His Wife Leaves Him

ll I read for diversion. Anyway, enough of me. I’d like to shut up now. You might think that impossible, but I’m really not much of a talker and don’t know how I got started rattling on so much. I’d much prefer hearing some of your life story and family history, but over coffee if you have a few spare minutes. More if you have more but a few if that’s all you can spare. I’d also like to know what you meant by my delivery. But could we do that?” Please, please, he was thinking, and she said “I don’t see why not. My bike’s safe here even without a lock — the co-op manager once told me they never had a bike stolen — and what little food I have won’t spoil. To save time, should we go to the snack bar they have here?” They went back inside, split a warmed-up buttered corn muffin and had herbal tea, his first. She ordered it for herself and he told the counterperson “I’ll have one too,” since the store had no regular coffee — not even in pound bags on the shelves — just grain coffee, which he didn’t like. He thought he spoke more articulately and his mind was clearer and he said more intelligent and clever things when he drank caffeinated coffee with someone, at least when his was real coffee and black and strong. That was then; not today and not for years. Now he doesn’t think it makes a difference, with or without. He’s become somewhat inarticulate and often unintelligible, when he was almost never that way, and gets lost in what he’s saying or breaks off his speech in the middle of a sentence because he forgets what point he was trying to make. There’s a long word for it he always forgets. Starts with an A or O, he thinks, and when he finally remembers it, he forgets how to pronounce it. What happened to him to make him like that? Age; again, loss of confidence and resistance to doing anything new or to change. Not that so much or much of it at all, but just things repeating themselves. Page after page, section after section, novel after novel, and so on. Same job and same workers at work and same bed and same newspapers and same news and same things to eat and drink and clean up and same dawn. Wait, what’s he missing? Gwen getting sick, that changed things, but ended up being the same day-to-day tasks taking care of her. Ah, why worry about it? He’s not worrying, just thinking. But to get back. And why’s he going on so long about Sharon? Could be because she reminds him of Gwen so much, more than any woman he’s been close to. The quietness and education and intelligence and serenity and sense of humor and modesty and the way she smiled and spoke and her soft voice and the soft features and other soft things and that she always had a book with her and read a lot of poetry. Both also wrote poetry. Sharon, he later saw, published some of hers in literary magazines and may have even had a book or two of her poems published, while Gwen never sent hers out. “It’s not that I fear rejection,” she said, when he said if she doesn’t want to do it, he’ll send them out for her, he knows the market. “They just never seem ready.” Maybe he can put together a collection of her poems, he thinks, with help from a poet friend of hers and the kids. Might take some doing, retrieving them from her computer, but the kids are probably whizzes at that. Also, how he met her. No, not even close, so why’d he think it? Gwen was by the elevator, after his eyeing her at the party for so long and she a few times catching him doing it, though she denied it. Sharon on the checkout line, when he looked around, as people waiting to be taken care of will do on lines, and saw her for the first time — she was looking around too and didn’t for several seconds see him looking at her — and was instantly, he could say, as he was with Gwen when he first saw her, attracted to her. That didn’t happen to him with many women, maybe just those two. And Terry, actress he saw almost every day for a couple of months — his first real girlfriend, really, meaning the first one he went with a while and also slept with — till she fell in love with an actor she was doing a love scene with in acting class. Her he also first met at a party — New Year’s Eve, vast West End Avenue apartment, enormous tall paintings on the walls and smaller ones leaning up against the bookcases and chairs of elongated male and female nudes by the mother of the guy who gave the party, same day or day before Batista fled Cuba and Castro’s forces were filtering into Havana for the final takeover of the island. He was elated at the news and then disgusted soon after when the revolutionaries, no doubt on Castro’s orders, or maybe not, but anyway he didn’t stop them and it went on for weeks, began lining up police and suspected Batista sympathizers and such against walls and shooting them. And Frieda, but should he really count her? He was sixteen, she fifteen, when he went with his friends to a dance at her all-girls’ private high school on the Upper East Side and first saw her, dancing the Lindy, he thinks, with another girl in the gymnasium turned into a seedy nightclub. She looks like a model, he thought, so beautiful and slim and dressed so well and sophisticated looking. “Hands off,” he told a couple of his friends who were also admiring her. “She’s mine, or at least give me a clear shot at her before you horn in.” She was the first girl he was in love with. It never came to anything, and he never told her how he felt but knew she knew by the way he acted toward her, other than for a number of dates, all but two of them on Sunday afternoons and a Jewish religious holiday during the week and one big long kiss at her apartment door at the end of their second and last evening date and a few French kisses in the Loew’s 83rd Street movie theater. Just “Loew’s 83rd” did they call it? He said on the phone weeks after she stopped going out with him “Didn’t those kisses we did mean anything?” She said “I don’t want to hurt you any more than I may have, but I’m new at it and was just practicing.” He went over to her and said something like “Hi, I’m Martin and I wonder if I could have the next dance,” and she said “I don’t see why that couldn’t be possible. Jessica.” “Hi, Jessica.” “It’s actually Frieda, but I’d like it to be Jessica.” They danced several dances in a row. He was surprised no other guy cut in on him, and told her so. She said “Oh, I’m a very unpopular girl,” and he said “Tell me another one.” She seemed to be having a good time with him — laughing and joking and whispering something in his ear he couldn’t hear — and he found himself falling for her. She had a nice smell about her — carnation or something. It didn’t seem like perfume or cologne — not as strong — so probably from soap. Wherever it came from, he thought, it was intoxicating, as they say. He imagined sitting in a movie theater, her head on his shoulder, and he was smelling that smell. When the Charleston was announced over the loudspeaker as the next dance, he said “Darn, I don’t know how to do that one. But my aunt, who tried to teach me it, was one of the six original dancers in the George White’s Scandals to introduce it to America.” She said “You’re making that up,” and he said “I swear,” and put his hand over his heart. “We can call my mother right now — it’s her sister — and ask her,” and she said “Okay, I believe you. It’s not a man’s dance anyway — you don’t have the legs for it. It’d be like a man dancing the cancan. It’s my favorite dance, though — I’m so glad it was brought back — so I’m going to dance it with my best girlfriend, if you’ll excuse me.” He said “In case my friends suddenly drag me out of here, can I have your phone number?”—she had her own phone, in her bedroom, something he’d never heard a girl her age having — and called the next night for a date and she said “Thursday’s okay, but it’ll have to be an early night; I don’t want to be too tired for school Friday.” They went to Radio City Music Hall. Took the Broadway bus down and then walked the two blocks to Sixth Avenue. But a cab back because he didn’t want her to think him cheap. Weekday afternoons and all-day Saturdays he worked as a delivery boy for a catering service and was making enough money to pay for everything that night, even the candy at the theater’s refreshment counter. “Should we go in for a snack someplace?” he said, after the movie, but she said it’s getting a little late and she should get home. The movie was