She clung to him as if she wanted their cells to merge, and she keened—because it seemed like the end, and tragic; or, more tragic, still more tragic, not the end.
If I can’t live with you, I’ll die. It’s all I care about. That night, in the midst of it, shocking both of them, he giggled. She lifted her face from his face to see why—could he be making fun of her? Hurt before she looked, looking she saw, no, that wasn’t it at all and kissed his face, and he whispered, “Just listen to me groan!” but didn’t say, Oh, so this is what it’s like, “romance.” This is romance! Well, what a goddamn awful, goddamn foolish thing. Then he turned his face and looked into her eyes again, and tears came to his eyes. “Oh my God, Deborah.”
And she: “I know.” Her mantra. “I know.”
And David: “Our kids, our kids.” He was seeing Joel, age 9, and Sarah, age 6. He was seeing Deborah’s 7-year-old daughter Cindy. He saw their eyes, staring at him and Deborah. Somehow in his mind’s eye, they were all three sitting at the dining-room table in Newton, hands folded on their laps. He saw Sheila’s eyes all the time, accusing—before Sheila knew there was anything to accuse him of.
“I know, I know.”
“We’re too old for this,” he said. “We’re supposed to be grown-ups who care about other people. What is this Me Decade bullshit that it doesn’t matter whom you hurt as long as you follow your heart? Besides, it can’t last, not with this intensity. We both know that. ”
_____________
So what happens after a love story comes to closure, love triumphant? In the aftermath, your children cry.
Your son gets into fistfights at recess. He hangs up on you. He hates you and wants you to drop dead. Your daughter refuses to spend the weekend. And your lover, well, her daughter throws up. She lives with her mother and David—her father, Alan, has moved out—but she won’t say good night, won’t kiss. Deborah weeps.
Alan goes through a period of communicating to Deborah only through his lawyer. Alan is a good man; it’s a brief period. Alan Bayer happens to be David’s dean—Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts. It was at the dean’s annual holiday party that David met Deborah. They didn’t say two words. She played Cole Porter songs on the piano. David sang—he knew all the lyrics. That night he dreamed the lyrics. Night and day you are the one. I get a kick out of you.
After their guests left, Deborah suggested to Alan, “Let’s have them over for dinner.”
As David crosses the campus, colleagues look at him without wanting to be caught looking, or they catch his eye and smile in collusion. David knows his grad students are talking. Everyone loves a love story, especially an Oedipal story, a Homeric story, in which a colleague carries off the wife of the dean, even a likable dean.
_____________
The worst pain begins when pressure eases. It’s when Alan becomes reconciled and the children begin to accept the new arrangements, when Sheila remarries—marries someone with money—when three families spring from two, that’s when things become hard.
Money is, of course, a piece of it. They can barely afford to live in Deborah’s house in Cambridge. David is no dean, nor an investment banker like Sheila’s new husband, and Deborah, assistant marketing manager at a publisher in Boston, makes even less than David. Alan, thank God, continues to pay tuition for Cindy’s private school, and by cutting back on savings and living frugally, David and Deborah are able not to pile up debt. Few dinners out. No vacations in the Caribbean, no weekends in New York. For a while there seems something heroic, romantic, in the slight deprivation. Then it begins to rankle. Deborah swears she doesn’t mind. David doesn’t quite believe her, and when he sees her feeling down, and she seems down a lot—this is after the divorces, after they’re married, when everything should be settled and sweet yet she seems sorrowful so much of the time—he wonders if she’s regretting the sacrifice, if she’s changed her mind about the whole thing. And he asks, and of course she swears. And then she wonders if he’s projecting his own disillusionment and asks, and of course he swears, and they go to bed right then as a demonstration of their commitment to one another. And in a couple of days, it begins again.
And strangely there are times he’s not all that attracted to her. Most of the time, just to touch her is enough to dissolve questions. But at times he notices a certain look in her eyes that strikes him as false, “smarmy,” he says to himself, too much sweetness, fake sweetness, really a desire to placate him—and why? Of what is she guilty with him? Of what is she afraid? When he sees this, well, it turns him off. Or when things are good between them, full of humor and tenderness, still, still there are times she simply doesn’t want to make love—three, four days of this—and he thinks maybe it was all crazy, this love story, a trick of his neurotic heart, and now—now he’ll be caught forever inside an ordinary marriage, the kind he was in with Sheila.
Ordinary failures. She never blamed him; he never blamed her. But each felt blamed. They’d sacrificed so much, paid so much in damage to others—in guilt—that their love has to be perfect, their marriage perfect—passionate and complete. Or else, what had they done it for? Still, all the turmoil that first year! It cost far too much. After, they were never the same. The place of tender contact between them, contact with protective skin removed like unnecessary gloves, seemed instead . . . a raw wound; it scabbed over; it buffered passion. Less and less she played piano for him, less and less he shared the piano bench and sang. They both had jobs. Then there was her daughter, then there were his children—it took so much work to keep the kids happy.
A year later, Deborah got pregnant and the baby, Michael, healed them. He gave them something else to focus on besides their own intimacy. Their intensity—nothing has ever been calm, easy, for either—poured itself out on Michael. And for Joel, Sarah, Cindy, well, the child Michael became for them a focus for tenderness. The kids relaxed, grew closer to each other because they all fell in love with Michael. He became the peacemaker.
Now studying law in Philadelphia, Michael still plays that role in the family.
Gradually they became a marriage. There are times when things are hushed with peace. Was it a mistake? Is it so different from what might have become of his marriage to Sheila? He doesn’t ask. His marriage to Deborah, perhaps ordinary, is a memorial to the mad beauty they’d shared. And the children have survived. Besides, there’s Michael—it’s impossible to imagine there not being Michael. Once, sitting with David over breakfast, taking his hand, out of the blue Deborah said, “It’s not a bad marriage, is it?”
No! No! There’s kindness, generosity, trust between them; there’s love. It’s a marriage. All that drama was, what?—my God—25, 26, 27 years ago!
_____________
Max and Ellie Fleishman come over—Max and Ellie were their first friends as a couple. A quarter century before, when families were being uprooted, Max and Ellie were young visual artists investigating new forms, and somehow this experiment in love gained the panache of experiments in painting. It gave the love a supporting myth of life as creative reinvention. Now, when they laugh together remembering the party Deborah threw for David’s 40th birthday, David brings a big leather album to the living room, and the four of them lean over the table to look at photos. Only those sympathetic to the lovers came to that party. All the celebrants tipsy, wood smoke from the fireplace, whiffs of marijuana. Tony Ames roasted him with a comic song about stealing a queen from a king.
But those pictures! How young they all were! David’s hair, now gray as he approaches 63, still black then—wild, wavy. The lines and creases that have begun to show themselves in his face weren’t there yet. And Deborah, oh my!—at 32 she was stunningly beautiful. No wonder I couldn’t end it.
“Look at us, just look at us,” Ellie says. “So tell me—you think if we make it to our 80s and look back at pictures taken now, we’ll think, ‘How young we were’?”
Somehow, none of them can face one another. Deborah straightens and, taking the wine from the ice bucket, fills their glasses. “Well,” she says, “for that matter, we still are young.”
“Speak for yourself, dear,” Ellie says a bit coolly, “you’re years younger than the rest of us.”
“I can’t believe how gorgeous you are in those old photos,” David tells Deborah as they get ready for bed. “Gorgeous, really gorgeous—what a babe!” He expects her to laugh—he’s sure she’ll love to hear this. How can she help it?—she’s more than a little vain. That vanity keeps her going to the gym three times a week, running on the other days. “Gorgeous,” he says again.
She hates his compliment! She sighs. After 25 years of marriage, he can translate sighs; this one means: What’s wrong with me now?
Can she actually be jealous of her own younger self, the beautiful woman in those snapshots? She can, she can—as if he’d gushed about a younger sister. He goes to her, wraps his arms around her, and runs his fingers through her hair, no longer straight but professionally curled, no longer chestnut but, at 55, dyed chestnut. You’re the same woman, he says to her with fingers, more beautiful to me now for having been the woman in those photos. They remind me.
She won’t buy his sugar. For she recognized it, too, looking at the pictures: her own beauty as a 32-year-old, and the thing is, she both wants to wear that beauty like a faded corsage, a reminder—and hates the woman in the picture for her irrecoverable beauty.
He won’t let her get depressed. He touches her with his fingers, a message massage, unbuttons her blouse, caresses her. Your skin, I know your skin so well, the bones of your shoulders, I love them, they’re not the same, but I love them. There was a time she would have softened, opened her skin to rest against his fingers. He could have convinced her of anything, as he had convinced her, when she was 30, to leave Alan. She stays shut down. His fingers know the difference.
_____________
Now, early spring, Heather enters the picture.
Heather Lindholm is David’s graduate student, perhaps his best student in a seminar on the modern novel. She’s preparing to write a dissertation on Virginia Woolf. Just what the world needs—another dissertation on Woolf! But hers, if anyone’s, might be original.
It’s not, he assures himself, that he wants to sleep with her. She’s barely 30 years old. But he finds himself obsessing over her. He writes long, long responses to her essays. He meets her for coffee to talk over her ideas. He looks and looks into her beautiful Nordic face, watches her walk down the hall, long, lean, can’t get enough of looking, has to keep himself from looking. Her blonde hair, days she doesn’t pin it up, falls to the middle of her back. So what? Why become obsessed with the length of someone’s hair or her soft skin? Why does he want to lay his cheek against that skin? He has the crazy idea it’s that picture of Deborah that’s done it—though Deborah is dark, Heather blonde. But Heather is 30, as was Deborah when they met.
This goes on for weeks. Always he’s been a little in love with one of his students, sometimes more than one. His tenderness is safe enough—the students are like his children. He wants to help them. This time his tenderness is not so safe. For Heather responds to him deeply. She asks for his cell number and calls to talk about Woolf’s letters. Then about the young man she’s been seeing. Then about her alcoholic father, though he’s not part of her life now. Then about her depressive moods. One night on the phone she cries—he presses the cell phone to his ear so Deborah in the next room won’t hear. It seems mysterious to him, her clear, fresh blonde looks torqued against her sadness. He wants to succor her. My God, she’s half my age—less.
One morning as he’s driving to campus he takes her call. She’s decided to break up with her boyfriend. She can’t imagine living a rich, deep life with that man. It’s good she has the courage, but she’s, well, very sad. And she’s got problems, she sighs, changing the music of this conversation, trying to place Clive Bell in Virginia’s life. After all, isn’t her sister Vanessa her deepest love? Was Virginia’s flirtation with Clive a surrogate for her relation to her sister? “There’s a letter I want to show you if you have a few minutes,” she says.
He folds the cell away and turns off Memorial Drive toward the Boston side of the Charles. He’s afraid that if he visits her this morning they’ll end up in bed. It’s as if the car has taken control. Dear God, please help me. But the old Camry drives him past B.U. into the back streets of Brookline. Though never before has he visited, he knows where she lives. For out of curiosity he’s driven past her apartment building near a little park. “We’re grown-ups,” he says aloud. Still, it’s best if they go to Coolidge Corner for coffee.
Heather lives on the third floor. No elevator. He remembers from when he was a grad student climbing stairs like these to visit young women in student apartments. Long, long ago.
But it’s not a student apartment. The furniture, unmatched but fine and old, substantial, suggests to him that she must have family money. It’s clean, bright, with a big bay window. She’s wearing jeans and a silk blouse, peach; her breasts, small and high, catch the sunlight. Her hair, usually pinned, is loose, blonde, full. He doesn’t want to leave the decent life he’s made, but his body is flush with erotic warmth. If he says to her, I think we’d better go have coffee somewhere, the implication that he’s keeping himself from his desire will be obvious, and then, of course, the implication that she’d want to go to bed with him, that she’s created this meeting to go to bed with him, that their desires are the same. And then the transgressive quality of such desire is so evident to him and must be to her—as if he’s her father, her uncle.
She makes tea. He goes to the bay window and looks out over the park. It’s April, still chilly, the trees leafless, but little kids are playing on the climbing structure. They sit together, David and Heather, on her raggedy sofa, and folding her long legs under her, she reads the letter from Virginia to her brother-in-law Clive: “Why do you torment me with half-uttered and ambiguous sentences?” Heather has a breathy, husky voice, and sitting close together this way, it’s as if she’s saying this to David. Well, of course she’s saying it to David. He breathes in her perfume. They’re in a charged space. It’s as if right now, at this moment, they’re already making love. What stops him from touching her, from questioning her with his eyes, isn’t that he’s shy, isn’t that it’s hard to change their relationship. It would be easier to do so, for the tension between them is so awful. He’s on a cliff in a dream, and all he has to do is let go and he’ll fly.
The very edge. He pulls back, stretches, takes a breath. “There’s no evidence they ever slept together. But I’m sure you’re right, Heather—her relationship to Clive was really part of the dynamics of Virginia and her sister.” They’re silent. “Well. I’ve got to go,” he says. “I’ve got a meeting on campus.”
He sits in his car shaking. Breathing. Crying. He accuses himself of being a coward, not living the truth in his life. He accuses himself of being a fool.
_____________
He sees Heather only in class. She calls, they talk about her dissertation.
She calls again, a couple of weeks later, a little drunk. He’s sure she’s been drinking. It’s eight at night. Heather says, “I really need to see you. Dave? Can you come over?”
Of course he can’t come over. Just to speak to her with Deborah in the house frightens him.
“I’m afraid you have to come over. You don’t know how upset you’ve made me.”
“Heather.”
“It’s not going to go away, Dave. It’s not going to end like this.”
“What’s not going to end? Heather? What?”
“Oh, sure. I was afraid you’d play it that way. Tell me. Does Deborah know about us?”
_____________
"I forgot,” he says to Deborah—"I’ve got a committee meeting tonight.” Deborah, her hair pinned up to keep it out of the way, is working on a spreadsheet; she nods, she waves.
They meet at a bar on Commonwealth. A young person’s bar, a singles bar, it’s crowded on weekends, but this is a Tuesday night. He’s by far the oldest person there. The place is decorated with hanging ships’ lamps; fish nets with tiny lights enmeshed give the illusion of a dropped ceiling; posters from To Have and Have Not, from Only Angels Have Wings, posters of 1930s movie stars fill the walls. He orders beers for them. “You’ve been upset lately. You’re so smart, Heather—I hate to see you get this way.”
“I know.” She puts her hand over his, comforting. “I know you do. It doesn’t have to go badly. You know I don’t want to break up your marriage.”
“God forbid.” Carefully he withdraws his hand. “Of course you’re right, it’s true, there’s a lot between us.” But, he says, he’s in a good marriage, and besides, well, he’s not a young man. Doesn’t she see how crazy—to take it further? “Let’s leave it as a mentor who feels tenderness for his student and a student who cares about her mentor. Isn’t that enough?”
“But . . . ,” she looks straight into his eyes and shakes her head, “that’s not the full truth.”
“Oh,” he says, hunkering down over the table and half-whispering, “the truth. The truth is, I am beginning to feel harassed right now.”
In her sweet, breathy voice, as if she were speaking of love, she says, says slowly, “Dave, Dave, we both know that isn’t how the university will define harassment in this situation.”
_____________
He drives her back the three blocks to her apartment. She leans across the emergency brake to rest on his shoulder. Her blonde hair has come out of its pins; it spills over his shirt. At the light he turns to her, cups her face in his hand, and kisses her. Her skin is like a child’s. “I can’t stay long,” he says.
It’s the kind of lovemaking he hasn’t known for years. It’s better because, older, he has restraint—can last a long, long time. When she climaxes, she scratches him just a little. She waxes and wanes and waxes again. And now he lets himself go, and danger is stirred into the brew of sex, of youth and age. He howls. She hushes him. She rubs the hair at the back of his neck.
_____________
Later, at home, he examines himself naked in the full-length mirror in his bathroom. From Deborah, downstairs, he hears a passage from a Schubert sonata, an opus posthumous, over and over till it becomes smooth. Using the hand mirror he checks on the scratches Heather made; they hardly show. He’s in good shape for a man in his 60s. The slightest fat on belly or hips. The muscles of chest and arms, never powerful, aren’t slack. David’s a runner, he still takes training in martial arts; he eats carefully. Looking at himself the way he never looks, he sees the lines from above his nostrils to the sides of his mouth—but really they’re smile creases. He has no wattle under his chin.
Disgusting vanity! All at once his life, a delicate architecture, a fabrication not triangulated, shaken by wind, tumbles in a heap. His life is destroyed. No, no!—he has destroyed his life.
_____________
Heather learns that she can reach him on his way to school. David learns that she’s almost always at home evenings, except when she goes with a friend to a concert. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to go to a concert together?” she sighs into her phone one morning as he’s negotiating traffic. Staring at the cell, thinking how to reply, he lets the Camry slide to the right, where it’s almost sideswiped.
“This can’t last,” she whispers to him the second time he spends an afternoon with her. She rubs his cheek as if he were her baby, her puppy. It embarrasses him, how much he loves it. “I don’t want to hurt you, Dave. I’ve taken so much from you. Not just as my mentor, understand?”
“Sure. My sanity,” he laughs. “That’s all.” He lies nose to nose with her in her queen-size bed, her beauty in his hands. She wraps him in her long legs. Her thighs are so strong, her belly so lean. She glows. Her youth almost makes him angry. He doesn’t tell her, This beauty is yours only a little while. His eyes close. Oh, he’s fallen off the cliff, they’re flying together on one set of wings. He imagines breaking it off, imagines her calling the ombudsman, calling Deborah. That fear, part of how he got here, is now diminished. Less wary, he feels more intensely both his own crazy passion and his shame. For even if he breaks it off and nothing catastrophic happens, still, he’s the person who has done this. He’ll always be that person. And the truth is, he doesn’t want to break it off. He wants and doesn’t want to go back to being the ordinary husband he had been: scholar and teacher slipping out of date toward retirement and old age.
“You should have known me when I was young,” he says. It’s meant to sound funny. Heather doesn’t laugh on cue or tell him how young he is. She says, examining him, “You’re young enough for me. You’re still a handsome man. You are. You’re . . . craggy,” she laughs. “And I love that broad forehead of yours covering all those brains.” She taps his temples.
“That’s called a receding hairline.”
“Dave, think about it. If I want someone young, don’t you think I can find him?”
David realizes how little he knows about Heather. He knows she took her B.A. at Berkeley. He knows her parents have split up; her father is, “at last report,” a businessman in Seattle; her mother teaches sociology at UCLA. It’s her mother whose family is wealthy.
Her parents are both younger than he.
He learns these disjointed facts about her. But he doesn’t know her. He’s alien to her age, her culture, her life. Sometimes, in bed in an afternoon, she begins to cry for no reason. He soothes but doesn’t understand. Her bathroom, with its makeup pots and tiny brushes, seems foreign; her music—contemporary jazz—deeply foreign. Some nights she goes with friends to dance to what she calls “techno.” “Techno? Play some for me.” She does; as he fears, he hears it as abrasive noise.
When she tells him stories of her father, she gets a music in her voice, a music of pain. He’d drink himself night after night into unconsciousness. Her mother finally “dismissed” him; Heather hardly sees him. She grew up in San Diego. She’s a surfer—You didn’t know that, did you?— No, nor did he know that she used to be a competitive skier, good enough to be given equipment and money by a corporation. Above her bed is a poster of a woman skier lifting up from a mogul. “Is that you?” She nods; he laughs. It was only in her junior year at Berkeley, she tells him, that she understood how much she loved literature.
“You’re very, very good at it.”
“You’re an inspiration to me. No, I mean it, David.”
He feels like nobody’s inspiration. Guilt and shame coat his experience so thoroughly that it surprises him Deborah can’t see. And yet he’s not just ashamed, not just afraid of being found out. He’s enthralled, in thrall, and also—admit it!—glorying in his own revival. That she, far and away the most beautiful woman among the grad students, has chosen him! Walking into his graduate seminar and seeing her sitting by the window, where she’s always sat, chin cupped in her palm, he’s both leading a class and speaking privately to Heather. His secret energizes him. He’s aware of her all the time. Never a stud, a wild lover, now he walks through the world in an erotic glow.
He begins to bring her gifts—a bonsai in a ceramic dish, a first edition of Woolf’s Between the Acts, insights. They spend a late afternoon in her bed, reading a letter to Roger Fry, a paragraph of To the Lighthouse. He’s brought her a bottle of bourbon; he pours a shot for her, a shot for him. Well, it’s five o’clock, time for a drink. But he has to leave. Depressed, he slumps in her old leather armchair, neck bare as if he were expecting to be knighted or beheaded, hands folded between his knees. She frowns—as if examining him through a magnifying glass. At last she says, “David Braverman, please? Dave? Am I right you feel bad that you’re not intensely in love with me this afternoon?”
Oh, my God, she’s smart! He looks up at her, stunned—because, now that she’s said it, he knows that’s exactly what he was feeling. A little gray, a little empty—and that can’t be permitted, it’s got to be continually intense, he’s got to be out of his mind in love or he can’t justify, even a little, this insanity. There’s a shrewd side to Heather. Sometimes, sometimes, she seems the calmer, the older. He suspects that Heather needs him but doesn’t love him. The balance is shifting. She wanted him; he was the cautious one, fearful—let’s be straight about this—that she was threatening him and could wreck his career. Now he needs her more than she needs him.
He’s never been a drinker, but now, the afternoons he sees Heather, he has a drink, sometimes two; days he doesn’t see her, he finds himself drinking, too. One evening as they’re cleaning up from dinner, Deborah stops, takes his arm, says, “It’s nice, a before-dinner drink. But an after-dinner drink? Are you sure you want that?”
It’s all she has to say. He hardly drinks in front of Deborah after that. They have wine at table. But if he gets home first, he takes a nip out of the bottle of Jack Daniels, maybe a second nip, maybe a third.
Heather is the one thing he can’t talk about with Deborah—yet all he wants to talk about. Used to telling her everything, he’s barely able to talk to her at all without telling of Heather first. Sometimes he describes her as one good student among several. He criticizes her as overly clever, but he’s clever enough himself not to highlight her. Once she asks, “What’s she like, this Heather?”
“Rather pretty. Blonde. Dates one of the other students.”
“You and your pretty students,” Deborah laughs.
“I don’t want to destroy your marriage,” Heather says to him after they make love. But saying this, her face is completely peaceful. She’s in control. She strokes his flanks.
He exaggerates: “Maybe you have destroyed it.”
“Dave,” she says very quietly. “No, not me, honey. I haven’t.”
_____________
David is respected as a good teacher. This term he’s growing a little sloppy in his undergraduate course—not bothering to prepare. Well, he’s taught the fiction of Lawrence and Joyce, Woolf and Conrad, so often that he can wing it. But papers, which he’s always made a point to get back to students in a week, begin to pile up or get hurriedly corrected. Embarrassed, he sweeps undone work under a mental rug. He doesn’t just “think about” Heather; she’s in every breath.
Do they know at school? He catches looks from students, from other faculty, looks he might be misinterpreting out of guilt. But then Sylvia, the administrative assistant for the graduate program, speaks to him as he’s pouring morning coffee from the carafe she keeps full. “David?” she says. “I’m sure it’s nothing. You know how grad students talk. But . . . ”
That’s all. “Thanks,” he says.
Ragged, he goes to synagogue one Saturday morning. He’s made up his mind to give Heather up and will need whatever strength he can find in services. But when the Torah service begins, he finds his attention wandering, and he realizes that since Deborah thinks he’s at services, he can slip away. It’s a good time to see Heather. She’s been complaining that he compartmentalizes her—what is she supposed to do, she asks, when he’s with his wife?
But parking just across the street from her building, he realizes how unfair it is, just walking in on her. So he calls from the car. “Are you free? Would you like it if I stopped by?” “Is everything all right, Dave?” “Fine, fine.” “Of course stop by. How nice. Give me a few minutes.”
So he waits in his car and just when he’s ready to go up to see her, the time it would take his car to have started off in Cambridge and gotten here, the downstairs door opens and a young man comes out, a man David recognizes—one of the students in the M.F.A. program, older than most, early 30s. The young man, Walter something, a man with curly black hair like David’s own at that age, hurries up the block. David crosses the street and buzzes. Of course, it’s possible that this is where Walter lives, or where some friend of Walter’s lives. He’s sure neither is the case.
He doesn’t know what he’ll say. But something—he can’t let it go. His heart is beating dangerously. He imagines having a heart attack on the stairs and being lifted on a gurney and taken to the hospital, and Deborah asking the nurse, Where did you find my husband? Heather stands at the top of the stairs in an iridescent green exercise suit. “Well, hi. You’re here so fast.”
“I saw Walter,” he says simply.
“Mmm. He stayed over,” she says simply.
“I see. I thought we had an understanding.”
“We didn’t.”
“I thought . . . I imagined stupid things. I know I’m getting to be a damn fool about you. I thought maybe we could take a trip to Paris next month. I could invent a conference—”
Heather puts a finger to his lips and takes his hand. They walk inside. She’s made tea. He’s wearing slacks and a blazer for the synagogue, and she helps him out of his blazer, takes off his tie. He goes into a cupboard and finds his bottle of bourbon and spikes the tea. She’s being very sweet to him. Tender. Tears come to his eyes. She licks them away.
“What do you expect?” she says. She sits beside him and puts her arms around him. “How often are you available to me? What am I supposed to do when you’re not around? I have friends. And David, sweet as it’s been, dear as you are, you’re . . . well, honey, a different generation.”
“Of course,” he says, but feels his heart sink in his chest. “I know that. You imagine I don’t know that? But do you think I’m going to just go away? I’m not going to go away. It’s not going to end like this.”
“Please,” she says. “I want us to be friends, I even want us to be lovers. But Dave, I won’t be harassed. I will stop that from happening, Dave.”
“That’s really funny. I thought I was the one being harassed. Remember?”
“Have I been hard on you, have I been hard on your marriage? The last thing I want is to hurt you.”
_____________
All this time, these months, David has been living an ordinary life in Cambridge, sometimes making love with Deborah, feeling tenderness toward her—tenderness clouded by shame—cooking dinner with her, calling their adult children, preparing his classes, seeing their friends. Most of the time when he’s alone with Deborah, he forgets Heather for hours, then longing for her washes over him and he feels crazy. He’s two people.
When Heather stops seeing him, he drinks hard one night at a sports bar on Mass Ave, but next night doesn’t feel like taking a single drink. Maybe he’s not going to become a drunk after all.
Afraid she’ll go to see the department chair—a new chair, Phil Benzies, a colleague who’s never liked him—afraid she’ll even call Alan—Dean Bayer—he stays away, doesn’t phone. But often for half an hour he sits on the climbing structure or on a swing in the little park across the street, watching her window, watching the front entrance, needing to give himself that pain, like tonguing a cavity. Once, while he’s sitting on a swing, Walter comes up the steps and David watches and waits till the lights in Heather’s apartment dim.
Just before the end of classes, she calls his cell. “Why have you been ignoring me?”
Her voice, its nasality, grates on him. The irritation surprises him. “Ignoring you? Oh, please, Heather. You know you’re turning things around.”
“You really hurt me,” she says. “I can hardly do my work.”
“Did Walter drop you?”
“No. You mean the way you dropped me? As it happens, I dropped Walter. That’s not the point. Can you stop by tomorrow?”
“It won’t be easy. Isn’t it best this way?”
“I’ll expect you in the late afternoon. Please, Dave?” She hangs up.
_____________
He’s supposed to chair a committee meeting the next afternoon; he claims a medical appointment and buys flowers for Heather, roses, a bouquet. On the drive to Heather’s, he gets a call from Deborah. “Honey?” Music in her voice, something not said. “Will you be home early?”
“Absolutely. The meeting will be over by five.”
“Good. I’ll expect you for dinner at six. Don’t be late, all right, David?”
Up the steps to the outside glass door. He buzzes. The hall is unlit, and so the glass serves as a dark mirror. Maybe it’s because he isn’t prepared to look at himself or maybe it’s his own awful projection into this strange image, but he sees someone he doesn’t know, face lined like a cowboy’s, eyes tired. Old.
Heather buzzes him in. Climbing the stairs he lugs the heft of his body—as if lifting weights. There, at the top of the stairs, this shining, golden girl. He stops on the landing, heaves a breath, climbs to her and kisses her, wraps his arms around her, puts his rough to her tender cheek.
“Poor sweetie,” she says. “Are you tired? Been a long day?”—as if this were a marriage.
All at once, a prophet, he sees a possible future: he’ll back away; she’ll need him. He’ll come to her; she’ll keep him at a distance. He’ll never know her. What he knows is the fact of the gaps between them: he old, she young; he Jewish, she Christian. It’s difference posing as mystery. It’s no good at all. He giggles, remembering The Blue Angel: Emil Jannings as the wretched professor, crumbling, in thrall to Marlene Dietrich as Lola.
“What are you laughing at?” For suddenly he explodes into laughter—his belly hurts. He has to sit down and double over to bear it.
“At me. I’m so funny. Hey—can a guy get some tea around here?” The thing is, he tells himself, he doesn’t have to relive Emil Jannings’s role. No.
He knows what he has to do.
When she returns, he helps with her big silver tray, and she says, “I know you don’t mean to ignore me.” And putting down the tray, he says, flat out, “Heather! Ignore you? Of course not. I’ve made a decision. I’m going to leave Deborah. We’ll be together.”
Now she stops pouring tea; she looks at him, puzzled.
“You were right, Heather. Age doesn’t have to matter all that much,” he says. He goes to her and enfolds her in his arms.
“Did I say that?”
“I can take early retirement. I’ll move wherever you get a job after you have your Ph.D.”
“Stop. Dave, stop. You’re going much too fast for me.”
“It’ll be awful. For both of us. I know that. Leaving Deborah. The kids will think I’m out of my mind. But they’re grown up. Of course . . . I’d want you to convert. Or at least try. You can take instruction from a rabbi. We’ll see what happens. And I’ll help you get a job, Heather. You know that, right? Whether we stay together or not, I’ll help. I can’t make promises, but I do have contacts all over the country.” Undermining love, meaning to undermine love, he holds her—maybe, he thinks, for the last time, how sad—holds her while (he’s sure) she considers what he can do for her. Well he can—even in this difficult year he can help. And wasn’t that in the back of her mind all along? Or the front of her mind? Though longing for her in his blood, in the tips of his fingers, longing even as he plays this role, absorbing the odor of her perfume into his chest, he whispers, “I have maybe 10 good years ahead of me, and then—well—you’ll only be 40.”
Forty! That does it. Holding her, he feels her instantly stiffen, pull back—oh, infinitesimally. He thinks how lovely it is to hold her. He wants her to pull back—it’s just what he wants. But doesn’t he also truly want her to throw away her 30s on him?—throw herself off the cliff and he, too, fall off the cliff and fly—and he’d leave Deborah (whom he loves especially now that he’s utterly betrayed her)—doesn’t he partly mean it—it’s crazy, it shows how crazy I am, I actually want to give myself to you. But, thank God, it can’t happen. He strokes her hair.
She’s already gone.
She’s gone, and, leaving her apartment after she says the words she’s supposed to say, words he knew she’d say—how sweet, etcetera, of course it wouldn’t work, etcetera, and he, words of how he completely understands, etcetera—afterward, he feels the emptiness of late afternoon and feels cheap for what he’s done, for who he is. He wants a drink but makes himself face bleakness. Why did Deborah call, insist he not be late? What does she know? Are we in for a terrible time? He drives across the Charles.
Deborah is wearing a new blue apron over a . . . cocktail dress. A sexy, black cocktail dress in the middle of the week? The dining-room table is set for a dinner for four, and candles are already lit, though it’s not dark yet. Oh, the rich cooking smells! What is it? It’s lamb. Deborah, hands on her hips, leans back and laughs at his bewilderment. “It’s for your birthday, dummy!”
“My birthday? That’s not till Friday.”
“I know, dear, but Max and Ellie couldn’t come on Friday, and they’re our oldest friends. They knew us when! Besides, Friday I want you all to myself.”
Sitting in his easy chair he takes the glass of wine she hands him. David feels old, old. Another few years he’ll retire. Already he feels the futility of keeping up to date in scholarship. He’s got his own take on literature, understandings developed over 40 years of study. But he cares little about publishing. So he feels something of a fraud in his work as well as in his marriage.
The Fleischmans arrive with gifts and party hats. The four of them eat stuffed grape leaves and drink champagne. The odors of a rack of lamb float through the room. David is shamed into leaving his bleakness behind. He smiles; he sighs; he smiles. Max and Ellie present David a caricature in pen and ink—David as an old Jewish peddler carrying a bag of the world’s troubles on his back. David feels tears welling up. He wishes the cartoon were accurate and he were that old peddler, a decent man, wishes the bag really held the world’s sorrow. But no—it’s just his own garbage. The champagne makes him want to open up the bag and spill it out before them, the garbage, even makes him almost believe that everyone would understand.
But of course nobody, nobody would understand.
“Thank you,” he says to Max, to Ellie, to Deborah. He looks up at Deborah, for the moment awash in love. Deborah has placed little candles on the mantle, on all the windowsills. It’s just dark enough for the candles to make a difference.