The Tunnel of Love

by Peter de Vries

  “So is the editor,” I piped up.

  Everybody turned and looked at me as if they thought I was nuts.

  “So is the what?” someone asked.

  “The editor,” I repeated, snapping the match away into the sand. “You know. He’s at odds with the culture of his time too, very often. So are the auditor and the architect, for all I know, but I can speak for the editor. I can name you several, all top men in their field, who wouldn’t take a plugged nickel for ours.”

  I pestered them systematically with this heresy for the good part of ten minutes, a long lecture for me. I went on to say that I didn’t know of an editor worth his salt who was really integrated with the prevailing mores, that at least two editors of my acquaintance had imperfect domestic backgrounds and even histories of sexual digression, as well as other of the stigmata of creativity—not too extreme a word, I submitted, for a profession that often as not involved whipping somebody else’s work into shape. Being compelled by modesty to leave out of the discussion what I might have in my private craw, I spoke of the compensatory part the work of editing might play, for the individual. I submitted that the drive to get out a magazine every week could be basically sexual in nature, a kind of sublimation for the person in question. I said I liked to think of the editor as a kind of pimp who brought the artist and his public together.

  They nibbled on this with long teeth at first, but gradually came to take a less dim view of it, and to treat me with more respect. I detected thoughtful glances from several, thoughtful pauses in the chewing of chicken meat, that seemed to foretell one’s being able to hold one’s head up a little higher in one’s community.

  There was an immediate tangible upshot of the disquisition.

  A girl on the edge of the group whom I’d noticed, in the light of the fire round which we were ringed, to have been listening with particular attention, crept across the intervening sand and wedged her way in beside me. The majority (not including me) were dressed for swimming, and she had on a dark blue suit which was still wet from a recent dip.

  “I was interested in what you said about editing,” she said. “I’ve written some articles that need cutting and maybe a little other working over—whipping into shape, as you say. A fresh eye is important, don’t you think?”

  “No doubt about it,” I said, running one over her hair, which was like corn silk; her long, luxuriant and, I was sure, native, lashes; her full if somewhat pulpy mouth. She had one of those faces that remind us that prettiness is not a degree of beauty but something else again. While far from pretty she just missed beauty, with the kind of plainness in which you feel that a stroke or two more of the chisel would have meant divinity. I swirled a can of beer I had in my hand—one whose half-dozen predecessors had lubricated my tongue for the harangue, as a matter of fact—and looking into it asked, “What kind of articles are they?”

  “Sort of memoirs. About my family?” She had that habit of ending declarative sentences with an interrogatory inflection, as if to add “You know?” “Mainly my father, who was a sort of character? In the town where I grew up in Massachusetts. The sort of thing you use a lot of in The Townsman.” She cleared a strand of hair out of her eye, and settling down beside me on the sand said, “I need someone who can sort of look at them objectively. Someone who’s not too close to the subject?”

  I drank the lees of my beer and pitched the can on a nearby pile of empties. “I’d be glad to look at them,” I said.

  “Would you?” She clasped her hands, on her knees again. “God, if I dreamt there was a chance of getting in The Townsman. Sort of all jelly at the thought?”

  A beer later I heard her remark that she loved the country so much every time she got out to it that she didn’t see how she lived all alone in the city in a stuffy apartment. Two beers later, and in the dying firelight, I heard myself say, “Perhaps we can discuss them over lunch one day.”

  She sort of mislaid a hand on my arm and said with a laugh, “There’s a whole book of them.”

  “I eat every day,” I assured her with an arch smile. I threw another can on the pile. “This is what is known as a publisher’s advance.”

  “Ish kabibble about that if I can just get some good sound professional advice.” She looked into a beer of her own, holding the can in both hands in a way that gave it the quality of a temple vessel, and asked, “Are you here alone?”

  “Yes. You alone too?”

  “Yes. That is, I came with the McBains. Week-end guest. They’re cousins. Do you know them?”

  I didn’t, except by sight; I hadn’t met them till tonight.

  The chiaroscuro broke up, with some of the Nereids and old youths charging in for a last dip. The water was so shallow here and the beach sloped so gradually you had to run a quarter of a mile to get your feet covered let alone attain a depth sufficient to fling yourself into with any éclat, so that these dramatic dashes petered out into bathos. A man had tried to commit suicide here once—a local artist who’d had a painting rejected by the Avalon Hardware Company, which hung canvases as a way of displaying wares in its picture-frame section—and had gotten so tired and discouraged walking out in search of deep enough water that he’d turned around and gone back. Gotten a little self-conscious too, as there’d been parties on the beach watching. A few hundred more feet and he’d have been under Long Island jurisdiction.

  The girl and I hesitantly rose. “Look, are your people—?” I began.

  “I’ll tell the McBains to go on, if you can drop me.”

  She went to the McBains’ station wagon where she also changed back into her street clothes. Carrying a last beer apiece, we went for a walk down the beach.

  Strolling along, I recalled my last summer holiday from domestic life, two years before; how I’d begun it in a ferment vaguely related to the hearsay about the “trouble” husbands “got into” when their wives were away. My debaucheries had ultimately consisted of an hour spent in the shooting galleries along Sixth Avenue with a friend named Al Standard; the consumption at Lindy’s of great bleeding wedges of strawberry cheese pie and a party at the home of a neighbor, to celebrate his revision of a hymnal for a denomination whose name escapes me. The interlude of lotus eating had been interspersed with plays and movies frenetically gobbled in the drive to “get as much in” as I could, and had ended, one final evening, in the company of an air pilot acquaintance, who confessed a secret desire to write obscenities on the sky.

  It was my memory of the general tepidity of that fortnight (and of the sheepish kind of shame that constituted its aftermath) that added, I suppose, a slight undercurrent of resolve to my mood of tingling expectation as we scuffed along through the sand. We fetched up near a breakwater a half mile from where we’d started. We sat down on the sand, turning our faces to the water and hearing nearby the tidal river pouring itself forever into the gluttonous sea; the same sea that wallowed softly or flung its pitiless spume against the rocks at Moot Point.

  “A nickel for your thoughts,” she said. “Inflation.”

  “I was just thinking how in all this Everything, there’s Nothing,” I said. “The more Everything, the more Nothing.” It was the old Weltschmerz act, which no longer worked with my wife. One arm flung out above my head, I lay back on the sand and went on, “Never to pluck the fruit of meaning or longer be permitted to eat the lotus of illusion—that is the curse of modern man. Never, never and again never to decipher what is written in the stars, or whispered in the ever-murmuring sea shells.”

  She pushed back the lock of hair the better to scrutinize me worriedly. I dropped my arm down over my eyes, gorging myself on her concern.

  “To think that death comes to species as well as to individuals; to worlds as well as species,” I continued. “That as we lie here the earth under us is cooling toward the clinker it’s bound to become—like the moon.”

  “Are there then no what-do-you-ma-call-its—values?”

  “None whatever,” I replied inclemently. I gav
e a small, bitter laugh. “Except those we scratch out our farcical little day with. Philosophy is the attempt to pick at a wet knot with boxing gloves.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. Think of the dreams and fancies set humming in this walnut hull.” I tapped my skull. It was considerably south of that point that my own fermentations were going on, but anyhow. I stretched a hand upward. “There’s nothing or nobody to whom all those boiling stars mean so much as a four-minute egg”

  “My father is an atheist too.” She rolled away and smiled reminiscently. “You and he are a lot alike.”

  I was wearing denim slacks, a soiled T-shirt, and a switchman’s cap, clothes not exactly suited to the elucidation of Weltschmerz, but I did my best to recover the offensive.

  “Life is a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. Millikan tried to add up the number of molecules there are in the Universe, and ended up with a cigarboxful of zeros. There it is—take it or leave it—the Universe.”

  “The Universe isn’t everything,” she consoled me.

  “What are your articles like?” I sat up.

  “Never mind them now.”

  “Tell me about your family.”

  I had drawn the bung from a rather capacious subject. She went into detail about her ancestors, who had been fishing people on both sides. An uncle was now curator of a marine museum of natural history in Massachusetts—he had reconstructed an entire whale skeleton from two corset stays, or something; a grandfather on her mother’s side was a captain who had gone down with his ship (rocked in the Credo of the deep?). I heard this while Arcturus slipped an inch toward the abyss, and the moon rose like a bloody cliché. She brought it up to date, the story, with an eccentric and wonderfully picturesque father, in the tradition of salty characters, who was the main subject of the memoirs she was working on. “He sues everybody,” she told me hilariously. “And always grumbling about the way things are. A lot like you.”

  Our hands met up like crabs cruising in the sand between us. I lay over toward her as, now, she settled back.

  “Are the eyelashes home-grown?” I asked, propped on one elbow.

  “Mm,” she said, nodding.

  I studied her with a morose intoxication. I tried to put a check on myself by flunking her out of Moot Point, that touchstone. I had been supposing to myself that Le Corbusier had designed the house, and now I imagined asking her whether she liked Le Corbusier, and her replying, “Love some—with a little Benedictine if you’ve got it.” Thus my imp and guardian floated above me, to sabotage and save. But it was no good. In her eyes was the splintered light of stars, and her voice seemed to echo the murmur of delinquent waters. Her eyes were blue, her skin fair, her lips strategically placed. After I had kissed her, she sat up and fanned her face in tribute to myself. “Whew,” she said. “Sort of absolutely flabbergasted.”

  I could have kicked myself as I drove her out to where she was staying, clear in Southport fifteen miles away, and I knew that I was going to feel more like kicking myself when I got home to my place. So, figuring I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, I kissed her again and again, when I dropped her.

  She sat musing on me from her corner of the front seat. “I had a feeling right from the start that you were going to play on my black keys.” She got out a comb and tidied up the mess of pottage for which I had sold my birthright. “Such a Schopenhauer.” She smiled, raking the long soft fleece. “The last boy I went with was a sort of moral fatso?”

  I came round and opened her door. “It’s been very nice—what is your name?” I said. “I didn’t quite catch it at the beach.”

  “Terry McBain,” she said. We walked up to the house. “About the articles. Supposing I phone you at your office. Sort of next week?”

  Thirteen

  I SPENT the days till then with a nagging conscience. My pricks of remorse were especially keen in the empty house, where my wife’s blank pillow and empty bed, the framed photographs on the mantel, the clock ticking into the silence drenched with absence filled me with a sentimental regret. Oh, if I had only kept my rovings to Moot Point! How many pleasant hours, ruminantly alone in my fortnight’s bachelorhood, might I not be spending there even now. In the coral gardens of my thought life the figure of Terry McBain did supplant that of Isolde Poole—just as Isolde Poole’s had that of her predecessor—like those hermit crabs which inhabit vacated univalves, but only brokenly and unsuccessfully: reality always routed me to account. More than that, my conscience dunned me with claims even for peccancies committed at Moot Point, now, a thing previously unheard of, for Moot Point had always been a sanctuary where I could tell the illusory hours unvexed. “There is nothing wrong,” I evoked myself as chatting on the terrace there with Terry McBain, “there is nothing wrong with the birds and bees as a metaphor for sex. For what man has not felt himself pecked and stung to death?” Oh, how I wished I could recall those words now; even that phantom wrong to my wife was gathered into the general circuit of guilt.

  This state of mind continued until I found myself in an endless round of wishing I had the truant evening to live over again.

  So obsessed did I become with this idea of having another chance that I finally began to ask myself, Why not? Why couldn’t I relive that evening? It should be perfectly simple. I would reproduce as closely as possible the circumstances under which I had erred, lead up to the point where I had succumbed, and then not succumb. This, I felt, would not be a mere ritualistic repair of my spirit but an actual moral victory, since the same physical indulgence would be open to me.

  The urge to make this token demonstration of fidelity put me in a fume of impatience when half a week passed without Terry McBain calling me at the office, as she had promised. The need to get this whole thing over with before my wife and family got back made me decide that, if Terry McBain didn’t phone by the following Friday, I would call her. By Friday noon she hadn’t phoned, and, having found her in the book, I rang her up. She was home.

  “Oh, hello, hello,” she greeted me, instantly recognizing my voice. “I was going to call you. How’s tricks?”

  “Fine? How are the articles coming?”

  “Why, I was polishing and cutting three of them—I wanted to get them in shape before I showed them to you. Sort of trimming away the fat?”

  “Well, swell. How do you feel about dinner tonight? Are you free?” Naturally my plan wouldn’t work if she just brought the stuff into the office. I had to have an actual temptation.

  “I’m free, yes, and I’d love to. I don’t know that I’ll have the articles done by that time, if that makes any never mind.”

  “That doesn’t matter. How’s seven o’clock?”

  “Okie doke.”

  We ate at a place of her choosing called Mrs. Ainslee’s, this being a bower of chintz garnished with potted palms and cooled by mechanical zephyrs, where the liquor had to be fetched from a bar next door. Terry was dressed in a navy blue faille suit of provocative sibilance and a blue and yellow ascot that, under the eaves of a floppy yellow hat, set off her amber skin and blue eyes. I watched her mood closely for any signs that her country relatives had supplied a dossier of me at variance with the idea of an unattached man I had permitted myself to be mistaken for, but there were none. Maybe the cousin McBains didn’t know me any better than I knew them, if indeed Terry had reported on the sequel to the barbecue at all. She chattered sociably over a dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, largely about her father, who sued everybody. I asked the waiter whether his neighbors could scare up a bottle of red wine, and one was obtained. We had a dessert whose identity was never clearly established, but it was a kind of cobbler in which apples figured principally. Picking at mine, I said, “Let’s go up to your place.”

  Terry sipped hot coffee through pursed lips.

  “I’ve been thinking, after the other night,” she answered gravely, lowering her cup to its saucer.

  So she had a moral reclamation of her own to mak
e. Good God, I’d never thought of that! But, of course. In addition to the normal female wish not to seem to be too easily had was the hazard of her appearing to be offering amorous favors in return for editorial ones. Casting couches. On top of all this loomed my owing it to her to tell her that I worked in the art department and had nothing to do with text, hence could be of no use to her. But I couldn’t do that quite yet. What a muddle this was getting to be—and with only tonight to play it out. Resistance was the last thing I’d bargained for. If she was going to play hard to get, I reflected as I set fire to a cigarette, we were faced with a hopeless stalemate: she withholding what I would wait forever for the opportunity to decline. Yet without my reclamation the evening would be a total waste.

  I began to get nervous and fidgety. When the waiter hove into view again I signaled him over and said, “Have they got any Corbusier? I mean Courvoisier?” He trotted out the front door, and presently trotted back with two glasses of cognac. Dreamily breathing in the fumes of hers, Terry closed her eyes. “Trying to ply me with liquor?”

  There was something to that: I would have to seduce her into a state of compliance advanced enough for me to extract some moral credit from it. I turned over the check which the waiter had left. Seventeen dollars and twenty-eight cents.

  “Come on, let’s go up to your place.”

  She closed her eyes again and shook her head with a playful smile.

  “What if I said it meant a lot to me?” I asked.

  She set her glass down. “What if I said it meant a lot to me not to miss a picture that’s running uptown? A revival of Mutiny on the Bounty.”

  “I’ve seen that.”

  “Well, so have I. Wouldn’t you like to see it again?”

  “Of course.”

  The film absorbed us both. Halfway through it, Terry peeled off a glove and slipped her arm through mine. She scratched my wrist lightly with her red talons. We held hands till the end of the picture. Then we walked to her place, which was only a few blocks away.