Presence

by Arthur Miller

  “Oh God, I’m going home.” Disgust flowed up her back, and glancing at the little box, she drank her second martini fast; how really weird, a whole man fitting into a four-by-six-inch carton hardly big enough for a few muffins.

  “If you’d throw some of your share in with mine, we could pick up buildings for next to nothing. This Depression won’t last forever, and we could clean up someday.”

  “You really know how to pick a time to talk about business.”

  “Did you read? No rain in Oklahoma; it’s starting to blow away again.”

  He had all Papa’s greed but none of his charm, with a baby face and pudgy hands. Slipping off her stool, smiling angrily, she gave him a monitory bop on the head with her purse, kissed Edna’s plump cheek, and with heels clacking walked into the street, Herman behind her defending his right to be interested in real estate.

  She was halfway home in the taxi when she recalled that at some point he had bequeathed the ashes to her. Had he remembered to take them from the bar? She called him. Scandalized, he piped, “You mean you lost them?” She hung up, cutting him off, scared. She had left Papa on the bar. She went weak in the thighs with some superstitious fear that she had to force out of her mind. After all, she thought, what is the body? Only the idea of a person matters, and Papa’s in my heart. Running a bath and flowing toward transcendence again in the remnants of her yellow martini haze, she glimpsed her unchangeable face in the steamy mirror and the body mattered again. Yet at the same time it didn’t. She tried to recall a classical philosopher who might have reconciled the two truths, but tired of the effort. Then, realizing she had bathed only a few hours earlier, she shut off the tap and began to dress again.

  She found she was hurrying and knew she had to get the ashes back; she had done an awful thing, leaving them there, something like sin. For a moment her father lived, reprimanding her with a sad look. But why, despite everything, was there something funny in the whole business? How tasteless she was!

  The bartender, a thin, long-armed man, recalled no such box. He asked if there was anything valuable in it, and she said, “Well, no.” Then the guilt butted her like a goat. “My father. His ashes.”

  “Holy Jesus!” The man’s eyes widened at this omen of bad luck. His flaring emotion startled her into weeping. It was the first time, and she felt grateful to him and also ashamed that he might feel more about Papa than she did. He touched her back with his hand and guided her to the dismal ladies’ room in the rear, but looking around, she found nothing. The man was odorless, like Vaseline, and for a split instant she wondered if this was all a dream. She stared down at the toilet. Oh God, what if someone sprinkled Papa down there! Returning to the bar, she touched the man’s thick tattooed forearm. “It doesn’t matter,” she reassured him. He insisted on giving her a drink and she had a martini, and they talked about different kinds of death, sudden and drawn out, the deaths of the very young and the old. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Two gas company workers at the bar listened in their brutal solemnity from a respectful distance. It had always been more relaxing for her to be among strange men than with women she didn’t know. The bartender came around the bar to see her to the door, and before she could think, she kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said. Sam had never really pursued her, she thought now; she had more or less granted herself to him. She walked down Broadway, angering at their marriage, and by the time she reached the corner loved, or at least pitied, him again.

  And so Papa was gone. After a few blocks she felt relieved as she sensed the gift of mourning in her, that illusion of connection with a past; but how strange that the emotion should have been given her by a probably right-wing Catholic Irishman who no doubt was a supporter of Franco and couldn’t stand Jews. Everything was feeling, nothing was clear. But she rejected that idea at once. “If feeling is everything, I might as well settle for being my mother.” Too awful. Somehow, in this sudden, unexpected collision with the barman’s direct feeling, she saw that she really must stop waiting to become someone else: she was Janice forever. What an exciting idea if she could only follow it; maybe it would lead her to solid ground. This endless waiting-to-become was like the Depression itself—everybody kept waiting for it to lift and forgot how to live in the meantime, but supposing it went on forever? She must start living! And Sam had to start thinking of something else than Fascism and organizing unions and the rest of the endlessly repetitious radical agenda. But she mustn’t think that way, she guiltily corrected herself.

  She smiled, perversely reminded of her new liberation. No parents! I am an orphan. In a few minutes, walking down Broadway, she saw something amusing in so formal and fastidious a man as Dave Sessions being left in a box on a bar: she could see him trapped in there, tiny, outraged, and red-faced, banging on the lid to be let out. A strange thought struck her—that the body was more of an abstraction than the soul, which never disappeared.

  Sam Fink had a warming smile, an arched bony nose, which, as he said, he had been years learning to love. He was just about Janice’s five feet seven, and standing face-to-face with him sometimes brought to mind her mother’s nastily repeated warning, “Never marry a handsome man,” a barely disguised jab not only at beautiful Papa’s vanity but at her daughter’s looks. But unhandsome Sam, absolutely devoted to her, had a different beauty, the excitement of the possessed. His Communist commitment turned her to the future and away from what she regarded as her nemesis, triviality, the bourgeois obsession with things.

  Nevertheless, it was painful to look at pictures in museums with him at her side—she had majored in art history at Hunter—and to hear nothing about Picasso but his conversion to the Party, or about the secret anti-monarchical codes buried in Titian’s painting or the class-struggle metaphor in Rembrandt. “They are not necessarily conscious of it, of course, but the great ones were always in a struggle with the ruling class.”

  “But, darling, all that has nothing to do with painting.”

  And, spoken with a teacher’s gently superior grin toward a child—and incipient violence buried deep in his eyes: “Except that it has everything to do with painting; their convictions were what raised them above the others, the ‘painters.’ You have to learn this, Janice: conviction matters.”

  She felt love in his voice, and so she was somehow reassured by what she did not quite believe. Tucking her arm under his as they walked, she supposed most people married not out of overwhelming love but to find justification in one another, and why not? Glancing at his powerful nose and neat, nearly bald head, she felt elevated by his moral nature and safe in his militancy. But it was not always possible to banish the vision of an empty space surrounding them, a lightless gloom out of which something horrible could suddenly pounce one day. Unconsciously, she began waiting for its appearance, a rending explosion from below.

  It was his amazing knowledge of books that helped quiet her doubts. Sam, unusual among book dealers, read or at least skimmed what he was selling, and could pick out of the air the names of authorities on a couple of hundred of subjects from Chess to China, as he snappily put it to his awed customers, who forgave his arrogance for the research it saved them from having to do. He knew the locations of dozens of old mansions all over New York State, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey where expiring old families still had sizable libraries to get rid of on the death of some final aunt, uncle, or inheriting retainer. A couple of times a month, he would drive into the country in his green stiff-sprung Nash for a day or two and return with trunk and back seat packed with sets of Twain, Fenimore Cooper, Emerson, Dickens, Poe, Thackeray, Melville, Hawthorne, and Shakespeare, and armfuls of arcane, mouse-nibbled miscellany—John Keats’ Secret, an 1868 Survey of Literature of the Womb, a 1905 Manual of Chinese Enamelware, Lasting Irish Melodies of 1884, Annals of Ophthalmology, or A Speculation on Ancient Egyptian Surgery. Janice would sit with Sam on the floor of their dark East Thirty-second Street living room, she ima
gining the silent, sealed-up life of the family in some upper Monroe County household from whose privacy these books had been ripped, books that must once have brought news of the great world out and beyond their lilac doorways.

  Watching him thumb through his finds, she thought he had the ethereal look of a cute monk, including the innocent round tonsure. Was it his sheer goodness that annoyed her? There was something monkish in his pretense of not noticing—when she leaned back resting on her elbows, one leg tucked under and her skirt midway up her thigh—that she was asking to be taken there on the floor. When she saw him flush and shift to some explication of the day’s news, a fury flashed and died away within her, and she despaired for herself. Still, with Britain and France secretly flirting with Fascism, she could hardly ask him to set her greedy desire ahead of serious things.

  But his plain love for his books and his work stirred her love for him. With the proprietary self-congratulation of an author, he would read choice passages to her, from Trollope especially, or Henry James or Virginia Woolf, or Communist Louis Aragon and the young Richard Wright. He was snobbish like her but, unlike her, denied it.

  Alone at least two evenings a week, when Sam went to Party meetings, she walked across the dead East Side over to slummy Sixth with its tenements and dusty Irish bars under the el and came home tired to listen to Benny Goodman records and smoke too many Chesterfields until she was tensed and angry at the walls. When Sam came home explicating Stalin’s latest utterances on how the Socialist future, bearing goodness at last, was moving as inexorably toward them as an ocean wave, she nearly drowned in her own ingratitude and was only restored for the moment by the vision of justice that he was guarding, along with the nameless army of civilized comrades spread out across every country in the world.

  On another Sunday morning in bed with Charles, forever trying to visualize herself, she said, “I can never figure out what got me; it was about four years after being married; we’d usually come home from a French or Russian movie on Irving Place and go to bed, and that was that. This time I decided to make myself a martini and then sat on the couch listening to records, you know, like Benny Goodman’s ‘A Train’ or the Billie Holiday things or Ledbetter, or maybe Woody Guthrie, I think, was coming on at that time, and after twenty minutes Sam came out of the bedroom in his pajamas. He was really shy but he wasn’t a coward, and he stood there, poor man, with that tense grin, leaning on the bedroom doorjamb like Humphrey Bogart, and he said, ‘Sleeptime.’”

  “That’s when it just fell out of my mouth. ‘Fuck the future,’ I said.”

  Charles’s eyes fluttered and he laughed with her and pressed his hand on the inside of her thigh.

  “He laughed, but blushing—you know, that I’d said that word. And he said, ‘What does that mean?’”

  “Just fuck the future.” She heard her own tinkling giggle and would always remember the free-falling feeling in her chest.

  “It must have a meaning.”

  “It means that there must be something happening now that is interesting and worth thinking about. And now means now.”

  “Now always means now.” He grinned against apprehension.

  “No, it mostly means pretty soon, or someday. But now it means tonight.”

  Angered, he blushed deeper, right up his high forehead, into his hair. She opened the dark oak cabinet and made another martini and giggling at some secret joke got into bed and drank it to the bottom. Feeling left out, he could only go on idealistically grinning, brave man, elbow on the pillow, trying hard to get a grasp on her spinning mind.

  “Papa and I once lived in this Portuguese beach house for a month after Mama died, and I used to watch this peasant cook we had when she’d come over the sand dunes carrying fresh vegetables and a fish in a basket for me to inspect so she could cook it for us. She’d take forever trudging in the sand till she got to me, and then all it was was this fish, which was still damp from the ocean.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, that’s it—you wait and wait and watch it coming, and it’s a damp fish.” She had laughed and laughed, helplessly nearing hysteria, then brushed a dismissive kiss on Sam’s wrist and fell into a separate sleep, smiling with some uncertain air of victory.

  Now she ran a finger lightly along Charles’s nose. “Did any of that mean anything to you—the Left?”

  “I was studying music in the thirties.”

  “How wonderful. Just studying music.”

  “I had enough to do just organizing my days. But I was always sympathetic. But what could I have done about anything? Some friends took me out to a picket line at Columbia once. I can’t recall the issue, but I was more of a nuisance to them than anything else; my dog hated walking around and around.” He turned and kissed her nose. “You make it all sound such a waste. Was it, you think?”

  “I don’t know yet. When I think of the writers we all thought were so important, and no one knows their names any more. I mean the militant people. That whole literature simply dribbled away. Gone.”

  “It was a style, wasn’t it? Most styles crack up and disappear.”

  “And why is that, do you think?”

  “It depends. When the occasion dominates, the work tends to vanish with the occasion.”

  “What should dominate, then?”

  “The feelings that the occasion roused in the artist. I personally believe that what lasts is what art itself causes to exist in the artist—I mean the sounds that create other sounds, or the phrases that generate new phrases. Bach wrote some wonderful piano pieces that were really meant as piano lessons, but we listen now to their spiritual qualities, now that the occasion is forgotten. The work created its own spirituality, in a sense, and this lasts.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?” she asked, kissing his earlobe.

  “You seem to have a need to mock yourself as you were then. I don’t think you should. A lot of the past is always embarrassing—if you have any sensitivity.”

  “Not for you, though.”

  “Oh, I’ve had plenty of moments.”

  “That you’re ashamed of?”

  He hesitated. “For a while I tried to act as though I had sight. For a long time I refused to concede. I did some boorish things. With women especially. It was terrible.”

  She felt she was blushing for him and could not press him. She did not want his nobility marred. Someday he might tell her. What she imagined was that he may have, in effect, blackmailed girls with his handsome blindness, pressed himself on them as a debt they owed. That would certainly embarrass him now. In fact, she was aware of how really little she knew of his life—as little as he knew of her face. “Radicals,” she said, “think they want truth, but what they really long for is high-minded characters to look up to.”

  “Not only radicals, Janice. People have to believe in goodness.” His eyelids fluttered faster when he was excited, and they did now, like birds’ wings. “They’re disappointed most of the time, but in some part of his beliefs every person is naïve. Even the most cynical. And memories of one’s naïveté are always painful. But so what? Would you rather have had no beliefs at all?”

  She buried her face in his flesh. His acceptance of her, she thought, was like a tide. She had lived a life of waiting, she thought now, and the waiting had ended, the thirst for a future was not in her any more, she was there. With a man who had never seen her. It was wonderfully odd.

  • • •

  With Charles she would often think back with wonder at what now seemed like thirty years of waiting. Or had the war stalled life for everyone? Nowadays there seemed to be no future at all any more, but it was all there was in the old days. One of her permanent stinging memories was of the day she had been shopping on Thirty-fourth Street for shoes and was walking home in new high heels, pleasured by how they sensualized the shape of her legs, when her eye fell on a corner candy st
ore newsstand with the immense headline slashed across the Times front page: STALIN AND HITLER IN PACT. Fink usually brought the paper home at night, and when she handed the vendor her three pennies he said, “Sam bought one this morning.”

  “I know. I want one.”

  The man shared Fink’s politics. “I thought he was going to faint,” he confided. “His face went white.”

  With her old shoes in the box under her arm, she walked down Madison to Thirty-first Street, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to read the incredible again and again. Simply unthinkable. Stalin so much as uttering Hitler’s name without snarling was like a god being discovered screwing on the floor, or farting. Yet she felt she had to find some way to continue believing in the Soviets, which after all were still the only imaginable opposite of West End Avenue, carpets, silverware, and things.

  “How can it have happened?” she asked Fink over dinner at a place called Barclay’s on Eighth Street, where a meal was ninety cents rather than the sixty-five next door in the University Inn. The Village was stunned. She could feel it in the restaurant. Bud Goff, the owner, normally pumped Fink for inside political information; he believed the Party had some secret key to future events. But tonight he had merely nodded when they entered, as though at a wake.

  With a wink and a canny grin, Fink tapped the side of his nose, but she knew how raked his spirit was. “Don’t worry, Stalin knows what he’s doing; and he’s not helping Hitler—he’ll never supply Germany.”

  “But I think he is, isn’t he?”

  “He is not. He’s just refusing to pull the French and British chestnuts out of the fire. He’s been pleading with them for a pact against Hitler for five years now, and they’ve stalled, hoping Hitler would attack Russia. Well, he’s turned the chess game around.”

  She quickly agreed; in some secret windblown room in her mind, she sensed that her connection to Sam depended somehow on her keeping the faith with the Soviets—they had made Russia literate and turned her lights on. To discard the Revolution meant living without the future, meant merely living now, a frighteningly bereft feeling. In that parched year-and-a-half interval, she had seen Sam Fink straining to justify the pact to her and to their friends. And when it was no longer deniable that Russian wheat and oil were actually being shipped to a Germany that was now invading France, something within her came to a halt and stood motionless behind her eyes.