Women and Men

the message for what it was worth

Meanwhile you have to come up with something, said the older gentleman with whom I exchanged views from time to time. Economical of words, he would have gone far giving business advice. Maybe come up with something now, I said; but the last thing you decide is what to put first. True enough, said this older acquaintance of mine, but who knows what condition you’ll be in on your deathbed?

He would listen, and then he would speak. I had an odd way of seeing things, he said.

Well, what did that mean?

Oh, he said, smart, but a bit turned around. Cart before the horse? I said. That’s the idea, he said; first things first. But the last thing you decide, I said, is what to put first; that’s what the French mathematician said.

Are you a French mathematician? my elderly acquaintance asked. And one day I asked myself that question verbatim. But I have heard that one should stop talking to oneself; or so advises one of the religions, I think. Does that mean talk to others instead? Well, I’m already in the train station, and I haven’t quite said the words to let me go. Have you told her, my elderly acquaintance would say. Have you told him? my wife would say, of whomever. I’m already in the train station, and I haven’t quite said the words to let me go.

A hand gripped my arm and I turned to the young man detaining me. The train terminal all around me seemed freed of its morning rush hour, but the terminal wasn’t going anywhere, while I was. An old girlfriend of five or six years ago had come to mind with such perilous decency and sweetness that, if I kept moving across the marble floor uninterrupted, I might reach her voice; I was thinking of her, she was wearing bluejeans, then a plaid woolen skirt I had paid for. The hand gripping my arm was like the foreground sound I heard against a deep mass murmur in the station.

"Sir, do you live here in New York?" the young man asked. He held a book to his chest, a holy book with a title I recognized. I wished him a merry Christmas. "Do you live in New York?" he asked, and I heard in his speech great spaces of our country that are not New York. His hand grew upon my arm, and I reminded him that I had wished him merry Christmas.

"O.K., but I don’t think we’re getting through to each other," the young man said. I looked down at his pale hand on my arm and said that at least we were still talking. "That’s right," he grinned, and I said indeed I did live here in New York and at this moment was leaving it.

He asked me where I was going. "It is the journey that counts, not the destination," I said, and withdrew my arm.

"That’s right," said the young man and touched my arm again.

But then I fell into a habit I have been ordered to break — a shorthand that somewhat privately brings together past and present: "I can’t come to your wedding," I said, "I’m busy every night this week."

Whatever he thought of this — a private joke, sarcasm, madness — he smiled with an understanding I am all too familiar with. Another young fellow had accosted me Saturday on a cold, festive street as my wife and I peered at a menu through the fogged window of a restaurant. He had had three girls in tow and it was he who had asked me to his wedding. He was marrying— and of course I knew how to believe him — Jesus Christ at midnight. We smiled and nodded, my wife and I; all six of us, I think, smiled.

But this morning I was alone. The young man with the holy book gripped my arm like a blood-pressure test. The Bhagavad-Gita was what he was holding. "Can I talk to you?" he said, as a son at a certain time of life might think of saying to a distant father.

I threw up my elbow in his face and he let go.

I approached my gate that had "11:40" in large white numerals below the name of the train. At the gate I turned and looked back. The young man was showing a blonde lady a passage in his book.

I was early for my local, but I had an unbelievable number of other things to do, and today, whatever I had in common with the man I was visiting, I had little if anything to say to him. "And yet — and yet. ."I already heard his words, this elder acquaintance of mine who in his slow humor betrayed only a very mild interest in his own affairs.

If he could see me now. Here I was, moving away from the very gate I had approached, and moving toward where the young man and the middle-aged blonde stood discussing the Bhagavad-Gita. It is, I am sure, a religious book. But I have my own notion of gods. I am no god; I won’t go for that. Nor to my knowledge are any of those close to me gods. And yet, as the older man I have mentioned would say—and yet. My notion is that there are many gods. No problem.

I passed near the young man and the blonde woman, and the woman looked up and smiled at me. I heard a child crying, and I heard another child, on being prompted, say, "Hi." I heard a man say, "So sue her — sue her ass." I swept the great echoing station, picking up more than I knew, noticing at the end of one row of marble ticket windows that were now devoted to Off-Track Betting a notice that did not apply to me, for an organization that helps gamblers. The man I was going to see had known a gambler who came to him with strange pains in his fingers. My host did not tell jokes, but he told very particular stories. It seemed that this gambler had been strolling down a street in Anchorage, Alaska, with his recently widowed sister-in-law and had run into another card player, a recent settler there. He had introduced the lady he was with, but only by name, as she afterward pointed out to him. What she was not to know, however, was that behind her back a few evenings later at a crisis he risked her — bet her as his own wife — against the settler’s powerboat no less. An old story, no doubt. But she had never learned of her stake in the boat or in the proceeds of its sale, and the gambler came to love her and they married and were happy. This despite his habits (though he had a regular job now) and perhaps at the price of a ritual anguish in the nerves of his fingertips four or five times a year, one of those times the anniversary of that game in Anchorage.

"Lucky at cards, lucky in love?" I had suggested.

"If that’s how you see it," said my host.

How then, did my host see it? He shrugged, but then he said, "Oh, smart at cards, smart in love."

What had that gamble to do with love? I thought then and later. My host added that he and the gambler had concluded that telling the wife the truth about that game in Anchorage wasn’t what was called for and wasn’t even a good idea. The truth was that the gambler and his wife were having a little trouble at the moment and she was a bit bored with life.

Once more at my gate, I thought of my wife in bed, answering, not answering. I was almost certain my elder daughter had read the Bhagavad-Gita. She talked of getting her own apartment. Our second daughter, much younger, had been my idea; her birth had proved unexpectedly easy. I wasn’t thinking straight, and yet to come out and think this thought could mean I was. I was going to get on my train.

The dispassionate man I was going to see had a habit of prefacing a remark with "You’re not going to like what I’m about to say." But while he had his idiosyncrasies, this was not one of them. My wife was also in the habit of telling me I was not going to like what she was about to say. But unlike the man I was going to see today, she was almost always correct in her warning, her prediction. I say "almost" because, having warned me that I would not like what she was about to say, she would sometimes stop and not say whatever it was, on the ground that I stopped her from speaking her mind.

Not half so much, though, as I stopped myself. For who has the time? I must speak for myself. Not a renouncing individual, I had renounced fighting with her. It was necessary to my renunciation that I had not told her.

I sat in the no smoking car of my train among newspapers left by commuters. I had a good empty feeling. I was hungry, but didn’t want whatever they were peddling in the cafe car. Christmas was going to be bearable. The somewhat elderly man I was visiting was not exactly a close friend; I was paying him this visit because I thought I ought to. I had nothing special to say to him today. As I’ve said, if he had taken himself seriously he could have gone far as a business consultant. I’m repeating myself.

I had met him at the bar of a business-lunch restaurant downtown through a journalist friend whom I hadn’t seen for months and haven’t since. A bright, windy day a couple of blocks from the harbor — and the brass rail I put my foot on and the polished wood under my elbow and the golden rust flecking the great mirror behind the bar might have inspired even me to take the day off. I recall that they were discussing their grown children when I appeared, and the journalist said he didn’t see his as often as he’d like but he guessed it was partly up to him; his friend here was retired so he had less excuse. Semi-retired, my new acquaintance said. Well, you’re not packing a stethoscope any more, said my journalist friend. When he left the bar to sit down with, as I recall, two well-known economists, each with a full, reddish beard, who instantly began studying their menus, he shook hands and for a moment held in both of his the hand of my new acquaintance, this somewhat elderly doctor who had come into Manhattan to see his lawyer that morning.

What happened was that the doctor and I had lunch, and the fish was watery. I told the waiter he had ignored us, he’d been taking something out on us, what was it? and I told my companion that I had been using my squash racket on court lately like a shillelagh and I had no idea how many blood types were represented on its raw head, and what did he do by way of being semi-retired!

The long and the short of it is that he was at present a therapist on an informal basis, with a few patients. That was the first and last meal we had together, a thought that came to me as I imagined what they were serving in the cafe car of my regular train. I had not asked what his qualifications were, though I had seen in his study a framed certificate from an institute of pastoral (I think it was) psychotherapy. My time was limited but we met quite often. What did I know of him? He had his share of sorrow. What more could one say? Well, that he was droll and, if not magical, self-contained. Mostly — for he declined to be an oracle — he said humdrum things like, You want to take some time for yourself. I sometimes thought I didn’t know what to say to him; but he was there, and I paid for the hour, though it was usually less. Well, it was supposed to be fifty minutes and it was usually at least that. I will say that I felt it was my time. There, that’s what I meant to say, banal as it comes out.

I had had the time to talk with the young man in the terminal who would not go away, but I was here in my car instead. I knew that the Bhagavad-Gita was a Hindu poem, a sacred text I was almost certain. Come to think of it, I knew it was conversations between two persons, a god and, I believe, a warrior. I had not felt called upon to read the book. I knew pretty much what I would find. My personal view is that there are many gods, and when we organize and rank them we go too far, we ask too much of them.

I saw my fellow passengers with such clarity that I might have suspected I could enter their bodies if I had not felt the opposite. A black woman in a red coat unwrapped a candy bar and watched a girl with a scout-green knapsack on a metal frame enter the car. Two mustachioed youths sat down, lighted cigarettes, and got up and left the car. An older couple — two older couples — sat in the far half of the car facing my way. A flaxen-haired woman who looked like my wife and had a slightly broken nose glanced across the aisle at me, held my glance, and gave me a smile. A man in a white helmet had wheeled his bicycle along the platform and was arguing with a conductor. Two men wearing glasses settled down with heavy-looking loose-leaf notebooks and, exchanging names of men they knew, talked for all our benefit as if the train were already rumbling along. A black woman entered the car, found the first black woman, and sat down with her. One had an old Macy’s shopping bag, the other a brown canvas bag like a blue one of mine in which I carry athletic gear.

The doors closed, the train moved, and I felt I could see anything I wanted to see. The man in the helmet stood on the platform like a trooper, his bicycle pointed in the direction our train was moving. I heard what sounded like a cat’s angry squall at a distance and knew it was someone’s zipper close by. The train’s movement was like the tunnel we were moving through, and the loud voices of the two men with the notebooks talking guidelines receded.

I hummed a chorus of an old tune, "It’s Just the Nearness of You"; those were very likely the only words of it I recalled. The flaxen-haired woman across the aisle smiled, and I asked her if it was going to be a good day, and we seemed to find that funny.

I reported to her that a young man with a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita had tried to convert me in the station, and the woman asked why I assumed he was trying to convert me. But then she raised a hand gently and said, "No, no, of course he was."

"Wait a second," I said. "You didn’t mean that."

"Oh I guess I didn’t know why you were telling me," the woman said, and looked down at the cover of a magazine in her lap.

"What are all these people doing traveling out to Westchester at half past eleven on a weekday morning?" I said.

The woman opened the magazine as if we were old friends, in fact as casually as my wife would turn the page of a magazine if we were traveling together — indeed just as she had done on the one occasion when she had come with me to visit the man I was going to see today. I swung my shopping bag from the seat beside me to the floor. Well, I was not quite empty-handed journeying out to see this after all wise and interesting man, but perhaps he would have a laugh or two in store for me.

The flaxen-haired woman looked at a page and barely glanced at me so that she seemed to be turning against the resistance of that small, abrupt angle where her nose had been broken.

I had bought my wife a Christmas present on the way to the train, a last-minute inspiration. Standing in the crowded subway I had felt time warming me, exciting me to a point of common happiness — holiday time. On the subway platform as I had gotten off, a man was singing. But he might have been screaming, to judge from the pain in a woman’s face as she climbed the stairs. He had been singing well and singing for us all. I had wanted to speak to him, give him something; but that wasn’t his idea.

I had my wife’s gift in a shopping bag. I had my doubts, which I don’t have when I buy things for my children. My doubts are that nothing I buy my wife can express my feelings for her. I love her looks and her humor. I fear my reactions to her moods and her commands. She is a hard person to shop for, and the nightgown or brooch I buy her can’t match, let’s say, the hand-carved, bass wood canoe paddle my wife produces for me on Christmas Eve.

That was worth telling the man I was on my way to see, for maybe once upon a time he had had the same experience. I would not wish to pry. Certainly not into the tragedy that had come to him apparently around the time I had first made his acquaintance.

Often I had bent his ear so that we didn’t know where the time had gone. I had told him all my stories. Once I had killed a burglar with a half-full bottle of apple juice in accidental self-defense and had had to go to court and could not believe that I had done what I had done. Another year I had hit a school crossing-guard, an unmarried woman in a yellow slicker and a pert, novel type of cap, who had stepped like an actress or an apparition out from behind a rental van as I approached an intersection and when I hit her I seemed to knock her back into the slot she had emerged from. My father had had a long, hopeless illness but had then shocked us all by suddenly dying. It seemed to have been a hard life all around, but I couldn’t believe this, and I was at least glad to hear myself say so to the man I was traveling out to see.

He knew me, I guess, and it was a pleasure to talk to him on these visits I paid him from time to time. I asked him if he would retire completely. He didn’t know. I suggested he come into town for a play I would get tickets for, but he felt he would rather not — as if it weren’t a good idea.

In the train window, the tops of the trees made a movie of the low winter sun. They divided endlessly the distance between me and where I was going.

The flaxen-haired woman smiled at what she was reading. The conductor told us the next stop over the loudspeaker. I thought that from time to time you have to come up with something. My host had said this.

My wife had asked to come with me in April soon after I had met him. She had sat in one comfortable corner of the room, the study it was — and she was both between me and my host and beyond us. A memorable visit. In amicable fashion, we had gotten onto my nature and my wife’s periodic spells (to put, no doubt, too explicit a label to it). We could not decide if she had been frozen out by me from time to time, or what. What the devil do I mean we could not decide? A bell had rung and our host excused himself and was heard at the other end of the house saying, "Put them there," loudly as if the person was coming in from outdoors; then there were scuffing noises and a faint concussion. Our host didn’t come back and I pulled out an old medical text and asked my wife if she’d like something to read, which for some reason is a joke between us. Our host came back into the room and stood at the door rolling his head at us with mysterious humor, secretly powerful, even if not for us. We resumed, and presently a clock struck somewhere. The clock had made us aware of the house.

My wife sat straight up on the edge of the couch. In the end, as we were leaving and after I had phoned for a cab, she asked in her own abrupt way a personal question.

"Are you married?" she said.

Our host smiled his crooked, courteous smile.

"I was," he said. "I was until a few weeks ago."

My wife looked from him to me. He told us what had happened. His wife had fallen from a ladder in the garage, had hurt her leg and died of a blood clot. A freak accident.

‘Thirty-five years," he said. "Just like that. It’s a lifetime," he said, still with the smile in the manner of the quiet host who says he’s glad you were able to make it.

"Damn," he said; "damn, damn, damn."

He raised his hand, and, unsteady on his feet for a moment, he snapped his hand to one side — an idiosyncrasy of his that brushed away irritation or that said, Well, that’s over with.

A door shut heavily, the impact came through the air as if that room, wherever it was, was sealed with carpets and drapes. But passing out through what might have been a waiting room in this wing of the house, we found an extraordinarily fat woman sitting on the couch smoking, staring straight ahead. And I remember a new car was parked in the driveway. Then our cab came.

I had wanted to see him again, I mean at once. I wanted to know what he had thought of us.

My wife said, "He didn’t like me, I could see that."

I had smelled the spring and, as we passed a green golf course that rose like a meadow away from the road, my wife leaned on me and kissed me on the cheek.

She wondered if he had children. Of course, he must, she said. I said, Oh yes. She thought he’d had a quick drink, probably a stiff one, while we were waiting for him to come back. She made an observation or two on the constant threat of immaturity and on the need to keep the parts of one’s life distinct. "But I didn’t think he liked me; I came between you," she said, and she clasped her hands in her lap. "He’s really quite a charming man," she said. "I’m terribly hungry, how about you?" I remember her words.

I didn’t ask him about himself. We kept it at a different level. I was in the middle of my life, if I could stay in. I mentioned a friend I had had who had let me know I held back too much; I should open with him more about my life. That is, our friendship depended on it. Naturally I came to find this view precious, not to say a pain. He wanted to know what my relationship was with a woman whom we both knew. As if what my revered friend did not know about my life waited secretly between us — call it misdemeanors accumulating interest unspeakable into my life whose integrity needed him. I have said too much too fast, as if I were short of time. My host once observed that I had a somewhat formal style of speaking.

Other friends I spoke of not so much as of my wife and of my two children, now at their different levels nearly grown. My wife, I said. The words are said less easily nowadays. I think my wife has found a spark in me. I had come to know my family better through my conversations with this semi-retired doctor. Not that he said much. But my family became so comforting to me in his presence that I would see my daughters with a distinctness that hurt, at the same time that I saw them stand up strong, truthful, unharmed, and independent, while I saw the finest brushmarks in my wife’s hair after she had drawn it back so tightly it shone like a reflection.

Which is the journey, which the destination? The train I had so often taken recalled such things. The woman across the aisle did not look up when I put on my overcoat.

I left the train, crossed the platform, and passed down an icy ramp. Like a resident I carried the shopping bag with my wife’s Christmas present. I gave the strange cab driver the address, and he named the person I was going to see.

The driver was big and fat and, below his thick, gray hair, his skin had a powdery softness infinitesimally wrinkled. We passed the golf-course sign and we passed a white lawn with colored figures on it. Again I saw what I wanted to see. I had been irritated with the driver because in speaking the name of the person I was going to see he seemed to pry. I made conversation. I asked if he had his snows on. He said that on bad days he used chains too; you could waste two hours spinning your wheels in driveways, and he said something else which went right out of my head because we had approached the house and I wondered why the hell I had come, and I believe that instead of responding to whatever the man had said I said perfunctorily that I didn’t know.

Behind me were the subway train and the railroad train, throw in some angry bicyclist with his bicycle, and now a taxi. I could not check my thoughts. I wondered if my wife was seeing someone and was reluctant to tell me. And would she if I asked? Or would she only if I didn’t ask? Because my host understood often without asking. I would tell him a joke, I would tell him he was not going to like what I was about to say, I would tell him the truth that I had almost not come and I would ask if he thought Christmas upset your biorhythms and if there were such things, and I would throw in the Jesus kids Saturday night; I would tell why I’d be damned if I’d answer the kid with the Bhagavad-Gita in Grand Central, and I would reiterate my notion that there are many gods who preside in the things that touch us and move us, gods we look up and down to, gods we enlist the support of, and I recalled the gambler in Anchorage who staked what he didn’t possess, lucky as a god and driven like a god. And I would add that — to quote one of the old polymaths — Pascal, Emerson, my daughter would know what I was recalling — when we most fly those gods, then they are most our fuel, or something to that effect — it had gods in it.

One of them drove too close to me on a three-lane northbound artery looking for trouble and when I yelled at him he shook his head deafly and grinned, and another came up behind him and they two took off around the next curve and must have vanished at the next exit in pursuit of each other or some such nonsense. I would tell my host all this and more and would tell how in the train I’d suddenly known I would see what I wanted to see; and I would talk about my wife as if she were there with us.

All right, I was bringing him some pretty good stuff today; I saw him smile inwardly at this. I felt better, and, as if experiencing difficulty in getting out of the cab, I could not for a moment get my hands on the right money to give the driver. I left him and he left me at the entrance to the driveway. Two cars were parked in the driveway; one had a Maryland plate and one, I half-noted from its color, was from further away.

The glass panes in the double doors of the garage were frosted over as if with Halloween soap. The sound of the cab receding rose and fell. I felt in my pockets and found a glove in each. I didn’t put them on but bunched one in each hand inside each pocket. My wife was home. I saw her in bed. I didn’t see her face but I heard her voice. She reached one fine hand toward her bed table.

I went across the snowy flagstones to the square flagstone porch, which was like a large doorstep. Two front doors faced at right angles to each other and were adjacent. The left one was locked, so I rang. I rubbed my hands together and heard myself way inside my heavy coat and muffler go, "Ho ho ho," and I dug my hands down into my pockets. Fir trees set the lawn off from the road. A car passed and then another in the same direction. I waited and rang again and wasn’t sure how many times I’d rung. He was on the phone or someone was with him and the door had gotten locked. The winter silence was of Christmas morning or of Sunday. What was missing was in me. I wondered if someday I might heal someone. I rang again.

I turned to see on the other side of the trees a car pass in each direction like curtains closing and opening at the same time. I looked at the other front door, with little oblong windows on either side of it. It led to the main part of the house, a one-story suburban dwelling. I pressed the one bell again and didn’t hear it and realized I had never heard it and then remembered I had heard it once from inside. My feet were cold. My wife was lying on her elbow, thinking less hopefully than I about the past, her hair down, shaking her head and smiling. I could very nearly see my host, and he was looking at his watch and saying to whoever was with him, "Wonder where he is."

What was happening had never happened. I stared at the bell, which was in the corner between the two front doors, and in the corner of my eye I felt appear and disappear in one of the narrow panes running vertically beside the right-hand door a face, and I could have sworn it was a woman. I rang once more and peered through the glass beside the right-hand front door to see what I could see. A carpeted foyer. The end of a living room maybe. Part of a window looking onto trees at the north side of the house. I stepped back.

Everything had passed out of my head and I had no idea what was going on, until then the right front door unlatched and swung open, and there was my host in broad daylight — hair not too thin, freckles at the temples, faintly wall-eyed. He was shaking his head, or he was rolling it, I don’t know what he was doing but he had been amused before he saw me and he was feeling just as good now. His eyes were misted and attentive. He was a different man. He had on a red-and-black lumberjack shirt. Along his jaw and cheeks was a silvery sheen of stubble.

He’d had something to drink, and his leisurely, slow speech hit me like a code: "Do you know I phoned you?" He’d had a few drinks. He chuckled as slowly as he talked. "I tried to put you off, but I didn’t remember in time."

I said, like a person of lower rank, that no one had gotten the message; and at once I saw this was an odd thing to say.

"My family arrived last night. From California. . from Washington." He flipped his hand out to the side. "I didn’t expect them until Christmas Eve, and they got away earlier and phoned me and—" he threw out both hands, happy with fate.

I said something like What the hell, sorry I didn’t get the message.

"Didn’t get the message?" he wheedled, and he chuckled as if I had come up with an idea he hadn’t thought of, and he frowned unsteadily. "Well, come in and meet my family." He stepped backward, and I stepped into the foyer with my cold snowy feet and felt huge.

This was the other part of the house, not where the study was, and I had lost something, which, it came to me, had been my opportunity to go on waiting.

I followed my host out of the dark foyer into a living room that opened to my right. And although what I had lost was my purpose, I found in the accident, in the awkward foul-up, a polite power.

My host was introducing me by my surname to two young men in their twenties, his sons. The introduction didn’t take long. Behind him, from somewhere at the far end of the room a tall, dark-haired young woman appeared as if drawn out of hiding. There was a door there. She must have been in the room talking with them. She was the woman here. All that curly hair of hers seemed playful in its abundance.

The son on my right did not get up but raised his hand to shake mine. The hand was hardly waiting to be gripped; it was where I was not. A scar like a seam cut down across his forehead and finished at the bridge of his thick nose. The second son, whose equally pale face was bearded and who wore a gold ring on his ring finger, took a swift stride or two toward me, gripped my hand, and stepped back. Beyond him the father came to introduce me to his daughter, who came forward and shook my hand as if she were shrugging. She wore bluejeans and a large, luxurious ski sweater, dark green, with a high neck that came up under her chin. Her hand was cold. Her face was very tan. I started to say the dumb thing that had just come to mind but didn’t say it; she blushed; I realized her hand was cold because she had been outside.

I had left my wife’s present in the taxi.

The three young people were being given what I had envisioned as my time, and they didn’t want it, I mean they didn’t want mine. Their father was feeling no pain. They had been talking about who I could possibly be, before their father had hauled himself up to go confirm his suspicion. But before that they had been talking of a whole life. But he must have known exactly who it was ringing the bell.

I said, "You all haven’t been together in quite a while."

I was a little angry, partly about leaving my wife’s present if not the thought that went with it in the cab. Well, they weren’t saying what was on their minds, and I was in this as if I and the father between us had brought them out. These serious young people. He knew me very well. The girl looked at me as if out of a tableau. She and her brothers were three serious, invaded faces. They seemed young for a thirty-five-year marriage. Nothing could be said until I left. Yet I could say what I wanted, for I always did here.

I knew what they had been talking about, knew it as certainly as I found a freedom in my embarrassment. But then no, I did not know what they had been talking about. I thought of the woman who was absent from this room. She came to me as if I had seen her.

"I’ll call a cab," I said.

"Oh no," my host said slowly, "I’ll drive you, I’ll drive you."

I decided that the door at the far end of the room must lead to the kitchen and beyond it the garage, a car, a lawn mower, a ladder.

"It’s better if I call a cab," I said and felt in my eyes looking at the fire on the hearth a warmth of excitement beyond my politeness.

"Oh no, I’ll drive you," my host said. "It’s not far to the station."

His children looked to me. Their father knew me. They wanted me to disappear, by cab.

I had a grievance. The clock struck a quarter of, and there it stood on the mantel; I’d heard it many times from a distance.

I knew where a phone was, and I nodded and left the room, and my host came shuffling along the carpet behind me. I found the way from the foyer into the other wing of the house. I went into his study and he said, "Where you going?" But just as I reached for the phone on the desk I heard a car horn close by, distinctly stationary, and instead of the phone in my hand I found I had made a fist. I turned to my host, and the car honked again.

"I had some pretty good stuff for you," I said.

"Good stuff?" he said, and smiled and rolled his head. My words had come back to me.

"I’m glad your family’s here," I said, feeling sincere.

"They’re delightful people," he said, as if that’s what they were— people. "I can’t tell you what delightful people they are."

"You’re not going to like what I’m about to say," I said, "but you should have tried harder to get in touch with me."

"Damn it all, you’re right," he said, and smiled with good-humored understanding of what I had said.

"Well, you don’t need visitors today," I said. I meant extra visitors, but then I didn’t mean that either. I saw us in a car, and he was playing games with the white line.

"Your time isn’t your own," I said. "No," I said, "I mean if you’re going to give time to someone, you don’t want to give it away. I mean, it ought to be still yours. How about that?"

"That’s pretty good," said my host.

"It wasn’t what I was going to say," I said.

"I know," he said, and he seemed more my equal than a widower or a man with a few drinks in him or a man made happy by his grown children returning to his household the first Christmas after his wife’s death.

The doorbell rang and I went through the unlighted next room in this wing of the house that I was more or less familiar with. My host followed me.

I put my hand on the knob of the front door I usually used. We’d been in another room today with an audience. Except that that wasn’t it at all. I was the audience, but that wasn’t it either. My time was theirs. As simple as that. This was his family even more than last year, when his wife was alive.

"I had some good stuff for you," I said.

"Will it keep?" came the voice behind me—"because I don’t know about next week."

The three invaded faces had vanished into my head. They had never been there before.

I pulled open the front door.

The strange cabdriver with the powdery, wrinkled skin held out my shopping bag to me and nodded when I told him I was coming with him but. hadn’t phoned.

I shook hands with my host. The last step had been mine and so was the next.

"I’ll phone you," I said.

"Do that," he said.

This is the end of the story, except that I now see I should add that when I returned home much later my wife, whose sense of humor is unpredictable, asked me among many other things how it had gone with my man in Mamaroneck. I replied that we had had a good exchange, though somewhat abbreviated, and we had wished one another Merry Christmas, etcetera. But, thinking of her question, I kept an uneasy one to myself when I said, "I came up with a couple of things."

"Like what?" my wife asked.

"Like the gods," I said.

"Oh, them," said my wife.

"Have I ever told you about the gods?" I said. "The gods reside where we may reach them if—"

"You never said that to him," said my wife.

"Wait," I said, but she went on, "You sit around and tell him stories on an informal basis as you say."

"I had competition today," I said.

"Well, that makes it more interesting for all concerned," said my wife. "Whatever happened to the gambler who bet his brother’s wife against a boat?"

"Hold on and let me say what I’m saying," I said. "The gods reside where we may reach them if we will; but they have their lives — I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say."

My wife took a long look at me as if I were a way of seeing something. "That’s what you came up with today? That’s what you came up with in your abbreviated session during which you had competition?" She paused and tentatively continued: "You found out that he had his life — is that it?"

"But I’ve never entered into his life as much as I did today," I said.

My wife thought a moment. Then she said, "He wasn’t alone." She paused. "He had guests. He had people with him." She tilted her head, eyeing me. "It’s Christmas; there were people there."

My uneasy question burst out, "Well if you got the phone message, why the hell did you ask me how it went with him?"

But this was the funniest thing my wife had heard all day, and I was amused at myself to see her laugh. She said, "Believe it or not, I got myself together right after you left this morning, and I’ve been out until half an hour ago. Did he say someone answered the phone here?"

I didn’t remember.

"Maybe it was a burglar," my wife said.

What I recalled was that I had said that I would phone and he had said, "Do that."

I wondered when I would phone him again. It might be a long time. I said to my wife that the gods leave some things for you to figure out, and my wife nodded sagely, eyeing me, and observed that that was true, very true.

Very, very true, I told myself.

"He should have let me know," I said. "It would have saved me a trip out there and back."

"Did you tell him that?" my wife inquired.

"As a matter of fact, I did," I said. "What I didn’t tell him was that I felt your presence there with us."

"I always feel that, but thank you for telling me," said my wife. "By the way, who was with him?"

"His family," I said.