T. Boyle - Riven Rock

He was back the next day, undeterred, ready to hire Cyrano to rehearse his speeches for him, anything, but he couldn’t seem to get socialism out of his head. In the afternoon, he took Katherine and Mrs. Dexter to the art museum, and he was able to talk knowledgeably about Titian, Tintoretto and the Dutch masters and fill them in on his experiences as a pupil of Monsieur Julien in Paris, but inevitably he found the conversation veering back toward social welfare and reform, because what was art after all but a plaything of the rich? Katherine couldn’t dine with him that evening — she was busy preparing for the following day’s classes — and he brooded over a long tasteless repast, which he interrupted three times to wire his mother on the subject of Katherine and her perfection, her intellect, her beauty, and his mother wired back almost immediately: WORRIED SICK STOP HAVEN’T HEARD FROM YOU IN A WEEK STOP VERY INCONSIDERATE STOP KATHERINE WHO? STOP YOUR LOVING MOTHER.

Then — and he couldn’t help himself; he felt he’d explode like an overbaked potato if he had to look at those pallid hotel-room walls another second — he took a stroll past Katherine’s house. A stroll, that was all. A constitutional. For his health. He had no thought of snooping, no thought of encountering Butler Ames or his ilk on the doorstep or catching Katherine slipping into a coach in her dinner clothes, nothing of the kind. It was raining again. He’d forgotten his umbrella and his silk hat was like a lead weight bearing down on the crown of his head and the shoulders of his overcoat were soaked through by the time he’d made his eighth circuit of Katherine’s block. And when he became conscious of that, the wetness beginning to seep through now, he just happened, by the purest coincidence, to be passing by the front entrance of Mrs. Dexter’s neat and prim narrow-shouldered stone house at 393 Commonwealth Avenue.

Katherine had made it very clear that she couldn’t see him, and he respected that, he did, but he couldn’t seem to prevent himself from mounting the steps and pressing the buzzer anyway. All sorts of things went through his head in the interval between pressing the buzzer and the maid’s appearance — visions of Butler Ames, with his blowfish eyes and prissy little hands, making love to Katherine over a box of chocolates, Katherine husbanded with nineteen faceless suitors, Katherine out dancing at that very moment and not lucubrating over a stack of scientific texts shot through with diagrams of the internal anatomy of lizards, turtles and snakes — but there was the maid with her mawkish smile, and the entrance hall, and Mrs. Dexter rushing to greet him as if she hadn’t seen him in six months rather than six hours.

His reward for braving the elements was a tête-à-tête with Mrs. Dexter that stretched past eleven o‘clock (and wasn’t it just five after eight when he arrived?), a gallon and a half of scalding tea and the ever-present platter of poppy seed cakes and sandwiches, which were soggy now and looking a bit frayed around the edges. Mrs. Dexter said things like, “You know, I’m afraid Katherine’s had so many gentlemen calling on her lately that she’s going to have to hold a lottery if she ever wants to get married”; and, “That Butler Ames is a darling, a perfect darling, don’t you think so? ”; and, “Did I ever tell you the time Katherine saw her first Angora goat — she was three at the time, or was it four?” Ever polite, Stanley sat there stiff as a post and made the occasional supportive noise in the back of his throat, but otherwise he didn’t have much to say — about progressivism, Butler Ames or anything else.

Finally, at half-past eleven, Katherine crept into the room in a pair of carpet slippers and her mother jumped up as if she’d been bitten and promptly disappeared. “Stanley,” Katherine said, extending her hand, which he rose to take in his, and then she clucked at him as if he were a naughty child or a puppy that’s just peed on the carpet. “Didn’t I tell you I couldn’t see you tonight?” she scolded, wagging a finger at him, and he would have felt miserable, abject, run through with a rusty sword of rejection and humiliation, but for the fact that she was smiling.

Now. Now’s the time, he told himself. “I — well — I just happened to be in the neighborhood and I thought—”

They were still standing, hovering awkwardly over the tea table and the platter of soggy sandwiches. She arched her eyebrows. “Just happened?”

He laughed — a braying nervous peal of a laugh — and she joined him, her whole face lit up, and then somehow they were both seated on the sofa, side by side. “All right,” he said, “I admit it, I just couldn‘t — well — you know what I mean, I couldn’t stay away — from you, that is.”

And what did she say? “Oh, Stanley”—or something like that. But she was smiling still, showing her teeth and her gums, and there was no mistaking the light in her eyes: she was glad he’d come. That made him bold, reckless, made him stew in the moment till he was a pot boiling over and there was no need for Debs now, his eyes on hers, hands clenching and unclenching in his lap as if they were feeling for a grip on a slick precipice, the taste of stale tea coming up in his throat. “Listen, Katherine,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to, to say something to you, I mean, I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I–I—”

That smile. She leaned forward to toy with one of the sandwiches, then lifted it to her lips and took a bite, carving a neat semicircle out of the center of it. “Yes?”

“Well, let me, let me put it this way. What if there was a man, a young man, of good family and with good intentions, but not worthy of consideration in the eyes of a woman, well, a hypothetical woman sort of, well, like yourself… and he really, but he hadn’t done anything in his life, he was nothing, a worthless shell of a hypothetical man not fit to kiss the hem of this hypothetical woman’s skirt, but he, he—”

She’d begun to see what he was driving at, or fumbling toward, and she tried to compose her face, but it wasn’t working — she looked like nothing so much as a woman hurtling toward a crash in a runaway carriage, the smile gone, the sandwich arrested in mid-air, something like shock and fright in her eyes, but Stanley was committed, he was driving forward and there was no stopping him. “Stanley,” she said, her voice lost somewhere deep in her throat, “Stanley, it’s late—”

He wouldn’t listen, didn’t hear her. “You see, this man, this hypothetical man, is so far beneath her he would never presume to even entertain the faintest hope in the world that she would, she might, well… marry him, I suppose, but if he asked her, this hypothetical but utterly worthless man who hasn’t accomplished a thing in his whole life, would she — would you — I mean, knowing the circumstances—”

There was a furrow between her eyebrows, and why had he never noticed that before? She didn’t look apprehensive now so much as puzzled — or pained. “Stanley, are you asking me what I think you are?”

He took a deep breath. His heart was thumping like a drum. “I just, well, I wanted your opinion, because I value it, 1 really do—”

“Are you asking me—?”

He couldn’t look her in the eye. All the drums of the Mohawks were pounding in his ears. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thump. “Yes.”

“But we’ve just met — you don’t know anything about me. You’re joking, aren’t you? Tell me this is a joke, Stanley, tell me—”

The rain, the clock, the hoofs, the drums. He looked up, as sorrowful as any whipped dog. “No,” he said, “it’s no joke.”