As the ship left Belson, first trembling, then roaring and howling its way upward to and immediately beyond the clouds, great fissures appeared in the obsidian plain around me; the Isabel disappeared upward with an alacrity that was astonishing. I had never watched a spaceship take off before and it was spectacular to see all that power unleashed. The air smelled electric—some mixture of ozone and of the unburned residue of the Isabel’s solid fuel, used only for takeoff and landing. She had vanished from the sky with Ruth and Howard and Mimi and all the others aboard, and the smell remained. She would go into orbit, then go nuclear and, after a half hour or so, when her capacitors were charged, into spacewarp, somewhere both within and outside the knowable universe, shimmering, taking that nondimensional road back to Sol and Earth and her landing pad in the Florida Keys. And I was here alone, as far from home as a man had ever tried to live. For a few moments my arms and knees trembled. I was scared shitless.
I stood there and then I looked around me at the glass planet where I stood and where I had elected to live for six months completely alone. Alone without even the cockroaches famed for friendship with Devil’s Island prisoners, growing their cave beards in solitary; alone without the consolation of a bird, a snake, a distant rustle of tree limbs. What in the name of God was I doing? What was I doing to myself? And the word jumped into my head as alive as Athena when she sprouted from the brow of the Cloudmaster himself: masochist. Ben Belson, masochist.
Oh, yes. The cat is out of the bag, the cards are turned face up on the dirty green cloth, and the Devil has come out from behind his disguise as Dolly the Chambermaid. I could have left Anna in a flash, with her rubber girdle at her feet. Divorce is awfully easy. I’m rich. I did not leave Anna, not for all those years of berating myself for being the wrong kind of husband for her. What a goddamned painful tango we danced. Well. You marry a woman like Anna when you’re afraid.
Afraid of love. I might as well face it. That’s the truth of it. I was afraid of Isabel and that’s why I moved out of her apartment and into that suite at the Pierre. That’s why I came chugging halfway across the cosmos in this Chinese spaceship—Flower of Heavenly Repose. Oh yes. Look here, Officer, my name is Ben Belson, the celebrated millionaire financier, friend to famous and beautiful women, theater buff, prowler of the galaxy and closet Marxist. Big hands, big feet, big prick and a booming voice. And a big, throbbing, empty hole in my heart.
The day after Isabel got the part in Hamlet we celebrated with steaks at a neighborhood restaurant. Isabel was radiant. Her complexion was luminous against her gray sweater and silver jewelry, her curly gray hair. I was pleasant on the outside but inside sullen. She had three glasses of wine; I had club soda. I had nearly given up drinking a few years before, after spotting some handwriting on the wall about what happened to people who drank gin with their scrambled eggs. In those days I was free of bad habits—especially of fucking. I smiled as Isabel drank her wine and talked about how much the part meant to her, but inside I sulked like a child.
That evening she sat by the fire with a cat in her lap and a beat-up paperback of Hamlet propped on the cat. She was underlining Gertrude’s speeches in red. I busied myself cleaning up the breakfast dishes, clanging pans from time to time to let my presence be felt. Fifty years old and often on the cover of Time or Peking, a “basic force” in world finance, as Forbes called me once, the terror of boardrooms and a mover and a shaker on Wall Street, and there I am in Isabel’s little New York kitchen clanging the frying pan against the steel sink because I’m pissed and jealous. Because she’s more interested in a play than in me. Because I can’t get it up with her and haven’t in the months we’ve lived together. Clang goes the pan as I set it back on the wood-burning stove, scrubbed. And from here in my self-imposed exile on Belson I can see I was angry with Isabel because she was a beautiful, smart, erotic woman who wanted me to fuck her. The very idea, I was saying in my heart, as I scrubbed bacon grease off that morning’s breakfast plates. Who in the hell does she think she is? said that scared child in my mossy old rib cage. I dried the silverware with a cloth and could hear the cat purring in Isabel’s lap. I wanted to wring its neck. Inside me an angry virginity smoldered, grimly loyal to a pair of miserable ghosts. I started throwing the silverware into its shallow drawer. Take that, you goddamn knives and forks! Son of a bitching, goddamned spoons! Isabel murmured pleasantly over her text, underlining speeches, occasionally stroking the big cat, Amagansett, in her lap. I slammed the silverware drawer shut and stated, with great control in my voice, “Hamlet is an overrated play.” Ben Belson, literary critic.
“Huh?” Isabel said. There was an edge in her voice; she had picked up the sound of a gauntlet falling. “What’s that, sweetheart?”
“Hamlet,” I said, “is an overrated fucking play. It’s too long, too wordy, and it has too many corpses on the floor.” I dried my hands off on the towel, walked over and stood by the fire. The other cat, William, saw me coming and slinked away. Those fucking beasts pick up vibrations. “Nobody really knows what Hamlet’s about, either. That’s a lousy recommendation for a play.”
Isabel marked her place with an ivory bookmark and then looked up at me coolly. “T.S. Eliot said it’s about a boy’s disgust with his mother.”
That one stopped me for a second, but I shook it off. I was in no mood to explore my own psyche. What I wanted was to work on Isabel’s. There she sat, content by the fire, happy in her career and her pussycats, warmhearted and serene. And here I stood with a rage in my otherwise empty heart and my big, calloused hands trembling. I got those callouses from chopping cords of wood, in fury, at my country home in Georgia, every time the Dow went the wrong way. Inside, there in New York, I am a complete mess, a bridge hand without a face card, a barren, angry hulk of impotence, a sick and furious motherfucker, and I say to Isabel, “Is something bothering you?” She should have brained me with a lump of coal.
She looked up at me steadily before she spoke. “Ben,” she said. “You look ready for homicide, or worse. I don’t want to talk about Shakespeare with you right now.”
A part of me recognized that she was completely right. So I counterattacked. I tried to relax my features into something more amiable. Plausible anyway. I went back to the kitchen—actually just a space along one wall with a small stove and a dish cabinet in it—and started heating water for tea. I looked at my watch. A little after 11 P.M. “Isabel,” I said. “You can get awfully snotty when you talk about the theater. Do you feel Shakespeare’s something holy? Too holy for a businessman to discuss?”
The black cat leaped off her lap at that one. “Ben,” Isabel said, “for Christ’s sake come off it. I’m not a Shakespeare snob and you know it.”
Something glowed in me. I had her there. “What about that time we saw Henry the Fifth? All that talk you gave me about the audience not being able to feel the cadences.” I was standing by the fireplace again, striking a pose of sweet reasonableness. “The fucking cadences.” I looked at her face. I could see I had hit home. Something inside me thrilled at it.