His old-fashioned ideas had charm for me; I thought with longing of an old-fashioned life. Perhaps I was tired of struggling so hard, without knowing it? I recognized how easy it would be to slip into the old way and become a squaw with a papoose. I thought this, who all day long was writing barbed and pungent paragraphs on how to be seductive, exquisite. I thought of the witty woman with a salon who was so exhausted keeping up with Talleyrand. I might become exhausted trying to keep up with even those poor fish, Aleck, Brock, and the many others, Ken, Amos. For the woman looking for love is like a little boat meeting waterspout after waterspout. She is tired of steering, rowing, looking for land, hanging up old shirts for sails and the rest of it. But the pirates, they are not tired at all. They don’t care if they don’t make a landfall once in three years; they live off little craft. I went home, and felt depressed. Nevertheless, dear Bill was never able to depress me as the others had, and I wondered if this were growing up. Perhaps I would weather the troubles and begin to regard men and their passions merely as trade winds.
I won’t say I was happy; in my heart I hoped always for the great love and the settled fate from which I need never look outwards. I wished never to wish for another man!
Still, Bill and I spent a lot of time together; he was a lavish man and his pockets were at present lined. He would never have anything but the best and ordered headwaiters about in an arrogant, practiced way. The only difficulty was that he often introduced into the party other women, generally of the rowdy, garish Hollywood type, the Edwige type, little high-heeled half-made-over vixens from the back of the Bronx; and when they didn’t suit him, he bawled them out in public and harried them all the way home, having apparently undertaken to tame all the shrews on the east and west coasts. The best of it was that my time was filled in and I sometimes slept; for it was a time when the news and my affairs might have kept me up day and night.
36
One night, coming home I slipped on the ice, and after that lay in bed for nearly a week with black-outs, raging headaches, and found myself unable to take things in my celebrated style. My father and mother, sisters, friends, came to see me; in the course of the week I began to hold a levee each day, so I sent Bill van Week out to buy me a negligee, for I thought I might as well make an attempt, as the occasion was handed to me on a platter, to hold a salon. He came back with the very thing, a long, fluffy, white one, with a small train. He confessed that it had come from the wardrobe of a play that he had once put on and that flopped. The wardrobe and scenery had been impounded, but he had handed the man in the warehouse a five-dollar bill.
Bill liked women in bed and wanted to give a party. I agreed to this, but said that the party must suit my means; that is, a beer and wine party, cigarettes and homemade canapés. Bill was in his element. He was at the place in Jane Street day and night for a few days before. He washed all my dirty dishes, cleaned the paintwork, fixed the lights, bought rug-cleaner, invited everyone, bought my beer and wine, and, of course, imported drinks of his own; only, said he, because he had a certain combination in mind—the secret of gastronomic and alcoholic success was combination and quality materials. Nothing loath, I let him mix.
The day before the party, he installed me in an armchair, in the white garb, saying “Dress Rehearsal,” while he fixed glasses and everything he required. He ran in and out a dozen times to get things he had forgotten. He became most irritable in the morning and would not tell me the secret of things he was mixing in the various big bowls, which he had bought or borrowed. As far as I could make out, for he never divulged his culinary secrets, one was a sort of avocado mousse, one a roquefort mousse, and one a fish-paste roll made out of thin slices of bread and butter. He carefully explained the mixing of a green salad, however. It was sharp and sour, and all his effects were male. This was for Sunday afternoon, so most of his work was done on the Saturday. He spent the Saturday night with me. He was a smooth-running lover, but this time he kept me awake half the night with his anxiety about his party.
“Oh, Jesus, I didn’t get any more toothpicks,” and “Green olives on one side, black on the other, and pearl onions in between, just one line, in a coupe.”
I started by inviting ten or twelve persons (it had started out as my party), but Bill became furiously enthusiastic and insisted upon my inviting twenty others, including Luke Adams. He was almost willing to kiss the footprints of the great man. When I declared I had quarreled with him, he actually went to the man’s studio to invite him himself. Luke was one of the first to arrive and came up to me, sitting down beside me with his hands on my thigh. At once the old flame started up. I took no notice of Bill nor of anyone for some time. Bill wound up with an areaway, a backyard, and an outhouse full of guests. The party went on nearly all night. Bill held court, butlered for himself, told everyone about his financial misfortunes, his flops on Broadway and in Hollywood, his divorces, his misguided parents; and presented himself, quite unconsciously, to my guests, as my possible husband. Some thought we were already a working team. My relations with him, also, were of an extraordinarily easy turn. Meanwhile, he brought me luck. I made up my quarrel with Luke. Late in the evening, while Bill was telling of his quarrel with his lovely second wife (actually she was just a high-school kid, with a fresh skin), Luke was asking me if I would make an appointment with him, “I think I can get away on Wednesday evening; will you telephone me, Letty?”
“Oh, yes, darling, yes.”
“Will you, though? You have too much self-control—these last weeks—” and he looked at me darkly, without a smile.
“Oh, yes, yes, Luke.”
He strained my fingers and gave me an ardent look. I thought of nothing else all night and sent Bill home, when the last guests went. At this he was surprised, for he had come to think of my flat as his tavern. I divided my night between thinking of a suggestion of Bill’s, and of my decision to give up the dress publicity in the Tweed and Silk. Bill thought, with my ability, he could start to run his little free theater himself as a little theater venture. He had brought me books, plays, French’s catalogue. I felt indignant with my parents, as I tossed, that I had not gone to a high-class college where I would have been able to take a drama course. I planned ways of spending what remained of my grandmother’s money. Perhaps I could spend a year or two at the Yale Drama School. I was wasting time in the dress business. Likewise, I had received an offer from a man who needed a secretary with foreign languages.
In the morning my headache raged. I spent the morning playing the Razumovskys, and read Boileau’s L’Art Poétique. But my headache increased, and I went out in the snowy air, ending up on the telephone talking to Bill; then to the Lafayette, to Charles; and elsewhere with him. When I came home, naturally, I was much worse, and went to bed with some sleeping pills which he brought me. Bill sat on the edge of my bed and we talked in French. I raved: “Sans être prise par l’emprise de la querelle des anciens at modernes, laquelle querelle,” I said, “ne doit son existence qu’aux cervelles trop fertiles de quelques vieilles institutrices irréellistes, car la virginité, dit Balzac, est une monstruosité …”
All this to show my partner that I had read Proust for whom, all of a sudden, I became reimpassioned.
“Certainly one of the stylists, the most pure in the world,” I said in French to Bill.
“Quelle faconde,” said my male nurse. “A nice little gift of the gab.”
“Pourtant, je veux dire que Boileau m’abasourdit, avec ses règles, son rationalisme, ses conseils. At first, he pretends that reason should dominate; then he says things like this: II faut que le cæur seul parle dans l’élégie; or, speaking of the ode, here, a fine disorder is the effect of art. On one side he destroys imagination, fantasy, declares himself an enemy of all things fantastic; on the other, he says, don’t go and hitch your wagon to the moon, a thing even a child like me knows; but, bring it down to you, with the seven ways they know in Bergerac. Enfin—what kind of counsel is this to a struggling writer
?”
“Tu deraisonnes,” said Bill, “are you a struggling writer?”
“Yes,” I said, defiantly. “Is it a closed guild? Everyone, to begin with, is a struggling writer and then, even when I played kid-games with Jacky, we were both going to write the Great American Novel.”
We had an exciting heart-to-heart talk. Later on, “Well,” said Bill, “we were made for each other. I think we’d make a go of it. But we ought to wait and see. We could get real bang-up fun out of running a theater, don’t you think?”
I was all for giving up my job at once, but Bill advised against this. My natural excitement made me want to go and view his theater at once. He took me in a taxi, and I saw a wretched little place with brown peeling walls in Twenty-eighth Street, near Sixth Avenue.
“This will never do for us,” I said; “besides, frankly, I think I ought to go to Yale.”
It all ended, at that particular moment, in the air; for Bill went back to his parents in the mansion in the sky.
Now Wednesday approached when I was to telephone Luke. Probably I was calmer that week than at any other time in my life. Although at four on Wednesday I had Brock Ford with me, weeping and detailing the tricks Susannah played on him, telling me the divorce had actually been started and asking me to be his friend and confidante, I made an excuse to go out to telephone. Luke’s studio secretary, some female of the watchdog kind, quite clearly fancying I was one of his women, told me that Mr. Adams was very ill, in hospital. He had been out at his shack in the storm of the previous night, and had been injured by a falling branch. I went to the post office to send a registered letter and came back home, in a white shock. To think that for the past day or two I had been looking at walk-ups in side streets, like Nineteenth, and thinking, “It’s there we could find a place.”
I had decided to move away from Jane Street. Susannah was jealous of me. The boys were dropping in on me too often, telling me their troubles with her. I thought that Luke and I could find a place to suit us, by the week, until my other affairs were settled. The Madrid story was going down in blood and fire and I could not fix my mind on anything till I knew what was to become of Clays. For nights now, I had looked at transient hotels as I took my walks out, to cool my constant headache. Luke could hardly ever come to me. His wife kept him away. People had always gossiped about him and now they would be glad to be able to pin him down, say, to me. Now he was snatched away from me, perhaps dying, and I couldn’t get to him. No one would let me know. I walked bitterly up and down the streets in the February snow, thinking:
“My God, if you exist, you punish me! Or society does. Here’s a strange rule we invented. The haters, the indifferent, the cold and bitter, like Mathilde, the utterly apathetic, the crazy and drunken, the children, like Jacky, the dull and stupid and those who are willing to pass their lives parroting slogans—they can meet whenever the mood takes them. But when two people love, they cannot meet— ever, ever again. Even the unrentable street, the empty, winter night, the cast-out silence of the river banks, he can’t grant me. They can’t talk, nor walk, nor think together; and if they want to love—who knows if it isn’t the first, the last, the true flame?—What we live for?—The secret hope in every sulking heart?—we’re belittled, by the grinning, spying, loafing, straw-chewing, chain-drinking, joking, whispering, milling, chance-breeding, flea-bitten, lousy, god-damned and devil-damned bunch of baboons, who crawl into corners to butt themselves against each other and hypocritically write dirty limericks in bachelor bedrooms, but beget their children so legitimately, colder than snails, with horrible grimaces and spittling in their hands, hiccuping ear to ear, and vomiting after drunks; and talebearing so that we can’t meet openly. And even fate helped them, the snow-bent branch. Is it I who am the whore? Do I destroy society? It is society, this one, which is the harlot and leaves me dissolute, desolate—It’s mad that I can’t meet Luke!
“But—here’s the twist that makes the play! They’re all mad to fall in love!”
Now I was lost in some dark street in Chelsea and walked for hours, near the Hudson, and found myself in Barrow Street and later in the coal-damp and gashouse districts near the East River. Probably I muttered to myself. Naturally, some men tried to stop me, but I shouted at them, I gave them something to chew on. I thought:
“Now there’s a man in this city I love, but what is he? A pale-faced man, stooped with work and sickness; you all have seen his face, it is the face of the dear one, behind all faces that we eagerly, desperately hunt in. He’s the demon-lover, himself a plain man, but his soul, a demon. When I didn’t care for him I saw him often, sleeping, eating, drinking, talking, borrowing things, quite at his ease and we could have laid down on the couch, no one would have looked. But once the look is given, the first hint of the immortal embrace, the only immortality, when this took place, the jealous, flushed apes came round, getting between us—with—suitability, morality, marriage, lechery—tearing us apart, inventing, until the whole thing was a mere shallow, sordid disgrace; and, yes, my best friends, my father and mother would have rendered me this service, too. Who hasn’t suffered this, that is alive today? Not one of us alive but has suffered this affront, this insult, this insult and injury—and why, because we offer life, body, heat, pleasure, all in one hour, to someone. It’s not a mean act; besides death for a cause and life-giving, it’s the only decent thing we ever do!”
Late, late at night, I came back to Jane Street. The house was cold; the lights were out upstairs; I suppose they were making love.
In three days I had a letter from Luke. I did not go to work, but went to the hospital. It was a long way; it took hours. He had had an operation and had just about come out of the ether. Nevertheless, he sat up, and put his foot, in its blue hospital slipper, on the side of my chair. I held it in my hand. There were six men in the same ward and I knew his wife was coming; but there are no stool pigeons among men. I thought, they’ll never tell. They never did. This was how they repaid me for my outcry against everyone, of three nights before. I went back home and thought a great deal about the question of the family. Why did Adams live with his wife when he loved me? With the landless and the moneyless, I said, the family is their only possession, and it is the only property they can acquire by a mere signature. If Adams falls ill, he is sure his wife will come; it is just charity or a miracle that I come. The family is a tract of land belonging to numerous generations; a self-help mutual. All this made me very uneasy. I wanted now to become part of society myself and have a husband in the regular way. The interest of the whole world was turned on the betrayal in Madrid. I had not only their reasons, but my own. I did not imagine that Luke, who had this fatal power over me, was the right husband for me, and since Clays, I had not met anyone suitable for me but Bill van Week; but only Clays had mentioned marriage.
When I wrote to him, I tried to tell him something of all I was feeling, but naturally, I left out my adventures with men, thinking that if it proved wise, I would tell all this later; and I wrote to Clays, now escaped to London, from whom I just had a short note which said nothing.
DEAR CLAYS,
… I thought of you today, it’s a lovely evening. It’s some time that I’ve known you, Clays. It only came to me lately that I know how to love you. The afternoon you suddenly kissed me—you remember? (Yes, I do remember, Hebe!) All week I’ve been thinking of you, thinking, thinking, I know the kind of man Clays is. I know he’s had women. I know your history. I don’t expect too much from life. But I love you. I must, because all the week I’ve been thinking of you, I could do nothing, I told everyone about you, read your letters over the phone; I was half-crazy, I thought I was sick, but it was just wanting you to come back. I thought I heard your voice, in the night, once sitting alone in the house, four times, more times, were you thinking of me then? Were you thinking of me all those times? I was thinking of—all love. You know … I am not selfish. I am living I really believe twenty-five hours a day. I do everything I can, except actual
ly go to Spain and I wish I could do that. It’s no life we lead, the life here. No one likes it, but we make a fantastic effort to live, just the same …
Your
POOR LETTY.
This was the truth. I did not want to live the way I was living; and I was becoming more disillusioned about Bill van Week every day. He had too many girl friends. For a few days I thought I would never have anything to do with men till Clays came back. I had tried this before, with poor results. It is impossible to resist the pleasure of love, once tried; and I am not the kind to sit listlessly in a room. I distrust dithyrambs. I made one up about Luke and it was disproved the very next day; but it faut que le cæur seul parle dans l’élégie.
It was a blow over the heart to everyone radical in New York when Madrid, and with it, Spain, fell. People were blue. Also the war, with all its murderous derring-do and fire, and with the harsh, fierce flame it had lighted Europe up with, had disturbed everyone with the first truths about mortal combat in society. For most of us had not known the first European war, nor even much about the civil war between reaction and revolution in the land of the Soviets. We knew strikers were wounded and killed in our own country, and they had armored cars and regiments with steel helmets watching the streets in Paris, and hunger marchers in Britain, things like that, but international politics still seemed to us something you could tear to pieces in an evening’s talk, in our strong white teeth; and we could now see it wasn’t. The whole struggle in Spain had been full of diplomatic and tactical puzzles. Who was on which side of the fence and why? Who aided and didn’t aid and why?
Letty Fox Page 52
