The Knife Thrower (7 page)

Harter had expected the affair to end badly, but he hadn’t expected it to end as badly as it did: he on the edge of the bed, grimly fastening the buttons of his shirt, she tearful and asprawl in her lavender nightie, the one that made him long for slimmer, younger, more desirable women, and then the surprise he ought to have foreseen, the little twist of fate that turned it all into farce—the suddenly opened door and the irate husband striding into the room. So that’s that, Harter thought, he’s going to kill me. But after a single step the husband stopped as if struck in the face, and Harter realized that only now had he raised his eyes to the unpleasant scene before him. Harter realized something else: he was going to get away with it. The man by the door was small and neat, almost delicate, no match for Harter. He wore a dark three-piece suit and a trim little
mustache and his dark, thinning hair was combed back in little waves over both temples. The exposed temples made him look oddly frail, as if the blow of a fist would crush his skull like a baby’s, and Harter felt a motion of pity for the little man, who stood there without moving, without saying anything. Harter buttoned his shirt and stood up. He did not look at Martha. He walked slowly and carefully around the bed toward the door, and as he passed close to Martha’s husband—was his name Joseph? Lawrence?—he saw that the man was not looking at him but staring straight ahead and that he was trembling. Harter was on the verge of saying something ridiculous—it’s over anyway, none of it matters, she loves you—when the man spoke in a low, stifled voice, a voice so low that Harter could catch only the hiss of hate and something that sounded like “you in the morning.” Harter passed quickly through the door and down the carpeted stairs to the living room. In the light of the table lamp a slender black briefcase gleamed on the cushion of the armchair. Only as he stepped onto the front porch did Harter realize that the little man had been trembling with rage.

The moon startled him. It was disturbingly bright, like a white sun. It threw shadows of trees against the high stone wall of the park across the street and polished the fender of his car discreetly parked a block away. The night sky dark blue, a touch of autumn coldness in the air—a night for young lovers walking arm in arm, the sharp, exciting knock of high heels on sidewalks, muffled laughter, the scritch scritch of stockings on striding legs. He’d been a fool not to break it off sooner.

As Harter bent into his car he saw two library books on the passenger seat and remembered the third, lying on the night table by
Martha’s bed. She would have to return it for him. The thought of this future act of hers, which she would perform bravely, letting her hand linger as she placed the book on the return desk, gave him a strange sort of pleasure, as if he enjoyed being present in her life a little longer, as if it all weren’t so depressingly final. Maybe he would see her again after a while. He would step up to her and place a hand on her shoulder. She would turn around, her eyes would fill with tears, or no, he would be reading in the library one night, he would look up, and there, sitting across from him—but he was being sentimental. It was over and done with. Harter started toward the other side of town, where he lived alone on the top floor of a three-family house. Was it really one in the morning? The little man had no right bursting in like that. But then, it was his room, and he hadn’t really burst in, the door had opened rather slowly. He need never have known. Harter could have slipped out of her life as easily as you pulled off a sock at the end of the day, leaving it a bit wrinkled, a little the worse for wear, but no more. No, that had an ugly ring to it. He was tired, tired—tired of everything. And then, on the very night when he had finally found a way, the suddenly opened door, the little husband striding in. Now Harter had to carry away the image of the hissing little man, the shamed wife, the terrible scene he would never witness. And the worst part was, even though he had finally broken it off, even though he had grown sick to death of it all, the thought of Martha’s tender reconciliation with her little husband did nothing to soothe his conscience. Instead it left him with a vague jealousy, as if he himself would have liked to be the one to wipe her tears away and forgive her for straying.

Harter was very tired, he scarcely noticed where he was driving,
and he was startled to see his block suddenly before him. He had left the light on over the sink in the kitchen—the only yellow window on a dark, sleeping street. The little man had stopped suddenly, as if struck in the face. Harter closed the car door with care, disengaging the handle and nudging the door shut with his hip. He fumbled for his house key, wearily he climbed the stairs to the third floor, and that night he dreamed that he was playing the piano in the living room of his childhood house. Martha was sitting close to him on the piano bench, a warm, drowsy feeling was filling him from the contact of her thigh, but when he turned to look at her he saw that the little husband was standing directly behind her, pressing his body against her back and twisting her ear in his little white fist.

Harter at thirty was a large soft man with broad round shoulders and a boyish face. He liked to wear single-color dress shirts with the cuffs rolled back once, soft pre-washed Wrangler jeans, and old loafers with thick socks. He taught history—ancient, modern, and American—at a community college at the edge of a bad neighborhood and played a lazy, good-natured game of tennis.

Although Harter had had his share of women, they always proved unsatisfactory, and unsatisfactory in the same way: finally, when all was said and done, they did not excite him enough, did not drive him to the pitch of frenzy he longed for. Sometimes he thought that the pattern of his erotic life had been set in the seventh grade, when for months he had desperately pursued a girl called
Lois Bishop. At first she had ignored him cruelly, but his persistence, his devotion, perhaps even his suffering, had slowly made an impression, and one day she had consented to let him walk home with her—and it was during that walk, in the midst of an exhilaration so intense that it made his muscles feel sore, that he began to notice certain flaws in Lois Bishop which he hadn’t noticed before, when she existed in the realm of the utterly inaccessible: a certain way the tip of her nose moved down and up when she talked, a certain harshness in her jaw, a disturbing boniness in her wrists and long thumbs. She seemed to like him, but he never asked to walk home with her again, and when he passed her in the halls he became cool and aloof. The same disappointment returned in high school, when in the act of sliding his hand to the top of Bernice Coleman’s stocking on her living room couch at eleven-thirty at night he suddenly imagined the beautiful, shimmering, unbearably desirable legs of Sharon Krupka, who sat across from him in the circle of maplewood desk-chairs in Problems of American Democracy and who had a habit of crossing and uncrossing her legs over and over again, slowly, restlessly, tormentingly. In college, sophomore year, he had met a shy, not bad-looking girl, with eyeglasses and a self-deprecating sense of humor, who had surprised him into bed with her one afternoon, while all along he could think only of her roommate, a brassy blond who liked to wear black tights and leather miniskirts, believed in astrology and Scientology, and had a way of sitting on chairs with her legs thrown carelessly over the arms. His handful of adult affairs had all suffered from the same theme of disappointment: the thin, quiet, older woman he had met at a party, who had seemed so relieved at finding someone to talk to and who had proved on better
acquaintance to have a flood of bitter grievances against her mother, her boss, the horrible men in her life, and finally against Harter himself; the heavyish psychology teacher who used too much perfume and required continual, exhausting assurances that he found her attractive; the fairly pretty artist he had met at another party, who laughed explosively, throwing back her head, but who in bed became silent and melancholy, as if locked in a secret sorrow. There had been others, all of whom had seemed promising but had quickly revealed a crucial flaw. And always behind or above these women was some other, fatally desirable woman, whom he longed for but could never possess—someone glimpsed on a bus, or on a beach, or on some glossy poster advertising liquor—women who haunted his imagination and followed him into bed, where they mocked the mediocre actual woman who had already become unsatisfactory.

Although Harter felt he should have slept with many more women, and was troubled by a shyness he seemed unable to overcome, he knew that women liked him well enough. He was a sympathetic listener, and his sympathy had a way of leading sooner or later to physical intimacy, but sometimes he wondered whether he deliberately sought out troubled women so that he could gain their affection without much effort—after which it was never long before their rather obvious flaws proved fatal. In darker moods he wondered whether he was cursed with a romantic temperament. Harter liked to call himself a romantic, especially in conversation with women, by which he implied that he was a mysterious man full of endless enthusiasms and passions, but by which he in fact meant that nothing, especially a woman, could satisfy him for long. Why are we born? Where are we going? These were some of the
questions that Harter liked to put to himself, from time to time, when the hours grew heavy on his hands; and for this reason he was fond of calling himself a philosopher.

He had met Martha in the reading room of the city library, where he liked to go several evenings a week to leaf through current magazines and look at the high school girls, wondering which of them would turn up in his classes in a year or two. The bodies of teenage girls excited him, though he was far too timid ever to start anything with one of them; but there was no harm in looking. He liked to pick out girls of special grace and elegance, with their cornsilk hair, white blouses, and knee-length kilts, but he also liked tough working-class girls with rouged cheeks, shiny black leather jackets, bright red nails, and jeans so tight they looked painful.

One rainy evening shortly before closing time he checked out a book and stepped with his umbrella through the door of the main room into the little lobby before the big glass front doors, where he saw a woman in a dark blue coat holding two books and looking out through the dripping glass with a worried expression. He had seen her once or twice before, reading a magazine or looking for a book. He joked about the rain and discovered she had parked two blocks away. She first refused and then accepted his offer to share his umbrella, and he led her carefully to her car, biting down his irritation when he stepped in a puddle up to his ankle and thinking how it was just his luck: not the two girls he had seen in the stacks that night, giggling over a big book in the art section, but this plumpish woman with her marriage ring. She thanked him earnestly. A week later he saw her again in the library, and this time she smiled and thanked him again. When he saw her two nights later they fell into conversation. She liked to read; her
husband traveled a lot; she was always forgetting things like umbrellas. The next time he saw her they spoke easily, as if they were old friends, and one night she invited him to her home for a cup of tea.

At first the affair excited him—she was his first married woman—and he was grateful for the way she doted on him, spoiled him, listened to him with earnest attention. For whole minutes, as she stared at him, she would forget to blink her wide, generous eyes. It may have been the very completeness of her surrender that began to make him uneasy, but he soon grew dissatisfied, and within a month he knew that he had made a mistake. He was not the adulterous type; at forty-three she was too old for him; the softness and ampleness of her flesh disturbed him. He began looking for a way to break it off cleanly, a way that would make it clear she was not to blame. He reminded himself that however much it might hurt her now, it would hurt her even more if he waited. He was certain he could find the right words. It was the best thing for all concerned.