Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  “You probably know nothing about all the ways of making love.”

  “Letty—at my age—” he said, coolly extending himself and looking fixedly, cynically before him.

  I knew his caution and even his egotism was part of his age, his forty years. I never had had to do with an old man before; I felt myself repulsed by his curious coldness; and yet with all his gestures and strange looks, he encouraged me to further play. I could see that he wanted to give himself to me, but that he wished me to coax him, as if against his will. The reason for this was plain. Presently, with a shadowy, almost regretful smile, he suddenly slid his clothes from his smooth limbs, but this was not done, when he sprang to his feet, standing straight, his eyes starting, muttering, “Listen, someone at your doorbell: someone is coming here—”

  “No one is coming here; I won’t answer, Luke, Luke—”

  “Listen, shh” he said, putting his hand in anguish on my head.

  “Come to the end of the room,” I whispered, “throw yourself on my bed.”

  “No, no, not there, because there, we—”

  “Yes,” I whispered, “there it is out of the lamp light and lamp shadow: there’s no silhouette.”

  With a wild air he went there, and at first, as his springing to his feet had brought my lips against his naked thighs, he dragged me after him, for I was embracing him, and there I was on my knees dragged at his feet for a step or two, like a woman worshiping her pagan god. I kissed his bare knees; then I laughed, seeing the disorder he was in, how wild, almost unconscious, so that there was no longer any barrier between us. I let him go and followed after him; he lay panting, murmuring words beneath his breath, and I began to kiss him all over, saying softly, full of joy at my triumph, “I always thought of kissing you like this; I dreamed of it; living alone would not be so hard, if only I did not dream.”

  He murmured words which precipitated me upon my knees in adoration, for I had resolved this night to conquer him rather than to think of my own pleasure; I did my best to fill him with love and joy and had the satisfaction of hearing him say my name many times, at the very moment when I thought he had fainted, so that I knew that he had been obsessed with me, too. It was me he had thought of, not others. His voice filled me with passion; I experienced a new and unexpected pleasure at this unselfish love of mine and I had a cunning hope too that I now really owned him. When he left, I smiled languidly and threw myself back in a chair at the window to watch him pass. His coat squatted on his back in the early gray morning: the streets were filled with a miserable mist; I saw him spit seedily in the gutter; he was unhappy because I had no coffee made and he was hungry. For some time I had no word from him and was disappointed; and yet I hoped every day to hear from him, I felt he loved me; and I seemed to see him, making plans for a week end, even an hour together. Wintry weather came; in spite of the icy rain and snow, he would go off to his shack in the country to be alone, and I expected to be invited there. True, he shared his shack with another man. I dreamed of us lying embraced in the icy upstairs room, of even climbing through the manhole into the freezing attic, but anything to be alone, for we were so hot for each other that even this would be a pleasure. I thought of the whole company walking at night, and our touching hands in the dark and how he would halt behind some shed or tree in the freezing dark, so that he could embrace me. This did not come about.

  About Christmas, he came back to the house and invited me to be present (though not to go with him) to a New Year’s Ball given by some union; and I said I would be there. I was in low water and could not dress as I wished for this ball, but when I saw myself in the large mirror which stands in the foyer of the hall, I saw I looked very handsome; I wore a long red dress with a white fur borrowed from Aunt Phyllis. I was like a great flower in this dingy place; and among these working girls. As an escort I had taken along Bobby Thompson, to whom I had breathed no word about Luke; but somehow or other he had a suspicion and was in no very pleasant mood. Another boy I knew came up to me and began laughing, saying, “You look as if you’re on the make.”

  “Oh, I am,” I said.

  This made Bobby more attentive to me. We walked around the upper gallery; dancing was already in progress downstairs on the big smooth square floor; they were doing the Big Apple, the Conga, and the Rhumba, which was just coming in as the rage. I thought we ought to go down and dance, since when Luke came he would see me in the arms of a handsome young man, and this might stir his sluggish senses. What worried me about Luke was that he was not jealous; for every man I had known, even when he was not much attracted to me, would show jealousy when I was with another man and would struggle to get me to himself; but not Luke. I was not sure that my appearance there with another man would not simply give him an excuse to neglect me for another six months. In imagination, I heard him saying, with his sweet, sultry smile, “I could see you were not lonely.” But, of course, I went and danced with Bobby, and had almost forgotten the man of my heart, when I looked across the hall at some groups of older men who were talking together and I thought, “What a handsome man; is he South American?” before I recognized in him Luke Adams. I looked at him for some time silently, rather surprised to find that he was so handsome; but he was conscious of me. He had a secret which I had surprised. One side of his face, being much handsomer than the other (the other was drawn and showed his hungry years), he did his best to keep this glittering, dark, full cheek, with its patine of sexual beauty, toward the woman he wanted to attract; and I now saw that, apparently all unconscious of me, he moved gracefully, as he talked, the few inches that were necessary to keep his beauty in my view. I said nothing of this to Bobby Thompson, but I could not conceal my wild exultation at this discovery, and Bobby naturally supposed that he was having this effect upon me.

  “How beautiful you are tonight; I hate to pay compliments, but—” I saw that he was falling in love with me but would not admit it; and full of glee, I did my best to conquer him too. Thus, he followed me upstairs, after the dance, in a dream; and I felt sure that Luke Adams would soon follow. This he did, always pretending to be unconscious of me. But now he had in tow his ugly, clumsy, plump wife who was very ill dressed in a dirty housedress. When I saw her, I flashed round, turning my back to them all, and indeed I felt quite sick at heart at the sight of her; for Adams had plenty of the hypocrite in him and always pretended a joviality and decorum in public toward this woman, which seemed to me in the worst taste. Everyone knew that she was his disaster: other women called her “the scourge of God”; and said she had been sent to him, to punish him for his ravaging of so many fine women. It was as if a plate of oatmeal had been stuck in the middle of a banqueting table, otherwise covered with wines, fruits, sweetmeats, and splendid dishes. I sat down in a booth with Bobby, and as he did not think to get me a drink from the crowded buffet, I waved to the other boy, who had said I was on the make, and he at once brought me what I wanted. Bobby understood the rebuke, and he became sulky; but I, thinking only of Luke, did not care what he felt; and this supreme indifference gave me an added charm in Bobby’s eyes. He was, alas, a typical New York college boy, the only son much spoiled of two doting parents who did not care for each other and had stayed together for Bobby’s sake. Of course they had to make much of Bobby to pay for their sacrifice; he fancied himself a young prince and was usually a most disagreeable and difficult, though much sought after, escort, because so handsome and usually in funds. I had my fill of this kind of man, but I knew how to handle him fairly well; and I was not so absolutely dependent upon him as the usual sighing college girl. These boys make a regular traffic of their sex, taking up girls and throwing them away at will, twisting them and making martyrs of them, just because they have and withhold what the girls are sighing for. Naturally, this did not work with me; and I knew Bobby for what he really was, a sulky, weak, and lazy boy, that some stronger woman could manage, once she had, by some sleight-of-hand, got him to marry her; he was, of course, quite frankly looking fo
r a girl with money, for he did not care to work too hard and yet he wanted a professional career.

  As I sat there, in the booth with my two admirers, I saw Mrs. Adams coming up to me, and this made me feel almost faint. I greeted her with unusual modesty. She sat down and said, “Letty, Luke is over there.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Yes.” She smiled as if she knew that I knew; then she said, “Don’t you want to see him?”

  “Yes—of course, but you see—” and I grinned at the boys.

  “I’ll bring him over,” she said, and lifting her heavy body off the seat, went away. Presently the couple came back, Luke laughing chastely and good-humoredly with his wife. He stuck out his hand, “Oh, hello, there, Letty; I did not know you were here.” His wife left us together and the other two boys hauled off and began to talk over some things that interested them. Of course, I taxed him with avoiding me and having no affection for me, and he only smiled, said caressing words, and said he had been busy, but some day, some day—I saw all my fantasies about going out with him to his shack had been mere daydreams; and this upset me, for I do not like to waste my time in such things. Had he really forgotten that he had invited me to this ball? But half an hour later, when the entertainment began, I saw another part of his game. The lights were turned low and people crowded into the boxes upstairs, to overlook the hall and see the stage. People pressed about me like the ghosts in Richard III’s tent; they rustled, it was warm and delicious, and I saw, with my heart in my throat, Luke standing on a chair just beside me and leaning over me. There, beside me (I had not observed them all moving in), was his wife, and in front of her, against the wall of the box, a sad-looking woman with fair hair who was the woman Luke had lived with for years before his marriage; and behind this trio was a dark, vicious, neurotic girl who was one of Luke’s light-o’-loves; while I sat at his feet, almost and beside me were my two men. Tableau. Mrs. Adams was speaking to the fair-haired woman with a sisterly superiority and yet a stiffness which showed that she knew who she was, she knew who I was, and so I suppose she knew who they all were, the five or six women of Luke’s that he had got round him there. He stood over them on the chair, husky with a cold, crooning the songs in his broken voice and an unpleasant gaiety in his voice; and I thought, “He’s a famous Love-lace, we break our necks to get him; but is this the truth, this aged croak and this lewd shameless behavior, getting us together, the creatures who—” I did not now care about the wife, but I was upset by the fair-haired castoff. I knew she had worked for him for years, when he was ill. Would he be grateful to me and remember me, simply because I had kissed him once or twice? I did not want him; I had no wish to live with such an old man, used up by so many affairs; and the hollowness of my life appeared to me as I sat, sang, and laughed in the yellow and ruby lights that came from the stage. It was the lovely old opera picture, pretty women, sharp-faced and handsome men in a box in the half-dark; and I could taste a kind of filthy dust in my mouth. Yet when the lights came on, his wife and he insisted upon our sitting together at a small table, while he got drinks for us; and I wondered if she had pleasure from looking at all these women she was humbling; I had to admire, unwillingly, her nerve. As we stood in the foyer to go out, I in my coat again, he came up beside me and we made a fine picture, I saw us in the mirror. I looked beautiful then, excited by the evening, and I saw hungry regret pass over his face. He moved nearer to me and I felt his scorching fire dart out and lick me; but he made no move, not with hand or foot. He muttered, “You’re pretty, Letty, I’d like to go along with you,” just as his wife came up.

  Some caution in me made me not so much doubt his words as try to think of them addressed to another woman. I “tried them over on my piano.” If he had been younger, I would have swallowed everything. And all the time, as I walked along with Bobby, and felt Luke’s charm, I was thinking, do I have to listen always to these old serenades? I felt throughout my adventures that I was only looking for the right man; if I had found him, I should have been very glad to renounce all these affairs. I had to admit it—the dangerous Luke was the most negligible of affairs.

  I thought with gloom of the time, when I was about fifteen, when I had thought I could manage men. Now, the barrier between men and women had come up, the question of marriage. No man I knew wanted to marry, and for me it had become desperate; not, of course, to enjoy men, which makes it the only resort of timid girls, but to give myself a start in life. As it was, I was living spiritually and mentally, from pillar to post (pillow to post!) and from hand to mouth.

  In these dark days Susannah Ford, for all her faults, was a good influence upon me. She believed that public discussion made all things moral and easy to bear. She not only teased out every strand of my affairs (for I told her all), but dragged me back into what was a sort of social and intellectual life. She forced me, with good-natured fanaticism, to think of every popular substitute for snake-oil and soul-balm. Led to believe that Freudianism would keep her chaste, she wallowed chin deep in psychoanalysis; and also took mudpacks for her complexion. She was so engrossed also with her troubles between husbands and lover, and with trying to regulate the love affairs of her friends (usually this meant to steal their men, though almost a naïve, blind theft), and she believed so rapturously in any man she chanced upon, if he were crooked enough and persuasive enough to cheat her and get her money from her, that in her house, at least at first, I plated my sensitive soul in the rich, thick, wholesome folly of thoughtless, bodily living. Here was a woman who lived as I did and was none the worse for it. New come from life in a female house, with a defeated and lazy woman, and two young sisters, I began to see I had my own place in the world. I had grown up.

  Susannah made me free of the house. I had expected, on taking up my residence in this house in Jane Street, that Luke would seize on the excuse of Leon, the orphan boy, to come and see me regularly, twice a week or more. But Adams was delighted to rid himself of his responsibility and stayed far away from Leon. Susannah’s eyes had lighted up when she first had seen Luke. Everyone in the room could see that she marked him for her prey! Luke, too. He had smiled, shifted his legs, cast his dark eyes down, and afterwards he had said to me, “Susannah’s a nice girl, she’s got a heart as big as a whale—but, you know, she wastes her time—I’ve known girls like that—”

  At first Susannah, then, watched and waited for him; perhaps that too kept him away. My need for a diversion was keen. Luke was the homme fatal. He only understood lechery. I understood him for a heartless coquette, yes, cold, for all his flame. The whereby of his daily food and roof and his pleasure, were all his concern.

  The struggle to suppress my feelings, difficult, since I have a nature, open, frank, and bold, and my unreciprocated love, produced whirlwinds in my blood. Once or twice he dropped in on me when he “happened to be passing.” One evening, I turned on Luke and scolded him for his ways. He opened his eyes, laughed and drawled out, I was a witch, a danger to men, a termagant queen, a lovely shrew; “You’ll get on all right, Letty.” As I saw that this excitement pleased him, I boiled and bubbled—but at what cost to myself! In the end, I realized that no matter what happened, he was the winner; my sufferings and outcries were merely pleasurable drama for him. I tried to tear Luke Adams out—he was much deeper rooted than I thought. It was like tearing my veins out one by one.

  I gave him a short history of my love adventures, so that he would be easy on that point; but he deduced from this account that I could look after myself and hence worried about me less than another.

  Some nights I came home late from work, to Jane Street, and looked from the street, over the little railed areaway, into the broad double windows of my flat. Often I hoped to see Luke there. He was never there. Once, I saw his back, in an old man’s crouch, as he turned the corner of the street. I ran after him, at length shouted, “Luke! Luke!”

  That was the kind of thing I would do, ruining my game after weeks of continence. Luke was, in all, a tease, a
hound of love; he worried and gnawed the heart to death. Luke would leave me half seduced, which was one of his cruelest, most telling trullmaker’s tricks. He would take himself off, murmuring something about his wife, my young girlhood, his respect for my father’s friendship, the presence of Leon in the house, and several other modesties and moralities; and at the door would turn with pain and yearning in his eyes and, holding me to him, whisper that he loved me. He had the boldness to say that he loved me, he needed me, and was in a fever fit thinking of long nights with me. I was at my wits’ end. I knew that while Luke found consolation for black hours and heart-stings in his wife’s arms, I found none anywhere. I decided to break with Luke at any cost. All the cost would be borne by me. This was my own fault. I bragged about my conquest. One of my acquaintances, a union organizer, David Bench, a gawky fellow of the Lincoln type, reproached me with it. It was strange to hear this tall man’s shamed whisper above me, “You let everyone know—you don’t try to conceal it. And if you even go out with that man, people suspect you.”

  David himself seemed to love me, but he was ashamed of me. I thought he was jealous, and that he had an interest in me himself. Sometimes, when I look back at my relations with David Bench, it seems to me I behaved with him as my slippery friends with me. “I loved her, she loved another, and he in turn neglected her for another.” Heine says something like that. This is love.

  I seized the occasion of a union dance to break with Luke. He had half asked me, which was his way. We went out into Jane Street; we walked along one street and another holding hands, making for Washington Square and then Union Square, and all the time Luke murmured and talked about sex. That was his pressing way, not love, but the end of it. He began by saying, “I have been thinking about you all the week.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking of you” his voice dropped and dropped—“all the week.”