Adapted from 'Soul Carried to Heaven' by William-Adolphe Bouguereau - 1878

Marbles

by John Friedman

It’s Greenwich Village in the summer of 1960. Paul looks out a bedroom window, superstitious about missing a call from his former girlfriend, Cassia. He’s rarely out of range of the phone, he’s so anxious to hear from her.

“The girl’s not going to show before you leave for France, Paul. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but I’m telling you anyway.” Standing in the doorway, his aunt Lillian, gaunt and horsey, explains this to him patiently, not for the first time. Her heavy black glasses, like those of a bebop musician, wobble a bit as she returns to the kitchen, shaking her head. He’s been staying with her since graduating from Woolman College in June, and she’s grown increasingly maternal toward him, feeling Paul’s mother, her sister, Vivian, is somehow failing him in his time of trouble.

Though he knows it’s silly, Paul looks at the phone on the desk again, willing it to ring. He can’t believe Cassia might have moved on. They agreed to meet in New York City in June–but it’s now early July with classes at the University of Rochester Medical School long over. She’s unreachable.

During his first two years at Woolman they lived together in a houseboat on the Willamette River–a doublewide trailer-like affair built atop a raft of huge pine logs. He recalls her standing like a figurehead on the prow of the little sailboat they kept moored to the dock, one hand on the mast and the other beckoning out over the river as if to display to him some unimaginable happiness there.

His aunt says, interrupting this memory as she returns to the doorway, “Now, Paul, you need to get outside. Take a walk uptown. See more of the city.”

Paul finally listens.

The weather’s so fine it’s foolish to stay indoors; his neck and shoulders relax as the afternoon sun warms him, pulling him into the crowds on West Twelfth Street. Soon, Paul wanders a neighborhood of brownstones typical of robber baron New York. He imagines that he and Cassia coming home together at dusk pass through a low, black wrought-iron gate into a tiny sunken garden with optimistic espaliered roses. They climb wide cinnamon-toned steps and hand-in-hand pass through beveled glass doors below carved facades. This is how he imagines being with her in New York. Each door and narrow window frame a perfect life together.

But as he walks further uptown, even these city blocks of magnificent domestic architecture and the rich social texture of the neighborhood don’t stop him from pondering what happened to him.

This last spring, after a two-year silence, Cassia and Paul began corresponding, though he can’t now recall whose letter came first. Hers were nostalgic, her normally buoyant manner muted. Some mentioned their past history together, more often, others lamented her medical student life. She wrote of a snotty roommate who complained about Cassia’s frayed toothbrush, of endless snow, and of feeling confined in a gulag.

Before he leaves for Paris to spend the remainder of the summer as a flâneur des deux rives perfecting his spoken French, Paul and Cassia will meet in New York to discuss a future. And come to terms with the unspoken obstacles to their life together. Since he so much wants this meeting to take place, he believes it will.

But her silence, since these letters, suggests another, less welcome truth–that Cassia always saw him more as a temporary roommate than as a life partner.

In Paul’s yearning for her, he accepts Johns Hopkins’ offer of a teaching assistantship in French, having blindly applied there, as its famed medical program is one to which she could transfer.

Paul first saw Cassia from a second-floor window in Sanders dormitory. A track through the woods led from the Chemistry Annex down to the main campus. Just before the brick Gothic Revival buildings and the Quadrangle was a cluster of prefabricated faculty office buildings, a post office, a bookstore, and a coffee shop. Like Sanders itself, these structures were brought to Portland in sections from various Oregon military bases in 1945.

The thin plywood floors of his building rattle as students returning from lunch race up and down the stair case. Though its location is convenient, Paul feels too self-conscious to live in a dorm much longer. He is an outsider simply by being twenty-three. Before coming to Woolman he’d worked and saved up tuition money.

Paul looked out to ash and oak trees radiant and misty in the rainy Oregon fall, the light as liquid as that in an Impressionist painting. In this glowing setting, a tall woman, wearing a calf-length brown coat, like the dusters in spaghetti westerns, walked down the trail.

Her head is large, with a long, oval face, and prominent, heavily shadowed eyes. Her hair is pulled back from her forehead in a braid tied with a black velvet ribbon, the bow ends bouncing as she walks. Something about this bow is heart-stopping. Watching her, he realizes that there is no one in Portland he would rather look at.

After his Friday classes, Paul sees two familiar women in the coffee shop. A crowd of students is between him and their booth, walking in and out of the sunlight, ordering, toting heavy mugs of coffee. One of the women is Erika Michaels, in his French composition class. Across from her is the woman in the duster. He approaches.

“Salut, Erika, ça va?” he says, raising his coffee cup to the pair. Paul also smiles directly at Erika’s companion, hoping his interest isn’t too obvious. She looks up at him with absolute attention, her pupils large, questioning.

Erika nudges her. “My cousin, Cassia. She’s been back here for a while doing organic chemistry for medical school. Want to join us? There’s room.” As he squeezes in, he introduces himself to her; they are seated so close he can only look straight ahead or at her face. He tells her that he is an older student, a French major, having come to Woolman after working as a machinist in the Los Angeles aircraft industry. Erika, forgotten, smiles at them. It’s as if Paul now breathes a different air.

He loses himself in Cassia’s mobile eyes, compelling. Close up, her hair is dark brown, glossy, very fine in texture, and fixed in the same straggling style of yesterday. Her lipstick is chewed and careless. Her teeth are irregular in shape and color, her lips full and shapely. He smells her floral scent and feels the bulk of her body. He can’t make out her figure under the duster, but her presence, her legs wedged against his, occupies all his senses in the crowded room.

He thinks she must be older than he is, and later learns she is twenty-five. Though her speech is unaccented, a hint of another language unlike his own lingers in her consonants.

The next day, Paul sees Cassia on the path and leaves Sanders to greet her as she comes towards him from the Chemistry Annex in a shimmer of fall leaves. “Hi,” Paul says. “You’re Erika’s cousin.”

“Yeah,” she brightens, “and you’re the French guy.” The corner of her mobile mouth breaks into a mischievous smile, recognizing this is no chance meeting.

“Well, not French; I just study the language. Can I get you some coffee after your stint in organic chemistry?”

“Sure, let’s. I’d like that.” She is clearly pleased at his good memory.

They walk congenially. There’s a lightness in her step, a dancer’s gait. Though they’re a little apart, there’s also a silent companionship between them. He imagines they’re like two chords vibrating just outside the range of hearing, but that he knows her in some other way.

Later, in the coffee shop he is excited at how she lights up across from him, remembers him, drawing him into her field of attention. For the first time at Woolman, he realizes, he feels at ease with a like spirit, though fearful at how little he has to say for himself.

Over their coffee, Cassia describes growing up as a Woolman faculty child. “I’m definitely my mother’s daughter,” she says, looking around the room, as if she fears being overheard by the other students, “with all the pressures to be artistic, but without my mother’s talent.” The mother, Vera, she tells him, was a once-renowned society photographer in Houston in the 1920s; she met and married Cassia’s father, Frank, a radiochemist, there on a post-doc. Frank became a professor at Woolman, and served as interim president during the War years. Now, a faculty wife and mother of three daughters, Vera gave up photography. Paul knows generally that Frank is a figure of power on the campus; the new chemistry building is named for him.

As Cassia describes them, it is clear that both parents are rain-makers, part of Portland’s conservative civic elite, on the boards of things, the Catlin-Gable school, the Museum of Art. Her father has deep scientific and financial ties to a new electronics company on the Columbia River.

“After I got my BA,” Cassia continues, “I went to Bryn Mawr in anthropology, and I’m about to get my MA there. However, this past summer . . . I know it was pretty sudden . . . I decided to go to medical school, to specialize in child psychiatry . . . And I need organic chemistry. Which is really difficult. I don’t know why I ‘m telling you all this. I, I’m talking about myself too much.” She winds down, squirming in the booth, tucking her braid over her shoulder.

Paul wonders, as he tries to put all this together with her earlier remarks, ‘Was medicine really her father’s wish for her? Does he consider anthropology a soft science?’ He cannot miss her evident unease in telling him how she came to change her life’s direction.

Cassia inherited, as she admitted earlier, her artistic side from her mother Vera, but her relations to her father Frank, who gave her his analytic cast of mind, are more fraught, and as they talk, Paul understands the familial dynamic with him less. She certainly admires his eminence, but there’s also an uncomfortable straining for his good opinion, which Paul senses is not easily forthcoming. All of this family history comes flowing out with wit and considerable self-dramatizing, her hair ribbon bobbing in every direction as she talks.

There is more. Cassia shares her many accomplishments. She studied dance at Woolman; she is musical, singing, playing the piano and the recorder. She also draws beautifully, as he discovers, in a Thurber-like way, with a sure and expressive line. She loves clothing and costume, and is an expert seamstress, a talent inherited from her mother.

Yet, in spite of all this, and of her legacy status on campus, he senses she is lonely. That like him, she is an older person on a college campus wanting something different than most of the other students. He hopes he can offer what she is looking for.

As he watches her, Paul increasingly wants to spend time with her. Yet, is he too lacking in earned status for her? “I’m afraid my history’s very different from yours,” he says, turning his coffee cup around in the saucer, and studying it. “I also love music, but I’m not a musician. From my dad, I got my pleasure in photography and its history, but I had to sell my cameras to raise money to come here. I’m good at languages. I suppose I’ll go to graduate school in French and become a university teacher. And I could be good at that someday.”

He looks off, thinking that for the moment ‘I’m still a freshman in a highly competitive college, transfixed with desire for an older woman who has already earned a Master’s degree and is now launched on a new and challenging career.’

Paul’s Volkswagen has yellow plastic semaphores in the door pillars, an early form of turn signals. They clack up and down at the touch of a lever. When he first gets the car he flicks them for no reason at all, smiling in pleasure at their sound. The Volkswagen is small, chocolate brown with an earnest, wavering chromium streak of aerial. The first time she sees it, Cassia immediately climbs in and out of the seats, delighted, stroking the upholstery as though she were at a car dealership ready to buy one. The car seems to be something about him she especially admires.

It is a sultry night when Paul picks her up in it to go to Shakey’s for pizza. Cassia doesn’t wear her enveloping coat, and as he helps her into the seat, he fastens on her graceful figure with beautiful legs and slender calves tapering to delicate ankles. The light from the street lamps falls across her face, highlighting her prominent cheekbones. He thinks to himself, ‘there’s a lot of her.’

While they eat, Cassia cutting her pizza into delicate pieces, handles her knife and fork as languidly as if she is about to discard them. She drinks beer and holds forth, illustrating her stories with gestures, intensely engaging him as her audience. As she talks, her shoulder-length hair, tonight unbraided, falls free of her neck, and Paul is fascinated by the hollows of her naked throat. She sits imperiously like the diva in Tosca ready to sing “Vissi d’arte,” room shadows dramatic over the length of her bare arms.

Listening to the lilt of her voice, Paul thinks how vital her role-playing is to her character. The varied changes of tone with which she tells her stories are as perfect as if they were made by an accomplished actress. In these roles, he understands, all feeling, both high tragedy and even more the stuff of daily life–becomes the manner of conscious representation. Cassia’s experiences immediately pass into drama, he sees by the changing expressions of her face, and yet she portrays her own emotions. She is not exactly stagey, but she embodies each person she describes. Because of this, she is a little hard to read. Though Paul as an audience lights her up, he suspects she is more responsive to his admiration than to his desire.

She speaks of mythic Woolman graduates in her time there, presenting them as larger than life. Paul sees them as ghosts around the campus, going in and out of familiar buildings. They walk into rooms and everyone stops doing whatever to look at them.

One is a former boyfriend, Dan Hiatt, Woolman, 1950, handsome and extremely accomplished, who first interests her in anthropology. She glows as she recounts Hiatt’s achievements. Hearing her recall him and focusing solely on his career, Paul believes she is less nostalgic for an old lover and more appreciative of his current eminence in sociolinguistics and folklore. Her need to be just as extraordinary as Hiatt is palpable, as all-consuming as the desire for love or for a good social reputation might be in others. “Maybe,” she says, not without a hint of irony, sipping her beer, “people will talk about me in psychiatry sometime, the way they do about Dan.” She softens this with a slight self-conscious moue and down casting of her chin, but still it hurts Paul. He tries and fails to imagine Cassia telling another man about his, Paul’s influence on her in the same way.

At a tugboat repair dock along the Columbia River they park and watch the wide prows of barges being towed, adorned with rows of twinkling lights that shimmer over the river. He takes her hand. Then he brings her face to his. Her kisses come quickly, her lips soft, holding his. She put her mouth at the base of his throat. He barely recognizes her voice, bold and broken with need, when she says “come over on this side.”

The car bounces and squeaks as two large people make love inconclusively, without much satisfaction. Afterwards, as they rearrange their clothes, Paul holds her face, looking at her directly.

He tells her, knowing it sounds stiff and self-conscious but true nonetheless, that he wants never to be away from her. “From the moment I saw you on the path, I wanted you. And now I know you better, I want you full-time. If you feel the same way, let’s be together.” He runs his fingers through the tangles of Cassia’s hair, straightening the strands. She kisses him wordlessly, as if sealing a contract between them.

They return to Sanders. In his narrow bed, Paul tries to pull himself away from his thoughts on their lovemaking. He thinks it might be a while before they are physically harmonious. She seems somewhere else, her gaze distant around his small dorm room, as her fingers trace patterns over his chest. As he rises to a second encounter, interested in learning every part of her body, now she’s talking about her living arrangements. Paul attempts to focus on what she wants.

She props herself up, leaning her head to his ear. “About what you said on being together more, well, I’ve a cousin,” she goes on, as if continuing his earlier remarks, “another cousin, of many in Portland. He has a houseboat on the Willamette we could rent. It’s walkable to campus. I’ve been wanting to leave my parents. What if we move into that boat? He said it’s only 40.00 a month. Would you like that?” She strokes his face with her long fingers, her lips to his ear.

“Yes,” he says. “I’d live on a houseboat–or for that matter–in a tent with you. Let’s do it. When can we go see the place?”

On Saturday, they drive to the Tyger Moorage, their lease signed, and three months rent paid. Along the river bank a dock built on logs bobs with the tides. Their houseboat, 14 of 30, was made in the 1920s, and is flanked by two telephone poles with floating collars, holding the structure in place.

Garbage? Well, hey, throw it in the river for the ducks. The bathroom is tiny–a shower stall, a toilet and a wall-mounted sink, with a half-sized electric water heater in a corner. Tall glass doors at the end of the living area open onto the drenched deck. Ducks swim all around the houseboats, as beavers splash mournfully in the sloughs by the river bank.

Over the next week they move in, painting the Celotex walls mauve from a scratch-and-dent can. Cassia sews burlap curtains stamped with block prints she makes from potatoes. Soon, the place smells fresh. They toss into the river a mattress with a perpetual damp spot and bring in a convertible couch bed and a folding sewing table to serve as his desk over which Paul puts a throw of green burlap.

Each morning they watch the sunrise. The traffic on this stretch of the river is heavy from dawn until midnight. Low-revving tugboats push barges heaped high with yellow industrial sulfur to the pulp mills up river. Sometimes a towed raft of pine logs, jumbled like pick-up sticks, wallops them gently with a groundswell of wake.

Cassia and Paul are practically strangers. Their schedules keep them so busy that they have little time to luxuriate, even on Sunday mornings, in the cheerful space Cassia had so lovingly created, with a coffee table that also serves as a dining table and a Mission armchair from the Salvation Army. As Paul wakes early from the sounds of river commerce, he looks at Cassia’s braid on his pillow, her deeply sleeping form flattened under the quilt, and wonders what future she imagines for them.

Certainly, Cassia knew of this house boat’s availability and thought about renting it from her cousin well before she met Paul. Neither does she initiate love in the way he expects she might. Still, he is pleased with his new life with her. He is out of Sanders, living in novel surroundings. He has Cassia for the next fifteen months, though after that their paths will diverge, perhaps permanently, as it is clear that she is going to a medical school far from Portland, no matter what happens with them. He lives with this, like a certain diagnosis of a mortal illness, hidden most of the time, but there in his mind always.

His sense of permanence with her is further shaken when Cassia asks him before an upcoming dinner with her parents not to mention they live together. She takes a small apartment in the city as her official address. Surprised at the expense, Paul remains silent. The rental of the apartment he feels, undermines them as a couple.

“I’m just not ready to tell them about the houseboat. They are conventional people, especially my father. So, let’s just wait for a while. I’m even hoping for a time–and soon–when we can have them over to see it.”

Cassia’s house, a grand Colonial Revival on a hillside, hosts Paul’s first glacial dinner with her family. Only the clicking of cutlery against the plates relieves the silence, the sparkle of wine glasses, the dining room’s somber lighting.

Distracting himself, Paul examines Vera’s gallery-framed luminous silver-gelatin portraits of socially prominent people taken during the 1920s and 1930s, Paul imagines her as a John Singer Sargent-like chronicler of the wealthy bourgeoisie in each city in which she has lived.

Frank is another matter.

He is large, monolithic, balding and deeply self-absorbed, like the hero of Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, Paul thinks. He says little. He wears a short-sleeved white shirt, and his forearms, massive, monumental, weigh against the table.

Frank asks perfunctory questions about Paul’s classes and his family in Los Angeles, but clearly finds him of no real interest or importance. Perhaps he sees Paul as too temporary to justify further effort. ‘My daughter will not settle for this guy.’ As Cassia discusses with her father her progress in Organic Chemistry, she is unusually subdued, toying with her silverware and glancing around the room from time to time. Her voice rises in a childlike pitch as she answers. They can’t speak about renovating the houseboat, where, as far as Cassia’s parents know, Paul lives alone.

“Don’t mind him,” Cassia says, chiming in after a stiff silence on the way home. “He’s just like that sometimes. He’s in the midst of some big grant application. It’s got nothing to do with you, or us.” Paul wasn’t sure this was true, but says he doesn’t think he made a forceful impression.

She laughs, speaking from experience. “It’s a bit like Kafka; you have to go through so many anterooms first to get at him.” But this could be said of Cassia herself.

In February, Cassia finishes Organic Chemistry and starts working six days a week, plus two nights in one of the University of Oregon Medical School laboratories on Marquam Hill. They live cheaply, as she saves toward medical school expenses. She regularly brings home chloroformed experimental rabbits, preparing them for dinner. They are good stewed, but have a lingering chemical aftertaste. Though she doesn’t serve them to company, Cassia often proudly describes her recipes to their dinner guests, both Paul’s fellow students and some faculty or lab people from the medical school, as they are now entertaining as a couple. In all this, she plays the role of the struggling and impoverished Mimi of La Bohème.

Paul plans a loving gift for Cassia’s birthday. Knowing she likes handmade things, he visits a Portland tobacco shop. Its owner, Turkish or Armenian, with black, deep-set eyes and a crafty grin, seems a fugitive from the Ottoman Empire. Paul explains he needs some broken amber pipe stems. They haggle over a price amid the heavy smells of Balkan Sobranie, and the dark cigars in glass humidors.

He saws the pipestems into small chunks, shapes them into beads on a grinder and polishes them. With doubled dental floss, beeswax, and a lot of knotting between the beads, he strings a gradated necklace. Each bead differs slightly from the next, in its rich golden yellows, its opacity, its chunkiness. He knots a gold-filled clasp and link to the necklace. It is on the large side, but she is a large girl.

The work occupied him for weeks, yet the close of his sophomore year brings the knowledge that each hastily snatched breakfast, each twist and turn of Cassia’s body in bed, is another tick of the clock to their impending twilight.

In the spare time between her job and his classes, they enjoy each other, sailing, taking their cats for walks along the banks of the river. They sit on the houseboat deck on plastic-strapped folding chairs with Cassia’s new medical student friends, witty older people, trying out her baked goods and laughing at her improvisations. She tells stories of long days in her lab among her groggy rabbits, their pink eyes rolling with anxiety as she approaches their cages.

Though Paul sometimes feels like one of her experimental subjects, there is hardly an evening when he is not struck with wonder and delight at Cassia’s recognition of incongruities, her sudden springs towards beauty in nature and the man-made world. He feels she completes him, filling a need from childhood he did not know he had. When he is with her he is there in a way he cannot recall ever experiencing before. Yet, he always fears this happiness is short-lived, illusory.

One morning she suggests, as though it were a sudden idea, that Paul transfer to Rochester, but her voice lacks his own loss or desolation. Naïve as he is, he knows that becoming a junior elsewhere–living with an absentee medical student he will never see, when he has amassed some modicum of respect and achievement at Woolman–would be a grave mistake.

After this conversation he hardly sees Cassia as she prepares to leave Portland–and his life. Each evening she takes another item to her parents’ house, the sewing machine, her mirror with a ring of small lights around it. Portions of their life together are packed away, one by one.

On the last day he drives her over to her parents’ house.

“Well, goodbye and good luck with the houseboat. It’s going to be cold in Rochester,” she says from the hallway.

Carrying in the last box, he kisses her and leaves. They agree not to write. It will make it less painful.

By August, as Paul returned from Paris to his aunt Lillian’s spare bedroom, the pain of Cassia’s recent behavior has dulled. And he is preoccupied with getting his few possessions from Los Angeles to Baltimore. So, he is surprised by a note from his now out-of-town aunt, saying that Cassia phoned, leaving a number. Paul calls her and immediately arranges to meet the next day.

There is a letter for him, too. Their friend Michael, who graduated Woolman the year before Paul, was in touch with Cassia in June. She is now engaged to Ralph Koehler, Woolman, class of 1956. Paul remembers this guy. He looks like a god in a Norse Edda and is a wunderkind biologist at the Rockefeller Institute. Though he is exactly Paul’s age, Paul can’t compete with his accomplishments.

This is painful news, as is the information that Cassia was seeing Koehler this last Spring and early Summer, going back and forth to the city from Rochester, while she wrote to Paul about meeting him in New York.

At his commencement Paul saw Cassia’s mother, Vera, and mentioned hoping to see Cassia in June. At the time, Vera looked at him oddly. He now realizes she knew something he didn’t. It should have occurred to him she was both embarrassed by this, and sorry for him.

Cassia and Paul meet at O’Shea’s tavern, on Third Avenue, where the Elevated shudders on its olive-green iron-work trestles as it shoots along the tracks in front of the turn-of-the-century tenements. The place is gloomy and quiet, with a few lunch-time drinkers socked in at the bar.

Stepping out of the sunlight, he finds Cassia at a small table to the side. Paul hasn’t seen her for nearly two years. He makes out her features in the shadows with difficulty. They order draft beer. Every so often, the Elevated’s clanking and crashing rips through the air, interrupting what she says. Afterward, in the silences, he looks at their reflections in the mirror mounted above the bar. Her hair is up in an urban style and she wears one of the newly fashionable Balenciaga low-waisted sack dresses. They both study their beers.

“I heard from Michael about your engagement. He sounds like the guy for you,” Paul finally says neutrally, to break the awkward silence.

“Yes, it will be perfect, and convenient, now I’m at Columbia. And we’re looking to buy a house in New Jersey.” She speaks rapidly, in a tone that precludes questions and further comment. In that way of people who have treated you shamefully, Cassia seems indignant. She goes on about the venue for the wedding, the bridesmaids, and how her family is coming from Portland. No guilt softens her voice, nor does she look away embarrassedly. Why is she there at all, given her dissembling, Paul wonders? Their meeting is so tightly choreographed there is no moment when he can ask her “Why?” Yet he knows the question will recur to him all of his life. Maybe she does not know the answer today; maybe she never knew it.

And always with him too, will be the terror of abandonment he gets that summer of 1960. Cassia destroyed his certainty about life. He still resents this.

As she talks about her wedding plans, Paul studies her as though she were a stranger. ‘Could their time together on that houseboat have been erased so completely? The slow, powerful heave of water, the iridescent blues and greens of ducks, the barges of yellow sulfur passing like behemoths. Did they matter less to her than to him? How can she speak about the registry for her wedding, as though he were a relative consulting on her China pattern?’

‘We shared a bed, a tube of tooth paste. Certainly, she was my first adult love,’ Paul thinks. But perhaps he’s been merely a convenience in her life, and she’s moved on to something larger, where the stakes are higher, and sentiment plays no role.

After this meeting, he reports to his mother, Vivian, who often phones him to console him about Cassia. “Her father saw something about me at that first dinner that I could not have known. I will never wield great influence. Cassia’s parents only ally with people who do. They understand and respect power. Indeed, Vera’s photographs chronicled it. Frank from his period as President of Woolman College during the early 40s to his later awards of huge government scientific grants mastered its intricacies.” He looks at the phone after this.

One night during one of these calls he says more about the meeting at O’Shea’s. “Her vocabulary, Mom, I can’t really explain it, changed. We sat there as if in an interview as she discussed her future life with Koehler–his Research Associateship at the Rockefeller Institute, the lab he runs, his articles in Nature–and her speech was peppered with verbs of status like ‘situate’ and ‘position.’”

Words used by the people who have power.

Paul goes off to graduate school and on the rebound marries badly, though he sticks it out for many years. He hears of Cassia off and on. After marrying Koehler and getting an MD, she specializes in child psychiatry. She has three children. In 1964 Koehler dramatically leaves her for a man, quickly becoming active in post-Stonewall circles in New York City.

After losing a custody battle to prevent Koehler from seeing his children, claiming he is a 'dangerous influence'–a celebrated legal outcome–Cassia, in 1975, marries another psychiatrist, a dean of a medical school. She opens her own practice. This is the largest drama she has so far starred in, practically an opera. She has graduated from the role of Mimi to that of the tragically renunciatory Tatyana of Eugene Onegin.

When Paul’s schadenfreude on learning of Cassia’s divorce and legal humiliations ebbs, he realizes that Frank’s scientific gifts now dominate, with little left in Cassia of Vera’s meditative artistic side. For Paul this is an unfortunate stroke of fate or fortune. Yet, he is grateful that the stars incline to him when he first loves her. For then the two sides of her character were more equally mixed in his favor.

Cassia is now 93. Paul must ask her the lingering O’Shea’s Tavern question before they both die: why had she ghosted him? There must be an answer. Increasingly, the desire prods him to show Cassia the havoc she caused, as if displaying this past suffering to her will satisfy something fundamental in his nature.

He phones his Woolman College friend Michael, whose wife’s a wheel in the Alumni Association. “Hey, do you remember my old girl, Cassia Koehler she still calls herself, though she remarried? I know it’s a nutty thing, we’re both so old, but I want to talk with her, ask her some questions, before we both get Alzheimer’s, lose our marbles. The past, memory is so evanescent. When it’s gone, it’s gone. That period is much on my mind, and while my own recall of it is still good, I thought Katherine could get me Cassia’s contact information.”

Michael responds a day later. “Well, of course I remember Cassia; she treated you pretty shittily. I can see why you’d want to remind her of that, marbles or not. Here’s the address you need and good luck with it. Let your taw shooter roll straight and play for keepsies.”

Paul phones Cassia. She is confused, not at first recognizing his name or voice. He hesitates at her unfriendly tone, stammering a moment as he thinks how glad he would have been–after all these years–if she had called him, even if conversation ran out quickly. In her voice, muffled, flat, he does not hear the timbre, or lilt, of the woman he once knew.

He asks, after general chit chat, if she remembers their time together. She hedges and says there are large 'potholes' in her memory, giving examples of how difficult her life is now. He thinks he might as well blurt it out.

“Can you explain, I’m just curious mind you, why you never told me about your engagement to Ralph Koehler when we wrote during my Senior year? You must know that what you did before I went to France that summer was very painful to me.”

She does not reply to this directly. She is searching her memory. She has already jokingly mentioned that for the last year she’s been leaving little notes to herself at key places around her apartment. Things to do and when to do them, drawers with their contents, cutlery, spatulas, described in notes on the pulls, labels on each handle of the gas stove. The worst was that she forgot to turn up–though she got quite elegantly dressed–for a dinner party with some people in her practice, and then, herself giving a dinner two weeks later, didn’t remember she was the hostess.

Once, on the phone she called Paul “Oliver” and went on for a moment with a different conversation. “I don’t know, I think I’m just losing my mind,” she said, when he corrected her. But her train of thought wandered off. It was all light enough, with a tone of private amusement. Still, several 'potholes' occurred in sentences. He remembered her remarkable mental acuity in their verbal games at Woolman, how they played with people’s names, invented imaginary dialects like 'Zardian' in their time together. But now he could not keep her focused.

“Would you like me,” he asks her tentatively after a bit, in an effort to bring her back to the topic of her behavior, “to write a little sketch of that time and e-mail it to you, refresh your memory?” The pitch of her voice rises in enthusiasm somewhere near what he remembers.

“Yes, yes, Paul, if you’d do that. Thanks so much. That could be so helpful to me.”

Where is the pleasure, he wonders, in the long pauses of their conversation, where she seems to fade from the phone like a wraith, in saying at last what he so long wanted to say? The next day, he sends her a minutely detailed account in their life together, surprised at his own recollections of even the smallest element. She quickly answers.

“Paul, thank you so much. Your message, sketch–if that is what to call it–was remarkable. It captures the magical loveliness of the houseboat which I remember–it does not take much to make me think about the houseboat–it’s like Proust’s experience with tea and a madeleine. Here’s another memory from that time, definitely not perdu, like everything about Ralph Koehler and my wedding, I promise you, because I find myself thinking about it and giggling. We were in San Francisco in an elevator in Saks Fifth Avenue, and you took a deep breath and said in a voice that commanded attention, like an actor uttering lines from Shakespeare, every word clearly articulated, crisp: ‘I love the smell of expensive women.’”

Paul does not remember this moment on their trip to San Francisco, but he takes delight that she does. He hears Cassia’s original voice, the one he fell in love with in the Woolman coffee shop so long ago, and thinks, perhaps there could be more nuggets like this, buried gold under pebbles. But as he weighs her response, he wonders how much of his 'sketch' she actually read.

Thinking e-mail is better than the phone because it puts her less on the spot, gives her more time to arrange her thoughts and tie her memories together, he sends her a message with the header “Mots d’escalier.”

“I wanted to thank you for your kind words about my little sketch and your own wonderful memory of our trip to San Francisco. I did wonder, though, in thinking over your comments, if you had read my account of our life together on the moorage from nose to toes, as some portions are unflattering. For example, those opera references I put there for a reason.

Because the tale of our months together is worthy of the Metropolitan. It is all about ambition. There is a principessa, a forbidding father, a worthy but undistinguished suitor. The principessa makes a seemingly better choice, who satisfies the father but later proves unworthy. The suitor, on the rebound, marries unhappily. High tragedy for all.

 And the elephant in the room (or on stage), large, with satchel-like knee-folds and bristles on its trunk is: why there was no mention of your engagement to Ralph Koehler in the Spring of 1960?

 As a wiser person now than then, I wonder if you were ever really in love, felt its pains at any time in your life. Ever stood with an equal amount of egg on your face, or waited for a telephone to ring? I think not. Or you could not have written me those letters through April and May (‘the snow and icy temperatures of Rochester’ was one phrase particularly heart breaking) and not mentioned the engagement, even if your feelings for me were neutral. This has been on my mind for 66 years. O muse of my youth, what think you of all this?”

This gets her attention. She replies in minutes. “Paul–you are correct–I was struggling . . . I know I behaved badly . . . with those things.” Paul hears something broken, and satisfyingly groveling in the pauses as well as in the words. But her discomfort is unsatisfying to him. He wants to tell her his mind, but not to hurt her. He understands that the woman he once loved is now barely there. That she could forget him, or perhaps has forgotten him as she has forgotten Koehler and her wedding, their images like monarch butterflies migrating to another clime.

He had wasted years brooding over Cassia’s treatment of him and now, he understands the she of that humiliation is not there anymore. If anything, he has driven her away, broken her recollections into smaller, unrelated fragments. The old Cassia exists only in his memories.

Paul wondered, as well, as with her marriage to Ralph Koehler, if Cassia had long forgotten his irresistible attraction to her, his sense that his life was nothing if he could not be around the girl with the dark hair, pulled so tightly back like that of a ballerina, a bow of black ribbon of bow at the end, the long, full arms emerging from the colorful skin-tight bodices she turned out so easily on her mother’s old Singer sewing machine. Cassia had certainly passed through a fire in her life with divorce from Koehler, but as the 'potholes' in her memory deepened and multiplied, had she the saddest experience of all–forgetfulness of what it was like to be in love?

In thinking of what must be her scattered recollections, Paul remembers his favorite childhood game, that every boy of his generation played at recess and after school. Children squat around a dirt circle. One, looking like him, holds the shooter. The child sights deliberatively, shoots the taw, and marbles fly in every direction. Aggies collide, scatter, and roll past the confines of the circle, without logic, like the milky colors of her fragmented memory of love and of him.

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