Asa, as I Knew Him (16 page)

“You know, it only alienated my neighbors more when I built the pool. They thought it was the height of ostentation. I was prepared to invite them all, to consider it their pool as well. They didn’t want it in the vicinity.”

“Why alienated them more? What had alienated them to begin with?” Asa asked. He had learned that Professor Sola, unlike Reuben, didn’t mind being asked direct questions.

“Oh, why does anybody dislike the Jews? I never knew.”

“It was that?”

“Maybe.” The old man said nothing else, and Asa felt unsatisfied, for once.

He found out, too late to make any difference, all that he’d wanted to know about Reuben’s mother. Blonde and rich, she’d passed for Aryan, supplied her husband and infant (Roberto; Reuben had been born in America) with food, obtained passports for the family and gotten them out of Germany, and killed herself five years later. “Why not?” Professor Sola had said, telling this story one long summer evening. “What was the point of her life after that? She’d saved the people she cared about, given me two children, compromised her identity, abandoned her country. Her work was done.”

“Did you feel the same?”

“Did I want to die? Well, yes, but she died first, and there were the boys, so I stayed.”

Asa never forgot his saying “stayed,” as though the world were a place, like Boston or Paris, and there were other places to be.

“And what was her name?”

“Marthe. Martha.”

So Grace remained a mystery. It was a mystery Asa pondered
by himself in his living room late at night, after Roberto had come and gone, or anytime he felt adrift or startled by some memory of the past. He avoided the Solas’ end of Brattle Street, driving down Mount Auburn to get to his parents’ house on Sundays when he and Fay went there for dinner. He braved that five-pronged intersection only when he intended to visit Professor Sola.

And at the end of the sixties, Professor Sola died. His cancer had recurred, and he told Asa he didn’t intend to have it treated. Asa wrote to Roberto, care of General Delivery, Hollywood; the letter returned after two weeks, addressee unknown. He put a few ads in the movie trade journals, called Parker at Yale, but Roberto was untraceable. There was a strange funeral at the Mount Auburn Cemetery with Asa and Fay and their baby girl, two cadaverous professors emeritus of English, and Lolly. Lolly had arranged the service, which consisted of a Unitarian minister reading Psalms. Reuben’s marker was on the left, Marthe’s on the right.

Roberto turned up several weeks later, drank rum, listened to the news, and talked about home computers, which he claimed were the wave of the future. Never, in all those years, in all those evenings Asa spent with Roberto or his father, did any of them say Reuben’s name.

After Professor Sola was dead, Asa unrolled the Breughel print, which he’d kept in the back of the off-season clothes closet in the guest room, and tacked it above his desk, which stood in a corner of the living room. Fay didn’t like it. “I think that’s an ugly painting,” she said more than once. “It’s depressing, that’s what.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Asa. “It’s about how life goes on, you know?” But he used it to get depressed with. During the day, or when there were people in the room, he never looked at it. At night, after Fay, tired from the baby, went
to sleep at nine, he’d sit on the sofa, and stare at the plowman, the hillside, the feeble effort of Icarus not to drown, and drink his scotch, and—what? He described it to himself as “remembering.” But he avoided specific memories. He drifted around in the past, smelling the roses that studded the Solas’ garage, seeing again the finely turned column of Jo’s arm, tasting the chlorine in his throat from too many dives into the pool. Occasionally he tasted real tears. And sometimes he heard his old litany: No more summer, no more myths—but it was halting and faint and had lost its power to hypnotize. Because life did go on, he and Fay had bought a shack on the Cape and had their own summers now. So what was he lacking, and what was he crying for?

Quite simply, the best love he’d ever known.

The Discrepancies

W
hat Asa had said to me was, “I had a boyhood friend who died.” This was in passing, in the middle of a conversation about friendship. “Who?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s dead.”

“I know.”

“His name was Reuben. He had an accident.”

“When was this? What kind of accident?”

“Oh, it was ages ago. We were teenagers. He was climbing something and he fell.”

“What?”

“What?”

“What was he climbing?” Sometimes conversation with Asa was impossible. He would retreat into stupidity and I would have to spell everything out for him.

“He was climbing the Mystic River Bridge. What do you want to know all this for?”

“Don’t you want to know things about me and my life?”

“Sure.” And his face settled into the expression of lust that he thought was affection. He was capable of affectionate feelings, but these produced a worried expression, as though it hurt to feel them. “I want to know everything.” He put his hand on the back of my thigh and slid it down to the dip behind my knee. We were in his office; in a week he was going to be forty-two. He didn’t want to know anything about me except how my breasts fit into his palms. We were still in the kissing stage.

“So?” I said.

“Huh?” He had gone behind his cloud. Was it purposeful or inadvertent? Maybe he was hung over. I examined his enormous eyes: bloodshot, but that wasn’t unusual. Still, they
were puffy underneath and he smelled of witch hazel, which, being slightly alcoholic, gave me the impression of booze by association.

“Are you asleep? Tell me the story.”

“I was up too late,” he said. This was his euphemism for having drunk too much the night before. He picked up a pencil and pressed the eraser to his lips. He had a habit of caressing inanimate objects in my presence. He would fondle his ruler, stroking it up and down, press paper clips to his cheeks, tap himself on the head with his magnifying glass. I enjoyed his displacement; it was I he wanted to press to his flesh. A year later I was reduced to being jealous of his tools. “You kiss the ruler but you won’t kiss me!” I said to him three weeks before I left my job. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he responded.

But this day, when he put his pencil to his mouth, I was bold and we were enough in love so that when I moved it and put my lips there instead, he kissed me back. The pencil fell on the floor. I tasted him—shaving soap at the corners of his mouth, his coffee, his Lucky—and sighed. He sighed too. It was morning; hours would have to pass before we held each other.

“So what happened?”

“He was a daredevil. Very good-looking, one of those boys who’s the natural leader of the group. I worshiped him—I guess.” The pencil, retrieved, was tapped on his chin while he pondered whether he had, actually, worshiped. “He was Jewish,” Asa said, looking sidelong at me.

“Did he look it?” I asked.

“What’s that mean?”

“Joke,” I said. “Go on.”

“He was an extremist, always pushing himself. Anyhow,
he was doing this crazy thing, climbing this bridge, and he fell off.”

“Were you there?”

“No. I chickened out at the last minute and stayed home looking at pornographic art with his father. His father had a hell of an art collection.”

“What was he like?”

“Who?”

“Reuben.” I kicked the leg of his desk.

“Oh, I don’t know. We were such kids. He wasn’t a very nice person, I suppose. I don’t know if I’d like him now.”

“But you liked him then?”

“I was crazy about him,” he said. He said it with the same tone he used to say “You’re a marvel,” or “You’re extraordinary,” or any of the other things he murmured to me at odd moments passing me in the hall.

“What wasn’t nice about him?”

“I think he was manipulative. Also, I think he was immoral. Amoral? Which do I mean?”

“How do I know?” He was always asking me what he meant. “Immoral means evil. Amoral means lacking a sense of right and wrong.”

“Amoral. That’s just what he was.”

Then his phone rang and I went back to my office. It took months for me to extract that story from him. And there’s a lot he never told me. I had to extrapolate and invent. When he said, “Then we went on some cockamamie break-in to the museum because Jerry wanted to look at a painting,” I had to supply the painting, the pebbles on the roof, the state of his mind.

I don’t know why it fascinated me so much, this story he wouldn’t tell me. Maybe just because I was jealous of Reuben.
Reuben was part of Asa’s mythology—he may have been Asa’s mythology in its entirety. When Asa spoke of him his voice was sad, but his face was aglow with the memory of events that had shaped his character and colored his life. What I wanted to know was how that had happened and what, precisely, had happened. I was able to piece together some of the events, but that was only half of it.

Whatever Reuben had meant to Asa, I was sure of one thing: He had planted a seed that had come to blossom only with me. Twenty-five years of dormancy. When I’d met Asa, when he’d leaned over my desk and perfumed my environment, he’d been asleep. I woke him up. That was what I intended to do and I did it. Then I began to see that what happened between us was the duplication of something that had happened long before. Like the past it was nipped in the bud, but it was Asa nipping, not Fate.

Asa had certain predictions about the course of love. They had to come true or he would be adrift. It was the same for me—but my predictions were entirely different. When I looked at him I predicted that we would lie in each other’s arms or I would die. I was right. He, on the other hand, predicted that after we lay in each other’s arms, our love would die. He was right too, about himself. And he believed this because of Reuben.

I wish I’d known I was just the reincarnation of a bad blond boy, a method of completing a fantasy he had no desire to make into an abiding reality. “This is an interlude, dear,” he said to me early on. I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to know anything about him that didn’t fit into my predictions. I kept myself in the dark.

Paradoxically, my very misconception of Asa was my safety. I could retreat into misinterpretations of things he’d said to me, comforting readings of looks he’d given me. The idea
that he’d ever loved me was astonishing enough to override any new astonishing information, such as that for the fifth day in a row he would not be coming over after work to make love on the sofa or, if he was daring enough, the bed. The bed was reserved for lunchtime. On the sofa, at five-thirty, he could tell himself he’d been carried away; walking all the way to the bedroom was too premeditated for the evening visit. So he would not be coming, hadn’t come yesterday, most likely wouldn’t come tomorrow—what did I care? I remembered when he’d come every day.

What I never considered was how things had changed. I didn’t want to think about what had happened between May, when the sight of me was enough to take his breath away (I’d heard him gasp when I walked into his office), and November, when the illness of his dogs, the social obligations imposed on him by Fay (Chamber of Commerce dinners, third cousins for cocktails), or simply his own bad temper fortuitously occupied him between five and six-thirty from Monday to Friday.

The truth was that from the moment we’d become lovers he’d stopped loving me. And it was that specific—we’d “done almost everything” on my sofa during the course of our first spring without diminishing his feelings. On the contrary, the more we poked and prodded each other through and around our clothing, the more entranced he became. We developed techniques for producing orgasm through kissing alone and would torment and satisfy each other this way. I don’t know how we did it. It had something to do with anticipation and denial, no doubt, but it was also a genuine method. Irreproducible; even with Asa, it never worked after we’d been to bed.

After we lay down, everything became topsy-turvy. In private he was my lover. In public he was wearing a blue
shirt and a dark-blue tie and talking on the phone. We would rise up from bed in the early afternoon and eat lunch in the sunshine and discuss, as lovers do, our favorite pastimes. “I think I like being on the bottom,” he’d say. Fifteen minutes later, passing me in the hall at work, he wouldn’t even look at me. Who was he aiming to fool if not himself? Everybody at the office was accustomed to our glances. This sudden sobriety between us was more noticeable, and more of an announcement, than an increase in flirtation would have been.

How deeply I didn’t understand him! On no information at all, I had decided that sex would bind us together. I thought that for a man like that to take off his tie and his shirt and put his body against mine would be so startling that we would share an extraordinary secret: the private world where he was naked and delighted. I would be a witness to the discarding of all his formality. I thought that the passion permitted by his dropping his clothes on the floor would be equal to the formality of the clothes. I was right, but I didn’t think it through. I didn’t see that once the clothes were on him again, the passion, like a garment with a particular purpose, would be folded away until the next time.