“You look like a Picasso!” she cried, laughing.
His fine brows wiggled. “Is that—good?” He had taken her empty glass away from her.
“I shouldn’t,” she said, eying the glass. “I’ve had enough already. But we come to town so seldom these days.…”
“Don’t make excuses,” he said. “Just stand there and look pretty. I’ll be right back.”
Swift, dimensionless, suave as a shadow, he was already gone toward the kitchen, edging easily through the crowd. A lean, hungry barracuda knifing through a school of fat, contented … what? Well, fish anyway. Just fish. She couldn’t remember the names of anything right now. Especially the names of fish. The stereo was blaring a popular tune from one of the new musicals. She knew it by heart, but she could not recall the title. And what was his name? Gold? Silver? It had something or other to do with precious metals or perhaps a stone. Stone would be better. Diamond, how would that be? He was all angles and subtle, sharp creases, etched lines. His face was pale as milk, but his dark eyes brimmed with an inner source of light, the overflow and excess of whatever hidden fires consumed him. A cruel glow, she concluded, compounded of pure and ruthless ambition and appetite, of boundless ego and an insatiable self-esteem.
Well, what did she expect an actor to be made of? Bells and cockleshells? Snails and tails?
Entirely without his knowledge or consent, the poor boy had been involved in their lives, the center of a shabby domestic crisis less than a week before. He had appeared in a minor role on a TV series. He had impressed her then, playing the long-suffering and inarticulate younger brother of the leading man. He seemed so fragile and vital. His inability to articulate the profound feelings, which so obviously swept through and racked his being like gusts of fire, seemed to her fine and clean in spite of Bill’s sotto voce comments, his dry ironic vivisection of the play, the plot, the characters. Billy was seldom at a loss for words. He wavered between a kind of acquired irony and a painfully natural talent for announcing the obvious in a periodic, sententious style.
She had watched the young actor’s high-boned, exotic face, framed in the glowing TV screen, and she glimpsed a whole magic world of fire and ice. She was offended by her husband’s good health, his rational composure, his words, words, words. Impulsively she jumped up and cut off the television. His reaction was merely sympathetic curiosity.
“Why do you always have to spoil everything?” she said.
“What seems to be the matter, Mildred?” he said, unruffled and solicitous.
“What’s the matter with Mary Jane? She hasn’t an ache and she hasn’t a pain!” she shouted at him.
She left him, ran up the stairs, and fell on their bed. She buried her face in the pillow and enjoyed the luxury of tears. She heard him turn on the TV again. After a while she fell asleep where she was. When he came to bed later, he gently undressed her and tucked her in. He was businesslike, efficient, and quick with buttons and snaps and zippers. She was aware of all this, and when she lay between the cool, clean sheets, still with her eyes closed, she waited for his first hesitant amorous touch. She lay very still for a long time and listened as he settled into a deep sleep and began to snore.
Now she was here and talking to the same actor. So many were here in the room. Nobody really famous, of course, but many recognizable faces and names. And he, Bernie—that was his name after all—was articulate enough in person, and he was tough, aggressive, the proud possessor of the armored sensibility worthy of, say, an old snapping turtle.
It was silly, she supposed as they chattered along inanely, silly to be here at all, mingling among people their own age who were really doing something. Their host, who was a classmate of Bill’s, was currently directing an Off-Broadway production. In this room there were actors, writers, other young directors, chic exciting women, and once earlier in the evening a well-known producer had passed in and out of the room, smiling tolerantly on one and all, benignly receiving the homage that was due him.
Bill was an Assistant Professor of English at a small New England college. Thus she, Mildred, became a Faculty Wife, turned out to perfection in her modest, decently expensive dress, her sensible shoes (for walking in New York), her hair cut short and designed mainly to demand a minimum of attention. More than two hours away on the unpredictable railroad (Bill didn’t trust their old car to make it all the way there and back), they did not often come to town anymore. With his eight o’clock classes, spent urging sleepy freshmen not to split infinitives and not to dangle poor helpless participles, it was very difficult to come in for an evening. It seemed to require so much planning, so many arrangements.
It had not always been that way. When they were first married and Bill was a graduate student at Princeton, they were only an easy hour away from the City. They lived in the Project then, the University housing development of drab, converted, one-story barracks, and they were poor and happy.
He wrote poems in sullen rebellion against his assigned task of tracking the Bestial Footnote to its ultimate lair, against the horror and the day when he might produce a Footnote himself. Mildred acted with the Theater Intime and even allowed herself to think of a career in the theater. They had friends in New York, at Columbia, and in the Village, and there were long wonderful nights, parties where the talk was deathless and vibrant with significance … surely they had at least talked well in those days.
Now, a few years later, Bill had two scholarly articles to show for all his dreams and pains, one in PMLA and another in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, both sound and solid examples of scholarship. He had invested in a depressing stack of separately bound offprints which he kept to send around to colleagues and rivals in his field—the Seventeenth Century.
Now she winced at that inevitable, and perfectly neutral, academic question: “And what century are you in?”
The infuriating, wholly inexplicable part of it was that Bill seemed perfectly satisfied now. He talked fondly of his students, gossiped amiably about his colleagues, wished and worked for eventual promotion and tenure, and looked forward nervously and eagerly to the regular dinner parties they gave with that aim in mind. That slothful beast, Security, was in view.
“You ought to come down more often,” the actor was telling her. “Play hookey for a weekend sometime. I’d love to show you around. I can get seats for a play and I know a great little restaurant …”
That, of course, was one alternative. Other faculty wives availed themselves of it. They called it coping. Mildred tried to picture it as she listened to him. She saw them smoking joints in the lobby of a theater between the acts. How he would listen to her! He would smile and nod and his eyes would be bright. She saw, vaguely, the denouement, a little scene played out in his apartment, whiskey, and the tape deck softly playing the appropriate music, a roommate conveniently absent. Even the perfect little shudder of illicit pleasure it gave her now seemed hardly worth the trouble. Suddenly she felt very tired.
“It would be very nice,” she told him, “but I probably won’t be back for quite a while.”
“Why?”
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
His eyebrows twitched almost imperceptibly, reflexively, but his smile never wavered. She could tell him very simply the truth, that she had lost two babies in miscarriages and that in a few months the doctor would not let her travel at all. But he was very young and he was very arrogant.
“I’ll be wearing maternity clothes in no time,” she added. “Would you like me to come for a weekend in maternity clothes?”
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
But already he seemed more preoccupied with his drink than before. She smiled and looked away, back toward Bill and the actress. They were still talking. There was a crash in the kitchen as something or someone fell heavily, a sound of shattering glass, then loud laughter. Neither Bill nor the actress reacted. Nor paid heed to the pounding noise of the music. Nor the heat and smoke of the room. Nor the gray winter
wind prowling like a hungry wolf just beyond the windows.
It was easy to understand Bill’s fascination. The actress was glittery, deeply involved in Real Life. Tall, in fact too tall for Bill in her heels, she was conventionally pretty and adequately voluptuous. Bill was probably haunted by the dim adolescent vision of An Affair. Poor old Bill! If Mildred’s intuition was sound, the actress was quite sexless. No doubt she was inordinately fond of little stuffed animals.
What on earth did she see in Bill? Probably, Mildred thought with a certain pleasurable malice, he represented what she would call “class.” That would be very amusing. It was Mildred who had been a debutante, and it was because of Mildred’s family that they happened to be listed in The Social Register. A curious triumph for Bill, since he had never even heard of it before they were married. Now it was Bill who refused to let their annual subscription go by. He said that on an Assistant Professor’s salary it was his last shred of dignity, like Englishmen on remote tropic isles dressing for dinner. Bill was pure, solid, yeoman middle class from the wilds of the Middle West. Like many others before him and since, he had come East from a small Middle Western college, lost in the vast inane distances of that Somewhere. He came to graduate school in Princeton, and there he acquired, almost to the exaggerated point of parody, all the local tribal habits of dress, of speech and conversation, even of thought.
It was doubly amusing, for Mildred had married him out of rebellion against her own family, precisely because he was what he originally was. Now, as though to compound the ironies, he had let himself become a kind of a caricature of the young ambitious academic, the kind of young man that nostalgic, aging Full Professors smile on. Maybe the actress thought that Bill might one day write a play for her. More likely, though, he was just a good listener. That particular sort of blind, bland worship, the horse who gratefully accepts the sugar lump, the wide-eyed, wet-eyed cow who licks the salt from your palm, was what the actress thrived on. As an orchid feeds richly on thin air.…
On the subject of thin air. When Mildred turned back the young actor was gone. Vanished into it. A dance of filmy smoke filled the space where he had been. Maybe all his pale fires had suddenly consumed him and all that was left of all his energy and hungers was a little smoke.
The room was whirling a little now. Bits and pieces of shredded conversation fell on her ears like senseless, intimate, lewd whispers. She started for the bathroom.…
Later she found herself in the bedroom lying in and among a shaggy flock of overcoats. After a long, dizzy time she was awakened by a gentle shaking. She opened her eyes, sat up stretching, and smiled at Bill.
“Poor girl.”
“Don’t poor girl me,” she said. “I’ve been having a lovely time. I just happened to get plastered and I passed out.”
She moved to a mirror and put on lipstick and ran a comb through her hair.
“Almost as good as new,” she said, winking at herself.
“I’m sorry,” he said, helping her into her coat. “I should have been looking out for you.”
“Don’t go around being sorry all the time. Don’t …!” She stopped. Her voice was loud. Her tongue felt thick and heavy trying to shape words.
He buttoned his overcoat and walked behind her. The host had disappeared, and the last of the beached and stranded survivors of the party ignored them. Bill shut the front door quietly behind them, the best thank you and farewell he could muster under the circumstances. They went slowly down several flights of stairs. He held the door for her and she stepped out into the cold air. There were fine snowflakes falling, beautiful in the light.
“We can stay over at a hotel,” he said. “Or the Princeton Club.”
“Why?”
“I’m afraid we’re going to miss the last train.”
“Who’ll take your classes?”
“They can get along for once without me.”
They walked along the quiet street. Bill was watching for a taxi, but there was none in sight.
“Tell me all about the great lady of the theater,” she said. “You two seemed to be having a very intense little těte-à-těte.”
“She’s having a hard time finding any work this season.”
“Maybe if she took up another line of work …”
“What’s the matter with you? I only talked to the girl.”
“She didn’t talk to me.”
“Please,” he said. “You’re shouting.”
“Very well,” she said in a stage whisper. “How’s this?”
Then they stood silently at a corner waiting for a traffic light to change. When the light changed Mildred bolted across the street, laughing, and he followed running behind her. The wind cut into their faces and carried her laughter away. Once they were in the partial shelter of the buildings in the next block, they slowed down to walk again.
“She’s good-looking,” Mildred said, “if you like that type.”
“I didn’t say I …”
“She’d have to wear flat heels with you. I don’t think she’d like that.”
“Why do you have to make such an issue out of everything?” he said. “Didn’t you have a good time?”
“I had a marvelous time,” she said. “That nice boy asked me to come down some weekend and shack up with him.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him I’d love to, but I’m pregnant.”
Bill put his arm around her, hugged her tightly, and laughed.
They decided to walk awhile before going uptown. Now the cold air felt good and clear. They went down a few blocks of bars, nightclubs, coffee houses, and little theaters, moving leisurely through the press of people and the sudden island of carnival atmosphere, staring in windows and blowing little foggy ghosts of breath.
“I bet everyone at school is sound asleep now,” she said. “They’re all dreaming about tenure.”
“Want to stop somewhere and have a drink or some coffee?”
She shook her head. “Let’s just walk.”
At a corner they stopped to look at the tinted posters flanking the entrance of a little strip joint.
“It’s so cold,” Mildred said. “They should at least let them have goose pimples on.”
The doorman, a shabby field marshal, cupped his gloved hands and called to them to come on in, the last show was going on. They passed by and crossed the street. From the other side they could see just a glimpse of the inside. They saw the sparse crowd and the little tables. Then the lights blinked and dimmed and a spotlight fell brightly on what must be a small stage or platform. A girl appeared in the light. She began to sway and dance to the sound of music which was completely stifled by the heavy glass door.
“Let’s stop and look,” Mildred said. “I’ve never even seen one.”
The doorman across the way eyed them a moment, then stamped his feet and clapped his hands together, looking away.
They stood watching as the girl, cool, moving as if to an elegant, subtle melody, danced and peeled off her elaborate costume. Finally she bowed to what must be applause. Then she smiled widely and began to dance to a different tune, a different, more frantic rhythm. There was a kind of blurred flashing white frenzy they saw.
“There she is practically naked,” Mildred said. “And here we are all wrapped up in our overcoats and freezing. And there’s only a little glass between us.”
“Like the snow and the roses.”
“What?”
“In that poem by Louis MacNeice.”
The girl finished, bowing again to unheard applause.
“Is that all?” Mildred asked.
“I guess so,” Bill said.
They were walking along again, talking into the wind. Far off a ship hooted in the harbor and the snow was beginning to fall more heavily now, damp flakes swarming around the streetlamps like soft, huge moths.
“Wasn’t that strange,” she said, “watching someone dance to music that you can’t hear?”
“If you can�
��t hear it, then it isn’t music.”
“Don’t be philosophical.”
“I wonder what they were playing?” he said without much enthusiasm.
After that he was silent and so was she. She was beginning to feel sorry for herself, for all the mess and clutter she created out of things, for her cluttered, untidy life. Then she was saved by a happy, silly thought.
“That’s me, Bill! I’m exactly like that girl.”
He looked at her, but said nothing.
“I dance and dance,” she said. “And nobody else can hear the music. Nobody knows the name of the tune.”
“That’s a pretty fancy reaction to a striptease,” he said.
“You wanted to be a poet,” she said. “You used to write poems. Whatever happened to you?”
He stopped walking, grinned, and started to say something—“We can’t always do …” He closed his mouth and the wan grin vanished and all of a sudden there were real tears in his eyes. She could not remember ever seeing him cry.
“I’m a bitch,” she said. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“It’s a legitimate question.”
“Poor Bill,” she said. “I love you, but I did a terrible thing. I sent you off to a party with a big hole in your socks.”
He took her in his arms and kissed her. Their lips were cold. Then he put his arm around her and they walked away leaning their heads together. He was lost in a dream, a deep-sea diver in a perilous sea, searching amid wrecks and bones for some lost, glittering treasure. She in her separate dream, with only a few bright sequins for costume, dancing and dancing before a mirror as wide as the sky.
A RECORD AS LONG AS YOUR ARM
RAY, OLD BUDDY, one of the things I’ll never be able to forget is the look on your face when you strolled into your bedroom and discovered me there with your wife.
Evening Performance Page 44
