Oh, nuts, Roger thought impatiently. Why did he keep rehearsing those dreary little dialogues. He was all through with Dr. Baume and his pronouncements. The man was an entertainer, primarily. He’d served his purpose, and that was that. The point was to go on and get things straightened out in his head. He’d been making some progress. Pretty soon he would have the whole story, then he could start writing apologies. “Dear Dick (Coulter). I’m sorry I bit your dog and insulted your mother. I thought it was my mother.” “Dear Lila. I’m sorry I was late. In fact I’m sorry I came at all. I should have stayed home and taken a regulation, full-size bath.” “Dear Emily. I’m sorry. That’s all. Just sorry.”
How had their quarrel started? He couldn’t seem to get it clear in his mind. He’d been listening to the symphony, waiting for Emily to finish her last-minute packing. It was Brahms, he remembered, the First. The grave passionate music had ended, and, thinking of Lila now and the few days they would have together with Emily gone, hearing, in his skin, that other soundless music that was all the memories he had of Lila, he’d felt suddenly eager and youthful again, very “unjowly” as it were, the lethargy, that numbing ennui of the bones slipping away from him in a wash of exuberance. He’d gone up the stairs, three at a time, to get out his dress things for the evening. And——
He winced. Good Lord. It wasn’t possible for a thing like that to throw him off! A dress shirt! He saw himself, all too vividly, hauling out drawer after drawer, flinging shirts around the room, yelling for Clara. Clara wasn’t there, of course, but Emily had come in after a moment, dressed for the train, in a gray-green suit, looking cool, almost prim, yet with that elusive tang-of-sensuality he’d always found so attractive.
“What on earth,” she said.
Something in her tone turned him completely unreasonable. “Why can’t I have a clean white dress shirt when I want one,” he declaimed. “It doesn’t seem like a great deal to ask.”
“There must be fifteen clean white dress shirts on this side of the room alone,” she said.
“They’re all starched,” he shouted. “I’ve told Clara a hundred times——”
Roger shook his head with a wry grimace. The things a grown man could let himself in for. The situation had deteriorated rapidly, of course. He’d gone down to the bar for another drink and she’d followed and said, “Why must you start drinking at this time of day?” as if she really expected an answer.
“Because I didn’t get up in time to start earlier,” he’d replied, not very brightly, but he was too annoyed to care.
“You’re not spiting me, you know, Roger. You’re not two years old and I’m not your mother. I happen to be your wife, and I happen to love you, though heaven knows——”
“If you happened to quit nagging once in a while, maybe I’d love you too. Why do you have to go on a holy crusade every time I take a drink?”
“You promised to cut down,” she said. “You ought to have some standards. How do you expect to make any progress with your analysis, if you don’t co-operate, if you keep slipping back into these infantile regressions?”
“Look, Emily,” he’d said, “I realize you’re looking down at me now from a lofty eminence of superior psychological insight. I even heard from Dr. Baume that you’re making so much progress you might walk out on me some day.” (Funny—and amusing—to think that had rankled a bit.) “But please spare me these thumbnail psychoanalyses. I get enough of them from the doctor.”
“I have to go now, Roger,” she said after a moment in that patient forgiving tone he found harder to bear than her pre-Freud hysterics. “You’ll be alone here. Please don’t drink any more. I don’t want you to set yourself on fire.”
“Well, don’t you try it, dear,” he said, unable to forego the malicious little gibe. “It might take too long and I wouldn’t want you to miss your train.”
She’d given a pretty good imitation of a lady calmly drawing on a glove. “You can’t hurt me with your words anymore, Roger,” she said. “I know you love me. And I understand you better now, your aggressions and hostilities. I wish you understood them as well. Someday you will….”
Lord. It had come to this. Emily patronizing him. He’d really felt like letting go then. Imagine. She wished he understood as well. Honestly. It was hard to understand how a woman like Emily had reached the ripe old age of thirty without being paved to death with her own good intentions.
“I’m afraid not,” he’d said coldly. “I’m not seeing your Theosophist friend any longer. I’ve quit.”
She’d dropped the pose then and given him a stricken look. “Oh, Roger. You didn’t. You promised….”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Emily,” he’d said violently, “will you stop bleeding and go away?”
* * *
—
He reached for another cigarette. The dog raised his head, looked at Roger. There was a theme song in his eyes. “Guilty of Loving You.” Roger stroked his head. “Your boss is in Dutch, Fred. Pretty bad. Pretty bad.”
There was no use making a production of it, though. It wasn’t the first time. Emily was probably used to it by now. He’d make it up to her some way, when she got back. Tell her he was through drinking. That would please her. She’d be sure it was a victory for her patience and understanding. Poor Emily. So fragilely balanced between her pre-Raphaelite sensuality and her New England conscience.
And Lila. He’d forgotten about Lila for the moment. He was going to have to make it up to her, too. He’d really done it up brown. Great little Sabbath. Well, a spray of green orchids would work wonders. And maybe a bottle of that “Muguet des Bois” she was so fond of, if he could find it. It was the little things that touched Lila. Violets in August. Emeralds in December. Dear Lila. How far were the green fields of Ireland, and the clotheslines of Second Avenue and the Saturday night bath.
Well, so he must have been fairly well plastered by the time he took Emily to the station. The next thing he could remember was stopping in at the Coulters, for a drink. That was quite a gap. And why the Coulters, instead of some nice quiet bar? He’d never liked the Coulters, despised them as a matter of fact, together with their set of Almanac de Gotham friends who were neither snobbish enough to be really amusing or amusing enough to be really snobbish. They all gathered, or coagulated, on Sunday afternoons to beat each other to the draw with the latest funny story, to rehash the latest play.
Why had he gone there? Maybe it had been too early for dinner with Lila. Emily had left on the four o’clock and if he’d dropped her at the station at, say, quarter to four and gone on into town, even in the stale he was in he’d have got there by six at the latest. As a matter of fact, he could recall the late afternoon light which on fine days turned New York into some kind of an organ fugue of a city, scored with those first warm lamps of evening coming on in the softening gray stone. Though that remembrance could be from some other time or times certainly. Those lights were in his blood, a kind of benign infection which was what made you a New Yorker wherever you happened to be—like that rooted touch of fever that travelers bring home from the equatorial zones.
Well, he must have gone to Lila’s place at six. Or phoned and got no answer and concluded she might have gone over to the Coulters. Would he have gone there to pick her up? It was a little indiscreet perhaps—but then who were they fooling, really? It was hard to believe there was anybody left in New York—who was interested—who didn’t know about him and Lila. Except maybe Emily. Or did she know, too? Was that included in the Great Understanding that had come to her through analysis? Was that what the doctor had meant when he said that she was making progress and might walk out on him one day?
Anyway, it seemed he’d got to the Coulters and Lila wasn’t there but everybody else in New York was. He could remember how the big room hung suspended in that subway roar of voices that is known as the cocktail hour. Dick Coulter, hearty and effusive a
s usual, had insisted on mixing him a Martini, personally—two parts vermouth, one part warm gin, and the rest bright conversation; he’d been summoned presently to turn on his sun-lamp charm elsewhere and Roger had emptied the Martini in the aquarium and let Jason mix him another one, four to one.
* * *
—
It was then that he’d heard someone beside him say, “You people always make such a fuss about Martinis.” The accent was English, Mayfair not Berlitz, and the voice extraordinarily clear and ringing, as if it had just been dipped in fresh sleighbells. He’d turned and looked at the girl. “It’s very confusing,” she said, “because you ought to be decadent and fussy, and you’re not. You talk about baseball and equally vigorous things in the same breath. Americans are really very confusing.”
Could he have dreamed that? He could see her standing beside him, in the brightly lighted room, blonde and slight and very British somehow, with her short upper lip. “You’re Roger Bowen,” she said. “I remember your picture on the jacket of a book. A marvelous book that I was simply mad about.”
The extravagant phrasing somehow didn’t have the tinny overtone it would have had, coming from one of the usual habitués of the place. She made it sound eager and youthful, and he was touched and warmed.
“You read The Vintners,” he said. “You must be one of the three people in England who did.”
“You’re joking, of course. Everybody I know has read it. I was in school at the time—” she’d mentioned the name of the school—Miss Phlegm’s School for Filiae Agricolae Nautam Amant in Devonshire—or something equally improbable. Anyway, the book had made a profound impression on her. “So compassionate—so terrifying,” she said. “We’ve only one person over there who writes like that, Graham Greene. Do you know him?”
Roger had said no, and she told him how she’d looked and looked for more of his books, combed the book stalls in the East End and even in Paris when she’d been there, thinking he might be one of those remote, El Greco figures who lived on the fourth floor in some Montmartre garret.
“Perhaps I should have,” he said. “Maybe then there would have been more books.”
“You mean you haven’t written anything since?”
How perfectly shameful it was, such a marvelous, marvelous gift. “If you belonged to me I should never have let you stop. I’d have locked you in and made you work.” And watching her high-strung, beautiful controlled movements with the Martini glass and a cigarette, he had a swift, tingly intimation of what she’d be like in the dark, behind a closed door.
“Tell me,” he said, feeling the excitement of her drawing taut and singy within him, like a stretched string, “there’s something I must know that only you can tell me.”
“What?” she said eagerly. “Please.”
“Is it Sacheverell? Or Sacheverell?”
She looked startled for a moment, then she laughed. “Oh, Sitwell. Sasheverell. Soft c.”
“Thank God. It’s bothered me for years.”
She kept laughing, a lovely sound. “You’re not very enterprising, are you?”
“No. But even if I were, where do you go to find out a thing like that?”
“Well, you’re sure to remember me at least. Now you can read him in peace.”
“Oh, I don’t intend to go that far.”
He’d taken her Martini glass and filled it again and they’d stood talking, and it was exciting in a special sort of way, as it used to be with Lila, the first time, with that sense of something building, building between them, that wonderful sense of aliveness, of language taking on new dimensions, new meanings, elliptical, full of nuance, keenly—even dangerously—informed with secret wit.
It must have been longer than he realized because he became aware finally that the party was breaking up at the Coulters, people were leaving. Then he looked at his watch and saw it was nine o’clock, and he remembered suddenly his dinner date with Lila. It was very embarrassing because Phillipa (that was her name, Phillipa Soames) had told him she was leaving very early in the morning with her aunt, for San Francisco. They were going on to Hawaii or Australia, and she had to be up by six in the morning. He’d told her it was foolish in that case to go to bed at all and offered to take her to some place in Harlem where she hadn’t been. She’d seemed very excited about the idea and had called her aunt to say she wouldn’t have dinner with her, and now he had to tell her about his dinner date with Lila, and it was very embarrassing.
But she’d been sporting about it, rather cute in fact. “I might have known,” she’d said ruefully, “the really choice seats are always occupied.” And she’d given him a lift in her taxi to the Baroque. “It’s been wonderful meeting you,” she said, and he knew she meant just that. “You will write some more….No. I won’t make you promise. But you should, you know.”
She held out her hand to him with that mannish gesture that only a really womanly woman can manage, and her smile, with that fetching upper lip of hers, was comradely—and yet personal. He’d watched her go with genuine regret. There weren’t many people left in the world who thought writers were anointed. Not his world, anyway.
* * *
—
He’d walked into the restaurant then, with the spell of the girl’s personality very much on him, almost like a very dry, wonderful wine, and Georges with his battery of culinary commandos had picked him up at the door and they’d danced him down to the table where Lila was sitting, with those long, black gloves almost to the sharp little elbows. He realized with a little shock of physical pleasure at the sight of her, that there was a striking resemblance between her and the English girl. The girl was really, in a way, a younger Lila….
He should have known something was wrong. Georges was twittering around them like a Gallie sparrow.
“Hello, darling,” he’d said, coming to. “Am I late? Or are you early?”
It was the wrong thing to say, of course. Nonchalance was hardly the right note. But he’d not felt exactly on the ball, at that point. He’d taken on quite a load since early afternoon, and his feet suddenly felt too big for his shoes and he realized now that the girl, Phillipa, had got to him in a big way. He felt disturbed, wrought up, vulnerable somehow. The whole time of not writing, and that earlier time of The Vintners (that mezzotint of dedication and high purposes) had moved of its own propulsion out of the closed attic room where he kept it hidden. It was suddenly like what the lights did to you late at night, those selfsame Christmasy lights of early evening, when they turned so desolate and lonely, rustling all the dead leaves of hope and desire in your mind….
“You’re late,” Lila had said, rousing him again, and he’d tried to smile, tried to fight off the sudden weariness.
“I know,” he said. “Later than I think. I’m sorry, Lila.”
“You’re an hour and forty minutes late,” she said. “I’ve been sitting here like a fool.”
“Well, if you’ve got to sit like a fool, it’s much better to do it in pleasant surroundings. Have a drink, darling, you’ll feel better.”
“I don’t want a drink,” she said. “And you don’t need any more either. You’re disgustingly tight already. You were practically staggering when you walked in here.”
“Lila, please,” he said. “Be beautiful and still.” To Georges he said, “A double Martini.”
“I want to know why you’re an hour and forty minutes late,” she said.
“I couldn’t get away. Emily decided to take a later train.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “I saw you drive up in a taxi. Who was that girl?”
“What girl?”
“Don’t lie to me, Roger. I happened to see you get out of the taxi. There was a girl in it.”
“Oh. She’s just a girl. She was at the Coulters. She was going up to the Savoy, and she gave me a lift.”
“Stop lying.
Who is she?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lila. Phillipa Something. I don’t know.”
“You kept me waiting for two hours. I want to know why?”
“Lila, darling,” he said, “a mistress is supposed to be good-humored, unpossessive, undemanding. A wife is supposed to be short-tempered, possessive, demanding. Do you have any idea why things should always get mixed up for me?”
Georges came up with the Martini.
“We were supposed to have a lovely evening tonight,” Lila said. “For a change. It was all arranged.”
“Man proposes and gin disposes. Happy days, darling.”
“You’re lovely,” she said. “You’ve got all the instincts of a killer. All you lack is the courage.”
“You sound just exactly like my analyst.”
He drained the glass Georges had set down before him, and as he set it down he saw that Lila was going to cry, and then it happened. The thing that had driven him to the analyst, really, not Emily’s importunities. The thing he’d never brought himself to talk about to Dr. Baume. Lila’s face went all to pieces as he watched, like an abstractionist painting. The eyes separated, the nose disappeared, the chin fell——This is what happens to the painters, he thought, Picasso, Chagall, only they put it together and make some larger sense. You could do it too, he told himself, pick up those blue eyes, those cunning hands, that lovely mouth that makes such sweet music in the dark, all you need is the talent. That’s all. You’ve got the nuclear fission department, the shadow that falls on the shadow, the paring knife that peels nuance from nuance, all you’ve lost is your talent. You can’t write any more. So what? Lots of people can’t write any more. Lots of people never could.
“Stop crying,” he said to Lila. “For pity’s sake, stop crying. Have a drink.”
“No, thanks,” she said. “But you have another.” And she picked up her glass of water and flung it in his face. He was too startled for a moment to move. Then he started futilely, to wipe himself with his napkin, trying desperately not to appear as ludicrous as he felt, there were people watching though they weren’t as important to him as that other one watching, himself, sneering at this buffoonish spectacle, but it wouldn’t do to make a scene now, pick up a plate and bang it down over her head, take her throat in his hands and squeeze until that demountable face of hers really came apart at the seams…
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 176
