would injure you. Why did I want to injure you? Because you had injured me. You wanted to take it off the table, all of it, despite the fact that for nearly two years it had sustained me. When I met you, my wife and I were going through a difficult period. I told her that it was the hell of adjusted expectations. She frowned and said that we were “above timberline.” It was not the right time for her fluency. I took a deep breath, sat down on the bed, and said that I was not sure that I loved her, that despite all that she had meant to me, I just could not see around the corner.

  A few days later, I met you. It was at an open house for one of my properties. Usually I don’t attend them myself, but it was a weekend filled with bad weather, and I needed somewhere to go. I let Janice, the agent, off the hook, and told her I would cover it myself. “Thank you, Mr. Ramirez,” she said. She yawned and stretched. Janice has always had a thing for me, and she’s beautiful, but I was never the type to run around. When I started off in business, they used to call me “Play-It-Safe Paco,” though in fact usually I did not play it at all. I held my residential properties for years, let their value grow slowly, like a tree rather than a flower—there was not always as much beauty in the process as there could have been, but there was a thick trunk and there were roots. I behaved similarly in my dealings with women. When Janice yawned and stretched, when she pressed her body against the fabric of her clothes, I cannot face.

  Janice left. I stayed. The apartment was a small two-bedroom with a bath and a half. The master bedroom was big and had one large walk-in closet. The kitchen had just been redone with a beautiful marble counter. The fireplace didn’t work, but the detailing on it was exquisite. I showed the place to a gay couple, then a straight couple, then to a man who was in the middle of a divorce. He was the most interested, and also the most interesting—he touched everything and shook his head, as if he were trying to rouse himself from a fog. He thought he’d put in an offer. “I just wish I knew what direction things were going to take,” he said. “I am ninety percent sure that I’m going to need to buy my own place, but that ten percent really weighs on me.” I wished him luck. I was sitting on a folding chair I had brought, reading a Blood-Horse magazine—since I was a little boy, I have always wanted to own thorough-breds, though now that I have the money to do so I realize that I don’t know nearly enough about it, and I am always trying to bring myself to the point where I feel, if not confident, at least competent enough to make a purchase. I collect art instead, because I know a little about it, because it gives me pleasure.

  A knock came at the door.

  A small woman was standing in the hallway. It was you. As you came into the room, I revised my first impression. You were short, certainly, but you were not skinny, and you had a presence, partly as a result of your beautiful arms and partly because of your enormous eyes. Neither was adventitious. “Karen Lewis,” you said, and extended your hand.

  “Francisco Ramirez,” I said.

  “That’s a very grand name,” you said.

  “Well, I am a nobleman,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “No,” I said. “Only a rich man.”

  You laughed. Perhaps you thought I was joking, I realized later. You had no way of knowing that I owned not only this apartment but nearly two thousand others. You had no way of knowing that I was worth ten thousand times as much as when I first came to the United States, fresh from a short but not entirely unsuccessful career as a waiter and restaurant manager, or that earlier in that career I was so poor that I sometimes had to steal from customers. I would like to say that the stealing was infrequent. The truth was that it was nearly constant. When I told my wife about it, she stared off into the middle distance and then returned with a vocabulary lesson. “Stealing and robbery are different,” she said. “Stealing is related to words like ‘stealthy.’ When you steal, you’re trying to escape detection. Robbery’s very different. That’s when you confront someone and take something by force.” I’m sure she was right, or mostly right. At the very least, I could not argue with her. English was not my first language. If I had told you about my early transgressions, I do not think that you would have come back at me with surgery performed on my words. You would have judged me, or loved me, or both. I did not tell you about my stealing. You did not lift your lovely arms over your head. We stood professionally near one another, and I manufactured enough concentration to speak about the central air and the marble countertop.

  You did not like the apartment. You felt that the closet was situated awkwardly in the master bedroom, and that the whole place was overpriced. I made a mental note to call the gay couple and tell them the apartment was theirs if they wanted it. On the way out, you picked up the Blood-Horse magazine, inspected the cover, put it back down. You paused by the door to tell me about yourself. You were a painter, beginning to acquire a reputation. Your father was a rich man, “like you,” you said, maybe believing it a little bit more this time. You had been engaged to one of your painting teachers, but it hadn’t worked out.

  “Why?” I said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “You can ask anyone anything anytime,” you said.

  One week later, we were lovers.

  Dear X,

  I fold your letter, unfold it, read it again, refold it. I have done this four or five times over the past hour. They say that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer. The letter did not bother me so deeply when I first received it. As I have said, I called to talk things through. No part of it was unexpected. We had been weakening each other for months, especially since we stopped sleeping together. I realize that I have skipped from the moment when we became lovers to the moment when we stopped sleeping together. Between that is a gap. I will protect this period, not from shame, not from fear, but from love and from a fierce sense of obligation.

  I can sketch what happened, but the sketch will not satisfy even the most casual reader. We were together. My marriage was stalled. I was making more money than ever, and enough that I could suddenly see clear to pay for any arrangement that might transpire: wife and mistress, ex-wife and girlfriend, ex-wife and new wife. One day, in bed, I made you an offer to come across to me. You refused. We lost and then regained our breaths. I asked again later, when you were not sitting astride me, when your face was not stretched with pleasure. You refused again. I backed off, nursed my wounds, waited a day, made another attempt, was rebuffed again, feared that the reopened wounds would never heal. I should have stopped making offers, but I could not, in this case, play it safe. You could say that it was a fatal flaw, but in fact it was the opposite: that was the one part of my life where I stayed the flaw and
surged forward hopefully. Whenever I saw you, even if it was just for a casual drink or a cup of coffee, I felt an almost overwhelming sense of desire. You reported similar trouble, and we blamed each other, and we fought. And so I knew the day would come when either you would break or I would, and the broken party would ask the other party to release him or her forever. You broke. I fully believed that in time we would be lovers again. I felt the unfairness of the circumstance pulling at me. Once, when the pain was nearly too high to bear, I told my wife a version of the story, pretending that it had happened to an old acquaintance of mine back in Spain. “He suffered not just from his circumstance,” I said, “but from the anxiety that his circumstance might not have been unique in any way. Is there a word for that?”

  “Pipe organs have devices called tremulants that create vibrato in the note,” she said. “At some point, time serves as a tremulant: everything that happens is just the minor recurrence of something that has happened.” It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but she seemed so happy that I didn’t object.

  About a month ago, you and I met for drinks. We were not the only ones meeting. Since we stopped sleeping together, we have worked hard to construct a social structure around us that will permit us to remain in each other’s company. We have one or two mutual friends in business (my business) or in the art world (your art world). I have continued to collect, a pursuit that stretches my wife to the bounds of her indifference, and so she permits me to go out by myself and sit with what she calls the “albinic syba-rites.” At some point there is no dividend in following her language. Even if someone had called my wife and reported exactly who was sitting around the table, it would not arouse suspicion. A fifty-year-old collector with a sixty-year-old gallery owner, a forty-year-old journalist, and a thirty-year-old painter? The composition was perfect.

  At this particular drink, you were nervous. Or rather: we were nervous, but you were showing it. We had been through a month of not speaking, and then a month of speaking every day, and then a day when you called me to say that you could not go through another month like it. “But it’s making me happy,” I said.

  You sighed. “It’s making me miserable. I love talking to you. But I don’t talk to a man every day unless I’m sleeping with him.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Not okay,” you said.

  The next night was the drink. You should have been asking the gallery owner about his fall shows. I should have been talking to the journalist and trying to extract the names of next season’s hot prospects. Instead, we spoke mainly to each other. At one point, the waitress asked us if we wanted more drinks, and I ordered for you. I am sorry. It was instinct. It doesn’t matter, anyway. No one noticed, not even the journalist, and after the second round of drinks, the conversation broadened, and there was nothing left for the others to notice. Around eleven, the party broke up. I wanted to walk with you a few blocks uptown before I got in a cab. You said no. It was cold outside. You wanted to go home and go to sleep. I insisted, and prevailed; we sat in a small restaurant and you drank coffee. “You didn’t even come to the show,” I said. I had converted one of my vacant apartments into a gallery, and I was showing work by Spanish painters I had collected over the years. The journalist had called it “a small show that produces large pleasures.”

  “I was busy,” you said.

  “You weren’t busy,” I said. “There was a woman there who said she had been at a drink with you just a half hour before.”

  “I didn’t feel like coming,” you said. “I think that maybe you acquired some of those paintings because they reminded you of me.”

  “What?” I said. “That’s idiotic.” But it was not idiotic. There was one portrait in particular, painted by a seventy-year-old Castilian, that looked almost exactly like you. If you had mentioned it specifically, I would have lied and said that I had owned that painting for years. I was not proud that you had turned my head far enough that I was buying paintings that looked like you.

  “Maybe,” you said. She looked defeated. “All I know is that I didn’t want to be there, and I don’t really want to be here.”

  “The show was important to me,” I said. “I would have liked it if you had made an appearance.”

  “I know,” you said. “I’m sorry.” You looked like you might cry.

  “I thought we were going to try to do well by one another,” I said. “If we’re not, then there are many other things we should discuss.”

  “Like what?” you said.

  “Like the new man,” I said. You had been to Los Angeles for a show of your work, and while you were there, you had started sleeping with a young doctor. He came to visit at least once a month, and while you told me without provocation that you weren’t in love with him, you also made it clear that you had no intention of ending things. It seemed that he was the perfect lover, at least for the moment. He did not live where you lived. He did not see you often enough, or for long enough, for you to grow bored, or to feel afraid that you were not feeling love—or worse, that you were. The perfection had a cost, which is that he was not in any true sense a real person. He was a coat you bought off the rack, an unsuperlative fashion statement. He was an appurtenance. When I told you that, your face darkened. You did not like me using my wife’s words.

  “That’s it,” you said, and got into a taxicab. The evening had begun light and ended with a thud. I went home. I slipped into bed. My wife was there, which was a rarity those days. Her work must have ended early. She slid back toward me. It was warm in the bed. That was where I belonged, and I told myself that until I believed it.

  Dear X,

  After I insulted you by insulting your new lover, after you stormed off to your taxicab, you disappeared. You wouldn’t answer my phone calls. I grew afraid that we would never speak again, and my fear drove me into irrational behavior. I dialed six digits of your phone number and hung up. I wrote your name on a piece of paper, over and over again, as if that might summon you. I went to the apartment where we had met, which was vacant again—the gay couple had decided to move to the suburbs and adopt a baby—and I sat in the middle of the floor and I thought I might cry. Then I went home, and went to bed with my wife, and never stopped thinking about you. Time passed like that for a while. Then, one day, there was a birthday party for a mutual friend. The guest of honor was a woman who was known both for her superb taste in contemporary art and for the massive fortune she had inherited from her father, who had founded the nation’s largest manufacturer of railway machinery. Her gallery was called, in tribute, Stacker. I asked my wife to go to the party, but she said she’d be at the office late. “I’ll probably be home early,” I said. “I get tired when I’m at parties without you. I feel weakened.”

  “Etiolated,” she said. “There’s a word for it.”

  I went to the party, thrilled to think I might see you. I started talking to a woman who owned a small gallery. You came up behind me and dug a fingernail into my side. “Hi,” you said.

  “Ow,” I said.

  “Louis is here,” you said.

  “Louis?”

  “The guy from California.” I was being tested. I had failed before, so I chose to pass. You introduced me as a friend and a collector. I shook Louis’s hand. “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  “I don’t know anything about art,” he said. “All of it looks good to me, or bad, depending on my mood. I can’t tell if there’s any real good or bad in it.”

  You excused yourself to go to the ladies’ room. “She’s been talking about you for the last few months,” I said. “She seems thrilled to see you.” I did not see the harm in supporting him. I doubted he would last, but I could not see the point of contributing to his demise. How would that work to my advantage?

  When he got up to get more drinks, you finished your wine with exaggerated quickness. “I was thinking maybe I would break up with him this weekend,” you said. “Or maybe not.” It is not an exaggeration to say that you were ha
ppier than I had ever seen you. Nor is it an exaggeration to say that you were incomplete without your sadness.

  “I thought we weren’t talking about those things anymore,” I said.

  “You’re right. Not allowed. If we follow the rules, there’s some chance we might not grow to hate each other.”

  The birthday girl floated by, and I went to speak with her. From the corner of my eye, I watched you and Louis. He handed you your wine. You put your head on his shoulder. His hand went to your head. Your face, which I had looked upon hundreds of times with something more than hope, disappeared inside the crook of his arm. I think his hands were between your knees. I was about to come back and sit, but the two of you stood. You walked up to me, smiling. “We’re going to head home,” you said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Louis said.

  The next person I spoke to was…. I cannot remember. Some young woman with a story about how her libido was the brightest color on the broader canvas of her life, I’m guessing. I was not feeling rage or sorrow or loss. I was feeling maturity. I had watched a man claim you, and I had thought mainly of your happiness and how you might truly secure it. My sense of things curdled into superiority and then drained away entirely. “Good-bye,” I said to the young woman I was probably talking to.

  On the walk home, it occurred to me that I might be married forever, to the same woman, that we might have an endless series of ups and downs, that they might be a condition of our existence, in the way the sea is the condition of a boat’s existence. I thought about you at home, in your apartment, undressing for your visitor. Would he stand looking at your paintings rather than at you? That would be a wonderfully modest evasion, almost strategic.

  My wife was not home when I arrived. I poured myself a drink and sat up waiting for her, paging through a Blood-Horse magazine. Something was wrong with the magazine. The pages were printed with a poorer quality of ink. The horses looked sickly. Something had tainted the finest bloodlines. I put the magazine away and took out the dictionary. I was looking for a word that described what I was feeling. I had no intention of using it. I just needed to know. And I needed to find it on my own. There was no asking my wife. There was no asking anyone anything anymore.