Pastime

CHAPTER 12

SUSAN insisted on cooking dinner for Paul and me. When she put her mind to it she could cook, but she had a lot of trouble putting her mind to it, and most of the time she had it delivered from The Harvest Express.

"Helmut hears you're doing your own cooking," I said, "he'll have a heart attack. You represent his profit margin."

"I won't abandon him," Susan said. She had every pot she owned, including two she had just bought for the occasion, out on the counter. Pearl was underfoot sampling the residue in a pan already used. Susan gave us each a

Catamount Golden Lager to drink and then went back to her preparation.

"Couscous," she said. "With chicken and vegetables."

"Sounds great," Paul said.

Susan cleared a space among the pans and put some chicken breasts down on the marble counter and began to cut them into cubes. Pearl stood on her hind legs, with her front paws on the counter, and pointed the raw chicken from a distance of three inches.

"Doesn't that tend to beat hell out of the knife blade?" Paul said.

Susan looked at him as if he'd espoused pedophilia.

"No," Paul said quickly. "No, of course it doesn't."

I sipped my beer. Susan continued to hack up the chicken. She had her lower lip caught in her teeth, as she always did when she was concentrating. I liked to watch her.

Paul watched me watching her.

"Is Susan the first woman you ever loved?" he said.

"Yes."

"What about this hussy you mentioned the other day in the Ritz bar?" asked

Susan.

"She was a girl," I said.

"And you?" Susan said.

"I was sixteen," I said. "And she sat in front of me in French class."

"Sixteen?" Paul said. "You had a childhood?"

Pearl managed to get a scrap of raw chicken. She got down quickly and trotted to the living room where she put it on the rug and rolled on it.

"I can hardly remember her face now," I said. "But she had long hair the color of thyme honey, and she combed it straight back and it was quite long and very smooth. Her name was Dale Carter,and I used to write her little notes of poetry and slip them to her. And she'd read them and smile and I knew she was flattered."

"Poetry?" Susan said.

Pearl returned from the living room licking her muzzle.

"Yeah. Stuff I'd read and would adjust to fit her.

Dale, thy beauty is to me like those Nicean barks of yore… that kind of thing."

Paul and Susan looked at each other. Pearl continued to point the chicken.

"Well," Susan said, "you were sixteen."

"Barely," I said.

"So," she said, "did it develop?"

"We became friends," I said. "We would talk all the time between classes and we would eat lunch together and sit on the high school steps after school, and I just couldn't get enough of her. I just wanted to look at her and hear her voice."

Paul was sitting quietly, watching me. There was no amusement in his face.

"She was slender," I said. "Medium height, from a well-off and intellectual family in the Back Bay. Very, ah, Brahmin. And there was something about her way of carrying herself. She seemed to walk very lightly. She seemed to be very, very interested in what you said, and she would listen with her lips just a little apart and breathe softly through her mouth while she listened."

Susan wet her lower lip and opened her mouth and leaned forward and panted at me.

"A little more subtly than that," I said. "And she would sort of cock her head a little to the side when she talked and look right at me."

Susan tossed her chicken into a bowl and poured some honey over it, and sprinkled on some spices. Pearl's eyes had never left the chicken. When it went in the bowl her eyes didn't leave the bowl.

"Did you go out?" Susan said.

"Not really," I said. "They used to have sort of a canteen dance every afternoon after school in the basement of the Legion hall across the street. Some sort of keep-the-kids-off-the-street campaign which lasted about six months. And we used to go over there sometimes and dance. I never danced very well."

"I'll say," Susan murmured.

"But with her I was Arthur Murray. She seemed to operate a little off the ground, as if her feet were floating; and her hand on my shoulder was very light and yet she felt every movement of the music and seemed to know exactly where I was going before I went. And she always wore perfume. And good clothes. I don't even remember what they were like, but I knew they were good."

"Longish skirt," Susan said. "Thick white socks halfway up the calf, penny loafers, cashmere sweater, maybe a little white collar like Dorothy Collins on The Hit Parade."

"Yeah," I said. "That's exactly right."

"Of course it is. It's what I wore. It's what we all wore, those of us who wore `good clothes.'"

Paul's attention, I noticed peripherally, had intensified. Pearl had moved out of the kitchen, encouraged by a gentle shove from Susan, and now sat on the floor beside my stool, her shoulder leaning in against my leg, – her eyes still fixed on the bowl where the chicken was marinating.

"Sure," I said. "Anyway we'd dance sometimes, and dance close, but no kissing, or protestations of affection, except cloaked as badinage. I never took her out in the sense of going to her house, picking her up, taking her to the movies, to a dance, that stuff. We never had a meal together except in the school cafeteria."

"Why didn't you take her out, kiss her, take her to dinner?"

"Shy."

"Shy?" Susan said. "You?"

"When I was a kid," I said. "I was shy with girls."

"And now you're not."

"No," I said, "now I'm not."

Susan was struggling with the seal on a box of prepackaged couscous.

Pearl was leaning more heavily against my leg, her neck stretched as far as she could stretch it, to rest her head on my thigh.

"Well, weren't you weird," Susan said.

"It's great talking to a professional psychotherapist," I said. "They are so sensitive, so aware of human motivation, so careful to avoid stereotypic labeling."

"Yes, weirdo," Susan said. "We take pride in that. What happened to her?"

Paul reached over to pat Pearl's head. Pearl misread it as a food offer and snuffed at his open palm,and finding no food, settled for lapping Paul's hand. Susan got the box of couscous open and dumped it in another bowl and added some water.

"She told me one day that a close friend of mine had asked her to the junior class dance, and should she accept."

"And of course you told her yes, she should accept," Susan said. "Because that was the honorable thing to do."

"I said yes, that she should accept."

"Now that you are sophisticated and no longer shy with girls, I assume you understand that she was asking you if you were going to ask her to the dance, and was telling you that if you were, she would turn your friend down and go with you."

"I now understand that," I said. "But consider if I had been different.

What if I had not panted after the sweet sorrow of renunciation? What if

I'd gone to the dance with her, and we'd become lovers and married and lived happily ever after? What would have become of you?"

"I don't know," Susan said. "I guess I'd have wandered the world tragically, wearing my polka dot panties, looking for Mister Right, never knowing that Mister Right had married his high school sweetheart."

Paul put his hands over his ears.

"Polka dot panties?" he said.

Susan smiled. She transferred the refreshed couscous from the bowl to a cook pot. Neither Paul nor I asked her why she had not refreshed it in the cook pot in the first place. She put the cook pot on thestove and put a lid on it and turned the flame on low.

I rested my hand on Pearl's head. "I think," I said, "that even had Dale and I gone to the dance and lived happily ever after, we wouldn't have lived happily ever after. Any more than you were able to stay with your first husband."

"Because we'd have been looking for each other?"

I nodded.

"That's what you think, isn't it?" Susan said. She was no longer teasing me.

"Yes," I said. "That's what I think. I think your marriage broke up because you weren't married to me. I think neither one of us could be happy with anyone else because we would always be looking for each other, without even knowing it, without knowing who each other was or even knowing there was an each other."

"Do you think that's true of love in general?"

"No," I said. "I only believe that about us."

"Isn't that kind of exclusionary?" Paul said.

"Yes," I said. "Embarrassingly so."

The room was silent now, not the light and airy silence of contentment, but the weighty silence of intensity.

Paul was choosing his words very carefully. It took him a little time.

"But you're not saying I couldn't feel that way?"

"No," I said. "I'm not."

Paul nodded. I could see him thinking some more. "Do you feel that way?" I said.

"I don't know," he said. "And I feel like I ought to, because you do."

"No need to be like me," I said.

"Who else, then?" he said. "Who would I be like? My father? Who did I learn to be me from?"

"You're right," I said. "I was glib. But you know as well as I do that you can't spend your life feeling as I do, and thinking what I think. You don't now."

"The way you love her makes me feel inadequate," Paul said. "I don't think

I can love anyone like that."

Susan was chopping fresh mint on the marble countertop.

"One love at a time," she said.

"Which means what?" Paul said. "My mother?"

Susan smiled her Freudian smile. "We shrinks always imply more than we say."

"There's nothing necessarily bizarre in wanting to find my mother."

"Of course not, and when you do it will help clarify things, maybe."

"Maybe," Paul said.

I sipped a little more of my Catamount Gold and thought about Dale Carter, whom I hadn't seen in so long. It wasn't the first time I'd thought about her. I looked at Susan. She smiled at me, a wholly non-Freudian smile.

"We'd have found each other," she said.

"In fact," I said, "we did it twice."