It was the period when, in Paris, the lengthy and futile negotiations to end the war in Vietnam were continuing for month after unsuccessful month. America was in endless and violent upheaval, the entire nation torn apart by the war, but Wells seemed curiously uninvolved. He was more interested in baseball, from other passions he lived apart. He was an avid reader, so was his wife. Their bookshelves were divided into his and hers, their books were kept apart. On an old, marble-topped buffet were stacks of books, many of them new. Nearby on the wall a postcard of the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna was pinned, along with a photograph of a girl in a bikini, and another of a dish of pasta clipped from some magazine.
“T T T,” Wells said.
“T T T?”
“Tits, towers, and tortellini.”
He grinned and showed the spaces between his teeth that were like walrus tusks pointing in several directions. There was also a black-and-white photograph of German women weeping with emotion at a Nazi parade and upstairs, though no one ever saw it, a framed photo of a woman’s naked legs and lower body tumbled across a bed. He wrote sophisticated crime novels, the investigator in which was an overweight woman in her fifties named Gwen Godding who had been married four times, the second and longest time to a California highway patrolman. She’d been widowed twice and had an eye towards marrying again. She was engaging and intelligent and described by Wells as having makeup like a disguise or put on by an undertaker. His research was meticulous, and he could work like a farmer, in fact his muscled jaws made him look like one. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, sometimes two pairs at a time, but to examine something closely pushed them up onto his forehead. His books sold very well, and the first of them had been bought for the movies as the vehicle for a quite mature star.
Wells liked to write, to sit at his desk reading and then begin to type. Only rarely did he talk about his time at sea, the working life, as he called it, staggering home in the morning, shirttail out, with a six-pack of beer and a case of the clap. He remembered being in Samoa in some hotel where the sign said Limited Room Service, Due to Great Distance from the Kitchen.
“You can’t say that about this place,” he said.
They were sitting in the kitchen.
“What made you decide to live up here?” Bowman asked.
“I wanted to get away from the water,” Wells said. “When we left Mexico—I got tired of Mexico, huge mosquitoes, animales , they called them—we lived in St. Croix, in Frederiksted. We had an old Danish sea captain’s house down by the water with wooden shutters, hibiscus, palm trees. Have you been to Frederiksted? The town is almost all black. Nobody seems to work. The bank had a For Rent sign on it, but you could see stunning black women in white evening dresses coming from the hotel at night out onto the street. The library was right across from where we lived. You could see the tall schoolgirls in there sprawled by the desks, their arms dangling over the chairs, boys whispering to them all day long. You could understand what slavery was about. The books—no one read any books—the only books taken out were those on pregnancy.”
His wife, Michele—Mitch, he called her—was a calm woman in her forties, unhurried and attentive to him, tolerant. She knew his views and his character. Although there was little evidence of discord between them, there must have been some, but from the pair of them Bowman felt a strong pull towards connubial life, joined life, somewhere in the country, the early morning, misty fields, the snake in the garden, tortoise in the woods. Against that was the city with its myriad attractions, art, carnality, the amplification of desires. It was like a tremendous opera with an infinite cast and tumultuous as well as solitary scenes.
He felt the absence, not necessarily of marriage, but of a tangible center in life around which things could form and find a place. He realized what had brought it to mind, this house, Wells’, and the description of the captain’s house in Frederiksted. He imagined a house of his own, though only vaguely. For some reason he saw it in the fall. It was raining, rain was a blur on the windows and he had lit a fire against the chill.
He took the time to look.
“I’m interested in a small house with an exceptional room or two,” he told the agent.
She was a tart woman who was a member of the board of the golf club nearby.
“I don’t know what you mean by exceptional room,” she said.
“Well, why don’t we begin by looking at something? Show me one or two of your favorites.”
“What is the price range you’re interested in?”
“Let’s say from two thousand dollars up,” Bowman said to annoy her.
“I don’t have anything in that range,” she said. “Also, I really have a business to run.”
“I know you do. Tell me, what can I buy a two-bedroom house for?”
“It depends entirely on the house and the location. I would say, between sixty and two hundred thousand dollars, south of the highway.”
“I don’t want a house in the trees, the woods. I’d like a house that’s well-situated and open to the light,” he said.
It was hard to tell if she was sensitive to what he was saying or not. She showed him nothing of interest although at the end of an astrigent hour and a half, passing through some open fields bounded by trees, she slowed down near a driveway and said,
“This is more expensive, but I thought I’d show it to you.”
She was in fact showing her authority. They drove down a long straight road, not overly maintained, in the shadow of foliage overhead. It was almost sepulchral. The green was intense. Then it unexpectedly opened to a dark wooden house on a slight rise, a sort of Adirondack house built to the mountain gods, in the open but surrounded by a tall canopy of trees like a layer of clouds. It was a house named Crossways and had been designed by Stanford White, another of whose great houses, Flying Point, on the ocean, had burned.
They went up wide wooden steps and into a serene interior with comfortable furnishings and devoid of haphazard light. The floors were polished but not shining. The windows were large and clear. The house was cruciform in shape with each arm looking down its own alley of trees to the fields. It had passed through the hands of several owners and its price was in millions.
When they were in the car again, Bowman said,
“That was worth it.”
But he did not go to that agent again.
He didn’t like women who looked down on you for whatever reason. Within limits, he liked the opposite. You rarely found all the qualities you sought. It was not something he spent time thinking about. He’d had various love affairs. As he became older, the women became older, too, and less inclined to foolish or carefree acts. But the city was teeming, the feminist movement had changed it. He was usually in a suit. He always wore one to work. On the escalator at Grand Central, a girl with a nice face, composed and brown, said to him,
“Hello. Are you going where?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I was asking if you are going to near here,” she said.
“I’m going to Forty-First Street,” Bowman said.
“Ah. Do you have an office?”
He couldn’t quite tell what she wanted.
“Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I just thought we could exchange numbers and you could call.”
“For what?” he said.
“Business,” she said simply.
Her raincoat, he noticed, was not entirely clean.
“What kind of business?”
“You can say.”
She looked at him openly. She had an outsider’s dignity, a West African dignity, and also a touch of weariness.
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