My Education (32 page)

“You said so many ends.”

“Yes. And all so enmeshed even when quite opposed. A party to show we were happy as parents, and to show parenthood hadn't changed us at all. A party to give a grand send-off to Gareth, whom none of us liked, and to conceal how much we disliked him, and at the same time to make him feel small, by demonstrating our great generosity to him.”

I offered, “A party to show off your beautiful home, and also show people that neither of you cared about it, not enough to hang pictures, or even to clean.” Then I saw that hot glow emanating from him, of confirmation no less than surprise, that I remembered from when he had first taken notice of me.

“Yes,” he agreed, almost pleased by my indictment. We regarded each other another long moment.

“Yet more ends?” I asked.

“Only one more of major importance.”

“To get rid of the fava beans crowding the freezer.”

“To bring someone near me.” When I didn't respond he went on, “In eyes other than mine, as a sop, or reward. But, no sooner to bring her near me, than to take her away.”

“So many cross-purposes.” My voice faintly scraped from my throat, for my mouth had gone dry.

“Some marriages are entirely constituted of cross-purposes. They make a plentiful if unstable building material.”

The bottle of Islay was empty. When I stood up the floor seemed to pitch and I used its momentum to carry me into the kitchen. I filled my glass from the tap and drained it. I filled it again and drained it, and filled it a third time, the cuffs of my sweater sodden where I'd fumbled them into the downpour. I had every intention of leaving. The prim sentence unfurled in my mind: I have every intention . . . I'd finish my water and leave. I could stalk past that gauntlet of gossip, I didn't give a damn what those people might think. The water's noise was so loud I didn't hear him come in behind me but turned, alerted by another sense, to find him just next to me, leaning onto the counter. I turned the water off and drained the third glass, staring into the watery eye at its bottom. Now he stood between me and the door. I could smell the sweetly pungent forest-rot of the scotch cooked together with damp flesh and salt as it came sweating out of his skin. “I never meant to suggest,” he said hoarsely, “that she pursued you to spite me. That would have been the job of an evening, not half a year. She adored you. I'm sure she still does.”

“Whose feelings are you trying to spare?” I said. “Mine or yours?”

“Mine?” he said with a bitten-off laugh. “Would you be standing here in your—in your stocking feet, if I'd meant to spare mine?”

Involuntarily I looked at my feet. Indeed shoeless. Now I had to look for my shoes. I had no recollection of taking them off. When I looked up again his mouth caught mine and with a sense of breakage, of hinges decoupled, I yawned open for him and seemed to take half his skull in my mouth. A hot, stinging rawness spread over my lips and my cheeks with unexpected instantaneity where his bristles dredged over my skin, as if having loved only Martha I'd lost some basic callus required for men. The more painfully raw my flesh felt the more I crushed him to me. My very submission was violent, self-hating and vengeful and blaming but most of all perfectly matched to his own, for he seemed to both attack me and throw himself onto my mercy, to bear down on me with a furious gaze and to swoon beneath me with eyes closed. My legs looped his waist. My scrabbling hands sought some point of access through the back of his shirt. My short wool skirt, stretched taut from thigh to upper thigh, gave way with a brief ripping sound and slid to bunch around my waist and he slotted himself tight against me, so that I felt his constrained erection through his lumpy blue jeans at the same time as he found my nipples through my challenging strata of midwinter clothes—brassiere and leotard and not one but two sweaters—and artfully twisting them wrenched out of me a harsh moan of shocked pleasure, for he seemed to have borrowed her hands.

“Here?” he gasped, somewhere between stovetop and sink. But I shook my head, for I did still have limits, though they were growing very difficult to find. We stumbled upstairs, tripping over and grappling against and barely able to look at each other.

There, in his barely furnished, abject, wifeless sleeping loft, almost the double of Walter Debrango's, with its futon adrift on the floor amid a flotsam of books and strewn boxers and a tableless table lamp trailing its cord, our hunger forsook us. It departed so quickly, we'd never know what sort of hunger, whether for Martha, or vengeance, or even each other, it was. Still we dutifully shed all our layers of cotton and wool until, trembling and naked and neutered, we lay down together and tried to make love. I seemed to watch him from miles below and for hours as in peculiar solitude he plumbed my body; and again and again sadness welled up in me, and when it did I groaned and sighed as if transported, or gripped his buttocks, or arched my back and pressed my face into the nearly hairless, alabaster smoothness of his chest—but these efforts, like struggling in water, only drifted us further apart. Again I thought of him paddling alone through a vast wilderness. He grew smaller and smaller, and at long length, on the distant horizon, a cry left his throat and across the wide waters came echoing back, and his body left mine and he sifted back onto the sheets. I wrapped myself in a blanket, an arm's length from him, and only then did he feel real again.

“I'm sorry,” he murmured.

“Why?” I said tenderly, as if both the word, and the tone, had appeared on a prompter before me. I felt exalted by a new, exotic sadness, as if some rite of passage were complete. It was my first experience with the strange honesty of that particular deception we offered each other. He fell asleep then, and so must have I, though later when I woke I had the bed to myself—he had moved to the sofa.

Every one of those uncounted, indistinguishable days we lived together like fugitives—eating from his bachelor's pantry, drinking from his cheap cases of wine that sat torn open on the floor, full bottles departing and drained ones returning until the whole box lightly rattled and stank with a faint rancidness—I told myself I would leave, and then at the end of the day I would find that I still hadn't left. I would tell myself, First thing tomorrow, I'll leave. I always expected to. Yet something kept feeling unfinished, some obscurity out of my hands. Sometimes we drove in his car for an hour to some other town, to eat burgers, or sit through a movie, or browse the musty inventory of some graveyard of valueless books in an unheated barn. But those were rare excursions; perhaps there was just one of each. If he needed to work he closed the door of his study on me. Other times, he went out and left me alone, and then I understood he must be seeing Joachim. He would return with fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh bread, other atypically wholesome foods, as if I were the child, or as if some belated impulse to nurture had pricked him. But we never discussed this, as we never discussed many things it would seem that we should have, with the exception of that first night together, when he'd brought up the dinner party. And the very mutual and thorough avoidance of all of those subjects seemed to me to denote profound kinship. The vapor of a mingled consciousness, filling whatever the vessel we shared.

Our lovemaking never improved. We might lie tightly braided together and hungrily kissing for hours while our hands trembled just at the edge of a final abyss—but inevitably, once the threshold was crossed, the warm wax burned away and we bumbled and bruised at each other while attempting to socket our ungainly limbs. Often he couldn't stay hard in his efforts to fuck me. Often my flesh went so dry we would squeak like a rubber shoe-sole on linoleum tile. Only formality restored dignity and desire; he owned a pair of beautiful, snow-white robes with some sort of monarchical crest stitched in gold on one breast, to lie over the heart; it was many years before experience taught me he'd pilfered them from a hotel. We would put on those robes and return to each other. Then he was my golden, remote god again of the cheekbones and nose, the dirty-blond rooster's crest of his hair like some sort of Victorian coach ornament. Cleanly I'd lie in his arms like the blade in its sheath. I would feel the hard heat of his body translated to me through the rough terrycloth, straining for any contact with my innocent hand. To escape from my teasing persistence at last he'd recite in his ragged-edged actorly voice, equally marbled with ego and self-deprecation; on and on I would spur him, the stanzas accreting like bricks, the hard heat and the innocent hand ever more roughly grinding against one another, his voice booming now from a resonant dungeon containing the hissing pump-works of his lungs—until, still reciting, he'd seize me and in some way confusingly brutish and brief masturbate himself using the whole of my body, although never entering me, biting off his own words at the point he let go with a terrible bark, like a primitive soldier absorbing a spear in the guts.

So many things never discussed—yet while we were together, except during lovemaking's arduous toil, he never stopped talking. Later it hardly seemed possible to me, that he could have confided as much as he did, and with such eager and eloquent trust, as if he had never before found a person to listen. And with no tale touching on Martha, either as subject or implied prior listener, though of course, I reminded myself, he must have told her his stories in their first days of love. I couldn't have been the first woman to listen to this beautiful, strange man of forty, though his gift was to nevertheless make me feel that I was. His handsome, unaffectionate parents, whose closed-off adult life he had thrilled to, from his exiled little-boy's bed. His gold, naked childhood calves above knobbly wool socks. His speech impediments and the impatience and disgust they provoked in his mother, and his unconfessed terror of, yet utter resignation to, the unredeemable life of a half-wit. His grief-stricken love for his brother, the family's true mental case, who even as Nicholas spoke of him was determinedly pursuing the existence of a menace idiot-savant on the campus of the University of British Columbia, where he lived on the streets despite all interventions, and attended, up to eight times a day, undergraduate and graduate lectures on such subjects as particle physics, which he often interrupted with belligerent questions or sinister hallucinations which had led him to be hospitalized. The thousands of acres of small interlinked glacial lakes, like a gilt filigree, Nicholas had paddled alone, which he spoke of as if he were scissoring open their surfaces just at that moment. The Swiss housewife, his hostess when as a sixteen-year-old exchange student he was living in Zurich, who seduced him his very first night in her home, and became his first female lover, at a time when he'd still been accustomed to hand jobs and blow jobs with his boarding-school mates—and when he spoke of his sexual past he seemed both hypervivid and freshly obscured by mystique, and I would remember him as I'd first known him, and feel a brief jolt of that erstwhile ignorant lust, so delicious and rare now because ignorance was required.

I never climaxed with him, never even came close. Yet in some way I continued to want him. He alone knew my deformity. I less felt I'd lost part of myself than endured some disabling intrusion, which by my own inexplicable logic only Nicholas, like a loverly midwife, could ever remove. But of course he could not.

One winter afternoon he went out while I remained on his couch under blankets and reading a book. But soon after he'd left I heard movement outside his front door, followed right away by violent pounding, as if an interval of civil knocking, ignored, had already elapsed.

“Nicholas!” Martha shouted, while pounding. And then, “Regina!”

Her ferocity paralyzed me. I who daily longed to hear her voice, even shouting denunciations; I who would have risked arrest for one more chance to fling her down on the sidewalk, and pin her beneath me, and keep her with me that much longer; I who had bolted awake, more than once, in the bed of her former husband, certain that some microscopic pair of orphaned molecules, ghost of a ghost of her scent, had precipitated into my nostrils from the sheet I slept on, which had once clad their marital bed—I who had nothing to lose to her, and nothing to want but her, was too frankly terrified of her to open the door. And yet her outrage outraged me, for how obtusely mistaken it was. That she could imagine herself wronged by
us
—a pair of invalids who'd taken to tending each other? The longer she shouted and banged, the more the inaptness of her self-righteous fury felt like a demon's idea of a joke. When my rage weighed the same as my fear I threw off the blanket intending to open the door—she and I would now murder each other—and realized she had ceased her onslaught and departed, as abruptly as she had begun. Perhaps someone else in the building had come out to say they would call the police.

By the time Nicholas returned courage had left me and I was huddled again on the couch underneath the blanket. “She was here,” I said when he knelt by me, and as soon as I said it felt the first outside air intrude into our hothouse, as if someone had cut a small slit in the membrane—not enough to collapse it. Not yet. Perhaps this was all she'd intended to do. “I didn't answer the door,” I added.

“I'm sorry, darling,” he said, as if I were the blameless young love of his postdivorce days, the intruder some she-hag I'd not even met.

“I'm sorry,” I echoed him, by which I might have meant, I'm sorry that merely by saying “I'm sorry” I desecrate our secret code, that merely by acknowledging our code I desecrate it yet further.

“I was going to make supper,” he said. “Should I?”

“Yes,” I said, but after we'd eaten I put on my coat, standing a long time struggling over the toggles, as if it were a new coat I had never worn before.

“I'll drive you,” he said, and at the curb in front of my house, he leaned across and lightly kissed me with thin, dry, chapped lips.