“Come to my place,” I said.
“All right.”
“Come live with me and be my love.”
“Yes.”
And as our taxi raced from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side, she settled her head on my shoulder. “I have things to tell you,” she said. “I am Phaedra Harrow. I am eighteen years old.”
“Half my age. Do you believe in numerology? I think the implications are fascinating-”
“I am a virgin.”
“That’s extraordinary.”
“I know.”
“Uh-”
Her hand pressed my arm. “I am not anti-sex or frigid or a lesbian or anything. And I don’t want to be seduced or talked into it. People try all the time-”
“That’s not hard to believe.”
“-but it’s not what I want. Not now. I want to see the whole world. I want to find things out, I want to grow. I’m talking too much now. When I drink too much I talk too much. But I want you to understand this. I would like to stay with you, to live with you, if you still want me to. But I don’t want to make love.”
At the time, what I wondered most about this little speech was whether Phaedra herself believed it. I certainly didn’t. I didn’t even believe she was a virgin, for that matter. I had long felt that the species was either mythological or extinct, and that a virgin was a seven-year-old girl who could run faster than her brother.
So all the way home I was certain I knew how we would celebrate the coming of spring. I would convert my couch into a bed, and I would take this fine, sweet, magnificent girl in my arms, and, well, write in your own purple passage.
The best laid plans of mice and men sometimes aren’t. Phaedra certainly wasn’t. At my apartment I was shocked to discover that she really meant just what she had said. She was a virgin, and she intended to remain a virgin for the foreseeable future, and while she would willingly sleep with me with the understanding that we would do no more than share bed space in a platonic fashion, she would not countenance any sort of sexual involvement.
So I made the couch into a bed, all right, and I put her to sleep in it, and then I went into the kitchen and made myself some coffee and read several books without being able to pay much attention to them. A mood, I told myself. Or a monthly plague, or something. It would pass.
But it never did. Phaedra stayed at my apartment for just about a month, and it was as acutely frustrating a month as I have ever spent in my life. She was in every other respect a perfect house guest: absorbing company when I wanted company, perfectly unobstrusive when I had something to do, an ideal companion for Minna, a reasonable cook and housekeeper. If the delight that was Phaedra had been purely sexual, I would have quickly sent her away. If, on the other hand, I had not found her so overpoweringly attractive, I could have quickly adjusted to the sort of brother-sister relationship she wanted to maintain. Unless one possesses the mentality of a rapist, after all, one regards desire as an essentially mutual thing. Lust cannot long be a one-way street.
At least I had always found this to be the case. Now, though, it wasn’t. Every day I found myself wanting the cloistered little bitch more, and every day it became more evident that I was not going to have her. The obvious solution – that I find some other female with a more realistic outlook on life and love – worked better in theory than in practice. I was not, sad to say, a horny adolescent who purely and simply wanted to get his ashes hauled. There are any number of ways to ameliorate such a problem, but mine was something else again. When lechery is specific, substitutes don’t work at all; they make about as much sense as eating a loaf of bread when you’re dying of thirst.
This went on twenty-four hours a day for a month, and if you think it sounds maddening, then perhaps you’re beginning to get the point. After the first night Phaedra had moved into Minna’s room and shared Minna’s bed, so at least I didn’t have to watch her sleep; but even at night the presence of her filled the apartment and addled my brain.
Yet I couldn’t even talk to Phaedra about it, not at much length. Any conversation on the subject served only to heighten my frustration and her guilt feelings without bringing matters any closer to their logical conclusion.
“It’s so wrong,” she would say. “I can’t stay here any-more, Evan. You’ve been wonderful to me and it’s just not fair to you. I’ll move out.”
And then I would have to talk her into staying. I was afraid if she moved out I would lose her. Sooner or later, I thought, she would either give in or I would cease to want her. It did not happen quite that way, however. Instead, I was like a man with an injured foot, limping automatically through life without being constantly conscious of the pain.
Hell. I wanted her and didn’t get her, and by the end of the month I had grown used to this state of affairs, and then one day she said that she had to go away, that she was leaving New York. She wasn’t sure where she was going. I felt a dual sense of loss and liberation. She was half my age, I told myself, and desperately neurotic, and her neurosis seemed to be contagious, and much as I loved her I was bloody well rid of her. So she moved out, and for a while the apartment was lonely, and then it wasn’t. There was, briefly, a girl named Sonya.
And now it was the middle of October, the one month of the year when New York is at its best. The air has a crispness to it, and the wind changes direction and blows most of the pollution away, and on good days the sky has a distinct bluish cast to it. Spring had been drizzly and summer impossible and it stood to reason that winter, when it came, would be as bad as it always is, but this particular October was the sort they had in mind when they wrote “Autumn in New York,” and I had been looking forward to it for months.
So before the week was out I was on the other side of the Atlantic.
Chapter 2
On my fourth day in London it rained. It had been doing this more or less constantly since my arrival, sometimes with fog as an accompaniment, sometimes without. I got back to the Stokes’ flat a few minutes after six, rerolled the umbrella that Nigel Stokes insisted I carry, and went into the kitchen. Julia was hovering at the stove, and I hovered beside her, as much for the stove’s warmth as for hers.
“I’m just getting tea,” she said. “Nigel’s shaving, I think. It’s desperate out, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“How did it go?”
“No luck at all.”
She was pouring the tea when her brother joined us. He was in his early forties, some ten years older than Julia. His guards’ moustache, which added several years to his appearance, was a recent addition; he’d grown it for his role in a farce that had opened a few weeks ago in the West End, and planned to shave it off as soon as the play closed. From the reviews it seemed that this would happen rather soon.
“Well,” he said. “Any luck?”
“None, I’m afraid.”
“And bloody awful weather for hunting wild geese, isn’t it?” He added sugar to his tea, buttered a slice of bread. “Where’d you go today? More of the same?”
I nodded. “Travel agencies, employment agencies. And I went to half the rooming houses in Russell Square, and I suppose I did have a bit of luck. I found the last place she stayed before quitting London. She had a room around the corner from the museum. The dates fit; she checked out on the sixteenth of August. But she left no forwarding address, and no one there had any idea where she might have gone.”