“I’ll be honest with you, Mrs. Haven. I don’t know how to answer that.”
“I had a fight with the Husband,” you said matter-of-factly. “The Husband took my furniture away.”
“Is that what that truck’s for, outside? Van Gogh Movers?”
You shrugged. “He hardly needed them, really. They just took everything upstairs.”
“This whole brownstone is Haven’s, then.” I felt my stomach twist. “Of course it is.”
Your expression went cold. “The Husband feels that way, too. You ought to get to know each other, Walter. You might turn out to have a lot in common.”
My plan had been to avoid the subject altogether, to keep Haven small and indeterminate and vague, but I should have known there’d be no way around him. He was a feature of the landscape through which you and I moved — as vast and undeniable as a mesa. But he was also as lifeless as one, and as flat, at least on that first magic afternoon. He was static on a TV set in a corner of the room in which I loved you. I couldn’t even bring his face to mind.
“As far as I’m concerned, Mrs. Haven, your husband—”
“Why were you following me, Walter?”
I wobbled in place for a moment, then stepped stiffly toward you, clutching an imaginary hat. “My intentions are honorable, Mrs. Haven.”
“Your what?”
I took your hand in both of mine, not caring how Victorian I seemed. “I saw you, just by chance, in Union Square—” What on earth was I trying to say? A humming sprang up somewhere behind my left ear, in what may or may not have been my temporal lobe. The chronologic wind was picking up again.
“I was following you,” I said. “I can’t deny it.”
“That wasn’t my question. I wanted to know—”
I grabbed you by the shoulders — roughly, clumsily — and kissed you. My eyes were clenched shut and there was a disturbance in my head like the buzzing of an ultrasonic toothbrush, but I could tell that I had caught you by surprise. I understood, as we kissed, that I was being offered the chance to step out of myself, to reset the clock: to start over from nothing, defenseless and naked, like a lizard wriggling out of its skin. Your body was tense, I remember, but your mouth was warm and open and alive. You smelled like rain and cigarettes and dill.
“Don’t get rid of him completely,” you breathed into my ear.
“Get rid of who?”
“The old you. Walter Tompkins. It turns out that I like him very much.”
I’d been thinking out loud — what else could it have been? — but I felt no embarrassment. “What is it you like? Of his many noble qualities, I mean.”
“I like his politeness. I like the look in his eyes when he’s trying to think. I like his terrible haircut. I like the jokes that he makes — the bad ones especially — and the way his head tilts when he’s listening. I like that he listens at all.” A shyness crept into your features. “I guess I like that he has time for me.”
“He has nothing but,” I said, and bent to kiss you again. It was true, Mrs. Haven: I might have nothing else to offer, but I had plenty of time. It amazed me to think that you might be neglected. How could your husband make such a beginner’s mistake?
You looked dazed and defiant when we stopped for breath. We stood an arm’s length apart, just as we’d been before, but now we were looking at each other without a trace of pretense, grinning complementary stupefied grins. You led me to the back of the apartment, mumbled something about the garden that I didn’t quite catch, then pulled a stack of framed museum posters out of a closet — the kind college freshmen tack on the walls of their dorms — and arranged them on the floor for me to see. At least six were reproductions of The Kiss.
“Gustav Klimt,” I said.
You watched me intently.
“Gustav Klimt,” I repeated. “From Vienna. Of the Viennese school.”
There were twelve posters in all, every last one a Klimt: gold and copper curlicues and gauzy-haired women with alabaster skin and privileged faces. The words THE KISS were printed across a few of them, leaving nothing to chance, in a font that looked lifted from one of my father’s dust jackets.
I noted all this carefully, Mrs. Haven, because I was stalling for time.
“He was definitely a painter,” I heard myself croak. “His use of gold leaf—”
“I can’t stand Klimt.” You shuddered. “His paintings are like butter-covered doughnuts.”
“Then why—”
“The Husband put them up yesterday. There’s one for every wall of this apartment. He screwed them in with an electric power drill and four-inch drywall screws.”
A truck passed outside, then another, rattling the windows in their frames. From somewhere nearby came the buzz of television. I made an effort not to wonder who else might be in the house.
“Four-inch screws, did you say?” I nodded to myself. “He certainly gave it the old college try.”
“He’s R. P. Haven, Walter. He gives everything the old college try.”
“What made him want to do all this, exactly?”
You gave a dull laugh. “I guess you could say he’s the possessive type.”
“So he knows about us?”
“I’ve only just met you, Walter. What’s there for him to know?” You sighed and let your head rest on my shoulder. “There’s no need for you to worry, anyhow. He’ll murder me before he murders you.”
I felt a twinge of dread at that, as anybody would; but you fit against me so well, notching your forehead between my neck and clavicle, that my fear felt like a kind of imposition. Your body was warmer than mine — much warmer — and your cropped hair spiraled clockwise at the crown. I looked down at your pale, goose-boned neck, the width of my palm exactly, and guessed (rightly, as it turned out) that it would be covered in freckles come summer.
“I’m reading a book,” you said suddenly. “A self-help book. I’d like to show you something.”
It was my turn to laugh. “What would you need a self-help book for?”
You pulled a slim, silver-bound book out of your jacket — a sleight-of-hand trick — and passed it to me. I read its title with a sinking feeling.
STRANGE CUSTOMS OF COURTSHIP & MARRIAGE
Authentic revelations of curious mating customs of all ages and all races, and the history and significance of modern marriage conventions
by
William J. Fielding, author of The Caveman Within Us, etc.
“Go ahead, Walter. Page sixty-eight.”
The last thing I wanted to do at that moment was to educate myself about marriages, either modern or ancient; but I did as you asked. Page 68 was marked with a wrapper from a pack of Newport Lights:
TREE MARRIAGE. — Among the Brahmans of the south of India it is the established custom that a younger brother should not marry before an older one. To fulfil this requirement, when there is no satisfactory bride in sight for a senior brother, he is married to a tree, which leaves the younger one at liberty to take a wife.
Mock marriages are also carried out among the Punjab of India, in the case of a widower taking his third wife. It is celebrated with a certain tree or rosebush, and sometimes with a sheep, which is dressed up as a bride and is led by the groom around the sacrificial fire while the real bride reposes nearby.
“I see,” I said slowly, though of course I saw nothing. “How is this a self-help book, exactly?”
“My marriage is like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I married a tree, Walter. That’s what I mean.”
“Has your husband — was he married before? Or are you trying to tell me—”