She was asked to supper one evening by her father’s mistress, Adele, who had telephoned her at work, and, on entering the apartment, saw a young sailor stand up from the couch. The lamps, as usual, were dim, and in a moment’s time she took a dislike to the laxness of his body, to the lazing pleasure the body took in its attractiveness. When he shifted weight, at her approach, from one foot to the other, an ungainliness in his legs, an overgrownness of his body, revealed him as Paul. Adele, sitting on the floor, her legs crossed, hugging an ankle with one hand and holding a wine glass with the other, jokingly introduced them as if they had never met, and they laughed with embarrassment, their laughter and voices sounding to Vivian like that of a couple who have always wanted to meet. Although, after he had left her, she had not known anyone who had meant as much to her, there was now no desire for him, only a superficial excitement. Adele served a feast despite the rationing, telling them it was done with mirrors and spices, and presided with a wide-gesturing charm that declared this young man her favorite brother and that denied she had ever ranted against him for his abandonment of his wife and child. He dawdled his fingers over the linen cloth, the arm of his chair, the silverware, as if his sense of touch had become more acute now that he was in the perceptive presence of two women who called for sensitivity; it was flattery done with gestures. He told them of his tribulations in New York; he had got a small part in a musical and found his legs rather heavy to dance around on; and with the closing of that show he had spent a year in Nassau as a companion for a very old and very wealthy man, but he had tired, he said, of reading his employer Alice in Wonderland every night, and then he laughed, apparently realizing Vivian was no longer naïve, that she might even have become more worldly than he and that his leaving her had contributed to her awakening.
David always came to her bed in the morning, while she reclined against the pillows and read the newspaper, and, with his legs under the covers, he ate his toast and sipped coffee and cream from her saucer and played with odd bits of broken jewelry and with a few small toys he carried in with him. Scrutinizing his features, the morning after her supper with Paul and Adele, she was pleased to find only a minimal resemblance to his father. She had known all along that the resemblance was only an undertone, but felt a desire to reassure herself about it. At four, his beauty combined the best features of her family. His hair, although resembling his father’s in its thickness and its arcs of curls like the hair of Renaissance angels, was a darker brown, with a cast of amber red, like her mother’s hair, a color she had always envied, for her own was the common light brown of her father’s family and had always to be bleached. David’s eyes were blue, but darker than his father’s, and there was a broadness across his eyes that Paul lacked, and a narrowing toward the chin. Under her scrutiny, he appeared to be more perfect than ever and more her own than ever, wholly her own and not the father’s, who had inquired about him with his glance slipping away as if to inquire was to confess a crime. But, though he seemed more than ever her own, the elusiveness of his father, which had contrived to make the son her own, became the son’s possession also. Although she nurtured him now and sustained him, his life was to be his own, even as his father and his stepfather appeared to belong to nobody but themselves, their lives their own though they were herded into regiments and battalions, into staffs and corps, onto transports, onto tremendous gray ships, and into battles.
When George was killed at St. Vith, she forgot his faults and remembered only his virtues. It seemed to her that his jealousy had indicated not a lack of understanding of her but a greater understanding than her own. He had prized her—that was the reason for his jealousy—and, prizing her, he must have known her essential self, the innocent self, and had struggled with her other self, the heedless, all-desirous self, as if it were his deadly enemy as well as hers. Nobody else would ever love her as much and understand her as well and join with her against the enemy within herself.
5
A few months after the news reached her of her husband’s death, she went up, one evening, to the room of an air corps captain who had bought a lacy slip for his wife back in Boston. In the shop he had chatted with her about the two cities, comparing this point and that, and then had invited her to dinner. In a quick breath, nervously, he told her he had some Scotch in his room and asked her to come up before dinner so they could work up an appetite. Up in his room, after the Scotch had eased his nervousness, he was able to look at her for a long moment with his eyes unclouded by his fear of her personal life.
“You got a husband?” he asked her, like a doctor who has been told that psychologizing with the patient helps in the cure. He sat on the foot of the bed and she in the chair. “Ah, somewhere?” he asked.
She saw him glancing at her legs and wished that silk stockings were still available—the rayon kind weren’t so flattering. “He’s dead,” she said, her mouth wanting the captain’s mouth. She saw that his little blue eyes were surprised. “At St. Vith. He was a doctor, he was a captain with the second division. They gave him a silver star, he has a silver star,” she said, tears slipping down her face.
“Ah, that’s too bad,” he said, alarmed, suddenly turning his head to see what was behind him. “You want to come over here and lie down?”
She lay on her back, weeping with her face exposed as if had just received the news from this man. He lay down beside her, jolting the bed in an awkward attempt to lie down tenderly, and put his arm across her, and she wanted to relate every detail of her life to him because he had laid his arm across her comfortingly like a man who was to love her and protect her for the rest of her life. She turned her head at his prompting to enable him to wipe her face with the palm of his hand and his fingertips, and saw, above his fingers, the many intimate details of his face that was as close as her husband’s had been, as the faces of the other men who had meant something to her, whom she had loved or had thought she loved; and she desired from that face, close beside hers, what all faces that lie close are called upon give. She had imagined that, since his face was temporal, she would ask for nothing, only the time together, even the eventual indifference, only the transience itself, the excitement of the transient union; but now she called for the lastingness that ought to come from the one close on the bed. She gazed above his fingers into his eyes that avoided hers; at his sparse lashes that were here and there in clusters; at the coarse skin tinged with pink, a weatherworn skin with a few small scars so faint she knew they were childhood scars; at the flat, small ears and the very short, scrubby hair and the hairline where there were some few gray hairs, hardly different in color from the rest; at the thin lips concealing thought; and, having examined the minute particulars of his face, she kissed the palm of his hand as it crossed her mouth.
With his mouth on hers, he moved his hand over her body heavily as if receiving long, difficult messages through his palm. “Well, what pretty things,” he said about her garments in the way. “What pretty little things,” and helped her remove them with care while she kissed his hands and his body. “Well, what pretty things. You know you had such pretty things?” holding up her opalescent slip to follow its satin glow moving up and down the folds. “Ah, the pretty things to cover up the pretty things. One pretty thing deserves another, right? Never saw such pretty things in all my life. Look at that.” Even if he had a wife in Boston, he might not be getting along with her, or before the war was over his wife might leave him, or the woman for whom he had bought the slip was not his wife. A man who could undress her with consoling words must be the man who would return to her.
But when he sat up on the side of the bed, rubbing his thighs, the bed moving up and down as he nervously rocked, the intent of the evening accomplished before the evening began and his gaze muddled, she knew that he was to be for that time only. She drew the blankets to her chin and lay grieving about his temporality as if it were a surprise, a revelation, and not a conviction that had accompanied her in the rising elevator. A sudden loweri
ng of her spirits, an onslaught of reality, the elusiveness of the men she had loved, Paul elusive by running away and George by dying, all brought on a need for grieving under blankets. She watched this one as he walked around the room, pouring Scotch—his bare, very muscular legs, his short body and broad back, his bristle haircut and small, flat face, his eyes narrowing to appear wise when he came to the denouement of the story with which he was bombastically entertaining her.
Afraid of other temporal lovers, she fell in love with him to transform him into the lasting lover as he hopped around the room, pulling on his trousers.
She clung to him in the taxi. She ran her lips up and down his face and told him that there had never been anyone so good to her, even her husband. She would not release him when the taxi drew up at the curb before her house and made him sit with her for half an hour while she begged him to return to her. The taxi driver, a woman, got out and took a stroll down the middle of the street, her hands in her trouser pockets.
Alone in her room, she removed her clothes that seemed soiled as though from several days of wear because she had already removed them twice that night, once before supper and once again after, and felt a rage take her over, a rage against the man who had left her at her door. She knew he would never write to her and never return to her, that he had rubbed his mouth against her face and promised to write only because the promising and the rubbing were part of the joke that he always seemed to be laughing at to himself and that he could not tell her, and she felt rage against herself for clinging to him, for exaggerating her wish beyond the true degree of it, when the truth was she wanted nothing to last, when she wanted to be as he was, elusive as he was. Wrapped in her negligee, she smoked one after another of the canteen cigarettes the captain had given her because so few were available to civilians, smoking them as though they were a glut on the market.
6
Her father escorted her one evening to a small lounge in one of the large hotels on Nob Hill. The manager sat down with them; he was a patient of her father’s and deferential to him, ordering a cognac for them, chatting with them, and watching them put the glasses to their lips. Over in a corner a slight, blond man was pounding a baby grand piano, smiling over its dark, slanting wing at the men in uniform and their women, who crossed their knees when he sang at them, their short skirts slipping up their thighs. While she was glancing away at the couples in the dim light of the carriage lanterns, stirred by the crowding of bodies, the manager clasped her wrist and asked her to sing. He escorted her to the pianist, who seemed delighted, who said he remembered her, and she sang, picking up the tricks again, toying with her beads, coddling her voice in her throat, combining the skills of her voice and her body. She was hired to sing several nights a week, and she and her father drank together with the manager to celebrate. She knew that her father would be delighted by his daughter’s becoming a famous singer as much as—or more than—he would be by his son’s becoming a physician who was summoned to the bedsides of presidents. He was attracted to theatrical people, to artists, especially to bizarre artists of any field if they were elegantly bizarre, not imitative, not tawdry. He never missed a first night at the Opera House or a society ball, and even his everyday clothes had the touch of the actor—his dark gray form-fitted overcoat and his black homburg.
David liked to watch her prepare herself to go out and sing. He sat cross-legged on her bed with his head thrown back against the headboard, his mouth open because he was bemused by her and, since it was nine o’clock, half asleep. His eyes shifted from the glitter of the buckles on her shoes to the glow of the dress where it curved over the hips and the breasts to the fall and sway of the long string of beads. He did not often look at her face, he was used to her face and was, instead, intrigued by the animation of inanimate things. But sometimes she sang to him as she dressed, and he would watch her face then, as if it too were inanimate and the words and the tune made it flicker and change, as curious about the mechanism in her throat that made the low, strong whisper of a voice as he was about the central mystery of a performing toy; and while he gazed at the lively spirits in her garments and in her face, she was transfixed by him, in return—by the particulars of his beauty, the sturdy shape of his legs, his half-closed eyes and open lips, by the vitality evident even in repose. At this phase of his life, although all he could convey to her was what he perceived, as a five-year-old, of the workings of the world, she was more tolerant than she had ever been, more humoring, and more demonstrative of her love, because she was in touch with the world now, because she sang to those who were involved and who comprehended the world. All around the earth, armies battled and cities were bombed, and she sang to the salesmen and the manufacturers of everything necessary to the prosecution of the war; she sang to the generals and the admirals and all the uniforms of the services of the country in a hotel on a hill in a great port city.
She stood before the long, oval mirror, with imperious flicks of her fingers pressing the rubber ball in its golden net to spray cologne over her bare arms, watching her son, acting as an empress for him. Then she sprayed the air, high up toward the ceiling, pretending to wield an antiaircraft gun, and he laughed, still with his head back, his arched throat jumping. When she played with him during the day, he was often at odds with her, but in the evening, in this hour in which she felt no boredom because she was to leave him in a matter of minutes, she enjoyed the playing. During the day he was absorbed in his own self and she was his accomplice in that absorption, but now he became an accomplice in her self-absorption. When she pantomimed for him, acted silly for him, she felt that the audience later in the night was already gathered around her, enthralled by her entertaining her son.
“Olga!” she called, “did you make the bed?” And to him, “Never mind, we’ll dump you in anyway.” She held out her arms to him. “Come on, then. You want to fly into bed? You feel like a bird? If the war’s still going on when you’re eighteen, you can learn to fly. You can fly a plane.”
He leaped into her arms, causing her to stagger in her high heels. With his arms clasping her neck, a leg on each side of her waist, and his face looking back over her shoulder, he was carried into his room.
“Up, up you go,” she said, boosting him onto the dresser top. From there he jumped, arms outspread, onto his bed.
She threw back the covers, pushed and joked him under, and kissed him on the mouth when he was settled in. When he called to her while she was in her bedroom again, slipping her coat from the hanger, she called in turn to Olga to go and see what he wanted. With her coat slung over one shoulder, she passed his open door; Olga was sitting on the small chair, attempting a low, singsong voice that induced sleep. Vivian went down to the kitchen and stood drinking black coffee while she waited for the taxi horn, glancing at her dark red fingernails, turning her head to see the back of her knee just under the black dress, to see the high satin heel of her shoe.
7
The day that Roosevelt died she took her son for a walk to share the shock of the death with the people in the streets. She and her son went hand in hand along by the shops, and in every shop people were talking about the death, and the ones inside and the ones waiting to cross at corners all had a look of shock that—because it was not for anyone close, for father or brother or husband, for anyone they had spent a lifetime with, but for a great man—was touched or tainted with a sense of privilege: that they were granted a time beyond the life of the great man was like a sign of favor. The sorrow that she felt over the President’s death became an encompassing sorrow for the millions of others dying, the anonymous others dying, and her husband dying, and for everything that went on that was tragic and that was not known to her. But as little as she knew, she thought, her son’s knowledge was only a fraction of her own. He was not even aware of nations and their governments, of the year and the era, and much less of the irretrievability of the dead; but if he did not have the comprehension now, he would have it in a few years. In a few years he wo
uld have more than she had at this moment, a great man himself, perhaps, about whose death—when he was seventy or eighty, and she was already dead a long time—everybody would be informed by newspaper and by radio. They walked slowly because that pace was suited to the day of mourning and to her son’s small legs; yet, after a time, the slowness began to annoy her. There seemed to be too much imposed upon her in that slowness, the dependent age of the child and the tremendous death of one great man.
In the evening, among the patrons of the lounge—among the men who, although they were subdued by the death, were nevertheless bathed and shaved and manicured and brilliantined and brushed and polished, and anticipative of pleasures that night with the women beside them or women waiting somewhere else—she gave herself up to the exciting paradox of the living opulently mourning the dead, and something more came into her consciousness of the magnitude of the world. At night in the bar with the changing patrons, the changing faces in the dimness moving in and out of her vision with more fluidity, more grace, because of the solemnity of the night, she realized, more than earlier with her son, the extent of a great man’s effect upon the world, the extent of the power he seemed to have even after his death, the extent of power over death that all these men seemed to have. She sang the president’s favorite song, and the pianist played it over and over again, pounding it out like a dirge while the solemn drinking went on at the tables.
Three Short Novels Page 3
