“You trivialize my feelings.”
“What is it that you feel? Tell me exactly.”
“This minute, talking to you, I feel exactly as if I were betraying Norbert.”
“Oh please. Every time you look at me, you betray Norbert. When I stroll down Wilshire Boulevard, Norbert is betrayed sixty times a minute. I answer the door to the postman, Norbert has horns. This is California, not Saudi Arabia. I’m a woman on display, front and back. Do you know it’s been said that a modern woman can neither dress nor undress.”
“Who said it?”
“I don’t know, but it’s true. Look, all that matters is you and me, Nachman — we’re friends. Our conversation is not a betrayal of anybody. Aren’t we friends? I thought we were friends.”
Adele was crying.
“Of course,” said Nachman, his voice hoarse, on the verge of failure.
“Nachman, are you in love with me?” said Adele. “Is that the real problem?”
“I love many people.”
“Liar. You love your mother in San Diego, and you never talk about your father or your colleagues or the women you date. Anyhow, I said ‘in love with me.’”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It has to do with everything. Norbert is the injured party, not you. Don’t you hear yourself?”
“What should I hear?”
“Don’t be a mystery to yourself, Nachman. Maybe we all walk in darkness, shadows, mystery — I wouldn’t deny it — but you must try to understand. Of mystery there is no end. Of clarity, there is precious little.”
“Adele, you’re raving. Stop it.”
She now spoke in a rush, sniffling and sobbing, “O.K., I’ll stop, but I want to make things clear to you. The telephone is no damn good. Let’s meet at Calendar’s, near the La Brea Tar Pits. It’s a few blocks from my office. I go there for lunch. One o’clock tomorrow. If you don’t show up, Nachman, I’ll understand that you didn’t want to betray Norbert. But please do show up.”
After the phone call, Nachman felt better. Nothing had actually changed, and yet he could think more liberally about what hadn’t changed.
He continued to sit on the edge of his bed. He didn’t want to move. It seemed he could still hear Adele’s unmelodious voice, made ragged by cigarettes. Adele had urged him to examine his feelings, but he didn’t care to know too much about what he felt. After all, as soon as you know what you feel, you feel something else. No. There would be no such examination. It would end in confusion. It was enough that he felt cheered by Adele’s phone call. He admired her daring. He liked her sluggish, heavy carriage. She walked as if she had large breasts, though they were average, proportionate to her height, which was about five feet five inches. Her hips seemed to lock slowly, and then reluctantly to unlock as she walked, toes pointed outward. Nachman wanted, mindlessly, to hug her.
O.K., he thought, energized, returning to himself, the moral being. Look at the issue analytically, from Adele’s point of view. As Adele had said, people have different needs. So let’s be fair to Adele, a green-eyed Hungarian woman of considerable intelligence and nice hips. God knows why she married Norbert Novgorad.
It was obvious, Nachman suddenly realized, that the unrelenting repetitiousness of domestic life was destroying Adele. So the poor woman had been unfaithful. What was infidelity, anyhow? What was it precisely that Adele might have done? Let’s get that straight. She kissed a man? Big deal. Perhaps she had sexual intercourse? Oh, who cares? It was an imaginative experience, a mental tonic, like a trip to Paris, except of course you don’t bring back photographs of yourself in a motel room performing fellatio to show your friends. But who cares? With stunning visionary force, a picture burst into Nachman’s mind. Adele was naked, lying on her back with her wrists tied to bedposts. She smiled with vague, soporific satisfaction at Nachman, her green eyes glazed by a delirium of pleasure as she said, in her cigarette voice, “Morals-shmorals.”
The picture vanished. Nachman looked down at his shoes, which he had dropped beside the bed. He felt an extraordinary need for ordinariness. His shoes were British. Hand-sewn, soft reddish-brown leather. He’d worn them for years and he’d had them resoled and reheeled at least three times. He kept them oiled. They were molded perfectly to the shape of his feet and so pliant they felt buttery. It occurred to Nachman, though he hadn’t been thinking about it, that maybe Norbert knew about Adele’s lover.
If Norbert knew, and if Nachman told Norbert what he had seen, it might be grotesquely embarrassing. Boundaries are crucial to the integrity of relationships. That settled it. He wouldn’t tell Norbert and he wouldn’t meet Adele for lunch. It was an enormous relief to have arrived at this understanding of his situation.
Traffic moved normally the next afternoon, so Nachman was on time when he parked his car in the lot near the La Brea Tar Pits. Calendar’s was crowded. Waiters rushed down the aisles, with expressions of intense concentration, as if solving puzzles. There was ubiquitous chatter and laughter. Nachman looked about for Adele. When he saw her, he took a breath and started toward her table. She was wearing sandals, jeans, a celadon-green tank top, and a thin beaded necklace of primary colors. Beside her wineglass was a newspaper, which she pressed down with her hand as she read it. She glanced up as Nachman approached. She smiled, folded the newspaper, and dropped it beneath her chair. She continued smiling as Nachman sat down opposite her. He looked at her tank top and necklace. He looked at her wedding ring, a barrel of dull yellow, and then at her watch. It had a large face, etched with black numerals, and a clear plastic band. Adele continued smiling. Nachman shook his head ruefully as he finally looked directly at her face.
Her black shining hair was pulled back severely, and tied with a red ribbon. She wore assertive poppy-red lipstick. In gold-framed glasses, her eyes, related to the color of her tank top though much brighter, accepted Nachman’s attention, but he could see their uncertainty. Her smile became tentative. Quizzical.
“Order something,” she said, unable to bear Nachman’s silence.
“I don’t want anything.”
“Won’t you have a glass of wine?” she implored, as if it would do her good if Nachman had a glass of wine. Her smile was weak.
“All right.”
Adele raised her hand. A passing waiter stopped. Adele said, “Two more,” pointing to her wineglass. The waiter nodded.
“I shouldn’t have another,” said Adele. “I have to work on a difficult case this afternoon. I hired a new assistant. A gay kid named Geoffrey Horley Harms. He has two degrees. Three names and two doctorates, can you believe it?” She paused, then said, “What are you thinking?”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“You’ve never been married. You don’t know what it’s like.”
Nachman looked around at the action in the restaurant and sighed.
Adele said, “This is going nowhere. Look at me, please. I want to talk to you. I wasn’t raised by Protestants. I’m not a nice person. Do you follow me? I’m a very direct person.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want your full attention.”
“O.K.”
“I’m glad you saw me outside the motel.”
“I was stuck in traffic. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m grateful. What you saw has been going on for a long time, but I could never tell anybody. If I told my girlfriends it would be unfair to Norbert. I’m bad, but not evil. The guy you saw me with — Ivan — is from another life. I was in high school when we met. I was a kid. Ivan was already out of college, working. His mustache got to me. I don’t know why. It made his face so fierce. But Ivan is very kind. He is in the insurance business, a claims adjuster. He doesn’t live in Los Angeles. Sometimes he disappears for two or three years, then he phones me as if we were still together. As if I had never married. People stare at him because of his mustache. When he wears dark glasses he has no face, just a nose.”