Arthur Goldhammer
Joseph Kaye, the nationally syndicated columnist, the pundit’s pundit, was still wearing his frequently televised public face when he caught sight of Dr. Anita Morris in the crowd of private faces filling the interval between himself and release into the coveted anonymity of the hotel’s lobby. The change in his countenance must have been frighteningly sudden, to judge by the reaction of the bejeweled and perfumed ladies in his most immediate vicinity, two of whom stood with hands outstretched and wrists elevated as if performing a pet trick for which they expected either to be rewarded with a morsel of wisdom from the man who had dined with so many heads of state, or else to be tickled behind ears drooping under the weight of milk-glass teardrops in the one case, gilt rhomboids in the other. Their expensively lifted faces fell precipitously as he pushed them aside, rather rudely he later feared, in making a bee-line for his old friend Anita, whom he hadn’t seen in eons--this last trumpeted with an exuberance uncharacteristic enough to turn heads and, as if to underscore the sincerity of his pleasure, in a more colloquial idiom than he had used on the podium.
But no sooner had all eyes turned upon the lady thus singled out than her still pretty face decomposed in a naive puzzlement that Joseph remembered well. Despite good looks, intelligence, success, and charm, she gave the impression of one congenitally unaccustomed to notice. She was in every way reliably more than good enough, yet she never surprised by outdoing herself or rising to some unforeseen height. Her classiness, arresting at first, was curiously unleavened: she seemed without idiosyncrasy. And so her friends—and Joseph would never dream of denying her the further distinction of having been among them—had always said of her that she was pretty rather than beautiful, smart rather than brilliant, competent rather than gifted, suggesting though never articulating an adequacy overshadowed by the perpetually unfulfilled promise of something more. She sowed uneasiness even among her many admirers by making them feel vaguely ungrateful, in some way niggardly because they failed to respond more generously to all that she so suitably provided.
Even her height, Kaye could not help remarking as he unbent his six-foot-four frame to buss her on the cheek, was average, and it was no doubt grudging of him, given the all in all quite vivacious figure she cut, to feel, as he so often had in the past, that the glacial mountain was somehow condescending to the bright, fruited, fragrant yet altogether too exposed and contourless plain. She nevertheless accepted his kiss, his necessarily clumsy embrace, and his offer of a drink with all the alacrity he could have wished for had he known she would be in the audience to hear him speak.
Just what had brought her there was the first question he put to her. It was a doubly useful gambit in any case, since it gave him the opportunity to be self-deprecating about his celebrity, of which ten years earlier he would have been quite vainly proud but which lately, in truth, had begun to oppress him, if anything as diaphanous as fame could properly be said to “oppress.” A certain fastidiousness about the proper use of words was in fact his trademark, and he often, even in the flow of conversation, which generally in his case ran quite easily, found himself backtracking a sentence or two to place, for later reconsideration, a mental tick beside a word not quite in its place. All his columns went through precisely two drafts, neither more nor less. Such efficiency in the nuts-and-bolts end of his craft he attributed to his early, mercifully brief, training in the hard school of shoeleather journalism, which had taught him to write to size, for deadline, and on the run.
What had brought her there? Well, himself to begin with of course, nothing less. That first shot of hers, delivered with her bright, round, glistening eyes locked firmly on his, was good and hard, so good, in fact, that he almost wished she had foreseen that it would catch him off balance, for then she might have been ready to send his weak return wherever she wished it to go. He would have known then where that was. But she hadn’t looked that far ahead, and he could sense her flailing after a further answer (perhaps not quite knowing where she wanted to go either) much as she used to flail at his top-spun backhand returns as they sliced mockingly out of reach on the Mount Auburn Club’s clay courts. She had been a decent player, no more, one of the parade of pretty girls from big houses with their own clay courts, or else raised on expensive weekly lessons from Sunbelt pros, girls from whom Joseph, in his student days at Harvard, had picked up pocket change as a part-time private coach at the Mount Auburn Club. On the court, he remembered, she had been light on her feet but easily deceived. In doubles the winning ticket was to lure her out of position while keeping the ball out of the reach of her husband Frank, whose blunderbuss forehand smash could give even Joseph fits, though the truth was that Kaye could handily take the two of them on his own with no help from his partner, no help being generally just what he got from Natalie, his jubilantly unathletic then wife, who took two years to work up resistance enough against the social pressure to refuse to play a game she detested and even denounced as a pastime for nobs and snobs. For people like Anita, in other words: Natalie, while prepared to endure Anita so long as her artiness and fancy soaps and Sunday Times lingerie could be laughed off as amusing affectations in one otherwise properly reverent toward a Thoreauish-bohemian ideal of simplicity, could get under her skin by suggesting that at the first opportunity Anita would revert to the ancestral pieties she temporarily joined the other three in mocking.
Of course Natalie had feared change of any kind on the simple ground that it could only be for the worse. It was the sheer implacability of her resistance, Joseph now explained, that had doomed their marriage, as he no doubt should have foreseen, change being inevitable since he had been an ambitious young man: a Jew up from the Bronx of modest backgrounds and preternaturally gifted at tennis along with everything else. Natalie had married him, he sometimes thought, to bind him not to herself but to her moment of happiness, that becalmed passage between dependency and responsibility, which to Natalie, at twenty already celebrated as Radcliffe’s finest poet in a generation, had seemed like a sojourn in the miraculous azure of an Aegean briefly alive with figures as close as she would ever come to heroes and gods. Another irremediable difference between them, he could see now, was that while he had known what he was fleeing towards, she had known only what she was fleeing from: her inescapable mother, a blowsy and hysterical actress from the socially committed stage, and her all too elusive father, said to have been (but given her mother’s penchant for wild exaggeration, who really knew?) an autodidact longshoreman who had organized for the CP. So in Natalie’s past radical politics was act one, which, along with the longshoreman’s Irish gift of gab, wavy red hair, immense eyes, and cherubic nubbin of a mouth, explained how her mother, a lady of presumably immense promise and talent, could have fallen for a faithless cad; act two was a spasm, on the cad’s part, of anamnesiac naming of names to HUAC, which explained, to the mother’s satisfaction at any rate, why this particular bum clouded their lives no more. To a refugee, like Natalie, from the Cold War, Harvard Yard had seemed Arcadian.
Joseph continued in this vein, as if Anita had set him an examination question: Why did you and Natalie divorce? Her past, you see, accounted for her dislike of two things above all else: politics and hypocrisy. And—he added with a faint little laugh—politics and hypocrisy are air and water to a journalist in my line of work. He was pleased with this pat little explanation. The habit of writing thousand-word columns had accustomed him to a near syllogistic clarity and brevity of reasoning. As for Frank, well, of course one didn’t like to speak ill of the dead, but it wouldn’t have surprised either him or Natalie to have heard at almost any time prior to Frank’s death that he and Anita had divorced. Oh Frank was a grand fellow, of course, Bacchus, joy incarnate, but the way he treated women … Of course Natalie made allowances for him. Frank had reminded her of her own father, at least as she imagined him from her mother’s tales—another handsome Irishman for whom allowances had to be made. Eventually Frank became one of the gods, and of course the gods weren’t expected to treat mortals well. Natalie’s judgments on such matters were irrevocable. And there was much to be said in Frank’s favor: he had come so far, overcome so much. Little that was visible remained of the truly appalling circumstances from which the tall fellow with the raffish red hair and mustache had sprung: a touch of working-class Malden, perhaps, in his a’s and r’s. Not that Natalie ever paid the slightest attention to sociology. Poetry was her only subject, and for her Frank was a noble savage, an emblematic democratic man: “Of r’s and the man I sing,” she once began a poem about him, a Virgilian-Whitmanesque mock epic. Or was it about her father?
The young journalist who had recently profiled Kaye for The New Yorker could have used some of Frank’s blarney, or some of Natalie’s father’s gift of gab. He had come to write about the pundit’s career from the “Boston beginnings” to the current pinnacle. The pity was he hadn’t been able to resurrect the past, only to plod from point to point along the well-known itinerary. And now here was an authentic incarnation of that past, most attractively turned out in a nacreous silk blouse and pumpkin orange skirt. The difference was between plotting a trip on a map and actually taking it. Anita, for all her conventionality, indeed perhaps because of it, had been the spark of the foursome that had consumed his rare leisure hours. Left to their own devices Joseph and Natalie on a Saturday night might have downed a quick souvlaki before taking in whatever Bogart happened to be playing at the Brattle, but it was part of Anita’s notion of convention that people should organize their leisure as carefully as they organized their work. And so when she wasn’t consulting the duly constituted authorities about what Italian film they all must see or booking a table at the restaurant owned by the chef featured in last Sunday’s supplement, she was plotting itineraries for European summers or pine-scented jaunts to the Pacific Northwest. If it was mildly irksome to be the object of so much improving ardor, it was nonetheless stimulating to be so assiduously and continually diverted.
Diversions, though, had been of no interest to the young interviewer, who somehow or other—was it, Joseph wondered, truly the impression he gave?—assumed he was talking to a man who had sped through life on the main highway. How else could he have come so far? In any case the reporter expected to hear a steady clink of negotiable names falling into his tin pot: this was a flack’s business, after all, and he was providing a service. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Joseph had hoped they might send someone interested in delving a little deeper, but no, it was the familiar litany: Had Nixon really threatened Kaye to his face with physical harm? Rumor had it that Helmut Schmidt had once kept the pundit in a hotel room in Geneva with an assessment of the strategic situation that ran into the wee hours. Had Kaye first crossed Kissinger’s path at Harvard or later on? The transcript read:
At Harvard. I had the good fortune, which was in no small way also a misfortune, to be one of Henry’s TA’s. We called him the Prussian, of course, or Henry von Bismarck, and were all in awe of him, because, as another teacher, Stanley Hoffmann, said at the time, ‘Henry is almost as brilliant as he thinks he is.’ [laughter] I remember coming to class one day only partially prepared (it was not unusual for the Prussian to assign up to 400 pages of reading a night). The discussion turned to Stresemann …
When Joseph read the piece in galleys, he had the same uneasy sense as when he read the memoirs of generals and statesmen. His memory had become selective and self-serving, his account of himself one that no person of intelligence could possibly believe. Where the article on the surface seemed too admiring and a trifle credulous, he read into it a complex and subtle irony, a brilliant send-up that would have pleased him as a reader had its subject been anyone else. Strangely none of his friends saw anything of the kind. Again and again he heard that, while it was a callow piece by a young naïf, it made him look awfully good. He was told that he had the young fellow eating out of his hand.
Yet the silences were damningly eloquent, Joseph thought. Reading about himself he felt that the cipher captured on the page—call it the compleat professional sage if you cared to be generous—was all that remained. For a personality he had always relied on others, on Natalie especially. What had been her trick? She forced him to look at things that did not yield to his implacable logic, tethered his breakneck intelligence to her immobile melancholy. But the reporter, impatient of complication, had found his hook and run with it: the sage in the making—or was it on the make? Perhaps because ambition was the only thing that interested a writer with no eye at all for the wrestling with angels even if that was what set Kaye apart from the rest. No matter. What did one elliptically unkind portrait weigh in the scale of human misery? Especially when for any disappointment there was always the ready consolation of yet another well-crafted column. Already he was compacting wisps of self-pity into lead sentences: “For the career-obsessed younger generation denoted sometimes by the tantalizingly enigmatic epithet X, the watchword of the day is good-bye Freud, hello Macbeth.” It was his job, Joseph sometimes felt, to pretty politics up, to rewrite “Glamis thou art and Cawdor thou shalt be” in the idiom of “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.” Lavishly educated lawyers in shirtsleeves who read his think pieces over the ten o’clock coffee cum croissant, over the Tuscan nutcake sent from the upscale cafe on Level One up to the Partners’ Lounge in the Mies-knockoff glass-and-steel office tower, were reminded of their senior theses on Spinoza or Wallenstein or The Federalist Papers. He plucked out his one-note tune on the lyre of Western civ, and song-starved litigators were on occasion momentarily diverted by faint echoes of the sirens’ descant.
Anita, to conceal her nervousness perhaps, had raved about the New Yorker piece. What an important man he had become: she had boasted to all her friends of having known him when. But, he cut her short, she knew him too well, they went too far back. Oh, yes, she said, back to well before troops began to move whenever he picked up his pen. Was that mockery in her voice? There would be time later to calibrate precisely the inevitable irony in the conversation of old intimates separated by life’s vicissitudes. Why, he hadn’t seen her since Frank’s funeral in ‘86. When he expressed surprise that she hadn’t heard of Natalie’s remarriage, she simply said that since the children had grown she’d become a “laboratory drone” who didn’t keep up with things, reminding him of what he vaguely knew: that she had given up the practice of psychiatry for some sort of brain chemistry and had even won a prize of some kind. His secretary did an excellent job of keeping him apprised of news items affecting the several hundred people on his watch list. He scarcely knew how many notes of congratulation had been dispatched from his office. People seemed to appreciate these gestures, God knows why. Having arrived, one developed certain superstitions about the rituals observed to propitiate the gods on the way up. From the top of the heap these gestures might seem absurd, but one hardly dared desist in case one of them held the secret that had made the difference.
He found himself talking on quite compulsively about Natalie, perhaps in recollection of Anita’s not always concealed dislike of his ex-wife. As if he felt a need to justify himself. And in truth there had been little in Natalie that Anita, insouciance personified, would have found likeable. To have loved a depressive like Natalie, whose very flesh seemed to close around her like an overcoat, one had to have had an inordinate need for what she was prepared to give to only a select few at a time: her admiration, or to put it more precisely, her anointment, for she believed that there were chosen people on earth and behaved a good deal of the time as if she—alone—knew who they were. Joseph Kaye had been one of the happy few but had needed a good deal of whispered encouragement to feel at home enough with his gifts actually to use them; so without Natalie’s confirmation his fine machinery might have turned to rust. He therefore felt a certain compunction about the supercilious tone that crept into his voice whenever he found it necessary to explain what had happened to the woman who had served him so well. Her confidence in herself had petered out with her talent: this was all that the admired wordsmith would add to Natalie’s putative dislike of politics and hypocrisy to account for the long years of bickering, breakdown, and separation. “She’s married now to a policeman.” He refrained from adding what he had heard from his sister Marilyn, who, having developed a fellow sufferer’s fondness for Natalie while they were in-laws, had actually gone to visit her in Phoenix, where Joseph imagined his ex botanizing among the cacti and writing dry Eliotic verse in and of the desert sand—for she had had a talent once, on that everyone agreed, a talent good enough to have taken all of Harvard’s literary prizes. Premature success, Kaye rationalized, is the enemy of promise. It was as if she had expected it all to be taken from her. That had been one source of her depression. His sister, however, hinted at a personal guilt he wanted no part of. The charges, though, were never direct. Directness wasn’t Marilyn’s way. “The policeman,” she said, “is good for Natalie. He’s everything you weren’t. Uncritical, adoring, kindness itself.”
Not that Joseph was altogether critical, iconoclastic, or cruel: it was rather that he avenged himself in private candor for the toll he was obliged to pay in public sham. One did not gain or keep access to great and powerful men without occasionally or even frequently saying things not precisely coincident with one’s private thoughts. To Natalie, by contrast, he had felt compelled by intimacy, respect, what he called love, to relate the brutal truth. And why should she have resented hearing that her poems were derivative and her mind at best second-rate? Would she rather he lied? Certainly he had never placed himself above her. What confirmed him in his judgment, in fact, was that he was no more severe on her than on himself. He too had conceived a “higher” calling for himself. Philosophy: he laughed to think of it now. It was hard to imagine himself in cheap tweeds delivering a fifteen-minute paper on “Boethius’ Concept of Ethics” to an empty room. Yet he had been “realistic” enough to draw the inescapable conclusion, whereas she had persevered in her illusions into depression and beyond. Now, apparently, she had emerged into the dry sobriety of the Arizona desert. Happiness of a sort was hers, but Phoenix, Kaye calculated, was about as far from Olympus as one could get. And married to a cop: dried tubers for dinner and Saturday night pistol practice at the department range. Did she, he wondered, ever point to the TV screen in the breakfast nook the next morning and say, to her off-duty husband relaxing in his crew-neck T-shirt and Adidas sweats, that she had once been married to that man, the best-spoken, most thoughtful, most carefully analytical of the Sunday-morning network talking heads?
It occurred to him—how could it not? Anita perfectly blatantly meant it to occur to him—that things might have turned out differently if he had married her instead. Of course she’d had eyes only for Frank. And he and Frank went back a long way. They had been friendly rivals on The Crimson long before maturing into cordial enemies at The Globe. In the relatively amorphous world of a campus paper Frank’s dash and brassiness and easy way with others had given him the edge, but those very blessings had begun to tell against him in the adult world of hierarchy, backstabbing, and traded favors. Sensing the ground slipping out from under him, Frank had gone abroad, where the foreign correspondent on his own is like the knight errant of old, his prowess his fate. But abroad was no place to grow old. Joseph, who in the afterglow of his first Pulitzer was already metamorphosing into a sage whose emotions existed exclusively on the highest plane, had been able to pity his old friend. He had of course foreseen from the moment of the first foreign assignment the end of Frank’s marriage to Anita and might have moved in even then; the long downhill slide with Natalie was already under way. Yet he held back, and not only because Frank’s enmity was something he felt might some day prove a threat to his career. Then an errant mortar round put an end to all danger, and the slain foreign correspondent’s longtime colleague was able to wring quite a magnanimous column out of the occasion, a lyrical tribute to the “reporter’s reporter”: “To some it might seem a squalid death: blood from his torn body they say reddened a little patch of parched Angolan earth. But wherever there was angry conflict over the meaning of liberty Frank could be counted on to be,” etc. etc.
Facing Frank’s ex-wife’s bright lunar face over a bourbon and a sweet strawberry daiquiri in the hotel bar thus mixed memory and desire in curious proportion. Anita was certainly, by conventional standards, more attractive than Natalie and far more presentable. Age became her. Had they married she would have accompanied him dutifully to an annually renegotiated quota of dreary diplomatic occasions, would have suffered her hand to be kissed and her backside to be fondled by beribboned lechers from the less developed nations and the more. He was in a rare mood tonight. Alcohol—he normally drank little—had made him brutal inside and out, a beribboned lecher himself: if years had gone by during which no thought of Anita crossed his conscious mind, her creamy thighs had never left him. He carried with him an image of her backpedaling on the tennis court, tumbling backward, kicking at the treacherous air, offering her bared thighs to years of fantasized remembrance. Yet his acceptance had definite limits. There was something she lacked. She seemed never to brood.
“We are shaped, of course, as much by what we abandon as by what we take up.” He became aware that she was making him uneasy. No doubt the tennis court was not the only time she’d caught him looking. He’d been an actor in many similar frames of flickering desire, which if strung end to end made a movie he wasn’t sure he wanted to see. Yet conversation between them proceeded along the relatively smooth path of careers, comfortably bridging the sexual currents roiled now as if by a late-arriving spring. By “abandoned,” if his momentary stammer and jumpy gaze told her he meant her, his voice assured her he meant only philosophy: all that hard thinking must have amounted to something, and in Kaye’s mind that something took the form of a soft-spoken superiority, a confidence in the weight of his opinion, no matter how hastily cobbled together or out of what unspeakable bureaucratic jetsam. He said he wished the fellow from The New Yorker had gotten a little of that side of him. For Anita it was an opportunity to turn the conversation to her late husband Frank, for philosophical gravitas was quite definitely something he had never possessed or aspired to. Frank had been a reporter first and foremost, a “reporter’s reporter,” as Kaye had put it in his column, for whom the hours of boredom, the vigils in the cold, the reading upside down of letters on people’s desks, the curses hurled over shoulders or shouted through closed doors were not ordeals to be endured in the quest for the grail but the warp and woof of life itself. Frank had had large appetites. What had always bothered him— She paused a moment in her long narrative of Frank’s career and the unraveling of their life together. A promise of further candor invaded her eyes. She had seemed earlier to guess Joseph’s secrets, but Joseph was no ingénu: Natalie had taught him long ago that women are always two steps ahead of men. But if he had been prepared for Anita to make him uncomfortably aware of his own lust, he was quite unprepared to be shown the seamier underside of his old buddy Frank. There was no stopping Anita, though. If he had felt compelled to explain his divorce, Anita apparently felt compelled to expose Frank—how for one thing Frank had resented Joseph’s quick rise up the editorial ladder more than he ever let on. In private she said he could be vile about it, asking rhetorically when Joseph was given regular op-ed space why anyone should be surprised, after all The Times was a Jewish paper.
Joseph’s pulse quickened. This, at least, was unexplored territory. Anita was working on a third daiquiri and irrepressible. She talked too much: he remembered that, too, as a reason why he had not moved in on her when Frank went abroad and the marriage to Natalie turned sour. She had talked too much even then. Could his own dirty linen bear such vindictive airing? Of course Frank had never held it against Joe personally, she said. It had simply displeased him as a professional journalist that the world valued, high-flown opinion produced with flair, show, and elegance, rather than hard facts laboriously unearthed by the patient craftsman. His writing wasn’t much, Frank knew that. (Yet, Joseph thought, he knew only the half of it.) But news was the business of finding fact, and Frank had been good at his business. And so it had bothered him—not that Frank cared about money, Anita said, but money was one measure of value—that the big salaries, the big speaker’s fees, went to the Joseph Kayes. Once—she laughed at the memory, as if it took her by surprise—Frank had called her from Moscow to say he’d seen their old pal Kaye on CNN wearing—Frank was willing to put money on this, and he had a good eye for clothes though he himself seldom got more formal than a safari jacket—a suit that could only have been tailored by the same London tailor Lord Owen used. (Who, Anita had been obliged to ask, exactly is Lord Owen?) And do you know what? He tracked it down. He made inquiries. With the Russian telephones in a shambles then, it must have taken him hours, but he had located the tailor—Ogilvie’s—all the way from Moscow and verified that Kaye had had two suits made there and from Owen’s secretary learned that, yes, his lordship had all his clothes from Ogilvie’s, one couldn’t say precisely how many suits but one should think at least a dozen. Frank and Anita had shared a laugh over that little journalistic coup and over those numbers: Joe may think he has arrived, they giggled, but still he has only two suits to his lordship’s dozen. Sure, she was willing to laugh as long as Frank kept it on the level of human foibles, but he couldn’t leave it there, had to take the next, nasty turn, to say, you see what a fool he is, he actually thinks they’ll let him be one of them. And how, she asked, did he think all that WASP-bashing made her feel? He had his antidote ready, more sweet talk: Why you’ve eaten so much Italian food already, sweetheart, you’re gonna grow a nose like Caesar and a fat behind, as though it had all been a joke and none of the angry words meant a thing. But, she said, the fact was that Frank was wound tight as a drum. You never knew which direction he might explode.
Joseph had no idea, he said, how obsessed his old friend had become. It was an obsession, wasn’t it? He turned to Anita as if she might offer him a professional opinion. She was a psychiatrist after all, and Frank, a man he had known for thirty years, about whom he had harbored complex but always friendly feelings, had become a stranger, almost loathesome to contemplate. About Frank, Anita promised, she could talk his ear off. All that old stuff. Water under the bridge. She hadn’t thought he would be interested. He ordered another round of drinks: a daiquiri for the lady, a black Jack for himself. She smiled broadly at him. Her skin was like the paper of a Japanese lantern, illuminated now from within by the pale flicker of alcohol. Age had added a texture, a mark of quality of the sort for which he scoured the pricier Japanese shops—Jade and Tokugawa—along Madison Avenue whenever he needed to find a gift certain to flatter its recipient. Then she turned her eyes on him, full round eyes, distended by an effort of will that intensified the light within. Frank, she said, liked to hoard nasty little secrets.
She told him some. Nothing that really surprised him. A reporter finds things out. Gossip comes his way. Still, he could tell she was holding things back. If Frank had been as obsessed with his friend as she said, he must have had dirt on Kaye too. What rotten things had he done in his life? Joseph put the question almost jokingly; his life, he took it for granted, was bland to a fault, surely too dull to have provided Frank with nuggets. When he made the same point out loud, Anita laughed too, as if in confirmation. It was almost hurtful. He felt in a way relieved when he remembered an act that Frank might have considered impeachable. That business with the Board of Overseers, surely she remembered, it had been a fairly big deal at the time. He had come into possession of files he had no right to see. It had been his first big scoop for The Crimson. The news got around. The Times picked it up—after verifying the information “independently” through “public and private sources.” His name began to get around. The reproach implicit in that “independently” was not, Kaye was privately assured, meant altogether seriously. The young man had demonstrated initiative, albeit tainted by a mild professional peccadillo that he would be obliged to spend three years expiating in the purgatory of The Globe. In any case Kaye distinctly remembered having celebrated the first in the ensuing series of articles in a Cambridge bar—Al Red Priest’s, they used to call it, for the “f” in Alfred had burned out and never been replaced, lending the place, seedy enough on its face, a certain degenerate cachet among the vaguely marxisant. Frank had drunk to Joseph’s success but bugged him all night about his source. For public consumption Kaye had always maintained that the papers had come to him by way of a family connection. This permitted the acquisition to squeeze in under the rather odd umbrella of journalistic ethics: it was all right to profit as it were inadvertently from a crime as long as someone else actually committed it. Frank—here perhaps was an early sign of the paranoia to come—never believed his friend’s story even as he drank to his success. The evening had ended, as in an Irish novel, in sodden friendship: a stumbling walk home, arm in arm, to the accompaniment of ballads neither man quite knew bellowed at the moon. No doubt Frank had later learned the truth: Joseph hadn’t stolen the papers but had paid the man who did—a disreputable thing by the standards of the time and one for which he would have been dismissed from the paper and possibly expelled if it had come to light.
Well, of course Frank knew that. Anita’s tone was dismissive, almost contemptuous, as though Joseph’s one crime, for which, having gone to the trouble of dredging it up, he now awaited absolution, scarcely even qualified as venial sin. Frank, she said, didn’t trouble himself about juvenilia. He had bigger fish to fry. She flashed him a knowing smile.
He had always detested this particular form of flirtatiousness. It was a trick of adolescence for the female to entice the male by pretending to secret knowledge. One of Natalie’s virtues was that she never flirted. Clearly he was being toyed with now, but for once it exhilarated him to feel not quite in control. Perhaps it was nothing more complicated than sex. It had been a long time since he’d been with a woman. Desire was beginning to take him by the scruff of the neck. Why complicate a simple business? When Anita next turned sarcastic, the mild sting came as a rather pleasant sensation, as if only a woman who already felt a bond of intimacy with him would have permitted herself to take such liberties. Joseph wanted to return the signal, but sarcasm was not his line. He fled—a hazard in his line of work—for the shadows of the great. De Gaulle was always good to stall for time. Had she heard the one about the night Jackie Kennedy informed the general that her ancestors were French? “So were mine,” replied de Gaulle. Anita, however, seemed more distracted than amused. A dry wit was a rare quality in women.
Drunk as he was, he then fell into long and pointless rumination on the state of the world—like a boat in a storm, he said, that had lost its stern mooring (he meant the Soviet Union, Anita gathered) and now floated free to face the wind, which could rise in any quarter of the compass. A moment later he seemed—as if standing outside himself—incredulous that he could have uttered such a thumping banality. And then, looking up suddenly to see if she noticed how far beneath himself he had fallen, he found her already studying him: not “the Walter Lippman of his generation” whose words had long since slurred into incoherence but the hairy beanpole who, though none too coordinated, had weekly beaten his nearsighted medical student partner at tennis thirty years before. The tufts of dark hair on his slender legs and wrists, the knobby knees, the odd jut of the elbows, the way his polo shirt seemed glued to his clavicles and to the band of sweat that invariably stretched across his chest from nipple to nipple—all these errata of the gangly persona he thought he had long ago left for dead her darkly deliquescent eyes now recalled. Hatred overcame inhibition. He lay his hand on hers for the first time that evening.
She laughed, and he sensed, even if he could not fully decipher, how much of herself went into that laugh, how many long evenings she had spent in the laboratory since giving up the practice of psychotherapy, how many styrofoam cups of coffee she had consumed at her desk since Frank’s death. Patients came to her in pain because fate had cheated them of happiness. At first she had understood them. Later, however, after she came to share their predicament, she only wanted to drive them from her sight. Objectivity deserted her. She saw herself in every teary eye. It was the tomboy in her who came to the rescue. She had liked the messy side of medicine, the bubbling beakers and smells of the organic chem lab, the reek of formaldehyde that stayed with you after anatomy class, the pickled viscera always precisely where they were supposed to be and just like the pictures in the book—only life-sized, as it were: she never got over how big the liver was. One of her old teachers took her on as a research associate. She turned out to have a flair for the work. Frogs replaced Frank. Not—she laughed again—that he’d ever been around that much, but he’d filled a psychic void. During his long absences she spun out the stories she would tell him when he returned, wonderful, elaborate stories distilled from her patients’ misery, from her own daydreams, from vignettes of the men she slept with in his absence. Oh, yes, there had been lots of men: Frank insisted on it, he was gone so much of the time, it wouldn’t be natural, he said, if he abstained or asked her to. And anyway his old pal Joe no doubt knew just how horny a sonofabitch Frank was.
Joseph was still absorbing the precise implication of these words when Anita came out with another surprising sentence, to the effect that Frank, God love him, had been something of a pig in bed. He liked to know she’d been with other men. He got off on it. He liked to wrestle with them. They excited him. She asked Joseph if any of this surprised him. He said—and in a sense it was true—that it didn’t. He took it in as calmly as he would have received a report of subcontinental savagery. There were whole vistas of life, Natalie had often remarked, to which Joseph’s mind resolutely turned a blank wall. On his mental map as on ancient charts of Africa there were many broad-mouthed rivers that led nowhere, that dwindled a short way back into a blank interior. Of course he had known about some at least of Frank’s compulsive infidelities. Marriage had scarcely slowed his womanizing. Natalie, true as always only to herself, had insisted that he say nothing to Anita: her ignorance, Natalie insisted, was of the willed kind. It would be a kindness to allow her to keep up appearances. And anyway Natalie had a soft spot for the noble savage. How could the exemplary man err? Later came the foreign correspondent’s tiresome tales of fleshpots around the globe, reason enough for Joseph to decline a good three-quarters of Frank’s invitations to join him without the wives for a night out on the town, “for old time’s sake,” Frank invariably said, as if memories like wine were to be valued for their vintage. And when it came to charting rivers, there wasn’t one anywhere that Frank didn’t claim to have ridden all the way back to its source, and still he never tired of paddling. Men differed. In a way he pitied Frank, always in rut. His wariness of Anita turned protective.
With his hand still encasing hers, a mantle on magma, he suddenly wondered if she hadn’t been trying to tell him that Natalie had been one of Frank’s infidelities. She looked at him as if taking stock for the first time of the magnitude of his blindness. Her No! was so nearly screamed that for the first time he darted glances at nearby tables to see if their long tête-à-tête might be drawing stares. Anita didn’t notice, caught up as she was in her lesson to Joseph on his own ex-wife. Frank would never have wanted Natalie. Sure, it amused him to be a subject of her poems, and he liked to play up to her, to brush her forehead with his seductive mustache, but sexually—the word, as she pronounced, had more syllables than Joseph had quite been aware of, it twisted and writhed like a many-segmented worm—Frank said Natalie was one of those women so tight she couldn’t be opened with a can opener and actually pitied his old pal Joe on news of the marriage. It was all too much for Joseph, lost as he was in an alcoholic penumbra between past and present. Marriage had not disappointed him that way, but here was Anita looking very inviting indeed and seeming to assent to the dead man’s aspersions on his friend’s ex-wife. And if Frank were right? Did Anita promise—what was her word?—an openness beyond anything he had known? Images ran together: the delicate swan of fine porcelain swimming on the rice-paper doily in Tokugawa’s window; brutish Frank, his Michelangelesque torso oiled as for a wrestling match, descending on her out of the clouds, the implacable Greek. But wasn’t it the other way around? Wasn’t Zeus the swan to whom lusty Leda opened her ruddy thighs? Meanwhile, watching, silently taking notes, was a figure shrouded in black, his wife the scribe. Through the blur of feathers and flesh, Joseph glimpsed the victim in tennis togs, struggling on her back, her feet after all these years still kicking at the air. Was she asking for his help? And yet only a moment ago she had seemed to be siding with Frank’s still randy ghost—exultant white sun swinging low in its sweet chariot, mocking him with sarcasm? While Frank was still alive, she admitted, they had mocked poor Joe mercilessly: his pomposity and self-importance, his maddening habit of repeating the same anecdotes—how often they had heard the one about Jackie and de Gaulle—his French cuffs and wing-tips and wispy mustache, his preposterous accent and fussy grammar (never ending a sentence with with or substituting who for whom), his habit of darting beady little eyes every which way as he spoke, as if acknowledging faces in a crowd even when engaged in private tête-à-tête. Yet they—she and Frank—had always been fond of him, in spite of everything. Suddenly she wasn’t laughing anymore. Her eyes met his. Their hands now clasped, each acknowledging the touch of the other. Joseph signed the back of the bar tab. The elevator, an exposed, light-wreathed bubble inspired perhaps by the transparent sarcophagi in which Bosch imprisoned the still flesh-burdened souls of his damned, soundlessly lifted them toward the pundit’s suite.
There he undressed her. It was a scene uncanny in its familiarity yet at the same time utterly strange, as if furtive fantasies had not, as it seemed, vanished into the ether but instead been stored up somewhere in cosmic memory almost exactly as he had imagined them. Only the discrepancies seemed real enough to stir him now. She stood with her back to him, as he had foreseen, but with her knees slightly bent, and swayed back and forth, side to side, even up and down, as he took her by the upper arms. Her wrap, a fishnet shawl, slid from her shoulders and hung across his wrists. He reached around her—he had to bend at the knees himself—and gathering up her breasts let his large and not altogether steady hands converge across silk toward the hollow of her throat. The undoing of the first button was for him even in the echoless silence of fantasy always a crescendo. In the next instant, however, the actual woman now in his arms turned and rapidly undid his buttons from bottom to top, like a pianist deftly fingering a familiar run of white keys. When she finished her hands were raised above her head and her face tilted upward. He tugged and lifted her blouse over her head with all but the top few buttons still fastened, tenderly, as a father might undress his child. Her skirt dropped away, leaving her still-stockinged feet wreathed in an orange halo like the carpet autumn spreads around the base of a tree. Stepping backward she led him toward the bed. Again he remembered her in her tennis skirt—white with blue piping—rapidly backpedaling in the face of his overhand smash. Again she fell on her bottom, exposing the inner surface of her winter-white thighs. Now, though, she did not kick the air but subsided backward onto the hotel bed, whose down coverlet billowed up, wrapping her in burgundy petals waiting to be parted.
He felt, standing over her smallish form, tall and powerful and flushed and suddenly sober. He smiled down on her, forgiving. Tonight she had outdone herself. Another man of course would have gone for the blossom as methodically as a bee. But Joseph, ever the critic, felt compelled to comment on the path the narrative had taken to this point: Here, he said, was one secret about him that Frank would never discover.
And Anita too, perhaps because she had been so successful up to now in seducing him with his past, could not refrain from holding him off, from delaying the denouement, by adding one final detail. Frank, she said, had also found out the secret of the Thompson story. There, she added soothingly, lifting her arms as if this last revelation was to have been one final goad, an end to one story, a beginning to another: Frank’s ghost laid, Joseph bedded.
Thompson! That all but forgotten footnote to history, that morality tale with which he had first made his journalistic reputation! Thirty years ago Thompson was a governor whose name was often mentioned in connection with the vice-presidency. Then it was reported that he had caused records of a brief hospitalization for depression to disappear from a state hospital administered by a man whom he had appointed. Kaye’s columns, unctuous with enlightenment, had greased the skids under the man, for whom he had no use anyway: “We question not the governor’s wise choice to seek professional counsel to deal with a widespread and treatable mental illness but his subsequent acquiescence in superstition, his decision to abuse authority in order to avoid a stigma rather than to face prejudice head on so as to draw that stigma’s sting.” Those six columns had earned him a plaque from the American Psychiatric Association, a feeler from the Times, and a source in Thompson’s cut-throat entourage who would prove invaluable later on. Thompson, after finishing out his term, returned to the private practice of law.
What no one knew—what Joseph at any rate until now thought no one had known—was that he himself had instigated the snooping into Thompson’s medical history as a follow-up to yet another piece of information that had chanced one day to come his way, this time through no dishonesty but by sheer, he had always thought, good fortune. He and Natalie, Frank and Anita had taken a house on the Vineyard for two weeks that summer. It was before the great vogue for the Vineyard hit the cognoscenti, and one could still find decent cottages for less than a king’s ransom. Theirs was a pleasant place, on an acre of land near Gay Head, no doubt worth a fortune today, and surrounded by fragrant flowers around which the bees buzzed pleasantly while Joseph, who liked to swim only in the late afternoon, when the crowds had fled and the beaches were deserted enough to strip to the buff, sat and read, one of the big books that he increasingly put off reading until summer, the books for the ages, things with no professional profit whatsoever to justify the time invested in them. As he sat reading—it was Bergson’s Laughter, as a matter of fact—the phone rang. He was alone, the others having gone to the beach. Six rings had passed before he picked up the phone, and he was sure that the calling party would have hung up. But hospital operators are persistent. Thirty years later Joseph remembered every word of the conversation, the operator’s Dorchester accent, the way she called him “Hon,” her statement that she had almost given up, but seeing as how it was the governor’s driver standing right there at the desk, Governor Thompson— The governor had run out of Elavil, his doctor was out of town, Anita was listed on the duty roster as the cover, but the person who answered the phone in her apartment said that she was away for two weeks and gave this number. One of those mistakes that happen: the duty roster was out of date. And since Anita was at the beach, well, it would be easier just to disturb the chief resident at home rather than keep the governor, who had a plane to catch, waiting.
Chatty, those operators. Joseph was halfway back to his Adirondack chair in the garden, his thumb still holding his place in Bergson, when he realized that a gift of some potential value had been handed to him. The news would keep. He said nothing to anyone for a week, but once back in Boston began the discreet inquiries that set the pot boiling. But how had Frank found out? Anita had no idea. Finding things out was what Frank was good at. He no doubt took many such secrets with him to the grave. He had revealed this one only because she was peripherally involved, only because— She paused, not for effect but because she knew that the time for banter and sarcasm was past. She parted her arms in a gesture meant to consign the past to the past, to let bygones be bygones. The coverlet fell away, and Joseph saw a smallish women of fifty in black lace bra and panties, drunk, her makeup smeared, her legs parted, waiting for him as she had been waiting night after night since that backward tumble on the hard clay court. But the silly game was over now. “Because?” he asked. But, knowing the answer, he didn’t hold her silence against her: Frank told the story because it showed Kaye up for what he was and because it confirmed his understanding of the way the world works, a world where Jews are good to Jews and the smart guy with his eye on the main chance and willing to pretend that only other guys break the rules will always come out ahead of the working stiff who’s merely good at what he does. Joseph’s crime was Frank’s alibi, and so it became, far more than it had ever yet been, a crime. He could hear the story as Frank had told it and wondered to whom, to how many others besides his lonely widow, a handsome enough woman but one who was after all not his type and never had been. He went into the bathroom, telling Anita he needed to wash up. He sat there for a long time. It had proved to be an expensive trip. Though the honorarium was good, the evening had cost him a part of his past and a part of his present. And by the time he returned to Anita’s bedside, the woman who for the briefest instant he had thought might have been a part of his future had crawled under the covers and gone to sleep.
[end]