The Pillow Friend (19 page)

“Whew,” he said, as they rested. “If you knew how long I'd wanted to do that . . .”

“Not as long as I have.”

He laughed. “Want to bet? That first day, when I gave you a lift to your bank, and then we went and got a coffee—”

“That wasn't the first day.”

“What was for you?”

“The first time I
saw
you.
‘Jeder Engel ist schrecklich.'
”

“Every angel is . . . terrifying?”

“Don't you remember?”

Their faces were inches apart and his eyes were steadily on hers, but she had no idea what he saw, or thought, or felt.

“High school?”

“I was in love with you. Didn't you know?”

He smiled. “In love with me? In high school? How could you have been. I was horrible.”

“I thought you were wonderful.”

“You must have been the only person apart from my mother who did, and even she had her doubts.”

He didn't seem to be taking her seriously, but she persisted. “You must have known. Why else would I ask you out?”

“God, who knows? It was a dance girls asked boys to, that's all. I don't think about high school very much.”

“I asked you out because I wanted you to ask me out. Because I was crazy in love with you and you hardly knew I existed.”

“Oh, I knew you existed.”

“Then why didn't you ask me out?”

“I did.”

“After. What did you think of me? Tell me the truth.”

“It's ancient history. What does it matter? I'm not the person I was then, thank goodness.”

“Alex, please, it's important. I want to know.”

“You want to know why I shied away from you like the nervous little nerd I was?” He sighed. “If you really want to know, I'll tell you. I was scared of you.”

“Why?”

“Um, every angel's terrifying? You were a teen angel.” He sighed and shook his head when she didn't laugh. “Okay, dumb joke. I was scared of most girls then, but I was particularly shy of you because you were so smart.”

“Oh, come on!”

“I mean it. I told you I was horrible. I was a complete male chauvinist pig, my only excuse is that we all were then, and I was uncomfortable around a girl who was smarter than me.”

“But you were the honors student, you were in all the Special Progress classes—I was only in English! You were in the top percentile, you graduated cum laude, I didn't.”

“I'm not talking about grades. Of course I got good grades. But you read books. Real books, not just for class. You not only read poetry, and quoted it, and understood it, you actually wrote it. It was a struggle just to keep up with you, and I felt I had to outdo you. That was my masculine role. I couldn't cope with someone like you; not then. Now, of course, although you're still smarter than me, and brighter, and more creative, and lots and lots prettier, I am a modern liberated man and I don't care.” He drew her to him for a kiss. “In fact, I feel proud as hell to be able to attract someone as special as you. Now can we stop talking about how dumb I was in high school and do something a lot more fun?”

“Alex, wait.” She held his head between her hands. “Tell me something. Did you—did we—” But it was impossible to ask. She'd never confessed those nighttime encounters to anyone, and she couldn't do it now, not to him. Yet she longed to know if he'd been aware, on any level, of what was happening. Perhaps he'd had dreams, maybe he'd remember something which would make her feel less alone, less strange. She temporized. “Did you want me? If you could have, if you hadn't been afraid of me . . . would you have made love to me?”

He sighed and closed his eyes. “Why . . . ?”

“Please.”

“Christ, of course I wanted you, I wanted every pretty girl I saw. I would have fucked anyone and anything then—if I'd dared. Only my fear was greater than my lust. I didn't have the first idea what to do. So I didn't lose my virginity until after I left home. It was true, what everybody said about those hippie chicks in Austin. . . .”

He opened his eyes. “And now I have some idea of what to do. I don't think I'm as horrible as I used to be. And I'm not scared of you anymore. What do you think about me? On second thought—don't tell me unless it's good.”

MAKING MAGIC

—Erica Jong, “The Evidence”

A
fter graduating from the University of Texas, Agnes stayed on in Austin with her boyfriend, guiltily allowing their affair to drag on instead of ending it, as she could have done by leaving town. Alex moved back to Houston, where there was a job waiting for him, and Roxanne went to Los Angeles in pursuit of the Hollywood dream. Although she liked to imagine herself leading a more cosmopolitan life in New York or San Francisco, London or Paris, Agnes found it difficult to leave Austin even after her boyfriend had become history.

Austin was a friendly, comfortable place where she felt at home. It had good bookstores, the university's libraries and film societies, and cafes where she could be confident of meeting someone to talk to if she was in the mood, or sit, reading or writing, with a cup of good coffee if she was not. She joined a local writers' circle and expanded her repertoire from poetry (which didn't pay) to short stories (which sometimes did). She had fantasies of a literary life like one she'd read about in books, set in London and New York, but how was she to afford it? She was too practical to want to starve and suffer while she wrote. In Austin she had a job she enjoyed, working for a small publishing company. This paid the bills, including her portion of the rent on an old house near the university, shared with a shifting population of graduate students, and also left her with a little spare time to write. She still felt that a fated existence waited for her somewhere else, out there in the future, but she was young and believed time and chance would draw her there eventually.

In between the boyfriends, who came and went, never affecting her very deeply, Agnes kept herself company with thoughts of Graham Storey. The crush she'd had on him as a child, seeing his shadowy, dreamy-eyed photograph on a scrap of newsprint, had become more sophisticated, but it was still a crush.

Reading the poems in his first collection,
The Memory of Trees
,
as a high school student, she had decided he was an English Rilke. His poems had been as mysterious to her, and as moving. The poems in his second collection, which was published in America when she was in her final year of college, were less mystical. By then, her own tastes in poetry had changed, and she liked them even better. It seemed to her that she and Graham Storey had a similar outlook on life. He wrote the poems she wished she could write.

She had many favorite poets, others who moved her more profoundly, or seemed to speak to her more directly than he did—but they were all dead. Graham Storey was alive. Reading library copies of the
TLS, Stand, The London Magazine
and other British periodicals, she often came upon not only his new poems, but also book reviews and letters, all of which she read greedily, combing them for clues to the person behind the poems. By chance, doing some research on W. H. Auden, she discovered that Graham Storey had been in correspondence with the older poet for a few years, and that Graham Storey's actual letters were a part of the Auden collection in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.

As a student, she had access to them. She sat by herself in a small, cool, well-lighted room with a box file open on the table and picked up the typewritten pages in her hands, raised them to her face, inhaling with eyes closed. What might be left, besides the words, indentations and ink on paper, after so many years? Cell fragments from the skin of his hands, a hair, a trace of cigarette smoke . . . ? She stared and stared at the signature in blue ink, the small, cramped hand. At first, the formality of his full name, but the last two letters were signed simply
G
.

How that initial reverberated, how personal it became, how it haunted her! The fact that it was one of her own initials did not detract but seemed to suggest a connection between them, proof they had something in common.

Just occasionally she would get carried away, caught up in a yearning so intense it was a physical pain and she was helpless before it. It frightened her a little, that she could be so overcome by emotion for someone she didn't even know, for a figure of her own creation. She had never felt such overwhelming love for a real person—only for the perfect lover she had once imagined Alex to be, and, as a child, for Myles.

But at least this time she knew her yearning could not be answered. She was perfectly aware that the real Graham Storey could not be the soul mate she'd invented. That was why, although she had his address, she never wrote him a letter (or, at least, she never sent it), and although she was saving her money with the idea of making a trip to England, she did not fool herself by thinking that an English holiday would bring her any closer to the real man. She indulged in fantasies of meeting him by chance: she would be walking along the Drag one day, and there he'd be, walking toward her. She would recognize him from the picture on the back of his latest book. The English Department did sponsor a series of poetry readings; it was not impossible that they might invite Graham Storey. Or maybe she'd be visiting London, walking down Charing Cross Road, and see him inside a bookshop, signing books. She could walk in . . .

The truth was, she didn't really want to meet him. She didn't want to be forced to give up her fantasy. She could enjoy it for what it was, her own creation, and her idea of the poet could be an inspiration to her. But they would never meet.

Standing in Victoria Station, alone amid the alien crowd, unreal-feeling from jet lag and lack of sleep, she stood and turned the tissue-thin pages of a telephone book. The sight of his name thrilled her, as always, like a familiar touch. All at once she felt more at home, able to deal with the problem of finding her way around this huge, unknown city.

The next day she set off for Harrow-on-the-Hill, which sounded to her as if it should be inhabited by hobbits, but was apparently no more than one of the far-flung tendrils of London's contemporary sprawl, easily accessible by the Metropolitan Line. His street she had located in her newly purchased
London A to Z
and she felt confident that she would find her way there from the station.

She had no plans for what she would say or do after she had made her way to his door. She was praying that magic would strike, that he would look at her and feel what she had felt when she'd first set eyes on his face.

It was a sunny day, but breezy and not very warm, even though it was June. She felt glad for her cotton jacket as she walked up the hill into the wind. Even before she saw the number and was sure, she had recognized his little white cottage with the honeysuckle twining around the green door. She knocked, and both her breath and her heart seemed to stop while she waited for a reply.

A woman opened the door. She was about thirty, attractive in a strong-featured, rather exotic way, with kohl-rimmed eyes and long, dark hair. “Yes?” She hadn't expected to encounter anyone else, and it took her a moment to find her tongue, and ask if this was indeed the poet's house.

The way the woman looked at her made her certain she would not be allowed in. To this woman, whatever her connection to the poet, she was just some person from Porlock. “Please, won't you tell him—won't you ask him—but not if he's working, of course. Don't interrupt him. But if I could come back later, I wouldn't take up too much of his time . . .”

“You're American, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“Here on a visit?”

She nodded. “My first time.”

“How do you know him?”

“I don't. Not personally. Just his work. I've admired it for so long. . . .”

The woman suddenly smiled. “Oh, you're one of his readers! Well, he's not here right now, but would you like to come in anyway? I can show you round.”

This was not at all as she had hoped it would be. “Maybe I could come back when he's in.”