When she first moved to the city, the fairy-tale aspects of life there fascinated Lucy — things were so excessive, the veneer only intensified how primitive everything really was. It took awhile to realize that there was no proper ending to the fairy tale: things were simply out of control, and no one was in charge once the strobes were unplugged and the interview was over. It was people’s own fault if they didn’t get the joke. Mayor Koch was right there doing his best to amuse, on Saturday Night Live, if you wanted to tune in.
It could be scary if you let yourself focus on the chaos, so most people kept their sanity by focusing, instead, on things. Those who would still take a risk focused on people. When they did, of course they gave the people magical powers: everyone was exceptional and mysterious, romanticized out of proportion. Real people couldn’t save anyone if they were in trouble, but heroes and heroines could. Since it was the tendency of many women to exaggerate men’s importance and abilities anyway, men fared particularly well in New York.
Les Whitehall had led a charmed life: he was attractive, intelligent and amusing. People who didn’t know him well would be slow to spot the fear disguised as optimism. He was always well spoken, an extrovert. The older generation knew to watch out for men like Les Whitehall, but in New York someone who was that together easily impressed people. What Lucy’s grandmother knew to call “a smoothie” was now, at natural-food stores in the city, the name of a refreshing drink. In another town (might as well say another world) it might never have been apparent to anyone, including Les, that he wasn’t achieving as much as he might. When Lucy met him, he was writing a novel, taking a course in philosophy, playing racquetball and jogging two miles a day, in addition to his job as a college teacher. He commuted to teach classes outside the city four days a week. This made him a maverick to New Yorkers, and exotic to his students and colleagues. In a town where every waitress was an actress, every cab driver a philosopher, where the construction workers were doing field work for their Ph.D.’s in psychology, and the hospital orderly sang opera, you gradually came to assume that every Nathan’s hot dog was actually a dehydrated roast beef. It was taken for granted that people weren’t what they appeared to be, and no matter what they were, you hoped that actually they were more than they seemed. The city was overcrowded, after all; people who couldn’t swim had no excuse for setting out for the island to begin with. Nobody cared much about anyone’s past. The present simply didn’t exist, and the real interest was in the future. Ask any New Yorker where to get the Sunday Times on Saturday night.
Les Whitehall was from Carbondale, Illinois, and if he had stayed there, he would have gone into business (his father and uncle owned a hardware store), bought a cruisemobile, married and had children. He was saved by a scholarship. He went to Princeton, where he dated lanky, loquacious women. He learned early that it was better to be quiet than to speak and make a mistake. Much to his surprise, his silence was accepted as the appropriate response of a superior mind. Everyone at Princeton was assumed to be intelligent until proven otherwise. More than the people he grew up with, the people who crowded around him at college thought in terms of black and white. It seemed appropriate to Les that from then on, those were the colors in which his classmates, in their tuxedos and elegant dresses, would be dressed. He kept up with a few people from that crowd. Lucy could never feel close to any of them. She was no longer sure why she had been so impressed with Les Whitehall. His optimism was part of it. And he had simply been so conspicuous in a town where almost no one stood out that she had been taken in. He was tall but not too tall, handsome but casual, one of those men who could change the filter on an air conditioner and your perception of what kind of a day you had had with equal dexterity. In time, she came to learn that optimism was not something he really felt, but a convenience for him — something he could use as a sort of weapon. When things worked out, he would say that he had predicted it all along, and if they went wrong, he would turn that against whoever had believed in him. Until she met Les, she never realized that fear, not strength, could make people resolute. He knew that he was handsome and forceful. He knew how he appeared to other people. He was so sure of this, and of their surprised and happy reaction to him, that he would play around — the confession of weakness that lightened his conscience also made others see him as forthcoming. Anyone smart enough to suspect that what he did was tinged with bravado would probably be won over to his side, anyway: interesting, this elaborate defense system in someone so urbane. The childishness made them warm to him.
Another couple introduced Lucy to Les Whitehall, and after dinner he had taken her for a drink. Les’s talk was full of significant pauses and deliberate omissions. He made people want to find out about him, but he chose carefully, selecting people who would have the good manners to question him graciously, backing off if the board creaked, tiptoeing forward when the bridge seemed stable. When they got tired (it was impossible to find out enough to think you had gotten to the other side) he would suddenly take on life. He wore them out in a difficult situation they never wanted to enter into, then gave them something — a fond look, a hand — so that when they least expected it, they were safe after all. He let them feel approved of, but in reality he did not approve of himself or of anyone else. Anyone who had less than he had wasn’t worth his time, and anyone who had more was a threat. That was Les: he perceived of everything in terms of competition. He was still racing with the football, but running more slowly than he had in Carbondale, the letters on the back of the jersey replaced, when necessary, with his heart on his sleeve. The new goal was to get women.
He had gotten Lucy so completely that it took her months after he had gone to realize that it was so hard to talk about Les because in some sense he didn’t exist. He relied on people to invent him. When he was quiet, she had supposed that he was thoughtful; when he was impervious to other people’s pain, she had admired him for being self-contained and not easily shaken by circumstance. Women adored him, and had always been there for him. He didn’t reject them, but like everyone who required such a thing, he hated both the person who provided it, and himself. It must have been frightening to him that he really liked no one. When he came close to a woman emotionally, he would move away physically. It worked out well for him that any woman he would bother with preferred an emotional revelation to a physical thrill. But these excesses were rare. Now, it was a mystery to Lucy why he had bothered to attach himself to her. Les took it easy on himself. He shadowboxed until he got his equilibrium back, and if he had trouble regaining it, he bounced from one woman to another, staying on his toes.
And Lucy had no one to tell it to. Just try to tell his colleagues with whom he had been so patient that he didn’t take them seriously, that his good manners were nothing more than condescension. Try telling the lonely women in New York that Les Whitehall was a fraud. Lucy would suddenly become ungrateful or worse, just another pretty, bitter woman, a simple stereotype; and Les — because at the very least everyone would grant that he was complex — would ascend to the category of What We Must Accept Though It Is Inexplicable.
It shocked Lucy to realize that she could think such a thing. Wanting to be talked out of such ideas, she had even told many of these things to Les, because he was so good at rebuttals, when he could not otherwise rearrange reality. The more convinced she became, of course, the more difficult it had been to even raise these issues. It was, for Lucy, as implausible as walking up to Machiavelli and asking to borrow a dime. Even now she was haunted by remembering the perfect lovemaking, the all-night conversations, the gifts, the cards inevitably signed Love Always, Les. After Les announced that he was in love with one of his students and that he was leaving, she had wandered around their house, rounding up the little notes, reading the closings, trying to revert to the way she had thought at the beginning: that if he had written these words, they must be true. Finally, unsure of what was or ever had been true, she took the coward’s way out: she simply turned it against herself. Night after night in the empty house, she thought bitterly that of course anyone else would have realized that the kiss that lasted forever would naturally become the kiss of death.