The only trouble with having an affair like ours is that the two of you cant go outside much. It tests the friendship more than it tests the sex. The old story: you cant be viewed in public, youre always Anna and Vronsky on this diminished suburban scale. You cant work in the garden, the two of you. You cant rake the leaves. You cant go to movies at the cineplex and you cant find yourselves at concerts or gallery shows. You have no opportunity to sit around on Sunday morning, funky and grungy and full of opinions, while you read the paper. You just stay in little rooms, those times when you can arrange it, the illicit playground of furtive and therefore heightened eros. The constraints challenge your sexual resourcefulness. Sometimes you have sex inventively all afternoon, in bed or on the floor or in the shower, for want of anything better to do. You do the fireworks. You light them and watch them go off. Of course, he didnt mind that, but, like me, he saw its limitations.
WE HAD ONCE TRIED to do what married people do: we went together to a department store to buy a pair of driving gloves. The whole event felt uncomfortably like a charade. At the counter, the salesgirl allowed me to try on several different pairs, and David smiled and frowned and exercised his discriminations and helped me choose the ones I bought, a very soft leather, light tan.
Is that pair the one you really want, Diana?
Yes. I smiled.
Sure?
Yes, Im sure.
He wasnt the least bit businesslike when he was strolling the aisles with me; he was pleasant when he admired the sweaters and the watches and the diamond pins, and me, but the whole episode was like an amateur theatrical: Two Lovers Pretend Theyre Not Clandestine. But we were, even there, under the lights and surveillance cameras. Our eyes kept roving, on the lookout for anyone known to the two of us, including the wife.
She, the wife, hadnt managed to stay interested in him, he said, though they did make love somehow for the sake of appearances, and she put the radio on to a twenty-four-hour news station so that she wouldnt have to hear the sounds they made together, the creaks and the groans. He liked going to bed in my bed because he didnt have to listen to the news when I was on top and was riding him to kingdom come. Well, I mean: the poor man.
Despite all this, he said he loved his wife, et cetera. And of course there were the children, two of them, a boy and a boy. Id say: You dont have to explain or apologize, honey; I dont want to marry you. I dont love you. But, oh, sweet guy, youre my friend, my buddy, and youre agreeable and adept in bed. He seemed wounded when I complimented him for these secondary virtues. And I said, No, no. A sane man who can be a friend and a lover to a woman is a find. You, David, are a find, I would say as we lay facing each other in my bathtubs hot soapy water and he slipped soap-rings over my fingers and then massaged my feet. You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, Im a malcontent and you cant change that.
SO THERE I WAS, in Jitters at the Briardale Mall, drinking my morning coffee and reading the paper during a power failure. Housed in my gray suit, nicely and distinctly accessorized with a small gold pin David had bought for me, I was sipping a Tip of the Andes specialty blend and checking the New York Times arts-and-leisure section, a feature on the choreographer Mark Morris whose work I happened to admire for its ritualized symmetries. In college I had aspirations to be a dancer, now done for. But I felt relaxed and very expensive, concentrating my forces. I had a large complicated case in the works and I was Zen-ing the whole thing, coolly distant but already imagining through strategy each step and each minute detail how Id win. I was pre-victoring it. I had a couple of aces up my sleeve, and the anticipation of my winning my future winnings made me not happy, exactly, but contented with myself. The client was almost irrelevant by that time.
When the power went off in the mall, I was the power, so I didnt care. I thought about my four colleagues in their darkened law offices half a mile away. I imagined those contentious characters nominally friends of mine stuck in elevators or in conference rooms with no ventilation, trying to figure out who to blame for the loss of electricity.
If God appeared on this earth again, lawyers would sue Him.
I always have coffee before going to work. I tend to get to the office a bit late. I am quite successful I do litigation and can pretty much set my own hours except when I go to court. I have to be reckoned with. No one tells me when to arrive at the office. No can do. You dont dictate anything to me.
My days are segmented, very clearly divided and defined, and that is how I work it. I have a compartment for everything, including getting ready for the working day, down to the coffee and the paper and the arts-and-leisure section. And I have always orchestrated my romances with, well, an icy methodical self-interest. Thats how I managed my affair with David.
As regulated by law, as soon as the power went off, the safety floodlights went on. Certainly enough illumination to catch up on the news. Sounds of meteorological strife resounded above me. From the sound of it, hail was falling out of the sky. I didnt care. I went on reading.
The manager of the shop appeared next to me.
How can you read in this light? Its so dim.
I didnt bother looking up. Im used to dim bulbs, I said.
In that case, youd be right at home here.
Oh, a contender. Someone for whom some notice was required. Its always a key moment when you have to drop what youre doing to look up at a man who has initiated this sort of conversation. So, noting the paragraph where I had stopped reading in the Mark Morris article, I trained my blue eyes on him and took his measure. Before me, leaning against a chair, stood a tallish man of somewhat uncertain appearance. He gave me a guarded smile. He didnt flinch when I gazed at him. He radiated a sort of old-fashioned semisexy kindliness planted in the midst of a serviceable face. He had meditative, haunted eyes, a painters eyes, as it turned out, widely set apart in his vaguely half-handsome head. I couldnt yet tell if he was being friendly in order to flirt, or to increase customer satisfaction. Or whether the flirting was specific to me or generic to women. I kept thinking: hes halfway there, wherever there is. Probably the kids in grade school had called him Froggy.
Oh, a contender. Someone for whom some notice was required. Its always a key moment when you have to drop what youre doing to look up at a man who has initiated this sort of conversation. So, noting the paragraph where I had stopped reading in the Mark Morris article, I trained my blue eyes on him and took his measure. Before me, leaning against a chair, stood a tallish man of somewhat uncertain appearance. He gave me a guarded smile. He didnt flinch when I gazed at him. He radiated a sort of old-fashioned semisexy kindliness planted in the midst of a serviceable face. He had meditative, haunted eyes, a painters eyes, as it turned out, widely set apart in his vaguely half-handsome head. I couldnt yet tell if he was being friendly in order to flirt, or to increase customer satisfaction. Or whether the flirting was specific to me or generic to women. I kept thinking: hes halfway there, wherever there is. Probably the kids in grade school had called him Froggy.
He stood, as if planted, in the cold trashy evacuation floodlight and smiled persistently. He didnt seem dim in the least. It was all a pretense. He was imagining us as comrades in a weather crisis, elbow to elbow as we faced a green sky. Meteorological solidarity. I heard the hail pounding atop the skylight. Weather is so nineteenth-century in its effects, I thought. Ive seen you here before, he said.
This place is close to work, I said.
I thought maybe the appeal lay in our atmosphere. He leaned against the wall. Our way of making our customers feel at home. Not customers guests.
Its close to work.
Or that maybe you were attracted by the paintings, the ambiance, all this comfortable furniture you see, or perhaps even the quality of the coffee.
Its close to work.
Okay, he said, its the staff, the friendly unassuming service people you tend to encounter periodically around here, like Chloé, snoozing there in the back. He gestured in the direction of a punkette half-asleep in a rear booth. I was about to get up and flee from his defective overtures when he said, Im sorry. Youre exasperated by me, I can tell. You know, I dont mean to be exasperating. Ill let you finish your coffee. Sorry to bother you. He waited. By the way, where is work, for you?
A mile or so away. I pointed a finger westward. Youre not particularly exasperating, you know. Not specifically. Ive known worse.
Thank you. What do you do? For a living?
I told him.
Ah. Sudden thunder crashed outside. We both moved, though I think I must have shuddered and surprised myself, because he told me a month later that I had shuddered and he had noticed and recorded it. That little movement, that tremor of mine, struck a flame. Bradley is interested in fears and phobias. He gestured toward the center of the mall, where there was nothing at all to see. Violent weather, he said.
Right.
Well, you know an improvement.
Ah. I decided to nod, but not emphatically. An improvement to what? I would not inquire. A nod without enthusiasm, a nod that withheld final agreement, was what I gave him. I realize that my irony and my distance can become fatiguing, tiresome. But evasiveness is deeply erotic, at least to me. I can fight my own chilliness when the situation demands, when I rouse myself to charm and warmth. He smiled at me as if facing a strong headwind, which I had created and which collaborated with the storm outside. You like it?
What?
The the violent weather.
Oh, he said, sure. He was very agreeable.
So do I, I suppose. I was trying to make a bit of a social effort. When I was a little girl, I was afraid of thunder. I glanced down at my newspaper. Something by Paul Hindemith was being revived at Lincoln Center. And something else by whats-his-name, the boy genius, Korngold. What had happened to the Mark Morris article? I was quite a cliché in those days, I said, remembering the conversation.