The Early Stories (119 page)

She picked up the book from the sofa. He was one of those men who could read a book gently, so it didn't look read. She surprised herself, in her great swimming calmness, by being unable to read a word.

Tuesday, as they had planned weeks ago, Rob took her to Philadelphia. She had been born there, and he had business there. Taking her along was his tribute, he had made it too plain, to her condition as a bored housewife. Yet she loved it, loved him, once the bumping, humming terror of the plane ride was past. The city in the winter sunlight looked glassier and cleaner than she remembered it, her rough and enormous dear drab City of Brotherly Love. Rob was here because his insurance company was helping finance a shopping mall in southern New Jersey; he disappeared into the strangely Egyptian old façade of the Penn Mutual Building—now doubly false, for it had been reconstructed as a historical front on a new skyscraper, a tall box of tinted glass. She wandered window-shopping along Walnut Street until her feet hurt, then took a cab from Rittenhouse Square to the Museum of Art. There was less snow in Philadelphia than in Connecticut; some of the grass beside the Parkway already looked green.

At the head of the stairs inside the museum, Saint-Gaudens's great verdigrised Diana—in Betty's girlhood imagination the statue had been somehow confused with the good witch of fairy stories (only naked, having shed the ball gown and petticoats good witches usually wear, the better to swing her long legs)—still posed, at her shadowy height, on one tiptoe foot. But elsewhere within the museum, there were many changes, much additional brightness. The three versions of
Nude Descending a Staircase
and the sadly cracked
Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
no longer puzzled and offended her. The daring passes into the classic in our very lifetimes, while we age and die. Rob met her, just when he had promised, at three-thirty, amid the Impressionist paintings; her sudden love of him, here in this room of raw color and light, felt like a melting. She leaned on him, he moved away from her touch, and in her unaccustomed city heels Betty sidestepped to keep her balance.

They had tea in the cafeteria, out of place in their two dark suits among the students and beards and the studied rags that remained of the last decade's revolution. Here, too, the radical had become the comfortable. “How do you like being back?” Rob asked her.

“It's changed, I've changed. I like it where I am now. You were dear to bring me, though.” She touched his hand, and he did not pull it away on the smooth tabletop, whose white reminded her of snow.

Happiness must have been on her face, glowing like a sunburn, for he looked at her and seemed for an instant to see her. The instant troubled him. Though too heavy to be handsome, he had beautiful eyes, tawny and indifferent like a lion's; they slitted and he frowned in the unaccustomed exercise of framing a compliment. “It's such a pity,” he said, “you're my wife.”

She laughed, astonished. “Is it? Why?”

“You'd make such a lovely mistress.”

“You think? How do you know? Have you ever had a mistress?” She was so confident of the answer she went on before he could say no. “Then how do you know I'd make a lovely one? Maybe I'd make an awful one. Shrieking, possessive. Better just accept me as a wife,” she advised complacently. The table was white and cluttered with dirty tea things between them; she could hardly wait until they were home, in bed. His lovemaking was like him, firm and tireless, and it always worked. She admired that. Once, she had adored it, until her adoration had seemed to depress him. And something in her now, at this glittering table, depressed him—perhaps the mistress he had glimpsed in her, the mistress that he of all the men in the world was barred from, could never have. She stroked his hand as if in acknowledgment of a shared sorrow. But happiness kept mounting in her, giddy and meaningless, inexplicable, unstoppable, though she saw that on its wings she was leaving Rob behind. And he had never seemed solider or kinder, or she more fittingly, as they rose and paid and left the museum together, his wife.

On the flight back, to calm her terror, she pulled the book from her handbag and read,
As Lionel Trilling was to say in 1957 (before women had risen in their might), “The extraordinary thing about Emma is that she has a moral life as a man has a moral life”; “A consciousness is always at work in her, a sense of what she ought to be and do.”

Rob looked over her shoulder and asked, “Isn't that Rafe's book?”

“One just like it,” she answered promptly, deceit proving not such a difficult trick after all. “You must have seen it on the front seat of his car Sunday. So did I, and I found a copy at Wanamaker's this morning.”

“It looks read.”

“I was reading it. Waiting for you.”

His silence she took to be a satisfied one. He rattled his newspaper, then asked, “Isn't it awfully dry?”

She feigned preoccupation. A precarious rumble changed pitch under her. “Mm. Dry but dear.”

“He's a sad guy, isn't he?” Rob abruptly said. “Rafe.”

“What's sad about him?”

“You know. Being cuckolded.”

“Maybe Lydia loves him all the better for it,” Betty said.

“Impossible,” her husband decreed, and hid himself in the
Inquirer
as the 727, rumbling and shuddering, prepared to crash. She clutched at Rob's arm with that irrational fervor he disliked; deliberately he kept his eyes on the newspaper, shutting her out. Yet in grudging answer to her prayers he brought the plane down safely, with a corner of his inflexible mind.

In her dream she was teaching again, and among her students Rafe seemed lost. She had a question for him, and couldn't seem to get his attention, though he was not exactly misbehaving; his back was half turned as he talked to some arrogant skinny girl in the class.… It was so exasperating she awoke, feeling empty and slightly scared. Rob was out of the bed. She heard the door slam as he went to work. The children were downstairs quarrelling, a merciless sound as of something boiling over. Wednesday. When she stood, a residue of last night's lovemaking slid down the inside of her thigh.

The children off to school, she moved through the emptiness of the house exploring the realization that she was in love. Like the floorboards, the doorframes, the wallpaper, the fact seemed not so much arresting as necessary, not ornamental but functional in some way she must concentrate on perceiving. The snow on the roof had all melted; the dripping from the eaves had ceased, and a dry sunlight rested silently on the warm house, the bare street, the speckled rooftops of the town beyond the sunstruck, dirty windows. Valentines the children had brought home from school littered the kitchen counter. The calendar showed the shortest month, a rectangular candy box dotted with red holidays. Rafe's office number was newly listed in the telephone book. She dialled it, less to reach him than to test the extent of the day's emptiness. Alarmingly, the ringing stopped; he answered. “Rafe?” Her voice surprised her by coming out cracked.

“Hi, Betty,” he said. “How was Philly?”

“How did you know I went?”

“Everybody knows. You have no secrets from us.” He stopped joking, sensing that he was frightening her. “Lydia told me.” Evan had told her; Rob had told him at work. There was a see-through world of love; her bright house felt transparent. “Was it nice?” Rafe was asking.

“Lovely.” She felt she was defending herself. “The city seemed … tamer, somehow.”

“What did you do?”

“Walked around feeling nostalgic. Went to the museum up on its hill. Rob met me there and we had tea.”

“It does sound dear.” His voice, by itself, was richer and more relaxed than his physical presence, with its helpless, humiliated clown's air. Her silence obliged him to say more. “Have you had time to look into the book?”

“I love it,” she said. “It's so scholarly and calm. I'm reading it very slowly; I want it to last forever.”

“Forever seems long.”

“You want to see me?” Her voice, involuntarily, had thickened.

His answer was as simple and sharp as his green glance when she had exclaimed, “Shit.” “Sure,” he said.

“Where? This house feels so conspicuous.”

“Come on down here. People go in and out of the building all day long. There's a hairdresser next to me.”

“Don't you have any clients?”

“Not till this afternoon.”

“Do I dare?”

“I don't know. Do you?” More gently, he added, “You don't have to
do
anything. You just want to
see
me, right? Unfinished business, more or less.”

“Yes.”

Downtown, an eerie silence pressed through the movement of cars and people. Betty realized she was missing a winter sound from childhood: the song of car chains. Snow tires had suppressed it. Time suppressed everything, if you waited. Rafe's building was a grim brick business “block” built a century ago, when this suburb of Hartford had appeared to have an independent future. An ambitious blazon of granite topped the façade, which might some day be considered historical. The stairs were linoleum and smelled like a rainy-day cloakroom. A whiff of singeing and shampoo came from the door next to his. He was waiting for her in his waiting room, and locked the door. On his sofa, a chill, narrow, and sticky couch of Naugahyde, beneath a wall of leatherbound laws, Rafe proved impotent. The sight of her naked seemed to stun him. Through his daze of embarrassment, he never stopped smiling. And she at him. He was beautiful, so lean and loosely knit, but needed to be nursed into knowing it. “What do you think the matter is?” he asked her.

“You're frightened,” she told him. “I don't blame you. I'm a lot to take on.”

He nodded, his eyes less green here in this locked, windowless anteroom. “We're going to be a lot of trouble, aren't we?”

“Yes.”

“I guess my body is telling us there's still time to back out. Want to?”

On top of one set of bound statutes, their uniform spines forming horizontal streaks like train windows streaming by, lay a different sort of book, a little paperback. In the dim room, where their nakedness was the brightest thing, she made out the title:
Emma
. She answered, “No.”

And, though there was much in the aftermath to regret, and a harm that would never cease, Betty remembered these days—the open fields, the dripping eaves, the paintings, the law books—as bright, as a single iridescent unit, not scattered as is a constellation but continuous, a rainbow, a U-turn.

Ethiopia
 

The Addis Ababa Hilton has a lobby of cool and lustrous stone and a giant, heated, cruciform swimming pool. The cross-shape is plain from the balconies of the ninth-floor rooms, from which also one can see the long white façade of the Emperor's palace. In the other direction, there are acres of tin shacks, and a church on a hill like the nipple on a breast of dust. Emerging from the pool, which feels like layers of rapidly tearing silk, one shivers uncontrollably until dry, though the sun is brilliant, and the sky diamond-pure. The land is high, and the air not humid. One dries quickly. The elevators are swift and silent. From the high floors the white umbrellas on the restaurant tables beside the pool make a rosary of perfect circles. All this is true. What is not true is that Prester John doubles as the desk clerk, and the Queen of Sheba manages the glass-walled gift shop, wherein one can buy tight-woven baskets of multicolored straw, metal mirrors, and Coptic crosses of carved wood costing thousands of Ethiopian dollars, which relate to the American dollar as seven to three.

The young American couple arrived at the hotel very tired, having been ten days in Kenya, where they had seen and photographed lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyraxes, oryxes, dik-diks, steinboks, klipspringers, oribis, topis, kudus, impalas, elands, Thomson's gazelles, Grant's gazelles, hartebeests, wildebeests, waterbucks, bushbucks, zebras, giraffes, flamingos, marabou storks, Masai warriors, baboons, elephants, warthogs, and rhinoceroses—everything hoped for, indeed, except hippos. There had been one asleep in a pool in the Ngorongoro Crater, but it had looked too much like a rock to photograph, and the young man of the American couple had passed it by, confident there would be more. There never were. It had been his only chance to get a hippopotamus on film. Prester John, cool behind his desk of lustrous green marble, divined this, and efficiently, gratuitously arranged that they spend the night away from
Addis Ababa, in the Ethiopian countryside. The countryside was light brown. Distant figures swathed in white trod the tan landscape with the floating step of men trying to steady themselves on a trampoline. But these were women, all beautiful. The beauty of their black faces, glimpsed, lashed the windows of the car like fistfuls of thrown sand. Some carried yellow parasols. Some led white donkeys. A few rode in rubber-wheeled carts, rickety and polychrome, their mouths and nostrils veiled against the dust. He tried to photograph these women, but they turned their heads, and the results would come out blurred.