Aquarian acquaintances, he thought. All the intense promises when you were youthful; but after marriage they had settled into their lives without any sparks. They had slowly got fat and out of shape. They had both been strangely old before they should have been—as if they had never been young.
In the beginning she had been an attractive girl who moved gracefully and had a soft voice, mercifully lacking in the brass that coated the tongues of most of the city girls he met. He supposed they had liked each other from the outset. They had gone on liking each other. There had been surprisingly few fights; he knew they both had been repressed people who had to build up a head of steam before being able to give vent to their rages, and by the time things became that intense there was usually some outside outlet—the office, the community volunteer groups where Esther worked almost full-time and Paul had contributed as much time as he could spare.
Now with hindsight he was unhappy with the feeling that they had both played life too carefully. Was he sad now because he had loved her, or because he was guilty that he hadn’t loved her? Nothing left now but a fistful of lost dreams—but then they were dreams that had been lost long ago; her death perhaps was nothing more than a punctuation mark. It had been, most of the time, a good quiet friendship—not what they had dreamed of in the early days, but perhaps the highest possibility either of them was capable of attaining. They did not blame each other for things; yet when he saw friends and acquaintances who adored their husbands or wives, he remembered his envy.
Now what would he do with himself on the weekends?
It hadn’t been a Technicolor marriage but she had become a condition of his life. It was important to have someone. He began to understand what his father, who had lived alone a good part of his life, had endured.
It came again: a shortness of breath, a debilitating rage that flooded all the tissues of his body.
He disentangled himself clumsily from the twisted sheets and went into the bathroom, switched on the light and stared at himself in the mirror. His ginger hair was getting very thin on top. The freckles that covered his cheeks and hands seemed to have multiplied and intensified to the texture of knockwurst. His eyes were in red pouches; he saw the flabby lines in his face and throat, the beginnings of a sagging pot in his belly that pulled creases into his sides along the ribs. A washed-up, used-up carcass. He walked into the kitchen, moving nothing but his legs; poured a new martini ten-to-one, not bothering with ice, and padded back into the living room. When he sat down he realized it was the first time he had moved naked through the apartment in years. They had both failed to overturn their pristine and modest backgrounds; they always changed clothes in the bedroom, they never walked naked through the living room and kitchen.
Chills swept him furiously. He took the top magazine off the unread pile beside the couch; opened it at random and read a long paragraph and went back to start it again, realizing he had not paid attention to the meaning of the words. After the second try he gave it up and closed the magazine.
This wouldn’t do. He had to do something; he had to start making some sort of plans.
He decided he would call the police in the morning. Maybe they had to be needled.
He swallowed half the martini and looked around the room with a different glance: trying to picture how it had happened. Where had they done it? On the carpet? Right here on this couch? He tried to visualize it.
It was hard to form a picture. He had never seen real violence except on television or in the movies. Until this had happened, he had been secretly convinced that a good part of it was fictitious—part of the spurious hearty masculine myths that city men constructed to reassure themselves of their machismo and the toughness of the world they inhabited. Intellectually he knew better but in his private emotions and fantasies he did not really believe, in a personal way, that hoodlums and killers existed. He had lived his entire life in the Sin Capital of the world, except for the two years they had lived within commuting distance of it, yet never with his own eyes had he seen any vice or corruption, or any violence beyond the occasional arbitrary explosion of a motorist or pedestrian so overcome by inarticulate rage that he began to shout at taxi drivers and beat their fenders with fists. He had never seen a bookie, never known a gangster. He knew drugs were pushed in the neighborhood: one block east was Needle Park, and he had seen the faces full of listless ennui which he understood belonged to addicts, but he had never seen drugs change hands, never seen a hypodermic needle outside a doctor’s office. Sometimes he had been frightened by the harsh laughing packs of teenagers who roamed through subway trains and stood in knots on street corners, but he had never actually seen them commit acts of violence. Sometimes it was hard to escape the feeling that the pages of the Daily News and the Mirror were filled not with fact-news but with the lurid fantasies of pulp-fiction writers.
He knew plenty of people whose apartments had been burglarized. Once, three or four years ago, Carol’s purse had been snatched by a quick nimble arm darting through a closing subway door. Those things happened but they happened anonymously; there was no real feeling of personal human violence to them.
Now he had to get used to an entire new universe of reality.
6
There was a crime story in the Sunday Times Magazine and Esther’s name was in it. Sam Kreutzer called at ten that morning to tell him about it. “How are you getting along?”
“I’m all right.”
“It’s a rotten time. Is there anything at all we can do, Paul?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Maybe you’d like to come over and have dinner with us one night this week.”
“Can I let you know later on in the week, Sam? Right now I don’t much want to see anybody.” He wanted to evade the kindnesses of friends. It hadn’t happened to them; it was secondhand to them. You only bled from your own wounds. There was a saccharine quality to people’s sympathy, they couldn’t help it, and pity was a cruel emotion at best.
He called Jack. Carol was still asleep. Paul said he’d telephone again later; he probably wouldn’t come there to eat unless she was feeling much better—otherwise a raincheck?
He went out to buy the Times. Walked up the avenue to Seventy-second and over to the newsstand by the subway station on Broadway. It was quite warm. He narrowly watched the flow of people on the streets, wondering for the first time in his life which of them were killers, which were addicts, which were the innocent. Never before had he felt acutely physically afraid of walking on the streets; he had always been prudent, used taxis late at night, never walked dark streets or ventured alone into uninhabited neighborhoods; but that had been a kind of automatic habit. Now he found himself searching every face for signs of violence.
He carried the Times back along Seventy-second Street, walking slowly, consciously looking at things he had spent years taking for granted: the filth, the gray hurrying faces, the brittle skinny girls who stood under the awning in midblock. There wasn’t much traffic—on these last warm Sundays after Labor Day everyone fled the city, seeking to prolong the summer as much as they could by soaking up sunshine in the country or at the crowded beaches.
A woman stood staring vacantly into a display window of one of the cheap variety shops. There was a red sign in the window: ¿Cómo sabe Vd. que no tiene enfermedad venérea? How do you know you haven’t got V.D.? She was a primitive woman, her dark face mottled with scars, her mouth loose: an ancient slut, an evil hag with a greasy shopping bag pendant from her doughy hand. How many killers had sprung from her loins? How many muggers had lain between her ancient yielding thighs?