Finding a Girl in America (24 page)

But with Jeanne in Boston he had to lie too much about where he was going and where he had been, and finally when Edith asked him one night:
Are you having an affair with that phony French bitch?
he said:
Yes
. He and Edith had met Jeanne when someone brought her to their Christmas party; Edith had not seen her since, but in April, when she asked him, he did not even wonder how she knew. He was afraid, but he was also relieved. That may have been why he didn't ask how she knew. Because it didn't matter: Edith was dealing with what she believed was an affair with a specific woman. To Hank, his admission of that one was an admission of all of them.

He was surprised that he felt relief. Then he believed he understood it: he had been deluding himself with his scheduled adulteries, as if a girl on his car seat in the woods were time in the classroom or at his desk; the years of lies to himself and Edith had been a detraction from the man he wanted and sometimes saw himself to be. So, once cornered, he held his ground and told her. It broke her heart. He wanted to comfort her, to make fraudulent promises, but he would not. He told her he loved her and wanted to live with no one else. But he would not become like most people he knew. They were afraid; and old, twenty years early. They bought houses, spoke often of mortgages, repairs, children's ailments, and the weight of their bodies. As he talked she wiped from her eyes the dregs of her first heavy weeping. His own eyes were damp because of hers, and more: because of the impotence he felt, the old male-burden of having to be strong for both of them at once, to give her the assurance of his love so she could hear as a friend what he was saying: that he was what he was, that he had to be loved that way, that he could not limit the roads of his life until they narrowed down to one, leading from home to campus. She screamed at him:
You're a writer too! Isn't that enough for one man?
He said:
No. There's never enough. I don't want to have to say no to anything, not ever
—It was the most fearful moment of his marriage until the night over three years later when she told him he had to leave her and Sharon. He felt closer to her than he ever had before, now that all the lies were gone. And he knew he might lose her, right there in that April kitchen; he was sure of her love, but he was sure of her strength too. Yet he would not retreat into lies: he had to win.

He did. She stayed with him. Every night there was talk, and always there was pain. But she stayed. He built a case against monogamy, spoke of it as an abstraction with subtle and insidious roots in the economy: passion leashed so that lovers would need houses and things to put in them. He knew he was using his long apprenticeship to words, not to find truths, but to confuse and win his wife. He spoke of monogamy as unnatural.
The heart is too big for it
, he said.
Yours too
.

In May she started an affair with Jack Linhart, who no longer loved his wife Terry; or believed he no longer loved her. Hank knew: their faces, their voices, and when they were in the same room he could feel the passion and collusion between them as surely as he could smell a baking ham. He controlled his pain and jealousy, his moments of anger at Jack; he remembered the April night in the kitchen. He kept his silence and waited until the summer night Edith told him she was Jack's lover. He was gentle with her. He knew now that, within the marriage he needed and loved, he was free.

That summer he watched her. He had been her only lover till now; he watched the worry about what they were doing to their marriage leave her face, watched her face in its moments of girlish mischief, of vanity, of sensuality that brightened her eyes and shaped her lips, these moments coming unpredictably: as they ate dinner with Sharon, paused at the cheese counter in the supermarket …Toward the end of the summer he made love twice with Terry, on successive nights, because he liked her, because she was pretty, because she was unhappy, and because he felt he had earned it. That ended everything. Terry told Jack about Hank. Then, desperate and drunk, Jack told Terry about Edith, said he wanted a divorce, and when Terry grieved he could not leave her: all of this in about twelve hours, and within twenty-four Edith and Terry had lunch together, and next afternoon Hank and Jack went running, and that evening, with the help of gin and their long friendship, they all gathered and charcoaled steaks. When the Linharts went home, Hank and Edith stood on the front lawn till the car turned a corner and was gone. Then Edith put her arm around his waist.
We're better off
, she said:
they're still unhappy
. He felt he was being held with all her strength; that strength he had feared last April; he was proud to be loved by her and, with some shame, he was proud of himself, for bringing her this far. That fall they both had new lovers.

When three years later she told him to leave and he tried to believe the injustice of it, he could not. For a long time he did not understand why. Then one night it came to him: he remembered her arm around his waist that summer night, and the pride he had felt, and then he knew why his tallying of her affairs meant nothing. She had not made him leave her life because he was unfaithful; she had made him leave because she was; because he had changed her. So she had made him leave because—and this struck him so hard, standing in his bedroom, he needed suddenly to lie down—he was Hank Allison.

On the morning after Monica jettisoned him, he woke with the images he had brought to bed. He had no memory, as he might have without last night's treatment, of anything about her that was intelligent or kind or witty or tender. Instead of losing a good woman, he had been saved from a bad one. He knew all this was like Novocain while the dentist drilled; but no matter. For what he had to face now was not the loss of Monica; he had to face, once again, what to do about loss itself. He put a banana, wheat germ, a raw egg, and buttermilk in the blender. He brought the drink downstairs and sat on the front steps, in the autumn sunlight. It was a Saturday, and Sharon wanted to see a movie that afternoon. Good: nearly two hours of distraction; he would like the movie, whatever it was. Before picking up Sharon he must plan his night, be sure he did not spend it alone in his apartment. If he called the Linharts and told them about Monica, they would invite him to dinner, stay up drinking with him as long as he wanted. He touched the steps.
It's these steps
, he thought. He looked up and down the street lined with old houses and old trees.
This street. This town. How the fuck can I beat geography?
A small town, and a dead one. The bright women went to other places. The ones he taught with were married. So he was left with either students or the women he knew casually in town, women he had tried talking to in bars—secretaries, waitresses, florists, beauticians—and he had enjoyed their company, but no matter how pretty and good-natured they were, how could he spend much time with a woman who thought Chekhov was something boys did in their beds at night? He remembered a night last summer drinking with Jack at a bar that was usually lined with girls, and he said:
Look at her: she's pretty, she looks sweet, she's nicely dressed, but look at that face: nothing there. Not one thought in her head
. And Jack said:
Sure she's got thoughts: thirty-eight ninety-five … size nine … partly cloudy
. Sharon was twelve. He would not move away until she was at least eighteen. He was with her every weekend, and they cooked at his apartment one night during the week. When his second book was published, an old friend offered him a job in Boston: he had thought about the bigger school, more parties with more women, even graduate students, as solemn as they were. But he would not leave Sharon. And when she was eighteen, he would be forty, twice the age of most of his students, and having lived on temporary love for six years, one limping, bloodstained son of a bitch. And if he moved then, who would want what was left of him?

He stood and climbed the stairs to his apartment and phoned the Linharts. Jack answered. When Hank told him, he said to come to dinner; early, as soon as he took Sharon home.

‘Maybe I'll invite Lori,' Hank said.

‘Why not.'

‘I mean, she's just a friend. But maybe she'll keep the night from turning into a wake.'

‘Bring her. Just be careful. You fall in love faster than I can fry an egg. What is it with these Goddamn girls anyway? Are they afraid of something permanent? Is that it?'

‘Old buddy, I think there's something about me that just scares shit out of them. Something they just can't handle.'

You were all the way across the room
, Monica said as soon as he came, before he had even collapsed on her, to nestle his cheek beside hers. So instead he rolled away and marvelled that she knew, that Goddamnit they always knew: his soul
had
been across the room; he had felt it against the wall behind him, opposite the foot of the bed, thinking, watching him and Monica, waiting for them to finish. Because of that, finishing had taken him a long time: erect and eager, his cock seemed attached not to his flesh but to that pondering soul back there; and since it did not seem his flesh, it did not seem to be inside Monica's either: there was a mingling of his hardness and her softness and liquid heat, but it had nothing to do with who he was for those minutes, or for who she was either. He knew it was an occupational hazard. Then, because of why it had just happened on that early Friday evening in winter when she was still his student, had two hours ago been in his class, had then walked to his apartment in cold twilight, he laughed. He had not expected to laugh, he knew it was a mistake, but he could not stop. A warning tried to stop him, to whisper
hush
to the laughter, a warning that knew not only the perils with a woman at a time like this, but the worse peril of being so confident in a woman's love that he could believe she would love his laughter now too, and his reason for it. She got out of bed and went to the bathroom and then the kitchen and when she came back she had a glass of Dry Sack—one glass, not two—and even that sign could not make him serious, for he was caught in the comic precision of what had just happened. She pulled on leotards, slipped into a sweater that she left unbuttoned, and brought a cigarette to bed where she lay beside him, not touching, and the space between them and the sound of her breathing felt to Hank not quite angry yet, not quite subdued either.

‘You were right,' he said. He was still smiling. ‘I
was
across the room. I can't help it. I was all right until we started; then while we were making love I thought about what I was working on today. I didn't want to. I never want to after I stop for the day. And I wanted to ask you about it but I figured we'd better finish first—'

‘Oh good, Hank: oh good.'

‘I know, I know. But I was working on a scene about a girl who's only made love once, say a few months ago, and then one night she makes love twice to this guy and again in the morning, and I wanted to know if I was right. In the scene her pussy is sore next day; after the three times. Is that accurate?'

‘Yes. You son of a bitch.'

‘Now wait a minute. None of this was on purpose. You think I want my Goddamn head to start writing whenever it decides to? It's not like being un
kind
, for Christ's sake. You think surgeons and lawyers and whatever don't go through this too? Shit: you came, didn't you?'

‘I could do that alone.'

‘Well, what am I supposed to fucking
do
?'

He got out of bed and went for the bottle of sherry and brought it back with another glass; but at the doorway to his room, looking at her leotarded legs, the stretch of belly and chest and the inner swell of breasts exposed by the sweater, at her wide grim mouth concentrating on smoking, and her grey eyes looking at the ceiling, he stopped and stayed at the threshold. He said softly: ‘Baby, what am I supposed to do? I don't believe in all this special crap about writers, you know that. We're just like everybody else.
Every
body gets distracted by their work, or whatever.'

He cut himself off: he had been about to say
Housewives too
, but the word was too dangerous and, though he believed that vocation one of the hardest and most distracting of all, believed if he were one he could never relax enough to make unhindered love, he kept quiet. Monica would not be able to hear what he said; she would hear only the word
housewife
, would slip into jargon, think of labels, roles, would not be soothed. She did not look at him. She said: ‘You could try harder. You could concentrate more. You could even pretend, so I wouldn't feel like I was getting fucked by a dildo.' She was often profane, but this took him by surprise; he felt slapped. ‘And you could shut up about it. And not laugh about it. And you could Goddamn not ask me your fucking questions when you stop laughing. I want a lover, not a Papermate.'

The line pleased him, even cheered him a little, and he almost told her so; but again he heard his own warnings, and stopped.

‘Look,' he said, ‘let's go to Boston. To Casa Romero and have a hell of a dinner.'

She stayed on his bed long enough to finish the cigarette; she occupied herself with it, held it above her face between drags and studied it as though it were worthy of concentration; watched her exhaled smoke plume and spread toward the ceiling; for all he knew (he still stood naked in the doorway) she was thinking, perhaps even about them. But he doubted it. For a girl so young, she had a lot of poses; when did they start learning them, for Christ's sake? When they still wrote their ages with one digit? She exhaled the last drag with a sigh, put the cigarette out slowly, watching its jabs against the ashtray as if this were her last one before giving them up; then quickly she put on her skirt, buttoned her sweater, pulled on her boots, slung her suede jacket over her shoulder, and walked toward him as if he were a swinging door. He turned sideways; passing, she touched neither him nor the doorjamb.
Awfully slender
, he thought. He followed her down the short hall; stood at the doorway and watched her going down the stairs; he hoped his semen was dripping into the crotch of her leotards, just to remind her that everything can't be walked away from. ‘Theatrical bitch,' he said to her back, and shut the door.