“Not the same as we were before? Six months ago I was at a class reunion, and the people who’d been decent and nice when we were in school were still decent and nice, and the assholes were still assholes. The others must have had the same reaction to me. And it gave me a shock. You work on yourself, you think you’re changing and developing, and then the others immediately recognize you as the person you always were.”
“You Europeans are pessimists. You come from the Old World and can’t imagine that there can be a New World and that people can make themselves new too.”
“Let’s take a walk along the beach. The rain’s almost stopped.”
They wrapped the towels around themselves and walked over the sand at the water’s edge. They were barefoot, and the cold, wet sand prickled.
“I’m not a pessimist. I’m always hoping my life will get better.”
“Me too.”
When the rain got heavier again, they went back to Susan’s house. They were freezing. While Richard took a shower, Susan went down to the cellar and turned on the heat; while Susan showered, Richard made a fire in the fireplace. He had put on Susan’s father’s bathrobe, which she had kept, red, warm, made of heavy wool lined with silk. They hung up their wet clothes to dry and figured out how to make the samovar that stood on the mantelpiece above the fireplace work. Then they sat on the sofa, she in one corner, cross-legged, he with his legs folded under him in the other, drank tea, and looked at each other.
“I’m sure my clothes will be ready to put on again soon.”
“Stay. What are you going to do in the rain? Sit alone in your room?”
“I …” He wanted to add that he didn’t want to impose, be a burden on her, mess up her day. But these were meaningless phrases. He knew that his company gave her pleasure. He read it in her face and heard it in her voice. He smiled at her, politely at first, and then embarrassed. What if the situation was arousing expectations in Susan that he couldn’t satisfy? But then she pulled a book out of the many piled along with newspapers beside the sofa and began to read. She sat reading so self-sufficiently, so comfortably, so relaxedly that he began to relax too. He looked for a book, found one that interested him, but didn’t begin it: instead he watched her read, till she looked up and smiled at him. He smiled back, finally free of all tension, and began reading.
6
When he reached the bed-and-breakfast at ten p.m., Linda and John were sitting in front of the television. He told them he wouldn’t be needing any breakfast next morning because he’d be having it with the young woman in the little house a mile further down the road, whom he’d got to know over dinner in the restaurant.
“She doesn’t live in the big house?”
“She doesn’t do it if she comes alone, and hasn’t done it for a long time now.”
“But last year …”
“Last year she came alone, but always had visitors.”
Richard listened to Linda and John with mounting irritation. “You’re talking about Susan …” He realized they’d introduced themselves to each other only with their first names.
“Susan Hartman.”
“She owns the big house with the pillars?”
“Her grandfather bought it in the twenties. After her parents died the administrator ran down the estate, collected the rent, and invested nothing until Susan fired him a few years ago and restored the houses and the garden.”
“Didn’t that cost a fortune?”
“It didn’t cause her any pain. Those of us who live here are happy—there were people interested in parceling up the land and dividing the house or replacing it with a hotel. It would have changed the entire area.”
Richard said good night to Linda and John and went up to his room. He would not have started talking to Susan if he’d known how rich she was. He didn’t like rich people. He despised inherited wealth and considered earned riches to be ill-gotten. His parents had never earned enough to give their four children the things they would have liked, and his salary from the New York Philharmonic was only just enough to cover his costs in the expensive city. He had no rich friends either now or earlier in his life.
He was furious with Susan. As if she’d led him around by the nose. As if she’d lured him into the situation in which he was now stuck. But was he stuck? He didn’t have to go have breakfast with her the next day. Or he could go and tell her they couldn’t see each other anymore, they were too different, their lives were too different, their worlds were too different. But they had just spent the afternoon together in front of the fire, reading sentences aloud to each other from time to time, they had cooked together, eaten, washed up, watched a movie, and both of them had felt good. Too different?
He brushed his teeth so furiously that he hurt his left cheek. He sat down on the bed with his hand to his cheek, feeling sorry for himself. He really was stuck. He had fallen in love with Susan. Only a little, he told himself. For what did he really know about her? What actually did he like about her? How would things go, given the difference in their lives and their worlds? Perhaps she would find it charming to eat three times in the little Italian restaurant he could afford. After that, should he allow her to invite him out instead? Or should he run up debt on credit cards?
He didn’t sleep well. He kept waking up, and around six a.m., when he realized he wouldn’t go to sleep again, he gave up, put on his clothes, and left the house. The sky was filled with dark clouds, but there was a red glow in the east. If Richard wasn’t to miss the sunrise over the ocean he’d have to hurry and run in his regular shoes, which he’d put on instead of his running shoes. The soles made a loud noise on the road, once scaring up a flock of crows and once several hares. In the east the red was glowing brighter and stronger; Richard had seen a sunset like that before, but never such a sunrise. As he passed Susan’s house he took care to move quietly.
Then he reached the beach. The sun came up golden out of a molten sea and into a sky that was all flames—it was a matter of moments, and then the clouds extinguished everything. Richard suddenly felt as if it wasn’t just darker but colder.
He needn’t have bothered to be quiet in front of Susan’s house. She too was already up, sitting at the foot of a dune. She saw him, got to her feet, and came toward him. She moved slowly: the sand by the dunes was deep and made walking difficult. Richard went to meet her, but only because he wished to be polite. He preferred to just watch her as she walked calmly and confidently, her head sometimes down and then raised, and when it was raised her eyes were always on his face. It felt as if they were negotiating something, but he didn’t know what it was. He didn’t understand what question was in her eyes or what answers she found in his. He smiled but she didn’t smile back, just looked at him gravely.
When they stood facing each other, she took his hand. “Come!” She led him to her house and upstairs into the bedroom. She undressed, lay down on the bed, and watched as he undressed and lay down beside her. “I’ve waited such a long time for you.”
7
That was the way she made love to him. As if she had been searching for him forever and had finally found him. As if neither she nor he could do anything wrong.
She swept him along, and he allowed it to happen. He didn’t ask himself: How am I? And didn’t ask her: How was I? As they lay next to each other afterward, he knew that he loved her. This little person with eyes that were too small and a chin that was too pronounced, skin that was too thin, and a figure more like a boy’s than the womanly shapes he had loved until now. With a confidence that after being pushed around from only moderately loving parents to a loveless aunt she had no right to have. With more money than could be good for her. And who saw something in him that he didn’t see himself, and thereby made a gift of it to him.
For the first time, he had made love to a woman as if no images existed of how love was supposed to take place. As if they were a couple out of the nineteenth century, for whom the movies and television could not yet dictate the right way
to kiss, the right way to moan, the right way for the face to express passion and the body to shudder with desire. A couple who were discovering love and kissing and moaning for themselves. Susan didn’t seem to close her eyes once. Whenever he looked at her, she was also looking at him. He loved that look, faraway, trusting.
She propped herself up and laughed at him. “Thank goodness I smiled at you in the restaurant when you didn’t know what to do. At first I didn’t think it was necessary. I thought you’d come to me as directly and quickly as you could.”
He happily echoed her laugh. It didn’t occur to them to take the clumsy, grating aspects of their meeting in the restaurant as any kind of warning. They took it as an awkwardness that laughter could dispel.
They stayed in bed until evening. Then they opened the garage and took Susan’s car, a well-maintained elderly BMW, to drive through rain and darkness to a supermarket. The light was harsh, it smelled of cleaning fluids, the music was synthetic, and the handful of customers were wearily pushing their carts through the empty aisles. “We should have stayed in bed,” she whispered to him, and he was glad that she was as disturbed by the light and the smell and the music as he was. She sighed, laughed, started shopping, and soon had filled up her cart. From time to time he added something, apples, pancake mix, wine. At the checkout, he paid with his credit card and knew that next month, for the first time, he wouldn’t be able to pay in full. It made him uncomfortable, but more than that, it irritated him that on a day like today something as trivial as an overdrawn credit account could upset him. So in the wine and liquor section he bought three bottles of champagne for good measure.
On the way home she asked, “Shall we get your things?”
“Maybe Linda and John are already asleep. I don’t want to wake them.”
Susan nodded. She drove fast and with assurance, and by the way she took the many curves, he could tell that she knew the car and the route well. “Did you drive the car here from Los Angeles?”
“No, the car belongs here. Clark takes care of the house and the garden and the car as well.”
“You only stay in the big house when you have guests?”
“Shall we move up there tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. It’s …”
“It’s too big for me. But with you there it would be fun. We’d read in the library, play billiards in the billiards room, you could practice the flute in the music room, and I’d have breakfast served in the little salon and dinner in the big one.” She talked more and more happily, more and more firmly. “We’ll sleep in the big bedroom where my grandparents and parents slept. Or we’ll sleep in my room in the bed where I dreamed of my prince when I was a girl.”
He saw her smiling face in the dull glow of the dashboard. Susan was lost in her memories. For the first time since they’d met, she was somewhere else. Richard wanted to ask which actor or singer she’d dreamed of back then, wanted to know everything about the men in her life, wanted to hear that they’d all been mere prophets while he was the Messiah. But then he thought that his worries about the other men were as petty as the excessive charge on his credit account. He was tired and laid his head on Susan’s shoulder. She reached over and stroked his head with her left hand, pressed his head to her shoulder, and he fell asleep.
8
Over the next few days he learned everything about the men in Susan’s life. He also learned about her longing for children, at least two, preferably four. At first with her husband there was no success, then she no longer loved him and she got divorced. He learned she’d studied art history at college, then had gone to business school, and had reorganized a toy train manufacturer which she’d inherited from her father and then sold along with the other firms she’d inherited. He learned that she had an apartment in Manhattan that she was in the process of having renovated because she wanted to move from Los Angeles to New York. He also learned that she was forty-one, two years older than he was.
Again and again, whatever Susan told him about her life until now ended in plans for their future together. She described her apartment in New York: the wide staircase in the duplex that led up from the sixth floor to the seventh, the wide corridors, the large high rooms, the kitchen with the dumbwaiter, the view of the park. She had grown up in the apartment until her aunt fetched her to Santa Barbara after her parents’ death. “I used to slide down the banisters and roller-skate in the corridors, I could get into the dumbwaiter till I was six, and when I was in bed I could watch the tops of the trees waving from out of my window. You have to go see the apartment!” She couldn’t show it to him herself because she was flying back from the Cape to Los Angeles to organize both the foundation’s move and her own. “Will you meet with the architect? We can still change everything.”
Her grandfather had acquired not only the duplex but the entire building on Fifth Avenue at a very favorable price during the Depression. Along with the estate on the Cape and another in the Adirondacks. “I have to renovate that again too. Do you enjoy architecture? Building and renovating and decorating? I got the plans and brought them with me—shall we look at them together?”
She talked about a couple, old friends of hers, who had been trying in vain to have children for years, and had just spent their vacation at a fertility farm. She described the diet and the program, which laid out when the two of them were to sleep, exercise, eat, even have sex. She found it funny, but was also a little anxious. “You Europeans don’t know about this kind of thing, or so I read. You see life as fate that cannot be changed.”
“Yes,” he said, “and if we’re destined to kill our fathers and sleep with our mothers, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
She laughed. “Then you really can’t hold anything against the fertility farm. If it doesn’t help your destiny, it can’t do any harm, either.” She shrugged apologetically. “It’s just because things didn’t work with Robert back then. Perhaps it wasn’t my fault, perhaps he was the one with the problem, we didn’t have any tests done. But all the same, I’ve been afraid ever since.”
He nodded. He was feeling afraid too. About the minimum two, maximum four children. And beforehand, about having to follow a set diet and have sex at set times with Susan at the fertility farm. About the loud ticking of the biological clock until the fourth child arrived or no more children were possible. About the possibility that Susan’s abandon and passion when she made love to him weren’t about him at all.
“Don’t be afraid. I just say what’s on my mind. That doesn’t mean it’s my last word on anything. You censor what you say.
“Again, that’s European.”
He didn’t want a conversation about his fear. She was right: he censored what he said, while she said directly whatever she was thinking or feeling. No, she didn’t want to plan a visit with him to the fertility farm. But she did want to plan the future with him, and although he too wanted it more with every day that passed, he had so much less to bring to the relationship than she did: no apartment, no houses, no money. If he and the woman at the first desk of the second violin section had fallen in love, then they would have looked for an apartment together and decided together which of his furniture and which of her furniture would go into the new apartment and what they would have to find at a thrift store. Susan was certainly ready to fill a room or two with his furniture. But he knew it wouldn’t fit in.
He’d be able to bring his flute and his sheet music, and practice at the music stand that would certainly exist among all her furniture. He could put his books in her bookcases, order his papers in her father’s filing cabinet, and write his letters at her father’s desk. He would best leave his clothes in the closet here in the country; in the city, he wouldn’t look so good in them when he was with her. She would be delighted to use her sense of fashion to buy him new ones.
He practiced a lot. Most of the time “dry,” as he called it, when he simply curled and stretched his little finger. But more and more frequently on the flute itself. It
was becoming a part of him in a way it never had before. It belonged to him, it was worth a lot, with it he created music and made money, he could take it wherever he went, he was at home with it anywhere. And when he played, he offered Susan something that no one else could offer her. When he improvised, he made melodies that fit her moods.
9
The corner room in the big house was their favorite. The many windows reached down to the floor and could be slid aside in good weather and protected with shutters when it was bad. When rain prevented them from walking on the beach, this was where they could still feel in touch with the ocean, the waves, the seagulls, and the occasional passing ship. Sometimes when they were out on the sand, the cold rain lashed their faces so sharply that it hurt.
The room was furnished with cane recliners, big chairs and tables, with soft cushions against the hard-woven surfaces. “Pity,” he said when she led him through the house and he saw the recliners, which were only wide enough for one person. Two days later, as they were having breakfast in the little salon, a truck pulled up and two men in blue coveralls carried a double recliner into the house. It matched the other furniture, and the cushions had the same flower pattern as the other cushions.
The weather made every day like every other. It rained day after day, sometimes rising to the level of a storm, sometimes stopping for hours or sometimes mere minutes, and sometimes the skies cleared for a moment and the rooftops made sheets of light. When the weather allowed, Susan and Richard walked on the beach; if they ran out of supplies they drove to the supermarket, otherwise they stayed in the big house. When they switched from the little house to the big one, Susan had called Clark’s wife, Mita, who came for a few hours every day to take care of cleaning and washing and cooking. She was so discreet that it was several days before Richard met her.