Asa, as I Knew Him (18 page)

It was late, late in the year when she called. The earth had
frozen already and rang out under his feet when he walked to work: the hopeless month between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“I have something for you,” she said on the phone.

He feared it was a Christmas present. She’d given him two, and two birthday presents as well. He’d never given her anything. He dawdled on his way to the restaurant despite the cold, or maybe in hope of numbing himself further. He had by then achieved a blankness that, in moments of lucidity, he worried would be his permanent state.

Dumplings, spicy fish, rice for two; the moment had come to look at her. She looked the same. “Is that a new ring?”

“Asa, I’ve had this for fifteen years.”

He did suddenly remember trying it on one summer afternoon and laughing because it didn’t fit even his little finger. “Oh, yeah.” He wanted a beer. Which was worse, forgetting or finding that wisp of memory?

“You’re so unobservant,” she said.

“Don’t hold it against me.” He raised his teacup. “Here’s looking at you.” He was, by then, able to more easily. It was true, she looked the same. “You never change.”

“It’s only been six months.”

“I love the skin on this fish. Crackly.” He realized she would think he was “avoiding” something.

But: “Very good,” she agreed, and they discussed what seedlings were in his basement and Roger’s latest unwritten article and how she was finding the free-lance life. He thought they might get through it without—what? Acknowledgment. And the longer they did, in fact, maintain their banal interchange, the safer he felt looking at her, enjoying her cheek and how it met her lip, the ivory of her sweater against her darker ivory neck, her hand clumsy with the chopsticks.

“You don’t know how to use those,” he told her. He realized she had always used them wrong. He moved to position them correctly for her. The sensation of her skin against his was so familiar that it was as if a landscape from boyhood were spread before his eyes. Her hand lay quiet in his. I’ve had a good life, he thought. He showed her how to cradle the sticks in the hollow between her thumb and forefinger; her hand was soft and pliant, and the whole time their skins brushed against each other he felt the warmth of his life surrounding him.

Then fortune cookies. “Why are they always like this? ‘You have a good head for business.’ ” His was, “A friend asks only for your time and not your money.”

“At least yours is true,” she said.

“So what do you have for me?”

“What I wrote.” She took a folder from her bag. “I wanted you to have a copy. After all, it’s yours in a way. So here.” She pushed it across the table.

They parted on the street, quickly, because it was cold and they didn’t know how to say good-bye. They settled on an awkward hug made more ungainly by their coats and gloves. “Merry Christmas,” they told each other, and “Let’s not wait so long next time.” Then they walked off in opposite directions.

It was a slow afternoon at work. The magazine had been put to bed the week before, and the pile of articles on Asa’s desk was only thicker than it had been before he got caught up in the mechanics of the last issue. A profile of a physicist whose work he didn’t understand; an article on weather; a photographic essay on East Africa. And on top, something by Dinah. Two-thirty. He cleaned his waxing machine. Three-ten. He discussed inside-cover advertising possibilities with
the sales manager over the intercom. Three-twenty. He shut the door to his office. He put his feet on his desk and began to read.

It made him queasy, no doubt about it. He kept fighting the urge to stop. At the same time he was fascinated, because he saw himself there—but then again,
not
himself, a ghost or duplicate. The queasiness came from the way he felt shuttled between recognition and confusion. Several times he said out loud, “But it wasn’t like that.” And it hadn’t been; surely he hadn’t been such a wimp. Or was he then, and even now, and had she detected it? But he hadn’t had anything to do with Reuben’s girlfriend, who wasn’t unlike Jo, surprisingly. He’d had a few ideas, maybe, but not … he had to keep reminding himself that this was a book. Or something, he didn’t know exactly what. At any rate it was not his life history written down by someone else. Except that frequently it was.

How had she deduced that about the Breughel print? She must have seen it at the office Christmas party he gave two years before. But to make the leap to this piece of his adolescence—the one true tragedy he’d ever been involved in—was remarkable. Had he said something that gave her a clue? He poked his memory, but it seemed unreliable to him after the incident of her ring. Without her to prompt him, he might as well erase everything that had gone on between them. He saw himself, on the page and in the past, brooding at that picture as at a votive portrait. Perhaps, he thought, we are actually transparent to those who love us.

Six o’clock on a December evening; he was the last person in the building. At home Fay was lighting a fire for his welcome. She loved him too. There he was, in his warm, handsome office, holding a story written about him by a woman who loved him. All he had lost through death and neglect,
and caution, and his damnable moderation—he did not think of it. Unassailable in his happiness, his luck in having received so much, he walked home through the night.

All these years, Asa has been too caught up in whether his book is “true” to know if it is “good.” He has never even considered it from this angle. By now it is history: part of his life, an artifact he possesses. And though only a typescript, it, like Ovid and Hardy, is final and eternal.

As is Asa. Granite Asa, his substance does not change. Why did I think it could? If I could take an aerial photograph of Asa’s rocky landscape, perhaps I’d find a new curve in a stream or a pile of stones freshly tumbled from a cliff—some slight evidence of my passage through the scene. But, reader, I can’t get far enough away. I have never been able to. Asa is always in my middle distance at the least. I have held him closer and known less, but as yet I can move him no further from me.

Late at night when I look out my windows I see an apartment building. It is six stories high; behind it is Asa’s house. I can’t see Asa’s house. For years this has frustrated me. Likewise has my inability to penetrate the lace of the branches that overshadow the Common, beneath which he walks to and from work each day. But I have come to realize that with nothing between us I was unable to see him. And so these physical impediments bother me less. They state the truth, which I am learning how to know.

I know who changed. I know whose soul awakened. I know whose blood these pages fanned to fire. I am sure of these things. For the rest, it is only hope, the whole world balanced on a straw. But on that straw we stake our lives and, heedless, we go on.

VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES

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