I did not detonate at that moment. I have always reserved the right to time my own detonations. "I was shot down," I told him, "twice."
"Too bad you weren't killed, then, you little idiot," he shouted.
I was so enraged that I became motionless. Moments passed, then, perhaps, a minute. Someone started to say something, as if the seminar would continue, but in a fog of red I rose from my chair and my gaze fixed upon Jaguar. As the seconds ticked, I heard the voice of the speaker trail off. And then, as I stared at Jaguar, silence descended.
My eye fastened upon the buffet. Spurred by the memory of those I knew who had given their lives, I said to Jaguar, so quietly that it could hardly be heard, in a kind of hoarse whisper, "Are you hungry? You look hungry. It's time for dinner, but don't get up, I'll serve you."
Things such as I did next are rarely done, because human inhibitions are so powerful. But coffee and its evil manifestations are justification for primal rage, as is defense of the innocent, and I include as innocent those who cannot speak, cannot move, cannot make their wishes known, those for whom love is only pure and forever unrequited, for they are gone and will never come back.
Among them is my cousin Robert. I hardly knew him. When we were little we would play at family gatherings, and during religious ceremonies we shared the same chafe and oscillation rate. We were too young to understand how we were related, or that it had meaning, or that we had a physical resemblance to one another.
Once, at an interminable family gathering where the girls wore patent-leather shoes and the rooms were too hot, we fled to the basement and tried to take apart a refrigerator. And once, at Thanksgiving, when it was unusually cold, we escaped onto a reed-bordered lake and skated for hours in the chill wind.
He died in his B-25. The B-25 was a weapon with which Americans slaughtered Americans, one of the worst and most dangerous planes ever produced, a coffin. A third of them were lost in training, so you can imagine how they performed in combat.
Do you think the crews didn't know? They knew very well. And their families knew. I remember exactly an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of my uncle, my aunt, Robert, and his younger sister. My grandmother is there, too, and another woman, probably the sister of Robert's mother.
They stand in front of Robert's parked B-25 on a field in southern California, looking into the camera as if they are looking at death. He is the only one who is smiling, though he knew as well as or better than they exactly what his chances were. How brave he was to face a pointless death each time he went up, and he kept on going up.
I made one step forward and thrust my left hand into Jaguar's lapels, clamping them like a vise. Stupidly, he grabbed my left forearm with both his hands. I then jerked him toward me about half a foot, brought my right hand, swordlike, even with my left ear, and struck him across the face.
Because he had probably never been hit in his life, he acted as if I had killed him. But this blow was merely to turn him around, after which he did exactly what I wanted him to do. He threw himself facedown across the table, with his waist bent at the edge. I used my left hand like a mechanical grasper once again, and in a sudden and irresistible movement seized the back of his belt and pants.
I have always been very strong, and I was in superb shape at the time. Thus it was possible for me to take him by belt and neck, lift him into the air, and carry him as if he were on a gurney. No one in the room moved a muscle, as physical confrontation was not their métier. Their mouths hung open and I think some of them must have stopped breathing, for the silence had a curious quality about it that suggested the sudden absence of oxygen.
We started at the head of the buffet table. "Here's some roast beef," I said. The roast was only partially carved, and under red heat lamps it looked like something from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. "You like roast beef. Have some," I commanded as I pounded his head against it. The impact was cushioned but substantial. He was still breathing and making sounds, so I knew he hadn't had a heart attack.
"Which does this remind you of more," I asked, ferociously swinging him through the air until his head slammed against the uncut roast and sent it flying across the room, "golf or baseball?"
His howlings of protest showed that his pride was hurt far more than his body, so I said, "What was that? Baseball? Right. So you get to eat all the potato salad you want." When his head emerged from the bowl of potato salad, he looked like Santa Claus.
"Robert was my cousin," I shouted.'"Just another jerk who went down in his B-25. Just another turd who never even got to go on the GI Bill. For you, not even a number. You don't even have to think about him."
I was in the same state in which petite mothers find themselves when they are able to lift six-hundred-pound gates off their trapped children, and I could have clasped him to a quick death.
"But now you are going to think about him. You're going to think of him every time you come into a gathering of people. You're going to think of him every time you see food. You're going to think of him every time you see or hear an airplane. Swear it!" I screamed, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, "Swear it!"
Had he not made some incomprehensible sounds that had the unmistakable quality of acquiescence, I would have killed him. I said, "Say, 'Robert, thank you for dying for me in your lousy B-25.' Say it!" And he did.
I let him go. As he stared ahead in shock, I picked up my knapsack and walked out into the arctic air, quivering and distraught that it had been Robert who went down instead of me, because in family gatherings, and on the pond, and during the few times that we had been together, I had known. I had known even then, although I didn't know how, that I was a survivor and that he was not. I had had the wit. I had had the fury. And I had had the luck.
I had been made that way, and he had been made gentler, somewhat awkward, and never as sure. But he was by far the better man, the quieter man, and he died in my place. The truth of it is that it should have been me, but there was never anything I could do about the truth.
I often think of him. You see, the colors up there were different, and the air ... was different. Half the time you felt as if you were dreaming, and the forces that played upon you—the blinding light, the gravity in turning or diving, the great cold, the air too thin to breathe—were such that you were always near the gates of death, and it was easy, far too easy, to be taken. I have fallen through the sky, my arms pulled away from me by centrifugal force as I tumbled, a ball of orange fire and the crack of thunder following, the straps and buckles on my clothing whistling in the wind.
Though my actions at the conference would not affect my career (my reputation was already compromised), I felt vaguely unsettled about what I had done. Nonetheless, my indiscretion had served me well, for as I exited a dark stand of spruce onto the moonlit frozen road, I heard footsteps.
Constance emerged from the darkness, moving so beautifully that I was comforted, and when she reached me, I felt infatuation. Still, those were different times. I recall then a delicacy, a reticence that held her away from me for longer than we wished, and although I wanted at that moment to take her in my arms, this was something that would come later on. In the meantime, love was well forged in the discipline that kept us apart.
Though I was middle aged, our affair had the kind of otherworldly traction into which adolescents and young people slip so often, though my ability to maintain otherworldly traction had lessened markedly. As compensation, I found myself better able to appreciate the factual.
The process has continued until, at eighty, I am well content with the little things that I used to think were of little import. I can see more deeply now, and my satisfaction with less and less grows alarmingly, so that I fear it will not be so long until I reach the end of life, where I will have to be satisfied perfectly by absolutely nothing.
I remember Constance as if I were looking at photographs. I see her dancing, turning gracefully, and each progressive moment is frozen, with a click, as if with a camera. As she c
omes into the light it shines on her hair and in her eyes and in her smile. She is turning toward me, open, trusting, full of love. She is wearing a sequined top that reflects spears of light like a magical thistle. So it was.
The train upon which I had arrived had turned around and been the last train out, the station was dark, and the only hotel held Igor Jaguar and his colleagues. We walked all night. We did not encounter a single car on the whitened road, or a single light in the few towns through which we passed in silence out of respect for the sleeping.
As long as we kept moving, we were perfectly comfortable: we could have run the whole distance. Our pace was rapid, and we covered thirty miles by the time the sun came over the mountains the next morning. When we boarded the train, we took separate compartments, had the beds turned down, and slept all the way to New York, where we were disgorged into Grand Central Station at the height of the evening rush hour.
Perfectly rested, windburned, and smelling of the bay rum that both of us had splashed on our faces after washing in cold water and looking up at the standard Pullman shelf loaded with standard Pullman toiletries, we seized upon the frantic motions of New York in early evening, but without the customary filter of fatigue, and we had dinner at the Oyster Bar.
Constance was twenty-eight, and did not at first believe me when I told her that I had gone with my father to the Oyster Bar the first week that it opened, in 1912. She pretended, at least, to be shocked at my age. Naturally, I was flattered.
She had assumed that I was, indeed, a Wabash student on the GI Bill. I royally let slip that, actually, I had been an undergraduate at Harvard, and taken an M.Phil, at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Thus began a series of surprises and double shifts that, in my time with her, were never to end. "Harvard!" she said. I was used to the delicious squeal of feudal self-abnegation that you hear when you mention that name (how disgusting it seems now), and I assumed that she was, well, you know ... impressed.
She wasn't impressed, she was merely pleased, for she had been to Radcliffe, and this meant that, though far apart in years, we shared certain things in common. I was more or less delighted. After all, that she went to Radcliffe meant that she would be able to understand me when I spoke, which is what we at Harvard thought the purpose of Radcliffe was. Though it was true that Cliffies got better grades, it was because they were more passive and therefore able to mold themselves to the wishes of their instructors, they did not find themselves in competition with the professors, they did not exhaust themselves in sports or debauchery—as we did, or said we did—and they gave their undergraduate years their full shot, because they were not going to have careers.
But Constance, I quickly understood, was never passive, and did not have the habit of molding herself to anyone's wishes. And, she rowed.
"You rowed?" I asked.
She nodded.
No wonder her upper body, her shoulders, her arms, and her breasts were so beautiful, so perfectly formed, so well defined.
"And what did you take up after college?" I asked, thinking of, perhaps, quoits.
"I still row—in Long Island Sound."
No wonder her upper body, her shoulders....
"I myself rowed singles," I told her, amazed. "We can go out together. I rowed for six years, four at Harvard and two at Oxford."
"I rowed for eight," she said.
"You mean, you've been rowing for four years since you were graduated? You should count only those years when you were in college or affiliated with a competing club."
"No," she told me, ever so cheerfully. "Four years in college, and four years in graduate school."
"Graduate school?" I asked, quite surprised.
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Harvard."
"Oh. In what ... in what did you...."
"Economics."
"You went for a doctorate?"
"I took it last year," she said. "My thesis was about the effects of political philosophy on economic theory. It's going to be published," she said, with more than a twinkle, "in a month."
"By whom?" I asked.
"Oxford University Press. What do you do?"
I didn't want to tell her. "I was demobilized fairly recently," I said. "I was a pilot."
"I know," she said. "Over Berlin."
"Yes. Many times."
"Shot down twice."
"Yes," I said, "twice, though only once over Berlin, and once over the Mediterranean."
"But what do you do now?"
"I haven't settled in yet," I said.
I didn't want her to know that I was a partner at Stillman and Chase. I didn't want to impress her that much. I didn't want to suggest, merely by announcing what I did, that her knowledge, while admirable, was merely speculative and theoretical, while mine was, well, the real stuff. And I didn't want to overawe her with the aspect of money, at least not yet.
My salary and my year-end apportionment were awesome. I lived on an entire high floor in a building on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. I had a cottage in East Hampton. I wanted to surprise her with all this to make her happy, but first I wanted her to love me for myself, so I decided to do things as in a fairy tale.
The next day, I rented a small apartment in a brownstone on the Upper West Side. When we met subsequently, under the clock at the Biltmore, I told her that I lived in this apartment. I just mentioned it casually. In a few days, I would have it furnished after the fashion of a demobilized pilot still smarting from the effects of war, still casting about for a peacetime profession. I moved some of my books, some war memorabilia—swagger stick, cap, framed commissions, cannon shells, etc.—and a few pieces of furniture to the new place. I told Constance, quite truthfully, that I did not yet have a telephone there, but that I was expecting to have one installed within a week.
"I never asked where you live, Constance. I don't know what I would have done had we not been able to meet here and had I not been able to reach you."
"I live at the Barbizon," she said nervously, and then she exhibited a magnificent rose blush, from tip to toe. She looked as if she had been on the beach at Krakatoa just before it blew up. Her color ebbed and it flowed for three or four minutes.
It was, I would learn not that long after, the color she turned when she made love, and the color she had probably been on the moonlit road when she ran up to me, though in the moonlight I had not been able to see it. And when her complexion burned, the heat vaporized the expensive and understated perfume she wore so well, which, for me, was bliss.
But why had she blushed when she told me she lived at the Barbizon? Because she didn't live there. I knew it was a lie, but I couldn't prove it. Every time I called her, they said she was out, or sleeping. When I went to pick her up, she would come down to the front desk as if she actually lived in the place, and she paid rent, but she never stayed there.
Who was I to complain? I had set up my own subterfuge on the West Side, and there I entertained her as if I were a moneyless former pilot whose troubled memory kept his heart and soul in the sky over Europe.
Though crowned with deception, our courtship was sweet. Because I was never to know Constance when she was older, our love did not proceed beyond the initial all-consuming passion of, say, Romeo and Juliet, the kind of love that blinds. You see it all the time in restaurants, when a man and a woman sit at a table and face one another, unable to turn their heads, locked together like cats in intercourse. At my age I tend to regard such display with something akin to fatigue and contempt, but I remember it at times with pleasure. It is the state to which sexual love is the handmaiden, and without which sexual love is like a dance without music.
Soon, which according to the old calendar meant six or eight months, our thousands of hours of kissing and embracing and fondling led to the irresistible, full, wet, prolonged ... oh my ... that custom had led us to avoid. Such a thing was not, as it is so often these days, an activity upon which to embark after, ten minutes' acquaintance, or
a gymnastic rite, a social prerequisite, or a form of orgasmic arm wrestling.
It was the climax of many months' testing, resolution, and moral struggle. It was the signal of true love and lifelong commitment. It was a mutual capitulation to the most elemental commandment, but only after a prolonged battle had proved us to ourselves, and, perhaps, elsewhere.
The greatest blizzards start with the finest snow. I must have been insane to start such a demanding regime in my early forties and well past my physical prime. We would lie together for days on end. I believe insects do this. Two crane flies were once locked in perfect symmetry on the upper part of my bathroom door. I blew a puff of air at them, and they flew away, linked as one. Their flight was graceful and quick. What miracle allowed them to know, suddenly, without study or reflection, how to be a biplane?
I see promiscuous young people on the beach, whose flesh is contained by their bathing suits in the manner of a melon resting in a slingshot. What do they know other than the most obvious? What could a voluptuary with a tattoo upon her tan overspilling breast know of Constance, with her lean strong shoulders, her unvarying modesty, and the great sensual explosiveness when finally she allowed herself complete abandon?
I hear the filthy, devilish strains of the lambada, and they mock the North. They mock what we have learned from the cold sea and the high wind. They mock the seduction and the Fall.
You do not know the reason for her deception, but you know the purpose of mine. I did not want her to love me for my money, and I did not want her to feel that what she did was, compared to what I did in the real world, with real people, and the whole economies of actual nations, a fruitless academic exercise.
Many love stories, I suppose, end with a flourish even more pompous and more destructive, in which heart-breaking passion is exhausted in the service of mere vanity. I suppose we could have moved to Connecticut and bought some ponies and sent our children to a school that called itself a hall. It could have ended with me in the saddle, the master of a dead horse. It didn't, because every time I turned around I encountered a double switch.