American Appetites (49 page)

He shook Benedict Harmon's hand too, and, with Ottinger and a few others, stood about chatting; for they were all professional men, successful men, husbands and fathers and citizens of Hazelton-on-Hudson; they understood one another. And it was a splendid April day, chilly, very windy, but clear, the kind of day that whets one's appetite for all that life can offer.

Sigrid had hugged him, had wept in his arms, saying, yet again, “How sorry, how sorry I am, Ian; will you ever forgive me, will you ever, ever forgive me?”

And Ian, overcome with happiness, said, “My darling, there is nothing to forgive.”

SO LONG, IN
theory, had they been adulterous lovers that the actual circumstances of their first lovemaking—on the very night of the verdict of “not guilty”—seemed to them a confirmation of an old love and not the initiation of a new. There was a sense, too, of déjà vu, their eager reverent kisses and caresses, the urgency, the hunger, the wordless melting pleasure of their sexual union, a sense that they had lived this experience before, many times before, and would live it many times again. In a delirium of happiness in Sigrid Hunt's rather strong arms, Ian McCullough thought, I have loved her all along; I have always loved her.

He did not regret, in that instant, that Glynnis was dead. For Sigrid Hunt would not have been possible for him, had Glynnis not died.

IAN SMILED AND
uncorked another bottle of wine. Sigrid was cutting wedges of the kiwi cream pie and easing them, with some little difficulty, onto dessert plates. The men watched her long slender fingers as she maneuvered the knife, the pie, the plates, her smoothly filed nails that gleamed as if they were polished, but were colorless. She wore no rings except a band of hammered gold on the third finger of her left hand: an inexpensive ring Ian had bought for her, only a few weeks ago, in a tiny goldsmith's shop in Rockport, Massachusetts, on their drive up to Maine.

They were talking about Maine, and the end of summer, and how abruptly, in this northerly climate, the summer would end: in another few days, in fact. “The seasons careen by more quickly all the time, don't they,” Denis said, sighing. “It's exactly as our elders told us: time accelerates near the point of impact. It really does.”

“Yet time is theoretically reversible,” Ian said. He had been silent for so long, the others looked at him as if he were obliged to say something crucial. “The mechanics of the cosmos, it's said, can run as easily backward as forward, in the universes of both Newton and Einstein; the past and the future are allegedly fixed. But I have never understood this, and though I've had physicists explain it to me, I have never had the impression that they understood it either. Do you?” He looked at his friends and at Sigrid. “Do you understand it?”

Sigrid lifted her stylish chunky glasses from the bridge of her nose and peered at him through the lenses. Her eyes were round and widened, glassy, lovely, shining: like a doll's perfect eyes. She crinkled her forehead and laughed. “Do we understand what?”

“The theory of time's reversibility.”

“That time runs backward?”

“That it could run backward. Though I think, in fact, it never does.”

Malcolm said, “I think it's a fallacy. I mean, the applicability of the theory in everyday discourse. It has to do only with subatomic particles, not with—well, us.” He laid a hand on Denis's forearm and a hand on Ian's shoulder, as if in consolation. “It doesn't apply to
us
.”

“But to memory? Our memories?” Ian asked.

“Bullshit, McCullough,” Denis said heartily. “Pass the wine.”

“There is a letter of Einstein's, a portion of a letter I've seen reprinted, in which Einstein speaks of someone, a friend, who has left ‘this strange world just before me.' But it's of no significance, Einstein says. For the convinced physicist the distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, ‘although a persistent one.'” Ian paused and drew a deep breath. They were watching him, and for a vertiginous moment, there on the high parapet, he had no idea what he was saying or what he was doing or why. The splendid summer day was bleached of color, and even the pounding surf was silent. He had a vague glimmery image of Sigrid staring at him as if she had never seen him before.

Then, in the next instant, time resumed, and Ian felt his blood beat again, warm and surging as always. “But, as I say,” he said affably, “I don't understand any of it. I've always wanted to, and I know now that I never will. I am fifty-one years old.”

“Oh Christ, McCullough,” Denis said. “Give us a break.”

They talked for some time of Denis's new position at the Arhardt Center in Washington, which he would take up in January: the challenge to him, as he saw it, to live in the midst of his ideological enemies without succumbing to them. “Dr. Max has assured me I can return to Hazelton whenever I want to, if I want to,” Denis said carelessly. “But I know I can never come back. And what about you, Ian? Are you really resigning? I think you're a fool, if you do. You
were
acquitted, after all.”

Ian said quickly, “It has nothing to do with that.”

“It doesn't?”

“Only that Sigrid and I think it would be better for us to leave Hazelton. To live somewhere else, anywhere else. Surely you can't disagree.”

“If you could get another position as good—”

“I'm afraid that isn't likely.”

“Hasn't Dr. Max tried to talk you out of it?”

“He has; he's been very kind, very considerate, of course, but he's retiring in another week or two. And his successor, as you know, is no friend of mine.”

“He's no one you know at all. No one any of us knows.”

“That's what I mean.”

“One of the ‘new breed' of historian,” Denis said, in a sneering sort of aside to Sigrid. “Be frank with me, Ian: are they forcing you out?”

Ian shook his head wordlessly.

Denis said, “After all you've done for the Institute!”

Malcolm said, “But, Ian,
are
you resigning? I've heard such different versions of all this. Where will you go? What will you do?”

“He's going to do independent research,” Sigrid said defensively. She laid, gently, a proprietary hand on Ian's hand, a gesture that did not escape their friends. Sigrid Hunt's hand, and Ian McCullough's. There on the glass-topped table amid the wine bottles, the glasses, the dirtied steel cutlery. “He has a contract to write a book. About history.”

Ian said, frowning, “I simply think it would be better for us all if I sold the house and moved away from Hazelton. My legal fees, for one thing. They're rather more than Nick led me to expect. And Bianca, for instance—”

“Where
is
Bianca?”

“—is in Thailand; and when she comes back to the States she doesn't plan to live with Sigrid and me. There is no need to retain a home in Hazelton any longer.”

Denis said heatedly, “You
were
acquitted, for Christ's sake!”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“It has a good deal to do with it!”

“But Glynnis is dead.”

Denis stared at Ian as if he had said something obscene.

Sigrid said quickly, linking her fingers through Ian's and gripping them hard, “Ian has a contract with the Harvard University Press, to write a book. What is the subject, Ian? Nineteenth-century theories of—”

“An overview of historiographical theory,” Ian said, embarrassed. He wished that Sigrid had not brought the subject up so casually; it meant too much to him. He said, smiling, quite explicitly changing the subject, “And, as I don't doubt you know, others have approached me about writing books, signing contracts. My ‘experience' as a man who has been tried for murder.”

“Yes,” said Sigrid, “and I've urged him to consider it, seriously. An editor—”

“Sigrid, it's too absurd.”

“—with an excellent New York publisher, a high-quality house, wrote him a remarkable letter, a really intelligent and sympathetic letter,” Sigrid said, looking at Denis and at Malcolm, as if to enjoin their support, “urging him to write a sort of memoir, a meditation, with facts of course and background information: a journal of his experience and an analysis of its effect upon him, and his family and friends, through the months. The editor said that no one has ever seriously attempted a project of this kind: something in depth, in a European style; it could be a unique and important document that would”—Sigrid paused, sensing Ian's annoyance; he had withdrawn his hand from hers, was slapping at his pockets for cigarettes that weren't there—“tell what it is like, from the inside, to endure a trial. And that the trial would be representative, of course, of the various trials we all endure, and their effect upon people around us.” And here, again, breathless and passionate, Sigrid paused: too intelligent a young woman, for all her bravado, not to register the hollowness of her own words and the way in which they struck her listeners.

“So demeaning,” Ian said, “even if done in ‘a European style.'” But he was smiling, very nearly grinning, and lifting his glass to drink. He said, “Still, I might do it. I've been offered a contract.”

Denis said, poking his arm, “With a considerable advance?”

“Do you know about it?”

“Meika was telling us the other evening, actually. Though I think her facts were askew, as usual; she seems to think you have already signed the contract.”

“Dear Meika,” Ian said, pained. “No. I have not ‘already' signed it.”

There was a brief silence. Sigrid said, “There's more of this delicious pie; would anyone like another piece? And I should start the coffee—oh, Christ, I forgot. Who would like coffee?” She took their orders but remained seated, her silky hair blowing, as if in tatters, into her face. The wine had visibly heated her skin, had suffused her with a girlish commandeering confidence; she smiled without knowing what she did, as if her perfectly shaped lips lapsed quite naturally, in repose, into a smile. She said, “This is the most beautiful, the most lovely . . . the most special place, to me . . . in all the world.”

When she left and the men were alone, Ian immediately asked, “And how is Meika? And Nick?”

Denis laughed in delighted scorn and said, “Christ, that is
the
subject in Hazelton, isn't it, Mal? You can't go into the lavatory, or wait in line at the post office, without somebody coming up and asking. The last I've heard, Meika and Nick are subletting an apartment—”

“Vaughn says they are jointly buying a condominium, actually,” Malcolm said.

“Really?
Buy
ing? Is this the place on Fifty-third Street, up the block from the museum?”

“He said, I think, some new place, a glass tower he called it, on Fifth Avenue. Within walking distance of the Metropolitan. Maybe that's what you're thinking of.”

“I'm sure I heard Fifty-third Street,” Denis said, frowning. “But, hell, what's the difference, now that Nick has this virtual new career, this ‘esteem of his colleagues'—was that the wording in the paper? Some high-sounding garblegese like that—now that he's been taken up by the trade as a brilliant criminal lawyer, you can bet he'll be able to afford anything he wants. He snubbed me, actually, the other day, at the club. Coming off the squash court—”

“He didn't snub you, Denis,” Malcolm said. “He didn't see you.”

“He
saw
me, he looked right
through
me. Don't tell
me
.”

So they talked for some animated minutes of Nick Ottinger and Meika Cassity, and of poor Vaughn Cassity, crushed with hurt and shame, unable to comprehend how, after all these years of devoted husbandhood, of indulging his wife, with the tacit understanding—“I assume,” Denis said, “it
was
tacit”—that she would never publicly betray him: and, of course, never leave him; he loved her so much. And Ian listened, finding himself, to his surprise, rather keenly interested: as one might dip one's finger in a sweet syrupy batter, and lick it, and want more. At the same time he was thinking, Who are these people? Why am I connected with them? He had long since given up his search, if it could ever have been called a search, for Glynnis's phantom lover. It might have been Denis; it might have been Malcolm; it might have been . . . but did it matter? No man would confess to having been a dead woman's lover, for, after all, the dead are no longer loved.

Ian said, laughing and stretching his arms in the warm sunshine, “Meika was so sweet to me, actually, you can't imagine.”

“Oh yes I can,” Denis said.

“And so can I,” said Malcolm.

SIGRID BROUGHT THE
men coffee, borne on a red plastic tray that shone blinding with reflected sunlight. It was getting time, Denis said, glancing at his watch, for them to start back; though
he
assuredly did not want to return to his brother and sister-in-law's, in Bar Harbor, where he was obliged to stay the night. Nor did Malcolm, who seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly, much want to leave. He was in Bangor to interview a prominent politician for a piece on yet another environmental outrage, and this was, he assured them, the
ne plus ultra
of outrages, involving a half-dozen states along the Atlantic seaboard, and
The New York Times Magazine
was sitting on a scoop, perhaps even Pulitzer Prize—quality material; but, dear Christ, how tired he was of raking others' muck. He said, in a tone of jocular envy, “You were certainly fortunate, Ian, to find this, this place,” gesturing, Ian thought quite tactfully, away from land, out to sea. Out to the very horizon.

“It's quite foggy in the mornings, most mornings,” Ian said, by instinct urged to qualify another's admiration or to disparage his own position—out of a muddled sense, Glynnis had once told him, of humility and charity—“and then of course there are days when it rains all day, and we just stay inside.” He stopped; his face heated; he felt absurd and exposed, very like a newlywed husband. He said, “I'm still editing the
Journal
, of course. Martha sends me stacks of mail at least once a week.”