Scott Spencer - Endless Love

Ann seemed so adamant that I meet Ingrid and so oblivious to my terror in waiting with her that thirty times in as many minutes the thought came revolving into my consciousness that Ann knew everything I was trying to hide, that her talkativeness and her coyness were only bizarre and costly strategies, like those deadpan psychological gambits private eyes run in movies to force a suspect’s hidden hand. She drank a glass of white wine and placed one on the table in front of me.

“What shall we call you?” she asked.

“My name?”

“We’ll make one up.” She reached behind her and switched on a delicate wooden floor lamp with a small flowered shade. “I know I’m bullying you, David, and believe me I know this is sick, but I do want to handle it this way. I have this terrible feeling Hugh’s led his new girl to believe I’m some frosty old celibate, and even if I’m correcting the image under false pretenses—” she overemphasized the word false, or so it seemed—“I think I have that right.” Her glass was already empty; the wine seemed to have disappeared without her having once raised the glass to her lips. “We’ll call you Tony. That’s a good one. It sounds well bred and frightfully proletarian. Hugh will turn it over in his mind, I think. And really, David, you don’t have to say anything. I’ll just introduce you and you can leave. But say you’ll be back. I mean, don’t make it appear that you’re off somewhere. I’ll owe you a favor, if you want. Will you do it?”

Ann got the jug of white wine from the kitchen and began to pour it into my glass before she noticed I hadn’t drunk any yet. A little oily puddle formed around the stem of my glass as the wine overflowed.

“Oh, I am nervous,” she said. “Ingrid coming to see me. Our little charade. I always get caught in my lies, too. I admire successful liars—I mean right up and over the edge of envy. My stories would be so much better if I could lie more easily. But I drag the actual facts of my life around like that poor man in Madame Bovary with the metal foot.”

The living room was dense with dead heat; the open casement windows brought in the noise of traffic and a faint gassy breeze. The down above Ann’s lips was shiny from the heat; her skin looked moist, stimulated; her hair refused to dry. I felt coated in sweat from my scalp to my legs; when I touched my throat, my hand came away wet.

And then, finally, the buzzer was rung from the downstairs lobby and it fired off in the long hallway of Ann’s apartment. The bulk of my fear had passed. My nerves seemed to have collapsed from exhaustion. When I heard the buzzer I sat forward and took hold of my wineglass. I had an impulse to ask Ann not to answer the door. But that was all: my decisions were made; my life was going on without me.

“Horrible thought,” Ann said, getting up. She put her hand over her mouth and looked at me. “What if she’s brought Hugh along? Or if he’s bullied his way in.” She shook her head. “That’s all we need. Right?”

She picked up the old-fashioned black intercom and said, “Who is it?” I took a small sip of the wine. “It’s her,” Ann said to me. “Sit where you are. When I come back, I’ll sit next to you.” She shook her head and said, “I’m positive I’m going to regret this.”

In a few moments, the elevator brought Ingrid to the seventh floor and Ann was waiting for her with the door open, leaning against it with her hands behind her back like a teenager. Ingrid wore clothes nearly identical to those she’d worn that afternoon: a sleeveless white shirt with pearlized buttons and a denim skirt. Her legs were bare and she wore sandals that had been repaired with string and tape. She carried a huge leather shoulder bag embossed with the face of a smiling avuncular moon. Her hair was no longer in braids but hung straight down to the middle of her back; indoors, it didn’t look nearly so red.

“Come in, come in,” Ann was saying, in a voice that meant to be cheerful but sounded merely insistent.

There’s a moment in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent in which an anarchist explains that he has wired his entire body to an enormous charge of explosives and if any policeman tries to bring him in he will detonate himself, avoiding the dangers of arrest and interrogation and killing a cop or two as well. All that is involved is tripping a simple mechanism, and in five or ten seconds—a fatal explosion. But the time waiting for the explosion, the listener wonders, the long heavy seconds—wouldn’t you go mad just waiting? Yes, the anarchist says, thoughtfully. Yes. But what difference will it make? As Ann and Ingrid made their way to the front of the apartment and I sat rigidly perspiring on the sofa, I felt as if the lever had been pressed that would explode my life—not in five seconds but at some elusive point in the future, and I would be waiting until then with fate ticking away in my belly. Would I even know when my life had finally been ruined? Ingrid pointing at me would not fully accomplish it—after all, I hadn’t seen Jade in years and I still thought of us as inseparable. All the blame I deserved and a good measure of what I didn’t would not end my life, would not even—and this is what was most fearful—change it. I would still be the same person and still want the same things—I would only have much less of a chance of ever having them. The same passion and no real chance: that was the kind of madness I seemed to be heading toward.

Ann sat next to me and Ingrid took the seat Ann had been occupying before.

“Can I get you a glass of wine?” Ann asked, after making herself comfortable.

I was looking straight at Ingrid. If she was going to recognize me, I wanted that moment now. Her eyes were dark brown, with tan and lavender hollows beneath them. She had the withdrawn, composed look of someone who is easily offended, someone who must prepare herself to meet people, someone who suspects others wish to cheat her. Ingrid’s nose was narrow and direct, red at the flares, and the freckled hands that she folded into her lap trembled uncontrollably.

“This is my friend, Tony,” Ann said. Her voice held a measure of uncertainty suspended in its center like a haze in a gem. Ann was poised for some balletic contest of wits and the letdown of seeing Ingrid in that chair, exhaling wet, broken breaths and searching for words as if for childhood memories, the sight of her would-be adversary in an already vanquished state left Ann in confusion and agitation. Yes, Ann’s voice faltered and thickened and took on a poignancy that had nothing to do with the impression she had wanted to create—I think that in all the most important ways she already knew that Ingrid had come to her with vile news.

“I guess I’d better be going,” I said. Ann took a deep breath, as a way of reminding me. “I’ll be back in half an hour,” I added. I was going to say something on the order of “I know you two have a lot to say to each other,” or some such social piffle, but I knew full well that everything I would say and hear would be in my memory permanently. I turned to Ingrid and nodded, then reached down and laid my hand on Ann’s shoulder. “I’ll let myself out.”

“No,” she said, springing up. “I’ll let you out. I have to, oh, lock the door.” She touched me lightly—and I suppose conspiratorially—on the elbow and we walked down the hallway to her door. Ann followed me out and pressed the button to summon the elevator for me.

“Whew,” she said. “Not at all what I expected. Hugh talks about her as if she’s something out of the Tarot and then he sends me this. Tell me, really, the truth I mean: aren’t you getting very down vibes from her?”