To the Precipice by Judith Rossner

Author:Judith Rossner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter Six

If I never thought I loved Walter, I was at least guilty of that dangerous adolescent fantasy: I could love him. Certainly I enjoyed being with him in the months following his separation. He seemed, if not a different person than the one who’d been married to Helen, a much happier, a more youthful version of the same man. He had been reticent; free of the weight of Helen’s personality he seemed to open up, to be eager to express himself. I remember being astonished during those months at the volume and range of his conversation. Astonished and pleased, for his talk was good, and came at a time when I felt cut off from most other communication. Memories, observations, ironic little jokes, random bits of knowledge—from that Saturday in May when he told me of the coming divorce, they gushed from him in a torrential flow that never ebbed, until we were married and it died.

As the weeks passed I found myself arriving earlier and earlier each Saturday, and staying later, so that I often had to rush to make my Saturday night dates with David. When the days got warmer, Boris and I spent more and more time outdoors, and almost always, Walter was with us. (In late spring he surprised us both with a driver’s license, and began taking us for short rides in the car, which had been stored in a garage until then.) I discovered that he was one of those people who absorbed huge quantities of random information and rarely let any of it go. He told us about the various statues in Central Park, about which churches were modeled on which European cathedrals. He showed us the brown-stones where various well-known families had lived, and told us which ones would be, sad to say, demolished before long. I had always thought of New York as having pretty sections and ugly ones, failing to distinguish between rich-pretty and rich-ugly, dull-pretty, poor-ugly, ugly-interesting, etc. He got me to look at the city, not because he made an effort to do so, but because he talked about it constantly and naturally during our walks. In museums he talked about the paintings, the sculpture, the craftwork, the dioramas. I was overwhelmed by a fund of information that I conveniently mistook for wisdom. I remember that every once in a while he would mirror my surprise at his knowledge on some new subject.

“My goodness,” he would say. “I’d forgotten I knew that. My memory’s coming back to me, Ruth.”

His talk was not just fodder for my brain, but distraction from the numerous problems that troubled me. It was after our marriage that I began to see it in another light, that I began to think of it as a protective device against feeling, that I wondered why Walter could not look at a statue and let its beauty wash over him, instead of pushing it away with his erudition. Like his rotten, “I love you, Ruth,” it came to represent in my mind a substitution for the real thing.

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