by Daniel Stern
“Won’t you call her? I’m afraid for Alec.”
“I’ll do anything except that. I owe something to your mother too. I can’t. Alec’s such a child and this proves it. He never grew up.”
“You never let him.”
“Maybe. He’s lived his way on my money for a long time. There’s a limit. He’ll thank me for it, yet. Jew and gentile cannot be happy together…. Look, I have a lot of work to do. I have to help Mother.”
“But she’s your enemy. She’s our enemy.” Elly was almost in tears and her voice was loud.
“Elly, what’s the matter with you? Don’t talk that way. She’s a difficult woman, so all right! Nobody’s perfect, but an enemy she’s not.”
Elly slammed the door behind her, thinking: It’s one of my bad days.
“Elly,” her mother called, “could you help Mimi with the cold cuts?”
“No,” she replied, trying not to shout. “I’m busy.” She was moving through the house and through the day like a stage director through a play that has somehow gone wrong: all the elements that should have been ordered to her liking, now gone out of control—the principal element, herself, a young girl in love for the first time, which should have been the most predictable of all, was most out of control. She ran to her room and changed her clothing completely from the skin out. She wore jeans and a T shirt; clothes she had not worn since coming back from school in Vermont. Then she presented herself in the kitchen and said: “I want to help.” Rose started to give her instructions but she interrupted her, saying: “No, I’ll hang the lanterns along the driveway.”
Outside, Justin had just finished stringing the wire from the house to the beginning of the stone steps that led down the hill. Naked bulbs dangled from the wire every few feet.
“I’ll use the ladder,” she told Justin, and added, “Tell Mr. Gordon I want to see him.”
Jay received the message and went to meet Elly with some trepidation. Beneath this, however, was the pleasant realization that his new-found drive and purpose were not as fragile as he had thought them. Elly was behaving strangely and he couldn’t imagine why, yet he was still hopeful about the concert, and happy about having fallen for Alec’s kid niece. Someday Max Kaufman might even put up the money for a return to American Concerts and a tour—but that was all in the nebulous future.
He found Elly covering bulbs with gaily colored Japanese lanterns. She was grimly concentrating, with her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth. One of her long brown legs was stretched out behind her like a temporarily useless weapon. Jay grasped it and she turned on the ladder with a start.
“Hi,” he said. “What’s eating you today?”
“I thought Alec was your friend,” she said.
“He is.”
She clambered down from her perch and sat on the top rung of the ladder. “But you don’t seem particularly worried about him.”
“You mean this fasting business? I had a talk with him this morning. I think he’ll snap out of it. I wanted to call the concert off but he wouldn’t hear of it.”
“I’m worried sick, Jay. I want you to do something for me. I can’t do it here. I want you to go into town and call Annette. If you can’t get her, then send her a telegram. Tell her what’s happened with Alec and ask her to come tonight. Right away.”
Jay gazed at Elly a while. “Do you really want me to?”
She said nothing.
“All right.” He sighed. “He’s your uncle.”
“Yes,” she said. “He’s mine.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a wonderful idea. It’s just that I don’t know if we have a right to mix in.”
“Everybody mixes into everything. We have a right.”
“You’ve changed your mind about them, haven’t you?”
“If it means this much to him, then … I don’t know.”
“You’re always so uncertain, always saying I don’t know and I guess,” he kidded her.
“I guess so.” She laughed. “Please call her, Jay.”
“Sure,” he said. “But I’ll miss lunch.”
“I’ll save you some.”
She watched him drive down the hill and stared until the car was a tiny speck and one could hardly imagine it contained anything except perhaps a still tinier speck. Then Elly strung the other lanterns quickly and went in to lunch, hoping that Alec might be at the table when she sat down. But only the expected ones were there, plus the two newcomers whom she had quite forgotten. There was a pulsing going on within her that had some direction, some point of discharge at which it was aiming, but she could neither localize the pulsing nor discover where it was going. It was, she thought, like the time they had put on The Emperor Jones in high school and she had been given the drum at rehearsals and told to tap it as evenly as a heartbeat. It would stop only when the Emperor Jones was dead. In the middle of the first rehearsal she had given up and, stopping, told them she couldn’t stand just tapping that goddamned drum all the time. It would drive her crazy. This pulsing she was feeling now was, however, more internal even than a heartbeat. It seemed to come from everywhere. She touched her thumb and the little lump felt warm. Perhaps it was throbbing like a second heart, from fever if it was infected. But there was no pain, and besides, the throbbing seemed to be coming from everywhere inside her. It seemed, like the sound of the sea had some months ago, to have something to say to her. This did not surprise her. To her all language was cryptic. When someone said, “I love you,” you had to treat it as a code and decipher just what it was he meant. The way people touched you was cryptic, all holding some message for you; but, trapped in the difficulties of communication, the messages became garbled, sometimes ignored and, worst of all, misunderstood. The thought of a possible message involved in this pulsing was comforting, because she had begun to wonder (as she asked Soames to pass the butter) whether the pulsing would stop only when she would die. But if it was only a more abstract means of communication than speech and touch, then it was as silly to expect it to be related to her own death as to expect the sea to cease its whooosh, when she, Elly, no longer existed.
“… in a few months,” Soames was saying to her.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear what you said.”
“I said you’ll be able to see yourself and your house in the magazine in a few months.”
“That’s nice.” She looked at him for the first time, aware that he was the spokesman for the other one who was silent. Soames was about Elly’s height. He had a bland sort of face, the most striking feature of which was his rapidly receding hairline, drawing attention to a man who could not be more than twenty-nine or thirty.
“You must like your work,” she said politely.
“It’s not often so interesting as this assignment,” Soames said.
Ah, Elly thought, the pitch. She seemed to have been born with the knowledge of men’s intentions toward her, not being able to remember having been shocked or at least surprised the first time she had divined a man’s desires. Most of the girls at school had related at least one instance of this feeling. I was born at the age of eighteen, she thought, and last year I was born at the age of seventeen, and so on backward. That accounts for why I know so much.
“I’m glad you enjoy your work here,” she said shortly and, pushing her chair back, she said, “I’m not very hungry. Excuse me,” ignoring the fact that she had eaten, by any standards, a very hearty lunch.
Soames half stood up in his place as she left, an act which surprised him as much as his companion. He was not usually given to such gestures.
In his room, Alec was playing a recording he and a group of his friends had made at a session of Shakespeare reading. He sat down, his eyeballs feeling a little distant from the rest of his head, and listened to himself speaking Othello’s words: “Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell …” Then Annette spoke and sounded so much like herself that he listened, breath held, his cigarette burning itself down to his nicotine-stained fingertips. He was sorry
now that he had played the damned thing, under the self-deception of the idea that he wanted to study, to distract himself. Dropping the cigarette to the spotlessly clean floor, he let it smolder there.
For the first time since Jay and Alec had arrived, Elly roamed the afternoon purposelessly, feeling uncomfortable in the unaccustomed blue jeans she wore, but unwilling to go home and change again. She circled far behind the pine forest and ran awhile to tire herself. The afternoon was like a great vacuum; the wind that had been building since the morning blew and resounded as if Elly and the afternoon were under a great glass bell and the wind was being piped in from outside.
She entered the dark and musty pine forest with fear, as if it were a mysterious place and one to which she had never been before. As she walked deeper and deeper into the tangled trees the sound of the wind grew more and more faint, until finally she stopped listening for it and the afternoon truly became a vacuum.
Once in the clearing where she and Jay had made love, her heart began to pound furiously. It seemed darker than it ever had before and somehow ominous; the distant cries of birds were threatening and she was encased in a sheath of loneliness. She dropped to the ground and buried her face in the thick, sweet ground-bush of the pine needles and breathed deeply. She knew that she was depressed, that there was an ache somewhere which must be relieved, and knew too that the pulsing was still with her. She wanted to cry but could not. There were so many worlds, the world of herself as a little girl and poor Eddie, the world of school in Vermont and herself dancing and the mess in the bathtub, and worlds she had only heard about, like the icy, starlit world of New York that Jay had described, himself stepping out of Carnegie Hall into the world that pulsed only for him (or was that what he had meant?). And why hadn’t she told him when he’d talked about New York in the winter that she had been there, that she had—Surely that was why. She might have told him about … what was his name? … Steven Burke. (What would have troubled him more—that she’d slept with him or that she’d stolen the money or, perhaps worst of all, that she had destroyed the money?) So many worlds, and this world here in the cool darkness had always been a safe one. Why was it so menacing now? The lack of wind itself seemed dangerous. She curled up into as small a ball as she could, feeling with anger the coarse material of the blue jeans against her soft skin. Perhaps because it was here that she had lost herself so that time with Jay—when she had been so transfigured that she was no longer herself, and then the terror—Somewhere in her consciousness there was a chain of effects of which the pulsing was a representation: she and Jay, leading to Alec’s fasting; she and Carl, leading to—leading to this entire crazy week.
Jay’s face, smiling faintly, appeared on her closed lids. She wished she were lying on the sand again, as she had after meeting him, listening to the sea, instead of enmeshed in this net of windless silence. Biting her lip ferociously Elly unbuttoned the jeans and found herself able to cry a little—not much, just a few sobs—and thinking with a sense of profound resignation, I thought I was through with this, she tried to find the self she had lost to Jay. She lay, afterward, shaken, thinking of nothing (which in itself was relief), and fell into a deep dreamless sleep.
When she awoke, because the pine clearing was timeless, she had no idea how long she had slept. She felt herself detached, almost disembodied, and a rising panic was building in her chest. With what was almost a physical contortion, a tensing of her muscles, she quieted this and was instantly sorry she had, because the awful dead quality returned. It was as if she had been on a journey, a quest for someone, and had found that someone to be—herself. If that was so, then who was the person who had made the journey? You couldn’t have two of the same person. If only she could have found someone else, like Jay Gordon and his stubby fingers on the piano keys.
Outside the sky was a shifting, cloudy black and the wind still tortured the trees and the grass. The party must have begun already but she could not bring herself to run, as much as she wanted to. She was still walking slowly when she came around the garage into a great splash of moonlight occupied by Professor Lanner, his wife and some people Elly did not recognize except for Carl, who stood smoking a cigarette near the entrance to the garden. The Japanese lanterns were lighted as she stood there, going up like a series of little explosions, telling her that the party had just begun. She brushed past Lanner, who smiled coolly at her, and she did not see, in her hurry to get inside, the look on Carl’s face as he half raised an arm to wave at her. It was a strange look, one not natural to Carl—the look of a man who has made up his mind about something.
There was a man wearing a tuxedo and she had to look again before realizing that it was Jay. He was like a stranger.
“Hi,” she said. “Did you do what I asked?”
“Yes,” he said. “I couldn’t get her on the phone, so I sent a wire, but that was hours ago. Where have you been?”
“I fell asleep in the pine forest. I’m going to get dressed. Tell the folks I’m here, will you?”
“Yes, dear, I will. Is there anything I can do?” He seemed to her to be speaking from such a long way off that she could hardly make out what he was saying.
“No, I’m fine,” she replied and hurried away because she was nauseated and was afraid she might vomit. Once in her room, the nausea was gone. She sat on the bed with her head in her hands for a while, wishing, oddly enough, that John Marron Lang were there. After all, she thought, it’s his house, not ours. Then she laid out her clothes on the bed and began to dress very carefully.
Setting the suitcase down for a moment, Annette brushed a few specks of face powder from her dress and straightened the belt that encircled her waist. A few passers-by glanced at the agitated young woman who, obviously leaving on a trip, was making last-minute adjustments that would be hopelessly wasted by the time she reached her destination. From the doorway of the little bungalow a rather bovine woman of about forty, wearing a house dress, looked despairingly at Annette. “Cut it out,” she drawled. “You look great.”
“Do I really look all right?” Annette murmured.
“Sure, sure. And it doesn’t matter anyway. By the time you get to Indiana you’ll be a wreck and have to do the whole job over again.”
Annette rushed up to her and threw her arms around her neck. “Thanks again, Clara. Thanks. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
“You would have lived at the Y, that’s what. But I’m glad you came to me. Your mother would have liked that. Here comes your bus. If you get airsick later, don’t forget the dramamine I gave you. Give my love to that skinny bastard Alec and tell him if he doesn’t treat you right I’ll fly there right after you and slit his lying actor’s throat.” Annette laughed nervously. “And,” Clara added, “find out about this hunger-strike crap it said about in the telegram.”
Annette nodded. “I can’t imagine—the bus—’By, Clara.”
As the bus padded away Annette felt the damp air with a chill suddenly and closed the window next to her. She was on her way. Maybe, she thought, it will be warmer in Colchester than in Los Angeles, and smiled. That was hardly likely. But no less likely than the crazy telegram from Jay and some kind of a fast. Today was the Day of Atonement—Yom Kippur—she knew from Clara, who was Jewish, and the religious ones fasted on that day. But not Alec. And even if he did, what was the big deal? So he wouldn’t eat for one day. There must be something else. There were few other people in the bus. Four o’clock was a slow time. Most of the other passengers were going to the airport too. Feeling her neck brushed by a finger of chilly, damp air, she turned and saw that the window behind her was open.
“Pardon me,” she said to the tall gray-haired man sitting next to the window, “would you mind closing the window? It’s a little damp.”
He smiled, a quiet inward smile, Annette thought, as if he were amused at some private thought, and said, “Certainly.” He slammed it shut and then said: “This kind of day is the one we tell jokes about back Ea
st. The heavy Los Angeles dew.”
She had turned around already, by the time he had finished his remark, but he was so pleasant that Annette felt constrained to twist around for an instant and smile a tiny response. The bus moved incredibly slowly, it seemed to her. She was watching this new Annette with interest—anxious, tense. Her mother had always pointed her out with pride as the phlegmatic one of the family: feet on the ground, non-hysterical. Well, she had grounds for hysteria. Alec gone only a week and a half (seemed like a day and a half—she’d almost expected him to walk into Clara’s and pick her up for a rehearsal or tell her the latest news from his agent) and an insane telegram from Jay. Perhaps Alec didn’t even know she was coming. And she, Annette, spending the days carefully severing the threads, intently adjusting to a life without Alec’s bony-faced grin in the doorway as she went off to dance class. She had just been realizing that it could be done, battling with the most disturbing thought of all—that if it could be done so swiftly and so well, how did you know if you’d really loved at all?
Damn her anyway! John Marron Lang was thinking. If there’s anything I need it’s a brisk breeze, after this California warm soup they call air. And a little dampness is welcome too. Well, she is dressed awfully lightly. I should have closed my window when I saw her close hers. You’d think for a man who’s so anxious to get away from here I’d have been long since gone. I was finished here three days ago. I could have stayed at the Kaufmans’ for at least two of those three days. What was I afraid of? Maybe, for me, going East means going toward Lorraine, and I’m certainly in no hurry for that. He tried to absorb himself in some of the sketches in his portfolio. He was to do a cliff house for a famous portrait painter who lived in Vermont. Somehow, on the wetly sliding bus in the light of day the sketches didn’t look so good as they had the night before. Nothing he’d done in the last few years had been as good as the Kaufman house. That was why, when The American Architect had asked him to pick the one he wanted photographed for their article on him, he hadn’t hesitated a moment before choosing the Kaufman house. The other boys got their photographs and articles in the big magazines: Life, Time, all of them. Wright, Le Corbusier, even Chester, who wasn’t really an architect, but more of a painter. He, Lang, was an architect’s architect. And a man’s man too. He certainly wasn’t a woman’s man.
