I paused and saw that her back was listening. I released the catch on the dictaphone and showed off some more:
“Memo to Mr. Blair. Catch no fetal heartbeat in attached fencing-school idea, however offer this notion which I’m afraid is a rather complete switch. Two fencers in dueling school having a fist fight. Their rapiers lying on the floor. One observer to another: ‘It all started when one of them made a crack about the other’s form.’”
I rose, handed the dictaphone record through the doorway to my secretary and came back in, closing the door behind me.
“Well, then.”
We walked on a light crust of formality and tact, like a snow crust you try not to step through. She wore a brown suit and had a silk ribbon in her yellow fleece; she struck at my vanished youth and my disreputable sorrows. She was holding a brown Manila envelope, disquietingly fat. Seeing me appraise it she suddenly took a tighter grip on it and moved to the door. “This is ridiculous.”
I reached over to prise the envelope from her grasp. She jerked it behind her back, and in my struggle to snatch it she banged against the closed door with a thud that rattled the latch. We scuffled against the door. I heard my secretary’s typewriter stop in the outer office, and the sound of a chair scraped back as by someone rising in alarm.
“No,” Terry said. “Don’t.”
I pinned her against the door. Holding one of her arms, I reached behind her with my free hand for the envelope. My embrace crushed a cloud of scent from her clothes. At last I wrested the envelope out of her clutch and dropped it on my desk.
“I’ll look forward to reading it,” I panted, smoothing back my hair.
She tugged her coat and skirt to rights. “Well . . . You’ll call me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, good-by then. And thanks a lot. You’re very sweet.”
She had not reached the elevators when I had the envelope open and the manuscript in my lap. It began:
“Father was always suing everybody. At the drop of a . . .” I shuffled through the pages reading sentences at random. “Father would say, The mean temperature for July has been ninety-one point five, and that’s pretty mean. . . .’ For years Father put no stock in ‘this allergy business,’ but later came to believe in it to the extent of being convinced that he was allergic to his own hair. . . . Dressed in his fur coat and coonskin cap, Father was a sight to behold. . . .”
I put the manuscript down and walked to the window. I looked down into the gulch of Forty-seventh Street, twiddling the Venetian-blind cord. Father was that star codger and ubiquitous nuisance who had still not been written out of the national system. Father McBain was a trifle overpicturesque for The Townsman, that much was sure—and his daughter not yet out of the building.
I phoned Father’s daughter shortly after noon three days later, by which time I’d read the manuscript through and so had the fiction editor Hackett, who’d sent it back to me with the note “Too reminiscent.”
“Look, this is good stuff, but not just up our alley. And they’re stocked up on reminiscence at the moment.” I made a slip of the tongue and said “reminuisance” first, or almost did.
Long silence. “I see.”
“I enjoyed reading it myself. A lot.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Come, come now. There are lots of places you can sell this.”
“I know. I’ve tried them all.”
“Well . . .” I hesitated. It wouldn’t do to just mail the stuff back to her, or leave it at the receptionist’s for her to pick up. I couldn’t seem to get my foot out of this thing. “Can you have a drink?”
“Can I have one! I need one.”
We met in the Biltmore lounge, and this time she had on a salt-and-pepper tweed suit and a “courageous” little hat of butterscotch color with a pompon on it.
“It’s junk,” she said instead of hello, as I set the envelope on the table where she’d been awaiting me. “Junk, junk, junk!” she repeated accusingly, with such ferocity I thought she was going to reach across the table and scratch me.
“Stop this nonsense,” I said. I signaled a waiter and ordered a Manhattan. She was already drinking a Martini. “You act as if your whole life was at stake.”
“Well, it is. I’m twenty-five, time to find out if you’ve got anything or should go back to Squeedunk. What’s the matter, don’t you like my hat?”
“Yes. I was just admiring the way you wear it—so nice and casually.” I made another lapsus linguae and said “casualty.” She called me on it and also brought up the one I’d made on the phone, which had not escaped her.
“What have you been doing, chewing slippery elm?” she said. “Well anyhow, if the stuff was only good for some magazine. I was always afraid to try The Townsman because that was where I wanted to be. Now I know.” She sighed and broke her hands apart. “I suppose I might as well quit.”
I wished she would quit—quit talking like this. And I wished that damned woman at the next table would stop too—she was delivering one of those “ices” monologues to a female friend. “So ices if you think you deserve a better job, go in and tell him ices. Ices you’ve been in the bathroom-fixture game long enough to have that right, and if you don’t blow your own horn nobody will. Right ices? Ices nobody ever got anywhere hemming and hawing—take the bull by the horns ices to him.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Ices to my own companion, after ten solid minutes of this. “What—what are you doing for dinner tonight?”
She gathered up her bag and gloves and the Manila envelope. “I’ll fix dinner for us. We’ll stop by and get some veal for scallopine. Don’t try to talk me out of it. I have to do something with my hands when I’m in a stew.”
Outside in the street, she threw the manuscript into a city trash basket, taking for granted of course that I would fish it out, which I did; but I felt very put-upon having to dive in head first, as I did, because the basket had been recently emptied and the manuscript lay at the bottom. I almost fell in. I carried the manuscript the rest of the way to her apartment, where I gave it to her. She threw it into a wastebasket. I ignored these proceedings.
She clattered to work in the tiny kitchen, conjuring utensils out of an area no larger than a phone booth. I tied an apron on myself, but then sat reading a newspaper because every time I offered to help I was jostled out of the way. At last, after much beating of flour into the veal with the rim of a saucer, she had it simmering in sherry in the skillet.
She turned and took me in. “Nickel,” she said.
“I’m reading the newspaper.”
“Nickel,” she demanded.
“I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school,” I said, with an air of aphorism that was undone by a wet paper napkin sticking to the bottom of my cocktail glass as I raised it to my lips.
“What would you tell your wife if she came in here now?”
“That we were cutting capers in the kitchen,” I said with a rather engaging smile, and slipped another inch behind my newspaper.
“We ought to have some wine with this. Besides this sherry.” She turned and stooped, and from a lower drawer dug a bottle of claret which she said someone had given her the previous Christmas. (I wondered was it the moral fatso, or the chap with two pages missing.)
“Have you ever had mulled claret?”
“Well, hell.” I crossed my legs under my apron.
“I’d like some now. That’s just what I feel like.” She got out spices and began to mix them briskly into the claret. “You know what mulled claret is, don’t you?”
“I know what mulled claret is. It’s a cure for alcoholism.” I wanted to read my paper. “You need a poker to heat it with anyway. We don’t have one.”
“The janitor has. Downstairs in the basement, a poker left over from the coal furnace.”
“But that’s ten feet long!” I protested.
“What of it? If you want mulled claret, do it right. Go on do
wn and get it. If the janitor isn’t there it won’t make any difference. He won’t mind. Just go through that door you’ve seen in the front hall and down the stairs. Go on.”
“Oh, all right,” I said, with that reluctance familiar to husbands when they are routed out of their easy chairs on some domestic chore. “I’ll get it.”
The janitor wasn’t around, but I found the poker. Carrying it up, I met a woman on her way down. I stood back in a corner of the landing to let her by, holding the poker up like a spear. “Mull some claret,” I explained with a giggle, so she wouldn’t think I was up to some kind of violence.
The poker wasn’t ten feet long, exactly. But I stood clear in the living room in order to heat the tip over a kitchen burner; and to plunge the hot end into the claret, which was on a table in the living room, I stood in the bedroom doorway. But it made a fine hiss, and I suppose the cups of claret tasted better for the observed ritual.
“There’s an autumn tang in the air,” Terry said, in defense of our doing this.
There was no autumn tang in that apartment. I went around in shirt-sleeves opening windows. Superimposed on the spirits in the scallopine, the mulled claret made me begin to feel a little mulled myself. Bustling about setting the table, we’d accidentally touched hands and felt a spark fly between us from the electricity scuffed up by our feet in the carpet. Terry found this amusing and wanted to do it with our lips. I did not feel these kisses “counted”; indeed, since they represented bodily contacts which I made no effort to develop, I saw them as actually piling up additional credit in the moral balance I had on deposit.
Suddenly she said, “All junk,” and sat down and dropped her head on the table, after clearing a space in which to do so.
“Now, now,” I said. “It isn’t that bad.”
“Isn’t it? I told you my father agreed to pay my rent for one year. The year’s up, without me coming through. And now I’ve got to ‘give up that nonsense.’ But I don’t want to do anything else. You’re right—we’re better off dead.”
“Don’t talk that way,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder.
She rose and was around, and I felt the clutch of a hand that advertised her warmth and demon. “Put me to bed.”
This affair, then, had no status and cohesion of its own but was purely a framework for its emotional concomitants, in which alone it had any shape and perseverance, like those old barns which, themselves in a state of collapse, are supported by the vines to which they have given rise.
I staggered into the bedroom with her and laid her on the bed. “Thanks for the dinner,” I said. “It was swell.” Starting for the door, I was arrested by the thud of a thrown shoe, which clattered to the floor after making a lesion in the wallpaper.
She removed and threw the mate, with a vigor which gave new force to the professed need to be doing something with her hands when upset. I hesitated in the doorway. “Close it,” she said.
I stood there as she peeled off her stockings and then the rest of her clothes. I still hesitated—I couldn’t offend the girl. She stood on a rug in the middle of the room, and through no fault of my own I saw the teacup-sized breasts and the lyre-shaped loins, the whole symmetrical edifice of youth in the light which dimmed when she came over and swung the door closed almost.
“Why are you an atheist?” she said.
Her hair hung down like the velvet in old collection bags.
“God only knows.”
I couldn’t get the knot out of my tie—my hands were shaking so. I slipped the noose over my head. My teeth chattered like castanets. Somehow I got my clothing off. I felt a cold breath from Betelgeuse, and somewhere a chunk crumbled from the Polar Cap whose thawing would one day flood the continents and blot us all from view.
“Hurry,” she said from the bed.
My knees knocking together, I picked my way across the cold floor, stepping carefully over Myerstown, Pennsylvania, where my mother-in-law lived, to the bed. I lay in it shivering from head to foot.
“Sorry,” I said later. I wished to Christ I was at Moot Point, where all this was so much easier.
“It happens to everybody.” She lay back smoking a cigarette, the sheet drawn to her chin. I watched the coal of her cigarette, like a pulsing jewel when she drew on it. She put it out and said, “Guilty wilty?”
She threw back the covers and went into the living room from which she returned with a bottle of whisky and a couple of glasses. She poured and handed me a drink. I took it like a man receiving medicine, and drank it off. A spark shot between our hands again, reviving her interest in that lark.
“You’re a regular dynamo on this rug,” she said. “Come on, get up and try it. Relax, for God’s sake.”
I climbed out of bed and stood on a shag rug with her, compliantly wiping my feet on its nap, to work up electricity.
“Say, I’ve got an idea,” I said, as I did. Some association, some accidental connection in my mind, had given it to me.
“What?”
“About where to send your articles,” I said, steadily generating current. “Or the first one anyway. The Reader’s Digest. Your Most Unforgettable Character. Lots of people have done their fathers or some other relative.”
She stood openmouthed with pleasure. “I never thought of that. But, of course—it’s a natural. Why, what a wonderful idea. Why didn’t I think of that myself?”
“Because you kept thinking of him as a book. Forget that. He’s a one-shot.”
As she digested the proposal, I slipped over to where my clothes were and started to pick my way into a cold shirt.
“No, no,” she said, seeing me. “Let’s drink to the idea.”
Three or four drinks in rapid succession produced a bonfire in the pit of my stomach; which warmth soon spread up my limbs and into my head, suffusing me with a delicious drowsiness; on the crest of which I floated off with the last reflection that, when I awoke in the morning, it would be to the assurance of having slept with another woman only in the literal sense of the word.
I awoke to find myself on the living-room sofa. How had I gotten there? No matter. Some filament of conscience, some tropism in the dark, had led me to it—to finish the night in a tableau of rectitude. Twisting about under a slipping quilt, I felt a crick in my neck, cramps in my legs, all morally usable miseries. Was that a dream of having been at Moot Point that I vaguely remembered? A clock on a desk said two-thirty. How could it be this light so early? And with all the shades drawn. I got to my feet and stole a look into the bedroom. It was empty; so was the apartment except for myself. My head ached and my tongue was parched.
I went into the bathroom and there met a poltergeist in the mirror. I took a closer look at him. My hair was mashed every which way, like grass after a storm. My eyes looked like swatted moths. I drank cold water and doused my face with it. I felt a relief that was a kind of crystal exhilaration: I had come off all right. In fact I was glad it had all happened—it put me in the light of having better instincts than I’d supposed. I was like the doors on that Italian church which had all along been assumed to have been bronze, but were discovered on cleaning to be gold.
When I went back into the living room, I took a look into the wastebasket in which Terry had thrown the manuscript. It was empty.
Fifteen
I HAD just been to the latest 3-D movie and was resting my eyes on some bas-relief at my favorite museum, and chatting with its curator, a man in a white coat who was polishing the establishment’s collection of crystal. His name was Frank.
“Experience is the shortest distance between anticipation and regret,” I said.
He nodded noncommittally, and looked out at the moist, suddenly autumn-like street. “It’s been an all-day drivel,” he said. He set a furbished glass on the back bar. I dug a handful of change out of my pocket and set it on the bar.
“The coins of desire are counterfeit; those of love have numismatic value. Neither can be spent.” I shoved a fraction of my wealth across t
he wood and said, “Give me another Rhine wine and spritzer.”
“I like these all-day drivels,” he said, contentedly scratching his briskets. “Pleasant.” He came over for my glass and refilled it. “I’m glad to see you switching to white wine and soda. I don’t make as much out of it, but it’s a damn sight better for you.” Pouring in the soda, he asked: “What made you so philosophical? What started it?”
“Oh, many things, Frank,” I answered, “but mainly, I think, flunking philosophy. It was my first intellectual disappointment, and gave me that sense of proportion about myself that one so sorely needs. Had I lightly mastered those great German noodle floggers, I might have gone on indefinitely without acquiring that philosophical viewpoint that is so indispensable.”
“It comes in handy around here all right.” He set the drink in front of me. “You sure get all kinds in this place.” He rang up the money, glancing at me in the mirror. I was wearing a reversible raglan which was new but showing the strains of repeated adaptations to the fickle weather prevailing previous to today’s (which had been largely as Frank had said). For the better part of a week, we had been through such abruptly alternating fits of sun and shower that, weary of reversing the raglan, I had put it on tweed-side-out and left it that way. “How come you got a topcoat that’s part raincoat and then when it rains you wear the topcoat part on top?”
“How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?”
“And then no hat to boot.”
“I like the gentle rains myself.” I drank. “They speak to me of peace. Of the peace at last when these upholstered bones—” I broke off and said, “All right. I know. Let there be no moaning at the bar.”
The Tunnel of Love Page 15
