I assured him it would be fun. We were all standing by now. Edgar hugged me hard and kissed my cheek (I returned his hug feelingly). Then he turned to George.
“I’m grabbing the Lex uptown,” he said cordially. “Talk to you later, George,” and he set off toward the subway.
I began to walk down the street. George followed. I thought of telling him not to bother to see me home, but I knew he’d insist, and it seemed martyrish game-playing somehow. He was subdued, and his body was in its most dejected posture. It did not even enter my mind to ask him what had been going on with him that evening. I knew absolutely that I would not get a coherent answer, that he himself probably had no idea. I wasn’t even sure he understood he’d behaved badly. It seemed likely that he was feeling miserable, but at the moment, I didn’t care.
However he looked, he acted as if nothing untoward had occurred. “Sure is a nice night,” he said pleasantly, as we walked along. “How’d you like Darcy? Nice guy, isn’t he? Smart too; we have some good talks. He’s one of the better people there. He handles all the edgy stuff—you know, the veiled racism—really well. And that Edgar! He sure knows what’s going on with these theater people. Course, I didn’t know half of who he was talking about, did you? Well, of course you did. You know all about those things, don’t you? Do you like Beenie? I really don’t. Oh, she’s okay, I guess,” he retracted, glancing sidelong at me. “A little pushy, maybe. I hate pushy women.”
I looked at him. His face was impassive.
“The park looks really neat at night,” he said as we came within sight of it. “I’d really like to take a walk through it at night.”
“It’s not safe,” I said.
“That’s what I hear. But it sure looks neat. You want to try it sometime?”
“Not without a Doberman pinscher,” I said laughing. But it was a thin laugh, dredged up. I don’t know if he noticed. Or cared.
We had reached my building. “Boy, Hermione, you know what I’d really like? There’s nothing I’d like better than to go up to your place and sit in that great living room and look down at the park. That would really be nifty. I’d really like that.”
“Of course you’re welcome,” I said blankly.
“Oh, I know, but I can’t. Too busy; gotta go—gotta read that report tonight, a thousand pages of bureaucratese. We’re having an editorial meeting on it tomorrow, nine a.m. sharp!”
“Right. Thanks for dinner,” I said, turning to him and trying to smile. “Good night.” I walked toward my building.
“Hey, Hermione!” he cried as I entered the front door.
I turned.
“I’ll call ya!”
I
’LL CALL YOU, HE
said.
But Saturday went by, and Sunday, in silence and heat. It was not yet July, but ninety-degree days and terrible humidity were already upon us. Normally, at this time of year I am safely in my cool Sag Harbor house, but here I was, stuck in sticky New York, and by my own will! Sweat dripped down my forehead and trickled into my eyes, burning them; my clothes were damp a half hour after I put them on. If I wanted to move without my skin dripping onto the floor at each step, or write without my arms sticking to the desk, or read a newspaper without the pages adhering to my hands, I had to run the noisy, smelly air conditioner. To add to my discomfort, since all my friends were out of town, no one called, and I felt lonely and abandoned.
Monday came and went, with only a few business calls. Lou and I had a chat about her vacation, to begin the first of July. She had arranged for her friend Lisa to come in for an hour a day to go through the mail and phone me to report on it. Lou simply assumed I would be in Sag Harbor, as in previous summers.
By Tuesday, I decided to go. But I couldn’t move. Every time I thought about leaving the city, my limbs ached; I was an animal caught in a trap I could escape from only by tearing off my leg or arm. Like an athlete at the end of an endurance test, I was dulled, hopeless, foggy-headed, yet I couldn’t give up and stop, couldn’t sit down on a bench, had to keep moving straight toward the finish line. My future, my very life, was at stake.
I forced myself to act. I waited until well after lunch hour and then called
Newsday,
the editorial department, and asked for George Johnson. He was not at his desk, and I got his voice mail. I left a light message in a light voice; I said I was prostrate in this heat and asked how he was holding up. I said I just wanted to let him know that I was thinking of him and that I was planning to go out to Long Island for the summer…
I didn’t say what day I would go. I didn’t mention the Sag Harbor number. I kept anger, sorrow, and despair out of my voice. I made it young, calm, sweet. I made it so he could hear a smile in it. I knew he was at the office; he went in every day. He must have been at a meeting, or chatting with someone across the room. He was certain to receive my message sometime that day.
But he didn’t call.
Wednesday morning, I left for the country, my thigh bleeding and raw where my leg had been attached.
I drove out in a blur and settled in the same way. It was good to be cooler, to be able to throw myself into the water whenever I wanted to, but I had to tell myself that. I didn’t feel much; I was, almost entirely, numb. I had left in defeat, having lost the fight for my future happiness. I had lost at love before, several times; the numbness, the shuddering ache, were familiar. But I could not recall a time before when I had believed that the happiness of the rest of my life, of whatever life remained to me, was at stake.
Obsessively, I went over everything I had done or said in our various encounters, finding fault with myself at every point. I should have been less assertive; I should have played harder to get; I shouldn’t have asked him about his parents; I should have kept the conversation light; I absolutely should not have kissed him.
I knew it was finished, yet wisps of hope still sometimes blew past my face, softening its strained lines. Liz Margolis came on Thursday, as usual, and threw herself upon me.
“Oh, Hermione! I’m so sorry I took off that way two weeks ago; I’m so awful, I just have no control. And then next time I came, you were gone. I didn’t know you were going away! I thought you were here for the summer, like other years. Whenever you’ve gone abroad, you told me beforehand!
“It was just such a shock, but how infantile of me, how mean! I mean, to assume that people, that a woman, that you couldn’t still fall in love at your age. You look great, you know, you don’t look old…but”—she paused, holding me by the shoulders and pushing me a little distance away from her—“you don’t look good.” She frowned. She let her sculptor’s eye play over my face. “It fell apart, huh?”
“Yes,” I said. My face felt tight. She hugged me, held me against her as if I were a small child, patting my back and whispering comforting nothings, like “There, there, poor baby,” which did not comfort me, but did make me want to laugh. This impulse I suppressed; but it enabled me to tell her in complete honesty later that she’d cheered me up.
Over coffee, she demanded the details. But one really charming quality of the narcissistic younger generation is their distractibility; you can easily deflect any unwanted attention they may direct at you simply by asking them about themselves.
Once Liz was gone, however, I sank back into my stuporous fog. I felt as if my head were encased in plastic, or a bag of flour, or a cloud, while the rest of my body went through normal motions. I swam, marketed, cooked, made telephone calls, and read, all the while using only a pinch of my brain. The novel was finished, but I did not call Molly to tell her. I just let it sit there in the computer, didn’t even print it out. I didn’t call friends, and I put off those who called me. I didn’t feel up to speaking to people. My one sharp perception was that I was driving badly. I worried about having an automobile accident, and the next week, I did hit a car stopped ahead of me, banging my front bumper. In fact, I did it
twice.
The first time, the woman asked only how I was, assuring me I hadn’t done any damage to her car (still, it cost me over a thousand dollars to fix my headlight—Porsches are expensive to repair). The second time, the driver claimed I had done over seven hundred dollars’ damage to his truck. Although I was only going ten miles an hour, and only scratched my bumper, there
was
a dent in his bumper. That accident raised my insurance rate.
Ah, well.
Actually, George had called that week. Tuesday morning, Lisa phoned to say that sometime Monday, someone had left a message on the New York machine. The caller had not left his name but said he was sorry not to have gotten back to me sooner. A young reporter at the newspaper had been mugged and left with a fractured skull, and he was spending all his spare time at the hospital. He would call me.
Did that make any sense to me? she wanted to know.
“Yes,” I admitted, jealousy crawling up my spine. I craved a fractured skull, anything that would make him turn that attention to me.
The days stumbled by. I hardly noticed. I swam a great deal, and I read or reread all the nineteenth-century novels the local library possessed—Trollope, Galsworthy, Austen, Gissing, Eliot, Burney, the Brontës. Just as I could not read anything serious when I was sunk in the misery of my first pregnancy and marriage, I could not read anything now that suggested modern life.
But as I always used to tell my children, nothing good happens without dragging along some attendant misery, and no misery occurs without its attendant good fortune. A version of the cloud-silver lining maxim, but it’s true. For during the night, unbidden, two ideas for new novels sprang into my mind. One came as I was drifting off to sleep, listening to the cicadas singing in the grass. The heroine falls in love with a man who is, unknown to her, one of a set of twins. The brothers are identical—no one can tell them apart—but they behave in utterly opposite ways. One eagerly seeks her out, while the other avoids her and is cruel and sadistic when they do meet. To her, the same man appears to take both attitudes. To complicate matters, they are spies, CIA agents in the service of their country (spies can still be admirable in romance novels), and so are required to be deceptive and evasive simply in the normal course of events. Their twinship is of use to them in their work. The heroine’s problem is not just to distinguish the lover from the hater, but also to discover their secret profession and the ways the cruel twin is making use of her.
It would be complicated, I thought. But I wanted to be engaged with technical details of plot, intricate conspiracies rather than intense emotions. Also, I could set it in wonderful cities and give myself a nice long trip to research it. I would start it in London, move to Paris, then to Constantinople, and end perhaps in Singapore, a tyrannical state from which the heroine and her lover escape in terror…
Yes. I began to make plans for the trip.
The second idea came to me in the middle of the night. Because of the heat, I was sleeping on the porch regularly. My fantasies had infiltrated my unconscious now, and I would frequently wake up in the darkness from a dream, my body still tingling with a lover’s touch, his murmurs of affection hovering in my ears, my entire front alive with crying desire. One night, at such a moment, it occurred to me: what if I wrote a novel about a love affair, filled it with sex, put one or two erotic scenes in every chapter? The heroine and her lover are drunk with desire. They make love near the ocean, under palms and hibiscus; on a sleeping porch utterly surrounded by trees and shrubs, whose leaves brush against the screens in the wind; in a hotel bedroom where the sheets are perpetually damp despite the whirring ceiling fan. Bamboo blinds hang over the glass doors, which open on a view of a pale sky. The lovers, their bodies always wet, call room service and order more champagne…I would set it in some sleepy, flower-and-frond-bedecked, humid, tropical place, where the water is aqua and the sky a deeper blue. Samoa or Fiji or one of the Caribbean islands. I could spend the winter there, researching it, writing it. Take my laptop.
What would make it unusual is that at the very end, the reader discovers that the entire affair has taken place only in the heroine’s imagination, that nothing actually happened with the man, that he rejected her early on, and that throughout the virtual time of the novel, she is wandering listlessly around, helpless with desire, dreaming it all up…Would love be less real that way? Less intense? Would the sex not still be ecstatic?
Of course, I would have to write this under another name; I could not taint my reputation with a novel like that. I would lose my audience, who did not like their sex explicit. I might even have to go to a different publisher. But it would be fun.
One Wednesday night, the phone rang. I was shocked to hear George’s voice on the other end.
“So what are you doing out there?” he wanted to know.
“I always spend summers here,” I said. “It’s beautiful and cool. I swim every day. You ought to come out and visit.” I heard myself say.
“God, I’ve been too busy. This poor kid that got mugged, it was touch and go for her for a while there. I spent a lot of time in the hospital, all my spare time…”
I wondered at his offering such devotion to a complete stranger—a young reporter, didn’t he say? Maybe she wasn’t a stranger at all. He went on about her a bit: it seemed she was making a full recovery. “Yeah, well, she’s young, you know,” he said, as if he did expect me to know.
“Oh,” I said finally. “Well, that’s good. So what happened? I haven’t heard from you in a long time.” I hated myself, hated hearing the words come out of my mouth, hoped there wasn’t a whine in my voice.
“Well, you know, you really blindsided me!” He laughed.
“I what?”
“Blindsided me. Came at me from a direction I wasn’t expecting. You know, I’m not very strong. I can’t fight. But one thing I
can
do—I can run and I can hide!” He was laughing. “I sure can run, and I can hide!”
Hide from me?
From me.
My heart was beating so hard in my ears that I was momentarily deaf, and his words passed me by. Only later did I realize that he’d said he was returning to Louisville in August. And not until the next day did I realize that Thursday—today—was the first of August. He’d decided not to take the job at
Newsday,
he said. He’d found New York fun. He’d learned a lot. But he was going back home.