Colin Asch broached the subject casually to his Aunt Ginny, not that Dorothea Deverell might want to have a birthday party for him of course but that he, Colin, wanted to celebrate by taking the Weidmanns out to dinner—the restaurant of their choice, and perhaps Dorothea Deverell would like to join them?—but as Colin should have known, Ginny insisted she would have the dinner herself, at home; she hadn’t known the nineteenth was Colin’s birthday—and it was coming up so quickly! why hadn’t he given her warning?—and he really was spending too much money on restaurants, wasn’t he—her fond worried eyes searching his—but Colin wasn’t listening to every syllable; he nodded, winced, said a little impatiently, “OK, but do you think your friend Dorothea would like to join us?” and Ginny hesitated a moment before saying of course, she’d call Dorothea, that was a good idea, but she’d thought—again searching his eyes quizzically—“Probably you would like me to invite Hartley? Aren’t you and Hartley …?” and her voice trailed off discreetly and in a moment of hauteur Colin said, “Hartley and I are—” as if really he couldn’t imagine what Ginny was thinking of, what the precise literal even clinical term was; thus it fell to the fat-faced busybody cunt to supply it, not “fucking” (as perhaps she was thinking; the old girl knew which end was up) but”—seeing each other? Quite often? That’s the impression I have—am I mistaken?”
Colin was back on his heels now. Cool it. Easy. Saying, smiling, “I guess that’s right, Aunt Ginny. I’m so grateful to you for introducing us.” He paused, and they smiled happily at each other, like conspirators. “Hartley is such a special person.”
“She is, she is!” Ginny said, as if the issue had been in some doubt. “So you’d like me to call her, then? For Saturday evening?”
“And your friend Miss Deverell too?”
“And Dorothea too—of course.”
Afterward Ginny said almost accusingly, “Colin, I’m really so glad you told me your birthday was imminent. It would have been a pity for none of us to know. Are there other things about you, dear, you should tell us?”—smiling, as if teasing—“other secrets?”
Colin laughed. “Not a one, Aunt!”
But to Colin’s regret Dorothea Deverell could not come to his birthday party: terribly sorry, she told Ginny, she had another engagement that night.
Mailed him a birthday card, however: tasteful, attractive, but just a commercial card. From a gift shop. No present, no other acknowledgment. If he was disappointed—and, yes, he was—he hid his disappointment so thoroughly that everyone (the Weidmanns, H.E. looking prettier than usual in something soft, lacy, pastel; Colin Asch often had that effect upon even the strongest-minded “career woman”) had a great time, a memorable time, Colin Asch telling amusing fantastical stories about travel in Europe, travel in North Africa, the vicissitudes of life “on the bum” on the open road, and truly he liked making people laugh, especially people who were fond of him, people who were on his side; you could see the excited emotion shining in H.E.’s big sensational mascaraed eyes: now this was a girl (not a girl, precisely: thirty-one years old) who adored him, adored his cock, anything he wanted to do to her he’d be welcome to do, in time, if (as of course he would: Colin Asch was no jerk-off asshole male chauvinist) he took it slow enough, gradual enough, didn’t lose his cool with her little-girl simpering and not wanting him to see her in the shower, the droopy big-veined breasts, the lardish thighs, potbelly, and her skin a little coarse without the thick pancake makeup, Jesus how he resented her going crazy the way she did as if for the show of it coming to orgasm like he was killing her or something breaking his rhythm and concentration which really pissed him off it tempted him to the cruel cruel thought of jerking his cock right out of her at the crucial moment as he’d done with one or two cunts in the past taking Colin Asch for granted, or why not—just a casual quicksilver thought: not serious!—actually kill the cunt closing his two big thumbs around her throat—the carotid artery, is it?—see how she likes it then, moaning and gasping and screaming bloody murder in his ear then sobbing afterward saying his name like an incantation like she had the right simply because he’d told her he thought he was in love with her he’d never met a girl like her and so on and so forth, it pissed him off too that she was that eager to believe, wrung his heart with pity and he hated pity: all it did was weaken.
“Thank you all very much … this is maybe”—eyes filling with tears like genuine pain—“the happiest birthday of my life.”
So that’s it, asshole.
Colin Asch’s twenty-eighth fucking birthday.
And Christmas too came and went and Colin Asch saw nothing of Dorothea Deverell but was relieved to hear she’d gone somewhere to visit relatives—“distant relatives I think,” a woman friend of the Weidmanns told them, “poor thing, distant relatives is all she has”—so he felt better immediately and in the Blue Ledger charted his plans for the New Year. Impatiently he thumbed through the earlier pages seeking, what was it, that Roman saying Mr. Kreuzer had printed on the blackboard, how the class had shivered when he translated it, and the strange knowing set of his eyes drifting as invariably they did onto C.A., the tall stiff pretty boy in the first row, what the fuck was it, and where?—then suddenly he’d found it, was staring at it. Hand-printed block letters in smudged India ink: Mors tua, vita mea.
He smiled; he saw what he must do. And she would never know—never know a thing!
“Your death, my life.”
PART TWO
5
“Yes? Who is it?—What?”
Dorothea Deverell, heart beating rapidly, fists instinctively raised as if to protect her face, was wakened from a deep, near-narcoleptic sleep by a sound as of something, or someone, in the room with her. A murmured word, a sharp inhalation of breath, a shifting (not precisely a creaking) of her bedroom floorboards … and suddenly she was awake and badly frightened.
She lay shrewd and unmoving. She heard nothing. She told herself calmly, There is no one in this room with you and there is no one in this house with you … as you know. As always at such moments of crisis Dorothea Deverell’s interior voice was brisk, pragmatic, and scolding, though her vision, struck so rudely from sleep, was blurred as if she were peering through an element dense as water. What had she heard, if she’d heard anything? It was early, still dark, too early for mourning doves in the eaves to disturb her with their melancholy cooing, or for the notorious sanitation truck, or the newspaper delivery.… A jetliner passing overhead, perhaps. Yes. Making windowpanes vibrate, casting a malevolent fibrillation to the very air. That seemed the most likely explanation.
Dorothea’s fear retreated but did not vanish, like shadows dimmed by light. She drew the covers up to her head, tried a childish maneuver of hiding her eyes, pressing her face against the pillow.… She tried to take comfort, as ordinarily she would have done, that she was in her own bed: returned home after ten days’ absence, amid her own cherished things, beneath her own ceiling, set soon to embark upon one of Dorothea Deverell’s flawlessly executed professional days. But these thoughts aroused an unexpected pang of dismay, like muck unwisely stirred. Today was January 4, the first Monday of the new year, and though she had fled the holidays in Lathrup Farms to force herself to a decision about her future, she had failed to come to any decision: the new year, stretching off interminably, would be a more strained variation of the old.
She’d gone away, in dread of the “holidays”—that debilitating season in America when stable men and women begin to quaver, and the unmarried, like Dorothea Deverell, are made most keenly to feel the pathos of their situation—to a small inn in Framington, Vermont, telling no one except Charles Carpenter about where she was going; she’d gone away alone to contemplate her life: as she thought of it, wryly, when in the mood for wryness, the ruins of her life. For she knew very well—how could she not know?—that her days at the Brannon Institute, where she had been so happy, were numbered and rapidly diminishing, and she could not much longer deceive herself about Cha
rles Carpenter—that happiness of any sane sort lay in that direction. They had quarrelled bitterly over the telephone; they had said bitter things. Dorothea Deverell, gentlest of women, had heard herself say to the person whom of all the world she loved the most, “To put it crudely, Charles, you seem to be waiting for Agnes to get seriously sick and die—you won’t take the first step either to divorce her or to break with me.”
Before Dorothea left for Vermont, Charles Carpenter had insisted on seeing her, to plead with her another time—not to lose patience with him, or faith in him, not to cease to love him: for what would his life be, without her? “What exactly is your life with me?” Dorothea had inquired, not archly but quietly, with the air of one asking a quite serious question; and Charles Carpenter, burying his face in her neck, had murmured, “Just—my life.” He had tried to talk her out of going to Vermont by herself, especially at such a time. It would make her all the more lonely. It would make her morbid. (Charles knew that, during the first summer of their marriage, Dorothea and her husband had driven together through New England, had stayed in romantic country inns.) But most of all, he would miss her enormously: “It’s so much more painful at this time of year to feel yourself alone,” Charles said, rubbing his eyes with both hands, “when you can’t actually find any time to be alone, to breathe. When you’re jammed up against other people and obliged, like them, to be having a good time.”
Dorothea ignored Charles’s gentle attempt at wit; such attempts, on both their parts, were also usually gestures at reconciliation. She said, unfairly, “You could come with me.” He said, staring, “Ah, but Dorothea—that’s what I can’t do.” And so it went, for they had had this conversation or its variants many times before; if one spoke impetuously, like Dorothea, the other had hardly any serious need to reply in defense—for in this case Dorothea knew that Charles Carpenter was not a man who took his responsibilities lightly: he had an emotionally unstable wife who did not so much threaten as to indicate, by her reckless behavior, the continuous possibility of suicide, and he had (the burden, Dorothea thought, of “had”!) aging parents in Boston, supremely nice people, for whom he represented the sole means of emotional support. As a partner at Bell, Carpenter, Smith & Lowe he had also, at this time of year, the duty to put in an appearance at any number of festive holiday affairs, ranging from black-tie dinners to the company’s annual Christmas party for its employees. Running away to a romantic inn in the Green Mountains had the appeal only of the impossible.
Dorothea said, “What I really intend is to spend some uninterrupted time being depressed. I realized, the other day, with the telephone ringing a half dozen times in an hour, it’s been a while since I’ve had the solitude for it. When you’re working you really can’t settle into being depressed in any systematic way.”
Charles laughed as if startled. Though he knew Dorothea Deverell more intimately than any other living person knew her, he professed frequently to be startled by her most candid remarks, as if they were out of character. He said, “You’re joking of course?”
“Oh, of course.” Dorothea laughed.
They kissed, shyly at first, then with increasing urgency. Dorothea felt her lover’s suddenly aroused desire with a pang of unease and excitement. For Charles Carpenter was another woman’s husband: Dorothea Deverell was trespassing; surely this constituted transgression? surely both were behaving criminally? Charles murmured, “Should we go upstairs? Dorothea—darling? Could we?—at least for a while?” but Dorothea said unexpectedly, “No, please—it would only make leaving harder.” “But which of us is leaving?” Charles said, hurt. And then, seeing Dorothea’s face, “I seem to have ruined your life after all. And I meant, you know, only good.” Dorothea said impatiently, “Don’t talk like that—you speak as if I were a victim, that my life were over! We both knew you were married, from the start. We both knew.” “But I’m preventing you from—from meeting other men,” Charles said humbly. And Dorothea, stepping away from him, laughing, a catch of despair in her throat, said, “I meet other men all the time! I wouldn’t lack for escorts, really! It’s just that, compared to you, they exert no special fascination.” The image of Ginny Weidmann’s young nephew flashed to Dorothea’s mind—the fine cheekbones, the intense intelligent eyes—but was as swiftly banished. She paused. She said, “Jerome Gallagher called the other evening.” “Who?” “Jerome Gallagher, you remember—the man Ginny introduced me to, back in November. At that dinner at their house.” Charles frowned as if suddenly vexed. “Yes. That dinner,” he said flatly. “The evening Ginny Weidmann’s strange nephew appeared,” Dorothea said, as if it were necessary to elaborate. She knew Charles did not want to be reminded of the evening since, by the end of it, his wife had drunk so much that she swayed visibly on her feet and had to be helped by Charles simply to rise from her place; yet she heard herself saying, in a bright, neutral tone, “What did you think of him, Charles? We never really talked about him: Colin Asch.” Charles passed a hand over his eyes; his skin was unevenly flushed, almost ruddy. He was standing in Dorothea Deverell’s charmingly furnished living room, on her exquisite old Chinese rug, as if, for the fraction of an instant, he himself were about to sway on his feet—to pass so rapidly from the exigency of sexual desire to the ellipsis of discourse might not be, Dorothea was afterward, repentant, to think, altogether healthy. But his voice was clear enough, if not indeed brusque: “I didn’t think anything of him at all.”
Charles Carpenter had extracted from Dorothea Deverell a vague sort of promise that she would telephone him from Vermont sometime during the holidays; but this, after all, she did not do: to her vast defiant relief she did not do. (How many times in recent years Dorothea Deverell had been reduced to the shameful act of telephoning her lover and hanging up quietly when his wife answered, she would not have wanted to calculate, nor would she in her pride want to acknowledge, even to herself, how frequently, with no excuse whatsoever, she had driven past the Carpenters’ handsome old colonnaded house on West Fairway Drive.) So for the duration of her retreat they had been chastely out of contact, which seemed to Dorothea both bracing and very sad, for she missed him terribly, missed even the special pang of not seeing him that we feel only when living in close proximity with the one whom we are forbidden to see—for distance, in matters of romance, is a powerful analgesic.
She was therefore relieved to discover, amid the pile of cards, letters, and packages of various sizes that had accumulated in her absence, a handwritten letter from Charles Carpenter, which she ripped open at once and quickly scanned: but it told her, in its carefully chosen, rather Augustan diction, nothing she did not already know. Her heartbeat, painful at first, had subsided by the end of the letter to its normal rhythm. Did I expect him to break it off? Dorothea wondered. Charles is not after all the one to break things off. One of the packages was auspiciously large, gift-wrapped, from Saks, with no other return address and no signature on the MERRY CHRISTMAS card from the store; Dorothea opened it slowly and lifted enthralled out of the tissue paper a white lace formal blouse—or was it a little jacket?—exquisitely beautiful, and in her size—size 6—and there was a matching skirt, floor-length, silken wool, dazzlingly white. It was so lovely a gift, so unexpected—Dorothea had bought nothing for Charles, had insisted they not exchange presents this year—she began to cry in hoarse gasping sobs.
“It’s too good for me; I don’t deserve it!”
Upstairs in bed she had been so besieged by unwanted thoughts she’d given up trying to get back to sleep; and rose, and showered, and dressed, and began the long day, setting herself in motion like a clockwork doll though it was not yet 7 A.M. In the inn at Framington, in her single rather chilly room with its impeccable antique-imitation furniture and windows overlooking the village green, Dorothea had managed to sleep heavily; yet she had not on the whole felt refreshed, but groggy, headachy, edgy, apprehensive—as if her flight from home had been perilous, exposing her to hairline fractures of the psyche she might not otherw
ise have noticed. Sleeping was always a problem for Dorothea: if she slept well she tended to feel guilty for having done so, as if it were a symptom of encroaching sloth and deterioration; if she slept poorly, she spent the better part of the day yearning to return to sleep. In Vermont she had not wanted to think that there might simply be something wrong … some growing unease in her soul, as of premonitory alarm. Waking several times in the night as she’d wakened this morning, as if something, or someone, were in the room with her. Or watching her. Or merely thinking of her.
And when, twice a day, except on the very coldest days, she left the hotel to trudge along the snowy country roads, she had to fight the panicky sensation that she was being followed. Followed! Dorothea Deverell in an old-fashioned fur coat, fur hat pulled down low on her forehead, knee-high boots … so bundled up as to appear ageless, sexless. She knew it was absurd; she knew it was groundless, such fear, such bone-deep apprehension. In a stained old volume of Montaigne’s Essays found on a shelf in her room she discovered a poisonous gem set in the midst of Montaigne’s affable prose, a quotation from Pythagoras, translated as Good is finite and certain, evil is infinite and uncertain. The insight made a sudden, sickening impression on her—“Of course!”