SEVEN
In Spring the War Got Worse
HE TOLD HER on a dreary Saturday morning in May — it was drizzling, the dark sky scarred with streaks of red as if something were burning on the other side of the world — that it would have to end between them. They had been walking in the park.
She nodded, said in a mild voice, looking at her shoes, that she thought she understood. Shrugging it off.
Her casualness not what he expected, he felt compelled to explain. “As you know, I’ve been under great pressure”—the words coming out as if he had dreamed them — “the war, my book which has to be done by September, the guilt I feel about us. Seeing you, I can’t seem to get anything done. The guilt paralyzes me.”
“It’s all right, Curt,” she said, angry at him for trying to provoke a scene. “It’s been hard on me, too.”
“You know I loved you,” he said.
“Past tense?”
“Love you. You know that.”
“I know,” she said, glancing at him coolly. “Good-bye, Curt.” Holding out her hand for him to shake.
“I thought we would have lunch in the park,” he said, wanting, now that its end was decided — how terrifyingly final endings were — to keep things alive a little longer. Wanting also (not to lose in memory what was) to make love to her one more time. The memory of her flamed in him.
They walked slowly through the park, coming to the south boundary of the reservoir, saw a man rubbing himself up against a tree, and turned to return. He sensed that she was crying, her head down, but when he looked saw that her eyes, which were very large and deep brown, were dry.
He said good-bye at the door, refusing her invitation to come in — the aunt listening to Berlioz inside.
She started to say something, kept him waiting, her face swollen with words, dark. “Curt,” she said in that barely audible voice that always had the effect of making him lean toward her, “I want you to know I’ll be here if you want me.”
Grateful, he crushed her in his arms, pressed himself swollen against her. They kissed twice briefly and she was gone. He carried with him down the steps and into the street, driving home to Brooklyn, a nervous sense of virtue like a thief in a movie he had once seen, a British comedy, who had sneaked into a bank at night to return the money he had stolen.
He had few regrets. Few regrets but fewer pleasures, surfeited by pride, hungry. He had the idea that the energy he had spent in making love to Rosemary — stored up since no longer in use — could be put into his book. Ascetic in his private life, he wrote intensely, passionately for a few days and felt, counting the pages he had done, a sense of accomplishment like a lover tilting a woman over the edge. Reading over what he had written, he was disappointed. Though he wanted to love it, had felt love in the writing, it was merely competent, unworthy of his passion. Words. Sentences. They died as they formed themselves. He had never felt so dry.
And though he denied himself, the war didn’t end. His obsession had been madness. The day before his split with Rosemary the President had suspended bombing of the North, waiting for some gesture from the enemy, but then, not getting what he wanted, not clear what it was, he had redoubled the intensity of the raids. For which Curt, still writing the White House, though less often than before, felt in the soft walls of his stomach responsible. As part of a nationally organized protest, he went to Washington with twenty-five of his students — Christopher not among them — and got sick on the bus, dry-heaving by the side of the road. The afternoon spent in a Washington motel — the wallpaper patterned with American flags — listening to inaccurate reports of the rally on the radio.
He worried that Rosemary was unhappy and, against his resolve to avoid all contact with her, called to see how she was. (“An untested resolve,” he wrote to himself, “is a paper tiger.”) It was hard to talk on the phone — her words without face — and he was tempted to suggest that they meet. She said she was all right, though sounded disconsolate. She was doing a lot of reading, she said, preparing for her finals. Reading at the moment for herself The Stranger by Camus. Did he know it? He said he did, though not well.
The talk pained him. It was as if they had hardly known each other. Were ghosts of themselves. What had been, their love, a corpse strangled by the wires of the phone. He was struck by loss — an old terror. In four days they had fallen from intimates — in memory he had never not loved her — to bare acquaintainces, strangers.
The next day, in his office, meaning to work on his book, distracted, he wrote Rosemary a poem. Not to her, about her, about his feelings. It was something he had not done in a long time — so long he couldn’t remember when last, but it was in him and came out.
Done, what could he do with it but put it among his papers or destroy it (though he was a man who didn’t like destruction), frightened that such a creature had been, without his knowledge, inside him. He felt like a Pandora’s box, the lid barely open. Still, the writing of it — the release it gave him — kept him another day from seeking her out. Inspired, he tried a poem about the war — “Peasant, peasant, burning bright/ In the jungles of the night/ American napalm bring western light.” The next morning he burned them both, fascinated by the burning form in his wastebasket. His words.
Though he couldn’t be absolutely sure — Christopher of late expert at staying out of sight — Parks had the sense he had given up following him. Since his blow-up at him a month ago, his student had, in his father’s words, “shaped up.” He had not been late again, not missed another class — their relationship increasingly businesslike and polite. Parks didn’t know whether to be pleased or not. When he thought about it, not being followed made him feel lonelier.
If some of his burdens were gone, there was still the war, his book, teaching responsibilities, his wife and daughter, to occupy his time. His time, not his spirit. Carolyn trod lightly in the house, treated him as if there were a HANDLE WITH CARE sign on his back. They seemed, even at meals, even at night in the same bed, to be at least two rooms apart. Used to it, his scar tissue of no use without it, he missed her bitchery. Preferable to her cautious silence — or was it merely polite disinterest that in his vanity he took for fear of him? He suspected that she was storing up her weapons to use when he was at lowest ebb, his guard down, in an all-out assault. No survivors. No prisoners. Though he disliked things out of his control, if she wanted her freedom the prerogative was hers. He would take her denial of him like a man. He was, his father had told him often enough, a gentleman and not to forget it. It was in the blood, tainted some by his mother’s family. And gentleman though he had been born, resolute in his sense of honor, he missed Rosemary, damned to hell the vain fool who gave her up. Decided at whatever the cost to ask her to take him back. He anticipated, which was what he had earned, a brush-off, rejection. Forever denied her, he suffered love lost. Saw himself rejected Curtis Parks, former lover, pacifist, WASP, man of destiny, and, despite who he was, sufferer.