A New Life (26 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: A New Life
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“You are an interesting woman,” Levin said.
“Do you mean as a person or sexually?”
“As a person with sex.”
“Is that part of me strong, the sex?”
“Yes.”
“I wish I had been more that way when I was young. If I had been confident of myself I might have had a lover or two.”
“Didn’t you?”
“I was a virgin when I was married.”
“After that?”
“I was interested in men but I’ve never had the sort of relationship we’re having.”
A minute later she asked, “Tell me what you hear about me?”
“In what way?”
“Any way.”
“Jeannette says you’re a very fine person.”
“She’s a very fine person. What does George say?”
“Nothing I remember.”
“Avis?”
“She thinks you could do more to help your husband.”
“She’s right,” said Pauline. “Is that all she said?”
“Yes.”
“She’s had a crush on Gerald for years.”
Levin said he had thought so.
He fell asleep. She woke him. “A woman my age is too old for a man yours. Wouldn’t you really be better off with a girl of twenty-three or -four?”
His thoughts were scattered and he answered nothing.
She said wearily, “I’d be afraid of intense love now.”
She dressed and went down the back stairs.
He expected her nightly all the next week but she didn’t come. One day they met by chance on a downtown street.
“Did I say something wrong last time?” Levin asked.
“No, I haven’t been myself.”
“Not my fault?”
“I’ve been nervous, nothing new, an effect of periodicity.”
“When can you come again?”
After a while she said she would soon.
Pauline reappeared the next night. Usually she was at once affectionate but tonight she sat at the fire, chain smoking. They talked but not about themselves. When he looked directly at her she seemed to look away. Levin assumed she felt guilty and foresaw the end of their affair.
“Suppose we were to break up?” she said.
“It would depend on you.”
It grew late. Pauline got up and put on her coat. She looked lonely. Levin, exploring an insight, lifted her and carried her to the bed. She stiff armed him. “You don’t dare.” He pushed her down.
Afterwards she grabbed his frontispiece. “I’ll never let you go, Mr. Micawber.”
The next time after making love, Levin experienced a fiery pain in the butt. He broke into a cold sweat and lay apart from her, his body stiff, pretending to be asleep. He shoved his face into the pillow to keep from crying out. For ten brutal minutes he was in torment, then the pain gradually eased. He felt sickly limp but relieved, thankful for his good health. Less than a week later he felt the same agonizing, flaming pain. Though tensed to misery Levin managed to hide it from her although the torture was worse than any he remembered. It moved up the side, then to the scrotum, then back to the butt, a harrowing embarrassment after sex and shameful way to be vulnerable.
After another such spasm he began to dread going to bed with her. At the same time he was disgusted with himself—pure Levin reaction, for every pleasure, pain. He thought of telling Pauline what the trouble was, but for a lover it was a too vital weakness to confess, one which might, if it continued, waken contempt. When she appeared the next time he suggested going for a drive or maybe to a movie in another town. Pauline seemed touched by the suggestion, sweetly agreed, but in one womanly way and another—although he sensed her puzzlement—enticed him into a performance. Levin paid the price of emission, a fiery pain in the ass.
“Aren’t you well?” she asked after minutes of silence.
He said he was.
“I feel you haven’t been enjoying yourself lately, I can’t quite describe it. Has my breath been bad?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to come less often, or not at all?”
“No.”
She left it at that, perhaps afraid to ask more, obviously worried. When the pain was gone, although they talked affectionately, he saw her watching him. Before she left she clung to him.
On the night of Gilley’s next class in Marathon, Levin tried hiding from her. After supper he went to a movie and later drank beer until midnight. She had left a note: “Sorry I missed you.” He slept badly, dreamed his whiskers were on fire. It seemed to him he had just fallen asleep when he was awakened by footsteps coming stealthily up the back stairs. These weren’t her steps. Levin listened, nailed to the bed, his heart thundering. The steps stopped. He jumped up in wet sweat, fumbled for the light, fell over his shoes, sprang up and flung open the door. Nothing. Rain in swirling light. Someone wandered up the inside stairs. Levin hastily got into a robe before Mrs. Beaty knocked. She stood at the door in her flannel robe, her earpiece in, holding the battery box in her hand. He said he had had a nightmare and fallen out of bed. She said to be careful, she knew a man who had broken his back that way.
Fearing something serious—kidney, bladder, rectal—possibly cancer—and because he was making Pauline so jumpy she went two moody visits without looking at the bed, Levin decided to see a doctor. He had hoped the pain would go without treatment but it was as bad as ever when they went to bed again.
One afternoon he drove to Marathon to someone recommended by Joe Bucket; he didn’t want anyone in Easchester to know his business. The doctor, an old man, examined him elaborately with every instrument he could think of except forceps. He made various tests, then pronounced his judgment.
“Tinsion is all I can find.”
“My God, what’s that?”
“Some sort of tinsion is causing rectal and other spasms, though possibly it’s the prostate, but I can’t find any evidence. Have you felt like going to the toilet when you have the pain?”
“I’ve gone.”
“Does it help?”
“No.”
“No relief or relaxation?”
“Isn’t sex supposed to relax you?”
“It is and it isn’t. It does and it doesn’t.” The doctor scratched behind his ear. “Is the lady your wife?”
“Yes,” he lied.
“Are conditions favorable for intercourse?”
“Yes.”
“You aren’t worried about your business or any such worries?”
“No.”
“Beats me, I’m afraid,” said the doctor, “unless you don’t like your wife.”
Everyman’s Freud, thought Levin.
“You might rest up a week.”
“I’ve rested, it comes back.”
The doctor wrote out a prescription. “Take one of the little green pills before intercourse. If that doesn’t work, take the white pill afterward. The first is a relaxant for your tinsion, it’s an anti-spasmodic. The other is a pain killer. If neither of them work come back and I’ll give you an antibiotic.”
In the street Levin tore up the prescription and scattered the pieces.
Levin afflicted by mystery: What was the painful egg the rooster was trying to lay? In the middle of driving home a thought he had had but never particularly valued, stalled the car. He was asking himself what he was hiding from: That he too clearly saw her shortcomings and other disadvantages, and was urgently urging himself to drop her before it was too late? That he was tired of the uneasy life, fed up with assignations with the boss’s wife, sick up to here with awareness of danger and fear of consequences? Here was truth yet not enough truth. After mulling these and related thoughts, Levin tracking an idea concerning Pauline, fell over one regarding himself: the dissatisfaction he had lately been hiding from, or feeling for an inadmissibly long time, was with him for withholding what he had to give. He then gave birth. Love ungiven had caused Levin’s pain. To be unpained he
must give what he unwillingly withheld. It was then he jumped up, stalling the car.
Once home, he didn’t know what to do with himself. Run twice around the block. Stand on his ear? Dig hard head into concrete sidewalk? Kiss the mirror or hit it with a hammer for imaging the dark-bearded one who ever complicated the infernally complicated? And Einstein, it said in the papers, used the same cake of soap to shave and bathe. Levin sat in his chair, momentarily slept, started while dreaming, bounded up to spend hours staring out of the open window at nothing he particularly saw. He lay on the bed, then rose up as if the sheets were on fire. He left his room to hurry somewhere—anywhere—and awoke to find himself standing on the back stairs. Above the tops of budding trees he watched the flaring, setting sun, wanting to abolish thought, afraid to probe the complexion of the next minute lest it erupt in his face a fact that would alter his existence. But nature—was it?—a bull aiming at a red flag (Levin’s vulnerability, the old selfs hunger) charged from behind and the Manhattan matador, rarely in control of any contest, felt himself lifted high and plummeted over violet hills toward an unmapped abyss. Through fields of stars he fell in love.
… Love? Levin eventually sighed. Is it love or insufficient exercise? Escape, perhaps, or excitement born from the tension of secrecy, wrongdoing? Love? How at all possible if the proposed lover had such profound reservations concerning the game, rules, even players? Consider once more, for instance, her lank frame, comic big tootsies, nose flying, chest bereft of female flowers. He mourned that motherless breast, the lost softness over the heart to pillow a man’s head. He had once in frustration nipped at her nipple; she had socked his head with both fists. Levin had never imagined such as she his, her insufficiencies, discontents. Consider too the burden of her ambient: prior claimant, husband-in-law; the paraphernalia of her married life—love her, love her past. With her possibly take kids and their toys. Not for me, he told himself. He wanted
no tying down with ropes, long or short, seen or invisible— had to have room to move so he could fruitfully use freedom. If, ecstasied out of his senses he let down his guard—was leapt on by fate—Lord help Levin!
But if he loved her why loved he her? You are comely, my love. Your self is loveliness. You make me rich in feeling. You have grace, character. I trust you. He loved because she had one unforgettable day given herself to a city boy in a forest. And for the continuance of her generosity in bed (was he less generous?) abating desire as she made it grow, taking serious chances (did he not chance as much?). Or was he moved to love because her eyes mirrored Levin when he looked? Or, to drag truth closer, because he was compelled by his being to be in love with her open, honest, intelligent, clearly not very happy self? (Why do I feel I have chosen her because I am her choice?) The catechism made little difference, for he knew fait accompli when accomplished. Who was he kidding, or what pretending to delay or dress in camouflage? “The truth is I love Pauline Gilley.” His confession deeply moved him. What an extraordinary only human thing to be in love. What human-woven mystery. As Levin walked the streets under a pale moon he felt he had recovered everything he had ever lost. If life is not so, at least he feels it is. The world changed as he looked. He thought of his unhappy years as though they had endured only minutes, black birds long ago dissolved in night. Gone for all time. He had made too much of past experience, not enough of possibility’s new forms forever. In heaven’s eye he beheld a seeing rose.
… But Levin had long ago warned himself when he arrived at this intensity of feeling—better stop, whoa. Beware the forms of fantasy. He had been, as a youth, a luftmensch, sop of feeling, too easy to hurt because after treading on air he hit the pavement head first. Afterwards, pain-blinded, he groped for pieces of reality. “I’ve got to keep control of myself. I must always know where I am.” He had times without number
warned himself, to harden, toughen, put on armor against love.
It snowed heavily.
 
The snow fell in buffeted veils. It bent shrubs and small evergreens and broke branches everywhere. There hadn’t been such a snowfall in years, Mrs. Beaty said. Gilley’s Marathon night passed and Pauline did not visit Levin. He accused himself, then blamed the snow, until after three warm days it vanished and she still had not appeared. Had his antics, while avoiding the bed, scared her away? He hungered to call her or write, but she had once asked him not to. Another Marathon night went by and Levin’s desperation grew. He felt he had lost her.
When Pauline appeared in his room ten days after he had discovered he loved her, Levin was moved by the glow of her, the lovely form she achieved in being. How love perfects each imperfect thing. What she was was beauty. With breasts she couldn’t possibly be the one he loved. I mustn’t forget this, he thought, it’s worth remembering.
Yet as she entered the room he knew at once—it smote him—that her detachment, almost unconcern—was something more than of the moment; and if desire, no more than that, the little she wanted from him, for which he castigated himself. She scanned his face and finding him fit plucked off her earrings. Hearing no objections to the contrary, she undressed for bed. When he embraced her she stiffened momentarily in his arms. When he spoke of love she whispered she had only an hour. Levin was thinking of forever. He felt he had loved her from the time he had laid eyes on her at the railroad station last summer—years ago. They had looked guardedly at one another. Had she guessed he would love her and turned away as though the thought was burdensome? Could she ever know that before meeting her he had loved the idea of Pauline Gilley? Didn’t that make him worthy of her love?

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