All He Ever Wanted (20 page)

“Professor Asher,” I said.

“Please call me Phillip,” he said.

“Well, yes, Phillip, then. I wonder if you would care to come to dinner at my home. My wife, Etna, and I should love to have
you. Hotel and college food cannot be much to your liking.”

For just a moment, Asher’s eyes widened in alarm, or what I took to be alarm — perhaps it was only surprise: would one rival
have another to his home? (Yes, I might have answered him, I would do so, if only to better assess the competition.) I didn’t
think Etna would mind, though she might decide it was strange I had invited a colleague home at all, since I so seldom did
this. Yet, she, too, had been at Ferald’s reception and could not have failed to grasp the import of Ferald’s public embrace
of Asher.

“Thank you, Van Tassel,” Asher said.

“Nicholas.”

“Nicholas.”

“Friday evening?”

He appeared to think a moment. “I’m afraid I…”

“Sunday dinner, then.”

Asher nodded slowly.

“There,” I said, once again seizing the moment. “That’s settled. Let me just write down the address. Shall we say one o’clock?
To give you time to get home from church and so forth?”

Asher said nothing.

“Do you have need of transportation?”

“No, I have an automobile.”

“Do you?” I asked. “What kind?”

“A Ford.”

“You drove up from New Haven?”

“I did.” He looked around and seemed anxious to be gone.

“And were the roads tolerable?” I asked.

“There’s a direct route,” he said distractedly.

“I keep you too long,” I said. “These are matters we may discuss on Sunday at my home.”

And before I could detain him a minute longer, he moved away from the table. “I look forward to it,” he said.

I sat to my cold breakfast and watched his retreating figure. I felt better than I had after our two previous encounters.
I had seen a momentary weakness in Phillip Asher, a sign that the man might fear my own candidacy. Perhaps all was not lost
after all.

* * *

As it happened, Asher did not come to dinner that Sunday, or on the Sunday after that, owing to the fact that William Bliss
died the Friday following our breakfast at the Hotel Thrupp, and Etna and I had perforce to enter a period of mourning. Etna
was understandably distraught, and I was required to remain close to home for the better part of a week to comfort her. She
found some solace in her sister Miriam, who came up from Exeter to attend the service. (Pippa, Etna’s other sister, was visiting
her husband’s family in Chicago and did not attend.) Keep, Miriam’s husband, came with his wife, and, of course, the couple
stayed with us. I did not care for Josip Keep, but in such a situation, one is more generous of spirit than one might be otherwise.
Besides, I was not at all unhappy to dispel the image of my boorish and unconfident intrusion into their household on that
long-ago Sunday morning. Though Miriam had visited yearly for a weeklong stay each time, Josip Keep had not accompanied her
to Thrupp; and while I had no illusions regarding his impression of the village (“Dreadful,” he pronounced it upon arriving),
I thought he might at least be impressed with our house. (In fact, he was not: “I wonder, Van Tassel, that you did not situate
the house so that it avoided the dismal prospect of those granite mountains,” he said.

“It was already situated,” I answered, seething.)

The funeral was impressive, with the Reverend Mr. Frederick Stimson delivering a personal and moving homily on the benevolent
brilliance of our Physics Professor. Etna wept copiously (her sister Miriam did not; indeed, she appeared hardly to have known
the man), and I, too, felt the masculine lump in the throat that will lodge when tears are not seemly. I was moved by Etna’s
obvious grief, by my affection for William Bliss (quite genuine; it had, after all, been in his house that I had come to know
Etna), and by the memory of our wedding, fourteen years earlier, in that very same chapel, a memory further enhanced by the
recollection of that first fluttering kiss with my wife. The chapel was filled to overflowing with mourners. I had not known
that Bliss had been held in such affection, though I might have guessed; he was a gentle man with a keen mind in a difficult
field. Following the ceremony, there was a buffet luncheon at the home of Evelyn Bliss, who appeared visibly exhausted from
the effort of tending to her husband during his illness and then having to watch him die.

Etna and I stood in the hallway of the Bliss residence, greeting the mourners who had come to have a meal (a bizarre custom,
I often think: who wants to partake of food following a death, which inevitably leads to an unhappy contemplation of one’s
own?). Occasionally, Etna would leave my side when freshets of grief threatened to embarrass her, and it was after an exceptionally
long absence that I went to find her. I searched through the crowd, and when I couldn’t locate her, I climbed the stairs.
I could hear a sound in one of the rooms. Approaching it, I hesitated just the one second outside the doorway as the memory
of coming upon Etna on our wedding day pushed itself forward through fourteen years of marriage. I refer to the sight of my
wife as she stood gazing into the mirror but an hour after our wedding, and the hollow and rav-aged reflection from said mirror,
a look such as I had hardly ever seen on another human’s face. I shook the vision from my thoughts and allowed forward momentum
to propel me across the threshold, where I beheld no more harrowing a sight than that of my wife sitting on the bed, her eyes
red rimmed and swollen. She took a breath of air and raised her head.

“My dear,” I said, “I have been worried about you.”

“I should have come to visit Uncle William more often,” she said.

“You came whenever you could.”

“Not enough. The man suffered. I have been so selfish.”

“Nonsense, Etna. No one could have been more dutiful.”

“I have thought only of myself!”

If I was surprised by my wife’s outburst, I was tolerant nevertheless; she was, in essence, losing a father for the second
time. “Etna, I do not understand you,” I said. “You think of everyone
but
yourself. You take excellent care of the children and me.”

“I deceive you, Nicholas. You think me virtuous when really I care so little about virtue. You think me selfless when really
I save everything for myself.” She studied me a moment. “I have not taken care of you, Nicholas. Not at all. I have been cold
in wifely matters, and I am sorry. I am so very, very sorry.”

I touched her shoulder. “You have not been cold,” I said.

“But I have not loved you!” she said.

My fingers froze upon her dress. I felt a paralysis such as that which may attend one in moments of extreme shock (I think
of the woman who succumbed to paralysis by the buffet table during the hotel fire and had to be carried bodily from the room).
I had known — of course I had known — that my wife did not love me. But to hear it said. To hear it said!

“Nicholas,” she said, “forgive me. That is not what I meant.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I have hurt you.”

“It is no matter.”

“Look at me, Nicholas,” she commanded.

I did so.

“Please sit down.”

Again, I did as she asked.

“You have loved me with all your heart,” she said.

“Yes, I have.”

“It is a treasure. To be able to love someone in that way. So thoroughly. So freely. Do you understand? Do you know how much
that is worth?”

I must have looked startled. I shook my head
no
.

“Yes, yes, Nicholas. I envy you!” my wife said.

I was stunned by the ferocity of her statement. This was so unlike Etna. For a long moment, neither of us moved.

And what am I to say of what came after? That out of death comes life? That in the darkest hours, grief gives the body license?
I have known such grief and the gradual emergence of desire that follows, a desire that may swiftly develop into a keen appetite
for life (a hedge, I often think, against annihilation). Thus it was, that day on the bed, when Etna turned to me and took
my face in her hands and searched my features for… for what was she so desperately looking? I do not know, but I do remember
clearly the kiss that followed, a kiss that both moved and aroused me. It was the first taste of true passion I had ever had
from my wife, and, as such, it produced a joy made all the sweeter for the wait.

I hesitate to trample here upon the most private of memories, but as it is part of my narrative, and part of my attempt to
understand Etna, I set it down in writing. Etna kissed my eyes and cheeks. She found her way again to my mouth. She touched
me gently on my neck. She tucked her fingers behind the knot of my tie and unfastened it with a surprisingly deft movement.
With both hands slipped beneath the lapel of my jacket, she slid it over my shoulders and along my arms. I began to help her,
scarcely able to believe my luck.

Etna touched me in a way she had not ever done before (
me,
Nicholas Van Tassel), and I experienced in that half hour such bliss (I do not think that William would mind having his name
used in such a manner; he always struck me as a man who had known happiness in sexual matters) that it now seems like a dream.
I kicked the door shut and let my wife undress me. For the first time in our marriage, Etna made love to me.

I needed no skill to please her. Indeed, it was effortless, sublime. And I recall thinking, as we lay in a state of considerable
disarray afterward, that this was how it was meant to be: husband and wife, intertwined and sated, no barrier between them.

If only such a state could have continued indefinitely.

I heard voices just outside the door and nudged Etna, who had drifted off to sleep. She flinched and sat up and, to my dismay,
immediately began to rearrange her clothes and hair. I wanted to tell her to
stop,
but I knew that she would be shamed were she to be caught in such disarray by one of the other mourners. As for me, a great
lassitude had overtaken my body, so that I was barely able to fasten the buttons of my shirtfront, buttons that had, but a
half hour earlier, been so deliciously undone by my wife.

“Forgive me, Nicholas,” Etna said with her back to me. She was pinning up the strands of hair that had fallen to her shoulders.
I adjusted my position on the bed so that I could see her face.

“There is nothing to forgive,” I said. “Far from it. Etna, I am celebrating.”

“I am not myself.”

“You are delightfully yourself.”

“Nicholas.”

“It is how a man and his wife should be,” I said, protesting. “You as much as said so yourself.”

Etna pressed her fingers to her temples and then drew them back through her hair. She folded her arms over her head as if
to hide herself.

“Etna,” I said.

She let her arms fall. She assessed herself in the mirror and saw that she had mussed the patient pinning of her hair and
would have to begin again.

“My dear,” I said. “I hope you are not feeling ashamed.”

“Ashamed?”

“Then what is it?” I asked, hating the distance she was already putting between us. I could feel my wife retreating. Or perhaps
the retreat was already complete, for she turned to me and gave me the half smile I had seen so often — the one directed to
me in kindness or to the children always, or even to Mary when praising her. A smile that was half of nothing. Nothing! I
would rather have seen despair in that moment or even deep chagrin than this indecently rapid return to the wife I had known
for more than a decade. I felt shut out, and I hope I do not blaspheme here, but it was akin to that experience described
by religious mystics of being shut away from the light of heaven. I did not want my former wife back; I desired the one who
had just revealed herself to me in all her sensual glory.

Etna turned, touched me on my ankle (I had not even removed my shoes), and then she was gone.

That abruptly. That fast.

I lay as a man will when he is spent, desiring only sleep (desiring it all the more when it is not possible). Gradually, I
found the wherewithal to finish buttoning my shirtfront and fastening my trousers. If circumstances had brought forth such
passion in Etna, I reasoned, perhaps they would again, the path having been forged, the way easier. I might have to draw her
out, or I might have to be alert to moments of vulnerability, but what had happened once could happen again, could it not?

In such a manner, I reached a kind of equilibrium, one that was entirely necessary in order to return to the other mourners
downstairs.

I do not recall much of the luncheon that followed the funeral, with the exception of a strange encounter with Josip Keep,
whom I had been trying to avoid. Toward the end of the affair, however, when I was watching Etna say farewell to Arthur Hallock
across the room, Keep surprised me at my elbow. Perhaps my brother-in-law was still feeling outmaneuvered by that long-ago
Sunday morning at his house in Exeter. Whatever his motive, he chose that moment to ask a question that startled me.

“Did she sell the painting?” Keep asked in a baritone that had grown only deeper through the years.

“What painting?” I asked, turning to him. Keep’s silky black hairline had receded to a vanishing point. His massive frame
had softened some, and his handsome face — that face so used to entitlement — had blurred a bit with age.

“Oh, I am mistaken, then,” Keep said. “I was under the impression that Etna had sold a painting she inherited.”

“A painting of what?” I asked.

Keep sipped from a glass of sherry. “My dear man, if you don’t know, how should I?”

“Etna has sold no such painting,” I said. “If she had, I surely would have known about it.”

“Of course,” Keep said.

“I can’t imagine what made you think she had inherited a painting,” I said. “We own many paintings, but none that she inherited.”

“Quite so,” Keep said, taking another sip from his glass of sherry (an amontillado I myself had purchased for the occasion).