The Tunnel of Love

by Peter de Vries

  “You’re trying to make me hate you because you think I’m just grateful to you for making me a star,” she said in a later scene, as the surf of applause beat undiminishing against the dressing-room door. “But I don’t want this—now—I want us. Oh, Bruce, we’ll go where we can hear the larks again.”

  “Larks, my dear, should be had, not heard. Take another bow now, and I’ll see you at the party.”

  But the chit had proved unquenchable. Now she had followed me here to Connecticut where all along I’d had a wife I’d never admitted. Presently the two must meet—all three of us. What a nasty mess, to be tidied out of whatever faith and courage and plain sense we had between us—

  I had been aware of my factual wife hanging up a real-life phone, then of the phone having rung again. “Swell, we’d love to,” I heard her say, and hang up again.

  She came into the living room where I was nursing my lager.

  “That was Mrs. Poole. You remember—we met them at the Crandons’ cocktail party,” she said. “It seems they live up the road in the old Shively place.”

  “Oh, yes.” I slid up in my chair and got a grip on my glass of beer. I was a bit startled, I must say. “What did she want?” I asked, picking up my drink.

  “She wants us to take in a movie with them. Come on. Get up and put a tie on. It’s that mystery we both want to see. Snap out of it. I’ll call Mrs. Goodbread and see if she can sit.”

  Three

  I HAD chance enough to be of service, though I didn’t know it yet. Not, to be sure, to make a star of Isolde, but to edit into printability the cartoons her husband kept turning out and sending to The Townsman—the more Herculean of the two challenges you may be sure. They knew about my magazine connection, but I still hadn’t tumbled about Augie’s name: some stopcock in charge of my peace of mind held the recognition back. They had the grace not to bring the matter up deliberately and nothing was mentioned after the movie, when we dropped into a bar for a drink.

  Isolde had on the bright wool scarf above which, and beneath hair the color of ripe wheat, her smile played, ionizing my stream of consciousness. Augie had on a brown tweed coat and a turtle-neck sweater, which gave him a vaguely profligate air. They were a handsome couple all right in their casual splendor. Spattered brogans completed their accommodation to the country. I felt like a hick in my banker’s gray flannel and tie that went well with it.

  Trying to keep an ice cube submerged in a Tom Collins with two straws, Isolde asked: “How many children do you have?”

  “Four,” I answered sheepishly.

  “Jesus,” Augie said ambiguously. Isolde looked at him as, Fontaine all forgot, a smile split her face like a coconut. “We’d like to have some. Ever so much.”

  She had, as the philharmonic commentators say of horns and woodwinds, stated the theme of our relationship; but it passed undetected, as a musical motif will slip by the unapprised listener. The talk went from this to that, and we parted with the Pooles asking us to dinner the following Friday. We could make it.

  When we arrived, Isolde let us in. She was wearing raspberrycolored slacks and a white peasant blouse, and blowing at an errant strand of hair, for she had been busy in the kitchen. Augie hove into view, wearing a denim coat and a silk scarf knotted with the proper casualness, even a touch of contempt. He was suavely stirring a shaker of Martinis, which he had just poured out of a bottle of Heublein’s ready-made. We were ushered into a large living room through which cats slightly less in size than lynxes freely charged. There was a slight lawn of hairs on things in general, and I reflected how under another code of honor I might be permitted to invert the cushion on which I was invited to sit. I furtively did this, as a matter of fact, when the host and hostess were momentarily out of the room, to find more of the same on the underside. It’s not a grudge I don’t hold against my own house, reading dog for cat. The room soared to “original” beams, and on its lower levels illustrated its owners’ allegiance to forthright fabrics and affirmative hues: there were large bright comfortable chairs almost haphazardly disposed, patternless drapes of the coarse, pleasant family known as homespun, scatter rugs offering splashes of further candid color. A heretical hooked rug or two were the effect of people not conscious of antiques but oblivious to them. Isolde flew between the kitchen and the living room, shading the oven flame in the one, the volume of a phonograph going in the other.

  During cocktails, Augie told a story that I remember. “When Stephen Douglas was a young man debating in the political campaigns in Illinois,” he said, “there was always a sort of lanky boy sitting in the front row, in one of the best seats. Grownups resented it, because seats were at a premium when Douglas spoke. But when they wanted to put him out, Douglas protested. He asked the boy why he came to the debates so regularly. And the boy said, ‘Because some day I hope to be up there on the platform myself.’ That’s fine,’ Douglas said. ‘What’s your name, my boy?’ And the boy said, ‘Abe.’ ‘Abe what?’ Douglas asked him. And the boy answered, ‘Abe Feldspar.”

  “Dinner!” Isolde called. It was a casserole of chicken cooked in red wine, and superb. But while we were eating it, fate chose to move in with his ruffian tactics.

  The winds of conversation swung around, from God remembers where, to the subject of cartooning, and a question was put to me that, for some reason I can’t fathom, I am constantly being asked. “Is it true that cartoonists draw themselves?” I answered that a lot of them did and that a few of them drew their wives, (but had drawn them before they’d met them). “Not friend Poole,” Isolde said, laughing in her husband’s direction. “Thank God. I’d hate to think there were any popeyes like that in this family. Maybe a popeyed girl jilted him once.”

  That was when the stopcock opened. “Good God,” I said. “A. Poole. I’m sorry I never tumbled. I’ll be damned.”

  “That’s all right,” Augie said, picking a shred of cork from his wine with a corner of his napkin, as though he were taking something out of somebody’s eye.

  Of course it wasn’t. The identification was anything but a happy one. The “popeyes” I had now suddenly connected with my visual memory of the signature, A. Poole, were rejected regularly with letters bearing my own. That was half the story. The other half was that the ideas in them were swell. Poole was a third-rate artist in whom a first-rate gagman was trying to claw his way out, or rather that I was trying to claw my way to. For years The Townsman’s editors had been trying to buy his ideas to send on to our good cartoonists, many of whom were indifferent jokesmiths and often becalmed at their drawing boards on that account. But he wouldn’t sell. He went on doggedly resolved to prove the reverse of our view—that the gagman we saw was a cocoon out of which an artist would one day burst. “Thank you, I don’t think I’ll release this idea. I’ll take another crack at a finish and maybe this time . . .” How choked my files were with letters beginning like that. How choked his own must be with my end of the correspondence. And how choked I was on this chicken.

  Sensing that her wonderful food had turned to gall, Isolde laid a hand on my wrist and said, “We won’t talk shop tonight, will we?”

  “Hell, yawl so grim about?” Augie said. “Mean why get so grim? Miro, Klee, Saroyan, they all tell us to relax.” However, he was wiping his palms on the sides of his pants.

  “I wish I knew what this was all about,” my wife said.

  “I send my work to your husband’s office. They don’t want the pictures, only the ideas.”

  “Oh, that goes on all the time, don’t let that upset you. There’s one artist he gets off the train wailing about. It’s been going on for years and this man never will. . .” The pressure of my foot on hers brought her up short. “What’s that cartoonist’s name again, dear?”

  “Spittlefield,” I said, fetching up for some reason with the name of my stationer. I very nearly said Feldspar. My wife said, “Oh, yes. Well, that’s the way it goes.”

  “Yes,” I sighed, “that’s the way it goes.” I refl
ected what a damn sight better this conversation would have gone at Moot Point, and made no secret to myself of wishing I was up there now.

  “I keep thinking of myself as an artist,” Augie went on. “They prefer to think of me as a gagman. Right?” The query came at me across the table like a fast Ping-pong shot.

  “The best,” I answered with a grin, “of our time.”

  Isolde put her napkin down. “Leave us repair to the living room,” she said.

  Coffee had the quality of religious proceedings, despite its being accompanied by a crème brûlée so delicious it was almost obscene. There were silences in which cups lowered on saucers sounded like pistol shots. When Augie was standing over a coffee table some time later pouring brandies and I was hovering in his neighborhood, I bent down and said in his ear, “I’m sorry I called you the greatest gagman of our time.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “That’s quite all right. Christola.”

  “It’s just not constitutional,” Isolde protested from elsewhere in the room, where she and my wife were perusing an architectural organ together. “All this shop talkety-talk. We’ll have no more.”

  “Where do you work, Augie?” I asked, calling him that for the first time.

  He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “Old barn back there.”

  “I’d like to see your studio.” I knew what the impulse that had made me say that was. That’s the impulse to swallow something hot to get rid of it.

  “Better put on your overcoats if you’re going to stay in there and chin-chin,” Isolde said. I knew what that impulse was too. She thought that now was the time to have Augie lay it on the line with me once and for all, and ask, “All right. Why don’t you buy any of my stuff? What’s the matter?” So we could get on with the business of becoming friends.

  Augie and I bundled into our overcoats, rather in the mood of men being egged out of them to have a fight.

  “Shall we take our drinks?” I suggested.

  “Take the bottle,” Augie said.

  Playing the beam of a flashlight behind him like a movie usher, Augie led the way across a long yard, past a disused chicken coop to a red barn. “You haven’t had any roughs in the last few weeks,” I said, to show I wasn’t afraid of him, and springing round a decayed poultry crate. “Done got me involved fixing this place up,” he answered in the same tone. He opened a door in the barn, snapped a switch, and led the way up a steep stair to a freshly paneled loft with large windows the length of one side, and a wood stove about which hovered the odor of defunct fires. The room had the comprehensive disorder of a junkyard. Files and tables inclined toward one another, papers lay about like a compost, pictures in varying stages covered everything including the walls. At one end was a drawing board on which was a captionless sketch of a goat in a vacant lot eating a copy of Duncan Hines’s restaurant guide.

  Augie dropped into an armchair, after a sidelong glance at me taking this in, and waved me hospitably toward a ruptured daybed. It was like an icebox in there. He sat with his overcoat spread open, but I buttoned mine to the chin. We lit cigarettes, and between the plumes our breath made and the tobacco smoke we blew in one another’s direction we all but obscured each other from view, which was just as well for we were both twitching with anxiety.

  “What shall we talk about?” Augie said, setting the flashlight on a table, still turned on. “The king of Spain’s daughter?”

  I finished off my brandy and he did the same with his. We refilled our glasses from the bottle which I had carried over in my overcoat pocket. Augie took a sheaf of drawings from the table and began to shuffle through them. “How about a stroll down Memory Lane. Remember this?” He thrust a picture at me.

  I remembered it very well. It showed a woman patient peering furtively down into the street from the window of a psychiatrist’s office, with a pistol in her hand. The psychiatrist was asking, “What makes you think your first analyst is following you, Mrs. Meyerbeer?” I smiled and said, “Yes.” It was one of the first ideas I had tried to wangle away from him. He’d worked over it at least twenty times, always ending up with something too unfunny for tears. Since then he had become if anything more wooden still, out of his drive to “perfect” himself. He handed me a picture showing an artist’s studio, inexpressibly squalid, in which a gloved visitor was saying to a painter in rags, “Boris, I wish to God I could get you out of your ivory tower.” The editorial mouths had watered in vain for that idea too. Done by the right cartoonist, it might have made a memorable piece of social satire. Now it was another souvenir of a joint frustration, moldering in the attic of a man in an ivory tower of his own.

  “Why do you keep sending my stuff back?” Augie asked abruptly.

  “Well, I mean hell.” My knees came together in a spasm of cold. Dared I say, “Because it’s as stiff as a new shoe and will never be anything else”—to be cruelly kind? I said, after a pull on my brandy, “We don’t set ourselves up as critics. We just feel whether a thing is right for us or not.”

  “My stuff isn’t right for anywhere else,” was his rebuttal to this. I have found only one thing richer in non sequiturs than a woman’s logic, and that is the logic of an artist about his own work.

  “The thing you ought to try to do is loosen up a little,” I said. This was, after all, the terminology of his own trade. “Tightness,” “stiffness,” these were a curse all cartoonists were rightly in horror of. I knew an artist so bedeviled by them that he went to every expedient including, so help me, that of working for a few weeks on transcontinental trains in hopes that the motion of the cars would rock his line free.

  “Oh, the joke business!” I groaned. Augie chose that moment to drop all the papers he was holding to the floor with a smack, and didn’t hear what I said, so I had to regroan it. I felt a spring in the daybed twang under one haunch. I threw a look toward the stairway.

  “Do you think I should give up?” Augie asked, pouring another drink. “Is that your opinion?”

  “No editor has the right to say that. I’ll just say I’ve given up myself,” I answered with a laugh, handing him back his fine jokes. He saw me roll an eye around the remodeled interior and guessed my thought. “Isolde has a grandmother with money,” he said. “She bought this house for her. For us. I didn’t marry Isolde for her money, but it’s because she had money that I could marry her. Mean the money problem is the artist’s perennial one.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  Augie brought his hand down on a nearby cabinet with what was neither quite a caress nor altogether a blow. “Well, if I ever get pinched enough to have to sell my ideas, it’s nice to know there’s gold in them thar hills.”

  “There sure are. Is.” I sneezed and added: “Thousands of dollars.”

  “Shall we join the ladies?”

  “If you like.”

  I was a time getting to sleep that night. In bed, I saw our new friends as having a last cigarette before putting out the lights, talking their guests over with special emphasis on my critical level as illustrated in the frozen loft. Isolde’s moving to the suburbs would imply a surrender of her own career, never, I gathered, a very hopeful one, and a consequent deepening of her interest in her husband’s. So I couldn’t help thinking of them as talking things over, maybe in the kitchen as they did the dishes—another couple huddled together over the blundering wheel of fortune. A wave of pathos washed my fretfulness away, but I did wonder whether business and friendship must be mixed in yet another case, and whether to the detriment of either or both. Had my chances of wooing A. Poole’s jokes away from him brightened or declined? But it was too trying a reality to rehearse long at this tired hour. And since I can’t count sheep, because I keep trying to guess their sex as they jump over the fence, I was soon again in the land of revery. More wish-fulfillment. I imagined Augie to possess a talent of the first order, which I discovered and nursed into stardom as that of “one of the finest comic artists of our time” (New York Herald Tribune), to the u
ndying gratitude of Isolde, and, what was more, the satisfaction of Hugh Blair, my volcanic editor in chief.

  Four

  THE next time I heard from Augie it was to find the goat eating Duncan Hines on my desk. Which picture was soon again restored to his possession. With the novelty of our not this time beseeching him for the gag.

  It was later that same week that my wife got a phone call from Isolde that was to prove important in the lives of all four of us.

  It was early evening. Our family were all in bed without the house having in the least retired. My wife lay in hers reading a book in which she was using a bus transfer for a marker, a fact which obscurely vexed me, and whistling tunelessly through her teeth, a grievance on which my hold was firmer. What a greater cumulative toll the small irritations of life take than its major woes; if instead of the thousand perennial gnats a man could pay in one good snakebite! My wife’s name, I’m afraid, is Aurora. Since her majority she has gone as Audrey, which she regards as short for it though I take it to be an outright substitution. A woman’s name ought ideally to steal over one, and not come up like thunder out of China ‘cross the Bay. Our four children are Phoebe, Marco, Ralph and Maude, and some of them were discussing the names they were going to change to when such alterations were within their legal reach. A dog, a hound rich in separate strains, was down in the basement, asleep in a bisected cello. His name was Nebuchadnezzar, and though he was in no position to oppose it there were times when his dark eyes seemed to me liquid with reproach. I felt foolish myself every time I called him.

  “We need more air in here,” my wife said, turning a page. “And while you’re up, get me a small brandy.”

  She is the soul of service by day, but at night is partial to being waited on. I’d be more willing to consider her whim my law if she didn’t tend to regard it as such herself. And tonight it was my own whim to see how long it would take her to prop her request with a complaint about her physical condition; I knew all her gambits and was ready with a stock of medical repartee. Also, I wanted to show her that taking an executive tone with me was not in itself enough.