Starting Out in the Evening Page 17

  They had a little time before his flight, so they went to get something to eat. The cafeteria was crowded; he claimed the only vacant table and Ariel went to get food.

  For herself she bought Swedish meatballs, an apple crumb cake, and a glass of milk; she got a salad with low-fat cottage cheese and a Diet Coke for him. Standing on line, she looked over at him; he was immersed in a novel he’d pulled from his carry-on bag.

  She could make out the title from here. The Ambassadors, by Henry James.

  When she was little, about eight or nine, she had a big reputation in her family as the girl with the eagle eyes. If her mother or father lost their keys, she would always find them. She could still remember how good it felt to hear her mother praise her.

  Her father looked content, serenely absorbed in the book. He was a Zen master, she thought: not because he’d only brought one bag, but because he lived in a kingdom of purely spiritual struggles and purely spiritual rewards. He didn’t care that he was sitting at a table in the smoking section, and that two nerdy guys next to him were chortling like goats. He didn’t care that his body was falling apart. He was somewhere far away, taking a walk with Henry James.

  As she brought the tray of food to the table, she looked out to watch a plane taking off, and she caught an alarming glimpse of herself in the glass.

  “My hair’s in trouble,” she said, sitting down.

  He laughed. “My dear,” he said, “your hair is fine, but in fact you’re such a lovely young woman that you’d be beautiful even if you had no hair at all. So I really don’t think you need to worry about your hair so much.”

  She loved it when he was gentle with her like this.

  She sensed, without having asked him, that the miniskirted scholar had dumped him. A certain lightness that he’d had for a while was gone. She’d noticed it last week, and, in spite of herself, she was glad.

  But today he seemed to have recovered; he seemed excited about his trip.

  “Did you see the paper this morning?” he said.

  “No. I didn’t get a chance.” The truth was that she hadn’t looked at a newspaper in about three months.

  “There was a story about a comet that’ll be visible in July. Russell’s Comet. It was discovered by a woman astronomer, so it’s a feminist comet. It comes close to the earth every sixty-four years. I saw it with my mother when I was seven years old—she took me out to New Jersey to have a look. And I remember my grandmother saying she saw it when she was a girl in Russia. You should try to see it this summer. You can tell your children about it, and when it comes around again, in the year two thousand and something, they can see it themselves.”

  My children, she thought. That was sweet of him to say.

  He was still holding The Ambassadors. She took it from his hands and opened it near the middle. “It was the first time Chad had, to that extent, given this personage ‘away’; and Strether found himself wondering of what it was symptomatic. He made out in a moment that the youth was in earnest as he had not yet seen him; which, in its turn, threw a ray perhaps a trifle startling on what they had each, up to that time, been treating as earnestness.”

  “Is it possible to get an English translation of this?” she said.

  Her father laughed. “It’s not so difficult once you get the hang of it.” She thought that was all he was going to say about it, but after a moment she could see he was thinking, and she knew that his teacherly impulses were coming into play. “During his last years,” he said, “James used to dictate his work. He would pace around the room, talking, and his faithful secretary, Miss Bosanquet, would take it all down. Some people think that’s the reason his late style became so indirect. James always denied that had anything to do with it, though: he thought he was simply growing more precise. In any case, there’s a lot of feeling hidden inside the coils of those sentences.”

  They talked a little more about Henry James—he reminded her that she had loved The Heiress, the movie based on Washington Square. “That might be a good place to start with James. That, or The Portrait of a Lady.” She was no more likely to read Henry James than to translate him into Dutch, and he knew it, but she appreciated the kindly way he told her about this writer he loved. He never made her feel bad about the fact that she was more of a TV person than a reader.

  She wanted to tell him that she was seeing Casey again—Casey was all she could think about lately—but she couldn’t.

  Why not? She wasn’t sure.

  Maybe, she thought, it was because it was still too new. It’s foolish to speak of your happiness before you’re sure you have it.

  Or it might have been because she wasn’t quite sure how he’d take it. Though he’d been friendly enough to Casey when she’d gone out with him years ago, she’d sensed that he was relieved when she and Casey broke up. As if he’d expected her to go back to white guys, where she belonged. If she did end up with Casey for keeps, she was sure her father would give them his blessing, but it might not be easy for him.

  The funny thing was that the two men had a great deal in common. Beneath the differences of age and skin color, both men were passionately serious in a modest, unshowy way.

  “Have you been thinking about Mom a lot these days?” she said.

  “I think about her every day,” he said. “It’s funny. When she died, all I was aware of was the loss. But as the years have worn on, she seems more present to me than ever.”

  To Ariel, as the years wore on, her mother seemed more and more distant. Her ghost, which had once been so powerful, had dwindled to a small white light.

  It was time for him to board the plane. He kissed her and told her he loved her. It wasn’t something he said often; she knew he’d said it because he wanted it to be the last thing he said to her if the plane went down. He joined the crowd at the gate, and then he disappeared.

  In the waiting room, for some reason, there was a TV monitor where you could see the passengers going through the metal detectors; she saw her father, dragging along slowly with his cane.

  She sat staring blankly at the monitor long after he was gone, and suddenly she felt weak with relief. It was only now that he was gone that she realized how much she worried about him, every moment of the day. It was as if the two of them made a trade-off: he worried about her emotional health and she worried about his physical health.

  Her emotional radar didn’t extend to France. He’d be out of her range of worry for a while.

  She left the terminal and boarded a bus—one of those one-stop buses that take you straight to Grand Central. She was still turning over the question of why she hadn’t told her father about Casey.

  She found a seat in the back and closed her eyes. She could nap if she wanted to—the driver would wake her when they got to New York.

  It felt good to be borne along, safe, in the darkness. And this feeling, the pleasure of letting go her hold, gave her the clue she needed. She hadn’t told her father about Casey because if he knew she was happy with a man, he might feel that his task—the task of taking care of her—was over. He might let go his hold on life. She didn’t want him to let go his hold.

  33

  Casey decided that if this part of his life had a chapter title, it would be “Getting to Know Your Penis.”

  He examined the base of his cock, for the twelfth time that day.

  In college he’d gone out with an ardent feminist who spent a good deal of her time peering into her vagina with the aid of a mirror and a speculum—a plastic instrument resembling one of those two-in-one salad spoons, with which she propped herself open. Her thesis was that women have to understand their bodies intimately if they are to liberate themselves from patriarchal oppression.

  Too bad she wasn’t around now. They could have kept each other company, interrogating their sexual organs together.

  A few months ago he’d gone out with a woman named Liz. A very nice woman with herpes. And now he was worried that he had herpes too.

  When she’d
told him she had it, he had shrugged heroically and said, “What’s a little herpes between friends?” He was sincere. She gave him so much pleasure in bed that he didn’t care about herpes.

  No: it wasn’t just pleasure in bed. She gave him pleasure in many of the realms of life. She was an interesting, moody woman, and he loved to listen to her think out loud.

  Sometimes, it was true, she could be a bit much. She was one of those overearnest left-wing white women who seek out black boyfriends as tokens of their own high ideals, and whenever they discussed some political question she would ask Casey what the black community thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said at one point. “What does the white community think?” But despite his belief that she was too dogmatic, and despite her belief that, politically speaking, he wasn’t black enough, they found each other stimulating, and they were enjoying each other a great deal until they got to the inevitable discussion about children.

  It was a hard conversation. Liz kept giving him opportunities to say he wasn’t sure about whether he wanted to have kids: opportunities to lie a little, so they could go on. But he wouldn’t avail himself of them. It was hard for him to insist, because it hurt her, and because he knew it would drive her away. But he couldn’t string a woman along anymore. He felt like a rat, but a rat at peace with itself.

  She was furious, and she had a right to be. Actually, she didn’t have a right to be: he’d never lied to her, but he understood why she was furious all the same. She called him a bastard; she even called him an Oreo—an insult he hadn’t heard in years; she threw something at him—it was a copy of Perry Anderson’s Arguments Within English Marxism; and they ended up making love. And then, later, as he was leaving her apartment for what they both knew would be the last time, she smiled wickedly and said, “I hope I didn’t give you anything. I’ve been feeling tingly this week. But I don’t think I’m contagious yet.”

  It was wicked because she knew he was a hypochondriac.

  And now he was sitting on his toilet seat examining his penis with a mirror.

  The amazing thing is how little you know your own sexual organs. A year or so ago he’d gone for a checkup and his doctor had asked him routinely whether there were any new lumps or bulges in his testicles. “How the hell should I know?” Casey had said. His testicles consisted entirely of lumps and bulges; who kept track of them all? Now he had to keep track. For three or four days after his final evening with Liz, his balls had itched madly, but there were no eruptions, and he’d concluded that the itching was psychosomatic; and when it finally passed, he’d congratulated himself on his refusal to panic. But earlier this week, sitting in his robe after a shower, talking on the phone with one of his ex-students and idly scratching his crotch as he made a point about the intellectual origins of the French Revolution, he had noticed a little red bump at the base of his penis that he’d never noticed before.

  He knew, in the rational part of his mind, that it wasn’t herpes. Liz was angry at him, so she’d left him with a little zinger, but she was basically a good person, and there was no way she would actually put him at risk.

  The thing was, he already had a kid. He’d fucked up at fatherhood once already, and he felt that having fucked up once, you don’t deserve a second chance.

  That was putting it too harshly. He hadn’t fucked up at fatherhood, he’d fucked up at marriage. After they broke up, Yvonne moved back to Chicago and of course took William with her. Casey faithfully paid his alimony and his child support; he talked to William once a week, saw him several times a year, and wished he could see him more often. But he didn’t want to have another kid. That time of his life—the time when you can give your best energies to the needs of a tiny child—was over.

  He had other things to worry about.

  He had reached a dangerous age. He was at an age when you either advance in the direction of your dreams or else succumb to the creeping blight of Scott Carter’s Disease.

  Scott Carter was Casey’s former mentor. He had been a young professor, a brilliant guy with seemingly unlimited promise, when Casey was studying political science at Columbia. Scott had eventually taken a job at Boston University, and he and Casey lost touch.

  A few years later Casey ran into him on the street and they had a drink. The first thing he noticed was that Scott was fat. He was fat, and he was relaxed. At Columbia, Scott had been nervous—physically and intellectually intense. Now, pudgy, bland, listless, Scott had the aspect of a neutered cat.

  As they talked, Casey discovered that Scott had grown spiritually listless as well. Remembering the three-hour discussions they used to have at the West End Gate, he was eager to put some of his new ideas to the test of Scott’s skepticism. Casey kept trying to get a conversation started; Scott kept having nothing to say. “You know,” Scott finally said, “I’m not proud of it, but I haven’t been reading much lately. At this point in life, when I come home at night I’m not in the mood to strain my brain. I’d rather drink a couple of brews and watch a hockey game.”

  This was Casey’s glimpse into the horrors of aging. This is what can happen to you after tenure. Scott, at that time, was hardly over forty, but, intellectually speaking, he’d checked out.

  That was a few years ago. And now Casey was alarmed to find symptoms of Scott Carter’s Disease in himself.

  His was a more benign form of the disease. He wasn’t dying intellectually. His problem was that he found teaching so challenging, and so exhausting, that he didn’t have much room for anything else.

  There was a part of him that was fulfilled by the life he was living now. But he wanted to be more than a little professor; he wanted to make a contribution in the wider world.

  In the last year he’d started thinking about how he might make one. He’d been talking with a few friends about starting a small-circulation political magazine. There was certainly room for a smart new magazine of the left. The Nation was maddeningly glib: there was no conceivable question it didn’t have an answer for. Dissent was stifled by its own sobriety: always intelligent, never exciting, it was a finger-wagging grandfather of the left. Monthly Review, now past its fiftieth year of existence, was still laboring tirelessly to prove that Marx’s theory of the falling rate of profit had relevance to the modern age.

  He thought he could be a good editor: he had a nose for what was interesting, and he didn’t have a huge ego. As a teacher, he’d always been good at helping people clarify their own thoughts. And what he liked to do best in his spare time, after all, was read magazines. Sometimes he thought about putting together a graduate course whose syllabus would consist exclusively of selections from magazines: from The Westminster Review and The Edinburgh Review to The Liberator to The Masses and The Crisis to Partisan Review to Studies on the Left and The New Left Review to Transition. Civilization, he sometimes thought, advances through its magazines.

  It was almost time to meet Ariel. He took one last look at the bump at the base of his penis. He had a medical book around the house, in which he’d read that the herpes virus “causes a genital sore that weeps colorless fluid.” Could this thing be described as a “sore”? He wasn’t sure.

  He peered at the red bump closely. “Are you weeping colorless fluid?” he said.

  He had been to his shrink that morning, and his shrink, an irrepressibly upbeat woman who reminded him of a cross between Mary Tyler Moore and Minnie Mouse, had suggested that he was freaking out about herpes because he was afraid of infecting Ariel—not with herpes, which he knew he didn’t actually have, but with unhappiness.

  34

  Ariel arrived in Manhattan near Grand Central and took a train downtown. She was meeting Casey for a movie at the Film Forum.

  She was thinking that sometimes life can be generous. Meeting up again with him like this, they had the best of both worlds: the comfort of an old love and the intensity of a new one.

  It was a cool night, but he was waiting outside in just a sport jacket and corduroys and a white shirt. He a
lways wore white shirts. He had sort of a perpetually preppie look.

  “Hello, Man from Glad,” she said—the hero of a series of commercials from the sixties, who was always popping up in the nick of time when somebody needed to wrap a sandwich.

  The Film Forum was having a retrospective of movies by the English director Michael Apted. They were going to see 35 Up, a movie they’d both missed when it was originally released.

  In the early sixties Apted made a documentary for British television, 7 Up, in which he interviewed a racially and socially diverse group of seven-year-olds. Every seven years after that, he’d interviewed the same subjects and made a new film, incorporating footage from the earlier ones. So you watched these people grow.

  They held hands during the movie, and Casey, in an idle moment, gently undid her watch—she’d bought a new watch—and put it in his breast pocket.

  She thought it was a very sexy gesture.

  Afterward they went to a Middle Eastern restaurant. They ordered drinks and looked at the menu, but when she asked him what he was in the mood for, he said he hadn’t thought about it yet.

  “I found the movie a little depressing,” he said. “In 28 Up, life seemed so full of possibilities—for most of them at least. Now they all seemed defeated.”

  She’d noticed it too: at thirty-five, the people in the movie seemed to have put away their dreams; the most they dared hope for was that their children would have better lives than theirs.

  “Is that the way it really is?” he said.

  “That’s the way it is in England,” Ariel said. “In America you can keep starting over again.”

  “That’s true,” Casey said, brightening.

  She was happy that her sociocultural insight had impressed him.

  “America is the land of second chances,” she said, pushing her luck.