“You’re a grown man, Max. And you hardly know her.”
“It’s as if she’s something I’ve wanted since I was a boy. You can’t know what it’s like. I mean, first love.” We sipped our drinks and sat in silence for a moment before I finally told him what I wanted of him.
He looked at me for a while with a look of sadness. “No,” he said. “I can’t, Max.”
“Come on, I need your help.”
“You can’t do this. A lie like this, it’ll wear you out.”
“You just have to forget you know me. Forget all about me. It’s easy. If you see Alice and me together, just say hello to her and ask to be introduced to me. It’s simple.”
“It’s not simple at all. We’re not seventeen. It’s idiotic.”
“Please.”
His mood changed. “Max, you have to tell her,” he said at last.
“You know what will happen.”
He looked down at his plate because he did know.
“Please, Hughie,” I told him, startling him by taking his hands. “I don’t have anyone.”
It was a month before it happened, but as I’d predicted, Alice and I did eventually run into Hughie. We were walking in the park to see the newly imported kangaroo, and she was telling me about a photography contest she had entered, pretending to be a man; she had anagrammed her married name and come up with the outrageous alter ego “Alan Liecouch.” I was walking along and watching our shadows together on the grass when I noticed that hers had stiffened where it lay beside, a stone. She had stopped laughing and I could hear the bamboo rattling in her parasol; her hands were trembling, but when I looked at her face she was smiling faintly, as if amused by her own reaction. I saw Hughie and his family coming towards us on the path. He must have seen us just moments before, because he was distracting his wife by pointing off towards the conservatory, leaning over to whisper in her ear before leading her off across the grass to follow what will-o’-the-wisp he had invented to save me.
“I know that man,” Alice said.
“You do?” She rarely spoke of her life before Seattle.
“Yes, I was a girl.”
“Really.”
“I used to visit him at the Conservatory of Flowers.”
“Oh, that’s not far from here.”
But she was not listening to me. She laughed a little. “I was so young.”
Just then, Hughie made a mistake. He looked back, and hooked our eyes with his own: bright blue. His boater was tipped far back on his head. What I read in those eyes was an intense sadness, the kind I had only seen before that night when I got so drunk in his apartment. This was not the first time, I guess, that he had been called upon to forget someone he loved, but who can say. At the time, I was merely grateful that he had done this simple thing, this crucial thing, to make me happy.
Alice said, “He saw us!”
“Oh.”
He turned away with a bitter tenseness to his mouth but Alice continued to watch him. She held her hand to the ruffles of her blouse, as if checking her own heartbeat for this reunion that I think she had been imagining for as long as I’d imagined ours. Her smile opened out and she seemed pleased, embarrassed, amazed. She said, almost in wonder, “He’s avoiding me.”
“Maybe he didn’t recognize you.”
“He’s grown old,” she said.
Hughie was far off now, chatting with his bundled son. I remembered our tea together, how she stared at a derbied shadow on the curtain, afraid. It had been his shadow that she thought she’d seen. I tried to laugh, saying, “Love of your life?”
“What kind of question is that?” she said, smiling playfully at me with eyes surrounded by the creases that I loved. Age will tell you what a woman is; if she has never been happy, you will know it from her eyes. Alice’s eyes were full of private joys, and though I had caused none of them, still it didn’t matter; I loved what they had made of her. Now she lifted her parasol again and we watched
Hughie’s family disappear behind a parade of orange ice sellers and begging children. What kind of question, Alice? Simply one that, years later, I am still asking.
It was a week after that event, I think, that I received an interesting letter. As I opened the custardy envelope, I smelled its faint cologne, recognized the handwriting, and was brought back to an awful morning when I lost the girl I loved:
April 15, 1906
Mr. Asgar Van Daler,
My daughter and I are leaving this Tuesday for the Del Monte and we would be pleased if you escorted us for our stay through Sunday. Alice says you are busy with work, and that I am old-fashioned and a fool, but we have no male relatives in the area and it is always helpful, when traveling, to have a man.
Mrs. David Levy
I’m sure the Del Monte hotel looked exactly the same as it did nearly forty years before, when my young parents met there: the long avenue of cypresses that cut the sun in stripes across our carriage (the Widow Levy would not take a car), the great ship of the hotel itself, barnacled with green shutters and balconies, the flagsnapping spires, the veranda of wicker chairs where a band in whiteblue military suits played waltzes, the interchangeability of the parasols and the table umbrellas, the ladies and the peacocks, the people and the statues. I’m sure society editors still scribbled as they watched the arrivals, and brothel madams passed as baronesses, and shopgirls as debutantes, but all I noticed was the practiced calm, learned from its guests, of a place that knew its luck would never end.
“Are we here?” Alice asked as I opened the door for her. Her hat had slid off to one side and she struggled with it, squinting at the building.
“You know,” I said, helping her from the carriage, “my parents met in this hotel.”
“What a funny place to fall in love.”
“In the pool, there used to be a net separating the men and women, like a veil, that’s where they met. Strange, isn’t it?”
She considered me as their servant, Bitsy, chatted with the driver. “Strange, yes, that’s the word for you, Asgar.”
“What do you mean?” I asked quietly.
She blinked at me in the strong sunlight, smiling mysteriously, then looked up at the hotel. “Lord, isn’t it ugly.”
“Alice!” her mother whispered, then stepped forward and took my arm. “It’s positively Shakespearean, don’t you think, Mr. Van Daler? A summer house of the Capulets, before all the trouble of course, all the old families with their young daughters, a masked ball and everything.” My old lover gave me a wink. Masked ball indeed!
She let go of my arm, saying, “I need to lie down after that awful carriage ride, the bouncing, I swear I don’t see why we didn’t take an automobile. Alice, we’ll dress. Mr. Van Daler, we’ll see you at supper and I hope you can recommend a book from the library as I don’t know anybody anymore, and I’m bound to be bored. Bitsy, do you have my sleeping drops?”
“Uh-huh.”
As the other two made for the hotel, Alice stood there on the drive, passing a glove from one hand to the other, watching her mother. The look on my love’s face was that of someone solving a math equation or, perhaps, plotting a murder.
“Your mother’s fascinating,” I said, coming up beside her.
Her eyes shifted towards me. “I’ve lived with her almost all my life.”
“That must be nice.”
“Hmm. I can’t even really see her anymore,” she said, looking back at her mother.
“Well, I love her,” I said, and felt a blush of shame for saying so carelessly something that would have made all the difference nearly twenty years before.
Alice said something very quietly.
“Pardon?”
The Widow Levy’s voice pounded through the spring air: “Alice! Stop mooning over that handsome young man! I need your help up here.”
Alice turned to me with her eyes blazing in the sun. What message was encoded in that brown-white semaphore? She only said, “You better tip the driver, handsome young man,” and then was off, picking up her skirt to climb the stairs, one hand keeping firm hold of her wayward straw hat with its trim as pink as ribbon candy. A peacock made its bored way across the sidewalk, dragging its gorgeous and filthy ballgown of a tail. It made a shimmering noise. I saw Alice turn back to look at me.
She was going to love me.
Even as she was stepping into the hotel, I felt the realization warming me like a new sun: she was going to love me. I looked up at the battlements and balconies of the Del Monte and realized, as the flags lashed in the bright sun, that it would be here, in the very building where another woman had loved another Asgar. Perhaps tomorrow night, in the ballroom with Ballenberg’s waltzes playing, on the same balcony, with the same tolling Mission bells and the sound of the sea, the smell of Sweet Caporals. Or on the veranda, very quietly, as we sipped lemonade and watched the old maids chirping at their croquet, perhaps in that white wicker chair where I would take her hand and hear her sigh and know she loved me. Or in her room, as she sat by the window staring out at the lawns and pines that led onto the ocean, as she cranked the glass open and let the salt air into the room and began to weep.
After all these years, it would happen here. Who would have guessed it? In one of these rooms, I would take her face in my hands and kiss both cheeks, then whisper to her as I undid the buttons of her jacket, of her shirtwaist, of all the unnecessary, ridiculous garments widows wear. Her look on the stairs told me everything I needed to know, and honeyed hope—the same hope of my seventeen-year-old self, bottled and stored so carefully on that high shelf—now broke and leaked down through my body.
But how to do it? I could tell—from that look on the stairs—that Alice was lonely with her mother, and that death and time had wearied her, so that she could almost love strange, handsome Asgar who stood overtipping the chauffeur. The next few days required a delicacy of spirit that my life had rarely needed. As the Japanese will tell you, one can train a rose to do anything, to grow through a nautilus even, but it must be done with tenderness, and that was how I had to treat this time with Alice. To listen to her, smile and woo her, treat her not like the goddess I’d met at seventeen, but like a bright, sad woman in her thirties, too wise to be fooled by flattery. I had to be careful. I had to coax the thorns of my life into the spirals of her heart.
You’re thinking: This doesn’t sound like love. Whatever happened to the wrinkled boy who listened for his downstairs neighbor, tears in his eyes? The one who lit her fires? The innocent, pure love of his so-called youth? You’re thinking: This sounds like a wretchedly broken heart. This sounds like revenge.
Perhaps. But, my readers, you people of the future, have some pity. My body may move backwards, but my heart ages just like yours, and while my simple and youthful longing had its place when she was just a girl, simple and youthful herself, a more intricate woman must be more intricately loved. Real love always has something hidden—some loss or boredom or tiny hate that we would never tell a soul. Those among you who have been rejected or ignored, you’ll know what I mean. Because when she comes to
you at last, though joy may burst in wet seeds inside you, still there’s a bitterness that it took so long. Why did she wait? You can never quite forgive. And when she is in your arms at last, when she is murmuring your name, kissing your neck with a passion you once thought impossible, you don’t feel just one thing. There is relief, of course, relief that all you imagined has come true, but there is also triumph. You have won her heart—and not from any rivals. You have won it from her.
Revenge, no, not quite. But not exactly love, either. These are confessions, so I confess everything in my heart. I do this for my penance and for my forgiveness. I do not claim to be proud.
Dinner was at eight, and hoping for more luck than I deserved, I wore my favorite pearly waistcoat with my tuxedo. As I awaited the arrival of the Levys, I sat in the lobby’s four-person circular ottoman—greenish, tufted, and topped in the center with a fern fountain—pretending to read the
San Jose Evening News
. I think there was a story about a Mardi Gras masquerade, a skating party, Caruso’s arrival in San Francisco to perform a portly
Carmen—
it all seems petty now. But I only pretended to read. For in that setting I had my sole moment of doubt.
I watched the couples descending the staircase, prompt for dinner, the men carved from solid black, the women ruffled as sea dragons. It occurred to me that this was the scene, in those Gothic novels, where the hunchback snatches his maiden. Here with the chandelier, the glow from the newel lamp, the diamonds and the bare flesh. This was the monster’s moment. Having trailed her, tricked her, now I was about to steal her—giving her nothing in return but my poisoned life, my warted lips. It was a moment of clarity. Hughie had said a lie like this would wear me out, but I saw that it would wear out everything I touched. As the clock began
to strike, I had a surprisingly unselfish thought: I could leave. I could get an auto and catch a late train, have my bags sent to me. I could write her a note, and save a number of lives tonight. I actually rose from my seat, as if in a dream, considering whether to head for the door, and who knows what kind of story this might be if I had made it?