They looked good together. They were what society columnists called “a striking pair.” I don’t say this maliciously — at least, I don’t think I do — but it was only when I saw her with him that I fully realized I was younger than she was. She pulled a face and whacked him with her spoon. Not gently, either. “How’s Snow?” she asked.
I didn’t catch his answer. A few minutes later Dinah and Betty were back in circulation, and Mia and I were back on the coat-check desk. For almost an hour we hardly said a word to each other. Then she kicked off one of her shoes, placed her bare foot on the hem of my dress so I couldn’t move away from her, and said: “Say, what’s the meaning of this? Are we back at kindergarten?”
I said: “I don’t know.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t sound so sure.” She moved her heel in a slow circle, dragging the material along with it.
“Okay, okay. I’m sure.”
“Whitman and I are just good pals,” she said. “Goodish — whenever I catch a glimpse of him, anyway. And yeah, maybe… maybe we were almost something more once, but it would’ve been a complete disaster. I don’t know… he’s a nice guy, but there are thoughts he doesn’t allow himself to think. So you can’t think aloud around him… it’s too risky. You might accidentally hit a nerve. Did I already say he’s a nice guy? He is, but you just stumble across one of those thoughts he hates to think and — it ain’t pretty. When I die, they’ll make me the patron saint of lucky escapes. And that’s all there is to it.” She took her foot off the dress and we both checked for a print. Luckily there wasn’t one.
“I don’t know why you feel a need to tell me—”
“Because he says he can’t stand you and you act like you can’t stand him, and whenever a man and a woman behave like that toward each other, it usually means something’s going on. There’s a precious metal kind of gleam about you, and the man’s a jeweler, you know. So look out. And listen carefully, Boy — we’ve got to start right. I’m talking about you and me. Kiss me now, right this minute, and I’ll take it as a promise that the next time you get mad at me it’ll be a fight that’s actually worth having.”
I kissed her cheek, and she kissed mine. “He said he can’t stand me?”
She chuckled.
“What have you been writing in that notebook all evening?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you later.”
The boat docked at Drake Island and every one of us hired blondes temporarily became a coat-check girl. Afterward I stood on the middle deck and sipped a glass of water as I watched a crowd of fur coats with people in them tottering across the sand. I was one of the girls who had to stay on board with the guests who didn’t want to go ashore, and my interpretation of “exclusive yet accessible” was to offer a smiling side profile to anyone who spoke to me. If my conversation partner moved to try to face me directly, I just turned my head again, and if they made another attempt to adjust our interaction, then so did I, and it was a merry circle that we walked until my opponent was defeated and either went away or settled for a cozy chat with a silhouette. It got so Arturo was the only man on board who’d talk to me.
“What are you playing at?” he said, taking my glass of water from my hand and tasting it.
“Keep it,” I said, when he tried to hand the glass back. “I hear you can’t stand me.”
He didn’t reply.
“You feel you’ve seen a hundred of me. You know how my tiny mind works. But maybe it goes both ways.”
That tickled him. “I doubt it,” he said, when he was through laughing. He wiped tears from his eyes — that’s how tickled he was. “But Mia likes you, so…”
“I like Mia too.”
“She’s a sweet kid,” he said, and I thought: What? You didn’t have to talk to Mia for five minutes to get the message that she wasn’t any sweet kid.
“Why’d you quit teaching?”
I felt him look at me, but I gazed steadily into the pastel pink dawn.
“I’m just trying to look busy, Whitman. I’m throwing myself on your mercy here. If you don’t talk to me, I might not get paid.”
“Ha. All right, since you asked so nicely. Two reasons. First of all history got itchy. As a field of study, I mean.”
“Itchy?”
“Yeah. I’m telling you it itched. I figured it’d pass, but it didn’t. I’d sit in my office with my shirtsleeves rolled up, kind of clawing myself from wrist to elbow — my neck sometimes too. It got so bad I’d have to take my shirt off. I was terrified my wife would think they were love scratches, but… anyway, she didn’t think that. No, don’t look at me… stay just as you are, if you don’t mind. Talking to you like this reminds me of confession.”
“Well, go on, my child…”
“Thank you, Father. I think I got too close to the details of my era of supposed expertise. You lose certainty that anyone or anything is really instrumental; you know, maybe time just does all the deeds from great to despicable, and uses us, and we pitifully try to save face by pretending we were at the controls. From where I was sitting the whole thing looked and felt like a flea circus. Not entertaining, not illuminating, just endlessly pathetic. Why is this flea being made to carry that grain of rice across a stick of spaghetti? Sure, it’s the strongest flea there, the strongman of the crew, but it’s struggling… the rice is obviously too heavy. The whole thing’s kind of degrading to watch… I decided to quit, with no clear idea of what I wanted my new job to be. That wasn’t as important as planning how to break it to my family that I was about to throw away a lot of work and a lot of sacrifice, theirs and mine. Snow was well on her way to being born, and my wife liked things the way they were; I think her favorite thing about our… collaboration was her actor and musician friends rubbing shoulders with my academic colleagues, she liked the atmosphere of challenge, the way anything that came under discussion could be claimed or rejected by either side. Time and time again the power of an idea or a piece of art was assessed by either its beauty or its technique or its usefulness, and time and time again my wife was surprised by how rarely anything on earth satisfies all three camps.”
He rested an elbow on the top railing and stood at a slant that made me think of the crooked man who walked a crooked mile. How does the rest of that nursery rhyme go? Something to do with this crooked man journeying farther and farther along and coming across crooked things that he takes for his own because nobody else wants them, and then he finds a crooked wife and the two of them have a crooked whale of a time ever after…?
It began to look as if he was just going to stand like that without saying another word for the rest of the boat trip, so I said: “I didn’t know you had to change friends when you change jobs.”
I think he smiled. “You don’t, I guess. I don’t know… I sometimes go to dinner with those same people now and I feel like a poser. I get what they’re saying but I’m not as invested in their bickering. I’d rather talk metals. Anyway, back when I was still a professor, I think my wife got wise to me before I even said anything about quitting. She sat me down to tell me, quite urgently and emphatically, how proud she was of all my achievements…”
“I think I get the picture. But you said there were two reasons.”