It came in a rush, as if, even talking, saying more words in the space of a moment than he had ever said before, Bedlow was enlarging, perfecting his suspicions — no, his certainty of what had been done to him.
We were silent for a moment.
— Well, it’s hard, Bert said at last.
— Hard? Bedlow glared at him as if Bert had insulted him. — You don’t even know hard...
— All right, I said. — We’ll go down to the office in the morning and draw up and file.
— Huh?
— We’ll file for legal separation. Will your wife contest it?
— Huh?
— I’m going to get you what you want. Will your wife go along?
— Well, I don’t know. She don’t... think about... things. If you was to tell her, I don’t know.
Bert looked at him, his large dark face settled and serious. — That woman’s a... Catholic, he said at last, and Bedlow stared back at him as if he had named a new name, and things needed thinking again.
A little while later they left, with Bedlow promising me and promising Bertram Bijou that he’d be in my office the next morning. For a long time after I closed the door behind them, I sat looking at the empty whiskey glasses and considered the course of living in the material world. Then I went and fixed me a shaker of martinis, and became quickly wiser. I considered that it was time to take Zeno seriously, give over the illusion of motion, of sequence. There are only a few moments in any life and when they arrive, they are fixed forever and we play through them, pretending to go on, but coming back to them over and over, again and again. If it is true that we can only approach a place but never reach it as the Philosopher claims, it must be corollary that we may almost leave a moment, but never quite. And so, as Dr. Freud so clearly saw, one moment, one vision, one thing come upon us, becomes the whole time and single theme of all we will ever do or know. We are invaded by our own one thing, and going on is a dream we have while lying still.
I thought, too, mixing one last shaker, that of the little wisdom in this failing age, Alcoholics Anonymous must possess more than its share. I am an alcoholic, they say. I have not had a drink in nine years, but I am an alcoholic, and the shadow, the motif of my living, is liquor bubbling into a glass over and over, again and again. That is all I really want, and I will never have it again because I will not take it, and I know that I will never really know why not.
— It’s bedtime, Joan said, taking my drink and sipping it.
— What did they want?
— A man wants a divorce because nine years ago his wife had a feebleminded baby. He says it’s not his. Wants me to claim adultery and unclaim the child.
— Nice man.
— Actually, I began. Then no. Bedlow did not seem a nice man or not a nice man. He seemed a driven man, outside whatever might be his element. So I said that.
— Who isn’t? Joan sniffed. She is not the soul of charity at two thirty in the morning.
— What? Isn’t what?
— Driven. Out of her... his... element?
I looked at her. Is it the commonest of things for men in their forties to consider whether their women are satisfied? Is it a sign of the spirit’s collapse when you wonder how and with whom she spends her days? What is the term for less than suspicion: a tiny circlet of thought that touches your mind at lunch with clients or on the way to the office, almost enough to make you turn back home, and then disappears like smoke when you try to fix it, search for a word or an act that might have stirred it to life?
— Are you... driven? I asked much too casually.
— Me? No, she sighed, kissing me. — I’m different, she said. Was she too casual too?
— Bedlow isn’t different. I think he wants it all never to have happened. He had a little car franchise and a pregnant wife ten years ago. Clover. He had it made. Then it all went away.
Joan lit a cigarette, crossed her legs, and sat down on the floor with my drink. Her wrapper fell open, and I saw the shadow of her breasts. — It always goes away. If you know anything, you know that. Hang on as long as you can. ’Cause it’s going away. If you know anything...
I looked at her as she talked. She was as beautiful as the first time I had seen her. It was an article of faith: nothing had changed. Her body was still as soft and warm in my arms, and I wait for summer to see her in a bathing suit, and to see her take it off, water running out of her blond hair, between her breasts that I love better than whatever it is that I love next best.
— Sometimes it doesn’t go away, I said. Ponderously, I’m sure.
She cocked her head, almost said something, and sipped the drink instead.
What made me think then of the pictures there in the parlor? I went over them in the silence, the flush of gin, remembering where and when we had bought each one. That one in San Francisco, in a Japanese gallery, I thinking that I would not like it long, but thinking too that it didn’t matter, since we were at the end of a long difficult case with a fee to match. So if I didn’t like it later, well...
And the Danish ship, painted on wood in the seventeenth century. I still liked it very much. But why did I think of these things? Was it that they stood on the walls, amidst our lives, adding some measure of substance and solidity to them, making it seem that the convention of living together, holding lovely things in common, added reality to the lives themselves? Then, or was it later, I saw us sitting not in a Roman garden in Britain, but in a battered house trailer in imperial America, the walls overspread with invisible pictures in the image of a baby’s twisted unfinished face. And how would that be? How would we do then?
Joan smiled, lightly sardonic. — Ignore it, and it’ll go away.
— Was there... something I was supposed to do? I asked.
The smile deepened, then faded. — Not a thing, she said.
II
The next morning, a will was made, two houses changed hands, a corporation, closely held, was born, seven suits were filed, and a deposition was taken from a whore who claimed that her right of privacy was invaded when the vice squad caught her performing an act against nature on one of their members in a French Quarter alley. Howard Bedlow did not turn up. Joan called just after lunch.
— I think I’ll go over to the beach house for a day or two, she said, her voice flat and uncommunicative as only a woman’s can be.
I guess there was a long pause. It crossed my mind that once I had wanted to be a musician, perhaps even learn to compose. — I can’t get off till the day after tomorrow, I said, knowing that my words were inapposite to anything she might have in mind. — I could come Friday.
— That would be nice.
— Are you... taking the children?
— Louise will take care of them.
— You’ll be... by yourself?
A pause on her side this time.
— Yes. Sometimes... things get out of hand.
— Anything you want to talk about?
She laughed. — You’re the talker in the family.
— And you’re what? The actor. Or the thinker?
— That’s it. I don’t know.
My voice went cold then. I couldn’t help it. — Let me know if you figure it out. Then I hung up. And thought at once that I shouldn’t have and yet glad of the miniscule gesture because however puny, it was an act, and acts in law are almost always merely words. I live in a storm of words: words substituting for actions, words to evade actions, words hinting of actions, words pretending actions. I looked down at the deposition on my desk and wondered if they had caught the whore talking to the vice squad man in the alley. Give her ten years: the utterance of words is an act against nature, an authentic act against nature. I had read somewhere that in Chicago they have opened establishments wherein neither massage nor sex is offered: only a woman who, for a sum certain in money, will talk to you. She will say anything you want her to say: filth, word-pictures of every possible abomination, fantasies of domination and degradation, sadistic orgies strewn out in detail, oaths, descriptions of rape and castration. For a few dollars you can be told how you molested a small child, how you have murdered your parents and covered the carcasses with excrement, assisted in the gang rape of your second grade teacher. All words.