She got home a little before midnight, wrapped up in a heavy coat with artificial furs and looking like a Russian countess. Her cheeks were as red as apples. She blew steam by the doorway, stamped her boots and sang out, “Hello, darling.” It thrilled my heart, grumpy as I was, to see her like that.
But a blast of icy air had hit me from the open door and I suddenly found myself furious. “Shut that damned door!” I shouted. And that was the way it often went from then on.
Sometimes, walking through the park that winter, dressed in a parka and muffled like a seal hunter, I would hear Isabel suddenly break out in song:
Her voice was so direct and unaffected that the old child in me wanted to cry at the sound of it. We held hands a lot, squeezing hard to feel one another through mittens.
We walked every day, no matter how cold it was. Isabel is the only woman I know who shares my love for walking the streets of New York. Her gray hair glowed in winter sunlight and she would face the icy air with zip and aplomb; I think I loved her most while striding briskly up Madison or Fifth Avenue in December, seeing the stares she would get from Chinese tourists muffled in their Korean scarves.
Sometimes she would window-shop. At first this was annoying; it seemed to be the customary female dumbness. But gradually I saw that Isabel was as perceptive about clothing as she was about the paintings in museums. She knew a lot about shoes, for instance—more than some people know about life. She had a sense of the sheen and poise of a shoe and eventually made me see it for the piece of minor sculpture it could be. But when I offered to buy she said there wasn’t room in her closets.
Eating at restaurants with her was delightful, and we did it a lot that winter. I think I began to love her a dozen years ago when I first saw her eat truite fumée. She would cut it neatly with her knife, slide an ample slice onto her fork, push a dozen capers on top—still using the knife—and then put it into her mouth and chew with serious concentration. There was nothing prissy in this; Isabel was a formidable trencherwoman and her eating was punctuated with little sighs of pleasure. That was when I was married to Anna; I was backing a play that Isabel had a tiny part in. She had also carpentered one of the sets. I was taken by her intelligent face and her figure and asked her to lunch. Nothing developed from that meeting for a long time, but watching her eat made my heart go out to her. I love people who like to eat and don’t get fat doing it. This woman ate with gusto and had a waist like a girl’s. In the twelve years I’ve known her her hair has become grayer but her figure hasn’t changed. I tingle now to think of that figure, to remember her putting away truite fumée.
We laughed a lot on our walks and in restaurants. We hugged each other spontaneously from time to time. I was delighted by her in hundreds of small ways. But whenever we tried to make love during those five months I found myself with a knot in my stomach and some old smoldering fury in my loins. What had been a happy afternoon of walking and chatting could become a nightmare; sometimes I became withdrawn and bitchy for hours. I should have quit trying altogether; Isabel herself told me I should quit, but I found ways to override her objections. I told her my sexual failures needn’t upset her, that if she were really turned on it might help my problem, that maybe at depth it was she who was afraid of sex. For about two weeks I had her buffaloed. Everybody has sexual fears; I developed Isabel’s like an impresario, trying to cover up my own.
She saw through it eventually. “Goddamn it, Ben,” she said in the middle of a cold night in the loft bed. “You’re the one with the problem and you’re trying to blame me for it.”
I fumed and blustered for a few minutes and finally fell back to sleep. In the morning I waked to see her sleepy-eyed and a bit grim-faced, and said, “I think you’re right.”
Things were better for a while after that. I left her alone and quit trying to act on every sexual tingle I felt—and I felt plenty of them. I slept better. But there was a lot of fury in me, and I felt it building. Much of the time I was good-humored and enjoyed doing what little work I needed to do—which took about three hours a day, mostly on the phone—but inside a pressure was building. I was becoming a time bomb, looking for an excuse to explode. I was scared by this and at the same time exulted in it. Living with Isabel and hating myself for impotence, I had become a sullen, angry, dangerous child.
Chapter 6
My hydroponics garden stands out now in green against the gray of Belson’s surface, alive against that bleak obsidian. It is remarkable what Fomalhaut can do to power a vegetable, more remarkable that plants bred to the light of Sol flourish under this blue star. They do it with chemical fertilizers recycled, and recycled water. Part of the fertilizers are recycled through me; I defecate into a hopper that feeds the system, and then add potash; I eat the same rearranged molecules over and over. Orbach would love it; it fits his thesis that my personality requires self-nourishment.
I find deep pleasure in seeing those lettuces and carrots and beets and asparagus growing in their plastic troughs. They cover a half acre of surface that for billions of years has been lifeless. I walk down the rows, encouraging my plants, rubbing their wet leaves tenderly, muttering to them sometimes, sometimes pulling a leaf of lettuce or spinach and eating it there in the rows, warmed by blue Fomalhaut, alone and happy with my vegetable companions.
Since there are no seasons here, every season is growing season; I am already on my second crop and am improving the breed. Why can’t you just let things alone? Anna would say at times in anger. Well I can’t. I don’t want to. So I save the best plants for seed, sensing that the new spectrum of Fomalhaut is an evolutionary spur and that some of my varieties will thrive on the short day-night cycle. Luther Burbank Belson, prodding his bush beans into stardom. It has worked, especially with the carrots; I’ve never seen such big, firm, orange carrots. I had Annie pull out one of the nuclear cooking coils from the Isabel’s galley, and I cook my vegetables on that. It requires twenty minutes at Belson air pressure to produce a carrot al dente—neither crisp nor mushy. They are superb with Java pepper.
I remember now the pattern of sliced carrots on Isabel’s white floor the day I cooked the leg of lamb.
It was the first time I had ever roasted a leg of lamb, but I hadn’t told Isabel that. My career as a cook had begun for all practical purposes in her apartment; I knew how to scramble eggs and make a grilled cheddar sandwich when I moved in, but that was it. I started taking over the kitchen at Isabel’s when I felt I had to create something for her and me, something elemental and sensual. For one orifice if not the other. Orbach pursed his lips when I told him that, but he didn’t look convinced. “Hell,” I said, “I’ve got to do something. I can’t fuck, and I’m bored with making money.”