[This piece is excerpted from the original version of the novel, before I had to condense it for the sake of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, and eventually for the sake of trimming the novel period. Originally it occurred where Chapter XIV left off, what is now p. 285, and its time frame preceded Chapter XIX, where p. 365 is now.]
Owen was still in the doghouse, as far as Sarah was concerned, for scaring her that night she asked me to find him, the night he went to his old house in Woodside,Queens , without telling anyone. There was a slight reparation due Sarah, not in the form of material substance but in verbal and physical reassurances, especially the kind that reinforced their emotional commitment to each other. It wasn't a question of boundaries or equity; there was no blurting of "Let me make it up to you, honey." There was, nevertheless, an entrance wound in their relationship.
Owen was still in the doghouse, as far as Sarah was concerned, for scaring her that night she asked me to find him, the night he went to his old house in Woodside,
For three months he'd put aside what little cash he could sacrifice--since neither he nor Sarah earned more than thirty-thousand a year, and New York expenses in 1990 had climbed while salaries did not--in order to save up for the purchase of four newly published tomes on the Civil War. Folding that money into his palm, and holding it up for excise like the third eye of a Hindu god, he offered to take Sarah to Second Avenue and spend the money on her: It was to be dinner at one of the upscale restaurants on the Upper East Side. Sarah alleviated the sacrificial burden by letting him buy dinner, letting him pay for a taxi, and by encouraging him to pick up a quotation quiz book that he'd seen in a bookstore on Third Avenue
He took her to the Manhattan Café. It was large enough to protect their intimacy, and small enough to be warm and shielded from the chance of a crowd. Over inch-and-a-half thick steaks cured in the hive glass and aged wood behind them, over cocktails and wine, Owen told Sarah jokes and read from the book of quotations. He gave her a new one every five minutes, and the quicker he'd made them up the cornier they sounded until she pleaded with him to stop, whereupon he began casually to feel her up under the table. He was determined that the evening should not be common. Owen described her beet red face and sparkling blue eyes as competition with a prize rose or as substitution for an aria by Monteverdi.
They finished eating by nine o'clock, when into the restaurant came Owen’s coworker, Douglas Tims, accompanied hand-in-hand by a woman who was not his wife. She was somebody else's wife. She was Andy McLean's wife, that's who she was. The surprise that came over Owen's face, since he was the first to see them, hit Sarah like a piece of lead. Owen saw events unfold because he preferred always to face the front of a restaurant rather than the rear, much like a mafia captain. He'd picked up this habit from way back in his childhood, having listened to selected nefarious conversations in his father's bar. "Keep your back to the kitchen and yourself facin' the door, son," advised an old puffy-faced regular at his father's pub. "That way, the dame you are hitched up with don't see ya with the dame y'aren't hitched up with. An' you can run out the back if she shows up."
Owen immediately put his head down and examined the floral print on his plate as the maitre d' brought the newcomers past his and Sarah's table to one that was ten feet away. Tims stopped.
Owen looked up.
"Douglas ," he smiled. "What a surprise."
"Hi, Owen, Sarah," said the uncomfortable Douglas Tims.
"Joan? Nice to see you," continued Owen, looking to Andy's wife.
Everyone shook hands. Tims's face, as well as Joan's, was as white as the table cloth. Their color, originally pinkish and rosy, brought out by the cold, had vanished.
"How's Andy?" Sarah asked Joan of her husband.
Although I wouldn't have asked such a question, Sarah at once felt entitled to it. She had never considered herself a judge, but she did consider herself a good friend; and if to be a good friend to Andy McLean meant to ask his wife an embarrassing question, while she was on a date with her husband’s friend, then so be it. Tims had already crossed his own line.
"Oh, he's doing okay," Joan answered meekly.
"I never get to see him," said Sarah.
"He's been a little tired," said Joan.
Joan's long, dark hair, partially covering one of her eyes, made a failed attempt at facial poise. She couldn't hide who she was or what she was feeling, and demonstrated that weak link in her chain by glancing at the maitre d', who was still waiting for them to follow him. Tims nervously tugged at his trimmed goatee and gazed flatly into Owen's face.
"And you, Douglas? How're you doing?" Sarah pursued with the same sense of justice, but this time there was a little playfulness in her eyes.
"Working too hard, Sarah," he answered her.
"Sorry to hear that."
"So am I," said Tims, in pain. "Well, we're going to sit." He broke his stare, grabbed Joan's arm, and said: "Have a good night."
They moved away to their table, and Owen called for the check. He told me later that he and Sarah had never put their coats on in a restaurant so deftly and quickly as they did that night.
Outside in the cold Manhattan
"It's nice to see our friends," remarked Sarah shivering. "It's nice to see them sleeping with each other."
“What do you expect?"
"They're crazy," she said.
"They're adults, Sarah. It's none of our business."
"Don't say that, Owen. Andy's your friend. Douglas works with you. What're you going to do?"
"Do? Me? Why me?"
"Because," she replied. "It's always you. What're you going to do?"
"Nothing," he answered.
"Doesn't it bother you that they're doing this?"
"Sure. Because I like Douglas . I like Joan. But he's made me take sides, now. I can't interfere."
"So you're not going to say anything?" she asked.
"Nothing," Owen repeated. "They tried to act as if nothing was wrong. And so did we."
Owen had ended up saying the same thirteen words to Andy McLean in a coffee shop a few blocks and a few minutes away on that very same evening. The initial collision had occurred less than a hundred feet from the restaurant's door. Andy had been trailing Joan from the apartment all the way from the west Village, where Douglas Tims lived. He intended to follow her and Tims to their final destination. Having decided to go home after he'd found out where the two had settled, he dipped into a delicatessen for a bottle of club soda and, reemerging, bumped into Owen and Sarah. Because of Andy's honesty, his good nature, his empathy, and his inability to keep hidden from a friend like Owen matters of great emotional strife, it didn't take Owen long to figure out what he and Sarah had got themselves mixed up in that night.
"Have you eaten yet?" Owen asked him.
"I'm not hungry," Andy replied.
"That's not what I asked," said Owen.
"How 'bout a cup of coffee?" Andy suggested.
Owen agreed and had pulled Andy along with him and Sarah into another coffee shop around the corner.
Sitting in a booth close to the front window, they'd soaked up coffee, tea, and chocolate cake. Behind the counter, football highlights, political talk, the business with Iraq
"Sarah," Owen said. "Change seats with me."
"What for?" she replied.
"I can't take it," he said. "It's Madison Avenue talking. It's Christmas talking."
Both Sarah and Andy laughed uneasily as Sarah and Owen got up to change seats, so that Owen could sit with his back to the TV.
"I can't listen," he pleaded his case smiling. "They're trying to control my mind, you know; they're trying to control the minds of any great-grandchildren that I might end up having."
Having changed his seat, he began to watch the condensation build up on the glass panes of the windows and thus felt protected against the outside world. Those windows blurred the activity of a busy weeknight along Broadway. He was safe inside, no matter what was at issue, no matter what friend's wife was sleeping with what friend.
As he sipped his coffee, Andy asked Owen to tell Sarah what they'd talked about when they were out drinking together in Long Island City, that night prior to my going to meet Owen at the diner that weary morning. That episode had started to take on a significance which I would recognize only too late. Owen explained that, what Andy had alluded to on that far away evening, and what Owen had withheld from Sarah and me, was a suspicion that his wife was having an affair. Andy couldn't prove anything and he hadn't wanted to accuse Joan of anything because their relationship had already shown signs of disintegration, and he hadn't wanted to make things worse or act unjustly.
“It’s too expensive to keep giving up your friends,” Andy joked.
Their marriage hadn't yet gone beyond the point of no return, but it had become difficult in the sense that, honest discussions had had worse repercussions. They were discussions that ended up making it harder to live with each other instead of making it easier to mend the tear. He decided to follow her, simply, remaining at a distance, without judging her. Because, he said, he might have had something to do with the cause of her unhappiness and preferred to look at the reality of their marriage in terms of construction rather than destruction. Suspicions had been running their course until Kathy Tims, Douglas 's wife, had shown up on Andy's doorstep demanding an explanation. (“Aha!” I had exclaimed later to Owen over the telephone.)
Andy had no explanation to give Kathy. She also told him to be sure to take care of his wife or she would be back. She had her hands full dealing with Tims and his depression and his low self-esteem bullshit and she didn't want another fight.
There wasn't much for Andy to do. Joan McLean had talked of staying with her sister, to give herself time to think. Apparently, she felt a lack of direction or one that was incommensurate with her wedding vows. It was almost a cliche. Andy had felt he was equally responsible for the mess because he kept putting off any confrontation for fear of what it might lead to. He couldn't argue with her. He simply deserted the emotional investment necessary for an angry and hurtful series of questions and answers. But he hadn't wanted to give it all up. He did, if one could phrase it this way, love her.
"Blew my mind," admitted Andy. "I'll give ya that much."
"How can you be so calm, Andy?" Sarah asked.
"I'm not calm," he replied.
"You look it.”
"This kinda thing happens all the time," he sighed.
"To you?"
"No."
"Then, who do you know has done this?" Sarah asked him.
"Personally? Nobody," he answered. "Heavy Catholics in my family."
"Then how can you say it happens all the time?"
"It does," insisted Andy. "Look at what's on TV. Look at what's in the papers under cause of death: 'fuckin' around.' They make movies about this shit. Look what they eat up in magazines and newspapers. Everybody's fuckin', Sarah, and usually they're fuckin' the wrong people. And it makes me kinda mad, y'know? It's... I don't know." He shook his head and stroked his beard. "Whole philosophies are formed from love," he smiled, treating the word with a mocking disdain. "Or the lack of it. I know. I teach philosophy."
"What're you and Joan going to do?" Owen asked him.
"I'm gonna try and understand what the fuck happened," Andy replied. He signaled the waitress for more water and coffee.
"Joan’s going to split?" Sarah asked.
"Probably."
"Do you want to come stay with us tonight?" she asked him. "Our place is warm. We've got a pull-out couch. Plenty of liquor. Good books. And best of all, we have Owen."
Andy smiled and placed his hand on her arm and they both knew at once that he wouldn't take her up on her offer.
The following morning Douglas Tims had called the office to report that he had a cold. He called in sick the day after as well.
"He's not returning my calls," Owen said to me.
"Is he depressed?" I asked.
"What do you think?” he said.
"I would be,” I said. “Then again, I wouldn’t put myself into this situation.”
“No,” Owen replied. “Not you.”
“No.”
“Never you,” he said.
And the burning truth behind the sarcasm and played out joke that I have been reluctant to take chances with my heart left me with yet another scab in the center of my chest, another trace of scar tissue to cover up breathless disappointment.
That night I hurried on home from work with an alien longing that reminded me of a little passage in War and Peace, when Pierre has just come from the Rostovs after seeing Prince Andrey, and his coachman asks him: "Now where, your excellency?" "Where? Home!" And the cold description of the dark night air, the starlit sky, and the longing for home filled me with anticipation. I wasn't worried about being mugged. I wasn’t pining to return to my family’s home in Connecticut. I was however worried that I would encounter someone I knew.
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