Last Night Part 6

- What were you going to say?

- Oh. My theory . . . My theory is, they remember you longer if you don't do it.

- Maybe, Kathrin said, but then, what's the point?

- It's just my theory. They want to divide and conquer.

- Divide?

- Something like that.

Jane had had less to drink. She wasn't feeling well. She had spent the afternoon waiting to talk to the doctor and emerging onto the unreal street.

She was wandering around the room and picked up a photograph of Leslie and Bunning taken around the time they got married.

- So, what's going to happen to Bunning? she asked.

- Who knows? Leslie said. He's going to go on like he's going. Some woman will decide she can straighten him out. Let's dance. I feel like dancing.

She made for the CD player and began looking through the CDs until she found one she liked and put it on. There was a moment's pause and then an uneven, shrieking wail began, much too loud. It was bagpipes.

- Oh, G.o.d, she cried, stopping it. It was in the wrong . . . it's one of his.

She found another and a low, insistent drumbeat started slowly, filling the room. She began dancing to it. Kathrin began, too. Then a singer or several of them became part of it, repeating the same words over and over. Kathrin paused to take a drink.

- Don't, Leslie said. Don't drink too much.

- Why?

- You won't be able to perform.

- Perform what?

Leslie turned to Jane and motioned.

- Come on.

- No, I don't really . . .

- Come on.

The three of them were dancing to the hypnotic, rhythmic singing. It went on and on. Finally Jane sat down, her face moist, and watched. Women often danced together or even alone, at parties. Did Bunning dance? she wondered. No, he wasn't the sort, nor was he embarra.s.sed by it. He drank too much to dance, but really why did he drink? He didn't seem to care about things, but he probably cared very much, beneath.

Leslie sat down beside her.

- I hate to think about moving, she said, her head lolled back carelessly. I'm going to have to find some other place. That's the worst part.

She raised her head.

- In two years, Bunning's not even going to remember me. Maybe he'll say "my ex-wife" sometimes. I wanted to have a baby. He didn't like the idea. I said to him, I'm ovulating, and he said, that's wonderful. Well, that's how it is. I'll have one next time. If there is a next time. You have beautiful b.r.e.a.s.t.s, she said to Jane.

Jane was struck silent. She would never have had the courage to say something like that.

- Mine are saggy already, Leslie said.

- That's all right, Jane replied foolishly.

- I suppose I could have something done if I had the money. You can fix anything if you have the money.

It was not true, but Jane said, - I guess you're right.

She had more than sixty thousand dollars she had saved or made from an oil company one of her colleagues had told her about. If she wanted to, she could buy a car, a Porsche Boxter came to mind. She wouldn't even have to sell the oil stock, she could get a loan and pay it off over three or four years and on weekends drive out to the country, to Connecticut, the little coastal towns, Madison, Old Lyme, Niantic, stopping somewhere to have lunch in a place that, in her imagination, was painted white outside. Perhaps there would be a man there, by himself, or even with some other men. He wouldn't have to fall off a boat. It wouldn't be Bunning, of course, but someone like him, wry, a little shy, the man she had somehow failed to meet until then. They'd have dinner, talk. They'd go to Venice, a thing she'd always wanted to do, in the winter, when no one else was there. They'd have a room above the ca.n.a.l and his shirts and shoes, a half-full bottle of she didn't bother to think of exactly what, some Italian wine, and perhaps some books. The sea air from the Adriatic would come in the window at night and she would wake early, before it was really light, to see him sleeping beside her, sleeping and breathing softly.

Beautiful b.r.e.a.s.t.s. That was like saying, I love you. She was warmed by it. She wanted to tell Leslie something but it wasn't the time, or maybe it was. She hadn't quite told herself yet.

Another number began and they were dancing again, coming together occasionally, arms flowing, exchanging smiles. Kathrin was like someone at one of the clubs, glamorous, uncaring. She had pa.s.sion, daring. If you said something, she wouldn't even hear you. She was a kind of cheap G.o.ddess and would go on like that for a long time, spending too much for something that caught her fancy, a silk dress or pants, black and clinging, that widened at the bottom, the kind Jane would have with her in Venice. She hadn't had a love affair in college-she was the only one she knew who hadn't. Now she was sorry, she wished she'd had. And gone to the room with only a window and a bed.

- I have to go, she said.

- What? Leslie said over the music.

- I have to go.

- This has been fun, Leslie said, coming over to her.

They embraced in the doorway, awkwardly, Leslie almost falling down.

- Talk to you in the morning, she said.

Outside, Jane caught a cab, a clean one as it happened, and gave the driver her address near Cornelia Street. They started off, moving fast through the traffic. In the rearview mirror the driver, who was young, saw that Jane, a nice-looking girl about his age, was crying. At a red light next to a drugstore where it was well lit, he could see the tears streaming down her face.

- Excuse me, is something wrong? he asked.

She shook her head. It seemed she nearly answered.

- What is it? he said.

- Nothing, she said, shaking her head. I'm dying.

- You're sick?

- No, not sick. I'm dying of cancer, she said.

She had said it for the first time, listening to herself. There were four levels and she had the fourth, Stage Four.

- Ah, he said, are you sure?

The city was filled with so many strange people he could not tell if she was telling the truth or just imagining something.

- You want to go to the hospital? he asked.

- No, she said, unable to stop crying. I'm all right, she told him.

Her face was appealing though streaked with tears. He raised his head a little to see the rest of her. Appealing, too. But what if she is speaking the truth? he wondered. What if G.o.d, for whatever reason, has decided to end the life of someone like this? You cannot know. That much he understood.

Give.

IN THE MORNING-it was my wife's birthday, her thirty-first-we slept a little late, and I was at the window looking down at Des in a bathrobe with his pale hair awry and a bamboo stick in his hand. He was deflecting and sometimes with a flourish making a lunge. Billy, who was six then, was hopping around in front of him. I could hear his shrieks of joy. Anna came up beside me.

- What are they doing now?

- I can't tell. Billy is waving something over his head.

- I think it's a flyswatter, she said, disbelieving.

She was just thirty-one, the age when women are past foolishness though not unfeeling.

- Look at him, she said. Don't you just love him?

The gra.s.s was brown from summer and they were dancing around on it. Des was barefoot, I noticed. It was early for him to be up. He often slept until noon and then managed to slip gracefully into the rhythm of the household. That was his talent, to live as he liked, almost without concern, to live as if he would reach the desired end one way or another and not be bothered by whatever came between. It included being committed several times, once for wandering out on Moore Street naked. None of the psychiatrists had any idea who he was. None of them had ever read a d.a.m.ned thing, he said. Some of the patients had.

He was a poet, of course. He even looked like a poet, intelligent, lank. He'd won the Yale prize when he was twenty-five and went on from there. When you pictured him, it was wearing a gray herringbone jacket, khaki pants, and for some reason sandals. Doesn't fit together, but a lot of things about him were like that. Born in Galveston, ROTC in college, and even married while an undergraduate, although what became of that wife he never clearly explained. His real life came after that, and he had lived it ever since, teaching sometimes in community cla.s.ses, travelling to Greece and Morocco, living there for a period, having a breakdown, and through it all writing the poem that had made his name. I read the poem, a third of it anyway, standing stunned in a bookshop in the Village. I remember the afternoon, cloudy and quiet, and I remember, too, almost leaving myself, the person I was, the ordinary way I felt about things, my perception of-there's no other word for it-the depth of life, and above all the thrill of successive lines. The poem was an aria, jagged and unending. Its tone was what set it apart- written as if from the shades. There lay the delta, there the burning arms . . . was the way it began, and immediately I felt it was not about rivers uncoiling but about desire. It revealed itself only slowly, like some kind of dream, the light fluttering on the fronds, with names and nouns, Naples, worn benches, Luxor and the kings, Salonika, small waves falling on the stones. There was repet.i.tion, even refrain. Lines that seemed unconnected gradually became part of a confession that had at its center rooms in the burning heat of August where something has taken place, clearly s.e.xual, but it is also the vacant streets of rural Texas, roads, forgotten friends, the slap of hands on rifle slings and forked pennants limp at parades. There are condoms, sun-faded cars, soiled menus with misspellings, a kind of pyre on which he had laid his life. That was why he seemed so pure-he had given all. Everyone lies about their lives, but he had not lied about his. He had made of it a n.o.ble lament, through it always running this thing you have had, that you will always have, but can never have. There stood Erechtheus, polished limbs and greaves . . . come to me, h.e.l.las, I long for your touch.

I had met him at a party and only managed to say, - I read your beautiful poem. He was unexpectedly open in a way that impressed me and straightforward in a way that was unflinching. In talking, he mentioned the t.i.tle of a book or two and referred to some things he a.s.sumed I would, of course, know, and he was witty, all of that but something more; his language invited me to be joyous, to speak as the G.o.ds-I use the plural because it's hard to think of him as obedient to a single G.o.d-had intended. We were always speaking of things that it turned out, oddly enough, both of us knew about although he knew more. Lafcadio Hearn, yes, of course he knew who that was and even the name of the j.a.panese widow he married and the town they lived in, though he had never been to j.a.pan himself. Arletty, Nestor Almendros, Jacques Brel, The Lawrenceville Stories, the cordon sanitaire, everything including his real interest, jazz, to which I only weakly responded. The Answer Man, Billy Cannon, the h.e.l.lespont, Stendhal on love, it was as if we had sat in the same cla.s.ses and gone to the same cities. And there was Billy, swatting at his legs.

Billy loved him, he was almost a pal. He had an infectious laugh and was always ready to play. During the times he stayed with us, he made ships out of sofa cushions and swords and shields from whatever was in the garage. When he owned his car, the engine of which would cut out every so often, he claimed that turning the radio on and off would fix it, the circuits had been miswired or something. Billy was in charge of the radio.

- Oh, oh, Des would say, there it goes. Radio!

And Billy, with huge pleasure, would turn the radio on and off, on and off. How to explain why this worked? It was the power of a poet or maybe even a trick.

On Anna's birthday, at about noon a beautiful arrangement of flowers, lilies and yellow roses, was delivered. They were from him. That evening we had dinner with some friends at the Red Bar, always noisy but the table was in the small room past the bar. I hadn't ordered a birthday cake because we were going to have one back at the house, a rum cake, her favorite. Billy sat in her lap as she put her rings, one after another, carefully over separate candles, each ring for a wish.

- Will you help me blow them out? she said to Billy, her face close to his hair.

- Too many, he said.

- Oh, G.o.d, you really know how to hurt a woman.

- Go ahead, Des told him. If you don't have enough breath, I'll catch it and send it back.

- How do you do that?

- I can do it. Haven't you heard of someone catching their breath?

- They're burning down, Anna said. Come on, one, two, three!

The two of them blew them out. Billy wanted to know what her wishes had been, but she wouldn't tell.

We ate the cake, just the four of us, and I gave her the present I knew she would love. It was a wrist.w.a.tch, very thin and square with Roman numerals and a small blue stone, I think tourmaline, embedded in the stem. There are not many things more beautiful than a watch lying new in its case.

- Oh, Jack! she said. It's gorgeous!

She showed it to Billy and then to Des.

- Where did you get it? Then, looking, Cartier, she said.

- Yes.

- I love it.

Beatrice Hage, a woman we knew, had one like it that she had inherited from her mother. It had an elegance that defied the years and demands of fashion.

It was easy to find things she would like. Our taste was the same, it had been from the first. It would be impossible to live with someone otherwise. I've always thought it was the most important single thing, though people may not realize it. Perhaps it's transmitted to them in the way someone dresses or, for that matter, undresses, but taste is a thing no one is born with, it's learned, and at a certain point it can't be altered. We sometimes talked about that, what could and couldn't be altered. People were always saying something had completely changed them, some experience or book or man, but if you knew how they had been before, nothing much really had changed. When you found someone who was tremendously appealing but not quite perfect, you might believe you could change them after marriage, not everything, just a few things, but in truth the most you could expect was to change perhaps one thing and even that would eventually go back to what it had been.

The small things that could be overlooked at first but in time became annoying, we had a way of handling, of getting the pebble out of the shoe, so to speak. It was called a give, and it was agreed that it would last. The phrase that was over-used, an eating habit, even a piece of favorite clothing, a give was a request to abandon it. You couldn't ask for something, only to stop something. The wide skirt of the bathroom sink was always wiped dry because of a give. Anna's little finger no longer extended when she drank from a cup. There might be more than one thing you would like to ask, and there was sometimes difficulty in choosing, but there was the satisfaction of knowing that once a year, without causing resentment, you would be able to ask your husband or wife to stop this one thing.

Des was downstairs when we put Billy to bed. I was in the hall when Anna came out holding her finger to her lips and having turned off the light.

- Is he asleep?

- Yes.

- Well, happy birthday, I said.

- Yes.

There was something odd in the way she said it. She stood there, her long neck and blond hair.

- What is it, darling?

She said nothing for a moment. Then she said, - I want a give.

- All right, I said.

I don't know why, I felt nervous.

- What would you like?

- I want you to stop it with Des, she said.

- Stop it? Stop what?