Then he saw someone across the room whom he admired. She was Mabel Goodley, the painter and set-designer. Her blond hair was short and shining and her glasses glittered in the light. Mabel had always loved The Night and had given a party for him when he got his Guggenheim. More important, she had felt his second book was better than the first one, in spite of the stupidity of the critics. He started toward Mabel but was stopped by John Howards, an editor he used to see sometimes at parties.
"Hi there," Howards said, "what are you writing these days, or is it a fair question?"
This was a remark Ken loathed. There were a number of answers—sometimes he said he was finishing a long novel, other times he said he was deliberately lying fallow. There was no good answer, no matter what he said. His scrotum tightened and he tried desperately to look unconcerned.
"I well remember the stir The Doorless Room made in the literary world of those days—a fine book."
Howards was tall and he wore a brown tweed suit. Ken looked up at him aghast, steeling himself against the sudden attack. But the brown eyes were strangely innocent and Ken could not recognize the guile. A woman with tight pearls around her throat said after a painful moment, "But dear, Mr. Harris didn't write The Doorless Room."
"Oh," Howards said helplessly.
Ken looked at the woman's pearls and wanted to choke her. "It couldn't matter less."
The editor persisted, trying to make amends. "But your name is Ken Harris. And you're married to the Marian Campbell who is fiction editor at—"
The woman said quickly: "Ken Harris wrote The Night of Darkness —a fine book."
Harris noticed that the woman's throat was lovely with the pearls and the black dress. His face lightened until she said: "It was about ten or fifteen years ago, wasn't it?"
"I remember," the editor said. "A fine book. How could I have confused it? How long will it be before we can look forward to a second book?"
"I wrote a second book," Ken said. "It sank without a ripple. It failed." He added defensively, "The critics were more obtuse even than usual. And I'm not the best-seller type."
"Too bad," said the editor. "It's a casualty of the trade sometimes."
"The book was better than The Night. Some critics thought it was obscure. They said the same thing of Joyce." He added, with the writer's loyalty to his last creation, "It's a much better book than the first, and I feel I'm still just starting to do my real work."
"That's the spirit," the editor said. "The main thing is to keep plugging away. What are you writing now—if that's a fair question?"
The violence swelled suddenly. "It's none of your business." Ken had not spoken very loudly but the words carried and there was a sudden area of silence in the cocktail room. "None of your Goddam business."
In the quiet room there came the voice of old Mrs. Beckstein, who was deaf and sitting in a corner chair. "Why are you buying so many quilts?"
The spinster daughter, who was with her mother always, guarding her like royalty or some sacred animal, translating between the mother and the world, said firmly, "Mr. Brown was saying..."
The babble of the party resumed and Ken went to the drink table, took another Martini and dipped a piece of cauliflower in some sauce. He ate and drank with his back to the noisy room. Then he took a third Martini and threaded his way to Mabel Goodley. He sat on an ottoman beside her, careful of his drink and somewhat formal. "It's been such a tiring day," he said.
"What have you been doing?"
"Sitting on my can."
"A writer I used to know once got sacroiliac trouble from sitting so long. Could that be coming on you?"
"No," he said. "You are the only honest person in this room."
He had tried so many different ways when the blank pages started. He had tried to write in bed, and for a time he had changed to long-hand. He had thought of Proust in his cork-lined room and for a month he had used ear-stoppers—but work went no better and the rubber started some fungus ailment. They had moved to Brooklyn Heights, but that did not help. When he learned that Thomas Wolfe had written standing up with his manuscript on the icebox he had even tried that too. But he only kept opening the icebox and eating.... He had tried writing drunk—when the ideas and images were marvelous at the time but changed so unhappily when read afterward. He had written early in the morning and dead sober and miserable. He had thought of Thoreau and Walden. He had dreamed of manual labor and an apple farm. If he could just go for long walks on the moors then the light of creation would come again—but where are the moors of New York?
He consoled himself with the writers who had felt they failed and whose fame was established after death. When he was twenty he daydreamed that he would die at thirty and his name would be blazoned after his death. When he was twenty-five and had finished The Night of Darkness he daydreamed that he would die famous, a writer's writer, at thirty-five with a body of work accomplished and the Nobel Prize awarded on his deathbed. But now that he was nearly forty with two books—one a success, the other a defended failure—he did not daydream about his death.
"I wonder why I keep on writing," he said. "It's a frustrating life."
He had vaguely expected that Mabel, his friend, might say something about his being a born writer, might even remind him of his duty to his talent, that she might even mention "genius," that magic word which turns hardship and outward failure to somber glory. But Mabel's answer dismayed him. "I guess writing is like the theatre. Once you write or act it gets in your blood."
He despised actors—vain, posey, always unemployed. "I don't think of acting as a creative art, it's just interpretive. Whereas the writer must hew the phantom rock—"
He saw his wife enter from the vestibule. Marian was tall and slim with straight, short black hair, and she was wearing a plain black dress, an office-looking dress without ornament. They had married thirteen years ago, the year The Night had come out, and for a long time he had trembled with love. There were times he awaited her with the soaring wonder of the lover and the sweet trembling when at last he saw her. Those were the times when they made love almost every night and often in the early morning. That first year she had even occasionally come home from the office at her lunch hour and they had loved each other naked in the city daylight. At last desire had steadied and love no longer made his body tremble. He was working on a second book and the going was rough. Then he got a Guggenheim and they had gone to Mexico, as the war was on in Europe. His book was abandoned and, although the flush of success was still on him, he was unsatisfied. He wanted to write, to write, to write—but month after month passed and he wrote nothing. Marian said he was drinking too much and marking time and he threw a glass of rum in her face. Then he knelt on the floor and cried. He was for the first time in a foreign country and the time was automatically valuable because it was a foreign country. He would write of the blue of the noon sky, the Mexican shadows, the water-fresh mountain air. But day followed day—always of value because it was a foreign country—and he wrote nothing. He did not even learn Spanish, and it annoyed him when Marian talked to the cook and other Mexicans. (It was easier for a woman to pick up a foreign language and besides she knew French.) And the very cheapness of Mexico made life expensive; he spent money like trick money or stage money and the Guggenheim check was always spent in advance. But he was in a foreign country and sooner or later the Mexican days would be of value to him as a writer. Then a strange thing happened after eight months: with practically no warning Marian took a plane to New York. He had to interrupt his Guggenheim year to follow her. And then she would not live with him—or let him live in her apartment. She said it was like living with twenty Roman emperors rolled into one and she was through. Marian got a job as an assistant fiction editor on a fashion magazine and he lived in a cold-water flat—their marriage had failed and they were separated, although he still tried to follow her around. The Guggenheim people would not renew his fellowship and he soon spent the advance on his new book.
&nb
sp; About this time there was a morning he never forgot, although nothing, absolutely nothing, had happened. It was a sunny autumn day with the sky fair and green above the skyscrapers. He had gone to a cafeteria for breakfast and sat in the bright window. People passed quickly on the street, all of them going somewhere. Inside the cafeteria there was a breakfast bustle, the clatter of trays and the noise of many voices. People came in and ate and went away, and everyone seemed assured and certain of destination. They seemed to take for granted a destination that was not merely the routine of jobs and appointments. Although most of the people were alone they seemed somehow a part of each other, a part of the clear autumn city. While he alone seemed separate, an isolate cipher in the pattern of the destined city. His marmalade was glazed by sunlight and he spread it on a piece of toast but did not eat. The coffee had a purplish sheen and there was a faint mark of old lipstick on the rim of the cup. It was an hour of desolation, although nothing at all happened.
Now at the cocktail party, years later, the noise, the assurance and the sense of his own separateness recalled the cafeteria breakfast and this hour was still more desolate because of the sliding passage of time.
"There's Marian," Mabel said. "She looks tired, thinner."
"If the damned Guggenheim had renewed my fellowship I was going to take Marian to Europe for a year," he said. "The damned Guggenheim—they don't give grants to creative writers any more. Just physicists—people like that who are preparing for another war."
The war had come as a relief to Ken. He was glad to abandon the book that was going badly, relieved to turn from his "phantom rock" to the general experience of those days—for surely the war was the great experience of his generation. He was graduated from Officers' Training School and when Marian saw him in his uniform she cried and loved him and there was no further talk of divorce. On his last leave they made love often as they used to do in the first months of marriage. It rained every day in England and once he was invited by a lord to his castle. He crossed on D-Day and his battalion went all the way to Schmitz. In a cellar in a ruined town he saw a cat sniffing the face of a corpse. He was afraid, but it was not the blank terror of the cafeteria or the anxiety of a white page on the typewriter. Something was always happening—he found three Westphalian hams in the chimney of a peasant's house and he broke his arm in an automobile accident. The war was the great experience of his generation, and to a writer every day was automatically of value because it was the war. But when it was over what was there to write about—the calm cat and the corpse, the lord in England, the broken arm?
***
In the Village apartment he returned to the book he had left so long. For a time, that year after the war, there was the sense of a writer's gladness when he has written. A time when the voice from childhood, a song on the corner, all fitted. In the strange euphoria of his lonely work the world was synthesized. He was writing of his youth in the windy, gritty Texas city that was his home town. He wrote of the rebellion of youth and the longing for the brilliant cities, the homesickness for a place he'd never seen. While he was writing One Summer Evening he was living in an apartment in New York but his inner life was in Texas and the distance was more than space: it was the sad distance between middle age and youth. So when he was writing his book he was split between two realities—his New York daily life and the remembered cadence of his Texas youth. When the book was published and the reviews were careless or unkind, he took it well, he thought, until the days of desolation stretched one into the other and the terror started. He did odd things at this time. Once he locked himself in the bathroom and stood holding a bottle of Lysol in his hand, just standing there holding the Lysol, trembling and terrified. He stood there for half an hour until with a great effort he slowly poured the Lysol in the lavatory. Then he lay on the bed and wept until, toward the end of the afternoon, he went to sleep. Another time he sat in the open window and let a dozen blank pages of paper float down the six stories to the street below. The wind blew the papers as he dropped them one by one, and he felt a strange elation as he watched them float away. It was less the meaninglessness of these actions than the extreme tension accompanying them that made Ken realize he was sick.
Marian suggested he go to a psychiatrist and he said psychiatry had become an avant-garde method of playing with yourself. Then he laughed, but Marian did not laugh and his solitary laughter finished in a chill of fear. In the end Marian went to the psychiatrist and Ken was jealous of them both—of the doctor because he was the arbiter of the unhappy marriage and of her because she was calmer and he was more unhinged. That year he wrote some television scripts, made a couple of thousand dollars and bought Marian a leopard coat.
"Are you doing any more television programs?" Mabel Goodley asked.
"Naw," he said, "I'm trying very hard to get into my next book. You're the only honest person I know. I can talk with you..."
Freed by alcohol and secure in friendship (for after all Mabel was one of his favorite people), he began to talk of the book he had tried so long to do: "The dominant theme is the theme of self-betrayal and the central character is a small-town lawyer named Winkle. The setting is laid in Texas—my home town—and most of the scenes take place in the grimy office in the town's courthouse. In the opening of the book Winkle is faced with this situation..." Ken unfurled his story passionately, telling of the various characters and the motivations involved. When Marian came up he was still talking and he gestured to her not to interrupt him as he talked on, looking straight into Mabel's spectacled blue eyes. Then suddenly he had the uncanny sensation of a déjà vu. He felt he had told Mabel his book before—in the same place and in the same circumstance. Even the way the curtain moved was the same. Only Mabel's blue eyes brightened with tears behind the glasses, and he was joyful that she was so much moved. "So Winkle then was impelled to divorce—" his voice faltered. "I have the strange feeling I have told you this before..."
Mabel waited for a moment and he was silent. "You have, Ken," she said finally. "About six or seven years ago, and at a party very much like this one."
He could not stand the pity in her eyes or the shame that pulsed in his own body. He staggered up and stumbled over his drink.
After the roar in the cocktail room the little terrace was absolutely silent. Except for the wind, which increased the sense of desertion and solitude. To dull his shame Ken said aloud something inconsequential: "Why, what on earth—" and he smiled with weak anguish. But his shame still smoldered and he put his cold hand to his hot, throbbing forehead. It was no longer snowing, but the wind lifted flurries of snow on the white terrace. The length of the terrace was about six footsteps and Ken walked very slowly, watching with growing attention his blunted footsteps in his narrow shoes. Why did he watch those footsteps with such tension? And why was he standing there, alone on the winter terrace where the light from the party room laid a sickly yellow rectangle on the snow? And the footsteps? At the end of the terrace there was a little fence about waist-high. When he leaned against the fence he knew it was very loose and he felt he had known that it would be loose and remained leaning against it. The penthouse was on the fifteenth floor and the lights from the city glowed before him. He was thinking that if he gave the rickety fence one push he would fall, but he remained calm against the sagging fence, his mind somehow sheltered, content.
He felt inexcusably disturbed when a voice called from the terrace. It was Marian and she cried softly: "Aah! Aah!" Then after a moment she added: "Ken, come here. What are you doing out there?" Ken stood up. Then with his balance righted he gave the fence a slight push. It did not break. "This fence is rotten—snow probably. I wonder how many people have ever committed suicide here."
"How many?"
"Sure. It's such an easy thing."
"Come back."
Very carefully he walked on the backward footprints he had made before. "It must be an inch of snow." He stooped down and felt the snow with his middle finger. "No, two inches."
>
"I'm cold." Marian put her hand on his coat, opened the door and steered him into the party. The room was quieter now and people were going home. In the bright light, after the dark outside, Ken saw that Marian looked tired. Her black eyes were reproachful, harried, and Ken could not bear to look into them.
"Hon, do your sinuses bother you?"
Lightly her forefinger stroked her forehead and the bridge of her nose. "It worries me so when you get in this condition."
"Condition! Me?"
"Let's put on our things and go."
But he could not stand the look in Marian's eyes and he hated her for inferring he was drunk. "I'm going to Jim Johnson's party later."
After the search for overcoats and the ragged good-bys a little group went down in the elevator and stood on the sidewalk, whistling for cabs. They discussed addresses, and Marian, the editor and Ken shared the first taxi going downtown. Ken's shame was lulled a little, and in the taxi he began to talk about Mabel.
"It's so sad about Mabel," he said.
"What do you mean?" Marian asked.
"Everything. She's obviously going apart at the seams. Disintegrating, poor thing."
Marian, who did not like the conversation, said to Howards: "Shall we go through the park? It's nice when it snows, and quicker."
"I'll go on to Fifth and Fourteenth Street," Howards said. He said to the driver: "Go through the park, please."
"The trouble with Mabel is she is a has-been. Ten years ago she used to be an honest painter and set-designer. Maybe it's a failure of imagination or drinking too much. She's lost her honesty and does the same thing over and over—repeats over and over."
Collected Stories Page 21
