The Tunnel of Love

by Peter de Vries

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “So now I think I’ve answered all your questions. I’ve settled down into a reasonable groove, and my marriage is in no danger as every hour I spend with my wife has this tincture of cheating on another woman. Must you leave?”

  “I have an office appointment. I can’t finish this sandwich, but you take your time. Here’s my share of the check,” I said, tumbling some money on the table and rising. “I’d like to hear more about this later.”

  What did I think of what I’d heard, after settling down in my office (and combing the snarls out of my hair)? This. That if Augie were put out for adoption, preferably to C.B., who would brook no nonsense, and Isolde married someone else, we might hope for a reasonable solution to all this. But failing that, I figured I might as well go along with Augie’s elucidation and see what we’d see. For if Cornelia Bly had succeeded in pruning his trespasses to within that degree of rectitude, that degree of the stern standards by which the agencies were bent on measuring man, who was I to quarrel with the alchemy by which these ends were gained? Furthermore, once he and Isolde got a child there was every reason to believe the progress would be completed by the responsibility that alone perfects growth. For who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The principle of society is forced growth. The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that childen produce adults.

  It was on the basis of this thinking, and a few of the points Augie himself had validly made in his anger, plus a dash of mercy and a pinch of hope, that I at last made a settlement with my conscience. I would give him the testimonial.

  “When,” I therefore impatiently asked my wife, “is that woman Mrs. Mash going to get here?”

  Nine

  SEPTEMBER slipped into October, summer into fall, and still no Mrs. Mash—except at the Pooles’ where she called for repeated interviews. She preferred to go slowly, letting her impressions steep and simmer. “It takes nine months this way too,” said Augie, who chafed under what he called the woman’s X-ray eyes. The exhilaration of the turning year was felt in the city’s quickened tempo. Autumn is the spring of the spirit, when the sap flows once again in wilted urban man. Also in wilted urban man who lives in the country. Audrey and I went for Sunday drives with the Pooles, improvising rides along the blazing back roads and through little towns whose names we didn’t catch and to which we fled without the aid of maps. There was an epidemic of some respiratory nuisance which all the children caught. Phoebe got it first, and she was pumped so full of penicillin that the fumes from her cured a cold I had. The others followed, and in addition to the miracle drugs, electrically driven croup kettles were set going in various corners of the house. There were so many hissing plumes of steam on all sides that the place looked like a roundhouse. We had no fears about leaving the children with Mrs. Goodbread, a skillful mechanic, who watched the croup kettles with all the care with which in the old country, she said, she had tended smudge pots to guard the orchard fruit from frost. You have an instinctive faith in anyone who has sat up all night with trees. Dr. Vancouver was all right in there too. He carried a supply of surgical masks which he put on the patients, when examining them with stethoscopes, explaining that this was indeed an epidemic and his first duty was to the community, for whom he must keep himself in fettle. Setting out on one of our foursome jaunts, we saw him parked beside the road in his car, taking his temperature. He waved as we went by, the thermometer sticking up out of his smile.

  It was on that trip that I first began to notice Augie wasn’t himself. He sat slumped in the back seat beside Audrey, managing to look glum even in the yellow tartan cap and houndstooth jacket which comprised his plangent motoring gear. Cornelia Bly was in Florida for a month. Did he then miss her that much? Isolde said the picking, poking painstakingness of the agency was wearing his nerves down, as it was hers. It was an awful mental hazard. Augie, who had claimed such attunement to the autumn season that he could smell the leaves turning in their faint combustion, “exactly like something burning,” and held reveling in her melancholy to be the highest joy open to man, didn’t feel like reveling in the melancholy now. He was too miserable. “Wenn du fehlen willst, fehle gut,” he said.

  “Don’t talk like that,” Isolde said. “What does that mean—something about not feeling good?”

  “No, it’s from one of the great Germans. ‘If you’re going to be a failure, be a good one,’” Augie said. In the rearview mirror in which I could see him as I drove, he seemed to be disappearing into his getup, like a turtle into its shell.

  We were to lunch that Wednesday and discuss his latest try—a drunk lying in the gutter of a bowling alley—but there wasn’t much to say about it. “Make him look dreamy and happy there, and you might put in a spectator—someone looking over and doing a ‘take’ on it,” I suggested. He nodded vaguely. Our food came—a sandwich and a bottle of ale apiece. Pouring myself a glass, I asked: “Heard from Cornelia Bly lately?”

  “I got a letter Friday,” he said.

  “You get letters from her at home?” I asked.

  “No, I pick them up at general delivery, Norwalk.”

  “How’s she doing? Still down in Florida?” I was sure from his expression that she’d given him the air, but I sensed that he wanted to talk about it and was doing my best to prime him past his reluctance.

  He brought the letter abruptly out of his pocket.

  “You might as well know the whole story,” he said. “It’s all in this. First she tells some gossip about where she’s staying, local history and one thing and another. How we’re still technically at war with the Seminole Indians.” He poured himself some ale. “The tribe was originally formed by splitting with the Creek Indians. The name means ‘seceders.’ They fought the United States bitterly in 1817-1818, and later under Osceola. Toward the middle of the century that was. There aren’t but three hundred Seminoles left in Florida. It seems a treaty was never signed with them.”

  “But that’s not what’s eating you.”

  “No.” He bent his head again over the letter. “I told you Cornelia went down there to paint, but that’s not the whole story. She went down there to think things through. Come to some conclusion about ‘us.’ That’s all right, ours is a special relation, outside the pale. She felt she had to go over the whole thing objectively and without any emotional kibitzing from me. And now she’s come to a conclusion about ‘us.’ Only down here she explains what she never told me before she left. It seems ‘us’ will soon be three.”

  It was a moment after his words reached me that his meaning did. There was an interval of dreamy disbelief during which the meaning floated dreamily toward me, like a shuttlecock over a badminton net well after the drive that sent it there is finished.

  “I see,” I said. “And?”

  “And she wants to have the child and keep it.”

  “I see,” I could only unresourcefully repeat. Then I asked: “How do you feel about that? Don’t you stand on the right to live your own life, outside the pale as you say?”

  “What is the matter with you?” he reproved. “A child . . .” He raked his hair and wet his lips. He shook his head distractedly. “I blame myself. . . . What’s so funny?”

  “Blaming yourself. I’m sorry.”

  “Who else is there to blame? I don’t know what’s the matter with you sometimes. Put yourself in my shoes.”

  I kept a straight face by pretending to probe a molar with my tongue. I said:

  “It seems to me this is her own affair. She’s sort of tricked you, hasn’t she?”

  He seemed not to have heard me. “My old will to fail,” he said.

  “How many months is she pregnant?” I asked, smiling helplessly now.

  He held up three fingers, as though he could not utter the word. “Too late to do anything now but see it through.”

  “She knows you’re married of course?”

  “Of course. But that has noth
ing to do with it in her view. She feels she has a perfect right to be a miss mother if she wants.”

  I asked: “Can she afford a child?”

  “She’s banking on the ten thousand dollars she’s suing that flour company for. Her lawyer says it’s a sure thing. He’s got a critic who’ll testify that there’s been damage to her reputation. Thousands of people who never heard of her before have read about the case. So she figures the ten thousand she’s asking will see her through the first few years, and by that time she expects she’ll be making enough on her paintings to support the child. And of course she’s hoping to get more advertising commissions as a result of the publicity.”

  The case was by this time already on the circuit court docket in New York. It came up very soon—in fact Cornelia’s lawyer called her back from Florida by wire.

  We all followed it with great interest. It was a libel suit, that being the category under which damage to professional reputation comes. The trial consumed two full days of expert testimony, disputed opinion, and legal and aesthetic wrangling. The pictures were of course placed in exhibit, and a long argument raged as to which looked more mutilated, with distinctions drawn between literal and artistic mutilation. The audience was all ears. The critic who testified in Cornelia’s behalf was the editor of a surrealist quarterly called Bloodshot. I was in court with Augie the afternoon of the second day, and also two afternoons later when the judge rendered his verdict. He awarded damages to the plaintiff in the amount of twenty-five cents—in other words, Cornelia had lost the case. Augie gripped my arm and hauled me to my feet. “Let’s go have a drink,” he said.

  “How the hell is she going to support that child now?” he said, in the bar to which we hurriedly repaired. “In France she’d have gotten a judgment. The artist has some rights there—what they call moral droit. Not here. I tell you, this country is a nest of Philistines.”

  “Won’t she get more work, as you said?” I asked.

  Augie shook his head. “Not a chance. The advertising agencies are laughing up their sleeves.” He took a long pull on his beer and lowered the stein to the table. “She’s got to give the child up now.”

  “Would she lay it at your door?”

  Augie gave me a slow burn; and when my face began to get out of control I hid it with my hands and said, “Oh, God,” holding them there till I had steadied myself enough to remove them and ask: “She has no other moneys?”

  “Not enough. She lives with her brothers in a sort of homestead they inherited from their parents, who are dead. In Norwalk. She comes from a fine family,” he added a trifle smugly. “I’ve never been there—we only met in New York. And where would I get any extra dough?” We glanced simultaneously at an envelope full of rejections in the pocket of his topcoat, which hung on the wall, the week’s rejections which he had picked up from the office that morning. I remembered what I’d told him that night in his studio, about all the potential cash there was in his files, if he ever needed any. The same thought must have crossed his own mind because he brought his fist down and said, “She’s got to give it up.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said, “tell her.”

  He did, the next night. His report was that she tended to agree, but he didn’t trust her. Women were too emotional. “Look at the cold, calculating way she sat down and figured this thing out from beginning to end—about having a child,” he said. She needed further persuasion, he was sure, pressure perhaps from another source. “I mustn’t run the risk of being seen with her from now on,” he told me across the table at which we were again lunching. “I’m being watched closely—very closely—by the agency at this stage. So I’ve got to keep my nose clean, as you say. I don’t suppose you’d talk to her?”

  He had another guess coming if he thought I was averse. “I’ll be glad to,” I said, emptying a bottle of ale into my glass. He turned on me a look of canine gratitude, which I must say ill became a stormy petrel. “You’re a brick,” he said.

  That was only part of it. What appealed to me was the opportunity of acting as proxy for a rogue. It was not only a role to which I was temperamentally drawn and by nature inclined, but one in which I was thoroughly grounded and even finely trained by the practice in which this picaresque side of me had been developed: I mean the hours spent at Moot Point honing my wits on just such romantic imbroglios as this. They had been literally without number, as I have perhaps adequately suggested. I had been embroiled there with women of all ages and from clinging vines to flinty intellectuals like Cornelia Bly, with no demonstrable damage. With this one a summer’s dalliance, through a squall of passion with that, and out of it all had come a fund of dexterities and attitudes, aphorisms and ripostes all ready and waiting in a reservoir of dialogue at which I was letter perfect. Put myself in his shoes indeed! When was the week in which I had not? Lucky for the collapsed rebel that there was someone available to step into his role who had been thoroughly rehearsed.

  Sympathetic as I was and ready with my good offices, however, I could not forego one final, somewhat reproachful remark as I rose from the table at which my deflated radical yet tarried.

  “I guess you realize now,” I said, laying a hand on his shoulder, “that you’ve been living in a dream world.”

  Ten

  TAKING over for Augie was a grave responsibility. I felt that. I spent the next days getting myself in the mood for the part. What did that call for as I saw it? Strict conformity to the character in which it had begun—that of a moral independent. Of that I was convinced. It was all right for Augie to reform in his private life, but any show of faintness on the other front, any faltering, gelatinousness of heart would be instantly taken advantage of to the possible detriment of the innocent. Perhaps beneath the girl’s bravado I would find another soft center? Then I must the more show no soft center myself, in taking it from here at the point where the rapids remained to be shot. There is only one way to shoot the rapids if you want to keep afloat until you’re past them—you must paddle faster than the current.

  I set to grooming myself for the part on these lines. I imagined that I was an international cad about whom there must be no mistake. In brushing up, I practiced on my wife, with some old capers of mine that were familiar to both of us. I often pretended that we weren’t married but were only living together, or had just met, or some such. I often tried to look not married when we checked in together at hotels, signing the register furtively and what not, to see if I could arouse suspicion. Well, driving her to town to shop for an aunt’s birthday present, that Thursday evening when the stores were open, I imagined that the family station wagon we were in was a low-slung open Jaguar in which I had just picked her up. I was wearing a tweed cap anyhow, and now slouching raffishly behind the wheel I said, “Let’s go up to my place and do a little hard breathing.”

  “Take this road here, it’s shorter,” she said. “Then cut over to Main Street.”

  I began to jab with my thumb at a jammed press latch on the glove compartment, to make my wife ask me when I was going to fix it. I jabbed at it several times, reaching across her to do it, and at last she said, “When in God’s name are you ever going to fix that thing—or take it down and get it fixed?”

  “Women nag their husbands about what they don’t do. Men nag their wives about what they do,” I said, settling back. “‘When are you going to fix this or mow that?’ women say. And men, ‘Why must you put chives in everything, what are you forever rearranging the furniture for?’ None of that for me.”

  I prowled down Main Street, steering with my hands on the bottom of the wheel. My wife was poking around in crannies looking for the mate of a glove she had in one hand. “Why can’t women lose gloves by the pair?” I debonairly chaffed.

  I was feeling my way around in the part, circling for the right vein, and now I felt I pretty much had it: that of a light and informed rascality, a profligate charm that was irresistible even to its victims.

  “We ought to pick up a little somethi
ng for the children, if Maude says they’ve behaved,” my wife said.

  “Children! How can you conceive of such a thing? No children for me, you may as well know. The human species is the only one that is devoured by its young.” For all this she would soon be at Moot Point, protesting weakly that my kisses drew the marrow from her bones. I dug up a paper-back novel that had got wedged under me. “What the hell is this?” I asked irritably. “Good God, you’re not reading that woman?”

  “Dip into it waiting for your train. I thought it was up your alley, that sophisticated sort of idiom.”

  “Every idiom has its idiot.” I drew to a stop before the gift shop and reached over to open her door and let her out. “Don’t take too long in there. And then let’s go up to my place and do a little hard breathing.”

  Augie arranged for me to see Cornelia the following Wednesday evening. The encounter was to be lubricated by the assumption that I wanted to look at her paintings; having seen which I would proceed to the main purpose of my call. At half past seven on Tuesday evening Augie phoned and asked me to come right over to his studio.

  When I climbed through the hatch leading to it, I found him in shirt sleeves, sorting through piles of drawings and sketches which lay everywhere on tables and on the floor. Two new electric heaters had the place hot as a kiln.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He pointed down at a stack larger than the rest. “Can you let me have a thousand bucks advance on these? There’s at least thirty more that you’ve expressed interest in over the years. I mean the ideas of course.”

  “What’s up?”

  He drew a long, harried sigh and hitched up his trousers with his wrists, his hands being black with dust.

  “Mean there’ll be expenses in any case. Whatever’s done in the end, there’s things I ought to foot. And if I give her the money—all in a lump sum, and enough—there’s less chance of anybody coming around here and asking me for it. You know—some relative or friend, maybe stirring up trouble or suspicion. I’ve got to keep out of this.”