Asa, as I Knew Him (2 page)

I grew up with boys who were to become men of the sort he is. They were blond and well formed, they came from the large, ungainly families rich people have in periods of national prosperity, they were beautifully educated and beautifully mannered. And they were upright; the old, stern morality still obtained in them. There were careers they would not pursue—not so much out of snobbism as from an obligation to “contribute,” to give their ease and insight to society. Now they are publishers and middle-level diplomats and heads of progressive schools. I’m out of touch with them. Their first names are Asa’s middle name, or Fay’s maiden name, and I have been reminded of them, seeing Asa’s checkbook open on his desk with all those names: Higginson, Thayer, Bowdoin. Old, stern Yankee names, on streets and buildings and checkbooks from Long Island Sound to the Kennebec River, names that sound like granite falling, like the ghosts of the Wampanoag treading the pine-needle floor, like the coals moving, settling down red in December, silver and hiss of ash—Asa, Asa.

But for all the hardness and clarity of these names and these values, their possessors are translucent, misty, soulless. There is no blood in them. They are not connected to the past—the human past—but to their heritage. They have great-grandfathers buried beside earth reserved for their own dead
bodies and they have pewter utensils that are also soulless. They have forgotten the cave and the long night by the dying bonfire and the difficulty of chipping flint. They think their great-great-grandfathers sprang fully evolved on these shores, products of the
Mayflower
’s timber and New Hamphire rock. They’ve forgotten how to grunt—they’ve dismissed the possibility that anyone connected with them ever did grunt. They make love graciously, as if fencing.

Maybe I can’t explain it. When I fell in love with Asa, I forgot he had no soul. No, not that: I believed he had a rudimentary one that lived in his perception of lacking it, and which I would nurture into a mythological beast, the Yankee with Blood. I wanted to give him this gift, passion. I wanted to make him alive. But he fought me; he even, for a while, transformed me into himself. All lovers experience this, the stronger absorbing the weaker and spewing him or her out remade, but I had thought I was the stronger. I am now. He is still bloodless; I survived him. I survived becoming him. Writing this is my last effort at transubstantiation. From his long, pale limbs I will make, by words, the body and blood of a human. If I fail, it can’t be done. He sits across town in his red chair dismissing me; I am his happy memories. But isn’t there yet in him something hot, some smoldering twig I left, which these pages can fan to fire?

As a story it’s old and boring, probably the oldest, most boring one around. We worked together, we loved each other. He didn’t leave his wife, I left my job. Living that story is living in a hurricane; that’s why it is repeated until the listening population can no longer bear to hear it. As an experience it is beyond the norm, and those who experience want to tell … I’m not going to tell the story. At least, I’m not telling that story, but another, the skeleton, the essence within the story. But perhaps that isn’t enticing either. After
all, it’s just a romance. We moved through rooms I could describe, talked with friends whose names you might want to know. Sometimes we took taxis—I think of kissing Asa in a taxi as we rode to the printer’s, the pretense of a public embrace, the second-rate Boston skyline a backdrop for our little passions. Not little: They were a skyline all their own, the only view my eyes could see for years.

Now I have another landscape, which is life without him. He is not in the Chinese restaurant where we ate lunch on view weekly; he is not walking down the street when I am walking down the street, although he might be, and I hope he will be; he is not on the beach where I turn over and over in the sun, tanning my body for him to admire, but he never will admire it again; he is not on the sofa, in the chair, on his knees beside the bed kissing my wrists. I have a hole in my vision, and it’s his absence.

But I know where he is. He is in his office at the end of a long dark hall. On his desk is a water glass gone cloudy from standing for an hour. From his tall, mahogany-framed windows he sees the same weather I see. Today, at ten-thirty, it is overcast, threatening August weather. The telephone with its bank of buttons is in front of him. My telephone is in front of me. We don’t call each other. For me, not calling him is an activity. I know it isn’t one for him. Once I would have convinced myself it was. My friends are glad that I know better now. My friends have hated Asa, first for monopolizing my mind, then for the endless discussions of him they were subjected to, finally, for making me unhappy. But they didn’t understand what was at stake. The awakening of a soul is not a small matter; neither is the concomitant justification of my soul, my efforts. It’s time to begin.

Dinah Provides Background

M
y name is Dinah, which means “judgment.” My parents, Adelaide and Frank Sachs, returned to the traditional names for their children. I have a sister named Leah and a brother named Seth. Now these names are fashionable; my married friends have children called Joshua, Jonah, even Obadiah. Thirty years ago our names set us apart and gave us an Orthodox aura that was at odds with our parents’ determined atheism. But there we were, marginal, victims in grade school of the fascination certain kinds of Jews hold for Yankees. I learned early that I was to them some finer self, some more focused version of what they tried to be. They yearned for my historical sadness and intelligence. I yearned for their self-control and the inherited lawns where they had parties. I went to the parties—there wasn’t anything that could be called anti-Semitism. It was more like the tension between the sexes; I was other, mysterious and full of power. Leah felt it too. She’s married to a Swede, so it kept ahold of her. Rocked in that cradle of uniqueness by those blue-eyed boys, what protection could I have against Asa when, twenty years later, I looked up from my desk to find his huge head blocking my view?

Childhood was pleasant enough, judging from what my friends have told me of theirs. If my father preferred looking through his microscope to playing with us, I didn’t blame him. He would park me, the eldest, in the reading room of Widener on Saturdays, with a stack of books on black magic (at eleven, my ambition was to be a witch), while he roamed the periodicals for the latest cellular breakthroughs. He must have made the journals himself occasionally—how else does one get tenure at Harvard?—but he was, and is, a small and
dusty man, slightly vacant in his social interactions. He had none of the luminosity of his more famous colleagues who sometimes turned up for dinner. My mother was secretive. She had a room where she withdrew and did unknown things. Leah and I turned the furniture upside down and played Queen of the Castle while Seth burbled in his bassinet. My mother was probably tired of children and just sat in her room quietly reading Jane Austen. We didn’t miss her. We were safe—we had enough to eat, each of us had a room with dire threats against trespassers posted on the door, we had bicycles, we had each other.

When I was thirteen I turned against witchcraft, having had a series of nightmares based on the activities of a wolf society in London that claimed membership of more than two hundred English werewolves (I had read about it in a book published only two years before, hence the nightmares), and took up the opposite sex. I dropped library research in favor of field work. I have been studying my subject for decades now, but it remains mysterious. Maybe, as my mother suggested when I was nineteen and my career had become clear to her, it isn’t a topic worth devoting your life to.

“With all your gifts!”—the slogan of Jewish parents everywhere. But all three of us drifted. Most academic children do. The more successful the parent, the vaguer the child. We were lucky to have dusty, muddled Frank as a father. Leah has made a successful marriage, whatever that is, after an unpromising three years at art school. Seth earns a lot of money writing about how to program computers, and spends it on blondes, inevitable blondes, in restaurants without prices on the menu. And I, in my own way, am continuing my father’s investigations into the origins of life. He doesn’t see it that way, I know. But isn’t the soul as vital as the gene?
Doesn’t it bear scrutiny? Isn’t the search for the Yankee soul as thrilling as Watson’s hunt for that helix?

The male Yankee soul, that is. Asa’s soul. I’ll be honest. Until I met Asa I was merely amassing general data on males. I had found out that: They are hard outside but not always hard inside; they treasure women who make them laugh; they can change their personalities under the influence of a kiss received in a dark hall, a parked car, a side street. Some smell good, and for these I have an interminable lust; some smell odd—not bad but unbeddable—and make me nervous, as though we were not the same species.

Asa’s smell (the fragrance of a beautiful man) is what I miss the most. I first smelled it three days after I had begun work at the magazine, when he leaned over my desk to hand me some papers, and the clarity of that mixture (rough, unfiltered cigarettes, fresh shirts, warm skin of a blond) alarmed me. My head snapped up to stare. He was in his persona of the happy, handsome man. Blue shirt, sleeves rolled up for the warmth of afternoon, gold and brown hairs shimmering on his arms, paper between his brown hands. Who was he? I remember sorting through the names and faces jammed into my head on the first day and coming out with the wrong answer—Roger Rowell, the editor. I didn’t care if he were the janitor or the publisher, he was mine. I looked into his eyes; they were flat and awesomely blue, empty, receiving nothing. It was like looking into a portrait. Then he smiled and showed his crooked teeth, tinted with nicotine but well formed and healthy-looking. His eyes stayed blank through the smile. He put the papers on my desk and the movement agitated the smell, which surrounded his body like a halo, so that another gust of it came toward me. I had to shut my eyes. Like a virus his smell entered me and changed my cells,
slowly, over years, until they craved only that smell, which was their oxygen.

The details. The names. The furnishings. It has a small staff, the magazine, and occupies a small brick house on a Cambridge side street, between a cobbler and a used-bookstore. Discreet gilt letters on one pane of the glass-paneled door identify it; I’ll go one better and leave it nameless. Five of us acquired and edited the issue quarterly. The magazine verges on the scholarly. Roger and Asa like to think it is scholarly, but they know better. It keeps the sort of lawyer, doctor, or politician who regrets that he didn’t get a Ph.D. slightly informed about a number of topics of no intrinsic interest to him, such as the newer understanding of fertilization in ferns or the controversy over the publication rights to T. S. Eliot’s letters. As an endeavor it always seemed to me second-rate and fuzzy in outlook. But it was a grand place to work.

It was grand because Asa was there. To be all day in the presence of someone you love—I spent more time with him than Fay did. And it was a vital group, full of argument and feud, alignment and camaraderie. When an issue had just come out, we stumbled down the long mahogany halls like sleepwalkers, as if we had caught Asa’s perennial drowsiness. There was time to quarrel about the content and layout of the next issue. Every combination of duos ate lunch together, discussing the characters of the other three. Whispers and confidences gave the workday a grade-school flavor. As publication drew near all this stopped; we became almost a unit, twenty arms and eyes focused on one objective. Almost, because Roger, the editor, thrilled to tight deadlines and inevitably slacked off at the penultimate moment in order to feel the full rush of adrenaline at the ultimate moment, when
everything was due at the printer the next day and one article hadn’t been written. Then he would take off his shoes and pad along the oak floor to the bathroom, where the claw-footed bathtub held competing periodicals, which he would read while sitting on the toilet—why? Revving himself into a frenzy of competition? Boom! Back to his typewriter, the article clattering out, a taxi coming at eleven at night to take the manuscript to the typesetter—we suffered under his mania for what Sally called “a photo finish.” “We are working at an insipid quarterly,” she said over one of those postissue lunches, “but Roger is the editor of the
Daily Planet
.”

Sally was my confidante, my level-headed adviser, my mischievous encourager, my occasional doomsday prophet. Her views on my affair with Asa were always slightly out of sync with mine. But she held them firmly and told me every one. “He’s not interested in you. He’s got everything he wants and anyhow, he’s barely interested in anything,” she said one day, after his smell had been mutating in my bloodstream for more than a year. A week later she announced, “You’re exactly what he wants. What forty-one-year-old man wouldn’t want a beautiful young woman fawning over him?” Was I really fawning? “You look at him with a smirk on your face; you just can’t get that expression of satisfaction off your puss,” she answered.