“And?”
“Well, we’re all defined by these things, aren’t we? By ourselves and by the rest of the world, to a greater or lesser extent. You’re probably more inner-directed than I am—”
“I’m not sure of that.”
“—but even so you can hardly help trying to see yourself as others see you, and that all has something to do with how you live and what work you do and everything else.”
“Maybe I just want some time first. And some space.”
“Well, I can understand that.”
“Last time I scared myself to death and left out of fear. This time, whatever I do, I hope it will be because I’ve got a clearer idea who I am. Then maybe I’ll let the rest of the world know.”
“Please let me be one of the first.”
Over hot-sour soup and spicy chicken with peanuts and fried preserved pork with vegetables, over a great many small cups of rather insipid tea, she found out a bit more about David Kolodny than she cared to.
Not that she learned anything that put her off. He had seemed like a pleasant and basically decent guy on first meeting, and that impression was not contradicted but reinforced. He was in his early forties. He had been in the army in Korea and had married within a year or two after his discharge.
His marriage had broken up almost two years ago. He’d lived at the YMCA for a short time to get his bearings, then shared an apartment with a girl friend until six months ago, when that relationship had dissolved and he’d found his apartment on Ninety-eighth Street. Reading between the lines, she guessed that the relationship with the girl friend had failed because he was still hung up on his wife.
Or perhaps he was more hung up on their house. Several years earlier they had purchased a brownstone in Park Slope, which she knew was somewhere in Brooklyn, and they’d spent all their spare time reconditioning it. Evidently the wife had waited until the house was in fairly good shape before deciding she didn’t want David to live in it any more.
He told her quite a bit about the house. Their conversation was deliberately anecdotal, because they had already established that they didn’t have an enormous amount in common. She knew next to nothing about Brooklyn, where he had lived all his life, or Brooklyn College, where he had gone to school. He knew that Buffalo was near Niagara Falls and they got a hell of a lot of snow there, and he knew that Bryn Mawr was in the general vicinity of Philadelphia. So they got that out of the way and he talked about his house in Park Slope and his classes full of juvenile delinquents in Washington Heights and she talked about her customers at the bookstore and they both talked about shops and restaurants they had discovered in the neighborhood.
After dinner he suggested a movie. There was an Ingmar Bergman double bill at Loew’s 83rd, he said, or they could walk up Broadway and see what was playing at the Riviera, if she’d rather.
“What I’d rather is not go to a movie at all,” she told him. “I don’t think I could sit through one. What I’d like to do is go someplace and have a few drinks and unwind a little.”
“Any place in particular?”
“You know the neighborhood better than I do.”
“There’s a bar around the corner from my place that I drop into every now and then. It’s just a neighborhood ginmill but it’s quiet and comfortable.”
“That sounds fine.”
“I wouldn’t mind having a couple of beers myself.”
He paid the check, and she didn’t even make a token effort to split it with him. Well, he’d asked her out, hadn’t he? Maybe she’d buy a round at his bar, if they had more than one round.
She wondered if he’d had his heart set on a movie. Too bad about it if he did. There was no need to be self-sacrificing, no need to pretend to enthusiasms she didn’t feel. She might never see this man again, and if she didn’t they would both survive. Neither of them was anything to the other; they were together because being together would, with a little luck, be preferable to being alone.
She might sleep with him or she might not. She had not yet decided. He wanted her to, she could tell that much, but he wouldn’t be devastated if she decided otherwise, any more than she would have been crushed if he hadn’t wanted her.
A shame she hadn’t been this sensible ten years ago. But you had to learn things. You weren’t born knowing them.
The bar he took her to was dim and quiet. There was no waiter, so he got her scotch and his beer at the bar and brought them to the table.
The conversation moved at once to a more intimate level. They talked about their respective spouses. She said she’d wanted to have Robin fly down over Christmas, but that her husband had refused. “If I want to see her I can come there, that’s the position he’s taking. He says she’s too young to fly by herself but that’s bullshit. She’s old enough.”
“He just wants to make things tough for you.”
“That or he’s afraid I wouldn’t send her back.”
“Sounds pretty paranoid.”
The mutual sympathy was automatic in conversations of this sort, and she no longer found it surprising. Here she was, a woman who had left her husband on her own volition, and here he was, a man whose wife had pushed him out of his own house, and each of them was automatically assuming that the other’s absent spouse was in the wrong. In actual fact she probably had more in common with his wife than with him, as did he with Mark. Sex, she decided, and where you happened to be had an awful lot to do with the way you chose to look at things.
“You deserve a lot of credit,” he said. “It took a lot of guts to do what you did.”
“I suppose so.”
“Of course it did.”
“My mother thinks it would take more guts to stay. In a way it would have because I just couldn’t stand it.”
“There’s a difference between guts and beating your head against the wall, isn’t there?”
“That’s what I was doing. Beating my head against the wall.”
“It feels so good when you stop.”
“It certainly does. I can’t really talk to my mother any more. I call her once a week out of a sense of duty but it’s pointless. We were really extremely close, but then I went and left my husband and my child, and I might as well have fucked a zebra in Hengerer’s window. That’s a department store in Buffalo.”
“My parents both passed away. My father when I was in high school and my mother passed away five years ago. No, it’s six years.”
“It’ll be three years next month since my father died.” She hated euphemisms for death. “I think he would have understood, but maybe not.”
“It’s a generation gap thing. We were talking about this in my group just the other day.”
He was in therapy. He had established this early in the conversation, dropping it in the way some people would let you know they had gone to a good college. It seemed as though everybody in New York was in therapy in one form or another. None of the people she knew in Buffalo went to psychiatrists, and the prevailing sentiment echoed Samuel Goldwyn’s maxim that anyone who did go to one ought to have his head examined. At first she had wondered if she was simply running into a disproportionate number of mentally disturbed people, but they didn’t seem abnormal to her. Then she realized it was simply something that New Yorkers did.
Cal had been in individual therapy at various times, and for the past two years had been in group therapy. Once she asked him if he thought it helped.
“Well, you have to think it helps,” he’d said. “Don’t you? Or otherwise you stop going. But how can you tell, really? If you function better, or feel that you’re functioning better, it might be the effect of group or it might have happened anyway. And if things go badly they might have been worse without group, so you can’t tell. I usually feel better after I’ve been to a session.”