Boomfell

I.
In September, which to him had always meant the fresh start of a new year, Boomfell sold his first house for Odyssey, and on a Saturday night, in the grip of a prodigal mood, he took his wife to Cyrano's. The bar was a narrow room of facing mirrors: old wood, brass, cut-glass chandeliers--crawling, Val whispered, with undaunted graying couples expensively turned out as befit Cyrano's on a Saturday night. Boomfell was slightly wrinkled and out of season in his weathered corduroy jacket, while through a throng of men sporting blazers, pinstripe, the odd seersucker, he possessively--one hand on the small of Val's back--steered his pretty companion. In black pants and the new lavender blouse she shared with their daughter, Val stood out. Men, Boomfell noticed, noticed her. They wedged themselves between women on stools and Boomfell raised his hand for drinks.
"Let's relax, all right."
Shy of surprises, Val wished she'd been told where they were going. Cyrano's made her feel out of it. "And you." She gave him the once-over, shaking her head at the sight of Boomfell. "Pitch this thing, Charlie." She tugged the sleeve of his jacket--more than ten years old, the dingy color of a good mustard. "You'd think you were out to shoot grouse."
"To put it solemnly, this is a special occasion. One guess."
Val correctly guessed the farmhouse in Northfield. She was pleased, of course. Then, as she looked at him, her clear eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "Charles Boomfell," she said,as if recalling that name from the past. "Who would have thought?"
For years now they'd been managing on Val's income and Boomfell's haphazard jobs, waiting for something to give. He'd painted houses, he'd worked in Archangel's Bookshop and had served as soup-and-salad chef at the Uncommon Kitchen; he'd cut cordwood for a season and had tutored high school students preparing for their SATs--anything to avoid the likes of what he was doing now. Nothing happened. No one was interested in Revisions, his free verse epic of daily life. Everybody says boring, Phoebe Orlando reported long-distance. She was a tax attorney who had set herself up as a literary agent after failing to find lawyer's work in New York City. Boomfell had been given her name by Archangel's writer-friend at the New School. Personally I can get into it in a certain mood, she said, but, Charles, you can't expect people to sit still for this kind of stuff anymore. And his first book, Disillusions, brought out by Painted Desert Press, the short-lived Southwestern outfit that had offered him vital encouragement at a difficult time, hadn't it disappeared like smoke? Like smoke signals, cracked the tax expert. He thanked her for her efforts on his behalf. Phoebe Orlando! From the beginning he had found her name hard to believe.
For two years he'd been trying, haltingly, to write his way into something new. Val was loyal--she wouldn't be the one to say quit--yet this, he saw, was more plausible to her: the sale of a farmhouse to a potter for ninety-six five.
The stress of futile labors, borne just so long, had suddenly become insupportable. The worried crease between Val's eyes had deepened so that now she often seemed to be anxiously--or angrily--frowning. Their daughter, Ruth, at present lost in the thralldom of erratic teenage life, began making judgments out loud about her parents' life. The cost of everything went up every time you turned around. One night in February, alone with a bottle of wine, Boomfell read The Summing Up,Maugham's bitter turn at truth telling. There was a sentence in that thin volume that oppressed his conscience and pierced his confidence. Under cover of darkness, stealthily as it were, he did what was necessary--read the book, took the test--to get a license to sell real estate. Briefly he had attended classes, seated at a little red plastic desk in the fluorescent glare of the ten-year-old community college classroom, numbered amongst the very sort of hapless halfhearted drudges--bored, all but burned out on the allure of betterment--who had haunted the night classes in Freshman English it had once been his duty to teach. That experience had proved so disturbing he couldn't even share it with his wife and at least let off the steam of his humiliation, so discomposing that during this period and for months afterward he had been unable to read--even lightweight contemporary novels, even Samuel Pepys, his hero of the moment, even The Yearling, which he had been reading aloud to Ben all winter. Boomfell unable to read had begun to feel like Boomfell unable to be.
Several months later he called Louis Weisman at the Odyssey Realty Company looking for a game of tennis. Weisman got him the job. Boomfell's friend seemed to feel, What else is new? In one way or another, for whatever reasons, everyone seemed to be kissing illusions good-bye. I've never had any illusions, said Boomfell. Weisman winked: You do now, Charlie.
"I'm glad Muler got it," he said. At first the bank had been reluctant to give the potter a mortgage. "He loves the place and he knows what he's doing. He won't ruin it."
"It's a dream," said Val. "Northfield is beautiful.
If things had gone differently, the sequestered farmhouse in the remote hill town was the kind of place they would have liked for themselves. That was one theory of happiness.
I didn't know you could get a life out of pots, he'd said to Muler. They were on the front porch, checking out the view that went with the property. From here, facing north, youwere on top of the world: hazy mountains piled up in successive shades of gray, blue, violet. The meadow sloping before them, bounded by woods, was deep green and featured an oak as old as the stone walls. Muler was a man in his forties with a ponytail, and four children under ten. It's what I do, he said, that's all there is to it. His tone was defiant, and unfriendly. I admire your perseverance, Boomfell told him. Muler said, Don't bother. Let the potter be happy hidden away in the hills with his pauper's pride, his garden, his wood-burning stove--in the house Boomfell had sold him. Tonight Boomfell was determined to enjoy a taste of ordinary indulgent pleasure at Cyrano's.
"Forget the men," said Val. "Look at the wives. Can women want to stand around looking like this in these hairdos, how-doing each other to death? Is that what I get to be in twenty years if you make big money in real estate, Charlie? One of these fluffy, puffed-up ladies no one listens to." Boy, she added, the drink was going straight to her head.
Boomfell watched her in the mirror behind the bar--a receding series of Vals--as, with eyes closed and chin up, she drew her hair back from her face with both hands. The gesture had a startling effect on him, as if he had been tapped on the shoulder just then in Cyrano's and had turned to face an old girlfriend from fifteen years and thousands of miles ago, whose existence, until that moment, he had forgotten. Unexpected desire, an old friend always welcome, began to swell in Boomfell from a neglected source of deep strong feeling for his wife.
If he made big money in real estate, he told her, he would buy her a hot fudge sundae with extra whipped cream and two cherries. How did that sound? And Boomfell, impetuously seizing the memory that had come to mind, recalled their long walks through the city and along the river to his tiny, tawdry apartment on Marlborough Street, where they would slide the twin beds together and pull the shades. How did his shy studious roommate, Freddie Ray, silently endure theirirrepressible laughter, the invariable wall-banging wrestling match that was their clumsy athletic push-and-shove version of--innocent word!--foreplay. Then, life was foreplay. "Sunday afternoons in the Gardner Museum, Val. My balls used to ache." Boomfell rarely went in for such nostalgic rhapsodizing with his wife or anyone else. Generally, he didn't regard the Boomfell of those years, his young know-nothing self, with much generosity or affection. Just now, he did. "Isn't it incredible, Freddie Ray turned out to be gay."
Yet Val, if she was listening at all, hardly seemed susceptible to Boomfell's rendition of student romance. She was far more interested in the Saturday nightlife of Cyrano's as reflected in the mirror behind the bar. She was looking hard at something there, and then she turned toward the busy room, boosted herself on tiptoe, craning her neck to see over the crowd.
"Charlie," she said, and tugged his sleeve. "I could have sworn ..." She pointed. "Doesn't that man by the framed mirror look the spit and image of Eliot Singer?"




Poor Singer had been the only friend to remain at the university where Boomfell, along with a dozen other casualties in humanities, had left off seven years before. (Had it been that long? Seven years?) Friday nights they would get together and deplore their state of affairs--the ignorance and incompetence of students and certain colleagues, the tedium of teachers' chores such as grading exams and attending faculty meetings--and these typical beery sessions of faultfinding formed the basis of their friendship. But while Boomfell did little to ingratiate himself in that small world--what could he do?--clever Singer guarded his ass, coyly courted the right people, volunteered for committees, flattered wives at parties to which out-of-it Boomfell was seldom invited, and generally demonstrated a sparky interest in his job. He distributed numerousmemoranda on pink paper pertaining to matters in and out of the department. He made a point of dropping in on older faculty members for advice, saw to it that people of so-called consequence received copies of his papers on Swift, Dryden, and Pope, submitted course syllabi to his chairman for approval, and was an occasional contributor to the school newspaper. Singer, Boomfell noticed, skillfully adopted a balanced position concerning controversial matters, which permitted him to side with most sides. He sent UNICEF greeting cards to a long list of people it behooved him to remember during the holiday season, and received numerous holiday greetings in return. Singer devoted days and weeks to maintaining useful correspondences, composing lengthy applications, dreaming up long-range projects, and in this way wangled helpful contacts and managed to weasel his way into research grants and expense-paid conferences to San Francisco, New York City, New Orleans, England. Apart from Boomfell, Boomfell soon realized, Singer only formed personal relationships with people he might meet along the steep uphill path of anticipated promotion. All in all, Boomfell often reminded himself, he only did what any able ambitious young man would do in order to become a full-fledged and respected member of his profession.
Yet, while he shrewdly and steadfastly careered ahead according to his own daily schedule of set goals, Singer never spoke of any of this to Boomfell, but continued to come around Friday nights and deride the colleagues who coddled him, mock the meetings he never missed, dismiss his duties as trivial, and agree wholeheartedly with Boomfell that it was all a waste of precious time and that the only way to make the best of a bad situation was to sit tight and do your work. I admire that, said sad Singer, propped on an elbow, his enormous hand concealing half of his long sallow face. If there was any justice, the poet's single-minded devotion to his task was bound to pay off.
His successes filtered down to Boomfell indirectly, as faits accomplis, and if Boomfell brought up such matters (I hear you've become a tenured one of the boys, Eliot. Nice going), Singer would respond with a casual contempt for his own good fortune (yes, it seems I may be able to remain in this hole forever. Maybe mediocrity is my niche), as if he and Boomfell agreed that Boomfell's precarious and untenable position was an enviable one. During his second year Singer's much revised dissertation on Swift was accepted for publication by the University of Chicago Press (but what is the point, he replied to Boomfell's enthusiastic congratulations, of a book that will be hastily read by a handful of dullards for the sole purpose of pointing out its shortcomings amongst themselves and putting their hollow competitive fears to rest), one of its chapters was delivered at the winter meeting of the MLA, and the author was promoted to associate professor.
At school Boomfell only saw Singer in passing, particularly after the second year, and it gradually became clear--at lunch in the faculty club one of the few times Boomfell set foot there, in the lobby of the library following a lecture on black holes, in the corridor between classes--that in the company of his staid colleagues, Singer really did not like his Friday-night friend lurking familiarly over his shoulder with knowing winks and wry wisecracks. At such awkward moments, Singer addressed Boomfell in the distant polite tone reserved for strangers or persons whose cheerful advances were not to be encouraged. So, all passion spent, hey, Eliot? leered Boomfell at the reception that followed a faculty reading of Samson Agonistes, in which Lantini was Samson and Singer was Samson's father. Maybe fifty people had shown up. Just insane, was what Boomfell thought of the whole charade. Insane and hilarious. Singer was unapproachable. Why, good evening, Charles, how have you been?
That bizarre performance was also insane and hilarious and memorable, especially memorable to Boomfell, because of thepresence onstage--in a black skirt and white blouse--of Wanda Gwertz, the cellist, who accompanied the actors at rather random intervals with fragments from a Bach suite. Presumably it was hoped that a touch of music would give the deadening affair the illusion of life. Wanda Gwertz was the reason Boomfell endured such nonsense at all. She was his maiden voyage, as he thought of it in retrospect, through the straits of adultery, which led from the safe becalmed bay of marriage to the treacherously open seas of obsession, humiliation, and after Wanda, other women. Rhymes with Kurtz, he once joked to her, never imagining the darkness he would discover within Boomfell as a result of their yearlong entanglement. Samson Agonistes was the occasion that introduced Wanda Gwertz to Boomfell's sometime friend, Singer.
Val forthrightly scorned the man and considered each and every Singer accomplishment a matter of wheedling, worming, or weaseling his way, rather than the result of intelligence and diligence. Why does he come over here, Charlie? Why do you sit up with him until one o'clock in the morning? If he thought you were competition, he'd knife you in the back at the drop of a hat. I enjoy him, Boomfell stated simply. Singer was smart, for one thing--one of the few people whose thoughts on poets and the presidency, movies or school gossip, gave Boomfell pleasure. Furthermore, their first year at the school together, Singer was the closest thing Boomfell had to a friend. Saturday mornings they would meet in Lovejoy, the only two people working in their offices on the weekends. Saturday afternoons they would get together for tennis, soccer if it was fall, or in the springtime of the first two years, the rejuvenating thrill of intramural softball (the one redeeming joy, Singer said, of being born American). He's only doing what he believes is expected of him, Boomfell said to his wife in Singer's defense, and the truth is he's good at it.
But Singer's friendship was puzzling and Boomfell had been unable to decide whether Singer had chosen him to behis privileged confidant as he maneuvered ahead, or whether Eliot Singer somehow imagined that Charles Boomfell might someday be useful to know. His motive in maintaining the relationship might have been something else altogether, or there may have been no motive at all. Maybe Singer likes me, he once suggested to his wife. Eventually the Friday-night visits fell off, which was all right with Boomfell, and by Boomfell's fifth and final year at the school he only saw Singer by chance, at a distance.
Even after they had moved, however, and put that life behind them, the Boomfells still received a UNICEF card each year, one week after Christmas, in which the scholar still wittily belittled his drone's life of joyless toil and concluded with self-deprecating allusions to some work in progress, each card bearing the postmark of a different distant city--thus keeping Boomfell abreast of his successful career. One year he alluded to a wife, almost parenthetically, as if this remarkable news could be of no interest to them. And in fact a married Singer had no reality for Boomfell whatsoever. In memory, the man remained a bachelor.
For his part, Boomfell didn't answer these glad tidings, and with each passing year he was slightly more surprised to find, amongst his Christmas bills, the envelope bearing Singer's unmistakable calligraphy. Such persistence was annoying as well as mysterious.




Yes, at a glance this might have been Singer. Black ringlets on his neck, the cavalier mustache Eliot had grown in the third year, a svelte jacket the color of a plum. Boomfell could imagine Singer in this jacket without any trouble at all. Grinning too pleasantly, he surmised, at whatever the people with him could be saying. But what brought his former colleague most to mind was the man's stooped posture. Towering Singer slouched like a humpbacked lady who had grown up trying tokeep big breasts a secret--as if he had never been comfortable with his imposing height.
"You know it's not altogether unlikely," said Boomfell. "Wouldn't he love to be teaching at one of the schools around here?"
But no--good Lord!--this in fact was not Eliot Singer sauntering into Cyrano's right out of nowhere. Only Boomfell knew his unpleasant excitement at the prospect. Singer he wouldn't want to see.
"When I think of Singer," said Val, "I think of long white feet with blue veins. Isn't that strange?" She shuddered.
These, in fact, were the unforgettable feet that had made their appearance the August evening fastidious Singer surprisingly showed up at Boomfell's back door in a blue oxford shirt, clean khaki shorts, and new, rather Roman-looking sandals--to say good-bye.
"Poor Singer."
"There was nothing poor about him," she said. "I wonder who he married. That would be interesting."
Singer's life as a man had always been an obscure matter. With two or three brief lapses--unforgettably, for Boomfell, Wanda Gwertz--Singer seemed, almost seemed, above the fervent fiddle-faddle of everyone's main joy and desire. No one was above it, Boomfell believed, a monadnock monumentally upthrust amongst the various ranges of the inside self, the cloud-covered peak never to be reached. For a while he imagined Singer lived in the grip of a profound never-to-bloom latency--like Freddie Ray. Or maybe here was a living example of textbook sublimation, Singer's overpowering ambition drying up healthy appetites. Maybe the poor son of a bitch, damaged in childhood, tossed and turned in an ongoing nightmare of sexual repression, his bachelor's apartment an onanist's fantastic lair. But frankly none of that fit Singer. Certainly, religion had nothing to do with his monkish disposition. No, Boomfell said to Val, you never knew what arrangementsSinger had made to satisfy or silence the overbearing boy between his legs.
His wife was not amused. She was frowning. She glanced behind her as if to see who might hear what she was about to say, then, pouting thoughtfully, she looked at Boomfell. "He wanted to go to bed with me. Did you know that?"
Boomfell laughed. That shy phrase--"go to bed"--was funny. The solemn heavy-duty expression on Val's face was funny.
"I'm serious."
"Lantini and Dean Reilley wouldn't have approved," he told her.
"Skip it."
Pressed against his wife in the warm crush of the crowded bar, Boomfell went on evoking the old days: Bagels from Ken's, shared first love of Ulysses, their single monthlong breakup, love letters by Boomfell, long Sunday afternoons playing with their genitals as if these private parts were amusing and fascinating pets.
"He was really far more interested in flirting with me than he was in discussing all that academic abracadabra with you. Eliot could be damned charming, Charlie. He charmed the pants off everyone there, including you."
"Forget Eliot Singer. God, we were innocents," Boomfell persisted. "Fellatio might as well have been the name of Romeo's friend."
"Ssh. I'm telling you something. Do you want to hear it or not? I was washing the dishes and he was standing against the stove watching me and he started telling me what an attractive woman I was. My hands were this and my hair was that and my eyes were something or other and how comely I was in this ratty old corduroy jumper I had on. You weren't home. It was Friday night and you took Ruth sliding or something. He was very sure of himself He said he hadn't met an interesting woman since he'd gotten there. I was interesting, right? Icould feel him watching me as I did the dishes. He made that huge fire, remember?"
This was a night--now that you mention it--that Boomfell remembered well. There had been a fire on the ice. The waterfall was frozen. He and Ruth held hands and drifted along the perimeter of the pond while young boys recklessly displayed their flash and flair. His daughter, new to skating, was a penguin in her snowsuit, cautiously jerking along with short abrupt strokes. One time Boomfell stayed behind by the fire while she determinedly scuttled off on her own. The band of boys flew by. He lost sight of her in the dark, the shadows of trees, amongst other skaters, and he was momentarily alarmed to an extent the circumstances hardly warranted--as if his little Ruth had skated out of his life.
At home the lights were out in the front rooms of the house, and from the car Boomfell could see a writhing forest of flames reflected on the white living room wall. The freezing air outside was redolent with wood smoke. Entering through the front door, arms full with Ruth, skates, a bag of beer, Boomfell found himself intruding upon a silent scene. Singer, settled back in the Boston rocker with a pipe in his mouth, and Val, snug in a corner of the couch with her stockinged feet cozily tucked up under her, were both staring into the hazardously large fire as if, Boomfell recalled clearly, they'd just received some sobering news. Warm enough, everyone? Val took Ruth off to bed and didn't return. Boomfell opened a window to let heat escape. Singer said in effect, Charles, I have something to tell you. Boomfell said, Let me get a drink first. That's real winter out there tonight, Eliot. When he returned to the room, Singer began talking about energy, the practicality of the wood-burning stove compared to the far less efficient yet elemental open fire. Ideally, one would want both. So, what's up? Boomfell asked. Oh, I've just been sitting here quietly tending the fire and tying one on against your return. However, Singer was not the least bit drunk. The following morningVal complained that he had wasted her evening. She wanted to read, but he wouldn't go home. Boomfell remembered the book she'd been reading at the time: Emma, a blue-green paperback. He remembered her grungy green corduroy jumper.
"Ruth and I didn't go sliding. We went ice-skating. At Slade's Pond."
"It had been a long time--forever--since someone had talked to me like that. He was getting all turned on while I'm standing there with my hands in the sink. My head was spinning."
"Remember Ruth's blue snowsuit with the weird frosty reindeer? God, she was gorgeous. You don't think you're ever going to forget, but you do forget. That little person is no longer with us, Val; she's gone. Yesterday she went out of the house looking like a bona fide woman. She's mad at me because we aren't taking a sabbatical to England or France or New Guinea like half her friends. He tipped up his whiskey."Singer could have burned the house down that night."
"I didn't see it coming at all. I didn't see Eliot Singer that way. He was very frank and relaxed about it. He thought we'd have a nice time. We should try it out." She paused, then asked, as if putting the question to herself, "Why haven't I told you this before?" She sipped her drink. "When do we get to eat around here, Charlie? I won't be able to taste the food."
"That lonely bastard," said Boomfell. "Not even one consoling kiss on the couch, Val?"
"It wasn't a joke. I thought about it a lot afterward. Eliot was intriguing. I thought he looked like a tall Thoreau, odd but appealing." Val encircled her tan wrist with clean slender fingers. "He had huge hands."
"Then, why not? You wanted to. Later you wished you had."
"Because of what you've done to me in this marriage probably. I couldn't go out and meet someone if my life depended on it."
This, however, was not a welcome turn in the conversation. He didn't want their big night at Cyrano's to become an occasion to air grievances. "Come on," said Boomfell. "I'm kidding. Why are we getting into this at all, an insignificant flirtation ten years old? I was on another track altogether. Marlborough Street in the sixties."
"It wasn't insignificant."
In the mirror the tall man who had put them in mind of his former friend raised his arms with animation--the climax of his story, thought Boomfell. His friends of the evening, an attractive older couple, laughed. Grand time at Cyrano's, examples of wit, tidbits of gossip, genial argument, intimations of desire, hints of larger issues in the backs of our minds. Our thin human fun, he thought. The man was handsomely balding. When Boomfell looked away from them, he met his wife's eyes observing him in the mirror. Her serious eyes.
"All right, then you might as well know, Charlie." She permitted this new note to resonate, as it were, in the suspended air of the barroom. "I did have a thing with him." Pouting, Val looked into the icy suds of her piña colada and began to stir with her straw. "When I saw that man come in, I had an impulse to tell you about it because it just doesn't mean anything to me anymore. The whole thing is so far away. Then I decided there wasn't any point. Now I've told you. So."
Boomfell pleasantly grinning.
"Don't ask me any questions because I'm not going to talk about it. Period."
"He used to ask Hyde for advice just to humor him--old folded-up senile Hyde, who happened to head the tenure and promotions committee. Lantini, with his high blood pressure and his bad back, rode a bike every day, so Eliot went out and bought a bike, and they could be seen, Singer and Lantini, riding their bikes to school together in their tweed jackets and striped ties and funny little phony berets. He actually bought a beret, Valerie, except Lantini's was blue and Singer's wasblack. Oh my God. He used to avoid me in the halls--at concerts and lectures he didn't know me. Samson Agonistes, Val. Samson Agonistes. And here's a detail I'll never forget, all right. I'm in the outer room waiting to see Lantini, who has summoned me to discuss my future, and who should I hear in his office with him but Singer, Val, right. They're flirting away in there like they're on a date. Singer has him purring with gentle laughter in the palm of his hand. And then I hear Lantini saying, Now, our Charles Boomfell is a mysterious fellow, Eliot. I'm sure you know him as well as any of us. What's this I hear about a book? And Eliot Singer, who had seen my manuscript in the flesh and was one of the few people I'd ever made the mistake of talking about it with--Val, do you know what he said? I wouldn't be the one to ask, Walter, I rarely see Boomfell. There are those who wonder if such a book exists. I left the room in shock. I never kept the appointment with Lantini. For shame. There are those who wonder if such a book exists, Val, which is simply another way of saying there are those who wonder if Charles Boomfell exists. Right? And on top of everything, he had those feet with the toenails. Right?"
During Boomfell's speech Val watched the bartender mix drinks. Nor did she look at him now. "Does Charles Boomfell exist now, Charlie? You just sold your first house." Glancing up into the mirror, she added, "Believe it or not, I believed in you."
"Once? Twice? What?"
"I don't know. Friday mornings for a while." Her initial anxiety, if that's what it was, had given way to an air of bored indifference. "I thought he liked you. I wouldn't have done it if he didn't like you." She turned to him and gave the lapel of his corduroy jacket an impatient yank. "The lumberjack. Boomfell the bumpkin. I don't know why he said that to Lantini. You should have asked him."
"For a while?" he asked. "How long?"
But she wasn't giving any clues to the chronology or the duration, or to the reality, of the affair--the thing--between Eliot Singer and herself. "See, I shouldn't have told you. I'm not going to say another word about it." She was going to the women's room.
"Well, was it okay?" Boomfell took her arm to detain her, and bore down upon his wife with a look of some urgency. "Was it fun?"
"Don't bully me. I know what you were up to with God knows who."
"But fun, Val. Our friend Singer wouldn't be my idea of fun."
"Right, I made it up, Charlie. Don't believe me." She freed her arm. "I'll tell you one thing, which I know interests you a great deal."
"Shoot."
"It," said Val, and she held up her index fingers as if this were a fish story, "was unreal."
Boomfell watched her cut her way through the packed room to the arched doorway. Singer's double touched her back as he let her by, then Val's bright blouse was lost in the dim light and the crowd and the dazzling mirrors of Cyrano's. Good-bye.
You can't imagine how remote and out of reach this seems to me, Singer once said to Boomfell following a scene of domestic peace and order in which adorable Ruth and Ben had kissed their father good night, kissed their father's strange giant visitor good night, and been led off to bed by their pleased, pretty mother. If I envied you anything, Boomfell, sad Singer had said, it would be this. With his large hand he gestured to the walls and ceiling of the room where they sat, to this house, Boomfell's home, to this whole heart of the family man's life.
Forgetting himself in Cyrano's, Boomfell groaned.


He remembered looking up from the puzzling and unpleasant realization of another checkmate, from the evening's secondgame of chess and his second defeat, to find Singer watching him with nothing of the victor's predictable air of irrepressible triumph, but rather gloomily, shruggingly, as if to say, Sorry, I wish you could have won. The sting of Singer's weary superior refusal when Boomfell pleaded in vain for a third game stung more now, some ten or eleven years later. How about one more game, Eliot, just one more? Not tonight, Charlie.
The hollow courtesy with which Val and Singer had always greeted each other, Boomfell had always interpreted that as an untested yet tacit antipathy. Val would excuse herself for the night ten minutes after their guest had shown up and Boomfell would be left to explain: She's been on the go since early this morning, Eliot, don't take it personally. God love us!
He remembered a discussion of Madame Bovary--mon dieu!--in which he had long-windedly argued against Singer's too sympathetic view of Charles, that pathetic fool, until at last a bored Singer came to his feet--it was late; he had to get to bed--and told him that he considered the whole matter academic and really didn't give a damn about any of the characters in that perfect book. It was the sentences that interested him. He had placed his hand on Boomfell's shoulder. Why had this stuck with him?
A great deal of Singer had stuck with him--his morose good looks, his astute silences and shrewd asides. Boomfell could recall a discussion of divorce in which he had boasted the mettle of his own tempered marriage--still kids back then, for crying out loud!--while this expert on eighteenth-century English literature sat with legs crossed, and nodded, grunted, grinned. In his unbearable black beret.
But if Singer had known his wife, so to speak, why then should Boomfell feel known? If he had in fact fucked and fondled Val Friday mornings for a while, why should Boomfell feel defenseless and found out? He did, he did. Eliot Singer--Boomfell's secret sharer! This seemed far worse at the moment than the mere licks and moans of adultery. Once Boomfell hadread to Singer from his manuscript, nothing he did easily. Singer smiled, unforgettably, and said, Not bad.
There are those who wonder if such a book exists. His visits had stopped at that point, but when Singer unexpectedly dropped in on them the following August, Boomfell welcomed him as cheerfully as ever, and listened as sympathetically as ever to the new professor's most recent complaints and the continuing chronicle, both comical and cruel, of Lantini's fatuous ways. Just as if revelation of that remark had not occurred. No, he wouldn't give Singer a cold shoulder at this stage of the game and, along with it, the satisfaction of attributing such last-minute hostility to a Boomfell case of sour grapes now that Boomfell was on the way out. No, he'd be a good sport and leave Singer answerable, where Boomfell was concerned, to his own conscience. Laugh, everyone. Laugh and spit.
Wasn't it mammoth gall to have come by at all? They'd already begun packing; labeled boxes were stacked in the living room. There, towering above them in his new sandals, and tanned as a cheerleader, Singer took down their new address in his little notebook and slipped it into the back pocket of his khaki shorts. He capped his fountain pen and clipped it to his shirtfront, Boomfell recalled, seizing upon every detail with pale fire. In no time, Singer told them, you'll have put these years behind you--unlike me. (Just as if, in those jobless days of rising inflation, it had been Boomfell's good fortune to be fired.) The man added, Maybe I'll get down that way to see you one day. Extending his hand to Val--his hand!--he said, Well, I guess this is it. Val stepped up on tiptoe and placed her hands on his broad shoulders to bestow one quick kiss. Without further ado, she left the room. At the time Boomfell only imagined it had been a distasteful duty for her, performed with such dispatch. He had imagined she was as impatient and fed up with Eliot Singer's pomposity and presumption as he was.
Boomfell, Boomfell, Boomfell.
The author of "Swift and Stella: Speculations on a Secret"--Boomfell still had his signed copy of the article somewhere--then turned to his former colleague and they shook hands. Oh, one last thing if it isn't too much trouble, he said. I believe I lent you my Hero with a Thousand Faces at one point. Voilà: the point of Singer's eleventh-hour call. Yes, yes, yes, chirped Boomfell. Of course; no trouble. He scrambled to the basement and found the oversize paperback amongst a stack of unpacked National Geographics and Ranger Ricks. Boomfell had borrowed it at Singer's insistence--a must, Charlie--at least two years before. Ah, you do have it, said Singer. So I thought.
Outside on the front steps he placed his hand on Boomfell's shoulder for the last time. His height endowed Singer with a patronizing and sometimes patriarchal manner. Now look, Charlie, don't vanish on us forever. Let's keep in touch. If you ever have any longing for this place, just remember the winters--and think of your unfortunate friend.
Take care, Eliot.
Boomfell watched him walk across the lawn to his white Raleigh ten-speed, which stood against the ten-foot birch tree he and Val had planted two years before. Tall, stoop-shouldered, glum. He was an incongruous giant, all arms and legs, on the elevated racing seat, slenderly hunched over the curled handlebars: a sublime praying mantis. Without looking back, the cyclist raised his arm as he glided down the slight grade. Boomfell waved back, although Singer wasn't looking, and he was touched, despite himself, as his Friday-night friend rounded the bend in the road and disappeared from view.
Maybe he likes me, Val, in his own way. Wince!
God yes, a great deal of Singer had stuck with him. Not to mention, for instance, the lonely nightlong vigil the lowly Boomfell kept outside a tiny rented house, huddled in bushes, waiting for Singer's faded Plymouth Fury to leave--not to mention, that is, the blond cellist from California, WandaGwertz. No, thought Boomfell, shutting his eyes to the slide show of trite repellent scenes featuring Singer, Gwertz, and Boomfell, which had switched on at the back of his brain. Not tonight.
Quite by accident, via these egoist's worries, he stumbled upon the question of his wife's needs. What loneliness, longing, and neglect ...? But when he took two minutes to sift through highlights of those years--their first house, its view, Val's vigils and marches, the blizzard, Ben's mysterious flu, the death of Grandma Welsh, their first canoe--it seemed to Boomfell that if ever there had been a mellow plateau in the course of their married life, that was it, despite, for instance, the Gwertz episode. Nestled, no less, in a rural countryside changing with the seasons like scenes out of a Grandma Moses calendar, that had been the period of their life--believe it or not, I believed in you--when he and Val had come closer than ever before (or since) to what he would have dared to call--oh word!--happiness.
Thanks in part to Eliot Singer, everyone? Your weaseling, wheedling, worming Singer? He even complained about our beloved pastoral countryside, Val. Nature annoyed him. He was indifferent to fields and streams, irritated by cows and farmers, afraid of dogs and the dark. He hated weather, for the love of God--wind, rain, cold, heat. When Val, holding back a tear, told him the story of their terrier's tragic death by snowplow, Singer was holding back a smile. Each detail of country life only contributed to his constant lament for his lost New York City--a sob story poured out to no one but Boomfell. Lantini, a city boy himself, turned country gentleman, would have been surprised to know that Eliot intended to abandon them and unspoiled beauty at the first decent opportunity.
No, she couldn't have done it, not with someone who didn't care whether birds and ladybugs lived or died. Or if she could have done it after all, she never could have concealed it so well, with such a seasoned deceiver's ease and skill and scorn ofspouse. Of course not. Not to have picked up one filthy hint of anything the whole time, how could that have been possible? Oh, good joke, sweetheart. The very night of our little celebration. You carried it off with real class. But why wasn't Boomfell laughing? Because the mood and manner of her off-the-cuff confession had been altogether convincing, was why. Because he knew her--she was his wife--and he knew when she was not joking.
Walking home one evening through new snow, briefcase in hand, he entered their warm welcoming kitchen to be greeted by the garlicky aroma of roasting lamb, his favorite meal, and then, more rare, the happy hug of a radiant rosy-cheeked wife. Charlie, you're home! Livelier, prettier, yes, cheerier than ever. The day had been a Friday. For Boomfell also remembered--trudging down memory lane in spite of himself--that the next morning, Saturday, the whole smiling family had gone sledding down a favorite hill not at all far from their house. Four Boomfells bundled up together on the Boomfell sled, caroling hoots and hurrahs as they flew down an ideal hill on a picture-perfect morning. Happier than ever, Val.
See, I shouldn't have told you.




In the room-length mirror behind the bar, reflecting everything, he was the glaring example of a person out of place, out of season, out of sorts. Does Charles Boomfell exist now?
A dozen stools from where he stood Boomfell spotted anyone's idea, he thought, of an attractive young woman alone on a Saturday night, bravely waiting for something to happen. He held his drink above his head and made his way to her side.
"Hi."
"You know I've never even been picked up, Charlie. I don't even know what that's like."
For the first time in years, Boomfell found himself observing his wife as he would any woman. She hadn't worn abra, he supposed, in years, and yet in a sense--in the sense of desire--he hadn't noticed. Val had applied gloss to her lips. Just on the line of her jaw, an inch below her left earlobe, all but concealed by makeup: a small mole. It had always been there. In the gentle light of Cyrano's, the lines in Val's face didn't amount to anything worth worrying about. Boomfell considered her capable beaten-up hands: a ten-dollar wedding ring.
Dormant lust for his wife, swelling in Boomfell earlier, now made him bold and, huddled over her, he began to recount joys of sex drawn from their real life. Dirty talk Boomfell wouldn't have expressed to anyone but Val and, even then, in only the most uncommon and unaccountable mood of shared lewdness. He praised the feast of her femaleness, lavishing laughable alliterative language on the various edibles of her anatomy. He recalled their delayed discovery, after years of marriage, of hitherto forbidden orifices, which had temporarily turned them into two venturous virgins again. Once, at the licentious urging of Boomfell's blue language, not unlike his present prompting, Val succumbed to unnatural acts with a vegetable from the garden while a breathless Boomfell watched from across the room like a drugged ape.
"That turns me off," said Val, "not on." He was being abusive. "Describe me savoring a piece of salmon, Charlie, if you want to be titillating."
Boomfell persisted, pestering his wife's ear with nonsense, and a little premarital scene in the woods, in which Boomfell happened to recall schoolgirlish knee socks, a pleated wool skirt, a handmade cabled sweater, as well as the joy and difficulty of making it against a tree, something in this moment seemed to take hold and Val didn't tell him to stop as he stammered to recapture the slippery thrill and urgency of that awkward upright maneuver. Like trying to hold broken eggs in your bare hands without spilling ... . But his hold onthe erotic began to slip and the focus on the merely physical became blurred as the context of their walk in the woods came back.
It had been Thanksgiving at Grandma Welsh's, Val's little old sharp-as-a-tack grandmother, and the first holiday Boomfell had spent amongst Val's large holiday-spirited family. By three-thirty the eating was over. Now I can die, Grandma Welsh declared. Everyone was "stuffed," and "adjourned" to the stuffy living room. In their warm sated state, half the holiday company dozed off in old slipcovered furniture while afternoon shadows lengthened along Grandma Welsh's Oriental rug and the band of roving cousins raised cries of play outside. Boomfell, the family guest, as stuffed and warm as the rest, endeavored to present an interested face to garrulous Uncle Guy, who held forth on unions, Jews, new cars. Bursting, that's all, with stopped-up longing that had been building for days, coming to a head all morning during his three-hour drive to the country. Just aching for this schoolgirl on the couch in the wool skirt and furry sweater whom he hadn't seen for a week, hadn't been alone with yet all day, and who had now abandoned him altogether for her older and plainer sister, her manipulative mother, her boring elderly aunt.
"Remember?"
"Yes."
Drowsy numbness overtook stuffed warm Boomfell at last, and when he least expected it, his hand was plucked from his lap and this smiling wide-awake anthropology major he'd known for two months or so was asking him if he'd like to take a walk. Oh, I guess so. Just suffocating, everyone, with want. I'll show you my favorite tree. Endearing Grandma Welsh, "tipsy" by now, her stockings rolled down around her ankles, said, My tree my arse; you haven't been back in those woods for years. General laughter. Can I come? asked a little cousin. Why don't you stay here, chimed the older sister, the mother, the aunt.Was it his obvious lust that commanded such respect? He was a thief stealing out of the room with her.
"We were kids. Babies."
"You wrote me that letter," said Val. "I thought it was great."
Then the beautiful air, crisp as an apple, bare trees, dead fragrant leaves, and the edgy oozy excitement of being stuffed with Thanksgiving dinner plus puffed up with desire for this warm near person. The cheers of children hounded them across the lawn. They strolled into the woods behind the house--oh, casually--as though they themselves could not have dreamed that the tender picture they made kicking up leaves would become, at first touch, a torrid X-rated scene of clinging and clawing containing everything: torn underwear, helpless animal sounds. The sky behind the bare trees was the color of bittersweet. There, Val said, is that a tree or not?
Then--and now--Boomfell placed his hand on Val's shoulder. We can't, darling ... really, the kids. That adult word--darling--which she never used as an adult. But they were already up against the mightiest elm tree Boomfell had ever seen and everything was already under way. And as the young ardent Boomfell begins to spill the eggs and as the present Boomfell began to run out of words again (and then ... remember), Val, his wife, turned her face into his shoulder and placed her hand on his chest just as she had done then (so it seemed), which affecting gesture brought Boomfell all the way back to that memorable late afternoon in the woods behind Grandma Welsh's house.
This was that person!
"My poor little grandmother."
Boomfell felt they had entered a realm, call it, of unlooked-for possibility. When she raised her head--this, he thought, is that person--an old response prompted him to proffer a kiss, which touched an old responsiveness in Val. As of old, Boomfell and wife kissed.
Big deal! But it was a big deal--if not quite the sort of white lightning Henry James employed to strike innocence with knowledge. Expert sex between Boomfell and Val, long since a single-minded, self-serving matter, mastered along tried-and-true lines of mutual give-and-take, didn't involve kissing, even at its abandoned best. They hadn't kissed each other, really, in years. Memory of the feeling flowed back as from another life altogether, and Boomfell recognized that here was the kiss he had always half expected on the occasion of each first kiss with anyone new--the measure of all that desperate hugger-muggery--and the authentic kiss to which no one else's kiss quite measured up.
Valerie Welsh!
His wife drew back to glance at him inquiringly, unsure of herself or Boomfell or the place, then she closed her eyes and this kiss of yesteryear, more novel and exciting in its way than any of the eroticism Boomfell had been drumming up for them--reminiscent, almost, of making love to Valerie Welsh against her favorite tree--momentarily resumed in the barroom intimacy and anonymity of Cyrano's.
Yet even as they partook of this first kiss in years, Boomfell knew--surely Val knew--that this would probably prove to be their last kiss in years as well. If it had once been the real thing, it no longer was. Holding his wife close, he looked into the mirror. Anyone might have taken them for a pair of devil-may-care adulterers set free in a foreign city, rather than, as they appeared to Boomfell at that moment, two lonely, vaguely disappointed people.
Does Charles Boomfell exist now?
The man who at a distance had seemed the spit and image of Eliot Singer reached over them for drinks. No, there was nothing of Singer's intelligence, audacity, or melancholy in this man's face.
"You don't love me anymore," Val said coolly. "You never say so."
Boomfell tipped his ear toward her and asked, as if he hadn't heard, "What?" Her boldness, this daring, stunned him.
With her index finger she traced the outline of his old jacket's crinkled lapel. "I don't think I love you anymore either."
Cyrano's burly host, his voice raised above the general hubbub of the place, announced "Boomfell." Their table was ready.
Before they reached the arched doorway that led from the glitter and noise of the bar to the reserved velvet formality of the dining room, Boomfell caught his wife by the arm and said, just loud enough for her to hear him, "Of course I love you, goddamnit."
"Sure you do."
Guilt and shame and lust were his constant companions. Lust lorded it over the other two, sulking hangers-on who went along kicking the dirt, never having any fun, always whining to get back home. Wandalust. An old Volvo wagon, a certain green, still had the power to make him turn away or, in a more fanciful mood, follow with hungry eyes until the streetlight changed, and the car turned left or right and was lost to view. It was her misfortune to be Boomfell's maiden voyage through the straits of adultery, which led, in this case, to the up-and-down sea of obsession with its squalls of hurt feelings and rejections, its little deserted islands offering fake respite, remorse, more lies, which led ultimately to the halting journey back to the mainland rather than, as they sometimes pretended was possible, a new sunlit shore, white beach beneath emerald hill, where you could live in your skin, there was plenty to eat, and the people were friendly, a place that justified and forgave all the waste and risk of getting there. It was the misfortune of her name--Wanda--to become, for him, something like the pained sound an old man might make stubbing his toe in the dark.
At first sight she was sitting on the carpeted floor of a frugal academic's dowdy family room, holding the slender leg of a harpsichord. She had taken off her red leather shoes. Her stockings were black. The wall-to-wall carpeting was oatmeal. Before the night was over he was sitting on the floor holding hands with her stockinged foot. Under interrogation--intenseBoomfell's mode of conversation in those days--she turned out to be a cellist, new to the music department. She swam, for exercise, and wove rag rugs for relaxation. When he spoke of the happiness of musicians, fluent in their universal language, buoyed above the prevailing muck by ageless works of genius, and the task itself an enviable matter of mastering the possible, she said, Music is dog-eat-dog; I've been killing myself since I was six.
Lost in his libido, he squandered time and energy like an infant. They spent most of the year tugging at one another's crotches at every opportunity, then breaking up and making up, months went up like smoke in banal anguishing almost as stimulating as secret screwing had been. The fun of torment, he wrote in his notebook. She moved three times in six months. Twice, catching up with her on moving day, he helped her cart her single-girl's stuff, an old oak table, an iron bed, her bricks and boards that made a bookcase. A driven man, he sped into the sunset on the arrowlike interstate at blind speeds, not to return until the small hours of the morning, either enraged or elated depending on whether he'd found her in her tiny apartment. One afternoon, following a thunderstorm, he cracked her bedroom door with his fist.
Although she was vain, and pretty in an odd way, it soon became apparent to Boomfell that she contrived to look as plain as possible when he was around. Unwashed hair looped behind large ears, face scrubbed clean of makeup, which in Wanda's case often concealed the rashes and blotches that flared up uncontrollably during periods of stress to mar her fair complexion. Her ugly-duckling strategem amused him. Obsession hungered for imperfections. No one would want this woman--save Boomfell.
One weekend she went to stay with a friend because, she told him with what seemed real alarm, she'd discovered large footprints in the moist tulip bed under her bedroom window. By means of merciless interrogation, poking and proddinguntil she bawled the man's name into Boomfell's wide-eyed face, he learned that she had spent the weekend at the White Horse Inn with Eliot Singer.
Obsession entered a new shameless phase. He spent most of a night returning to her little rented house on Grand Avenue at hour-long intervals, waiting for Singer's faded Plymouth Fury to be gone so he could come tapping at her door to find out what the devil she thought she was doing to him--to Boomfell. Unbelievably, the car didn't leave. Undeniably, it was Singer's car: three missing letters left the rude word MOUTH in chrome on the left-hand corner of the trunk for Boomfell, hour after hour, to read. MOUTH MOUTH MOUTH. Unbearably, by quarter to three, the lights in the house had gone out.
He pounced on pale wan Wanda as she wheeled her three-speed bike into her overgrown backyard the next day. Questioning, reviling, but also kidding around, jokes from Boomfell about Singer's nose, his ass-licking ambition, his humped back, although the night before he'd been beside himself at the thought of this back humped above his smothered Gwertz. In the thick of crisis and hate he could still make her laugh, winning her over again, while he caught a whiff of the sex between them and the thrust of their pillow talk. Once he got his foot in the door it was only a few steps back to the bedroom. Endings followed endings.
She practiced a minimum of four hours a day even on her worst days, even on the worst days of the depressing Boomfell debacle when he could do little more than run--five, ten, fifteen miles--and fret. Wanda, after all, had a career under way. Regularly, she was off to Boston, New York, New Haven, to play in some string ensemble or chamber group, at some festival, some church or university affair. It took years of Ruth's violin lessons, years of subsequent concertgoing, for Boomfell the ignoramus to realize how good she was--very good--and how hard she worked to stay that way.
During the first months of knowing her he would let himself into her house, silent as an assailant if he heard her at work, and sit for half an hour before leaving as unobtrusively as he had come, not wishing to break her concentration. He admired the manly way she straddled her beloved cello with her legs, her square-assed upright posture, her dead-seriousness. The expression on her face--her puckered brow--was something like the expression on her face when he made leisurely love to her. Listening hard to bring something inside out, something outside in. Her fingering was remarkable. Her vibrato could cause vibrations in the pit of his stomach. More than one humid afternoon he had come upon her wearing nothing but a dish towel over her left shoulder as she played. She didn't intend to be enticing. When she practiced, Wanda hardly seemed to know he was there. That was hard to believe--discipline and determination that blocked him out--but it was true. Later on, when to intrude at all would have disturbed her, he stayed away during her customary practice times. Long afterward, even now, he thanked his stars that he had maintained that shred of sanity. There had been days, to be sure, when he could have put his foot through the gleaming back of her priceless instrument, her enviable and unassailable refuge.
At the end of April he and Val went to a faculty recital. The second half of the program was Wanda Gwertz. She wore a simple black dress. Nothing, not even a music stand, stood between her with her cello and the cruel world, it seemed to Boomfell just then. Silence! he wanted to shout as the restless audience settled down. Marilyn Reilley clicked down the aisle, late from her intermission smoke; he could have wrung her simpleton's neck.
The first note caused his gut to jump. He was as nervous as he had been the first time little Ruth performed her dizzying Suzuki solo, "Perpetual Motion," for a dozen child violinists and their tense, grinning moms and dads. In no time, however, he saw that Wanda didn't need him holding his breath forher. She was in command. He sat back more comfortably, loosened his grip on his knees.
Her face, as she played, was as changeable as the ups and downs of her relationship with Boomfell. She was severe and authoritarian, almost angry, during passages of rapid virtuosity or mounting force. Her torso tipped and swayed, her full lower lip protruded arrogantly, her nostrils flared with her studied breathing. Then, the music sweeter, she turned away, presenting her profile to the audience, turned away from this big member of the violin family as if resisting its cloying, too seductive sound. Here, he considered, was her lifelong friend, her loyal comfort and opposition. Several times Wanda Gwertz swooned, seemed to swoon, seated alone onstage in the university's paneled nineteenth-century auditorium.
She concluded with Bach's Suite no. 5 in C Minor--the only piece Boomfell, having heard it before, recalled by name. He recognized the movements he'd listened to her working on in the bare white-walled living room on Grand Avenue. During the sarabande, the cellist's head fell back, pale neck exposed, eyes closed. Her lips moved as if mouthing the sounds she was making. He too, he considered, weirdly identifying with old wood and gut that stood on one leg, had stood like that before her seated figure, similarly embraced by her whole body. But mere lovemaking had never done this to her face, elicited such surrender. Giving them her all, the entranced stranger, as she suddenly struck him, was unusually attractive, beautiful to everyone present, he imagined--a soul who had thrust herself above the rest of them. He looked at his lap in alarm. Val had placed her hand over his. When he glanced toward her, she was facing the stage, evidently moved. What did this mean? What was she saying?
The brisk gavotte came as a relief At last, when the Bach suite ended, he was relieved.
Huddled over her cello then, Wanda looked momentarily lost. The applause--Boomfells hands roaring--might havehad nothing to do with the woman onstage. Her smile, as it gradually appeared, was more radiant, that was the word, plain happier than any smile she had beamed in his direction. She must have had him in mind during the Bach suite, he assumed, somewhere in the back of her mind. But when he sought and met her eyes as they panned the audience--there, wasn't she looking directly at him?--Wanda didn't seem to know Boomfell was Boomfell.
Her performance was a revelation to him, yet revelation of the real Wanda didn't provoke him to leave her to her first love, the antique overlord, four feet four, that sang between her knees, aglow in its honeyed patina.
For two weeks she visited Nova Scotia, then drove down the Maine coast, dropping in on old friends at the Pierre Monteux School. When she returned she agreed to meet him for dinner. Boomfell couldn't think straight all day. Just as he was leaving his office to pick her up, at the last possible moment, she called and told him she couldn't make it after all. Her father had suddenly shown up from somewhere, she explained, and wanted to spend the evening with her. She was whispering over the phone because she was in this amazing personal library--you'd love this, Charlie; it's your dream of a library--and didn't want to be overheard. She called her father Dad. Indirectly, as it were, he quizzed her about Dad's friend, the house, the room she was then standing in. He was able to picture the whole scene without any trouble: Wanda in a cotton dress whispering over the phone in the paneled room of a huge fake Tudor in a nice neighborhood. She was impatient, yet she was able to answer his questions without hesitation. There was a ship's portrait over the mantel, a large oak table, two walls of books, an Oriental rug--like the one in your living room, she said. Heriz. Hey, I remembered!--a view of the backyard with a clump of birches in it. Dad's friend was an endodontist. I've got to go, really, she said. Wily, clever, quick-witted.You can't do much about the prerogatives of fatherhood, said Boomfell the father. He believed her.
He believed her.
Nevertheless, the moment he hung up he instinctively, if this was instinct, phoned her tiny downtown apartment.
She answered immediately, she hadn't even moved away from the phone. Following his evil hello, a smug grunt, there was silence on Wanda's end. For Boomfell it was a moment of terrible satisfaction. You bastard, she swore, that's not fair. You shouldn't have called back.
He didn't call again. Heriz. Hey, I remembered! What did it mean, to come up with that off the top of your head? Was it a gift? Part of his obsession, he thought, had been trying to get to the bottom of her. There was no bottom. The idea of her standing in her cramped and steamy efficiency kitchen, in underwear probably, whispering over the phone as if she were in the tall library of a stranger's gracious home--inventing the room for him, his dream of such a room--while Dad drank cocktails outside by the pool, the crazy desperation of it seized his imagination. He had to stop doing this to her.
It was like the big sleep was over, here comes spring (it was actually another fall), time to wake up, and bearish Boomfell emerged from his cave with a half-assed grin on his face, blinking at the bright life all around him. There was Val and Ruth and Ben again. There was his own backyard, his neighbor with a beer, a stack of unread books, his running shoes. Wanda Gwertz was over. He no longer wanted to phone, or write letters on yellow paper, or prowl her street at midnight, or run into her by chance at an evening of Ravel or anywhere.
Then, from one of her music friends--oh, by the way, said Sue List--he learned that she was gone in more ways than one, self-exiled without a word to a gray island in the Atlantic, a place he had never laid eyes on. Wanda had joined the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra. For Boomfell's intents and purposesNova Scotia didn't exist. When it turned up in an issue of National Geographic on his coffee table, "Nova Scotia: The Magnificent Anchorage," he didn't look at the pictures.




A year later, while Val and the children were away, he ran into Singer at the grocery store. The bachelor, who seemed overly happy to see him--they hadn't met socially for months--invited Boomfell to dinner.
Singer's apartment, located at the rear of a sprawling Victorian place surrounded by porches, was one long room plus a standing-room-only kitchen. Boomfell had been here before, but not, come to think of it, since Wanda Gwertz had been here. It was easy to imagine her sitting on the edge of Singer's enormous bed, which dominated his meager dwelling. There was a Victorian love seat, worn rose velvet. That would have gone well with the white dress she had liked the look of herself in that summer. Between bed and couch stood a card table covered with a white tablecloth and fastidiously set for two. Two white plates; goblets for water and wine; extravagantly ornate silver handed down to Eliot, Boomfell learned that night, from an elderly aunt; off-white candles in brass candlesticks; a rose, for the love of God, in a crystal vase. Was this how the room had looked to Wanda Gwertz the evening Singer stuffed her with Cornish game hen, anesthetized her with wine, and persuaded her to spend the night? From the outset, Boomfell felt he was on a date, or revisiting a date, a scene of undoing.
Aside from the table setting, this might have been the temporary room of a poor student rather than the home of a professional man in his thirties. Plants would have helped, he thought. Books would have helped, but Singer kept most of his books at school. Picasso's Swimmer, tacked above the bed, its corners curling, was the only thing on the walls. Three neat stacks of magazines stood at the foot of the bed: The NewYorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation. Singer's formidable rolltop desk was, at second glance, orderly. Papers, books, and manila folders were arranged in neat piles around a blank blue folder. To Boomfell, the family man, this looked like a lonely life.
Taking a leak in Singer's surprisingly bright and spacious bathroom, he was able to imagine--too easily--Wanda Gwertz up to her tits in the old deep tub. It stood on ball-and-claw feet.
Wearing an apron over his white tennis clothes, and rosy as an eighteenth-century English portrait, Eliot smiled handsomely as he carved a slab of steak and placed it on Boomfell's plate. Veins stood out on his tan capable hands. Yes, Boomfell saw, Singer was an attractive man. Wanda Gwertz must have noticed that. For dessert they had Singer's chocolate mousse, which was as good as Wanda Gwertz, under pressure of Boomfell's relentless questioning, had said it was: Fucking delicious, you bastard. He thoughtfully savored each spoonful as if seeking the secret of its subtle bittersweetness. They drank whiskey, wine, cognac, and at some point their mutual friend, the cellist, came up. Singer still laughed, he said, recalling the setting of his first intimacy with her (that was how Singer talked). It had been charged with danger and comedy.
"Don't make me guess," said Boomfell. He believed he already knew where the hard-to-believe trick had been turned. The White Horse Inn.
"The living room floor of the faculty club, following the May Day meeting of the Wine and Cheese Society." Flushed Singer sat back to laugh. "Behind the couch, Charles Boomfell, like thieves. Behind the couch--like furtive fresh-faced teenagers with nowhere to go. But you know what?"
Boomfell shook his head: he didn't know what.
"I wouldn't trade a week in a king-size bed for that sweet panting spontaneity."
She and Singer had been thick as thieves all afternoon,swapping the wisecracks of schoolteachers, stuck in their muck of puns. In a wildly uncharacteristic gesture, Eliot had unbuttoned the top three buttons of his short-sleeved cotton shirt. In bare feet and her flimsy yellow sundress, Wanda had flaunted her well-being that day like a reckless ten-year-old. Boomfell, lurking at the edge of the party, had been blind as a spoiled old man to the sexual signals bandied between them as visibly as the shuttlecock they'd batted to one another at one point in the backyard. Fed up with the tipsy whine and wheeze society, he'd left the miserable gathering. Wanda would regret her refusal to leave with him, he had imagined, when he withheld himself from her for two or three punishing days.
"You were there that day, weren't you?" Singer asked. "Charles Boomfell wouldn't play in our game of volleyball. I guess you and Wanda had more or less had your fill of one another at that point."
"Wanda was a friend," Boomfell replied, "that's all."
But Singer was grinning. "She told me you became a bit of a nuisance. Something about sniffing around her house at night. Grand Avenue. Footprints under her window. That was it, the waffle footprints. Boomfell the runner. Vanity gave you away."
Boomfell guffawed his disbelief She had seemed authentically frightened by those mysterious footprints under her bedroom window. No, there was no getting to the bottom of her--her twenty thousand leagues of deceit. To portray him as a skulking Peeping Tom to the likes of Singer! At last he felt betrayed.
"We had a card from her not long ago," Singer went on. "This spring she did the Elgar."
"You've heard from her?" asked Boomfell. He was unable to conceal his surprise. "I mean, you've stayed in touch?"
Singer leaned toward him over the small white table. "Haven't you?"
And Boomfell recognized the sudden sickening sensationhe had too often felt seated opposite Singer as he sought in vain, eyes scrambling, to find the move that would free his king, at least for a few more moves, from final mate.
Haven't you?




Now, as he lay in the dark beside his wife years later, following their vaguely disappointing dinner at Cyrano's, how well he remembered supper at Singer's--another surfeit of revealings--right down to the apron over tennis shorts, the salad dressing, things said. To rerun that scene in light of Val's purported thing with the man--could Singer have been that bad? The behind-us past upon us again--and different than it had been. Unsettled, unknown. The way we're always on thin ice, liable to fall through the present at any moment without warning. Val's old news, chances were it never would have come up--her thing with Singer--it never would have happened as far as Boomfell was concerned, had he not chosen Saturday night at Cyrano's, that particular time and place, for his surprise evening out.
You just sold your first house. He had taken her there to celebrate that unlikely accomplishment: his loath break with the past.
Now, on the other hand, what did any of it matter? These years later, other, graver concerns had come to the fore. Everyone had moved on to another world of worries. Their life together was becoming a lifetime. Times of their life together could be measured counting years by fives and tens. Roughly. You're a fortunate man. He reached under the covers for the hem of his wife's flannel nightgown and carefully drew it up over her legs. Fifteen and more years ago he could hardly believe his luck: slipping a hand into her silken underthings. Valerie Welsh! Desire survived intact in the same inside self. Sex became important--like sleep--when you weren't getting enough of it. Awake, unfold, want. Val groaned impatiently,drew down her nightgown, pulled up her heels, and turned her back to him.
Wanda Gwertz! From here they looked like a pair of innocents. Those days would have to amuse her now, if she ever thought about them: Charles Boomfell! Still there in the front row of the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra with your faithful cello? That seemed unlikely. Yet time passed. People got stuck. Ten years ago the Franklins went off to Maine to raise a house, have a garden, spin wool; they never came back.
Does Charles Boomfell exist now?
I believed in you.
Crickets sang under the stone steps below the window. Something sad about it. September. The harvest moon out there in their red maple. His lonely neighbor's lights were on. Holly Dean Lawson. The young woman never dreamed that marriage would mean someone never home--living alone in a strange house, circa 1830. You will find we adapt to our major disappointments pretty well as a rule.
So how have things turned out with you, Wanda Gwertz? In a sense he no longer cared. Are you married? Or working to save the planet? Are you still thin? Has fucking ever turned out to be thicker? In Boomfell's mind, she remained stubbornly out of fashion--her pants too loose or too tight, her skirts too long or too short, her colors too bright or too dull. She would never drive anything but an old Volvo a certain green. Consigned to the past as she was, he nevertheless made one definite assumption concerning Wanda Gwertz: she was thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five; she was all right; alive.
He never expected to see her again, any more than he expected to see Lantini, the Franklins, Eliot Singer, the woman from France. It took years to sort out the people you missed. That was no excuse. With a little effort he might have stayed in touch. An annual Christmas card, for example, might have kept things open. That was smart. Getting in touch no longer seemed possible. You assumed everyone was all right, goingabout their lives, and yet surely everyone wasn't all right. A mysterious symptom, a pain that got worse instead of better. A loneliness with no relief in sight. There were people he missed, awake on a September night, crickets outside, the new neighbor off to bed with every light in the house left on. With damned little effort he might have stayed in touch with them.
Leaning toward him across a small candlelit table, the serious face of Eliot Singer, perplexed and concerned, appeared somewhere behind Boomfell's closed eyes.
Haven't you?




Long silent Saturdays in deserted Lovejoy were among Boomfell's fondest memories of his short-lived teaching career. The classroom building, emptied of students, acquired a hallowed feel. Silence seemed to echo through the maze of darkened corridors. In the men's room the flush of the toilet would resound. Boomfell read bulletin boards and the office doors of colleagues papered with cartoons by Koren, Booth, Steig. He slid down banisters like a boy. From the plate-glass window on the third floor he surveyed the playing fields--two or three colors moving in clusters, breaking apart--like a reclusive monarch dreaming of future conquests. Once as he stood there an ovenbird flew into the glass wall and dropped to the concrete balcony, and didn't revive. In his office, a small windowless cell, he worked on his manuscript, or read, or maybe mused in undisturbed solitude. On Saturdays the building was a fortress in which time slowed down, and the secret life of Boomfell went forward.
In fact, he was seldom alone in silent Lovejoy. From the tall windows on the third floor, he would see a distant cyclist making his way up Amity Hill. Pump, man! This was also a newcomer, although Boomfell, who had missed the gala get-together in honor of newcomers, had not yet met him. Their offices were on different floors. Boomfell studied the courselist. By process of elimination he concluded that the tall man who rode the white bike must be Singer. He was teaching a course in Freshman English like everyone else, but also a graduate seminar: "Swift." He looked older. Already he conveyed something of a world-weary professorial air as he walked from bike to building, briefcase in hand.
It might be a day of mist and drizzle and the cyclist would be a distant dab of yellow--Singer in slicker--on the bright blacktop, winding through the green fields of the campus. Asshole, smirked Boomfell. Yet he would be pleased, also pleased, to see the Saturday scholar of the second floor showing up after all. Indeed, Boomfell probably had been to the window several times already, wondering if Singer was going to make it this morning.
Or if Boomfell arrived as late as nine, he would likely find the soon familiar Plymouth--MOUTH--already parked out front, or the white Raleigh bicycle already chained to a young inflamed maple. Hurry! As he passed Singer's wing on the second floor he would look for the open door, a show of light in the dark corridor of closed doors. The rapid clatter and repeated ping of Eliot Singer's typewriter at that hour in the still building was an unsettling sound, urging Boomfell to his self-appointed task. What was this fellow Singer working on, Saturday after Saturday? Taking a leak, Boomfell occasionally heard the rumble of plumbing below him, reminding him that Singer was there, drinking coffee like himself
One day, as he skipped downstairs to the vending machines, passionate voices, shattering the Saturday serenity of the second floor, drew him toward Singer's hallway. He approached cautiously and looked into the daylighted room. Singer was tipped back in his chair, his feet propped up on his tidy desk, one raised hand counting time with a pencil, deaf to the world. His knees, steep jagged peaks, hid his face. Boomfell retreated unseen. Each Saturday at the appointed hour, hesoon learned, the radio broadcast of the opera went on in Singer's office.
Several times those first weeks, Boomfell passed him on the staircase or found the scholar, as he thought of him with friendly condescension, standing before the window on the second floor, smoking his pipe. Fall that first year was picture perfect, the playing fields bordered by an illuminated fringe of crimsons and golds. They might exchange a grunt by way of greeting, or merely nod, as preoccupied as big-time thinkers. What was Singer thinking? His presence was inspiring, contributing to the poet's dream of purpose and discipline. You developed a bond with the only other person in the building on Saturday. Did Singer feel the same way?
Dark rainy days heightened the sacrosanct feeling of the place. The ideal Saturday for Boomfell was a day of rain tapering off to clear sky by late afternoon as he emerged from Lovejoy--as if inner and outer weather were in tune. (In retrospect, such days didn't seem uncommon, yet how many could there have been?) At the end of one such day, showers gradually gave way to spangled sunshine. As he stood before the large west-facing window--lo and behold, he thought--a rainbow appeared. If you asked Boomfell, rainbows were right up there with visions. He could count all the rainbows he'd seen on one hand. To hell with his work in progress; life was full of surprises. Don't go away, he pleaded to the thin air, and bounded for the staircase, descending light as a goat.
Eliot Singer was already there, standing before the wall of glass on the second floor directly below the spot where Boomfell had been standing on the third. Arms folded, slump-shouldered. A broad swath of light, slanting into the hallway, just missed him. Boomfell stopped several feet behind him and silently stood by. The rainbow stood out there in all its colors, clear as a bell. There was Day-Glo green grass, westering sun, spectral mist arching overall like ...
"Glorious," Boomfell burst out at last. "I was just coming to rap on your door, but here you are." He gestured to the indisputable fact of Singer's bodily presence.
"Glorious may not be the word," said Singer. He glanced at his watch, he couldn't talk, he had to get back to work.
The moment Boomfell returned to the third-floor landing he heard his phone, which continued ringing until he reached it.
"Where have you been?" Val asked impatiently. "I've been calling you for five minutes to go look outside. There was a rainbow, but now it's gone."
"I can't talk," said Boomfell. Before he could say so long, his wife socked him in the ear.
Glory be to God.
The day before Thanksgiving the poet found himself locked out of Lovejoy. He circled the building, pounding on doors. At the main entrance he threw his head back and hollered, his hands upraised claws. The steep face of the building, brick and reflecting glass, was silent.
"Sounds serious."
Boomfell started, turning to the speaker. Singer, still astride his bike, was ten feet behind him.
"The doors are locked," said Boomfell, still in the grip of his emotion. "I need to get in there. The doors are locked."
"And they call this a university," said Singer. He raised a hand to stop the flow of Boomfell's indignation. "I have a key. They lock up for holidays, but keys are available."
Wasn't that Singer for you: Sounds serious?
Wasn't that Boomfell: Locked out?
Singer suggested coffee. His office was spacious. More enviable, there was a window, which looked out on grass, trees. His desk was a bare surface, a blank pad of yellow lined paper in the center of it. Taped to the wall was a map of London's Underground and a large calendar. The blocked days were crammed with small tidy printing: the striving scholar'sbusy life. There were more books here than Boomfell owned--real cloth-bound books, not the sort of tawdry paperbacks Boomfell had been toting since he'd been a college sophomore. From his briefcase Singer brought out a bag of coffee, which he'd ground that morning at home.
"Smell, Charles Boomfell. How do you drink that rotgut from the machines?"
They became friends. Singer began to drop in on the Boomfells Friday nights. Saturdays they would meet in Singer's office for lunch. Occasionally, Eliot read to Boomfell from whatever was sticking out of his typewriter. Eventually, Boomfell let Singer hear a few lines from his work in progress. In contrast to the poet's long apprenticeship, however, it soon became clear that Singer's labors steadfastly advanced his career. He rarely put pen to paper unless he was assured that the result would appear in print. Everyone received copies. To my friend the poet and his faithful spouse. Best, Eliot. The fruits of Boomfell's labors invariably ended up in his drawer, doomed to go stale in time.
Singer told him, Try something possible.
Like real estate, he thought, swallowing lukewarm coffee from Arnie's next door, unable to face the phone calls he'd come here, to his Odyssey office, to make this clouded-over afternoon. Cold calls.




The name of the Humanities Division softball team they organized that first spring was the Myth (a lisped "mitts") of the Golden Age. Boomfell was in center. Stretch Singer was at first. They had Zilch with his bad back at second--every ball went through his legs--and another smallish man with a serious air, Bill Whipple, played a shaky third. Several times they persuaded Lantini to come out and pitch. He wore his tie loosened at the throat. His mitt, not much larger than a man's hand, went back to World War II. Singer wore a white handkerchiefaround his head. Boomfell bought a new glove from K mart for ten bucks, his first in fifteen years, and a hat with an M on it for two-fifty. During his edgy boyhood, baseball had never been so much fun. The thrill of batting a base hit on Saturday afternoon was more real to the poet than the temporary elation that might have accompanied the completion of a tricky passage earlier in the day. The Myth of the Golden Age never won a game in the university's intramural league.
The Monday morning following his one and only home run, he found a printed headline tacked to his office door: MYTH'S POET HOMERS.
Singer!
There's Boomfell in center, socking his fist into the pocket of his new glove, chanting to his chairman. Come on, Lanny! Lanny-anny-anny, put it in there! Be you, Lanny baby! Be you! They are ten runs behind in the second game of the season. He notices for the first time, written along the large thumb of his glove in black script indistinguishable from that of the manufacturer's labeling: BOOMFELL X-TRA. In black lettering along the wide last finger: CHUCK "THE GLOVE" BOOMFELL. And across the heel: CHARLES BOOMFELL SPECIAL. The day before he had unintentionally left his glove in Eliot's car.
Remarkable person! What winning wit and cunning sympathy it took to lightly toss Boomfell such subtle delight as he rather too seriously took to the field for the comedy of errors that this game, and every other, would prove to be. With that brilliant stroke Singer laid enduring claim to Boomfell's imagination. Every spring for years to come he would be reminded of the Myth's first baseman. Each time he dug out his ten-dollar K mart special to play catch with Ruth, and then later, with Ben, he had to smile with renewed warm feelings toward Eliot Singer.
His betrayer!
The friendship gradually fell off. Yet Boomfell would still see the bike in front of Lovejoy, hear the flush of the toilet inthe men's room below. If he ventured downstairs in the afternoon, the opera was sure to be sounding from Singer's wing of the building. In a sense, the man remained his Saturday companion, but now it seemed they both took care to avoid each other. Along with lonely thousands, Boomfell took up the solitary sport of the long-distance runner. One late afternoon, from his third-floor window, he saw Eliot Singer--orange T-shirt, blue shorts, the white handkerchief around his head--setting off across the playing fields at a cross-country pace. He jogged down Amity until he reached the bike path, turned, and disappeared behind woods.
Glorious may not be the word!
That sort of annoying remark soon became amusing, even endearing, for what it said about the person you came to know. How far they'd come, Boomfell considered, from two strangers sharing a silent building on weekends. They'd become strangers again. From here--here and now--those Saturdays belonged to another life altogether. At best, maybe they shared some memories brought on, for example, by a face in a restaurant, a certain make of car, the light outside. And maybe not even that much. Who knew what Singer's mind had mysteriously selected to be played and replayed in memory? To Singer, the name Boomfell might mean Valerie more often than it meant her husband.
The Myth of the Golden Age.
He missed him.
Boomfell looked up from his Formica desk, from the hypothetical percentages he'd been idly calculating with half a brain. Does Eliot Singer exist now? The same Singer?




As he crossed the street from the liquor store, the on-and-off rain became cats and dogs, and Boomfell, holding his bottle of wine close to his chest, scuttled for shelter beneath Nibs's green-and-white-striped awning. The uninspired display windowfeatured a female torso in a college sweatshirt, an easel, posters of O'Keeffe flowers, for example, poor luscious Marilyn Monroe turning herself inside out. Several illuminated globes hung from the ceiling. Motorists had turned their headlights on, it had become so prematurely dark. A red Toyota--Val?--stopped at the light in front of the bank. No, the young woman in the passenger seat was no one they knew. An unfamiliar bike protruded from the back end of the car, the trunk should have been tied down. The girl was laughing, sort of beautiful, friends, you figured, life was a lark, world on a string, nice for them. The voyeur, he thought, lurked under the awning. The car turned right, toward Boomfell, and he saw that the woman gaily gesticulating behind the wheel, hey, was his wife. In the next moment he spotted Ruth's old LET THEM LIVE sticker on the car's rear bumper. Since when was Val funny? Storyteller! So what about supper, Val, what's for supper? The dark-haired young woman might have been one of her girls, but Boomfell hadn't heard about anyone new. His sudden excitement was hardly warranted by this chance glimpse of Val in her everyday life, relax, yet he didn't look away until her red car, half his, was lost in the homebound traffic.
Copyright © 1991 by Douglas Hobbie