Who was she? What was this burden she carried within her, this ache that like an unborn child was so unquestionably worth bearing? Was she unique? That young black girl like a chocolate swan, that dowager in rouge and wool – was each of these also prey to a clawing love that could literally lift her into the sky? Sally could not believe so; yet she did not like to believe either that she was totally unique, eccentric, mad. She remembered her mother. When her father had died on that last trip, a quiet calm man finally too quiet in a room of the St Francis (there were no pills, no bottle, all the authorities had agreed), they had moved to Chicago, to be near her mother’s people, and her mother though a Catholic had taken not to religion or drink but to gambling. The strangest happiest islands of that time were those days when together they would go by train and bus to Arlington Park, or to the Hawthorne track in Cicero, or to see the trotters at Maywood; at these places everything was thin and nervous and obliquely illuminated by chance – the legs of the horses white with tape, the whips of the jockeys, the slats of the fences, the rods of the turnstiles polished by pushing hands, the sideways glances of the men who might be gangsters, the fluttering scraps of losing tickets torn in half, the oblique rays of the sun like the spokes of a slowly turning wheel. Her mother’s fattening hands fiddled again and again at her pocketbook. Horses or men, is the instinct any different? Oh God, when he came he bucked as if he were dying, and now he was gone, lost among these marble buildings. One minute all over her, filling her, whimpering; the next minute meeting an appointment with the Undersecretary of Animation. What sense did it make? Who had made these arrangements? He had gotten her so confused, her husbandly lover, she didn’t even know if she believed in God or not. Once she had had a clear opinion, yes or no, she had forgotten which.
As the sun passed noon, her shadow pinched in; her hot feet hurt. Idly Sally wandered north from the hotel, through stagnant blocks of airline offices, past verdant circles where pistachio-coloured military men on horses were waving to catch her attention. Jerry was to meet her at the National Gallery at one. The time until then moved forward or backward, depending on the clock she glimpsed; in the haste of her departure she had forgotten her watch. There was a gap in the tan of her arm where the watchband had been.
The iron braziers and stone vases and Asiatic paper knives in the windows of antique shops glinted back at her stupidly as she sought to find herself in them. Once she had cared about these things; once, being in a city alone had fulfilled her and coveting objects and fabrics had been a way of possessing them. Now she sought herself in bronze and silk and porcelain and was not there. When she walked with Jerry, there was something there, but it was no longer her, it was them: her explaining to him, him to her, exchanging their lives, absorbing fractions of the immense lesson that had accumulated in the years before they had loved. She saw each thing only as something to tell him about, and without him there was nothing to tell; he had robbed her of the world. Abruptly, she became angry with him. How dare he tell her not to come and then make love to her when she did come! And then with such sad eyes beg her to feel guilty! How dare he take her free when she could sell herself for hundreds to any honest man on this avenue – to that one. A foreign official with snowy cuffs and an extravagantly controlled haircut preened, grey-horned on the burning sidewalk beside the Department of Justice. He was eyeing her. She was beautiful. This knowledge had been drawing near to her all morning and now it was hers. She was beautiful. Where she walked, people glanced. She was tall and blonde and big inside with love given and taken, and when, at last, she mounted the steps of the museum, the gigantic scale of the rotunda did not seem inhuman but right: our inner spaces warrant palaces. She studied Charles V, sculptured by Leone Leoni, and existed as a queen in his hyperthyroid gaze.
‘Stop,’ Jerry said, taking her elbow from behind. ‘Stop looking so beautiful and proud. You’ll kill me. I’ll drop dead at your feet, and how will you get the body back to Ruth?’
Ruth, Ruth: she was never out of his mind. ‘I was feeling very indignant about you.’
‘I know. It showed.’
‘You think you know everything about me, don’t you? You think you own me.’
‘Not at all. You’re very much your own woman.’
‘No, Jerry I’m your woman. I’m sorry. I’m a burden to you.’
‘Don’t be sorry’ he said. ‘It’s a burden I need.’ His eyes were watching her face for a warning, a change. ‘Shall we look,’ he asked timidly, ‘or eat?’
‘Let’s look. My stomach is funny.’
And in the galleries, she was conscious of existing among paintings, of shining in portraits’ eyes, of glancing, bending closer, backing off, of posing in a rapt and colourful theatre. Jerry was manic in museums; all the old art school came out in him. His enthusiasm tugged her from room to room. His hands demonstrated, slid hungrily through the motions of tranquil masterpieces. People obedient to lecturing boxes plugged into their ears glared. She must seem his dumb student. He had found what he wanted – the wall bearing three Vermeers. ‘Oh, God,’ he moaned, ‘the drawing; people never realize how much drawing there is in a Vermeer. The wetness of this woman’s lips. These marvellous hats. And this one, the light on her hands and the gold and the pearls. That touch, you know; it’s a double touch – the exact colour, in the exact place.’ He looked at her and smiled. ‘Now you and me,’ he said, ‘are the exact colour, but we seem to be in the wrong place.’
‘Let’s not talk about us,’ Sally said. ‘I’m too tired to be depressed. My feet hurt. I must have walked miles this morning. Couldn’t we sit down and eat?’
The cafeteria walls were hung with beady-eyed Audubon prints. Sally’s stomach sank under the weight of unwelcome food. She had no appetite, which was unlike her; perhaps it was sleeplessness, perhaps the pinch of dwindling time. Whereas Jerry ate briskly, to keep from talking, or in relish that another adulterous escapade was all but safely completed. They were silent together. The immense lesson she thought they had for each other felt to be fully learned.
She sighed. ‘I don’t know. I guess we’re just terribly selfish and greedy.’
Though she had said it to please him, he disagreed. ‘Do you think? After all, Richard and Ruth weren’t giving us much. Why should we die just to keep their lives smooth? Quench not the spirit, didn’t St Paul say?’
‘Maybe it’s just the newness that makes it seem so wonderful. We’d get tired. I’m tired now.’
‘Of me?’
‘No. Of it.’
‘I know, I know. Don’t be frightened. We’ll get you back safely.’
‘I’m not worried about that. Richard doesn’t really care.’
‘He must.’
‘No.’
‘I don’t think Ruth really cares either, if she just knew it.’
And though she knew Jerry said this just to match her, she heard herself pressing him with, ‘Do you want to not go back? Shall we just run off?’
‘You’d lose your children.’
‘I’m willing.’
‘You say that now, but a week with me and you’d miss them and hate me because they weren’t there.’
‘You’re so wise, Jerry.’
‘But it doesn’t help, does it? My poor lady. You need a good man for a husband and a bad man for a lover, and you have just the opposite.’
‘Richard’s not such a bad man.’
‘O.K. Pardon me. He’s a prince.’
‘I love it when you get mad at me.’
‘I know you do. But I don’t. I won’t. I love you. If you want to fight, go home.’
She looked around at the tables – the art students, the professors with taped spectacles, the plump women escaping the heat, the ever-so-dead-looking birds on the walls. ‘That’s where I’m going,’ she said.
‘Yes. It’s time. We’ll have to stop somewhere and buy my damned kids something.’
‘You spoil them, Jerry. You’ll have hardly been gone a day.’
; ‘They expect it.’ He stood up and they left, by the ground level exit. His anxious long stride hurried her past the Popsicle vendors and the tourist buses, and she had no breath for words. Pitying, he took her hand, but the contact was damp and made them self-conscious; they were too old to hold hands. At the door of the drugstore displaying the usual cheap souvenirs – piggy-bank monuments, flags, sickly Kennediana – she panicked and refused to go in.
‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Help me choose.’
‘No. I can’t.’
‘Sally.’
‘Do it yourself. They’re your children – yours and Ruth’s.’
His face went pale; he had never seen her like this.
She tried to make it better. ‘I’ll walk to the hotel and pack your suitcase. Don’t worry. Please don’t make me buy the toys with you.’
‘Listen. I love –’ He tried to take her arm.
‘Don’t embarrass me, Jerry. People are trying to get by.’
In walking down Fourteenth Street alone, the pavement pricking her eyes with mica, she began to cry, and realized it didn’t matter, for no one was looking at her, no one at all in these multitudes.
Together they left the hotel and caught a taxi. They crossed the Potomac and passed an inexplicable wreck on the Washington Memorial Parkway. An old blue Dodge with red Ohio plates had turned turtle in the middle lane, it was impossible to guess why. No other automobile seemed involved. Laughing policemen were redirecting traffic in the sunshine. Two fat women with dishevelled hair were embracing each other on the median strip, and the road surface glittered with glass powder. Jerry’s hand tightened over hers. Then the wreck was behind them, the traffic expanded and speeded, the taxi driver ceased muttering, and they wound their way through a series of loops to the north terminal.
The waiting room was unexpectedly crowded, for a weekday afternoon. In the faces that turned towards them Sally felt them register as a handsome couple, vaguely ordinary and vaguely striking, he in grey and she in black, he with a suitcase, she with a paperback Camus. She pictured them entering a lifetime of airports, depots, piers, and hotel lobbies, and knew that they would always look like this, tallish, young, bumping together a bit too much. She wished Jerry would stop touching her; it damaged the illusion that they were married. The maintenance of this illusion did not seem to concern him here. He put down his bag and walked to a waiting line, leaving her, flustered, blushing, to take a place in the adjacent line. The line was long and sluggish; it slowly dawned on Sally that the air of jocular agitation in the room did not centre around her embarrassment. She was startled – as a sleeper is startled to find, upon awakening, a room whose furniture has steadfastly kept its shape throughout her long immersion in dreams – to realize that other people and other problems existed. A plump flushed man in rumpled Dacron joined the line behind her and in sheer force of worry several times nudged her legs with his briefcase. ‘I’m supposed to be in Newark by seven,’ he explained. His anxious face had forgotten the attempted suavity of its blurry little moustache. Once, Richard had affected such a moustache, and she wondered if that was why his upper lip seemed now, in profile, so bald and vulnerable.
When the two lines wobbled close enough to touch, Jerry held her arm and said, ‘Apparently the strike at Eastern has created a jam-up here. We should have thought to make reservations. What time must you be back?’
‘I had thought between five and six. Don’t look so worried, Jerry.’
‘I’m not worried for myself. She won’t meet me until nine. Let me think. It’s five after three now. Assuming we miss the three-fifteen, that puts you on the four-fifteen, your car’s at LaGuardia –’
‘It may not start.’
She said it to tease him. But he was not amused. His long face tensed and lost the laughter wrinkles that gave it some look of maturity, of having endured. Richard had more than once remarked of Jerry that he never suffered. She took the remark to mean that Jerry skimmed where Richard burrowed, or that Ruth was easier to live with than she. But it haunted her, and she wondered if that was why Jerry had taken her into his life, to be taught about suffering. He said, ‘Let’s assume it does start. You’ll be home a little after six, allowing for the rush. Is that good enough?’
‘Whatever is possible will be fine,’ she said curtly. Their conversation was beginning to distract the man behind her from his own difficulties.
Jerry tugged the money from her hand and irritably motioned her out of the line. ‘I might as well buy both the damn tickets. I don’t know what the hell we’re trying to establish.’ He looked the Newark-bound man full in the face and recited, ‘Travel by air, and swear.’ This was like him, this impudence; he was pleased to have people guess he was with a mistress.
All the plastic chairs were occupied. A young Chinese sailor rose to offer her his seat, and she stepped across his duffel bag to take it. Usually she disliked being treated as weak, but now she was willing. She wished herself away. She concentrated into the Camus. The gun in his hand, the blinding light. The Arab in dungarees. The whiplike gunshot. The unreality. Jerry came to her with two yellow tickets and said, ‘What a mess. Apparently there aren’t any reservations to be had on anything to New York tonight; we’re all standbys. But they’re expecting word on an extra section any minute now. I’m sure you’ll get home by six.’
‘Shhh. You’re talking too loud.’
‘Too loud for what?’
‘Oh, never mind.’
Chastened, he said, ‘I got these numbered boarding passes.’
‘What name did you put on them?’
‘Mine. O.K.?’
She had to smile. ‘It seems illegal,’ she said, because this was so clearly what he felt.
The loudspeaker left off a Muzak version of ‘Easter Parade’ and burbled unintelligibly. A fresh wave of weary travellers came down the ramp and washed up to the ticket counters. The personnel behind the counters, uniformed in aeronautic blue, seemed very young, and frightened. They stapled tickets with an exaggerated precision and answered questions in an emphatic way that reminded Sally of her own lies to Richard. ‘You lie like a man,’ he had once told her. ‘You pick an incredible story and keep repeating it.’ So Richard knew something about her that Jerry didn’t. She never lied to Jerry. This realization made him seem hopelessly innocent, helpless; she went to the counter herself, bypassing the lines of men. There must be some advantage to being a woman; it can’t be all waiting and wanting.
The girl handling tickets was so young she had dared bleach her hair white; Sally felt haughty towards her, a woman above her. This child had no children, no married lover she could not marry. She had frosted her hair in play. ‘I must get home by six o’clock,’ Sally told her. But her voice came out fragile and shy, whereas the girl’s answering was professionally firm.
‘I’m very sorry, Miss,’ she said. ‘The next LaGuardia plane departs at four-fifteen. Standbys are advised to be at Gate Twenty-seven with their numbered boarding passes.’
‘But will we get on?’ Sally asked.
‘The next scheduled flight to LaGuardia is at four-fifteen,’ the girl repeated, stapling a ticket smartly.
Jerry had come up behind Sally. ‘We were told there would be a section.’
‘We’re waiting for word on that, sir,’ the girl said. Her doll-like eyes, cleverly enlarged by the company’s official make-up, took in Jerry and Sally together but did not change expression. Sally wondered if she should say ‘we’ or ‘I’. Other people, overhearing the conversation and scenting preferred treatment, had begun to bunch behind them. ‘Hold your lines, please,’ the girl called, her voice rising. ‘Please do not get out of line.’ Suddenly Sally felt only sympathy for this girl: while she and Jerry had been making love, children had been compelled to assume management of the world. And now the grownups, returning from their selfish beds, were angry to find that the world had fallen apart. How greedy we all are, how pushing! Ashamed, Sally closed her eyes and wished she were herself a ch
ild. A child before her father failed to return. All trips, she saw, have that possibility, of no return.
‘I’m thirsty’ she said.
Jerry asked, ‘What sort of thirsty? For a real drink or just for anything?’
‘Just anything. A drink might make me dizzier still.’ A part of her still dreamed back on the beach with Meursault and the Arab.
The hot-dog counter was too crowded to approach, but a hundred steps down the corridor towards the main terminal they found a bar, wide open on one side like a stage, with an empty table in a far corner. Jerry sat her here and fetched two containers of milk, in the shape of little wax-paper tents, from a dingy oasis marked by bubbling urns of coloured water. Coming to her at the table, Jerry set one carton on his head and balanced it. He waved a white-wrapped drinking straw at her like a magic wand. She was Cinderella.
She said, ‘Don’t be an exhibitionist.’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘I’m a terrible person, I’ve decided. I can’t imagine what you see in me.’
She pried up the dotted corner and inserted the straw and sipped; she knew by the edge in his face that he was going to talk.
‘Let’s analyse this,’ he said. ‘What do you see in me? It must be that you can have me only for moments, moments you have to fight for, and this makes them seem precious. Now, if we got married, if I destroyed my wife and waded through my children’s blood for you –’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say, Jerry.’
‘It’s the way I see it. If I did this, I’d no longer be the man you think you love. I’d be the kind of man who abandons his wife and three children. I’d despise myself, and quite quickly you’d concur.’