His Wife Leaves Him

s urge for a slice of roast beef.” She’s translated, and a few have been published, a lot of French and Italian postwar poetry. “Italian too?” he said. “I’d love to read them. It’s been an unattainable goal of mine all my adult life to read and speak French fluently…what I went to Paris for in ’64 and eventually to get a news job there. Would you send me some translations with the originals, if it’s not too much of a bother?” and she said “They might take a while for me to find. I’m not the most organized person and I’m always forgetting to buy more file folders. I should just steal them from my department,” and he said “No rush; whenever you can. And the Italian.” She goes to Maine every summer for two to three months. Takes her and her parents’ cats along. “They’re one big happy Siamese family: mother, spoiled son and two sweet daughters.” She rents a car for the summer. “That can get expensive,” and she said because she takes their cats, her parents help out. “Where do you go, not that I know Maine?” and she said “A small coastal village, where every other summer person is a writer or professor or spouse or child of one — Brooklin with an ‘i.’” She started renting this cottage three years ago to be close to where her doctoral advisor spends the summer with his family. It had no water or electricity or gas — it had been vacant for more than five years — so she had to have all that brought in. “I learned how to prime a pump to get the water going, which I’ve had to do twice first thing after getting there because the caretaker forgot to or was drunk.” “How do you?” and she said “Please, you don’t want to know,” and he said “I’m a writer. I like being informed of obscure technical things I know nothing of so I can encumber my fiction with them,” and she told him and he said “Very complicated; I’d have to have your help.” He said “Two to three months in a cottage in the woods? Doesn’t it get lonely sometimes?” and she said “I have dinner a lot at my advisor’s house, my parents each come up separately for a week, and if I get lonely I invite other company,” and he said “Then you’re set.” He said “Another thing I always wanted to do—” and she said “What was the other one?” and he said “Learn French…was to rent a cabin or cottage — you know, I’m suddenly not sure of the difference, if there is one,” and she said “A cabin is more rustic and usually smaller and often doesn’t have the basic amenities a cottage does.” “Then just a cottage, but in Maine or Vermont for a month or two in the summer. A fantasy of mine since my early twenties. But I guess lack of money or that I was working summers at the time and that I’ve gone to Yaddo three of the last six Augusts, stopped me from doing it, and I also didn’t know how to go about renting one.” “I’ve spent summers in both,” she said, “and I like Maine better. From my cottage I can see the ocean through the trees, or the bay of the ocean. It’s only a thirty-second walk down to it from the back porch, and the cottage comes with its own secluded cove.” “You’re making my mouth water,” and she said “Then one of these summers you should rent a place, while they’re still affordable, in the same area I go to. I could give you the names of a couple of real-estate agencies that specialize in summer rentals.” Most of her time in Maine is spent writing essays and poetry and also some translating and preparing her fall courses. “Do you send your poetry out? Or should I say, has any of it been published?” and she said “So far I haven’t had the courage. It’s different with the translations, because I only pick works I love. By the way, I’m sure I’ll find them and can send a few to you, but you’d have to give me your address.” He wrote his name and address on a piece of paper he tore out of his memobook and gave it to her. “I’d like to give you one or even three of my books that have been published,” and she said “Just one. You choose.” He said “Let’s start from the beginning, my first. Came out two years ago. Five stories, a hundred-twenty-eight pages, a cinch to read.” She asked what the title was and then said “I’m afraid I haven’t heard of it.” He said “It didn’t get around much and only a couple of reviews. Big pans. Both found it too scatological and one objected strongly to the couple in the longest story — they’d met in the hospital two days before — coupling in a chair in the room his father was dying in. I have your address but not the zip. Or maybe I’ll just give you the book the next time we meet, if we do,” and she said “We can do that. I’ll save my poems for then too,” and he said “No, send them, unless we’re going to see each other in the next two days,” and she said “I’ll send them, then. Do I have your zip?” and looked at the piece of paper with his address on it and said “Yes, I do. Let me give you mine,” and he wrote it down in his memobook. He said “May I ask you a personal question?” and she said “Depends. I don’t think we should speak too personally so soon.” “Then I won’t.” He was going to ask if she was presently seeing someone. They talked about something else. Then she said “All right. What was the personal question you wanted to ask? I have to confess; I’m curious,” and he asked it and she said “I’ll be honest with you, Martin,” and he thought Oh, shit; here it comes. “There is an English architect whom I see whenever he passes through,” and he said “And his name is David.” “Why do you say that?” and he said “I don’t know. I was once involved with a woman who began dating an English architect named David, so something in my stupid head assumed they were all named David.” “He isn’t. He’s Evan,” and he said “A good English name. How often do you see him?” and she said “Not very much, really. Every other month. Sometimes twice in two months,” “So why isn’t it more than that? Is he married?” and she said “No. I think it’s because his London firm flies him here on business and it’d be expensive for him to fly here on his own. And that both of us are quite satisfied with the arrangement as it is,” and he said “Do you ever go to London to see him?” and she said “Yes, once; it was fun. But I think we both knew things would never get that serious between us,” and he said “Well, that’s okay, then, not that I know what I mean. But it must be wonderful to go to London or Paris or a city like that to see someone. Anyway, thanks for answering me so frankly, and now we should probably drop the subject,” and she said “Good idea.” “What else do you like to do?” and she looked puzzled and he said “Do you like to go to plays, concerts, movies, opera, ballet?” and she said “All of them, when I have time, but opera the least. I like contemporary operas, though,” and he said “Same with me. Chamber music?” and she said “More on LP’s than in concert halls.” “Friends? I’d think you’d have lots of them,” and she said “I’m sure no more than most people.” “Hate to sound like a loner, but I really only have three. Two men — a writer and a filmmaker — and a woman whom I’ve been close to as a friend for years. She’s in publishing and we have lunch about every other week. She tries to fix me up,” and she said “That’s good,” and he said “Not for me.” She has two best friends. One lives in SoHo with her husband — both are artists — and the other’s moved to California with her husband, but they talk all the time on the phone. The one in SoHo’s been her best friend since their first day in college. “I was giving Melissa, my pet guinea pig, an outing on the campus green, and my future friend literally tripped over us.” “They let you keep pets in college?” and she said “Some of the girls brought their horses from as far away as Oklahoma and boarded them at the school’s stables.” He asked where’d she go for Thanksgiving and she said her parents don’t celebrate it, as they don’t Mother’s and Father’s Day, so she always goes to the SoHo couple’s loft. “Where’d you?” “I took my mother out as I always do, usually with her sister. Not easy finding a restaurant that’s open and serves something other than turkey and crab dishes and that isn’t Chinese, all three of which my mother and aunt don’t like.” He asked if she knew other poets and she said “You say ‘other’ as if I’m one,” and he said “Then just poets.” She mentioned a few, two very well-known. “If you decide to send your own work out,” he said, “all the names you gave should help get it to the best places,” and she said “I’d rather not use anyone for that. If the time ever comes, I’ll do all the submitting and coping. Who’s your publisher?” and he said he’s on his second and gave the name. “Oh-h, a very good house. Who’s your editor there?” and he told her and she said “I know Fern. Sat next to her at a dinner party a few months back and then bumped into her on the street and we had coffee and talked some more. I like her and she’s smart. She does all their poetry, so is someone else I’d never send to because that would be taking advantage of having sat in the right spot. Did they throw you a book party?” and he said Fern said they don’t do that anymore except for writers who get huge advances and their books are potential blockbusters and they expect a party. “For writers like me: too costly and parties never pay off, as don’t ads for the book. So I threw one myself. Made all the food and paid for the wine and booze and at the last moment, because it had started raining, ran out and bought a tarp and set it up over my large terrace. Otherwise, my apartment would have been too small for all the people I invited. Fern came with her husband and two kids. I also invited the publisher and executive editor — it was the wrong thing to do, Fern said; as if I was rubbing it in their noses that they didn’t give me a party — and they both sent courteous regrets.” Because she was an only child, she said, and her parents lost most to all of their families in the Holocaust, she got lots of attention and affection from them when she was growing up. “Same here,” he said, “from my mother. My father was from the old school. He basically ignored me and wanted affection but didn’t much care to give it, except for maybe pinching my cheeks and tweaking my nose and ruffling my hair, which I hated but couldn’t get him to stop, especially in front of his friends.” “This English architect,” he said. “Is it approaching the time when he might be making his next professional visit to New York? Just wondering,” and she said “I don’t keep tabs on him, and we rarely speak on the phone when he’s in London. But he usually lets me know a week or two before he arrives. In fact, that’s the only time he calls me from there.” “Gosh, you’d think he’d call more, but that’s his business,” and she said “I think it’s a subject we should rule out of our conversation, Martin. Like your recent romantic connections to women, if you’ve had any,” and he said “No, not of late, but I won’t go in to it.” He said “There’s a nonpersonal question I’ve been meaning to ask you. You had tea at the drugstore. You don’t drink coffee?” and she said “What a funny thing to ask. I love good coffee and I believe I already told you I had some with Fern. I just had enough of it for that day. But I never asked. Was the coffee there as dreadful as I once experienced and it looked? I should have warned you,” and he said “I think you did ask and warn me, and I think I said it was awful.” “Then why’d you have two cups?” and he said “Did I? I forget.” “I’m almost sure, two. And after, you said that was the reason you needed to pee before we left,” and he said “I always take that precaution, coffee or not, when I’m out for a while and think I’ll be walking in the cold — you know how that stirs it up…something, the precaution, I think I told you about too.” He asked where she went to elementary school—“Hunter, too?” and she said “Hunter was my next stop in my educational journey. PS,” and she gave the number of the school in the Bronx. “We were very proud that Bess Myerson graduated from it — you know, the only Jewish Miss America?” He said he went to PS 87. “A character in one of Bernard Malamud’s novels went there, but he didn’t. He came from Brooklyn.” “I think I’ve passed it. Between Amsterdam and Columbus?” and he said “The 87 I went to was torn down for the one you saw. We were very proud that it was a pre-Civil War building and reputed to be the oldest and most rundown grade school in Manhattan. When I first got my teacher’s license I per-diem subbed in the new 87 a few times. My last two years of subbing I mostly did in IS 44, the next block over, till I couldn’t take it anymore and quit in the middle of a class and never taught again.” “What’d they do about your salary that day?” and he said “I told them to keep it, keep my entire week’s pay; the kids who couldn’t be disciplined were driving me crazy.” Jobs she had, he had. She was a salesperson for Lord & Taylor, he at Bloomingdale’s and, when he was in college, Macy’s and Gimbel’s during the Christmas season. Both worked in bookstores and waited on tables in restaurants and he also at Catskill Mountain resorts. He was a bartender and cab driver and newsman, she a group leader of a bike trip in Canada. “Me too,” he said, “in Europe, but only half of it by bike.” Both were camp counselors. He was a technical writer in California, she a script reader for a film production company in New York. “When was that?” he said. “No, too early for you to have done any good for my second and third books, the two that were sent around as possible movies.” She’s never been to California. “I was heading there with my college boyfriend at the time and got as far as Nevada, when we had a terrible argument, decided we couldn’t stand each other, and drove silently home for four days. I think the only words we spoke, depending on who was driving, were ‘Like a pit stop?’” She had her appendix taken out when she was ten and was once so seriously ill with a bacterial infection that she nearly died. “Oh, no,” he said. “I’m so sorry,” and she said “Thank you.” He’s never really been sick. “I take that back. I had my gallbladder removed. Gallstones.” “That can be painful,” she said, “when they attack,” and he said “It was. Worst in my life. I don’t know how I could have forgotten it.” How she’s able to pay the rent for a one-bedroom apartment in an elevator and doorman building on Riverside Drive below a Hundred-sixteenth Street and with a river view? She was left some money by her godmother, her ex-husband invested it wisely in stocks that give a nice dividend each month, her parents help her out if she needs them to, she finished paying off her student loans two years ago, she occasionally does book reviews for