The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  She let him get off the train, still talking happily, pressed his hand warmly but did not kiss him.

  It was three weeks before he came to see her in her New York apartment, and then, she could tell, he was convalescent. He had become more critical of her and more self-assured. Her one and a half rooms in Greenwich Village gave him claustrophobia, he declared, and when she pointed out to him that the apartment was charming, he stated flatly that it was not the kind of place he liked, nor the kind of place she ought to be living in. He was more the businessman and less the suitor, and though he continued to ask her to marry him, she felt that the request was somewhat formal; it was only when he tried to make love to her that his real, hopeless, humble ardor showed itself once more. She fought him off, though she had an inclination to yield, if only to re-establish her ascendancy over him. They went to the theater two nights, and danced, and drank champagne, and the third morning he phoned her from his hotel that he had a stomach attack and would have to go home to Cleveland with a doctor.

  More than a month went by before she saw him again. This time he refused to come to her apartment, but insisted that she meet him at his suite in the Ambassador. They passed a moderate evening: the man contented himself with dining at Longchamps. He bought her a large Brie cheese at the Voisin down the street, and told her an anti-New-Deal joke. Just below the surface of his genial manner, there was an hostility that hurt her. She found that she was extending herself to please him. All her gestures grew over-feminine and demonstrative; the lift of her eyebrows was a shade too arch: like a passée belle, she was overplaying herself. I must let go, she told herself; the train is pulling out; if I hang on, I’ll be dragged along at its wheels. She made him take her home early.

  A little later she received a duck he had shot in Virginia. She did not know how to cook it and it stayed in her icebox so long that the neighbors complained of the smell.

  When she got a letter from him that had been dictated to his stenographer, she knew that his splurge was over. After that, she saw him once—for cocktails. He ordered double Martinis and got a little drunk. Then his friendliness revived briefly, and he begged her with tears in his eyes to “forget all this red nonsense and remember that you’re just your father’s little girl at heart.” Walking home alone, trying to decide whether to eat in a tearoom or cook herself a chop, she felt flat and sad, but in the end she was glad that she had never told him of her broken engagement.

  When her father died, the man must have read the account in the papers, for she got a telegram that read: SINCEREST CONDOLENCES. YOU HAVE LOST THE BEST FRIEND YOU WILL EVER HAVE. She did not file it away with the other messages, but tore it up carefully and threw it into the wastebasket. It would have been dreadful if anyone had seen it.

  FOUR

  The Genial Host

  WHEN HE TELEPHONED TO ask you to do something he never said baldly, “Can you come to dinner a week from Thursday?” First he let you know who else was going to be there: the Slaters, perhaps, and the Berolzheimers, and John Peterson, the critic. And he could not leave this guest-list to speak for itself, but would annotate it at once with some short character sketches. “Peterson’s a queer fellow,” he would say. “Of course, he’s moody and right now he’s too much interested in politics for his own good, but I hope he’ll get back soon to his book on Montaigne. That’s his real work, and I wish you’d tell him that. You may not like him, of course, but underneath it all John is a marvelous person.” He was deferential, ingratiating, concerned for your pleasure, like a waiter with a tray of French pastry in his hand. This one had custard in it and that one was mocha; the chocolate-covered one had whipped cream, and the little one on the side was just a macaroon. With Pflaumen you were always perfectly safe—you never had to order blind.

  In a way, it was a kindness he did you, putting it like that. Other acquaintances made the opposite error, calling up to demand, “Are you free Thursday?” before disclosing whether they wanted you to picket a movie house, attend a lecture at the New School, buy tickets for a party for Spain, or go and dance at a new night club. Nevertheless, there was something too explicit about Pflaumen’s invitations that made you set down the telephone with a feeling of distaste, made you dress hurriedly, though carefully, for his parties, as if you were going to keep some shameful assignation, made you, stepping out of your door in the new clothes you had bought, look furtively up and down the street before starting for the subway. Pflaumen had taken the risks out of social life, that was the trouble; and you felt that it was wrong to enjoy an evening without having paid for it with some touch of uncertainty, some tiny fear of being bored or out of place. Moreover, behind those bland and humble telephone calls, there was an unpleasant assumption about your character. Plainly Pflaumen must believe that you went out at night not because you liked your friends and wanted to be with them, but because you were anxious to meet new people, celebrities, to enlarge your own rather tacky social circle. No doubt this was at least half true, since with your real friends you seemed to prefer those whose spheres of interest were larger rather than smaller than your own—or at any rate to see more of them, if you could—but in those cases you were able to be sure that you liked them for themselves. With Pflaumen, unfortunately, there was never any question of that. Yet every time you accepted one of his invitations you entered into a conspiracy with him to hide the fact that he was a foolish, dull man whom nobody had much use for. And though some of his friends—the rich ones, perhaps—could feel all right about sitting at his table (after all, they were doing him a favor), you poor ones knew that he had bought your complaisance with his wines and rich food and prominent acquaintances, and you half-hated him before your finger touched his doorbell.

  Standing there in the apartment-house corridor, you listened for voices that would mean that other guests had arrived and you would not be alone with him and the unmentionable secret. If you heard nothing, you hesitated, considered hurrying back downstairs and walking round the block till someone else should get there; but perhaps he had heard the elevator stop, heard your heels click on the stone floor, and was even now on the other side of the door silently waiting to admit you. You rang, and by the length of time it took him to answer, you knew that he had been in his bedroom after all. He came to the door in a maroon-colored smoking jacket, evening trousers, and black patent-leather shoes; he was newly shaved and scrubbed and powdered, and there was a general odor of Mennen’s about him. His whole stocky, carefully exercised body was full of energy: well-directed arrows of delight and welcome shot at you out of his black eyes, and his mouth curved downwards in a strenuous, sickle-shaped smile that gave his face an expression of cruelty.

  How ill-suited he was, you thought, to his role of élégant! What a tireless struggle he must wage against his own physical nature! Looking at him, so black and broad and hairy, you saw that his well-kept person must appear to him like a settler’s plot triumphantly defended against the invading wilderness. No wonder he took such pride in the fit of his coat, the shine of his nails, the whiteness of his sharp, jagged teeth. You saw the lines his body ought to have followed; he had the regular merchant’s build; though he was not yet thirty-five, you looked for the crease in the waistcoat, but it was always just absent. Whenever you really noticed Pflaumen, you became aware of an additional person, a comfortable, cigar-smoking, sentimental family man, a kind of ancestral type on which the man-about-town had been superimposed, so that his finished personality came out as a sort of double exposure that was very disconcerting. If you were in a sympathetic mood, you might think what a pity it was he had not given in to his real self, had not married some nice girl and had some children, and reproduced in modern terms that atmosphere of bay rum, whisky, spilled ashes, poker chips, potted plants, kindness, and solid comfort that must have been his father’s personal climate. How nice he could have been under those circumstances! But if you looked at him hard again, you realized that something else was being held in check, something that did no
t fit at all with this picture of easygoing German-Jewish family life—something primitive and hungry and excessively endowed with animal vitality. Though it was true that his figure had a mercantile cast to it, in other ways he did not look like a German Jew, but like a member of some early barbarous tribe, a Scythian on a Greek vase. In his habits he was soft and self-indulgent; yet you felt there was a furnace of energy burning in him, and you drew back from the blast. It was this energy that had made it possible for him to discipline his body and his manners into patterns so unnatural to him; and, ironically, it was at the same time this energy that undid him as a society man by making him over-demonstrative, over-polite, over-genial, like a comedian who produces an effect of fatigue in his audience by working too hard at putting his gags across.

  He held out his arms to help you with your coat, and what might have been an ordinary service became a tableau of politeness. Your hands shook, missing the buttons, for you felt that the coat was getting too much of the limelight. It would have been kinder to whisk the shabby thing inconspicuously into a closet. If you did not yet know him well, you did not realize that he loved you for that patched fur. It signified that you were the real thing, the poet in a garret, and it also opened up for him charming vistas of What He Could Do For You. He led you into his bedroom, where a new novel by one of his friends and a fine edition or two lay open on a table. A lamp with a pale-amber shade (better for the eyes) was burning beside them, and the cushion in the easy chair by the table was slightly mussed. An impression of leisure and the enjoyment of fine things was readily engendered, though you knew that he could not have been back from his office for more than an hour, and that he must have bathed, shaved, dressed, and arranged the final details during that time. Yet he was not a hypocrite, so undoubtedly he had been reading. Five minutes with a book was as good as an hour to him anyway, for he took literature like wine-tasting: you can get all the flavor in the first sip; further indulgence might only blunt your palate. The room was furnished in a half-monastic style; the bed was narrow, with a monkscloth cover. On the walls were pictures by Kunyoshi and Reginald Marsh, some George Grosz water colors and the reproduction of a detail from a mural by Rivera. You sat down behind his desk, a good piece, a little too heavy for the room, in black walnut; it had a great many fancy paper-weights on it, and a large marble cigarette-lighter, gifts, obviously, from clients in the patent law business. He got out the cocktail shaker, and said, “Let’s try it before the others come.”

  He was disappointed, always, if you pronounced it perfect. He wanted to tinker with it a little, add a dash of Cointreau or Curacao at your suggestion. “You’re absolutely right,” he would agree at once. “I knew it needed something,” and, picking up the shaker, he would hurry out to the bar he had installed in what had once been a linen closet. When he came back the drink would taste exactly the same to you, but Pflaumen’s satisfaction in it would be somehow deepened. The process was familiar to you. You had gone through it with other people, at dress rehearsals, at fittings with a tailor or a dressmaker, in a painter’s studio, till you had become expert at discovering and pointing out some trifling flaw that in no way invalidated the whole, a prop that was out of place, a coat that wrinkled imperceptibly across the shoulders, sleeves that were a quarter of an inch too short on a dress, a foreground that seemed a little crowded. Once you had made your criticism, everybody would be very happy. It was a form of exorcism: some minor or totally imaginary error is noted and corrected, symbolically, as it were, with the idea that all real and major imperfections have thereby been dealt with—as if by casting out some impudent small devil you had routed Beelzebub himself. Perhaps, also, there was a hope of dispersing responsibility; that cocktail was not Pflaumen’s any longer, but yours and his together, as it would never have been if you had merely given it your approval. By arriving early, you had become his hostess, and, all at once, you were sure that Pflaumen had intended this to happen.

  Yet this conviction did not disturb you. On the contrary, you felt slightly uplifted, like one of those “good” bums who voluntarily chops half a cord of wood for the lady of the house to square her for the meal she has just put in front of him. Pflaumen rarely gave you a chance to repay his benevolence, so that generally you were uncomfortable with him, dangerously over-stored, explosive, a living battery of undischarged obligations. There were, for example, those letters of introduction, a great pile of them now, lying unopened, gathering dust on your desk. If only you had not drunk too much that one night when you had first known Pflaumen! If you had not let him see that you were frightened because you had no job and almost no money left! Above all, if you had not cried about it! The next morning he had sent you a sheaf of letters of introduction, and you had been touched and a little amused by the lack of judgment behind them. But you had presented them all. You had interviewed a brassière manufacturer in Ozone Park, a crank lawyer downtown who wanted someone to ghostwrite a book on the sunspot theory of economics, an advertising executive who needed some soap slogans, a hotel man, a brilliantine manufacturer. When it was over you were relieved, for somehow you had never felt so out of step, so unwanted, so drably unemployed, as in these offices Pflaumen had sent you to.

  But the next week there was a new batch of letters, some of them signed by people you had never heard of, friends of Pflaumen’s whom he had got to recommend you for a job; and while you were delivering these, still more letters came in, taking you on errands that grew more and more bizarre. There was a loft in the garment district with AMERICAN RESEARCH printed on the door and inside three large rooms that contained nothing but a filing cabinet and a little man with a cigar—you had never found out what his research consisted of. Then there was a bald man on the seventeenth floor of the St. Moritz hotel who wanted a girl to go round the world with him—he, too, was writing a book, on occultism.

  After that, you had presented no more letters, but they kept coming in as relentlessly as bills, and there was Pflaumen’s voice on the telephone, patient at first, then hurt and puzzled, but always mysteriously complacent. Had you gone to see the man in the Squibb Building? No? Really, it was impossible to understand you. He had been under the impression that you wanted a job. You made explanations at first, halting and shamefaced (after all, you supposed, he was trying to help you). Finally, you had quarreled with him; but your rudeness had only added to your debt, and your air of bravado and Bohemian defiance had quickened his admiration. (Such indifference to the question of survival was impractical, of course, but somehow, he knew, in awfully good taste.) You were for him, you discovered, the perfect object of charity, poor but not bedraggled, independent, stubborn, frivolous, thankless, and proud. He could pity you, deplore you, denounce you, display you, be kind to you, be hurt by you, forgive you. He could, in fact, run through his whole stock of feelings with you. A more grateful beneficiary would have given him no exercise for his masochistic emotions; a more willing one would have left his sadism unsatisfied. He was not going to let you go if he could help it. You stood to him in the relation of Man to God, embraced in an eternal neurotic mystery compounded out of His infinite goodness and your guilt.

  When the others came, you all went into the living room, which was done in honey beige. There were pieces of sculpture by Archipenko and Harold Cash, and the head of a beautiful Egyptian queen, Neferteete. Everybody praised the cocktail, and Pflaumen’s old friends, of whom there were always a pair, complimented him on a new acquisition—a painting, a vase, a lamp—he had made. All Pflaumen’s friends lived on terms of intimacy with his possessions; if someone did not notice a new object, it was as mortifying a slip as a husband’s failure to notice his wife’s new hat. Indeed, Pflaumen, opening the door of his apartment, often wore that look of owlish mystery that says, “What’s new about me?” and the guests, being warned by it, examined the premises sharply till they found the single ornament that was responsible for the host’s elation. This acquisitiveness of Pflaumen’s was, you thought, just another way of ma
king it easy for his friends to appear to like him. He was giving them something they could honestly admire, and if the objects could be viewed as extensions of Pflaumen’s personality, why, then, it followed that his friends admired Pflaumen. It was on such questionable but never questioned syllogisms that his social life was built.

  By the time the maid announced dinner and the party moved down to a refectory table set in the foyer, Pflaumen’s eyes were damp with happiness. Everything was going well. Voices had risen in lively controversy over the new play, the new strike, the new Moscow trials, the new abstract show at the Modern Museum. Nobody was incoherent; nobody made speeches; nobody lost his temper. Sentences were short, and points in the argument clicked like bright billiard balls. Everyone felt witty. Pflaumen made a great bustle of seating the guests, and finally plumped himself down at the head of the table and beamed at them all as if to say, “Isn’t this cozy?” The steak came in, with an orange and sherry sauce, and everyone exclaimed over it. Pflaumen himself kept casting joyous sheep’s eyes up at his maid, commending her for the success of “their” dish. (He had put into circulation a dozen anecdotes designed to prove that this Scotchwoman who worked for him, like the maids of all really smart people, was a Character, full of sweet crotchets, bons mots, and rough devotion. Nobody, however, had seen the slightest sign of this, and tonight, as usual, she paid no attention to her employer, but continued to make her rounds with a stony face.) Peas were served, new ones cooked in the French style in their pods, and then the wine was brought in, a Château Latour Rothschild.