My Education (19 page)

A vague futurity settled on them like fog. Within it, keeping busy as if keeping ahead of too much circumspection, they did what they did best, executing elaborate plans. Martha must defend her dissertation. Nicholas must publish again. Both must throw their charismatic weight around on the scholarly job market. Two appropriate jobs in one appropriate place was a pay dirt that most academic couples did not dare expect in the early part of their careers, but Nicholas and Martha achieved it, perhaps because, being so striking, they seemed more than the sum of their parts. There was a touch, Martha said in a tone of admission, of a prom royalty atmosphere. Nicholas and Martha were dazzling where dazzle was rare. Had they met as professional windsurfers, perhaps; as 1940s Hollywood contract players; as vacant-eyed fashion models somewhere in Milan; had they simply not seemed so remarkable, to others and so to themselves, none of it might have happened—the earnest boat trips, the uncomfortable fucking, the marriage.

Yet marriage has its own momentum. This was a truth she was forever impressing on me, and that I was forever disputing. Like any inexperienced fool, I believed that one need only follow the heart.

O
ur time together in New York had granted me the sense of partnership I'd so badly wanted. I was no longer just Martha's lover, but her equal and most trusted adviser. Strangely, yet perhaps not so strangely, this was owing to Nicholas, who'd so obligingly surrendered his shade, that we might theorize, anatomize, regret, and deplore him for hours of the day, days on end. Nicholas had gone everywhere with us, our ghostly third wheel, not an intrusion but the basis of a bond. His prominent role in our conversation was the proof of our intimacy. I believed then—perhaps I still believe—that such complete confidence is exclusive, or at least, it should be. In sharing his secrets with me, she'd replaced him with me—or should have. But then we returned and acquired a different third wheel, with very different, even opposite, effects.

Martha and Dutra had developed a mania for bar pool. I couldn't play pool at all, and found myself, in their company, less and less able to learn, so that from the beginning their fondness for pool left me sitting alone with my drink. But soon they'd debuted as a team. It was inevitable that this should have happened—on any given evening Martha and Dutra could play against each other only so long before another player, or several, signed up on the dusty blackboard with the nub of gray chalk for the privilege of playing the winner. Then the only way both could stay on the table was to suggest a contest between teams. But it wasn't inevitable, or to me unobjectionable, that they should do quite so well—that they should win quite so often, and, worse, start to practice their game in the daytime with grave self-importance.

Their preferred venue was the half-derelict poolroom of the town bowling alley, a windowless concrete-block tomb that was open for business from ten in the morning. This made it ideal for Martha—no sooner had baby and nanny embarked for the playground than Martha and I hurried off to meet Dutra, so that they could play pool for an hour free of all competition, and equally free of what threats to intense concentration are posed by a bowling ball knocking down pins. Not even the most purposeless in our town bowled or shot pool at ten in the morning, though like me a few of them drank. I tried to drink only for show, from a glass of Budweiser I hoped to make last the whole length of the visit, and pretending to read while my lover and housemate crept around the worn felt taking aim with their cues like game hunters surprising an elephant. I could find this amusing just up to a point. One day when the stroke of noon found them still playing, I demanded of Martha, “Can I have the keys?” interrupting their lazy trash talk. I'd driven us home late at night many times in the Saab, though of course she had always been there in the passenger seat. “I'm hungry,” I added brusquely. I was daring her to refuse me, in a similar way, I now felt, she'd been daring me to complain I was bored.

“You are, babe? There's food here,” she said, bent from the waist in a perfectly right-angled, upside-down L as she lined up her shot. Dutra, one long leg triangled in front of the other, one elbow stuck out as he planted his cue just in front of his crotch, watched her with a motionless concentration he very rarely achieved. It was his way to be twitchy, impatient—but pool brought out a physical kinship between them. With their long-limbed and meticulous predation they seemed, perhaps, less like armed hunters than elegant herons beak-skewering fish.

“Those hot dogs have been riding the wheel since June. I'll go to Jade Dragon. I'll bring you back something.”

“Moo shu pork and egg rolls,” Dutra said without looking at me. “Aw, fuck you, Hallett,” as Martha sank two in a row.

“Lend her the Volvo if you're asking for food.”

“Am I actually standing here begging for keys?”

“You're not begging,” Martha said, straightening.

“Gottlieb can't handle the clutch in the Volvo. It's too specialized.”

“Fuck you, Dutra.”

“Fuck me? I'm on your side!”

“There's not sides,” Martha said with annoyance, excavating her keys from her pocket and tossing them to me.

“Do you want anything?”

“Just a Pepsi.”

“They sell Pepsi here.”

“They sell food here too, but you're leaving.”

“I'm not going to Jade Dragon for
hot dogs
.”

“It's soooo sad when the honeymoon ends,” Dutra said with a sigh.

“Shut the fuck up and take your shot, Dutra,” said Martha, as if I had already left.

Outside I slammed myself into the Saab and squealed out of the lot and bounced over the freight railway tracks and took the wide turn onto State Road 15, among the strip malls of which lay Jade Dragon, putting Jade Dragon half a mile in my wake before I realized I'd passed it. Jade Dragon was another of Dutra's esoteric bequeathals, a linoleum temple to peppers and grease situated as far from the flagged walks and greenswards of campus as a person could go without crossing the town line in the general direction of Canada. Of course Martha had not known of it before meeting Dutra, despite the fact that the town's most inexpensive supermarket, Mighty Buy, was also located here at the back of a vast lake of asphalt. Now I had to turn into the Mighty Buy lot, to reverse direction and go back to Jade Dragon. That parking lot was always a confusion of mud-spattered four-door pickup trucks and professorial Volvos and other commingled town/gown/John Deere vehicles among whom there was no right-of-way consensus. I was a long time getting back to Jade Dragon and by the time I arrived I was no longer angry. I just wanted Martha. Had it not been for Dutra's moo shu and egg rolls I would have blown off Jade Dragon and gone straight back to her with the claim I had eaten the food in the car. It was strange to be there in her car, so surrounded by her, yet alone. There was Joachim's Swedish car seat, a sliding pile of Xeroxes—she'd started research on a book—dumped in its cradle of cushions. Here was her stainless-steel travel mug, with its fitted rubber lid and its mountaineer's clip, suitable for attachment to backpacks. A vestige of wholesome Berkeley. Here, on the black leather seat, lay a pale orphaned hair. Human movements in the parking lot woke me again—other car doors being opened and closed. Again I remembered my errand. I wanted to go back to her; and I wanted to protract this strange moment alone in her sanctum; and I had to go order the moo shu and rolls to achieve a reunion at all. With a sense of sacrifice I got out of the car and found Nicholas there, his face alive with combating emotions, as if he'd both meant to surprise me, and been shocked by me at the same time.

“No good ever comes of spying,” he said. The sun beat down onto our heads and back up from the asphalt, despite which squirms of cold raked the goose pimples out of my skin. “I thought I'd find the owner of this car if I followed behind. I saw you in the lot at Mighty Buy. Not you—the car. You know the windows are tinted.” I might have affirmed that I knew this, or conceded never noticing before, or made a sound of surprise or acknowledgment, or perhaps only chattered my teeth in the motionless heat and stared at him, because I understood now that despite all I'd said to Martha, the demands I had made for acknowledgment, I was a coward. I had tried to pretend Nicholas didn't really exist, and now I felt all the defenseless secret history of his I had come to possess like ill-gotten loot bulging my pockets. If only I could have returned it, just emptied my thief's sack and run.

“I wonder why you have Martha's car,” he went on steadily. “I wonder where she is.”

“I was just—picking up lunch for her.”

“It's thoughtful of you, Regina. Martha's kept so busy. Our nanny informed me she's hardly at home anymore.”

“And you—you took a trip?” I attempted, as if we were making small talk.

“I did. My canoe trip. It was generous of Martha to let me go this year, despite the baby. I did have a wonderful time. But the trip's lasted longer than I had expected. Strangely it's still going on. Don't you need to go order your food?”

“No,” I murmured, or perhaps I only shook my head mutely at him.

“Martha won't be expecting you back?” This consideration of his verged on unkind and he realized; he didn't persist. “In that case I'd like to waylay you a few minutes more. I'd like to talk. Somewhere out of the sun. It's lucky I happen to live just a short way away. Did you know that? Did you know that I have a new home?” My face must have told him I didn't. All this time he'd kept me pinned beneath his merciless, pale-eyed gaze, yet in my wordless reaction to his disclosure he saw me anew. He actually tilted his face very slightly to alter his angle of gaze, as if he might, in that way, see beneath the mute mask that I wore. He should have seemed masked to me also, because so transformed, but the transformation further revealed him. The canoe trip had painted a rose-tinted brown on his usual scholarly pallor. His face seemed both harder and younger, the same shape as his anger, which was not at all veiled by his mock-courtesy. Recognizable as he was he also seemed a very different person from the one I'd known before, and despite the suffocation of the moment I recalled Martha saying of him, “There's no
inside,
inside,” and wondered if she could have said this if she'd ever seen him angry at her—truly and maximally angry, as he now was at me.

He released me for the moment from his gaze, like letting a lid slam back down. “Follow me,” he said, turning away. Though I could have sped off in another direction, could have ignored his high-handed directive, or even laughed at it, such defiance of him at that moment was unthinkable to me. It was more unthinkable than clutching the slippery thighs of his wife through the arduous thunder of dual orgasm; it was more unthinkable than gazing on the perforated toes of his socks and the flaccid waistbands of his boxers. It was somehow most unthinkable of all. Could he have believed I respected him more, since I'd fallen in love with his wife? Could he have believed that in fact I loved him, with a comrade's compassionate, sorrowing love? Perhaps he, of all people, could have, though I wouldn't have dared make my case. Dumbly I got back in her car, to follow.

Halfway up the hill he turned on one of the transverse streets and into a small parking lot behind a building I wouldn't have noticed. Left in the lot side by side, perhaps the two cars would discuss everything that their owners could not. A few paces behind Nicholas I passed down corridors without noticing them, but through the door he unlocked I stopped short. Blinding masses of light filled a vast, almost unfurnished space. “Do you like it,” his voice startled me, but it wasn't a question. The cheap lock had imprisoned his keys, which he wrenched loose and impatiently hurled on a counter in the galley-style kitchen just inside the door. Past the kitchen the ceiling height doubled, and then after a time the room ended, on a distant horizon, in gigantic windows. “An old munitions factory. It's unfurnishable. Apparently unheatable also. My friend Walter Debrango—history department, revolutionary France—moved here when he got his divorce. He calls it the Home for Scorned Husbands. Walter says that because it's so hard to get comfortable here, there are always available units. I'm pouring a drink if you want one. I only have gin. I'm not well set up to play host.” The kitchen appeared to be empty, except for lonely glasses in the cupboard, and ice cubes in the freezer, and a two-thirds-empty bottle of gin. The emptied box that had held the glasses, a set of eight from Woolworth's, sat with torn-open flaps on the floor. “In the living room you'll find an armchair. Please take it. I'll sit on the floor.”

“I'll sit on the floor!” I implored.

“I insist that you sit in the chair. It's my prerogative as host.” If he'd intended to allude to my transgressions, in the past, as his guest, he couldn't have chosen a better means of enforcing my compliance. I sat down in the chair, among other dwarfed objects. There was a spindly floor lamp and a spindly potted ficus that had shed a few leaves, a small stereo system set directly on the floor, and several short piles, new growth, making tentative claim to the vast territory—a little pile of scholarly hardcover books, a little pile of compact discs, a pile (shortest of all) of trade paperback novels, and a slim pile of folded, seemingly never-opened copies of the
Times Literary Supplement
, perhaps five weeks' worth
.
Each pile was perfectly squared. Altogether the armchair and stereo and printed matter and ficus made no impression whatsoever on the sense of stark emptiness. I drank from the glass he'd thrust at me and my mouth filled with protesting saliva but I managed to swallow. Nicholas seated himself on the floor with his back to the opposite wall. It put him far from me, which was worse than if he had been near: I'd have to speak up, to respond to his questions. Then he did not even start with a question, but an accurate statement.

“You didn't know I'd moved out of my house,” he observed.

“No—but why would I have known?” I'd been wrong—silence so filled that cavernous room I could whisper to him and be heard.

“I would have thought Martha would tell you. Lucia said you accompanied her, the week that she spent in New York. The week that she spent in New York to be out of my way, so that I could move out, as she'd asked me to do.”

“She said you were coming to see the baby,” I said after a moment.

“Of course. Joachim was my primary interest. Hers was that I should get out, and be gone by the time she was back. I'm surprised that she didn't tell you,” he repeated.

“Why?” Now my voice rang out harshly. “Why should she have told me?”

“Wasn't it for your sake that she asked me to leave?”

So he knew. Yet I'd learned something, too. She hadn't told me she'd asked him to leave, precisely because it was not for my sake. She had told me this plainly herself, but I wouldn't believe her. “I don't think so.”