Finding a Girl in America Page 16

  He went to the kitchen, did not even look at the phone as he passed it. He was thinking of the snake, and one night Jack saying that after the one bit Russell, he wrote down the effects of the poison as it killed him; and Jack said: You know, maybe he studied those bastards so long that finally he had to go all the way, know it all, and he just reached down and touched it … In the dark bedroom which tomorrow would still be a bedroom, a dreary and hung-over place, not a study as it became most mornings, he listened to ‘Just Like a Woman’ and thought Maybe that’s what I was doing, waiting for that hitch to give me the venom, end it between us, between me and all of them, between me and—He stopped. It was time to finish the drinks, swallow aspirins and vitamin B and go to bed, for—had he completed the sentence in his mind—it would have concluded with some euphemism for suicide. He went to bed hating Monica; it was a satisfying hatred; it felt like the completion of a long-planned revenge.

  He woke with relief, nearly happiness, nearly strength. He knew, for today, that was enough: last night’s cure had worked. As it had with every young girl who left him since his divorce. They all left. One night he told Jack: I think I’11 get a fire escape up to my window, so they can just climb out while I’m taking a piss. When Edith sent him away, he did not have a cure.

  Five years ago, when all his pleas and arguments and bargains and accusations lay on the living room floor between them (he actually felt he was stepping on his own words as he paced while she sat watching), and he knew that she really wanted him to leave, he believed it was because he had been unfaithful. So his grief was coupled with injustice, for she had had lovers too; and even as Hank talked that night her newest and, she said, her last lover so long as she was married, was dying early of cancer: Joe Ritchie, an ex-priest who taught philosophy at the college where Hank worked.

  When he moved to his apartment he was too sad to be angry at Edith. He tried to be. Alone at night, and while running, and watching movies, he told himself that he and Edith had lived equally. Or almost. True, he had a head start on her, had student girl friends before she caught him because he was with a woman more demanding: a woman not only his own age but rich and from Paris, idling for six months with friends in Boston; a woman who laughed at him when he worried about Edith catching him. Now, at thirty-five, with eight years’ distance, he saw how foolish he had been, for she was a woman of no substance: her idea of a good day was to sleep late, buy things at Bonwit Teller or Ann Taylor, and make love with Hank in the afternoon. He was young enough to be excited by her accent, so that he heard its sound more than what it said. He saw her in Boston, on Saturday afternoons, on Tuesdays and Thursdays when he was supposed to be in his office at school, he got careless, and he got caught.

  When it happened he realized he had always known that someday it would: that he could not have lived uncaught his entire life, or until he outgrew his crushes that so quickly turned to passion not only for the body, for that lovely first penetration into new yielding flesh, but for the woman’s soul too, a passion to know as much of her as he could before they parted (they were students; parting was graduation) and went on with their lives. Sometimes for weeks, even months, he would not notice a particular girl in class. Because while he was teaching he was aware mostly of himself: this was only partly vanity; more, it was his love of teaching, his fear of failing, so that before every class he had stage-fright, had to spend a few minutes in silence in his office or walking about the campus, letting his apprehension and passion grow inside him until, entering the classroom, those were all he felt. When he began to speak about a novel or story, it was as though another man were talking, and Hank listening. He taught three afternoons a week, had many bad days when he became confused, lost the students, and seeing their listless faces, his apprehension overcame his passion and he fearfully waited, still talking, for the fifty minutes to pass. At a week’s end, if he had had two good days out of three, he was satisfied. He knew that hardly anyone hit three for three in this work. On his best days he listened to Hank the teacher talking, and he tried to follow the ideas coming from his mouth, ideas he often didn’t know he had until he heard them. So, usually, he did not notice a certain girl until she said something in class, something that halted him, made him look at her and think about what she had said. Or, while he was talking, his face sweeping the class, the windows, the ceiling, his hands busy with a pen or keys or coins, his face would suddenly stop, held by a girl whose eyes were fixed on his; sometimes he would stop speaking for a moment, lose the idea he was working on, as he looked at her. Then he would turn away, toss his keys or coin or pen in the air, catch the idea again as he caught the tossed object, and speak. Soon he would be talking to her on the campus.

  In his thirties, he understood what those crushes, while he was married, had been. His profession was one of intimacy, but usually it went only from him to the faces sitting in the room. Any student who listened could know as much about him as all his friends, except those two or three truly deep ones. His crushes were rope bridges, built in haste between him and the girl. It was a need not only to give her more of what attracted her in the classroom, but to receive from her, to know her; and with the beginning of that, talking on the campus sidewalks or in his office, came the passion to know all of her. The ones he chose (or, he realized in his thirties, the ones who chose him) were girls who would have been known as promiscuous when he was in college; or even now in the seventies if they were salesclerks or cashiers and at night went to those bars where the young men who had gone to work instead of college drank and waited. But they were educated, affluent, and well-travelled; they wore denim to class, but he knew that what hung in their dormitory closets and in their closets at home cost at least half of his year’s salary. He never saw those clothes until he was divorced at thirty and started taking the girls to Boston for the evening; and then he rarely saw the same dress or skirt and blouse twice; only a favorite sweater, a warm coat. While married, his lovemaking was in his car, and what he quiveringly pulled from their thighs was denim. They all took the pill, they all had what they called a healthy attitude toward sex, which meant they knew the affair with Hank, as deep and tender as it might be, so that it certainly felt like love (and, for all Hank knew, it probably was) would end with the school year in May, would resume (if she and Hank felt like it) in the fall, and would certainly end on Commencement Day.

  So they made it easy for him. He was a man who planned most days of his life. In the morning he wrote; then he ran, then he taught; then he was a husband and father. He tried to keep them all separated, and most days it worked, and he felt like three or four different men. When the affairs started, he made time for them as well. After class or instead of office hours he drove through town where the girl was walking. She entered his car as though he had offered her a ride. Even when they left town and drove north she would sit near her door until he turned onto the dirt road leading to the woods. Going back he stayed on the highway, skirted the town, approached the school from the south, and let her out several blocks away. Then he went home and hugged and kissed Sharon and Edith, and holding their bodies in the warmth of his house, he felt love only for them.

  But with Jeanne in Boston he had to lie too much about where he was going and where he had been, and finally when Edith asked him one night: Are you having an affair with that phony French bitch? he said: Yes. He and Edith had met Jeanne when someone brought her to their Christmas party; Edith had not seen her since, but in April, when she asked him, he did not even wonder how she knew. He was afraid, but he was also relieved. That may have been why he didn’t ask how she knew. Because it didn’t matter: Edith was dealing with what she believed was an affair with a specific woman. To Hank, his admission of that one was an admission of all of them.

  He was surprised that he felt relief. Then he believed he understood it: he had been deluding himself with his scheduled adulteries, as if a girl on his car seat in the woods were time in the classroom or at his desk; the years of lies to
himself and Edith had been a detraction from the man he wanted and sometimes saw himself to be. So, once cornered, he held his ground and told her. It broke her heart. He wanted to comfort her, to make fraudulent promises, but he would not. He told her he loved her and wanted to live with no one else. But he would not become like most people he knew. They were afraid; and old, twenty years early. They bought houses, spoke often of mortgages, repairs, children’s ailments, and the weight of their bodies. As he talked she wiped from her eyes the dregs of her first heavy weeping. His own eyes were damp because of hers, and more: because of the impotence he felt, the old male-burden of having to be strong for both of them at once, to give her the assurance of his love so she could hear as a friend what he was saying: that he was what he was, that he had to be loved that way, that he could not limit the roads of his life until they narrowed down to one, leading from home to campus. She screamed at him: You’re a writer too! Isn’t that enough for one man? He said: No. There’s never enough. I don’t want to have to say no to anything, not ever—It was the most fearful moment of his marriage until the night over three years later when she told him he had to leave her and Sharon. He felt closer to her than he ever had before, now that all the lies were gone. And he knew he might lose her, right there in that April kitchen; he was sure of her love, but he was sure of her strength too. Yet he would not retreat into lies: he had to win.

  He did. She stayed with him. Every night there was talk, and always there was pain. But she stayed. He built a case against monogamy, spoke of it as an abstraction with subtle and insidious roots in the economy: passion leashed so that lovers would need houses and things to put in them. He knew he was using his long apprenticeship to words, not to find truths, but to confuse and win his wife. He spoke of monogamy as unnatural. The heart is too big for it, he said. Yours too.

  In May she started an affair with Jack Linhart, who no longer loved his wife Terry; or believed he no longer loved her. Hank knew: their faces, their voices, and when they were in the same room he could feel the passion and collusion between them as surely as he could smell a baking ham. He controlled his pain and jealousy, his moments of anger at Jack; he remembered the April night in the kitchen. He kept his silence and waited until the summer night Edith told him she was Jack’s lover. He was gentle with her. He knew now that, within the marriage he needed and loved, he was free.

  That summer he watched her. He had been her only lover till now; he watched the worry about what they were doing to their marriage leave her face, watched her face in its moments of girlish mischief, of vanity, of sensuality that brightened her eyes and shaped her lips, these moments coming unpredictably: as they ate dinner with Sharon, paused at the cheese counter in the supermarket …Toward the end of the summer he made love twice with Terry, on successive nights, because he liked her, because she was pretty, because she was unhappy, and because he felt he had earned it. That ended everything. Terry told Jack about Hank. Then, desperate and drunk, Jack told Terry about Edith, said he wanted a divorce, and when Terry grieved he could not leave her: all of this in about twelve hours, and within twenty-four Edith and Terry had lunch together, and next afternoon Hank and Jack went running, and that evening, with the help of gin and their long friendship, they all gathered and charcoaled steaks. When the Linharts went home, Hank and Edith stood on the front lawn till the car turned a corner and was gone. Then Edith put her arm around his waist. We’re better off, she said: they’re still unhappy. He felt he was being held with all her strength; that strength he had feared last April; he was proud to be loved by her and, with some shame, he was proud of himself, for bringing her this far. That fall they both had new lovers.

  When three years later she told him to leave and he tried to believe the injustice of it, he could not. For a long time he did not understand why. Then one night it came to him: he remembered her arm around his waist that summer night, and the pride he had felt, and then he knew why his tallying of her affairs meant nothing. She had not made him leave her life because he was unfaithful; she had made him leave because she was; because he had changed her. So she had made him leave because—and this struck him so hard, standing in his bedroom, he needed suddenly to lie down—he was Hank Allison.

  On the morning after Monica jettisoned him, he woke with the images he had brought to bed. He had no memory, as he might have without last night’s treatment, of anything about her that was intelligent or kind or witty or tender. Instead of losing a good woman, he had been saved from a bad one. He knew all this was like Novocain while the dentist drilled; but no matter. For what he had to face now was not the loss of Monica; he had to face, once again, what to do about loss itself. He put a banana, wheat germ, a raw egg, and buttermilk in the blender. He brought the drink downstairs and sat on the front steps, in the autumn sunlight. It was a Saturday, and Sharon wanted to see a movie that afternoon. Good: nearly two hours of distraction; he would like the movie, whatever it was. Before picking up Sharon he must plan his night, be sure he did not spend it alone in his apartment. If he called the Linharts and told them about Monica, they would invite him to dinner, stay up drinking with him as long as he wanted. He touched the steps. It’s these steps, he thought. He looked up and down the street lined with old houses and old trees. This street. This town. How the fuck can I beat geography? A small town, and a dead one. The bright women went to other places. The ones he taught with were married. So he was left with either students or the women he knew casually in town, women he had tried talking to in bars—secretaries, waitresses, florists, beauticians—and he had enjoyed their company, but no matter how pretty and good-natured they were, how could he spend much time with a woman who thought Chekhov was something boys did in their beds at night? He remembered a night last summer drinking with Jack at a bar that was usually lined with girls, and he said: Look at her: she’s pretty, she looks sweet, she’s nicely dressed, but look at that face: nothing there. Not one thought in her head. And Jack said: Sure she’s got thoughts: thirty-eight ninety-five … size nine … partly cloudy. Sharon was twelve. He would not move away until she was at least eighteen. He was with her every weekend, and they cooked at his apartment one night during the week. When his second book was published, an old friend offered him a job in Boston: he had thought about the bigger school, more parties with more women, even graduate students, as solemn as they were. But he would not leave Sharon. And when she was eighteen, he would be forty, twice the age of most of his students, and having lived on temporary love for six years, one limping, bloodstained son of a bitch. And if he moved then, who would want what was left of him?

  He stood and climbed the stairs to his apartment and phoned the Linharts. Jack answered. When Hank told him, he said to come to dinner; early, as soon as he took Sharon home.

  ‘Maybe I’ll invite Lori,’ Hank said.

  ‘Why not.’

  ‘I mean, she’s just a friend. But maybe she’ll keep the night from turning into a wake.’

  ‘Bring her. Just be careful. You fall in love faster than I can fry an egg. What is it with these Goddamn girls anyway? Are they afraid of something permanent? Is that it?’

  ‘Old buddy, I think there’s something about me that just scares shit out of them. Something they just can’t handle.’

  You were all the way across the room, Monica said as soon as he came, before he had even collapsed on her, to nestle his cheek beside hers. So instead he rolled away and marvelled that she knew, that Goddamnit they always knew: his soul had been across the room; he had felt it against the wall behind him, opposite the foot of the bed, thinking, watching him and Monica, waiting for them to finish. Because of that, finishing had taken him a long time: erect and eager, his cock seemed attached not to his flesh but to that pondering soul back there; and since it did not seem his flesh, it did not seem to be inside Monica’s either: there was a mingling of his hardness and her softness and liquid heat, but it had nothing to do with who he was for those minutes, or for who she was either. He knew it
was an occupational hazard. Then, because of why it had just happened on that early Friday evening in winter when she was still his student, had two hours ago been in his class, had then walked to his apartment in cold twilight, he laughed. He had not expected to laugh, he knew it was a mistake, but he could not stop. A warning tried to stop him, to whisper hush to the laughter, a warning that knew not only the perils with a woman at a time like this, but the worse peril of being so confident in a woman’s love that he could believe she would love his laughter now too, and his reason for it. She got out of bed and went to the bathroom and then the kitchen and when she came back she had a glass of Dry Sack—one glass, not two—and even that sign could not make him serious, for he was caught in the comic precision of what had just happened. She pulled on leotards, slipped into a sweater that she left unbuttoned, and brought a cigarette to bed where she lay beside him, not touching, and the space between them and the sound of her breathing felt to Hank not quite angry yet, not quite subdued either.

  ‘You were right,’ he said. He was still smiling. ‘I was across the room. I can’t help it. I was all right until we started; then while we were making love I thought about what I was working on today. I didn’t want to. I never want to after I stop for the day. And I wanted to ask you about it but I figured we’d better finish first—’

  ‘Oh good, Hank: oh good.’

  ‘I know, I know. But I was working on a scene about a girl who’s only made love once, say a few months ago, and then one night she makes love twice to this guy and again in the morning, and I wanted to know if I was right. In the scene her pussy is sore next day; after the three times. Is that accurate?’