What He's Poised to Do: Stories (P.S.) Read online

  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 morn
ing 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.

  I went back to sleep, where I had a dream. I was riding on a bicycle. A beautiful young woman with long blonde hair was sitting on my lap. I was facing forward. She was facing me. She had on a white skirt, and I reached up underneath it and felt the presence of nothing additional. “Lift it,” she said, and I did, and she joined us together with a gasp. This was my betrothed, I was sure, and the prospect of being joined to her in this way each and every night for the rest of my life suddenly seemed less odious. There was transport involved. I kept riding, fast at first and then slower and slower until my feet were going around in a nearly frozen circle. The bike remained upright. She put her arms around my neck and spoke my name. Then she spoke her own. It was Edith. This time, I did not wake with a start. I slid down into the bed of sleep and, having arrived there, tried to climb back up the incline to my dream. I saw my salvation, finally. My dream would protect me. My dream would keep time from moving forward ruthlessly, from suffocating my sense of my self, from forcing me to come into the world as someone else. I regained sleep, and then the corner of my dream. We biked on, over a long cobblestone path, the unevenness of which was wonderful for both of us. She asked me to tell her what was up ahead. “Black branches,” I said, and she laughed. There were no black branches and she knew it. What there was, which she didn’t know, was a place where the road ended, or at least dropped off into a shallow stream. I rode on into the water. We slowed down again and nearly stopped. The bike was upright in the shallows. The water began to rise. Edith’s arms tightened around me. Heat came out of her mouth and her chest and from between her legs. The water was cold. I knew it, but even when it had reached the bottom of my feet I experienced it only as an idea. The dream gave no indication of ending; inside it I thanked Edith, and she threw back her head and delivered a laugh I can describe only as godly. I matched her laugh, there in the dream. Did I laugh outside it? Did I disturb the sleeping Samantha? I did not know and I was not about to surface and find out.

  THE HUNTER AND THE HUNTED

  Dear X,

  I am not writing to you. I am writing to your letter. It is sitting on the table in front of me, white paper, black type that looks like it came from an old typewriter, your signature streaking across the bottom of the page. Why am I writing to your letter and not to you? For focus and also for protection: protection for us both. Dear letter, I attack. Dear letter, I relent. My wife is out of the house. I have time for this now. I should get on with it.

  Writing a letter to another letter may sound questionable, but it is a deep conviction of mine. It is related to a trick I learned when I was a waiter. I would tell customers, “Do not direct your anger toward me. Speak to me, but let your anger flow toward the menu.” It started as a joke—I had a series of belligerent patrons who drove me to the edge of retaliation—but it grew into a kind of belief system. The restaurant’s soul did reside in the menu. It was a record of what was and what could not be. I was only a messenger. Do not kill the messenger. Do not even address him. Direct your attention toward the text. Make peace, or war, with what is written.

  I relayed this philosophy to hundreds of customers during my last years at the restaurant. Some found it charming, because they understood my aim. Some found it presumptuous, because they subscribed to another philosophy—that servants should not think above their station. One of the members of this latter camp complained to my boss, and I was fired. My dismissal launched me into my new life, into real estate, into wealth. I became a husband to a woman who was an equal match for me in ambition and intelligence. She did not want to have children, and I agreed, imagining that we might be happy together. I could not have imagined any of this while I was working in the restaurant. In retrospect, I am thankful I was fired, for all these reasons. At the time, I was stung. I wanted a fair hearing but I received none. Only a single sous chef shed a tear for me. Her name was Clementine. Much later, after I came to America, I learned that song: Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine. A little while after that, I met you. I told you that if we ever had a child together, we’d name her that. I assumed it would be a daughter, a little girl who looked like you. I was talking in the heat of new love. We were sitting by the water. There was a gap of bench between us. You never liked to sit too close to me. Once I asked why and you said, “The space between us represents your wife.” You spoke slowly and deliberately, as if lecturing a child on safety measures—which, in a sense, you were.

  My wife would have known exactly what to call this space between people that represents another person. Her vocabulary is and has always been the most impressive thing about her. “It’s true that I love words,” she said. “But all this time I’ve believed that my interest in finding the exact right word for a situation was just an adventitious bonus.” In a less serious woman, this would have been a joke, but she intended, as she would say, not a soupçon of levity.

  Dear X,

  Direct your attention toward the primary document. In my case, the primary document is the letter you have written me. It was written ten days ago, mailed nine days ago, received six days ago, left to cool off on my counter for one day, and then read with hands that somehow manufactured a steadiness that I did not, deep down, possess. Its message was clear: you did not want to see me again, would not be my lover, could not be my friend. “I am gone,” you wrote, “like the dodo.” I called you when I received this letter because I wanted to tell you that I loved you. I did not tell you anything of the sort. Instead, I agreed with you that you needed to be gone. “Like the dodo,” I said.

  “After this call, no more me,” you said.

  “Understood,” I said. I was gripping the phone so hard that I hoped it might break.

  “You know why,” you said. “Right?”

  “No,” I said. I was stalling.

  “The pain,” you said. “But the pleasure is part of it, too. I need it all off the table.”

  “So let’s clear the table,” I said.

  “Well, no,” you said. “That makes it sound like a clean slate, and like something might be later
put there. The whole table has to be gone, and everything around it, too. There can’t be things that are next to the table, waiting to be lifted up and placed there. There can’t be anything. There has to be nothing. I am saying this as much to myself as to you.”

  “I was just following your metaphor,” I said.

  “I know,” you said. “I’m not sure I’m finding the right words. I’ve gone through it all. I went through accepting the side deal. I went through hating you. I went through her-or-me, and play-me-or-trade-me. I don’t know where I am now, or what to call it. I just know that it has to be far from you, and that there has to be a high wall between us. I have to go.”

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “What?” you said. “You mean hang up?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That sounds right.”

  “Jesus,” you said. Your voice sharpened. “Is your wife home? I thought I heard a door close.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That sounds great.” I paused. “Yes. It’s the corner building. I just have a few pieces of furniture up on the roof-deck: two chairs and a table. There’s an umbrella, but I think I can remove it before you get there. Nine o’clock, you said?”