The Dangerous Husband

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Chapter One

We were introduced at one of those theatrical, poignant Manhattan Thanksgivings, a splendid party (singular guests, including small precocious chess-playing children and a cousin of Jim Jarmusch's; cornucopia of gourds and wildflowers pouring down the center of the trestle table; old family silver bought at a yard sale in Maine) in the clever, threadbare Horatio Street home of our shared acquaintance Lydia, a magazine editor who bravely orchestrates holiday feasts for the friends who have become her family and always takes in strays: This guy and I were the strays.

"Help me," he said in greeting. "I'm in a mess."

"I'm not the one to save you!" I snapped, and we laughed like maniacs.

He was holding his canapé plate as though clutching a railing and tipping white wine onto his trousers; my first act as his new friend was to swab with my cocktail napkin at his attractive lap. I had just finished recuperating from a romance with a fellow photographer that had ended as badly as expected—a bolter, and he bolted. Then, in a convalescent mood, I'd been taking some walks alongside a large psychiatric social worker and seeing some French movies with a small, wiry urologist, and these goalless activities had grown too noticeably noncommital for everybody involved; we were all three of us, medium, short, and tall, depressed, you may think, and maybe so. I had figured this was maturity—the end of gullibility, exaggerated expectations, being in a rush. Still, I occasionally caught myself in a sort of prayer: Somebody come to me. All these years and I had never managed to be married. This guy with thespilled wine, for his part, as I would learn immediately, was imagining his own new life, nothing involving any woman—he was going to write a novel.

"I'm so bad at impression management," he said.

"'Impression management'? Are you making a joke?"

"I'm thinking about Erving Goffman—sociologist who wrote Asylums? Goffman also wrote more interestingly than anybody about almost everything that happens when people get together, including spilling your drink. He's dead now. It's a real loss."

"I'm sorry." Suddenly I was aware of being stupidly charmed, as in the presence of, say, Sting, or Danny DeVito.

"Even though I only met him once, Goffman was my mentor."

"Okay, tell me."

Our first topic, then, Erving Goffman, late hero. Goffman who brilliantly delineates the ways in which social situations offer opportunities to convey flattering information about oneself even as those same occasions are inevitably risky times when unflattering information may be revealed—say, perhaps, about one's physical aplomb or lack thereof, he told me, grinning, standing slightly bent with the big wet spot on the front of his slacks. "Goffman himself was incapable of attending a dinner party without making the hostess cry." Goffman who in his book Interaction Ritual quotes an assertion attributed to Karl Wallenda on the subject of returning to the high wire after the Wallenda troupe's fatal accident in Detroit: "To be on the wire is life. The rest is waiting." I was excited. Yes, the time is now—I will inch out on the wire! I gazed into the man's beautiful, fast-darkening eyes. Is this guy getting an erection? I asked myself, with the normal admixture of fear and hope, as together we prepared to kiss the past good-bye.

"Take a walk with me," he said, "and we'll start our conversation."

Once around the block at a measured pace through gray November air, doing some of the talking we'd apparently been saving up all our years for just such a moment.

How long ago it seems. We were chatting our little hearts out.

I told him about my first photograph, shot in 1971 in subway light at the Thirty-fourth Street station with my first range finder, when I was nineteen: an old man and an old woman sharing a laugh.

I told him about my thumbprint cyanotypes—to this day, I still love the giant whorls swirling lusciously in all that beautiful nineteenth-century blueness. "Hands have been used by artists in so many cultures," I averred, straining to attach some perhaps tenuous but nonetheless arguably genuine sociological (or possibly anthropological—still in the ballpark) import to my work. As we rounded the first corner, he held my wrist, causing me to blurt out useless technical information: "The paper is prepared with ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferrous cyanide, dried away from bright light!" I wanted to forestall his thinking, For the last five years this woman has been taking pictures of her thumb. And, strolling at his side through an arcadian Greenwich Village, I saw myself breaking free of hitherto unfelt chains: I've worked with blue too long.

As soon as we met, in short, we fell in love. It hit us hard, the way love is supposed to, here in America. It made us feel nauseated and carry ourselves tenderly. Sudden passion. Unlooked-for communion. Hope of repair.

When sociologist Erving Goffman speaks of fatefulness, this is surely what he means. Secretly we were starved twins, suddenly at the end of our lifelong search for our other halves. We were forty years old and, now I see, immaculate.

* * *

Back at Lydia's, we switched the placecards in order to sit side by side. He shoved my chair under me with a refreshing disregard for ceremony, and we talked on.

"Goffman was really a symbolic interactionist," he murmured, "and a dramaturge. He understood that our interactions with each other are symbolic, and that their purposes are twofold: one, to further our aims. And, two, and crucially, to save face."

"Go on."

"Here's the great thing Goffman revealed: Life is lived in the evocative tense."

"What does that mean?"

"That the self is situationally constructed. That, by and large, people are not, as they imagine themselves to be, governed by an inner core of values."

"That's only half right," I whispered. "Do you believe that literally? You wouldn't deny that some of our values are absolute and do determine how we act. There are certain things you and I know we simply would not do."

"Yes," he whispered, "you think that, of course. Goffman illustrates how you're wrong. Goffman shows the ways in which our rational ideas about our values and goals are always secondary to ego protection. What makes him fascinating is his depiction of a huge variety of face-saving mechanisms."

"No no," I whispered. "In social situations, yes. But in more serious matters, ultimately our values are going to determine what we do. They just are."

"You'd be surprised," he whispered.

"Well, no I would not," I whispered, with that urgent womanly sincerity that bespeaks sexual arousal.

He countered with a frankly masculine grin, appreciative, indulgent, and calm.

My underpants seemed dampish. Actually, why were we whispering? This was a dinner table and we were entitled to have dinner conversation! "Look," I whispered. "Here's something I know: I am not going to kill. I mean unless it was in some extreme self-defense situation, to save my own life, and that's just normal. Otherwise, even if I felt abused or victimized, believe me, I'm not murdering anybody."

"Sure you are, if your ego is sufficiently threatened. You'll suddenly find that you—"

"Are you actually maintaining, in a more than theoretical way, that people, in real life, if their ?ego is threatened,' will—"

"What I'm saying," he whispered, "and all I'm saying, is that people are more collaborators with each other than they are individuals guided by a moral compass. What Goffman demonstrates are the myriad ways this gets played out—the number of gestures we make, the repertoire of gestures—"

Somewhere there was a musical clinking and a thick silence fell. I whispered, "I understand you're trying to say that we—"

"Hel-lo?" a woman—our hostess!—sang.

As one, we looked up. All down the table, faces were smiling at us in the candlelight, the fresh pink faces of twenty unfamiliar, apparently friendly but completely uninformed persons, waiting in vain for my beloved and me to find our way back to their pale and irrelevant world. After a long moment spent gazing at us, they applauded. Of course we ate almost nothing, he and I. When the pumpkin pie and apple crisp were passed, we were still animated, still fresh. Candles low and guttering. The other guests, strangers all, lolling around us obtunded with tryptophan. We talked on.

I tasted a tiny drip of whipped cream with my finger. He shifted his foot and I glanced under the table. Brand-new highly polished palomino-colored wingtip. He rested its edge against the edge of my boot, and I can tell you I felt his heart beating like mine, through two layers of shoe leather and hose.