He next saw her five days later, and he’d have given her the bear then but they wound up at her apartment, and of course he hadn’t dragged the creature along to the Woody Allen screening, or to the Thai restaurant. A week later, just to set the stage, he’d made his bed that morning with the bear in it, its head resting on the middle pillow, its fat little arms outside the bedcovers.
“Oh, it’s a bear!” she would say. And he would say, “The thing is, I’ve got a no-bears clause in my lease. Do you think you could give it a good home?”
Except it didn’t work that way. They had dinner, they saw a movie, and then when he suggested they repair to his place she said, “Could we go someplace for a drink, Paul? There’s a conversation we really ought to have.”
The conversation was all one-sided. He sat there, holding but not sipping his glass of wine, while she explained that she’d been seeing someone else once or twice a week, since theirs had not been designed to be an exclusive relationship, and that the other person she was seeing, well, it seemed to be getting serious, see, and it had reached the point where she didn’t feel it was appropriate for her to be seeing other people. Such as Paul, for example.
It was, he had to admit, not a bad kissoff, as kissoffs go. And he’d expected the relationship to end sooner or later, and probably sooner.
But he hadn’t expected it to end quite yet. Not with a bear in his bed.
He put her in a cab, and then he put himself in a cab, and he went home and there was the bear. Now what? Send her the bear? No, the hell with that; she’d be convinced he’d bought it after she dumped him, and the last thing he wanted her to think was that he was the kind of dimwit who would do something like that.
The bear went back into the closet.
And stayed there.
It was surprisingly hard to give the bear away. It was not, after all, like a box of candy or a bottle of cologne. You could not give a stuffed bear to just anyone. The recipient had to be the right sort of person, and the gift had to be given at the right stage of the relationship. And many of his relationships, it must be said, did not survive long enough to reach the bear-giving stage.
Once he had almost made a grave mistake. He had been dating a rather abrasive woman named Claudia, a librarian who ran a research facility for a Wall Street firm, and one night she was grousing about her ex-husband. “He didn’t want a wife,” she said. “He wanted a daughter, he wanted a child. And that’s how he treated me. I’m surprised he didn’t buy me Barbie dolls and teddy bears.”
And he’d come within an inch of giving her the bear! That, he realized at once, would have been the worst possible thing he could have done. And he realized, too, that he didn’t really want to spend any more time with Claudia. He couldn’t say exactly why, but he didn’t really feel good about the idea of having a relationship with the sort of woman you couldn’t give a bear to.
There was one of those cardboard signs over the cash register of a hardware store on Hudson Street. SOME DAYS YOU GET THE BEAR, it said. SOME DAYS THE BEAR GETS YOU.
He discovered an addendum: Sooner or later, you sleep with the bear.
It happened finally on an otherwise unremarkable day. He’d spent the whole day working on a review of a biography (Sydney Greenstreet: The Untold Story), having a lot of trouble getting it the way he wanted it. He had dinner alone at the Greek place down the street and rented the video of Casablanca, sipping jug wine and reciting the lines along with the actors. The wine and the film ran out together.
He got undressed and went to bed. He lay there, waiting for sleep to come, and what came instead was the thought that he was, all things considered, the loneliest and most miserable son of a bitch he knew.
He sat up, astonished. The thought was manifestly untrue. He liked his life, he had plenty of companionship whenever he wanted it, and he could name any number of sons of bitches who were ever so much lonelier and more miserable than he. A wine thought, he told himself. In vino stupiditas. He dismissed the thought, but sleep remained elusive. He tossed around until something sent him to the closet. And there, waiting patiently after all these months, was the bear.
“Hey, there,” he said. “Time to round up the usual suspects. Can’t sleep either, can you, big fellow?”
He took the bear and got back into bed with it. He felt a little foolish, but he also felt oddly comforted. And he felt a little foolish about feeling comforted, but that didn’t banish the comfort.
With his eyes closed, he saw Bogart clap Claude Rains on the back. “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship,” Bogart said.
And, before he could begin to figure it all out, Paul fell asleep.
Every night since, with only a handful of exceptions, he had slept with the bear.
Otherwise he slept poorly. On a couple of occasions he had stayed overnight with a woman, and he had learned not to do this. He had explained to one woman (the single mother on East Ninth Street, as a matter of fact) that he had this quirk, that he couldn’t fall fully asleep if another person was present.
“That’s more than a quirk,” she’d told him. “Not to be obnoxious about it, but that sounds pretty neurotic, Paul.”
“I know,” he’d said. “I’m working on it in therapy.”
Which was quite untrue. He wasn’t in therapy. He had indeed thought of checking in with his old therapist and examining the whole question of the bear, but he couldn’t see the point. It was like the old Smith-and-Dale routine: “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” “So don’t do that!” If it meant a sleepless night to go to bed without the bear, then don’t go to bed without the bear!
A year ago he’d gone up to Albany to participate in an Orson Welles symposium. They put him up at the Ramada for two nights, and after the first sleepless night he actually thought of running out to a store and buying another bear. Of course he didn’t, but after the second night he wished he had. There was, thank God, no third night; as soon as the program ended he glanced at the honorarium check to make sure the amount was right, grabbed his suitcase, and caught the Amtrak train back to the city, where he slept for twelve solid hours with the bear in his arms.
And, several months later when he flew out to the Palo Alto Film Festival, the bear rode along at the bottom of his duffel bag. He felt ridiculous about it, and every morning he stowed the bear in his luggage, afraid that the chambermaids might catch on otherwise. But he slept nights.
The morning after the night with Karin, he got up, made the bed, and returned the bear to the closet. As he did so, for the first time he felt a distinct if momentary pang. He closed the door, hesitated, then opened it. The bear sat uncomplaining on its shelf. He closed the door again.
This was not, he told himself, some Stephen King movie, with the bear possessed of some diabolical soul, screaming to be let out of the closet. He could imagine such a film, he could just about sit down and write it. The bear would see itself as a rival for Paul’s affections, it would be jealous of the women in his life, and it would find some bearish way to kill them off. Hugging them to death, say. And in the end Paul would go to jail for the murders, and his chief concern would be the prospect of spending life in prison without the possibility of either parole or a good night’s sleep. And the cop, or perhaps the prosecuting attorney, would take the bear and toss it in the closet, and then one night, purely on a whim, would take it to bed.
And the last shot would be an ECU of the bear, and you’d swear it was smiling.