Last Night (8 page)

— Oh, oh, Des would say, there it goes. Radio!

And Billy, with huge pleasure, would turn the radio on and off, on and off. How to explain why this worked? It was the power of a poet or maybe even a trick.

On Anna’s birthday, at about noon a beautiful arrangement of flowers, lilies and yellow roses, was delivered. They were from him. That evening we had dinner with some friends at the Red Bar, always noisy but the table was in the small room past the bar. I hadn’t ordered a birthday cake because we were going to have one back at the house, a rum cake, her favorite. Billy sat in her lap as she put her rings, one after another, carefully over separate candles, each ring for a wish.

— Will you help me blow them out? she said to Billy, her face close to his hair.

— Too many, he said.

— Oh, God, you really know how to hurt a woman.

— Go ahead, Des told him. If you don’t have enough breath, I’ll catch it and send it back.

— How do you do that?

— I can do it. Haven’t you heard of someone catching their breath?

— They’re burning down, Anna said. Come on, one, two, three!

The two of them blew them out. Billy wanted to know what her wishes had been, but she wouldn’t tell.

We ate the cake, just the four of us, and I gave her the present I knew she would love. It was a wristwatch, very thin and square with Roman numerals and a small blue stone, I think tourmaline, embedded in the stem. There are not many things more beautiful than a watch lying new in its case.

— Oh, Jack! she said. It’s gorgeous!

She showed it to Billy and then to Des.

— Where did you get it? Then, looking, Cartier, she said.

— Yes.

— I
love
it.

Beatrice Hage, a woman we knew, had one like it that she had inherited from her mother. It had an elegance that defied the years and demands of fashion.

It was easy to find things she would like. Our taste was the same, it had been from the first. It would be impossible to live with someone otherwise. I’ve always thought it was the most important single thing, though people may not realize it. Perhaps it’s transmitted to them in the way someone dresses or, for that matter, undresses, but taste is a thing no one is born with, it’s learned, and at a certain point it can’t be altered. We sometimes talked about that, what could and couldn’t be altered. People were always saying something had completely changed them, some experience or book or man, but if you knew how they had been before, nothing much really had changed. When you found someone who was tremendously appealing but not quite perfect, you might believe you could change them after marriage, not everything, just a few things, but in truth the most you could expect was to change perhaps one thing and even that would eventually go back to what it had been.

The small things that could be overlooked at first but in time became annoying, we had a way of handling, of getting the pebble out of the shoe, so to speak. It was called a give, and it was agreed that it would last. The phrase that was over-used, an eating habit, even a piece of favorite clothing, a give was a request to abandon it. You couldn’t ask
for
something, only to stop something. The wide skirt of the bathroom sink was always wiped dry because of a give. Anna’s little finger no longer extended when she drank from a cup. There might be more than one thing you would like to ask, and there was sometimes difficulty in choosing, but there was the satisfaction of knowing that once a year, without causing resentment, you would be able to ask your husband or wife to stop this one thing.

Des was downstairs when we put Billy to bed. I was in the hall when Anna came out holding her finger to her lips and having turned off the light.

— Is he asleep?

— Yes.

— Well, happy birthday, I said.

— Yes.

There was something odd in the way she said it. She stood there, her long neck and blond hair.

— What is it, darling?

She said nothing for a moment. Then she said,

— I want a give.

— All right, I said.

I don’t know why, I felt nervous.

— What would you like?

— I want you to stop it with Des, she said.

— Stop it? Stop what?

My heart was skipping.

— Stop the sex, she said.

I knew she was going to say it. I had hoped something else, and the words were like a thick curtain tumbling down or a plate smashing on the floor.

— I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Her face was hard,

— Yes, you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

— Darling, you’re mistaken. There’s nothing going on with Des. He’s a friend, he’s my closest friend.

The tears began to run down her face.

— Don’t, I said. Please. Don’t cry. You’re wrong.

— I have to cry, she said, her voice unsteady. Anyone would cry. You have to do it. You have to stop. We promised one another.

— Oh, God, you’re imagining this.

— Please, she begged, don’t. Please, please, don’t.

She was wiping her cheeks as if to make herself again presentable.

— You have to do what we promised, she said. You have to give.

There are things you cannot give, that would simply crush your heart. It was half of life she was asking for, him slipping off his watch, holding him, having him in your possession, in indescribable happiness, in love with you. Nothing else could be like that. There was an apartment on 12th Street that we were able to use, the garden behind it, the dazzling chords of
Petroushka
—the record happened to be there and we used to play it—chords that would always, as long as I lived, bring me back to it, his pliancy and slow smile.

— I’m not doing anything with Des, I said. I swear to you.

— You swear to me.

— Yes.

— And I’m supposed to believe you.

— I swear to you.

She looked away.

— All right, she said at last.

A great joy filled me. Then she said,

— All right. But he has to leave. For good. If you want me to believe you, that’s what it takes.

— Anna . . .

— No, that’s the proof.

— How can I tell him to leave? What’s the reason?

— Make up something. I don’t care.

IN THE MORNING he got up late and was in the kitchen, the smoothness of sleep still on him. Anna had gone off. My hands were trembling.

— Good morning, he said with a smile.

— Good morning.

I couldn’t bring myself to it. All I could say was,

— Des . . .

— Yes?

— I don’t know what to say.

— About what?

— Us. It’s over.

He seemed not to understand.

— What’s over?

— Everything. I feel like I’m coming apart inside.

— Ah, he said in a soft way. I see. Maybe I see. What happened?

— It’s just that you can’t stay.

— Anna, he guessed.

— Yes.

— She knows.

— Yes. I don’t know what to do.

— Could I talk to her, do you think?

— It wouldn’t do any good. Believe me.

— But we’ve always gotten along. What difference does it make? Let me talk to her.

— She doesn’t want to, I lied.

— When did all this happen?

— Last night. Don’t ask me how it came about. I don’t know.

He sighed. He said something I didn’t get. All I could hear was my own heart beating. He left later that day.

I felt the injustice for a long time. He’d brought only pleasure to us, and if to me particularly, that didn’t diminish it. I had some photographs that I kept in a certain place, and of course I had the poems. I followed him from afar, the way a woman does a man she was never able to marry. The glittering blue water slid past as he made his way between the islands. There was Ios, white in the haze, where the dust of Homer lay, they said.

Platinum

THE BRULE apartment had a magnificent view of the park, bare and vast in winter and in the summer a rich sea of green. The apartment was in a fine building, narrow but tall, and it was in a way comforting to think of how many others there were, dignified and calm, building upon fine building, all with their unsmiling doormen and solemn entrances. Rare carpets, servants, expensive furniture. Brule had paid more than nine hundred thousand for it at a time when prices were high, but the apartment was worth far more now, priceless, in fact. It had high ceilings, afternoon sunlight, and wide doors with curved brass handles. There were deep armchairs, flowers, tables dense with photographs, and many pictures on the walls, including Vollard prints in the hallway that led to the bedrooms and a ravishing dark painting by Camille Bombois.

Brule was one of those men about whom more is rumored than known. He was in his fifties and successful. He had defended some notorious clients and, less publicized, was said to have done unpaid work for those with no resources or hope. Details were vague. He had a soft voice that nevertheless carried authority and iron beneath a calm smile. He walked to work, perhaps a mile down the avenue, in a cashmere overcoat and scarf during the winter, and the doormen, who murmured good morning, received five hundred dollars apiece at Christmas. He was a figure of decency and honor, and like the old men described by Cicero who planted orchards they would not live to see the fruit from, but who did it out of a sense of responsibility and respect for the gods, he had a desire to bequeath the best of what he had known to his descendants.

His wife, Pascale, who was French, was warm and understanding. She was his second wife and had herself been married before, to a famous Parisian jeweler. She had no children of her own and her only fault, Brule felt, was she didn’t like to cook. She couldn’t cook and talk at the same time, she said. She was not beautiful but had an intelligent, faintly Asiatic face. Her generosity and good instincts were inborn.

— Look, she had said to his daughters when she and Brule were married, I’m not your mother and I can never be, but I hope that we’ll be friends. If we are, good, and if not, you can still count on me for anything.

The daughters were young girls at the time. As it turned out, they loved her. The three of them and their husbands and children came on all the holidays and often, though not all at once, of course, for dinner. They were an intimate and devoted family, a matter of great pride to Brule, the more so since his first marriage had failed.

You belonged to the family, not as someone who happened to be married to a daughter, but entirely. You were one of them, one for all and all for one. The oldest daughter, Grace, had told her husband,

— You have to really get used to the plural of things now.

Brian Woodra had married Sally, the youngest, on a glorious summer day on a lawn set with countless white chairs, the women in clinging dresses. Sally was in a gown of white, stiffened silk, sleeveless, with wide shoulder straps and her dark hair gleaming on her slender back. Her ears had fluted, silvery earrings and her face was filled with joy and the occasional concern that things go right, a lovely face with only the barest hint of smallness behind it and you instantly saw the expense of her upbringing. A New York girl, smart and assured. She’d gone to Skidmore, where she roomed with two nymphomaniacs, she liked to say, wanting to shock.

The groom was no taller than she was and slightly bow-legged with a wide jaw and winning smile. He was lively and well liked. His friends from college and even prep school came to the wedding and rose to give their fond recollections of him and predict the worst. At the moment of vows he found himself overcome by his wife-to-be’s purity and beauty, as if it were for the first time fully revealed.

The great tent in which the wedding dinner was held had long tables with large arrangements of flowers. As evening came, the tent slowly bloomed with light from within like an immense, ethereal ship, destined for voyage on the sea or in the heavens, one could not tell. Brule told his new son-in-law that he, Brian, was now to know the greatest happiness that one could experience on earth, referring to matrimony, of course.

For a wedding present they were given a cruise in the wake of Odysseus along the Anatolian coast, and in not much more than a year their first child came, a little girl they named Lily, loving and good-natured. Sally was a mother who, though completely involved in her child, still found time for all the rest, entertaining, seeing films, dinners with her husband, equality, friends. The apartment was a little on the dark side, but she did not expect to be in it forever. Grace lived just ten blocks away with her husband and two children, and Eva, the middle sister, was married to a sculptor and lived downtown.

Lily was delicious. From the beginning she loved to be in bed with her mother and father, especially her father, and when she was three whispered to him in adoration,