scrutinized.
“I’m starving,” she said.
I thought at first she was just going through the motions, having dinner with me to be polite. And that that would be the end of it. She was behaving not like the vampy creature who’d flirted with me at Walt’s, then spent the night in my bed; rather, she was the demure woman I’d seen that evening in Sulfur. But after several glasses of wine she began to warm up. She was with me because she wanted to be, and remembering how we were then, when it was all promise, with nothing to ruin it but folly, or fear, I see us as though from a camera attached to a track on the ceiling: a lean, lanky man with his hair cut short,
en brosse,
in a creased linen suit with one elbow propped on the candlelit table, his chin cupped in his fingers, the other arm thrown over the back of his chair, listening with a smile to this peachy woman gesticulating and smoking on the other side of the table. She ate only a little of her pasta and barely touched her steak. She drank several carafes of white wine, I didn’t count, while I nursed a glass of red. She must have smoked seven cigarettes over the course of the meal, but a number of them she crushed out after only one or two drags. I idly wondered why some cigarettes got smoked right down to the filter and others were crushed out at birth.
I paid the check and we emerged into the night. We were a couple of blocks west of Seventh Avenue. She took my hand. We stepped away from the restaurant, and there were flowers for sale in the deli on the corner. I asked her if she’d like some.
“No, Charlie,” she said. “Let’s just go home.”
Home. My apartment, she meant. Which no woman had entered for many months, excepting Agnes, of course.
In which I had become accustomed to retire from the world at the end of the day and there indulge the stark pleasures of my solitude. I experienced a flicker of misgiving at the prospect of relinquishing that solitude, but it was only a flicker. For a woman to refer to a man’s apartment as home is of some importance, for it suggests trust; and this had come from a woman I’d known barely twenty-four hours.
One of the rewards of maturity, I told myself, in a rare burst of complacency, is the ability to make a rapid decision on a matter of profound emotional significance and have confidence in its soundness. The folly in this line of thinking didn’t become apparent until later, though even then I was aware, somewhere in the engine room at the back of my mind, of a needle flickering across a gauge and entering the red zone, signaling danger.
Had I guessed it already, had I glimpsed again the eternal inexorable truth that it is always the sick ones who seek out the healers? The lost ones who hunt down the fathers?
There was a slight tremor, this I do remember, for I had barely touched my wine, I was clearheaded; or no, not a tremor, a sensation of
blur,
the lover blurring into the shrink. This I ignored, and instead I exulted. Home, such as it was.
We could talk, this was the point. In the back of cabs, in restaurants, in the park after visits to Walter and Lucia, all that spring and into the summer we talked, we told each other stories, the stories of our lives so far. Oh, the risks one has run, the injuries suffered, the losses, the triumphs, the vital relationships—though she wouldn’t talk about her childhood, curiously—all assume fresh coloring when narrated to a new lover while submerged in her gaze. She was curious about my relationship with Walter. I asked her if she had a sibling, someone she could look up to as I did my brother. I was being ironic.
She shook her head. “I’m an only child.”
Our conversations were like sex, our sex like conversation. In my relative social isolation since the end of my marriage I’d grown wary and suspicious but now I relaxed; I allowed the inner man to show, whoever he was. Though of course one edits. I spoke little about Agnes, for my relationship
“I’m starving,” she said.
I thought at first she was just going through the motions, having dinner with me to be polite. And that that would be the end of it. She was behaving not like the vampy creature who’d flirted with me at Walt’s, then spent the night in my bed; rather, she was the demure woman I’d seen that evening in Sulfur. But after several glasses of wine she began to warm up. She was with me because she wanted to be, and remembering how we were then, when it was all promise, with nothing to ruin it but folly, or fear, I see us as though from a camera attached to a track on the ceiling: a lean, lanky man with his hair cut short,
en brosse,
in a creased linen suit with one elbow propped on the candlelit table, his chin cupped in his fingers, the other arm thrown over the back of his chair, listening with a smile to this peachy woman gesticulating and smoking on the other side of the table. She ate only a little of her pasta and barely touched her steak. She drank several carafes of white wine, I didn’t count, while I nursed a glass of red. She must have smoked seven cigarettes over the course of the meal, but a number of them she crushed out after only one or two drags. I idly wondered why some cigarettes got smoked right down to the filter and others were crushed out at birth.
I paid the check and we emerged into the night. We were a couple of blocks west of Seventh Avenue. She took my hand. We stepped away from the restaurant, and there were flowers for sale in the deli on the corner. I asked her if she’d like some.
“No, Charlie,” she said. “Let’s just go home.”
Home. My apartment, she meant. Which no woman had entered for many months, excepting Agnes, of course.
In which I had become accustomed to retire from the world at the end of the day and there indulge the stark pleasures of my solitude. I experienced a flicker of misgiving at the prospect of relinquishing that solitude, but it was only a flicker. For a woman to refer to a man’s apartment as home is of some importance, for it suggests trust; and this had come from a woman I’d known barely twenty-four hours.
One of the rewards of maturity, I told myself, in a rare burst of complacency, is the ability to make a rapid decision on a matter of profound emotional significance and have confidence in its soundness. The folly in this line of thinking didn’t become apparent until later, though even then I was aware, somewhere in the engine room at the back of my mind, of a needle flickering across a gauge and entering the red zone, signaling danger.
Had I guessed it already, had I glimpsed again the eternal inexorable truth that it is always the sick ones who seek out the healers? The lost ones who hunt down the fathers?
There was a slight tremor, this I do remember, for I had barely touched my wine, I was clearheaded; or no, not a tremor, a sensation of
blur,
the lover blurring into the shrink. This I ignored, and instead I exulted. Home, such as it was.
We could talk, this was the point. In the back of cabs, in restaurants, in the park after visits to Walter and Lucia, all that spring and into the summer we talked, we told each other stories, the stories of our lives so far. Oh, the risks one has run, the injuries suffered, the losses, the triumphs, the vital relationships—though she wouldn’t talk about her childhood, curiously—all assume fresh coloring when narrated to a new lover while submerged in her gaze. She was curious about my relationship with Walter. I asked her if she had a sibling, someone she could look up to as I did my brother. I was being ironic.
She shook her head. “I’m an only child.”
Our conversations were like sex, our sex like conversation. In my relative social isolation since the end of my marriage I’d grown wary and suspicious but now I relaxed; I allowed the inner man to show, whoever he was. Though of course one edits. I spoke little about Agnes, for my relationship
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