He beheld her through the musty curtains of the front door, his hand resting on the knob. How can it be? he thought; that’s in the past. It was a cold early morning; he had been getting up at five to work on a paper about a white whale. It was an awesome burden and woke him in the dark every morning. At a quarter of eight he had drunk his coffee and was about to leave the house to give his first exam when he saw her through the curtain, standing across the street. The day was overcast, intensifying color. Behind her were purple irises and a flaming azalea bush. She stood at the curb under a tree and he thought at first she was waiting for someone to give her a lift, though why at this hour, or why here, or where she might be going, he didn’t know. He was, however, moved to see her and memorized this picture of her standing across the street alone.
May, in its middle, had turned disappointingly cold. June came in as bad. Heavy vaporous clouds, on the move from the Pacific, hid the sun except for unexpected minutes of light. It rained on and off. In the late afternoon the sun bloomed gold but give it a welcoming cheer and it sank in a red sea. Mrs. Beaty recalled many a wet cold summer. She wore long underwear, thick around the ankles under heavy stockings, and often drank hot tea. They decided to continue the furnace full time, for a while had been using no more than a half hopperful of sawdust each morning to flush the chill. The chill was there especially because it wasn’t supposed to be, less than three weeks to summer.
He watched her from deep within, his hand still on the knob, nothing new about her that he could see. She wore her raincoat and black headscarf. Though she was a plain woman he could still see wherein she was lovely. It was this thought that had momentarily moved him. Also a sense of the waste of life. Of experience lived to what purpose? He knew she was waiting for him.
Levin went up the stairs and out by the back way. He climbed the fence, crossed a muddy yard, then over another wet fence to come out on a side street. He hurried to Humanities Hall by a roundabout route. All morning he wondered how long she had waited. He stayed in his office, grading papers. When he got back to the house, toward six, there was a note on the hall table, that Mrs. Gilley had called. He was both surprised that she would and that Mrs. Beaty would tell him so casually. Upstairs on his bureau lay a blue envelope addressed in Pauline’s writing; it had been mailed yesterday. He put it into a drawer. Later that night, after returning from a walk he hadn’t particularly wanted to take, Levin got out the letter and tore it open. He read it with spy glass from a distant planet. Then, by an effort of the will, he read it in his room. “I must see
you—please.
Can you call me? Pauline.” An overwhelming sadness settled in him. If suffering was for something what had he suffered for? Levin burned her letter.
What renunciation was supposed to do he assumed it had done. Occasionally there were still unexpected moments of warm recall—his first sight of her in the forest, their falling in love, the bed at its best; but remembrance of the bed invariably led to thoughts of their last failures, nature uncooperative, hers. What he felt now—felt?—was abstraction, no more than the memory of memory. She stayed in the mind in the act of dropping into his unwilling lap the hot contents of a tuna fish casserole, mopping same with baby’s diaper; he thought of her as the small town lady who talked of a new life but had been consistently afraid of it, never daring beyond the frontier of sex. He was at times harsh in judging her, Avis Fliss once removed. Wasn’t that renunciation?
At his worst he blamed her for Duffy. Not that she had invented him; the man had an existence in history that Levin, almost from the moment of hearing his name, had in self-love been drawn to. But he blamed her for having used the Irishman against him, as it were, in a sense negating Levin’s value as Levin. What she had probably wanted was someone like Duffy at a Duffyless time, so she settled for him come disguised with a beard. He held against her her never revealing the repetition she had fabricated, never told him whose carbon copy he was. She had not once whispered of her wild Irish lover, who, although he hadn’t created it, had most recently lived the myth Levin fell into, or was dragged into assways. She had caused him to believe he was her first true love, Gilley not qualifying beyond somebody who had married her in a desperate moment (hers), although Levin had seen in her picture album also a Guggenheim scholar she had girlishly given her heart to, who had given it back. Before that, innocence; after, Duffy. Once he had heard about Leo from Avis, during the bad time he was having Levin thought he had lost the will to be Levin; that he was, so to say, the extension of Duffy’s ghost. This sort of thing could become dangerous if it went too far. What most enraged him was clear evidence of the continued weakness of his old self.
He was thus affected until, as events developed, he had reason to distrust Avis as informant and began to wonder at some of his recent judgments of Pauline. From nothing to speak of he had more than once in his life erected fantastic structures, complicated Babels on stilts, overwrought constructions that collapsed under a single cold fact, or in whiff of sober sense. In talking with Fabrikant that night in his melon patch, Levin had realized doubts of his own suspicions that Pauline and Leo Duffy had been lovers. He knew only circumstantial details of an affair between them; her rumored confession to Gilley, authored, however, by Avis, author of the spying notebooks and the story of a picture she hadn’t seen but could describe. If the photo existed, and Levin assumed it did, all it proved was that Pauline and Duffy had once gone swimming bareass together. End of evidence. What it proved about Gilley was a jackass of another color. From the supposition of the existence of the picture it was of course no trick to infer an affair between two discontented adults; yet a man of more than ordinary imagination, with good reason might infer nothing of the sort. Two and two was sometimes not two and two. If they had been lovers it would somehow have come out. She spoke openly of her life even when trying not to.
Having arrived here, Levin, explorer, ventured farther. Suppose there had been something between them—love, affair, love affair, what did that subtract from him, appearing on the scene two years later, Duffy, if not forgotten, long since gone? Nothing, if the mind stopped overreaching itself in creating analogies. As for telling or not telling him, so she hadn’t—out of modesty, shame, pain—who knows how many motives lead to a single omission. Had he, for instance, told her about Nadalee Hammerstad, for all her knowledgeability in bed not much more than a kid? Must Pauline confess who first had slipped his subtle fingers under her skirt; or he go back to age five, when he had packed earth in a little girl’s backside through failure to think boldly? All this plus and minus in a
long long world was nobody’s business if privacy had any meaning. What Levin dwelt on was this: Was her love for him when it was love, less true because she had once loved Duffy, if she had loved Duffy? Why the obsessive linking of himself with the fabricated protoytpe, no more than just another guy trying to run into the meaning of his life, raising a little Cain in the process, and, in the nature of things, disappearing for good in all but name. There was enough in life to sneeze at without sniffing in dusty time. Let’s admit-wherever Levin had been, someone had been before (no Chingachgook he, even in the primeval forest, even forest of the night). Two men with similar temperaments, possibly backgrounds and ideas, showing up after a short interval at the same all-but-unchanged locale, would see the same birds and flowers, walk the same streets, create similar adventures, and, not impossibly, love the same woman. What was wrong with my head? he asked himself. He blamed his overworked emotions and resolved to forget the long-departed Duffy.
Where did all this involved thinking leave him? It left him, a week before the election, electioneering. It left him much where one is left, he thought, who had suffered and renounced. Wherever he was he was left; if Levin, still in doubt. Recalling how deeply, tenderly, fervently—to the twisted core of his being—he had loved her, he could not understand how he had brought himself to give her up. Was it cowardice calling itself reason, or a true, even talented, reading of the hopelessness of the situation? It was hopeless; he had fled love to dispel her anxiety and misery. He had suffered to free her from suffering. He felt he had done the right thing; he sensed she had willed their break; he had carried it out for her.
Therefore, when he saw her through the front door he left by the back.
She was there, the image in the curtain, the next morning. Watching, he tried to feel something for her but felt nothing. I get this way, he thought. Levin escaped the back way, tearing
his pants leg on a nail as he climbed the fence. A man in the neighboring house shook his fist at him. In the office a blue letter—guess who?—lay on his desk. He tore it up. Simply hopeless. Then he regretted what he had done, then tried not to.
Mrs. Beaty that afternoon nervously reported two phone calls. “She asked me if you knew she had been trying to get in touch with you and I said I thought you did. She said nothing after that, just hung up the phone.”
“Thanks,” he said. The old woman waited for more but got nothing.
Another call came while he was lying in bed, watching the rain. He had told her if it was Pauline to say he had gone out.
She walked slowly up the stairs and said through the door, though he pretended to be sleeping, “I told her what you told me to say, Mr. Levin, but please, you’ll have to tell her yourself if she calls again.”
He asked, after minutes, if she was lowering the drawbridge; she wanted to know what he meant.
“Aren’t we still protecting the honor of your house?”
“Please don’t be sarcastic with me, I’m an old woman. I’m sorry for her and I’m sorry for you.”
“I’m in an election. I have my future to think of.”
“Tell her yourself.”
He tried to think what he could tell her but told her nothing. He reveried his life as a drunkard. He had suffocating dreams of walking miles for a bottle but when he got to the store he had no money. When he had got the money the store was closed. When the store opened he dropped the bottle on the sidewalk. Then he lay in a dank cellar watching his shoes burning. He woke apprehensive.
Looking out early on Wednesday he spied her coming up the back stairs. Like old times. Levin slipped out the front way as she was knocking upstairs. He called himself nasty names but saw no profit in the chase. The time to have come was a month ago.
Glancing out of his office window later he saw her, with Erik and Mary, in front of the Student Union. She waved, he retreated. She’s surely mad. He stayed out of sight till she had left. Home, he tacked a sheet of heavy wrapping paper over the back door window, long overdue. Levin ate on the run and ran to a movie. He had considered leaving a note: “What can I give you? For Christ’s sake, let’s keep it quits.” He lived in fear she would pop in at night, he would wake to find her in bed pumping his organ. But she did not appear; maybe Gilley kept a wide-open eye on her now.
Though he hungered to stay in bed the next morning, because he had slept badly and had no exam, he was dressed early to be out of the house before she appeared. He figured another day or two and the chase would end. He had waked heavy-hearted, a weight of sadness in every movement. He had felt this way, on and off, since the day she had reappeared. For three days he had tried to beat the mood but couldn’t; he was uneasy that it persisted. Lifting the wrapping paper he looked cautiously out at one corner. Nothing but the wet world. He detested having to climb wet fences. At half-past seven Levin went downstairs and looked through the front door. She was standing in the rain under the dripping sycamore, with both kids. His teeth were on edge.
He went up to his room. It’s useless, he thought. I can’t outrun her.
Mrs. Beaty labored up the creaking stairs. “It’s raining hard. The children are getting wet.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“Just for a minute.”
“What does she want?”
“She’ll have to tell you herself.”
For five minutes he listened to her breathing at his door.
“Ask her to come in,” said Levin.
He heard her go down and open the front door. Then he heard her speaking and Pauline saying something to her, and they all came in.
Levin looked at himself in the mirror and looked away. He went to the window and gazed at the back fences but returned to the mirror. He did not remember going to the stairs, only going down them.
Pauline, holding Mary on her arm, ground her teeth. The little girl began to cry.
Mrs. Beaty took her. “We’ll make coffee.” She took Erik’s hand and they went into the kitchen.
When they were alone Pauline said, “I’m sorry, I wanted to leave them but I couldn’t get anyone to sit at this hour.”
She looked weary, harried, lonely. Her face was taut, small, her dark eyes, restless. “Why did you run from me?” she said bitterly. “Why didn’t you call when I asked you to?”
“Does Gerald know you came here?”
“No. He’s always at the office early during exam week.”
“Come inside.”
They entered the small parlor off the hall. She sat in one stiff-backed chair at the wet window, he in the other at the wall opposite. The clock ticked above his head. She had removed her wet raincoat and scarf; her hair hung in dark rattails. Turning her head away from him she wiped her eyes with her fingers. Outside it was raining steadily. He listened to the sound of the rain.