Different Seasons(171)

Come again, if you like. Don’t wait for an invitation ...

I was waiting for an invitation anyway, of course; my mother taught me donkey’s years ago not to automatically believe people who tell you glibly to “drop by anytime” or that “the door is always open.” I didn’t feel I needed an engraved card delivered to my apartment door by a footman in livery bearing a gilt plate, I don’t mean that, but I did want something, even if it was only a casual remark: “Coming by some night, David? Hope we didn’t bore you.” That kind of thing.

But when even that didn’t come, I began to think more seriously about going back anyway—after all, sometimes people really did want you to drop in anytime; I supposed that, at some places, the door always was open; and that mothers weren’t always right.

... Don’t wait for an invitation ...

Anyway, that’s how it happened that, on December 10th of that year, I found myself putting on my rough tweed coat and dark brown pants again and looking for my darkish red tie. I was rather more aware of my heartbeat than usual that night, I remember.

“George Waterhouse finally broke down and asked you back?” Ellen asked. “Back into the sty with the rest of the male chauvinist oinkers?”

“That’s right,” I said, thinking it must be the first time in at least a dozen years that I had told her a lie... and then I remembered that, after the first meeting, I had answered her question about what it had been like with a lie. Old men telling war stories, I had said.

“Well, maybe there really will be a promotion in it,” she said... though without much hope. To her credit, she said it without much bitterness, either.

“Stranger things have happened,” I said, and kissed her goodbye.

“Oink-oink,” she said as I went out the door.

The taxi ride that night seemed very long. It was cold, still, and starry. The cab was a Checker and I felt somehow very small in it, like a child seeing the city for the first time. It was excitement I was feeling as the cab pulled up in front of the brownstone—something as simple and yet complete as that. But such simple excitement seems to be one of life’s qualities that slip away almost unnoticed, and its rediscovery as one grows older is always something of a surprise, like finding a black hair or two in one’s comb years after one had last found such a thing.

I paid the driver, got out, and walked toward the four steps leading to the door. As I mounted them, my excitement curdled into plain apprehension (a feeling the old are much more familiar with). What exactly was I doing here?

The door was of thick paneled oak, and to my eye it looked as stout as the door of a castle keep. There was no doorbell that I could see, no knocker, no closed-circuit TV camera mounted unobtrusively in the shadow of a deep eave, and, of course, no Waterhouse waiting to take me in. I stopped at the foot of the steps and looked around. East Thirty-fifth Street suddenly seemed darker, colder, more threatening. The brownstones all looked somehow secret, as if hiding mysteries best not investigated. Their windows looked like eyes.

Somewhere, behind one of those windows, there may be a man or woman contemplating murder, I thought. A shudder worked up my spine. Contemplating it ... or doing it.

Then, suddenly, the door was open and Stevens was there. I felt an intense surge of relief. I am not an overly imaginative man, I think—at least not under ordinary circumstances—but this last thought had had all the eerie clarity of prophecy. I might have babbled aloud if I hadn’t glanced at Stevens’s eyes first. His eyes did not know me. His eyes did not know me at all.

Then there was another instance of that eerie, prophetic clarity; I saw the rest of my evening in perfect detail. Three hours in a quiet bar. Three scotches (perhaps four) to dull the embarrassment of having been fool enough to go where I wasn’t wanted. The humiliation my mother’s advice had been intended to avoid—that which comes with knowing one has overstepped.

I saw myself going home a little tipsy, but not in a good way. I saw myself merely sitting through the cab ride rather than experiencing it through that childlike lens of excitement and anticipation. I heard myself saying to Ellen, It wears thin after awhile... Waterhouse told the same story about winning a consignment of T-bone steaks for the Third Battalion in a poker game ... and they play Hearts for a dollar a point, can you believe it? ... Go back? ... I suppose I might, but I doubt it. And that would be the end of it. Except, I suppose, for my own humiliation.

I saw all of this in the nothing of Stevens’s eyes. Then the eyes warmed. He smiled slightly and said: “Mr. Adley! Come in. I’ll take your coat.”

I mounted the steps and Stevens closed the door firmly behind me. How different a door can feel when you are on the warm side of it! He took my coat and was gone with it. I stood in the hall for a moment, looking at my own reflection in the pier glass, a man of sixty-three whose face was rapidly becoming too gaunt to look middle-aged. And yet the reflection pleased me.

I slipped into the library.

Johanssen was there, reading his Wall Street Journal. In another island of light, Emlyn McCarron sat over a chessboard opposite Peter Andrews. McCarron was and is a cadaverous man, possessed of a narrow, bladelike nose; Andrews was huge, slope-shouldered, and choleric. A vast ginger-colored beard sprayed over his vest. Face to face over the inlaid board with its carved pieces of ivory and ebony, they looked like Indian totems: eagle and bear.

Waterhouse was there, frowning over that day’s Times. He glanced up, nodded at me without surprise, and disappeared into the paper again.