The Short History of a Prince (26 page)

He had shaken himself, pushed the cat off his lap and gone to the piano to begin another tender embrace. But even as they hobbled together back to the bedroom he felt the burden of their complicated future together. He found himself thinking through each sentence before he opened his mouth, so that by breakfast he could not speak. Julian,
looking anxious at first over coffee, and then hurt, and finally angry, had let Walter go without asking for his phone number or his address.

Every morning since that November concert Walter had thought about Julian, and he wondered, too, about himself, about why he had become paralyzed at the thought of a regular life with a man who was clearly decent, knowledgeable, affectionate and also enviably well hung. He knew that if he went to a therapist he’d have to delve. He guessed he’d find out that in his occasional sexual encounters with strangers in bathrooms or parks he was after a fragment of an early profound experience. He could cook up a summary, a punch line. He’d have to pay a large sum of money and do a lot of talking to come up with one ridiculously simple statement. When he slept with someone, he’d say, with whom he might develop real feelings, the blaze of the future intruded on the glow of long-ago splendors.

Walter first thought of Julian as usual on Saturday morning, on the seventeenth of January, but after he brought his face into focus he remembered that he was supposed to go to Chicago, to help Susan. Back in November, in that first flush of information at Orchestra Hall, Julian had said he’d be commuting between New Orleans and Chicago, that he’d have to come back to Illinois on weekends to finish his job at an advertising agency. And so it was not impossible that Walter might see the poet walking into, say, Marshall Field’s or the Stuart Brent Bookstore. If they met on the street Walter might then give his life over to God, or decide to endorse fate as a life principle. It would mean something if he bumped into Julian. Of course it would! If there was any such thing as a signal, that would be it. If Julian would have him this time around, Walter might well have to follow because there was no banking on a third chance.

A bird whacked into the picture window and he sat up to listen. In the distance he heard a scraping noise. He peered through the slat of his broken blind. It had snowed heavily in the night, the starlings were disoriented and a plow was moving through town. The roads
were going to be slick or impenetrable. He might go off into a ditch on the way to the train station, might have to eat the cushions in his car to stay alive in the blizzard. It was unlikely his automobile insurance would pay for a seat that had been ingested or his health insurance cover the removal of his intestines stuffed with fiberfill. He’d been looking forward to seeing Susan, even if she was on the verge of wrecking her life. She was in love, she’d said, with a man whom she had seen for only three hours six months before. It was love, she insisted. Surely, Walter had thought, someone was soon to develop a mathematical formula with x’s and a y or two, measuring the relationship of absence to ardor. He had been invited to the first assignation, and he was supposed to either foil the husband or else bear witness to her ruin. He wasn’t quite sure of his role. If he could get to the city without damaging his car or killing himself he’d be glad to see her, happy to help.

He packed a small bag. He was going to allow himself two hours to get into the black one-piece snowsuit Lucy and Marc had given him for Christmas, put on his old snow boots, clear the Otten drive, get back out of the snowsuit, take a shower after all the exertion and drive to the train station. The grueling labor, the trouble, was the bit about country living the magazines didn’t show. He was suddenly in a state, running around his unfurnished house, looking in empty drawers for things he knew he didn’t have, for a beret, a red silk thong, onyx cuff links, a pale peach linen shirt. He wondered what he should wear for Julian. Imagine meeting Julian outside Union Station, wearing all of those fantasy garments he didn’t own. Between Otten and Chicago, Walter would try to think of something to say that was equal to a prize-winning writer. He wondered what Julian would think of him in his shiny black snowsuit, including his black wool mask with the orange trim around the eyes and the mouth and the nose opening. He looked like a yeti in his outfit, something to stalk, something you’d fear finding in a cave, a monster you’d brag about murdering.

He was leaving Otten for the weekend, leaving his snowsuit behind. Susan would choose a restaurant for lunch, and she’d explain how he was to assist her adultery, and later in the afternoon he might buy clothes that he would want to be seen in for his God-ordained coincidental
meeting with the darling labiate one, the man who had an endearing hole in the heel of his sock and silky black cat hairs all over his tight wool pants.

At noon Walter met Susan in the unprepossessing lobby of the Richmond Hotel, north of the Loop, on East Ontario. It was a small middle-range hotel, a quiet inn with no flash, a place an angry husband wouldn’t think of if he had to track down an errant wife. She was sitting in a wing chair looking to the untrained eye as if she was only waiting for Walter. He could tell that her calm was studied, but someone as new as her beau, Lester, would never have suspected a deeper agitation. She was wearing brown-and-white-checked leggings that drew the eye up and down the unbelievable length of her legs, a thick white oversize cotton sweater, and laced fashion boots that evoked a hiker, although one who walked only on marked paths. She could easily have just come in from the slopes, her hair pulled high in a pony-tail, a white headband covering her ears, her white fuzzy mittens still on her hands, folded in her lap. A person who was not distracted would have removed her outerwear in the warm lobby. In her usual way she took hold of his face, this time with the mohair mittens, and kissed him on the mouth. “I’m so nervous,” she whispered.

At lunch, in the hotel café, she said she was too overwrought to eat. She ordered water and a minute later asked for herbal tea, changed her mind and wanted coffee. When Walter’s deluxe bacon burger came, she absentmindedly ate his French fries, the detail that made the deluxe what it was, the thing he had been looking forward to out of the whole meal. The fries were zigzagged and shiny with grease. He loved the fact that she didn’t even realize she was eating them. “Tell me the plan,” he said, “for your liaison, so that I can be ready, at any point, to catch you, if by chance you fall.”

“The plan, the plan,” she said, her outstretched fingers quivering at either side of her head. “I’m so out of practice at this kind of thing. I’m going to meet him at six o’clock at the Palmer House, and then, and then, we’re going someplace for dinner. This is the extent of the plan. Why so early? I guess that’s when his meeting is over. Do I know
what will happen? No, I do not. Will we talk about the
Bible
—he’s sort of Christian, you know—’The Song of Solomon,’ perhaps, until dawn? Will we skip dinner altogether? Does he have in mind what I have in mind? What if we run into my mother? Will he let me crawl into his shirt and slide down his pants? Or will we sup, shake hands and part? Will I join you in front of the video of your choice in our tasteful room with the one regulation-size double bed at the Richmond Hotel?” She reached across the table and shook his shoulders. “I DON’T KNOW.”

“Tell me again what Gary thinks we’re doing here in Chicago, so I’ve got the story straight,” Walter said. Although he would always be on Susan’s side, and certainly on the side of love, he liked her husband. He had read more novels than anyone Walter had ever known, being as he was, in the book business, and in spite of the fact that he was always at his store, he seemed to love his family and his wife.

“Oh, dear God”—she groaned. “I lied to him, Walter. I lied to lovely old Gary. How does that line go? ‘What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.’ I know some poetry, after all, you see? I’ve talked myself into thinking he deserves to be cuckolded because he works eighty hours a week. I told him I just had to see you, that there were important matters we had to hash over, issues, you know, issues, that had been bothering me for decades, about Daniel, about that awful year we don’t speak of. He thinks I’m here to clear my head! He never asked why I couldn’t go up to your place in Otten, why we had to meet in Chicago, spend money on a hotel. I was prepared to tell him a preposterous lie, that you and I needed neutral territory. Can you believe that one?”

“It does sound pretty suspicious,” Walter said.

“If I had Lester and Gary, both of them, it would be like having a party dress, very special, an Armani, as well as a nice baggy denim dress for every day. Both are useful, a person wants each at different times, to be perfectly relaxed and ordinary, and then to light up, gad around.”

“This experience has turned you into something like a poet—” “Something like! I’m a jerk, is what I am. I’ve talked myself into thinking I have to fool around with Lester because I made bad choices years ago. I got myself stuck in Miami and now I’ve got to blow my
stack. Or maybe I want Lester only because I want Lester. Maybe it’s not any more complicated than that. Does desire always make a person go wrong, do you think?”

“It’s not one hundred percent reliable, but—”

“You have to live wildly, every now and then, so you can sleep at night, and have interesting material for your dreams. Don’t you? I figure it’s for the dream life that we have to really live. That’s what I told Daniel near the end, that’s what I already knew. I guess that’s why I had no shame, falling in love with him. We both knew good dreams applied to the long sleep, his forthcoming one.”

It was noteworthy, he thought, that she brought up Daniel whenever she talked about Lester, that the two of them seemed to be linked in her mind.

“Walter, how do we live when we’re so young and stupid? Do you realize that I still don’t know what Daniel died from? No one ever told me. I didn’t think anyone knew. It seemed beside the point, at the time, to ask. He never said. Who cared what it was; it was killing him. Cancer, my mother said, but cancer of what? Which kind? With each passing year I can’t believe that I still don’t know, that I’ve always been too embarrassed to admit that I don’t know.”

“It was Hodgkin’s,” Walter said. He spoke with deliberate slowness, in an effort to calm her. “I asked my mother about ten years ago. It irritated her to have to tell me, but I think she was angry with herself, for being so secretive about Daniel’s prognosis. I knew, generally, that it was cancer, too, but I never gave it a name. There was a faulty diagnosis at first, I guess, a mishap with one of the early surgeries, a month or two in the winter when he was stable and then the slow journey to the end. My parents eventually sued the doctor, and although they never said explicitly, part of that money paid for me to go to college.”

“Oh, Walter,” Susan said.

“I don’t think Lucy really believes that she had an older brother, that I didn’t just make him up as a way to tell her amusing stories with morals. I don’t think that there were very many people at the time who knew what was going on. Sue Rawson probably got the details by talking to my father in a businesslike way. She was never nicer to me than she was that year, all concern and flattery. Mrs. Gamble received the
word telepathically, I’m sure. I remember being told that Daniel was having radiation, but I didn’t really understand what it was for, or what the odds were.”

“We didn’t know anything outside of ourselves,” she burst out. “We hardly knew there was a war going on. I’ll have to read old
Time
magazines so I can answer my children’s questions about the sixties. How would I know about any of that strife? I was a bun-head dancing while the world fell apart.”

“My students don’t pay attention to anything but themselves either, but it does seem remarkable that we weren’t interested, considering all the excitement. I spent three hours in the car every day with my mother that winter Daniel was sick, driving to Rockford, and we never talked. Not about Nixon, not about the war, not a mother-son chat about how cancer cells mutate. I assumed Daniel would get better. He was my brother, brothers didn’t die. He was going to the doctor, they were taking care of it. Joyce had this uncharacteristic ferociousness, her clenched hands on the wheel. She scared me to death. She’d park banging into the car behind her and the car in front of her. The modern age gives us a certain number of false promises, I think, and so when the horrible truth rears its head we go to pieces.”