Endless Love

at home so someone could call and tell her about Hugh. The police? Ingrid?

But by the time I reached Ann’s, she still didn’t know. It was seven in the evening and the darkness’s only presence was in the lengthening shadows. Ann was dressed in striped seersucker pants and a boyish shirt. Her hair was wet and combed straight back and her face was paler than before and her lipstick darker. She’d been writing all day and that’s what we talked about.

“I can feel myself getting better,” Ann said. “I can hear my own voice now. I mean, I sound like myself when I write, and later on I recognize myself in a way that pleases me and surprises me, too.”

“Would you show me something you’ve written?” I asked. I was sitting on the sofa, rocking back and forth.

“You seem so nervous,” Ann said. “It’s about last night?”

“No.”

“Maybe we should talk about it, though. I’d like to let it rest, but you seem…”

“No,” I said, but it didn’t matter because now, finally, the phone was ringing.

“Ah!” said Ann, rising. “Opportunity. Fame. Romance.”

Ingrid. She was calling from a phonebooth. There was something she needed to discuss with Ann and she didn’t want to do it over the telephone. Could she come over? Right away? Yes, right away.

“What a peculiar mystery,” Ann said. “My guess is she wants to look me over, which is, if I recall, a common symptom of the matrimonial virus. Listen to me! I feel so cocktail-in-hand ex- wifey. But I feel such an advantage over Hugh’s new girl. With her hushed little voice and the bogus drama: she so wants to make an impression.”

I made a move to get up and Ann started in her chair as if she’d just remembered I was there. I wondered if she had any idea how nervous she was.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I’ll come back later. I’ll call in an hour or so.”

“No. Stay right where you are. We’ll make up a name for you, if that’s what you’re worried about. I like my little illusion of superiority and I don’t intend to cancel it out by letting Hugh’s girl find me all alone on a Saturday night. My generation places great mystical emphasis on Saturday nights and I know that’s the first thing Hugh will ask her, if I was alone. Let him think I was with some young hip man. It’ll do us all a lot of good.”

And so I waited with Ann, in a position so profoundly false that the highest pitch of madness could not have felt more strange. Of course, it was not the first lie I’d told in my short, evasive life, but it was by far the most enormous. This was no social lie, no defense of my privacy, and this was in no way on a par with the careful deletions I made in my monologues with Dr. Ecrest, or my upbeat progress reports to Eddie Watanabe. The lie I’d told to Ann loomed over, darkened, and then devoured all the truth that was in me. The popular expression is “living a lie” but you don’t live it, you live in it, the way you might live in a cave.

I thought suddenly, sickeningly, with that sense of relief that slows the racing heart by stepping on it, that there was a good chance no one would ever guess my part in Hugh’s death. Only Ingrid could connect me to that moment, and with a gambler’s feverish keening prayer—it moaned through me in a fretful, spacy tone, chanting like a man at the top of a mosque—I begged the future to make Ingrid innocent of all knowledge of me. Of all she’d seen that afternoon—Hugh’s race into the path of that cab, the black man with his dimes, the driver of the florist’s van dabbing at his forehead, the refraction of the sun off the policeman’s spiral notebook—I hoped that my face existed in her memory only as so much kindly vapor. My lie, my need to remain near the wounded core of the Butterfields’ life, my slow way back to Jade—everything finally depended on Ingrid’s not recognizing me, the way a smuggler’s run, months in the planning, depends finally on a heavy fog for its success.

Ann seemed so adamant that I meet Ingrid and so oblivious to my terror in waiting with her that thirty times in as many minutes the thought came revolving into my consciousness that Ann knew everything I was trying to hide, that her talkativeness and her coyness were only bizarre and costly strategies, like those deadpan psychological gambits private eyes run in movies to force a suspect’s hidden hand. She drank a glass of white wine and placed one on the table in front of me.

“What shall we call you?” she asked.

“My name?”

“We’ll make one up.” She reached behind her and switched on a delicate wooden floor lamp with a small flowered shade. “I know I’m bullying you, David, and believe me I know this is sick, but I do want to handle it this way. I have this terrible feeling Hugh’s led his new girl to believe I’m some frosty old celibate, and even if I’m correcting the image under false pretenses—” she overemphasized the word false, or so it seemed—“I think I have that right.” Her glass was already empty; the wine seemed to have disappeared without her having once raised the glass to her lips. “We’ll call you Tony. That’s a good one. It sounds well bred and frightfully proletarian. Hugh will turn it over in his mind, I think. And really, David, you don’t have to say anything. I’ll just introduce you and you can leave. But say you’ll be back. I mean, don’t make it appear that you’re off somewhere. I’ll owe you a favor, if you want. Will you do it?”

Ann got the jug of white wine from the kitchen and began to pour it into my glass before she noticed I hadn’t drunk any yet. A little oily puddle formed around the stem of my glass as the wine overflowed.

“Oh, I am nervous,” she said. “Ingrid coming to see me. Our little charade. I always get caught in my lies, too. I admire successful liars—I mean right up and over the edge of envy. My stories would be so much better if I could lie more easily. But I drag the actual facts of my life around like that poor man in Madame Bovary with the metal foot.”

The living room was dense with dead heat; the open casement windows brought in the noise of traffic and a faint gassy breeze. The down above Ann’s lips was shiny from the heat; her skin looked moist, stimulated; her hair refused to dry. I felt coated in sweat from my scalp to my legs; when I touched my throat, my hand came away wet.

And then, finally, the buzzer was rung from the downstairs lobby and it fired off in the long hallway of Ann’s apartment. The bulk of my fear had passed. My nerves seemed to have collapsed from exhaustion. When I heard the buzzer I sat forward and took hold of my wineglass. I had an impulse to ask Ann not to answer the door. But that was all: my decisions were made; my life was going on without me.

“Horrible thought,” Ann said, getting up. She put her hand over her mouth and looked at me. “What if she’s brought Hugh along? Or if he’s bullied his way in.” She shook her head. “That’s all we need. Right?”

She picked up the old-fashioned black intercom and said, “Who is it?” I took a small sip of the wine. “It’s her,” Ann said to me. “Sit where you are. When I come back, I’ll sit next to you.” She shook her head and said, “I’m positive I’m going to regret this.”

In a few moments, the elevator brought Ingrid to the seventh floor and Ann was waiting for her with the door open, leaning against it with her hands behind her back like a teenager. Ingrid wore clothes nearly identical to those she’d worn that afternoon: a sleeveless white shirt with pearlized buttons and a denim skirt. Her legs were bare and she wore sandals that had been repaired with string and tape. She carried a huge leather shoulder bag embossed with the face of a smiling avuncular moon. Her hair was no longer in braids but hung straight down to the middle of her back; indoors, it didn’t look nearly so red.

“Come in, come in,” Ann was saying, in a voice that meant to be cheerful but sounded merely insistent.

There’s a moment in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent in which an anarchist explains that he has wired his entire body to an enormous charge of explosives and if any policeman tries to bring him in he will detonate himself, avoiding the dangers of arrest and interrogation and killing a cop or two as well. All that is involved is tripping a simple mechanism, and in five or ten seconds—a fatal explosion. But the time waiting for the explosion, the listener wonders, the long heavy seconds—wouldn’t you go mad just waiting? Yes, the anarchist says, thoughtfully. Yes. But what difference will it make? As Ann and Ingrid made their way to the front of the apartment and I sat rigidly perspiring on the sofa, I felt as if the lever had been pressed that would explode my life—not in five seconds but at some elusive point in the future, and I would be waiting until then with fate ticking away in my belly. Would I even know when my life had finally been ruined? Ingrid pointing at me would not fully accomplish it—after all, I hadn’t seen Jade in years and I still thought of us as inseparable. All the blame I deserved and a good measure of what I didn’t would not end my life, would not even—and this is what was most fearful— change it. I would still be the same person and still want the same things—I would only have much less of a chance of ever having them. The same passion and no real chance: that was the kind of madness I seemed to be heading