After he’d earned his law degree he went into the Army for six months of active duty. He spent two months in basic training at Fort Dix and the rest of the time as a clerk-typist at Fort Polk in Louisiana. He had to go to reserve meetings every Monday night, but that would be over and done with in a couple of more years. And every summer he went to a camp in Watertown for two weeks. It was an idiotic waste of time, but it was better than giving up two years of your life in one chunk.
He still lived at home. He had taken the bar exam as soon as his active duty ended, and surprised himself by passing it the first time. Ever since then he had been with Gordon, Weissbart, and Gordon. The firm’s offices were downtown in the Liberty Bank Building, and on several occasions he had looked around for an apartment closer to his office, but he did get on well with his parents and hated the idea of having to cook for himself. He supposed he would move out sooner or later.
He loved being a lawyer. At Cornell he had considered several other careers. Medicine appealed, but the endless ordeal you had to go through had discouraged him; he knew he was not sufficiently dedicated to cope with it. And he had liked history enough to contemplate making it his life’s work, but being a historian meant being a teacher, and he couldn’t see himself doing fundamentally dull work for low pay for the rest of his life.
Law absorbed him. He had the right sort of mind for it. His firm had a broad general practice, and there was enough change in his work from day to day so that it could never become boring. He wasn’t setting the world on fire, but then he had not had the desire to set the world on fire. He was gradually building up a reputation and getting ahead, and he was doing what he wanted to do, and that was the most important thing.
He collected original cast albums of Broadway shows. Now and then he went to a concert at Kleinhans Music Hall but he wasn’t really crazy about it. He didn’t have the time to play golf as often as he would have liked. He had bowled in a Sunday morning league when he was in high school and had been fairly good, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone bowling. It was pretty dull, when all was said and done, because you just did the same thing over and over again.
They spent a long time at the restaurant. They both had several cups of coffee, then nursed small snifters of brandy. He was easy to be with, and he evidently found her easy to talk to. She did little talking herself but enjoyed listening to him. He was a man who knew just what he wanted to do; moreover, he was doing it. He had a sense of self, a sense of his place in his community, which was a quality quite outside of her experience in men. It was a quality she was now prepared to find extremely attractive.
He returned her to her house well before midnight. She wondered if she had done something wrong, but decided that she hadn’t; she was certain he had had a good time. And he said as much as he walked her to her door.
“I can’t remember enjoying myself this much, Andrea. I must have talked your ear off.”
“I enjoyed myself.”
“I hope you did. I know I did. Can I see you Friday? Maybe we’ll catch a movie or something, and I’ll give your ears a rest.”
“I’d like that. Seeing you, I mean. Not—”
“I know. Friday, then. I’ll call you.”
In the weeks before her wedding there were times when she looked back at that first date and thought that she had known then that she would ultimately marry Mark Benstock. But this was not strictly true. It was remarkable enough that, as she lay in her bed that night, she found herself speculating as to what her life would be like if she did marry Mark, or someone quite like him. She sensed even then that it would be a very comfortable life, and by this she meant emotional rather than financial security.
He was a sound person, a stable person, and she found his stability far more attractive than would have been the case a year or two earlier. It was the disquieting lack of stability in her own life and the lives of everyone she knew that was at the root of her return to Buffalo. Of course there were other more specific factors, but they seemed to be metaphors for the insecurity and isolation of her life in New York.
Yes, she could be married to someone like Mark Benstock. In fact it seemed unlikely that she could be successfully married to anyone who was not similar to him in most respects. But she did not seriously think that she might marry him, not then.
By Thanksgiving she knew they would one day be married.
She had not gone out with anyone in Buffalo before Mark called her, and she did not date anyone but him in the weeks that followed. There were a couple of phone calls from other men. A boy she had dated in high school called her one evening; he was recently divorced, had heard she was back in town, and wondered if she would like to get together for a drink. She would probably have gone, but the night he suggested was one on which she had a date with Mark, and he never called her a second time. Another man asked her out early in November; he too was divorced, and like Mark had heard of her through the aunt’s grapevine. By that time she was seeing Mark twice a week and had no desire to see anyone else. Besides, this man had a nasal voice and sounded like a creep. She told him she was seeing someone on a regular basis, and he sounded disappointed, but not terribly disappointed.
Their dates were always enjoyable for her. While they didn’t go anywhere spectacular, he frequently found something interesting for them to do. They had dinner at a few good restaurants, several mediocre ones, and one remarkably poor Chinese place. They saw half a dozen movies and one play, a reasonably good amateur production of Juno and the Paycock. The imperfect Irish brogues made her think of some of the men she had known who did their drinking at the White Horse and the Lion’s Head, but she did not think of them very intently, or for very long.
One night they drove to Niagara Falls and had dinner on the Canadian side. They had a window table with a good view of the Falls. She quoted Oscar Wilde’s line, expressing his assurance that Niagara Falls was the American bride’s second greatest disappointment. He had never heard the line before and he loved it.
On the long drive home he said, “I couldn’t even guess how long it’s been since I’ve seen the Falls. We had this tradition in my high school fraternity. God, high school fraternities and sororities! They were stupid enough in college, but in high school!”
“What was the tradition?”
“After our closing affair in the spring we would all drop off our dates and drive to Niagara Falls, and then we would all solemnly pee over the Falls. Well, into the river, and then it would go over the Falls.”
“At least you dropped your dates off first. Although I guess it might have been fun to watch. What fraternity?”
“Pal. Pi Alpha Lambda. And you were Phi Ep?”
“Uh-huh. I don’t think I ever dated a Pal boy. Yes, I did, come to think of it. Gerry Leibow.”
“Familiar name, but I don’t remember him.”
She sang:
“I remember that song. But the last word wasn’t girl. It was whore.”
“Hoor, you mean. To rhyme with mature, but we could only sing it that way when no one was around. And when we were in a particularly daring mood. ‘And now I am an Ulps boy’s hoor.’”