On Green Dolphin Street (14 page)

She could still sense him trying to interrupt, but raised her hand again. It occurred to her that the reason she was sounding like someone awarding a school prize was that she was choosing unemotive words for fear of breaking down. She was finding it difficult to breathe.

She said, “I want you to know for today, tomorrow, for the rest of your life how much you have meant to me, how much you have touched me with your …” she smiled, feeling tears pricking at her eyes “… your tour of the city. I want you to remember always what a fine man you are, or so you seem to me. I so much admire your dedication, how much you’ve done, how hard you’ve fought for yourself. And your kindness, your manners, your … Well, everything about you. I think you’re wonderful. Wonderful.”

Frank sat staring at her for a few moments. He looked now exactly as he had on the first night she had met him, after the party, black marks beneath his eyes, his tie at half-mast, his cropped hair slightly rumpled.

He said, “Have you finished?”

She bit her lip and nodded.

He said, “I’m in love with you too.”

The words hit her hard. “Is this … is that what …”

“From the day I saw you. Every second that’s gone past I’ve become more convinced that you are the most extraordinary and perfect person in creation.”

“No, you are. The best.”

“I don’t want to have a competition with you, Mary. Just believe that I’m right.”

Mary looked down at the table. She felt alarmed at the passion of his response, but not as much as she felt relieved. Above all, she felt an absurd sense of propriety: that something that needed to be said had been fully and properly expressed.

“And now?” she said. “What do we do now?”

“You walk back with me to my apartment, then we say good-bye and I put you in a cab.”

“All right.”

“It’s just a few blocks that way.”

Time, any more time, was enough. As they began to walk, he put his arm around her, and her tremor of guilt as she slipped her own arm round his waist was as nothing to her sense of rightness and decorum.

They were outside a tall 1930s apartment building on Bleecker Street. He looked down at her.

She said, “Could I … come up? Just for a few minutes? A cup of tea or something?”

“Hmm … Maybe.”

Frank nodded a greeting to the doorman as they crossed the hall. Inside the elevator, he and Mary stood side by side, staring straight ahead back toward the front door of the building, but as soon as the doors closed, they fell on each other.

At the top floor they pulled apart and walked down the corridor with exaggerated propriety. Mary stood well back as Frank fumbled with the key to his apartment; once inside, however, she began to kiss him again before he had kicked the door shut with his heel. She felt his hands running up inside her clothes and tore the shirt from the grip of his belt so
she could feel the skin of his back beneath her hands. For several minutes they made no progress past the small entrance lobby of the apartment, but stood entwined with one another. Her face was turned up toward his, seeking his mouth from different angles, her eyes closed; his hands ran through her dark hair as though he would uproot it, while his tongue seemed to be searching for a withheld core of her. She noticed that while one of Frank’s hands stroked her face, her ears, the outline of her jaw, the other had slipped beneath her blouse and swiftly sprung the stretched clip between her shoulder blades, so that before she knew it, his face was buried in her breasts, which he had worked free, so that they were both exposed while her back was still pressed against the wall of his entrance lobby, where the frame of a picture was pressing into her shoulder. He was talking to her, but she could barely make out the words because his face was buried in her flesh, from which he would not take his lips, until at last she pulled up his head long enough to kiss his mouth.

They moved into the sitting room, where Mary straightened her clothes to some extent and Frank eventually stood back.

She said, “Frank, I must …”

He said, “Of course.” But under the guise of helping her regain her dignity, he began to caress her again. She felt his hands run over her hips, down her thighs; she felt his fingers lifting the hem of her skirt and heard a callus on his skin snag for a moment on nylon before it touched flesh.

Mary pulled away again, kissed him and said, “I must stop.”

“So must I. That’s enough.”

But she kissed him again.

Frank said, “I can’t do this.” His hand was on the outside of her skirt, at the back, but feeling down between her legs, crunching the loose material up between his fingers.

“No,” she said. “You must stop. I’m a married woman.”

“I know. And I’m a decent man.”

“Of course you are,” she said, leaning in to kiss him once more. After several more false stops and new beginnings, Frank turned violently away and walked into the galley kitchen at the end of the living room. Mary breathed in deeply, straightened her skirt and refastened her blouse; she
pushed the hair back from her face and, seeing a tiled wall visible through a half-open door at the other end of the room, went into the bathroom.

She flipped the light switch up and looked in amazement at her guiltless face, bright in the mirror. Her brown eyes stared back candidly. This is not me, she thought. Yet she felt no guilt at all: her composed features bore no mark of shame; even her lipstick was barely smudged. She lifted her skirt and straightened the ivory slip with its embroidered hem. What was the point, she thought, when she might soon be hoisting it to her waist? She clipped the bra together with a momentary tremor at the thought of how easily he had sprung it open. How often, how many … But when she looked down at the basin and saw the impatiently squeezed tube of shaving cream, the tin of sticking plasters, the still-damp brush and dimestore soap, she was filled with tenderness.

She did not linger over her reflection; the face she wanted to be looking at was his.

Frank was leaning over the record player. He looked up when she came back into the room. “You found the bathroom.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“I thought you’d like to hear some Miles Davis,” he said. He paused for a moment. “He’s pretty darn good at a time like this. Here. Have a beer.” He passed her a cold glass. The sound of a breathy, muted trumpet came up softly.

“It’s called ‘Stella by Starlight,’ ” he said.

She nodded, like a child under instruction.

“Now you sit down there,” said Frank, pointing to an old couch on one side of the room. “And I’m gonna sit on this bar stool right here.”

Mary did as she was told and sipped at the beer, which was very cold.

Frank looked at her, with his head on one side. “You just stay there,” he said. “Where I can look at you. Don’t move. You want a cigarette?”

“About ten.”

The music coiled about the space between them; the trumpet was mournful, caressing, but with some suggestion of menace. Mary looked down at her lap.

“That’s it?” she said.

“That’s all. That’s all there is. The rest is … nighttime. Forgetting.”

“But I’m crazy about you. I’m demented. Do you know what it’s like for me to say that?”

Frank laughed. “Yup.” He held up his right hand. “Remember this?”

“What?”

“This scar. No, don’t get up or we’re dead. Here, I’ll hold it under the light. See?”

“Of course. That first night when you came to our party. The car door or something. There was blood everywhere. What was it?”

Frank leaned over to the kitchen counter and picked up his key ring, which had a small penknife attached. He held it up. “This.”

“What do you mean?”

“I cut my hand with this knife.”

“While you were fixing the car?”

Frank laughed. “What car? Why would I have a goddamn car? I came by cab. I just flew in from New York that day.”

“So how did you cut your hand?”

“I told you. With the knife. I cut it on purpose so I would have an excuse to come back to your house.”

Mary’s eyes widened. “Because?”

He nodded. “Because of you.”

Eventually Mary began to laugh. “It was rather a clean cut, wasn’t it, for a greasy wrench.”

“I thought I could count on Charlie. He’d want someone to sit up and have another drink with.”

“Don’t mention Charlie.”

“No, I think we have to keep mentioning him.”

Mary swallowed a little more beer. She was finding the separation from Frank difficult to maintain.

She said, “This is going to change my life. You do understand that, don’t you? I’ve been married for however many years it is. And I love my husband. I haven’t the slightest intention of … leaving him, or anything like that. And my children. I love them with a passion you couldn’t possibly understand.”

Frank smiled. “And now this.”

“Yes. I mean, I just don’t want you to think this is the kind of thing that happens to me. Or something I wanted to happen. It’s the last thing I wanted. It’s probably different for you. Being a man. Single.”

“Sure.”

“No. You’ve got to tell me seriously, Frank. You have to.”

Frank coughed. “All right, I’ll tell you. I’ve never felt anything like this. From this moment on, everything is changed. Is that good enough?”

“I … think so,” said Mary. “I think so. Do you know what time it is?”

“It’s twenty to three. I think you need to go home now. I’ll come down with you and get a cab. And you might want this.” He handed her a book of matches with a phone number written inside the cover.

Fifteen minutes later they were still in the lobby inside the front door of the apartment.

“The only way I’m going to manage this is if you walk, like, twenty feet ahead of me,” said Frank, kissing her ear. “And keep that distance.”

Alone on the backseat of the cab, Mary closed her eyes against the confusion of feeling that was overpowering her; there was a certain, remote dread that this unexpected joy was going to be paid for at a very high price. Ecstasies did not come free. Then she opened her eyes again and looked soberly at the passing storefronts of lower Sixth Avenue, the garbage cans and stacked crates of empty bottles, the street corners that reeled by as the lights yielded their sequential greens. There was no confusion, really, when she came to think of it, just this desperate elation.

Chapter 6  

C
harlie looked in a deplorable state when Mary glimpsed him through the glass screen at La Guardia, waiting for his bag to come off the carousel. He was red-eyed, unshaven and apparently unsure which suitcase might be his; he picked off two quite different-looking ones before settling on his own. When he finally came through the door, he smiled, a defeated grimace, and she saw the tension dissolve from the lines of his face in his relief at seeing her; she threw her arms round him, finding the rush of faithful love rise up in her unchanged.

Back at the hotel, after a long bath and a gin and tonic from room service, he rallied a little. Mary cleared up and repacked the cases, while he dressed in the bathroom. She found the book of matches with Frank’s telephone number and tried to memorize it so she could throw away the evidence.

“Whose number is this?” Charlie would say.

“It’s … Katy Renshaw’s brother’s. She said I should give him a call if I had time, but I didn’t.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s … a journalist. No. He works on Wall Street.”

“I’d like to meet him. I’ll ask Katy about him.”

“No. No. Don’t do that. He moved. Katy doesn’t talk about him. She denies his existence.”

“It’s not Katy’s brother’s number, is it, Mary? It’s Frank’s. You’re having an affair with him, aren’t you? I’m divorcing you now and I’ll get custody. You’ll never see the children again. My lawyers will see to that. Take your case and go now.”

She would have to keep it simple. “It’s Frank’s number actually. He showed me round while you were away. It was fun.”

Before Charlie emerged from the bathroom, she had refined her guileless explanation and practiced saying the word “Frank” in a normal voice. Then she thought this sounded suspiciously ordinary and that she should perhaps plead a theatrically exaggerated
tendresse
for Frank, as though she were trying to divert Charlie’s attention, as she suspected he had sometimes done with her (that Japanese girl, Hiroko, for instance), from the true object of a problematic affection. It could be like one of those crime novels in which a suspect is discovered with the knife in hand in chapter two, after which the detective goes through a maze of bluff and counterbluff only to reveal in the end that the killer was, though for reasons and in a manner entirely unforeseen, the suspect with the dripping knife in chapter two.

On the other hand, Charlie might have read such books, and … Mary shut the suitcase. This was unbearable. She loved Charlie. Nothing had changed between them. She had done nothing with which to reproach herself; on the contrary, she and Frank had behaved—it seemed to her—with a painful self-restraint. Now she would return to the business of her family and her life, her reputation intact, and devote herself to Charlie’s happiness.