There have always been other Janet Ellsworths, all of them infinitely desirable, all emphatically unobtainable, hovering in his consciousness like a gauzy harem. Janet Ellsworth in innumerable transformations has stalked, light-footed, the fleeing days of his manhood. Take, for example, the most recent manifestation, the new receptionist down at the office, a divine, supple creature with a full-lipped, pouting indifference to the desires of men and the envy of women. Only the other day she looked up and caught him staring, transfixed, while she smoothed and adjusted her stocking on a marble thigh.
“Enjoy yourself, pop,” she said, laughing out loud. “You can look but you can’t touch.”
And Harry could have swooned on the spot out of the huge force of his love and hate for her.
Reality has been somewhat different for him. The first time had been with a new girl in the neighborhood, dirty and, as he now knows, feebleminded. Four boys took her into the excavation for a new building. In the breathless dark she started to laugh hysterically and spoiled everything for him. As a grown man he has known whores and still from time to time takes that solace, but by now the only real pleasure left in it, the little shudder and wince of guilt, is growing tedious also.
“Money!” Grace is saying to him. “You talk about your pockets full of money. What I’d like to know is where does it all go to?”
“You tell me,” he says. “Prices are so high these days.”
“Think you’ll get a good raise this year?”
“Maybe,” he says. “You never know. It depends.”
“That’s what you always say about everything—it depends.”
“Well, it does.”
“On what? What does it depend on?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” he says, looking away from what he takes to be her accusation. “It just depends. On a lot of different things.”
“Mother was right.”
Grace’s mother was exactly right. “This Harry may make you happy,” she told Grace. “You never know about a thing like that. He may even make you a decent husband. But one thing for sure—he won’t make you rich.”
“He may not get rich,” Grace said, “but he’s got a good steady job and an excellent opportunity for advancement.”
“Sure, baby, he’s got plenty of chances. We all do. Everybody does. But he won’t get too far, if you know what I mean. Money is just like sex in a man. You get where you can almost smell a winner. Harry smells like a loser to me.”
“Oh, Mama!”
Still, her mother had always been tolerant of Harry. More than that. Just the last time she came for a visit they decided to splurge and Harry took them out to dinner at this very expensive restaurant. Everything went along fine until the check came. When the waiter presented the check, Harry had to go and put on his reading glasses and take out his ballpoint pen and double-check every item on the bill. Right in front of the waiter! With the waiter just standing there! The waiter was a young man, darkly handsome and cool in his crisp, starched jacket. He stood aside, supercilious and amused, supremely contemptuous.
“They know how to add,” Grace said.
“Let him be, baby,” her mother snapped. “Money don’t grow on trees.”
“But, Mama,” Grace whispered. “It’s so embarrassing. They don’t try and cheat you in a place like this.”
“Sometimes they make a mistake,” Harry said without even looking up.
“I’d rather pay the bill and save the embarrassment.”
“So who do you think you are?” her mother said. “Doris Duke? The Duchess of Windsor?”
“Jackie Onassis,” Harry added, chuckling.
“Let me tell you something, baby,” her mother told her later. “I’m just an old woman now—no, don’t interrupt me, it’s the truth—but I think you got yourself a pretty good man, after all. You ought to appreciate him more. You could have done worse, a whole lot worse. When you get my age you’ll find out that’s the best you can ever say about anything. That you could have done worse.”
“What do you hear from Flora these days?” Harry is asking her on the bus.
“What in the world made you think of Flora?”
“I don’t know,” Harry says. “She just popped into my head.”
“It’s funny you would think of her right now.”
“Why? I can’t explain it. It’s just the way my mind works.”
“Just like that?” Grace says, snapping her fingers. “Up pops Flora?”
“Listen, what are you supposed to be—a psychiatrist or something?”
“I just don’t see how you can be riding along on this bus and all of a sudden you’re thinking about Flora.”
“Forget it. I just wondered, that’s all.”
“I haven’t heard a word from her,” Grace says. “Not since last Christmas. She’s probably in Mexico or Bermuda or some place interesting. The Christmas card came from Key West.”
Flora used to be Grace’s best friend. They worked together at the Luxuria Beauty Salon before Grace married Harry. She had been Grace’s friend since childhood. It is hard for Harry to picture Flora as a child. Flora must have sprung into this world full-blown and thirty. It is hard for him to imagine her old either. She will always be the same—tough, cynical, good-looking, rootless, and ageless. When they were first married they saw a lot of Flora. The Luxuria wasn’t far from where they first lived and when Flora got off work she would come over to see Grace. Harry would get home later and find her there. She often stayed for supper and after. The two women had so many private jokes, signs and signals, swift allusions to the past, that it made Harry feel uneasy, like a stranger in his own house.
“Why doesn’t she just get married and settle down?” Harry says abruptly.
“Who? Flora married?”
“What’s so funny about that?”
“You never did understand Flora, did you?” Grace says. “She’s not the domestic type.”
That’s the truth, Harry thinks. That is the plain damn honest truth.
Flora was always taking wonderful trips on her vacation even in those days. She had been to Mexico and Cuba and Nassau. She favored the sunny, southern climates.
“Harry, you ought to take Grace South sometime for a vacation,” she used to say. “You can’t even imagine how great it is.”
“I can imagine all right,” Harry would answer. “What I can’t imagine is where the money for a jaunt like that is going to come from.”
“Go now and pay later.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“You depress me,” Flora said. “Talking so poor all the time. You’re making good money.”
“That’s easy to say, for a person without any responsibilities.”
“What kind of responsibilities have you got? I ask you!”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Harry said. “Grace hasn’t been too well and we’ve got all these doctor bills and expenses.”
“A trip would do her a world of good.”
“Well,” Harry said, “maybe if I save up a little this year.…”
“If you wait to do the things you want, it’s always too late.”
“We just can’t afford it now.”
“You ought to be more adventurous.”
“Sure, sure,” Harry said. “I ought to be more adventurous.”
“I mean it,” Flora said. “One thing that makes me sick is to see a perfectly normal healthy man wasting his life away in some office. Getting all pale and gray in the face like a prisoner or something. Losing his muscle tone. Getting a big soft rear end like a woman’s and a potbelly, just from sitting behind a desk all day long.”
“Muscles! What am I supposed to do? Buy me a shovel and go out and dig ditches?”
“Man,” Flora would then usually say with a solemn dignity, “was made to be a hunter and a fisher and a lover. A builder of cities and a warrior.”
“And I’m supposed to do all this hunting and fishing and loving on my presen
t salary.”
Looking for something? Somebody? You might at least knock, boy. Knock, boy, knock, knock …
“I never could figure out what you saw in her,” Harry tells Grace.
“Who, Flora? Are you still thinking about her?”
“She leaves me cold.”
“That’s funny,” Grace says. “Most men think she’s very attractive. She has a real way with men, even at her age.”
“If she’s so attractive, why can’t she find herself a new husband? Answer me that one.”
“You always bring that up. Flora isn’t looking for a new husband.”
“Okay then,” Harry says. “You tell me. What is she looking for?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Grace says. “She just wants to have a good time out of life, I guess. To enjoy life, that’s all.”
“Personally I think she is a bad influence. She always was a bad influence.”
“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard,” Grace says. “Flora is the best friend I ever had.”
Harry is painfully remembering one brief moment with Flora. They were alone in the apartment. Grace had gone to the store to get something for supper. Harry was trying to read the paper.
“It’s a shame about you two,” Flora said. “A crying shame.”
“How’s that?”
“I mean it’s just a shame that you two can’t have any children.”
Harry folded the paper. When he tried to shrug, the weight of the world descended on his shoulders.
“Well, you know,” he said, “I guess you can’t have everything.”
“Here we are!” Grace says. “This is our stop.”
They get off the bus, breathing ghosts in cold air. They climb the stairway to their apartment. Harry fumbles a minute with the reluctant lock, masters it, and they go inside. The air of the apartment is close and warm. Harry yawns. The odor of dinner haunts them like a forlorn family ghost.
“See? See what I mean?” he says, sniffing. “It stinks in here. That’s why I always like to leave the kitchen cleaned up.”
“Never mind,” she says cheerfully. “I’ll go take care of it right now.”
While she cleans up the kitchen, whistling, nibbling at leftovers more out of habit than hunger, Harry settles down in a chair to read the paper.
Here is what will happen next. She will clean up the kitchen and then it will be time to go to bed. Grace will undress in the bathroom as she has always done. She will put on a long, shapeless, warm winter nightgown. She will rub cleansing cream on her face and fix her hair. Then she will wait quietly for him in bed, staring at the cracked plaster of the ceiling with its map of well-known imaginary continents and countries. She may turn on the radio and listen to late music. That will be a bad time for him when he stares at his familiar enemy in the mirror, looking over the top of a glass of water on the shelf, a glass in which Grace deposits her dental bridge to soak overnight. The bridge, a rude, simple twist of metal, rests at the bottom of the glass like some submarine creature in an aquarium, somnolent and vaguely dangerous. Looking at it nightly in the same astonished and vexing instant that he greets himself in the mirror, Harry dons a crown of thorns.
Thinking about these things, Harry folds up the newspaper, laying column of disaster upon disaster, wars upon rumors of wars, and goes into the bedroom. He is going to listen to the weather report. He sits down on the edge of the bed and snaps on the radio. There is a flash and all the lights go out. He swears, feeling his way out of the dark room.
“What happened?” Grace calls.
“Must have blown the fuses or something. Maybe the power is off.”
“Wait a minute,” she says. “I’ll light some candles.”
A moment later she appears, smiling in the soft glow of two tall candles in candlesticks.
“I think candles will be fun,” Grace says. “We hardly ever use them.”
She puts the candles on the table beside the bed. The little flames flicker and dance like the quick, forked tongues of a pair of snakes. They cast huge shadows in the room.
“It’s kind of romantic, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Harry says. “Like a tomb.”
Grace carries one candle with her into the bathroom. Harry takes off his shoes and rubs his feet. While he is undressing, he can hear Grace humming a tune above the sound of water running in the basin. He throws his clothes over a chair and puts on his pajamas. Then he lies back on the bed smoking a cigarette, trying to blow smoke rings inside one another. Wheels within wheels.
She emerges, her round, smiling face gleaming with cleansing cream, her hair pinned in place. Harry rises and goes into the bathroom. He looks at himself in the mirror. Looks at the dental bridge in the glass of water. And then begins to brush his teeth.
“Harry! Harry, come quick!”
He spits, rinses his mouth, and opens the door to the bedroom.
“What’s the matter?”
“Look!”
“It’s only a moth.”
“I can’t stand them.”
“They don’t hurt anything,” Harry says. “The light attracts them.”
“Please, Harry, I can’t stand it. Kill it for me please!”
A single moth has come from somewhere and now circles the candle flame, fluttering toward it and away. Grace huddles in the bed clutching the sheets. Harry picks up the newspaper, rolls it into a tight cylinder, and comes toward the candle. He tiptoes close, stalking his prey. He swings, misses, and the moth darts aside, filling the room suddenly with the shadow of huge wings. Cunning now, Harry stops moving, freezes until the moth returns, lured by the flame. Even with his back to her he knows that Grace is watching him. Now the moth is moving close to the flame again, graceful and erratic, as Harry slowly, very slowly, raises his weapon and cocks his arm to strike. He studies his enemy in a bright clean fury of concentration. Then swings fiercely, catches it in flight and smashes it to the floor. It flutters and then is small and brown and still.
“Thank you. Oh, thank you, thank you …!”
“What’s the matter, honey? Is something wrong?”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you …!”
“Can’t you tell me what’s the matter?”
Grace shakes her head. “Nothing is the matter, please.”
She feels the tears rolling down her cheeks, rich and warm and strange, and she feels the whole weight of her body shaking with sobs. She doesn’t know why she is crying. She doesn’t feel like crying at all. She feels light-headed, empty of any emotion at all, except, perhaps, a slight and altogether unfamiliar sense of joy.
II.
AT LEAST THEY’LL HAVE CANDLELIGHT
LUCILLE IS RESTLESS. During the day, especially in the morning, she hardly knows what to do with herself anymore. After Sam leaves for work she eyes the small disorder of breakfast dishes, a tan film of coffee in the cup’s bottom, fragments of fried egg hardening on the plate, the crumpled, stained paper napkin, the crushed cigarette, and she feels almost physically sick. She feels dizzy and heavy, the way they say pregnant women are supposed to feel in the morning, but she isn’t pregnant. Fat chance of that after five years! She’s thinking about doing the dishes now and getting them over with; she’s thinking about washing the curtains in the kitchen (they’re as gray as a ghost); she’s thinking about calling the plumber to fix the leaky faucet in the bathroom. But even as she’s thinking of these things, she knows she’s not going to. In just a minute she’s going to leave everything just the way it is and go back to bed for a while. She won’t go to sleep. She’ll just lie there studying the map made by cracks in the plaster on the ceiling and wondering for the thousandth time what continent it reminds her of, studying the ceiling with a blank indifferent mind, hugging her pillow like a child and hearing the sounds of the waking world around her.
After a while the radio clicks on in the apartment next door. (They got walls so thin in this building you can hear everything, I mean everything.) They always play
it too loud, as if they weren’t really listening at all, as if they just wanted plenty of sound to reassure them. At first it used to annoy her to hear the radio next door blaring like that. Suppose she wanted to sleep or something? But now it is a ritual part of her morning. If the Seegars happen to be away, she misses it, and the harsh hacking cough of Mr. Seegar too.
Now she’s thinking about men. She hears Mr. Seegar’s cough and she can picture him, bulked and pendulous as an old woman in his soiled, sleeveless undershirt, reaching for the morning paper and the milk bottles. He’s retired or something. Mr. Seegar. Doesn’t work, anyway. She thinks of Sam. She can see his rumpled silk pajamas on the floor like a corpse. A real extravagance those pajamas. Ridiculous too. He’s heavy, not like Mr. Seegar, but soft and heavy. In silk pajamas, his uniform of love, he looks like some kind of a clown.
“It’s the line of work I’m in,” Sam has said to her jokingly. “Now, if you want me to look like Charles Atlas or Jack La Lanne, why I’ll give up my desk at the office and start digging ditches. I’ll get all kinds of muscles and you can take in washing to make ends meet.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” she has replied. “I made a general remark to the effect that a man’s body ought to be a beautiful thing. I just said that when a man does the things his body was meant for, it’s beautiful.”
“You’d have a lot of time to think about beauty if I spent my days digging and lifting. You’d have a lot of time to hang around the beauty parlor,” he has said.
“Why do you have to take offense at a general remark? Why do you have to apply everything to yourself?”
“Skip it.”
Sam’s good to her, it’s true. He works hard and long and is very conscientious. They appreciate it, too, at the office. He’s making some progress, advancing, but it takes too much out of him. He’s tired, tired, tired in the evenings. He comes home slumped, weary. He’ll sit in the kitchen and drink a bottle of beer while she fixes the supper. Afterwards they’ll sit around and watch TV or maybe they’ll go down the street to the early show, and once a week he’ll go out and play cards with some of the guys from the office. Lucille thinks about Sam and his life and she feels a little sad and guilty, as if maybe she’s to blame for it all. There are always two sides, like they say, and she’s to blame for a lot of things, she guesses. When a marriage breaks up they always blame the woman anyway, so what’s the difference? But so is he. So is he to blame. He doesn’t have to be so miserable. He could put his foot down. He could really tell her a thing or two. He could tell her, “I don’t go to work eighteen hours a day just to come home to a sloppy house. You better get in gear and clean this place up!” Or something like that. He could say, “So, you been to the beauty parlor today? Well, I’m sick to death of coming home to a cold supper just because you like to go out in the afternoon and get your hair done.” Will he ever say anything like this? No, indeed. He’ll come home and say not a word about the mess the apartment is in, no matter if she even calls it to his attention, saying something like, “Honey, I’m sorry everything is in such a stew.”
Evening Performance Page 41
