A New Life (30 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: A New Life
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“I never see you,” he said on the phone. “Where are you besides in my heart?”
“Here,” she said, “at this end.”
“We’ve got to meet.”
“Where would we go?”
“I’ll find some place,” he said.
“A beautiful place, a forest.”
At night Levin haunted her street. After a walk to river, or the hills, he came to her house when it was late and unlikely Gilley would step out with milk bottles or the cat. Levin stood across the street near the flowering plum tree thick with deep-hued pink blossoms. He watched for a touch of Pauline, a glimpse of her dress as she passed the half-shaded window, or whatever morsel luck would let fall into his empty hands.
In his thoughts he crossed the street and entered his house. She was waiting for him. They ate together, then when the kids were in bed, talked, read, listened to music. They went to bed and made love without ache or fear—was there ever such a life? Anyway, it was love and he had it, until he was standing alone across the street as she lay in bed with a stranger …
Levin was startled by a touch on the arm. A cop, staring at his beard, said a taxpayer had called and complained of a peeping Tom.
“Not me,” said Levin.
“Could I see some I.D.?”
Levin produced his automobile license.
The cop looked at it and returned the card.
“Could you tell me why you’re standing here?”
“Resting after a walk. Such a beautiful night.”
“Right in the middle of the sidewalk?”
“I love this tree.”
“The lady that phoned said you had been here more than an hour. She thought you might be casing one of the houses across the street.”
“That long?” said Levin. He left, heavy hearted.
One early spring night when a brimming moon in the white sky gilded houses, trees, and spring flowers, a moon-drenched Levin wandered along Pauline’s street and paused at the flowering plum. He crossed the street and stood, hat in hand, a few feet from her partly-open, dark bedroom window. Come to the window for a minute, my dearest, and I’ll be
content for a month. But no one appeared, though he thought of it often. In the stillness he heard the rhythmic creaking of a bed, and then on the night—a bird, catch it, hold it—the soft cry of a woman at the height of her pleasure.
Gilley had, in an inspired moment, satisfied her for him.
 
They made plans to be together but for one reason or another abandoned them. She was afraid they might be seen wherever they met. “It would be absolutely cruel if Gerald found out through gossip.” “Am I never to be with you?” “Be patient, Lev.” He cursed the day Mrs. Beaty had seen her in the alley. One morning when he was famished for a look at her, she let him watch from down the block as she entered the food market. When she came out, she looked in his direction for several seconds, then walked to her car. This can’t go on, he thought.
Learning on Thursday morning that she was going with Gilley to a post-season basketball game on Saturday night, Levin hurried to the Basketball Palace and with luck got a reserved seat in the balcony, facing the faculty section. On Saturday night he was there early, amid an enormous crowd of students and townspeople. Levin spent most of his time scanning faces with his birdwatching binoculars. Once the glasses met a pair directed at him, a hard eye for an eye. A chill ran through him as he recognized the flushed half-bald dome and expressionless features of Dr. Marion Labhart. Levin had sulfurous visions of himself as Arthur Dimmesdale Levin, locked in stocks on a platform in the town square, a red A stapled on his chest, as President Labhart stood over him, preaching a hellfire sermon denouncing communist adulterers, the climax of which was the public firing of Levin out of the college. Next to the president sat Dean Lawrence Seagram of the Liberal Arts Service Division. When Levin first saw him in September the dean was a clean-shaven youngish type; now he was middle-aged and wore a grizzled Van Dyke but at least looked human.
Seeking Pauline, Levin located Gilley with an empty seat at his side, a gap for Levin. Above in the next row were both Bullocks. Levin, focusing on the empty seat, wondered what had happened to Pauline; he waited impatiently for the two-hour sight of her. From a man at his side he learned that Cascadia was playing Los Angeles for the Western Conference Championship. The floor of the court blazed with reflected light, practice went on, and two bands blared. Among the rally girls on the Cascadia side Levin recognized Nadalee Hammerstad. She shook red pompoms, danced and twirled, revealing her slim thighs and frisky black-tighted behind. She performed directly below Pauline’s empty seat, and Levin was uneasy at how life related events and people.
When the game started, Pauline had still not come. He considered running downstairs to telephone to make sure she was all right but he was caught in the prevailing excitement and stayed. The L.A. band had antagonized him. Costumed in hard straw hats, red bow ties, shorts and hairy legs, it created a jazz uproar, drowning out the pep songs of the white-shirted Cascadians. If the strategy was to keep their own players hopped up, they did the same for all present, setting Levin’s teeth on edge, and arousing in him a strong antagonism to the State of California. From the whistle Los Angeles broke into the lead, and Levin, realizing the home town was the underdog, found himself cheering it. For a minute he studied himself with a sour eye yet went on as before.
Though he had not since college watched basketball, he was gripped by the game. More than once he jumped out of his seat to cheer a good play or boo a bad call. What a bad call was he left to the crowd. He shouted encouragement to the players, in particular Whitey Barker, a skinny, long-chested type, a solid C minus student in Levin’s last term’s class, but on the court, canny, alert, graceful, wise. He defended like a matador enclosing the bull, and on offense hit baskets with every kind of shot. His rebounding was outstanding. The instructor waving his hat, cheered himself hoarse for his former
student—although he suspected the boy had complained to Bullock about the grade he had got, because George had been cold to Levin for a while at the end of the winter term. Peering with his binoculars at the faculty section to study George’s face, he discovered Pauline sitting next to Gerald.
A little ashamed of having forgotten her, he focused his glasses and was moved by her drawn face. She had lost weight. He could hear the game going on, ten men thundering back and forth, pitching a ball at two hoops, but now he kept his glasses tightly on her, taking his excitement from her presence. Pauline seemed, after a while, to be squirming this way and that; he realized she had become aware of him and was trying either to shrink or hide from his magnified eyes. Levin lowered his glasses and absent-mindedly watched the last few minutes of play. At the end he did not know who had won.
As he was leaving the Palace he thought he had at least shared the town’s big emotion. He would not, if he could, deny them basketball if once in a while the big emotion came from a good book.
Going down the stairs, he overheard one beanied freshman he knew talking to another.
“Did you see that cat with the black whiskers who had those binocks in front of us? That’s my comp prof.”
“So what?”
“He’s supposed to be nuts about some dame. Maybe he could see her naked in those glasses.”
When Levin arrived home, he snipped off his beard with scissors and shaved the rest.
 
When they met, on a street at the southern edge of town, Pauline looked at him in disbelief then wept, though Levin said it wasn’t too bad. He had searched long in the mirror, felt ill but lived. Too much face, the eyes still sad candles, blunt bent nose, lips without speech telling all, but the jaw looked stronger, possibly illusion.
“Why did you do it?” she asked. “It had gotten to look so rich and silky. I hope it isn’t bad luck.”
He waited until she stopped talking about it.
They tried to think where to go to be alone. He suggested the woods or the riverbank but it rained every day and they had to settle for motels near outlying towns. This was during a time Gilley was beginning to go fishing again. Levin registered and she stayed in the car, her face averted. Alone, they kissed, he tasting on her tongue the Scotch she had had to relax her. She was still mistress of the quick lay, and once it was over he dozed by her side, dreaming of her. Longing was long, the consummation brief. Satisfaction bred quick hunger. It saddened him he couldn’t be contented for more than minutes. Levin held her in his arms, longing for Pauline. The thought of all the time that would go by before he saw her again oppressed him.
She wanted, of course, not to be nervous but usually was. “I hate motels. Your room was so nice. I felt at home in it.” He offered to move to Marathon, where nobody knew them. “That’s not good either,” she said. “You’d be miles away and I’d have less time to be with you. And after a while, no matter where you lived, somebody would find out I was coming to see you and this would start again.”
One night when there was not much time and they had worked themselves into desire in Levin’s car, parked by the riverbank, she joked about the back seat, then grew depressed. The result was nothing achieved, his loss, for she seemed soon to feel better, as though she had exchanged nothing for something. He had lost more than a lay. But loss enlarged love, or so they said. And part of the experience of paradise was when it was no longer paradise. This thought had come to him in a former time when he was struggling to accept fate without making less of experience.
She said, as he was driving her to the street where she usually got out and walked home, “I’ve been thinking if only something very good happened to Gerald it would be easier
to think of leaving him. Please don’t oppose him for the headship. I’m sure he’ll be good at it.”
“There are better men around,” Levin said.
“Last night I dreamed he found us in bed and took the children away from me.”
“That won’t happen.”
“I always knew I would fall in love again but I wasn’t prepared to feel ravaged so soon.”
“Love is life.”
“I wish you hadn’t cut your beard.”
“What can I do to make things easier for you?” Levin asked her. “I could stay away for a month, even till summer if you’d feel any better. Then in the summer we could come to a decision.”
“Could you stay away that long?”
“I could for you.”
“I don’t think I could stand it, I’d worry about you.”
“What worry?”
“About how you were and if you still loved me.”
“You know I would.”
“No, I don’t want that kind of worry. I’d rather have this.” Afterwards he wanted to send her something—flowers—but what would she say if Gilley asked her where they had come from? So he settled for a pair of gold hoop earrings which he bought for more than he could afford. But when could she wear them except with him, and where would she hide them later? He kept them for her in his notebook drawer.
The next time they talked on the phone she said, “Don’t think of me as poor Pauline, think of me as rich. I may have fears but I have you. I have lovely thoughts of you. I want to give you what you haven’t had. I want to make up for all you’ve been through in the past. I want to make you happy with me.”
He said he was happy.
In bed, the next time, she failed to achieve satisfaction. Since this was twice in a row Levin was disappointed.
“Don’t make anything out of it,” she said, “I’ve been sleeping badly and I’m usually tired. The kids tire me, and it’s not easy to live with one man and be always thinking of another. I worry he senses something is wrong. And I worry about the strain on you.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Now you have her, now you don’t is no life for a man. And I worry about a definite break with Gerald. I guess I was not passionately attached to him but I’ve never been able to unlove anyone I ever loved.”
“We’ll settle it in the summer.”
“I already have settled it but my nervous system hasn’t. That’s what flopped just now—not me. But I’ll be myself next time.”
Next time was in a little hotel about thirty miles out of Easchester—she was insisting they not go back to the motels they had been to. After a while, Pauline, her brow wet, said, “Don’t wait for me, I don’t think I can.”
“Are you sure?”
“Come without me.”
Finally he did.
“I’m really beat,” she said.
“Is that it?”
She said, “Gerald is ardent again. I think he senses something. I told you he might. Sometimes I get so tired of sex.”
Now we have truly come to adultery, Levin thought.
“I would have skipped it if you had asked me,” he said. She caressed his beardless face. Her eyes were tired, her nose thin. “Please don’t worry. I go through these periods. I was in a bad period with Gerald just before the first time with you. But he’s used to me and doesn’t seem to mind.”
“I mind.”

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