Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [103]
And, at long last, I told her about the late night call that I’d received after Eve disappeared and how with my overnight bag in hand I’d skipped to Penn Station like a schoolgirl so that I could catch the Montrealer and take it to a hoot owl and a hearthstone and a can of pork and beans.
Bitsy emptied her glass.
—That’s a Grand Canyon of a tale, she said. A mile deep and two miles wide.
The metaphor was apt. A million years of social behavior had worn away this chasm and now you had to pack a mule to get to the bottom of it.
I suppose I suspected that some display of sororal sympathy was in order; or if not that, then outrage. But Bitsy exhibited neither. Like a seasoned lecturer, she seemed satisfied that we had covered the necessary ground for the day. She signaled the waiter and paid the bill.
When we were outside, parting ways, I couldn’t resist but ask:
—So . . . ?
—So, what?
—So, what do you think I should do?
She looked a little surprised.
—Do? Why, keep it up!
When I got back to my place it was after five. In the apartment next door, I could hear the Zimmers sharpening their sarcasm. Over an early dinner, they chipped away at each other like little Michelangelos, placing every stroke of the mallet with care and devotion.
I kicked my shoes at the icebox, poured a glass of gin, and dropped into a chair. The rehash with Bitsy had helped me regain some perspective, even more than the crack I’d taken at Tinker. It had left me in a scientific mood, a mood of morbid fascination—the way a pathologist must feel when looking at a viral rupture on the surface of his own skin.
There’s an old parlor game called On the Road to Kent in which someone describes a walk he has taken on the road to Kent and all of the things that he witnessed along the way: the various tradesmen; the wagons and carriages; the heath and heather; the whip-poor-will; the windmill; and the gold sovereign dropped by the abbot in the ditch. When the traveler finishes, he describes the journey a second time, leaving out some items, adding others, rearranging a few, and the game is to identify as many of the changes as possible. Sitting there in my apartment, I found myself playing a version of this game in which the road was the one that I had traveled with Tinker from New Year’s Eve to the present.
This is a game that is won through powers of visualization more than memory. The best player puts herself in the traveler’s shoes as the journey unfolds, using her mind’s eye to see exactly what the traveler has seen, so that when she walks the route a second time the differences will draw attention to themselves. So as I took a second pass at 1938, setting out from The Hotspot and proceeding through the pageant that is day-by-day Manhattan, I immersed myself in the landscape and reobserved the little details, the offhand remarks, the actions on the periphery—all through the new lens of Tinker’s relationship with Anne. And many fascinating changes did I discover there. . . .
I remembered the night that Tinker called me to the Beresford—and how he had come home from the office after midnight with his hair combed and his twice-shaven cheeks and his crisp Windsor knot. But, of course, he hadn’t been to the office at all. Once he had poured me that warm martini and backed apologetically out the door, he had taken a taxi to the Plaza Hotel—where after exertions of one form or another, he had freshened up in Anne’s convenient little bath.
And the night at the Irish bar on Seventh Street—when