"You're so right!" he retorted with a laugh. "Happiness is fatal." He looked at her for a quiet moment. "And I'm happy right now."
What saved him from any diminution in her eyes was a nostalgia that she recognized as even greater than her own; what guarded his masculinity from the least tint of weakness was the only too obvious fact that he was a warrior who had been tried and tested in combat, that he was able to master the complicated machinery of an undersea vessel, that if he had ever known fear, it must have been largely overcome. At night she shivered even in the Panamanian heat at the suffocating sense of being trapped in that cigar-shaped tube deep below the surface as depth charges detonated around it. Yet he never talked about it, nor did she presume to ask.
After their second dinner, she knew she was in love with him and felt not the smallest twinge of guilt or the least pang at her disloyalty to Thad. What she was going through was so utterly her own affair that it seemed to have nothing to do with the past, or even, for that matter, with the future. It was an interlude, an elating interlude, and she was determined—well, perhaps not so much determined as re-signed—to let it have its full sway over her.
She was hardly surprised on their third evening together when he said suddenly, "Of course, I'm in love with you. How could I not be? But you needn't worry. Nothing is going to come of it. Your husband is never going to get a 'Dear John' letter as a result of anything I do or don't do. And don't feel you have to comment on this. I just had to let you know, that's all. And that's bad enough of me. Now let's talk about anything else. How long, for example, you plan to stay in the Canal Zone."
Linda, her heart full of joy, knew she could take him at his word. He was too much a gentleman to extract from her the avowal of a love of which he was only too well aware. She took a long sip of her wine and then replied, in the flattest voice she could muster, "Pretty soon, I think. But not, certainly, before you sail."
He nodded slowly as he took this in. "Thank you, my dear. But that should be any day now."
And it was. On their fourth evening he announced that his vessel was due to sail on the morrow. But she was ready for it.
"Then this is our last night together. Do you have to spend it onboard?"
"No. Everything's ready. I have till eight tomorrow morning."
She had rehearsed her lines. "Then there's something I think you and I ought to do. It may be our last time together."
He reached across the table to take her hand. "You're sure?"
"Of course I'm sure. Aren't you?"
"On one condition only. If you can promise me it won't break up your marriage."
"It has nothing to do with my marriage!" she exclaimed, almost with a note of shrillness. "Oh, I know people say that. But it still can be true!"
He closed his eyes for a silent moment. "I can't fight this," he said simply. "Let's go to your place."
It was, God knew, if God were watching, a simple enough and common coupling, but it was still unlike anything she had imagined, and certainly unlike her unions with Thad. Nor did she feel the least shame or regret afterward, when he had left her; it was almost—however odd this might seem, and indeed it seemed very odd—as if she had been to church. She didn't regret that he hadn't come into her life before, that he had not been her husband. She felt only a fierce gratitude that he had come at all.
Linda stayed on in the Canal Zone for several months after the departure of Conrad's submarine. She had been earnestly persuaded by her boss to remain at her post, and besides, the war was coming to a conclusion. She and Conrad had agreed not to correspond; it was part of their resolution—or at least part of his—that they would do nothing more that would tend to break up her marriage, and she thought a period of continued isolation in Central America might help her to adjust her spirits to taking up her life again with Thad when peace came.
Thad's letters had been cheerful and newsy; he had been taken off convoy duty when the submarine threat had eased and assigned to shore duty as the executive officer of a naval section base in one of the English Channel ports. He wrote a good deal about Britain and some of his new British friends; he was still apparently his old tolerant and accepting self. She wondered if going back to her old life wouldn't be like awakening to a rather dull and routine but certainly not disagreeable existence after a blissful but fantastic dream.
And then one morning Stuart Fraser, calling on the Admiral on official business, stopped by her desk on his way out.
"Do you remember Conrad Vogt, Linda? The submarine officer we dined with some months ago at the Union Club?"
She stared; her heart seemed to stop. "I remember him," she half whispered.
Stuart noticed nothing unusual in her response. "His submarine was lost off the coast of Okinawa. Blown up, of all things, by a kamikaze that caught it on the surface."
"He's lost, then?"
"Oh, yes, with all on board. Horrible, isn't it? But then everything in this war is horrible. Thank God it'll soon be over. Would you be free for dinner some night this week?"
"I'll see," she muttered. "I'll call you." And he left.
She didn't plead illness and flee to her quarters. She simply sat dumbly at her desk for the rest of the afternoon. Fortunately it was not a busy day; her boss was in conference, and she was left to the silent entertainment of her agony. She kept saying over and over to herself that at least she had had that night, that single night; she clenched her fists as if she were holding their time together tight. There was that, only that. The rest of the world, the rest of her life, was something altogether separate. But she knew that the crash of a hissing sea as it burst over a stricken vessel was never to be muted in her inner ear.
***
When Thad came back to New York, released from the navy, she had already reoccupied and redecorated their old apartment. Their reunion had its awkward, its inevitably stiff moments, but both had the intelligence to recognize that many of their friends were undergoing the same experience, and on the whole the thing was managed pleasantly enough. He professed to find her unchanged—"as beautiful as a movie star," as he rather tritely observed—and she found in him some of the old exuberance, but a bit chastened. He was thinner and paler and inclined to sudden silences. They agreed to take their time before renewing old intimacies. They would not, for example, sleep together for the first few nights.
And then one evening he told her, almost solemnly, that he had booked a table at a very expensive French restaurant. "I have something to confess to you that needs the best of food and wine."
"Some limey gal, I suppose," she retorted with what she intended to be a sophisticated shrug. "I've seen what you men were up to in Panama. Don't worry. The war has taught me a perhaps excessive tolerance."
"Well, you'll see," was his enigmatic reply.
She wondered whether this might not be the time to tell him about Conrad. Wouldn't it be something of a fraud to conceal from the partner of her life—as Thad was destined now to be—that a substantial part of her soul and being did not, and never could, belong to him? That even if she were forever faithful and became the mother of his children, it still behooved her to build their joint lives upon a declared truth? But she would hear him first on the subject of his limey hussy or hussies. As if she cared!
At their table in a secluded alcove, with a bottle of Haut Brion and two martinis apiece already consumed, Thad slowly and with difficulty told his tale.
An English woman serving as his secretary at the section base in Falmouth, whose husband was serving with the Royal Navy in the Indian Ocean, had become his right hand in administration, then his close friend, and at last his mistress. She had broken off their relationship abruptly when her spouse had been unexpectedly invalided out of the service and came home and had passionately vowed never to see him again. Nor had she. The break had been final.
"The reason I'm telling you this, Linda, is that it was no fly-by-night affair. I was in love. Deeply in love. It was unlike anything that ever happened
to me before. Now it's over. But it was a part of me that I thought you ought to know about. If you choose to leave me now, I'll make it easy for you, financially and legally. But my hope is that we might build a new life together."
Linda was so startled by the clash of emotions within her that for several moments she felt almost dizzy. It was as if she had walked into her old life and collided with a stranger. Under her surprise was a kind of muffled anger, a resentment that he could so complacently tell her of his wonderful experience. Resentment of the English woman? Not in the least. The woman had no reality to her; she could hardly be jealous of a wraith. No, it was resentment that he—the likes of him—should aspire to something as precious as she had had with Conrad! That he should intrude himself in the same heaven as her! For if Thad could have such a love in his life, couldn't anybody? Was her one exquisite night with Conrad to lose its unique magic in the desert of her wartime disillusionment? Would it have to take its place with all the Canal Zone couplings, with all the scatological chatter at the bars and barracks, with the appalling nothingness of military stagnation?
"Are you totally disgusted with me?" Thad asked. "I can't blame you if you are."
"No, it's not that. It's just something I need a little time to adjust to. Perhaps I should even be glad that you had something like that to make up for what the war has done to all of us. Perhaps it is right that everyone should have the blessing of love. Only there has to be a part of me that begrudges it to you."
"I'm glad of that part, Linda. Very glad. It gives me a ray of hope for our future."
"Because you think it shows I care?"
"Well, mightn't it? Just a little? I know I can care for you a great deal if you can care for me the least bit."
He reached for her hand, and she allowed him to take it.
"And now," he pursued, "do you have anything to tell me?"
Again she was silent for several moments. But she knew now that she was never going to tell him about Conrad. She was sure, with a sudden spasm of conviction, that the only way to preserve that throbbing memory alive within herself—and maybe even to live on it—was to share it with no one. Oh, maybe one distant day with a beloved and sympathetic daughter—who knew? Did that mean it was too frail to subject it to the common stare? Perhaps. What of it? Frail things can be precious.
"No, my life down there was very dull. Very commonplace. I'm afraid I have nothing glamorous to tell you."
She saw that he didn't believe her but that he wasn't going to—and never would—pry. And for that she almost loved him.
Her next remark was delivered in her flattest tone. "You know what I think we both need more than anything else? To raise a family. And we might start this very night."
The Artist's Model
JJOHN EPPES GLANCED about the big studio that he occupied on West Forty-first Street to be sure that it was in reasonable order to receive his next sitter, Mrs. Harold Ames, whose husband owned almost as many city blocks in Manhattan as Colonel John Jacob Astor. There had not been many things to clear away, as the large, square, high-roofed chamber whose three great windows overlooked Bryant Park contained mostly empty space, space that Eppes loved now that he was prosperous enough to afford it. Aside from his easel and the marble-topped Italian Renaissance table on which he kept his paints and brushes, and the spectacular Persian carpet, there was little but the unfinished canvases stacked against the walls, the different period armchairs in which he sometimes seated his customers, and the various rolls of cloth and curtain that he used for backgrounds in his pictures. He turned a second easel so as to make visible to a visitor the charcoal sketch resting on it of former president Theodore Roosevelt, now on a much publicized safari. It had been the preliminary sketch to an oil portrait hanging in the Capitol in Washington.
Eppes, age fifty, though still the fine strong figure of a man, with large staring eyes and a full head of sleek black-and-gray hair, was at a crisis in his career. He had gone as far as one could go in the painting of fashionable portraits, and he was beginning to wonder if there might not be a higher goal to attain if he were to achieve any really lasting fame. Even though he received the highest fees of any portraitist and some of his works now hung in museums, he was only too bitterly aware of what younger art critics were saying about him: that he was slick and superficial, that his skill in detail was mere trickery, and that his flattering portraits of society matrons were fashion plates. The English critic Roger Fry had even gone so far as to state that it was hard to believe Eppes had ever been taken seriously.
Of course, much of this could be written off as jealousy or the resentment of plutocrats by radicals, but he suffered from the uneasy suspicion that there was still some basis for it. Had the gorgeousness of his dresses and interiors in his paintings of women manifested a too complacent acceptance of the vulgar values of a mercantile society? Had he become the apologist of the early-twentieth-century goldbug?
He had liked to think of himself as a Velazquez or Goya, able subtly to suggest the faults of an era in the very countenances and poses of the aristocrats who represented it, but wasn't it possible that he was actually more like Nattier, whose bland French court beauties gave little hint of the guillotine that awaited their like in the near future?
His reverie was interrupted by his sudden realization that Mrs. Ames had quietly arrived and was standing in the doorway.
"Are you ready for me, master? I hate to break in on great thoughts."
Really, she was lovely. A painter's dream. She had eager, darting, gray-blue eyes, a pale oval face, thin scarlet lips, and a small, perfect nose ending in a tiny hook, with hair a rich chestnut, and she was clad in red velvet with gold trimmings, an evening dress in which, quite rightly, she evidently wished to pose. She apologized for her lateness, for her presumption in choosing her attire, for her nervousness at meeting "so great an artist." She paused before the Roosevelt sketch and raised her hands in gratifying admiration.
"Imagine painting silly me after doing him!"
Eppes decided to paint her sitting, and he selected a gilded eighteenth-century Venetian armchair for the initial sketch. She adapted herself quickly and gracefully to each pose he suggested, and he finally chose one in which she was leaning slightly forward, as if to be sure to catch every word of the man—of course it would be a man, and a charming one—who was engaging her in conversation at a soiree. Her expression was amused, receptive, delightful.
She professed herself enchanted with the rapidly executed sketch and accepted cheerfully his invitation to stay for the tea that his manservant, rung for, now brought in. Eppes asked her what sort of pictures she liked.
"Oh, you'll think me a terrible philistine," she protested. "I love all those big academic historical paintings that tell stories. Of course, I realize that makes me totally out of fashion."
"You shouldn't be ashamed of anything you really like. Liking something is the start of appreciation in art. Liking can always be extended. It's indifference that can't be. Tell me about some of the academic pictures that you like."
She took him up enthusiastically on this. "Well, I remember one that particularly thrilled me. It showed Catherine de Mèdici coming out of the Louvre on the day after the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre to view the dead bodies lying about, half stripped, on the street. Her ladies, obviously compelled to follow her, exhibit every kind of horror and disgust, turning their eyes away and putting handkerchiefs to their noses. But the queen mother, stalwart in widow's black, strides ahead, taking in the bloody scene with a calm and glacial satisfaction. How terrible, but how unforgettable!"
"I know the picture. It's by Pinson. What else did you like?"
"There was one of the execution of Lady Jane Grey. Oh, you must find me very macabre. But they're so exciting, those scenes. In museums you always see a lot of people in front of them, until they're scared away by remembering the art critics. But this one was so pathetic. You see the poor girl, who was only fifteen, blindfolded, on her
knees and reaching about for the block, helped by a kindly older man, while the headsman stands mutely by with his terrible ax."
"That's by Delaroche. He was very good. He also did the little princes in the tower."
"But you know everything, Mr. Eppes!"
"I know that, anyway. But you needn't be ashamed of liking those pictures. They're competently executed."
"Executed does seem the right word. And do you know something? I think there are stories in some of your portraits."
"Really? Can you give me an example?"
"Yes! In your rendering of the duke and duchess of Ives. She's so tall and proud and fine. The captive American heiress sold against her will to an impoverished peer. Talk about slave markets! And he's so short and plain and arrogant. You can see that he'll never even try to appreciate her!"
Eppes was amused. He had not thought of the duke so meanly. "Dear me. I had no notion of such a drama. And how do you think I have rendered, as you put it, the doomed duchess?"
"Oh, as bravely determined to make the most of her bad bargain. Which, by all reports, she has. One hears she is the toast of London. And that the duke is small enough to resent being cast in her shadow."
Eppes found this implausible, though he was flattered. After two more sittings he allowed a friendly art critic, Frank Shea, to come in for a private view.
"The pose is fine, and the colors quite up to your usual splendid standard," Shea assured him. "Of course, you're still developing the face. It will be interesting to see what you will finally do with her. Will she be at last your definitive study of the wife of the American goldbug? Lost in the silly pipe dream that she has affinities and aspirations nobler than those of her commonplace husband?"
"What's the husband like, have you heard? Pretty grim, I suppose?"
"Oh, not such a bad guy. But you know: stolid, stout, and dull."
"I might have guessed."
He had discussed several topics with Mrs. Ames in their sittings, as she was always lively and interested, but she had tended to shy away from questions about her life, preferring more general subjects. But at their next session he resolved to be more personal.
The Young Apollo and Other Stories Page 10
