For a while, a year and a half before, I had been involved with Mack Bolger’s wife, Beth Bolger. Oddly enough — only because all events that occur outside New York seem odd and fancifully unreal to New Yorkers — our affair had taken place in the city of St. Louis, that largely overlookable red-brick abstraction that is neither West nor Middlewest, neither South nor North; the city lost in the middle, as I think of it. I’ve always found it interesting that it was both the boyhood home of T. S. Eliot, and only eighty-five years before that, the starting point of westward expansion. It’s a place, I suppose, the world can’t get away from fast enough.
What went on between Beth Bolger and me is hardly worth the words that would be required to explain it away. At any distance but the close range I saw it from, it was an ordinary adultery — spirited, thrilling and then, after a brief while, when we had crossed the continent several times and caused as many people as possible unhappiness, embarrassment and heartache, it became disappointing and ignoble and finally almost disastrous to those same people. Because it is the truth and serves to complicate Mack Bolger’s unlikeable dilemma and to cast him in a more sympathetic light, I will say that at some point he was forced to confront me (and Beth as well) in a hotel room in St. Louis — a nice, graceful old barn called the Mayfair — with the result that I got banged around in a minor way and sent off into the empty downtown streets on a warm, humid autumn Sunday afternoon, without the slightest idea of what to do, ending up waiting for hours at the St. Louis airport for a midnight flight back to New York. Apart from my dignity, I left behind and never saw again a brown silk Hermès scarf with tassels that my mother had given me for Christmas in 1971, a gift she felt was the nicest thing she’d ever seen and perfect for a man just commencing life as a book editor. I’m glad she didn’t have to know about my losing it, and how it happened.
I also did not see Beth Bolger again, except for one sorrowful and bitter drink we had together in the theater district last spring, a nervous, uncomfortable meeting we somehow felt obligated to have, and following which I walked away down Forty-seventh Street, feeling that all of life was a sorry mess, while Beth went along to see The Iceman Cometh, which was playing then. We have not seen each other since that leave-taking, and, as I said, to tell more would not be quite worth the words.
But when I saw Mack Bolger standing in the crowded, festive holiday-bedecked concourse of Grand Central, looking rather vacant-headed but clearly himself, so far from the middle of the country, I was taken by a sudden and strange impulse — which was to walk straight across through the eddying sea of travelers and speak to him, just as one might speak to anyone you casually knew and had unexpectedly yet not unhappily encountered. And not to impart anything, or set in motion any particular action (to clarify history, for instance, or make amends), but simply to create an event where before there was none. And not an unpleasant event, or a provocative one. Just a dimensionless, unreverberant moment, a contact, unimportant in every other respect. Life has few enough of these moments — the rest of it being so consumed by the predictable and the obligated.
I knew a few things about Mack Bolger, about his life since we’d last confronted each other semi-violently in the Mayfair. Beth had been happy to tell me during our woeful drink at the Espalier Bar in April. Our — Beth’s and my — love affair was, of course, only one feature in the long devaluation and decline in her and Mack’s marriage. This I’d always understood. There were two children, and Mack had been frantic to hold matters together for their sakes and futures; Beth was a portrait photographer who worked at home, but craved engagement with the wide world outside of University City — craved it in the worst way, and was therefore basically unsatisfied with everything in her life. After my sudden departure, she moved out of their house, rented an apartment near the Gateway Arch and, for a time, took a much younger lover. Mack, for his part in their upheaval, eventually quit his job as an executive for a large agri-biz company, considered studying for the ministry, considered going on a missionary journey to Senegal or French Guiana, briefly took a young lover himself. One child had been arrested for shoplifting; the other had gotten admitted to Brown. There were months of all-night confrontations, some combative, some loving and revelatory, some derisive from both sides. Until everything that could be said or expressed or threatened was said, expressed and threatened, after which a standstill was achieved whereby they both stayed in their suburban house, kept separate schedules, saw new and different friends, had occasional dinners together, went to the opera, occasionally even slept together, but saw little hope (in Beth’s case, certainly) of things turning out better than they were at the time of our joyless drink and the O’Neill play. I’d assumed at that time that Beth was meeting someone else that evening, had someone in New York she was interested in, and I felt completely fine about it.
“It’s really odd, isn’t it?” Beth said, stirring her long, almost pure-white finger around the surface of her Kir Royale, staring not at me but at the glass rim where the pink liquid nearly exceeded its vitreous limits. “We were so close for a little while.” Her eyes rose to me, and she smiled almost girlishly. “You and me, I mean. Now, I feel like I’m telling all this to an old friend. Or to my brother.”
Beth is a tall, sallow-faced, big-boned, ash blond woman who smokes cigarettes and whose hair often hangs down in her eyes like a forties Hollywood glamour girl. This can be attractive, although it often causes her to seem to be spying on her own conversations.
“Well,” I said, “it’s all right to feel that way.” I smiled back across the little round blacktopped café table. It was all right. I had gone on. When I looked back on what we’d done, none of it except for what we’d done in bed made me feel good about life, or that the experience had been worth it. But I couldn’t undo it. I don’t believe the past can be repaired, only exceeded. “Sometimes, friendship’s all we’re after in these sorts of things,” I said. Though this, I admit, I did not really believe.
“Mack’s like a dog, you know,” Beth said, flicking her hair away from her eyes. He was on her mind. “I kick him, and he tries to bring me things. It’s pathetic. He’s very interested in Tantric sex now, whatever that is. Do you know what that even is?”
“I really don’t like hearing this,” I said stupidly, though it was true. “It sounds cruel.”