The Precipice

by Hugh Maclennan

There was a long delay before Marcia Stapleton's voice came onto the phone, following two suave female voices who announced themselves and then switched him to other extensions. Marcia informed him that she was delighted to hear from him and the eagerness of her personality seemed to be in the booth with him.

  When he walked out into the sunshine he felt once again as he had felt twenty-four hours ago, adventurous and brimming with vitality. She had agreed to let him take her to dinner that evening.

  IT WAS another evening with a flaming sunset over the Hudson followed by darkness and the same flowering of electric lights all over the city. Bruce met Stephen's sister in her apartment in Sutton Place, a very different kind of apartment from Lucy's. It was old-fashioned and prim, as if a prized New England interior had been transported to New York and installed within view of the East River. Electric lights had been covered by frosted glass originally designed for oil lamps. The chairs were antique, brittle, and unsafe for anyone heavier than a small child. Over the mantel hung a line-engraving of New Bedford harbour, a period piece in which a flotilla of brigs and three-masters with yards backed lay at anchor among waves that resembled a mass of twisted black wires. On the other walls were three paintings with highly lacquered and cracked canvases of black-suited men displaying grim red faces and bitter turned-down mouths, apparently representing the heads of a family in the first three generations of its wealth. The family resemblance was strong in all three, though the first wore a round collar and was certainly a clergyman and the second wore a stock and was probably a merchant.

  Bruce had always felt an insatiable curiosity about the insides of other people's houses, so now he prowled around the room while he waited for Marcia to change for the evening. He discovered a pair of small photographs on the mantel and decided they must be Marcia's parents. Her mother's features were delicate, she wore her hair in bangs, and it was evident that she had been both a charming and beautiful woman. Her husband's square jaws and hard eyes made no impression whatever on Bruce; the type was unfamiliar to him.

  As Marcia came in from the bedroom wearing a rich blue velvet dinner dress with a gold belt and gold jewellery, Bruce turned away from the pictures, his expression showing startled approval. She came across the room and stood before him, smiling like a friendly child.

  “Kiss me!” she said.

  He put his arms about her obediently, but when he felt her body quiver and her lips open beneath his, he thought Good God, what have I here?

  She stepped back, drew a deep breath, and then she smiled again. “You're awfully nice! And don't look so surprised. I've been in the office all day doing something completely useless. I wanted to kiss you the first time I saw you last night. You liked me, too…before you started looking at Lucy.” She glanced around the room. “Damn! I've forgotten the drinks. Wait a minute.”

  She went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses, one in either hand, containing rye, ice, and water. She handed Bruce one glass, set the other on a table, then laid her fingers, cold and slightly damp, against her forehead.

  “Do you know what I do for a living?” she said.

  “No.”

  “I'm in the research department of LIFE. Somebody over there discovered what this place is like…” One hand swept in an arc to indicate the room…“So for three weeks I've been getting up material on old New England interiors. They may do a piece based on my findings sometime. And they may not.”

  “It sounds like interesting work.”

  She studied him a moment before she answered. “I'm one of the very most obscure individuals in the whole enormous staff of that magazine. Fortunately, I still get a pittance from my last husband to keep me in hair-ribbons.” She sat down in a fragile chair beside a Duncan Phyfe table, picked up her glass and drank a third of its contents, and seeing his eyes travelling over the room again, she twinkled with amusement. “This room's not genuine. It's just a family museum. After Father died, Mother collected all this stuff from her family's old homestead in Massachusetts. This was her apartment before she died. Making it look like this was her way of trying to forget her life with Father, I suspect. Or maybe she was simply trying to escape back to her childhood. Ever since I've lived here I've found my ancestors rather embarrassing.”

  Bruce got up and crossed the room to stand, glass in hand, in front of the oldest painting. Authentic puritan eyes, framed by an authentic puritan face in which the bone structure seemed to be straining at the skin, stared bleakly back at him. All his life he had seen faces like that in Grenville and it had never occurred to him to consider them distinguished.

  “Everything Mother ever did was terrifyingly symbolic,” Marcia said. “When she married Father there was a wild fluttering in the dovecotes. Some of the relatives said he was impossible and one or two of them said he'd graft new energy onto the family tree. Father was crude, but considering Steve and me, I guess his energy was no more use to the Massachusetts blood of Mother's family than a truck running downhill with no brakes. All he gave Steve was a compulsion to pretend he's a lot cruder than he really is.”

  Bruce looked down at her and gave her a puzzled smile. “Do you always add up scores like that?”

  “Don't take me seriously. Nobody else does. Relax and drink your drink peacefully.”

  He returned to his chair and wondered if he looked as tense as he felt.

  “Did Lucy tell you about my two failures in marriage?” Marcia said.

  “Only that you were separated.”

  “That's all she would say. Lucy's so tactful. Or rather, she's just plain damned nice.” She got up and went into the kitchen and came back with a bowl of ice. She dropped a piece in Bruce's glass and one in her own. “I hate divorce,” she said. “I really do. I haven't divorced Arnold – my third husband – but I suppose I'll have to. Men are so chivalrous these days. They commit adultery and then allow the wife they don't want any more to go out to Reno by herself and announce to the whole world that she can't hold her husband.”

  She went into the kitchen again and returned with a half-empty bottle of rye. She poured some in his glass, poured some in her own, and then stood over him, looking at a white scar which ran behind the knuckles of his left hand.

  “Don't try to make something symbolic out of that,” he said. “It came from a scythe when I was working on a farm the summer I was sixteen. All it means is that a farmer threw a scythe on top of a load of hay and it slid down the other side of the wagon and hit me.”

  She continued to stand in front of him with a mocking, childish smile on her lips. He got to his feet, took the bottle and her glass, and set them down, and then put his arms about her and kissed her again. Her fingers teased his hair.

  “You're so defiantly healthy minded!” she said when he finally released her.

  “Oh, to hell with you!” He kissed her again. Then he went to the kitchen himself to search for water and a pitcher to carry it in. By eight o'clock she had finished three more drinks and Bruce was hungry, but Marcia was in no hurry to leave.

  “Tell me something,” she said, showing no evidence of having been drinking anything stronger than lemonade. “Why did Lucy marry Steve?”

  “She was in love with him, I should imagine. And she was very lonely.”

  “What's the matter with the men in Canada?”

  He avoided her questioning eyes and fumbled for cigarettes. “In 1938, there wasn't a man Lucy's age with a decent job in the town where we lived. Not an unmarried one, anyhow.”

  “Did that include you?”

  Instead of answering her question, he said, “Lucy's changed since she married your brother, you know. If she went home now people would hardly recognize her.”

  “Nonsense. She hasn't changed at all. Underneath she's always been exactly what she is now.”

  When Bruce made no reply, she added, “Lucy's too good for Steve, you know.”

  He found her eyes and held them. “I wouldn't know about that. Everyone liked Steve in Grenville.”
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  “That's why he was sent up there.”

  Bruce eyed her with curiosity. “Why do you dislike him?”

  “I don't. As a matter of fact, I'm sorry for him. After all, I knew his parents.” She looked down at her empty glass and decided it was time for them to go out and eat.

  But later on, in a restaurant of her selection with a ceiling quite as low as the one she had objected to the night before, Marcia began to talk of Lucy again.

  “Sometimes when I'm horribly down, I think about her and I feel better just to know she's alive. And I'm not even envious. Women like Lucy don't usually like me, but she's never held me off. I don't know why. But I also don't have any idea what she thinks about us all. She seems to have emerged from an earlier segment of time.”

  Bruce looked down at his plate and impaled a piece of marinated herring on his fork. He heard French spoken at a table on his right and an unfamiliar language at the table ahead of them. The man with the unknown tongue was bald-headed and he wore his napkin tucked into one side of his collar; the young woman who faced him had black eyes which darted from a mid-European mask and she gestured with suave hands which made arabesques over her food.

  Marcia followed his glance. “I met him once when he first arrived, but he wouldn't remember. All he remembers is how much he hates being here. She smuggled her diamonds out in jars of cold cream and they've been living on the proceeds ever since. New York's become queer since history moved in on us.”

  Bruce finished the herring and stole another glance at the unhappy couple. He heard Marcia speaking softly.

  “I wish you weren't in the Airforce,” she said.

  “Why?” He turned his glance back to her.

  “Because I like you.”

  He smiled grimly. “Maybe you'd have liked me better two years ago. I was a pacifist then.”

  “Why did you change?”

  “This is the season of the universal payoff. The era of good intentions is over.”

  She thought about what he had said, and when she answered her voice was wistful. “I call us the well-meaning generation. We threw away the wisdom of the ages because we quite correctly despised our parents. In our own way we were so terribly moral. We slept with each other whenever we felt like it because we thought it was hypocritical not to follow our natural instincts. We believed that wars were made by munitions-makers and old men who should have been dead, and so we let this one become possible because we weren't going to let ourselves be fooled a second time. We thought science had arrived to take the place of religion, and we believed the only thing needed to make us good was a good economic system. Because our parents were wrong about nearly everything, we took it for granted we were automatically right whenever we disagreed with them. If Jesus Christ appeared today, we'd send him to a psychoanalyst to get rid of his maladjustments.”

  Only a little of what Marcia said touched an emotional chord in Bruce, for he had met nobody in Canada who thought as she did, nor did her words agree with most American opinions he had seen in print. She stirred his senses every time he looked at her, but his soul felt empty and his mind confused.

  As though to regain the attention she sensed she had lost, Marcia's voice began to rise, and the couple at the next table concentrated on their plates with the abstracted attention people always give to their food when they are straining their ears to listen to somebody else's conversation.

  “Steve's custom-made,” she was saying, “and yet I know a gross exactly like him. They all went to Yale or Princeton and they all graduated into the big time in New York and they all had tough, silent fathers who were successful in the neolithic age and they can't realize that the future belongs to smooth little swine like Carl Bratian who can size them up and undress their minds for them. They…”

  “Does it?” Bruce interrupted.

  “Does it what?”

  “Does the future necessarily belong to men like Bratian? I don't think so.”

  Marcia made a gesture of despair. “And I was doing so well! I was being terribly serious.”

  “You certainly were.”

  “But I do know what I'm talking about. Men like Steve use women to prove something to themselves. They think the only thing women want of a man is for him to be super-colossal in bed. My first husband believed that, and since he wasn't very strong he had an inferiority complex and ended by hating me. Steve isn't that bad, of course. At least he's strong.”

  Bruce said nothing more until he had finished his steak. He wished Marcia would stop talking about her brother, for he knew that Lucy was in love with Steve, and he knew that his sudden new feeling for Lucy had been aroused by the emanations of her love for another man, and. from this he tried to reason that love was infectious, like a disease, and that it was probably a mistake to pin it directly on a single person when you caught it.

  While they drank their coffee he asked Marcia if she would like a brandy, but she shook her head impatiently.

  “Let's get out of here,” she said when she had snapped her compact shut and dropped it into her purse. “There's a new place I want to see. I've been thinking about it ever since you called me.”

  Soon they were in the full course of one of those evenings cut from a pattern set in the last war, developed in the long armistice, and celebrated in a thousand novels until it had become as formal as a ritual. Drinks in clouded bistros, growing intimacy, mutual discovery of each other's inevitable loneliness, taxies in the night, a few dances, more drinks, a conversation on the curb in front of a night-club in the Village with a drunk who claimed that Mike McTigue would have been the daisy of them all if his hands hadn't been so brittle, another smoke-filled joint, and a piano player whose eyes were bright with marijuana as he rolled out the barrelhouse.

  Some time after two in the morning, riding back uptown in a cab with his arm about Marcia's shoulder and her hair in his eyes and the perfume she used wild in his nostrils, Bruce remembered the war. It was easy then to face the fact that he was sure he would be dead before long. Would it be quick, a stitch of bullets across his chest, blacking him out as the hot, antiseptic metal snapped his spine? Or would he be trapped in his plane, and slide down the sky in a long, slow-seeming arc, beautiful to the onlookers as he burned alive?

  “Your jaw's too tight, darling. Relax.”

  “Is it?”

  “Don't think so hard. Nothing in the world's worth the effort of thinking about it.”

  “We've got to knock hell out of them.”

  “You're too serious.”

  “Why not? It's your war, too.”

  “It's not my war. I live in the United States.”

  “You're a North American and so am I. You've got to knock bloody hell out of them, too. We're not washed up on this continent. Not yet.”

  Silence. The taxi lurched as it turned off Madison and headed east.

  “Do you love me?”

  His jaw tightened again. The taxi passed Park, ran rapidly between silent buildings, and crossed Lexington.

  “It's such a little thing to say,” she murmured. “Please say it to me.”

  Silence again as they passed under the Elevated at Third, Bruce feeling the tension rise within him, thinking of more things than he could understand if he had a whole year to consider them. Alone with Marcia, longing for her not because she was Marcia but because she was all women, in love with Lucy whom he had never taken seriously when he might have loved her, in New York, in a war, sitting close to Marcia who used perfume behind her ears and made him feel grateful because she liked him so much.

  “Right now is all the time there ever is,” she said.

  He thought of Grenville and the long, cautious nights where desire is an ache under the moon, and marriage an endurance, and the future the sole reason for the present.

  The tires bumbled on the paving blocks of First Avenue. As they passed through the yellow splash of a street light Marcia's face became visible.

  “Darling,” she whispered. “Please st
op thinking. You must. At least for tonight.”

  He crushed her in his arms, but the cab lurched and threw them apart. He caught a blurred vision of the cage-like girders of a section of the Queensborough Bridge.

  Less than half an hour later, watched in the dim light by still another of Marcia's New England ancestors, Bruce Fraser came to the end of a trail he had been following since adolescence; and in the conflicting tensions of the moment he was not sure whether he had crossed the frontier of a deeper mystery or merely entered the first of a long series of empty rooms.

  For his remaining day in New York he made no attempt to see either Lucy or Marcia again. Shy with himself and deeply disturbed, he spent his last American money on two bouquets, wrote a brief note to accompany each, and ordered one sent to Lucy and the other to Marcia.

  When he found a seat in the day coach for the bumpy night ride back to Montreal he was hungry, after a supper limited necessarily to a single hamburger and a cup of coffee. He was too tired to sort out his feelings and his eyes closed before the train left the station.

  The hard, green-plush seats of the old coach were filled that night with exhausted Canadian soldiers and airmen, as broke as himself, all returning from leave in New York. They were all too tired to talk, too tired even to look at one another. All military glamour was gone when they took off their tunics and sprawled on the seats in their wrinkled khaki or sky-blue shirts with the braces pulling their trousers halfway up their backs.

  As the train stirred and began to rumble along the tunnel under Park Avenue, Bruce's lips moved in a trace of a smile in answer to a rueful gleam of self-knowledge. A month from now this holiday would seem like a mirage in a desert. When poetical moods came upon him he would think of Lucy's face; with reawakened desire, Marcia would surge back imperiously; his imagination would distill them into beings who never existed. By that time he would again be the man he had been trained by his background to become, strong in the knowledge that whatever he most wanted he would probably never have and would certainly never enjoy.