Asa, as I Knew Him Read online

  “With all your gifts!”—the slogan of Jewish parents everywhere. But all three of us drifted. Most academic children do. The more successful the parent, the vaguer the child. We were lucky to have dusty, muddled Frank as a father. Leah has made a successful marriage, whatever that is, after an unpromising three years at art school. Seth earns a lot of money writing about how to program computers, and spends it on blondes, inevitable blondes, in restaurants without prices on the menu. And I, in my own way, am continuing my father’s investigations into the origins of life. He doesn’t see it that way, I know. But isn’t the soul as vital as the gene? Doesn’t it bear scrutiny? Isn’t the search for the Yankee soul as thrilling as Watson’s hunt for that helix?

  The male Yankee soul, that is. Asa’s soul. I’ll be honest. Until I met Asa I was merely amassing general data on males. I had found out that: They are hard outside but not always hard inside; they treasure women who make them laugh; they can change their personalities under the influence of a kiss received in a dark hall, a parked car, a side street. Some smell good, and for these I have an interminable lust; some smell odd—not bad but unbeddable—and make me nervous, as though we were not the same species.

  Asa’s smell (the fragrance of a beautiful man) is what I miss the most. I first smelled it three days after I had begun work at the magazine, when he leaned over my desk to hand me some papers, and the clarity of that mixture (rough, unfiltered cigarettes, fresh shirts, warm skin of a blond) alarmed me. My head snapped up to stare. He was in his persona of the happy, handsome man. Blue shirt, sleeves rolled up for the warmth of afternoon, gold and brown hairs shimmering on his arms, paper between his brown hands. Who was he? I remember sorting through the names and faces jammed into my head on the first day and coming out with the wrong answer—Roger Rowell, the editor. I didn’t care if he were the janitor or the publisher, he was mine. I looked into his eyes; they were flat and awesomely blue, empty, receiving nothing. It was like looking into a portrait. Then he smiled and showed his crooked teeth, tinted with nicotine but well formed and healthy-looking. His eyes stayed blank through the smile. He put the papers on my desk and the movement agitated the smell, which surrounded his body like a halo, so that another gust of it came toward me. I had to shut my eyes. Like a virus his smell entered me and changed my cells, slowly, over years, until they craved only that smell, which was their oxygen.

  The details. The names. The furnishings. It has a small staff, the magazine, and occupies a small brick house on a Cambridge side street, between a cobbler and a used-bookstore. Discreet gilt letters on one pane of the glass-paneled door identify it; I’ll go one better and leave it nameless. Five of us acquired and edited the issue quarterly. The magazine verges on the scholarly. Roger and Asa like to think it is scholarly, but they know better. It keeps the sort of lawyer, doctor, or politician who regrets that he didn’t get a Ph.D. slightly informed about a number of topics of no intrinsic interest to him, such as the newer understanding of fertilization in ferns or the controversy over the publication rights to T. S. Eliot’s letters. As an endeavor it always seemed to me second-rate and fuzzy in outlook. But it was a grand place to work.

  It was grand because Asa was there. To be all day in the presence of someone you love—I spent more time with him than Fay did. And it was a vital group, full of argument and feud, alignment and camaraderie. When an issue had just come out, we stumbled down the long mahogany halls like sleepwalkers, as if we had caught Asa’s perennial drowsiness. There was time to quarrel about the content and layout of the next issue. Every combination of duos ate lunch together, discussing the characters of the other three. Whispers and confidences gave the workday a grade-school flavor. As publication drew near all this stopped; we became almost a unit, twenty arms and eyes focused on one objective. Almost, because Roger, the editor, thrilled to tight deadlines and inevitably slacked off at the penultimate moment in order to feel the full rush of adrenaline at the ultimate moment, when everything was due at the printer the next day and one article hadn’t been written. Then he would take off his shoes and pad along the oak floor to the bathroom, where the claw-footed bathtub held competing periodicals, which he would read while sitting on the toilet—why? Revving himself into a frenzy of competition? Boom! Back to his typewriter, the article clattering out, a taxi coming at eleven at night to take the manuscript to the typesetter—we suffered under his mania for what Sally called “a photo finish.” “We are working at an insipid quarterly,” she said over one of those postissue lunches, “but Roger is the editor of the Daily Planet.”

  Sally was my confidante, my level-headed adviser, my mischievous encourager, my occasional doomsday prophet. Her views on my affair with Asa were always slightly out of sync with mine. But she held them firmly and told me every one. “He’s not interested in you. He’s got everything he wants and anyhow, he’s barely interested in anything,” she said one day, after his smell had been mutating in my bloodstream for more than a year. A week later she announced, “You’re exactly what he wants. What forty-one-year-old man wouldn’t want a beautiful young woman fawning over him?” Was I really fawning? “You look at him with a smirk on your face; you just can’t get that expression of satisfaction off your puss,” she answered.

  “He smirks too,” I said.

  “More fool he.”

  We had these conversations in the fall. September was a hot, gold-and-umber month, and the warmth continued, supernaturally elongated beyond anybody’s memory, into the start of November. On Halloween Asa’s white cuffs were still rolled up to his still-brown elbows; he was still walking home at twelve-thirty to eat lunch on his back porch and maintain his tan. The vanity of middle-aged men—he knew his tan hid the broken veins in his cheeks and the scotch-spread of his nose.

  On November 10, it snowed. I remember because it was the evening before my birthday. It was a high, blue, fluffy snowfall, leavened with warm air, rising a full foot on top of the piles of oak and maple leaves that edged the streets. I walked to work in the middle of unplowed streets, a thirty-year-old. I felt doomed, and irritated at feeling that because it was so predictable. But the snow seemed like a lid on life, the way turning thirty seemed. The world had stopped; it was just a static replica of itself, preserved in coldness. I was chilly and sad in my office, looking at gray papers in the milky light of a snowy day.

  What was disturbing me more than anything was an erotic dream I had dreamed about Asa that morning, just before waking. It was so vivid (his tawny limbs moving against my white sheets, his smell saturating the pillows and my hair) that I had woken entirely excited. And in one of those flashes of insight that come between sleep and true waking, I had wondered why I was wasting my time on this impossible mission. For I was by then completely occupied in my siege of Asa’s heart. I was set up in front of his fortified self with enough rations, in the form of obsessive thoughts and endless desire, for years. Nobody else interested me. What a way of putting it—I didn’t even register other men on my eyeballs. They were grains of sand on the beach, and Asa was the ocean, an unplumbed blueness in which I was determined to swim. So I sat at my desk, still dizzy from my dream and half hoping he wouldn’t walk in to say good morning as he always did, because I thought I might jump him and wrap my legs around his waist and push him onto the floor—and so forth. Of course, at the same time I was waiting for him, so that I could quickly graft the three-dimensional Asa onto the remnants of my dream and have a private swoon as I sat at my desk. My birthday present, wrested from him in secret.

  He must have had a busy morning, because he didn’t appear until almost eleven. He sat down in the chair opposite my desk—my interview chair, we called it, joking, for none of the women interviewed anyone. He crossed his arms and pushed himself back with his feet, so that his chin rested on his collarbone and his eyes were level with mine.

  “I had a dream about you last night,” I blurted. I often blurted things at him. He caused me to become overvivid, tensed until I was nearly par
odying myself. I sensed that what drew him to me was my foreign approach to life. Foreign from his. I talk more than he, and about things he wouldn’t discuss, and I cry, and embrace people when I’m happy. I found myself exaggerating all this with him, in response to some need of his to have it exaggerated.

  “You did?” He shut his eyes and lifted his chin. “I had a dream about you too.”

  This was so stunning that I was momentarily quiet. I stared at him. He was smiling at me and nodding slightly, or maybe his drowsy head was wobbling.

  “What was it?” I asked. My pulse was so noisy I was sure he could hear it.

  “Oh, I’m not going to tell you. But it was full of warm, loving, tender feelings.” And he looked at me with what he thought was a loving, tender gaze. It wasn’t; it was an unmistakable grimace of lust and it made me panic. If he was going to capitulate this easily I would feel cheated. I was set up for a long fight, and I suppose I wanted one. I wanted the obstacles to be proportionate to the prize. At that moment, when I had been at the magazine barely a year, he was still my superior, my married boss about whom I had sexual fantasies. I hadn’t separated him from his function. I couldn’t see him simply as a man. So this evidence of his susceptibility to me, though thrilling, was too early. I began blurting again.

  “I dreamed we were in a kindergarten, all sorts of kids running around, and there was a fire—was that it? Something—and I couldn’t find you, then I saw you on the other side of the yard and I ran to you.” I paused. “I ran up to you and right into your arms.” I said this softly. I didn’t look at him.

  When I did look up he was still staring at me with his “tender, loving” look. We sat like that, staring, until Sally passed by my door on the way to her adjacent office. Asa heaved himself out of my chair and slinked into the hall.

  “Goo, goo, goo,” said Sally. I could hear her through the wall. Asa was halfway to his office, and as he’s somewhat deaf he couldn’t have heard her. Nevertheless it worried me. Now that the moment was over, it took on the slippery feel of fantasy. His desire seemed like something I had conjured up or talked him into. Sally’s teasing heightened my sense of having manipulated the situation, making me believe I had something to hide from him and worried that he would “find out.” If he thought I was plotting love attacks and, worse, checking my strategy with Sally, he might resist me to teach me a lesson. “Shut up,” I said, loud enough for her to hear. I put my head into her office. “He’s still walking down the hall.”

  “Oh, he’s deaf,” she said. Then she laughed. “What was all that goo about?”

  “Erotic dreams. We were trading erotic dreams.”

  “Terrific. What was his?”

  “No details. It was full of ‘warm feelings.’ ”

  “He’ll say anything to you.”

  At first this pleased me; yes, he would say anything to get my attention. But Sally had meant it dismissively, and, as I sat at my desk and pretended to work, I decided that he was just flirting with me. He would say anything because nothing mattered; it was all fantasy. Whereas for me it was real, a concrete advance. I was one yard closer to the ramparts. I jumped up and went into Sally’s office.

  “But I love him,” I said. I was standing in the middle of the room and staring at her. She was the only person to whom I could say it. She had been that for so many months that some of my love had rubbed off onto her and I saw her as beautiful and precious. I wanted her to say, “I know,” or “Of course you do,” or anything that would make me feel my love was accepted. She had become a figurehead to whom I offered my gifts. But she wasn’t one, she was Sally who’d been at the magazine for too many years, who was trying to get her work done, who was tired because her job was harder than mine and she had a child at home.

  Simultaneously she was a Jewish woman who ought to be sympathetic. She’d married a Yankee rather late in her life, a man named Dickie Dana, and had thereby become a cousin of Asa’s. They socialized a little; the Thayers invited the Danas to the Cape for a weekend every summer and the Danas had the Thayers to dinner once or twice during the winter. Asa borrowed tools from Dickie, who had a collection of saws, chisels, plumb lines, routers, even a miter box left to him by a black-sheep carpenter uncle who had built himself a cabin in Vermont in the twenties and died there in the sixties, during a winter so cold his body was frozen—wrapped in frozen sheets and blankets—by the time he was missed in town, which was only overnight. This uncle’s habit (his name was, I think, Faneuil Dana) had been to ride his tractor into town every morning and take coffee with three other old farmers in the donut shop. They missed him. They finished their coffee and took somebody’s truck into the woods to look for him, a few boards in the back in case they needed to make a coffin. They didn’t bother to bring a Band-Aid, or even some brandy. Arrogance, or a morbid acquiescence? They used his tools to put the nails in.

  Dickie had told me this story the night I met him, and it was obvious that he relished it, as a story. As I came to know him better, I began to understand some of its appeal—the studied eccentricity and need for solitude were qualities he had also inherited from his uncle. More important was the element of foresight, which I labeled acquiescence. For Dickie, this certainty the three old fellows had about what they would find in the cabin was delightful. “They knew!” he kept repeating, leaning across the table in his drafty dining room. “You see, they understood what had happened. And they were prepared.” Dickie was trying to prepare himself for death as well. We must, and he’s past sixty, but he has moved his perspective somehow, as though he’s looking back at life from the other side. He’s healthy, he looks to be in his late forties, and he spends his time “tidying up,” “sorting things out,” stripping himself of unnecessary objects and thoughts. He has some money, some old Yankee money, and Sally works.

  What struck me about this story—and I think of it often, in connection with my research—was the cold. The cold outside, the cold living in the shack when no one else could live in it, the cold old men in the unheated truck bumping through the woods without a word. I hear Asa saying, “Oh, I don’t feel the cold.” They all say that. Do only Jews have skin and nerves? Sally and I spent ten minutes every morning discussing how cold we were, which parts of us were almost frostbitten on the way to work. Dickie stands on the front porch in January wearing his bathrobe, saluting the gray, rigid day with his naked chest. Are they made of stone?

  That morning, when I stood expectantly beside the file cabinet containing the manuscripts for the previous issue, waiting for Sally to sympathize and tell me Asa’s secrets, she instead put on a very good performance as a stone Yankee.

  “Mmmmmm?” she said, not raising her head from Fowler’s. “Mmmm.” A well-bred invitation to get out.

  So I got out. I shuffled back to my office and I resolved to declare myself to Asa. I wanted to confront him with what he was doing, which was making me fall in love with him. I wanted to move it away from fantasy and into reality. As long as neither of us admitted what was happening, it could continue. I was going to jeopardize everything, possibly, for the sake of flesh. I couldn’t bear all the goo, the sidelong looks, the whispered comments during editorial meetings, the hand on my shoulder as he passed me in the hall, unless I had the substance. What I meant by the substance was the food of his flesh, his arms and face and back to lick and smell and twist myself around. I was willing to give up the flirtation if it didn’t progress.

  I was not. I was not willing to give up anything—but I was sure I would succeed. I felt his heat; he was and remains the only Yankee man who smolders. Maybe it was simply lust, even after these years of him I don’t know, but he was warm with it, flushed from it, and I trusted that. I wanted to make a bonfire, at first. I made one, and then I wanted something else, a well-planned arrangement of kindling and a backlog, that would burn for years. But I am getting ahead of myself.

  Sally, on the day I turned thirty, was past forty. We might have been sisters, and it would have been diffic
ult to say who was the older. We are both small, dark women with smooth skin that doesn’t wrinkle. Only her laugh reveals her age; it is sad, knowing, and short. I haven’t learned enough about the world to have the sense of sorrow that curtails laughter. I don’t have many clues about what made her sad. Perhaps getting what you want is saddening. Dickie too had been married when she’d met him.

  I miss her and Dickie. Dickie was enthusiastic—ecstatic, actually—about my prospects with Asa. “He needs you to wake him up. You are a goddess, you will drag him into the waters with you,” and so on. Then, gazing into my eyes, which I suppose reminded him of Sally’s eyes ten years before, “I’m jealous of him.” There was much of this while I was plotting my attack. They were my aides-de-camp; they knew the territory better than I did, and spread the maps out for me, and fed me dinners while I raved about my strategy. But when Asa kissed me, that black March evening when the world turned inside out, a barrier went up between me and the Danas. I had moved into another sphere. I was Asa’s satellite, not theirs. I didn’t need their maps because I had hard, inside information. I knew how he tasted, the sounds he made when I touched him in ways that he liked, the way his face looked when he was lying down. They knew what he and Fay had for dinner, and how much Julia’s school cost, and where Asa banked his paltry salary. So we became estranged, in a civilized and subtle way. We had used each other up. I was too loyal to Asa and too single-minded to provide them with the tidbits that might have kept their vicarious interest up. And they, out of some other loyalty, perhaps to Fay, or perhaps just to the institutions of stability, were unwilling to give me ammunition for the next challenge, which was making Asa mine.