I was not bored; I was distraught.
A strange thing happened. It occurred to me that perhaps my old fastidiousness regarding the inviolability of a friend’s wife was wrong, morally wrong. Had not these women made overtures, dropped hints, left doors ajar so that returning to my room with a book I could see them in nightgowns beside bedlamps; hadn’t they smiled sweetly and raised arms? Perhaps I had been a prig, had placed too high a value on myself by insisting on the virginity of my intended. Perhaps it was my fate to figure in a divorce. I decided that henceforth I must not be so stand-offish with my friends’ wives.
So I stroked their knees beneath the whist table and put down their alarm to surprise. I begged off going on the excursions and stayed home with them when my friend and the other guest climbed into the jeep. I followed the wife all about the house and cornered her in stairwells and gardens.
“I’m no prig,” I told Nan Bridge, and clasped her breast and bit her ear.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, buster?” she shouted.
“Four months ago I would have called you out for that,” I told her lamely and left her house that afternoon and went to the next three days early, determined to be more careful.
I was staying with Courtney and Buffy Surface in Connecticut. Claiming a tennis elbow, I excused myself from the doubles early in the first set. Courtney and I were partners against Buffy and Oscar Bobrinage, the other houseguest. My plan was for Buffy to drop out and join me. I sat under a wide umbrella in the garden, and in a few minutes someone came up behind me. “Where does it hurt? I’ll rub it for you.”
“No thank you, Oscar.”
“No trouble, Brewster.”
“I’ve a heating pad from Chase Manhattan in my suitcase, Osc,” I told him dejectedly.
That night I was more obvious. I left the library and mentioned as casually as I could that I was going out for a bit of air. It has been my observation that the predisposition for encounter precedes encounter, that one must set oneself as one would a table. I never stroll the strand in moonlight except when I’m about the heart’s business, or cross bridges toward dawn unless I mean to save the suicides. There are natural laws, magnetism. A wish pulls fate.
I passed the gazebo and wondered about the colors of the flowers in the dark, the queer consolidation of noon’s bright pigment, yellow sunk in on yellow a thousand times as if struck ’ by gravity. I thought of popular songs, their tunes and words. I meant for once to do away with polite conversation should Buffy appear, to stun her with my need and force. (Of all my friends Buffy was the most royally aloof. She had maddening ways of turning aside any question or statement that was the least bit threatening.)
I heard the soft crunch of gravel. “Oscar?”
“No, it’s Buffy. Were you looking for Oscar?”
“I thought he might be looking for me.”
“Voilà du joli,” Buffy said. She knew the idioms of eleven modern languages.
I gazed into her eyes. “How are you and Courtney, Buffy?”
“Mon dieu! ¿Qué pasa? Il est onze heures et demi,” she said.
“Buffy, how are you and Courtney?”
“Courtney’s been off erythromycin five days now and General Parker says there’s no sign of redness. God bless wonder drugs. Darauf kannst du Gift nehmen.”
“Do you ever think of Madrid, Buffy?” Once, in a night club in Madrid on New Year’s Eve she had kissed me. It was before she and Courtney met, but my memory of such things is long lasting and profound. I never forget the blandest intimacy. “Do you?”
“Oh, Brewster, I have every hope that when Juan Carlos is restored the people will accept him.”
“Buffy, we kissed each other on New Year’s Eve in Madrid in 1966 before you ever heard of Courtney Surface.”
“Autres temps, autres moeurs.”
“I can’t accept that, Buff. Forgive me, dear, but when I left the game this morning you stayed behind to finish out the set against Courtney. Yes, and before that you were Oscar’s partner. Doesn’t this indicate to you a certain aberrant competitiveness between you and your husband?”
“Oh, but darling, we play for money. Pisịca blândă pgarịe raŭ. Didn’t you know that? We earn each other’s birthday presents. We’ve an agreement: we don’t buy a gift unless we win the money for it from the other fellow. I’ll tell you something, entre nous. I get ripped off because I throw games. I do. I take dives. I go into the tank. Damit kannst du keinen Blumentopf verlieren. Isn’t that awful? Aren’t I terrible? But that’s how Courtney got the money together to buy me Nancy’s Treehouse. Have you seen her? She’s the most marvelous beast. I was just going out to the stables to check on her when I ran into you. If you’d like to accompany me come along lo más pronto posible.”
“No.”
“De gustibus.”
“That’s not a modern language, Buffy.”
“People grow, darling.”
“Buffy, as your houseguest I demand that you listen to me. I am almost forty years old and I am one of the three or four dozen truly civilized men in the world and I have been left a fortune. A fortune! And though I have always had the use of the money, I have never till now had the control of it. Up to now I have been an adventurer. The adventures, God save me, were meant to teach me life. Danger builds strong bodies twelve ways, I thought. Action and respite have been the pattern of my existence, Buffy. Through shot and shell on hands and knees one day, and breakfast in bed at the Claridge the next. I have lived my life a fighter pilot, beefed up like a gladiator, like a stuffed goose, like a Thanksgiving turkey. I am this civilized…thing. Trained and skilled and good. I mean good, Buffy, a strict observer till night before last of every commandment there is. Plus an eleventh — honor thy world, I mean. I’ve done that. I’m versed in it, up to my ears in it as you are in idioms. I was an environmentalist a decade before it was an issue. When I first noticed the deer were scrawnier than they’d been when I was a boy and the water in the rivers where I swam no longer tasted like peaches.
“I’ve been a scholar of the world — oh, an amateur, I grant you, but a scholar just the same. I understand things. I know literature and math and science and art. I know everything. How paper is made, glass blown, marble carved, things about furniture, stuff about cheese. This isn’t a boast. With forty years to do it in and nothing to distract you like earning a living or raising a family, you can learn almost all there is to learn if you leave out the mystery and the ambiguity. If you omit the riddles and finesse the existential.
“No, wait! I’m perfectly aware that I’m barking up the wrong tree — do you have that idiom, my dear? — but looky, looky, I’m speaking my heart. I’m in mourning, Buff. Here’s how I do it. By changing my life. By taking this precious, solipsistic civilization of mine — Buffy, listen to me, dear; it’s not enough that there are only three or four dozen truly civilized men in the world—this precious civilization of mine and passing it on to sons, daughters, all I can get.”