if I had come back from shelving the Pound book forty seconds later, he would have been
gone), but no stranger than most of the other things that had gone on that evening.
I stepped out just behind him, and Waterhouse glanced around, as if surprised to see
me … and almost as if he had been startled out of a light doze. ‘Share a taxi?’ he asked, as
though we had just met by chance on this deserted, windy street
‘Thank you,’ I said. I meant thanks for a great deal more than his offer to share a cab,
and I believe that was unmistakable in my tone, but he nodded as if that was all I had
meant. A taxi with its for-hire light lit was cruising slowly down the street — fellows like
George Waterhouse seem to luck onto cabs even on those miserably cold or snowy New
York nights when you would swear there isn’t a cab to be had on the entire island of
Manhattan – and he flagged it.
Inside, safely warm, the taxi-meter charting our journey in measured clicks, I told him
how much I had enjoyed his story. I couldn’t remember laughing so hard or so
spontaneously since I was eighteen, I told him, which was not flattery but only the simple
truth.
‘Oh? How kind of you to say.’ His voice was chillingly polite. I subsided, feeling a dull
flush in my cheeks. One does not always need to hear a slam to know that the door has
been closed.
When the taxi drew up to the kerb in front of my building, I thanked him again, and
this time he showed a trifle more warmth. ‘It was good of you to come on such short
notice, he said. ‘Come again, if you like. Don’t wait for an invitation: we don’t stand much
on ceremony at two-four-nine. Thursdays are best for stories, but the club is there every
night’
Am I then to assume membership?
The question was on my lips. I meant to ask it; it seemed necessary to ask it. I was
only mulling it over, listening to it in my head (in my tiresome lawyer’s way) to hear if I
had got the phrasing right – perhaps that was a little too blunt – when Waterhouse told the
cabbie to drive on. The next moment the taxi was rolling on towards Madison. I stood
there on the sidewalk for a moment, the hem of my topcoat whipping around my shins,
thinking: He knew I was going to ask that question – he knew it, and he purposely had the
driver go on before I could. Then I told myself that was utterly absurd -paranoid, even.
And it was. But it was also true. I could scoff all I liked; none of the scoffing changed that
essential certainty.
I walked slowly to the door of my building and went inside.
Ellen was sixty per cent asleep when I sat down on the bed to take off my shoes. She
rolled over and made a fuzzy interrogative sound deep in her throat. I told her to go back
to sleep.
She made the muzzy sound again. This time approximated English:
‘Howwuzzit?’
For a moment I hesitated, my shirt half-unbuttoned. And I thought with one moment’s
utter clarity: If 1 tell her, I will never see the other side of that door again.
‘It was all right,’ I said. ‘Old men telling war stories.’
‘I told you so.’
‘But it wasn’t bad. I might go back again. It might do me some good with the firm.’
‘ “The firm”,’ she mocked lightly. ‘What an old buzzard you are, my love.’
‘It takes one to know one,’ I said, but she had already fallen asleep again. I undressed,
showered, towelled, put on my pyjamas … and then, instead of going to bed as I should
have done (it was edging past one by that time), I put on my robe and had another bottle
of Beck’s. I sat at the kitchen table, drinking it slowly, looking out the window and up the
cold canyon of Madison Avenue, thinking. My head was a trifle buzzy from my evening’s
intake of alcohol – for me an unexpectedly large intake. But the feeling was not at all
unpleasant, and I had no sense of an impending hangover.
The thought which had come to me when Ellen asked me about my evening was as
ridiculous as the one I’d entertained about George Waterhouse as the cab drew away from
me -what in God’s name could be wrong with telling my wife about a perfectly harmless
evening at my boss’s stuffy men’s club … and even if something were wrong with telling her, who would know that I had? No, it was every bit as ridiculous and paranoid as those
earlier musings … and, my heart told me, every bit as true.
I met George Waterhouse the next day in the hallway between Accounts and the
Reading Library. Met him… Passed him would be more accurate. He nodded my way and
went on without speaking … as he had done for years.
My stomach muscles ached all day long. That was the only thing that completely
convinced me the evening had been real.
Three weeks passed. Four … five. No second invitation came from Waterhouse.
Somehow I just hadn’t been right; hadn’t fitted. Or so I told myself. It was a depressing,
disappointing thought. I supposed it would begin to fade and lose its sting, as all
disappointments eventually do. But I thought of that evening at the oddest moments – the
isolated pools of library lamplight, so still and tranquil and somehow civilized;
Waterhouse’s absurd and hilarious tale of the schoolteacher stuck in the privy; the rich
smell of leather in the narrow stacks. Most of all I thought of standing by that narrow
window and watching the frost crystals change from green to amber to red. I thought of
that sense of peace I had felt.
During that same five-week period I went to the library and checked out four volumes
of Archibald MacLeish’s poetry (I had three others myself, and had already checked
through them); one of these volumes purported to be The Complete Poems of. I
reacquainted myself with some old favourites, including my favourite MacLeish poem,
‘Epistle to Be Left in Earth.’ But I found no poem called ‘The Toll’ in any of the volumes.
On that same trip to the New York Public Library, I checked the card catalogue for
works of fiction by a man named Edward Gray Seville. A mystery novel by a woman
named Ruth Seville was the closest I came.
Come again, if you like; don’t wait for an invitation …
I was waiting for an invitation anyway, of course; my mother taught me donkey’s years
ago not to automatically believe people who tell you glibly to ‘drop by anytime’ or that
‘the door is always open’. I didn’t feel I needed an engraved card delivered to my
apartment door by a footman in livery bearing a gilt plate, I don’t mean that, but I did
want something, even if it was only a casual remark: ‘Coming by some night, David?
Hope we didn’t bore you.’ That kind of thing.
But when even that didn’t come, I began to think more seriously about going back
anyway – after all, sometimes people really did want you to drop in anytime; I supposed
that, at some places, the door always was open; and that mothers weren’t always right.
… don’t wait for an invitation .. .
Anyway, that’s how it happened that, on 10 December of that year, I found myself
putting on my rough tweed coat and dark brown pants again and looking for my darkish
red tie. I was rather more aware of my heartbeat than usual that night, I remember.
‘George Waterhouse finally broke down and asked you back?’ Ellen asked. ‘Back into
the sty with the rest of the male chauvinist oinkers?’
‘That’s right,’ I said, thinking it must be the first time in ai least a dozen years that I had
told her a lie … and then I remembered that, after the first meeting, I had answered her
questions about what it had been like with a lie. Old men telling war stories, I had said.
‘Well, maybe there really will be a promotion in it,’ she said … though without much
hope. To her credit, she said it without much bitterness, either.
‘Stranger things have happened,’ I said, and kissed her goodbye.
‘Oink-oink,’ she said as I went out the door.
The taxi ride that night seemed very long. It was cold, still, and starry. The cab was a
Checker and I felt somehow very small in it, like a child seeing the city for the first time.
It was excitement I was feeling as the cab pulled up in front of the brownstone –