Augusta Played (18 page)

“I don't think that would be a very good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Because, Mr. Gold,” she said, “I must speak with you privately. It concerns your wife.”

“But you said you had something that belongs to me, not my wife.”

“I do. You see, Mr. Gold, I wish to make a trade.”

“But I don't have anything that belongs to you.”

“Your wife does, Mr. Gold.”

32

W
ITH
A
HEART-CONSTRICTING
SENSE
of ill omen, Norman retrieved the crumpled note from the wastebasket, reread it—“Gone to look for a Christmas present for Tom and Cyril. Back soon”—and crumpled it again.

He met Elaine Hacking in a workingman's bar on Amsterdam Avenue, a gin mill. It was a place he hadn't been to since before he got married. In just that time, it had gone from bad to worse—it was almost empty. All over New York, Norman thought, there were these isolated pockets of ruin—existential potholes. One day the network would expand an inch too far: one hole would eat into a neighboring hole, and the entire city would collapse into a single giant cavity of poverty and despair.

“Okay,” he said, when he was facing her in the only booth in the place, “what's this all about?” He lit a cigarette. He had paid for her vodka gimlet and he was beginning to be annoyed at all the mystery. There was a hole in the red leather seat and the stuffing was extruding—why did he keep thinking of Kellogg? was it because he was a cynic about marriage?—and every time he crossed his legs, the bench seemed to sigh.

“You want to know what this is all about, I'll tell you,” she said. She reached into a large squashy leather bag, open at the top like a marsupial pouch, brought out a book and set it on the table in front of him. “It is about this.”

“That's my book! I was looking for it just the other day.”

“I said I had something that belonged to you.”

“But how—”

“My husband's name is Richard.”

“Richard.” Oh Christ. Oh Christ oh Christ.

“I don't know if you knew that your wife and my husband were—What is the current term?”

“That was before I married Gus.”

“Yes. Well, I found this book in my apartment one day when I returned home from shopping. As you will see”—she leaned across the table to turn pages—“there is a letter inside. Unopened. It's addressed to your wife.”

“All right,” Norman said, “my wife happened to lend a book to your husband. She forgot there was a letter inside it. That's no crime.” But it was a crime, dammit, or ought to be. If Gus had some legitimate reason for seeing an old lover, because he was a conductor and could help her plan her program, say, why didn't she tell him about it? “The postmark on this letter is June! And it's never been opened? For Pete's sake, when did you find this book?”

“Last June, of course.”

“Look, I may be dense, but why did you wait six months before you decided to return it?”

“For the reason you just gave. Maybe your wife just lent Richard the book and Richard forgot that he had it. He's never asked me about it. Richard,” she added, testily, “is easily distracted. You must be too. This book's about three years overdue at the library.”

“This letter is from my mother,” Norman said, slowly. “I wonder why she would write to Gus.”

“I'm sure I don't know. I didn't open it.”

“So I see. What I don't see is why, if all you want to do now is return the book, you didn't just mail it to us.”

“Because I thought you would want to be told that your wife and my husband have resumed their affair.”

As she said this, Norman watched her nostrils flare. She had a red nose, and the skin over her cheekbones was tight and shiny. Her hair was drawn back over the temples, giving her face an exceptionally naked look—almost indecent. She must have been pretty once, when she was softer; even now, she was a type some men would admire—sharp-shinned, good on the tennis court, conscientious in bed, a standout among dinner hostesses, one of those women who are proud of their ability to save a man from himself. Such pride was nearly always justifiable, but Norman didn't like it, nevertheless. She looked as though she controlled her figure with low-calorie bread. She was still wearing her coat, and beyond the plain fact that she was taller than he was, he couldn't deduce for sure the shape of her body in its woolly pod. He tried to think of his wife sleeping with her husband. What could Gus find attractive in a man who had found this woman attractive? The more he thought about this, the angrier he became; rancor seemed to swell inside him, like an inner tube. At first, he was angry at the woman across the table—he was furious with her for being so sexually unappealing to him. If he had at least been moved to ball her, maybe he could have sympathized with Gus. He could have said to himself, Hell, marriage doesn't make people monogamous… What's to worry if you or your wife is getting a little on the side? It doesn't mean anything. It's just energy, and energy has only the significance its given context supplies. Screwing doesn't have to be
spiritual
. And justifying his own desires, he would render hers reasonable.

The trouble was, sitting across from this woman, he felt profoundly monogamous, and God damn it to hell, why didn't Gus feel the same way? Why had she married him if she didn't feel the same way?

For his money, his father said.

But his father had disowned him.

But Gus kept urging him to make it up with his father. Evidently, she had been pretty sure that his father would come around.

So now she had resigned herself to the idea that he wouldn't and figured she might as well crawl back into bed with her old lover. Whom she herself had said she cared about more than anybody else.

“What are you thinking?”

“Listen,” he said, “are you sure of this? And you better be damn sure before you say yes, because if I find out you're wrong I'll tear you limb from limb.” But even as he said this, he realized that it didn't make sense: he would give anything to discover she was wrong. It was the possibility that she was
right
that made him want to bash her over the head with her fucking purse.

“I'm sure. Why do you think I waited this long? To make sure. Richard lies to me. He's too nervous to lie well. He forgets he's said he's going to be at a recording session and when he comes home he says he had a board meeting. He is not very good at subterfuge, but he is persevering. This has been going on for six months and I have put up with it as long as I intend to.”

“What do you propose to do?”

“I thought you might have some ideas about what ought to be done.”

Norman finished off his drink. He smoked Kools, and his mouth felt mentholated. “I'll see you to a subway stop,” he said, instead of answering her. “This is not the best block to be walking around on at night.” He put on his Burberry; it had a detachable lining that he used in the winter. He felt that he needn't have worn it tonight—his heart was on fire.

“Don't worry, I'll get a cab.”

“It's up to you,” he said, retrieving the book from the table. He held it in his hands. “It's a good book,” he said, wistfully. “Your husband would have liked it.”

33

E
VERY
DAY
Norman thought about his wife cheating on him, and his heart clamored so loudly for revenge that instead of doing anything about it, he retreated inwardly—anything to get away from the noise, the emotional buzz in his brain. It was as if he had locked himself into an invisible bathroom. In this invisible bathroom, he conjured up wonderfully vivid scenes of sexual vengeance, Othellian in their pity-wrenching magnitude. For this reason, he said nothing. Every time he thought of confronting Gus or Richard Hacking, he envisioned himself strangling Gus to death, or at least punching her in the face, and if he could think of doing that to Gus, what might he actually do to the man she was making it with? Norman did not exactly despise himself for having these fantasies; he figured they were par for the course, psychoanalytically speaking; but he was terrified that he might accidentally-on-purpose act on one of these impulses, and, of course, the last thing he wanted to do was hurt Gus.

How could she look so—oh Jesus, it was a word that hit him with the force of revelation—pure? Because that was exactly how she looked, unpolluted, free from any corrupting admixture, influence or compromise, untouched by time. In short, unadulterated. The eyes were guileless, the mouth was frank, the nose as innocently abbreviated as the American sense of history. Yet she was sleeping with another man before they had reached even their first anniversary—and on top of that, she was writing to his mother, his own mother, behind his back. He kept the letter and the Beethoven book where they wouldn't be seen, under a pile of socks in the dresser; he couldn't very well return the letter to Gus without letting her know that he knew everything. It occurred to him that his inner life was like a book under a pile of rolled socks, size ten.

The way Norman had it doped out (Morris had helped) was that as a child he had felt unloved. Reconnoitering hostile positions, Norman concluded that there was some basis for this feeling. His father thought that the height of intimacy with someone was to blow smoke in his face. Norman was, as his father liked to say, the child of their old age, and his mother had clung to him like a last-minute reprieve from death, or, not to be so melodramatic, from mahjong. Receiving an allowance of sixty dollars a month, he could only conclude that his parents felt they owed him something; he was obviously worthy, he was existentially valuable, and yet he did not feel loved. Clearly, then, he was not at fault—they
ought
to have loved him. They even acted as though they knew they ought to love him. What Norman had discovered (with Morris's help) was that as he grew older he had, unconsciously, of course, directed a considerable amount of mental energy into the attempt to order the world in such a way that “ought” and “is” were equivalent terms. What ought to be, was; or, since he had to allow for the reality principle,
would be
. He was a compulsive optimist. He believed that cause and effect obtained in the moral realm, and to hell with Hume. “Ought” and “is” were not merely con tiguous; the latter was necessarily entailed in the former. This had nothing to do with philosophy; it had to do with the way Norman's head whirled, veering like a
draydl
, whenever his life seemed to him to be out of control, either through accident or as a consequence of being in someone else's control. He desired passionately to be the architect of his own experience and in that way achieve some measure of freedom, and he could not very well succeed in a world where there was no meaningful relation—at least a logically possible one—between “ought” and “is.”

Nevertheless, having over years pieced all this together in Dr. Morris's drape-drawn office, with the air conditioner lightly humming and dripping water on the other side of the wall in the white-hot sunshine (or with the radiators hissing, coughing, choking, gurgling and suspiring as if commenting on Norman's gray-winter-day monologues), he was now on the lookout against his own compulsive reactions. He knew that he perceived any threat to this conceptual structure as a threat to his psychic structure. When anyone doubted him—his abilities, his judgments—his initial response was to feel rejected. Knowing this and knowing why, he reminded himself that Hacking's wife could be mistaken. Then he remembered afresh—each time it smarted, like sand on a scratch—that Gus had not been one hundred percent satisfied, or else she would never have attacked his work—or his sexual performance. Then he remembered that only that morning—the day before, five minutes ago—she had said she loved him, and said it so unambiguously that she must at least think she meant it, and he did his best, watching her fill Tweetie's water bowl or iron her white blouses, to understand why she had gone back to that son of a bitch. He even found himself watching with a degree of fascination, like watching a foreign language film without subtitles—the cinematography was beautiful, the action incomprehensible. How could she seem so little disturbed? Didn't she care about him at all? Didn't she know how he was suffering? He adopted a tone of sarcasm; this served to keep his own emotions at bay as well as Gus's, and while it pained him to see her flinch at his voice, it also gratified him. A little.

34

I
T
WAS
a sad time, a gloomy stretch in which the days seemed to disappear like snowballs hurled into a river, becoming water and rushing downstream. The light from the favorite lamp took on a bluish tinge against the Persian rug; the ceiling bulb burned out. Even Tweetie seemed lackluster, and Gus had to let him perch on her finger while she stroked his breast with her other hand to perk him up. Only Gus seemed to switch on, like a light, as the nights fell earlier, but that was an illusion—her mood was as blue as the blue in the rug or the quilt, not golden like her hair. Norman's mood was one of crescendoing panic, augmented by frustration. Was this all there was to marriage? To life? He wished more and more that some action would present itself to him as a possibility—anything.

They didn't do much about Christmas, not being entirely clear about which tradition they were supposed to be following. They had no family to celebrate the season with in any case. They had dinner across the hall with Tom and Cyril one rainy evening, but the night before Christmas, there was nobody stirring—not even, Gus remarked guiltily, a mouse.

She and Norman were lying side by side, dressed, on top of the dark red and blue quilted comforter. The radiator hissed; the landlord evidently had the seasonal spirit. A Brandenburg Concerto was spinning on the Garrard turn- table, and the joyful noise of the music underscored the restraint with which Gus and Norman approached each other. Gus was tracing Norman's face with her fingers and hoping he would make love to her. She didn't dare ask him, feeling that if he really wanted to make love to her, he wouldn't make her ask him. She wondered what the other woman did in bed that was so splendid. Could Gus learn to do it? Or was making love like playing an instrument? Technique could be acquired, but all the technique in the world wouldn't do you any good if you didn't have the gift of music in your soul. Could she be sexually tone-deaf? Then what was this hemi-demisemiquaver she heard in her heartbeat?