Rupert got breakfast around the corner, at Spanky’s Diner. He ordered pancakes with real maple syrup and bacon. It was the best meal he’d eaten in America. At nine, he went to his bank in Fort Greene and bought a four-hundred-dollar certified check, made out to Vera. I’ve squandered my inheritance, thrown it away on a woman, he thought. Then he remembered her breasts. She had been worth it; the whole experience had been worth it. He’d have paid double. He wondered what Father Falkes would think. He thought he’d understand. Around the corner from the bank, at Sammy’s Discount, he bought sheets, a blanket, a towel, and two locks. Back at the bar at ten, he stashed his suitcase and linens in the back room and fastened the lock to the outside hinge. He pulled on it several times. It held.
He was back in Greenpoint by eleven. Ruta and Vera were not home. They were probably at Daria’s. They usually spent their weekday mornings with her and her children, smoking, cooking, ironing, and gossiping. Rupert wrote Ruta a note, using his left hand, paranoia creeping in. “I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye. A family emergency has made it necessary for me to leave. Thank you for your hospitality. I will always remember the months on Leonard Street. Yours, Robert Fairchild.” Rupert was not unaware of the ironies in his letter, the family emergency, the necessary departure, Ruta’s hospitality, the memories. Molière would make it a comedy, Chekhov a tragedy. Rupert had paid his rent to Ruta through the month. She’d think she got the better of him, even if Vera got the worse. He wrote Vera a left-handed note as well. “I cannot marry you. I cannot say more. I’m leaving New York. Here is $400, all I have. I’ll never forget you. Robert.”
Rupert made the bed and straightened the room, making sure no trace of him remained. He put the check and note for Vera under her pillow, the note for Ruta on the kitchen table. He left the house and slipped the key through the mail slot. He walked around the corner to the subway. He didn’t look back.
Four years later, with Eleanor sitting beside him at the Thalia, he watched, in a state of arousal and self-disgust, the movie version of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.
“I’m Jimmy,” he said to Eleanor as they walked out of the movie house. “With a posh education.”
“Yes and no,” she said.
“The ‘yes’ part, you don’t mind,” he said.
“No. It’s all right.”
“Where shall we go for dinner?” he said.
“Let’s buy sandwiches and go to your rooms,” she said. “I’m not wearing underwear.”
He had not expected her to say that. “I thought you were a good girl,” he said.
“I am,” she said. “Very good.”
Rupert pulled her to him and kissed her, one hand gripping her lower back, the other, in front, reaching under her skirt and snaking between her legs. He proposed that night and she accepted. Am I marrying him because of a movie? she wondered as they lay tired and almost happy on his bed. I went to Vassar because of Women in Love. She remembered then that Lawrence’s hero was named Rupert. “Do you like D. H. Lawrence?” she asked Rupert. “He wants to have his cake and eat it too,” he said. He leaned down to kiss her. “You are my cake,” he said.
—
Vera haunted Rupert for months after he left Greenpoint. He missed her breasts, her thighs, her mouth on him, her submissiveness. He wondered if she’d had the baby or an abortion. He wondered if his father had left his mother pregnant like that. Was that their story, his story? He didn’t want to think about it. They had been well matched, he and Vera, a pair of young brutes, using each other for their own purposes. He had been better at it. He had been longer at it. He couldn’t get pregnant. Would she know where to get an abortion? He wouldn’t think about it.
At the bar, he took to having sex with married women, older young women in their late twenties and early thirties. He’d take them into his little back room at closing. Afterward, they’d go home to their husbands, who worked the late shift. He never had sex with any of them more than three or four times. He didn’t want an angry husband pounding on his door. He didn’t want a relationship. “I don’t have much conversation,” he’d say. They taught him things he couldn’t learn from porn movies.
At Yale, he slept mostly with graduate English students, bluestockings in black tights. They were competent, obliging, undemanding. He used condoms, not willing to find himself cornered again. He talked books with them and read what they recommended, American authors he didn’t know, Melville, Hawthorne, Cather. They rounded some of his edges. His vanity made him a decent lover; he liked being good at the things he did. He learned by doing.
Eleanor was the only woman he had sex with who made him please her. “I like that,” she’d say. “Would you do it again?” In her desire and her pleasure seeking, she brought a level of wantonness that made him, to his surprise, wild with wanting. It was almost as enthralling as Vera’s surrender.
Sex was an important part of the Falkeses’ marriage, as important as the boys. Even in their last year, they had stirring encounters. Eleanor’s voice, husky and intimate, with a sly hint of laughter at its edges, filled him with desire, from the first day to the last. Her phone calls could give him erections, even when she didn’t talk dirty, which she often did in the early years. It took him years not to mind going to cocktail parties with her. Other men were always seeking her out; he knew they wanted her, as he did. She was a MILF before there was a word for it. In the late ’80s, at a Maynard, Tandy Christmas party, a drunk, thirty-year-old associate took Eleanor’s hand as they were talking and pressed it against his crotch. Quietly, she removed her hand and poured her glass of red wine on his pants front. He stood moaning as she walked away, “Come back. I’m sorry. Come back.” Rupert fired him the next day. The associate didn’t protest. All he said was “How did you get to be such a lucky son of a bitch?”