My Education (18 page)

I glanced over my own shoulder, hearing Martha in the living room now, one room closer to me, calling out titles of records. “Handel,” she called out, “Haydn, Haydn, more Haydn.” “Anything!” I called back. Now I noticed the low bedside table, entirely bare except for a cheap radio alarm clock. I knew that Nicholas had cleared off that table, probably at the last moment, perhaps after he'd already gone half out the door—rushing back to sweep the loose coins and little totems and portable shrine to the adored wayward wife off the surface in one hasty motion and so into his underwear drawer. He would have done so not to protect these items from her but to offer her the uncluttered table, get them out of her way.

How had I lived with my perfidy up until now?

The apartment, elegant and small, was still very much the apartment of the professor acquaintance who was spending his summer in California. As I took the further measure of the bedroom, I understood even more the effort Nicholas had expended erasing his presence, for there had been very little room here for him to start out. The other two drawers of the three-drawer chest were so full of clothing I could not fully open them; clearly the resident professor had overstuffed them to offer one drawer to his guest. It was the same in the closet, a mashed upright bale of drab-colored, unfashionable men's clothes to one side, and at the other, a mere handful of hangers, half of them bare, the other half double-hung with handsome shirts I recognized. Double-hanging meant trouble for the sleeves of the shirts underneath, besides being a pain, but I knew why he'd done it. For her. Had there been a cubic inch in the other two drawers of the chest he likely would have mashed his things in there to give her the whole upper drawer, but this was physically impossible.

I closed the chest of drawers and the closet doors also and was leaving the room when an impulse drew me back. I found myself reopening the top drawer and reburying the photograph of Martha, at the very bottom and back where she could not ever happen across it, as I had. I didn't do this because I feared that the sight of it would melt her heart toward him. I did it for the opposite reason, to shield him from her scorn. I owed that much to him.

In the living room Martha had filled two glasses with greenish wine. “I don't have any idea how old this is, but I know it was cheap to start out,” she said. “For a man of his supposed refinement Nicholas is an amazing ignoramus about spirits and wine. Left to himself he'd drink Jameson's for every cocktail and sticky grocery-store red every meal.”

“I know you haven't told him, but if you were to tell him, what do you think his reaction would be?” I wondered abruptly.

“I don't see the point of speculating, nor do I see the point of revisiting this conversation. Regina, look around. We're here in this apartment in Manhattan, all by ourselves. I want to enjoy that. Don't you?”

But it didn't feel like we were there by ourselves. Somehow in his paltry exile, his dispossession he'd even seen fit to erase, Nicholas felt more present to me than he did in his home. He felt more present than he had in that well-furnished, book-lined master bedroom wherein sat his abandoned dry cleaning, awaiting his doubtful return. The trouser-pocketful of spare change scattered over his shorts, the double-hung shirts, the framed photo might have all had his eyes. When Martha persuaded me onto the sofa and began with one hand to tease open my blouse, I was stiff as a corpse. But this remoteness of mine, which was rare, seemed to deepen her amorousness. She put her wineglass on the table and metaphorically rolled up her sleeves.

“Am I the first woman you've been with?” I now wanted to know.

“I'm afraid not,” she said, not elaborating because too intent on her work, like a mariner leaving the dock. There was uncleating and unfurling and hoisting, and all to be done with quick, deft forcefulness.

“Why did you marry Nicholas?”

It must have been the optimism of lust on the scent of its gratification that allowed her to lightly endure such an onslaught of questions. “He was not the first man in my life, certainly,” she remarked, in refutation of some logic I couldn't follow, but then she firmly disregarded further queries and I stopped making them. For all my history of love, which coincided with my history with her, an exquisitely porous membrane lay between the mundane and the deeply ecstatic. She'd only needed to caress me, even send me a glance down the length of a room, and pure ardor bloomed. The transit from reading the paper or taking a shoe off or draining a glass to the howl of titanic passion was no transit at all. Now for the first time I experienced delayed, obstructed passion as it stubbornly burned its way toward me through a lacquer of fear. What was I afraid of? Losing her. What alone quelled that fear? Having her. So the woe and its cure locked their horns, each gaining what inches the other gave up, until finally cure muscled forth and I wailed and shook in her arms. But afterward as we languorously dressed the forewarning stayed with me.

Yet we thrived in New York, that first night the germ of the week, that one week, afterward, the beau ideal of our whole time together. Heat, the day's and our own, had built up in those rooms. Passing back out the doors of the building into indigo twilight a temperature differential submerged us, like going into cool water. The doorman—a new man now, pale-skinned and black-haired and transfixed by a tiny TV he'd set up on an overturned bucket—glanced without surprise at our linked-fingered egress, made with one of his own hands a careless salute, and in a flash I perceived the lifeblood of that city, its particular meaning, paradoxically mapped at the cross point of the greatest breadth of possibility with the highest expectation. You could be anyone that you wanted, yet you had to be
someone
. I was wearing her clothes—she had vetoed every item I'd brought—but I felt less diminished than transposed into my more ordained form. At the corner of Broadway the subway was two blocks away, but she hailed a cab and directed the driver to almost the opposite end of the island. “We might be in this cab for an hour,” she predicted with satisfaction. Our driver turned his attention to traffic and we turned ours to each other, and the endless innovations of fingers and tongues.

In the deep velvet booth of a crepuscular velvet-rope club she gave me my first gin martinis. At the white marble bar of a clamorous French brasserie she fed me my first oysters. Everywhere we went we attracted approving attention, the more so the drunker and more flamboyantly demonstrative we grew. At the brasserie when we surfaced from necking, the shells of the oysters denuded and strewn on the ice, the bartender, middle-aged and avuncular in a white Oxford shirt with sleeve gaiters, stood grinning at us with arms crossed. “What are you grinning about?” Martha said, but flirtatiously—the more she groped me in public, the more flirtatious with others she grew, but the less, I now found, that I cared.

“I find your friend very attractive,” the bartender said.

“She's my lover, you dolt,” Martha smiled.

“That's disappointing. Maybe you'd like to go out sometime?”

“I'm
her
lover.”

“Oh, twist the knife,” the bartender admonished.

And yet there were times in that endlessly dilating week—for every day's newness made days within days, so that the week seemed to magically lengthen, the more it diminished—when Martha and I, having drunk our way past drunkenness to a gritty sobriety; having eaten ourselves hungry again; most rare having fucked ourselves calm, so that sex relinquished its hold for a while on our minds; would sit across from each other in that professor's apartment, or in a white-doily coffeehouse run by Greek Orthodox nuns, or in a bleach-washed linoleum Chinatown diner with scum-covered lobsters in tanks by the door, simply pouring ourselves out to each other in talk, as we somehow had not done before. “I married Nicholas because I didn't know him or understand him, and that gave him mystique,” she said with regret one late night, as we ate salt-baked shrimps from a bed of limp lettuce, and carefully stacked up the shells to keep count. “There was something so impenetrable about him, he had this surface that was so alluring but everything just bounced off, he was always charming, you never saw him upset or confiding or out of control, and I thought—I think I thought—that getting past that, being on the inside, must be extraordinary. To be the One he was intimate with. But he isn't—there's no intimacy. There's no
inside
, inside.”

“There's something so intimate and disarming about his casual manner, just the first time you meet him,” I recalled.

“There
is
! But that's as deep as it goes. You get there right away, but then—” She mimed with her hands a blade striking a wall. “You don't get any further.”

“Having the baby with him must have gotten you further,” I said, as I might have said to a friend—not to a lover. Instantly I wished I had not.

“That's why I did it,” she replied, looking sharply at me—a challenge, to see if I judged her. I didn't. But I also doubted it had been so simple, the baby as a tool to pry Nicholas open. For at other times Martha spoke with real wistfulness of just the sort of thing she claimed Nicholas lacked: his element of surprise, of disclosing aspects of himself both unexpected and unknown to observers in general. In Berkeley, where they had met, he'd had much the same public persona as now, if an occasional Far East/West Coast trend to his clothes. He was not above wearing, and with perfect success, a Nehru jacket, leather thong flip-flops, and pajama-loose striped linen slacks. He could have looked like a mincing bohemian or he could have looked like a soldier of empire gone native (and indeed the wrong idea that he was British clung stubbornly to him, on account of his superlative charm and his scholarly specialization). If the latter, still Martha's surprise was complete when, to woo her, he took her on a grueling backcountry canoe trip in Yosemite Park and turned out to know what he was doing. He'd been as deft as an Algonquin portaging their boat, perhaps a Canadian national trait but for that no less sexy.

Growing up in Maine Martha had been the sort of statuesque girl who is a natural athlete, but Martha's particular athleticism, though versatile, was severe. Exceedingly competitive and self-contained, she did poorly on teams. She was a fine horseback rider but disliked the culture. There was a period of skiing, and, my personal favorite for its apt symbolism, of archery, but what suited her best was to sail. All that cleating and tacking and furling—these were really the earliest habits ingrained in her limbs. And so she and Nicholas had that in common, she said smiling wryly, disparaging such a slight bond. But it was more, at that time of her life, than she'd found herself sharing with anyone else. Both very smart, she and Nicholas had wound up professional scholars, in a milieu where climbing stairs was considered exertion and driving a nail a rare physical skill. Yet they were both, unbeknownst to their colleagues, outdoorspeople partial to small wooden boats.

That discovery made, their alliance was rapidly sluiced down the obvious channels. They took sea kayaks up from Fort Bragg along the so-called Lost Coast, with the migrating whales. They sailed among the Channel Islands, and south to Baja. That each possessed a slightly different expertise gave them much—at the start—to discuss. But from the beginning there was a strange discontinuity between their modes of interaction. Certain types of togetherness seemed to mesh them as snugly as beings can mesh. They did wonderfully on boats, all the more if there were challenging conditions. Their steps easily synced on remote hiking paths. They never struggled with shared physical tasks. And though they seemed their best in wilderness, it was not mandatory—they had terrific abstruse arguments about some books and films (not all: Nicholas, unlike Martha, was indifferent to popular culture, not snobbish so much as uncomprehending and bored, so that she could not even keep him awake through
Pulp Fiction
, let alone make him argue about it). Yet much of the rest of the time a space of unfamiliarity, even abashed awkwardness, seemed to open between them. It happened very regularly at the table, when their talk was as halting and random as that on an ailing first date. It happened on walks in Berkeley, where the sublime wilderness wasn't there as a shared interlocutor. It happened while socializing with their colleagues, when Martha—always animated by desirous attention to a height of brash, husky-voiced, devil-may-care posturing—would feel herself turned into their mascot, while Nicholas, smiling much like a parent, withdrew into silence. But it happened most often in bed, most particularly after foreplay. While a master of coy and withholding techniques of arousal, Nicholas always seemed to conclude at some point that his dues had been paid, diving into her body with as much savoir faire as a twelve-year-old boy diving into a pond. He wasn't restrained or inhibited—he'd once abraded her tailbone bloody with his furious thrusts, and he screwed his whole face up, and yelped like a dog being pulled by its tail. But neither did he seem aware of her. She had the uneasy sense, when he fucked her, of spying on him while he got himself off—of intruding on a private and unguarded moment to which she lacked any claim.

Once she'd grown aware of this sense of aloneness, which weighed down at precisely the moments she ought to feel closest to him, the moments of untroubled intimacy also took an odd tinge. She wondered if he felt so porous and attuned to her when they mended a sail or pitched a tent less because she was his lover than a sort of fellow scout. Nicholas had a boyishness to him, a shy, watchful sweetness that joined to his romantic appearance and his mercurial clothes was a significant source of his sexual cult, of the countless women and men of all sorts slavering in his wake. But the boyishness, reframed by their affair, proved incompatible with sexual feeling. After sex Martha found herself watching his back as he mopped with a Kleenex and slid into his robe and from there a hot shower. They rarely lingered in bed after sex, nosing over each other, carefully nursing depleted limp flesh back to life. They never showered or bathed together. Martha, who had never given a thought to nudity, began using a robe as he did. Martha had pursued her carnal interests since the age of thirteen, with no small number of women and large numbers of men. Always, in her lengthy experience, sex had been the key to a door behind which lay a realm of shared secrets. Sexual love was conspiracy, the blood pact with the partner in crime—you didn't spend the evening with that person wondering if conditions would tend toward a fuck. You didn't find yourself, some twelve years and twenty lovers after losing your virginity, wondering if you were “good” at sex as had wondered those overpainted, knobble-kneed girls you grew up with, aggressively fellating their boyfriends as if swallowed spunk would improve the complexion. But if sexual insecurity had been foreign to Martha before now, so had certain types of esteem. Nicholas neither marveled over nor competed with her professional accomplishments. He expected them, as he expected and desired her enormous intelligence. For her part, she had never been involved with a man she knew to be her intellectual equal. This might have had to do with her previous habit of favoring, for example, the sexual attentions of a cocaine-addicted motorcycle enthusiast and bar owner who lived on her street over those of her departmental colleagues, but no matter. Her partnership with Nicholas gratified needs her previous lovers had not even suspected. This was enough, for a while, to distract from the niggling distance she felt.