All That Is

19


RAIN



The ways divide. In the house above the river to which a room had been added, a small room with a window at one end and of a size that almost invited one in to sit and open a book or gaze out into the little garden, untended but nevertheless intimate because of the sculpture in it, a piece of natural sculpture that had been part of a tree that was cut down and sawed into two-foot logs, one of them, thick and upright, happening to have the shape of a woman’s body from waist to where the legs began, a kind of primitive altarpiece, neo-African, rounded, dark, immune to weather—in this house where Eddins, his wife, and son had lived in happiness, free from all danger, where the neighbors were good people, the streets were quiet, the police, finally past the bitter feud with the mayor, were friendly and knew you by name, here, among the trees and village calm, like something fallen from the sky, a great engine detached from an airliner high above and unseen and unheard hurtling down, death had struck, destruction, plunging into life like a sharpened stake.

The ways part. Eddins’ life was now broken in two. The pieces were not equal. All that was happening and that could happen in the future was somehow lighter, inconsequential. Life had an emptiness, like a morning after. He kept rejecting the accident. He could hardly remember the funeral except that it was unbearable. They were buried in the cemetery in Upper Grandview, above the road, in graves that were side by side. Dena’s mother and father had come. Neil was hardly able to face them. He couldn’t rid himself of a feeling of guilt. He was a southerner, he had been raised to honor women and give them protection, to defend them. It was a duty. If he had been on the train, somehow this wouldn’t have happened. He had failed them, like the philosophy professor in Valley Cottage whose house had been broken into and he and his aging wife assaulted. He was never the same afterward. It was not so much the injuries and continuing fear, it was the shame he felt. He hadn’t been able to protect his wife.

Eddins appeared in many ways unchanged, his usual though slightly more casual self. He had a flower in his buttonhole, a boutonniere, he talked to people, joked, but there were things you could not see. He had failed them. He was stained.

For a while he continued to live in the house, but he disliked coming back to it in the evening, to the emptiness and what seemed the knowledge of the world that he was there alone. He rented a small apartment in the city, below Gramercy Park, where in the evening he watched the news and had a drink, sometimes a second or third, and decided not to cook dinner, simple as it was. He was not depressed, but he was living with the feeling of injustice. There were times when he almost broke into tears over his loneliness and what he had lost. He saw them now for what they were and had been, the great days of love. She had asked for and had demanded so little. She had given her love so completely, her great smile, her teeth, her lighthearted foolishness. I love you so much—who could say that with the overwhelming truth of countless acts of love behind it? He hadn’t done all he should have, he should have given more. I would give it now, he thought, and he said it aloud, I would so much give it! Ah, Jesus, he said, and rose to fill his drink. Don’t become a drunk, he thought. Don’t become an object of pity.


Bowman had the other. Without a wife or girlfriend he had seemed settled into a single life, of habit, not uncomfortably, appearing in a dark-blue suit at restaurants and readings, at ease in the visible world, familiar.

It turned out to be other than that.

He was not fully living with Christine, she had resisted it until her life, she explained, was on a more even keel. She continued to spend the night with him in the apartment two or three times a week. She would meet him at the end of the day, sometimes with a bunch of flowers or a fashion magazine, the European edition with its suggestion of the glamour of life there.

They were not married, but they had the pleasures of guiltless love. It was impossible to have enough of her. What Chekhov had meant was that lovemaking that took place once a year had a staggering power, the power of a great, religious experience, and more often than that it was merely something like nourishment, but if that were the price, Bowman was only too willing to pay it.

In the morning there were pieces of her clothing lying about, her shoes, which he particularly liked, near a chair. She was in the narrow kitchen making coffee. They could live in harmony, he knew from the way she talked and behaved, from their intimacy. He had fallen in love before, deeply in love, but it had always been with an other, someone not like himself. With Christine there was the feeling of always having known her. If she could rid herself of her husband, they would marry.

His thoughts were of this as he walked across Central Park, green and immense, with its boundary of tall buildings shining in the morning light. For all of her assurance and poise, Christine was seeking stability. She had confessed it, and it was something he could provide along with much more. He was noticing the youthfulness of various people he passed. He was in the middle of life and just beginning.

On the weekend it rained. They stayed in. They lay on the bed in the quiet of the afternoon, the rain like mist on the window. She was watching something on television, an old movie, Italian, as it happened, and he was reading Verga, Sicilian. A woman in a low-cut dress sat polishing her nails while two men talked. It was in black and white, white shirts, Italian faces, dark hair. The subtitles were partly washed out, Christine was hardly reading them. As Bowman read, her hand slipped inside his robe and held his cock, almost distractedly, although as it swelled her thumb began to move softly along it. The sound had been muted. He could hear himself as he swallowed. He could see from the corner of his eye Christine’s soft cheek. She was contentedly watching the film. His cock was hard, smooth as a scar. By the shore of a lake a woman in a black slip was struggling with a man. She suddenly broke free and ran but then for some reason gave up and awaited her fate. In the close-up her face was resigned but filled with scorn.

He had stopped reading, the words made no sense. The movie went on. The woman was about to be killed. He would never forget her tear-streaked face or bare arms rising to embrace her murderer. He was feeling excruciating pleasure. The movie went on and on. Occasionally Christine’s hand would gently tighten as if to remind him. Finally the credits were shown.

He was free to do anything. It had never been this way, not with Vivian, certainly not with Vivian, not with Enid. She was naked from the waist down and he had her turn to her stomach and picked up his book and resumed reading, one proprietary hand resting on her buttock. She lay unmoving, her face turned away. They were not equals, not now. All his life, then, had been in preparation. In a while they began. The city lay silent. He rubbed his cock slowly along her raised cunt as if bathing its length. Finally he seated it. There was a long lovemaking in which his mind went blank. They neither saw nor heard the rain.

Afterwards they were like victims, face up, unable to move.

“It’s like nothing else in the world. I simply can’t imagine anything on earth more … extreme,” he said.

“Heroin,” Christine murmured.

“Have you ever had heroin?”

“Four times as pleasurable as sex. Pleasure that can’t be compared with anything else. Believe me.”

“So you’ve taken it.”

“No, but I know.”

“I don’t want to be thought of as just a nice man.”

“You’re not a nice man. You’re a real man. You know you are,” she said. “That night in the taxi, I already knew.”

Everything he had wanted to be, she was offering him. She had been given to him as a blessing, a proof of God. He had never really been paid. He had never been paid in the one true coin. She had held him casually in her hand, he had known what she was thinking. They might have lain like that and talked for days or been silent. The afternoon had been unforgettable.

“Why are we always so tired?” he asked. “It can’t be that much effort.”

“Yes, it can,” she said.


Eddins recovered slowly. He had finally accepted what had happened, but he was crippled by it. He was less committed to life and more passive. Unlike his former self, he could sit quietly listening. He sat listening to two women next to him in the theater before the curtain went up talking enthusiastically about a movie they had seen, what had happened in it and how it was so like life. They were in their forties, probably, and no different from women he might be more interested in if he knew them, but he had no interest in knowing them. Or, for that matter, the couple two rows in front of him, the woman. He had been struck by her beautiful, full hair and the fur collar on her coat. Her head was almost leaning against the man’s, and from time to time she would turn slightly to say something to him. She had Slavic cheekbones and a long nose that came down straight from her forehead, a Roman nose, a sign of authority. He could look at a woman’s face, he thought, and almost recite her character. Delovet’s girlfriend who was an actress or former actress, a little on the short side to be one in either case, Eddins marked at first sight as a drinker and probably nasty if not made love to. Delovet was finding it difficult to detach himself from her. He was bored by her, impatient, but at the same time he liked to show her off. Her name was Diane Ostrow, she was called Dee Dee. Eddins had never come across anyone who’d seen her on the stage. She had black hair and a voracious laugh. Also just enough shrewdness to keep from slipping any further down. She could be persuaded without much effort to name several stars she had slept with. She liked it when they stood on their head naked for her.

“A number of them did it?”

“Two,” she said casually. “So, what kind of things do you like to do?” she asked Eddins.

“Wrestle,” he said.

“Really?”

“I wrestled for the university,” he said. “I was a terror.”

“Which university?”

“All of them,” he said.

One day in a taxi heading south on Park, he saw a woman on the corner in expensive shoes and her coat tied at the waist with a cloth belt, a woman with the assumption of her class in every detail. She doubtless lived along the avenue and perhaps had ordinary concerns or cares, but the image of her impressed him with its poise or even, in its way, gallantry.

He began to pay some attention to his clothes and appearance. He bought some soft cotton shirts and a blue silk scarf. When the weather was good he walked to work.

It was around this time that he met a divorced woman named Irene Keating in the New York Public Library. It was after a lecture and people were standing along the hallway drinking wine. She was by herself, not completely comfortable but wearing a nice-looking dress. She lived in New Jersey, a few minutes away, she said.

“More than a few minutes,” he said.

“Do you live in the city?”

“I have a house in Piermont,” he said.

“Piermont?”

“At the foot of the Ngong Hills.”

“The what?”

“Not well-known,” he remarked.

She was not literary but he liked her face that showed a pleasant nature.

“I thought the lecture—what did you think of it?—I thought it was a little boring,” he said.

“I’m so glad you said that. I was falling asleep.”

“Not a bad feeling. At certain times, that is. Do you come in often?”

“Well, yes and no. I usually come in hopes of meeting someone interesting.”

“You’d do better in most bars.”

“Why aren’t you in one, then?” she said.

He took her to dinner a few days later and ended up telling her stories about Delovet, his yacht without a motor in Westport, and his former Romanian girlfriend, of whom he liked to say, “I could have her deported,” about Robert Boyd, the ex-preacher that Eddins had never met but liked so much. Boyd’s father had died, and he was living alone in the country, in desperate need as always.

“You’d like him. His letters have such dignity.”

She listened rapt. She asked if he would come to dinner at her house.

“I’ll cook something good,” she said.

He agreed to come that Friday. Then, on the train there in the evening crowd he found himself regretting it. They were all going home to their families. Their life was familiar to them.

She met him at the station and they drove to her house five or six blocks away. It was an attached house with brick steps and an iron railing. Inside, however, it was less forbidding. She wanted to hang up his coat, but he said, no, just leave it on the chair. She poured champagne and had him come into the kitchen, where she had put on an apron over her dress and continued cooking as they talked. She seemed younger and excited.

“Is the champagne any good?” she asked. “I just go by the price.”

“Very good.”

“I’m glad you could come,” she said.

“Have you lived here long?”

“Taste this,” she said, holding a spoonful of what looked like consommé out to him.

It was delicious.

“I made it myself. From scratch.”

The table was set for two. She lit the candles and after they had sat down seemed to relax a little. The light in the room had a soft hue, perhaps it was colored by the champagne. She filled their glasses again. Suddenly she stood up—she had forgotten to take off her apron, which she stripped away, mussing her hair. She sat down and then stood again, leaning deliberately across the table to kiss him. They had never kissed before. The consommé was in front of them; she raised her glass slightly.

“To the night of nights,” she said.

They ate roast squab, the birds succulent and brown on their beds of buttered rice. He didn’t remember how it proceeded from there. The bed was wide, and she seemed nervous as a cat. She tried to get away from him as much as she drew him towards her, she hadn’t made up her mind or she kept changing it. She kicked and turned away, he felt he was trying to catch her. Afterwards she apologized and said it was the first time she had made love in three years, since her divorce, but she loved it. She kissed his hands as if he were a priest.

In the morning she had no makeup. For some reason—the purity of her bare features—she looked like a Swede. She talked about her marriage. Her ex-husband had been a businessman, a sales manager. In the daylight the house seemed drab. There were no bookshelves. The magical dining room, he noticed, had some kind of striped wallpaper. It had been there when they moved in, she said.