“But they returned in 1941.” He remembered thinking about the Pope’s treachery during the war.
Her blouse kept changing, now yellow, now green. It was kind of driving him crazy, but maybe it was the effect of Chartreuse. What she liked best about the Carthusian monks was their vow of absolute silence — it was the most rigorous order. Resolute religiosos, she joked, who, paradoxically, brewed a high-volume alcoholic drink. She figured they didn’t indulge, because it might loosen their tongues.
“In 1960, there were only 537 Carthusians,” she said.
“Your tongue isn’t loose,” he said.
“I’m thinking of going on a retreat — I want to be silent.”
“Leave the conversation?” he asked.
“You’re too ironic for words.”
“You got me.”
Just what he expected of her, to run; but what did he expect of her. He toasted her with the Manichean aperitif or liqueur, whatever it was. Her reticence settled over him like a green or yellow cloud. With it, she left. She spent half a year away, in silence, or at least she didn’t talk to him. He had to trust her, he supposed. She stayed with a very small order of Carthusian nuns, who didn’t drink Chartreuse. He condemned himself for not pursuing her there.
While she was away, he spoke of his perplexity to his therapist, who was not silent enough. Loyalty, betrayal, living with the lie, not escaping it, the way some fled from what was supposed to be true — he wrote notes to himself about honest disillusionment. To others, within this mostly quiet time, sometimes he was shameless and blatant. He once declared at a cocktail party, a fragile glass of Chartreuse — his drink now — in his hand, “Fidelity and infidelity, what’s one without the other? You can’t imagine a mountainless valley, can you?” With a secret-holder’s thrill at disclosure, he told his therapist: “I love her. I live inside an illusion. A shimmering criminal illusion.”
On weekends, he hit stores and developed the habit of collecting shirts and jackets of chartreuse. The dubious shade represented his obsession with transparency and opacity. Now he thought it was one thing, and he could see right through it and her. Then it was another, and she was denser than a black hole. He wished he were the Hubble telescope.
Chartreuse was popular, the new grey, he liked to say, and his closet was full when she returned. Her need for silence — at least with him — hadn’t completely abated. He never knew if it was because she had once deceived him or because she couldn’t stop. Or because his once having thought she did horrified her, when she hadn’t, and now she wanted to and couldn’t.
He contented himself with the little things, his and her chartreuse towels, how they equitably divided chores — the pleasure of domesticity stayed novel for him — and her occasional marital passion. Like him, she fashioned herself daily, a devotee of Harold Rosenberg’s “tradition of the new.” So eventually they would turn old-fashioned. At least, they were together.
He would always associate the night it happened, when he thought it happened, with fateful chartreuse, whose eternal shiftiness he could spin tales about. Also, about the CIA, the monastery as the first factory, and the beauty of silence. It was really golden. He and his wife celebrated themselves and their differences on their anniversary. They loved and denied each other, simultaneously, and more and more laughed at themselves. There were things he’d never know. Still, nothing competed with their complicity, their chartreuse hours together.
A Simple Idea
This happened a long time ago. My best friend was in Los Angeles, and she and I talked on the phone a lot. I urged her to move to New York, and finally she did. She drove cross-country, and when she arrived, she was told she didn’t have to worry about the $10,000 in California parking tickets she had on her car. There was no reciprocity between the two states, she was told, so there was no way her car’s outlaw status would be discovered in New York. The guy who told her said he was a cop. They met in a bar, then they had sex. Anyway, I think they did.
My friend started accumulating NYC tickets. Blithely, for a while. She shoved the tickets into the glove compartment. I suppose people kept gloves in those compartments at one time. When there was no room left, she threw them on the floor of her car. Then she decided she’d better find a parking lot. But she didn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for a space.
One day she noticed a parking lot near her house which was barred from entry by a heavy chain and lock. A week later she noticed a man walking to the lot. He used a key to unlock the gate. She got up her nerve and asked him if she could park there if she gave him some money. Would he make her a key? He said he’d think about it. The next day he telephoned her and said OK. So every month my friend handed the man $50 in a white business envelope. It was illegal, but she wasn’t getting tickets from the City and throwing them on the floor of her car.
She was relatively happy parking in the lot, relieved anyway, because there was one less thing to worry about. But after a while she thought some of the other drivers — men going to work in the building attached to the lot — were looking at her weirdly, staring at her and her car. Some seemed menacing, she told me. But then she was paranoid. She knew that, so she decided not to act on her suspicions.
Time passed. Time always passes.
One afternoon my friend received a call from a man who identified himself as a cop. He said, Hello, and used her first name, Sandra, and asked her sternly:
— Are you parking illegally, Sandra, because if you are, and you don’t remove your car from the lot right now — I’m giving you ten minutes — I’ll have to arrest you.
My friend hung up, threw on her coat, ran out the door to the lot, and drove her car far away. Then she phoned me and told me what happened. She was terrified. She thought the cop might show up and arrest her at any moment, she thought she’d be taken to jail.
— That was no cop, I said.
— How do you know? she asked.
— A cop wouldn’t phone you and give you a warning, I answered. But I was worried that I might be wrong, and that she might be arrested.
— And he’s not going to say he’s going to give you a second chance, because you don’t get second chances if you’re doing something illegal and they find out, unless they’re corrupt, and he wouldn’t say, I’m a cop. He’d give his name and rank or something.
My friend listened, annoyed that I was calm, and she wasn’t satisfied or convinced. She thought she might be under surveillance and would be busted later. She owed thousands of dollars in tickets in two states. It might be a sting operation, something convoluted. I had to convince her she was not in danger of going to jail. I told her I had an idea and hung up.
It was simple. I’d call a precinct and ask the desk cop how a cop would identify himself over the phone. I’d learn the protocol, how cops wouldn’t do what that so-called cop had done, allay my friend’s fears, and also show her I was taking her anxiety seriously.
I looked up precincts in the telephone book and chose one in the West Village, where I thought they’d be used to handling unusual questions.
— Tenth precinct, Sergeant Molloy, the desk cop said.
— Hi, I have a question, I said.
— Yeah.
— How do police identify themselves over the phone?
— What do you mean? Molloy asked.
— If a cop calls you, what does he say?
— What do you mean, what does he say?
— I mean, how does he say he’s a policeman? What’s the official way to do it? The desk cop was silent for a few seconds.
— A cop called you. What’d he say? What’d he want?
— He didn’t call me, he called a friend.