By the time the coffee came he could see that it was all taking effect. Her face had become an automatic register of quick responses to everything he said: he could make it leap into delighted laughter or frown and nod in solemn agreement or soften into romantic contemplation; if he’d wanted to he could very easily have made it weep. When she looked briefly away from him, down at her cup or off misty-eyed into the room, it was only for a kind of emotional catching of breath; once he could have sworn he saw her planning how she would tell Norma about him tonight (“Oh, the most fascinating man…”), and the way she seemed to melt when he helped her on with her coat, the way she swayed against him as they walked out of the place for a stroll in the sunshine, made it clear that the last shred of doubt could be safely abandoned. He had it made.
The only problem now was where to go. They were heading vaguely toward the trees of Washington Square; and the trouble with taking a walk in the park, aside from its waste of valuable time, was that this was the hour when the park would be full of women who had once been April’s friends and neighbors. Anne Snyder and Susan Cross and God only knew how many others would be there, lifting their softening cheeks to the sun or wiping ice cream from the mouths of their children as they talked of nursery schools and outrageous rents and perfectly marvelous Japanese movies, waiting until it was time to gather up their toys and graham crackers and stroll home to fix their husbands’ cocktails, and they’d spot him in a minute (“Well, of course it’s Frank Wheeler, but who’s that with him? Isn’t that funny?”). But he had scarcely allowed this uneasiness to develop before Maureen came to a stop on the sidewalk.
“This is my place. Would you like to come up for a drink or something?”
Then he was following her hips up a dim carpeted stairway, and then a door had clicked shut behind him and he was standing in a room that smelled of vacuum cleaning and breakfast bacon and perfume, a high, silent room where everything lay richly bathed in yellow light from windows whose blinds of split bamboo had turned the sun into fine horizontal stripes of tan and gold. He stood feeling tall and strong as she ducked and curtsied around him in her stockinged feet, straightening ash trays and magazines—“I’m afraid the place is an awful mess; won’t you sit down?”—and when she sank one knee into a studio couch to reach across it for the cord that opened one of the blinds, he moved up close behind her and put his hand on her waist. That was all it took. With a moist little whimpering groan she turned and pressed herself into his arms, offering up her mouth. Then they were on the couch and the only problem in the world was the bondage of their clothing. Twisting and gasping together, they worked urgently at knots and buttons and buckles and hooks until the last impediment slipped away; and then in the warmth and rhythm of her flesh he found an overwhelming sense of this is what I needed; this is what I needed; his self-absorption was so complete that he was only dimly aware of her whispering, “Oh, yes; yes; yes…”
When it was over, though, when they had fallen apart and rejoined each other in a lightly sweating tangle of arms and legs, he knew he had never been more grateful to anyone in his life. The only trouble was that he couldn’t think of anything to say.
He tried to get a look at her face, to give himself a clue, but she had clasped her head against his chest so that all he could see was the black disorder of her hair; she was waiting for him to speak first. He rolled his head a little and found he was looking through a crooked opening of the window blind, which she had managed to raise a few inches before falling into his arms. He studied the weathered brick cornice of a house across the street, whose chimney pots and television aerials made intricate silhouettes against the vibrant blue of the sky. From somewhere high and far away came the faint crawling drone of a plane. He looked the other way, into the room where everything—Picasso prints, Book-of-the-Month Club selections, sling chair, mantelpiece bristling with snapshots—everything swam in the vivid yellow light; and his first consecutive thought was that his flung coat and shirt were lying over there, near the chair, and his shoes and pants and underwear were here, closer at hand. He could be up and dressed and out of this place in thirty seconds.
“Well,” he said at last, “I guess this wasn’t exactly what you had in mind when you went to work this morning, was it?”
The silence continued, so complete that he was aware for the first time of the ticking of an alarm clock in the next room. Then:
“No,” she said. “It certainly wasn’t.” And she quickly sat up. She groped for the royal blue sweater and snatched it up to cover herself. Then, hesitating, she seemed to decide that modesty could hardly be said to matter any more, and let it drop; but in a flurry of embarrassment she picked it up again, evidently wondering if this wasn’t exactly the kind of a time when modesty mattered most, and covered her breasts with it again and crossed her arms over it. Her hair was as unattractively wild now as it must have been in childhood; it seemed to have exploded upward from her skull into hundreds of little kinks. She touched it delicately with her fingertips in several places, not in any effort to smooth it but rather in the furtive, half-conscious way that he himself had sometimes touched his pimples at sixteen, just to make sure the horrible things were still there. Her face and neck were pale but a deep red blush had begun to mottle both her cheeks, as if she’d been slapped, and she looked so vulnerable that for a second or two he was certain he could read her thoughts. What would Norma say? Would Norma be appalled at her for having been so easy to get? No; surely Norma’s feeling would be that in a really adult, really sophisticated affair it was hopelessly banal to think in such terms as being “easy” or “hard” to “get.” Yes, but still, if it was as adult and sophisticated as all that, why couldn’t she decide what to do with her sweater? Why was she having such an awful time thinking of what in the world she could possibly say to the man?
Finally she composed herself. She lifted her chin as if to toss back a smooth, heavy lock of hair and willed her face into a drawing-room comedy smile, looking him straight in the eyes for the first time.
“Do you have a cigarette, Frank?”
“Sure. Here.” And at last, mercifully, the dialogue began to flow.
“What was the name of that department you invented?”
“Mm?”
“You know. The place you told her we’d be. Mrs. Jorgensen.”
“Oh. Visual Aids. I didn’t really invent it. There used to be something called that, down on I think the eighth floor. Don’t worry, though, she’ll never figure it out.”
“It does sound wonderfully real. Visual Aids. Excuse me a sec, Frank.” And she skittered across the apartment, crouching awkwardly as if that would make her less naked, into the room where the alarm clock ticked.
When she came out, wearing a floor-length dressing gown and with her hair almost completely restored to its former shape, she found him fully dressed and politely inspecting the snapshots on the mantelpiece, like a visitor who hasn’t yet been asked to sit down. She showed him where the bathroom was, and when he came back she had straightened up the couch and was moving indecisively around the kitchenette.
“Can I get you a drink or anything?”
“No thanks, Maureen. Actually, I guess I’d better be cutting out. It’s getting kind of late.”
“Gee, that’s right, it is. Have you missed your train?”
“That’s all right. I’ll get the next one.”
“It’s a shame you have to rush off.” She seemed determined to be calm and dignified, and she carried it off with elegance until the moment of her opening the door for him, when her eyes strayed to the corner near the couch and discovered that something flimsy and white, a brassiere or a garter belt, had been overlooked in her straightening-up and still lay twisted on the carpet. She started, visibly fighting an impulse to run over and grab it and stuff it behind the cushions—or possibly tear it to shreds—and when she turned back to him her eyes were pitiably wide and bright.
It couldn’t be avoided; he would have to put
something into words. But the only honest thing he could say was that he’d never felt more grateful to anyone—to thank her—and he wondered if this mightn’t have exactly the wrong effect, almost as if he were offering her money. Another idea occurred to him: he could be sad and tender; he could take her by the shoulders and say “Look, Maureen. There can’t be any future in a thing like this.” But then she might say “Oh, I know,” and hide her face in his coat, and that would leave him nothing to say but “I don’t want to think I’ve taken any kind of unfair advantage here; if I have, well, I’m—” and that was the trouble. He would have to say “I’m sorry,” and the last thing he wanted to do—the very last thing in God’s world he wanted to do was apologize. Did the swan apologize to Leda? Did an eagle apologize? Did a lion apologize? Hell, no.
What he did instead was to smile at her—a subtle, worldly, attractive smile—and hold his face in that position until she falteringly smiled back. Then he bent and kissed her lightly on the lips and said, “Listen: you were swell. Take care, now.”
He was down the stairs and out on the street and walking; before he’d gone half a block he had broken into an exultant run, and he ran all the way to Fifth Avenue. Once he had to swerve to keep from stepping into a baby carriage, and a woman shouted “Can’t you watch where you’re going?” but he refused, no less than an eagle or a lion would have refused, to look back. He felt like a man.
Could a man ride home in the rear smoker, primly adjusting his pants at the knees to protect their crease and rattling his evening paper into a narrow panel to give his neighbor elbow room? Could a man sit meekly massaging his headache and allowing himself to be surrounded by the chatter of beaten, amiable husks of men who sat and swayed and played bridge in a stagnant smell of newsprint and tobacco and bad breath and overheated radiators?
Hell, no. The way for a man to ride was erect and out in the open, out in the loud iron passageway where the wind whipped his necktie, standing with his feet set wide apart on the shuddering, clangoring floorplates, taking deep pulls from a pinched cigarette until its burning end was a needle of fire and quivering paper ash and then snapping it straight as a bullet into the roaring speed of the roadbed, while the suburban towns wheeled slowly along the pink and gray dust of seven o’clock. And when he came to his own station, the way for a man to alight was to swing down the iron steps and leap before the train had stopped, to land running and slow down to an easy, athletic stride as he made for his parked automobile.
The curtains were drawn in the picture window. He saw that from the road before he’d reached the driveway; then, when he’d made the turn, he saw April come running from the kitchen door and stand waiting for him in the carport. She was wearing her black cocktail dress, ballet slippers, and a very small apron of crisp white gauze that he’d never seen before. And he’d barely had time to switch off the ignition before she wrenched open the car and took hold of his forearm with both hands, talking. Her hands were thinner and more nervous than Maureen Grube’s; she was taller and older and used a completely different kind of perfume, and she spoke more rapidly in a higher-pitched voice.
“Frank, listen. Before you come in I’ve got to talk to you. It’s terribly important.”
“What?”
“Oh, so many things. First of all I missed you all day and I’m terribly sorry for everything and I love you. The rest can wait. Now come on inside.”
If he’d had a year to devote to it and nothing else to do, he couldn’t for the life of him have sorted out and weighed the emotions that filled him in the two or three seconds of his lumbering to the kitchen steps with April fastened to his arm. It was like walking through a sandstorm; it was like walking on the ocean floor; it was like walking on air. And this was the funny part: for all the depth of his bafflement he couldn’t help noticing that April’s voice, different as it was, possessed a quality that made it oddly similar to Maureen Grube’s voice telling of the fabulous people Norma knew, or saying “Visual Aids”—a quality of play-acting, of slightly false intensity, a way of seeming to speak less to him than to some romantic abstraction.
“Wait here, my darling,” she was saying. “Just for a minute, till I call you,” and she left him alone in the kitchen, where the hot brown smell of roasting beef brought tears to his eyes. She handed him an Old-Fashioned glass full of ice and whiskey and disappeared into the darkened living room from which, now, he could hear an ill-suppressed giggle of children and the scrape of a match.
“All right,” she called. “Now.”
They were at the table, and he looked into all three of their faces before he saw what it was that bathed them in a flickering yellow light. It was a cake with candles. Then came their slow, shrill singing:
“Hap-py birth-day to you…”
Jennifer’s voice was the loudest and April’s was the only one in tune when they took the high note—“Hap-py birth-day, dear Dad-dy…” but Michael was doing the best he could, and his was the widest smile.
SEVEN
“FORGIVE YOU FOR what, April?” They were standing alone on the living room carpet, and she took a tentative step toward him.
“Oh, for everything,” she said. “For everything. The way I was all weekend. The way I’ve been ever since I got mixed up in that awful play. Oh, I’ve got so much to tell you, and I’ve got the most wonderful plan, Frank. Listen.”
But it wasn’t easy to listen to anything over the outraged silence in his head. He felt like a monster. He had wolfed his dinner like a starving man and topped it off with seven cloying forkfuls of chocolate cake; he had repeatedly exclaimed, over the unwrapping of his birthday gifts, the very word he’d used to describe what Maureen Grube had been to him—“Swell…Swell…”—he had heard his children’s bedtime prayers and tiptoed from their room; now he was allowing his wife to ask forgiveness, and at the same time, with a cold eye, he was discovering that she wasn’t really very much to look at: she was too old and too tall and too intense.
He wanted to rush outdoors and make some dramatic atonement—smash his fist against a tree or run for miles, leaping stone walls, until he fell exhausted in a morass of mud and brambles. Instead he shut his eyes and reached out and drew her close against him, crushing her cocktail apron in a desperate embrace, letting all his torment dissolve in pressing and stroking the inward curve of her back while he urged his groaning, muttering mouth into her throat. “Oh, my lovely,” he said. “Oh, my lovely girl.”
“No, wait, listen. Do you know what I did all day? I missed you. And Frank, I’ve thought of the most wonderful—no, wait. I mean I love you and everything, but listen a minute. I—”
The only way to stop her talking and get her out of sight was to kiss her mouth; then the floor began to tilt at dangerous angles and they might have fallen into the coffee table if they hadn’t taken three tottering steps and gone over instead into the voluptuous safety of the sofa.
“Darling?” she whispered, fighting for breath. “I do love you terribly, but don’t you think we ought to—oh, no, don’t stop. Don’t stop.”
“Ought to what?”
“Ought to sort of try and get into the bedroom first. But not if it makes you cross. We’ll stay here if you like. I love you.”
“No, you’re right. We will.” He forced himself up, dragging her with him. “I better take a shower first, too.”
“Oh, no, don’t. Please don’t take a shower. I won’t let you.”
“I’ve got to, April.”
“Why?”
“Just because. I’ve got to.” It took all his will to move one heavy, swaying step at a time.
“I think you’re terribly mean,” she was saying, clinging to his arm. “Terribly, terribly mean. Frank, did you like the presents? Was the tie all right? I went to about fourteen different places and none of them had any decent ties.”
“It’s a swell tie. It’s the nicest tie I’ve ever had.”
Under the stiff pelting of hot water, in which Maureen Grube had become a
n adhesive second skin that only the most desperate scrubbing would shed, he decided he would have to tell her. He would soberly take hold of both her hands and say “Listen, April. This afternoon I—”
He turned off all the hot water and turned up the cold, a thing he hadn’t done in years. The shock of it sent him dancing and gasping but he made himself stay under it until he’d counted to thirty, the way he used to do in the army, and he came out feeling like a million dollars. Tell her? Why, of course he wasn’t going to tell her. What the hell would be the point of that?
“Oh, you look so clean,” she said, whirling from the closet in her best white nightgown. “You look so clean and peaceful. Come sit beside me and let’s talk a minute first, all right? Look what I’ve got.”
She had set a bottle of brandy and two glasses on the night table, but it was a long time before he allowed her to pour it, or to say anything else. When she did pull away from him, once, it was only to remove the constriction of lace from her shoulders and let it fall away from her breasts, whose nipples were hardening and rising even before he covered them with his hands.
For the second time that day he discovered that the act of love could leave him speechless, and he hoped she would be willing to let the talking wait for tomorrow. He knew that whatever she had to say would be said with that odd, theatrical emphasis, and he didn’t feel equipped to deal with it just now. All he wanted was to lie here smiling in the dark, confused and guilty and happy, and submit to the gathering weight of sleep.
“Darling?” Her voice sounded very far away. “Darling? You’re not going to sleep, are you? Because I do have so much to say and we’re letting the brandy go to waste and I haven’t even had a chance to tell you about my plan.”
After a minute he found it easy to stay awake, if only for the pleasure of sitting with her under the double cloak of a blanket, sipping brandy in the moonlight and hearing the rise and fall of her voice. Play-acting or not, her voice in moods of love had always been a pretty sound. At last, with some reluctance, he began to pay attention to what she was saying.