I had met her in the off-season in the big restaurant where she worked. It was a quiet night, and I was not only alone at my table but the only diner in my section. She waited on me with a quiet friendliness, much at home with the notion that a meal that tasted right for me was better wages for her than a meal that tasted wrong. Like other good materialistic people before her, she was also maternalistic: She saw money as coming in all kinds of emotional flavors. It took happy money to buy a dependable appliance.
When I ordered the shrimp cocktail, she shook her head. “You don’t want the shrimp,” she said. “They’ve died and risen three times. Take the chowder.” I did. She guided me through the meal. She wanted my drinks to be right. She did it all with no great fuss—I was free to stay in my private thoughts, she in hers. We talked with whatever surplus was in our moods. Perhaps one waitress in ten could enjoy a lonely customer as much as Chloe. I realized after a while that on pickup acquaintance, which was never my style, I was surprisingly comfortable with her.
I stopped off again at the restaurant on another quiet night and she sat and had dessert and coffee with me. I learned of her life. She had two sons, twenty and twenty-one; they dwelt in Manchester, New Hampshire, and worked in the mills. She claimed to be thirty-eight, and her husband had broken up with her five years ago. Caught her cheating. “He was right. I was a boozer then, and you can’t trust a boozer. My heels were as round as roller skates.” She laughed with enough good humor to have been watching her own pornographic romp.
We went to her trailer. I have an ability developed, I believe, by my profession. I can concentrate on what is before me. Inter-office flaps, bureaucratic infringements, security leaks, even such assaults on the unconscious as my first infidelity to Kittredge, can be ignored. I have a personal instrument I think of as average, a good soldier, a dick as vulnerable as any other. It throbs with encouragement and droops with the oncoming of guilt. So it is testimony to the power of my concentration and to Chloe’s voluptuous exposures (call it a crime against the public pleasure for her to be seen in clothes) that, considering the uniqueness and magnitude of my marital breach, there was only a hint of sag from time to time in the fine fellow below. I was starved, in truth, for what Chloe had to offer.
Let me see if I can explain. Lovemaking with Kittredge was—I use the word once more—a sacrament. I am not at ease trying to speak of it. Whereas, I can give all away in talking about Chloe; we were like kids in the barn; Chloe even smelled of earth and straw. But there was ceremony to embracing Kittredge.
I do not mean that we were solemn or measured. If it did not come to real desire, we might not make love for a month. When it happened, however, it certainly did; after all our years together, we still flew at each other. Kittredge, indeed, was as fierce as one of those wood-animals with claws and sharp teeth and fine fur that you can never quite tame. At its worst, there were times when I felt like a tomcat in with a raccoon. My tongue (once key to devil’s heaven) was rarely now in her thoughts—rather, our act was subservient to coming together, cruelty to cruelty, love to love. I’d see God when the lightning flashed and we jolted our souls into one another. Afterward, was tenderness, and the sweetest domestic knowledge of how curious and wonderful we were for one another, but it was not in the least like getting it on with Chloe. With Chloe it was get ready for the rush, get ready for the sale, whoo-ee, gushers, we’d hit oil together. Recuperating, it felt low-down and slimy and rich as the earth. You could grow flowers out of your ass.
Driving that car, my heart in my teeth, and the road ice in my ice-cold fingers, I knew all over again what Chloe gave me. It was equality. We had nothing in common but our equality. If they brought us up for judgment, we could go hand in hand. Our bodies were matched in depth to one another, and we felt the affection of carrots and peas in the same meat soup. I had never known a woman so much my physical equal as Chloe.
Whereas, Kittredge was the former consort of a knight, now a crippled knight. I felt like a squire in a medieval romance. While my knight was off on a crusade, I entertained his lady. If we had found a way to pick the lock of her chastity belt, I still had to mount the steps. We might see lightning and stars, yet the bedroom remained her chamber. Our ecstasy was as austere as the glow of phosphorescent lights in Maine waters. I did not see Creation; rather, I had glimpses of the heavens. With Chloe, I felt like one more Teamster with a heavy rig.
On a night of driving so unsettled as this—sleet on the cusp of freezing—there was no way to meditate for long. Rather, thoughts jumped up before me. So, I saw that Chloe had the shape of a wife, and Kittredge was still my lady. In most affairs, a kiss can remind you of many a mouth you have known. It lubricates a marriage to have a wife who reminds you of other women as well. Many a connubial union is but the sublimation of orgies never embarked upon. With Kittredge, I had hardly been enjoying the promiscuity of making love to one woman who might serve as surrogate for many.
Once, about a month after we were married, she said to me, “There’s nothing worse than the breaking of vows. I always feel as if the universe is held together by the few solemn promises that are kept. Hugh was awful. You could never trust a word of his. I shouldn’t tell you, darling, but when you and I first began, it was such an achievement for me. I suppose it was the bravest thing I’d ever done.”
“Don’t ever be that brave with me,” I said, and it was no threat. At the uneasy center of my voice, I was begging her.
“I won’t. I won’t ever.” She would have had the clear eyes of an angel but for a touch of mist in the blue. A philosopher, she was always trying to perceive objects at a great distance. “No,” she said, “let’s make a pledge. Absolute honesty between us. If either of us has anything to do with someone else, we must tell.”
“I pledge,” I said.
“My God,” she said, “with Hugh I never knew. Is that one of the reasons he clung to that awful name, Harlot?” She stopped. Harlot, whatever he was doing at this moment, was in the wheelchair now. “Poor old Gobby,” she said. Any compassion she still held for him was in this nickname.
“Why is the name Gobby?” With Kittredge, there was a time for everything and I had never asked her before.
“God’s old beast. That’s his name.”
“One name, anyway.”
“Oh, darling, I love giving people names. At least, people I care about. That’s the only way we’re allowed to be promiscuous. Give each other hordes of names.”
Over the years, one by one, I had learned a few of them. Hugh had a fine mustache, trim pepper-and-salt. It belonged on a British cavalry colonel. Kittredge used to call him Trimsky. “Just as bright as Leon Trotsky,” she’d say, “but ten times as neat.” Later I found out she was, this once, not original. It was Allen Dulles who first christened him thus. That was when Hugh was working for the OSS in London during the war. Apparently Dulles repeated it to Kittredge at her wedding. Kittredge had been mad about Allen Dulles ever since meeting him at a Georgetown garden party her parents took her to during the Easter vacation of her sophomore year in Radcliffe. Ah, the poor Harvard men who tried to spark Kittredge after Allen Dulles kissed her on the cheek for good-bye.
Following the nuptials, she took to calling Hugh Tremont Montague by Trimsky. He gave her monikers in return. One was Ketchum, for Ketchum, Idaho (since Kittredge’s full pedigree was Hadley Kittredge Gardiner, first name taken from Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife, whom Kittredge’s father, Rodman Knowles Gardiner, met in Paris in the twenties and thought was “the nicest woman ever encountered”).
It had taken its own good time for me to learn a few metamorphoses of my beloved’s names. Ketchum, avoiding Ketchup, was transmogrified into Red—which was perfect, and stuck for a period, since Kittredge’s hair was raven-black (and her skin as white as your best white marble). I also knew a lover’s pain when Kittredge confessed that Hugh Montague, on notable nights, would call her Hotsky. Did people in Intelligence shift names about the way others move
furniture around a room?
In any event, Gobby was the postmarital a.k.a.
“I hated,” said Kittredge, “the idea that I couldn’t trust Gobby’s personal honesty. You do pledge, darling? We will have honesty between us?”
“We will.”
My car went into a severe skid, much longer now in memory than it takes to tell. The wall of forest on one side stuttered up to me, and my front end yawed when I spun the wheel, whereupon car and I rushed viciously across the lane toward the other wall of pines at the far shoulder, now suddenly the near shoulder. I thought for a moment I had died and become a devil, for my head seemed put on backwards: I was looking down the road at the turn I had just come out of. Then, as slowly as if I were in a whirlpool at sea, the road began to revolve. Interminably. I could have been a spot of dust on a turntable. Presto!—car and I were moving forward again. I had skidded ninety degrees to the right, then had spun the other way through a full three-sixty counterclockwise, no, put on ninety more degrees to find myself going straight at last, a full one-and-a-quarter, four-fifty-degree turn. I was beyond fear. I felt as if I had fallen out of a ten-story window, landed in a fireman’s net, and was now strolling around in a glow and a daze. “Millions of creatures,” I said aloud to the empty car—actually said it aloud!—“walk the earth unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep,” after which, trundling along at thirty miles an hour, too weak and exhilarated to stop, I added in salute to the lines just recited, “Milton, Paradise Lost,” and thought of how Chloe and I had gotten up from bed in her trailer on the outskirts of Bath a couple of hours ago and had gone for a farewell drink to a cocktail lounge with holes in the stuffing of the red leatherette booths. Just after the potions were brought, I knocked one over in a conversational sweep of my arm, and the glass shattered into intolerable little bits as if nothing much was holding together any longer. Whereupon Chloe and I both fell into an uncharacteristic brown spell, and were gloomy when we said good-bye. Infidelity was on the horror of the air.
Now I pondered those millions of creatures who walked the earth unseen. Did they whisper in Kittredge’s ear as she slept, even as once they had called out to me on that long-ago day eleven years back when she grew ready to cut her wrists? Who ran the espionage systems that lived in the ocean of the spirits? A spy needed thoughts as narrow as lasers to rouse no stir. How did an agent making copies of secret papers week after week, year after year, keep from himself the awful fear that this spirit sea of misdeeds might seep into the sleep of the man who could catch him?
I passed a phone booth in a rest area and stopped the car. I was in a panic to speak to Kittredge. Abruptly it seemed that if I did not reach her at once, every last barrier between my mind and hers would be down.
What can be closer to the ages of old-ice than one corroded, pockmarked phone booth on a freezing highway in Maine? I had to raise the operator, and she had trouble repeating the number of my credit card. I was stamping my feet to keep warm before the machinery of the Bell Company was able to stir itself out of chilly sleep. The phone rang four, five, six times, and then I leaped with love at the sound of Kittredge’s voice and, on the instant, recalled how my heart had once lifted equally with joy one dark night alone in a canoe in Vermont, when, behold! a galaxy of light lit up every ripple on the black waters of the pond as a full harvest moon rose exactly in the notch between two steep round hills. Druid certainties left their flush then on my heart. I knew a curious peace. So did Kittredge’s voice now give ease to the stricken tunnels of my breath. I felt as if I had never heard her voice before. Let no one say I did not love my wife if after eleven years of marriage I could still discover her wonders. Most speaking tones come into my ear through filters and baffles. I hear people monitoring their larynx to purvey warmth and cold, probity, confidence, censure, approbation—we are phony voices if only by a little. After all, one’s speech is the first instrument of one’s will.
Kittredge’s voice came out of herself as a flower opens out of its bud, except I never knew which bloom would be first. Her voice was as amazing in anger as in love—she was never on guard for the turn of her own feelings. Only those who walk about with the notion (it can be modest) that they are an indispensable part of the universe can speak with such lack of concern for how they sound to others.
“Harry, I’m glad you called. Are you all right? I’ve been full of forebodings all day.”
“I’m fine. But the roads are terrible. I’m not even to Bucksport.”
“Are you really all right? Your voice sounds as if you just shaved off your Adam’s apple.”
I laughed as madly as an embarrassed Japanese businessman. It was her claim that I would have been as dark, tall, and handsome as Gary Cooper or Gregory Peck if not for my prominent Adam’s apple. “I’m all right,” I said. “I think I needed to talk to you.”
“Oh, I need to talk to you. Can you guess what arrived today? A telegram from our friend. It’s demoralizing. After being nice for so long, he’s now in an absolutely deranged mood.”
She was speaking of Harlot. “Well,” I said, “it can’t be as bad as that. What did he say?”
“I’ll tell you later.” She paused. “Harry, promise me something.”
“Yes.” I knew by her tone. “Yes,” I said, “what’s your foreboding?”
“Drive most carefully. There’s a very high tide tonight. Please call me when you get to the dock. The water’s roaring already.”
No, her voice concealed nothing. Tones were flying in many directions as if she were working a dinghy buffeted by chop.
“I have the oddest thoughts,” she said. “Did you just have a bad skid?”
“Never a worse,” I answered. The windows of my telephone booth might be iced up, but perspiration was collecting on my back. How near to me could she get without encountering the real hurly-burly?
“I’m all right,” I went on. “I expect the worst weather is over. It feels that way.” I took a chance. “Any other odd thoughts flying around?”
“I’m obsessed with a woman,” she said.
I nodded intently. I felt like a boxer who is not certain which hand of his unfamiliar opponent he should respect more. “Obsessed with a woman?” I repeated.
“A dead woman,” Kittredge said.
You may believe I took relief.
“Is she family?” I asked.
“No.”
When Kittredge’s mother died, I woke on more than one night to see Kittredge sitting at the side of the bed, her back to me, talking with animation to the bare wall on which, with no embarrassment, she could perceive her mother. (How much this had to do with my warped dream—let us call it such—about Augustus Farr is, of course, anyone’s good question.) On these earlier occasions, however, it was clear: Kittredge was in some sort of coma. She would be wide awake, but oblivious to me. When I would tell her in the morning of such episodes, she would neither smile nor frown. My account of her actions did not disturb Kittredge. It seemed fitting to the nocturnal fold that there would be occasions when those of the dead who had been near to you could still speak. Of course her son Christopher had never come back, but then he had been smashed. His death was different. He had fallen into the bottomless abyss of his father’s vanity. So his demise had been rendered numb for all. In this fashion, Kittredge reasoned.
Kittredge had Highland blood both sides, and you have to know how Celtic a few Highlanders can be. Not all of the Scotch content themselves with devising controls for the law, the banks, and Presbyterian practice; some take a cottage on the interface between this world and the next. They do not blow those bagpipes for too little.
“Do you want to tell me,” I now asked, “about this woman?”
“Harry, she’s been dead for ten years. I don’t know why she is trying to reach me now.”
“Well, who is it?”
She did not reply directly. “Harry,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about Howard Hunt lately.”
“Howard? E. Howard Hun
t?”
“Yes. Do you know where he is?”
“Not really. Someplace quiet, I guess, picking up the pieces.”
“Poor man,” she said. “Do you know I actually met him first at that party long ago when my parents introduced me to Allen Dulles. Allen said, ‘Here, Kitty, meet Howard Hunt. He’s an absolutely nifty novelist.’ I don’t think the Great White Case Officer had top powers in literary criticism.”
“Oh, Mr. Dulles always went in for superlatives.”
“Didn’t he?” I had made her laugh. “Harry, he said to me once, ‘Cal Hubbard would be the Teddy Roosevelt of our outfit if it weren’t for Kermit Roosevelt.’ Lord, your father. It fits!” She laughed again, yet her voice, honest as a brook full of the quick lights offered by moving clouds and pebble bed, was in shadow now.
“Tell me about the woman.”
“It’s Dorothy Hunt, darling,” said Kittredge. “She’s come right out of the woodwork.”
“I didn’t realize you knew her well.”
“I don’t. I didn’t. Hugh and I had the Hunts once for dinner.”
“Of course. I recall.”
“And I do remember her. An intelligent woman. We had lunch a few times. So much more depth than poor Howard.”
“What does she say?”