Testimony and Demeanor (25 page)

I have mentioned the deer to her, making it clear that that
edge of thought exists only involuntarily. She said it probably had to do with my resenting the fact that she could not have a baby. I said no, that her steering clear of babies made her seem more like a young girl.

She said, “A quick-frozen young girl, thawed out in perfect condition years later.”

I didn’t say anything, but the fact is I’m not sure I would have liked her as a young girl. What I like is that she seems like a young girl. She, on the other hand, is in love with her memories of being a girl. I doubt if I’ll ever spend that much time dredging up stories. My story, the one that interests me, is from now on.

It is interesting how Ann can tell stories publicly (the way she did today, Sunday) with real polish. And then she can tell me a story in private as though her recollections were a form of caress, as though she were nestling against me. If she were a patient and I were a psychiatrist, I would fall in love with her as she just lay there talking. She sometimes demands stories from me, but that is often like a caress that she asks for. Too requested. She once took my hand and very slowly pulled it against her face; now, if she could get stories from me like that …

But when I hear her tell a story in public, it is hard to imagine how we ever get along in private. I can imagine what it would be like to be married to an actress.

Today Professor Keller got after her about laughing at his Central European “private economist.” She said, “Let me explain. Marie-Claire was being driven back to her villa in Neuilly by her chauffeur when she happened to see a tramp eating grass by the roadside. She rapped on the glass partition and told the chauffeur to stop. She addressed the tramp. ‘My good man,’ she said. ‘Are you actually eating grass by the roadside?’ The tramp said, ‘Yes, madame.’ ‘Well then, you
must come with me,’ said Marie-Claire. They drove off and at length reached Marie-Claire’s house. She told the tramp to follow her. They proceeded through the front hall, and out the back door onto the terrace. Marie-Claire gestured with her slim white hand across the well-tended grounds. ‘My poor fellow,’ she said. ‘I was touched when I saw you eating grass by the roadside.
Here
is an English lawn!’ ”

Professor Keller said, “Oh, come on. That’s not an analogy.” But Ann won the point by acclamation.

I enjoy her triumphs, but not as much as she does. She lights up, revs up, and doesn’t slow down for hours. But when she does finally, she is especially low-keyed and balmy. When we got back to her place I was going to leave, but she said no—she wanted me to sit and talk for a while. She floated around the living room, turning on lights in corners and bringing me a drink. She settled down on the sofa and said, “I’ve been thinking about that friend of yours you told me about.”

I said I didn’t remember any more than the first time I told her. She said, “That’s all right. Tell me again. I love it. It’s like a painting.”

I told her again. “I had a friend in New Hampshire who lived outside Nashua when he was a kid, and he started going to a whore in town when he was just fourteen. He would save up his chore money, and when he had ten bucks, which was maybe every other month, he’d go down to see this whore, who mostly just did the old geezers around town—the retired mill hands and so forth. She was always very glad to see him, and she would give him a bath and ask him how he was doing in school and on the baseball team and so forth—the same things each time—and then she’d dry him off, take off her bathrobe, get up on the bed, and say, ‘Climb aboard, sunshine boy.’ ”

“Tell me when he told you,” Ann said. “How did it come up? How old was he?”

“When he told me? We were both eighteen, and he hadn’t told anyone before me. After we got out of high school we got
a couple of IDs and went to the dog races down in Taunton. In the last race there was a dog named Sunshine Boy, and my friend started laughing and told me about it. We went out to a bar and had some drinks, and he couldn’t get off it. It was the first time I’d seen anybody drunk that way, although he was probably copying someone he’d seen. At the time I couldn’t tell if it was real. He said something like ‘She’s probably dead and gone.’ He fell asleep in the car and I drove back to New Hampshire. I went off the next day to a summer job in Keene and then to college. He joined the Army, I think. I used to think about that in college—his story, I mean. It seemed mysterious. Not so much the sex part—that seemed more natural than anything else I heard—but the fact that he’d kept it secret for such a long time and finally only told me by accident.”

Ann said, “It is like a Hopper. A cliché imbued with realism. A realized cliché. An intensified cliché. No. You aren’t making anything up?”

I said no.

She said, “What I like about Hopper is this—the other dimension, the suggested dimension, is absolutely, precisely in focus. There is nothing to play with, to jiggle into focus. It all comes at once. In fact, it all comes at once even though I don’t know of another painter who can suggest that a scene—the one of the inside of the movie theater, for instance—has such a stretch of long, boring time locked into it. Just on and on and on. Even his houses with the yards grown over. And yet every one of his paintings has such a clear point. I mean, all the time is brought to a head, as though his picture is a dam waiting for you to look at it for all the time to be released.”

I thought: This is the way she is most coherent—fitting her mood to a subject and controlling both at once by talking. I thought: I have never known anyone this well and this abstractly at the same time. Somehow she has made sure I know the mechanics of her, but for no mechanical reason.

At the same time, I thought that we were caught up then
too, sitting there and drifting in her mood. I thought it would not be possible for us to feel this way if she were not completely
for
me.

IV

Mr. Pelham got back today. He’s been away for two weeks or so, so I haven’t seen him since Ann told me their ancient history. At first it bothered me a little, but then I thought that, after all, he’s over sixty now, and there might as well be a statute of limitations on that sort of thing.

In any case he was very subdued. No essay on France, where he’d been. He asked me if I knew that Ann was taking a trip to France and I said no, but that it didn’t surprise me, since she went every spring. Then he asked me how I was doing on the job, and I said O.K., although that is something he could certainly find out better from one of the other partners. Then he just mumbled around for a while. Not one of his brighter days. But I have to ask myself, Am I faster now to pick him up on signs of bleariness? Do I
try
to see him as gone by?

I have changed some, at least in one respect. My “ear,” as Ann—or Mr. Pelham—would say, is attuned.

Ann told me this: “If you are ever miserable, Charlie, I can tell you that you shouldn’t despise Job’s comforters. I remember when Alfred and I were divorced, which was a perfectly good idea, but nevertheless a painful experience—like a physical illness—an aunt of mine, who was an extremely kind and silly woman, took me to lunch and comforted me. She said, ‘Ann, my dear, it was really too perfect. Too good to be true. You were both too glamorous, you know. I mean, it was just too perfect and unreal for you to keep your minds on each other. What you really needed was someone less high-powered. He was too ambitious to give you the kind of attention that
would nurture you. You simply weren’t nurtured, because he never gave a thought to it. I remember saying something like this to you some time ago. I’m sure you don’t remember, because there was no way you could have understood at the time. I’m not saying I could have saved you any unhappiness, but it was just so clear to someone outside, to someone who really wanted you to be happy. And I hope you will be, dear.’ Of course, she was nowhere near right. If anyone ever insisted on nurturing, on the hothouse, green-thumb approach to wives, it was Alfred. I assure you, his current wife would win a tulip contest in Holland. But everything my aunt said was strangely comforting. It made the whole subject seem remote. Something that I knew more about than anyone in the world but that was essentially a very obscure, useless subject. Something it would do me no good to think about anymore but that I was satisfied to have figured out.

“And my aunt took me to have my hair done and bought me some new clothes, all of which was so beside the point, but helpful. In fact, I think I cut my hair short the next week. But my aunt’s carrying on reminded me that there was a ritual, and that where there is a ritual there must be a midden of old experience nearby, and that I could just go on for a while impersonally until I felt like taking over myself again.”

Some time after Ann told me this, I realized that it could be construed as advice, and even as fair warning.

I’d never seen a steel mill. It’s a good thing I went through after the conference. I couldn’t have got it out of my mind when I laid out the memos for the various company officers. It would have made me think there must be more to them than there really is.

Mr. Leland got sick. I went to Pittsburgh by myself. Scared the hell out of me. Even though I knew that I knew what they wanted to know.

The client’s v.p. who was in charge of setting up the conference had written to Mr. Leland that it would be O.K. for Mr. Leland to send his second-in-command. I guess the v.p. figured that with the money they pay us, there must be at least a half dozen old gray lawyers working full time. So when I walked into his office the v.p. assumed I was the second-in-command’s clerk. His mistake aggravated me some, since I was nervous. However, I soon realized he was a jerk. While he was still a little embarrassed and thought maybe I just looked young, he actually asked my age. I said, “Twenty-seven going on twenty-eight.” He didn’t even smile. His secretary laughed and then he managed to get it.

I laid out the issues for them without much trouble. At first I thought one of them was laying some elaborate groundwork with his questions, but it turned out he was just a little slow. After that the only thing that surprised me was how much dead wood they carry in their executives. They could get along just as well with a couple of the bright ones. And then I guess I was surprised at how conservative they were even just discussing, or rather not discussing, litigation. They moaned once or twice about the cost of litigation, even though that should be peanuts to them.

But the tour of the steel mill impressed me. Oddly enough, I thought of Ann talking about what art should be concerned with—i.e., the changes that are ordinarily hidden from us. But I suppose you don’t really see the transformation here, although the impression is that you do. The coal and ore coming in one side and steel being rolled out the other, and the cooling sheets visible from a catwalk. It was the colors that amazed me most. They looked like red clouds being blown across a bright moon. They seemed to have a shape and another side down in the cooling steel.

I was impressed with my response too. To the color and to the brute force of the process. It amazed me that a process so violent and precise should have a by-product as momentary
and delicate as those shades of red. I admired both. And then I finally thought: Here is an analogy for Mr. Pelham: I was raw material before I went to law school. Practically useless. I was fed into the mill, and by a violent but precise process I became useful. But not until Ann and Mr. Pelham came along did I realize there were appreciable by-products, that I was not so colorless—and did not have to be so grimly thrifty with myself—as I had grown used to thinking.

But without the original crude effort there would have been much less now. Both the violent energy and its precise control served me, and they would not have worked on me so well had I been able to imagine there was any other way.

I must admit that this line of thought would not have occurred to me without the influence of Ann and Mr. Pelham, and I am going back to New York gladly. With relief to leave here. I don’t have the simple single-minded drive I once had. There were dark hints here from the company—room for another house counsel, not a surprising thing for house counsel to find himself in key positions on a number of matters, and so forth and so on. That would have knocked me over not so long ago. I still don’t take it lightly, but it doesn’t hit all of me. I suppose the hints of the company are useful testimony of my value, but I’m not so interested anymore in my brute usefulness.

I suppose the extreme of that last position would be Mr. Pelham.

I called up Ann when I got back, but she’d already left for Europe. I was surprised, and a little worried, but then traveling, especially flying, makes her so nervous that, I suppose, she suddenly found the nerve to get on and so she just got on.

I told Mr. Pelham about the company’s feeling me out. He was amused, but he took it seriously too. He asked me if I’d told Mr. Leland. I said no. I wasn’t even considering the offer, so I didn’t want him to think I was. Mr. Pelham told me to go
ahead and tell him. He said there was always a chance that someone from the company would tell him—“Ho, ho, your boy sticks pretty close to the apron strings. No, seriously, I admire loyalty”—and so I’d better tell him first. Mr. Pelham also pointed out that even if I wasn’t considering it at all, it would do Mr. Leland good to hear it.

He said, “But I’m glad you like being in a firm better. I can’t imagine being house counsel. That’s not really law. I must say I have come to appreciate law in my nonage. I appreciate it now even in its capacity as men’s club, monastery, temple of high Protestant rite. There is a reassurance in its formality, which is, after all, not a superficial aspect of it. I’m in favor of communal formality, and mental formality. Look at the mess in which people suddenly find themselves—people who have lived solely by their own personal achievements. Those can collapse in a minute. Money, personality, taste, social life. I mean a modern social life; I suppose there was a time when family tradition provided a framework for life. The proud Don Pedro in his Spanish ruff seeking death before dishonor. Now all there is of anything approaching like magnitude is professional tradition. The rest of life is merely existential. What a wonderful word, ‘merely.’