The New Yorker Stories

“Confide what?” he said.

“You always take that attitude,” she said. “You pretend that you have no thoughts. Why does there have to be so much silence?”

“I’m not a professor anymore,” he said. “I don’t have to spend every minute thinking.”

But he loves to talk to the young women. He will talk to them on the phone for as much as an hour; he walks with them through the woods for most of the day when they visit. The lovers the young women bring with them always seem to fall behind; they give up and return to the house to sit and talk to her, or to help with the preparation of the meal, or to play with the children. The young women and George come back refreshed, ready for another round of conversation at dinner.

A few weeks ago one of the young men said to her, “Why do you let it go on?” They had been talking lightly before that—about the weather, the children—and then, in the kitchen, where he was sitting shelling peas, he put his head on the table and said, barely audibly, “Why do you let it go on?” He did not raise his head, and she stared at him, thinking that she must have imagined his speaking. She was surprised—surprised to have heard it, and surprised that he said nothing after that, which made her doubt that he had spoken.

“Why do I let what go on?” she said.

There was a long silence. “Whatever this sick game is, I don’t want to get involved in it,” he said at last. “It was none of my business to ask. I understand that you don’t want to talk about it.”

“But it’s really cold out there,” she said. “What could happen when it’s freezing out?”

He shook his head, the way George did, to indicate that she was beyond understanding. But she wasn’t stupid, and she knew what might be going on. She had said the right thing, had been on the right track, but she had to say what she felt, which was that nothing very serious could be happening at that moment because they were walking in the woods. There wasn’t even a barn on the property. She knew perfectly well that they were talking.

When George and the young woman had come back, he fixed hot apple juice, into which he trickled rum. Lenore was pleasant, because she was sure of what had not happened; the young man was not, because he did not think as she did. Still at the kitchen table, he ran his thumb across a pea pod as though it were a knife.

This weekend Sarah and Julie are visiting. They came on Friday evening. Sarah was one of George’s students—the one who led the fight to have him rehired. She does not look like a troublemaker; she is pale and pretty, with freckles on her cheeks. She talks too much about the past, and this upsets him, disrupts the peace he has made with himself. She tells him that they fired him because he was “in touch” with everything, that they were afraid of him because he was so in touch. The more she tells him the more he remembers, and then it is necessary for Sarah to say the same things again and again; once she reminds him, he seems to need reassurance—needs to have her voice, to hear her bitterness against the members of the tenure committee. By evening they will both be drunk. Sarah will seem both agitating and consoling, Lenore and Julie and the children will be upstairs, in bed. Lenore suspects that she will not be the only one awake listening to them. She thinks that in spite of Julie’s glazed look she is really very attentive. The night before, when they were all sitting around the fireplace talking, Sarah made a gesture and almost upset her wineglass, but Julie reached for it and stopped it from toppling over. George and Sarah were talking so energetically that they did not notice. Lenore’s eyes met Julie’s as Julie’s hand shot out. Lenore feels that she is like Julie: Julie’s face doesn’t betray emotion, even when she is interested, even when she cares deeply. Being the same kind of person, Lenore can recognize this.

Before Sarah and Julie arrived Friday evening, Lenore asked George if Sarah was his lover.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “You think every student is my lover? Is Julie my lover?”

She said, “That wasn’t what I said.”

“Well, if you’re going to be preposterous, go ahead and say that,” he said. “If you think about it long enough, it would make a lot of sense, wouldn’t it?”

He would not answer her question about Sarah. He kept throwing Julie’s name into it. Some other woman might then think that he was protesting too strongly—that Julie really was his lover. She thought no such thing. She also stopped suspecting Sarah, because he wanted that, and it was her habit to oblige him.

He is twenty-one years older than Lenore. On his last birthday he was fifty-five. His daughter from his first marriage (his only marriage; she keeps reminding herself that they are not married, because it often seems that they might as well be) sent him an Irish country hat. The present made him irritable. He kept putting it on and pulling it down hard on his head. “She wants to make me a laughable old man,” he said. “She wants me to put this on and go around like a fool.” He wore the hat all morning, complaining about it, frightening the children. Eventually, to calm him, she said, “She intended nothing.” She said it with finality, her tone so insistent that he listened to her. But having lost his reason for bitterness, he said, “Just because you don’t think doesn’t mean others don’t think.” Is he getting old? She does not want to think of him getting old. In spite of his ulcer, his body is hard. He is tall and handsome, with a thick mustache and a thin black goatee, and there is very little gray in his kinky black hair. He dresses in tight-fitting blue jeans and black turtleneck sweaters in the winter, and old white shirts with the sleeves rolled up in the summer. He pretends not to care about his looks, but he does. He shaves carefully, scraping slowly down each side of his goatee. He orders his soft leather shoes from a store in California. After taking one of his long walks—even if he does it twice a day—he invariably takes a shower. He always looks refreshed, and very rarely admits any insecurity. A few times, at night in bed, he has asked, “Am I still the man of your dreams?” And when she says yes he always laughs, turning it into a joke, as if he didn’t care. She knows he does. He pretends to have no feeling for clothing, but actually he cares so strongly about his turtlenecks and shirts (a few are Italian silk) and shoes that he will have no others. She has noticed that the young women who visit are always vain. When Sarah arrived, she was wearing a beautiful silk scarf, pale as conch shells.

Sitting on the floor on Saturday morning, Lenore watches the fire she has just lit. The baby, tucked in George’s chair, smiles in his sleep, and Lenore thinks what a good companion he would be if only he were an adult. She gets up and goes into the kitchen and tears open a package of yeast and dissolves it, with sugar and salt, in hot water, slushing her fingers through it and shivering because it is so cold in the kitchen. She will bake bread for dinner—there is always a big meal in the early evening when they have guests. But what will she do for the rest of the day? George told the girls the night before that on Saturday they would walk in the woods, but she does not really enjoy hiking, and George will be irritated because of the discussion the night before, and she does not want to aggravate him. “You are unwilling to challenge anyone,” her brother wrote her in a letter that came a few days ago. He has written her for years—all the years she has been with George—asking when she is going to end the relationship. She rarely writes back because she knows that her answers sound too simple. She has a comfortable house. She cooks. She keeps busy and she loves her two children. “It seems unkind to say but,” her brother writes, “but . . .” It is true; she likes simple things. Her brother, who is a lawyer in Cambridge, cannot understand that.