Must Read Well, page 10
Anne shifted this way and that as she listened to me, trying to get comfortable, or less uncomfortable, at least, and sometimes closed her eyes as if to listen better. When she asked how it had happened that I’d attended Columbia, I admitted to having done unusually well in high school. With becoming modesty, I added that I’d been floored when they admitted me. I would never even have applied there if my high school guidance counselor hadn’t told me to, and I had certainly never expected to be accepted. I’m not sure why I said it was a guidance counselor who had helped me instead of telling her the truth. Maybe some instinctive scruple about dragging Miss Hart into the moral murk of my current adventure.
“Smart girl,” said Anne, with that curiously dry tone she sometimes had. “And good for that guidance counselor.” A moment later, she added, “And do you have a boyfriend?”
For once I could answer sincerely.
“Not anymore,” I blurted out, and my heart thumped as I said it. “That’s why I was looking for a place to live.”
“I’m sorry,” Anne replied, though she didn’t sound very sorry. “Well, it was very lucky indeed for me that you needed to move. You do read so very well.”
As I thanked her for saying so, she yawned and reached for her cane.
“Forgive me for yawning, Beth. It’s been a pleasure to learn a bit more about you, but I think I’d better try to go back to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning. You go make yourself that hot milk,” she added, as she took her first slow steps. “I hope it helps.”
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When we met to read the next day, I felt that my midnight chat with Anne had had a good effect. There was a friendlier feeling between us, less formal, more collegial. Still, I was careful to remain respectful, to keep my face neutral, an impassive helper with no particular interest in whatever she wanted me to read. Yesterday’s journal was already on her desk. I picked it up and opened it, and she told me to start again with the entry after the one we’d finished the day before.
It proved disappointingly bland.
Tuesday March 19, 10 p.m.
Up early and at desk by nine, only to scrap new backstory for Laura. It just doesn’t do what I need it to, so...back to reimagining. This ghastly, impossible book! Sometimes I think it will be the death of me.
Stuck at it till one, had lunch, and then out to get food for dinner. At Jefferson Market ran into Nick Spencer and talked about a couple of the people we have in common from Bread Loaf. Home again and back to the desk. Made myself sit for an hour in front of a blank page. When I stood up, it was still as virginal as when I had sat down. Started to cook at five and discovered the burners don’t work again. Of course no handyman till tomorrow, so—
“Oh for pity’s sake,” Anne broke in. “The crap I bothered to write down! Go ahead and look for Greg.”
I paged forward, glad myself to leave the useless stovetop behind. There was a good deal of other crap, as Anne had called it, and not even a morsel of literary gossip, during the two days before the sought-after initial reappeared. Anne waited patiently as I scanned through, but we were both relieved when I could resume reading aloud.
Thursday March 21, 10:00 p.m.
In my study, door locked. I am in a new world now. This afternoon, I went to Greg’s studio “to hear him play.” To “see his etchings” it might as well have been, although I doubt any etching ever so melted a woman.
The “studio” is a studio apartment, a single, soundproof room several floors above the public part of Carnegie Hall. I had heard that there were such places and on arrival had a pleasant sense of privilege at being admitted to one of them. Greg confirmed for me what I dimly recalled, that there are many musicians who practice or even live there (though I doubt many have the advantage of simply going downstairs to play a concert!). His place is so small that his baby grand takes up half the space, but there’s still room for a daybed sufficiently long and wide for a man—a man of Greg’s height and slimness, anyway—to sleep on. There’s also a kitchenette, and he offered me coffee.
I didn’t want any but said yes, a feint of sorts to disguise the nature of my visit, delay the inevitable, perhaps. To keep up the pretext of a tame, sociable rendezvous. That it was a rendezvous in the more significant sense of the word was overpoweringly clear to both of us, not just as the thing itself unfolded but from the moment he had first suggested it at lunch. The charge in the air both scared and excited me. I sat primly on the edge of the daybed, the only place to sit except the piano bench. His back to me, Greg began to busy himself in the kitchen.
In books, I’ve written scenes of “illicit” encounters, but “illicit” was then a word like any other. Now it flashed like a neon sign, fascinating, mesmerizing, terrible in the tawdry, blazing, blinking fact of it. And yet I didn’t think of Steve, not once. My desire enveloped me, inhabited me completely.
Still we kept up the pretense of a civil, pleasant visit, generous on his part, politely curious on mine. The pretense multiplied the truth tenfold. I drank my coffee as if its taste were the very one I craved. We made conversation—and never has the expression “made” conversation been more apt, since neither of us had a genuine word to say. After an absurd ten minutes or so of this, Greg asked me whose music I would like to hear first. Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, anything crashing and romantic came to mind, but I said, “Bach?”
He gave me a knowing, amused look, went to the keyboard, opened and closed his hands, bowed his head, and threw himself into the first movement of the first French Suite. Such a tiny piece, not even two minutes, but the furious intensity with which he played it made an efficient end-run around my demure selection. He is indeed an extraordinary musician. When the last note had diffused into the quivering air, he stood up, crossed the room, and bent over me. With both hands, he lifted the hair from the back of my neck to kiss what he had exposed. The warmth of his breath there undid me and I surrendered.
His touch, his touch! We sank into each other. In the aftermath of lust—what discretion, this cinematic elision of what came in between, but I can’t bring myself to translate it into words—after lust came tenderness, surely unearned after so short an acquaintance, but palpable all the same. We lay on the daybed entangled both by choice and the insufficient width for two, but entanglement of this sort is very uncomfortable, I’ve always found—the numb arm under the suddenly heavy body, the awkward angle of the neck as it tries to rest on a shoulder. This brought me back to my senses (or out of them, more accurately) and I sat up. A chill in the room I hadn’t felt before, as well as the fact that he could now see my body in all its nakedness, made me stand and fetch my coat. I put it on, even buttoned it up, before sitting down on the daybed once more. What have we begun? Here there be dragons.
I stopped and was quiet for a few seconds, thinking Anne might like a minute to think all this over before we went on. But she asked if that was the end of the entry—it was—and told me to continue reading.
Friday March 22, 10 a.m.
Woke at five this morning in a state of high alert. As I was writing the above last night, Steve knocked on my study door and called through that he was going to bed. Quietly, I locked the journal away and joined him. To my surprise, I promptly managed to turn off my brain and collapse into sleep. But only till five. Lay awake hoping to sleep again but my mind continued its mad racket and I gave up at 6:00.
Now to finish writing yesterday’s events—not that I expect ever to forget them. So.
Soon after I hid my nakedness under my coat, I asked Greg to check his watch and was astonished to learn I had been there less than an hour. All the same, I felt compelled to go away at once, to try to collect myself, I suppose, or maybe just relieve the intensity of the encounter. We kissed goodbye and made an appointment to meet again a week from Tuesday. He has many obligations between now and then, he said, most immediately the concert at Carnegie; but he also has another lecture to give, two days with a houseguest—a violinist he and Susan went to school with at Juilliard who now lives in Paris—and most of all, a great deal of preparation to be ready for another concert, this one in Philadelphia with the Berlin Philharmonic. I went downstairs alone while he sat down at the piano.
It was just as well I left when I did. We’d met rather late in the day and I had little time for any solitary interval. If I were to take a shower before seeing Steve—and that I certainly had to do—I needed to head straight home.
I cooked a hasty dinner. At the table, I could barely face Steve. It seemed incredible that I’d gone from that to this, from the frenzy in the daybed to broiled salmon and buttered red potatoes. I tried to appear my usual self, but when Steve asked his invariable nightly question, “How was your day?” my cheeks went hot. Thankfully, he was chasing a potato around his plate and didn’t see me till the blush started to subside.
“How was my day?” In the few hours since I’d left Greg, my mind had been a movie house replaying and replaying our time together. What we did, how we had touched, even the awkward fifteen minutes after I got to the studio. The looks we had given each other. The way we parted. In the rare moments when my thoughts wandered from these recollections, they wandered no farther than across the lobby. What was Greg’s homecoming to Susan like? What were his thoughts about me? Was he as excited (and frightened) as I am about meeting again?
As Steve and I sat and ate and chatted, I couldn’t help imagining that he somehow sensed that something noteworthy had happened during my day, something cloudy to him, but disturbing. Naturally, I felt compelled to erase any such suspicion, even going so far as to try to get him back into bed after he got up to go to work this morning. No dice, and in retrospect I wonder if this very stratagem only heightened any vague intuition he might really have that something is not quite right. He is a trial lawyer, after all. It’s his business to read people—guilty people in particular.
After he left for the office, I sat down at my desk as usual but couldn’t focus on my concerns about And Sometimes Y, in particular Laura’s thinness as a character and my growing doubts about whether she even belongs in the story. Gave up after lunch and incautiously lay down on the living room sofa to read but fell asleep at once—a deep, dream-filled sleep that lasted almost two hours. The content of these rich, languorous dreams evaporated the moment I opened my eyes. All I remember is how sensuous they were.
Following this, decided I might as well devote the remaining hours before I had to cook dinner to taking care of the usual waiting list of annoying chores—paying bills, answering a few tedious letters, doing the laundry... Steve home at seven, the suggestion of a change in my demeanor still, I worried, in his manner. Surely I am imagining this. And yet I’m afraid even to think of Greg when Steve is around. What if I say his name? I feel it might leap out of my mouth like the toad in the fairy tale.
EIGHT
Reading aloud Anne’s account of her fevered visit to Morris’s studio sent a queasy wave through my innards. Different as her infidelity to Stephen Pace was from Tim’s to me (at least I hoped so!), it was infidelity all the same. So when she told me to give her the journal, that she wanted to end our session for today, I felt relief as well as disappointment. I could use a little time to myself. I handed her the journal, which she locked away with the others in her desk.
It didn’t surprise me that she’d wish to pause here. Naturally, she would want to linger over this pungent, thrilling, rescued bit of her past. As her day went on, she would, perhaps, recall new details—the quality of the light in the room, the smell of the coffee she didn’t want, the temperature of her lover’s skin, the taste of his mouth, her own heightened heartbeat. She might even relive the tryst overnight in a dream.
As I began to stand up, though, she gestured to me to stay put.
I sat, confused. She held up a finger as if to say that she needed a moment to think. Then she folded her hands on the desk, inspected them, and looked up and smiled.
“My, my,” she said at last. “What must you think of me?”
Her question and the tone in which she delivered it brought to mind what she’d said apropos of her wrecked vision: “You can imagine my vexation.” Both sentences were mille-feuilles of rage, irony, and style. And for all the strange coyness of her delivery, both were passionately sincere. Were I to answer the question literally, my first reply would have been, “Wow, you skank! You cheated on your nice husband?”
I might also have said that I thought she’d been enviably sexual into her forties—and that she was a better writer than I’d taken her for. Some authors, I’ve observed, do write better when they write with their left hand, as it’s sometimes called—when their goal is not to shape a work of art but simply to say what they mean.
However, her question wasn’t really a question at all. It was a bitter acknowledgment of the fact that she’d been forced to share with a stranger this most intimate of scenes. Accordingly, I said nothing, only trying to telegraph with a fleeting smile some sympathy for her pain. And this was wholehearted. Weil’s present-day predicament struck me as genuinely, profoundly mortifying, and entirely unfair. Later, I cursed myself for failing to use the moment as an occasion to say that she seemed to me to have been an unusually liberated woman and ask whether she saw herself that way. I needed to know to what extent Vengeance had been a political statement for her, if it had been at all. Yet I gave way to my own emotion.
“Well, whatever you think, there it is,” she said after a short silence. She sighed. “What are your generation’s norms of sexual behavior? I wonder. Are people unfaithful to their spouses? I mean, I’m sure some are, but is it less shameful, more something to be expected and managed, lived with?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been married.”
“I see.” She was silent again, then continued, “Well, do you—hook up, I think is the term? I mean, not you particularly, but people you know, people your age?”
I hesitated, again wishing that I could be the one asking such questions. But I knew she was trying to get the spotlight off her own behavior, and yielded to her preference.
“I don’t know what other people do, of course,” I said after a moment, “but my friends... I think most of us, by the time we were sixteen or so, old enough to be out of the house without supervision, we did start hooking up. Having sex. Women—and men, obviously. And men and men, and women and women, and so on, for that matter. But lately the people I know seem to be more into finding something that will last, someone to have a real relationship with.”
“But not necessarily to marry, I hope. You’re only—twenty-four, I think you said?” And here she tilted her head and raised her eyebrows before continuing, “That seems very young to me.”
“No, I mean—I think a lot of people go through at least one or two serious relationships before they get married. Committed relationships.”
“And do they live together meanwhile?”
“Eventually. Most of them.” As I said this, I felt a wave of sorry-for-myself. The subject of marriage had come up between me and Tim occasionally, usually when friends of ours announced that they were getting married, but neither of us was very enthusiastic about the idea. My own parents’ marriage had been such hell; and anyway, finishing my doctorate came first. Tim was no great fan of marriage either. His parents divorced when he was eight, an enduringly ugly rift that left him bouncing back and forth between them, doing his best to please first one, then the other, trying to keep them apart and himself together. If anything, he was even more skeptical about marriage than I.
“And what about children? Do your friends want them? Or have them already? Or are they too young?”
I thought of Petra, who could hardly wait to start a family and had taken to putting that fact right out there as soon as she started seeing someone new. And Carrie, with her wall-climbing son and spelling bee champion daughter. “I think most of the women I know want to have kids eventually,” I said. “Most of the men, too. But I don’t,” I added truthfully.
“More focused for now on working for Planned Parenthood?” she suggested.
I had forgotten this lie and almost said, “What?” It came back to me just in time, and I nodded.
“Hmm. Well, this is all very interesting for an old lady like me,” Anne said, in a summing-up way that indicated she was about to end the conversation. “Thank you for filling me in.”
“Of course. But what was it like for you?” I quickly, finally asked. “What was normal behavior when you were growing up? Did teenagers—well, not ‘hook up,’ I mean, but—”
“Oh,” Anne interrupted me, voice airy, “you know. I was born into another world. In 1922, nice women were chaste, or claimed to be. Bad girls were fast and had babies ‘out of wedlock,’ as we called it. But then came the Roaring Twenties, and then the Depression. By the time I finished high school, Hitler was all over Europe. The London Blitz started the week I got to college. It felt like the world was about to end, and of course that makes you want to gather your rosebuds. My friends and I had a lot of fun, and no one thought any the worse of us. I wouldn’t say we were promiscuous—now there’s a word you don’t hear much anymore—but we certainly weren’t chaste.”
I was about to seize on that word, “promiscuous,” and use it to pole-vault the conversation into sexual politics, when she sighed, shifted in her chair, and reached for her cane.
“But that’s all history now. You can read about it in books,” she concluded. “Let’s start again tomorrow. You really are doing an exceptional job of reading, by the way.”
I thanked her for the compliment, waited a moment for her to steady herself on her cane, then went swiftly down the hall. I was annoyed by her useless, impersonal answer to my question, her obvious disinclination to trade information about her own experience for mine (not that I’d told her anything about mine), and seething at myself for failing to ask what I needed to know, no matter how uncomfortable it might have made her. It was all too true that what she’d said was history I could find in books. I had allowed my sympathy for her to prevail—an afflicted old lady, after all, reduced to listening to someone else read her sexual past out loud—and the consequence was that I’d let myself down. I was angry at myself, and this helped me as I set about my next task.
