Starting Out in the Evening Read online

  He stepped off the sidewalk and walked into the street to hail a cab. He was happy to have a reason not to stand next to her.

  “Is something wrong?” she said in the cab.

  “Not that I know of,” he said. He couldn’t admit that he was jealous; he was sealed in the cave of his pride.

  When they got back to his place he quickly found her bag and held it out at arm’s length. “Well then.”

  “But you haven’t fed me,” she said.

  In spite of himself, he was charmed. “I thought you ate at the party.”

  “I didn’t like the look of that seafood salad. All I had to eat there was a lettuce leaf.”

  “We can’t send you home starving,” he said, softening.

  There wasn’t much in his refrigerator, except for the fixings from Ariel’s Fluffernutter.

  “Maybe a little sandwich,” she said. She took some things out of the refrigerator and the cupboards; she was comfortable enough in his place by now to help herself. It gave him pleasure to watch her moving easily about in his kitchen.

  She was comfortable enough, in fact, to slip off her shoes. He was taken aback by this. He felt like an Edwardian gentleman—the man of fashion out of fashion, unfit for the modern world.

  His back hurt and he wanted to sit on the couch, so they brought the things into the living room and put them on the coffee table: peanut butter, honey, brown bread, and a bowl of trail mix that Ariel had left here recently.

  “You looked sad tonight,” she said. “The knight of the mournful countenance.”

  “Honestly, I can’t stop thinking about my daughter.” This wasn’t honest at all, but he didn’t want to tell her that she’d made him jealous. He couldn’t believe that he was trading on his daughter’s problems like this, but once he’d begun he couldn’t stop himself, and soon he was saying things he hadn’t intended to say. “I think I messed her up from the beginning. Her mother died when Ariel was still in her teens. And I can’t say I did a very good job after that. I wasn’t very attentive. I was more concerned . . . let’s say I was concerned with the perfection of the work, not of the life. So I messed up my daughter’s life. And it’s not exactly as if I achieved perfection of the work in the process.”

  Heather rested her hand on his; she squeezed his hand supportively. “Supportively”—the word was an abomination, a product of the contemporary culture of therapy. There were too many words in the world that were impossible to abide and impossible to avoid. He was losing his language. It was time to go.

  But the fact remained that she was squeezing his hand supportively. “You’re very hard on yourself,” she said. She had been making a peanut butter and honey sandwich; some of the honey had dripped onto her fingers, and now, when she withdrew her hand from his, she saw that she’d left small dots of it on his knuckles. “Sorry,” she said. She smiled at him speculatively, dipped her fingers into the jar, said, “Sorry for getting honey on you,” and then she touched his face.

  With the soft stickiness of her fingertips, she painted his forehead, his jawline, his lips.

  This is the only way it could have happened. If there had been no honey, there could have been no physical communion, for the honey made the moment half-comic.

  They were seated awkwardly on the couch. It had been years and years and years since a woman had touched him. Schiller was petrified with surprise. Sex, he was thinking, is never what you think it is.

  What is sex? This was a question that had baffled him all his life. When he was young his sexual energy had been boundless: if his desire could have been converted to electricity he could have kept all the lights in New York City blazing full-time. He was so crudely hungry with sexual need in those days that he must have been a lousy lover—but that was in the forties and fifties, when everybody was a lousy lover. And then there were the eighteen years with Stella: the early days of groping awkwardly in bed, and then the slow and blessed learning. He remembered the night he confessed to her that a woman’s sex was still as mysterious to him as the source of the Nile, and she took his hands and guided him through her pleasures. They were both shy, but the memory of how they overcame their shyness together was moving for him still.

  And for years, he burned for her. He remembered an afternoon in the early sixties when he returned home from some appointment and her Uncle Manny was in the living room, gleefully describing one of his new inventions. (“It can’t miss!” That was Uncle Manny’s mantra—every one of his inventions couldn’t miss. Poor Uncle Manny, also gone.) Stella was sitting on the couch, her long legs tucked beneath her, an expression of humor and interest and irony on her face—she was in the fullest flower of her gorgeousness, and she struck him as the most desirable woman he’d ever seen. He couldn’t wait to be alone with her, and though she was listening to Manny attentively—one of the amazing things about her was that she never seemed to give anyone less than her full attention—he understood somehow that she shared his feeling. He considered picking Manny up, holding him out the window, and letting go: he was a tiny man—he weighed about as much as a tissue—and he favored baggy clothing, so there was a fair chance that he’d float gently and unharmed to earth. Finally he left by the front door; after seeing him out, Schiller turned and looked at Stella on the couch. No. He didn’t simply look at her: he beheld her. She was wearing a sundress: she was a little too large, too big-boned, for the delicate sundress look, but with her gleaming shoulders and her long brown arms, and the long, sturdy, somehow noble line of her neck, and her eyes alight with wit—taking her in, Schiller felt that he was not a bounded entity, that he existed in her as much as he existed in his own body. And though he could remember now, years later, that they went eagerly and happily and immediately to bed, his memory of the lovemaking itself, curiously, was not nearly as strong as the memory of desiring her.

  Over the years, in the usual, gradual way—it was somehow both predictable and shocking—his sexual vitality had declined. In part this may have been because he never fell in love again after Stella died, but in part it was the inexorable running-down of the body. It was hard to accept; it was hard to believe. In his youth his sexual vitality had seemed as essential a part of him as his ability to use language, so it was hard to comprehend its waning—especially since his love of looking at beautiful women was as strong as ever.

  After Stella, there were three or four affairs, one of which lasted for more than a year. But the sex that he had during those years always seemed somehow post-sexual; the period in which sex was a major part of his life had passed.

  When he was being honest with himself, he admitted that he didn’t completely regret its passing. The sexual encounter had always struck him as extraordinarily complex. Movies, bad novels, even good novels usually represented sex as something that simply flowed—something that came as easily as Robert Frost said a poem should come to a poet: like an ice cube melting on a hot stove. For Schiller, though it had provided him with moments, hours, of pleasure and communion, it had rarely simply flowed. To sit across the table and talk with someone you love is itself a complex engagement, with an exhaustingly subtle flow of information; to go to bed with someone—to carry your conversation into the realm of the body, a realm of insecurity and fear as well as pleasure—was always fraught with the sad evidence of how difficult it is to understand another person and make yourself understood. And now, though he was amazed and grateful that this woman was touching him, he had the sense of being asked to return to an arena that he had been glad to quit.

  If all this was passing through his mind as he sat on the couch beside Heather, it was only in the most fragmentary way. She was touching his face with her soft, sticky fingertips, and he wanted to kiss her, but he was afraid he had old man’s breath—cat food breath, he thought—and he was afraid, also, that she would recoil in horror if he tried to kiss her—that she’d tell him he’d misunderstood her, that that wasn’t what she’d meant at all—so he didn’t do anything, and although she was touchin
g his face tenderly, his uncertainty about what she wanted made the experience a kind of torture. How could she be doing this? How could she be enduring the experience of touching his skin? I’m old enough to be her ancestor.

  Her body, in its nearness, radiated a peculiar force. It was like sitting next to an engine.

  Heather put her arms around him, to the extent that she could. He was too large to be embraced by one woman: it would take a team.

  Outside his window, fifteen floors below, a car plowed into another car. There was a horrible sound of metal on metal and the long depression of a car horn. They separated for a moment, and Schiller felt as if injury or death had entered the room.

  “Excuse me,” Heather said, now that they had paused; she squeezed his hand and rose, to go to the bathroom.

  But before she walked away, he made a mistake. He looked toward the window. In the dark window, the two of them were reflected: a lovely, alert-looking young woman and an elderly clown. He had a double chin, and a bulbous nose, and a huge smooth head.

  She left the room; waiting for her, he had a little munch of the trail mix. It wasn’t bad. He carried another handful nervously to his mouth. He was still looking at himself in the glass, trying to find an angle from which he might appear less gruesome. He looked like a rabbit under the influence of mind-altering drugs.

  “A rabbit under the influence,” he said quietly.

  “Excuse me?” Heather said, standing in the hall.

  “I was just . . . I don’t know. Pardon me.” And he went to the bathroom himself, touching her shoulder awkwardly, not quite familiarly, as he passed her.

  He closed the bathroom door and wiped the honey off his face with a towel. He wasn’t sure whether he should—he might seem to be rebuffing her, erasing her strange and tender gesture—but if he came out of the bathroom without having cleaned his face, he’d probably look like an ass.

  Now he had a decision to make about how to urinate. In the last five years he had found himself needing to urinate more frequently, but he’d also found that he urinated with less force. Giving forth little dribbles, he’d all too often spotted his pants. Therefore, he now routinely sat down to urinate. Tonight he would have preferred to do the manly thing and pee standing up, but cautiousness prevailed. He undid his pants and, feeling like a little old lady, sat down.

  When he stood, he looked at his gray, fat penis, a smoked-out stub of an antique cigar. Old man, he thought, are you still with me? I may have to call on you to perform an unusual task.

  It was too absurd. He was an elderly clown, and he should try to preserve one last fragment of his dignity in the only way available to him: by accepting his essential clownishness, and not pretending to be an actual man.

  When he emerged, she was sitting on the couch. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I think it’s time for you to go.”

  “Oh dear. Did I do something wrong?”

  “No, you’ve been very kind to me. It’s just that I’m too old.”

  “Please.” She got off the couch and walked toward him. “I’m not being kind. If you want me to go, I’ll go. But I don’t know what you mean when you say you’re too old. I’m not expecting anything from you. I just want to hold you for a while. I was enjoying myself. I hope you were enjoying yourself too. I thought we could enjoy ourselves a while longer.”

  He was touched by her sensitivity, her tact. It was as if she’d read a guide. A moneymaking scheme popped into his mind: a guide to the things young women should say to old men. It doesn’t matter to me that you can’t get much of an erection, my love; all I really want is to hold you. Of course I don’t mind speaking louder, my darling—I like a man who likes to hear me shout.

  She put her arms around him, and they stood together in the center of the room. He noticed that her breathing was deeper and more regular than his. But as they remained pressed against each other, his breaths became deeper; he felt as if she were giving him life, breathing life into him. They stayed like that for a long time.

  “Can we lie down?” she said, and thereby murdered his illusion that she couldn’t make a false step. He didn’t want to lie down. He felt so spent, so old. This young woman was offering him a gift; she was astonishingly kind; he thought of friends of his, other men in their late sixties or seventies, who simply wouldn’t believe him if he told them about all this. Could he ever tell them that a lovely young woman had offered herself to him and that he’d been less than elated? The fact was that he wished she weren’t there. He wished he were alone in bed, reading Daniel Deronda.

  They went into the bedroom without turning on the light and lay side by side on the bed. He was ashamed of his body, ashamed of being old, as if it were a mistake he had made.

  “We don’t have to do anything,” she said. “I just want to be near you.” This was the perfect thing to say; and yet he had a spasm of irritation at the thought that she was treating him like an old man, a semi-impotent old man, which, he supposed, was what he was: he had a tenuous and dispirited half-erection, like an aged mole blinking uncertainly as it raised its head, coming up to see what the commotion was about. But her words, though they humiliated him a little, also, after a moment, had their intended effect: they relaxed him, and as he lay beside her in the dark he was able to think, finally, not of his shabby elderliness, but of her.

  He touched her face. When he was a young man, a few months after the end of the Second World War, he had attended a fund-raising event for Europe’s “displaced persons” and had met Helen Keller there. As her way of saying hello, she had put both her hands on his face and explored his features. Touching Heather’s face now, he felt as if he were Helen Keller. He had forgotten what it was to know someone in this way; he had forgotten how much you could learn about someone with your hands. He could feel her youth, not only in the sharpness of her features and the suppleness of her skin, but in something that was harder to define, some force that seemed to radiate from her. He removed his hands from her face and held them in the air, still quite near her, and he could still feel that force, rising from her skin. He passed his hand in the air above her closed eyelids, and he felt their delicacy, their subtle trembling.

  He wanted to take her clothes off. He didn’t want to take his own clothes off. It would have been too painful to expose his bloated stomach, forty years pregnant; his chest where they had cracked him open like a lobster; the scar on his leg where they’d removed some of his arteries to replace the fat-clogged arteries around his heart.

  She seemed to understand that he didn’t want her to touch him. She lay on the bed with her eyes open and unbuttoned her dress. He ran his hands through the air a few inches above her, and he could have sworn that he could feel her body as he touched the air. Without placing his hands on her skin, he acquainted himself with her small breasts—he had always loved small breasts: large breasts he’d never known what to do with; with her protruding ribs—she was too skinny, she needed some meat on her bones (he found himself thinking this in a grandfatherly way, concerned for her health if she should catch a flu); with her sinewy forearms; with the muscular thickness of her thighs.

  As he moved his hand in the air above her he was reflecting on the fact that this well-muscled modern woman represented an entirely different variety of womanhood from the one he was familiar with.

  As he did all this, she was watching him. She was looking into his eyes, and her gaze never wavered. She had looked directly into his eyes like this before—on the day they met, and again during one of her first visits. It unnerved him, and it thrilled him, to look unwaveringly into her eyes.

  He didn’t put his hand near what he was old-fashioned or prim enough to think of as her sex.

  She closed her eyes. He lay beside her, propped on one arm, nervous, unsure of what was supposed to happen next.

  “I think that was the most erotic thing that anyone’s ever done to me,” she said. Instantly, as if he’d been injected with a drug, he swelled with male pride: I’m still the
cocksman I used to be! Move over, you whippersnappers, I’ll teach you all a thing or two about loving! His penis swelled with hubris, but he just lay there beside her, unmoving, and in another few minutes, listening to her slow, even breathing, he realized that she was asleep.

  He was still fully dressed: he still had his shoes on. The experience was a little easier to enjoy now that it was over. He could rely on the filtering processes of the mind to retain only the good parts of the evening.

  He was astonished by her generosity. Surely it must have been horrible for her to be mauled like this by an old man.

  Even though he hadn’t actually touched her.

  To be mauled by an old man’s shadow.

  He tried to calm down. His heart was jerking around in his chest; his jaw was numb. He sent up a prayer to the God he didn’t believe in: Please don’t let me have a heart attack tonight.

  After a few minutes he became aware of the need to urinate. He decided to ignore it. She seemed to be sleeping very lightly; if he got out of bed he might wake her. He didn’t want to wake her. The experience had ended nicely: he hadn’t humiliated himself in any way, as far as he knew. He didn’t want to push his luck.

  The need to urinate became insistent. It was odd, because he hadn’t had much to drink all night. He wondered whether this was a sign of prostate trouble. Probably it was just nervousness. Incontinence was one of the few geriatric disorders he hadn’t experienced yet.

  Or was that true? Certainly, in recent years, he had found it more difficult to control his bladder. He’d learned that after a meal at a restaurant he neglected to visit the bathroom at his peril, for if he did, the trip home would be extremely uncomfortable. And it was also true that there were moments when he couldn’t quite keep his sphincter clamped shut. A sudden sneeze often caused him to leak.

  So perhaps what he was feeling right now wasn’t just nervousness: perhaps he had become incontinent, and was discovering it at a particularly inconvenient moment.