The Christmas Kid

The Price of Love

IN THE MORNINGS NOW, Levin walked the winter beach, his body buffeted by the hard sea wind, his heart blown through with emptiness. Gulls watched his progress. He plucked shells from the receding surf. He combed the sand for man-made things. He was accustomed now to the permanent grieving sadness of the summerhouses, sealed with boards and plastic sheets against the invasions of winter. On some mornings, Levin was sure he could hear laughter from their porches, remnants of summer evenings frozen in ice.

Alone, bundled in down and wool, his boots heavy, Levin walked about three miles each morning, with the Atlantic pounding the shore beside him, and then went back. He never had breakfast, and no longer read the newspapers or watched television. Across the long mornings, he worked with his hands in the small rented house, carving wood into birds and small animals and the heads of vanished friends, amazed that after so many years his hands were again capable of intricacy and control. The wood shavings helped feed the fireplace. Mozart fed his heart. He only thought about her five or six times a day.

He ate a late lunch, always in a pub called Magic’s, where he liked the chili and the cheeseburgers. Nobody talked to him. He was just another middle-aged customer. If the pain came over him, as it sometimes did when he saw a waitress brush back her hair, or heard a woman’s laugh, he would try to remember a melody by Mozart. This usually worked. After lunch, he would stop at the post office to pick up his mail, most of which was junk; his friends didn’t know where he was, and that was all right with Levin. He didn’t want to experience their pity, or have them ask for an explanation. His wife didn’t love him anymore. It was as simple as that. And she had gone. That was all. He didn’t want to explain that to anyone.

In the afternoon, he would polish whatever piece he had been working on that day, sitting in the large, soft chair beside the fireplace. The nights were more difficult. In those first weeks, after quitting his job, and closing his apartment, and coming out here to the beach to do things he had never had time to do, Levin’s pain was most terrible at night. He would see her laughing with other men. Faceless men. He would see her cool gray eyes accusing him of misdemeanors he had not known he’d committed. He saw her empty closet. He would get up and walk around the small house then, and try to read, and lie again on the brass bed, hearing the house settling and the distant roar of the sea. And sometimes he was afraid. Thinking: I could die here, and nobody would know.

The fear of solitude slowly left him. It had been years since he’d slept alone, and for a long time he would still awaken and reach for her. But then, knowing that she was not there, and would never be there, he learned to accept her absence, and made new habits. Indifference replaced fear. And he began to look forward to the luxury of his solitary bed. I must be healing, he thought. I don’t fear, I don’t love, I don’t hate. The wound is closed. I am alone. I am indifferent. I have survived.

And then one gray afternoon after lunch, he went to the post office and opened his box and removed the little bundle of mail. And along with the circulars and the tax forms from his accountant and the catalogs, he saw the letter. His name was written in the familiar handwriting, the round letters made by a fountain pen on a pale-blue envelope. But he did not open it, and then walked slowly back to the rented house.

He sat before the fire for a long while, dropping junk mail into the flames, until there was nothing left except the pale-blue envelope. He looked at the flames, considering whether he should simply throw the letter in with the other junk of his life. He decided not to do this, but could not open it, either. He laid the envelope on a table and went into the workroom to polish a head he’d carved of W. H. Auden. He thought about Auden’s ravaged face and gentle eyes, wondering what his own face would look like after time had finished its erosions. I have time yet, he thought. Another twenty years. Maybe a few more than that. And will leave the world as alone as when I entered.

That night, he fell asleep while a heavy rainstorm lashed the village. He dreamed of Prospect Park when he was a boy, running across meadows. Then he was in the zoo, and the bars of the cages had all been removed, and the animals roamed around, free at last. They seemed almost timid in the dream. And then a panther was before him, sleek and black, with yellow eyes, and Levin was afraid. He tried to move, but his legs seemed encased in concrete. And then he was awake, and sweating, and still afraid.

He turned on the light, and lay in the damp bed listening to the steady drumming of the rain. And then he rose, pulled on a terry-cloth robe, and went out to the guttering fire to read the letter. He held it for a brief moment, jingling coins in the pocket of the robe, then opened it with a forefinger. There was a date on the upper-right-hand corner of the page, and the letter was addressed simply: “Darling.” The word itself made Levin hurt.

He read the words:

She signed it with love, and Levin stared at the words for a while as if they were abstract forms — squiggles and circles and lines made by an inhabitant of some lost city. Then he put the letter back in the envelope and placed it on the couch beside him. His fingers rubbed the coins in the pocket of his robe. And then the fear rose in him again, as if some coat of armor had been abruptly removed. He saw her leaving him, again and again and again. He saw her with other men, always laughing. And then anger displaced fear; he cursed her, he snarled, he said terrible things.

The rain spattered the windows, and he peered through them into the darkness. He opened the front door and stepped outside. The rain lashed him, whining through the trees, drowning the lawn, soaking his robe. Levin shouted her name at the sky. Once. Twice. The wind and rain tore the words from him. He wrapped his arms around a maple tree, its wet bulk solid against his body. He cursed her again, his voice now a strangled sob.

And then he started to walk across open lawn, heading for the dark, drowned village. There was a telephone there, beside the bank. And he had coins in his pocket, to pay the price of love.