The key in his hand, fascinating wrinkle of sweater at her waist. Of course, life is a conspiracy of defeat, a sophisticated joke, endless. I’ll get some money and we’ll go the holiday week, he said, we’ll take a train, O.K.? O.K., she said. She smiled and asked for another coffee, taking the key and dropping it into her bag. It was a joke after all. They walked to the subway and he said I’ll give you a call right after Christmas. Gray bitter sky. What he remembered was her gray cashmere coat swirling around her calves as she turned at the foot of the stairs to smile at him, making the gesture of dialing a phone and pointing at him and then at herself.
Give these children a Silver Phantom and a chauffeur. A black chauffeur, to complete the America that owned them.
Now I come to the literary part of this story, and the reader may prefer to let it go and watch her profile against the slick tiles of the IRT stairwell, since she has gone out of the reality of narrative, however splintered. This postscript offers something different, something finely artificial and discrete, one of the designer sweaters her father makes now, white and stylish as a sailor’s summer bells. I grant you it will be unbelievable.
I put the young man in 1958. He has served in the Army, and once told the Automat story to a group of friends as proof of his sexual prowess. They believed him: what else was there for them to believe? This shabby use of a fragile occurrence was occasioned by the smell of honeysuckle and magnolia in the tobacco country outside Winston-Salem. It brought her to him so that he was possessed. He felt the magic key in his hand again. To master this overpowering wave of nostalgia he cheapened it. Certainly the reader will recall such shoddy incidents in his own life.
After his discharge he married some girl and had three children by her. He allowed her her divers interests and she tolerated his few stupid infidelities. He had a good job in advertising and they lived in Kew Gardens in a brick semi-detached house. Let me give them a sunken living room to give this the appearance of realism. His mother died in 1958 and left the lake house to him. Since he had not been there for ten years he decided to sell it, against his wife’s wishes. The community was growing and the property was worth twice the original price.
This is a ruse to get him up there one soft spring day in May. He drives up in a year-old Pontiac. The realtor’s office, the papers, etc. Certainly, a shimmer of nostalgia about it all, although he felt a total stranger. He left the car on the main road, deciding to walk down to the lake, partly visible through the new-leaved trees. All right, now here we go. A Cadillac station wagon passed and then stopped about fifteen yards ahead of him and she got out. She was wearing white shorts and sneakers and a blue sweatshirt. Her hair was the same, shorter perhaps, tied with a ribbon of navy velour.
It’s too impossible to invent conversation for them. He got in her car. Her perfume was not the same. They drove to her parents’ house for a cup of coffee — for old times’ sake. How else would they get themselves together and alone? She had come up to open the house for the season. Her husband was a college traveler for a publishing house and was on the road, her son and daughter were staying at their grandparents’ for the day. Popular songs, the lyrics half-remembered. You will do well if you think of the ambience of the whole scene as akin to the one in detective novels where the private investigator goes to the murdered man’s summer house. This is always in off-season because it is magical then, one sees oneself as a being somehow existing outside time, the year-round residents are drawings in flat space.
When they walked into the chilly house she reached past him to latch the door and he touched her hand on the lock, then her forearm, her shoulder. Take your clothes off, he said, gently. Oh gently. Please. Take your clothes off? He opened the button of her shorts. You see that they now have the retreat I begged for them a decade ago. If one has faith all things will come. Her flesh was cool.
In the bedroom, she turned down the spread and fluffed the pillows, then sat and undressed. As she unlaced her sneakers, he put the last of his clothes on a chair. She got up, her breasts quivering slightly, and he saw faint stretch marks running into the shadowy symmetry of her pubic hair. She plugged in a small electric heater, bending before him, and he put his hands under her buttocks and held her there. She sighed and trembled and straightened up, turning toward him. Let me have a mist of tears in her eyes, of acrid joy and shame, of despair. She lay on the bed and opened her thighs and they made love without elaboration.
In the evening, he followed her car back into the city. They had promised to meet again the following week. Of course it wouldn’t be sordid. What, then, would it be? He had perhaps wept bitterly that afternoon as she kissed his knees. She would call him, he would call her. They could find a place to go. Was she happy? Really happy? God knows, he wasn’t happy! In the city they stopped for a drink in a Village bar and sat facing each other in the booth, their knees touching, holding hands. They carefully avoided speaking of the past, they made no jokes. He felt his heart rattling around in his chest in large jagged pieces. It was rotten for everybody, it was rotten but they would see each other, they were somehow owed it. They would find a place with clean sheets, a radio, whiskey, they would just — continue. Why not?
These destructive and bittersweet accidents do not happen every day. He put her number in his address book, but he wouldn’t call her. Perhaps she would call him, and if she did, well, they’d see, they’d see. But he would not call her. He wasn’t that crazy. On the way out to Queens he felt himself in her again and the car swerved erratically. When he got home he was exhausted.
You are perfectly justified in scoffing at the outrageous transparency of it if I tell you that his wife said that he was so pale that he looked as if he had seen a ghost, but that is, indeed, what she said. Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.
DECADES
Ben and Clara Stein were made for each other. I won’t go so far as to say that they were meant for each other, but it all comes out the same way. It is impossible for me, even now, after these fifteen or so years since I first met them, to think of them as anything but “the Steins.”
I have no idea how and where they met, but it might have been at a party during the Christmas vacation — this would have been back in 1955 or thereabouts. Clara was a Bard student at the time, having gone there from Bennington, to which she had gone from Antioch, to which she had gone from Brooklyn College. All this moving about had something to do with art, i.e., she went where art was “possible.” All right, I don’t know what it means, either. She published some poems in various student magazines, and in one of them an essay on Salinger’s Nine Stories, which won her a prize of twenty-five dollars’ worth of books. She was a dark, slender, hyper-nervous girl, whose father thought that she was going to be a teacher. He comforted himself with this, although I assure you that he would have sent her to school no matter what he thought she wanted to be, for, to her father, school was good, it was sunshine and bananas with cream. He had plenty of money from his business, which had something to do with electronic hospital equipment, and Clara was denied nothing.