Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (16 page)

I
PEDALED
harder; he caught up, kept up; Inez slipped a bit more behind. Ett and I are fitness-minded; Inez is, too, but chiefly in her mind. I turned and said over my shoulder, “Inez, I think your husband and I are having a race. We’ll wait for you farther on.”

As I turned, I briefly saw beside the road a not entirely familiar girl, her face set inside coarse-textured wavy brown-blond hair.

Ett said, “We aren’t racing.” His honesty has areas of clouded interference.

“I was joking,” I said, for no reason that was yet clear to me, and settled back and pedaled alongside him; we were on an upward slope, and when he slowed I did not, but maintained my speed and pulled somewhat ahead, whereupon he kept up. I increased my speed modestly; he kept up. He muttered, “You’ve stopped doing isometrics.”

I am moved by fashions in exercises as in everything, and while I was in my isometric phase my wind and stamina were far less than Ett’s; however, I had in the meantime switched to aerobics, and my lungs and heart were correspondingly mightier. Ett had grown used to a noticeable superiority as a bicyclist—which is why, to cheer me during my divorce, he had suggested we go bicycling.

He is short, very muscular still; once, in a dream, he appeared to me as a general and as a dessert, a sweet Napoleon. He strengthened his leg thrust, moved faster, pulled ahead; I pulled even and passed him toward the crest of the hill, saying—untruthfully—“I’m out of breath—whew!” and sailed on downhill. He passed me halfway down; he was not coasting, he was secretly pedaling: I caught him out of the corner of my eye.

It has always been true between us that his long-term determination—one marriage!—is greater than mine, while for anything short-term my will and fruitfulness in tactics can beat him; so it was best to
avoid racing openly—and he had been the one to deny we were racing—until we were both tired and then to set a short sprint. I am at my best when I am in extremis, which my second wife once remarked was very tiring for everyone and gave one an entirely new attitude toward the question of whether excellence was worth bothering with or not.

I am not competently competitive; like most verbal men, who become judges, after all, or newspaper editors, or politicians of a certain type, I keep avoiding argument by pleading, “But it is obvious”—that is, past argument. I put everything past argument if I can. So a race is a bit difficult for me. My mind wanders. To help myself concentrate, I thought of myself bicycling to win the hand of Inez. It was a mental game. I increased our average speed but frequently said, “God, let’s slow down! I don’t want to have a coronary.”

Our minds interflow, his and mine; we wear each other’s thoughts.

I began to practice yoga breathing, something I had learned during the winter. Near Harlem—or rather as one turns to leave Harlem behind—the road becomes very steep, with a symbolic aptness. It was there that I said, “I’ll race you to the boat lagoon.”

The speed with which I pumped up the long hill, the way my wind lasted, the ferocity with which I kept on without looking back, attest, I think, to my jealousy that Ett was not getting a divorce. And to my wish that he love me, since he, like most of us, loves best someone he can look up to. His mind is on the stars. In beating Ett, I practically insured a weekly or even twice-weekly dinner invitation. I could hear him—his breathing is distinctive—a very short distance behind me. I saw again, somewhere on my left now, that slightly familiar girl—her face.

I
BEAT
Ett by a great many yards, slowing down in the end in fear that I had overdone it. I halted on the concrete bridge. The trees around me were in new leaf, shyly pointillist, but I hardly noticed. On the boating lagoon, a carefully landscaped spoon of water partly ringed with picturesque and miniature cliffs, moved an enormous regatta: a da Vinci enclosed a Guardi, multitudes of prows and figures on gray, dancing water, a democracy’s shabby mock-festival, crowded, sordid, and beautiful.

I briefly glanced at, largely ignored the extraordinary scene.

Will someone one day soon build a model of a human personality—
soul, heart, spirit, mind, shifts, magnetic eccentricities, perverse connections? As they build models of molecules? Would such a model show how a victory led to the adoption of certain traits possessed by the defeated, a spiritual cannibalism? To cannibalize—can you imagine such a word? “I’m going to cannibalize two of my essays on Rilke and do a monograph,” Malcolm Glick said to me the other day. Never mind.

Ett met Inez during an International Science Congress of some kind, in Copenhagen, and when he returned to New York he came to my lair (I was an assistant professor then) and said, “I have met someone.”

I was newly divorced—the first divorce. It pains me now to remember suddenly how young I was. My hands, my God, my hands—I was a great one for clasping my hands in front of me on my desk in those days—my hands were not
thin.
How stupid I was; how cakey, sugary, ill-nourishing, and doomed that last rim of youth is. He said, “I think I’ve found the right girl, Leo,” and there was a glimmer of cakey satisfaction in his handsome, Viking’s face. I had, of course, just been parted from a
wrong
girl. Ett said pseudoscientifically of his find, “She seems sensible.” My first wife had not been sensible. I said, “You poor ass,” and began to question him, mimicking a cold-minded dean: who were the girl’s people, what was her schooling, her attitude toward religion, was she giddy, sexually up-to-date, had he committed himself to her?

He said, “It’s half settled. She is willing to put my career first. She’s very intelligent.”

“I assume she’s good-looking.”

“She has a fantastic body,” he said with a self-satisfaction that made me think, not for the first time, he was incapable of love. “She does?”

“Fantastic whim-whams,” he said. “Her legs are great.”

Then at some point his self-satisfaction ebbed; he sat there, in my absurdly tiny office, a squat Viking, and said with half accusation, half envy, “I don’t know if
you
‘ll think she’s so great-looking.”

“If she’s a good wife to you, I will,” I said, staunchly sentimental.

He said, “You know, Leo, the wonderful thing about her is that she’s not just passionate, she’s also got good sense.”

I did not believe him, but I envied him his finding such a girl just in case and his having me for a friend; I had only him.

He said, “You’ve always been flighty about women.” I thought, Ah, he and I are father figures for each other.

When we flew to Copenhagen—I was to be best man, of course—and I met Inez, I saw a girl, twenty-two, with a heavy coil of dark hair and blue eyes, slender legs, and a pigeony breast; she seemed a bit dowdy, quite proper. Her father was a government official concerned with teaching science or some such thing. But there was in her an astonishing sexuality. At once monomaniacal and pedestrian, she was and is a bureaucrat’s Carmen.

She has some good sense, much good nature, and her attachments are profound. Ett, neuroses and all, was always quite sturdy, but he has not been able to stand up to Inez’s monomaniacal assaults. Her gaieties can be as earnest and bruising as muggings. Ett has moments of sturdy jollity, but he prefers a smiling, understated gloom. Within two years Inez had reawakened in him his self-doubts. She was a fanatic mother; after their first child appeared, Ett came to see me and said in a defensive, hearty tone, “I’m jealous of my child. I’m going to see an analyst.”

I was about to marry the second time, and often felt engulfed in music. I said, “Ett, look at this functionally: you have the aphrodisiac torments of Proustian jealousy without having your wife play around with another man.”

But Inez
wanted
him to see an analyst. One looks on and wonders about the interplay of judgments, wishes, vengeances; youth falls away, the thumbnails grow ridged, that moral scrofula the young hate so in their elders sets in, that semipermanent, delicately power-mad and cool ambiguity. Age! Age! The body ceases to be an ally when one is twenty-eight or so; the next phase runs sourly, corruptly, on toward thirty-five, when idealism often returns, that or a nervous breakdown, and fates begin to be clearly marked. Ett became well known, his analyst became little more than a sycophant, Ett’s self-approval soared eaglelike and looked down on all the kingdoms of the earth save that of the two molecular geneticists who were better m.g.’s than he. And when he was not grandiloquent Ett was querulous—his insomnia, his diets, his devious colleagues made him peevish, as if he had a vision of himself as a living statue of an eminent and gentle and useful man who was constantly being yanked into ungainly poses, who was de-pedestaled by the envy of his co-workers and the frailty of his physical being.

But he climbed back up on the pedestal again and again and did good work. It is not easy to admire him: he is absentminded and selfish, and he approves of his own selfishness, perhaps rightly; he and his analyst have decided Inez is an emotional masochist—God!—but one can observe
the war in him between the analyzed monster and the gentle Ett, for he is afraid, whenever he is roused from his self-absorption, that he might be treating Inez badly. He cares for her and does not want her hurt or too badly mauled by time and himself.

She is not much wiser than he. She, too, has been analyzed; if anything, she is more monomaniacal than ever: “I must develop a sense of humor,” she will say, frowning. “I am humorless on both sides, Spanish and Danish.” She laughs self-deprecatingly, somewhat tragically, although whether more in the Norse or in the Iberian mode I cannot say.

Like paint on a wall, they grow cracked and yellow, those two, but they adhere. Perhaps they are weak and too frightened to change, or lazy; they are certainly not well equipped for adventures; but perhaps also they are good people, and sound in some mysterious way: they have stuck not just to the marriage but to each other. They become elegiac about the reasons they don’t get along. Inez will say proudly, “We have very serious problems, Ett and I.” Ett, who is practicing to be a Grand Old Man and is beginning to experiment with a folk manner, will say, “Logic doesn’t suit women, and a good thing, too. If they were logical, why would they settle for being wives to a man like me?”

T
HE FACE
I have glimpsed in the park, the girl I have not yet spoken to, has said to me since that day, “Your friend Ett is awful—his attitude toward his wife. He has deformed emotions.” (She has also said, “You’re as much married to Inez as Ett is.”)

I said, “I enjoy insights. What do you mean, Ett has deformed emotions?”

“Oh, if you can’t see it!” she said despairingly. “Why do you like him?”—also despairingly.

“Why shouldn’t I like him?”

“He’s not the sort of man a man like you should have as a friend!”

“What kind of friends do you think I should have?”

“Other men like you, sensitive and with it and sexy.…” She did not look at me as she spoke.

She imagines my kindness exists; she sought it in someone older—an experienced kindness, which is perhaps only the reflected safety of a bargain with someone who cannot easily afford to hurt her.

I had made it a rule never to touch a student, and when I heard of a colleague who had no such rule, I thought how fitting it would be for him to be delivered to the wrath and jealousy of the outraged parents. I don’t blame the young. It is impossible for them to check their appetites and still be young; they have their youth to offer, and they will offer it. Sometimes there is love; we’ll pass that by. But when a girl drifts up to a professor, looks at him with wide brown eyes, he must not respond as a man; he holds the title of professor, not of a man. But why be cruel and withhold from the girl the happiness she craves? Because she does not know what she is doing. It is not kind or sensible to imprison anyone in the consequences of a partial lust. But she will learn so much. Too much. Why cannot we be happy animals? Because that is not how happiness works—quite.

If a girl has been failed by her father and needs to find that strength in someone, or if she was so happy she wants to repeat that happiness, why be puritan?

Why, indeed?

The father of the glimpsed face, Mr. Macardling, works for Continental Electric, is an associate vice-president, is a water-worn brook pebble of a man, hard, interchangeable with others of his type, and with tints especially clear when he is in the water that shaped him. He said to me a number of times, “It’s a simple matter.” My affair with his daughter.

I replied, “Yes. Of course. But it
feels
complex.”

“Would you say you were an indecisive man?”

“I will say almost anything, I fear.”

“I don’t disapprove,” he said. Of the affair.

“I do.”

“Ha-ha,” he said, and grasped my arm. “I like you, Leo.”

“I find you acceptable,” I reply cautiously.

“Tell me, Leo, are you pretty much what a New York intellectual is?”

“Good God, no!”

“I didn’t think so. What impresses me is your fantastic honesty.”

“Well, I’m not a businessman,” I say, and pat his arm. He starts to tighten up. “I am under fewer pressures,” I continue. He begins to smile. I smile, too, and say, “I have different tricks up my sleeve.” We both laugh. Then he looks at me with a mock—is it a mock?—scowl.

I do not know where we stand, he and I.

He is orderly, and children admire order, and he is cheerful, and children like smiling fathers; he is open and not weak and he must always be off to business. If he were my father, I would admire him—
indeed love him distractedly—I would re-create him in myself or in someone who has a good deal of time and patience or who is indebted to me, and then when I had him where I could hold his attention and devour his time I would pity him and soothe him, quarrel with him at leisure, in pain or with raw delight, I would rebel, forsake him, return to him.… Jeanie Macardling finds no young man so elusive, so orderly, so capable of stirring her imagination as her father. Damn her father!