She backed away from me into the center of that huge, high room, and standing there in a plain black dress, she looked small and lonely. My heart stirred for her.
“What is it, Grant?” she asked with a kind of meek quietness. “Is anything wrong?”
“No, not really, I think,” I said.
“But possibly?”
“Well, just possibly.” I took a few steps toward her.
“What is it?”
I stopped, charged with a sense of our being alone together, and standing so near her now, with the possibility of everything that I thought I wanted so near, I lost my resolution for a moment. I had in my plan two simple steps. I hoped that I would not have to take the second, which might mean losing her entirely, but I had been determined to, if she made it necessary. Now, gone all soft in my stomach and my legs with a mingling of fear and desire, I could hardly bring myself to take the first.
She moved suddenly. The heavy draperies at the long windows stood open, and a bleak gray light crept, as it were, into the room, where only a heavily shaded lamp or two brightened the late winter gloom. Milly crossed her arms over her breasts, as though this light were cold, and then walked to a window and stood looking out. I followed her and, standing behind her, looked out, too. The Park was desolate from that high view: trees bare of leaves still, rocks jutting cruelly out of soiled fringes of half-melted snow, water still leaden-colored and half-frozen.
“In another month …” she began.
That helped me. “Let it be our month,” I said impulsively, and without allowing her to turn to me, I put my arms around her and my face in her hair, and simply held her as gently as I could. She did not stir, but stood stiffly in my arms as if waiting.
I lowered my head until my mouth was on her cheek. Then she turned in my arms and, her hands pressed against my shoulders and her head bent down, lips twisted and brows intently furrowed, she pushed away from me. My arms tightened. It was her quietness that surprised me, alarmed me and made me hope, too, as for a moment we struggled against each other. Then her resistance stopped, and she fell against my chest. I held her gently again.
“Darling, I’m not going to lose you again. I did once—a stupid brute of a kid. This is different. This is all that matters to me now.”
She would not look at me. She said, “This is impossible,” and strained away from me again.
I held her firmly, pulling her close, forced her face up, saw how her eyes were clenched shut, her lips pressed tightly together, and yet I kissed her. It was no kiss, that meeting of my mouth and her cold, hard mouth—no kiss at all, and it shamed me. I let her go abruptly. She stood still for a moment, and when she looked at me, her face was white and shaken, and she was not angry, but dismayed. “You see? Nothing. Impossible!” and perhaps because her voice trembled, she shook her head impatiently. I saw how small strands of that closely combed blond hair had detached themselves and stood apart.
I turned away from her and from the window, and looked into the gloomy room. “Do you dislike me?”
“Grant!”
“Are you afraid?”
“Not that either.”
“Well?”
“It’s just impossible—”
“If you would permit yourself—”
“One doesn’t, in such a thing, permit or not permit! Good God, Grant—”
“I tell you,” I cried out, almost wheeling, “I won’t lose you! Not again. I won’t let you—not.”
She bowed her head, put her hands together at her waist, and laughed briefly, without either mirth or malice.
“Why are you laughing?”
“This is bitter,” she said, and looked up at me for the first time with a plea, as if I could help her, or would help the situation. I stared back at her in the only way I could, in a kind of sullenness of desire, and we stood for a long time in a static transfixion, as the gray light gathered darkness.
Then she sighed sharply and began to walk about the room, pulling at the chains of lamps, pushing at switches. Dim details of carved wood, embroidery, gilt frames, and painted canvas leapt out of the gloom into full objects, until we stood in light. She found a leather box of cigarettes and came to me, holding it open, and when I only stared at her, she walked on. She settled down in the corner of a large sofa, her knees drawn up under her, and said, “Come and sit down.”
I felt heavy and inert, and it required a kind of effort to walk to the place where she sat. Heavily, I sat beside her, and she leaned toward me and put eager hands on my forearm. Now her face was positively alight with happiness, glowing with it, as her hair glowed golden under the lamplight, as her moist, parted lips gleamed in it. Maddening! And she said, “I can’t lose you either, darling. I couldn’t bear it. Really. And why should we lose each other, even talk of it? Hasn’t it been a pleasure, these past two months, being together in the way that we first were?”
“It’s not enough,” I said.
“It’s everything. It’s what we can have!”
“Not enough for me,” I said. “It’s only painful.”
“It’s what we can have. It’s everything. It’s friendship. It’s what we’ve always had.”
“Always?”
“Should always have had.”
I hesitated. Then I said, “It’s perverse.”
Her hands drew sharply away from my arm, where her fingers had tightened. Her face grew sad slowly, almost as if light faded in it, and when she spoke, it was no longer with enthusiasm, but very quietly. “No,” she said. “What you want—that, for us, would be perverse.”
After a moment, I asked, “Aren’t you a woman?”
Almost easily she returned her answer. “I think so, Grant.”
“But are you? If you are—”
“Haven’t I made a woman’s choice?”
“Have you?”
“Certainly!” That she said sharply, with an edge of anger.
“I wonder.”
She stood up. “Why can’t you allow it? As you would for another woman who is committed?”
I stood up, too, and seized her arms. “Because I love you until I’m half sick, and I don’t think it would have happened to me if for a moment I felt that you already had love, or knew what it is. Committed! Why can’t you say married?”
“Ah!” she said on a long, despairing breath, and looking down on my hands where they gripped her arms, she said, “You’re hurting me.”
I let her go.
“You’re arrogant,” she said quietly.
“No, no.” I threw out my hands. “It’s not that at all. Please don’t say that, or think it. Listen, before you, in this, really, I’m—I’m just crawling.”
“Don’t do that either. Can’t you just be easy? Can’t you just come here, as you have, and be with us? It’s been wonderful. More than I could have asked for. Because I thought we had lost you. Forever. And our meeting again, it’s been, well, just pure bounty. Isn’t that all we can ask? And can’t it be enough? Can’t you just be—well, equal?”
Equal! It shook alive some echo of anger down sealed corridors of mind, and I said quickly, “No. It’s too painful, and too pointless. I’ll have to get out.”
“What does that mean?”
“Mean? Get out? It means leave you with Dan and Freddie.” I turned and started across the room to the carved doors.
“Grant!” she called after me. I hesitated and looked back at her. Across the room, I could see her face shining with tears. Once again she looked small and forlorn, really pitiable.
“Yes?”
“You’ll come back soon, won’t you, Grant?”
It was the moment of the second step. I took it. “You know when, Milly,” I said evenly, and I turned, and kept on going, out, and down.
For a week nothing at all happened and I began to see myself as I imagined that she was seeing me: arrogant, indeed, and less and worse—an impertinent ass who felt that he could walk into any life and order it to his will, who did not hes
itate after an absence of a decade to thrust himself into a situation and declare that this must be altered, and that, and in these considerably drastic ways. And yet, that picture was entirely false to my feelings. It was not, I assured myself, the picture that her own responses had communicated to me on that afternoon when we were alone together. Certainly it was not my picture of myself. Obsessed as I was with need of her (and this need became almost intolerable as the days passed, and I did not see her), groveling under the weight of yearning to have her truly present in my life, I was equally certain that her life demanded me, or at least some other man than either friend Freddie or her husband Dan, in hers. This was the extent of my egotism: not arrogance, I assured myself, not even only desire, but the whole thing, love, which wishes equally to give and to take, and knows no difference between them, does both at once, is both, is one.
And is everything, usurps everything. Fulfilled, it makes everything else go, gives everything else its motive, its point and meaning; unfulfilled, corrupts everything, eats like an acid through the most closely woven cloth of habit and of work. So I said to myself, not only in order to stave off the uncomfortable alternative which might in fact be Milly’s view of me, but also in order to hold on to at least some remnants of effectiveness and order in my job, on which I also depended. It was not easy to persist in this persuasion, and before a week had passed, I was almost ready to go back to Milly uninvited on her terms. Then one day Dan telephoned.
He said that he was calling for Milly, who wanted me to come for dinner two evenings later and to a Landowska concert afterward. I said, after a struggle, that I was working on a special assignment that demanded my evenings. He said that he was sorry and that I shouldn’t stay away much longer. I told him that just then I could not help it, and put down the telephone with the fugal strains of Scarlatti in my ears, and a bitter memory of her loveliness on that first night that I had seen her again, after the long lapse of years.
In three more days Milly telephoned. She hoped that I could meet them all for lunch next day.
“I can’t,” I told her, as angry as I was relieved.
“We’ve missed you.”
“I’ve more than missed you.”
“Are you very busy?”
“No, and one always has lunch somewhere.”
There was a silence. I waited. Not even her breath came over the wire, and at last I said, “Milly?”
“Yes?”
“Oh, I thought you’d gone.”
Another pause, and then she said, “Will you have lunch with me?”
“Of course.”
The rest was hurried and brief. The St. Regis. At one o’clock. Good-by. And next day we met among the white columns and the mahogany and the bright green palms. Milly, in a dark blue suit, with a small hat that seemed to be all veiling, and small brown furs at her neck, was waiting for me in a high, thronelike chair from which she waved when I entered, and then came toward me through the little crowd of lingering people. “Hello, darling. How nice!” She took my arm and pressed it with gentle intimacy.
“Thank you for coming,” I said, and tried to say it in such a way that she would know that I meant much more than I said. To the innuendo of my tone she was impervious, smiling brightly, clinging to my arm, and saying only, “Darling, you look tired, you’ve been working too hard.”
We were going down steps toward the dining room. I said, “No. I haven’t been working at all, I’m afraid.”
“But you told Dan—”
“You believed that?”
She hesitated. “It was a lovely concert. I’m sorry you didn’t come.”
“You couldn’t have expected me to.”
She hesitated again before she said, “Let’s have a pleasant lunch, Grant, darling.”
“Darling!” I burst out.
“Yes?”
“That word! And pleasant, unpleasant, lovely, unlovely! Good God, isn’t this the point when our words are going to begin to mean something? Or why did you come?” I said it all as bitterly as I could, as I felt it. Milly glanced at me with only a little surprise before the expectant look in her face dimmed out and she sagged perceptibly on my arm. She said nothing.
“For two, sir?”
“Please.”
It was luncheon of a sort with which I was no longer familiar. We sat side by side on an upholstered banquette and sipped, at Milly’s suggestion, a sherry most delicately dry. The refined circumstances and Milly’s exquisite presence gave me the feeling once more of being outside, a stranger, and as my only possible approach to her, I clung to the blunt, hard tone that I had taken in the corridor outside the dining room.
“This sherry—what’s it called?”
She smiled and told me the name.
“This room, those people out there, you—have you any idea how expensive you look?”
“Not only, I hope, expensive.”
“No, damn it, of course not. I wish that it were only expensive.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“Oh yes, you do. You’re so beautiful that I can’t look at you without pain, but I have to look over an impossible distance.” There was less than a foot between us, and I could see her hands tremble.
Without turning to me, she said, “You make that distance. I don’t feel it. For me, it’s as it always has been. I feel very close to you. If you don’t, it’s your doing.”
“No. It’s the doing of a couple of different worlds.”
“Worlds?”
“I have some idea of the one you live in, but I don’t think you have the remotest idea of mine.”
“We’ve tried to get you to talk about your work, Grant.”
I did not know how far to trust her naïveté, and only said, “We!”
“Yes. We’re all fascinated, but it’s you who hold back.”
I laughed briefly, watched a waiter’s hands set down silver serving dishes before us and lift covers, and when they had finished, I said, “The difference is not one that talk will bridge. And it’s between you and me only.”
She looked at me with eyes suddenly troubled. “But Grant, you don’t mean, do you—?”
“What?”
“You do want our friendship, don’t you? Our friendship—Dan’s, and Freddie’s, too?”
“Yes, yes, of course. That, too. But first, if there’s to be anything at all, there is us, alone.”
She looked down at her plate and shoved at a piece of parsley with her fork. Then she took some food. I ate, too. We sat in silence. At last she put down her fork and looked at me. “And afterward?” she asked.
“Afterward?”
“After we’ve had—this.”
“This?” I pressed.
“This that you want.”
I covered her hand on the table’s edge with mine. “I see no afterward,” I told her.
“But there must be. And what will it be like? You might say you see no future. Such a thing can’t have a future, can it? We’ll never, in lamplight, descant upon the themes of art and song. Or anything. No future. But an afterward—yes. And what will it be? That’s what I have to know.”
In that agitated speech, she made the only literary allusion I was ever to hear from her, and it gave me courage. If now she could express her dilemma through a lyric, she was not, I thought, as agitated as she seemed. I said, “How can you know? I love you. That’s what I know. Twenty-four hours a day. And I can’t just live around you in an aimless daze.”
“I love you, too,” she said.
“But you can’t trust me.”
“Trust you to what?”
“To make you happy.” I pressed her hand tightly, and she looked at me.
“How can I know?” she asked. “I love them, too. Dan and Freddie. I love all of you.”
“All in the same way? You love Dan as you love Freddie?”
“No, of course not.”
“Or me, as you love Dan?”
“No.”
And then my real
question: “Or Freddie, as you do me?”
She hesitated and at last said, “Well—no.”
“Well, then,” I said quickly, “have us all, but have each of us in the way that you can.”
“But three? And one of them you?”
“Surely you don’t expect me to be Freddie!”
“I’m afraid.”
“I asked you that. You said that you were not afraid. But I know that you are. And in a deeper way than you know. But you needn’t be, if you’ll let me—if you’ll admit me as a man, in my own right, and once find the courage to be your whole self, a woman.”
She answered humbly. “I want you with us, I don’t want to lose you.”
I lifted her taut hand and kissed her wrist, and the hand grew limp.
“The waiter,” she said, lowering her arm. I clung to her hand on the seat between us. “I’d like coffee, please,” she said. “And a brandy.” And then presently, detaching her hand from mine, “Different worlds. How are they different? What is my world?”
“Isn’t it like this?” I asked, turning the brandy snifter before me in my hands. “Not quite a bell jar, but nearly? Lovely and shining and self-contained, made to concentrate essences, and through this small opening admitting very little from outside?”
“We have, of course, our obligation to Dan,” she said.
“Ah, yes,” I answered. “That. But I only want to persuade you that you have another to yourself, as I have to myself.”
“And your world, Grant? How is it so different?”
“It involves people, many people, not just a few who can buy pictures, many people, and the way people live together, what people need to live at all.”
“It’s more humane than mine, you’re saying?”
“Just more human, because it includes more. It’s a public world; yours is private. Being public, mine values ideas; yours values things. Yours is a world of sensation and nuance; mine of fairly rough struggle, passions. Forgive my pomposity.”
“You make it all sound very clear cut,” she said, looking down in her bag, hunting through it. “Shall we go?” And without saying more, she rose, dropped a bill on the salver with the check, and stepped down from the raised banquette. “This lunch is the pleasure of the closed, expensive world,” she murmured, scarcely looking at me, and went out, ahead. I followed her, and it was only when we came into Fifty-fifth Street and she turned to me under the marquee that I saw she was crying.
The Wars of Love Page 9
