She finished her coffee and looked at the kitchen clock. She would have to get busy. Even though the house was always shipshape, there were many little things to be done. She wanted the whole place as neat and dustless as a good museum when John arrived.
Even though he said on the phone that he would be by “sometime in the middle of the morning,” he came at noon to be in time for lunch. She counted on that and had a good lunch ready for him.
John seemed a little shabbier, softer, fleshier, balder, and grayer than the last time, but he still had an easy smile, that winning smile. Often, after he was gone, that would be the only memory he left behind, like the vanishing Cheshire cat. They had moved since he had come last. Howard moved up, and they moved farther out into the suburbs. So she showed him all around the house and he ably and tactfully noticed the nice things she had done with the place. She offered him a drink before lunch and was somehow pleased when he declined, even though his color, the little veins around his nose and a slight tremor of the fingers showed he was begging for one. She was amused, but deeply pleased, too, because his abstinence seemed to prove the ritual importance of the occasion to him. Of course, before he went back to the city, beginning at some bar near the station and continuing on the Club Car, he would more than make up for it. But, for the time being at least, he was willing to deny himself and pretend to her.
During lunch he managed to approach the subject openly.
“I’d say it looks like the best chance I’ve had in a coon’s age,” he was saying. “Silberman says it’s almost a sure thing.”
“Silberman?”
“My partner.”
“And what does this Mr. Silberman have to offer you besides sage advice and counsel?”
“It isn’t the way you think, Jane. Silberman is giving me a great opportunity. He could give it to anybody else, but he likes me. He wants to help me. We get along and he’s doing me a favor.”
“No doubt,” she said. “No doubt this Silberman has an inbred and deeply charitable disposition.”
“Let’s leave him out of it, then.”
“Why? Why leave him out? It’s his idea, isn’t it?”
“You’re a wonder,” John said, laughing.
“Well, isn’t it?”
“You don’t even know what the plan is. You don’t even know anything about Silberman except his name. And already you’re competent to pass judgment on the whole thing.”
“You’ll have to admit, John, that I have had a certain amount of vicarious experience with these ‘things’ in the past.”
“This is different,” he said. “Just let me tell you about it.”
“I really don’t want to know,” she told him. “Spare me the sordid details of the Great Silberman-Singletree Treasure Hunt. Just let me go to my desk and write out a check for what you need—if I have enough in the bank.”
She rose from the dining-room table and went to her writing desk in the living room. She opened her checkbook and sat waiting with her pen poised. He followed and stood behind her, looking over her shoulder.
“How much do you think you need?”
“You really would give me a check right now, without even knowing what for, wouldn’t you?”
“Haven’t I always? Have I ever let you down?”
“Not exactly,” he said.
“How do you mean that—not exactly?” She twisted around to look at him.
“Look,” he said. “You offered me a drink before lunch. Could I have one now?”
“Just tell me how much money you want.”
He sighed and turned away, looked out of a window at the yard.
“What would you say,” he said softly, “if I told you I didn’t come here just for money?”
“I’d probably say you were lying.”
“Suppose what I really wanted was your blessing and not a dime?”
“There’s an old proverb,” she said. “It goes ‘Beware of lying, for it is sweeter than the flesh of birds.’ ”
Inexplicably, John laughed. His laughter was sudden, loud, and crude in the dustless, well-kept room.
“God Almighty, Jane! Where did you get that one?”
She shut her checkbook, put the top back on her pen, closed the desk, and stood up. She was stiff with stifled anger.
“I will be happy to give you what I can,” she said. “I am happy to do what I can if you will only tell me how much.”
“I’m sure you are,” he said. “Now that we’re talking about the truth, I’m sure you are happy to give me the money.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I guess it means I don’t want it this time. I guess it means I’d rather go back empty-handed and face Silberman and get the immemorial horselaugh than to take another check from you.”
“You’re getting mighty proud in your middle age.”
“Proud?” he said. “Pride, that is it, isn’t it? You’ll let a man have anything, anything under the sun except his pride. Lord, I’m just the ne’er-do-well brother. What kind of a life does poor Howard have around here?”
“That’s quite enough,” she said, feeling her hands tremble a little and hating herself for it.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a moment. “You know I didn’t really mean that.” Then: “Maybe I will have that drink now, if you don’t mind.”
“Help yourself.”
He poured himself a drink and then they sat down and chatted easily about the family. He had been out of touch with everybody and she told him all the news. Soon it was nearly time for his train and she called a taxi for him. They did not mention the check or the reason he had come to see her. But when the taxi tooted its horn and he was at the door saying good-bye, she gave him a ten-dollar bill. She stuffed it into his coat pocket and saw his eyes film with quick tears before he turned from her and ran, still light-footed, after all, still graceful, down the walk to the cab.
She shut the door and leaned back against it, breathing deeply. John would be back. He would come back again all right. Or maybe he would not come; he would write and then she could send a check in the mail.
Now she was alone again. In an hour or so the children would be home from school. She had an hour to read or sew or write letters or phone somebody. But she felt tired, beyond doing anything.
She climbed the stairs and went into their bedroom, rummaged in her bureau drawers until she found what she was looking for—a yellowing snapshot of herself at the age of ten, a plain girl with pigtails, short skirt, skinny legs (one with a bandage), and bony knees, a sad little girl with an apprehensive, frightened look. She looked at herself in the picture and wept for herself and all the tricks and ravages of time, silently and hopelessly.
But when she raised her head and saw herself in the mirror, already red-eyed and puffy from weeping, she put the picture back where she had found it. She went into the bathroom to wash her face and be ready for the children when they came home. Maybe she could take them somewhere. Perhaps they could read a story or play games. She really ought to think of something nice for them to do this afternoon.
THE INSECTS ARE WINNING
(Two Versions of the Same Tale)
I.
THE MOTH
NOW THE MOMENT OF TRUTH is near. The young matador, theatrical in his suit of lights, has dedicated the killing and he is working the bull close with the muleta. He stands poised like a dancer and the dark bull moves to the inaudible tune of his least gesture. There is a long gasp from the crowd at the dangerous beauty of each pass, followed by the exaltation of their roared olés, one roar overlapping the other like the sound of stormy surf. Then the moment itself arrives, the bull fixed, his great head lowered, and the young man rising on the balls of both feet, sighting along the delicate deadly blade in lean profile. He goes forward, graceful between brutal horns, sword easing home, seeking and finding death; and, triumphantly, he spins around grinning with sweat gleaming on his face as the bull’s legs bow and cave behind him. The uproar o
f the crowd crackles with portent like the sound of distant summer thunder.
“Okay, honey,” Grace says. “This is where we came in.”
The truth is that a full five minutes have passed by since the exact place in the picture when they first entered the close darkness, stumbled into their seats, and looked up together into a flat, rectangular, transfigured world of improbable joys and abstract, riskless dangers. During those last, precious five minutes, ever since the scene he remembered flashed into view again, Harry has been sweating with a vague anxiety that Grace, wholly involved, may discover herself and wake to what is happening before he has had a chance for the second time to see the climactic moment of the killing. For those five minutes he has been completely aware of her, aware of her intense, palpable concentration at his elbow, aware of the solidity of her flesh, of the breath of life in her. Still, wishing and hoping against the inexorable flow of time and the gradual gray dawning of her self-consciousness has not spoiled it for him. Now that he has succeeded after all, if anything the possible danger of being detected and deprived of pleasure has added a furtive zest to it.
“Sure,” he says. “Let’s go on home.”
He stands up and moves along the row just ahead of her, mumbling excuse-me-please’s as he wriggles through a squirming nest of legs around his ankles, and he waits at the end of the row while his wife, struggling with her coat, hat, gloves, and pocket-book, runs the same gauntlet to join him. They walk up the slanting aisle under the long beam of light, still fountaining its bright configuration of images, through the lobby where a pimply young usher, apparently surprised by them, cups a cigarette in his palm and looks away. Outside they stand under the glittering sign, dazed by the sudden winter air and all the sad burden of reality.
“It wasn’t such a bad picture,” Grace says. “I don’t like to even think about them killing animals. But the rest of it was fine.”
Harry grunts something, not a word, in reply, lights a cigarette, and they start to walk past mounds of frozen slush, the remains of last night’s snowfall, which seemed bound to annihilate everything, all known shapes and forms and images, under the white, unspeakable weight of its silent purity, to the bus stop. Harry’s car is in the garage again. Trouble with the transmission. That thought and the loneliness of the late street have released in him the sullen demon of self-pity.
Not for him the joys of the bullring. Not for him the brilliant band music reproduced with stereophonic clarity, nor a life that can sparkle to unmistakable identity in the magic light of a thousand urgently attentive eyes. Not for him the dark lady of the oh-so-perfect skin and bones who bestowed luminous glances on the matador while he risked hide and hair for her. Not for him the never-to-be-forgotten moment when the two embraced in a spontaneous excess of passion and the camera showed a close-up of her sharp enameled nails digging into his bare back, and then the whole scene blurred and faded out to the music of many violins. By God, there are not any merciful fade-outs and transitions in his life. Neither violins nor brass bands will ever play a musical accompaniment to any action he performs.
“I wonder why they do a thing like that?” Grace says.
“Who?”
“Those bullfighters. Why do they do it?”
“For money,” Harry says, chuckling. “It’s a way to make a buck. What else?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she says, seriously. “You wouldn’t catch me doing it for all the money in the world.”
“It’s a gimmick. You gotta have a knack for it. It’s a talent like anything else.”
“I don’t care about talent,” she says. “I wouldn’t go in there and take a chance on getting stuck by those horns for anything.”
“Don’t you worry about it,” he says. “You won’t ever have to.”
“I know that. I was just wondering.”
“Well, don’t worry about it. It was only a movie.”
Hell, Harry thinks, if Grace ever got in there they’d put horns on her and let her be the bull. They could starve her and steam her out and massage her for a month and they would still never cram her into one of those little skintight suits.
“What’s so funny?” she asks.
“I was just thinking how you’d look as a bullfighter.”
“Huh!” she says. “I guess you think you’d look like some kind of a movie star yourself.”
The picture of himself in the same role is equally absurd, and not so funny. Harry does not need to be reminded that by any standard he is an undistinguished man, a soft-bodied, tired little man with lines around his eyes and a double chin and thinning hair and an apprehensive, earnest, hardly memorable countenance. It is hard enough for him to love himself without the added discomfort of knowing that he is unlovely to others. Of course, he thinks, neither of them is exactly what you would call a handsome specimen. Neither of them has ever had a chance to win a beauty prize.
Grace has always been fat. But when he married her, her very fatness seemed to be a ripe and buxom promise of mystery. And she had a beautiful, creamy complexion in those days and the peculiar, healthy odor, a sweetness like fresh bread, of a fat woman. When he married her he was possessed by the erotic fiction that somehow he was going to wake from all that sleeping flesh an undreamt-of energy and enthusiasm precisely proportionate to its mass. He went to the nuptial bed like a rodeo rider. Whatever the magic was, though, it had eluded him. She was discovered to be (and so she remains) a big lazy woman of easy bovine pleasure in no way similar to the wild white mare of his adolescent hopes and fears. She is, as she has put it to him so often, only human. At least she has the comfort of that certitude. Harry is divided, split in carnival images of himself, on the one hand as the favored child of shining gods and on the other as a naked, squalid thing of aging flesh and blood, a little lower than the beasts and lacking their elemental dignity and simplicity.
“So if you’re so hot for a movie star, why didn’t you marry one?”
“I didn’t say I like movie stars,” she says. “Anyway, I never met one.”
The bus hisses to a stop for them, and while Harry is fumbling for the right change, she finds two seats for them toward the back. Harry can be so rude sometimes. He is so moody. And the really disgusting thing is how easy it is to hurt his feelings. It is an anguish to her, to be asked endlessly to offer sympathy and pity and praise. Jesus, what happened to all the real men in the world?
What once in girlhood was a dreamy world of burnished armor and naked swords has dwindled to become a world of fists. The tightly clenched, grubby, sticky hands of little boys who are wearing the bodies of grown men like Halloween costumes. In those gone days there was so much of the sweet contentment and mystery of the world contained and always to be found in a piece of cake. Grace did not love herself then, but she still loved what she might become. When she became a woman, though, the few men who were drawn to her, the only ones she met, were all like Harry. Fidgety little sparrows who hopped all around her solidity and good health, pecking. Mosquito men! How she longed for a creature with an arrogant body like a statue made of bronze or stone to bruise herself against! She dreamed a tall lover with a whip in his hands who would come and beat down and subdue her unruly white flesh while, free at last, her spirit awoke and flourished like a rose.
Harry came along at last and was a diplomatic compromise with reality. For some reason he obviously wanted her, and thus she managed to exact the tribute of marriage from him. Maybe then, she thinks now, it was partly her own fault that from the beginning he treated her like a kind of shrine, a sanctuary. At first he approached her on tiptoes and then misbehaved with mild blasphemy like a naughty boy in Sunday school. By this time it is only a weary ritual.
“I don’t know why every time I get on a bus I never have the right change,” Harry says. “All day long my pockets are like a big sack full of quarters and nickels and dimes. Then whenever I really need some change, like getting on a bus, all I can find is folding money.”
“Why did
n’t you ask me?” Grace says. “I’ve got lots of change.”
“Isn’t that just like a woman?” Harry says, and for some reason he smiles.
Harry is not an expert on the subject. There have not been many women in Harry’s life. In the heyday of adolescence, the flush of puberty, he suffered a long, groaning, and secret desire for the girls’ gym teacher at high school, Miss Janet Ellsworth. She was trim and vigorous, a flashing montage of well-muscled legs and hard, high buttocks as she taught the girls to play basketball and volleyball in the gym. Aloof, shining, and magnificent. Completely unlike his plain older sister who always seemed to be cringing, who was always on the verge of crying about something. And completely unlike the gray thin shape of his mother, a woman who seemed so universally weary with living that she was always about to fall asleep on her feet. Miss Ellsworth, dear Janet Ellsworth, was bright and blond. She was real life. Huntress, sorcerer, witch, and fairy princess, she appeared in a thousand filmy disguises and shared countless adventures with him in dreams and daydreams.
The pity was that Miss Ellsworth never knew of his passion for her. Once and once only he steeled himself and determined to confront her with simple truth. Miss Ellsworth, I love you. I worship you. If it will make you happy, cut off my silly head and use it for a basketball.… He waited around the gym until the last period was over and the last students drifted away to the lockers and the shower room. He waited behind the empty bleachers, tense and vague and bodiless, feeling as if he had a high fever. Then he walked swiftly and opened a door with her name on it. For one instant a shining vision in fact of Janet Ellsworth, surprised in all her blond and austere purity. Angry, but unhurried, clouded but casual, she covered herself with a towel.
“You might at least knock, boy.”
“I … I’m sorry …”
“Looking for something?”
He shook his head and backed out of the room and ran all the way home and shut himself in his room, tears of shame and rage brimming in his eyes, warm on his cheeks. But once alone there with the door shut he felt the shame vanish to be replaced by a yawning languor and a sly smile. Looking for something? You might at least knock. Something? Somebody? Knock, boy! Knock, knock, knock …
Evening Performance Page 40
