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| Comet Jackson Pollack |
COMET
Philip married Adele on a day in June. It
was cloudy and the wind was blowing. Later the sun came out. It had been a
while since Adele had married and she wore white: white pumps with low heels, a
long white skirt that clung to her hips, a filmy blouse with a white bra
underneath, and around her neck a string of freshwater pearls. They were
married in her house, the one she’d gotten in the divorce. All her friends were
there. She believed strongly in friendship. The room was crowded.
“I, Adele,”
she said in a clear voice, “give myself to you, Phil, completely as your wife .
. .” Behind her as best man, somewhat oblivious, her young son was standing,
and pinned to her panties as something borrowed was a small silver disc,
actually a St. Christopher’s medal her father had worn in the war; she had
several times rolled down the waistband of her skirt to show it to people. Near
the door, under the impression that she was part of a garden tour, was an old
woman who held a little dog by the handle of a cane hooked through his collar.
At the
reception Adele smiled with happiness, drank too much, laughed, and scratched
her bare arms with long showgirl nails. Her new husband admired her. He could
have licked her palms like a calf does salt. She was still young enough to be
good-looking, the final blaze of it, though she was too old for children, at
least if she had anything to say about it. Summer was coming. Out of the
afternoon haze she would appear, in her black bathing suit, limbs all tan, the
brilliant sun behind her. She was the strong figure walking up the smooth sand
from the sea, her legs, her wet swimmer’s hair, the grace of her, all careless
and unhurried.
They settled
into life together, hers mostly. It was her furniture and her books, though
they were largely unread. She liked to tell stories about DeLereo, her first
husband—Frank, his name was—the heir to a garbage-hauling empire. She called
him Delerium, but the stories were not unaffectionate. Loyalty—it came from her
childhood as well as the years of marriage, eight exhausting years, as she
said—was her code. The terms of marriage had been simple, she admitted. Her job
was to be dressed, have dinner ready, and be fucked once a day. One time in
Florida with another couple they chartered a boat to go bonefishing off Bimini.
“We’ll have
a good dinner,” DeLereo had said happily, “get on board and turn in. When we
get up we’ll have passed the Gulf Stream.”
It began
that way but ended differently. The sea was very rough. They never did cross the
Gulf Stream—the captain was from Long Island and got lost. DeLereo paid him
fifty dollars to turn over the wheel and go below.
“Do you know
anything about boats?” the captain asked.
“More than
you do,” DeLereo told him.
He was under
an ultimatum from Adele, who was lying, deathly pale, in their cabin. “Get us
into port somewhere or get ready to sleep by yourself,” she’d said.
Philip Ardet
had heard the story and many others often. He was mannerly and elegant, his
head held back a bit as he talked, as though you were a menu. He and Adele had
met on the golf course when she was learning to play. It was a wet day and the
course was nearly empty. Adele and a friend were teeing off when a balding
figure carrying a cloth bag with a few clubs in it asked if he could join them.
Adele hit a passable drive. Her friend bounced his across the road and teed up
another, which he topped. Phil, rather shyly, took out an old three wood and
hit one two hundred yards straight down the fairway.
That was his
persona, capable and calm. He’d gone to Princeton and been in the navy. He
looked like someone who’d been in the navy, Adele said—his legs were strong.
The first time she went out with him, he remarked it was a funny thing, some
people liked him, some didn’t.
“The ones
that do, I tend to lose interest in.”
She wasn’t
sure just what that meant but she liked his appearance, which was a bit worn,
especially around the eyes. It made her feel he was a real man, though perhaps
not the man he had been. Also he was smart, as she explained it, more or less
the way professors were.
To be liked
by her was worthwhile but to be liked by him seemed somehow of even greater
value. There was something about him that discounted the world. He appeared in
a way to care nothing for himself, to be above that.
He didn’t
make much money, as it turned out. He wrote for a business weekly. She earned
nearly that much selling houses. She had begun to put on a little weight. This
was a few years after they were married. She was still beautiful—her face
was—but she had adopted a more comfortable outline. She would get into bed with
a drink, the way she had done when she was twenty-five. Phil, a sport jacket
over his pajamas, sat reading. Sometimes he walked that way on their lawn in
the morning. She sipped her drink and watched him.
“You know
something?”
“What?”
“I’ve had
good sex since I was fifteen,” she said.
He looked
up.
“I didn’t
start quite that young,” he confessed.
“Maybe you
should have.”
“Good
advice. Little late though.”
“Do you
remember when we first got started?”
“I
remember.”
“We could
hardly stop,” she said. “You remember?”
“It averages
out.”
“Oh, great,”
she said.
After he’d
gone to sleep she watched a movie. The stars grew old, too, and had problems
with love. It was different, though—they had already reaped huge rewards. She
watched, thinking. She thought of what she had been, what she had had. She
could have been a star.
What did
Phil know—he was sleeping.
Autumn came.
One evening they were at the Morrisseys’—Morrissey was a tall lawyer, the
executor of many estates and trustee of others. Reading wills had been his true
education, a look into the human heart, he said.
At the
dinner table was a man from Chicago who’d made a fortune in computers, a nitwit
it soon became apparent, who during the meal gave a toast,
“To the end
of privacy and the life of dignity,” he said.
He was with
a dampened woman who had recently found out that her husband had been having an
affair with a black woman in Cleveland, an affair that had somehow been going
on for seven years. There may even have been a child.
“You can see
why coming here is like a breath of fresh air for me,” she said.
The women
were sympathetic. They knew what she had to do—she had to rethink completely
the past seven years.
“That’s
right,” her companion agreed.
“What is
there to be rethought?” Phil wanted to know.
He was
answered with impatience. The deception, they said, the deception—she had been
deceived all that time. Adele meanwhile was pouring more wine for herself. Her
napkin covered the place where she had already spilled a glass of it.
“But that
time was spent in happiness, wasn’t it?” Phil asked guilelessly. “That’s been
lived. It can’t be changed. It can’t be just turned into unhappiness.”
“That woman
stole my husband. She stole everything he had vowed.”
“Forgive
me,” Phil said softly. “That happens every day.”
There was an
outcry as if from a chorus, heads thrust forward like the hissing, sacred
geese. Only Adele sat silent.
“Every day,”
he repeated, his voice drowned out, the voice of reason or at least of fact.
“I’d never
steal anyone’s man,” Adele said then. “Never.” Her face had a tone of weariness
when she drank, a weariness that knew the answer to everything. “And I’d never
break a vow.”
“I don’t
think you would,” Phil said.
“I’d never
fall for a twenty-year-old, either.”
She was
talking about the tutor, the girl who had come that time, youth burning through
her clothes.
“No, you
wouldn’t.”
“He left his
wife,” Adele told them.
There was
silence.
Phil’s bit of
smile had gone but his face was still pleasant.
“I didn’t
leave my wife,” he said quietly. “She threw me out.”
“He left his
wife and children,” Adele said.
“I didn’t
leave them. Anyway it was over between us. It had been for more than a year. He
said it evenly, almost as if it had happened to someone else. It was my son’s
tutor,” he explained. “I fell in love with her.”
“And you
began something with her?” Morrissey suggested.
“Oh, yes.”
There is
love when you lose the power to speak, when you cannot even breathe.
“Within two
or three days,” he confessed.
“There in
the house?”
Phil shook
his head. He had a strange, helpless feeling. He was abandoning himself.
“I didn’t do
anything in the house.”
“He left his
wife and children,” Adele repeated.
“You knew
that,” Phil said.
“Just walked
out on them. They’d been married fifteen years, since he was nineteen.”
“We hadn’t
been married fifteen years.”
“They had
three children,” she said, “one of them retarded.”
Something
had happened—he was becoming speechless, he could feel it in his chest like a
kind of nausea. As if he were giving up portions of an intimate past.
“He wasn’t
retarded,” he managed to say. “He was . . . having trouble learning to read,
that’s all.”
At that
instant an aching image of himself and his son from years before came to him.
They had rowed one afternoon to the middle of a friend’s pond and jumped in,
just the two of them. It was summer. His son was six or seven. There was a
layer of warm water over deeper, cooler water, the faded green of frogs and
weeds. They swam to the far side and then all the way back, the blond head and
anxious face of his boy above the surface like a dog’s. Year of joy.
“So tell
them the rest of it,” Adele said.
“There is no
rest.”
“It turned
out this tutor was some kind of call girl. He found her in bed with some guy.”
“Is that
right?” Morrissey said.
He was
leaning on the table, his chin in his hand. You think you know someone, you
think because you have dinner with them or play cards, but you really don’t.
It’s always a surprise. You know nothing.
“It didn’t
matter,” Phil murmured.
“So stupid marries
her anyway,” Adele went on. “She comes to Mexico City where he’s working and he
marries her.”
“You don’t
understand anything, Adele,” he said.
He wanted to
say more but couldn’t. It was like being out of breath.
“Do you
still talk to her?” Morrissey asked casually.
“Yes, over
my dead body,” Adele said.
None of them
could know, none of them could visualize Mexico City and the first unbelievable
year, driving down to the coast for the weekend, through Cuernavaca, her bare
legs with the sun lying on them, her arms, the dizziness and submission he felt
with her as before a forbidden photograph, as if before an overwhelming work of
art. Two years in Mexico City oblivious to the wreckage. It was the sense of
godliness that empowered him. He could see her neck bent forward with its
slender nape. He could see the faint trace of bones like pearls that ran down
her smooth back. He could see himself, his former self.
“I talk to
her,” he admitted.
“And your
first wife?”
“I talk to
her. We have three kids.”
“He left
her,” Adele said. “Casanova here.”
“Some women
have minds like cops,” Phil said to no one in particular. “This is right,
that’s wrong. Well, anyway . . .”
He stood up.
He had done everything wrong, he realized, in the wrong order. He had scuttled
his life.
“Anyway
there’s one thing I can say truthfully. I’d do it all over again if I had the
chance.”
After he had
gone outside they went on talking. The woman whose husband had been unfaithful
for seven years knew what it was like.
“He pretends
he can’t help it,” she said. “I’ve had the same thing happen. I was going by
Bergdorf’s one day and saw a green coat in the window that I liked and I went
in and bought it. Then a little while later, someplace else, I saw one that was
better than the first one, I thought, so I bought that. Anyway, by the time I
was finished I had four green coats hanging in the closet—it was just because I
couldn’t control my desires.”
Outside, the
sky, the topmost dome of it, was brushed with clouds and the stars were dim.
Adele finally made him out, standing far off in the darkness. She walked
unsteadily toward him. His head, she saw, was raised. She stopped a few yards
away and raised her head, too. The sky began to whirl. She took an unexpected
step or two to steady herself.
“What are
you looking at?” she finally said.
He did not
answer. He had no intention of answering. Then,
“The comet,”
he said. “It’s been in the papers. This is the night it’s supposed to be most
visible.”
There was
silence.
“I don’t see
any comet,” she said.
“You don’t?”
“Where is
it?”
“It’s right
up there,” he gestured. “It doesn’t look like anything, just like another small
star. It’s that extra one, by the Pleiades.” He knew all the constellations. He
had seen them rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts.
“Come on,
you can look at it tomorrow,” she said, almost consolingly, though she came no
closer to him.
“It won’t be
there tomorrow. One time only.”
“How do you
know where it’ll be?” she said. “Come on, it’s late, let’s get out of here.”
He did not
move. After a bit she walked toward the house where, extravagantly, every
window upstairs and down was lit. He stood where he was, looking up at the sky
and then at her as she became smaller and smaller going across the lawn,
reaching first the aura, then the brightness, then tripping on the kitchen
steps.
This masterful short story, Comet, is taken from Salter's Collected
Stories.
DRAGON
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