She said that she would like to see him. Outwardly cool, his thinning blond hair flying, he was at her place in twenty minutes. He came almost as soon as he entered her — anticipation all — and she held him locked between her legs for the rest, at peace, without desire herself. A disappointed man, his dissatisfaction apparently ineradicable, he told her how lonely he had been without her. She, too, she said, though he was not convinced. Felt pinched, old, unworthy of her prize, wanted to do something for her (sorry he hadn’t brought a gift), though didn’t know what. He suggested taking her to a movie — in the past they had rarely gone anywhere together — Curt, from his youth, a lover of bad movies. What if they were seen together? she asked. Hadn’t he wanted her to be circumspect? The hell with circumspection, he said, his life growing hard between her legs. “I want to take you to a movie sometime soon.” She clasped his back. They danced to it, a movie, a celebration. Sometime soon.
Outside — the feeling of loss still with him (something lost) — he noticed Christopher standing circumspectly at the next corner. A sudden rage took him. The boy had no right to spy on his movements — what he did, right or wrong, his own affair. To set things straight between them — something he should have done from the beginning — he rushed after his shadow. As before, the student eluded him, vanishing — Curt too tired to pursue — into the maze of the park.
Two hours later (his dinner barely swallowed), Curt, from a candy store two blocks away, phoned him at his home — a familiar voice answering. It would be better, he realized, to confront the student in person, but if he waited, he knew he would put it off again, his nature to avoid unpleasantness.
“Christopher, I have something to say to you,” he started in, “and I don’t want you to interrupt until I’m done.”
“To save us both embarrassment I’m afraid I’ll have to interrupt,” Christopher’s voice said. “Christopher isn’t home.”
“Chris, this is Curt Parks.”
“It’s nice that you’re curt parks, whatever that is. The fact is, my son isn’t here, and I have no information as to the probable time of his return, if ever.”
“Mr. Steiner,” he said, still not convinced that it was the father, not the son, “would you tell Chris that Curt Parks called.” But somewhere along the way — the sound of his voice covering the click — the phone had died.
If his father, the old man was a rude bastard. If the son, what the hell game was he playing with him now? In either case, Curt had been mistreated. He banged the side of his fist against the phone. What kind of man was this father, this scholar, who wouldn’t even be civil to a friend of his son, who wouldn’t even take a message? He couldn’t get over how similar the two voices were, father’s and son’s, how amazingly alike, which brought him back to the idea that they were the same voice. Out of curiosity, he thought to call again. Instead he dialed Rosemary’s number, and got the aunt, who in a barrage of words — a talker, this Imogen — said her niece was having dinner with someone whose name she didn’t know and would be back at any time. Rosemary (like Christopher) not where she ought to be, not home. The same true of Curt. So he returned to his family, the bosom of his respectable misery, to find both wife and daughter, though early, already asleep. People were running from him, deserting him. Who was she having dinner with, who?
Maybe he used the wrong deodorant, or the wrong mouth-wash, or the wrong mouth. He lifted his shoe to see if he had stepped in something. There was nothing.
A lonely, jealous man, he watched the late show on television — The Maltese Falcon (one of his all-time favorites) — and sipped bourbon. Somewhere along the way, wrestling the fat man for the blackbird, he became aware that the girl, if given the chance, would destroy him — the bird, no longer black, flying from his mouth. He watched it, nostalgic at its loss, ascend.
She told him in her aunt’s living room — hard to talk to him (love easier) — of a curious thing that had happened to her. Curt, interested in essentials, listening to the unsaid. They had come back from Return from the Ashes, depressed as if the movie, its subject adultery, deception, and murder, had been a comment on their lives. Curt sensed that its abrasiveness had disturbed her — women tended to see everything in terms of themselves — and that she was angry at him because the man in the movie to whom he corresponded was indecent. Rosemary talking about walking home from a poetry-writing class she was taking at night. A car of boys, college-looking types, calling her over at the entrance to the park. While the driver asked her directions to someplace, one of the boys in the back had leaned forward and squirted shaving cream in her face.
“You shouldn’t walk in the park alone at night,” he said. “You know that, Rosemary. And why did you talk to a group of strangers like that?”
She had never wholly gotten over the feeling that he was still her teacher — he was always, unasked, giving instruction.
“They looked all right,” she said, feeling the need to defend herself. “And it was only nine o’clock. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“What if they dragged you inside the car?”
“Oh, Curt. All they did was get my face wet and frighten me and stain my coat a little.”
“What if they had dragged you inside the car?”
“Then I would have been in the car with them.” She made a face.
Charmed despite his exasperation, in love with her. “I worry about you,” he said. “Please don’t take any unnecessary chances, baby. All kinds of madness goes on in New York because everything’s so impersonal. Human life isn’t worth much….” He stopped, bored with himself. “You know what I mean.”
Her face dark, her eyes as in his poem. “I know. You’re always telling me,” she said softly. “I can take care of myself.” She kissed his face. “Don’t you believe I can take care of myself?”
“I worry about you,” he said, still vaguely disturbed, the source out of focus, worried that he had bored her with his nagging (what an old woman he had become!), that she was tired of him.
His response, his missing of the point, numbed her against him. She couldn’t tell him the simplest thing without his making something else — something that satisfied some theory of his — out of it. It was as if he had blamed her for the incident, or was disappointed that it hadn’t been worse. Why the boys had done what they had done, and why to her, had not concerned him at all. When he tried to kiss her she turned her head away. He had taken too much from her already, preferred others to her, was no comfort.
“Do you have another man?” he asked.
She left the room, then came back, and when he said he loved her she forgave him, though her heart was sore. “You don’t love me,” she said to herself, though pretended to be pleased with him. “You have no reason to be jealous,” she said.
Her saying it providing reason. He felt old, in the way of her happiness, unworthy. The tension wouldn’t go away. He looked, sneaked a look at his watch, caught in the act.
“You can go if you want to. Don’t stay on my account.”
“On whose account should I stay?” He wrestled her down on the couch, Rosemary unresisting. “I’d like to squirt some shaving cream in your face.”