Another Marvelous Thing Read online

  “We don’t have to go, Billy,” I said. “I only sent the check yesterday. I can cancel it.”

  There appeared to be tears in my mistress’ eyes.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t do that. I’ll split it with you.”

  “You don’t seem pleased,” I said.

  “Being pleased doesn’t strike me as the appropriate response to the idea of sneaking off to a love nest with your lover,” said Billy.

  “What is the appropriate response?” I said.

  “Oh,” Billy said, her voice now blithe, “sorrow, guilt, horror, anticipation.”

  Well, she can run but she can’t hide. My mistress is given away from time to time by her own expressions. No matter how hard she tries to suppress the visible evidence of what she feels, she is not always successful. Her eyes turn color, becoming dark and rather smoky. This is as good as a plain declaration of love. Billy’s mental life, her grumpiness, her irritability, her crotchets are like static that, from time to time, give way to a clear signal, just as you often hit a pure band of music on a car radio after turning the dial through a lot of chaotic squawk.

  In French movies of a certain period, the lovers are seen leaving the woman’s apartment or house. His car is parked on an attractive side street. She is carrying a leather valise and is wearing a silk scarf around her neck. He is carrying the wicker basket she has packed with their picnic lunch. They will have the sort of food lovers have for lunch in these movies: a roasted chicken, a bottle of champagne, and a goat cheese wrapped up in leaves. Needless to say, when Billy and I finally left to go to bur love nest, no such sight presented itself to me. First of all, she met me around the corner from my garage after a number of squabbles about whose car to take. She was standing between a rent-a-car and an animal hospital, wearing an old skirt, her old jacket, and carrying a ratty canvas overnight bag. No lacy underwear would be drawn from it, I knew. My mistress buys her white cotton undergarments at the five-and-ten-cent store. She wears an old T-shirt of Grey’s to sleep in, she tells me.

  For lunch we had hamburgers—no romantic rural inn or picnic spot for us—at Hud’s Burger Hut off the thruway.

  As we drew closer to our destination, Billy began to fidget, reminding me that having her along was sometimes not unlike traveling with a small child.

  In the town nearest our love nest we stopped and bought coffee, milk, sugar, and cornflakes. Because I am a domestic animal and not a mere savage, I remembered to buy bread, butter, cheese, salami, eggs, and a number of cans of tomato soup.

  Billy surveyed these items with a raised eyebrow.

  “This is the sort of stuff you buy when you intend to stay indoors and kick up a storm of passion,” she said.

  It was an off-year Election Day—congressional and Senate races were being run. We had both voted, in fact, before taking off. Our love nest had a radio which I instantly switched on to hear if there were any early returns while we gave the place a cursory glance and put the groceries away. Then we flung ourselves onto the unmade bed, for which I had thoughtfully remembered to pack sheets.

  When our storm of passion had subsided, my mistress stared impassively at the ceiling.

  “In bed with Frank and Billy,” she intoned. “It was Election Day, and Frank and Billy were once again in bed. Election returns meant nothing to them. The future of their great nation was inconsequential, so busy were they flinging themselves at one another they could barely be expected to think for one second of any larger issues. The subjects to which these trained economists could have spoken, such as inflationary spirals or deficit budgeting, were as mere dust.”

  “Shut up, Billy,” I said.

  She did shut up. She put on my shirt and went off to the kitchen. When she returned she had two cups of coffee and a plate of toasted cheese on a tray. With the exception of her dinner party, this was the first meal I had ever had at her hands.

  “I’m starving,” she said, getting under the covers. We polished off our snack, propped up with pillows. I asked Billy if she might like a second cup of coffee and she gave me a look of remorse and desire that made my head spin.

  “Maybe you wanted to go out to dinner,” she said. “You like a proper dinner.” Then she burst into tears. “I’m sorry,” she said. These were words I had never heard her speak before.

  “Sorry?” I said. “Sorry for what?”

  “I didn’t ask you what you wanted to do,” my mistress said. “You might have wanted to take a walk, or go for a drive or look around the house or make the bed.”

  I stared at her.

  “I don’t want a second cup of coffee,” Billy said. “Do you?”

  I got her drift and did not get out of bed. The forthrightness of her desire for me melted my heart.

  During this excursion, none of my expectations came to pass. We did not, for example, have long talks about our respective marriages or our future together or apart. We did not discover what our domestic life might be like. We lived like graduate students or mice and not like normal people at all. We kept odd hours and lived off sandwiches. We stayed in bed and were both glad when it rained. When the sun came out, we went for a walk and observed the bare and almost bare trees. From time to time I would switch on the radio to hear the latest election results and commentary.

  “Because of this historic time,” Billy said, “you will never be able to forget me. It is a rule of life that care must be taken in choosing whom one will be in bed with during Great Moments in History. You are now stuck, with me and this week of important congressional elections twined in your mind forever.”

  It was in the car on the way home that the subject of what we were doing together came up. It was twilight and we had both been silent.

  “This is the end of the line,” said Billy.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “Do you mean you want to break this up?”

  “No,” said Billy. “It would be nice, though, wouldn’t it?”

  “No, it would not be nice,” I said.

  “I think it would,” said Billy. “Then I wouldn’t spend all my time wondering what we are doing together when I could be thinking about other things, like my dissertation.”

  “What do you think we are doing together?” I said.

  “It’s simple,” said Billy. “Some people have dogs or kitty cats. You’re my pet.”

  “Come on.”

  “Okay, you’re right. Those are only child substitutes. You’re my child substitute until I can make up my mind about having a child.”

  At this, my blood freezes. Whose child does she want to have?

  Every now and then when overcome with tenderness—on those occasions naked, carried away, and looking at one another with sweetness in our eyes—my mistress and I smile dreamily and realize that if we dwelt together for more than a few days, in the real world and not in some love nest, we would soon learn to hate each other. It would never work. We both know it. She is too relentlessly dour, and too fond of silence. I prefer false cheer to no cheer and I like conversation over dinner no matter what. Furthermore we would never have proper meals and, although I cannot cook, I like to dine. I would soon resent her lack of interest in domestic arrangements and she would resent me for resenting her. Furthermore, Billy is a slob. She does not leave towels lying on the bathroom floor, but she throws them over the shower curtain rod any old way instead of folding them or hanging them properly so they can dry. It is things like this that squash out romance over a period of time.

  As for Billy, she often sneers at me. She finds many of my opinions quaint. She thinks I am an old-time domestic fascist. She refers to me as “an old-style heterosexual throwback” or “old hetero” because I like to pay for dinner, open car doors, and often call her at night when Grey is out of town to make sure she is safe. The day the plumber came to fix a leak in her sink, I called several times.

  “He’s gone,” Billy said. “And he left big, greasy paw prints all over me.” She found this funny, I did not.

 
After a while, were we to cohabit, I believe I would be driven nuts and she would come to loathe me. My household is well run and well regulated. I like routine and I like things to go along smoothly. We employ a flawless person by the name of Mrs. Ivy Castle who has been flawlessly running our house for years. She is an excellent housekeeper and a marvelous cook. Our relations with her are formal.

  The Delielles employ a feckless person called Mimi-Ann Browning who comes in once a week to push the dust around. Mimi-Ann hates routines and schedules, and is constantly changing the days of the people she works for. It is quite something to hear Billy on the telephone with her.

  “Oh, Mimi-Ann,” she will say. “Please don’t switch me. I beg you. Grey’s awful cousin is coming and the house is really disgusting. Please, Mimi. I’ll do anything. I’ll do your mother-in-law’s tax return. I’ll be your eternal slave. Please. Oh, thank you, Mimi-Ann. Thank you a million times.”

  Now why, I ask myself, does my mistress never speak to me like that?

  In the sad twilight on the way home from our week together, I asked myself, as I am always asking myself: could I exist in some ugly flat with my cheerless mistress? I could not, as my mistress is always the first to point out.

  She said that the small doses we got of one another made it possible for us to have a love affair but that a taste of ordinary life would do us in. She correctly pointed out that our only common interest was each other, since we had such vast differences of opinion on the subject of economics. Furthermore, we were not simply lovers, nor were we mere friends, and since we were not going to end up together, there was nothing for it.

  I was silent.

  “Face it,” said my tireless mistress. “We have no raison d’être.”

  There was no disputing this.

  I said: “If we have no raison d’être, Billy, then what are we to do?”

  These conversations flare up like tropical storms. The climate is always right for them. It is simply a question of when they will occur.

  “Well?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” said my mistress, who generally has a snappy answer for everything. A wave of fatherly affection and worry came over me. I said, in a voice so drenched with concern it caused my mistress to scowl like a child about to receive an injection: “Perhaps you should think about this more seriously, Billy. You and Grey are really just starting out. Vera and I have been married a long, long time. I think I am more a disruption in your life than you are in mine.”

  “Oh, really,” said Billy.

  “Perhaps we should see each other less,” I said. “Perhaps we should part.”

  “Okay, let’s part,” said Billy. “You go first.” Her face was set and I entertained myself with the notion that she was trying not to burst into tears. Then she said: “What are you going to do all day after we part?”

  This was not a subject to which I wanted to give much thought.

  “Isn’t our raison d’être that we’re fond of one another?” I said. “I’m awfully fond of you.”

  “Gee, that’s interesting,” Billy said. “Just last week you broke down and used the word ‘love.’ How quickly things change.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Whatever our status quos are,” Billy said, “they are being maintained like mad.”

  This silenced me. Billy and I have the world right in place. Nothing flutters, changes, or moves. Whatever is being preserved in our lives is safely preserved. It is quite true, as Billy, who believes in function, points out, that we are in each other’s life for a reason, but neither of us will state the reason. Nevertheless, although there are some cases in which love is not a good or sufficient reason for anything, the fact is, love is undeniable.

  Yes, love is undeniable and that is the tricky point. It is one of the sobering realizations of adult life that love is often not a propellant. Thus, in those romantic movies, the tender mistress stays married to her stuffy husband—the one with the mustache and the stiff tweeds—while the lover is seen walking through the countryside with his long-suffering wife and faithful dog. It often seems that the function of romance is to give people something romantic to think about.

  The question is: if it is true, as my mistress says, that she is going to stay with Grey and I am going to stay with Vera, why is it that we are together every chance we get?

  There was, of course, an explanation for this, and my indefatigable mistress came up with it, God bless her.

  “It’s an artistic impulse,” she said. “It takes us out of reality and gives us an invented context all our own.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said. “It’s only art.”

  “Don’t get in a huff,” Billy said. “We’re in a very unusual situation. It has to do with limited doting, restricted thrall, and situational adoration.”

  “Oh, how interesting,” I said. “Are doting, thrall, and adoration things you actually feel for me?”

  Naturally Billy would never deign to answer a leading question.

  Every adult knows that facts must be faced. In adult life, it often seems that’s all there is. Prior to our weekend together, the unguarded moments between us had been kept to a minimum. Now they came more frequently. That week together haunted us. It dogged our heels. It made us long for and dread—what an unfortunate combination!—each other.

  One evening I revealed to her how I sometimes feel as I watch her walk up the stairs to the door of her house. I feel she is walking into her real and still fairly young life. She will leave me in the dust, I think. I think of all the things that have not yet happened to her, that have not yet gone wrong, and I think of her life with Grey, which is still fairly unlived.

  One afternoon she told me how it makes her feel when she thinks of my family table—with Vera and our sons and their friends and girl friends, of our years of shared meals, of all that lived life. Billy described this feeling as a band around her head and a hot pressure in the area of her heart. I, of course, merely get a lump in my throat. Why do these admittings take place at twilight or at dusk, in the gloomiest light when everything looks dirty, eerie, faded, or inevitable?

  Our conversation comes to a dead halt, like a horse balking before a hurdle, on the issue of what we want. I have tried my best to formulate what it is I want from Billy, but I have not gotten very far. Painful consideration has brought forth this revelation: I want her not ever to stop being. This is as close as grammar or reflection will allow.

  One day the horse will jump over the hurdle and the end will come. The door will close. Billy will doubtless do the closing. She will decide she wants a baby, or Grey will be offered an academic post in London, or Billy will finish her dissertation and get a job in Boston, and the Delielles will move. Or perhaps Vera will come home one evening and say that she longs to live in Paris or San Francisco, and we will move. What will happen then?

  Perhaps my mistress is right. A love affair is like a work of art. The large store of reference and jokes, the history of our friendship, our trip to Vermont, our numberless phone calls, this edifice, this monument, this civilization known only to and constructed by the two of us will be—what will it be? Billy once read me an article from one of Grey’s nature magazines about the last Coast Salish Indian to speak Wintu. All the others of his tribe were dead. That is how I would feel, deprived of Billy.

  The awful day will doubtless come. It is like thinking about the inevitability of nuclear war. But for now, I continue to ring her doorbell. Her greeting is delivered in a bored monotone. “Oh, it’s you,” she will say.

  I will follow her upstairs to her study and there we will hurl ourselves at one another. I will reflect, as I always do, how very bare the setting for these encounters is. Not a picture on the wall, not an ornament. Even the quilt that keeps the chill off us on the couch is faded.

  In one of her snootier moments, my mistress said to me: “My furnishings are interior. I care about what I think about.”

  As I gather her into my arms, I cannot help i
magining all that interior furniture, those hard-edged things she thinks about, whatever is behind her silence, whatever, in fact, her real story is.

  I imagine that some day she will turn to me and with some tone in her voice I have never heard before say: “We can’t see each other any more.” We will both know the end has come. But meanwhile she is right close by. After a fashion, she is mine. I watch her closely to catch the look of true love that every once in a while overtakes her. She knows I am watching, and she knows the effect her look has. “A baby could take candy from you,” she says.

  Our feelings have edges and spines and prickles like a cactus, or porcupine. Our parting when it comes will not be simple, either. Depicted it would look like one of those medieval beasts that have fins, fur, scales, feathers, claws, wings, and horns. In a world apart from anyone else, we are Frank and Billy, with no significance to anyone but the other. Oh, the terrible privacy and loneliness of love affairs!

  Under the quilt with our arms interlocked, I look into my mistress’ eyes. They are dark, and full of concealed feeling. If we hold each other close enough, that darkness is held at bay. The mission of the lover is, after all, to love. I can look at Billy and see clear back to the first time we met, to our hundreds of days together, to her throwing the towels over the shower curtain rod, to each of her gestures and intonations. She is the road I have traveled to her, and I am hers.

  Oh, Billy! Oh, art! Oh, memory!

  Frank and Billy

  At a perfectly ordinary cocktail party given by the Journal of American Economic Thought for its staff and contributors, Francis Clemens was introduced to the author of some articles he had admired on the subject of medieval capitalism. Her name was Josephine Delielle (nicknamed Billy) and although it slipped right by him at the time, he fell in love with her at once.

  She had lank brown hair, gray-blue eyes, and a deadpan mug. Her expression ranged from a frown to a somewhat grudging grin.