All That Is (18 page)

In the distance, on a small hill near a village, was a white house surrounded by trees, a house he might live in with her, the bedroom above the silent garden, cool and green, doors to the balcony that overlooked it, mornings of love with the sun slanted across the floor. She would bathe with the door left open and at night they would drive to a city—he had no idea which one, one not far, they were all magical—and then back later in the deep, starry night.

At the same time, he was unsure of her, you would have to be, especially when she had been silent or withdrawn. He felt he was the object of her thoughts then, or worse, not even a part of them. She sometimes glanced at him briefly as if judging. He knew not to show fear but she sometimes made him uneasy with her composure. There were times when she left to go on an errand, to the pharmacy or the consulate—she never bothered to explain why she’d gone to the consulate—and he suddenly felt with a certainty that in fact she was really leaving, that he would go back to the hotel and her bags would be gone, the clerk at the desk would know nothing. He would run in the street looking for her, the blondness of her hair in the crowd.

The truth is, with some women you are never sure. They had traveled for ten days and he felt he knew her, in the room he knew her, at least most of the time, and also sitting at the chestnut-colored bar of the hotel, but you could not know someone else all of the time, their thoughts, about which it was useless to ask. She did not so much as acknowledge the existence of the handsome bartender, so intent was she on whatever she was thinking at the time. The bartender was used to being admired and stood almost disconsolately waiting a few steps away. She hated the thought of going back to London, Enid then said.

“Me, too,” Bowman said.

She was silent.

“Your husband,” he continued.

“Oh, partly my husband. Well, more than partly. I don’t want to leave here. Why don’t you move to London?”

He hadn’t expected it.

“Move to London,” he said. “Are you going to get a divorce?”

“I’d love to. I can’t at the moment.”

“Why is that?”

“Oh, there are two or three reasons. Money is one of them. He won’t give me any money.”

“Couldn’t you get it in court?”

“It’s exhausting to think of. The battle. The courts.”

“But you’d be free.”

“Free and alone.”

“You wouldn’t be alone.”

“Is that a promise?” she said.

They didn’t return to London together. He took the plane to New York from Madrid. As it happened, there was no one in the seat next to him and he sat looking out the window for a while and then sitting back with a feeling of relaxation and deep happiness. Spain was falling away beneath them. She had taken him there. He would remember for a long time. The high, wide steps of the great hotel, the Alfonso XIII, up which, as ascending to an altar, bankers and Nationalist generals had walked. The dirt paths in the Retiro, the ranks of white statues.

On the flyleaf of the book of Lorca poems he carefully wrote the names of the hotels, the Reina Victoria, Dauro, del Cardenal, Simón. They had slept in a bed with four pillows, lost in the whiteness of them. The word for naked in Spanish was
desnudo
. It was the same in any language, she remarked.

He ordered a drink. The announcements were finished and there was only the low, steady sound of the engines. He saw himself sitting there as if from the outside somehow, but he was also thinking about himself. He could see himself, all of himself, from his hand holding the glass right down to his feet. How lucky he was. He could see the leg of another passenger, a man in first class, a gray-suited leg. He felt superior to the man, whoever he was, to everyone. You smell like soap, she had said. He’d had a bath. You washed all the man-smell away. It’ll come back, he’d said. The suited leg made him think of New York, of the office. He thought of Gretchen with her stigma and how it somehow made her more desirable. He thought of the girl in Virginia that Christmas, Dare, who breathed a sexuality, she would be yours in a minute if you were the
one … if you were the one. It had happened and he was, in Spain with a woman who had given him the feeling of utter supremacy. He had crossed some line. Her blond hair, her lean style. He saw himself now to be another kind of man, the kind he had hoped, fully a man, used to the wonder. Enid smoked cigarettes, she did it only now and again, and breathed out the rich fragrance slowly. The light in the Ritz made her beautiful. The sound of her high heels. There is no other, there will never be another.

Later in the fall he came back to the office after lunch. It was growing colder, the crowds in the street had wind-freshened faces. The sky was without color and the windows of buildings, as happened at ever earlier hours, were alight. The office seemed unusually quiet, had everyone gone out? It was eerily still. They were not gone, but they were listening to the news. A frightening thing had happened. The president had been shot in Dallas.

In the small white house in Piermont, together with his wife and Leon, Eddins was living the life of a philosopher king. The house was still plainly furnished, two old wicker chairs with cushions were near the couch and there was a worn oriental rug. There were books, bamboo night tables in the bedroom, and a sense of harmony. They wanted for nothing. In the kitchen, which was also the dining room, was the table on which they ate and where Eddins often liked to sit reading with a cigarette burning in an amber holder and a feeling of the house around him, on his shoulders, as it were, his wife and Leon upstairs and sleeping and he, like Atlas, supporting it all.

Around the town they dressed casually, Eddins, as he said, in house-painter style, the locale seemed to call for it. He wore an overcoat, a scarf and suit jacket, sweatpants, and a fedora although he dressed up when he went into the city. He drove, usually alone, and always with a feeling of exhilaration when, crossing the George Washington Bridge, he saw the great skyline in the distance. At night, driving more freely and amid less traffic the farther he got from the city, he arrived home still humming a little with the energy of Manhattan.

For a long time they remained one of the new couples one always envies, a couple free of habit and familiarity, of history even, and at parties
as they stood talking to people she would, unseen, hold his thumb. At night they would lie in bed listening to the stairs creak and watching television, hardly bothering to tell Leon to turn out his light. Night with the great river silent. Night with bits of rain. The entire house creaked in winter, and in the summer it felt like Bombay. Because of Leon, they could no longer sit, like William Blake and his wife, naked in the garden, but on the headboard of the bed she had printed a small sign that said
Umda
, a kind of Egyptian king or chief, and he wore only the bottoms of his pajamas.

In town and in the neighboring village, Grand View, they had made friends. At Sbordone’s one night they met a somewhat doleful-looking painter named Stanley Palm who looked like Dante in the painting of him seeing Beatrice for the first time and lived in a cinderblock house on the river with a small studio to the side of it. He was separated from his wife, Marian. They had been married for twelve years and had a nine-year-old daughter named Erica. Erica Palm, Eddins thought to himself. He liked the sound of it. Erica and Leon. It was unusual but very modern, the parents of both of them had been divorced or at least had come undone. In Palm’s case it was because his wife had gotten discouraged and given up on him: he was going nowhere. He had no gallery in New York, no reputation. He taught three days a week in the art department at City College, the rest of the time he worked in his studio on paintings that were sometimes all one color.

Palm didn’t have much luck with women though he hadn’t abandoned hope. Especially at bars he had no luck. In the city he stopped for a drink and to a woman who seemed to be by herself, ventured,

“Come alone?”

He could be sized up in a glance.

“No. My friend is getting me a drink,” she said.

Palm saw no one and finally asked,

“Where are you from?”

“I’m from the moon,” she said cooly.

“Ah. I’m from Saturn.”

“You look it.”

He’d been separated for more than a year. It was hard to understand things, he confessed to Eddins. There were painters doing very well who
were not any better than he was. There were people for whom everything seemed easy. On impulse one night he called Marian.

“Hi, babe,”

“Stanley?”

“Yeah,” he said somewhat threateningly, “it’s Stanley.”

“I didn’t recognize your voice for a minute. You sound funny.”

“Do I?”

“Have you been drinking?”

“No, I’m fine. What are you doing?” he asked more casually.

“What do you mean?”

“Why don’t you come over here?”

“Come over there?”

He decided to go ahead with it, in the spirit of the times.

“I feel like fucking you,” he said rather quickly.

“Oh, gosh,” she said.

“No, I mean it.”

She changed the subject, he’d clearly been drinking or listening to something.

“What have you been doing with yourself?” she asked.

“Nothing. I’ve been thinking about us. Why don’t you be nice about it?”

“I have been nice.”

“I’m feeling really lonely.”

“It’s not loneliness.”

“What would you call it?”

“I can’t come over.”

“Why not? Why not be a good-hearted woman?”

“I have been. Lots of times.”

“That’s not helping me now,” he said.

“You’ll get over it.”

She talked to him a while longer. At the end she asked if he felt any better.

“No,” he said.

Then one day at the Village Hall, where he’d gone with some announcements of a show he was part of, there was a dark-haired girl in a tight sweater who seemed friendly. Her name was Judy, she was younger
but they talked for a while and she was impressed that he was a painter. She had never met a painter before, she said. She gave him a ride back towards Piermont and along the way, as if in a trance, he reached over and slipped a hand inside her leather jacket, like a rock star, as she drove. She said nothing and became his girlfriend. Soon he told her about an idea he had which was to open a restaurant, the kind that was in New York that painters and musicians went to. It would be Italian and he had a name for it, Sironi’s, after a painter he admired.

“Sironi’s.”

“Yeah.”

Judy was enthusiastic. She would help with everything, she said, and be a partner. Palm saw a dream coming true, the kind of dream that seldom dies. Sironi’s would be in town somewhere, although there was also a possible location up on 9W. Judy was in favor of town, she didn’t like the idea of being away from everything, particularly late at night.

“Why do you want to be up there?” she said.

“Well, there’s an old place for rent there right next to a curve. Marian didn’t like the idea, either.”

“What does Marian have to do with it?” Judy said.

Stanley had known they were not going to get along and had even been uneasy about Judy spending nights with him. He had her park a little down the road.

“What’s wrong? You afraid someone will see me?”

“It’s not that. It’s Erica,” he said.

“Doesn’t Marian know you have a girlfriend? And what business is it of hers, anyway?”

“Marian doesn’t have anything to do with it, and it doesn’t matter what she thinks. I don’t give a damn what she thinks.”

“Yes, you do,” Judy said.

Stanley was bothered by this. He did talk to his wife a lot, she sometimes called when Judy was there. It was plain who he was talking to. But he was an artist, he felt he should not be constrained by bourgeois mentality or behavior. He asked Marian to write a letter saying that he was free to see anyone he liked and to make love to anyone he liked though she declined to say in any place he liked and in any way he liked.

Judy read the letter and began to cry.

“What is it?”

“Oh, God!”

“What?”

“You have to get her permission!”

The colored sketches Stanley had made of the front and also the bar area of Sironi’s notwithstanding, an unrelated event stopped everything. The mayor, who had been in office for years, a man with a family and many relatives in town, had been having an affair with a cashier who worked at the Tappan Zee Bank, and they were sexually engaged one night in his car when a diligent policeman shined a light in the window. The cashier claimed rape but then regained her poise, and the mayor sought to explain it to the policeman, who, unfortunately, was the chief of police. The mayor’s attempts to keep him from entering it on the blotter were of no avail, and the result was a state of hostility that divided the town into two camps with the mayor’s wife on the police side, and a state of administrative paralysis. Sironi’s permits were indefinitely stalled.

In the city one day Eddins had lunch at the Century Club, in the distinguished surroundings of portraits and books, with a successful literary agent named Charles Delovet, who was well-dressed and walked with a slight limp said to be from a ski accident. One of his shoes had a thick heel though it was not obvious. Delovet was a man of style and attractive to women. He had some major clients, Noël Coward, it was rumored, and also a yacht in Westport on which he gave parties in the summer. In his office he had a ceramic ashtray from the
Folies Bergère
with a dancer’s long legs in relief and, imprinted around the rim:
Plaire aux femmes, ça coûte cher
—women are expensive. He’d been an editor at one time and he liked writers, loved them, in fact. He rarely met a writer he didn’t like or who didn’t have some quality he liked. But there were a few. He hated plagiarists.

“Penelope Gilliatt. Kosinski,” he said, “what a phony.”

When he was an editor, he remarked, he bought books. As an agent, he was selling them. It was much easier than deciding whether or not to buy something, and the best part was that once you sold a book, your responsibilities were over. The publisher took on all that, and if the book
did well, so did you. If it didn’t, there were always more manuscripts out there. You also had the opportunity, he said, to see a writer grow and advance, there was a relationship.