On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

  They moved into the sitting room, where Mary straightened her clothes to some extent and Frank eventually stood back.

  She said, “Frank, I must …”

  He said, “Of course.” But under the guise of helping her regain her dignity, he began to caress her again. She felt his hands run over her hips, down her thighs; she felt his fingers lifting the hem of her skirt and heard a callus on his skin snag for a moment on nylon before it touched flesh.

  Mary pulled away again, kissed him and said, “I must stop.”

  “So must I. That’s enough.”

  But she kissed him again.

  Frank said, “I can’t do this.” His hand was on the outside of her skirt, at the back, but feeling down between her legs, crunching the loose material up between his fingers.

  “No,” she said. “You must stop. I’m a married woman.”

  “I know. And I’m a decent man.”

  “Of course you are,” she said, leaning in to kiss him once more. After several more false stops and new beginnings, Frank turned violently away and walked into the galley kitchen at the end of the living room. Mary breathed in deeply, straightened her skirt and refastened her blouse; she pushed the hair back from her face and, seeing a tiled wall visible through a half-open door at the other end of the room, went into the bathroom.

  She flipped the light switch up and looked in amazement at her guiltless face, bright in the mirror. Her brown eyes stared back candidly. This is not me, she thought. Yet she felt no guilt at all: her composed features bore no mark of shame; even her lipstick was barely smudged. She lifted her skirt and straightened the ivory slip with its embroidered hem. What was the point, she thought, when she might soon be hoisting it to her waist? She clipped the bra together with a momentary tremor at the thought of how easily he had sprung it open. How often, how many … But when she looked down at the basin and saw the impatiently squeezed tube of shaving cream, the tin of sticking plasters, the still-damp brush and dimestore soap, she was filled with tenderness.

  She did not linger over her reflection; the face she wanted to be looking at was his.

  Frank was leaning over the record player. He looked up when she came back into the room. “You found the bathroom.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “I thought you’d like to hear some Miles Davis,” he said. He paused for a moment. “He’s pretty darn good at a time like this. Here. Have a beer.” He passed her a cold glass. The sound of a breathy, muted trumpet came up softly.

  “It’s called ‘Stella by Starlight,’ ” he said.

  She nodded, like a child under instruction.

  “Now you sit down there,” said Frank, pointing to an old couch on one side of the room. “And I’m gonna sit on this bar stool right here.”

  Mary did as she was told and sipped at the beer, which was very cold.

  Frank looked at her, with his head on one side. “You just stay there,” he said. “Where I can look at you. Don’t move. You want a cigarette?”

  “About ten.”

  The music coiled about the space between them; the trumpet was mournful, caressing, but with some suggestion of menace. Mary looked down at her lap.

  “That’s it?” she said.

  “That’s all. That’s all there is. The rest is … nighttime. Forgetting.”

  “But I’m crazy about you. I’m demented. Do you know what it’s like for me to say that?”

  Frank laughed. “Yup.” He held up his right hand. “Remember this?”

  “What?”

  “This scar. No, don’t get up or we’re dead. Here, I’ll hold it under the light. See?”

  “Of course. That first night when you came to our party. The car door or something. There was blood everywhere. What was it?”

  Frank leaned over to the kitchen counter and picked up his key ring, which had a small penknife attached. He held it up. “This.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I cut my hand with this knife.”

  “While you were fixing the car?”

  Frank laughed. “What car? Why would I have a goddamn car? I came by cab. I just flew in from New York that day.”

  “So how did you cut your hand?”

  “I told you. With the knife. I cut it on purpose so I would have an excuse to come back to your house.”

  Mary’s eyes widened. “Because?”

  He nodded. “Because of you.”

  Eventually Mary began to laugh. “It was rather a clean cut, wasn’t it, for a greasy wrench.”

  “I thought I could count on Charlie. He’d want someone to sit up and have another drink with.”

  “Don’t mention Charlie.”

  “No, I think we have to keep mentioning him.”

  Mary swallowed a little more beer. She was finding the separation from Frank difficult to maintain.

  She said, “This is going to change my life. You do understand that, don’t you? I’ve been married for however many years it is. And I love my husband. I haven’t the slightest intention of … leaving him, or anything like that. And my children. I love them with a passion you couldn’t possibly understand.”

  Frank smiled. “And now this.”

  “Yes. I mean, I just don’t want you to think this is the kind of thing that happens to me. Or something I wanted to happen. It’s the last thing I wanted. It’s probably different for you. Being a man. Single.”

  “Sure.”

  “No. You’ve got to tell me seriously, Frank. You have to.”

  Frank coughed. “All right, I’ll tell you. I’ve never felt anything like this. From this moment on, everything is changed. Is that good enough?”

  “I … think so,” said Mary. “I think so. Do you know what time it is?”

  “It’s twenty to three. I think you need to go home now. I’ll come down with you and get a cab. And you might want this.” He handed her a book of matches with a phone number written inside the cover.

  Fifteen minutes later they were still in the lobby inside the front door of the apartment.

  “The only way I’m going to manage this is if you walk, like, twenty feet ahead of me,” said Frank, kissing her ear. “And keep that distance.”

  Alone on the backseat of the cab, Mary closed her eyes against the confusion of feeling that was overpowering her; there was a certain, remote dread that this unexpected joy was going to be paid for at a very high price. Ecstasies did not come free. Then she opened her eyes again and looked soberly at the passing storefronts of lower Sixth Avenue, the garbage cans and stacked crates of empty bottles, the street corners that reeled by as the lights yielded their sequential greens. There was no confusion, really, when she came to think of it, just this desperate elation.

  Chapter 6

  Charlie looked in a deplorable state when Mary glimpsed him through the glass screen at La Guardia, waiting for his bag to come off the carousel. He was red-eyed, unshaven and apparently unsure which suitcase might be his; he picked off two quite different-looking ones before settling on his own. When he finally came through the door, he smiled, a defeated grimace, and she saw the tension dissolve from the lines of his face in his relief at seeing her; she threw her arms round him, finding the rush of faithful love rise up in her unchanged.

  Back at the hotel, after a long bath and a gin and tonic from room service, he rallied a little. Mary cleared up and repacked the cases, while he dressed in the bathroom. She found the book of matches with Frank’s telephone number and tried to memorize it so she could throw away the evidence.

  “Whose number is this?” Charlie would say.

  “It’s … Katy Renshaw’s brother’s. She said I should give him a call if I had time, but I didn’t.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s … a journalist. No. He works on Wall Street.”

  “I’d like to meet him. I’ll ask Katy about him.”

  “No. No. Don’t do that. He moved. Katy doesn’t talk about him. She denies his existence.”

&n
bsp; “It’s not Katy’s brother’s number, is it, Mary? It’s Frank’s. You’re having an affair with him, aren’t you? I’m divorcing you now and I’ll get custody. You’ll never see the children again. My lawyers will see to that. Take your case and go now.”

  She would have to keep it simple. “It’s Frank’s number actually. He showed me round while you were away. It was fun.”

  Before Charlie emerged from the bathroom, she had refined her guileless explanation and practiced saying the word “Frank” in a normal voice. Then she thought this sounded suspiciously ordinary and that she should perhaps plead a theatrically exaggerated tendresse for Frank, as though she were trying to divert Charlie’s attention, as she suspected he had sometimes done with her (that Japanese girl, Hiroko, for instance), from the true object of a problematic affection. It could be like one of those crime novels in which a suspect is discovered with the knife in hand in chapter two, after which the detective goes through a maze of bluff and counterbluff only to reveal in the end that the killer was, though for reasons and in a manner entirely unforeseen, the suspect with the dripping knife in chapter two.

  On the other hand, Charlie might have read such books, and … Mary shut the suitcase. This was unbearable. She loved Charlie. Nothing had changed between them. She had done nothing with which to reproach herself; on the contrary, she and Frank had behaved—it seemed to her—with a painful self-restraint. Now she would return to the business of her family and her life, her reputation intact, and devote herself to Charlie’s happiness.

  She put the matches in an inside pocket of her purse and zipped it up.

  “There’s a train at six o’clock,” she said.

  They sat side by side in the Pullman car and she tried to discover what had happened in Chicago.

  “I was talking to some people there,” said Charlie. “The Democratic organization, you know. Daley’s people. There’s a feeling Kennedy could win this, if he gets the nomination. They truly believe he might pull it off. Seems unlikely to me, but you never know. Also, I was meant to check on a few things while I was there.”

  A waiter leaned over the table with their drinks and a bowl of pretzels.

  “What sort of things?”

  Charlie ran his hand through his hair. “Everyone in this country is anxious at the moment. They think they’re about to be annihilated by a hydrogen bomb.”

  “Are you talking about Communists?”

  Mary’s plastic swizzle stick clinked swiftly on the ice, the glass and the ashtray.

  “Yes,” said Charlie, leaning back. “The days when the shoe-shine boy or the lady in the laundromat was thought to be in the pay of the Kremlin are behind us, I think. But they don’t like foreign visitors. They have to be looked at closely. And they really do believe the Russians have more powerful missiles. They believe they’re losing this war, the Cold War, the only one that matters.”

  “But why you, Charlie? What’s it got to do with you? Why do you get into such a state?”

  Charlie turned to her, his eyes filled with tears. “People ask me questions. But I’m all right, sweetheart.” He raised his glass to her and drank, then put his hand on her arm. “We’ll be all right,” he said. “Won’t we?”

  Number 1064 came into view through the taxi window, and as they unloaded their bags from the trunk and walked up the path to the house between the blossoming trees, Mary felt the familiar centripetal forces drawing her into her own home and the home of her children; at the same time she felt the falling anguish of separation from what she most wanted. The circuitry seemed confused, the polar forces variable.

  Inside the house she had the comforting sensations of return and belonging; she noted with approval that Dolores had polished the tiled hall and sorted the mail; she saw that some bulbs she had planted in a pot on the kitchen windowsill had begun to sprout. She went about preparing supper, scrambled eggs and bacon, while Charlie read through his letters with occasional derisive oaths.

  As she stared at the aluminum of the pan, on which the slimy yellow mixture began slowly to coagulate, she saw through the metal atoms of its surface to another room, in which the air was filled with the sound of a soft, insinuating trumpet, and she was charged with an exhilaration so powerful that even the memory of it was hard to keep in check. She noticed her lower lip begin to tremble.

  She was out of control. She shook her head, and salt drops fell into the hardening egg. Without daring to raise her eyes from the stove, she reached out a hand to the work top where her cigarettes habitually lay and fumblingly withdrew one.

  “Christ!” said Charlie, throwing down a letter.

  She took the book of matches and struck one. She pushed the eggs, which were done too soon, onto a cold ring and turned the flame up on the bacon.

  “Who are these people? Fund managers. They couldn’t manage a bloody piggy bank.”

  She sucked on the cigarette and held the smoke in her lungs till she felt giddy. Still looking down, she reached out for her glass and raised it to her lips. Her nose was running, but she did not want to blow it for fear of attracting Charlie’s attention. Her eyes were burning red.

  She tried to imagine what sort of figure she made, standing there, and she had a picture of herself as her mother used to describe her when she was five or six years old: like a real person, only smaller. This sentimental memory did not help; it reinforced the sensation that she was being run over by some force greater than she could withstand. She raked her fingernails into the palm of her hand.

  For Christ’s sake, she thought, I’ve seen death and birth, I’m forty years old. I can bear this, I can bear this.

  She felt Charlie’s arm suddenly on her shoulder. She swung round and buried her face in his chest, feeling her nose and eyes dampen his clean shirt. She sobbed within his innocent embrace.

  “There, there,” he said. “You’ve been so brave and I’ve been so useless.”

  He clearly thought she was upset about her mother, and even in her distress Mary recoiled from the idea of such an alibi.

  “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s … I don’t know what it is.”

  In the moral no-man’s-land into which she had apparently been swept, the second evasion felt less reprehensible than the first.

  The next day, she telephoned her mother, and they spoke for almost an hour. Mary offered to go to London and help look after her, but Elizabeth dismissed the idea impatiently.

  “I’m perfectly all right. I’m still running the house. The last thing I want is another mouth to feed.”

  When she spoke to her father, Mary asked to what extent this bravery was a front. He told her Elizabeth had had a tantrum of vintage proportions a day or so before and they agreed that this was a good sign. He promised to call if there was a change.

  As for the other developments in her life, Mary decided that all she could do was say nothing, remain speechless and perhaps misunderstood, because that was the only way she could be sure of doing no damage. She planned her day in such a way that she was primed for jollity when Charlie returned from work, and he, meanwhile, was so absorbed in his own difficulties that he appeared to see no falsity in her manner. It was a pity, she thought, that she had such a reputation for happiness; a melancholic could have passed off the behavior she wanted to indulge in as no more than a periodic fit. But in her any sign of despondency, even a weary sigh, would be considered grounds for concern by those who loved her.

  In the afternoons she lay on the bed and tried to catch up on the sleep that was eluding her at night. She discovered that it was better if she lay on her front; it was as though her physical weight helped compress the anguish.

  As for a larger strategy, she had none. There were two imperatives of which she was aware, the well-being of her children, her husband and her parents, her primal care for them, which had not altered; and then her love for Frank, and his for her, which had a power that seemed to her not just primal but almost moral in its urgency. She could not establish an order
of preference between the two; as well ask her to distinguish between a tree and a cloud: no crude ranking could reflect the reality of either.

  She became sure that her decisions were right, or at least not wrong, but they had one weakness: they left her without a plan of action, groaning on the bed, forcing her belly harder against the mattress. When she telephoned Frank’s number in New York, she felt no guilt toward Charlie; in fact, there was a certain self-righteousness in her manner toward him. How many women in her situation would have shown such restraint? If the price of that was a couple of forlorn phone calls, then Charlie was a luckier man than any other husband they knew. As for the calls themselves, made surreptitiously when Charlie was at work and Dolores out of earshot, the furtive comedy they provided was all the lightness in her day.

  Her success in reaching him, on the other hand, was nil. By the time Charlie left for work in the morning, Frank had evidently departed for his newspaper office; by the time he was back in his apartment at night, Charlie was also back at Number 1064. One evening, when Charlie went to a reception without Mary, Frank, it appeared, also had a dinner date. Charlie did not return till one in the morning; but by a quarter to one Frank was also still out, presumably at the Vanguard or some other smoky room where the tenor saxophone was hopping over the piano rhythm. Mary did not let herself dwell on the thought of whether he was there alone; there was not enough room in her heart for that kind of self-torture, and in any case, she believed what he had said. For him too, everything was changed, set in the altered light of his feeling for her.