Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “No, my dear,” she said, crossing the room to where I stood. “I was laughing at the way you were sitting there in your overcoat with your hat in your lap like a little boy.”

  “I’m sweating like a horse,” I said, and began unbuttoning my coat. By this time Nancy was standing directly in front of me, and I leaned forward to kiss her. She drew back with an expression of revulsion on her face.

  “Keep your coat on!” she commanded. Then she began giggling and backing away from me. “If you expect me to be seen with you,” she said, “you’ll go back to wherever you’re staying and shave that fuzz off your lip.”

  For three weeks I had been growing my first mustache.

  I had not yet been to the hotel where Jim and I planned to stay. It was a place that Jim knew about, only three or four blocks from where Nancy was living, and I now set out for it on foot, carrying my suitcase. Our car had broken down just after we came up out of the Holland Tunnel. It had been knocking fiercely for the last hour of the trip, and we learned from the garage man with whom we left it that the crankcase was broken. It seems we had burned out a bearing, because we had forgotten to put any oil in the crankcase. I don’t think we realized at the time how lucky we were to find a garage open on Thanksgiving morning and, more than that, one that would have the car ready to run again by the following night.

  After I had shaved, I went back to Nancy’s place. She had gone upstairs again, but this time she did not keep me waiting so long. She came down wearing a small black hat and carrying a chesterfield coat. Back in St. Louis, she had seldom worn a hat when we went out together, and the sight of her in one now made me feel uncomfortable. We sat down together near the front bay window of that depressing room where I had waited so long, and we talked there for an hour, until it was time to meet Jim and Carol for lunch.

  While we talked that morning, Nancy did not tell me that Lon Havemeyer was in town from St. Louis, much less that she had spent all her waking hours with him during the past week. I could not have expected her to tell me at once that she was now engaged to marry him, instead of me, but I did feel afterward that she could have begun at once by telling me that she had been seeing Lon and that he was still in town. It would have kept me from feeling quite so much at sea during the first hours I was with her. Lon was at least seven or eight years older than Nancy, and for five or six years he had been escorting debutantes to parties in St. Louis. His family were of German origin and were as new to society there as members of Nancy’s family were old to it. The Havemeyers were also as rich nowadays as the Gibaults were poor. Just after Nancy graduated from Mary Institute, Lon had begun paying her attentions. They went about together a good deal while I was away at college, but between Nancy and me it had always been a great joke. To us, Lon was the essence of all that we were determined to get away from there at home. I don’t know what he was really like. I had heard an older cousin of Nancy’s say that Lon Havemeyer managed to give the impression of not being dry behind the ears but that the truth was he was “as slick as a newborn babe.” But I never exchanged two sentences with him in my life—not even during the miserable day and a half that I was to tag along with him and Nancy in New York.

  It may be that Nancy had not known that she was in love with Lon or that she was going to marry him until she saw me there, with the fuzz on my upper lip, that morning. Certainly I must have been an awful sight. Even after I had shaved my mustache, I was still the seedy-looking undergraduate in search of “mature experience.” It must have been a frightful embarrassment to her to have to go traipsing about the city with me on Thanksgiving Day. My hair was long, my clothes, though quite genteel, were unpressed, and even rather dirty, and for some reason I was wearing a pair of heavy brogans. Nancy had never seen me out of St. Louis before, and since she had seen me last, she had seen Manhattan. To be fair to her, though, she had seen something more important than that. She had, for better or for worse, seen herself.

  We had lunch with Jim and Carol at a little joint over near Columbia, and it was only after we had left them that Nancy told me Lon Havemeyer was in town and waiting that very moment to go with us to the Metropolitan Museum. I burst out laughing when she told me, and she laughed a little, too. I don’t remember when I fully realized the significance of Lon’s presence in New York. It wasn’t that afternoon, or that night, even. It was sometime during the next day, which was Friday. I suppose that I should have realized it earlier and that I just wouldn’t. From the time we met Lon on the museum steps, he was with us almost continuously until the last half hour before I took my leave of Nancy the following night. Sometimes I would laugh to myself at the thought of this big German oaf’s trailing along with us through the galleries in the afternoon and then to the ballet that night. But I was also angry at Nancy from the start for having let him horn in on our holiday together, and at various moments I pulled her aside and expressed my anger. She would only look at me helplessly, shrug, and say, “I couldn’t help it. You really have got to try to see that I couldn’t help it.”

  After the ballet, we joined a group of people who seemed to be business acquaintances of Lon’s and went to a Russian nightclub—on Fourteenth Street, I think. (I don’t know exactly where it was, for I was lost in New York and kept asking Nancy what part of town we were in.) The next morning, about ten, Nancy and I took the subway down to the neighborhood of Fifty-seventh Street, where we met Lon for breakfast. Later we looked at pictures in some of the galleries. I don’t know what became of the afternoon. We saw an awful play that night. I know it was awful, but I don’t remember what it was. The events of that second day are almost entirely blotted from my memory. I only know that the mixture of anger and humiliation I felt kept me from ducking out long before the evening was over—a mixture of anger and humiliation and something else, something that I had begun to feel the day before when Nancy and I were having lunch with Jim and Carol Crawford.

  Friday night, I was somehow or other permitted to take Nancy home alone from the theater. We went in a taxi, and neither of us spoke until a few blocks before we reached 114th Street. Finally I said, “Nancy.” And Nancy burst into tears.

  “You won’t understand, and you will never forgive me,” she said through her tears, “but I am so terribly in love with him.”

  I didn’t say anything till we had gone another block. Then I said, “How have things gone at the art school?”

  Nancy blew her nose and turned her face to me, as she had not done when she spoke before. “Well, I’ve learned that I’m not an artist. They’ve made me see that.”

  “Oh,” I said. Then, “Does that make it necessary to—”

  “It makes everything in the world look different. If I could only have known in time to write you.”

  “When did you know?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know when I knew.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing you came to New York,” I said. “You almost made a bad mistake.”

  “No,” she said. “You mustn’t think I feel that about you.”

  “Oh, not about me,” I said quickly. “About being an artist. When we were at lunch yesterday, you know, with Jim and his girl, it came over me suddenly that you weren’t an artist. Just by looking at you I could tell.”

  “What a cruel thing to say,” she said quietly. All the emotion had gone out of her voice. “Only a child could be so cruel,” she said.

  When the taxi stopped in front of her place, I opened the door for her but didn’t get out, and neither of us said goodbye. I told the driver to wait until she was inside and then gave him the address of my hotel. When, five minutes later, I was getting out and paying the driver, I didn’t know how much to tip him. I gave him fifteen cents. He sat with his motor running for a moment, and then, just before he pulled away, he threw the dime and the nickel out on the sidewalk and called out to me at the top of his voice, “You brat!”

  The meeting between Nancy and Carol was supposed to be one of the high points of our trip. The
four of us ate lunch together that first day sitting in the front booth of a little place that was crowded with Columbia University students. Because this was at noon on Thanksgiving Day, probably not too many restaurants in that neighborhood were open. But I felt that every student in the dark little lunchroom was exulting in his freedom from a certain turkey dinner somewhere, and from some particular family gathering. We four had to sit in the very front booth, which was actually no booth at all but a table and two benches set right in the window. Some people happened to be getting up from that table just as we came in and Carol, who had brought us there, said, “Quick! We must take this one.” Nancy had raised up on her tiptoes and craned her neck, looking for a booth not quite so exposed.

  “I think there may be some people leaving back there,” she said.

  “No,” said Carol in a whisper. “Quick! In here.” And when we had sat down, she said, “There are some dreadful people I know back there. I’d rather die than have to talk to them.”

  Nancy and I sat with our backs almost against the plate-glass window. There was scarcely room for the two of us on the bench we shared. I am sure the same was true for Jim and Carol, and they faced us across a table so narrow that when our sandwiches were brought, the four plates could only be arranged in one straight row. There wasn’t much conversation while we ate, though Jim and I tried to make a few jokes about our drive through the snow and about how the car broke down. Once, in the middle of something Jim was saying, Carol suddenly ducked her head almost under the table. “Oh, God!” she gasped. “Just my luck!” Jim sat up straighter and started peering out into the street. Nancy and I looked over our shoulders. There was a man walking along the sidewalk on the other side of the broad street.

  “You mean that man way over there?” Nancy asked.

  “Holy God, yes,” hissed Carol. “Do please stop gaping at him.”

  Nancy giggled. “Is he dreadful, too?” she asked.

  Carol straightened and took a sip of her coffee. “No, he’s not exactly dreadful. He’s the critic Melville Bland.” And after a moment: “He’s a full professor at Columbia. I was supposed to have dinner today with him and his stupid wife—she’s the playwright Dorothy Lewis and really awfully stupid—at some chichi place in the East Sixties, and I told them an awful lie about my going out to Connecticut for the day. I’d rather be shot than talk to either of them for five minutes.”

  I was sitting directly across the table from Carol. While we were there, I had ample opportunity to observe her, without her seeming to notice that I was doing so. My opportunity came each time anyone entered the restaurant or left it. For nobody could approach the glass-front door, either from the street or from inside, without Carol’s fastening her eyes upon that person and seeming to take in every detail of his or her appearance. Here, I said to myself, is a real novelist observing people—objectively and critically. And I was favorably impressed by her obvious concern with literary personages; it showed how committed she was to a life of writing. Carol seemed to me just the girl that Jim had described. Her blond hair was not really flaxen. (It was golden, which is prettier but which doesn’t sound as interesting as flaxen.) It was long and carelessly arranged. I believe Jim was right about its being fixed in a knot on the back of her neck. Her whole appearance showed that she cared as little about it as either Jim or I did about ours . . . Perhaps this was what one’s girl really ought to look like.

  When we got up to leave, Nancy lingered at the table to put on fresh lipstick. Carol wandered to the newspaper stand beside the front door. Jim and I went together to pay our bills at the counter. As we waited for our change, I said an amiable, pointless “Well?”

  “Well what?” Jim said petulantly.

  “Well, they’ve met,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “They’ve met.” He grinned and gave his head a little shake. “But Nancy’s just another society girl, old man,” he said. “I had expected something more than that.” He suddenly looked very unhappy, and rather angry, too. I felt the blood rising in my cheeks and knew in a moment that I had turned quite red. Jim was much heavier than I was, and I would have been no match for him in any real fight, but my impulse was to hit him squarely in the face with my open hand. He must have guessed what I had in mind, for with one movement he jerked off his horn-rimmed glasses and jammed them into the pocket of his jacket.

  At that moment, the man behind the counter said, “Do you want this change or not, fellows?”

  We took our change and then glared at each other again. I had now had time to wonder what had come over Jim. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Carol at the newsstand and took in for the first time, in that quick glance, that she was wearing huaraches and a peasant skirt and blouse, and that what she now had thrown around her shoulders was not a topcoat but a long green cape. “At least,” I said aloud to Jim, “Nancy’s not the usual bohemian. She’s not the run-of-the-mill arty type.”

  I fully expected Jim to take a swing at me after that. But, instead, a peculiar expression came over his face and he stood for a moment staring at Carol over there by the newsstand. I recognized the expression as the same one I had seen on his face sometimes in the classroom when his interpretation of a line of poetry had been questioned. He was reconsidering.

  When Nancy joined us, Jim spoke to her very politely. But once we were out in the street there was no more conversation between the two couples. We parted at the first street corner, and in parting there was no mention of our joining forces again. That was the last time I ever saw Carol Crawford, and I am sure that Jim and Nancy never met again. At the corner, Nancy and I turned in the direction of her place on 114th Street. We walked for nearly a block without either of us speaking. Then I said, “Since when did you take to wearing a hat everywhere?”

  Nancy didn’t answer. When we got to her place, she went upstairs for a few minutes, and it was when she came down again that she told me Lon Havemeyer was going to join us at the Metropolitan. Looking back on it, I feel that it may have been only when I asked that question about her hat that Nancy decided definitely about how much Lon and I were going to be seeing of each other during the next thirty-six hours. It is possible, at least, that she called him on the telephone while she was upstairs.

  I didn’t know about it then, of course, but the reception that Jim Prewitt found awaiting him that morning had, in a sense, been worse even than mine. I didn’t know about it and Jim didn’t tell me until the following spring, just a few weeks before our graduation from Kenyon. By that time, it all seemed to us like something in the remote past, and Jim made no effort to give me a complete picture of his two days with Carol. The thing he said most about was his reception upon arriving.

  He must have arrived at Carol’s apartment, somewhere on Morningside Heights, at almost the same moment that I arrived at Nancy’s place. He was not, however, kept waiting for forty-five minutes. He was met at the door by a man whom he described as a flabby middle-aged man wearing a patch over one eye, a T shirt, and denim trousers. The man did not introduce himself or ask for Jim’s name. He only jerked his head to one side, to indicate that Jim should come in. Even before the door opened, Jim had heard strains of the Brandenburg Concerto from within. Now, as he stepped into the little entryway, the music seemed almost deafening, and when he was led into the room where the phonograph was playing, he could not resist the impulse to make a wry face and clap his hands over his ears.

  But although there were half a dozen people in the room, nobody saw the gesture or the face he made. The man with the patch over his eye had preceded him into the room, and everyone else was sitting with eyes cast down or actually closed. Carol sat on the floor tailor fashion, with an elbow on each knee and her face in her hands. The man with the patch went to her and touched the sole of one of her huaraches with his foot. When she looked up and saw Jim, she gave him no immediate sign of recognition. First she eyed him from head to foot with an air of disapproval. Jim’s attire that day, unlike my own,
was extremely conventional (though I won’t say he ever looked conventional for a moment). At Kenyon, he was usually the most slovenly and ragged-looking of us all. He really went about in tatters, sometimes even with the soles hanging loose from his shoes. But in his closet, off our room, there were always to be found his “good” shoes, his “good” suit, his “good” coat, his “good” hat, all of which had been purchased for him at Brooks Brothers by his mother. Today he had on his “good” things. Probably it was that that made Carol stare at him as she did. At last she gave him a friendly but slightly casual smile, placed a silencing forefinger over her lips, and motioned for him to come sit down beside her and listen to the deafening tones of the concerto.

  While the automatic phonograph was changing records, Carol introduced Jim to the other people in the room. She introduced him and everyone else—men and women alike—by their surnames only: “Prewitt, this is Carlson. Meyer, this is Prewitt.” Everyone nodded, and the music began again at the same volume. After the Bach there was a Mozart symphony. Finally Jim, without warning, seized Carol by the wrist, forcibly led her from the room, and closed the door after them. He was prepared to tell her precisely what he thought of his reception, but he had no chance to. “Listen to me,” Carol began at once—belligerently, threateningly, all but shaking her finger in his face. “I have sold my novel. It was definitely accepted three days ago and is going to be published in the spring. And two sections from it are going to be printed as stories in the Partisan Review.”

  From that moment, Jim and Carol were no more alone than Nancy and I were. Nearly everywhere they went, they went with the group that had been in Carol’s apartment that morning. After lunch with us that first noon, they rejoined the same party at someone else’s apartment, down in Greenwich Village. When Jim told me about it, he said he could never be sure whose apartment he was in, for they always behaved just as they did at Carol’s. He said that once or twice he even found himself answering a knock at the door in some strange apartment and jerking his head at whoever stood outside. The man with the patch over his eye turned out to be a musicologist and composer. The others in the party were writers whose work Jim had read in New Directions anthologies and in various little magazines, but they seemed to have no interest in anything he had to say about what they had written, and he noticed that their favorite way of disparaging any piece of writing was to say “it’s so naïve, so undergraduate.” After Jim got our car from the garage late Friday afternoon, they all decided to drive to New Jersey to see some “established writer” over there, but when they arrived at his house the “established writer” would not receive them.