The following evening, once more arriving separately, we met for dinner in an Indian restaurant on West Forty-ninth Street. A spectacular woman wearing a sari took our order.
Jennifer and I had a long talk. She was afraid of everything- subways, strangers, high buildings, the number nine, plastic, smoke, airplanes, snow, pigeons, insects, parties, cabdrivers, elevators, suburbs, Bergman films, Spanish cuisine, men in Gucci loafers. After dinner we walked through Central Park, emerging in the West Eighties, and headed toward her building, a summer evening, bald men sitting on orange crates with handkerchiefs on their heads. Two squad cars and an ambulance were parked halfway down the block. It was still light. Children played and a dog moved across the shadow of an old man's cane. We came to her building and went upstairs, saying nothing, both feeling the tension generated by the sound of our footsteps on the dark staircase. It was a small neat apartment. The bathroom smelled of lemon and mint. When I came out she fled to the kitchen alcove to make drinks. I sat on the sofa bed and we talked across the room, balancing the celebrated dangers of the West Side against its lower rents. So this is the extramarital life, I thought.
"I'm making you a gin and tonic. It's too late to protest."
"Nice apartment," I said.
"Do you think it's too conventional?"
"It's so conventional it transcends convention. It's like a premature artform. A room in a museum a hundred years from now. The American Wing."
"I really should get an air conditioner."
"They're expensive, aren't they? We had to pay a small fortune for ours."
"It's terrible, isn't it?"
"Mind if I take off my jacket?"
"Of course not," she said.
"There, that's better. Maybe I can open that window a bit more."
"It's stuck. It's been stuck ever since I moved in."
"How long have you been living here, Jennifer?"
"It'll be two years in October."
"Is this a rent-controlled building?"
"David, before you make love to me, promise you'll call me again."
Girls like Jennifer carry with them through their lifetimes an empty cup into which a man must pour his willingness to be responsible. They ask only that, to be taken seriously. I left her apartment at two in the morning and returned three evenings later. After several months I began to realize how much I meant to her. Of course, like all filmgoers and dabblers in adultery, all students of the cliche, we had discussed the importance of keeping our relationship at a low emotional level. But all this time I had been trying, almost desperately, to make her fall in love with me. Once I was sure she had, I began my retreat. I saw her less often and when we were together I was moody and evasive. Jennifer knew what was happening and it hurt her deeply; she was not just another of those neurotic rag dolls, so indigenous to New York, who fed on rejection as if it were a nipple. In bed I was treacherous, playing private games, teasing along the edge of fetish and violence. One night, the next to last, I swung off her, got out of bed, turned on the radio, reached for a pack of cigarettes and lit one quickly-all the things, it seemed, I had been looking forward to while we were making love. Then I put on my tapered shorts and sat in an armchair.
"Do you have to leave right away?" she said. There was no tragedy in her voice and no plea; she simply wanted to know, to confirm.
"She's been complaining about all the late nights. She thinks they're working me too hard."
"Before I forget, next Tuesday is off, David. My sister is getting married and we have to rehearse. I go to Brooklyn for weddings and funerals. Is Wednesday all right?"
"I guess so. I'll have to let you know. I saw you on Park Avenue today."
"When?"
"Lunchtime. We walked right by each other."
"Why didn't you stop me?"
"You weren't alone," I said.
"David, that was my future brother-in-law. And this is the third or fourth time you've mentioned something like this. You know I'm not seeing anyone."
I put out the light. Then I turned up the volume on the radio. Sound filled the room, huge noise, bass and drums booming out of the speaker, beating and scratching, then the sting of a fierce needling trumpet. In the darkness that trumpet had a deeper beauty, filling space, leaving time behind, a difficult sound departing and returning, and I did not feel I was in a room with four walls. A note hung at eye level, dim speck on the railroad horizon, then vanished into a long silence shaded by the revving bass. I went to the bed and sat there, still smoking, legs draped over her belly, crosswise, my back to the wall. A boyfriend for Jennifer. What a gift-wrapped piece of luck he would have been for me. Whatever guilt I felt was set around a picture of Jennifer, alone and wounded, and had nothing to do with my stock betrayal of Meredith. To Jennifer I remained unrevealed. I refused to give her any sense of myself and I can only guess the reason, that I needed every ego-scrap, that I feared my own disappearance. To say I took advantage of her love would be much too mild an indictment. What I did was worse. I did not take advantage of it; I did not even acknowledge its existence. I pretended to believe that I was just another season in her life, in no way exceptional; there had been others and there were surely more to come the moment I went my way. Then her body shifted beneath me, hunting a beat, and the four walls returned. I had an early meeting the next day.
"It's getting to be time," I said.
"David."
"It's getting to be time to go. Time to wrap it up, folks. Be back tomorrow night on behalf of the Bell System-communications for home, industry, and four-fifths of the universe-with another installment of whatever it is we've been doing here, brought to you courtesy of the first family of telephones and electronics since time began and life crawled forth upon the land where it has remained ever since with an asterisk for the Ice Age. What time is it? It must be after two."
"Fascist," she whispered, once, twice, again, a clear brilliant fury in her calm voice.
I saw her alone one more time. I wanted to make perfect love to her. A final touch. But she would not even let me see her home. All she wanted was a book I had borrowed.
There were several other women, girls, during my affair with Jennifer, and there were many afterward. It was simpler with them and at times I was even more the fascist but they let me get away with it, either because they had no choice or because they liked it that way. I was very fond of Jennifer. She is the only one who remains more than a memory of slide-out beds, indifferent dawn departures and that hellish feeling of having left something important behind me in one of those indistinguishable rooms.
Meredith found out of course; they always find out. It brought us closer together. I came home late one night. She was in our yellow bed, sitting up like a daisy.
"I've discussed it with mother," she said. "I'm leaving you."
"Will you go back to Old Holly?"
"Dad has been re-assigned. They're going to Germany. For a while I thought I might go with them. But I've decided to stay in New York."
"Maybe I'll go with them," I said, a remark that was supposed to imply that I liked her parents, that I wanted to hide my shame in a foreign country, that I had not lost my sense of humor.
"There's some cold lamb in the fridge."
(What a game kid, I thought.)
"No thanks. Quincy and I took a break around ten and had some dinner at Asia Minor, that place I told you about where Walter Faye punched the waiter. Walter Faye's the one with the wife who's from Brazil who invited us out to Greenwich that weekend we couldn't go."