The sun was hot. The ice in my tea had all melted. I stirred, thinking I should get a move on, do something. I could hardly avoid finishing the present novel within a day or two, no matter how much I continued to procrastinate. I should start thinking about the next one. Maybe I should give myself a change of scene to get the imaginative juices flowing, go someplace that would inspire a romantic story: Venice, Bombay, Suzhou, Paris. I could simply pull out old guidebooks and recall these places, but cities change, even Paris, and it’s better if one’s impression is fresh. Perhaps I’d go in August, when it emptied out. Of course, all the decent restaurants in Paris were closed in August. Maybe better to wait until September. But I’d like to go soon—next week, or the week after. The hell with George. If I went to Paris next week, I’d beat the August exodus. I could stay three or four weeks, come home at the end of July. But then, Paris was full of tourists in July. Ugh. Perhaps I should go to Africa. I hadn’t been there in a few years, and the weather was fine there in July: skies clear as ether, broad as the sea, a world of sky. I could visit West Africa, countries I hadn’t visited—Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Benin, say. Yes, that was what I should do! I was searching my Rolodex for the phone number of Marlene, my travel agent, when the phone rang. I answered it absentmindedly.
It was George.
Heart-stop.
“Hi!” Hearty as ever, never know he’d been away. “What the hell are you doing way out there, wherever you are?”
“Hi! Where are you?”
“I’m in New York,” he said, as if it were self-evident. “In a really snazzy apartment Warren got for me, midtown, walking distance to the office. It’s really neat.”
“When did you get back?” Did my voice sound cool? Why was that?
“Last night. Called you but just got your machine. Called again this morning and got somebody called Lou. What a great girl! Really nice! Terrific! She said you were out in Bag Bar, or whatever you call it. So when're you coming back?”
I’m not coming back, I wanted to say, I’m here for the summer. Or: I’m on my way to Paris. Or Harare. Or Ouagadougou.
But what came out of my mouth? “Oh, probably tomorrow. Why?”
“Want to do something?”
“Sure.” I considered. “Why don’t I get us tickets for a play?”
“We-ell…don’t get anything too highbrow, okay? Remember I’m just a country boy.”
I decided to take some control. “Why don’t you give me your number there, so I can call and let you know where to meet me?”
“No, I’ll come and pick you up. Plays start around eight, don’t they? So I’ll be there about seven-fifteen. See ya tomorrow!”
And he was gone.
I did not allow the thought that he had outmaneuvered me to perch even briefly in my mind. Swinging into action, I called Lou and asked her to get tickets for
The Good Times Are Killing Me,
and make a hair appointment with Antoine for tomorrow afternoon. And buy fresh milk and oranges and croissants for my breakfast. I ran indoors and tossed soiled towels in the hamper and dishes in the dishwasher, preparing to leave the house for an unlimited time. Accra would have to wait.
I did not pause to say to myself, Hermione, what are you doing? I did not question how it was I was abandoning all my resolve, all my plans, to fly back to New York, dropping everything at the mere sound of George’s voice. In my soul, in some deep part of me, I felt I was fighting for my life, struggling, like a drowning person trying to keep her head above the waterline. Perhaps my brain knew I was fighting not for my life but for the life of the dream, the fantasy, the yearning, the need. But so enmeshed with, so identical to my own life had it become that I knew I could not live unless the dream came true. Anything at all was warranted; I would do whatever I had to to preserve it.
I can’t say I was happy. My excitement was nervous, penetrated, with anxiety; my head and heart pounded. I longed for some resolution. Tomorrow, perhaps.
So there we were Wednesday night, in a cab heading crosstown to the theater to see the off-Broadway production of
The Good Times Are Killing Me,
when George, sitting half-assed on the taxi seat, facing me and leaning toward me as if he wanted to press against me, said: “The reason I don’t want to get involved with you, Hermione, is that I don’t want to end up a character in one of your novels.”
I did not want to discover what he was
really
telling me, because I suspected that he really meant what he
said
and the different signal his body was sending out came from his body alone, an entity with which he was not in close or regular contact. For a moment, I searched my mind to find a way to make him feel happy or pleased or at least comfortable, but I could discern no way to do that, so I just sat back and let him take control. I wanted to ask him: If you don’t want to get involved with me, why do you keep calling me? But I said nothing. He relaxed. As we stood in line to enter the theater, I slipped my hand through his arm, and he smiled down at me, his eyes bright with pleasure. Maybe, finally, I’d done something right.
And he liked the play, was amused and moved by it, and was pleased I had chosen it. He had himself picked out a restaurant near the theater and made reservations. This pleased me, and I avoided thinking about his need to stay in control. We had a fine dinner at a steak house: he ate a huge sirloin and I ordered lamb chops I could not finish. We both had the baked potato and excellent creamed spinach that are typical steak house fare. He liked his meal. He seemed to like me. He gazed at me with warm eyes and a sweet smile, listened to me with interest, spoke about himself more easily than usual. I wondered if perhaps he had missed me.
That evening was the best time we had spent together, and he did not seem in any rush to get home. It was a beautiful summer night, and we walked over to Columbus and then uptown for nearly a mile before we decided to take a cab to my apartment. He asked if I wanted to have lunch the next day. I did. I was almost in bliss, I was right outside the door to bliss, the door was ajar. There was just this anxiety…
He said he’d keep the cab to take him back to his place. It was on the West Side, downtown, back where we had come from. Oh, I said. At my building, he stepped from the cab. I slid over and got out, and looked up at him standing there. The light from the canopy shone on his fair hair, and, his head illuminated, he was beautiful and austerely sweet, like an angel in a Van Eyck painting. I gazed up at him, and my heart lurched: I could not bear to let him go. It was breaking my heart, making my body scream, to let him go. I wanted to reach out, to clutch at him, to beg, “Come upstairs with me!” And without thinking, suddenly, I stood up on tiptoe and kissed him. On the lips.
I shocked him. Horribly. His shock was so extreme, waves of it hit Jack, the doorman, who was standing behind me: I could feel him reverberate. Yet he was used to seeing me kiss my friends good night at my door. George must have gasped, jumped back, looked pale, must have done something I didn’t see but felt—chill, horror. The goddamned cabdriver was probably shocked! Not only was everyone shocked, but there wasn’t even any pleasure in it: he didn’t kiss me back, so there was no passage of electricity. He didn’t really even accept my kiss, so there was no tenderness. My kiss was like a bird peck on a pole, immobile and inanimate: my head bobbed forward, his bobbed back, like two wooden birds on sticks and strings in an old children’s toy. I walked into my building, holding myself erect, and did not look back.
It had been a terrible, maybe fatal, mistake.
I prepared for bed with a sense of dread, sure that my move had damaged things. I considered calling a friend to talk about it, but the situation was really beyond help. And I was tired of talking about it.
My skin moisturized, my teeth flossed, I sat in bed looking out over the park, a large dark space dotted with tiny lights. I wished I smoked. I would have smoked if I’d had a cigarette. I decided to let an idea into my mind that I had heretofore barred the door to, very firmly: I entertained the possibility that George was impotent. I’d had experience with that, in a number of different men, both older and young. I had been able to help those I was willing to take in hand, to speak metaphorically. But all of them—all but one, anyway—were eager for sex, were raging with desire. Whereas George alternated between abrupt propulsion and abrupt revulsion and seemed to be in control of neither.
I remembered Harvey, a lawyer in a publishing firm, who for three years pursued me with relentless fury. While I was married to Charles, he offered me eloquent conversation, much of it about poetry, over long lunches at La Grenouille and La Caravelle, after morning visits to art galleries and museums. After Charles died, he offered it over dinners at the Four Seasons and Lutèce before or after the theater, a jazz club, a carriage ride through Central Park. I say “fury” because he pursued me ardently but with a cold rage at my intractability. Yet he
never
tried to make love to me, never made any physical contact beyond holding my hand. Pouring out his desire in lacy language, he never asked me how I felt about him. Sometimes I felt like a statue he’d chosen for his delectation, an idol he used to stimulate his poetic impulses. He’d sit and gaze at me, reciting poetry and defining me—at least, that’s how it felt. “You’re really above it all, aren’t you, Hermione?” he’d say. “So brilliant. One of these days you’re going to write a real novel, one that shows your true talent. So brilliant and cold, so glittery you are, your eyes cold and beautiful…” Stuff like that. His descriptions varied from time to time, but in all of them, I was beyond his reach. So of course I didn’t want to go to bed with him. I would just smile, and he would scrunch up his eyes as if he were dying and order another martini. We drank martinis in those days.
When Andrew began laying siege to me—and he did, oh, he did!—I saw less of Harvey. And once I realized I was in love with Andrew, I told Harvey I couldn’t go out with him anymore. He began to cry, great gasping sobs came out of him, tears poured down his face, right there in La Côte Basque. The waiters were shocked. And I felt terrible—after all, I did like him a great deal—so I said that I’d never been beyond his reach, that all he had ever had to do was just that, just reach out to me. He didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about, so as a parting gift, I took him home with me and led him to my bed. But of course, I
was
out of his reach, not because I was the unapproachable lady of the sonneteers but because he had stuck me on top of a pedestal—no, a pyramid—and he knew that if he climbed to the top, I would be standing there waiting to cut his heart out. I wasn’t the troubadours’ cold lady he’d made me out to be: I was a fucking Aztec priest.
I didn’t see him for years after that, but one night around Christmas, when I was with Mark, I ran into Harvey in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons. He smiled and made conversation, while his eyes regarded me with hate.
But George was nothing like Harvey. Was he?
George pursued me with such intensity. So had Harvey.
George had such kindliness in his face. Well, so did Harvey.
George gazed at me with such warmth. So had Harvey.
But George left in a hurry; Harvey had never wanted to let me go. And George spoke a funny male language, full of boyisms and sincerity and enthusiasm, whereas Harvey used a rhetoric of poetry, high-blown and sentimental, often soaring into true eloquence. And George had recently been involved with a young woman he had mentioned to me—sexually involved, I was sure. Whereas Harvey had not been involved with any woman for several years before I met him and (I thought) for several years after. They were nothing alike, I decided. I put out my imaginary cigarette and slid down to sleep.
Thursday morning, George called. He sounded irritable. Bad morning he said: a thousand interruptions, lousy writing by a person who should know better…Just one of those days.
“We on for lunch?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll be by at noon, then. See ya.”
By the time he arrived, his mood had improved. We wandered over to our usual lunch place on Lexington, in pleasant conversation, his smile as warm as ever, his eyes sexy and intense and focused on me. I was telling him about my novel, and a question I had about the conclusion. I had reached the penultimate point, at which my heroine rejected the villain. She had pushed him away and run, because the man’s embrace and kiss overpowered her, made her feel smothered, small and powerless. She did not recognize that his behavior showed he cared only about his own desire, not hers, or that this was a sign of his evil nature. On the contrary, she felt apologetic toward him, because his aggressiveness had also aroused her somewhat, and she suspected that her sense of insignificance was a result of her own weakness, was a flaw in her character. She felt that, having failed him, she owed him something.
Now he, of course, being a villain, was going to take advantage of her apologetic attitude toward him to kidnap and rape her. (You must realize that in romances, as in eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century novels, a woman’s virginity is a great prize, which can be won only once and, once lost, is irrevocable. I know it seems silly, but that’s the convention. You just have to accept it, the way you do chess moves.) My question was, how would the hero feel if he thought that the villain had succeeded? (Of course, he would not succeed. He would be thwarted by the heroine herself, a gutsy little thing called Lila.) But the hero would
think
—for a while at least—that the villain had accomplished his dire purpose, and his response was the revelation of
his
character.
Smiling, I asked George, “Do you think that in this day and age, a man of thirty-odd would turn against his fiancée if she was kidnapped and raped? You know, reject her as spoiled, used goods?”
“How old is this fiancée?”
“Twenty-five.”
“She’s twenty-five and still a virgin?”
I laughed.
“That seems completely unrealistic to me.”
“Well, it is nowadays in urban circles. But it’s conceivable among some people. And anyway, this is an unrealistic literary genre. What do you think the man would feel?”