The Invitation(84)

The telephone rings. For a moment I think it might be him, that he has somehow found out about my discovery. I lift the receiver.

‘Signora,’ the man says, ‘I am calling to tell you that your car is waiting.’

The party, which I have forgotten all about. Somehow, it is already evening. I will go. Away from here there may be space to think, to decide what I will do. I dress like one in a dream, travel through the twilight city in the same stupor.

The Contessa tries, admirably, to draw me into conversation with my fellow guests, but I find myself unable to follow the thread of any conversation. I drift through the crowd, avoiding the gaze of others, avoiding the attempts made by other guests to speak to me. At the end of the room is an open doorway, and I find myself drawn towards it, out into the night.

A roof garden, above the city. To my relief it seems I am the only one to have found it. Finally, here is space and relative quiet.

I have two options, as far as I can tell. I can remain or I can run away.

But then, looking out across the black void that is the city, another way presents itself. The idea has its own strange appeal. I take a cigarette from my bag. I will smoke it for courage. Though I wouldn’t need nearly as much courage to do that as I would if I am to run. I will finish it, and then I will decide.

Before I can find my matches, I hear movement on the metal ladder. I watch a man emerge, look about himself. I can see him because of the way the moonlight catches him – though I am certain he can’t see me. I know instantly that he isn’t one of them. The other guests are all people like my husband; but he lacks that same patina of wealth – the ease of it.

He has come so near to me now that I have to say something, or risk him stumble across me.

‘Hello,’ I say.

I see him start, turn to face me. It is the first time I have had a proper look at his face. And something in his expression catches at me. There is something in it that I recognize, something that makes me realize I don’t want to choose oblivion; not quite yet.

*

I wake before dawn the next morning.

He is here next to me, the stranger, his arm thrown behind his head. The underside of his arm is pale: blue-white, soft skin. There is a vulnerability to his face in sleep that I thought he must go to great pains to disguise in his waking hours.

Last night, I was brave, or mad, or something between the two; blown towards him by the force of my despair. I sought another kind of oblivion through him. The woman of the evening before was a completely different creature to myself now. Part of me wishes I still had her courage. I know that I am a coward again, I can feel it. I am a coward, and I will go back to my husband, because the other options available to me are too frightening in the light of day. I run from the apartment like a thief.

On our flight back to New York, I am aware of an ache in my chest, almost like grief. I suppose it is the knowledge that I really have said goodbye to her this time – that girl that I was.

She moves in his arms so she can look at his face. ‘So you see, I tried to leave him, and I wasn’t brave enough to do it. And when we returned to New York everything went back to how it had been. I had thought it would be hard, pretending I didn’t know. It was easy. So much easier than I would have thought.’

‘You should leave him. If not for how he lied, then for how he treats you, now. He diminishes you.’

A long silence. Then she says, ‘I know. But I thought all of that before, and then I realized that I wouldn’t know where to begin. You get used to living in a certain way. I’ve left it too late. Starting a new life at sixteen is one thing, but now …’

‘You don’t have any ties. You don’t have any children, even.’

‘No,’ she says, quietly. ‘I don’t. But I do have a home, a life.’

‘Even if those are a sham?’ But he stops himself from saying more. Who is he to convince her to give these up, he who has neither?

There is a long silence. Then she says, ‘I keep wondering—’

‘What?’

‘If the reason I feel free, now, is precisely because this’ – she gestures to the bed, the room – ‘isn’t real life. It’s make-believe. It is a fantasy.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘Don’t you?’

He had, at first. Right at the beginning, he had wondered if the very reason he was drawn to her was because she was beyond his reach. But he doesn’t believe it any longer. He tries to put it into words. ‘I think,’ he says, ‘actually, that this might be the one real thing that has happened to me in a long time.’ For once, he is articulate. In saying it he realizes the truth of it. How, suddenly, the future is all possibility.

He turns to her. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

She won’t look at him. ‘It’s impossible, Hal. I have had … a wonderful couple of days.’ He sees her wince a little at the triteness of it. ‘But something like this, it can’t last.’

‘What if it did, though?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know.’ Never has he felt so inarticulate: never has he so keenly felt the need for the right words.

She shakes her head, half-smiles. ‘You and I don’t know one another well enough to discover the things we will hate about each other yet. That’s all it is.’