My aunt Enzian had once given my father — for reasons long since lost to time — a piece of advice that he’d passed on to me: “Fall for a single girl, Waldy, and you’re competing with every other man on earth. Fall for a married woman, on the other hand, and you’re only competing with one.” Though Enzian had always frightened me — she was the kind of person, to put it generously, whose patience with children was moderate — I admired her insight into the economics of sex, especially since (as she’d once told me proudly) she’d never once had her “chastity impugned” in the whole of her duration. She was less capable of lying than a pocket calculator, so she must have believed the advice she gave Orson. And as we both know, Mrs. Haven, she was right.
I’d tried to impugn your chastity, God knows, on that first death-defying afternoon. You’d let me drape you across my lap on that sad little beanbag of yours, even fondle you a little, but your sweater stayed on and your buttons stayed buttoned. Your shoes came off after a while, but only grudgingly: it was against your better judgment, you informed me. (I couldn’t help wondering, as I held your bare feet in my trembling hands, which aspect of our situation could possibly not be against your better judgment — but I kept my mouth shut.) Incredible as it seems to me now, I was in no particular hurry. I was prepared to stand by for as long as it took the last spark of your common sense to die.
Not to say I wasn’t horny, Mrs. Haven. Since dropping out of college I’d been practically septic with lust. By my twenty-first birthday, a few weeks before Van’s party, I was running through a Decameron’s worth of obscenity for every respectable thought. You’d made your entrance, in other words, when my defenses were at their weakest, and your own powers — whether or not you cared or understood, or even noticed — were at their indefatigable peak.
You rarely wore makeup, because it struck you as gratuitous, and no one who saw you would have disagreed. Your body looked immaculate by daylight, as though you’d just been created, and at night you glowed like interstellar dust. It overwhelmed me at times, I confess — it fried me like an overloaded circuit. I envied Haven in those moments, it’s true, but also every other sentient being who’d ever known you, down to your most trivial acquaintances; just as I’m jealous, as I write this, of the self-regarding fool that I was then.
To distract myself when these paroxysms hit, I’d steer my thoughts back to plans from the pre-Haven era, half-forgotten now and very long delayed. I hadn’t come to New York on a whim: I’d come for information — even guidance, of a kind — and I’d gotten what I needed only days before we met. I was on a covert mission, one I needed time and money to complete: money for travel, first to Vienna, then to the Czech Republic, then to places still unknown. In my most presumptuous fantasies, I asked you for your help, and you said yes.
In those hours — usually late at night — when even this vision lost its mesmeric power, I fell back on the only source of distraction I had left: my history. I’d been blocked for a time, Mrs. Haven, as any historian would be when writing about something he still barely understood. For most of my duration the truth had been kept from me, and I was terrified of the countless blanks that needed filling in. You’ll laugh at me, and rightly so, but I feared the judgment of posterity. Since meeting you, however, I’d hit on a solution. If you’re reading this, Mrs. Haven, then the borderline-impossible has already occurred, and there’s nothing to be gained by being coy. My solution was to approach this history as a kind of novel — with dialogue and narration, the occasional sex scene, and even an attempt at atmospherics — and to write it for an audience of one.
* * *
I kept clear of your neighborhood for seven full days: you’d told me it was risky, which was very likely true. By the eighth night, however, my mental distractions were losing their juju, and by morning my self-control lay in tatters. I woke up with a hangover I’d done nothing to deserve, queasy and drained of emotion, and knew that something had to happen soon.
I didn’t have long to wait. Less than an hour later, as I lay bunched on the floor like an old pair of boxers, a padded legal envelope arrived by UPS. I tore the package open and found Fielding’s silver-bound opus inside, carefully dog-eared at page 41:
THE MAGICAL VIRTUE OF CHASTITY. — Belief in the magical potency of chastity and asceticism is widespread, from ancient times down to the modern.
Influential chiefs of the Congo keep in their service a virgin to care for their arrows, shields, rugs and other instruments of war. They are hung up in her room, generally speaking, or in a convenient tree. It is believed that the girl’s purity imbues these objects with some extraordinary virtue, which their user, in turn, “catches.” If the custodian loses her virginity, the articles are destroyed as tainted and dangerous to those who would use them.
As late as the first century A.D., it was believed that the Vestals of Rome had the power by a certain prayer to immobilize runaway slaves where they stood, if they were still within the city walls. A similar power was attributed to one of the “gangas” of Doango, in Mozambique.
For the second time in our acquaintance, Mrs. Haven, you’d sent me a code I was helpless to crack. “Influential chiefs” of the Congo? The “gangas” of Mozambique? Had you sent me the book as a joke, or was it precisely the opposite: a veiled cry for help? And in what sense, exactly, could a rug be considered an instrument of war?
I never needed to break this particular code, as it turned out, because you rang my buzzer that same afternoon. You were out of breath when you entered, like a Hollywood adultress, and you couldn’t seem to look me in the eye. I took the Eskimo coat from your shoulders and kicked a stack of photocopies off the couch. You had on a hideous pair of Adidas cross-trainers, the kind a Boca Raton retiree would wear, and rumpled blue cotton pajamas. The pajamas were emblazoned with a design that I couldn’t decipher: it might have been a pattern of storm clouds, or whirlpools, or even tiny, slate-gray galaxies. You glanced down at yourself, frowning a little, as though someone had dressed you without your consent. You had just taken a step: perhaps the biggest of our secret life together. You must have been as terrified as I was.
“What’s this?” you said, picking up one of my notebooks.
“Nothing,” I mumbled. “Just notes and such.”
“Notes and such for what?”
“For that project I mentioned at my cousin’s party.”
“What sort of project? I can’t quite remember.” You hefted the notebook like a piece of evidence. “Are you working on a novel, Mr. Tompkins?”
“Jesus no,” I said, giving a tight little laugh. “One of those per family’s enough.”
“You’ve got a novelist in your family?” You narrowed your eyes. “No more cloak-and-dagger, Walter. Spill the beans.”
I’d trapped myself, Mrs. Haven, and I knew it. I felt the familiar pool of shame condensing at the base of my spine, the shame I’d felt for years whenever the subject of Orson came up; and there were definite reasons, given who your husband was, to keep his name from you. But there was no way out for me but straight ahead.
“It’s my father, believe it or not. But his books aren’t the kind—”
“I wonder if I’ve heard of him. Is his name Tompkins, too?”