Making love to her tonight on ocean-damp sheets, he recalls all this. Sees it clearly in his mind’s eye. Remembers.
“Hello?” he says. “May I join you?”
She turns to look up at him.
Eyes as blue as a searing flash of lightning.
He is twenty-six years old, a recent graduate of Harvard’s medical school, and he is sporting a mustache because he thinks it makes him look older and therefore, he hopes, more authoritative in the Emergency Room at Mass General, where he is interning. He has already decided he will become a psychiatrist, but he won’t begin specializing till next year, Mom, and meanwhile he’s treating people who are bleeding, biting, babbling, bawling or merely broken in a hundred pieces, all flowing through the E.R. doors in a constant stream designed to instruct him in the basic truths of medicine, fundamental among which is the knowledge that any mistake he makes can prove fatal. He guesses this gorgeous blond goddess sitting here with her legs crossed and an open book in her lap doesn’t know much about life and death, the way he does. He guesses she is four or five years younger than he is — actually, it turns out to be six — and he hopes as he sits beside her that the mustache doesn’t make him look too much older or wiser, although the way her blue laser glare seems to focus in on the mustache leads him to believe she doesn’t much care for “an hairy man,” Esau notwithstanding.
“I’m David Chapman,” he says.
He resists adding “Dr. David Chapman” because the title still seems strange to him, even though he is now officially a doctor, more or less, otherwise why is he allowed to treat all those maimed and wounded people who swarm into the E.R. day and night?
The way she keeps looking at him also leads him to believe she’s unaccustomed to strange mustachioed men sitting beside her uninvited on a public bench. Out on the river, the scullers keep rowing past tirelessly. Here on the bank of the Charles, the leaves fall softly, gently, even romantically, an appropriate backdrop, he feels, for this first momentous encounter, though she doesn’t seem to be sharing the same keen sense of History in the Making.
“I don’t want to intrude on your privacy,” he says.
Then why are you? her look asks.
“But... I’d like to know you,” he says.
“Why?” she asks.
“Because... you’re so beautiful,” he says.
Lamely.
“That I know,” she says.
The scullers are out of sight now. Pedestrians are idling across the Longfellow Bridge to Alston. On the other side of the river, he can see automobiles rumbling along Storrow Drive, and beyond that the big Coca-Cola sign near the entrance to the Mass Pike. The leaves continue falling silently. She has returned to her book again.
“So what do you think?” he asks.
“About what?” she says without looking up.
“About let’s walk over to the Square and have a cup of coffee.”
“I have a class in twenty minutes,” she says, without even glancing at her watch.
“Then I guess we’ll have to sit here and talk,” he says.
She looks at him again. His daughter Annie will one day inherit her mother’s intent gaze and direct manner, but he doesn’t know that as yet, of course, he isn’t thinking that far ahead, he isn’t even thinking past her scented proximity on the bench (Tea Rose, she will later tell him) or the bee-stung temptation of her lips, pursed now in seeming displeasure, he can’t imagine why. He wonders if she’s noticed the stethoscope sticking out of the right-hand pocket of his jacket. If so, does she think it has perhaps been stolen from an attending physician on a psychiatric ward someplace? The reason he wonders this is because her look somehow implies he may be an escaped lunatic.
“I have a test in twenty minutes,” she says in dismissal. “I don’t wish to appear rude, Mr. Chapman...”
His opportunity.
“Dr. Chapman,” he says.
“Dr. Chapman, do forgive me. But I have to...”
“A test in what?”
“Irrelevant,” she says. “I have to study. Please.”
“Can I call you sometime?”
“Why?” she asks again.
“So I can get to know your mind?” he suggests, and grins so broadly that she bursts out laughing.
The first time they go out together, Helen advises him to “lose the mustache” because together with the eyeglasses they make him look as if he’s wearing one of those trick disguises you put on with the big nose and the shaggy brows and the glasses and mustache, though he doesn’t have a big nose at all and his brows aren’t shaggy. It’s just that she can’t imagine ever kissing anyone with a mustache, which, if not exactly an open invitation, does seem an opportunity he shouldn’t ignore, so he kisses her for the first time and stars fall on Alabama — for him, at least. She says this sort of thing has got to stop. He shaves his mustache that very night.
The reason this sort of thing has got to stop is that Helen Barrister — her name, and an appropriate one in that both her parents are lawyers and both are of English ancestry — is engaged to someone named Wallace Ames who happens to be going to school in California, which technically makes him a GUG, shorthand for a Geographically Undesirable Girl or Guy (a Guy, in this instance), but Helen doesn’t yet realize this. At the moment, she is a straight 4.0 student at Radcliffe, concentrating in journalism and hoping one day to become editor in chief of The New Yorker, her favorite magazine, although he suspects she reads Vogue as well, witness the dandy outfits she wears during this blazing Massachusetts autumn while he diligently pursues her, stealing a kiss here or there, hither or yon, when not busy stanching wounds or delivering babies, three of them by Christmas alone.
David feels certain his mother would be a solid Wallace Ames supporter if she knew of his existence, or even of Helen’s existence, for that matter, since he hasn’t yet told her about the radiant blue-eyed beauty he stumbled upon one bright October day. Knows without question that his mother would agree Wallace is really the man this nice young girl should marry, why don’t you concentrate on your work, David, on becoming a good doctor, David, instead of sniffing around a blond, blue-eyed beauty already engaged to a surfer?
To the surfer’s credit — and anyway he isn’t a surfer, but is instead seriously studying film at UCLA — it is he who decides to end this long-distance engagement to a girl he “hardly knows,” as he puts it in a Dear Helen letter which she receives on New Year’s Eve, great timing, Wally. Two weeks later, this still being the lewd, lascivious, obscene and pornographic seventies, David and Helen consummate their budding romance on a single bed in a rented room on the Cape. To his mother’s credit, she accepts Helen without a backward sigh.
There is a history here.
It is a record as complex as the computer banks of their separate minds, storing and recalling memories solitary or shared, before or since. It is as pervasive as the waves gently lapping the shore beyond the sliding screen doors in this room where they make quiet love lest they wake the children, reckless love in that they cannot quite muffle their ardor.