She heard the rasp of Stephen's chair as he thrust it back from the table and his voice raised in anger. “For God's sake, shut up! What are you trying to do, make Lucy think I use whores in my work the way you do?”
“You would if they paid off for you.” Then Bratian's laugh. “Take it easy, Steve. You'll get an ulcer.”
She heard Stephen in the front hall and the sound of the door opening and closing. Then she heard the station wagon backing out of the garage and knew she would not see Stephen again until lunch or later. He had gone in to Nassau Street to look for friends.
THEY were in the garden, Lucy in her work gloves spraying bordeaux mixture on the new peony shoots, Bratian following her along the bed.
“You're uncommonly silent this morning,” he said.
She laid the sprayer on the grass, took off her gloves, and faced him. “All right, let's talk,” she replied.
He looked at her enquiringly, his oval eyes widening, the smoke spiralling up from his fine-ashed cigarette. She moved toward Sally's swing that hung from an old oak at the back of the garden.
“You can sit on John's wagon,” she said as she balanced herself on the board that separated the ropes.
Again his eyes widened and again he said nothing. She waited until he had spread a handkerchief on the wagon and then placed himself carefully on the white square.
“Do you know why Stephen is so unhappy?” she said.
“Is he?”
The sun was warm on their faces; it was like a June day in Grenville.
“Carl, in your own way you've several times paid me the compliment of believing I'm not quite as stupid as you think most people are.” She paused and then she went on. “I love Stephen. If he's happy, our whole family is happy. Perhaps I shouldn't have let myself become so dependent on him, but I have.” She gave a quick look around. The garden was empty and there was no sound but the breeze. “If he goes on much longer the way he's going now he'll have a breakdown. And then he'll be of no use to you at all. You know that as well as I do.”
Bratian was still calculating some aspect of her as she looked calmly back at him.
“All right, Carl,” she said. “If you don't want to talk to me that's your own affair. In that case I'll have to ask you to leave quietly before Stephen comes back. I can't have the two of you against me in my own house.”
For the first time since she had known him Bratian looked surprised. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“For the past six months I've been seeing Stephen an average of twice a week. I'm not complaining about it. I'm even selfishly glad he's not in the Pacific.” She paused. “You'll know exactly what I mean when I ask you this – is it really necessary for him to work every night in the week?”
Bratian's face still told her nothing. “These are the years, Lucy. If a man doesn't pick his lettuce now, he'll not have another chance after the men in uniform get home.”
Lucy seemed not to have heard him. She continued almost as though she were talking to herself. “You and I both know that Stephen is a man who could never bear to be alone. Is it just that he's got into the habit of spending evenings with other men like himself – who also can't bear to be alone? Drinking too much and feeling they can't spend a good evening unless they have women around? Is it just –” She stopped abruptly and turned away. “Or is Stephen in love with somebody else and afraid to tell me so?”
Bratian got to his feet and shook the dust from his handkerchief. “Any woman who starts checking up on a man who works nights is asking for trouble, Lucy.”
The ropes crossed overhead as she turned to face him, then fell apart again. “When I married Stephen,” she said, “I didn't expect him to be faithful to me physically. He's not the kind of man who could be – forever.” She saw his long lashes flicker slightly, but she could not tell whether he was suppressing a smile or a look of surprise. “I told myself it wouldn't matter so long as I didn't know about it. Things like – like that aren't easy for Stephen. He's – well, in a way he's still very young.”
“He's been voting for nineteen years,” Bratian said.
She watched his face, saw that he was against her, saw that he was finding her situation with Stephen amusing, finding it just another proof of his theory that no matter how hard people try to live a normal life they were sure to end up like this. She left the swing and put on her garden gloves, picked up the sprayer and began to
264
work on the peonies once more. Patches of virulent blue splashed onto the shoots and the dark earth around them and for several minutes there was no sound but the hiss of the mixture shooting out of the sprayer. Finally her contempt became intolerable to him. He snapped away his cigarette and lit another.
“Don't want to talk any more?” he said.
“No.”
“You've still got a lot to say.”
She made no answer and her silence exasperated him. “Listen, Lucy – what do you expect these days? You're still new down here. It's a bigger place than Grenville, Ontario. What's happening to Steve is what goes on all the time in New York. Steve was trained to feel like a heel if he didn't make money and he was trained to feel like a heel if he made it the way everyone else makes it. So he's right in there between two sides of himself and he can't make up his mind to choose one or the other. If it makes it any easier for you to understand, call it the American disease.”
She stopped spraying and measured out her words one by one. “Carl – what makes you so stupid?”
He stared at her and a slow flush mounted to his forehead.
“Do you really believe that what you just said means anything? Has your brain become as superficial as one of your own ads? Do you imagine you can explain away a man as complicated as Stephen Lassiter in a few cheap generalities you picked up from a book you read somewhere?”
His lips puckered and he made a whistling sound. “For Christ's sake!” he said. “All right, you asked for it. You said you wanted to know.” He waited a timed second. “Steve's got another woman. There's always one available and he's found his.”
His eyes seemed to fix on her face as if they were claws, but if he expected her to show pain, shock, or fear he was disappointed. He got nothing at all. She picked up the sprayer and went back to work on the peony bed.
He watched her a moment and then he said, “All right, you win, Lucy. No wonder Steve feels he's licked.”
She continued to spray until she reached the end of the border. When she straightened her back and turned to meet his eyes, raw sexual desire was all she could see in his face. So they stood for several frozen seconds. And then he laughed.
“Get wise to yourself,” he said. “You and I are the same kind. They think they can push us around, but you and I know we can do what we like with them. You don't belong in a hideaway like Princeton. You belong on top.” He made no move to draw closer to her. “You're the same kind my mother was. Only you're a lady and you use correct English and you don't have to start with two strikes against you.”
The sprayer was dripping thick blue liquid as she stared at him. When he smiled again and threw away his cigarette she said, “Please, Carl!”
“Okay.” The desire disappeared from his face as though he had drawn a mask over it.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “Forget it. I've still got a lot to do out here this morning and I'll do a better job if I'm alone.”
He pulled out his handkerchief and sat down on the wagon again. “But you wanted to know something, didn't you?”
“I only wanted –” Her voice shook a little. “Suddenly it's become horrid and embarrassing. I thought I could –” She turned away from him. “Carl, just tell me this, please. Do I know her?”
“I don't think so.”
“How old is she?”
“Early twenties, but she seems older. And don't ask me what she's like. She's one of those girls that come to New York. You meet them all over the place and for a little while everyone thinks they
're pretty good. I don't know much about her. Maybe her old man was a doctor or a lawyer or maybe he sold dry goods in Napoleon, Ohio. Whatever he did for a living, she's got enough background not to have to bother about it. Her name's Gail Beaumont.”
“Is she married?” There was something irrevocable in knowing a name.
“Maybe she has been, but I doubt it. Right now she's on her own. She works for CBS and she got the job all by herself, so I understand.” Sarcasm had found its way into his voice. He was very much himself again. “She writes programs about democracy. I heard one and I forget whether it was about Abe Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson, but it was a pretty slick job technically. Lousing up Lincoln and Jefferson is a new racket this year. There's not much money in it but it's got prestige.”
Lucy waited while he talked and she said nothing when he finished. As he continued to look at her the quality of his voice changed.
“Don't ask me what she's like because the only thing I know about her is that she's a smooth number and can look after herself. She may be sweet and lovely in bed or she may be a combination of Van de Velde and The New Republic. I wouldn't know.”
Lucy was suddenly afraid she was going to cry. To do so would be an unbearable humiliation in front of Carl.
“I'm throwing a party next week,” he said. “Cocktails on Thursday in my apartment. You've been to hundreds of them and this is just another. Why don't you come in for it? Everybody will be there.”
“No,” she said quickly. “I couldn't.”
“Think it over. You ought to see for yourself. Hell, she isn't Madame du Barry. She's just another girl who came to New York.”
She tried to keep herself from saying it, but her lips moved automatically. “If he just goes to bed with her I don't care, but – do you think he's in love with her?”
“How do I know? They're always in love with somebody.” His eyes became as cruel as a cat's. “Love, for Christ's sake! The opium of the people and Hollywood knows all about it. A jerk has no brains so give him love and it doesn't matter. A guy takes a look in the glass and maybe for once in his life he gets the right idea about himself. So he falls in love and he thinks he doesn't stink any more. Do you find people like my mother around these days? Do you find her any place that counts?” He got to his feet again, his wiry shoulders tense under his neat tweed jacket. “Right up to the end she let my old man go on thinking he was a big shot who could save humanity if humanity would only listen to him. Old Jan Bratianu who used to give the neighbourhood kids ice cream on hot nights while my mother was wearing out her eyes sewing indoors. There was an Irish priest who knew my old man was a socialist but he used to say that God was in him just the same, and the old man swallowed it whole! Once –” Carl's voice dropped so low she could hardly hear him. “Once in Rumania – I don't remember but my brother told me – once in Bucharest the dope got himself locked up for passing out revolutionary leaflets and my mother worked as a whore to keep us fed and have a couple of rooms waiting for him when they let him out. And she wasn't soft, either. She was as hard as a rock. Those are facts, God damn it, and I'm not making them up. Is that love or do you want a new name for it?”
Lucy wondered as she listened if he was telling her anything new about himself or if she had always known it: the lonely, undersized foreign boy transferring to the New World the hatreds of the old. Then she thought of Stephen again and knew just how frightened she really was.
BRATIAN'S cocktail party on the following Thursday was neither better nor worse than other such parties Lucy remembered at his place. The people he asked to his place were either successful or intellectual, sometimes they were celebrated, and seldom were they common in the ordinary sense of the word; yet the atmosphere of the ensemble was always oddly promiscuous. This afternoon Lucy arrived late and when the junior of Carl's two Filipino servants showed her into the living room the noise of seventy people yelling at each other hit her ears like a rolling broadside.
While she was looking around for someone she might know Bratian appeared with a blonde at least ten inches taller than himself who seemed to be under the impression that being his friend of the moment involved her in the duties of being his hostess as well. After Bratian had introduced her, she said to Lucy, “Now be sure to meet the guest of honour. He's over there by the piano, but he seems pretty busy.”
Lucy looked in the direction indicated and saw a tall man standing with his back to the room making sculptural motions with long brown hands before Bratian's Rouault.
“He's terribly clever. He's an Englishman and he helped plan the invasion.”
“He's a stupid bastard of an Austrian and he wants to sell me a new picture,” Bratian said. To Lucy he added, “I haven't seen you in city clothes for over a year. You look like a million.”
“But Carl,” the girl protested. “I know there's an Englishman somewhere.”
“There are several, darling.” He put his hand under the girl's elbow as though displaying her to Lucy. “Myrna wants me to get her a job with Harry Luce. Do you think it would make any difference?” He gave Lucy another long and approving look as the blonde drifted away. “Well, my dear?”
“Well, Carl?”
“I'm glad you changed your mind. It was the smart thing to do. Suppose you make your own way around the room. Half the people here don't know each other and most of them would hate each other if they did.”
He moved toward the door to greet a newcomer and Lucy turned to face the sea of spring hats with men's heads sticking up among them like islands. Small clusters of people were talking intimately around the fringes of the room.
“Martini, manhattan, daiquiri, or whiskey sour?”
The senior Filipino in Bratian's service was smiling before her with a tray held elbow high. She took a martini, sipped it, moved on with it in her left hand, and was immediately confronted by a distraught young man who informed her he was an expert on Czechoslovakia.
“For ten minutes I thought I was talking to the editor of Foreign Affairs, but do you know who he turned out to be?”
“No.”
“I don't either. Why are all these people here?”
He moved on, leaving Lucy with the feeling that she had been asked a question of some profundity. She began to sort the faces, separating those who were familiar from those she had never seen before. There was no sign of Stephen.
“I tell you,” a large man in a grey suit was saying to another who looked like his twin, “it's all a matter of know-how. Either you've got it or you haven't. Were you ever in Russia? You were? Then we're talking about the same thing.”
She passed them unseen to starboard and then she was blocked by a group surrounding a young major with two rows of ribbons on his chest. She gathered from a question somebody asked him that he was just back from Europe and from the expression on his face that he wished he were still there. “But you'll love it in Washington,” a young woman with hyperthyroid eyes was saying to him. “It's the purest Kafka!”
A woman with a vaguely familiar face spoke to Lucy. She had a mountainous bosom and would have looked like an earth mother if her face had not been lifted and she were not discussing Rorschach tests. A fresh-cheeked boy with a crew cut nodded to her and she remembered him as one of the bright college graduates who had moved from Yale into the agency; now he was in a captain's uniform and he was hobbling stiffly on a cane. Behind her the Austrian was gesturing truculently to a meek little woman in a ribald hat who nodded her head to his every sentence.
“The red dots on the forehead – there is from Rouault the attitude to pain. In America you have pain, but to it no attitude. So in America, no tragedy – no? In America you think that pain is something for foreigners only. Here you think to reform the pain in us, but this you cannot do.” He looked at the woman accusingly. “For the next ten years there will be more pain in America than for the last hundred.”
Lucy left the vicinity of the Austrian. Now her eyes were moving quickly from face to face. Which one
of these women was the girl Stephen had found? Whoever she was, Lucy guessed she would not be discovered in the nondescript crowd in the centre of the room.
As her eyes turned to the stray groups clustered near the windows she saw Stephen appear through the door leading to the pantry. He had a glass in either hand and as he entered the room she pulled back into the lee of a large man who stood between them. But Stephen was not looking about the room; his eyes shot directly to the window nearest the bookshelves in the far corner. Lucy saw his face break into a smile as he went over and handed one of the glasses to the girl who was standing there alone. A single glance told Lucy that young as she was, she was the smartest woman in the room; a second glance that she was not beautiful or even particularly good looking. She was short, with wide shoulders and a slim figure. An almost Slavonic width of cheekbones increased the look of depth in her grey, intelligent eyes. As she said something to Stephen and followed it with a quick laugh, Lucy received an impression of tremendous vitality.
The room went out of focus and gradually cleared again. Lucy felt the need of steadying herself but she stood quite still where she was. Physical jealousy might come later; at the moment her mind was too alert for her senses to feel empirical pain. Across all the people between them she heard Stephen laugh, saw him turn with a glance of intimacy and fondness to which the girl responded. He looked very well this afternoon. The grey streaks in his tawny hair served to enhance the vitality he always radiated when he was happy or excited. Both of them, she thought, had questing faces.
For only a fraction of a moment Lucy watched them, yet it was time enough to make an inevitable comparison between this girl and herself. How dull and stale his wife must seem to Stephen now, all her lights and shadows explored, all her feelings and responses known, nothing left but his dread of hurting her. Lucy turned to look for Carl, saw him coming toward her through his thronging guests, and skirted a knotted group to join him.
The Precipice Page 34
