“If you want to come out and see me,” she said, “you should have the decency to say so in so many words—”
“And by then, of course—”
“Like any polite man who wants to spend time with a woman he respects, instead of making your invitation some sort of icky accusation—”
“By then, of course,” I said, “it’s gotten to be pretty late in the day, which means that by the time we actually do get together, which is what you’ve secretly wanted all along, it’s very late, and when we then, inevitably, go ahead and sleep together—”
“Instead of insidiously twisting things around,” she said. “So that it looks like my neediness rather than yours, my lousy life rather than your own lousy life—”
“Inevitably go ahead and sleep together—”
“I don’t want to sleep with you! I don’t want to see you! That’s not why I called! I called to say a simple thing which—”
“It’s three or four in the morning before we actually get around to the sleeping part of sleeping together, which, with three hours of travel and a workday ahead of me, has tended, in the past, to become kind of a bad scene. Is all I’m trying to remind you.”
“If you want to come out and go for a hike with me,” she said, “that would be very nice. I would like that. But you have to say it’s what you want.”
“But I didn’t call you,” I said.
“But you were the one who brought up getting together. So just be honest with me now.”
“Is this something you want?”
“Not unless you want it and you say so like a human being.”
“But that perfectly mirrors my own sentiments. So.”
“Look, I called,” she said. “You could at least—”
“What could I do?”
“Do you think I’m going to harm you if you let your defenses down for one tiny half second? I mean, what do you think I’m going to do? Make you my slave? Force you to be married to me again? It’s a hike, for God’s sake, it’s just a hike!”
Simply to avoid the two-hour version of this conversation — wherein Party A tried to prove that Party B had made the fatal statement that prolonged the conversation in the first place, and Party B challenged Party A’s version of events, and this, in turn, there being no actual transcript, compelled Party A to reconstruct from memory the conversation’s overture and Party B to offer a reconstruction that differed from Party A’s in certain crucial respects, which then necessitated a time-devouring joint effort to collate and reconcile the two reconstructions — I agreed to go out to New Jersey and take a hike.
Anabel was cleansing her spirit on land that belonged to the parents of her younger friend and only fan, Suzanne. One of my first actions after requesting a divorce was to sleep with Suzanne. She’d asked me out to dinner as a kind of ambassador for Anabel, intending to talk me into reconsidering the divorce, but she was so worn out from listening to Anabel’s complaints about me and about the New York art world, in nightly two-hour phone calls, that I ended up talking her into betraying Anabel. I must have been trying to make Anabel want a divorce as much as I did, but things hadn’t worked out that way. She’d terminated her friendship with Suzanne and accused me of refusing to rest until I’d stolen or polluted every last thing she had. But the upshot, according to her curious moral calculus, was that both Suzanne and I owed her. I continued to take Anabel’s calls and get together with her, and Suzanne allowed her to keep living on the New Jersey property, which Suzanne’s parents, who’d relocated to New Mexico, were trying to sell at an unrealistic price.
The frosty bus ejected me at a nowhere little intersection in the woods. For a split second my eyeballs fogged up in the humidity. A kind of atmospheric curfew had been imposed by the heat — everything felt close and lush. Greenhouse. I saw Anabel step out of some trees where she’d been hiding. She was smiling broadly and, all things considered, inappropriately. My face did something grotesque and inappropriate in reply.
“‘Hello, Tom.’”
“‘Hello, Anabel.’”
Her extraordinary mane of dark hair, whose intricate care and increasingly frequent colorings probably occupied her more than any activity except sleeping and meditating, was all the thicker and more splendid in the steam of summer. Between the top of her beltless corduroys and the bottom of a tight plaid short-sleeved shirt was a strip of naked belly that could have been a thirteen-year-old’s. She was thirty-six. I was two months short of thirty-four.
“You’re allowed to come closer to me,” she said at the moment I was about to come closer.
“Or not,” she added, at the moment I was deciding not to.
Bus fumes lingered in the buggy road cut.
“We’re sort of perfectly out of sync here,” I said.
“Are we?” she said. “Or is it just you? I don’t feel out of sync.”
I wanted to point out that, by definition, a person couldn’t be in sync with a person who was out of sync with her; but there was a logic tree to consider. Every utterance of hers gave me multiple options for response, each of which would prompt a different utterance, to which, again, I would have multiple options in responding, and I knew how quickly I could be led eight or ten steps out onto some dangerous tree branch and what a despair-inducingly slow job it was to retrace my steps back up the branch to a neutral starting point, since the job of retracing the steps would itself result in utterances to which I would inevitably produce a certain percentage of complicating responses; and so I’d learned to be exceedingly careful about what I said in our first moments together.
“I should tell you right now,” I said, “that I absolutely have to catch the last bus back into the city tonight. It’s a really early bus, like eight o’clock.”
Anabel’s face became sad. “I won’t stop you.”
In the minute I’d been off the bus, the sky had steadily grown less gray. Sweat was popping out all over me, as if somebody had turned on a broiler.
“You always think I’m trying to detain you,” Anabel said. “First I bring you out here when you don’t want to come here. Then I make you stay here when you want to be gone. You’re the one who’s always coming and going, but somehow you have the idea that I’m the one pulling the strings. Which, if you feel powerless, just imagine how I feel.”
“I wanted to get it said,” I said carefully. “I had to say it sometime, and if I’d said it later, it might have seemed like I’d been trying to hide it from you.”
She tossed her mane with displeasure. “Because of course it would disappoint me. Of course it would break my heart if you had to catch the eight eleven bus. You’re standing there wondering: What is the best moment to convey this heartbreaking news to your clinging, suffocating, former whatever-I-am?”
“Well, as you’re kind of demonstrating right now,” I pointed out, “both approaches carry their own risk.”
“I don’t know why you think I’m your enemy.”
Cars were approaching on the main road. I moved up the smaller road toward Anabel, and she asked me if I’d thought she would be disappointed that I wasn’t spending the night.
“Possibly, a little bit,” I said. “But only because you’d mentioned that you didn’t have anything planned all day tomorrow.”
“When do I ever have anything planned?”
“Well, exactly. And that’s why the fact that you went so far as to mention it—”
“Instantly became translated in your mind into the threat of recrimination if you decided not to spend tomorrow with me, too.”