Mudwoman (15 page)

Not one of you knows who I am. But what I will tell you, you will believe.

“ ‘Meredith’—or should I say ‘M.R.’?—would you like to have dinner sometime?”

“Dinner? I—”

“Tonight? Now?”

“I don’t think—this isn’t—”

“Tomorrow night? Or—when?”

Kroll had followed M.R. out of the reception room, and into a high-ceilinged front foyer. And from the foyer, down the steps of the building which was one of the old historic buildings on the University campus, originally designed to resemble a Greek temple.

She’d meant to discreetly retreat—escape. But he’d followed her of course. Spangled late-afternoon sunshine and dappled light filtered through the leaves of those tall thick-trunked trees with peeling bark—sycamores?—the season was early autumn. And a sound of fevered adolescent shouts, careening Frisbees on the green. How easy the lives of others appear, seen from a little distance! There was no reason that her own life could not be easy as well, seen from a little distance.

Though she was eager to escape from the aggressive man with the spade-shaped beard—eager to return to her refuge overlooking the glassy lake—she was thinking—conceding—that Kroll’s presence did excite her, in a way; his attention, like a beacon of light shone in her startled face, was both disconcerting and flattering. And she was lonely—beyond the protective boundaries of her work: her work that was words; walls, barriers, concentric circles of words like the rings of Saturn.

Thinking—conceding—that Andre wasn’t likely to telephone her that evening.

Nor would Andre e-mail M.R.: fearing an
e-mail trail
his suspicious wife might discover.

Kroll had called her
Merry.
No one had called her
Merry
in decades. She felt a thrill of—was it hope? Reckless hope? Thinking
I must make my own life, apart from Andre. I know this.

Kroll told M.R. that they’d met before—in fact, several times at the University.

“Not very flattering, ‘M.R.’—you don’t remember me.” Kroll’s smile was tight with an expression M.R. could not have named and his eyes were narrowed as if he too were staring into a bright blinding light.

And so M.R. had to protest of course she remembered him—she thought. And she’d had to say yes. She would like to have dinner with Oliver Kroll—sometime.

“Tomorrow?”

T
his was the fall of 1990. They would see each other for no more than six weeks but these were intense weeks for M.R. Initially Kroll was warmly friendly, or gave that impression—he took M.R. to dinner, to movies and University events and art museums—when M.R. offered to pay for her ticket to a Cézanne exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to which Kroll drove them on Sunday afternoon in October—(in a sleek low-slung vehicle M.R. discovered was a Jaguar XK coupe, cobalt-blue, with a speedometer astonishingly equipped to measure 250 mph)—Kroll brushed aside the suggestion with a brusque sweep of his hand and a tight little smile. Was this a rebuke? Had she offended him? Or had her offer been too hesitant, and seemingly insincere? M.R.’s (secret) lover was the sort of man to fling down bills and loose change—bills of all denominations, change that included pennies—onto tables and counters with the lavish air of a king; no one dared defy Andre Litovik and offer to pay instead, or as well as Andre; no one who wanted to be his friend dared resist Andre’s promiscuous generosity which M.R. had come to assume was a quintessentially masculine trait. Kroll too exhibited an adversarial air when taking out his wallet, bills or credit cards—the knife-crease between his eyebrows deepened. In a restaurant near the University where they’d met another couple for dinner, when M.R. offered to pay for her meal Kroll had said to her in an undertone, rather sharply, “Another time, thank you.”

She saw that she’d wounded Kroll, in the presence of the other couple who were old friends of his, from the University. He would not glance at her and for some minutes would not speak to her, as if she’d ceased to exist though seated close beside him in a booth.

That Kroll was proud, and vain—so easily wounded—was touching to M.R. For Kroll was an attractive man, or nearly—except for his sharp-chiseled features that seemed always about to stiffen guardedly and the fleeting quasi-smile on his lips that seemed always about to turn downward, in irony.

And M.R. began to see too that, in the eyes of Kroll’s friends, a middle-aged couple named Steigman, she and Kroll were a couple of some undefined sort—friends? companions?
Lovers?
The possibility was unnerving to M.R., like staring at an object rolling to the edge of a precipice—and over.

In a mirror against a farther wall in the candlelit restaurant, M.R. saw their booth—two couples, four glimmering pale faces—you could just barely distinguish Kroll from his colleague-friend and you could just barely distinguish M.R. from the other woman. The thought came to her
But why not? A couple like any other.

At this time M.R. was still a very young-looking woman—in her thirtieth year, with the ruddy cheeks of a girl hockey player, a flushed and breathless look, very appealing; her hair was a fair, burnished brown, with streaks of silver, a thick mane she’d tamed and braided into a single plait that fell between her shoulder blades. She had so little sense of herself as a physical being—let alone an aesthetic object in another’s eyes—she’d been deeply embarrassed when Kroll told her that he’d been initially drawn to her not just because of her “exemplary” written work but because she reminded him of a portrait by Joshua Reynolds—“
Jane, Countess of Harrington
—I saw it in an exhibit at the British Museum, I think. Years ago when I was a post-doc at Oxford but I still remember it—the effect of the portrait—her . . .” Squinty-eyed Kroll was smiling at M.R. in a way to make her uneasy. Her face warmed with blood—she blushed so readily!

How Andre Litovik would have laughed at this. How droll and foolish, like one of those mawkishly tender scenes in a Chekhov play that take on a bitter irony, as the play evolves.

Of course, M.R. sought out the Reynolds portrait in a book of color plates in the University art library—she was stunned to see that yes, the young woman so lovingly painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1775 did bear some slight resemblance to M. R. Neukirchen—except the woman in the painting was far more beautiful than M.R., her skin creamy-pale, flawless. What was most striking about the portrait of Jane, Countess of Harrington was the aura of confidence it exuded—not merely the figure of the beautifully composed young noblewoman, her slender face seen just slightly in profile so that her elegantly long nose was outlined, but an air of ontological entitlement as different from M.R.’s sense of being in the world as if she and “Jane, Countess of Harrington” were of two distinct species.

Being in the world.
Either you believed that you were entitled, or you were not.

Between one and none there gapes an infinity
. How alone Friedrich Nietzsche had to be, to know this!

M.R. laughed—did Oliver Kroll see her this way? Or was this the man’s fantasy, impressed upon M. R. Neukirchen from Carthage, New York?

T
his season in M.R.’s life before she lost faith in herself as a woman.

This season when M.R. approached the edge of the precipice, in fascinated dread.

They were not lovers—exactly. But they were rapidly becoming more than friends.

There was this—unexpected!—romantic side to Kroll.

He brought her flowers: a large pale-blue hydrangea in a clay pot. Then, each time he visited her, he looked for the hydrangea—he examined the soil with a forefinger, to see if it was damp—that is, if M.R. had remembered to water it.

“So beautiful!”—M.R. stared at the flowers that looked strangely artificial as if they’d been dyed, or were made of a crinkly sort of paper.

He brought her a glossy reproduction of Joshua Reynolds’s
Jane, Countess of Harrington
—poster-sized. He expected M.R. to have it framed and hung on a wall in her house and when M.R. didn’t have the poster framed within a week or two he became angry with her—“If you don’t want the portrait, give it back. You aren’t obliged to keep it.” M.R. was stunned by his reaction and quickly apologized—her Quaker instincts led her to apologize for wrongs not her own, to minimize conflict; she had the poster framed, at some expense, and she hung it prominently on a wall in her small living room, displacing other, smaller works of art which she preferred.

(She couldn’t bring herself to look often at the portrait—Jane, Countess of Harrington was too coolly beautiful and so extravagantly dressed, her mere image on the wall was a rebuke to earthly/fleshy/damp-eyed M.R.) And each time Kroll came to the house he gazed at the portrait on the wall as at an old friend; M.R. had placed the poster just slightly high, so that you looked up at the Countess’s creamy-pale face.

“It’s a beautiful poster,” M.R. said, awkwardly. “I mean—the portrait is beautiful. Reynolds painted so many—masterpieces. . . .”

Staring at the countess on the wall, Kroll seemed scarcely to hear M.R.

Kroll swam several times a week—early—in the University pool.

Kroll invited M.R. to come with him—he’d been inviting her for weeks—and at last M.R. said yes, yes she would join him; she had not wanted to say yes yet she’d heard herself say yes, she heard the eagerness in her voice for it was distressing—shameful—how M.R. was beginning to fear being alone, now that Oliver Kroll had intruded into her life.

She did not want the man in her life, yet she had allowed the man in her life. And now by degrees she could not bear losing the man, whom she had allowed in her life.

She didn’t want to be with him, really—she was awkward in his company, always anxious, unsettled. Especially she didn’t want to swim in the University pool at the desperate hour of 7
A.M.
yet there she was lowering herself into the lapping aqua water that felt unnaturally soft, dizzy from the smell of chlorine, bizarre thoughts like sea serpents assailing her as she swam laps—arm over arm, Australian crawl, eyes fluttering shut—
Will we be married? Is that what will happen? Is that why I am here?
On the mosaic ceiling of the University pool and on the upper walls were rippling reflections like quivering nerves. The smell of chlorine and the echo-chamber of the pool reminded her of high school in Carthage which caught at her heart, this was not a memory M.R. wished to revive in her new life. Especially she dreaded the isolation of the swimmer, amid propelled and splashing figures yet she was isolated, always one is isolated in the water where thoughts await like froth on the surface of the water that smelled like chemicals.
It will happen, then. The man makes a claim.

She had only to not-resist. She felt a thrill of excitement, a childish vindication like one who has tightened a noose around her neck ever tighter, tighter—if her (secret) lover would not leave his wife for her, another man would claim her; M.R. could not resist this other man if only to demonstrate her ability to love another man—wasn’t this proof?

M.R. had never asked Andre Litovik to leave his wife for her. For
her
—that would not have seemed possible.

The wife, like the son, was unwell. Though Andre did not speak in such clinical terms, scarcely did he speak of his “difficult”—“temperamental”—wife at all, Meredith surmised that the wife suffered from something resembling bipolar disorder.

A very fashionable malady, in intellectual circles.

For the son, there was no diagnosis that Andre Litovik would accept.

M.R. shuddered to think—
If something should happen to the son. To either of them. And Andre were—free . . .

She would know, then: if he loved her.

Or, rather: she could not deceive herself about knowing, in such circumstances.

Thinking of these matters, that were disturbing to her, yet familiar-disturbing, like snarls in her hair when she’d been a girl, that no amount of combing seemed to dispel for long, M.R. was swimming quite capably—vehemently. Despite her self-consciousness she was a quite good swimmer. She’d been a high school athlete—though not on the girls’ swimming team, for she’d been too self-conscious about her solid, flat-breasted body in a clinging swimsuit, for all to see—and retained still a young athlete’s coordination. To Oliver Kroll’s surprise M.R. was swimming laps nearly as well as he did—and Oliver had happened to mention that, as a Yale undergraduate, he was told he might have been a candidate for the Olympic swim team if he’d had time to train—“Of course, that was a long time ago.”

Olympics? Swim team? M.R. wondered how this could be. Of course, she said nothing.

Kroll was impressed by M.R.’s swimming. His eyes on her body—the unflattering single-piece swimsuit of some polyester fabric resembling a thin sort of reptile hide; the fleshy dimpled thighs that seemed to explode out of the suit, the small high hard breasts, shapely upper arms—Kroll gazed at her blinking. “Hey. ‘Meredith.’ You’re beautiful.”

Even at such a time, meaning to flatter, Kroll could not speak without sounding ironic, insincere.

In embarrassment M.R. laughed, turning away. She’d managed to push—shove—her thick hair up inside a rubber bathing cap that felt distended, like an encephalitic brain. She was not beautiful and was made uneasy by the claim—she had no wish to try to live up to such a claim.

What a farce! Masquerade . . .

Kroll never swam less than a mile, he’d said. For the sake of his back. When at last he climbed out of the pool M.R. saw how water streamed from his hard-muscled legs; the long dark hairs of his legs flat against his pale skin, glistening with moisture. She saw the just slightly flabby flesh at his waist, the bulge of his groin, and the antic hairs of his thighs that descended from it. . . . She felt an unexpected tenderness for the man: his maleness.

At a short distance of fifteen or twenty feet, M.R. liked Kroll best. She felt her heart expand with an emotion she could not have named—not love, not sexual desire, but a wish to touch, and to protect; a wish to
console.
She thought there could be nothing more tender between a man and a woman, than this wish to
console.