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Page 9.

“We tried. Half dozen years ago, when we were first married. One of us can’t. Bill has a really low sperm count. Jeez, why am I telling you this? Because you asked, I suppose. Don’t get a headache over it.”

He felt lost. “Have you thought about a divorce?”

My freedom means everything to me.

“We’ve talked about it. Then Bill runs off quickly on another dig.”

“Are you satisfied with being alone all the time?”

“Yes, in a way. I can do what I want. Not going out, I mean. There is always something to do. I’m not answerable to anyone. I see Bill off on the plane with a feeling of relief. When I drove him to the airport last month, I could sense he feels the same way. So the feeling is mutual. And what’s marriage except mutuality? Maybe we have a good marriage.”

“By that logic, I suppose.”

I will never understand.

“Do you ever feel like a prisoner?”

She arched her eyebrows ironically. “I’ve never known anything else. That’s why I cherish your wild freedom.”

“I thought I was just poor, and horny.”

She tickled his ribs. “And creative.”

He put an arm around her. He could feel her vertebrae like tender, submissive, vulnerable steps to her soul. He wanted to possess her, and have her, and pour himself into her, and hear her laugh, or listen to her surf-like breathing as she gently snored beside him, full of dreams like the sea.

She spoke at the ceiling beams. “I like the idea of being married. I’m not sure about actually living it day to day. When I meet a stranger I enjoy saying I’m married. I enjoy seeing the envy. I’m attractive to men, who mistake that as meaning I’m happily married, whatever that means to them. They look closely, trying to read the truth in my hair, in my hands, in my eyebrows. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t toy with anyone. I just like to leave them on that note. It’s like credit, like protection.” She gave him a sudden, violent look. “I have never screwed around with anyone.”

“Is this screwing around?”

Ready to walk.

She took his hands in hers, as if to blow on them and heal the sting. “No, baby. I don’t know what this is. Maybe it’s friendship. God knows I am so alone it scares me.”

I hope you don’t own a gun.

“You’re worried about me.” She made a reassuring face. “I won’t do anything to hurt myself. I love life too much.” She added, “The last thing I want is to hurt you.”

He pushed his hands out and wrapped them around hers. “I am not looking for anything hurtful. This is like science.”

She laughed. “What?”

“Gravity. Mutual attraction. The moon and the earth. The earth and the sun.”

She stroked his wrist slowly and considerately, as if reading his fortune. “Maybe you can shed some light on me.”

“We can help each other. Not that I’m in much need.”

“Me neither. Or maybe we are and don’t know it.”

“You’re nice to look at,” he said. “More nice to sit with, look in your eyes, watch how your lips gleam in this rainy light, and love the warmth in your soul.”

She pulled herself close as if they were high school kids on a date. “We can split a banana some time.”

He laughed. “A banana split.”

“Splat.” Her eyes glittered and she looked gamine.

He knotted his hands together on the table, squeezing her yielding hand close to his chest. “Why you have this thing about you, something young? At twenty feet distance you could pass for twenty-one. You’re like”(he groped for words, diplomatically)”not yet domesticated. A girl.”

“A girl, always young.” She looked grateful. “I’m still filled with impulse.”

“Yes.”

“I am careful, though.”

“Are you sure nobody from the faculty would recognize you here? I mean, after all, we’re at the center of the university.”

“In a restaurant? Some university—I’m sorry. Like there are spies everywhere.”

“You can be a little cynical.”

Biting, maybe, which gives you a cutting edge.

“I’m sorry. Sometimes I get to be a wise guy, a wise ass chick. No, I doubt if anyone would recognize me. Bill takes me to parties and shows me off. I don’t really mind. Are you shocked? I was brought up that way.”

“You told me you are from Westport.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m spoiled. My daddy is a famous surgeon. My older brother is an architect. Groomed for Harvard, so naturally he went to MIT.”

“And you?”

“Do you know the Style commercial?”

“You mean that new cigarette.” He remembered the ads—always anchored on a smiling, tanned blonde accepting a Style from some curly-haired rascal holding a crisp new red-and-white, candy-striped pack of The Really Thin Cigarillos.

“It’s a cigar,” she corrected. “I was groomed to smile and hold the cigar. Like Momma. She held the cigar for years. It was the only thing she could train me for. So I hold the cigar for Bill when he needs me. My face and a few cocktails too many got the chair in anthro somewhere on the West Coast to invite Bill to teach for a year. Bill turned it down for Yale. But he’s in Upskate, and here we are.”

“Here we are,” Jon said. “How did you get the name?”

“You mean Merile?”

He nodded. “I’m Jonathan, the prophet from the Bible.”

“No,” she said ironically, “you are Jonah who was swallowed by a whale.”

“But he escaped and got barfed up on shore.”

“Lucky you. Well, my parents couldn’t imagine me as a finished product for the Seven Sisters and some Ivy League cigar smoker unless I had a name right out of a commercial. You know, a soap opera name. So they named me Merrill. Which is so masculine that it’s almost like there is no woman in the starched blue shirt, just a concept from an ad for expensive whatevers. So I changed it, in the still of the night, all by myself, playing around with the dial until I got it more supple and moist like a girl’s handle should be.”

He made a dreamy face. “Merile does sound feminine and mysterious. Soft and mushy.”

She laughed. “It’s so subversive. You say it the same way—Merrill—like a suburb in Cos Cob, or a hunting rifle in Africa, or a tragic regiment in Flanders; but it’s really like a Parisian mist, or a Belgian waffle, or a Yalie donut.”

“I like the donut part,” he said. Keep the Yalie. “My father sells cars and my mother bakes a helluva cake. My older brother’s in the Army. My younger brother James is studying Political Science. I’m the first person in the history of my family to finish college. I mow lawns for a living.”

“Do your parents live near here?”

“In West Haven,” he told her. “Jimmy’s the big hope in the family. He was president of his class in high school and he wants to go into politics.”

She regarded him minutely, running a speculative tongue tip around inside her lips. “We grew up not far from each other.”

He thought for a moment. “I was starting high school when you graduated from—where was it?”

“Vassar.”

“Vassar, of course.”

She posed with raised shoulders, a cocked head, and batty eyelashes while making airy motions with a fluid hand. “Vassar…o to dream of holding your cigar!”

“You don’t have to hold any cigars for me.”

She slapped his wrist lightly. “Of course, you ain’t got one. Being from West Haven and all.”

Mildly annoyed, he peered at her in the watery light.

“I don’t think that way. Please don’t be annoyed. A lot of girls in my class at Vassar went off to hold their own cigars. It just so happened I wasn’t endowed with the sense of independence. My role is more to the hearth. I spin and Bill goes delving. That whole bag, you know?”

“You keep the fires banked?”

“That’s coarse.”

“And to the point.”

“I get the point.” She sighed. “Penelope, spinning and chaste by the hearth in Ithaca.” She crossed her arms, wrapping her elbows in opposite hands. “If I didn’t feel so…affectionate…about you I’d be insulted.”

He rubbed his stomach. “It’s getting late and my stomach tells me it’s time for supper.”

“What do you usually do for supper?” she asked.

“Burger Barn,” he told her candidly.

She irradiated him with one of those warm smiles he’d come to love. “I could go for a Quick Yack.” The verbal ping pong was over. The net was discarded, the table folded; they walked out into glowering twilight and drizzle arm in arm like two twenty-three-year-olds—her blonde hair flying, his shoulders spread proudly like a sailor’s.

Behind them, bottles made chinking noises. Piano music welled up from the Venetioid windows of the music school. Dribbles drabbled as they huddled, dashing. Envious looks followed their departure into the dripping and fresh spring and mossy evening. He knew she knew he knew now what it was like to have a woman like her holding your cigar. Not such a bad feeling; like being intoxicated with all that Fairfield County money and fire and first-class Scotch. Those smiles, like thrown snowballs. That skin like sweet caramel wanting to be licked.

Better yet, remove the wrapper and stare, but don’t spoil by touching.

With her, he felt the anything, the indulgence, the experience at last of life. Somewhere sat her dark gray Porsche or whatever it was, locked and sullen and mysterious. Jon took Merile to his old blue Pontiac. Rather than mind, she seemed excited by it.