Two Serious Ladies

by Jane Bowles

  "None whatsoever!" said the boy. "We know perfectly well that it is this security of theirs that makes us cry out at night."

  Miss Goering by now was very anxious to get into the conversation.

  "You," she said to Dick, "are interested in winning a very correct and intelligent fight. I am far more interested in what is making this fight so hard to win."

  "They have the power in their hands; they have the press and the means of production."

  Miss Goering put her hand over the boy's mouth. He jumped. "This is very true," she said, "but isn't it very obvious that there is something else too that you are fighting? You are fighting their present position on this earth, to which they are all grimly attached. Our race, as you know, is not torpid. They are grim because they still believe the earth is flat and that they are likely to fall off it at any minute. That is why they hold on so hard to the middle. That is, to all the ideals by which they have always lived. You cannot confront men who are still fighting the dark and all the dragons, with a new future."

  "Well, well," said Dick, "what should I do then?"

  "Just remember," said Miss Goering, "that a revolutionary is an adult who must kill his childhood once and for all."

  "I'll remember," said Dick, sneering a bit at Miss Goering.

  The man who had been rolling the balls was now standing at the bar.

  "I better go see what Andy wants," said Frank, He had been whistling softly all through Miss Goering's conversation with Dick, but he seemed to have been listening nevertheless, because as he was leaving the table he turned to Miss Goering.

  "I think that the earth is a very nice place to be living on," he said to her, "and I never felt that by going one step too far I was going to fall off it either. You can always do things two or three times on the earth and everybody's plenty patient till you get something right. First time wrong doesn't mean you're sunk."

  "Well, I wasn't talking about anything like that," said Miss Goering.

  "That's what you're talking about all right. Don't try to pussyfoot it out now. But I tell you it's perfectly all right as far as I'm concerned." He was looking with feeling into Miss Goering's eyes. "My life," he said, "is my own, whether it's a mongrel or a prince."

  "What on earth is he talking about?" Miss Goering asked Bernice and Dick. "He seems to think I've insulted him."

  "God knows!" said Dick. "At any rate I am sleepy. Bernice, let's go home."

  While Dick was paying Frank at the bar, Bernice leaned over Miss Goering and whispered in her ear.

  "You know, darling," she said, "he's not really like this when we are home together alone. He makes me really happy. He is a sweet boy and you should see the simple things that delight him when he is in his own room and not with strangers. Well"—she straightened up and seemed to be a little embarassed at her own burst of confidence—"well, I am very glad indeed that I met you and I hope we did not give you too much of a rough time. I promise you that it has never happened before, because underneath, Dick is really like you and me, but he is in a very nervous state of mind. So you must forgive him."

  "Certainly," said Miss Goering, "but I do not see what for."

  "Well, good-by," said Bernice.

  Miss Goering was far too embarrassed and shocked by what Bernice had said behind Dick's back to notice at first that she was now the only person in the barroom besides the man who had been rolling the wooden balls and the old man, who had by now fallen asleep with his head on the bar. When she did notice, however, she felt for one desolate moment that the whole thing had been prearranged and that although she had forced herself to take this little trip to the mainland, she had somehow at the same time been tricked into taking it by the powers above. She felt that she could not leave and that even if she tried, something would happen to interfere with her departure.

  She noticed with a faint heart that the man had lifted his drink from the bar and was coming towards her. He stopped about a foot away from her table and stood holding his glass in mid-air.

  "You will have a drink with me, won't you?" he asked her without looking particularly cordial.

  "I'm sorry," said Frank from behind the bar, "but we're going to close up now. No more drinks served, I'm afraid."

  Andy said nothing, but he went out the door and slammed it behind him. They could hear him walking up and down outside of the saloon.

  "He's going to have his own way again," said Frank, "damn it all."

  "Oh, dear," said Miss Goering, "are you afraid of him?"

  "Sure I'm not," said Frank, "but he's disagreeable—that's the only word I can think up for him—disagreeable; and after it's all said and done, life is too short."

  "Well," said Miss Goering, "is he dangerous?"

  Frank shrugged his shoulders. Soon Andy came back.

  "The moon and the stars are out now," he said, "and I could almost see clear to the edge of the town. There are no policemen in sight, so I think we can have our drink."

  He slid in, onto the bench opposite Miss Goering.

  "It's cold and lifeless without a living thing on the street," he began, "but that's the way I like it nowadays; you'll forgive me if I sound morose to a gay woman like yourself, but I have a habit of never paying attention to whoever I am talking to. I think people would say, about me: 'Lacking in respect for other human beings.' You have great respect for your friends, I'm sure, but that is only because you respect yourself, which is always the starting-off point for everything: yourself."

  Miss Goering did not feel very much more at ease now that he was talking to her than she had before he had sat down. He seemed to grow more intense and almost angry as he talked, and his way of attributing qualities to her which were not in any way true to her nature gave his conversation an eerie quality and at the same time made Miss Goering feel inconsequential.

  "Do you live in this town" Miss Goering asked him.

  "I do, indeed," said Andy. "I have three furnished rooms in a new apartment house. It is the only apartment house in this town. I pay rent every month and I live there all alone. In the afternoon the sun shines into my apartment, which is one of the finest ironies, in my opinion, because of all the apartments in the building, mine is the sunniest and I sleep there all day with my shades drawn down. I didn't always live there. I lived before in the city with my mother. But this is the nearest thing I could find to a penal island, so it suits me; it suits me fine." He fumbled with some cigarettes for a few minutes and kept his eyes purposely averted from Miss Goering's face. He reminded her of certain comedians who are at last given a secondary tragic role and execute it rather well. She also had a very definite impression that one thing was cleaving his simple mind in two, causing him to twist between his sheets instead of sleeping, and to lead an altogether wretched existence. She had no doubt that she would soon find out what it was.

  "You have a very special type of beauty," he said to her; "a bad nose, but beautiful eyes and hair. It would please me in the midst of all this horror to go to bed with you. But in order to do this we'll have to leave this bar and go to my apartment."

  "Well, I can't promise you anything, but I will be glad to go to your apartment," said Miss Goering.

  Andy told Frank to call the hackstand and tell a certain man who was on duty all night to come over and get them.

  The taxi drove down the main street very slowly. It was very old and consequently it rattled a good deal. Andy stuck his head out of the window.

  "How do you do, ladies and gentlemen?" he shouted at the empty street, trying to approximate an English accent. "I hope, I certainly hope that each and every one of you is having a fine time in this great town of ours." He leaned back against his seat again and smiled in such a horrid manner that Miss Goering felt frightened again.

  "You could roll a hoop down this street, naked, at midnight and no one would ever know it," he said to her.

  "Well, if you think it is such a dismal place," said Miss Goering, "why don't you move somewhere else, bag and ba
ggage?" "Oh, no," he said gloomily, "I'll never do that. There's no use in my doing that,"

  "Is it that your business ties you down here?" Miss Goering asked him, although she knew perfectly well he was speaking of something spiritual and far more important.

  "Don't call me a business man," he said to her.

  "Then you are an artist?"

  He shook his head vaguely as though not quite sure what an artist was.

  "Well, all right," said Miss Goering, "I've had two guesses; now won't you tell me what you are?"

  "A bum!" he said stentoriously, sliding lower in his seat. "You knew that all the time, didn't you, being an intelligent woman?"

  The taxicab drew up in front of the apartment house, which stood between an empty lot and a string of stores only one story high.

  "You see, I get the afternoon sun all day long," he said, "because I have no obstructions. I look out over this empty lot."

  "There is a tree growing in the empty lot," said Miss Goering. "I suppose that you are able to see it from your window?"

  "Yes," said Andy. "Weird, isn't it?"

  The apartment house was very new and very small. They stood together in the lobby while Andy searched his pockets for the keys. The floor was of imitation marble, yellow in color except in the center where the architect had set in a blue peacock in mosaic, surrounded by various long-stemmed flowers. It was hard to distinguish the peacock in the dim light, but Miss Goering crouched down on her heels to examine it better.

  "I think those are water lilies around that peacock," said Andy, "But a peacock is supposed to have thousands of colors in him, isn't he? Multicolored, isn't that the point of a peacock? This one's all blue."

  "Well," said Miss Goering, "perhaps it is nicer this way."

  They left the lobby and went up some ugly iron steps. Andy lived on the first floor. There was a terrible odor in the hall, which he told her never went away.

  "They're cooking in there for ten people," he said, "all day long. They all work at different hours of the day; half of them don't see the other half at all, except on Sundays and holidays."

  Andy's apartment was very hot and stuffy. The furniture was brown and none of the cushions appeared to fit the chairs properly.

  "Here's journey's end," said Andy, "Make yourself at home. I'm going to take off some of my clothes." He returned in a minute wearing a bathrobe made of some very cheap material. Both ends of his bathrobe cords had been partially chewed away.

  "What happened to your bathrobe cords?" Miss Goering asked him.

  "My dog chewed them away."

  "Oh, have you a dog?" she asked him.

  "Once upon a time I had a dog and a future, and a girl," he said, "but that is no longer so."

  "Well, what happened?" Miss Goering asked, throwing her shawl off her shoulders and mopping her forehead with her handkerchief. The steam heat had already begun to make her sweat, particularly as she had not been used to central heating for some time.

  "Let's not talk about my life," said Andy, putting his hand up like a traffic officer. "Let's have some drinks instead."

  "All right, but I certainly think we should talk about your life sooner or later," said Miss Goering. All the while she was thinking that she would allow herself to go home within an hour. "I consider," she said to herself, "that I have done quite well for my first night." Andy was standing up and pulling his bathrobe cord tighter around the waist.

  "I was," he said, "engaged to be married to a very nice girl who worked. I loved her as much as a man can love a woman. She had a smooth forehead, beautiful blue eyes, and not so good teeth. Her legs were something to take pictures of. Her name was Mary and she got along with my mother. She was a plain girl with an ordinary mind and she used to get a tremendous kick out of life. Sometimes we used to have dinner at midnight just for the hell of it and she used to say to me: "Imagine us, walking down the street at midnight to have our dinner. Just two ordinary people. Maybe there isn't any sanity.' Naturally, I didn't tell her that there were plenty of people like the people who live down the hall in 5D who eat dinner at midnight, not because they are crazy, but because they've got jobs that cause them to do so, because then maybe she wouldn't have got so much fun out of it. I wasn't going to spoil it and tell her that the world wasn't crazy, that the world was medium fair; and I didn't know either that a couple of months later her sweetheart was going to become one of the craziest people in it."

  The veins in Andy's forehead were beginning to bulge, his face was redder, and the wings of his nostrils were sweaty.

  "All this must really mean something to him," thought Miss Goering.

  "Often I used to go into an Italian restaurant for dinner; it was right around the corner from my house; I knew mostly all the people that ate there, and the atmosphere was very convivial. There were a few of us who always ate together. I always bought the wine because I was better fixed than most of them. Then there were a couple of old men who ate there, but we never bothered with them. There was one man too who wasn't so old, but he was solitary and didn't mix in with the others. We knew he used to be in the circus, but we never found out what kind of a job he had there or anything. Then one night, the night before he brought her in, I happened to be gazing at him for no reason on earth and I saw him stand up and fold his newspaper into his pocket, which was peculiar-looking because he hadn't finished his dinner yet. Then he turned towards us and coughed like he was cleaning his throat.

  " 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'I have an announcement to make.' I had to quiet the boys because he had such a thin little voice you could hardly hear what he was saying.

  " 'I am not going to take much of your time,' he continued, like someone talking at a big banquet, 'but I just want to tell you and you'll understand why in a minute. I just want to tell you that I'm bringing a young lady here tomorrow night and without any reservations I want you all to love her: This lady, gentleman, is like a broken doll. She has neither arms nor legs.' Then he sat down very quietly and started right in eating again."

  "How terribly embarrassing!" said Miss Goering. "Dear me, what did you answer to that?"

  "I don't remember," said Andy, "I just remember that it was embarrassing like you say and we didn't feel that he had to make the announcement anyway.

  "She was already in her chair the next night when we got there; nicely made up and wearing a very pretty, clean blouse pinned in front with a brooch shaped like a butterfly. Her hair was marcelled too and she was a natural blonde. I kept my ear cocked and I heard her telling the little man that her appetite got better all the time and that she could sleep fourteen hours a day. After that I began to notice her mouth. It was like a rose petal or a heart or some kind of a little shell. It was really beautiful. Then right away I started to wonder what she would be like; the rest of her, you understand—without any legs." He stopped talking and walked around the room once, looking up at his walls.

  "It came into my mind like an ugly snake, this idea, and curled there to stay. I looked at her head so little and so delicate against the dark grimy wall and it was the apple of sin that I was eating for the first time."

  "Really for the first time?" said Miss Goering. She looked bewildered and was lost in thought for a moment.

  "From then on I thought of nothing else but finding out; every other thought left my head."

  "And before what were your thoughts like?" Miss Goering asked him a little maliciously. He didn't seem to hear her.

  "Well, this went on for some time—the way I felt about her. I was seeing Belle, who came to the restaurant often, after that first night, and I was seeing Mary too. I got friendly with Belle. There was nothing special about her. She loved wine and I actually used to pour it down her throat for her. She talked a little bit too much about her family and was a little good. Not exactly religious, but a little too full of the milk of human kindness sort of thing. It grew and grew, this terrible curiosity or desire of mine until finally my mind started to wander when I was with Mary and I
couldn't sleep with her any more. She was swell all the way through it, though, patient as a lamb. She was much too young to have such a thing happen to her. I was like a horrible old man or one of those impotent kings with a history of syphilis behind him."

  "Did you tell your sweetheart what was getting on your nerves?" asked Miss Goering, trying to hurry him up a bit.

  "I didn't tell her because I wanted the buildings to stay in place for her and I wanted the stars to be over her head and not cockeyed—I wanted her to be able to walk in the park and feed the birdies in years to come with some other fine human being hanging onto her arm. I didn't want her to have to lock something up inside of her and look out at the world through a nailed window. It was not long before I went to bed with Belle and got myself a beautiful case of syphilis, which I spent the next two years curing. I took to bowling along about then and I finally left my mother's house and my work and came out to No-man's Land. I can live in this apartment all right on a little money that I get from a building I own down in the slums of the city."

  He sat down in a chair opposite Miss Goering and put his face in his hands. Miss Goering judged that he had finished and she was just about to thank him for his hospitality and wish him good-night when he uncovered his face and began again.

  "The worst of all I remember clearly; more and more I couldn't face my mother. I'd stay out bowling all day long and half the night. Then on the fourth day of July I decided that I would make a very special effort to spend the day with her. There was a big parade supposed to go by our window at three in the afternoon. Very near to that time I was standing in the parlor with a pressed suit on, and Mother was sitting as close to the window as she could get. It was a sunny day out and just right for a parade. The parade was punctual because about a quarter to three we began to hear some faint music in the distance. Then soon after that my country's red, white, and blue flag went by, held up by some fine-looking boys. The band was playing Yankee Doodle. All of a sudden I hid my face in my hands; I couldn't look at my country's flag. Then I knew, once and for all, that I hated myself. Since then I have accepted my status as a skunk. 'Citizen Skunk' happens to be a little private name I have for myself. You can have some fun in the mud, though, you know, if you just accept a seat in it instead of trying to squirm around."