Reality for this Lad

"goodbye, sarah; go home to your cuckold," he said, and the taste of impending loss was bitter on his tongue

I'm moving on. No more games! I'm different now.

With these three ideas (really one), Peter Hattan floated out of the tunnel of love. For nearly four years he had been desperately attached, like a child, to a woman who remained faithful to her husband, except on Saturday afternoons, on occasional, hastily arranged evenings, or during special festive business trips when she came to his door with overflowing joy and bags of groceries in order to cook him a meal. The deprived and anxious love-making of adultery had been their habit, rending each other's flesh ("It's been so long, so long!"), followed by discussions of her children and the impossibility--the impossibility -- followed by stiff recriminations, a blue space of solemnity, an obsessive studying of the clock, and long farewell waking dreams as they lay curled together on his bed. But she would not change. Nothing would change. And finally, some time after his thirtieth birthday, Pete decided to grow up. Goodbye to all that fanatic secret devotion.

He left a note for her, taped to his door, and just went out walking. When he returned, the note was gone; she had slipped his key under the door, wrapped in Kleenex, but no mawkish comments -- no word at all. A damn sensible lady she was. Now she could stop making excuses to her husband. If she really had. If she hadn't really gone straight from Peter's bed into her husband's arms--she must have sometimes! Peter's jealousy flashed on suddenly, blinding him, and then off like a flashbulb. Dead and destroyed, with a charred worm of filament inside. Enough.

Now he tried her name once more: Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. Yes, it was over. The last sign of her was the two pears she had brought him for her Saturday-morning gift -- luxury fruits from a luxury fruiterer, deep yellow and green, carried across town from Madison Avenue. Gluttonous, destroying, he ate them both, hunched over the sink, his hands drenched in ripe pear juice. He washed. He opened the window. Pear fragrance gone. Goodbye, Sarah; go home to your cuckold.

Peter sat at home that evening, looking at his one room studio, now reduced by Sarah's absence to less than one room, and decided to get a new lamp for reading and to paint the walls white. A new life was beginning. He would become a suitor, a swain, and then in due course, a husband and father, each step succeeding the other in proper order, with a sense of time and growth. Goodbye to adultery, he thought, goodbye to timelessness. He opened his arms to a future of tender boredom, with a girl by his side always -- the dream of the secret lover of a married woman -- and while his arms were still open, he took a banana off the refrigerator in the alcove. He huddled on a stool, peeled the banana, and filled his mouth with the sweetish paste.

All at once, he regretted his courage. Suddenly, as he tried to eat, the ceiling was cranked down upon him so that he had to hunch his back in order to keep from being crushed. Only the taste of fruit could save him now, and the banana was followed by a cold ripe peach. Again thick juice squirted on his hands. By eating he saved himself from the crisis of loneliness, and then went to bed at a strange early hour on that Saturday evening, just as if he had made love to Sarah again all the afternoon. A dinner of two pears, a banana and a peach; a swollen sleep before the smoky dusk of Riverside Drive had deepened into night outside his window; evasions, fears, indigestion, a sweating forehead, dreams of isolation.

But when he awoke, very early, just after sunrise on a springtime Sunday, he found himself with good appetite for the day. This pale young man, plump but graceful, with the easy stride of a tennis player and the soft middle of a man who had suddenly given up sport -- he would go back to tennis, he would join a health club -- strolled among early churchgoers, discovering the morning, and had the Sunday Times with his breakfast in a Rudley's. French toast because that was his mother's habit on Sunday. Eggs were for weekdays. The Sunday Times was for Sunday. He loafed the whole day through, with no afternoon longing for Sarah, no evening depression, and with a thrill of anticipation went to work on The Street Monday morning in his familiar crowd of stenographers and secretaries and female junior executives. Which unmarried one was for him? Which hopeful and bright one? Which fresh girl, full of juice, amid this crowd of carefully groomed or cleverly mussed ladies?

The phrase which defined his employment -- "I work on The Street" -- always gave him a twinge of embarrassment. It meant that he worked on Wall Street: Saratoga Springs, Princeton, liberal arts; he followed this familiar path of the bright enough, lazy enough, not much skilled young man of good family. But from his wanderyear in Europe (parents dead, small legacy), he had learned that "on The Street" is a common phrase for prostitution, and now he wondered why he should ever have been pleased with his job. He sold stock to friends he had grown up with in Saratoga, the last vestiges of the old racing aristocracy (talk of famous horses); he picked up new customers in Southampton and at his clubs in town (talk of old Princeton days and the sick comics, talk of the "jet set"); he managed the portfolios of a few griping, talkative, blue-haired widows, who fancied him their clever son. And how endlessly they gossiped on the telephone! And the teas he had to take with them on their birthdays! They seemed to have several birthdays a year, though they never grew any older.

Peter had no real money of his own ("real money" is capital, not earnings), but he had a courteous manner, a retentive mind, a head of pale, barely thinning hair which he kept meticulously brushed, and an attractive air of melancholy which nevertheless did not depress anyone; his mouth was small, firm, full and intelligent; his eyes were blue and light under eyebrows darker than his hair, habitually drawn together with an expression both complex and unthreatening; his words were direct, discreet and courteous all at once, and also sheathed an edge of judgment in the silence between them. Such a young man repays study by the discerning executive, and so it was with Peter Hattan. He was no longer a mere customer's man in the small firm where he worked. When one of the senior men came down with a popular disease (male climacteric: tantrums and inefficiency), and had to be eased into an improvised chairmanship, the surviving members of the firm looked at Pete Hattan and found him good. He was given their most junior junior partnership and assigned to study electronics and chemicals.

The cold war ran along nicely, with absorbing perturbations. Electronics and chemicals did well, and somehow this was put down to the credit of Peter, although he assured both the senior men and his clients that the scientists, the military and the politicians went their way without considering his hopes of fortune. Nevertheless, he was a messenger of good tidings, and the messenger had chosen well among companies and projects. Pete turned into his thirties and decided it was time to move on. Not really a grasping young man, he kept his large, faintly bohemian, one-room apartment, defying convention by remaining on the unfashionable West Side just because he liked his view of the Spry sign across the river on the Palisades; he made a bow to his success by buying a Jaguar, which spent most of its time in a garage; now he took a winter two weeks in Mexico and a summer two weeks in Paris. But the main resolution was about Sarah. And after less than a year of deliberation, he had lived up to it. When she would not leave her husband for him, he finally left that note of goodbye under the knocker on his door.

And now the freedom of erotic adventuring after all this stern fidelity. Pete sat at his desk, inhaled deeply and proudly, and took his first call of the week from a widow who wondered if they shouldn't maybe switch from U.S. Borax to IBM. On the one hand, IBM can buy up almost any new device of consequence, or improve on it, true. But on the other hand, U.S. Borax has all that borax in the ground and an active research department discovering new uses for it besides soap and high-energy fuel. "And cetera," Pete commented to his first widow of the day. He had a little repertory of these banal, mysterious phrases with which he cut off the old ladies before lunch.

But this time she replied crankily, "And cetera yourself, Peter, that reminds me. I just can't be alone on my wedding anniversary this year. Poor Mr. Warden passed away he died God bless almost seventeen years ago, so stop by, will you?" He felt it coming by the shrill leer of intention in her voice: "My niece--"

OK, OK. He knew these herds of nieces -- long-toothed spinsters with festoons of lace hanging from the collarbones to give grace to their no-bosom bosoms. No, he would not do that job. He believed in love before inherited capital. This was not the way for Mrs. Warden to develop new uses for borax, either. But of course he would have to take the tea with her anyway, with pink cookies and napkins of a linen thick as white fur.

The niece. Ah Elsie, the niece. That profligate fate which has blessed New York and San Francisco and a few other American places distributes pretty girls where they are needed, and often just when. Elsie was no long-toothed spinster with a coated tongue; she was no glamorous beauty, either; she was merely an electric and pert little breathless thing, freshly styled by Sarah Lawrence, who wanted to be an avant-garde actress (no other guard would do). "You mean you want to play lesbians?" Peter asked, in order to see her blush and make her understand that he was an exceptional stockbroker.

He saw her blush. "What kind of a stockbroker are you?"

"Please, I'm a customer's man."

"Shush anyway, Auntie will hear you," she answered, and true enough, Auntie did hear them.

"You young folks must have lots to discuss, so will you excuse me? I don't understand the theater any more." And with a satisfied glower on her hairy, high-pressured face, the old lady went upstairs to dress for dinner.

They were alone and silent amid the diminishing afternoon and the reflection of light on silver. Elsie had small eyes, carefully extended by make-up, thickly veiled by dark lashes, and a small pert face which would get prettier and prettier until it abruptly crossed the border into matrondom. With a point of conscience, Peter realized that his silence was a paltry revenge on Sarah --he was trying to take control this time. And with a still sharper point of exacerbated pride, he wondered if his silence did not in effect give the control to Elsie.

"There were --" she said timidly.

He coughed and waited.

"Do you have a cold?"

He shook his head and waited.

"There was," she said. No interruptions. And then all in a rush: "A-girl-like-that-in-school." And her face went crimson in the last glow of sunlight under the blinds.

A trumpet sounded in Peter's ear; he had won! His delay did not give over control after all! She was waiting for his lead! (The trumpet was also Mrs. Warden asking if he wanted an umbrella some damn fool had left in her umbrella stand six months ago.)

"No," he said, taking the hint, taking Elsie with him. They enjoyed dinner together, an illuminating discussion of the troubles "a girl like that" can get into, and, of all things, a neighborhood movie. Going to a neighborhood movie seemed somehow the subtle and complicated gesture: to remove her from her class, habits and expectations. He continued this original program of variation on the expected pattern by taking her to bed on the following evening, without the movie. Thereafter, for several weeks, they followed a rhythmically varied schedule, movie or bed, bed or movie, on alternate nights. By this time Peter discovered that he had almost exhausted the available stock of films and he began to notice about Elsie those little defects which men gratefully seize upon in order to make excuses for their own diminishing ardor: Her handwriting slanted backwards. She could not walk barefoot gracefully, since the tendons of her feet had been stretched by high heels, and she was a ludicrous spectacle on her way to the bathroom in the mornings. She preferred the Germans to the French, and this seemed inexcusable (the usual grounds: plumbing and politeness).

Worse, she wore her tiny eyelids covered with silver make-up and had the habit of modestly closing her eyes and fluttering the lids whenever she said something that implied faint flattery of herself. But as her entire repertory of philosophy, judgment, observation and comment all softly praised her own perspicuity, generosity and elevation of spirit, her face seemed to have no eyes for looking outward -- only those two agitated, quicksilver, triangular spaces. "I never judge people ... I can always tell from the way a man says hello if he's nice or just out for what he can get -- you know -- by that I mean a good time." And when she spoke about the "girl like that" at school, she meant to add, and did: "I may be a rebel and all that, but at least I'm normal."

What, thought Peter, must I do to get rid of Elsie? Before I am required to strangle her, that is. And do I run a chance of losing Mrs. Warden's account on grounds of having broken the windpipe of her niece?

He worried about this for several weeks, until Elsie announced that she had been offered the role of a corpse in a play by Ionesco, in return for which all she had to supply was part of the (continued on page 42)Reality for this Lad(continued from page 40) financing for the play ("Off Broadway it's not very expensive") and a few harmonious moments with the producer (male -- Elsie was normal); and thus, on excellent terms, with Elsie very proud of her silvery-lidded business and artistic heads, they parted. Peter promised to come to opening night, but promptly forgot about it. Mrs. Warden restlessly shuffled her holdings about a bit (General Dynamics and Getty Oil), and then was quiet.

The life of the putative Strangler of Wall Street was suddenly much too quiet. He found himself shocked awake in the night, trapping his dream before it fled -- Sarah's sleepy afternoon caresses. Elsie had blown through his life like a trial subscription to an unwanted magazine; his loneliness returned with its old-time insistence. He strolled down Broadway and gazed at the stylish loiterers, the beatnik girls all in black, the young marrieds doing their shopping in pedal-pushers, the Puerto Rican girls in voluminous gaily-colored skirts, all these women who wanted to, lived for, schemed at, and perhaps actually succeeded in making men happy. New York was full of women. Peter was full of longing. The subway shook the pavement at his feet and he thought, with lugubrious self-pity: In ten years I'll be over forty.

He grinned at this idea, close relative to the child's dream of his parents weeping by the side of his grave. He grinned under his burden of self-pity and nostalgia on the streets of New York, where every Jane seemed to have found her Jack, or at least to expect him soon. He smiled, judged himself, was not content.

To distract himself, he plunged and replunged into the study of love. He behaved as if he were studying those others, the girls, but in fact he knew he was studying himself, and this did not displease him. He began to develop his private theories, like all men who live alone too much with women. How can you tell if a girl has a good heart for love-making? Well, you make love, but by that time it may be too late for comfort. How do you know in advance? Show her a menu, and if she does not worry over it, but chooses decisively and then eats with good appetite, sweating slightly, she is OK. Note: Air conditioning throws off the calculations. Note: Fat girls don't count. And in fact it turns out, after all, that a fellow only really discovers the truth about a particular girl when he lives through those precarious getting-to-know-you moments, up the stairway and into the room and beyond. And perhaps there are differences for her, too, depending on whether it is only Peter or the man she has been waiting for.

After Elsie, you might have thought that the vision of Sarah -- discreet, grateful and brooding, with her impulses to make him a home-cooked meal -- would have tempted him. No. Or rather, not for long, not while fully awake. For despite his dissatisfactions with Elsie, she had given him something -- freedom of action. He discovered an important underground doctrine about love: You don't have to care. Raised in a very moral American world, he had thought that strong desire was necessary to success; on the contrary, Elsie was easy on the heart and easy on the body. And why not? He did not need Sarah; he did not need love. He could settle for fun: boredom followed by release -- fun.

Still, those long afternoons with Sarah and her pears and Berlioz in his small apartment had unsettled him, unnerved him for other girls. Because of Sarah, he judged Elsie from the height and the depths of other possibilities. He had cared, or wanted to care, or imagined caring. The newspaper society pages were full of glossy Elsies getting brightly married to well-brushed men like himself, but these were men who had had their college weekends, had passed relieved through a few paltry adventures, and had never known Sarah dreamily playing her fingers along the edges of the dime-sized bald spot in his silky thatch of pale hair. Gingerly those men in the papers had tested their points; they would never discover that a man can be plunged up to the hilt in flesh. Poor Elsies. Poor lads.

Following Elsie and a time of discreet meditation, during which electronics stocks continued to do well as a group, there was an Austrian divorcee named Inga. Inga did marvelous imitations of the Gabor sisters, seven or eleven of whom were her best friends. It seems that one of them met a great movie producer and said, "I hear you are the most im-portant man in Hollywood." But by accenting the first syllable and leaving out the "r" in "important," the merry Gabor obtained the word "impotent." Peter listened to Inga tell this charming anecdote seven or eleven times, one for each sister, and after each time she always made sure that attention continued to be focused on her with a change-of-pace remark like, "Dahling, please get me my wrap, I'm cold."

With Inga, Peter discovered that it was possible to think of a woman as a foam-rubber doll and to throw himself upon her with destructive fury and yet be unable to mark her at all. Afterward, restoring her face, she would comment, "You were especially good tonight, I thought, dahling. It's those oysters, I'm sure. Whatever will we do when the months without 'r' come around?"

"I'll figure something out," he said, brooding malevolently on her preoccupation with "rs." He did not wait until May to stop calling Inga. And the funny thing was that she never once asked him to explain; she seemed to understand without apologies, and that was more sensitivity than he expected in her. He did see her once in a restaurant where he happened to be eating alone. She was in a crowd at a large table, and her voice rose above the clatter, in pseudo-Hungarian, "Oh dahling," she said, "you are in Hollywood the most impotent man."

He sneaked out of the restaurant without finishing his meal. He thought that perhaps his shame came of being discovered at dinner by himself, but as he hit the street, cool air and damp, a tangle of taxis, he realized that he was ashamed for Inga -- she was still telling that same old story. Her companion at dinner was a well-known minor actor with a sulky handsome face and no talent. If he had been a few inches taller, he might have been a Hollywood star.

Perhaps partly in order not to be caught eating dinner alone, Peter then took up in rapid succession with a secretary in a rival brokerage firm, a Hawaiian pottery-maker whom he met in a Greenwich Village Mexican restaurant (shyly they later confided that too much spice gave them both loose stomachs), and a graduate student in physical education at Columbia. Each of these affairs ended with, in order of appearance, a demand of marriage simultaneous with the onslaught of boredom, a rapid accretion of fat at the hips and boredom, a slipped disc during badminton and boredom.

Look at me! thought Peter, again between women, and decided that perhaps his disease of the lapse of love was deeply significant of our age. Personal failures equal public failures -- why not? But a man accustomed to hard-headed examination of annual reports was not easily satisfied by such glossy justifications. The bookkeeper's tables tell more of the story; mismanagement and diversion of effort and failure to use resources. Peter therefore gave up philosophy about love, and discovered that he could eat alone without much risk of being caught at it by going a little out of his way. He took to the movies again. He started with foreign art films, but gradually worked his way up to Alan Ladd Westerns. He visited museums, and noted that he was perhaps the only person in Manhattan who went to museums without looking to pick up somebody of the opposite (or same) sex. He also went to concerts. As his feelings atrophied, he developed a taste for the artistic expression of feelings. But he was not dead yet. He had a thrilling itch in his ears (continued on page 97)Reality for this Lad(continued from page 42) when IBM jumped nineteen points in one day; it lost half the gain the following day -- quake in pit of stomach.

It may be significant of our age, he decided, but it is more importantly significant of me. He folded his paper and thrust it over the side of his chair. He thought: I need to do or die somehow, to live and love somehow, or else be content to become a waxy middle-aged man with irritable moods and a cultivated eye. What do I want? Wildness. What do I get? A dream of tired blood. The grape gives its best when it is squeezed, trampled, fermented; I seem to be turning not into wine but a raisin on the floor, dry, hard, stale, and pushed to and fro by ants.

With this over-deep and rather literary thought, Peter fell to his knees and began looking for the raisins that had dropped as he ate from an open box. Crawling about nearsightedly, he had an abrupt fear of assault from the rear. He left the raisins for the maid. He dusted his hands together. It was time to do something about his isolated jitters. It was time to do the same old thing.

Going to the bathroom on this spring evening of verdant self-doubt, reproach and resolution, he examined his face in the mirror while the birds were busy receiving the season outside his window. Back in Saratoga, the dogwood was in bloom and the martins had returned; on Riverside Drive, there were kids a year older, there were mothers with eyes made up a new way, there were girls strolling and boys stalking. From the profile, he decided, he was a but slightly sagging Ivy League tennis player, and he could qualify to take most recent coeds to the Village Vanguard. From the front, at full face, he looked like a possible handsome young President of the United States, ever so delicately frayed by care, and wishing to care even more than he already by nature did (curlied locks, proud and firm mouth). He was ready. Up arms again, up the flow of life, up girls and girlishness and girldom! Spring has come, Peter my lad, and it is time once more!

But who? To whom? This nagging question required a major, statesmanlike answer: she whom he loved. Ah, well done.

But what would be her blessed name? Alice, Betty, Carrie, Doris? Mary, Nora, Olive, Peggy? A personal identification, with individual characteristics, a way of opening her umbrella and a way of smiling, a lilt of voice and a glint of eye, these things are important and make the difference between a genuine girl and a foam-rubber doll. (Cheep-cheep, said a robin redbreast at his window sill. He must remember to put out crumbs.)

Resolutely, then, Peter fell in love, and with a particular girl named Irma, whom he met while she was out walking her dog and he was out walking her, although she did not know it at first. The dog seemed to understand at once. Upon seeing Peter, or rather, sniffing him, since dogs have limited vision but trust greatly in smells, the dog, whose name was Peter ("What a coincidence! We are fated for each other!" -- "Now isn't that rather pretentious of you? I just happened to name him Peter, in honor of my visit to Rome"), began to bark and bark and jump in little circles, which caused a bright flow of admonition, and the dog then suffered a crisis, which was treated with alternate doses of icy calm and furious advice, and Peter being nearby, the cause of all this canine hysteria ... he rescued her; he calmed the dog; he smiled; she smiled. And there they were, Irma and Peter, standing in the dusk near the Hudson River, making philosophy together. "Did you know," Peter remarked, the dog being safely diverted by a fire hydrant, "that dogs do not bark in a state of nature? They only learn to bark out of futile imitation of human speech."

"My dog," she replied; "I have never believed," she also remarked primly (she was not the sort of girl who); "but do dogs exist in a state of nature, Mr. Patten? My dog was bred in a kennel in Philadelphia."

"Ah, you know Philly, Miss?" Peter asked daringly.

"Umm," she said, and he knew that in the golden future which lay before them he should always remember to pronounce it "Philadelphia." Also the dog set up a crisp fresh yipping in protest against his dog-disparaging insinuations.

"It's Hattan," he said, "Peter Hattan. I've been to Philadelphia many times. Victor's. Eugene Ormandy. The Philadelphia Athletics."

Irma was a light and metal person who had gone to a fine finishing school, had been finely finished, and now was in town, like Elsie and ten thousand others, for a spell of Showbiz. Having been analyzed from the age of fifteen to seventeen, she had picked these slightly later years for her Stage of Parental Rebellion, as she named it; she had a little word for it, her own little expression; and she danced in an off-Broadway musical. This did not mean that she was less pretty or attractive or anything than the girls in the on-Broadway musicals, however. It only meant that she was slightly less skilled. She had just as much heart, and heart is what matters when you come right down to it (if you happen to be coming right down to heart), and she put all her talent and heart and hopes and dreams into her dancing and walking Peter, "I mean the dog, silly." She had a strong doubled bud of rump and that balletic stem above. And cute. Slender, but cute. When you can't think about breasts, you can think about doubled bud of springtime rump. Irma knew her own virtues: she had learned a trick of turning her back. She kept herself going with the aid of chicken salads (light on the mayonnaise), filter cigarettes ("I think they're all right, don't you?"), the love of a dog ("Well, he's almost like human"), and an occasional audition ("But there are some things I won't do even to get on Broadway"). As she confided to Peter, she had already suffered from one important romance, with a man named Mr. Marvin Magleberg, one of our foremost composers of Country and Western. He was a highly moral person who disapproved of rock 'n' roll and owned part of a Country and Western recording company in Nashville, Tennessee, where, it turned out, he also had a wife. Irma left him almost immediately upon discovering his guilty secret. She only waited until she had removed her belongings from his apartment and they had gone to see a musical for which he had written away for tickets in advance. "Why the delay?" asked Peter.

From her blush, he understood that the delay only seemed like a delay. In spirit she had withdrawn her allegiance weeks before. As a matter of fact, she had given Marvin no joy from that day forward (the day on which she had gone through his pockets and discovered the letter, onward), except perhaps the pleasure of being seen with her in orchestra seats. And afterward, while he watched her white and angry little face on his pillow in the ghostly dark, her stemlike, firm-rumped body huddled away from him, the bud closed to him, he must have regretted his duplicity, don't you think?

Peter did indeed think.

But enough of Irma's past. It was her innocence and hope that captivated Peter, not her stupidity; for he too had suffered for love of a married person, and felt as if he had been used as the respondent in one of those Personals advertisements: Seek Lonely man free Saturday mornings and Wednesday afternoons. Ah, but Irma was free and with him always. They would do the Times crossword puzzle on Sunday afternoons because they had already done everything else they wanted to do. And Irma thought words are so educational, don't you think? Peter did think. And they would grow fat and amiable together, and then go on a diet together, slimming amiably. Health foods are so good for one, don't you think? Peter did so think. Who knows? They might even marry. Peter considered this seriously, without even being asked if he thought. They would marry, later. At his age, with a bald spot the size of a quarter on his scalp, it would soon be time. Soon, or perhaps later. And maybe a sturdy grain of stupidity is healthy in a wife.

They went to museums, and ate in museum cafeterias, and while they recuperated from works of art, Peter explained the workings of the stock market to Irma. She was fascinated. "How much can you make per annum?" she asked.

They went to theaters, mostly musicals, because Irma was not working now and she wanted to make sure that the employed dancers had been hired by mistake or by erotic influence. She was better than all of them. She had tendencies to paranoia -- she believed that dancers sometimes used their bodies offstage in order to influence casting directors. "Hmm, a tendency to stark realism," Peter informed her.

"That's not the same as paranoia, except in New York," she observed, switching her rump, and Peter decided that maybe contact with him was making her witty. "No," she replied, "that's contact with Life makes me humorous, a sense of humor. But you're interrupting, Peter. I was saying. Ever since I finished my analysis and entered like Real Life, I've always known that realism and paranoia aren't the same, but they're similar, don't you think?"

"I wish you wouldn't always say don't-you-think," he said.

"I think that's an effort to reassure myself that you're emotionally in tune with me, don't you, Peter?"

He did.

Changing the subject, maybe, Irma informed him that a man of his abilities should be good for thirty-forty thousand by the time he was forty or more. She added thoughtfully: "Per annum." It was one of her favorite learned phrases. Like Shakespeare, she was gifted in little latinities. She ducked her head, twisted, showed him her back in the little gesture.

They went to tearooms and coffeehouses. They went to espresso shops where the floorshow consisted of poetry read to jazz, and to smaller places with bigger cups, where the floorshow consisted of interracial chess-playing, and to cappuccino specialty places with full-sized cups where the floorshow was just each other, themselves, Peter and Irma, cinnamon and hot milk, exploring the lovers' world of mute satisfaction, don't you think? And then, of course, less mutely, they went to bed. She had a small head and large muscular hips. Afterward Irma liked to talk about it. She felt that mature discussion domesticated a confusing violation of her body. It's more a spiritual than a physical action, or should be, don't you know? She liked to wonder about how many times they would perform this action per annum, and figuring on the average of their first month together, she toted up an impressive figure, one hell of a lot of spiritual actions. "Considering your age," she prodded hopefully. "After all, according to Kinsey, a man's best age is --"

"I know," he interrupted, "but that's before a man is a man. And it's quality that counts."

It was a fine, spiritual distinction. Irma brooded prettily over it. She also watched his diet and urged him to learn to love spices, as she did. She was noticing that the spiritual average of their first month had dropped slightly by their fourth month. They knew each other well, but she wondered if perhaps Peter would never plunge into her deepest depths of feeling and know her very well. "It takes an effort," she told him. "I come from a repressed background during my first, or formative, years and it's hard to break through to me. I tell you daddy was a stick! Please try, Petey."

He tried.

Afterward she did an exercise at the window, stretching her arms and tensing her buttocks, belly in, flexing below, her back to him -- good for the muscles. "Ooh, the air is nice," she said to the open window. (continued overleaf)

He tried and tried again.

Placidly Irma accepted his bids to uncover her repressions and placidly she rehearsed all the required responses, did all the exercises, but placidly she discovered that she still felt herself a stranger to the swirling maelstrom of passion. "Ooh, you're like a beast," she said, "and I like it."

But. But she didn't like it as much as, she understood on good authority, she was supposed to. She pouted and hoped that this sort of thing (you know) didn't make a girl, like, spread. Peter pointed out that no, she shouldn't worry, in a way it was a kind of exercise. She worried. A dancer can't just exercise like any old muscles. She has got to be creative all the time.

Then a new outlet for creative expression of feeling occurred to Irma: another man and Peter's jealousy. "Tomorrow," she informed him, running her finger back and forth over his bald spot, "like tomorrow night, that is, I'll be busy. Freddie. He asked me like ages ago. You don't really mind, do you?"

To tell the truth, he didn't. At least not until he thought about it, and then no more than duty required. Alas, poor Irma, he like knew her well. He wanted a space of peace, recuperation, and reading, and he liked to stroll alone on the streets of a quiet evening. And so he didn't mind until the third or fourth time, and a certain special abstraction which he found in the center of Irma's customary talkative abstraction -- a hard kernel of genuine hooky.

"What is it?" he asked her after a few weeks of this (sick headaches, cousins from out of town, unexpected yawning).

In a wee voice she answered, "Somebody else." She let this sink in. "But I can't decide between you. He isn't as -- I don't know, you have so many good qualities, Petey. You're so nice."

"Who is it?" (Ice.)

"Freddie. Gosh, I feel terrible about the whole lousy mess, Petey. It lacks dignity like."

Peter knew what was expected of him. Rage, tears, sweaty protests, mussing, desperate love-making. Forgiveness, violation of her body in order to possess it, more tears, promises, oaths. Sickness, fury and despair. Instead he declared, "Let me help you decide." Rapidly he summed up the arguments on both sides, and then crisply counseled her: "Pick him."

"Ooh, Peter, why?"

"Take my advice." He gathered up his hat, Mrs. Warden's friend's umbrella, and a pair of pajamas he had left on a hook in her bathroom. Irma watched him with half a fist in her mouth. He started to the door. She was wearing her most fetching bedtime shortie, one of his Ivy shirts, the buttons at the collar of which sometimes caught against the lace edging of her pillow when he turned her over. Below her long graceful dancer's neck, the costume was held out by petite but genuine Irma, and then dipped in a free fall to just above her dimpled knees. Yes, there were real dimples, and when she crooked her knees, they dimpled at him. What is cute? Irma is cute. Sadly she followed him to the door, leaned against the wall in the hallway, took her fist all the way out of her mouth, and said reproachfully, in a low voice: "Peter."

He was human. The soft sound of soft her caused him to turn back, half willing.

"I care for you a lot," she said. "But a girl needs security, don't you think?"

A gentleman does not close the door on a pair of dimpled knees while the mouth three and a half feet above is moving. Perhaps she could say something important. She might have the wisdom of her dimples and her analysis, her firm embrace and her slow, switching amble.

"You never made me feel secure, Peter," she was saying. "I met this nice fellow I was telling you about, I really mean it, he is nice, one of the nicest I've met this annum, and he knew all about you -- you know, I mean he could like guess -- but he just cares for me so much, Peter, I mean don't you think that matters?"

The door closed as if someone else had slammed it. He was standing, looking at the door, and then he was rapidly walking. If she had run to his arms, letting the eloquent flesh speak, and not said the word "annum," his whole life might have been different. As it was, walking and walking, slowing down, strolling, peering into the darkened windows of a discount store on Broadway, he felt that his education in the vessels of love was now complete. He could see nothing more to learn. He believed in health, getting his rest, and keeping up with the world. He took a merely social interest in drinking. Tonight he wanted no sociability. Therefore he bought the early edition of the Times, had a dish of prunes in a cafeteria, and went to bed.

Exhausted and replete, he was tempted into a long period of continence, during which time he discovered that the warrants of a small electronics company in Cleveland had hidden values in a scanning device about to be brought out of the laboratory stage. He put a few thousand dollars in it and made a paper profit of twenty thousand in less than six months, without ever growing conceited. He decided to hold the stock for six months for the capital gains benefit; it slumped badly when IBM came up with a radical new method of performing the same operation; he ended the roller-coaster ride where he had begun. He felt neither shame nor regret; his company's fortunes obeyed scientific events over which he had no control. But the gambler's excitement kept his evenings busy with vaguely sensuous reveries, dreams of luxury and power, a persistent fantasy of a Eurasian mistress (he had never known a Eurasian woman). The Captain of Finance slept alone on Riverside Drive, but talked United Artists Hindustani in his sleep. ("Me stunning girl in sari. You mighty Captain of Finance. Us make amour in stereo together.") He did not regret Elsie, Inga and Irma. His Eurasian charmer evaporated in the heat of the alarm clock. He had now cut both his losses and his gains.

All this could make him smile while reading his Herald Tribune at breakfast, and the days were full of gestures and amusements, but sometimes Peter awoke at dawn with a vacant nightmare anxiety, and he was holding his breath, gasping, coughing, fighting his way out of sleep, with the hot sheet entangled about his body: They are pushing me around! But then, as he heard the comforting hum of the electric clock and spied the rich gleam of his shoes in the little light off the street, he came back from the frights of sleep and realized that he had chosen his women. He had gone from one to the next in search of the perfection he defined for himself -- gaiety, wit, grace, and the desire to please. And so tomorrow -- Marijane or Rita or Julia. Be still, angry heart.

But tomorrow he knew that he had learned his lesson. He did not try. He would make do with his patience, with his Hollywood dream. He wore his body down to accepting sleep by spending the evenings at pulleys and bar bells in the Luxor Health Club, on West 46th Street, opposite the High School of Performing Arts, where delicious, milky young girls, with deep smudges of eye shadow and brilliantly capped teeth, loitered in cashmere sweaters with textbooks on American History and the Stanislavsky Method under their arms. Their arms were slender but their bodies were full; they laughed richly together, exchanging the complex wisdom of their experience with men who are casting directors and men who are agents; and then they went in to read about Senator McCarthy in Civics 3. They were gone when he emerged at the Luxor's closing time, exercised, steamed clean, exhausted. Head down, he lunged into the street and claimed a taxi.

A few months later came the great disaster of his life: her name was Patricia. Those others had confirmed him in a sour self-concern because they were sourly self-concerned and could not touch him. But Patricia, she was fresh, bright, tender, and, incredibly, she loved him. It was as simple as that. She quieted his sarcasms; she stilled his angry nighttime heart. She had a naturally affectionate nature as some girls have a naturally graceful sway to their walk. She had responded to the sadness within him with a fierce determination to bring joy (perhaps this missionary intention is a flaw, too): she believed that her reality could penetrate his abstract, starry dream of love (she was brave, she was foolhardy); she liked teaching him to ice skate again, and to kiss in doorways, and to have private jokes: and yet she was not a wreck of candybox femininity -- she was a beautiful exception to all the rules.

Patricia remembered Peter from her childhood in Saratoga. The old-age daughter of a retired and forgotten Congressman, the occupation of his oblivion, she had given air to his last years and understood from the age of six that only her gaiety kept her father alive. They had lived in a gabled Victorian mansion which was now a boardinghouse during the racing season, a mausoleum with spittoons on the porches; it had gone to pay the old man's debts and his nursing during the final lingering, amnesic years. This shy child. grave and gay, prematurely burdened, brave with death-defying hope and explanations of senility -- and yet nothing but a silken, dreamy child -- had thought Peter grand, from afar, during a Christmas vacation from Princeton. It was a matter of an eightfoot scarf worn in the snow over a tweed jacket and thick blond hair like a Norse god's and the snow crackling when he walked.

"Ha!" Peter commented on her revelation. "I was more a sophomore than a god. And dry snow crackles when a Princeton mortal walks, too. What they won't think of in junior high school."

She had remembered him with breathless hope, and then he picked her out by fairy-tale luck, ten years later, on a winter weekend in the town where they had both grown up. Did their love ripen quickly? It sprang ripe from their wills. It shipped without spoiling from upstate New York on vacation to workaday Manhattan; they discovered the city together. With her small, delicate, old-fashioned face -- oval, and oval cheeks, and long straight hair -- she toured the city with him, and they explored each other: they hurried home in taxicabs, her face buried in his shoulder, breathless with waiting. The first time they made love, she sobbed with fear and desire, but said, "No, no, no, it's all right, no, no, no, Oh I won't say it--"

"Say it!"

"Oh I love you!"

And he found his own throat broken by dry sobs. And she took this for an answer. Perhaps it was, at that moment, even for him.

But sex is not love, though it can seem to be for a time; and can seem to be for an evening or many evenings; but there are also long days and weekends and evenings when sex is only the map to love, not love itself, and a couple must look up from the map to find the land and the sky above. The pointing finger is not the star, and even that bright point of light a million miles away is not the star--for its own reality, the star needs a cushion of blackness and its location in the galaxy.

And tenderness, respect, gratitude, hope and desire are not love, either, though they often can seem to be. There were long evenings when Peter wanted to know why he was a salesman of stocks, bonds, warrants, and put and call options. And why there was not something better to do with his clever head and nostalgic heart. And why love cannot replace all the things which a man can imagine wanting to do when he puts his chair near the window, his feet on the sill, and looks out over that little stretch of green, interrupted by humming roadway, which runs down to the Hudson River.

Before falling in love, Peter had imagined that love could fill the barren February trees with leaves, twigs and ripe fruit. Now he found that love was merely love, and mere love slipped gravely away, like desire, like youth, like the hope of a future of effort and achievement. This, he decided, at the age when his friends were going through their first divorces, is how marriage becomes a trap. They begin with both love and the desire to make up for all the lacks of their lives; marriage does not make up, and love withers; and thus the agonies of the happy hearth, upon which they revenge themselves for all their disappointments in work, in the world, in hope of grace. He had it all figured out, and abstained.

But in the meantime, there were pleasures with Patricia: kitchen pleasures of good appetite and drink, pleasures of coasting through the city together, easy with half-understood agreements, calm contemplation of the renewable pleasures of bed. Naked and playful, they would go to the window together and watch the Spry sign flashing on the Palisades across the river. Then Peter would try to forget, as he squeezed shut his eyes and embraced her, that she could invade but not come to rest in his heart.

Long before he decided for sure -- he would wait, he was cautious -- Patricia understood that he was slipping away. But since she loved him, she could not allow him to slip quietly away. This slender young girl from Saratoga, who had watched him in his red scarf, home from college for Christmas ten years ago, had now discovered sex, and now she invented and reinvented sex, imagining from her paltry experience that sex was what a man wanted. She remembered girlish conversations and hints and rumors. She tried to be clever and fanciful, and for love, for the dream of pleasing him, she discovered fanciful, clever, desperate variations of whatever sex they had experienced together. True, this be-mused Peter for a while. Who doesn't like experiences? Even a dream-ridden soul can be shocked awake. This slender child did that? She looked sideways and calculated so greedily?

But finally it wore him out. He had an ache in his loins and he took to saying, "No, honey, I'm sleepy." And he would doze with distant pity in his heart as he remembered the night before -- her laboring body, slippery with sweat, running sleekness, her beautiful slender girlish body, and her eyes full of tears -- her prayerful lips at his cheek: "You don't mind? You like this? You love me?"

He guessed that he did. He pitied her, cherished her, admired her, and was bored by her. He did not want to be bothered.

Peter wanted to be immortal, not merely subtly tickled, not merely to twist against thighs and suckle against breasts and be eased and lightened into dreamless sleep. He wanted to be nourished into dreams and reality -- to make his mark. But love seemed to create invisible, markless pleasure and nothing else. The body turned heavy and violent and flushed, and then slept, and then was the same body once more. There was Patricia, sweet as a child after her exertions. There was Peter, drifting off. He looked at her and thought: No, she can't do it.

And thought: No, I've got to get out.

And thought: I'll do it myself.

If he couldn't have everything, perfect everything he wanted in life, then he could at least have nothing, perfect nothing, the spacious vacancy of his heart. Again he created his dream of quiet in his room on Riverside Drive; the office and quiet, home and quiet, a view of the river and the days going quietly by. He was tired.

When at last she understood, she did not make a scene. It was as if her tears had been spent in effort and she had none to waste in regret. She did not curse him or berate him or reproach him, as some women do, but she did not wish him well, either. When he took her to the door of his apartment, she only looked into his eyes and said, "There are some things I would like to forget."

"I have good memories of you, Pattie," he said, with the relieved immediate tenderness of farewell. Together they had admired a crumpled-paper pink flower abandoned by a flirt in Central Park. Afterward he had bought her a real flower; she had kissed him openly, in the daylight, on West 57th Street, unabashed.

"Some things," she said softly, "I wish I didn't have to think of your remembering. I tried too much. I'm ashamed."

He patted her on the shoulder. Perhaps she could remember his casual platitudinous joviality, not her intimate striving. "Don't worry," he said, "I respect you."

She smiled, and her eyes turned very bright. "Do you?" she asked. "Do you? And you also respect yourself? Just waiting like that?"

She turned and her heels sounded down the hall and she was gone. She had applied her little female pinprick after all. But he did not blame her. He went to bed.

He ate, he slept, he worked, and the identical days filed by. Often now he dreamed and overslept the alarm. Repeated, repeated, remembering dreams vexed him; he spent the nights escaping over roofs, sliding, scraping, slipping, escaping only because he was especially quick, like an ape, over chimneys and turrets and towers, but slow, dangerously slow, crawling with torn fingers over the long treacherous stretches of loose slate; and the tireless enemy pursued him. "Oh no! Oh no!" he groaned, finding an abutment to scramble over just before he was touched, before the pursuing soft paws touched him. And sat up shocked awake. He welcomed the day and thought: I can still run! He ran to money and he ran to the Luxor Baths and he ran to his pure station in space. Despite his dream, he was making himself, and remaking: and not through the illusion of love but the reality of abstention; and he was stern and smiling at his office, rigorous in his routines and easy after five, agile on his feet, the flesh of a thirty-three-year-old college tennis player, now on his way with an altered metabolism, reluctant to rush the net, licked into shape by exercise, diet and steam. He came home exhausted and fell into bed and thought he would not have the dream that night.

Inevitably, however, on one late afternoon in his office at 110 Wall Street, he felt the armor of blessed fatigue suddenly lift from his body as he sat at work, and with this lifting of weight, he welcomed back the jitters, the shakes, the horrors, desire -- the soul's loneliness and the body's clamoring. An ant-heap city, making its obscure hive noise, was being sifted, fed, built, destroyed and rebuilt all about him; he had no comfort or extension in it, and felt like an ant separated from his kind by the gift of consciousness, but punished for his isolation by having no meaning or purpose. There is no place in the hill for the ant who abruptly decides that he would like to reconsider everything under the sun. Like a lost ant, he ran to and fro in his office. His secretary came in to ask if he were missing something. "Yes, just a thingamajig." Yes, just something. He smiled at her, because he was no ant; and she smiled back, because he was her boss and had smiled at her. He sent her back to her cubicle.

Now he had no more doubts. Even the simplest perfection requires compromise. He went home early, shook off his hot clothes, sat down naked at his desk, and wrote:

Sarah: Please take me back.

On your terms. Peter.

That would settle Saturday afternoon for him. The evenings and the long nights he would live through somehow. By this time next annum, the bald spot on his crown would be the size of a waxy silver dollar, and he could predict its rate of progress as he could predict most of his future.

But if Sarah did not remember him well enough to reply to his note? If she had made other arrangements? He predicted no excess of humiliation for himself. He might almost be relieved. There are even simpler arrangements with which he could make do until time relieved him of the only means he had found to share in human life. As he sat there, the letter folded in its envelope and the air conditioner blowing on his naked body, he thought of Sarah, he thought of Patricia; he felt his sex with his hand and found it engorged with the thought of sacrifice.