“You’re just afraid I’ll say the same thing about you, Johnny.” She smiled and touched her damp fingertip to her lips, which were wonderful lips.
“Afraid,” I said. “Afraid’s really not the word, is it?”
“Well, then, whatever the word is.” Beth looked quickly away and motioned the waiter for the check. She didn’t know how to be disagreed with. It always frightened her.
But that was all. I’ve already said our meeting wasn’t a satisfying one.
Mack Bolger’s pale gray eyes caught me coming toward him well before I expected them to. We had seen each other only twice. Once at a fancy cocktail party given by an author I’d come to St. Louis to wrest a book away from. It was the time I’d met his wife. And once more, in the Mayfair Hotel, when I’d taken an inept swing at him and he’d slammed me against a wall and hit me in the face with the back of his hand. Perhaps you don’t forget people you knock around. That becomes their place in your life. I, myself, find it hard to recognize people when they’re not where they belong, and Mack Bolger belonged in St. Louis. Of course, he was an exception.
Mack’s gaze fixed on me, then left me, scanned the crowd uncomfortably, then found me again as I approached. His large tanned face took on an expression of stony unsurprise, as if he’d known I was somewhere in the terminal and a form of communication had already begun between us. Though, if anything, really, his face looked resigned — resigned to me, resigned to the situations the world foists onto you unwilling; resigned to himself. Resignation was actually what we had in common, even if neither of us had a language which could express that. So as I came into his presence, what I felt for him, unexpectedly, was sympathy — for having to see me now. And if I could’ve, I would have turned and walked straight away and left him alone. But I didn’t.
“I just saw you,” I said from the crowd, ten feet before I ever expected to speak. My voice isn’t loud, so that the theatrically nasal male voice announcing the arrival from Poughkeepsie on track 34 seemed to have blotted it out.
“Did you have something special in mind to tell me?” Mack Bolger said. His eyes cast out again across the vaulted hall, where Christmas shoppers and overbundled passengers were moving in all directions. It occurred to me at that instant — and shockingly — that he was waiting for Beth, and that in a moment’s time I would be standing here facing her and Mack together, almost as we had in St. Louis. My heart struck two abrupt beats deep in my chest, then seemed for a second to stop altogether. “How’s your face?” Mack said with no emotion, still scanning the crowd. “I didn’t hurt you too bad, did I?”
“No,” I said.
“You’ve grown a moustache.” His eyes did not flicker toward me.
“Yes,” I said, though I’d completely forgotten about it, and for some reason felt ashamed, as if it made me look ridiculous.
“Well,” Mack Bolger said. “Good.” His voice was the one you would use to speak to someone in line beside you at the post office, someone you’d never see again. Though there was also, just barely noticeable, a hint of what we used to call juiciness in his speech, some minor, undispersable moisture in his cheek that one heard in his s’s and f’s. It was unfortunate, since it robbed him of a small measure of gravity. I hadn’t noticed it before in the few overheated moments we’d had to exchange words.
Mack looked at me again, hands in his expensive Italian coat pockets, a coat that had heavy, dark, bone buttons and long, wide lapels. Too stylish for him, I thought, for the solid man he was. Mack and I were nearly the same height, but he was in every way larger and seemed to look down to me— something in the way he held his chin up. It was almost the opposite of the way Beth looked at me.
“I live here now,” Mack said, without really addressing me. I noticed he had long, dark almost feminine eyelashes, and small, perfectly shaped ears, which his new haircut put on nice display. He might’ve been forty — younger than I am — and looked more than anything like an army officer. A major. I thought of a letter Beth had shown me, written by Mack to her, containing the phrase, “I want to kiss you all over. Yes I do. Love, Macklin.” Beth had rolled her eyes when she showed it to me. At another time she had talked to Mack on the telephone while we were in bed together naked. On that occasion, too, she’d kept rolling her eyes at whatever he was saying — something, I gathered, about difficulties he was having at work. Once we even engaged in a sexual act while she talked to him. I could hear his tiny, buzzing, fretful-sounding voice inside the receiver. But that was now gone. Everything Beth and I had done was gone. All that remained was this — a series of moments in the great train terminal, moments which, in spite of all, seemed correct, sturdy, almost classical in character, as if this later time was all that really mattered, whereas the previous, briefly passionate, linked but now-distant moments were merely preliminary.
“Did you buy a place?” I said, and all at once felt a widely spreading vacancy open all around inside me. It was such a preposterous thing to say.
Mack’s eyes moved gradually to me, and his impassive expression, which had seemed to signify one thing — resignation — began to signify something different. I knew this because a small cleft appeared in his chin.
“Yes,” he said and let his eyes stay on me.
People were shouldering past us. I could smell some woman’s heavy, warm-feeling perfume around my face. Music commenced in the rotunda, making the moment feel suffocating, clamorous: “We three kings of Orient are, bearing gifts we traverse afar …”
“Yes,” Mack Bolger said again, emphatically, spitting the word from between his large straight, white, nearly flawless teeth. He had grown up on a farm in Nebraska, gone to a small college in Minnesota on a football scholarship, then taken an MBA at Wharton, had done well. All that life, all that experience was now being brought into play as self-control, dignity. It was strange that anyone would call him a dog when he wasn’t that at all. He was extremely admirable. “I bought an apartment on the Upper East Side,” he said, and he blinked his eyelashes very rapidly. “I moved out in September. I have a new job. I’m living alone. Beth’s not here. She’s in Paris where she’s miserable — or rather I hope she is. We’re getting divorced. I’m waiting for my daughter to come down from boarding school. Is that all right? Does that seem all right to you? Does it satisfy your curiosity?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.” Mack was not angry. He was, instead, a thing that anger had no part in, or at least had long been absent from, something akin to exhaustion, where the words you say are the only true words you can say. Myself, I did not think I’d ever felt that way. Always for me there had been a choice.
“Do you understand me?” Mack Bolger’s thick athlete’s brow furrowed, as if he was studying a creature he didn’t entirely understand, an anomaly of some kind, which perhaps I was.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Well then,” he said, and seemed embarrassed. He looked away, out over the crowd of moving heads and faces, as if he’d sensed someone coming.
I looked toward where he seemed to be looking. But no one was approaching us. Not Beth, not a daughter. Not anyone. Perhaps, I thought, this was all a lie, or possibly even that I’d, for an instant, lost consciousness, and this was not Mack Bolger at all, and I was dreaming everything.
“Do you think there could be someplace else you could go now?” Mack said. His big, tanned, handsome face looked imploring and exhausted. Once Beth had said Mack and I looked alike. But we didn’t. That had just been her fantasy. Without really looking at me again he said, “I’ll have a hard time introducing you to my daughter. I’m sure you can imagine that.”