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Page 8.

Chapter 3

They sat by a rainy, runnely window in the rear room of George and Harry’s Restaurant on Wall Street. It was Sunday. Dribbles drummed on lead gutters outside. The narrow street, framed by high neo-Gothic Yale buildings, glimmered in a greenish half-light. From the music school near the restaurant issued complex but neutral piano studies. Some anonymous person was pensive and dreaming over the keyboard. Tentative notes complemented ivied walls and drowning spring blossoms crushed in a film of water covering the street, while more water dribbled obscenely out of high eaves and splattered along rust-stained walls.

Jon Harney felt embarrassed. All week long he had yearned and schemed toward this meeting. Now she sat near him and he had nothing to say. She sat with her back to the window. Her hands were in the pockets of her open raincoat. Her blue-jean clad legs extended on sharp high heels under the table. Her head tilted expectantly while her blonde hair hung down into the windowsill behind the bench back. He sat askew in a corner, one finger in the mouth of the beer bottle he’d finished. It was an ale bottle, brown as amber, in which light glowered amid slowly falling foam resembling rain—or sea water. He alternately studied the worn mouth of the bottle and the white buttons spaced in a generous arc on her blue shirt.

“I didn’t know if you’d come,” she said. Her eyes flicked toward the ceiling beams full of worry and determination.

He leaned forward and soccered the bottle between the palms of his hands. “I was afraid you might not come.”

I was afraid I might not come.

She sat tensely but let him move close so he inhaled the essences of her hair, her skin, even her tea breath. His eyes fell to the soft salient which pushed her shirt way out, and what quivered underneath. He was surprised to see her sharp breaths, her trembling breasts.

Her finger felt icy with fear when he touched her hands. They were not those of a young girl. If she were a charcoal drawing, he could have washed her to a glowing blur and she would have passed for the essence of a very equestrian, sapphire twenty-three (his age) or even a preppy, pristine seventeen. Hinted rilles and dry cross-etchings were as yet only a preliminary design—over her knuckles, at the corners of her mouth, near the orbits of her eyes.

Seeing his look she did not protest. “You don’t always.”

“Always what?”

“Older women.”

He shoved the bottle away. “My own age and younger.”

“Oh. So far.”

“I guess.” The wrinkles could be from too much sun if she’d tanned too much over the years. She was the type for skiing, sailing, tennis, slender cigarettes if any, and credit cards, all prescribed for Ivy League; none of which he had. “You don’t feel older.” He corrected, “Seem.”

Getting ahead of ourselves. The signal is still red, but the signs ahead are clear to read.

She looked directly in his eyes for the first time. Her eyes were frank and grateful. “You seem like a wise rebel.”

“It’s relative,” he concluded.

“I had nobody to feel older than,” she said. “Bill’s thirty-four. Sometimes. Or sixty-four. Or four. Depending.”

“Bill.” Thinking of this other man made a sweat burn inside his collar.

I wish you wouldn’t talk about him.

Seeing his look, she pursed her lips and studied the flotsam of lemon seeds and tea shreds in the brown lake at the bottom of her cup, aground on a sand bar of stained sugar. “I won’t say anything again. After all, it’s not your problem.”

“Does he beat you?”

Her glance was sudden and bright blue. “Oh no. No, no. Dear.” She laughed out loud. “I would be lucky if he gave me that much attention.” Her teeth were unflawed white. “You needn’t worry. He’s gone to Australia. They’re digging near Upskate or something on the North Coast.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Doesn’t it.”

“If you happen to be in Upskate at the time.”

“I’m actually rather Downskate.”

“And here we are.”

“There you are.” She reached for her pocketbook. “That’s about the way it is.” She touched his arm. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

He sat alone, listening to water gurgling gently in secretive drains. Clocks moved slower in this oceanic time, where massive waves of leaves made a rushing in your ears, and your heart beat too hard and too fast. He knew he was free to get up and leave. Silly though—run? From what? Morality? No, a single transgression could not be very expensive. He would be mowing other lawns in this garden of easiness. Charles Egeny should savor forbidden apples and write firmer beats.

He heard her footsteps in the hollow wooden room and turned to watch her approach. She could easily be twenty or twenty-one. She smiled as she approached, guilelessly. Hands in raincoat, steps sure and direct, chin up…he thought he had the answer.

She hasn’t been domesticated.

Still wild and coltish, she slid in along the bench, quick to be beside him again. He reached impulsively and put his hand on hers. She laid her other hand on his. Their bones and skins were dry but mortised together in a sensuous tension. In planetary gravity, they were the architecture of circumstance: skillfully engineered canals laced through intricate chambers of cartilage, muscle, and flesh.

She might be complex, but she was not deep. She inclined her head slightly away and gave him a questioning look—a friendly but pained contraction about the mouth and eyes. “What are you thinking?”

We are accomplices now—spies or assassins—or at least thieves in the night, a well-matched pair who can telegraph each other’s brain waves; fight or flight.

He took her hands in his.

She let him hold her hands resting on the table, her fingers pliably relaxed but unhelpful.

“You’re not troubled by existential questions?”

She made the faintest motion of shaking her head.

No such logo at the varsity tennis shop.

Her teeth were still white but the smile was gone, replaced by distance and indifference. She said, “Are we going to discuss what is reality?”

We’re in an East Egg roadster, doing ninety in a forty zone with the top down and our hair flying behind us.

He released her hands and put his hands in his lap. “I was hoping we wouldn’t.”

She gave him a long, beautiful, sexy look. Her eyes darkened, and her wide, glossy lips took on a deeper shade of Merlot, with a smart, cutting laugh. Or was that Harlot? She wrapped her arm through his and pulled him close to her firm, warm side.

“We aren’t going to, are we?”

“What?” She looked at him mockingly.

Talk about why the sky is blue and stuff.

She shook her head and said in a throaty voice, “Nothing complicated.”

He said ruefully, “You are more experienced.”

You have money. Or, Bill has money and he has you. Or—he has the bills, and you have Bill, rich bitch.

She brought her hands together and made a gun of them, aimed at his heart. “I enjoyed what you said back in the break room on St. Ronan Street.”

“What did I say?”

Devilment glinted in her eyes. “About needing success. What a declaration! All I want is to write poetry. I want to mow lawns, conquer grass…”

“And love women like yourself,” he finished. He rescued some fervor out of his momentary uncertainty, “What else could a man say, looking at you?”

“A man,” she said, making a fist of her fight hand on the table and reaching with her left to grasp his knee and squeeze under the table. “That’s how I like you.” She squeezed his knee, shaking it with surprising intensity, and leaned close and said with tea-breath, “I’d like to take you by your grass…and mow you!”

He felt relieved, and they both laughed.

Some bubble had broken, a tension had disintegrated and filtered away in pieces into this greenish air.

“What I want,” he said, “is to be honest and open. I have this feeling we can have that.”

“Maybe Charles Egeny will write me a poem.”

“He did last night,” Jon Harney confessed. “He fell asleep though before he could retype it.”

“Honest and open. Those qualities are hard to find, unless two people hate each other.”

“What I mean is, I have this feeling we don’t have to act, know what I mean? We don’t have to play games.”

“Does it bother you I’m married?”

“You bring me neatly from the general to the particular. Yes.”

“Would you love me and leave me, excuse my cliché?”

“Maybe if it was the right thing, or the right time.”

She raked the opposite wall, the fireplace, the stained glass windowlets, with a gaze filled with hot and cold computations. “Maybe that’s how it should be.” She darted a look at him. “Suppose I don’t surrender?”

He spread his hands in the air. “I would dip my colors to you in salute, and pass you at a respectful distance.”

She placed her hands in her lap. “Would you think badly of me if I…had you on board?”

“I’d bring my best manners. Charles Egeny would rhapsodize you in the third person.”

She was resigned to her sensibility. Lying back again with her hands in her pockets, she looked up at the ceiling. “I wouldn’t get you get into anything embarrassing, or dangerous. Bill won’t be back for three months.”

“Why doesn’t he have you along?”

“He asked me. He asks me every time. I just don’t want to. Things won’t be any better in Australia.”

“Upskate.”

“Downskate.”

“Cheapskate,” he said, knowing it was the last thing about the world in which she sailed.

“Ice skate,” she said, signaling with her eyes. “Make me warm, Charles Egeny. Warm me up, Jon Harney.”

He took her hands in his, and rubbed them for warmth. “Love is free.”

She laughed. “That’s a hippie thing.”

“We’re not at Woodstock.”

“I’d go anywhere with you.”

In a play world, we could orbit the earth or be in a yellow submarine blowing bubbles at smiley fish.

She shuddered. “You make me feel warm and loved.”

“You don’t have any kids either.”