His Wife Leaves Him

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He puts his hands under his head on the pillow and thinks about the first time they met. He left the party and saw her at the other end of this long hall. She was standing in front of the elevator, waiting for it to come. Then she must have heard him behind her. No, she definitely heard him. They talked about it sometime later. She said her first thought was that someone was about to grab or attack her, and that she’s usually not so paranoid. That his feet stomped as he ran as if he were wearing combat boots. He wasn’t running but hurrying now because he didn’t want her to get in the elevator before he got there and the door to close. Though if the elevator had come he would have yelled “Hold the elevator,” wouldn’t he? She then might have pushed the “open” or “6” button to keep the door from closing — not an easy move to do, as you got to think fast and have quick coordination — or held the door open with her hand. Or maybe she would have let the door close. Intentionally, because she still might have felt he wanted to hurt her, or because she couldn’t get to the right button in time. If that had happened, he thinks he would have run to the stairway and down the five flights. But by the time he would have reached the ground floor, she would have been out of the building. Would he have tried, if he had run out of the building and saw her on the street, to catch up with her? Doesn’t think so. Wouldn’t want to startle or scare her. But he could have just walked fast — that is, if she hadn’t stopped in front of the building — and then slower when he got near her, and said something to start a conversation, like what? “Excuse me, but we were at the same party tonight. My name’s Martin Samuels, I’m a friend of Pati’s, and I hope I didn’t just now startle or scare you in any way.” Ah, why’s he speculating on something that didn’t happen? Because it’s interesting, going through all the possibilities that could have happened and then zeroing in on what actually did. And what the hell else he’s got to do now? And he likes the idea of, well…of, that he was going to meet and get to know her no matter what. What’s he mean by that? That if all else flopped — if the elevator had closed with her in it and she wasn’t on the street when he got there — he would have asked Pati if she knew the slim blond woman with the beautiful smile and her hair in a chignon, if that’s what that is when it’s knotted or rolled up at the back of the head. Or knew someone at the party who did — the person she came with — and if she could fix them up somehow or just give or get him the woman’s phone number, if she isn’t married or engaged. Or if married, not separated. And, of course, she wasn’t married or even seeing anyone then. And Pati would have got him her number and he would have called, or asked Pati to call her first about him, and then called and arranged to meet her for coffee or a drink. Anyway, on the sixth floor, waiting for the elevator, she heard him and quickly turned around, looking a bit startled. He said something like — or he also could have asked Pati for the woman’s name and address or whereabouts in the city she lived, if she knew, or just what borough, and he would have got her number out of the Manhattan phone book because it turned out she was the only person in it with her name. But he said something like — definitely the “leaver” part, though; that he definitely remembers, his first attempt at trying to be funny or clever with her—“Don’t worry, it’s just me, a fellow partygoer and now — leaver, and also a friend of the host. That is, if you are a friend of Pati’s and weren’t brought to the party by someone who is or who knows her in some other way — a colleague at her magazine, let’s say.” She said something like “No, I know Pati quite well.” “That so?” he said. “May I ask from where?” and she said “Grad school. She was a few years ahead of me but we became friends.” “I only met her this summer. At Yaddo — you know, the artist colony, or art colony, or whatever they call it.” He said that to let her know right off he was an artist of some sort and serious enough at it to get into that place. He thought, maybe because he assumed she was interested in the arts, he thinks, she’d ask him what he does, and then, because he also must have assumed she was getting or had gotten a doctorate in some kind of literature at Columbia, like Pati, what he was working on up there and was it a productive stay and so on. Probably not the latter. But she just as easily could have assumed he was working on nonfiction. Pati had gone straight from getting her doctorate to working for Partisan Review and was at Yaddo the exact same time period he was — they even took the bus back together — writing a biography of an influential eighteenth-century French thinker whose name he forgets. Starts with a T, his first name. T-s, T-z, T-p — but it’s not important. He never read anything the guy wrote, though Pati had loaned him a couple of his books at Yaddo and then at the party asked for them back. Such a stupid move, though, trying to impress Gwen fifteen seconds after he met her with that “leaver” remark and then the Yaddo business. Thierry, that’s it. He should have thought at the time — maybe he did, but just couldn’t stop himself — that she was very smart — she certainly looked it, and her voice, if he can put it this way, was very smart too — to see through his inept maneuvers. She might even have thought “What bullshit this guy’s trying to hand me.” Not “bullshit” but some other word. “Hokum”; “bullcrap”; “baloney.” Can’t think when she ever cursed, and he bets she also rarely did it in her head. Though once, when she was very sick, she cried out “Why the fuck did this have to happen to me? Excuse me; I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to be vulgar. But I’m fed up with my illness; fed up.” But about that first night, she later said — weeks later, maybe months, when they were seeing each other almost every day — that she knew — he’d asked — he’d made the Yaddo reference to impress her. He’d said something like “I thought so. And what a dummy I was, too, because it doesn’t take much to get into Yaddo — a few publications and a couple of good references — and you probably knew that. It was so desperate, but it shows how eager I was to get you interested in me, at least to the point where you wouldn’t brush me off when I asked, and I was intending to, if we could meet for coffee sometime or a drink. I’m just glad it didn’t do any lasting harm. It didn’t, did it? And she said — now he remembered: they were having dinner at her apartment; he’d brought food from Ozu, a restaurant he’d discovered and which became, more for dining there than takeout, one of her favorites for a couple of years—“What do you think?” “What about my ‘leaver’ remark from the same night?” and she said “‘Leave her’? ‘Leaver’? ‘Lever’ like the handle?” “As in ‘fellow partyleaver,’ one of the first things I said to you when we met at the elevator after leaving Pati’s party. Also said just to impress you?” She said “I think I didn’t understand what you meant with that leaver but didn’t want to question you on it, so I let it go. Now I see what you were getting at—‘partygoer, partyleaver.’ I can be slow — and I’d say it’s so-so to maybe a-little-more-than-that clever. At any rate, original. I’m not aware of anyone else who’s used it. So you are, to the best of the little I know, a coiner.” For a while after that, when he called her, he’d say “Hi, it’s your coiner calling,” or just “It’s the coiner” or “your coiner” and once or twice “your coiner calling from a corner,” till she stopped laughing at any line with “coiner” in it, so he stopped using it. Anyway, sixth floor, after he mentioned Yaddo and got no verbal response and he doesn’t think any visual reaction to it either, “So, I assume that, like Pati, you went or still go to Columbia for your doctorate?” and she said yes. “Went? Go?” and she said “Went, although I’m still very much there.” “So you’re not completely done with it? Or you are — orals, dissertation, defense of it, if the orals and defense aren’t the same thing,” and she said “They’re not, and I am done with them.” “Literature, also, like Pati?” and she said “Same language but literature of a different century.” “What are you doing with it? Or maybe I should say, why are you still at Columbia, if that’s not too personal a question?” “I’m doing a post-doc and also teaching a humanities course as part of their Great Books program.” “That should be interesting,” he said. “And a feather in your cap and gown, I guess, and no doubt a terrific addition to your vita for a possible job there or somewhere else, though I’m not sure what a post-doc is.” “It’s short for post-doctorate,” and he said “No, that my little pea brain figured out. But it’s not another degree, is it?” and she said no. “So what were your thesis and dissertation on? And it is a dissertation for your Ph.D. and not a thesis, right?” and she said yes and gave the title of her thesis and he said “You’re not going to believe this, though I don’t see why not, but he’s just about my favorite nineteenth-century fiction writer. Maybe favorite of any kind of writer and of all centuries and millennia, not counting whichever one Homer was in. though he only wrote, if we can call it that, two books, while your guy filled up volumes and everything I’ve read of his shines,” and she said “You of course know he extended into the twentieth century, though not by much, but is considered primarily a nineteenth-century writer.” “Right,” he said, “the late great stuff,” and gave a couple of the titles. “As the title suggests, I wrote about his long stays in France and his friendships with intellectuals there and all things French. He’s not who I wrote about for my dissertation,” and he said “Oh, and who’s that?” and she said, and he said “This is amazing. He’s one of my favorite contemporary writers, and I’m not just saying that.” She smiled, not, it seemed, at what he said but as if that was to be the end of their conversation, and turned to face the elevator. “Tell me,” he said, “and if I’m talking too much or you no longer want to talk, tell me that too, but have you been waiting long? I mean, more than the three minutes or so we’ve been standing here?” “Not that long.” “So what should we think, the elevator’s broken or stuck?” “It was working fine when I got to the party. I’d say it’s not working and that if it doesn’t come in the next minute we should think about walking downstairs. It’s only five flights.” “You walk,” she said; “I don’t mind waiting. And I’m sure it’s being held up because someone’s loading or unloading a lot of things off it and that it’ll eventually come. Besides, I don’t like those stairs.” He said “Why, what’s wrong with them?” and she said “They’re unusually long and insufficiently lit and also a bit creepy. And the one time I walked down — not because the elevator didn’t come — I couldn’t get out on either the ground or second floor.” “In that case, you’re right, and I’m glad you warned me. But it’d seem locking those doors would be against some fire regulation.” “I don’t know if they were locked or, as someone explained to me, it had something to do with humidity and air pressure. But I thought the same thing about a fire regulation being violated and told Pati and she said it’s happened to her too, more than once.” “Someone ought to complain, then, in case there is a fire or something like that,” and she said “Pati did, several times, she said, and the situation hadn’t been corrected when I walked down the stairs, so you can see why I don’t want to take the chance.” “I’ll be with you,” and she said “No, thanks.” “I was just kidding, of course,” and she said “About what?” “Nothing. I thought I might’ve sounded pushy,” and she said “I didn’t think so. You were trying to be helpful. Thank you.” The conversation went something like that. More he talked to her, more he knew he didn’t want to leave her without getting her phone number and some assurance she’d meet him sometime for coffee or a drink. He still didn’t know if she was married or engaged or had a steady boyfriend. She had gloves on now but at the party he got close enough to her to see she wore no ring on either hand. He remembers thinking at the elevator What a beautiful voice she has, clear and soft, and a lovely face and good figure. And she speaks so well, he thought, and is obviously very smart and seems gracious and he likes what she does: teaching and getting a Ph.D. in literature and at Columbia. They’d have lots to talk about if they started seeing each other. He was never a scholar but he did like to talk about books and writers and he often read literary criticism of novels and stories he’d recently finished but felt there was more to them than he got and wanted somebody else’s take on them. He could reread her writer or read some of the work he hadn’t read or she recommended and what she thought were the best translations of it, and later talk about it with her. He liked the way she smiled and laughed at the party — not loud, and the smile warm and genuine, and the intelligent look she had when she seemed to be in a serious conversation. She usually had a guy or two talking to her and one time three or four men surrounding her, each, it seemed, vying for her attention. That made him think that maybe there wasn’t one particular guy in her life, but of course, he thought, it could be that her husband or boyfriend hadn’t come to the party. She was the beauty there, that’s for sure. He remembers when she came in — alone, took her coat and hat off in the foyer, probably her gloves too, and went in back with them and, he assumes, put them with most of the other coats and where his was too, on Pati’s bed. When she came back out and waved to some people and went over to them, he said to himself something like “Jesus, what a doll.” He practically stalked her at the party, losing sight of her only when he went to the bathroom or into another room for a drink. He was waiting for a chance to go up to her and introduce himself or say anything to her, just so long as they started talking, but she was always with someone, mostly men but sometimes a woman or two. She never noticed him staring at her because she never turned his way when he was. He wanted her to and then, he thought, he’d give an expression with his raised forehead and some other thing with his face that he was interested in her or had been wanting to talk to her but didn’t want to barge in and could she free herself for a moment? How he was going to get any of that in with a look, he didn’t know. But he thought he could — maybe just smile in a way that suggested he wanted to meet her — and she might even come over to him or at least gesture in some way — hand or face or some move with her head — for him to come over to her. Then she was gone. A man tapped his shoulder from behind, and he turned around. “Aren’t you Donald Boykin?” the man said, and he said no and the man said “You look just like him; sorry.” When he turned back to the spot he’d been watching her at, she’d disappeared. He looked for her in the room he could see from the one he was in, but she wasn’t there. He went through the entire apartment looking for her. He’d made up his mind; he was going to go over to her even if she was with other people. He didn’t know what he was going to say; something, though. Maybe make up a woman’s name — Dorothy Becker — and ask her if she was this woman and then say “Sorry, haven’t seen her in a long time and I used to know her fairly well and I thought she’d think I was ignoring her if I didn’t say hello. And now that I think of it, you couldn’