NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN

by Harvey Swados

  Philip broke in furiously, “You’re pronouncing it wrong!”

  “That’s possible.” Holliday nodded equably. “My French is pretty poor—although I’ve never had any trouble making myself understood by the babes in Marseilles. It’s different with Phyl. She takes it as a personal affront every time I mispronounce a word.”

  It was fantastic. By admitting his inadequacy, Holliday succeeded in representing himself as a simple, straightforward fellow; while Phyllis became, to just that extent, the snob and the fake. But was that completely false? Wasn’t Phyllis being driven by anxiety and ambition to the kind of extreme attitudes that would entitle her lover to smile patronizingly, secure in the knowledge that he was by comparison more unassuming and more honest?

  Holliday however could not rest content with having planted these seeds of doubt in his listener’s mind; he had to add, “Phyl claims that she prefers French movies to Hollywood movies. I think it’s just an affectation. We have to sit through all those arty movies instead of being able to see a decent show, just so she can discuss them afterwards with her intellectual friends. Let me read on a bit—you’ll see what I mean.”

  As Holliday read on, the all too familiar words, anguish, love, the hideous power of loneliness, the memory of you lying beside me in the dark, falling dully from his lips like tarnished stones, Phil asked himself: Why did I become angry? Why should I care how he pronounces her words?

  The answer lay not so much in Holliday as it did in the girl, and in Philip’s own attitude towards her. It was no longer possible for him to maintain the pose of the detached author, to listen to these revelations with the keen hopefulness of one who would hasten to note his impressions in his journal upon the conclusion of the reading. For he knew the girl too well already, and any further display of the literary efforts and the borrowed French phrases with which she exposed herself to this coarse man reflected less on Holliday than it did on her, or even on Phil himself.

  Something very strange was happening. It wasn’t even necessary for him to regard her taut cheekbones, or her serious and sensuous mouth, in order to visualize her in any number of “honest” poses: listening to a Horowitz recording, semi-recumbent on a studio couch in her stockinged feet, her paired shoes standing neatly on the rug; leaning forward in a hard undertaker’s chair at a protest meeting for Spain, or Czechoslovakia, or Greece, or Palestine, her chin cupped firmly in her large white hand and her hair tied back behind her ears; lounging in an armchair with him, running her fingers easily through his hair and teasing him with a little private dirty joke about the similarity of their names, her legs lying fluidly athwart his lap while he plucked at the nylon hose, feeling the close grain of her neatly shaved shins under his thumb, and thinking cloudily of how it would be when he moved his hands upwards under her clothing to undefended smoother places. He shuddered …

  Meanwhile Holliday was reading: “… as though I could burst when the crescendo swells through the room, Brahms appeals to the adolescent in me, my darling, just as Thomas Wolfe would appeal to the adolescent in you.” Holliday flicked at the letter with his long index finger. “Phyl thinks there’s something of me in Wolfe. Or vice versa. She’s a great one for literary allusions—is that the expression? Here, for example, she says: “I must quote you a few lines from Jean Stafford’s lovely first novel, which I am belatedly reading. Miss Pride, a crusty old spinster, like me, is… ”

  Phil looked at him in horror. You son of a bitch, he thought, you’re reading my mail. Who do you think would write you letters like that? How dare you open my mail? Why, even Natalie had written to him like this before the game had palled on her. He could have predicted, if Holliday had asked him, that presently Phyllis’s pride and frustration would fuse into an irritated analysis of what she now began to call “our relationship.”

  “Our relationship,” Holliday read stolidly (if they only knew, Phil thought, how I despise those stale words!), “can only be understood when we’re separated. Because it’s true, isn’t it, my dear, that our mutual sexual attraction blurs the edges of all the sharp and strong reasons for our remaining separated? Any rational attempt to explain what we mean to each other has to start from the premise that…”

  As Holliday droned on, Phil felt himself shrinking down into his chair, embarrassed for Phyl by what she was saying to him, the way she was saying it, and the intermediary who was intercepting her letters to him. Ah, Phyl, Phyl, he thought, everything you’re going to tell me has been told to me before; why must you persist in spelling it out, why must you delude yourself into believing that you are saying something profound or acute, or even especially intelligent? He looked at her picture again. She still looked as bright and as pretty, in her wistful and touching way, as she had when Bradley Holliday had first placed the photo on the desk; but now Phil sensed another quality in her taut and sharp-boned face that he had not seen before when he looked into her full piquant smile: it was a special kind of ambition, the ambition to achieve sexual dominance and psychic mastery peculiar to educated American women. But your aggressive ambition, my love, he said silently to the photograph, is really nothing more than fear. You can disguise it with tough secondhand phrases about—he heard Holliday mouthing the words—personality differences and clashes of interest and areas of incompatibility, but behind this tangled shrubbery of pseudo-technical jargon there lies still the cold sweating body of fear. And that’s why, in the end, after you have bravely attempted to talk away the salty terror, the awful certainty that the final decision: to quit or not to quit? lies not in your hands, but in mine, then you will capitulate. Yes, you will capitulate. Because you know what it means, you and all the other girls like you that I have known so well, to be past twenty-five and to feel in the very marrow of your bones that there will no longer be an infinite number of Philip Stolzes, or even Bradley Hollidays, for you to meet, with a shivery foretaste of excitement, at a party, on a bus, or even in your imagination. It is this knowledge that breeds the bitter rebellion, and yet also enforces the ultimate capitulation. I know, Phyl, he told the picture, because it was my profile that graced the other side of the coin in the bedroom in Brisbane; heads or tails, we all proceed, protest though we may, to be melted down together in the same final furnace.

  Holliday was drinking from the bottle now. He wiped his lips carefully with a clean white handkerchief and said shrewdly, “You know where she gets this analytical business—it’s her job. That advertising agency pays her sixty bucks a week for what they call market research. Women are all the same, aren’t they? Instead of forgetting about the job when she gets home, she has to sit down and write up a report on the status of her love-life.” He stared cunningly at the photograph. “You don’t fool me, baby. I don’t impress as easily as you think, not even when I’m all alone in the middle of no-place, and sick, and—” Turning back to Phil, he said lightly, “She doesn’t pull any of that stuff when we’re alone together. She may indulge herself in public, it’s true, but never in the bedroom.”

  Well, wasn’t it true of himself too? There was no reason for him to feel superior, no reason to hate this man who was so like himself, when he too had more than once been forced to recognize that what caused a girl’s eyeballs to roll upwards, her toes to crisp, her fingers to scrape against his flesh, was something other than an intense satisfaction at the discovery of common intellectual interests.

  “Watch how her mood changes now,” Holliday said confidentially, like a mechanic explaining the workings of an engine. “This one is dated the twelfth of June, before she got my first batch of letters. My very very dear Brad, she says, Still no word from you, and I begin to wonder if I shall ever open another one of your exotic envelopes. I feel obliged to tell you, prompted by the special kind of honesty that we have saved for each other, darling, that it might be better for us both if I were never to receive another letter from you.”

  “What a special kind of dishonesty!” Phil murmured aloud.

  “What?”

>   “Nothing.” He ducked his head, as if to listen to the earphones, and scrawled a few words on the pad before him. “Go ahead.”

  “… another letter from you. There are two reasons for this feeling, which strengthens day by day. First is the very strong suspicion that we would both be too cowardly to ever bring things to an end face to face—perhaps if our love must end, it would be better for it to peter out in unwritten letters … And I must admit, darling, that the letters I have received from you during your previous absences have not been such to set me aflame with desire for you …”

  “I’m not that kind of a person.” Surprisingly, the reading of these words had put Holliday a little on the defensive. He took another drink and coughed quietly, like an after-dinner speaker, preliminary to going on with his explanation. “I could never sit down and say all those things. It’s a woman’s place … Besides, how did I ever know if I’d be writing the truth? If I never really knew how I felt, how could I let go with a lot of romantic …”

  Philip felt closer to his enemy than he had at any time since their first meeting. Phyl was forcing Holliday into the same kind of virtuous refusal to commit himself that Philip had always prided himself upon. This demonstration of honorable male solidarity was so unexpected that Phil did not now know quite how to react.

  He listened with dismay as Phyl gave herself away in this series of letters written in the month of June, growing more vituperative as her desperation increased. How terrible that she could not find it in herself to maintain the minimal dignity of silence! But no, here aboard the tanker that slid along the surface of the black warm sea at three o’clock in the morning, Holliday, perceptibly drunk by now, went on relentlessly reading aloud from this serialized chronicle of guilt and shame.

  “Was I a girlish fool to have expected that mere exposure to the books I liked, to the people whom I call my friends, to the music that is so important to me, would alter the ingrained attitude of vulgar mockery and lowbrow disdain that seems more important to you than any affection?… Shouldn’t I have known, Bradley, from your first stilted, insincere letters, that you would fall asleep at a chamber music recital, and that on the way home you would attempt to justify yourself by impugning the sincerity of my appreciation of the music!”

  Holliday looked up from the letter, his mouth twisted. “She doesn’t mention how we made up when we got to her house that night. Funny, isn’t it, the way they can forget the things that really count? Then she says, Shouldn’t I have known that you would seize the first opportunity to sneer at my dearest friend, the girl with whom I live, the girl whose hospitality you have accepted on so many occasions? That’s Doris Fleischman, her roommate. She’s got a beak sharper than the bow of this ship.”

  Phil cringed. The hackles of terror rose tremblingly, his fingers suddenly began to drum senselessly against the green table, and he had to blink to clear the film from his eyeballs. All of the old taunting phrases came surging into his gullet like vomit. And Holliday was saying:

  “All I said to Phyl was that Doris ought to get her nose bobbed if she really wanted a man. I wouldn’t have said it to her face, Phyl knows that, and she didn’t hear us, because she was out in the kitchen mixing drinks. Dor isn’t a bad sort—for a Jew. She even baked some brownies once and mailed them out to me. But that’s no reason to live with one, is it?”

  So once again he was accepted into the community of Gentiles. What could be more humiliating than the knowledge that he was too cowardly to become enraged, that secretly he was pleased at what should have disgusted him…. Yes, he was pleased that this weak, sick, vulgar man, this personification of everything that he despised, had casually included him in his world; by its very nature, the compliment excluded even the possibility of his protesting. He lowered his head to the table, his forehead resting on his slowly sweating forearm, thinking that perhaps he might cry; but it was too long since he had indulged himself in the feminine pleasure, even the dry sobs of self-pity would not come, and he was forced to sit quietly with his face rubbed in his own sweat while his faithful antagonist read aloud from the pathetic diary of their mutual mistress.

  “… seven of them, all at once! I was such a child, darling, I lined them up on the rug and plopped down on my stomach and fondled them, making sure that I would read them in the order in which you had written them. Such wonderful letters!

  “Have I been terribly foolish, sweetheart! If I could have only one wish granted, I would wish with all my heart that the letters I have written you could disappear before they reached your hand. Did I really say that I couldn’t possibly love anyone who didn’t care for the Emperor Concerto! You’re going to have to try very hard to forgive me for all the snobbish nonsense that I’ve been inflicting on you in these last few weeks. But pride feeds on loneliness, I guess. All I can promise you is that when you finally return to me I will know how to make you forget the cruel and stupid things I have been writing. I wouldn’t care if you never wanted to go to another concert with me again, as long as you still wanted to be with me, Bradley. We have been so happy, and we will be happy again. I know it in my bones, just as I know that all of our superficial differences are not central to the one new person that both of us merge into when we are really alone together…”

  Above, on the night-wrapped bridge, the ship’s bell tinkled seven times. It was half past three. This was the blackest hour of all. In another hour, perhaps two, dawn would come sneaking over the horizon like a sob. Holliday was still reciting the final chapter of the girl’s capitulation; the ugly desperate lies knocked against Philip’s ear with the flat finality of a radio announcer’s description of doom. If only Holliday would accept her, how quickly Phyllis would prove that she meant what she said! How quickly the pot roasts and the babies would replace the anxious insistence upon an immediate acquaintance with the critically certified! You will put them off, Phyl, he thought tiredly, first the concerts, and then the plays, and at last the books. And in a few years you will content yourself with the intellectual luxury of a Saturday matinee while Bradley is out golfing—perhaps you will be able to slip off your shoes midway through the first act, to ease your swelling feet and your shriveling soul….

  He looked up from the green linoleum into Holliday’s bleak eyes. The Bols was almost empty; in the sudden silence he could see, he could almost hear the last few ounces of gin stirring gently in the bottom of the bottle, quickened by the soft vibrations of the ship’s engines.

  Now was the time for confidences and revelations. In this final hour before dawn, Holliday doubtless expected to receive advice and sustenance that would enable him to adopt an unfaltering attitude toward Phyllis. But his hands trembled as he slid her picture carelessly in to the manila folder with all of her letters, so that her exquisite face, composite of all the best of Philip’s girls, was pressed against her own truths and her own lies. Was there a light fragrance hanging in the air above the manila folder, a mild fresh scent emanating from the lonely letters of May, the bitter letters of June, the tear-drenched letters of July, that had outlasted the briny air in which they must have been handled so much?

  Holliday, falsely casual, gathered together his liquor and his letters and rose to his feet. He wavered, belched, smiled an apology behind the back of his hand, but said nothing. Wasn’t he going to ask any questions? Could he dare to believe that everything explained itself? You rotten coward, Phil muttered, staring malevolently at Holliday’s naked bony feet that jutted from his sandals as they slapped across the room, you dirty rotten coward. Then he noticed that Holliday was still trembling involuntarily, as a tree moves when it is shaken by a slow steady soundless wind. It reminded Philip of something he had quite forgotten: Holliday’s terrible sickness. Not even the fat doctor could know what it had already done to him. One thing however was certain; he wanted to be relieved of the moral responsibility of deciding in what way it would affect his future with Phyllis. Go ahead, ask me, Phil said to himself, ask me, you syphilitic bastard. I’ll t
ell you what you ought to do.

  But Holliday did not ask. Instead he walked quietly to the door and stopped there for a moment with one foot on the coaming, looking more like a gaunt drunken spider than ever, his lank shadow falling jaggedly across the high metal filing cabinet and the ten-gallon jug of distilled water. He smiled insolently and said, “I’d better hit the sack right away. I like to get up fairly early so that I can skip rope before the sun gets too high.”

  He was gone before Philip could open his mouth to reply. His conduct was as unexpected as it was unfathomable. Did he really believe that Philip was unaware of his illness, or did he mean to trade on Philip’s knowledge of it, as a blind singer on a subway benefits from the guilty superiority of his seated listeners, so that he could wrench the final coins of pity from his own listener?

  Philip jerked the typewriter towards him and typed out the entries in his log from the sweat-soaked jottings he had made while listening to the letters. When he had finished bringing himself up to the minute in this impersonal diary that no one would ever read aloud, he leaned back weakly, exhausted by the force of his hatred of Holliday and the realization of what it meant.

  As he sat numbly watching the complex clock, with its slowly swinging silver second hand, and its hypnotic double circle of numbers that indicated both Greenwich Mean Time and Ship’s Time (neither of which had any meaning for him now), Phil could smell the stale fumes of his visitor’s gin. The room was too quiet. The subdued static that had sputtered softly throughout the reading of the letters was dying away to a whisper. One of his batteries had gone dead; he noted the fact in the log and signed his name as self-witness to his exit from this room. Then he dismounted the battery and connected a fresh one.