What He's Poised to Do: Stories (4 page)

T
HE YEAR KICKED OFF WITH AN EVENT THAT
I
FEEL CONFIDENT
describing as godly. There were floods in London that grew the river to monstrous proportions; the banks were rendered meaningless. I had an acquaintance there, and I heard about the floods in a letter. “More than a dozen souls have perished in the Thames,” Edith wrote. “Strange as it may seem, all but one were malign. Nature did its part to sweep the city clean. It was a clarifying moment.” A few days later, the moat at the Tower of London, which had been drained midway through the last century, was completely refilled by the brute force of a flood wave. On this topic, Edith was droller. “I suppose it wished to visit the Tower,” she wrote.

That was how the year began, and it continued on in that headlong spirit. In February massive hailstones rained down in both the south of England and the south of Nebraska, killing eight all told. In April, Chicago was host to what became known as the Pineapple Primary, in which more than sixty bombs were lobbed into polling places and the Nineteenth Ward committeeman was shot to death in front of his wife and daughter. The murderess Ruth Snyder was executed at Sing Sing. Edith commented upon these events in letters she sent me over the course of the spring and summer. She had a healthy appetite for both the global and the local, and a penchant for anything involving death, destruction, or disruption. As she wrote in one of her missives, “Estonia changed from the mark to the kroon; Chang Tso-lin was murdered in June. History is quite lyrical these days.” I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday in early July, and when I looked at that portion of life that stretched before me and that which trailed behind me, I realized that I was in no condition to do what I had promised to do, which was to marry Samantha Noble, the beautiful girl who wanted to marry me, and who was, as luck would have it, Edith’s daughter.

I was in good with the family, as should be clear. And why not? I had been good to their daughter. In return, she had been good to me, in some ways more than others. Over the course of the year, Samantha and I had courted, had promised ourselves to one another, and, formalities dispensed with, had proceeded to investigate one another carnally in a rather rapacious manner. We held the line against the most fearsome of intruders, of course, until we did not: the surrender (or conquest, depending upon your perspective) came shortly after my birthday, just as the Olympics were beginning in Amsterdam. (They followed the winter games in St. Moritz; I learned about both sets of Olympiads from Edith, who had a thing for them.) My parents had settled me into a small apartment in New York City that Samantha had never seen—how could she have?—and one fine afternoon, after a walk through Central Park, she sat on a bench and clutched her stomach with a loud cry. When I asked if she needed a doctor, she shook her head. “I just need to lie down for a few moments,” she said. “Isn’t your apartment nearby?” The pain on her face had to be seen to be believed—or rather, I should never have seen it, and then I could have disbelieved it.

I led her upstairs. Her hand was hot inside mine. I put her on the daybed and sat down to read a bit of Calkins. I was deep into a chapter when I noticed that there were hands at the sides of my head, and that they were connected to arms, and that those arms were bare of any petticoat and connected to a body that was every bit as bare. “My stomach is feeling better,” said Samantha, and took my hand as if to show me, though she missed her stomach by a good half-foot: a very good half-foot, as it turned out. Amelia Earhart had successfully taken an aircraft across the Atlantic just weeks before, and that was what Samantha recalled to me as she piloted me toward the daybed. I was powerless to think of anything but what she was showing me, and yet I thought mainly of her mother, Edith, who was at that moment sitting in her drawing room in London, innocently considering the recent declaration of Malta as a British dominion, entirely unaware of the fact that I was accessioning her daughter. I felt for that woman and what she did not know. And yet, what matter? A tidal wave had filled the Tower moat, and now one filled me. I dreamed of an airship crashing into an icy plain. I knew that something like that had happened near the North Pole, but within my dream the event seemed fully original.

The dream must have been pushed up right against my wakening, for I came into the morning light with a sharp fear. For starters, one of my thumbs was sore, as if it had been bent backward nearly to the breaking point, and that concerned me greatly until I remembered that it had. But, in addition, there was a pain in my right eye, and I had a cottonmouth, and my ears could not decode the sounds they heard. Samantha was sleeping beside me, and I began to put my symptoms in order so that I could convey them to her when she woke. I thought that perhaps I was catching whatever she had contracted that had caused her stomachache, and it was a few moments before I remembered that the stomachache had been contrived, and that the contrivance had in fact led directly to the events that had dried my mouth and bent my thumb. The eye and ear I could not account for entirely.

Samantha was not my first; there had been a lady of the evening I patronized during a trip to Lisbon some years earlier. But Samantha was the first among the girls who were considered proper matches—the right age, the right class, the right faith—and as she lay there on the daybed, I suddenly had a pang of hatred for her. A pang of hatred for myself followed close behind. The woman had made herself available to me in a manner that risked her reputation. What right did I have to judge her? And yet my contempt was indisputable: “the woman,” as a way of referring to my beloved, my betrothed? Beastly. Perhaps the devil in me was broadening. I went to the window. The park was across the street and I tried to take it all in with one long stare. Was that even possible? I had read an article about that exact question; the author, a respected alienist and psychologist, had suggested that a duration of twenty seconds contributed most to the masonry of recollection, and that any longer study began to take bricks away. I looked for twenty-five seconds, looked away, remembered nothing, wondered if I had proven anything.

The lady in Lisbon had been the first. Someone else had been the second, and another someone else the third. Then came the fourth, a girl here in town, the older sister of a school friend, and that was when my brazenness began to turn back in on itself. That woman, the older sister, had a worldly air; she had spent a year in Lyon, which she called a magical city, though I came to realize that by magical she meant sensual, and by city she meant the garret of her older lover, a married painter who had her strip down and stand in the center of a large bare floor. His paintings were portraits of her that he later surrounded with antique grandeur—palaces, fountains, arches. I had seen one. It was terrible: quite realistic. It was through this woman that I met Samantha.

They had come together to a dinner party at my aunt’s town-house the previous winter. The woman and I were pretending that we only hardly knew each other, and asking the sorts of questions you would ask a person of new acquaintance:
Tell me again, have you been to France?
That excited her. As part of that ruse, she drew in Samantha, who had been a younger classmate of hers some years before. Samantha later said that she took one look at me and knew I was the man she would marry. I took one look at her and thought little, though when she turned to speak to someone else I do remember remarking to myself that she had the figure of an angel, particularly from the rear. I was by no means immune to that fact, or in general to the effect of a beautiful young woman with long blonde hair. She was demure and quiet for the entirety of that first dinner engagement, and as we parted, she took my hand and said that she was pleased to meet me, and I went home with the other woman and we ruined one another additionally. A few days later, the other woman was scheduled for another visit, and she did appear, but with a restless look in her eyes that was nevertheless devoid of hunger. I asked her what seemed to be the matter, and she told me she was laying down her arms because Samantha was in love with me. It was such a preposterous excuse that I knew it to be true. Four months later, Samantha and I were betrothed to one another.

Samantha came on quickly at first. She was beautiful, and that made me the envy of many men of many ages, and I enjoyed the warmth of their covetousness. She was ardent, which kept me distracted, and she was faithful, which meant that I did not have to account for a time when that ardent spirit would alight elsewhere. I took her attentions as she wished me to, which is to say that I took them for granted. I met her family during those first months—though by family I should say her parents, because she had no siblings. They were visiting in the States before heading back to London. Her father, Herman, was a stern, handsome, fatally superior man who had started as a butcher and grew a small empire in the north of England. He liked to speak of the “black branches of being that hung down low in the minds of men.” He wanted a poetical effect around him, and I suppose that he got it. Her mother was Edith, whom I mentioned before. At first, Edith was nervous, or seemed to be: her eyes darted from spot to spot in the room, though it was her own hotel room, and not much of it could have come as a surprise to her.

After we took coffee and biscuits in the room, we got to talking, the four of us. Her father had much to say about Trotsky’s exile to Turkestan, a punishment he believed was severally insufficient, both as penalty for past infractions and as deterrence to similar-minded radicals. He had many friends who had gone over the edge politically. “It is a curse of our race,” he said, his face so grim that I nearly laughed. Samantha tended to agree with her father in matters such as these, but her beauty both camouflaged her hard edge and rendered it all the more surprising when it appeared. Edith, unlike her husband and daughter, displayed both a lightness of touch and a heavy ethical hand, and she negotiated one against the other deftly. She liked to make witty remarks that seemed like mere decoration but gained substance under scrutiny. An example: The Chinese founded an Academy of Art in March. “Oh,” she said, “and to think they have their own art, too.” It sounds like the statement of a flibbertigibbet, but that is because I cannot possibly convey the finely wrought combination of irony, condescension, and even hostility toward the idea that such news should surprise anyone. “The West rests on its own sense of its uniqueness, but that uniqueness is only another word for novelty, and novelty is only another word for repeating the past without acknowledging that repetition.” She did not say that, but she might as well have: It was all woven into the tapestry of her remark. There were other examples I cannot recall at the moment; I remember only the kindness of her face as she made them, and the activity at the corners of her eyes and mouth that made that kindness count. She was the smartest woman I had ever met, and she was the mother of the woman I was to marry.

When Herman rediscovered his biblical distaste for America and the two of them sailed back to England, I stood with Samantha dockside and waved. I was smiling, but it was only at Herman’s departure. I experienced Edith’s loss almost surgically and drew closer to Samantha to allay the pain I felt. Edith must have sensed it, too, because her letters began to arrive at once. It pleased Samantha that her mother had such a favorable impression of me, though the two of them had an ambivalent relationship. Samantha wanted her mother’s wisdom but feared the rest: she worried that the ravages of time would erase her beauty, which was substantial, and turn her into something more ordinary. “We all become our mothers,” she said, by way of apology. I did not tell her that I was banking on it.

I have not spoken of my livelihood, have I? This seems like an appropriate juncture. I am a junior manager in a bank. My uncle is the president of the bank, so there is every expectation that I will rise through the ranks and become an officer of the institution. That will make me a wealthy man by forty, and a comfortable man long before that. When she visited the bank, Samantha told me that she did not care about money, but by now she has said it so frequently that there is no way to believe her. Edith, on the other hand, cared about worldly things only insofar as they informed her understanding of the world, and she proved it all the time. I once saw her put a dollar bill in a tree. “I want to see if it is here tomorrow,” she said with a straight face. “Maybe a bird will use it to buy some eggs.” Again, a joke that revealed a deeper truth.

That morning when I woke and stood by the window, I returned and sat at the breakfast table in my apartment and considered what had transpired the night before. Samantha had taken me, or at the very least she had taken me to a place where I had taken her. And now, hours later, I was in a small space with a woman I had possessed, and I still smelled her on my hands and face, and I still remembered the way she had opened her mouth to meet my open mouth, and yet I did not feel an ounce of kindness toward her. I had a schoolmate who used to say that he had “throbbed off into” a woman, a phrase I found reprehensible at the time, but which I found useful the morning after I had throbbed off into Samantha. I retreated from the window and found one of Edith’s letters. I sat on the bed and reread it. Her hand was steady and her mind more so. I treasured her opinion on everything from Hirohito to Mickey Mouse. When Charles Lindbergh had received the Medal of Honor for his first transatlantic flight, she had confessed to me that she found the man “frightfully repulsive, not just for his ideas but for his single-mindedness of purpose—I would have preferred that he fly off in all directions at once.” Her daughter, for all her beauty, for all her youth, accounted Lindbergh a hero. That saddened me. Despite that, I was pledged, and her scent was on my hands and face, and one day soon I would marry her.

How can a day like that be forestalled? I considered jumping out of the window, though I was only on the third floor and would most likely embarrass rather than extinguish myself. I considered paying one of my schoolmates to seduce Samantha, after which time I could denounce her as unfaithful and promiscuous, though that seemed rather too Byzantine a scheme, not to mention that I did not wish to crush her spirit, only to free my own. I had no real sense of my options and no real belief in my freedom. This may not make for much of a story, and yet it is every story, told all the time, in every language, with every available flourish. Man is asphyxiated by choice, not in the abstract but in the concrete. It hardens around him.