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Victor rephrased his question. "Have you considered buying a car that doesn't sound as if it's going to shake itself to pieces as soon as it approaches fifty miles an hour?" Unlike most people, he usually spoke in complete sentences. It was part of his perfectionism, part, also, of his snobbery. A way of separating himself from the herd.
"The approach may be a bit noisy, but once it goes past fifty, it settles down to a delightful hum," I answered.
He thought about that for a few moments before he came back with, "Someday you might find it and yourself scattered all over the roadway before it reaches fifty."
"Not likely," I said. "It has more dignity than to be caught dropping pieces of itself helter-skelter on the highway. If it should do something like that, I am sure that it would wait until it was serenely parked."
Victor, a tall thin man with a decidedly Latinate look, sucked his cheeks in and then blew out a stream of air, as he always did when he was exasperated by something. "The next thing you will tell me is that the car has feelings."
That didn't require a verbal response. Grinning, I glanced at him.
"If I didn't know you, I'd think that you were some sort of religious or cultist freak."
"The religion I leave to you," I said. "As for being a cultist freak--well, I'm not much a joiner."
We stopped speaking, and again Victor seemed to drift off to some private place.
Victor and I had known each other for over fifty years. Neither of us have brothers, and as much as it was possible each of us filled that void for the other. We'd met in the army at the very beginning of the Korean War and continued the relationship after we had been discharged. We had even gotten our doctorates about the same time, his in philosophy, mine in English. Eventually we wound up on the faculty of Bridge College, a small institution with a magnificent campus that overlooked the Narrows. We had even retired at the same time.
Our relationship had carried us through Victor's three wives and as many mistresses, as well as several difficult times in my life. Cynthia, my wife, has always looked upon Victor as a member of the family. To my sons he had been Uncle Victor.
Despite what might seem like profligate behavior, Victor was, if anything, a Puritan--a Catholic Puritan, if there is such an entity.
I was thinking about Lucy, his first wife and mother of his three children, when he faced me and said, "Maybe, I shouldn't have divorced Lucy?"
I wasn't thinking the same thing. Rather, I was wondering why he'd ever married her. Though, of course, I knew why.
"Had I stayed with her --"
I didn't let him finish the sentence. "You would have been dead by now. Besides, that happened a long time ago."
"But from my vantage point, it all began with my divorce from her."
"You know and I know that it, as you choose to call your life, began when you didn't marry the woman you loved and married the woman your parents wanted you to marry."
Victor said nothing. What I had just said was true. When I first met him, there had been a young woman in his life. Patricia, Pat. I have forgotten her last name. But Victor's parents had put an end to the relationship and he had wound up with Lucy.
Traffic increased as I had suspected it would. Driving became a process of stop and go. But there was no danger of Victor missing his flight. A cautious man in every aspect of his life except in his relationships with women, he had insisted that we leave a three-hour window to accommodate any delays.
"I wanted to be a dutiful son," Victor said after a long pause. "Our families knew each other in Naples. Besides, it was expected that I would marry Lucy."
"That 'besides' has about it the feel of none too subtle coercion," I said.
I braked behind a very large, silver hued SUV and commented how much I disliked that kind of vehicle.
"I don't see much ahead of me," Victor said softly.
I glanced at him. He was looking out the side window.
"Not if you look sideways," I said, in an effort to be droll. But I knew what he meant. He was old. Whatever time he had left of his life would be emotionally bleak. Sexually barren. Suddenly it occurred to me that he might make an end to a life he no longer wanted. After all, he was terribly depressed. A Hamlet without Hamlet's compelling causes. But also, like Hamlet, he was very much aware of God's "canon 'gainst self-slaughter."
Though the cars in the lanes on either side of us moved slowly forward, our lane remained locked in place.
"I did what was reasonable and therefore right," Victor said.
It took me a moment or two to realize that he was no longer speaking about his marriage to Lucy, but about his affair with Bernadette. Victor seldom made that kind of conversational leap. He was too disciplined a logician to be guilty of such a non sequitur. His reasonableness was frequently the cause of other people's despair. He'd start with a false premise and reason his way through to a false conclusion. And because he had arrived at it logically, there wouldn't be any way to reason him back to reality. Though Victor and I have profound philosophical and religious differences, we never argued. He being a Thomast and I an Existential Relativist--as he claimed I was--gave us considerable ground for lively and often intense discussion. But each of us was aware of that invisible line that divides meaningful discussion from irrational argument.
"What is rational and good for you may not be rational and good for someone else," I finally said. "Besides, Victor, didn't you tell me that you wanted her to have a life."
For Bernadette, Victor had defined having a life as having a husband and children. He could have been a husband, but having children would not have been possible.
He admitted that he had.
"And she's trying to do just that," I told him. I was becoming impatient with the traffic delay and with Victor's self-pity. Or was it more like emotional self-flagellation?
I had warned him when he first had broached the idea of giving Bernadette an ultimatum that it would be a very foolish thing to do unless he was absolutely certain he could live with the consequences. I remembered exactly where and when our conversation took place . . .
###
We were in Staten Island on the South Beach boardwalk. It was a warm July day. A few chunks of white clouds drifted slowly over the Verrazano Bridge.
"I will ask her to marry me," Victor said.
"But you've already done that, and she said she was willing to continue to live with you but didn't want to marry you."
"I find that unacceptable," he said.
"But--" I wanted to tell him that he hadn't the right to force Bernadette into marriage.
"I want to be married," he said. "I want to know that she'll be there for me when I need her."
"You mean to take care of you in your dotage, don't you?"
He pursed his lips to show that he didn't care for my appraisal and said, "I love her."
"Wonderful!" I said. "Then why spoil a good thing?"
Victor moved over to the railing and placed one foot on the middle bar.
The beach in front of us was empty except for three bikini-clad women, who were stretched out on a blanket midway between the water and the boardwalk. The day was very clear. Brooklyn was off to our left. A very large, blue-hulled container ship was slowly making its way into the narrows. Directly in front of us lay the vast openness of the Atlantic Ocean, touched by a blue sky where the two were seamed together in the distance.
"She says she loves me," he commented, after having been quiet for several moments.
"She must if she's willing to put up with your nuttiness."
"I just can't settle for--"
"For what she's willing to give," I said.
"I just can't take her life and use it," Victor said, "and that's what I'd be doing if I let our relationship continue the way it is."
Victor had something of Pygmalion in him. He always wanted to remold the woman with whom he was involved--to make her see things as he saw them, whether it had to do with art, the style of clothing she wore, or the food she ate. Victor, in this way, saw himself as the dominant male. It was one of those ideas into which he had reasoned himself, failing to see that what was reasonable and therefore good was neither reasonable nor good.
"You're not giving her much of a choice," I said.
"Since I am older and by extension wiser," he reasoned, "I must make the choice or choices that are necessary."
We started to walk again. Victor was being Victor. Marry me or else!
"All right, she already told you that she wouldn't marry you, so, now tell me, what's your next move in your ridiculous chess game?"
"We remain very good friends?" he answered.
I stopped, looked at him and shook my head. "Good friends?"
"Yes."
"From having been lovers to being good friends?"
"It's the only path open. I want to do the right thing. She'll be free to go with other men and--"
"And you'll sit back and enjoy every moment of your noble sacrifice," I said, walking again.
"I didn't say that," Victor answered softly. "I will miss the physical intimacy we'd shared."
"Has it occurred to you that she might miss it too?"
He shrugged as if that didn't matter. "Whether she believes it or not, what I'm doing is for her own good."
"So you've started on your new regimen?"
"Yes."
"This isn't going win you any brownie points in heaven," I said angrily. After his first divorce, Victor had left the church. But he was still very much a Catholic and believed in heaven, hell and redemption with considerable passion. And though he was plagued by the inability of his faith to answer the question of his individual purpose in God's plan, he became even more Catholic as he became older, just as I became more "Existentially Relativistic."
"I want to do the right thing," he said stubbornly.
Again I shook my head. He would never admit that he wasn't doing the right thing either for Bernadette or himself . . .
###
By the time we finally crossed the Gothel's Bridge and arrived at the New Jersey Turnpike toll plaza, several enormous thunderheads had developed to the North and West. Thunderstorms had been forecast for the afternoon and those clouds said clearly that they were coming. In a few minutes we'd be at the airport.
Victor faced me. "She's met someone," he said dolefully.
"Oh!" I couldn't respond with anything else. Had he expected it not to have happen?
"She called and told me."
"When? I mean when did she call?"
"The night before last," he said. "We stopped seeing one another a couple of months ago."
"Was that your decision or hers?"
"Hers. She said there was no point to continue."
I eased into the right lane and off the turnpike at exit 13A. The thunderheads had drifted across the sun, turning everything a dull gray.
"She did what was reasonable and therefore right for her to do," I said, using words similar to those he'd used a year before.
"You never give much leeway, do you?" he asked.
"Do you?" I shot back. Because of our friendship I could say with impunity what I thought should be said.
"No," he answered. Then, in a melancholy voice, he added, "she was my last chance."
"That's something you don't know," I said, easing the car up to the curb in front of the entrance to the Alitalia terminal.
Victor's baggage was soon in the hands of a skycap.
"Take care of yourself," I said, as we hugged each other.
He bid me do the same and added, "Send my love to Cynthia."
We separated, and I watched him go into the terminal, a slightly bent old man walking tentatively toward the check-in counter.
###
Before I was back on Staten Island, the sky darkened. Streaks of lightning slashed vertically down and were followed by bomb-like explosions of thunder. I switched on my wipers and lights. It was the kind of storm that would quickly pass, but while it lasted it was ferociously threatening.
According to my speedometer, I was moving at five miles an hour, a rate of speed conducive either to impatience or reflection. I thought about Victor. The image of him walking into the terminal came back and I shuddered with the realization that I would never see him again. He was going back to his beginnings to die. To waste slowly away. He'd given up. His life had become meaningless. Nothing. Niente. He'd judged himself and had found himself wanting. He would do what was reasonable and therefore good . . .
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