The Spot: Stories

Reading Chekhov

He was a thirty-five-year-old part-time student at Union Seminary. In four years he would be the minister of a church up the Hudson, in a place called Sneden’s Landing. But at this time he was working for an interdenominational insurance organization in an office building on Claremont Avenue, just off Broadway. The view from his window was spectacular, stretching all the way up to the George Washington Bridge and the Palisades beyond. When the carillon played in the tower of Riverside Church, across the street — the individuated notes of the bells smearing together by the time they reached him — he sometimes felt its vibrations, spreading his fingers out against the glass.

She commuted in from a town thirty miles up the river and worked two floors down as an insurance adjuster. Steeples that have toppled in storms, she explained. You know, church fires and the like. Midwestern churches are always burning, being rebuilt, and then burning again. I think of church fires as a kind of civic right of passage. You know, bucket brigades passing hand-to-hand. Then there are lawsuits, of course, elderly slips and so on. You’d be surprised at how often people stumble during Communion. But this is not really what I do. I’m a voice coach by training.

Adultery is multifaceted, he said. It’s shapeless but at the same time has a rudimentary figure, like a snowflake; an abundance of clichés surround it and yet it’s unique, an entity different each time. Over the window in his bedroom was a grate secured with a large padlock. The sun came through the grate and then the embroidered curtains he brought back from Spain, spreading a lattice across her body that he traced with his fingers, from her belly — with its cesarean scar — to her chin.

There was the inelegance of it, too, of course, and the requisite lies that must be told, and the foolishness they felt when alone: his feeling of desertion when she was up at her house along the river. He went down near the water, to walk the length of Riverside Park, to breathe the creosote and salt air, and to look at the edge of the Palisades beyond the bridge.

The superstructure that held the subway where it emerged from the tunnel at Broadway and 125th Street. The brutal way the trains heaved to a stop, out of sight but not out of earshot — the clandestine sensation of secreting some part of his life away.

They made love in his apartment most afternoons, one way or another, during lunch.

I don’t care about this job. I’m a part-timer. I’m not obligated to this career, he said.

We provide fine insurance for religious institutions under the umbrella, but otherwise we’re just another business; we weigh the risk factors — and she stopped herself here because it was easy, she found, to fall into a mindless prattle about the nature of the insurance business, about the ways risks were covered. This subject, along with the embroidered curtains, made her think of the time in Spain, with her husband, when they had gone up onto the mesa for dinner with a British couple, a man who worked for Lloyd’s of London. She remembered something seminal about that night; they had felt so young, so fresh, so keenly American. They drank a punch made of Pimm’s and talked about life. Then there had been — and here she was somewhat fuzzy on the details — an insinuation about group sex? A hint at some form of experimentation? It was never clear. They’d excused themselves, gone to the car, driven down the road into Carboneras, laughing and excited, cutting straight through the town. The street busy, jammed with people, she had sensed the carrying of a secret agreement, of something deep and unspoken.

The night when the circumstances were correct — her daughter was on a sleepover with a friend, her husband away on business — they took a cab through the park to the East Side for dinner, roaring through the trees, the redolent smell of the earth, passing the old horse stables, to emerge into a larger order, the stateliness of Park Avenue.

The rattle of the emerging subway, salsa music from gypsy cabs — if he listened, when she woke him to make love again, he heard these sounds coalesce and deteriorate into nothingness: the quaint, paradoxical dynamic of knowing and not knowing. She’d become acutely aware of this sensation much later, when she moved back to the city and was living near Park Avenue, looking down at the traffic.

The great sorrow of being part of the overall tradition, for lack of a better phrase: knowing that Chekhov had it right. They read “The Lady with the Pet Dog” together, in the grass in the park, lying on a blanket, while across the street, near Grant’s Tomb, a boy lifted a pit bull up by a stick to strengthen its jaw.

I’d come to Lincoln Center some night, he said, when you’re with your husband, and watch you two listening to the symphony. I’d meet you at the fountain during the intermission and we’d steal away.

No, we’d meet just as we’re meeting now. Except it would go on forever. The story would end and then it would just keep going, the way this one does. That’s what it’s about. It would keep going onward, like the light from a star. We know they’re not going to find a way out, around it, and we know that they’re just going to continue until it ends.

But it doesn’t end, he said. He was on his back with his hand behind his head and the sun coming down through the bristle of his whiskers.

Around the edge of her voice when she was tense, or anxious, came the tightness of her Midwestern upbringing; she spoke one afternoon about her daughter. She’s, well, how should I say this? She’s kind of a troubled teenage kid. Maybe not much different than most. A little on the edge. Troubled is the only word I can find for it. I try never to say it because to say it is to make it so. But saying it to you seems safe enough.

The point where lust and love meet, where one ends and the other begins: the innate sincerity buried in the act of betrayal. The way it revealed the vestiges of her home to her, so that upon her return she saw everything, the pebbles in the driveway a buttermilk color, the old shingles smeared with moss, the clapboards lifting away from their nails, the yard wide and grand all the way down to the water’s edge, the light in her daughter’s room through the curtains. .

Dressing in the morning, snapping and adjusting undergarments, examining herself in the mirror with one hand on her belly, like Napoleon, lifting her skirt up her over her thighs, the single spritz of perfume around her belt line, all in the pale predawn light. With her mug of coffee at the kitchen sink, craning a bit to see if the traffic was heavy on the bridge: a chain of moving lights. She would cross it in a few minutes and go to the platform and wait, feeling a small soft pulse in her groin.

They stood together on the grating over the East River Drive, in the whoosh of updraft, and engaged in a long kiss while beside them the river gathered the last light of the Manhattan day. The kiss brought them as close to floating, as close to flying, as they’d ever get, and proved to be the most memorable moment, one that would remain with her for the rest of her life: the tangle of her hair around his face and lips, the touch of his fingers near the waistband of her skirt, while the cars passed beneath.

Using the excuse of work obligation, she came in on a Sunday, met him in the doorway of his building, and they walked to a service together. The reverend’s voice boomed past the microphone, reverberating hard against the stone, speaking about the elegance of grace, about the manner of forgiveness and the nature of redemption. He quoted from the book of Job:

The squares of the town forget them;

their name is no longer remembered;

so wickedness is broken like a tree.

On top of the flat pleats of her tweed skirt, tight against her spreading thighs, their hands rested, clasped firmly.

One year, from start to finish, the affair bent in a great arch, the first hints of lust building into the long lovemaking sessions at the apartment, twisting into the thick helix of obligation, the secretiveness of talk.

I want you to see the house, she said. I want you to know where I live, to get an idea. I want you to know a little bit about my life the way I know about yours. I’d like you to see my daughter. I want to kiss you on the riverbank, to implicate you into my existence. .

He rented a car, an old blue Ford — the kind of car a priest might drive — and drove across the bridge, turning up to the parkway as she had directed, exiting and following the river, crossing the town to her house, which stood up a drive — complacent-looking, just as she had described it, with its white clapboard and the lawn behind it stretching down to the water. He drove to the end of the road, to the park she had mentioned, and turned around and went past the house again. In his ribs was the clench of sadness. There was a light on in the upstairs window, behind a gauze of cotton, soft and yellowish. Her bedroom, he knew, was in the back and out of sight, facing the water.

He waited in the coffee shop for darkness to arrive, and emerged back into a soft fall evening. This time the house was silent and dark, and the car in the driveway was gone.

At the lookout off the Palisades Parkway, in her car, the lights of the Bronx a Milky Way of stars quivering in the Indian summer heat: Every year a kid falls from the Palisades here, she said, or leaps. I’ve talked to my daughter. . mouths kissing. . about it, about the dangers. . kissing, parting. . there is a reasonableness in her, there is something that still listens. .

As she left her office, the thin black skirt she wore was overcharged with static. She sprayed it and felt it lift away, but by the time she was back on the street it was recharged, clinging in wavelets to her thighs, riding along her crotch, sliding up with each step as she climbed the stairs to his apartment, where, in the wintry afternoon light, she stood before him and marched, letting the hem rise up and up her thighs until he was on his knees, clutching her waistband by the elastic.

There was the disrobing, the unveiling, the sublime exposure. The sunlight was low and cold; a bitter wind came in across Riverside. The heat in the pipes lurched and thumped, and from the steam valve there came a sputter, the sound of lips parting. He opened the window and she thought of her own house, leaking heat, the old plaster cold to the touch. It was that simple, in some ways, the wonder of the affair, the sense of lines that were drawn and redrawn: to have demarcations so clear and perfect, like lines on a map, not the regions and countries but the everlasting longitudes and latitudes; that part she retained when all else was gone.

He’s rather serious, she told a friend. Of course he has to be a bit serious, because he is studying theology. He speaks Hebrew and some Aramaic and is studying the Psalms. . but he’s funny, and not too serious, really, and you wouldn’t know from meeting him that he’s going to be a man of the cloth.

He’s funny, she told another friend. He’s lighthearted, with this nasal twang of a voice that somehow gets to me, you know, and he can turn phrases and do things that get inside me and make me feel alive.

The shame she felt came from the truth: she had been fucked and was fucking. The carnality of the affair was brutal and the main point. She wore the skirt again, electrified by the dry winter air, and let the static build as she walked along his street.

When you argue about your own story, she explained, well, that’s the end of things. As soon as we started to argue about our story, things fell apart for us.

When they tried to get God in, when he mentioned the idea of God nudging them together, the narrative, she would later think, immediately became banal and meek, rooted in the world. It was near the end. On a clear spring day the promenade urged them south. Beneath the wall that ran along Riverside Drive a man lay asleep on an old, splintered bench, his fat belly spilling from green work pants, a newspaper folded over his face. On the next bench sat another man wearing thick headphones, moving his head placidly in small rotations, as if working out an eternal kink in his neck. There was something unsettling about his deep absorption in music that could not be heard and that would never be heard.

They went down toward the river, cutting off the promenade along a thin dusty path through the weeds. He let her go a few yards ahead so he could watch her hips shifting beneath her skirt, the movement of her rear against the silk fabric, light- and dark-blue daisy-shaped flowers. There was that helplessness in her movement — from her pumps on the unsteady ground — that he enjoyed, a sense that she might tumble at any moment, and she did, twisting sideways to the right with a small grunt, and falling into the weeds.

The bone was broken — a spiral fracture — just above her ankle. With her arm around his shoulder, and his arm around hers, they hobbled up the path, along the promenade, to Riverside Drive, where they hailed a cab and went all the way up to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

In his apartment — cool with blue twilight — she lay on his bed while he ran his fingers along the soft cotton gauze, against the fiberglass, that spot where the two met. He’d remember that forever. His finger going up and in against the warmth of her foot, slipping as far as it would go.

On the way to the car, I was stepping off the curb and twisted it and the bone bore the brunt, she explained to her husband. I got a cab to this hospital and then went back to get my bag from the car. The story felt frail and feeble, like old lace; it had the gaping open spaces you’d expect, although it was made carefully, with consideration of all the angles. He chose to believe it. He let his compassion — his duty as a good husband — slip like mortar between the cracks. Much later he’d examine his foolishness and think: I was as complicit as she was in that story, driving in to pick her up, finding her standing up, leaning against the car.

A fetid, oily smell emerged from beneath the cast: sweat, dead skin, and dirt. Afternoons, she lay on a divan in the back room and read Tolstoy.

The way bone heals, calcifying and thickening and becoming stronger. The knob of new bone you can feel against the skin. The elation of the cast being removed, the saw touching the skin but not cutting, the sudden sensation of freedom.

Summer was deep and warm. Behind them the office building, with its reflective glass, collected and cubed the vista. The great terminus of parting; the deep, elegiac tragedy of it. The upstate reservoirs had been depleted by the heat wave, their dirty skirts powdered with dried algae and muck. Spray caps were attached to the fireplugs, unleashing thin, tight streams, until the kids removed the caps with lug wrenches. The dry silence of a late Friday in early July. Broadway, visible from the corner, was strangely empty.

Never mutual, the fact that one must suffer more than the other, however preordained, seemed startling. Ginkgo nuts fell early from trees along Claremont Avenue — the drought had urged the season forward — and a man collected them in a cloth sack, working slowly in the heat, plucking them up one at a time.

Her explanation was stilted: First she talked about her marriage and her daughter and the fact that she was not willing to give these things up, to let them go, and then, fumbling for something more specific, she said, I went last night to check my daughter, and she was uncovered and sleeping facedown and I looked at her back, the bones of her back, and they were, well, they reminded me of the bones of a sardine. You could chew and swallow them and not even notice.

I believed it myself when I told him that, she said to a friend.

To go back to Chekhov: the torment of it, the way it was rooted in place — the hot winds of Yalta, the wintry streets of Moscow. In her case it was the long stretch of riverfront at the end of the yard at home: then the gray spans of the bridge, with the city, down to the right, stretched lengthwise into the summer haze.

The potential was there for a long time: He’d show up in her town, unexpectedly, standing with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets, or at Lincoln Center, as he had proposed, during intermission, the next tier down, spotted through the glass railing, looking, searching.

Much later, she’d hold specific memories of it: the clandestine ventures out into the night; the way the grid of north-south streets seemed to contain them, walking hand in hand down Columbus in the fall, dressed in sweaters, relishing the itch of the wool. A man had been selling cashmere scarves from a sheet of cardboard near the Plaza Hotel. He’d bought one and lifted it gently around her neck.

Weirdly enough, I lied and told him my daughter was sixteen, and troubled, she admitted to a friend. I added four years to my own daughter’s life and didn’t know why I was doing it at the time.

There was deliberation at the deepest level, even in the falling away, the parting, the bitterness. There was an inelegance. No matter how fanciful and wild, no matter how impulsive, in retrospect it had stood within the fact of the marriage itself. Still, she beheld a certain dignity in the exactitudes: the smell of cut flowers at a bodega, rubber bands bright red around their stems; the dusky light off Broadway on summer afternoons; the heavy wall along Riverside Park, cool against their calves, as they sat holding hands during lunch, turning now and then to glance down through the trees to the river, which was broken up into shards, a deep blue against the green.