“When they start to harden, they want fur,” Nick was saying. “Ever notice that? When their hair gets dry and they go to exercise class and get all toned up, they start thinking about fur.” Nick puffed on his cigarettte, not inhaling. “When they start to get old, and they’re afraid of getting cold. They think about being hard and cold and in the ground, and the answer is a mink coat.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Metcalf just passed on one of his accounts to me. I’ve got to think of some way to convince the twenty-five-and-under crowd that they want to wear mink and not worry about dead animals. I’ve got to convince people twenty-five and under that it doesn’t matter that some animal is trapped and killed.” Nick got up and looked out the window. “I don’t want to,” Nick said. “Days like today, I’d like to just lie in the grass naked. Maybe I could do something along the lines of the avocado ads, where the woman grows the plant from the pit. I could offer the twenty-five-and-under crowd a free bag of mink bones with their coat. Tell them their wishes would all come true if they wished on a mink bone. Poor minks. Poor fuckers.”
Nick wandered out of the office. In the corridor he turned and said: “I wish you luck. I really do. I hope she wants a divorce and doesn’t take you for everything you’ve got. But I guess it doesn’t matter much to you. I guess you’re serious about liking that tiny apartment on Columbus Avenue.”
He called Nina at Lord and Taylor’s to tell her that Louise had called, and that he thought she was going to ask for a divorce. He changed his mind about telling her, though, and he was half glad when he was connected with the wrong person. He knew that Nina thought he was a coward. “A wise coward,” she said, qualifying it. “I don’t know that I’d walk out on a family.” She had had dreams, when they first met, that she was bobbing in the water along with Louise and John Joel and Brandt and Mary, and that he was in a boat only large enough to take one of them on board. Sometimes he would reach for her, sometimes Louise, sometimes one of the children. She would tread water for what seemed like hours. And then she would dream the rest of it: No matter who he reached for, everything got blurry, and then she was somewhere looking down, puzzled because what was in the boat was a starfish, or a sea nettle, a sea anemone, a water lily, a conch shell. Some small, beautiful sea creature would be in the boat with him. She had told him the dream in early May, the second time they had gone away together, to Nick’s sister’s house in Provincetown. High up on one of the dunes, a bright day with still an edge of winter, she had suddenly remembered, looking out at the water, her peculiar dreams about the drifting boat, the outstretched arm. They had sat on top of one of the dunes, the beach deserted, and she had told him about it, shaking her head in embarrassment, because the dream obviously meant that she thought he could save her. He had made light of it. The truth was that he did not think of her as someone who needed saving. He thought that she could save him, that her light grip on his arm, as they sat on top of the dune, was anchoring his body to the earth. Who would he really save if they were all in the water? He thought that he would try to haul all of them into the boat, too ashamed to claim the one he really wanted. She was right: He was a coward. He kicked a little sand down the slope and watched it gather more with it and go like a trickle of water until it stopped. Now the shape of the dune was different, though no one else would notice. He looked at it. He couldn’t look at her. He didn’t know what to say when she was so honest. He didn’t know how to say, simply, okay, if you think that having me will save you, you can have me. If he could really have believed that he would be leaving Louise and the children to save her, then he probably would have done it instantly, but he was sure that he was leaving to save himself. She thought she couldn’t cope very well with things, but she could. She was more complicated than she knew. She dreamed questions while he dreamed answers: In the morning her questions were still good, but his answers were simple, facile. They didn’t apply. Later that day he and Nina had gone back to the house, sure that everyone would know that they had made love, and Nick had been in the kitchen with Laurie, who was his girl then, scrubbing clean a bucket of mussels. They had had a stew made of mussels and shrimp, and they had all gotten a little drunk on ale. Nick’s sister had a movie projector, and they had watched Dial M for Murder after dinner, and then gone for a walk along the beach. Nick’s straw hat had blown off, and Laurie had chased it into the cold, black water. When she retrieved it, she shook it and put it on, holding the hat with one hand, and Nick’s hand with her other. Back at the house, Nick had talked about living with people who mattered to you: having some huge, grand house somewhere by the sea, and all your good friends living in the house. There couldn’t be any cats, because he hated cats; but there could be dogs, hundreds of collies, poking their long snouts into everything, miracle collies that would go to the beach to sniff out mussels and come up with truffles instead. Truffles would roll around the huge house like billiard balls. They would play indoor miniature golf with truffles. Nick’s sister had sighed. She was just back from France, and had made the mistake of telling him about the white truffle she had brought back with her. The next afternoon they had eaten it, grated over pasta. When they left on Sunday night, they were high on nothing but the good time they had had. He and Nick had bought a present for Nick’s sister at a greenhouse they walked to early Sunday morning: a plant with pink and silver leaves. He remembered driving a nail into the top of her window frame, and Nick standing below him, handing up the plant. Those wide, tall windows, the view of grapevines and poison ivy just starting to leaf out, clots of tangled green pouring over rocks and onto the sand behind the house. And then the way that scene had looked later, when it was almost dark: the way the vines turned and tangled had reminded him of some nightmare creature crawling toward him, all legs and arms and lumpy greenness. He had jumped when Nina touched him from behind. He hadn’t known she was there. She had complained — jokingly, but she had also been serious — that he never let her out of his sight. That was Nina: She thought he was her salvation, and she didn’t want him around all the time. What Nick had said earlier about a group of friends living together had really touched him; he talked to Nina about it, standing at the darkening window. It was so nice to see plants outside, instead of a parade of retards; it was so nice to be able to breathe clean air. “You’d never make it living this way,” she had said. “You’d be like Thoreau, going home to get his wash done.”
Now, in the office, he was thinking again about Provincetown in the off-season: that it would be nice to stride down a sand dune, feel the sand shifting, see it moving into new patterns. Instead, he would be going to the parking garage: walking down the concrete ramp to the cashier, waiting for the black man to bring his car and turn it over to him, then up the ramp, into the traffic, the long drive from New York to his house in Connecticut. And then he would have dinner with them, watching John Joel taking seconds and thirds, and Mary sullen and bored, and Louise — how would she act? He remembered the night in the Chinese restaurant, and how he had tried to get a conversation going with Mary and failed. He wondered what he would try to talk to them about at dinner. It would be a real challenge to be polite and calm. She would never make a public announcement. He would have to wait until John Joel and Mary weren’t in the room, and then let her speak. Then she could say that he should go, and he could admit that he wanted to go. Then she would either be ugly or not be ugly. Either way, he knew that he would not spend the night, but go back to Rye; and in the morning, before she went to work, he would call Nina and tell her.