Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  He rose to meet her; she extended her hands. He seized them both; they were very cold.

  “I lost my gloves,” she said.

  How feminine of her, he thought, how ungrammatical, how charming! In the last few weeks he had been very unfair to her. This was no Zetkin, no Luxemburg. If the truth were known, she was probably as much out of her depth in sectarian politics as he was. He squeezed her hands.

  She sat down.

  “Well,” he said. “You’ve lost your job.”

  “Oh,” she murmured, looking grave for an instant. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose it was about time. But you—” He watched her get the idea. “Did you——?”

  “I walked out,” he said.

  He stared into his glass and hoped that she was not going to be effusive. When he finally looked up at her, however, he saw that she was blushing slightly.

  “Thank you very much,” she said. “I suppose I ought to tell you that you shouldn’t have done it.”

  “Never mind,” he said. “It was a good thing to do, anyway. I feel wonderful. I’m going to write a book. It all just came to me while I’ve been sitting here, though I guess the idea must have been in the back of my mind for quite a while.”

  He told her about the book.

  “It’s a very good idea,” she said at last.

  “You ought to write a book yourself.”

  She shook her head.

  “A fortune teller told me I was born to fritter away my talents. I wouldn’t want to go against my destiny.”

  He grinned at her. It was a silly remark, and characteristic, too, but it was no longer within her power to make him angry. He could barely recall a time when he had wrestled with her all night in a terrible ideological embrace, though it was not yet twenty-four hours since Nancy had spoken from the next bed and begged him to go into the living room if he could not stop tossing.

  She went on talking excitedly and he ordered two more drinks. He had forgotten about the letter of resignation, and he did not want her to go. He had gradually become aware that he would like to sleep with her, but he did not know how to broach the suggestion. The fact that it would not be the first time made it more difficult. All those months in which he had not wanted to sleep with her would have to be wiped out with some brief, tactful sentence, but no satisfactory one occurred to him, partly because he was puzzled as to why, on the one hand, he should want to sleep with her now, and why, on the other, he should not have been sleeping with her all along, since she was undoubtedly an attractive girl.

  “I was not free . . .” he muttered, experimentally, to himself. But it would not do. She might want to know in what sense he was free now, and had not been before. In relation to Nancy, he was still tied. Did he mean that his time was now his own, that an afternoon of love could—without too much difficulty—be occasionally slipped into his new schedule? No, he thought decidedly, he did not mean that. The idea of a systematic infidelity was offensive to him; the very notion of assignations, trysts, affected him in much the same way that the notion of crop rotation affects the American farmer. It would not be right, he told himself. You oughtn’t to plan a thing like that. Besides, he would be too busy. The new book would need all his energies. It was just this once that he wanted her. “I was not free,” he repeated, troubled by these words that had risen to his mind, feeling that they were true in some way that he had not put his finger on. It was as if he had paid off a nagging creditor, a creditor whom for months he had not dared to face, but to whom he could now open the door with the utmost geniality, knowing that there was nothing the man could do to him, knowing that his former fears had been groundless, that the creditor was just a human being like himself.

  “You really are a sweet girl,” he said, “even if you do act like a Trotskyite dragon.”

  After the third drink he took her home in a taxi. He decided not to say anything but merely followed her up the stairs and kissed her as she stood in the doorway. She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back with a look of astonishment; for a moment, he thought she was going to bar the way to him. She dropped her hands, however, and went on into the apartment. She sank into a chair. He shut the door behind him and waited.

  “I’m sorry, Jim,” she said. “I’d like to celebrate your resigning and the book and everything, but I just can’t.”

  “It’s not a question of a celebration,” he said stiffly.

  “Well . . .” she conceded, as if not disposed to argue. Her whole aspect was vague and weary. There was a look of strained kindness about her, as she sat in the chair, her coat falling loosely about her; she might have been a schoolteacher kept after hours.

  “Margaret,” he said, “I can’t explain, but the set-up wasn’t right before. Working in the same office . . .”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “It would have been a terrible mess.” She smiled.

  “It hasn’t been any picnic for me, Margaret,” he said in an aggrieved tone. “I still feel the same way about you.”

  “That’s wonderful,” she said with her first touch of sharpness. “I would like to feel the same way about you (I really would), but I can’t. I don’t seem to be able to bank my fires. That’s a man’s job, I suppose.”

  He frowned. There was some ugly implication in that metaphor of hers, something he did not want to examine at the moment.

  With a dim idea of being masterful, he strode across the room and half-lifted her to her feet. He attempted a long close kiss, pressing her body firmly against his. In a moment, however, he let her go, for, though she kissed him back, he could feel no response at all. It was not that she was deliberately stifling her feelings (if he could have believed that, he would have been encouraged to go on); rather, she seemed preoccupied, bored, polite. It was like kissing Nancy when she had toast in the toaster.

  She walked to the door with him.

  “Good-bye,” she said. “Good luck with your book. And don’t think I don’t appreciate . . .”

  “Forget it,” he said.

  He closed the door behind him, feeling slightly annoyed. In some way, he thought, he had been given the run-around. When you came right down to it, he had quit his job for her sake. What more did she want? “The hell with her,” he said, dismissing her from his mind. “After all, she knew I was married.” The thought of Nancy brought him up short. Under a street lamp he drew out his watch. If he took a taxi, he would still be in time for dinner. And after dinner, he promised himself, he would make love to Nancy. He would have her put on her blue transparent nightgown, the one he had given her for Christmas and she had only worn once. Making love to her would be more fun than usual because he was still steamed up about that girl. He sensed at once, as he raised his hand for a taxi, that this sexual project of his was distinctly off-color; yet his resolution hardly wavered. In the first place, Nancy would never know; in the second place, he was entitled to some recompense for the moral ordeal he had been through that day. Later on, in bed, his scruples served him well; where a thicker-skinned man would have known that he was simply sleeping with his wife, Jim’s active conscience permitted him to see the conjugal act as a perverse and glamorous adultery, an adultery which, moreover, would never land him in a divorce court or an abortionist’s waiting room.

  No one could ever understand, afterwards, what happened about that book. When his resignation from the Liberal was made public, all sorts of people congratulated Jim. Literary columns in the newspapers reported that he was at work on a study of the transportation industries which promised to revise some of the classical conceptions of Marxism. Several publishers wrote him letters, hoping that he would allow them to be the first to see . . . It was felt in general that he was coming into his manhood, that his undeniable talents were at last to be employed in a work of real scope. Jim himself began the task with enthusiasm. He did six months of research in the public library, and amassed a quantity of notes. Then he wrote two chapters. He worked over them diligently, but somehow from the very fi
rst sentence, everything was wrong. The stuff lacked punch. Jim saw it at once, and the publishers he sent the chapters to saw it also. It did not sound, they wrote him reluctantly, like the real Barnett. On the other hand, it did not sound (as he had hoped it would) like a major work. It was solemn enough but it was not momentous. What was missing was the thing Jim had found in Marx and Veblen and Adam Smith and Darwin, the dignified sound of a great calm bell tolling the morning of a new age. Jim reread these masters and tried to reproduce the tone by ear, but he could not do it. He became frightened and went back to the public library; perhaps, as someone had suggested, the material was under-researched. He could not bring himself to go on with the writing, for that would be sending good money after bad. When he got an offer from the illustrated magazine Destiny, the businessman’s Vogue, as someone called it, to do an article on rural electrification, he accepted at once. Traveling with a photographer all over America, he would have the chance, he thought, to see his own subject at first hand. He could do the piece for Destiny, and then return to his own work, refreshed from his contact with living reality. However, when the article was done he took a job with Destiny, promising himself that he would work on his book over the week ends. He started at ten thousand a year.

  The job took more of his time than he had expected, and his friends eventually stopped asking him about his book. Once in a while someone would question Nancy, and she would contract her brows in a little worried frown. He was working much too hard, she would say. He had counted on a vacation to get back to the book, but when the time came, he was on the verge of nervous exhaustion and she had had to take him to Havana for a rest. “You have no idea,” she was fond of exclaiming, “what a terrific toll Destiny takes of its writers. It burns them right out. If Jim didn’t keep up his tennis, and get away to the country every possible week end, he’d be in the hospital right now.”

  Everyone sympathized with Nancy on this point. The research girls in the Destiny office worried a good deal about Jim, and they, too, thought it was a great pity that he did not have time to do his own writing. Jim himself took a certain pride in being overworked, especially since he was not underpaid—the original ten thousand had been raised several times and he got a handsome bonus at Christmas every year. The truth was that he enjoyed working on Destiny. Outsiders imagined that his radicalism kept him in hot water there, but this was not true. He wrote about American youth, farm security, South America, musical comedy, and nylon. He said what he pleased, and if the article seemed too “strong,” it was given to someone else to modify. He was not obliged to eat his own words. Now he was not so much a writer as a worker on an assembly line. He did his own task conscientiously, and since the finished product was always several removes away from him, it was, in a certain sense, not his concern. He would send an article down from his desk with a droll, schizophrenic, pessimistic air, as if to say, “You’re on your own now, God help you.” And as his own productions passed more and more beyond his control, he relished more and more the control of data, which was the singular achievement of the Destiny machine. Jim liked the facts that were served up to him daily by the girl research workers, liked the feeling that there was nothing, absolutely nothing in the world, that he could not find out by pressing a bell, sending a telegram, or taking a plane. He liked the fact-finding trips that he took with a photographer; he had only to mention the name of the magazine and he would be whisked into a farmer’s homestead, an actress’ dressing room, a Fifth Avenue mansion, a coldwater flat in an old-law tenement, a girls’ college, an army camp, a club, a great hotel. And he saw everything from the inside; he was free to examine the laundry lists, the budgets, the toilet facilities, the sleeping arrangements, of any American family he chose to visit; he could ransack a desk or peer into an icebox; nobody but a tax assessor had ever had such freedom, and where the tax assessor was detested, Jim’s subjects welcomed him into their homes, their hobbies, their businesses. It pleased them that someone should know all about them and write it down and publish it with pictures. It pleased Jim too; it gave him a great feeling of responsibility, as if he were a priest or God.

  He believed—most of the time—that he was doing an important work. He still considered himself a Marxist, but he saw that the Marxists were never going to get anywhere until they took a real look at the American scene and stopped deluding themselves with theory. Occasionally, after an argument at some literary cocktail party, he felt that he would like to pick up the whole radical movement by the scruff of its neck and rub its nose hard into the good American dirt. He himself, whatever his failings, was at least setting the facts on record; in a time of confusion like the present this was a valuable thing to do. Moreover, he was playing a part, a rather significant one, in the molding of public opinion. It was true that the publisher of Destiny was a reactionary in many ways—potentially, he might even be a fascist—but on certain points he was progressive. He believed that the old-style capitalism would have to go, and now and then he would allow Jim to say so in a signed editorial that was termed by everyone in the office “astonishingly outspoken.” Jim had come, he told himself frequently, a long way from the Liberal, and he was proud of the fact. He looked back on the years he had spent there with a kind of amazed disgust. How could he have wasted his time so? The Liberal was no more revolutionary than Destiny; it published nothing but muddle-headed opinion; it paid poorly, and it had no influence. No matter what his mood, Jim never doubted for a moment that his resignation had been the most sensible act of his life.

  It was not the memory of the Liberal that caused Jim, whenever he got drunk, to abuse the publisher of Destiny, to contrast his lot unfavorably with that of his radical friends, to protest with tears in his eyes that he was doing it for the wife and kiddies. This lachrymose, self-accusatory stage was usually followed by an aggressive stage in which he told anyone who was still a socialist how he had waked up to himself back in 1937 and what a fine thing it had been for him. These contradictory demonstrations puzzled his interlocutors, who did not see that in the first stage he was comparing his actual work to some imaginary lost vocation, a life of dedication and scholarship which he had in reality never been attracted to, and in the second stage he was comparing his present career on Destiny to his former job on the Liberal. The majority of Jim’s friends paid no attention to the second stage of his drunkenness, ascribing anything he might say to the effects of alcohol (“liquor hits some people that way”); it was the first stage that impressed them. Here, they thought, he spoke from the heart; here the honest, decent man revealed himself to be incorruptible; though obliged to make his living by working on Destiny, he did not deceive himself as to its true character; he rebelled, if only on Saturday nights. Actually, however, the utterances of the second stage were “real,” and the lamentations were largely histrionic.

  The truth was that Jim had changed, though the outward signs of it were still so faint as to pass undetected by his intimates. He got drunk oftener, there was no denying it, but, as Nancy said, the strain of being a writer for Destiny had made alcohol “an absolute necessity” for him. His boyish features were now slightly blurred; his awkward, loose-jointed figure was fatter than it had been, and his habitual sprawl was not so becoming to it. Imperceptibly, he had passed from looking pleasantly unkempt to looking seedy. The puzzled frown had become chronic with him; he was, in fact, professionally bewildered. And yet there was something dimly spurious about all this: his gait, his posture, his easy way of talking, half-belied the wrinkles on his forehead. In his young days he had been as lively and nervous as a squirrel; women had been fond of comparing him to some woodland creature. Today that alertness, that wariness, was gone. The sentry slept, relaxed, at his post, knowing that an armistice had been arranged with the enemy. In some subtle way, Jim had turned into a comfortable man, a man incapable of surprising or being surprised. The hairshirt he wore fitted him snugly now; old and well used, it no longer prickled him; it was only from the outside that it appeared to
be formidable.

  Jim knew that in middle-class intellectual circles his career was regarded as a tragedy of waste. Half-unconsciously, he fostered this illusion, for it permitted him to enjoy what was really a success story, secure from the envy of the less privileged. It was commonly believed that Nancy was the villain, Nancy who had gone and had two more children, Nancy who needed a house in the country, Nancy who kept his nose to Destiny’s grindstone. And whenever they had friends in, Jim would grumble good-naturedly about expenses, the children’s new shoes, the tricycles, the nursery school. Occasionally, during one of these mock tirades someone would look over at Nancy with a touch of concern or curiosity—perhaps these complaints were a little hard on her? But Nancy would always be smiling with genuine sweetness, for Nancy knew the duties of a wife, and knew too that Jim loved the children, the garden, the new radio, just as much as if not more than she did.

  Undoubtedly, Jim was still a good guy. On the magazine, he was always on the side of the underdog. He treated his subordinates with consideration, and he helped organize the Newspaper Guild chapter. He voted for Roosevelt, though Destiny was pro-Willkie, and when the Trotskyites were indicted for sedition in Minneapolis he sent them a check through the Civil Liberties Union. If he showed a certain ruthlessness—socially—to people who did not count, he had the excuse of being extremely busy, preoccupied with the great issues of the day. And he was always interested in the common man. He could spend hours talking to taxi drivers, grocers, swing musicians, real-estate agents, small lawyers or doctors who had married old school friends of Nancy’s. These people and their opinions “counted” for Jim; it was only the intellectuals, the unsuccessful, opinionated, unknown intellectuals, who had nothing, so far as he could see, to say to him.

  Margaret Sargent belonged to this tiresome class. In memory of old times, he always talked to her a few minutes when he met her at parties, but her sarcasms bored him, and, unless he were tight, he would contrive to break away from her as quickly as possible. It irritated him to hear one day that she had applied for a job on Destiny; he was perfectly justified, he said to himself, in telling the publisher that she would not fit in. It would be intolerable to have her in the office. He owed her no debt; all that had been canceled long ago. And yet . . . He sat musing at his desk. Why was it that she, only she, had the power to make him feel, feel honestly, unsentimentally, that his life was a failure, not a tragedy exactly, but a comedy with pathos? That single night and day when he had been almost in love with her had taught him everything. He had learned that he must keep down his spiritual expenses—or else go under. There was no doubt at all of the wisdom of his choice. He did not envy her; her hands were empty: she was unhappy, she was poor, she had achieved nothing, even by her own standards. Yet she exasperated him, as the spendthrift will always exasperate the miser who feels obliged to live like a pauper, lest his wealth be suspected and a robber plunder him. But there was more than that. What did he regret, he asked himself. If he had it to do over again, he would make the same decision. What he yearned for perhaps was the possibility of decision, the instant of choice, when a man stands at a crossroads and knows he is free. Still, even that had been illusory. He had never been free, but until he had tried to love the girl, he had not known he was bound. It was self-knowledge she had taught him; she had showed him the cage of his own nature. He had accommodated himself to it, but he could never forgive her. Through her he had lost his primeval innocence, and he would hate her forever as Adam hates Eve.