All That Is (29 page)

“Outrageous.”

“The thing is, they want a life like ours. We both can’t have a life like ours. So, the old fellow died, eh? Your father-in-law.”

“He died, and my father died.”

“Sorry to hear that. Mine did, too. He died just this last spring. It was sudden, I couldn’t get there beforehand. I come from a small town and a respectable family. We knew the doctor, we knew the president of the
bank. If you called the doctor, even at some god-awful hour, he’d come to the house. He knew you. He knew your whole family. He’d held you up by the feet when you were two minutes old and whacked you to get the first wail of life out of you. Decency, that was a word you lived by. Loyalty. I’m loyal to all that, boyhood, the Old South. You have to have loyalty to things. If you don’t have loyalty, you’re alone on earth. I have a wonderful photograph of my father in his infantry uniform, he’s smoking a cigarette. I don’t know where it was taken. Photography is a tremendous thing. In this photograph he’s still alive.”

He paused as if to reflect or turn the page.

“I’m selling this book to the movies,” he said. “Handsome sum of money, but what jackals they are. Unworthy. They have too much money, limitless. I had a writer named Boyd, an ex-preacher, he could write, he had the gift. I couldn’t sell his stories. It’s a shame. He wrote a story I’ll never forget about a blind pig, it would break your heart. His ambition was to sell a story or two to
Harper’s
. Not very much to ask, other people managed to do it, other writers who for some reason or other they preferred.”

They shook hands on the street. It was past two and a beautiful afternoon. The light seemed unusually clear. He walked up Madison then. There was no neighborhood quite like it—the galleries on the side streets with fragments of statues, the bourgeois apartment buildings on the corners, monuments really, not of impressive height, eight or ten stories with wide windows. The traffic was not heavy, the green of the park only a block away. On the sidewalk the few tables of a small restaurant were empty now. Women were shopping. An old man was walking a dog.

There was a bookshop further up that he liked. The owner was a slight man in his fifties who was always dressed in a suit and came, it was said, from a well-to-do family in which he was the errant son. From childhood he had always loved books and wanted to be a writer, later copying out pages of Flaubert and Dickens by hand. He’d imagined himself in a light-filled room in Paris working in solitude and had eventually gone to Paris but was only lonely there and unable to write.

The bookshop was in his image. There was only a small display window, and the shop was narrow in front, squeezed by an adjoining stairway
to the apartments above, but it widened in back to the size of a room that was filled from top to bottom with shelves of books any of which Edward Heiman could put his hand on without hesitation, as if he had originally placed it there himself. His recommendations could be relied on. His customers were largely known to him, if not by face, then by name, although people unfamiliar to him also came in and lingered. He had grown up a block or two away on Park Avenue where he still lived, and it was to the disappointment of the family that he’d become a bookseller. Best-sellers were displayed on a pedestal in front though sharing the space with lesser-known books.

He did much of his business by telephone. Customers would call and order books they had heard of, and they would be delivered that day to the apartment, sometimes including a title or two of his choosing that could be returned. His idea of what was worthwhile was not without its own cachet, worthy books that had eluded the critics—all but the most perceptive—and when opened had a seductive power of information or intellect or style. Women particularly liked his advice and found him sympathetic although his manners made him seem almost shy. He had a fondness for women who wore masculine clothes, he had once remarked to Bowman—Japanese women especially. He liked women writers, even those whose reputation was based on second-rate or even political work. Men had had all the advantage for centuries, he felt, and now women were having their turn. The excesses were to be expected.

“Clarissa,”
he said in his quiet voice. “That’s a terrifying book. It deserves response. We don’t sell many copies of
Clarissa
, of course, but that doesn’t mean much. Whitman gave away more copies of
Leaves of Grass
than he sold, which I could do with any number of books here. We’re not selling much John Marquand or Louis Bromfield either, but that’s a different matter.”

He was married although his wife never came around. Someone described her as very attractive. Not in the physical sense. It was her entire person.

A woman as unique, then, as her husband with something like his tastes or perhaps with tastes of her own. He lived in the world of books. She was not that interested in books, she preferred clothes and certain friendships. There were too many books altogether—you might read one
once in a while … Edward Heiman was perhaps like Liebling or Lampedusa in his own Sicily. Their wives were off somewhere.

Bowman continued walking. It was a part of the city he liked, a comfortable, well-off part where eccentricities could be paid for. The white brick building where the old writer, Swangren, had lived was only a few blocks away, and Gavril Aronsky’s chaotic apartment was nearby.
The Savior
had been a notorious book, half a million copies sold at least. Baum had never uttered a word of regret for not having published it. Aronsky had written four or five more books, but his reputation had gradually become thinner and thinner. As he aged, he had become thinner also until he finally looked like a starving bird. When someone mentioned
The Savior
, Baum had remarked merely,

“Yes, I know the book.”

In Clarke’s a soft feeling of reminiscence came over him. The bar was almost empty at that hour of the afternoon. The crowds had gone back to their offices. There were a few drinkers down near the front window where the sunlight prevented you from seeing them clearly. He was remembering Vivian and her friend, Louise. Also George Amussen and his lasting disapproval. His two daughters had shared his love of horses and had each married the wrong man. The thing about Vivian was that she was—Bowman hadn’t really understood it at the time—so ineradicably part of it, the drinking, the big houses, and cars with mud-crusted boots and bags of dog food lying in back, the self-approval and money. All of it had seemed inessential, even amusing.

He ordered a beer. He felt himself floating in time. He could see himself in the mirror behind the bar, shadowed and silvery, as he had seen himself years before when he had just come to the city, young and ambitious with the dream of finding his place there and all that implied. He studied himself in the mirror. He was midway or a little past that depending on where you began counting. His real life had begun at eighteen, the life he now stood at the summit of.

Christine was in the city less often, but she and Bowman were like a married couple who were together on the weekends. Her life was really in the country, which seemed somehow right for her. She had friends, many of them his friends, and she was good company. She had made almost four thousand dollars commission on the house. She offered to help with the mortgage by making the payments for a while since she was really living there.

Sometime around Thanksgiving she went to look at a house that was under construction in Wainscott and met the contractor who was inside cutting some floorboards. He stopped and turned off the saw. He asked if he could show her the house. He was building it to sell it, and when he did would probably build or remodel another. He’d have to see how it went. They walked around. She was in heels and had to be careful going up the unfinished stairs. Houses always looked wonderful before the walls went up. He had an easy, persuasive way of talking and asked if she could have lunch with him sometime to talk about the business of selling the house. It was casual—he didn’t say more than that.

His name was Ken Rochet. They had lunch in a restaurant across from the harbor where it was a little noisy, but they were able to talk. He’d come from the site. There was even a bit of sawdust on his hands.
He was wearing a blue polo shirt. He seemed at home in the world. He worked, read, cooked, and lived with women, though none of that was known to her. She was drawn to him as she’d once been drawn to her husband, irresistibly, without consent. There was something in her that turned towards such men. It was beyond anything she might explain. It was the blue shirt faded from countless washings that seduced her. He knew more about real estate than it had seemed, but still she was able to advise him. He watched her go to the ladies’ room and then come back. She was wearing a print dress. She looked to him like a glorious feathered bird and he a fox.

He had a hardness she liked. He was husky and played second base on the local softball team. At his favorite bars and restaurants the hostesses knew him. She didn’t want to meet him in places where her car might be noticed, and they went instead to a restaurant never very crowded and sat drinking and talking at the bar with their cars parked near each other amid the trees. Evening fell and on into the dark. Her chin was in the palm of her hand and her slender fingers outstretched. He told her about his brother with whom he had been in a terrible accident. His brother had been in the passenger seat. He was brain-dead on arrival at the hospital—this was in Providence—but they kept him on life support for three days. His wife finally agreed that it was hopeless, but she wanted to keep him breathing until they could take some semen from him—they had no children and she wanted a child.

“What finally happened?”

“I’ll tell you sometime,” he said.

“Tell me now.”

“They used mine. She did.”

“So you’re a father.”

“I guess technically,” he said.

“It’s not so technical.”

That first night, as it happened, Christine’s car wouldn’t start when she was leaving. It was Bowman’s old car—he’d had it for more than ten years.

“What are you driving a Volvo for, anyway?” Rochet asked her.

“It’s not my car,” she said.

“Whose is it?”

“That’s another story. Don’t ask me now.”

“It’s an old married couple’s car,” he said.

“Well, it started before. Do you know anything about cars?”

“I’m afraid I do,” he said.

It wasn’t much—the lead on the battery terminal was loose. He carefully scraped it clean with a penknife and worked it down.

“Try it now.”

It started, and she followed him driving out.

His house had a small porch and, like hers, was always unlocked. It was really a small summer house with two rooms upstairs and down. He had only a half bottle of wine, and she drank it with him feeling nineteen again.

“Take off your shoes, if you like,” he suggested.

He reached down and untied his. They sat barefoot, drinking in the dark. He kissed her throat, and she let him take off her blouse. They made love on the couch. The next time she came they went upstairs. It was supposed to be just for a look, but she turned to him at the top and slowly took off her earrings. He was on her like a beast. It was his house they went to but not always. He came walking up the driveway having prudently parked on the road. She was waiting. He followed her into the house. Who owns it? he asked her. It had a nice dry feeling. The walls needed painting. She got out of bed with a terrible thirst after hours of lovemaking.

Bowman knew nothing and never suspected. He saw himself as Eros and Christine as his. He lived in the pleasure of possessing her, unbelievable as it was, the simplicity and justice of it. As if he were part now of the secret world of the senses, he saw what he had not seen before. Walking to work he passed a florist’s and caught a glimpse of, in back among the dense greens, a girl bent forward at the waist and another figure, a man stepping in behind her. The girl changed her stance slightly. Was he really seeing this, Bowman thought, in the morning as the ordinary world went past? An older woman, about to walk by him, paused to look, too, as just in that moment it changed. The girl was merely bending over to arrange some flowers, and the man was beside, not behind her. It might have been an omen or part of one, but he was not open to omens.

The first that he learned was word being forwarded to him in Chicago, where he was attending the booksellers convention. A suit had been filed
against him. It was seeking sole ownership of the house. He immediately called Christine and left a message. It was early evening, but she didn’t call back. He couldn’t reach her until the next day.

“Darling, what is all this?” he asked.

Her voice seemed cool.

“I can’t talk about it just now,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just not able to.”

“I don’t understand, Christine. You have to explain. What’s going on?”

He was experiencing a sudden, frightening confusion.

“What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

She was silent.

“Christine!”

“Yes.”

“Tell me. What’s happened?”

“It’s about the house,” she said as if giving in.

“Yes, I know. What about it?”

“I can’t talk. I have to go.”

“For God’s sake!” he cried.

He had the sense of being reduced to nothing, a sickening sense of not knowing. When, back in New York, he had the full details, he insisted on meeting and talking, but she would not. But I love you, I loved you, he was thinking. And she was unperturbed. She was cold. How did it happen, that something no longer mattered, that it had been judged inessential? He wanted to take her by the arms and shake her back to life.

Her claim was that the house was hers and that it had been bought in both their names only because she was unable to qualify for a mortgage. She was suing for breach of an oral contract and for sole title to the house. Bowman’s lawyer was a man in Southampton, a former alcoholic with silvery hair. He had handled cases like this—she had almost no chance of prevailing.