The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  Actually, she decided, it was the combination of provincialism and adventurousness that did the trick. This man was the frontier, though the American frontier had closed, she knew, forever, somewhere out in Oregon in her father’s day. Her father, when that door had shut, had remained on the inside. In his youth, as she had learned to her surprise, from some yellowed newspaper clippings her aunt had forgotten in an old bureau drawer, he had been some kind of wildcat radical, full of workmen’s compensation laws and state ownership of utilities; but he had long ago hardened into a corporation lawyer, Eastern style. She remembered how once she had challenged him with those clippings, thinking to shame him with the betrayal of ideals and how calmly he had retorted, “Things were different then.” “But you fought the railroads,” she had insisted. “And now you’re their lawyer.” “You had to fight the railroads in those days,” he had answered innocently, and her aunt had put in, with her ineffable plebeian sententiousness, “Your father always stands for what is right.” But she saw now that her father had honestly perceived no contradiction between the two sets of attitudes, which was the real proof that it was not he, so much as the times, that had changed.

  Yet this man she was sitting with had somehow survived, like a lonely dinosaur, from that former day. It was not even a true survival, for if he was, as he said, forty-one, that would make him thirty years younger than her father, and he would be barely able to recall the Golden Age of American imperialism, to which, nevertheless, he plainly belonged. Looking at him, she thought of other young empires and recalled the Roman busts in the Metropolitan, marble faces of businessmen, shockingly rugged and modern and recognizable after the smooth tranquillity of the Greeks. Those early businessmen had been omnivorous, too, great readers, eaters, travelers, collectors, and, at the beginning, provincial also, small-town men newly admitted into world-citizenship, faintly uneasy but feeling their oats.

  In the course of this analysis she had glided all the way from aversion to tenderness. She saw the man now as a man without a country, and felt a desire to reinstate him. But where? The best she could do was communicate to him a sense of his own isolation and grandeur. She could ensconce him in the dignity of sadness.

  Meanwhile, the man had grown almost boisterously merry. It was late afternoon; the lunch things had long ago been taken away; and the bottle was nearly empty. Outside the flat yellow farm land went by, comfortably dotted with haystacks; the drought and the cow bones strewn over the Dust Bowl seemed remote as a surrealist painting. Other passengers still paused to look in at the open door on their way to the club car, but the girl was no longer fully aware of them: they existed, as it were, only to give the perspective, to deepen that warm third dimension that had been established within the compartment. The man was lit up with memories of the war, droll stories of horseplay and drinking parties, a hero who was drowned while swimming in a French river, trips to Paris, Notre Dame, and target practice in the Alps. It had been, she could see, an extension of college days, a sort of lower-middle-class Grand Tour, a wonderful male roughhouse that had left a man such as this with a permanent homesickness for fraternity and a loneliness that no stag party could quite ease.

  “I suppose I’m boring you,” said the man, still smiling to himself, “but—it’s a funny thing to say—I haven’t had such a good time since the war. So that you remind me of it, and I can’t stop talking. I don’t know why.”

  “I know,” she said, full of gentle omniscience. (This was her best side, and she knew it. But did that spoil it, keep it from being good?) “It’s because you’ve made a new friend, and you probably haven’t made one for twenty years, not since the war. Nobody does, after they’re grown-up.”

  “Maybe so,” said the man. “Getting married, no matter how many times you do it, isn’t the same thing. If you even think you’d like to marry a girl, you have to start lying to her. It’s a law of nature, I guess. You have to protect yourself. I don’t mean about cheating—that’s small potatoes….”

  A meditative look absorbed his face. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “I don’t even know Leonie any more, and vice versa, but that’s the way it ought to be. A man doesn’t want his wife to understand him. That’s not her job. Her job is to have a nice house and nice kids and give good parties he can have his friends to. If Leonie understood me, she wouldn’t be able to do that. Probably we’d both go to pot.”

  Tears came to her eyes again. The man’s life and her own life seemed unutterably tragic.

  “I was in love with my husband,” she said. “We understood each other. He never had a thought he didn’t tell me.”

  “But you got a divorce,” said the man. “Somebody must have misunderstood somebody else somewhere along the line.”

  “Well,” she admitted, “maybe he didn’t understand me so well. He was awfully surprised….” She giggled like a soubrette. The giggle was quite out of character at the moment, but she had not been able to resist it. Besides (she was sure) it was these quick darts and turns, these flashing inconsistencies that gave her the peculiar, sweet-sour, highly volatile charm that was her spécialité de la maison.

  “Surprised when you picked up with somebody else?” asked the man.

  She nodded.

  “What happened to that?”

  “After I got divorced, I didn’t want to marry him any more.”

  “So now you’re on your own?”

  The question seemed almost idle, but she replied in a distinct, emphatic voice, as if he were deaf and she had an important message for him.

  “No,” she said. “I’m going to be married in the fall.”

  “Are you in love with this one?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “He’s charming. And he and I are much more alike than Tom and I were. He’s a little bit of a bum and I am too. And he’s selfish, which is a good thing for me. Tom was so good. And so vulnerable. The back of his neck was just like a little boy’s. I always remember the back of his neck.”

  She spoke earnestly, but she saw that the man did not understand. Nobody had ever understood—and she herself did not quite know—why this image retained such power over her, why all her feelings of guilt and shame had clustered around the picture of a boyish neck (the face had not been boyish, but prematurely lined) bared like an early martyr’s for the sword. “How could I have done it?” she whispered to herself again, as she still did nearly every day, and once again she was suffused with horror.

  “He was too good for me,” she said at last. “I felt like his mother. Nobody would ever have known it, but he needed to be protected.”

  That was it. That was what was so awful. Nobody would ever have known. But she had crawled into his secret life and nestled there, like the worm in the rose. How warm and succulent it had been! And when she had devoured it all, she had gone away. “Oh God,” she muttered under her breath. It was no excuse that she had loved him. The worm indubitably loves the rose.

  Hurriedly, to distract herself, she began to talk about her love affairs. First names, with thumbnail descriptions, rolled out till her whole life sounded to her like a drugstore novel. And she found herself over-anxious to explain to him why in each case the thing had not borne fruit, how natural it was that she should have broken with John, how reasonable that she should never have forgiven Ernest. It was as if she had been a prosecuting attorney drawing up a brief against each of her lovers, and, not liking the position, she was relieved when the man interrupted her.

  “Seems to me,” he said, “you’re still in love with that husband of yours.”

  “Do you think so really?” she asked, leaning forward. “Why?” Perhaps at last she had found him, the one she kept looking for, the one who could tell her what she was really like. For this she had gone to palmists and graphologists, hoping not for a dark man or a boat trip, but for some quick blaze of gypsy insight that would show her her own lineaments. If she once knew, she had no doubt that she could behave perfectly; it was merely a question of finding out. How, she thoug
ht, can you act upon your feelings if you don’t know what they are? As a little girl whispering to a young priest in the confessional she had sometimes felt sure. The Church could classify it all for you. If you talked or laughed in church, told lies, had impure thoughts, or conversations, you were bad; if you obeyed your parents or guardians, went to confession and communion regularly, said prayers for the dead, you were good. Protestants, like her father, were neutral; they lived in a gray world beyond good and evil. But when as a homely high-school girl, she had rejected the Church’s filing system, together with her aunt’s illiterate morality, she had given away her sense of herself. For a while she had believed that it was a matter of waiting until you grew older and your character was formed; then you would be able to recognize it as easily as a photograph. But she was now twenty-four, and had heard other people say she had a strong personality; she herself however was still in the dark. This hearty stranger in the green shirt—perhaps he could really tell whether she was in love with her husband. It was like the puzzle about the men with marks on their foreheads: A couldn’t know whether his own forehead was marked, but B and C knew, of course, and he could, if he were bright, deduce it from their behavior.

  “Well,” replied the man, “of all the fellows you’ve talked about, Tom’s the only one I get a picture of. Except your father—but that’s different; he’s the kind of a man I know about.”

  The answer disappointed her. It was too plain and folksy to cover the facts. It was true that she had loved her husband personally, for himself, and this had never happened to her with anyone else. Nobody else’s idiosyncrasies had ever warmed her; nobody else had she ever watched asleep. Yet that kind of love had, unfortunately, rendered her impotent to love him in the ordinary way, had, in fact, made it necessary for her to be unfaithful to him, and so, in the course of time, to leave him altogether. Or could it not be put in another way? Could she not say that all that conjugal tenderness had been a brightly packaged substitute for the Real Thing, for the long carnal swoon she had never quite been able to execute in the marriage bed? She had noticed that in those households where domesticity burns brightest and the Little Attentions rain most prodigally, the husband is seldom admitted to his real conjugal rights.

  But it was impossible to explain this to the man. Already the conversation had dropped once or twice into ribaldry, but she was determined to preserve the decorum of the occasion. It was dark outside now and the waiter was back again, serving little brook trout on plates that had the Union Pacific’s crest on them. Yet even as she warned herself how impossible it was, she heard her voice rushing on in a torrent of explicitness. (This had all happened so many times before, ever since, as a schoolgirl, she had exchanged dirty jokes with the college boys from Eugene and seen them stop the car and lunge at her across the gearshift. While all the time, she commiserated with herself, she had merely been trying to be a good fellow, to show that she was sophisticated and grown-up, and not to let them suspect (oh, never!) that her father did not allow her to go out with boys and that she was a neophyte, a helpless fledgling, with no small talk and no coquetry at all. It had not been fair (she could still italicize it, bitterly) for them to tackle her like a football dummy; she remembered the struggles back and forth on the slippery leather seats of sports roadsters, the physical awkwardness of it all being somehow the crowning indignity; she remembered also the rides home afterwards, and how the boy’s face would always be sullen and closed—he was thinking that he had been cheated, made a fool of, and resolving never to ask her again, so that she would finally become notorious for being taken out only once. How indecent and anti-human it had been, like the tussle between the drowning man and the lifeguard! And of course she had invited it, just as she was inviting it now, but what she was really asking all along was not that the male should assault her, but that he should believe her a woman. This freedom of speech of hers was a kind of masquerade of sexuality, like the rubber breasts that homosexuals put on for drags, but, like the dummy breasts, its brazenness betrayed it: it was a poor copy and a hostile travesty all at once. But the men, she thought, did not look into it so deeply; they could only respond by leaping at her—which, after all, she supposed, was their readiest method of showing her that her impersonation had been convincing. Yet that response, when it came, never failed to disconcert and frighten her: I had not counted on this, she could always whisper to herself, with a certain sad bewilderment. For it was all wrong, it was unnatural: art is to be admired, not acted on, and the public does not belong on the stage, nor the actors in the audience.)

  But once more the man across the table spared her. His face was a little heavy with drink, but she could see no lechery in it, and he listened to her as calmly as a priest. The sense of the nightmare lifted; free will was restored to her.

  “You know what my favorite quotation is?” she asked suddenly. She must be getting drunk, she knew, or she would not have said this, and a certain cool part of her personality protested. I must not quote poetry, she thought, I must stop it; God help us, if I’m not careful, we’ll be singing Yale songs next. But her voice had broken away from her; she could only follow it, satirically, from a great distance. “It’s from Chaucer,” she went on, when she saw that she had his attention. “Criseyde says it, ‘I am myn owene woman, wel at ese.’”

  The man had some difficulty in understanding the Middle English, but when at last he had got it straight, he looked at her with bald admiration.

  “Golly,” he said, “you are, at that!”

  The train woke her the next morning as it jerked into a Wyoming station. “Evanston?” she wondered. It was still dark. The Pullman shade was drawn, and she imagined at first that she was in her own lower berth. She knew that she had been drunk the night before, but reflected with satisfaction that Nothing Had Happened. It would have been terrible if … She moved slightly and touched the man’s body.

  She did not scream, but only jerked away in a single spasmodic movement of rejection. This can’t be, she thought angrily, it can’t be. She shut her eyes tight. When I open them again, she said, he will be gone. I can’t face it, she thought, holding herself rigid; the best thing to do is to go back to sleep. For a few minutes she actually dozed and dreamed she was back in Lower Seven with the sheets feeling extraordinarily crisp and clean and the curtains hanging protectively about her. But in the dream her pillow shook under her as the porter poked it to call her for breakfast, and she woke again and knew that the man was still beside her and had moved in his sleep. The train was pulling out of the station. If it had not been so early, outside on the platform there would have been tall men in cowboy hats. Maybe, she thought, I passed out and he put me to bed. But the body next to her was naked, and horror rippled over her again as she realized by the coarseness of the sheets touching her that she was naked too. Oh my God, she said, get me out of this and I will do anything you want.

  Waves of shame began to run through her, like savage internal blushes, as fragments of the night before presented themselves for inspection. They had sung songs, all right, she remembered, and there had been some question of disturbing the other passengers, and so the door had been shut. After that the man had come around to her side of the table and kissed her rather greedily. She had fought him off for a long time, but at length her will had softened. She had felt tired and kind, and thought, why not? Then there had been something peculiar about the love-making itself—but she could not recall what it was. She had tried to keep aloof from it, to be present in body but not in spirit. Somehow that had not worked out and she had been dragged in and humiliated. There was some comfort in this vagueness, but recollection quickly stabbed her again. There were (oh, holy Virgin!) four-letter words that she had been forced to repeat, and, at the climax, a rain of blows on her buttocks that must surely (dear God!) have left bruises. She must be careful not to let her aunt see her without any clothes on, she told herself, and remembered how once she had visualized sins as black marks on the white soul. This si
n, at least, no one would see. But all at once she became aware of the significance of the sheets. The bed had been made up. And that meant that the Pullman porter…. She closed her eyes, exhausted, unable to finish the thought. The Vincent Sheean man, the New Deal lady, the waiter, the porter seemed to press in on her, a crowd of jeering material witnesses. If only nobody could know….

  But perhaps it was not too late. She had a sudden vision of herself in a black dress, her face scrubbed and powdered, her hair neatly combed, sitting standoffishly in her seat, watching Utah and Nevada go by and reading her publisher’s copy of a new avant-garde novel. It could be done. If she could get back before the first call for breakfast, she might be able to carry it off. There would be the porter, of course, but he would not dare gossip to passengers. Softly, she climbed out of the berth and began to look for her clothes. In the darkness, she discovered her slip and dress neatly hung by the wash basin—the man must have put them there, and it was fortunate, at least, that he was such a shipshape character, for the dress would not be rumpled. On the floor she collected her stockings and a pair of white crepe-de-chine pants, many times mended, with a button off and a little brass pin in its place. Feeling herself blush for the pin, she sat down on the floor and pulled her stockings on. One garter was missing. She put on the rest of her clothes, and then began to look for the garter, but though she groped her way over every inch of the compartment, she could not find it. She sank to the floor again with one stocking hanging loosely down, buried her head in her arms and cried. She saw herself locked in an intolerable but ludicrous dilemma: it was impossible to face the rest of the train with one stocking hanging down; but it was also impossible to wait for the man to wake up and enlist him in retrieving the garter; it was impossible to send the porter for it later in the morning, and more impossible to call for it in person. But as the comic nature of the problem grew plain to her, her head cleared. With a final sob she stripped off her stockings and stuffed them into her purse. She stepped barefooted into her shoes, and was fumbling in her purse for a comb when the man turned over and groaned.