What He's Poised to Do

You laughed. Perhaps you thought I was joking, I realized later. You had no way of knowing that I owned not only this apartment but nearly two thousand others. You had no way of knowing that I was worth ten thousand times as much as when I first came to the United States, fresh from a short but not entirely unsuccessful career as a waiter and restaurant manager, or that earlier in that career I was so poor that I sometimes had to steal from customers. I would like to say that the stealing was infrequent. The truth was that it was nearly constant. When I told my wife about it, she stared off into the middle distance and then returned with a vocabulary lesson. “Stealing and robbery are different,” she said. “Stealing is related to words like ‘stealthy.’ When you steal, you’re trying to escape detection. Robbery’s very different. That’s when you confront someone and take something by force.” I’m sure she was right, or mostly right. At the very least, I could not argue with her. English was not my first language. If I had told you about my early transgressions, I do not think that you would have come back at me with surgery performed on my words. You would have judged me, or loved me, or both. I did not tell you about my stealing. You did not lift your lovely arms over your head. We stood professionally near one another, and I manufactured enough concentration to speak about the central air and the marble countertop.

You did not like the apartment. You felt that the closet was situated awkwardly in the master bedroom, and that the whole place was overpriced. I made a mental note to call the gay couple and tell them the apartment was theirs if they wanted it. On the way out, you picked up the Blood-Horse magazine, inspected the cover, put it back down. You paused by the door to tell me about yourself. You were a painter, beginning to acquire a reputation. Your father was a rich man, “like you,” you said, maybe believing it a little bit more this time. You had been engaged to one of your painting teachers, but it hadn’t worked out.

“Why?” I said. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

“You can ask anyone anything anytime,” you said.

One week later, we were lovers.

Dear X,

I fold your letter, unfold it, read it again, refold it. I have done this four or five times over the past hour. They say that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer. The letter did not bother me so deeply when I first received it. As I have said, I called to talk things through. No part of it was unexpected. We had been weakening each other for months, especially since we stopped sleeping together. I realize that I have skipped from the moment when we became lovers to the moment when we stopped sleeping together. Between that is a gap. I will protect this period, not from shame, not from fear, but from love and from a fierce sense of obligation.

I can sketch what happened, but the sketch will not satisfy even the most casual reader. We were together. My marriage was stalled. I was making more money than ever, and enough that I could suddenly see clear to pay for any arrangement that might transpire: wife and mistress, ex-wife and girlfriend, ex-wife and new wife. One day, in bed, I made you an offer to come across to me. You refused. We lost and then regained our breaths. I asked again later, when you were not sitting astride me, when your face was not stretched with pleasure. You refused again. I backed off, nursed my wounds, waited a day, made another attempt, was rebuffed again, feared that the reopened wounds would never heal. I should have stopped making offers, but I could not, in this case, play it safe. You could say that it was a fatal flaw, but in fact it was the opposite: that was the one part of my life where I stayed the flaw and surged forward hopefully. Whenever I saw you, even if it was just for a casual drink or a cup of coffee, I felt an almost overwhelming sense of desire. You reported similar trouble, and we blamed each other, and we fought. And so I knew the day would come when either you would break or I would, and the broken party would ask the other party to release him or her forever. You broke. I fully believed that in time we would be lovers again. I felt the unfairness of the circumstance pulling at me. Once, when the pain was nearly too high to bear, I told my wife a version of the story, pretending that it had happened to an old acquaintance of mine back in Spain. “He suffered not just from his circumstance,” I said, “but from the anxiety that his circumstance might not have been unique in any way. Is there a word for that?”

“Pipe organs have devices called tremulants that create vibrato in the note,” she said. “At some point, time serves as a tremulant: everything that happens is just the minor recurrence of something that has happened.” It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but she seemed so happy that I didn’t object.