The Afterlife (27 page)

Frank’s mother, once a fluffy belle from Louisville, had been gaudy, strident, sardonic, volatile, needy, demanding, loving; from her he had inherited his “artistic” side, as well as
his blondness and “interesting” almond-shaped eyes, but he was not especially grateful. Less—as was proposed by a famous formula he didn’t know as a boy—would have been more. His mother had given him an impression of women as complex, brightly colored traps, attractive but treacherous, their petals apt to harden in an instant into knives. A certain wistful passivity had drawn him to Sharon and, after the initial dazzlement of the Avises of the world faded and fizzled, always drew him back. Other women asked more than he could provide; he was aware of other, bigger, hotter men they had had. But with Sharon he had been a rescuer; he had slain the dragon of the Ohio; he had got her out of Cincinnati. What more devastatingly, and less forgivably, confirmed the rumor’s essential truth than the willingness of the one who knew him best and owed him most to entertain it? Sharon’s instinct had been to believe Avis even though, far from running off, he was sitting there right in front of her eyes.

He was unreal to her, he could not help but conclude: all those years of cohabitation and husbandly service were now thanklessly dismissed because of an apparition, a shadow of gossip. On the other hand, now that the rumor existed, Frank had become more real in the eyes of José, the younger, slier of the two security guards, whose daily greetings had subtly moved beyond the perfunctory; a certain mischievous dance in the boy’s velvety features had come to enrich their employer-employee courtesies. And Jennifer, too, the severely beautiful receptionist, with her neo-hippie bangs and shawls and serapes, now treated him more relaxedly, even offhandedly. She assumed with him a comradely slanginess—“The boss was in earlier but she went out to exchange something at Bergdorf’s”—as if both he and she were in roughly parallel bondage to “the boss.” Frank’s heart felt a
reflex of loyalty to Sharon, a single sharp beat, but then he, too, relaxed, as if his phantom male lover and the weightless life he led with him in some nonexistent apartment had bestowed at last what the city had withheld from the overworked, child-burdened married couple who had arrived fifteen years ago—a halo of glamour, of debonair mystery.

In Hastings, when he and his wife attended a suburban party, the effect was less flattering. The other couples, he imagined, were slightly unsettled by the Whittiers’ stubbornly appearing together, and became disjointed in their presence, the men drifting off in distaste, the women turning supernormal and laying up a chinkless wall of conversation about children’s college applications, local zoning, and Wall Street layoffs. The women, it seemed to Frank, edged, with an instinctive animal movement, a few inches closer to Sharon and touched her with a deft, protective flicking on the shoulder or forearm, to express solidarity and sympathy.

Wes Robertson, Frank’s favorite tennis partner, came over to him and grunted, “How’s it going?”

“
Fine
,” Frank gushed, staring up at Wes with what he hoped weren’t unduly starry eyes. Wes, who had recently turned fifty, had an old motorcycle-accident scar on one side of his chin, a small pale rose of discoloration, which seemed to concentrate the man’s self-careless manliness. Frank gave him more of an answer than he might have wanted: “In the art game we’re feeling the slowdown like everybody else, but the Japanese are keeping the roof from caving in. The trouble with the Japanese, though, is, from the standpoint of a personal gallery like ours, they aren’t adventurous—they want blue chips, they want guaranteed value, they can’t grasp that in art value has to be subjective to an extent. Look at their own stuff—it’s all standardized. Who the hell but the experts
can tell a Hiroshige from a Hokusai? When you think about it, their whole society, their whole success really, is based on everybody being alike, everybody agreeing. The notion of art as an individualistic struggle, a gamble, as the dynamic embodiment of an existential problem—they just don’t get it.” He was talking too much, he knew, but he couldn’t help it; Wes’s scowling presence, his melancholy scarred face and stringy alcoholic body, which nevertheless could still whip a backhand right across the forecourt, perversely excited Frank, made him want to flirt.

Wes grimaced and contemplated Frank glumly. “Be around for a game Sunday?” Meaning, had he really run off?

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?” This was teasing the issue, and Frank tried to sober up, to rein in. He felt a flush on his face, and a stammer coming on. He asked, “The usual hour? Ten-forty-five, more or less?”

Wes nodded. “Sure.”

Frank chattered on: “Let’s try to get Court Four this time. Those brats having their lessons on Court One drove me crazy last time. We had to keep retrieving their damn balls. And listening to their moronic chatter.”

Wes didn’t grant this attempt at evocation of past liaisons even a word, just continued his melancholy, stoical nodding. This was one of the things, it occurred to Frank, that he liked about men: their relational minimalism, their gender-based realization that the cupboard of life, emotionally speaking, was pretty near bare. There wasn’t that tireless, irksome, bright-eyed
hope
women kept fluttering at you.

Once, years ago, on a stag golfing trip to Portugal, he and Wes had shared a room, with two single beds, and Wes had fallen asleep within a minute and started snoring, keeping Frank awake for much of the night. Contemplating the unconscious
male body on its moonlit bed, Frank had been struck by the tragic dignity of this supine form, like a stone knight eroding on a tomb—the snoring profile in motionless gray silhouette, the massive, scarred warrior weight helpless as his breathing struggled from phase to phase of the sleep cycle—from deep to REM to a near-wakefulness that brought a few merciful minutes of silence. The next morning, Wes said Frank should have reached over and poked him in the side; that’s what his wife did. But he wasn’t his wife, Frank thought, though he had felt, in the course of that night’s ordeal, his heart make many curious motions, among them the heaving, all but impossible effort women’s hearts make in overcoming men’s heavy grayness and achieving—a rainbow born of drizzle—love.

At the opening of Ned Forschheimer’s show—Forschheimer, a shy, rude, stubborn, and now elderly painter of tea-colored, wintry Connecticut landscapes, was one of the Whittier Gallery’s pets, unfashionable yet sneakily sellable—none other than Walton Forney came up to Frank, his round face lit by white wine and his odd unquenchable self-delight, and said, “Say, Frank old boy. Methinks I owe you an apology. It was Charlie Whit
field
, who used to run that framing shop down on Eighth Street, who left his wife suddenly, with some little Guatemalan boy he was putting through CCNY on the side. They took off for Mexico and left the missus sitting with the shop mortgaged up to its attic and about a hundred prints of wild ducks left unframed. The thing that must have confused me, Charlie came from Ohio, too—Columbus or Cleveland, one of those. I knew it began with a C. It was, what do they call it, a Freudian slip, an understandable confusion. Avis Wasserman told me Sharon wasn’t all that thrilled
to get the word a while ago, and you must have wondered yourself what the hell was up.”

“We ignored it,” Frank said, in a voice firmer and less catering than his usual one. “We rose above it.” Walton was a number of inches shorter than Frank, with yet a bigger head; his gleaming, thin-skinned face, bearing smooth jowls that had climbed into his sideburns, was shadowed blue here and there, like the moon. His bruised and powdered look somehow went with his small spaced teeth and the horizontal red tracks his glasses had left in the fat in front of his ears.

The man gazed at Frank with a gleaming, sagging lower lip, his nearsighted eyes trying to assess the damage, the depth of the grudge. “Well,
mea culpa, mea culpa
, I guess, though I
didn’t
tell Jojo and that
poisonous
Ed Jaffrey to go blabbing it all over town.”

“Well, Wally, thanks for filling me in,” Frank said resonantly. Depending on what type of man he was with, Frank felt large and straight and sonorous or, as with Wes, gracile and flighty. Sharon, scenting blood amid the vacuous burble of the party, pushed herself through the crowd and joined them. Frank quickly told her, “Wally just confessed to me he started the rumor because Charlie Whitfield downtown, who
did
run off with somebody, came from Ohio, too. Toledo, as I remember.”

“I said Cleveland or Columbus,” Wally murmured, not sure Frank was being satirical.

Sharon asked, “What rumor, honey?”

Frank blushed. “You know, the one that said I ran off with a boy.”

“Oh,
that
rumor,” Sharon said, blinking once, as if her party mascara were sticking. “I’d totally forgotten it. Who could believe it,” she asked Wally, “of Frank?”

“Everybody, evidently,” Frank said. It was possible, given the strange willful ways of women, that she
had
forgotten it, even while he had been brooding over its possible justice. If the rumor were truly quenched—and Walton would undoubtedly tell the story of his “Freudian slip” around town, as a self-promoting joke on himself—Frank would feel diminished. He would feel emasculated, if his wife no longer thought he had a secret.

Yet that night, at the party, Walton Forney’s Jojo came up to him. He seemed, despite an earring the size of a faucet washer and a magenta stripe in the center of his “rise” hairdo, unexpectedly intelligent and low-key, offering, not in so many words, a kind of apology, and praising the tea-colored landscapes being offered for sale. “I’ve been thinking, in my own work, of going, you know, more traditional. You get this feeling of, like, a dead end with total abstraction.” The boy had a bony, humorless face, with a silvery line of a scar under one eye, and seemed uncertain in manner, hesitant, as if he had reached a point in life where he needed direction. That fat fool Forney could certainly not provide direction, and it pleased Frank to imagine that Jojo was beginning to realize it.

“All that abstract-expressionist fuss about
paint
,” he told the boy. “A person looking at a Rembrandt knows he’s looking at
paint
. The question is, What
else
is he looking at?”

As he and Sharon drove home together along the Hudson, the car felt close; the heater fan blew oppressively, parchingly. “
You
were willing to believe it at first,” he reminded her.

“Well, Avis seemed so definite. But you convinced me.”

“How?”

She placed her hand high on his thigh and dug her fingers in, annoyingly, infuriatingly. “
You
know,” she said, in a lower register, meant to be sexy, but almost inaudible over the roar
of the heater fan. The Hudson glowered far beneath them, like the dark Ohio when he used to drive her home from a date across the river in honky-tonk Kentucky.

“That could be mere performance,” he warned her. “Women are fooled that way all the time.”

“Who says?”

“Everybody. Books. Proust. People aren’t that simple.”

“They’re simple enough,” Sharon said, in a neutral, defensive tone, removing her hand.

“If you say so, my dear,” Frank said, somewhat stoically, his mind drifting. That silvery line of a scar under Jojo’s left eye … lean long muscles snugly wrapped in white skin … lofts with a Spartan, masculine tang to their spaces … Hellenic fellowship, exercise machines … direct negotiations, between equals … no more dealing with this pathetic, maddening race of
others …

The rumor might be dead in the world, but in him it had come alive.

Falling asleep has never struck me as a very natural thing to do. There is a surreal trickiness to traversing that in-between area, when the grip of consciousness is slipping but has not quite let go and curious mutated thoughts pass as normal cogitation unless snapped into clear light by a creaking door, one’s bed partner twitching, or the prematurely jubilant realization
I’m falling asleep
. The little fumbling larvae of nonsense that precede dreams’ uninhibited butterflies are disastrously exposed to a light they cannot survive, and one must begin again, relaxing the mind into unravelling. Consciousness of the process balks it; the brain, watching itself, will not close its thousand eyes. Circling in the cell of wakefulness, it panics at the poverty of its domain—these worn-out obsessions, these threadbare word-games, these pointless grievances, these picayune plans for tomorrow which yet loom, hours from execution, as unbearably momentous. Consciousness, that glaring fruit of evolution, that agitation of electrified molecules, becomes a captivity—a hellish churning in which the insomniac is as alone as Satan, twisting and turning and boring a conical hole in the darkness, while on all sides the wide world blessedly, obliviously snores.

One such night breeds another; wearily stumbling through the day, you arrive back in bed at last and the same electric barrier has been switched on, the same invisible shell bars the way into sleep. From over twenty years ago I recall a spell of such sleepless nights ending. It was in
1967
, a year of riot and expanding quagmire but in my own tiny corner of North American domestic life noteworthy for Expo
67
, a world’s fair in Canada to which my wife and I had promised to take our many small children. Our launching pad for the drive to Montreal was my wife’s parents’ summer house in Vermont, an old farmhouse up a dirt mountain road so steep that in one section, unless you had floored the accelerator at the bottom and made a wild, fishtailing run for it, the car wheels would begin to spin in the gravel near the top and you had to back down and try again. The house was surrounded by pine woods reputed to be haunted by bears, and my father-in-law, a theologian so liberal he considered both Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr to be neo-orthodox, had been accustomed by years of delicate health to having poised around him a household at all points respectfully alert to his comfort. It made for a lot of tiptoeing and unexpressed tension. Yet I couldn’t really blame bears or my father-in-law for my insomnia. Maybe it was the hard bed—a horsehair mattress supported by ropes laced through the maple side rails—or the stark moon-drenched mountaintop silence, or some internal romantic conflict whose terms I have forgotten. I was a passionate creature in those years, with surges of desire shaking my bones like loose bolts in the undercarriage of the old Ford Fairlane we bounced up the gravelly hill. My wife felt so sorry for me in my sleeplessness that, on the second morning, she begged a sleeping pill from her mother.