The Company She Keeps

by Mary McCarthy

  She was there, standing beside a fat, middle-aged radical who had his arm around her waist. She was drinking a Scotch and soda and laughing at what the man was saying. The man reached out and tapped Jim on the shoulder as he passed by.

  “Hello,” he said, with a slight German accent. “The speeches are terrible.”

  The girl turned and saw Jim.

  “Now I know,” she said, “why you wanted to pass this up. Can you imagine,” she added to the man, “I thought it was my personal charm.”

  Jim smiled uncomfortably. This Dorothy Parker act rubbed him the wrong way. Especially after what had happened.

  “Would you like to go somewhere and dance?” he said.

  The girl looked inquiringly at her companion.

  “What about it?” she asked.

  “I didn’t invite Leo,” Jim said, trying to make his voice sound light, knowing that he was behaving foolishly, that Leo was a gossip, and that Nancy would probably hear of this.

  “Oh, but I invite him,” said the girl.

  “I don’t dance,” Leo said. “You young bourgeois go along.”

  In the end, Leo went with them. The two men bought the girl gardenias on a street corner, and there was a great deal of joking competition as to whose gardenia was the biggest and most perfect. They went to a French place on the West Side that had a small orchestra and was not too capitalistic. Jim and the girl danced, and Leo sat at the table like a German papa and made Marxist witticisms about them. The girl did not dance so well as Nancy, but she carried herself as if she were the belle of the evening. When it was time to go home, there was more joking about who should be dropped first, but it was finally agreed that Leo’s place was obviously the first stop. As soon as the cab door closed on Leo’s stout figure, Jim kissed the girl again.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “It was better to bring Leo along,” she murmured as if in answer. “I’m an expert conspirator. I know.”

  Jim felt a slight chill run through him.

  “I don’t like conspiracies,” he said.

  “Oh, neither do I,” she said quickly. “But sometimes they’re necessary.”

  Her tone, he thought, was precisely that of an army officer who professes to hate war.

  “This time,” he said, “they won’t be necessary, Margaret.”

  She looked up at him. As they passed a street light, he thought he could see her lips quiver slightly.

  “It’s funny,” she said, “whenever a man starts to tell you he’s going to break with you, he uses your first name, even if he’s never used it before.”

  “I wasn’t …” said Jim.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Yes, you were. Well, I’m going to be nice. I’m going to help you out. I’m going to say all the proper things.” She took a breath and began to recite. “There is no future in this, it can’t lead anywhere, it would only hurt us both, it wouldn’t be any good unless it were serious and under the circumstances it can’t be serious; if we once loved each other, we might not be able to stop, so we had better stop now. Or I could say,” her voice dropped, “if we once loved each other, we would be able to stop, so let’s stop before we find that out.”

  The taxi drew up in front of her apartment, which was on a street with a quaint name, in the Village.

  “Good night,” she said. “Please don’t see me to the door.” She jumped out of the taxi with a kind of exaggerated lightness, just as she had done at the hotel. She ran up the steps and opened the outer door.

  “Where to?” said the driver.

  Jim could still see her in the entryway, searching in her purse for the key.

  “Go on across Seventh Avenue,” he said.

  The next afternoon he took her home from work on the subway. They went up to her apartment, where they made love. After dinner, he had to leave her to go to see Nancy in the hospital. He stopped and bought some flowers on the way.

  It was fortunate, all things considered, that he was called to Washington the following morning. When he got back, Nancy was ready to come home with the baby. Naturally, under the circumstances, there could be no thought of continuing the affair. Miss Sargent, he told himself, was an intelligent girl; she would surely understand … the impossibility, et cetera, better to kill the thing quickly … more painless in the long run … no need to talk about it … why stir up the embers? These serviceable phrases rose readily to his mind; it was as if he had memorized them long ago for just such an occasion. The only difficulty was that he could not imagine looking Miss Sargent in the eye and uttering a single one of them.

  From her demeanor he could make out whether she was suffering. It seemed to him sometimes that she was waiting, waiting with a kind of maddening self-control for the word of explanation, the final phrase with which to write off the affair. But it was quite possible that this notion was purely subjective with him, that it arose from his own sense of owing her an explanation and had no basis in fact. It was possible that she had already written off the affair, that she had never expected anything of him, that he was just a guy she had gone to bed with one afternoon, when she had no other engagement. After all, she had never said she loved him. It was he, he thought with a groan, who had said all those things; she had merely said “I know” in a sweet, wise voice. Recalling his declarations in the taxi that night, he ground his teeth in shame and anger.

  “Why the hell did I do it?” he muttered to himself. He considered what alternatives there had been. If he had not let her run away that night? If he had followed her and taken the key from her hand and opened her door? He could imagine himself climbing the stairs behind her. He could see them coming into her small room and turning to face each other, bulky and absurd in their winter coats. Her face would have had that strange, white look, as if she were going to faint. They would have clung to each other just as they were, and he would have pushed her gently down on the couch. He could not see clearly what would have happened afterwards, when they would have begun to talk again; but it would have been something desperately serious. He would have promised to leave Nancy. Suddenly he felt utterly sure that that was what he would have done; and even now, in his office, his mind turned a somersault of terror at the very idea. It was a premonition of this that had made him, in the taxi, acquiesce in her dismissal of him, accept her formulation of why it could not be. He had ridden home in a mood of mournful exaltation, in which a sense of heroic resignation had mingled with relief and joy, as if he had come out of some terrible catastrophe alive.

  But when he woke up the next morning, this peculiar happiness, half-elegiac, half-prudent, had vanished, and he was on fire with lust. He knew that he had had a narrow escape, but he knew also that he could not leave the thing as it was. He had an implacable conviction that the affair must be finished off somehow, and he had not been at the office half an hour before he had decided that it was absolutely essential to his peace of mind for him to sleep with the girl. He could not read a manuscript or write a letter; he could not listen when anyone spoke to him; later, when he went out to lunch, he could eat nothing but the quartered pickle that lay beside the sandwich he had ordered. There was no longer any question of love or high tragedy; he had given the girl up the night before; and he saw no reason now to change his mind. He was going to give her up, of course, but he must have her first, and indeed it seemed to him that if he did not have her he could not give her up. All his feelings about her had hardened into a physical need which he endured like a pain, believing from moment to moment that he could not stand it any longer. He said to himself that if he could only bear it for a day or two, it would diminish and finally be dissipated altogether; but, though he knew from observation and experience that this was true, he did not believe it, or rather it seemed irrelevant to him, for, like all sufferers, he had lost the sense of time.

  Shortly after lunch, he knew that he had passed the threshold of tolerance, and just as a desperate patient will reach up and deflect the surgeon’s arm, no longer caring wh
at the surgeon or the nurse or the attendants think of him, he leapt up from his desk and strode into the literary editor’s office. “I’ll take you home at five,” he said in a grim voice. Both of the women stared at him. “You sound as if you were going to murder her,” exclaimed the literary editor, but Jim had already turned and was on his way out.

  Immediately, he felt better. His excitement was succeeded by a frozen calm. He was able to go on with his work, able to think about the girl with detachment, able even to feel a premature remorse, as if he had already committed the adultery, and were now doing penance for it. The girl no longer appeared to him so desirable; he could toy with the notion of not sleeping with her; in fact, he nearly persuaded himself that he was going to sleep with her somehow against his inclination and only because he had told her he would take her home. It was as if he had made a contract with her which he would be glad to wriggle out of, but which seemed, alas, binding.

  Riding uptown on the subway beside her, he began to dislike her. If only she would flirt or be demure or pretend that she did not know what was going to happen! Then he could feel free to choose her all over again. But she did not speak, and when he looked into her face, he saw there an expression that was like a tracing made with fine tissue paper of his own feelings, an expression of suffering, of resignation, of stoical endurance. It was as if she were his sister, his twin, his tormented Electra; it was as if they were cursed, both together, with a wretched, unquenchable, sterile lust that “ran in the family.” Once she turned her head and smiled at him disconsolately, but though he felt a touch of pity, he could not smile back; he had lost the ability to make any human gesture toward her.

  In the apartment, he took her twice with a zeal that was somehow both business-like and insane, and then rolled over on his back and sighed deeply, like a man who has completed some disagreeable but salutary task. He no longer wanted her; he knew he would never want her again. As if she, too, knew that it was finished, she got up at once, with an air of apology for being naked in unsuitable circumstances. She picked her clothes off the floor where he had tossed them, and went into the bathroom. When she came out, she was dressed. Without a word, he took his own clothes off the chair and went on into the bathroom.

  Why the hell, he said to himself now, had he not at least taken her to a decent restaurant for dinner and bought her cocktails and a bottle of wine? “I could have taken her to Charles,” he murmured once. “It was right around the corner.” He banged his fist on the desk until it hurt him. Instead, they had gone to a Japanese tearoom, where they had eaten the seventy-five-cent dinner and talked lamely of office politics. He had called for the check before she had quite finished her chocolate sundae.

  Much later, when his career had been achieved, that afternoon assumed for Jim an allegorical significance. Here, surely, had been the turning-point; here the hero had been chastened and nearly laid low; here had been the pit, the mouth of hell, the threat of oblivion, the gleam of redemption. Or, to put it more vaguely, as he did himself, this unfortunate love affair had somehow been “necessary”: he had had to go through it in order to pass on to the next stage of his development. It was like one of those critical episodes in the autobiographies of great businessmen, as ghostwritten for The Saturday Evening Post—the moment of destiny when the future E. W. Sears or Frank Woolworth is fired by his employer for daydreaming or incompetence, and thus awakened to the necessity of carving his own niche, a moment the elderly tycoon reverts to in print with tireless gratitude: “If he had not fired me, I would be a clerk today.” In later years, Jim came to have this same kind of feeling about Miss Sargent, and, once, when he was tight at a party, he tried to tell her about it. “Oh, thank you,” she had exclaimed, widening her eyes. “I’ll have a brass plaque made to hang around my neck, saying, ‘Jim Barnett slept here.’” And he had burst out laughing at once, saying, “Ouch” loudly, because there was no real vanity in him.

  It was a long time, however, before he took this view of the affair, a long time, indeed, before he could think of it without the most excruciating remorse. The odd thing was that this remorse seemed to have no connection with Nancy. He did not feel that he had betrayed Nancy with the girl in the office; he saw it, in fact, the other way around. He could almost believe that with Nancy and the new baby he was enjoying an idyllic and respectable liaison, while Miss Sargent was the neglected wife. He found that he was avoiding her around the office, fearing a showdown in an empty corridor, fearing equally a kiss or a snub. He came in softly, at odd hours, like a married man in a comic strip creeping up the dark stairs with his shoes in his hand. At the same time, he found that he was trying to appease her politically. At editorial conferences, he began to reveal certain ultra-leftist tendencies; he would make long, earnest speeches, stuttering slightly in the Yale style, and then raise his eyes furtively for her approval. But still she gave no sign, and as time passed and she continued to behave with impenetrable self-possession, as they never met in the elevator or the library, he began to desire the showdown as greatly as he had feared it. Now he arranged occasions to be alone with her; and he was startled to discover, after several failures, that she was avoiding him. She came to the office late and left early; the telephone operator reported that she was engaged to a new man. Late that summer she went away, out West somewhere, where she came from; it was understood in the office that she was to get up some articles for the paper and at the same time secure her father’s blessing for her second marriage.

  As soon as she was gone, Jim felt light and happy again, and the other women in the office told him that he was “more like himself.” He threw himself into the job of getting out a special election supplement. This was the sort of work he was well suited to, for he took the election with intense seriousness, regarding his vote as a sum of money which was not to be invested lightly. Unlike the other members of the staff, who were hysterically predisposed in Roosevelt’s favor, Jim could look at the array of candidates with the impartial sobriety of the ideal consumer attempting to choose between different brands of soap. He was not deceived by labels, and he saw at once that Landon was not a tory, Lemke was not a fascist, Browder was not a communist, and Roosevelt was not a socialist. He was sent to interview each of the candidates, and he wrote a series of informal character sketches that astonished everyone with their perspicacity and good humor. In the end, he decided to vote for Roosevelt, though he had an uneasy feeling about Norman Thomas, whom Mr. Wendell, alone on the paper, was supporting. The war in Spain, however, seemed to clinch the matter; in times like these, a protest vote was a luxury, and that was enough to outlaw it in Jim’s eyes.

  He was never sure, afterwards, whether or not it was Miss Sargent’s letter that changed his mind. This was a reply to an election questionnaire the paper had sent out to its contributors; Jim came upon it one afternoon in August. She would vote, she wrote, for the Socialist-Labor candidate, whose name she could not remember—would someone in the office please find out for her? Jim stared at the familiar angular handwriting, and felt himself flush with anger. It must be a joke, he said to himself; it was something she had thought up to annoy the managing editor; in fact she could not even have thought it up for herself; her friend Leo must have egged her on to it. “What a damn silly thing to do!” he exclaimed out loud, and he was tempted to destroy the letter to save the girl’s face. Then suddenly a large sense of chivalry displaced his annoyance: he was determined to protect her from the consequences of her frivolity. He could announce that he was supporting the Socialist-Labor candidate himself, write an article on that tiny, fierce, incorruptible sect. Something might be done about De Leon and the American socialist movement. But almost immediately he realized that the idea was too outlandish; he could not bring himself to cut so fantastic a figure. Why, for God’s sake, couldn’t she vote for Thomas, he muttered, and then it came to him as a happy thought that he could vote for Thomas: in some indefinable way this would cover her, make a bridge between her and the rest of the
staff.

  A fine exhilaration quickly took possession of him, and he perceived that he had wanted to vote for Thomas all along. The Roosevelt bandwagon had been far too comfortable—that fact alone should have been a warning to him. He could predict for himself a long talk with Nancy and a short wrangle with the managing editor, but already he could see the article that would appear in next week’s issue, “Why I Think I’ll Vote for Thomas,” by James Barnett. It would be an honest, dogged, tentative, puzzled article that would invite the reader into the author’s mind, apologize for the furniture, and beg him to make himself quite at home. In the end, the reader might not be persuaded, but he would be able to leave with the assurance that, however he voted, there would be no hard feelings. With each of Jim Barnett’s articles, that, somehow, became the main object. He was like a happy-go-lucky, well-mannered salesman who seems to the prospect delightfully different from other salesmen—as, indeed, he is, since in his eagerness to please he loses sight of his purpose and sells nothing but himself. The born political pamphleteer, like the born salesman, is usually a slightly obnoxious person. Inescapably, Jim had noticed that the two qualities often went together, but it did not appear to him in the light of a general law, but rather as an unhappy accident, a temporary disagreeable state of things which could, with patience, be remedied. And, for a long time, he considered himself the exception which disproved the rule. When it came to him at last that he was not exceptional but irrelevant, when he was, so to speak, ruled out as immaterial, having no bearing, incompetent in the legal sense, the shock was terrific.

  It was the Moscow trials that made him know, for the first time, that he did not really “belong.” Miss Sargent came into his office one day in the fall with a paper for him to sign. (She was back from the Coast and—mysteriously—no longer engaged to be married.) Clearly, the document in her hand was of deep significance for her, and as Jim read it over, his heart swelled with magnanimity, for he saw that he was going to be able to grant her the first request she had ever made of him, and grant it easily, largely, without a second thought, like a millionaire signing a check for a sister of Charity. The statement demanded a hearing for Leon Trotsky, who had been accused in the trials in Moscow of numberless crimes against the Soviet state. It demanded, also, what it called (rather pompously, he thought) the right of asylum for him. Jim had never believed for a moment that Trotsky was guilty of the charges, and this disbelief remained to the bitter end profound and unshakable. Other people wavered, were frightened or coaxed or bribed to resign from the Trotsky Committee; Trotskyites of long standing would wake sweating in the night to ask, “What if Stalin were right?” but Jim was serene and jocular through it all, and the strength of his skepticism came, not from a knowledge of the evidence, nor a sense of Trotsky’s integrity, nor an historical view of the Soviet Union, but simply from a deficiency of imagination. Jim did not believe that Trotsky could have plotted to murder Stalin, or to give the Ukraine to Hitler, because he could not imagine himself or anybody he knew behaving in such a melodramatic and improbable manner. People did not act like that; it was all like a bad spy picture that you hissed and booed and applauded (ironically) from the gallery of the Hype in New Haven. And indeed the whole Russian scene appeared to Jim at bottom to be the invention of a movie writer; his skepticism included not only the confessions of the defendants but the fact of the defendants’ existence. How could there be such people as Romm and Piatakov and the GPU agent, Holtzman? How indeed could there be such a dark and terrible organization as the GPU? It was all so very unlikely. And, in some strange way, Europe itself was unlikely. Jim always had the greatest difficulty in making himself see that Hitler was real, and one reason he had never subscribed to the Popular Front was that whenever he tried to conjure up the menace of fascism, somewhere deep down inside him a Yale undergraduate snickered.