Memoir From Antproof Case (16 page)

The train upon which I had arrived had turned around and been the last train out, the station was dark, and the only hotel held Igor Jaguar and his colleagues. We walked all night. We did not encounter a single car on the whitened road, or a single light in the few towns through which we passed in silence out of respect for the sleeping.

As long as we kept moving, we were perfectly comfortable: we could have run the whole distance. Our pace was rapid, and we covered thirty miles by the time the sun came over the mountains the next morning. When we boarded the train, we took separate compartments, had the beds turned down, and slept all the way to New York, where we were disgorged into Grand Central Station at the height of the evening rush hour.

Perfectly rested, windburned, and smelling of the bay rum that both of us had splashed on our faces after washing in cold water and looking up at the standard Pullman shelf loaded with standard Pullman toiletries, we seized upon the frantic motions of New York in early evening, but without the customary filter of fatigue, and we had dinner at the Oyster Bar.

Constance was twenty-eight, and did not at first believe me when I told her that I had gone with my father to the Oyster Bar the first week that it opened, in 1912. She pretended, at least, to be shocked at my age. Naturally, I was flattered.

She had assumed that I was, indeed, a Wabash student on the GI Bill. I royally let slip that, actually, I had been an undergraduate at Harvard, and taken an M.Phil, at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Thus began a series of surprises and double shifts that, in my time with her, were never to end. "Harvard!" she said. I was used to the delicious squeal of feudal self-abnegation that you hear when you mention that name (how disgusting it seems now), and I assumed that she was, well, you know ... impressed.

She wasn't impressed, she was merely pleased, for she had been to Radcliffe, and this meant that, though far apart in years, we shared certain things in common. I was more or less delighted. After all, that she went to Radcliffe meant that she would be able to understand me when I spoke, which is what we at Harvard thought the purpose of Radcliffe was. Though it was true that Cliffies got better grades, it was because they were more passive and therefore able to mold themselves to the wishes of their instructors, they did not find themselves in competition with the professors, they did not exhaust themselves in sports or debauchery—as we did, or said we did—and they gave their undergraduate years their full shot, because they were not going to have careers.

But Constance, I quickly understood, was never passive, and did not have the habit of molding herself to anyone's wishes. And, she rowed.

"You rowed?" I asked.

She nodded.

No wonder her upper body, her shoulders, her arms, and her breasts were so beautiful, so perfectly formed, so well defined.

"And what did you take up after college?" I asked, thinking of, perhaps, quoits.

"I still row—in Long Island Sound."

No wonder her upper body, her shoulders....

"I myself rowed singles," I told her, amazed. "We can go out together. I rowed for six years, four at Harvard and two at Oxford."

"I rowed for eight," she said.

"You mean, you've been rowing for four years since you were graduated? You should count only those years when you were in college or affiliated with a competing club."

"No," she told me, ever so cheerfully. "Four years in college, and four years in graduate school."

"Graduate school?" I asked, quite surprised.

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Harvard."

"Oh. In what ... in what did you...."

"Economics."

"You went for a doctorate?"

"I took it last year," she said. "My thesis was about the effects of political philosophy on economic theory. It's going to be published," she said, with more than a twinkle, "in a month."

"By whom?" I asked.

"Oxford University Press. What do
you
do?"

I didn't want to tell her. "I was demobilized fairly recently," I said. "I was a pilot."

"I know," she said. "Over Berlin."

"Yes. Many times."

"Shot down twice."

"Yes," I said, "twice, though only once over Berlin, and once over the Mediterranean."

"But what do you do now?"

"I haven't settled in yet," I said.

I didn't want her to know that I was a partner at Stillman and Chase. I didn't want to impress her that much. I didn't want to suggest, merely by announcing what I did, that her knowledge, while admirable, was merely speculative and theoretical, while mine was, well, the real stuff. And I didn't want to overawe her with the aspect of money, at least not yet.

My salary and my year-end apportionment were awesome. I lived on an entire high floor in a building on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. I had a cottage in East Hampton. I wanted to surprise her with all this to make her happy, but first I wanted her to love me for myself, so I decided to do things as in a fairy tale.

The next day, I rented a small apartment in a brownstone on the Upper West Side. When we met subsequently, under the clock at the Biltmore, I told her that I lived in this apartment. I just mentioned it casually. In a few days, I would have it furnished after the fashion of a demobilized pilot still smarting from the effects of war, still casting about for a peacetime profession. I moved some of my books, some war memorabilia—swagger stick, cap, framed commissions, cannon shells, etc.—and a few pieces of furniture to the new place. I told Constance, quite truthfully, that I did not yet have a telephone there, but that I was expecting to have one installed within a week.

"I never asked where you live, Constance. I don't know what I would have done had we not been able to meet here and had I not been able to reach you."

"I live at the Barbizon," she said nervously, and then she exhibited a magnificent rose blush, from tip to toe. She looked as if she had been on the beach at Krakatoa just before it blew up. Her color ebbed and it flowed for three or four minutes.

It was, I would learn not that long after, the color she turned when she made love, and the color she had probably been on the moonlit road when she ran up to me, though in the moonlight I had not been able to see it. And when her complexion burned, the heat vaporized the expensive and understated perfume she wore so well, which, for me, was bliss.

But why had she blushed when she told me she lived at the Barbizon? Because she didn't live there. I knew it was a lie, but I couldn't prove it. Every time I called her, they said she was out, or sleeping. When I went to pick her up, she would come down to the front desk as if she actually lived in the place, and she paid rent, but she never stayed there.

Who was I to complain? I had set up my own subterfuge on the West Side, and there I entertained her as if I were a moneyless former pilot whose troubled memory kept his heart and soul in the sky over Europe.

Though crowned with deception, our courtship was sweet. Because I was never to know Constance when she was older, our love did not proceed beyond the initial all-consuming passion of, say, Romeo and Juliet, the kind of love that blinds. You see it all the time in restaurants, when a man and a woman sit at a table and face one another, unable to turn their heads, locked together like cats in intercourse. At my age I tend to regard such display with something akin to fatigue and contempt, but I remember it at times with pleasure. It is the state to which sexual love is the handmaiden, and without which sexual love is like a dance without music.

Soon, which according to the old calendar meant six or eight months, our thousands of hours of kissing and embracing and fondling led to the irresistible, full, wet, prolonged ... oh my ... that custom had led us to avoid. Such a thing was not, as it is so often these days, an activity upon which to embark after, ten minutes' acquaintance, or a gymnastic rite, a social prerequisite, or a form of orgasmic arm wrestling.

It was the climax of many months' testing, resolution, and moral struggle. It was the signal of true love and lifelong commitment. It was a mutual capitulation to the most elemental commandment, but only after a prolonged battle had proved us to ourselves, and, perhaps, elsewhere.

The greatest blizzards start with the finest snow. I must have been insane to start such a demanding regime in my early forties and well past my physical prime. We would lie together for days on end. I believe insects do this. Two crane flies were once locked in perfect symmetry on the upper part of my bathroom door. I blew a puff of air at them, and they flew away, linked as one. Their flight was graceful and quick. What miracle allowed them to know, suddenly, without study or reflection, how to be a biplane?

I see promiscuous young people on the beach, whose flesh is contained by their bathing suits in the manner of a melon resting in a slingshot. What do they know other than the most obvious? What could a voluptuary with a tattoo upon her tan overspilling breast know of Constance, with her lean strong shoulders, her unvarying modesty, and the great sensual explosiveness when finally she allowed herself complete abandon?

I hear the filthy, devilish strains of the lambada, and they mock the North. They mock what we have learned from the cold sea and the high wind. They mock the seduction and the Fall.

You do not know the reason for her deception, but you know the purpose of mine. I did not want her to love me for my money, and I did not want her to feel that what she did was, compared to what I did in the real world, with real people, and the whole economies of actual nations, a fruitless academic exercise.

Many love stories, I suppose, end with a flourish even more pompous and more destructive, in which heart-breaking passion is exhausted in the service of mere vanity. I suppose we could have moved to Connecticut and bought some ponies and sent our children to a school that called itself a hall. It could have ended with me in the saddle, the master of a dead horse. It didn't, because every time I turned around I encountered a double switch.

The first inkling that not everything was as I assumed came to me the next summer: that is, the summer of '47, in August, which in New York is when heat settles over the city like a sparkling, blinding veil. I remember the city then as a colossal essay in black and white, with more shades of gray than the world now knows. The city was quieter and more subdued than it is at present, perhaps because all the old forms had risen to their greatest height and this was the pause before the fall. The death of the old kingdom and the birth of the new seemed to have come during the Blizzard of '47, when the city was covered as never before and never since by a great white shroud. It stopped every man, woman, and child, stopped the streetcars, stopped the theaters, stopped the stocks, stopped the buses, and stopped the clocks.

It brought families together in complete quiet, and when everyone had been assembled in a city as tight as a bowstring, they suddenly felt a great shock. The snow was thrown from cornices and ledges the way it would have been had someone picked up Manhattan and banged it against the ground, and the streets were buried in a white fume, as if a child had turned over a snow glass, righted it, and watched the last of an old age float down and away.

My great regard for the period that led up to this arises because it is where those I can no longer reach reside. I want more than anything to go back to them, so I see in memory everything that surrounds them with what is perhaps a mistaken tenderness, but it is tenderness nonetheless.

Had I not gone into exile, I would have remained in New York, and it would have changed, and I would have been overwhelmed. As it is, I have it as it was, although it is always just beyond my reach, but I see it, and I will see it clearly until I die. Who knows? Perhaps with infinite dissolution comes infinite velocity, and I will be tossed back into the heart of the time I love.

I see it as if it were real. Constance and I are on the Bear Mountain boat. Like all the people against that gray background, she is a study in vivid color. She is so sunburnt that her white sundress is tinted rose. As we move north on the Hudson in a slight breeze the roar of the West Side Highway comes to us over the water like the sound of faraway surf.

I put my left arm around her and gently pull her to me. Through my suit and her dress I feel her body as if there were no such thing as cloth. My fingers curl lightly around the top of her arm at the end of her shoulder, and she has taken me just as lightly by the waist. Beyond us lies the city, its old glory shining through but about to change forever. The ferries will no longer pull trails of steam and smoke across its golden bays, and horses will disappear from the streets. Wood and stone have had their day, and flowing coats, and windows that open in trains, and the irrational manners that protect the delicacy and charm of the human soul.

Though a young woman, far younger than am I, Constance is of my time, and she too understands all that will soon be lost. As I stand on deck in the August heat, I cannot take my eyes from her. I am amazed at how much I love her.

But she was not who I thought she was. I began to suspect this after we had sailed across the Tappan Zee, in a haze of blue and white. Long after we had passed Ossining and I had strained unsuccessfully to see my old house through the trees—it was impossible to see the house from the river, although you could always see the river from the house—we rounded a bend in the upper Hudson.

In perfect majesty, symmetry, and order, a great estate appeared on a hillside. In our smooth motion across the water we could see ranks of maneuvering apple trees, by the thousand; neatly trimmed fields; roads without ruts; stone walls both straight and plumb; brightly and uniformly painted gates and wood fencing; and huge barns that were neither weathered nor tilting.

Everyone on deck looked out at this well ordered wealth, and was impressed by the labor and the beauty of the design. Whereas the expressions of the passengers were those of admiration, longing, and envy, and even I calculated swiftly that never in a million years would I be able to afford such a vast and peaceful domain, Constance went partially vermillion and her expression was that of a burglar with a flashlight in his face.