Young Mr. Keefe

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “I hope we’ll like her,” Claire said. “Even if she is a Californian.”

  Jimmy extracted a cigarette from a pack and lighted it with the enamelled lighter. Be careful, he remembered, that lighter throws out sparks.

  There was a pause, and then Jimmy said, “You’ve seen this picture of her, haven’t you? I took it in Nassau.” He handed them a photograph in a small leather frame.

  Claire took it and studied it. “I think you’re making her up,” she said. “You don’t really have a wife. This is just a picture of a pretty girl.”

  Jimmy laughed. “She is pretty, isn’t she?” He accepted it as Claire handed it back and looked at it. There she was, in a loose yellow sweater, her camera slung over the handlebars of her bicycle, her short light-brown hair blowing in the wind. She looked distant, fragmentary. She was looking away from him, towards something. What had it been? A sailboat on the horizon, a cloud? The expression on her face was not exactly a smile. It was tense, preoccupied. She eluded him now, as she had eluded him then. “That was on our honeymoon,” he said.

  “Yes, I’ve heard about your honeymoon,” Claire said. “You went everywhere under the sun for months and months.”

  “Six weeks,” he said. “That was all.”

  “Is it all right if Claire and I sleep here to-night?” Blazer asked, pouring himself another drink from the Thermos. “It’s a little late to find a hotel room.”

  Jimmy hesitated. “Well, the accommodations will be a little on the Youth Hostel side,” he said. “The sofa opens out into a double bed—you and Claire can have that. I can take my sleeping-bag into the kitchen and sleep on the floor.”

  “You can put our two sleeping-bags underneath you for a mattress,” Claire said.

  “You don’t need to sleep in the kitchen,” Blazer said. “Just spread out here on the rug. We don’t mind.”

  “Doesn’t give you much privacy, old man.”

  “Privacy, schmivacy.”

  “If you get chilly, you can crawl right in with us,” Claire said. “I’ve always wondered what it would be like to sleep with two men.”

  “Don’t worry—I don’t mind the floor.”

  “Do you talk in your sleep?” Claire asked. “If you talk in your sleep or snore or do anything uncouth like that, you will have to sleep in the kitchen. Blazer does both. With two of you doing it, I couldn’t bear it.”

  “It all seems rather modern and casual, doesn’t it?” Jimmy said.

  The telephone rang. “Oh, God,” he said. “Do you know what that is? It’s Jeep Tanner. I called him in Florida this afternoon. Do we want to talk to Jeep Tanner?”

  “Jeep Tanner!” Claire said. “Do you mean that dreadful football player with the Buick? Let it ring.”

  “All right.”

  “Jeep Tanner would break the spell.”

  “Why in the world were you calling Jeep Tanner?” Blazer asked.

  “This afternoon—I didn’t have anything else to do. It was beginning to look as though you two weren’t coming. I wanted to hear a friendly voice.”

  “You are in a bad way,” Claire said. “Fill my glass with that golden elixir!” She extended her glass to him. He filled it and she put it down carefully on the coffee table. The phone stopped ringing. Claire stretched her arms high over her head and yawned. “Blazer says I’m ugly and fat. Am I? I think I’m rather gorgeous, what do you think?”

  “I think you’re splendid,” Jimmy said.

  In a way, she was, though she was not gorgeous. Her legs were a little too heavy, and her nose was too small. But she had, Jimmy thought, a wonderfully elfin face, and her blonde hair, long and twisted into that strange bright scarf, fell across her back and made her look like a polished urchin, or a little girl who had been left alone for the first time with her mother’s cosmetic tray. She used too much make-up, but somehow got away with it. Her lips were rouged a dark creamy red, and her pale blue eyes were accented with dark mascara and eye shadow. Claire wanted to look worldly. She dreaded looking “Smithish,” as she put it. But under her movie-star patina, her face was round and smooth and snub as a cherub’s.

  “I’m glad that one person agrees with me,” she said.

  “Tell me what you brought for food,” Jimmy said, before he realized that now he, not Jeep Tanner, was breaking a spell.

  Claire let her arms droop. “Everything,” she said sadly. “I brought everything except eggs. I decided eggs would break. I brought bread and butter and jam and corned beef hash and tomato soup. I brought chicken gumbo soup. That’s Blazer’s favourite kind. I brought everything. You’ll see. I even brought my silver knives and forks. Much nicer for a picnic, don’t you think?”

  “Our packs weigh fifty pounds apiece,” Blazer said. “You’ll have to carry all three sleeping-bags to make up for it.”

  “Why don’t you let me carry Claire’s pack?” Jimmy said.

  “He’d never let me live it down,” Claire said. “He doesn’t think girls are worth anything if they can’t do everything a man can.”

  “Do her good,” Blazer said. “Carrying that pack may help her whack off a few pounds.”

  “Hear him?” she said. “He talks to me that way all the time. Do you know what he did the other day? I called him from work the other night to tell him what was in the refrigerator—”

  “Did you say from work?” Jimmy asked.

  “Oh, yes! Didn’t I tell you? As of three days ago, I’m a working wife. It’s terribly exciting. True to Smith tradition, I’m doing case work. I had to do something. I couldn’t spend my entire day admiring the view from Russian Hill! But Blazer called me—or rather I called Blazer—and I said there were some tomatoes and some tuna and so forth. And then, all of a sudden, I heard this peculiar, this unidentifiable—this sound—from the other end of the wire. Well!”

  “Well—what was it?” Jimmy asked.

  “Well, it was—well, I can’t bring myself to say it. It was too terrible a thing.”

  Jimmy laughed. “I’m only slightly confused,” he said.

  “Not an uncommon occurrence when Claire tells a story,” Blazer said. “Not only does the story have no point, in the first place—but when she gets to it, she won’t tell you what the point is.”

  “Isn’t he dreadful? Isn’t he awful?”

  Jimmy laughed again. “He certainly is.”

  They laughed and joked aimlessly, pointlessly, through another cocktail. Claire had learned to do the hula. They had finally gone to the place in the International Settlement. The strip tease had been a disappointment. But the hula! Claire performed it for them: “Lovely hula hands, hands that seem to say, ‘I love you,’ lovely hula hands—” They applauded her. Claire said suddenly, “Jimmy, are we really clever and amusing? Or are we only silly?”

  “Both,” he said. “Clever and silly. It’s a pretty combination.”

  She sat down. “I have a terror of being silly,” she said. “Blazer says I sometimes am. Don’t let us be silly people, Jimmy. Really—the only thing I want to be is young!”

  “You are young.”

  “Jimmy—old sobersides Jimmy. Even when you laugh and smile, I think you’re being very serious, thoughtful, deep inside. You’re the audience to everything; you have that quality. Even when someone says something very silly—as I did, just now, when I said I wanted to be young—you turn to me and nod, very seriously, and say, ‘You are young.’ You’re a funny boy.”

  They decided that it was time for bed. Claire went to the linen closet and took out sheets and pillow-cases. “I hate to say it, Jimmy,” she said, “but you’re a terrible housekeeper. Look at this linen closet. Everything’s stirred in the middle.”

  “Well, as soon as Helen gets back—”

  The three of them, pulling together, separated the sofa bed into its component parts. Jimmy stretched two sleeping-bags on the floor and tested them for softness. “Better than the Statler,” he said. “I don’t usually wear pyjamas, but since you’re company, I’ll p
ut some on.”

  He went into the bathroom, changed into his pyjamas, and when he came out, Blazer was already in bed and Claire was sitting on the edge in neat white boyish pyjamas that looked starched, and stood out all around her. She had pinned her hair on top of her head, and she looked roughly twelve. She stood up and opened the window. They stood there, Jimmy and Claire, in their bare feet, surveying themselves and the disorder they had made of the room, and laughed. They were still laughing when Claire got into bed and Jimmy crawled into the sleeping-bag on the floor. And when they had turned out the lights, and the room was dark, and Claire and Blazer pretended to fight for the covers, they were still laughing softly.

  “If we had a picture of this—” they said.

  “If Mother could see us now—”

  “If Helen should walk in now—”

  “If there were a fire and we all had to jump out the window into a net—”

  “If the police should come—”

  They lived in their laughter, Jimmy thought. They had found a world in which everything, even tragedy, had its humorous side. The Korean War was over. They laughed, because they had missed it; they had been too young. An earthquake in Tehachapi had sent timbers of houses shuddering to the ground. They laughed, because who would want to live in Tehachapi? Claire told of a flood that had threatened Mars Hill, her mother’s house in Connecticut; Mrs. Denison had been without water and electricity for two days. They had had to carry water from the swimming-pool. Wasn’t that funny? Claire had sold some Wrigley stock from her grandfather’s estate to buy their new car. Why Wrigley? Because it had the funniest name …

  Laughing with them, Jimmy tried to live in their laughter too, tried to move into its warm and wonderful comfort. “What if I should crawl in?” he said. “What if I made advances on you, Claire? What would Blazer do? What would you do, Blaze?”

  “Blazer would say, ‘Make a little less noise, please,’ and go back to sleep. Ah, the pleasures of married life! Where have they sped, on what wings—”

  “I can tell you,” Blazer said.

  “Think of to-morrow. Think of Sunday morning on the mountain—when the dawn, in russet mantle clad—”

  “Make a little less noise, please,” Blazer said.

  “Ah, we’re deep,” Claire said. “Aren’t we deep? About as deep as three frying-pans.” They laughed again.

  Jimmy thought: If Helen should walk in now. For several minutes, he thought of what she would say, of what he would say to her. He pictured the little scene, the elaborate explanations, the pyjama-clad introductions. It was a funny thought. But of course she would not walk in now. Or ever. Never no more, he thought, but he clung to that moment.

  They sang, “I’m tying the leaves so they won’t fall down …” But they had forgotten most of the words. Then the room was quiet. A full moon appeared and cast the shadow of the eucalyptus tree in the courtyard across the floor.

  Sleep was tricky for him. It had been so lately, and it was getting no better. He had brief, vivid dreams that were unpleasant only for their vividness and realness. He woke and tried to sleep again, but it was difficult. He knew it would be difficult; he had tried it before. It was as though, shoeless, in pyjamas, you were asked to climb a tree or a mountain, and every false step meant disaster. Indeed, he thought, he was on a mountain now, with nothing to do but look downward, or even upward to where nothing at all lay. Helen was asking too much of him to expect him to survive on these slopes. There were several things he wanted to ask her. “Where are you?” was the first of them. He had written her letters; she had not answered. The second—what was the second thing? He couldn’t think of the second thing; he was going to sleep again.

  He dreamt of Claire and Blazer, and they suddenly were all on their trip, the mountains flattening out in front of their heavy strides. Their hearts were beating audibly in the high air; he could hear three heartbeats. He looked at Blazer and Blazer was a little boy. The little boy he had grown up with at home, in Connecticut, that he had roomed with at prep school and college, with whom he had fought over girls and patched things up later. It was Blazer Gates before he had married Claire Denison, before all of them, by sheer coincidence, had ended up three thousand miles from home. Blazer was smiling at him, saying Jimmy could count on him.

  Then suddenly the dream switched, became frantic, fast. Claire was saying something about soap, that they had forgotten it. “How then shall we be cleansed?” she asked. Then they were sitting at the camp-fire. Then the camp-fire disintegrated. Claire threw her mink coat from her shoulders and sighed. She removed her diamonds. “These rocks made me sweat so!” she said. She was in a car, arguing her way out of a ticket. “I’ve been to the most boring cocktail party, officer, and I suddenly decided I had to get home as fast as possible. That’s why I was speeding. You understand.” Then, for no reason, she was behind a desk, interviewing a charity case. “My wife has left me,” the man explained. “I don’t have enough dough to feed the kids. They’re starving. My mother-in-law insists that I support her. My wife’s lover insists that I support him. My wife’s lover’s mother insists that I support her. My problem is that I can’t support anybody, but everybody expects me to. What should I do?”

  “Well,” Claire was saying, “don’t you think you’re letting this situation get the better of you just a teeny bit? Who sent you to our charitable agency, you dear old soul? I was at a cocktail party the other night and heard a story very similar to yours—all lies, of course—but still it convinces me that your problem is not a unique one.” She was standing up, extending to him an arm that was a-glitter with precious and semi-precious stones. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, “just because I’m rich and you’re not. No. No! Don’t touch my hands, that’s against the rules. Go out and find yourself a highly paid position, move to a respectable neighbourhood, and you’ll be all right.” She buzzed her secretary. “No more charity cases to-day,” she said. “My hang-over is killing me.”

  He woke with a mild start. In half sleep, he was filled with a resentment of Claire, for what she was doing to Blazer. My God, she’s ruining him, he thought wildly. Ruining Blazer, his friend, who was nicknamed for a jaunty jacket that he used to wear with scuffed-up white buck shoes, dirty chino pants, and open-collared shirts. Then, further awake, he realized that it was a dream, and that the room was getting cold. He crawled out of his sleeping-bag, tiptoed across the room, and closed the window quietly. He avoided looking at them, then did. The moonlight through the eucalyptus branches moved across their faces. Claire lay with one arm extended whitely on the pillow. Her hair had tumbled down. Her white pyjamas were tangled about her neck, and she was twisted fantastically in the bedclothes. Blazer lay beside her, breathing softly. They looked very happy. The dream, like all his dreams lately, had no relation to the fact. They were happy. Miserably, he wondered where he had turned wrong, where he had lost touch, how he had missed the thing they seemed to share so perfectly.

  He looked at Claire again. It would not be hard to love her, not hard at all. He went back and lay down again, trying to untangle his thoughts. Claire stirred. “Hmmm?” she said. “You awake? I’m getting cold.”

  “I just closed the window,” he whispered.

  “Blazer,” she said, poking him with her feet, “I’m getting cold.”

  Blazer turned sleepily. “Go to hell,” he grumbled.

  “The perfect marriage!” Claire said.

  They were silent. Presently, Claire got out of bed and went into the bathroom. Jimmy politely pretended to be asleep through the sounds of the plumbing. When she came back, she stood in the centre of the room shivering, hugging her pyjamas around her. “Now I really am cold,” she said unhappily. “Wake up, everybody! I’m cold. Let’s all do something about me being cold.”

  Jimmy sat up. “Here,” he said, “take one of these sleeping-bags.” He pulled one out from underneath him and handed it to her.

  “Thank you.” Standing there, she stepped into it and zi
pped herself in. Then all she could do was hop. She began hopping as though she were in a potato-sack race. She hopped to the bed and fell flat across it. “I’m in the bag,” she said, and giggled.

  And then, after a minute, she said, “Oh, this is marvellous. It’s like being between two slices of warm toast, or two pancakes. Blazer,” she said, “look at me.”

  “Shut up, please,” he said.

  “Are you still awake, Jimmy?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She talked in a husky whisper. “There is one nice thing about being married,” she said. “When you sleep with someone then, you don’t have to worry about touching them. I mean, when you sleep with another girl, you’ve always got it on your mind not to roll over against them, or touch them. For fear they’ll think you’re peculiar or something. I imagine it must be the same with two boys in the same bed, not wanting to touch each other …”

  “A profound observation,” Blazer said. “Go to sleep.”

  “Though I saw two little Air Force cadets one night on a plane,” she said, “and they had literally fallen asleep in each other’s laps. They looked awfully cute and sweet, sleeping there like that. Babes in the wood. I kept wanting to take them both in my arms … the madonna in me …”

  Jimmy laughed softly.

  “Blazer and I—what a silly pair we are! But we have fun. We started this ‘Shut up, please,’ and ‘Quit it, please,’ routine—but it’s just a routine we go through. We tell each other to shut up, please, or to quit it, please, at least seventy-five times a night …”

  “Shut up, please,” Blazer said. “And this time I mean it.”

  But after a moment, Claire went on. “The funniest thing is in the morning, before we get up. We have these funny arguments. Someone says, ‘Shut the window, please,’ and the other says, ‘I shut it yesterday.’ ‘Yes, but I set the alarm …’ ‘Yes, but I made the bed yesterday, and that’s supposed to be your job …’ ‘Yes, but I shut the window two days in a row last week, so it’s your turn.’ And we go on like that. We sometimes get quite mad about it. Isn’t that awful?”