After You've Gone (15 page)

Cath's gesture—if you call running off to an island with a poet a gesture—was made even less bearable for Duncan by the publicity it drew; she had to choose a famous poet, a Pulitzer Prize-winning, brawling media hero of a poet. A small item in
Newsweek
(Newsmakers) described O'Donahue as having run off to Ocracoke Island “like a pirate, a professor's wife his plunder.” Very poetic for a newsmagazine, Duncan thought. Perhaps Brennan himself had written the item? In any case, a lot of people seemed to know whose wife was meant.

At times Duncan feels literally murderous: he will go there
to Ocracoke and shoot them both, and then himself. He has found the place on a map, and it looks as though you had to take a ferry from a town called Swan Quarter.
Swan Quarter?
But surely murder would be a more respectable, even a nobler act than a lot of talk, so deeply embarrassing, so sickly humiliating to recall.

Nearing his hotel, and the promise of some comfort, Duncan begins, though, to dread the coming night. He is to dine with Emily, his second wife: his briefest marriage, that to Emily, and perhaps for that reason they have stayed in touch, have remained almost friends. Emily and Cath have even met, Duncan now recalls, on a trip to New York that he and Cath took just before their marriage. Emily is a painter, beginning to be quite successful. She is, as they all have been, considerably younger than Duncan.

(Younger and in one way or another very talented, the first three of them, Duncan reflects. More talented than he? That was surely a problem with Jessica, the first wife, a poet who took a very low view of criticism. Less so with Emily, perhaps because painting is—well, not literary, and they were not together very long. The worst was Janice, herself a professor, a literary critic. Undoubtedly, Janice in her way was responsible for Cath, who is talentless, a born appreciator.)

But unless he exercises the utmost caution, for which he feels himself much too tired, devoid of resources, Duncan fears that he will simply repeat the follies of the day, with Emily, tonight. He will talk again—perhaps even more ridiculously—about Cath; obviously he will do so, since she and Emily have met. Emily by now is probably—is undoubtedly a feminist; she could finish him off entirely.

At the hotel desk Duncan looks longingly toward the cubbyholes of messages. If only there were a pink phone slip from
Emily, canceling, for whatever reason. (Or a slip saying Cath had called?) But there is nothing, and heavily now Duncan walks over to the elevator. He rings, ascends.

This making a fool of himself began for Duncan at breakfast, in the somewhat dingy dining room of his hotel, as he talked (or tried to explain) to Jasper Wilkes, a former student, and began to babble. “In point of fact I actually encouraged her to have an affair—or affairs; one can't say I wasn't generous. Ironically enough, she could be said to be doing just what I told her to do. In a sense.”

Jasper repeated “In a sense” with perhaps too much relish. A highly successful advertising executive since abandoning academe, Jasper is a prematurely, quite shiningly bald young man, with clever, hooded eyes.

“After all,” Duncan continued, long fingers playing with his croissant's cold buttery remains, “I'm very busy. And besides …” He smiled briefly, sadly, implying much.

“Of course.” Jasper's eyes closed, but his voice had an agreeing sound.

Gulping at strong lukewarm coffee—he had just sent back for fresh—Duncan had a nervously exhilarated sense that this was not how men talked to each other, or not usually. Or perhaps these days they do? They are “open” with each other, as women have always been? In any case, he hoped that he had not got out of his depth with Jasper. The coffee had made him feel a little drunk.

And at the word “depth” his mind stopped totally, and replayed,
depth, depth.
He had suddenly, involuntarily seen Atlantic waves, brilliant and mountainous, quite possibly fatal. He had imagined Ocracoke Island. Again.

But could Jasper be in a hurry? Off somewhere? Duncan was conscious of wanting to prolong (oh! all day) this relieving, if highly unusual, conversation. “Precisely,” he hastened to agree
with what he imagined Jasper just had said. “I intended something discreet and, I suppose I also hoped, something minor. A dalliance more or less along my own lines. My old lines, I suppose I should say.” He attempted a modest laugh, but the sound was bleak.

“Right,” Jasper agreed. “Something to take up a certain amount of her time and energy. Rather like going to a gym.”

“Oh, precisely.”

The two men exchanged looks in which there was expressed some shock at their complicitous cynicism, but more pure pleasure—or so Duncan for the moment believed.

The coffee arrived, at which Jasper frowned, conclusively proving to Duncan that he was after all in a hurry; he did not even want more coffee.

“The point is,” said Jasper, in a summing-up way, “whether or not you want her back. One. And, two, if you do, how to get her.”

Unprepared for this précis, Duncan felt quite dizzied.

Nor was he prepared for what came next, which was Jasper's efficient departure: a smooth rise to his feet, and a firm, sincere handshake. Lots of eye contact. Murmurs of friendship. And then Jasper was gone, last glimpsed as a narrow, animated back departing through the door that led out to the lobby.

Quite disconcerted, and alone with his hot, unconsoling coffee, Duncan looked around. This room had got uglier, he thought, trying to recall what he used to like about it. Surely not the pictures, the big bright oils that all looked like copies of famous works, giving the room a spurious look of “taste”? Never the pictures, he concluded, and surely not the inferior coffee, and fake croissants. Dismally he reminded himself that he had always chosen this hotel for reasons of economy, never for charm.

Now everything seemed to disturb him, though: the room
with its awful art, the bad coffee, and particularly his just ended conversation with Jasper Wilkes. And why? Rerunning that conversation, he succeeded in finding nothing truly objectionable. (Unless that crack about going to gyms—would that have been a “put-on”?) Bright Jasper, though. All agreement, stating and restating Duncan's own views in a clear succinct way. But perhaps that very succinctness was the problem? Especially at the end, just before Jasper hurried off to wherever?

Leaning back into the once pneumatic banquette, for reassurance Duncan stroked his hair, now white but still gratifyingly thick and fine. How Jasper must envy his hair! That in itself could explain quite a lot.

Duncan thought then of the old days, when Jasper as a student came petitioning with his poetry. In conference with Jasper, Duncan might sneak a quick look at his large grandfather clock while pretending to allow his gaze to wander. And apprised of the time, he, Duncan, might then too brusquely sum up his view of Jasper's poem, or poems: Jasper had been all too prolific. And as Jasper at last got up reluctantly to leave, the also departing Duncan, a man in early middle age, might well be off to visit some pert-breasted, ambitious literary girl, for something “discreet,” and “minor.”

As though Jasper had encouraged him—seduced him, even—into all that talk about Cath, Duncan felt a pained resentment. Especially he resented Jasper's just getting up and leaving him like that—all at sea, almost drowned in ungovernable feelings.

But at lunchtime Duncan could be said to have done it again.

“It was really the way she left that I so much minded,” he remarked to his lunch companion, Marcus Thistlethwaite, an English critic, a very old friend. They were seated in a corner
of a pretty new Upper West Side restaurant, banks of fall flowers in the windows, filtered sunshine. “I would have given a maid more notice,” Duncan added, and then reflected that his analogy had been slightly confused: just who did he mean was whose maid, and who gave notice? He hoped that Marcus had not observed this, but naturally no such luck.

“I'm not sure just who was whose maid,” said Marcus, with his ratchety, cropped-off laugh. “But I believe I rather catch your drift, as it were.” And then, “Is this quite the proper thing to do with lobster claws?”

“Oh yes, you just crack them like nuts,” instructed Duncan, who had just wondered why on earth he had ordered something he had never much liked, and that was at best quite difficult to eat. (And that reminded him inevitably of the seacoast.)

Marcus's hair is thin and silvery, like tinsel; draped across his bright impressive skull, it ornaments his head. Duncan has always been somewhat in awe of Marcus, of his erudition and his cool, uncluttered, passionless judgments. And so why on earth did he have to make that silly remark about Cath, and the dismissal of maids? “Say what you like about New York,” he then attempted, striving for an even tone despite a certain pressure in his chest, “the autumns here are wonderful. You know, I walked up through the park from my hotel, and the air—so brisk! And the color of the sky, and those flowers.”

Marcus just perceptibly inclined his head, acknowledging flowers, and weather. And then he launched into one of the mini-speeches to which he is given. “An interesting fact, and one that I've made note of”—to those who know Marcus, a familiar beginning, very likely boding no good to his audience, be it plural or singular—“and of which you, my dear Duncan, have just furnished further proof, in any case so interesting, is the human tendency in times of distress at some
ill-treatment by a fellow human to complain of the method of treatment, the form it took, rather than the actuality. The cruel event itself is not mentioned, even. A man who is fired from his job invariably sounds as though a little more tact would have made it perfectly acceptable. And a fellow whose mistress has taken off—well, I'm sure you quite see what I mean.”

“In my own case, I do think even some slight warning might have been in order,” Duncan bravely, if weakly, managed to say. “And she was not my mistress—my
wife.
We'd been married for almost three years.”

“My dear fellow, naturally I was speaking in a general way, and you know how I tend to run on. Well, I don't think I much care for these lobsters of yours. What's our next course? I seem already to have forgotten.”

What an old bore Marcus has become, so opinionated, so—so insensitive, thought Duncan, once they parted and he began his walk. However, irritation soon gave way to the sound of darker voices, which asked if he himself was not almost as old, and as boring. And perhaps Marcus was less insensitive than he, Duncan, was hypersensitive, an open wound.

At which point he made—or, rather, his probing tongue made—the most unwelcome discovery about his missing tooth.

Back at last in his hotel room, that cold and perilous park walk done with, behind him, Duncan picks up the phone and almost instantly he succeeds (the day's first small piece of luck) in reaching his dentist. Who is reassuring. Nothing to worry about, the dentist tells Duncan, happens all the time. He adds that it probably does not look as unsightly as Duncan thinks it does; and gives him an appointment for the following week.

The bathroom mirror informs Duncan that his missing
tooth, his “black hole,” is unsightly only when he very broadly grins, which he can surely see no reason for doing at any foreseeable time.

Lying at last across his oversized bed, eyes closed, Duncan attempts to generalize about his situation; particulars are what finally do you in, he has found—and so he will not think about Cath's pretty shoulders, not her odd harsh mountain consonants. He strives instead for abstraction, beginning some mental notes on jealousy in an older person, as opposed to what is experienced by the young.

When one is young, he thinks, the emotion of jealousy is wracking, torturous, but at the same time very arousing (he has to admit), an almost delicious pain. Whereas when one is older, and jealous, there is only deep, irremovable sadness, deprivation, hopelessness.

(So much for notes.)

Cath: just a pallid, slightly gangling, easily blushing, mild-tempered girl from the land of the Great Smoky Mountains, from whence those consonants, those vowels. But a girl with an amazing ear for poetry, and a passion for it. Cath was (she
is
, oh, surely she still is) literally crazy about the verse of Andrew Marvell, Herrick, Donne. Wallace Stevens (Duncan's own particular enthusiasm) and more recently some women whose names he now forgets. And most recently of all, Mr. Brennan O'Donahue.

Though at first she did not even want to go to his reading. “It's too hot to go anywhere,” she complained.

“But you're crazy about O'Donahue,” Duncan (oh irony!) reminded her, and he added, “He's just back from Nicaragua, remember? Besides, I do think one of us should go.” Duncan sniffed to emphasize the bad summer cold from which he was suffering (and he now remembers that self-pitying, self-justifying
sniff with such shame, such regret). “I'm sure the Taylors would come by for you,” he added, naming a younger, obsequious colleague, with a silly wife.

Cath sighed. “Oh, I'll go by myself. That way I can come home early. And Bipsy Taylor is such a nerd.” Another sigh. “If I can work out what to wear in this weather.”

It was an especially hot September, everything limp and drooping, or fallen to the ground. Bleached rose petals on yellow lawns, and out in the woods where Duncan liked to walk the silence was thick and heavy, as though even the birds were prostrate, drugged with heat.

Cath chose to wear her barest dress that night, which seemed sensible, if slightly inappropriate for a poetry reading. But Duncan felt that it would not do to object: he was making her go there, was he not? And so she went out alone, bare-armed and braless, in her loose black cotton; her sun-bleached hair loosely falling, her small round shoulders lightly tanned.

You look almost beautiful, is what Duncan thought of saying, and fortunately or not forbore; too often he said things to Cath that he later lived to regret. His suggestion—half-joking, actually—that she could have an affair had aroused real rage. An obscene suggestion, she seemed to take it as; clear evidence of lack of love. Whereas he was not even really serious (God knows he was not). And so as she left that night Duncan only said, “I hope it won't be too dull for you, my love.”