On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  James, who must have known about Kevin and her—the Village always knows—has never spoken of him since the party. But shortly after several weekends of finding his sister disheveled, deadfaced and cooking round the clock—“Springerle cookies,” his younger and favorite nephew Royal tells him, “we must have ten thousand of ’em”—James, clever James, dear pimp and brother, gives, not a party but a dinner for sixteen people and their illsorted mates. Not one couple of whom appears to be interested in one another. How has he managed it? With the exception of one man farther down the table who seems to be unattached—the tall, rangy dark one who James has cannily not placed next to her—all the men are connected with the public health.

  After coffee, she walked out on the terrace James had made of the roof—after re-annexing the top-floor for his own use, once the playwright and James’s own wife were gone. The room behind it, where the rest are still having liqueurs, had been the house’s ballroom once. Her nostalgia doesn’t extend that far back.

  Her right-hand dinner partner had been speaking of an eye-surgeon who was diagnosing myasthenia gravis from the degree of elasticity in the lid. “Your own are fine,” he’d said, testing them. Not his field, of course. He himself is just returned from a village in South India where the incidence of multiple-breasted women is remarkable. “Four?” she cries. “Sometimes only three,” he says. Giggling when she sparks “You needn’t test me for that.”

  Down the long table which James has had made in Kyoto and shipped home in parts, packed lotus-style, which her own children have helped to put together, the conversation, itself reassembled from so many parts of the world—and of humans—has an eely life of its own, superior to the men who are making it. Composed as their talk is of bread-for-villages and birth-control-for-the-planet, it dignifies their civil-service lips and country-squire cheeks; as they spoke she saw chains of the human colon girdling the globe, foetal armies clashing for stance on it. While down the table, wives chime with assents learned from their husbands, in whose fields, socially speaking, they too specialize. One new young wife, until recently head nurse of a maternity ward, on introduction first-names every woman there, as if they are all due her in hospital the next morning. But others like Lexie are silent, aware now that parties are their only events really, as well as their second-hand way of touching the world professionally. So that their lives, like hers, stalk these parties, and when arrived at them, sit sexually dreaming.

  She leans out on James’s artfully safe fence, which the children, encouraged by her, have helped to paint. She wants the children to have the taint of city air. Even though it hadn’t done for her what it might have, it rings familial still, with the vying parental voices. And for all the dirt, with certain baby-clean hopes. Like the white smoke that sometimes twists from these dark stacks. From the head of his table, James had stared at her in his concentrated way, as if she were a starving village, perhaps. Or that suffering one in whose pipes the visiting epidemiologist from the UN—her lefthand neighbor—had found arsenic.

  A woman leaning on a parapet has an animal grace the woman herself can feel. She knows she has a forty-ish beauty now, summonable at parties, or suddenly arriving on her at a corner curbstone, as a truckdriver whoops to it. From Kevin, though he hadn’t strictly said, she knows its peculiar ingredient. The tigerish attraction, intent from ambush, of the incomplete. She’s still wearing the blue-black dress.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  Smart, this one must be. He senses she’s doing something.

  “I was streetwalking.”

  “No, no,” he says. “That’s not for you. At least—may I telephone?”

  Their connection, except when in the bed his first call leads to, has been entirely that way; it’s for him that she’d had the third telephone installed. Through all their passages in bed, he remains exactly as seen that first evening. Day Folger, Texan, veteran of women but still single and five years younger than she—in age only—with a fine, mashed-ugly face that reminds one of the movie-star whose name one can never remember, and Indian hair. His folks have a ranch near the King ranch, though not as large; his mother was born on a slice of what was once the Shirley plantation in Virginia—white skin assumable. All his life has been large in gesture, free with money and desperately small in the drama he’s hoped from all that output. Only the money has fruited, cleverly on and on. Since the age of nineteen he’s backed plays, movies and now records; in his past with women, in and among the many actresses, painters and writers, are a dead rockstar, a live trapeze-artist, a female toreador and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography. For two early years he himself had been an actor, doing so badly that the doomedly shrewder side of himself had caught up with him. Technically he’s a “producer,” a name he loathes. When challenged however, he stammers it. What he yearns toward, and rains presents on, are those persons—to him enchanted in present heaven—who spin the web of art from their very selves. Since he himself is as male as any drake, such men as encountered he merely options or supports with monthly remittances, meanwhile participating in their stagings on film, disc or in print—and there he has excellent taste. The women he penetrates, probing for the living-doll artiste as for the marble tip of some sphinxly clitoris.

  And with the women—by what she can gather from the arsenal of photos at his flat, his artistic taste has been poor, either bedazzled by their looks, or misguided by other ambience. Apparently he has a penchant for the second-rate—particularly for those who can theatricalize it. Probably the prizewinner’s been his best so far, artistically, but from her photo, signed in heavy flourish, not nearly stylish enough for the crowd of high-living artists he hangs out with. Real ones, here. Who never eat a meal at home. During her own short tenure, she’s met them in those haunts that are Day’s also; playwrights at Maude’s and Elaine’s, actors at Sardi’s or Pearl’s, or at the Blue Ribbon, just before it closed. And the Lion’s Head once, for a trio of Dixieland Jazzers in their eighties—almost as late-in-the-day for her to be there, she thinks, as for them. Lunch, for her, is the most powerful draw erotically. To stroll at noon toward a lover, or with him after, with all its side-implications of secrecy, luxe and time-stop, is European—and a flight. Lunch is also where Day meets the people he’s really going to do something with, and where she feels strangely comfortable, almost as if she’s not always going to be an amateur. It piques him to have one of his playwrights find out that she reads, and to hear a casting-director say “Why this girl has wit!”—although she’s often innocent of her own humor and can never repeat or reuse it knowingly.

  Day knows about her poems—since he’ll venerate them without reading them. Also—so delicately entrepreneur is he even at lovemaking’s height—he’s found out about the journal she once kept, and intends to keep again. Though in an access of shame, she bars him from ever mentioning it.

  “God, I never saw a girl blush from the hips before. You should be proud.” And maybe she is, of the blush.

  That evening she has a ride with him in a scenarist’s Rolls. And at Michael’s Pub, sits at the left ear—the deaf one—of an earl who plays the harmonica. And for the first time, feeling guilt all over, like a bodystocking woven of an allergy-producing polyester, she stays the night. After that, she does this often, without alibi. Spending the morning-after hunting for marvels of dress, tarty ones, which she hangs in Day’s closet on East 79th Street, and never takes home. Though she expects he must have other women, she never sees a trace of one.

  Day in bed is all confidence, a man-about-town who goes for a woman like a cowboy straight off the range. For their first meeting, she chooses with severe instinct a rustling-rosy underpetticoat, with a bodice like a girl’s in a Western, which makes his eyes glisten—though to the end she judges him unconscious of any role. Their alliance thrives only so long as he keeps thinking she must have some talent he is looking for; when she incautiously finds the strength to deny this, his calls begin to fail. Hers to him become
unevently successful. One Thursday, the wrong part of the week for their assignations, she forces it, walking into the restaurant where he lunches with his partner. He doesn’t recognize her right off; in a grim rush of bourgeois pride she hasn’t dressed for it. He takes her home with him; he’s kind. But the minute they enter his apartment she smells another girl, through his awkwardness. That he can after all be gauche in this way wrings her—a little. She wishes for the rose petticoat, but she too has her sentiment; it’s the one new garment she’d taken back to her village, as the smallest of links between her two lives.

  As they undress, she sees he’s uneasy but, as always, able, not a man who needs champagne or carnal chitchat either; indeed, no sooner had she learned to coarsen her tongue with Kevin, than she’s had to clip it back for this Southerner.

  Just as they rise, facing each other knee to knee on his many experienced pillows—his luxury—the phone rings. With a polite murmur, and yes, lowered lids, he goes into the pantry to answer it. From the bedroom extension-phone, so close under her eye, she turns consciously to the photographs. She likes the bullfighter—who’d gouged him in the pocket and left him—much the best. In this moment, she understands that she too should be gouging him in some way. If, when he comes back, she can say “Yes, you were right: I have a secret volume of poetry here”—pointing meanwhile to her throat or her stomach—he’ll rise to it at once. Setting out on the double for printer, afterward. Or perhaps: “Carnegie Recital Hall, my concert two weeks from now; remember the date. Well of course I haven’t told you, Day. I don’t wear my harp on my sleeve.”

  Instead, when he comes back to the bedroom and begins again, too polite not to, she feels even desire fade before her utter urge to have him know she understands his mechanism—to reveal it to him.

  As he eases her off the bed to her feet, and standing too, places her arms around his hips, she fixed her eye on the organ of his confidence, as it rose under her. “Producer!” she spat forth, saw him stammer in the flesh, and it was over.

  She’s proud of having left behind the clothes.

  This time, in the aftermath, she’s not dulled, but inordinately restless, and ashamed of not having been in love with him. “I am at home, home, home” she says to herself each dusk—“and I need two lives.” Spasmodically she still attends the class, which is now in spring-term. One day, outside the college, she meets Plaut, the instructor, walking with his wife. She sees that his wife’s baby is well on. He waggles a finger at her. “Going to have to give you an Incomplete.”

  Her laugh startles him. “But I’m continuing.”

  All home duties she now performs only adequately, and restraining the cookies; she has heart now neither for excess or neglect—and has the third telephone taken out. But something from those city afternoons-in-bed has been held over. She knows for sure now that sexually she won’t go back again to Ray. Yet she sees to it that her second day in New York now comes only on weekends, when the whole family gets itself together for the Boat Show, or she shops with the two girls. One Saturday, on the way to Olafsdotter’s in the Village to buy them clogs, they pass the door of Kevin’s old flat on Bleecker. Her haunches shift for a moment, and she says to the girls “Hold my hands.” On another, walking toward the Frick, she says suddenly to Ray “Let’s walk up a few more, why don’t we?” and to the two boys “We’ll meet you there”—and so doing, she and Ray walk down Folger’s block. Not on the chance of meeting him; he’s never in town on weekends. “Why’d you do that?” Ray says. “Oh I dunno,” she says, indifferently. Why’s he stopped seeing Betsy? But at the Frick, she hesitates. The two boys must have gone in. Her heart skirls—at the discreet way the children are managing. Not confiding, she’d bet, even among themselves. “I think … it was to learn more about you and me, Ray.” She stands in the street outside the quiet entry. A street—how appropriate. “Ray. Do’ya think—we are almost at the end of it?” He doesn’t answer. Even as doctor, he’s a man to let things ride; some patients leave him for the highroad to surgery, others praise him for letting nature take its course.

  Driving home at his side, the car silent except for the boys, she sees how, after twenty years, he and she are matched—neither interlocked at the head or heels, nor in handfast, but like certain notched wheels which fit each other’s serrations: what one or the other cannot confront, the other continues with.

  So pass four months. What does Ray do in his study while she watches her house-of-cloud—though no longer from her nightly ledge? Twice that pile of tumulus downriver has opened a window to her however briefly; one day, there may be a door. At four in the afternoon now, never at nine—though she can’t say why these changes, she’s not really depressed—she still walks the cat.

  One day, a Saturday too warm for town, when Ray is off on a trip and the kids are all at picnic, just as the cat and she are returning, the cat leading, she sees a long black coupe drawn up at the door. Even before she recognizes the Jag which for so many evenings—no, so few really—had needled her back and forth between those restaurants, Day Folger gets out, and a girl.

  They’re looking for a house, it appears, and have found themselves in the region.

  He’s hangdog, the girl triumphant; in one of the exquisite revenges men are blind to, or prefer to be, she has led him here. “Bonnie’s from down home.”

  She does adaptations for television, Day says. Her first big one is just coming up.

  She’s pretty in a chalkboned way, but about Day’s age, not a girl. A few months more with Day’s crowd of sharp-eyed dazzlers and she’ll get him to option those upper teeth of hers, and have them crowned. She dresses in the brightly literal way smalltowners do when they begin to make it in New York; down home, Lexie suspects, Bonnie’s not quite Day’s sort, but up here, it won’t show.

  Just now she’s all after-bed slinks and twitches, aimed at Day. From an excess of secrets, she bursts out laughing! “Dyin’ to see the house.”

  Lexie’s breasts feel too big and sloppy in the washed-thin white sweater she’s wearing over old, stretched shepherd’s-check trousers she always means to throw out. Though she’s only a couple of inches above average height, she walks after them into her house feeling herself its shambly giantess.

  Day holds back politely. Bonnie stalks through as if she’s buying the place. Or not buying it.

  Following after them through parlor—too white-and-red against the river?—library—the best of rooms, dining room, a broad empty swathe at this hour, kitchen (in which the enormous farmhouse plank of a nineteenth-century counter has been kept but its niggling corner sink also), she keeps them from the children’s rooms—for the children’s sake, especially Chessie’s. Watching the house huckster its own views, window-to-window, she’s defensive. Yes, it is majestic; no, poor tower, we never did enough for it. She’ll even defend the suburbs if she can bear to—to Bonnie, clearly one of those girls who’ll adopt the city so fast that its born citizens will have to take a step back.

  From the top of the house there’s a peal of laughter. They’ve found her ledge. That view of the river will stop their breath. She advances, its smiling custodian.

  They’ve just kissed. A couple househunting for the afternoon, for kicks: “Let’s, shall we?” she can hear them saying to the spanking city noon, to the subtle outer noises that lip Day’s shaded bed.

  She folds her arms, touching her elbows as if they are the points of a heart. They aren’t—though she can still see Day’s naked chest advancing over her, jackknifing suddenly to put his black head between her thighs. Takes women longer to wrench themselves free of the details. She knows that already.

  Though Day has turned red.

  He’s getting his artiste. Providentially, one from home; maybe that’s what’s held him back, but he and this girl are the kind of provincials who’ll make born New Yorkers look slow. Meanwhile settling a mite slavishly for the brand-names in life, the best of course. How she, Lexie, knows this, is what makes her not a provincial. H
as nothing to do with these two. Comes from the piers and the streets.

  At the same time, Day’s out of this catfight. A little vanity, yes, but his real dramas are elsewhere: commercial, military. The dramas of women are small ones, containable in rooms. What happens to him with this woman will be submerged, whatever it is—years will pass, before he knows. We drag them down, she thinks. And thinking of Ray—do we keep them up?

  What Bonnie knows for herself is that Day is the enemy. Who must pay.

  Right now, he’s uncomfortable. “Lexie. Is this house for sale?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Why Day Folger. You did give the im-pression.” Quick to the attack, Bonnie addresses Lexie. Not by name of course. Bonnie will leave other women in limbo, if possible. “I do believe I built you up as restless.” To Day. “One of my stoh-ries, dawlin. You know how they come to me, ’bout people. All I do is ketchum. It’s just out of my control.”

  Down the steps they go, not routed. Routing, Bonnie is. Day’s gaze, fast on her as he descends to the car, is holy.

  She runs back up the steps to where Lexie is. Whispers “I do believe—it was those clothes.”

  And trips down again.

  Below, the car is hidden by the high hedge. Only river-road people realize how voices float up here. “It was an expirament, Day honey,” hers says. “Y’all know how I have to expirament.”

  The cloud of dust the couple leaves hanging in the air is unexperimental—exactly the shape and duration for such a car on such a day.

  And such people. All three of us.

  Gaze at the river. It has no sexual health one way or tother.

  Wish for the children, your experiment, to come home and save you, their faces lavender under the beach-streaked hair. Save me—with the work I will do for them. Ray is unwishable.