All That Is (21 page)

“For me, too.”

On a hot day in June, Bowman drove north from New York, generally following the Hudson for more than four hours to Chatham, a place once sacred for a love goddess, the poet Edna Millay, a siren of the 1920s, to spend two days working on a manuscript with a favorite writer, a square-faced man in his fifties with blue eyes and thinning hair who in his youth had dropped out of Dartmouth and gone to sea for three years. Kenneth Wells was his name. He and his wife—she was his third wife, he didn’t particularly look like a man who’d been married a number of times, he was homely, his eyesight was bad; she had been married to his neighbor and one day the two of them had simply gone off to Mexico together and not come back—lived in a house that Bowman liked and that always stayed in his mind as a model. It was a plain wooden house not far from the road and resembled a farm building or stables. You entered through the kitchen or into it. There was a bedroom on one side and the living room on the other. The main bedroom was upstairs. The interior doors, for some reason, were slightly wider than usual with glass in the upper half of some. It was like a small family hotel, a hotel in the West.

It had been a long day. The summer had come early. Sun struck the trees of the countryside with dazzling power. In towns along the way, girls with tanned limbs strolled idly past stores that looked closed.
Housewives drove with kerchiefs on their heads and their men in hard yellow hats stood near signs warning Construction Ahead. The landscape was beautiful but passive. The emptiness of things rose like the sound of a choir making the sky bluer and more vast.

It was the period when, in Paris, the lengthy and futile negotiations to end the war in Vietnam were continuing for month after unsuccessful month. America was in endless and violent upheaval, the entire nation torn apart by the war, but Wells seemed curiously uninvolved. He was more interested in baseball, from other passions he lived apart. He was an avid reader, so was his wife. Their bookshelves were divided into his and hers, their books were kept apart. On an old, marble-topped buffet were stacks of books, many of them new. Nearby on the wall a postcard of the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna was pinned, along with a photograph of a girl in a bikini, and another of a dish of pasta clipped from some magazine.

“T T T,” Wells said.

“T T T?”

“Tits, towers, and tortellini.”

He grinned and showed the spaces between his teeth that were like walrus tusks pointing in several directions. There was also a black-and-white photograph of German women weeping with emotion at a Nazi parade and upstairs, though no one ever saw it, a framed photo of a woman’s naked legs and lower body tumbled across a bed. He wrote sophisticated crime novels, the investigator in which was an overweight woman in her fifties named Gwen Godding who had been married four times, the second and longest time to a California highway patrolman. She’d been widowed twice and had an eye towards marrying again. She was engaging and intelligent and described by Wells as having makeup like a disguise or put on by an undertaker. His research was meticulous, and he could work like a farmer, in fact his muscled jaws made him look like one. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, sometimes two pairs at a time, but to examine something closely pushed them up onto his forehead. His books sold very well, and the first of them had been bought for the movies as the vehicle for a quite mature star.

Wells liked to write, to sit at his desk reading and then begin to type. Only rarely did he talk about his time at sea, the working life, as he called it, staggering home in the morning, shirttail out, with a six-pack of beer
and a case of the clap. He remembered being in Samoa in some hotel where the sign said Limited Room Service, Due to Great Distance from the Kitchen.

“You can’t say that about this place,” he said.

They were sitting in the kitchen.

“What made you decide to live up here?” Bowman asked.

“I wanted to get away from the water,” Wells said. “When we left Mexico—I got tired of Mexico, huge mosquitoes,
animales
, they called them—we lived in St. Croix, in Frederiksted. We had an old Danish sea captain’s house down by the water with wooden shutters, hibiscus, palm trees. Have you been to Frederiksted? The town is almost all black. Nobody seems to work. The bank had a For Rent sign on it, but you could see stunning black women in white evening dresses coming from the hotel at night out onto the street. The library was right across from where we lived. You could see the tall schoolgirls in there sprawled by the desks, their arms dangling over the chairs, boys whispering to them all day long. You could understand what slavery was about. The books—no one read any books—the only books taken out were those on pregnancy.”

His wife, Michele—Mitch, he called her—was a calm woman in her forties, unhurried and attentive to him, tolerant. She knew his views and his character. Although there was little evidence of discord between them, there must have been some, but from the pair of them Bowman felt a strong pull towards connubial life, joined life, somewhere in the country, the early morning, misty fields, the snake in the garden, tortoise in the woods. Against that was the city with its myriad attractions, art, carnality, the amplification of desires. It was like a tremendous opera with an infinite cast and tumultuous as well as solitary scenes.

He felt the absence, not necessarily of marriage, but of a tangible center in life around which things could form and find a place. He realized what had brought it to mind, this house, Wells’, and the description of the captain’s house in Frederiksted. He imagined a house of his own, though only vaguely. For some reason he saw it in the fall. It was raining, rain was a blur on the windows and he had lit a fire against the chill.

He took the time to look.

“I’m interested in a small house with an exceptional room or two,” he told the agent.

She was a tart woman who was a member of the board of the golf club nearby.

“I don’t know what you mean by exceptional room,” she said.

“Well, why don’t we begin by looking at something? Show me one or two of your favorites.”

“What is the price range you’re interested in?”

“Let’s say from two thousand dollars up,” Bowman said to annoy her.

“I don’t have anything in that range,” she said. “Also, I really have a business to run.”

“I know you do. Tell me, what can I buy a two-bedroom house for?”

“It depends entirely on the house and the location. I would say, between sixty and two hundred thousand dollars, south of the highway.”

“I don’t want a house in the trees, the woods. I’d like a house that’s well-situated and open to the light,” he said.

It was hard to tell if she was sensitive to what he was saying or not. She showed him nothing of interest although at the end of an astrigent hour and a half, passing through some open fields bounded by trees, she slowed down near a driveway and said,

“This is more expensive, but I thought I’d show it to you.”

She was in fact showing her authority. They drove down a long straight road, not overly maintained, in the shadow of foliage overhead. It was almost sepulchral. The green was intense. Then it unexpectedly opened to a dark wooden house on a slight rise, a sort of Adirondack house built to the mountain gods, in the open but surrounded by a tall canopy of trees like a layer of clouds. It was a house named Crossways and had been designed by Stanford White, another of whose great houses, Flying Point, on the ocean, had burned.

They went up wide wooden steps and into a serene interior with comfortable furnishings and devoid of haphazard light. The floors were polished but not shining. The windows were large and clear. The house was cruciform in shape with each arm looking down its own alley of trees to the fields. It had passed through the hands of several owners and its price was in millions.

When they were in the car again, Bowman said,

“That was worth it.”

But he did not go to that agent again.

He didn’t like women who looked down on you for whatever reason. Within limits, he liked the opposite. You rarely found all the qualities you sought. It was not something he spent time thinking about. He’d had various love affairs. As he became older, the women became older, too, and less inclined to foolish or carefree acts. But the city was teeming, the feminist movement had changed it. He was usually in a suit. He always wore one to work. On the escalator at Grand Central, a girl with a nice face, composed and brown, said to him,

“Hello. Are you going where?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I was asking if you are going to near here,” she said.

“I’m going to Forty-First Street,” Bowman said.

“Ah. Do you have an office?”

He couldn’t quite tell what she wanted.

“Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I just thought we could exchange numbers and you could call.”

“For what?” he said.

“Business,” she said simply.

Her raincoat, he noticed, was not entirely clean.

“What kind of business?”

“You can say.”

She looked at him openly. She had an outsider’s dignity, a West African dignity, and also a touch of weariness.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“My name? Eunice.”

He felt in his pocket for bills. He took one out and put it in her hand, a ten.

“No,” she said, “you don’t have to.”

“Take it, Eunice. It’s a down payment.”

“No.”

“I have to go,” he said and walked away.

For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publishing house, Baum gave a party in a French restaurant. There was a large crowd, almost all of them people Bowman knew. On the far side of the room he caught sight of Gretchen, who had long since become an editor herself, at a paperback
house. She was married and a mother. He made his way across to her to say hello.

“It’s so nice to see you,” he said.

She still had the quality that had allowed her to ignore the terrible blemishes although these were now gone. On her smooth forehead and cheeks were only some faint etched scars, barely noticeable.

“How have you been?” he asked.

“Very well,” she said. “And you?”

“The same. You look wonderful. It’s been a long time. What is it, six years?”

“More,” she said.

“It doesn’t seem it. We miss you. Neil left, I guess you know that. He went to work for Delovet. He went over to the enemy.”

“I know.”

“You were a great distraction to him,” Bowman said. “You had a boyfriend, though.”

“I didn’t have a boyfriend,” she said.

“I thought you did.”

“I was married.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Just briefly,” she said.

“You seemed so innocent.”

“I was innocent.”

She was still innocent. Also, he hadn’t noticed it before, slightly shy.

“I miss Neil,” he said. “I don’t see him very often these days.”

“He sent me some poems,” she said. “Back then, I mean.”

“I didn’t know that. He was smitten. There were some poems he didn’t send you.”

“Really?”

“Oh, nothing terrible.”

“I wasn’t sure if you liked me,” she said.

“Me? I’m surprised to hear you say that. I liked you very much.”

“Neil wasn’t the one I was interested in,” she said.

In the same undramatic way, she went on, “You were the one. I didn’t have the nerve though.”

He felt inept.

“I was married.”

“It didn’t matter,” she said.

“You shouldn’t be telling me now. I don’t know, it’s too disorienting.”

“Since I’m confessing it,” she said, “I might as well say nothing has changed.”

It was said quite simply.

“Why don’t you call me? I’d love to see you,” she said.

She was looking directly at him. He didn’t know what to say. Just then her husband, who had been getting drinks at the bar, came back. The three of them talked together for a few minutes. Bowman had the feeling that they all knew. That evening he didn’t talk to her again.

He saw her now, of course, in a different way. He was tempted to call her but felt it would not be right, from a moral viewpoint and something besides. They were not the people they had been. He admired her, however, the marred girl she had been, the poised woman she now was. She was the age when she could still be naked. He could be gone from the office for several hours in the afternoon, almost any afternoon, and so could she. It was not indiscretion, it was what was due her.

You’re a fool, he told himself. He saw himself in the mirror in the morning. His hair was thinner now but his face, it seemed, was the same. He had come to the point where he was certain of his abilities, how to make writers want to be published by him, among others. He knew that some of the best writers began as journalists and sometimes ended as journalists when the passion faded. He knew also that he had the ability to turn people against him. That came with the rest of it. He could talk about books and writers and literature blooming in one country and then another, not through one great writer but always through a group of them, almost as though you had to have enough wood for a real fire, one or two big sticks were not enough. He went on about Russian writing, talking too much about Gogol, perhaps, and about the French and English. They had their great periods, Paris, London. Now it was undoubtedly New York.

“Would the genius mind telling us his name?” a man across the table asked.

He was involved, though not that closely, with certain poets, not as their editor, if editor was the correct word, since poems were essentially inviolable. Poetry was largely left to McCann, who had been hired more or less to replace Eddins. He was an easterner who walked with a cane. He’d had polio, both he and his roommate at Groton, the two of them had helped the stricken football captain from chapel and had come down with it. At the time, in the 1930s, there was an epidemic every fall—parents lived in terror of it. McCann was married to an English journalist who wrote for the
Guardian
and was often away on assignment.

Poetry books sold few copies. Publishing them was a charitable act, Baum used to say, mainly to arouse McCann, although the books were an important ornament to the reputation of the house. Since few people read poetry after college, the struggle for prominence among poets was all the more fierce and the award of one of the important prizes or a secure academic position was often the result of intense self-promotion, flattery, and mutual agreements. There were perhaps poets in parochial cities living drab lives like Cavafy’s, but those Bowman knew were quite social and even urbane, well accustomed to the current in which they were swimming, brushing against one another as they went, a Yale Younger Poets to one, a Bollingen to the next, a Pulitzer.