“Can I ask you why we just did that?” I said when we left the theater
“You may,” he said. “But first, I think, a hot beverage.”
We drank coffee at a diner, three cups each. He wasn’t eating anything, so I didn’t push for food. He said, “So?”
I felt like saying, “Noo?,” which is what my father would have said.
“What about those movies?”
“What about them?” Truffaut would have been disgusted.
“They’re the first movies I ever saw. My mother took me. I was nine.”
I did the prayer thing with my hands that he’d been doing as we watched the movies. “Are we doing sob stories? Because if we are I’ll have to remember my first movie too, and I’m not sure I can.”
He laughed. “You’re tough. You’re not used to being up this late, are you?”
I sprayed coffee all over the table, some on his shirt. “You can’t be serious.”
“I wasn’t,” he said. “I know you and Tillinghast” (that was Pam’s last name) “never go to bed. Thus the coma when I came in to get you.”
Pam did have a way of looking terminal when she slept, as if she’d never snap out of it.
He went on, despite my sarcasm. He said he’d been writing for the movies, between four and six every morning. “I start just about the time you and Tillinghast come oozing up from the lake after the night’s dissipation. You look wonderful at that hour, like some undiscovered species, slow but undeniable.”
It seemed he never stopped, never let his guard down, always saw and knew everything, was never without his arsenal of commentary and prediction.
“Why are you telling me this?” I said, trying to sound bored.
“Because you want to know what I do.”
“Like fun.” I smiled. I’d given myself away.
We talked about movies. I told him about seeing The Sound of Music three times in three days, first with my grandmother Liza, who somehow earned the nickname Pussy, then with my mother, then with a friend of Liza’s, Holly Butterfield, who loved taking me places because she had no grandchildren of her own. I told him about leaving the theater after the first time, spellbound, on a late fall afternoon, during the season he and I were in now. It was cold. Somehow the excitement continued, I said. I tried to describe the clarity of color, of happening, in the movie as I saw it that day, how these seemed extendable to the sharp beauty of an early winter night, how this was a kind of love I hadn’t known before, this love for a movie, for all movies. He watched me. He put money on the table, then stood, and reached for my hand.
“Where are we going now?” I asked, giving it. My questions had sounded unforgivably childish to me all evening.
“Driving,” he said. “Continue the excitement.”
• • •
We drove through towns whose main streets were pitch black, reminders that we were out at the wrong time—had we no shame? We rattled through some covered bridges. He talked about ideas for movies, reasons to make them, what they meant, in terms of livelihood, for him.
“Some teacher,” I said, too tired to care what I was saying.
“It’s possible, Adelman, to do more than one thing at a time.”
I didn’t like his instructional tone just then. “Good,” I said. “Take me back to campus, in that case, because I’d like to continue this conversation while I’m sleeping.” I had given up on sex for the evening.
He stopped the car just shy of the two brick pillars that marked the front entrance to Hastings Prep. He was staring straight through the windshield at the brightening sky.
“Two things,” he said, “that matter. Movies and you.”
I sighed. I was exhausted.
“And anything you’re thinking,” he corrected himself. “Now go. Go in through the back door. It’s open, as you know.”
Again, I did as he said. I stole over the wet grass and up through the metal staircasing to my room where Pam was still comatose, seeming not to have moved. I lay down on my bed, and when I woke two hours later I wasn’t even tired. I felt charged, on top of things, ready for him and anything he was planning to dish out.
• • •
It is important, for my own sake and for Isaac’s, that I remind myself from time to time of Fowler’s less salient features, the ones that kept me watching for his car lights on Thursdays when we went driving over state lines to see movies we’d already seen, to have coffee and, finally, sex. We made love in the car, and this was what ultimately bound me to him: a sadness. He didn’t gear up for the act in the obvious ways the guys on Martha’s Vineyard had (aided by drink, music, urging from peers). He didn’t struggle with it. He was careful. At times I thought I was too much for him, that he’d weep or cry out for help. It was the only time I could imagine him as a child, grabbing at the world, seeking help when it became too much. On the rare, sweet occasion when Isaac comes to me in tears I see Fowler in him.
• • •
I expect to see him at the bar, downing the drink of the day and talking up the employees, but he isn’t there. He’s at a table beyond, staring into the middle distance, missing my entrance from the left. The hair at his temples has gone beyond gray to white. Leaning against the table is a walking stick. This year he turned forty-seven.
I stop and wave. An absurd gesture, really, given our history. From his post at the table he opens his arms. He smiles without constraint, with relief, I think. I put my bag on the seat and reach for the hand he’s offering me.
“Leigh,” he says, softly, tapering, like the final word in a poem or a prayer. He tightens his grip on my hand, and I shut my eyes to the heartbreak of his face because I know, without his saying another word, that he’s dying.
chapter two
There’s a line prudence begs you not to cross in love. It makes a distinction between your perceptions of the one you love and what is actual about him. Once you cross this line you abandon the truth that both of you are fallible and that whatever is between you is volatile and fragile. As a teenager I crossed this line, and once I had, it wasn’t visible. I fed my idea of me and Fowler as lasting and invincible with details of the attention he paid me. I embellished our evenings together with promise, and when he wasn’t with me I imagined he was. I invented irresistible postures for him, charming comments, an undeniable allure. The line I crossed allowed me to wallow in his very existence, and only when he was finally gone, when he’d found a place for himself that had no place for me, did I realize what I’d done.
“You look wonderful,” he says. Instead of railing against all the years he stole from Isaac, I want to weep. He’s got my hand, both hands. In his grip there’s a faint tremble. His long fingers are softened by weather and years. His hair is so fine, to the collar, the length it always was.
“Sit,” he says. “Let’s take the afternoon.”
I slide in. It’s not a crime, this line I cross in love. I do remember moments when Fowler had me completely in mind, would come to find me wherever I happened to be in my series of grim jobs before Isaac was born. He’d have a triumph to share or a film idea for us to work on, or an exotic dinner in a bag. “Sweet girl,” he’d say. “My sweet, sweet girl.” It’s not a crime to believe such words, to believe you’ll hear them again and again. It’s something people innocently do.
“Tell me,” he says.
Eight years with a man who speaks directly hasn’t kept me in practice for this. I used to consider myself a repartee queen. Now I’m tongue-tied.
“You first.”
He smiles into his glass. I haven’t been able to deduce what the drink du jour is.
“I’ll be in New York for a while. I wanted you to know about it. Or: you’ve been on my mind.”
It could never be “I’ve missed you,” “I made a terrible mistake,” “I was cruel,” “Thank you for not having me killed.” It has to be some either/or circumstance, some choice that demands thought or commitment. Which would I prefer: that we’re coll
iding, as of this moment, or that I’ve never left his heart?
“I’ll pretend I’ve been on your mind,” I decide.
“Fair enough. All right. Let’s get two of something and I’ll tell you the rest.”
We order scotch. We never went in for prissy drinks. Now that I don’t drink the hard stuff any more, a scotch will knock me into the state required to handle this man.
“I’ve done these movies,” he says, “but you know all that. Soon a teaching post comes up at N.Y.U. So I’m back in the East Village, wandering those avenues.”
He stops, deals with a cough, one hand fluttering up with a handkerchief, not reaching a destination, accepts our drinks from the waiter, who for some reason will not look either of us in the face.
“And you thought I should know.”
He sips, pats the table. “Indeed.”
I wanted it to be more tender, more wrenching, torrid in some way. Not adversarial. If I pulled out Isaac’s baseball photograph now, the tone would surely turn hostile.
I taste the scotch. Firewater. What I seem to crave. Anything to turn this interview into the kind of raw afternoon we’d have had as younger people. To turn me to him, move us to the floor, the backseat, any bed, to make him say, “I’m going in,” to make me tighten around him.
“No,” I say.
“No?” He looks strange, almost offended.
“No. That isn’t why you wrote. You didn’t write to me because you’re in New York for a spell. You’ve been in New York a lot in recent years, and this is my first postcard. My first phone call. Let’s not waste time. Tell me about the cane.”
He leans back in his chair, eyes narrowed at my powers of deduction, which are not extraordinary but which he once told me were. He nurses the scotch with the offense.
He speaks slowly, as if I’m disabled, not he. “Why stop at the cane? Notice my hands. They shake. And it isn’t because I’m nervous, although that’s usually true.”
“I’m sorry.” I want to apologize for searching for lesions, protruding bones, death in the eyes, the telltale signs Jane’s friend Adrienne can list at will.
“Don’t be,” he continues. “I’ve been well most of my life. I’ve been criticized, as has my work, for being unsympathetic to a world that moves at a slower pace. So I’m going to wind down for a while, teach this course, and finish working on something. I’m told I have the winter. Or, in a best-case scenario, I could linger on horribly until the weather gets warm.”
“It isn’t—” I begin.
“No,” he says firmly. “That would be too boring. What’s chosen me is far less usual. I remain, as ever, an open invitation to drama.”
I swallow. Now the scotch is a friend, a buffer. “Who told you?”
“Some demigod at a clinic. A man with more winters ahead of him than you and I have combined.” He shakes the ice and drains the color from the glass. “An expert, in a word.”
It’s an impossible moment, but I take heart in the fact that we’ve stared at each other over tables before. We’ve arrived at impasses, redirected ourselves or just borne them.
“I want your news,” he says. “I want to celebrate.”
It isn’t going to be what I thought, this day. It’s not going to be about claiming things, about rights.
“Do you want to do photographs, career switches, or marital news?” I’m getting it back, the trick of being with him.
“Your choice.”
I waste no time. “I write things for a glamorous, lonely person named Gillette. She has too much money and a theory that when there’s too much money people fall from grace. She’s straight out of one of your movies. Right now I’m researching the decline of manners in Western civilization during times of economic glut. Otherwise, I live in a house. I have three kids, one of whom you know.”
“Let me see you,” he says. “Your eyes, your mouth. Your wrists. Just let me see you.”
Forget sleek, I’m sticking to my clothes. I’ve worn the wrong thing, as always. A sundress would have been more representational, more honest, perhaps less of a come hither. The scotch sings in my head, tells me I can be two people. I can be Simon’s wife, the mother of my three. And I can be Fowler’s for a few hours. There’s no harm in it. Perhaps I should thank the Lord I can still be swayed like this, can still get overwhelmed. Perhaps this meeting is meant to test my sexual and romantic mettle. Perhaps I can afford to expand.
“I’m right here,” I say. “Just look.”
• • •
Imagine a life that works solely on this premise: unforeseeable things do happen, and it is possible to be shaken by them. You have considered yourself a happily married woman for some time, have even boasted to those closest to you that this is the case, and then you spend an hour with a man whose words and touch do the same things to you that you remember happening when you were a teenager falling in love for the first time. Imagine this man is the same one you loved back then. You didn’t think you’d ever be inclined toward him again, but now you suddenly wonder what you’d do without his attention. You begin to behave uncharacteristically, and yet you feel oddly yourself. It’s a fierce shame to your current life, this falling, but you’ve come alive in a way you haven’t since your teens. Your temperature is running one degree higher than usual; your heart beats fast. You remember feeling beautiful in profile walking beside this man years ago, just hours after he’d first kissed you. It could be that, in friendly light, you are now as beautiful as you were then. It seems you and he are moving at a different speed from the rest of humanity, slower, more careful, less angry. You are so full you can’t imagine being antagonized by anything, and yet you know that this very admission, that you’re in love again, with the wrong person, will break hearts. It’s shocking to you that love is this way, that love was ever this way, so demanding of you, so wrenching, but here it is. You didn’t intend this to happen.
Fowler and I are back downtown, crossing over the Bowery from Great Jones Street in frightful heat neither of us seems to mind. I’ve called Kirsten, who thinks I’m with Gillette, lunching. It’s not an unusual scenario, my getting caught up in business with Gillette after a boozy lunch. I’ve told Kirsten that Gillette is an eternal wreck over men and that working for her entails buoying her up during the worst squalls. On occasion Gillette will ask me to handle the runoff when she’s betwixt and between. I have found myself eating lunch at Lutèce with a dumpee, ordering drink after drink for him so he’ll go home painless and unaware of my mission to let him down for her. Simon thinks I should seek new employment, but I’ve grown fond of Gillette. What I’m doing with Fowler wouldn’t faze her in the least. Whenever I suggest a less hectic relationship schedule to her, Gillette reminds me that there are many women—George Sand, Camille Claudel, to name two—who were not lesbians and made conscious choices against marriage because they had to. Marriage would have killed them, she says, as it would kill her. “You can handle it,” she tells me. “You thrive on detail work. I’m after vision. I’m impossible, and every man who gets near me finds that out. Because that’s what men are after—vision—and they don’t like to compete with women over it.”
I thought of Simon’s vision, if he has one, being thwarted by his first marriage to a surgeon. How could he compete with her, setting up computer systems for small businesses and schools while she went out to save lives every day? He was in constant eclipse. It is no wonder he finds me a comfort: I rarely discuss my work, as I am dubious about what will come of it and I fear being dull. Furthermore, “vision” is a word I wouldn’t dare utter seriously, particularly in current company.
Fowler is a tall man, not large, so the walking stick doesn’t diminish him. There is no limp, no stiffness, only a gingerly favoring of the stronger leg. I both want and don’t want to know the exact diagnosis of his illness, as I both want and don’t want what we’re heading for.
At a stoplight he turns to me. “I want to be sure of one thing,” he says.
I could
make a comment about uncertainty, its prevalence over certitude, but in his eyes there is pleading.
“Shoot.”
“That you don’t feel pity,” he says. “That your best interest doesn’t get messy with altruism or pity.”
I’m insulted, but I’ve read about defensiveness in people who are ailing, who know that ultimately no one can help them. I tell him I don’t feel pity, which is true. I’m too wrapped up in being wanted.
We cross to a street where almost every building is abandoned, then arrive at the one, Fowler’s, that has a proper door and other signs of life: garbage awaiting pickup on the curb, some flower boxes, shades, air conditioners on several floors. It’s a walkup, which seems cruel, but we turn after the row of mailboxes into a small foyer where he unlocks several locks. The apartment is bright and airy, the one with the flower boxes full of geraniums and impatiens, red, white, and violet. The walls are bone white, the wood floor polished to perfection. Sparse furnishings give the place a handy, easy, Southwestern flavor. Bookshelves and stacks of labeled moving boxes take up the corners. I remember this about him: a fondness for some order in the house, even when life was complete chaos.
“Nice,” I say, dopey with the heat and drink.
“Nice with you in it,” he says. He tosses his seersucker jacket onto a chair in the big living room. “Let me get you something.”
“I think I may have had enough,” I tease, knowing we’ll have more, wishing we didn’t have to get destroyed to get to bed.
He brings two cans of Tecate and sits on the sand-colored sofa. I join him there, not close enough, willing him to pull me to him when the mood strikes. The beer is freezing. I hold the can to each side of my face and let the water drip off.