A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  But they were there, and a tall woman and a tall, pink man were coming at them, running at them, great smiles and cries of love filling the air.

  He woke at two in the morning, sober. He knew where he was—in a guest room, because the bed was high and too soft, and everything was so clean it squeaked. Phyllis was there beside the bed, shaking him.

  “Richard!” she whispered, “Wake up for a minute!” The moon was bright enough so that he could see his watch.

  “I hate you for looking at your watch,” she whispered as she slid in beside him. He turned toward her, his arm sliding across her smooth, firm belly, his nose aching at the bridge it was so full of her, and he sneezed violently into her shoulder. “I love you,” she said, and she grabbed him so hard it hurt. Just before he was into her, into that surprising dark violence in a girl so fresh and young, he had the idea that he must try to teach her to be more gentle, more feminine, more passive somehow in her embraces. It was he who should work upon her—she shouldn’t try to grab everything herself. He thought this before she melted and got what she wanted, until, it always seemed to him, she turned to butter like the tiger in Little Black Sambo.

  Later they smoked, lying side by side in the narrow bed. With two in it they had to balance themselves, really; it was like floating in water. Phyllis put her cigarette out and snuggled down beside him.

  “You’d better not go to sleep,” he said.

  “I won’t. They know anyway, though,” she said.

  “You mean you told them?” He knew she was impossibly honest, but not, he hoped, that honest.

  “No. I don’t want to hurt them. But you know damn well they knew the minute they laid eyes on you.”

  “I always thought I looked like a nice boy,” he said.

  “You look like a nice boy superficially,” she said. “Anyway, I think they like you. I don’t think Dad would like you if you didn’t seem to be a man. Once I brought a boy home and Dad sneered at him. Really. He was a nice boy, but sort of a sissy, and Dad knew right away.”

  He found it hard to visualize a sneer on William Krause’s face. When they’d got out of the car there was the big pink hand in his, and on the man’s face the most straightforward grin of delight. He was a fairly fat man, whose skin was almost indelicately pink. He looked a little translucent, as though he were not full of blood but were pink as ham clean through. What hair he had left was blond, and each hair was as thick as a toothbrush bristle. His eyes were pale, pale blue. He wore a white shirt open at the neck, and with the low, nearly horizontal sun coming across the lawn and hitting him he seemed brighter and bigger than life. Richard had to blink.

  “Come on, Dick!” William Krause said. “After that drive you need a drink!” He took Richard’s arm and started off with him.

  Phyllis had to reach out and pull him back in order to introduce him to her mother. Hannah Krause was a tall, well-built woman with a good square chin and open eyes, nearly as tall as her husband, but not so husky. Richard could see Phyllis at that age. You are tall, like your mother, he thought—the words of a song MacGregor used to sing. And now, seeing this older version of Phyllis, he saw why she had always seemed, in the weirdest way, familiar, as though he’d known her somewhere before, in his childhood, or at least before the war, or in school long ago. It was that girl of the nineties—or was it the tens and teens of this century—the Gibson Girl. Both she and her mother had that same clean, almost masculine yet delicate face.

  Hannah took his hand in her firm one, and in spite of some embarrassment over her husband’s behavior, smiled and welcomed him. Really, he thought, they were nice people, and in the next few days he got to know both of them better than he had expected to under the circumstances of his being their daughter’s suitor. He liked them both, their liveliness, their excitements, their conventional, and he thought typical, civilization. But still he was an alien, an orphan from another city, a man seven years older than their sweet daughter, a man with a seedy past, too, if they only knew, a past that included some dangerous experiments with ugliness, and too much indifference to the coldness and cruelty of the world.

  And so it seemed to him each night when Phyllis slipped tender and naked into his bed that he was doing these people dirt, defiling their clean, hopeful lives.

  Six months later he and Phyllis sat at the Capoulade, in Paris, and he turned in the wire chair and spoke to her.

  “You see that one there by the kiosk, Phyllis? He’s looking at Paris Match. No, he’s looking at Ladies’ Home Journal.

  The one with the beard and spats and all that goes with spats. You met him yesterday. The Indian—the bloody Oxford Indian. We used to call him Kris Le Barbu.”

  “He’s very attractive,” Phyllis said.

  He looked again, startled, at the Indian.

  “We called him ‘The Armpit,’ among other things. And he spent most of his time scheming for blondes.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that, if you like blondes?”

  Phyllis said. “Didn’t you scheme a little for me?”

  “Not for sociological reasons, I don’t think.”

  “How do you know?” Phyllis asked seriously. “You imply that he wants blondes because he’s fairly black, but maybe you want them (me, that is, I hope) because you’re blond yourself—maybe that’s just as sick.” She turned her wide blue Iowa eyes on him, and he admired their precision and purity; he thought of fresh vegetables and cornflakes.

  “A sort of inbreeding?” he said.

  She smiled at him. “I never think of anything like that—I mean like genetics—when I think of a man. You, that is,” she said, and moved her hand down his arm.

  He loved her—good God, he had married her!—but she never quite agreed with him about anything, and sitting here in the Capoulade, where he’d sat so many times with another girl, he had to make comparisons. The other girl was Eva, and he decided that after breakfast he would take a sentimental little walk in the Luxembourg Gardens.

  “It’s late,” Phyllis said. “I told Mother and Dad I’d meet them at ten!”

  “It’s not much of a walk.”

  “You don’t want to come?” She was really disappointed, and as she stared straight at him he leaned toward her and kissed her. She pushed her lips firmly back at his, and then began to gather her things from the table.

  “I promised Jean and Jewell I’d see them this morning,” he said, and Phyllis looked at once tortured and guilty. She wanted so much to do the right thing, to help people and to give sympathy to them. Suddenly he shivered, seeing again the vision of Henri Varniol dead, Jewell, his fat black wife sobbing, at the heartrending shoddy pompe funêbre yesterday in Montreuil. Phyllis had been brave, near to tears, and now she felt guilty because she didn’t want to see Jewell again in such sorrow. God knew it had been horrible—the ghastly wax flowers that had seen too many poor corpses, the flyblown horses slipping on the cobbles and grunting, soon enough to be on their own way to the boucherie chevalline.

  So many things had changed since he’d left Paris. Henri was dead of cancer. MacGregor was dead of TB and alcohol. Jewell had told him that, her huge moony mammy’s face broken and sorrowful. Nothing was good—no news was good of the years he had been away. Jewell had even lost the permit for her club, and the French were not so tolerant now the quarter contained so many Negroes.

  He put his icy glass along his cheek and smelled the cognac. MacGregor used to call this drink a “finalobe,” and had died probably without knowing exactly what had killed him, certainly not caring very much. He wasn’t an alcoholic, that was the funny part. No more than a suicide by gas is addicted to gas.

  “Do you think I ought to come?” Phyllis asked.

  “No, you promised your folks,” he said. He smiled at her for her dutifulness, and she understood. She would have come if he’d asked her, he knew. Her careful hair, the color of honey, moved softly against her ear as she shook her head.

  Outside the glass partition the boulevard was w
et, the magazines in the kiosk wilted in their brackets. A cold wind came along the sidewalk, through the crack below the partition and touched his ankles, swirled damply over the table and made waves across the liquid blue flames of the overhead gas heaters. She took a Kleenex out of her handbag and carefully pressed the coffee from her lips.

  “I don’t know where we’re going after the Flea Market, but will you remember five o’clock at the Cujas? We’ll meet there for a drink. They want to take us out to dinner so badly.”

  “I’m looking forward to it,” he said. She didn’t believe him, and she was only partly right. The fact was that he did like her parents, but nobody else could quite believe it.

  “It’s something we have to do,” she said, and he saw a grave thought pass across her clear face as she remembered her own dereliction of duty.

  “It’s all right, Phyllis,” he said. Another thing that bothered her in some moral way was that this off-season trip to Paris was a wedding present from her parents. She didn’t like to be beholden to them, and yet she loved them.

  He saw her watching herself as she left, walking towards herself all the way to the wall mirror, then making a sharp turn out the door. And what could she see but a clean and pretty girl, most likely the prettiest in sight at any time, and that smooth, athletic body that moved with such natural authority? She was pregnant, but it wasn’t noticeable yet. There was a lump inside her belly, though, and she was always making him put his hand on it, to feel it.

  He put his glass down on the round table. It was still full and the ice had melted. He couldn’t drink at breakfast any more, and this was another indication that things had changed. He was healthier, probably, than he had been back in those days, but something was missing. They all used to drink before breakfast then and never care. They’d talk themselves sober, run upstairs, get into an argument or a fight, take off to anywhere with a twenty-dollar traveler’s check and a sleeping bag. A headache was a trophy then, not a symptom of decay.

  Those were the days of his exuberance, before Pinay overvaluated the franc, before the G.I. Bill ran out. The ones who were left seemed to have exact and prissy little schedules, like old maids—certain restaurants, certain fresh croissants, certain hours for everything. Most had gone back, as he had, to their own countries, where they could earn money.

  Perry had gone back to England. Plump and affable Perry, who was sometimes broke and sometimes not frowned upon at Barclay’s Bank. Once they had gone off to Germany, he and Torgy and MacGregor, and left Perry broke. They’d asked Perry if he wanted to come, and hadn’t thought about Perry’s being a Jew. Nothing could have made Perry go to Germany. When they’d come back they found Perry shivering in his room. He’d sold his overcoat and was about to be thrown out for lack of rent—actually starving. He’d lost fifteen pounds. They half-carried him to the Vietnamese restaurant on rue M. Le Prince and fed him fifteen eggrolls and a bottle of wine. Perry said:

  “Those who have crossed

  With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

  Remember us—if at all—not as lost

  Violent souls, but only

  As the hollow men

  The stuffed men.”

  With that he belched and forgave them.

  MacGregor had played the piano, then, at Jewell’s night club. Nobody listened. And now Perry had gone back to England for good. Jewell had told him that. Jean the Czech had told him that, too, and that Torgy, the Dane, had borrowed a typewriter and sold it three times before going back to Denmark. Then he took the typewriter with him.

  Richard rapped his key against the glass, and the waiter came with a fat wallet to give him tattered change.

  He walked, remembering, across the boulevard to the Luxembourg Gardens, then to the Italianate little statue by the goldfish pond. The stone girl lay on her side, beautiful, ideal, still able to cause in him a sad, delightful shiver. Some son-of-a-bitch had thrown a hot dog into the shallow pool, and it floated near its bread, surrounded by an obscene, scummy haze. The fat gold carp ignored it.

  The stone girl wore dead leaves; one had landed on her cheek, another lightly touched her breast. It started to rain again, slowly, mistily, as it had on and off for days. The old people on the benches drew their coats a little tighter, but did not get up to go.

  He left the Gardens and walked down the long hill to the Seine. The plane trees had been pruned to the bolls and looked like crooked clubs. The buildings leaned backward in the rain, as cold inside as they were out. In the cafes the girls’ ankles were bluish with the cold, and the floors were all damp stone, wet tile, as chilling as the street but not so clean.

  He remembered that he used to dream at night. He had had happy dreams, victorious dreams. He had quite often been happy for no reason at all. He remembered walking with Eva along the river, running, suddenly jumping up on top of the wall along the river, running, jumping down and over benches, cracking his heels in the air.

  He stopped and bought a package of Gauloise Bleus. He used to inhale the smoke that seemed to have particles as big as grains of sand in it, it was so strong. Torgy, who was a sailor, said once that they could always tell when they were approaching the coast of France: they could smell the piss and the Gauloises. He pulled one of the lumpy cigarettes out and lit it. It was like trying to inhale something solid, like a golf ball. One more segment of his appetite had gone.

  At the bottom of Boul’ Mich’ he turned toward rue Galande, where Jean the Czech lived. The narrow, crooked little alley of a street dripped and echoed. The concierge was quite impressed by his expensive clothes, and she let him in with no questions. He climbed the last flight to Jean’s door in that dark—the timed hall light was always too quick to go out.

  Jean let him in and smiled politely. The top button of his shirt was unbuttoned, but he would button it and tighten his tie before he went outside. He always wore a complete set of clothes—vest, tie, hat, coat, everything neatly in place, yet grimy. He buttoned his shirt and tightened the hard knot of his tie.

  “You’ll come with me,” he said. “Some of us are going over to Jewell’s Club.”

  “She’s not open…”

  “No, but she’s going to be there. She has the radio. It’s disgusting, but we’re going to hear the latest excuses from Moscow.” Jean’s face was bitter, and his long, pointed nose seemed to quiver. Surprisingly, he poured two glasses of white wine. Richard looked closely at his face and saw the unmistakable signs of too much alcohol—thin red veins in the whites of his eyes, and beneath his eyes, incipient little softenings; he looked a little more like a Frenchman.

  “So you drink now,” Richard said.

  “Why not?” Jean said recklessly.

  “You never used to.”

  “What good is it not to? I am now a Neutralist. Neutralists always drink too much.” He sat at his desk and snapped the bottle with his fingernail. “It’s not even decent wine.”

  “It’s all right. I used to drink worse.”

  Jean examined Richard’s clothes.

  “By the looks of you, you don’t now,” he said.

  “No, I’ve got some money now.”

  Jean tossed off the rest of his wine. The reckless gesture did not suit him. Richard had always been aware of Jean’s envy in matters such as this. The young Americans usually had an air. They could dress like bums and still not be treated like bums. The police looked at them differently. Jean without his suit, without his tie, without his careful respectability, would be lost among the rest of the Cold War’s tidewrack, as inconsequential as one of the cats in Les Halles.

  His room was bare, his books were stacked neatly beside his desk. Another icon of his former faith had disappeared: Picasso’s dove had come down from the yellow walls.

  “Do you remember Eva?” Jean asked.

  “Yes. She is in Lyon…”

  “Married to a disgusting middle-class who owns a hotel. She now takes money from the poules and cleans the bidets.”

  “It�
��s too bad,” Richard said.

  “But it’s security.”

  “I’d rather be insecure and not have to clean the bidets,” Richard said, although he wondered if this was really true.

  “It’s easy for an American to say that!” Jean said angrily, then slumped down as if he had just remembered that he was a Neutralist. “I would rather have seen you marry her and take her to America. Why didn’t you?”

  He thought of Eva, smooth as the stone girl in the Luxembourg Gardens, and lost to him. Her complicated, yet submissive little face, her dark hair—all seemed to be in shadow.

  “But you are married,” Jean said.

  “Oh, yes. I’m married all right. I’m goddam well married.”

  “I hated you then. I think I still do. Have some more wine and we’ll go to Jewell’s. She always liked you, God knows why.”

  “We’re both Americans,” Richard said. “And besides, she never really believed all that crap you used to have to believe about the Sunday lynchings in Central Park.”

  “She’s a Negro!” Jean said.

  “Look, we come from the same home town. She just lived farther uptown than I did.” Then Richard decided not to do this to Jean. “She always did like me, that’s true. She told my fortune once. She doesn’t do that for everybody.”

  A Communist fortuneteller is the only kind, he told her once, who can tell the future according to scientific principles. This did not amuse her. It was one superstition she would not give up.

  Jewell liked Eva. It pleased Jewell to see them together—another non-Marxian rudiment like the fortunetelling. Jewell wanted them to be together, and once told him, “Richard, that girl belongs to you, hear? She’s a sweet woman, Richard. You got a treasure you don’t want to throw away. She’s worth more’n your wanderin’ libido ever know, Richard!” And then the huge laugh, and with it the level large eyes, serious, observant and kind. She often invited them to stay after hours to hear the jam sessions and drink the free liquor.