Presence

by Arthur Miller

  But none of this entered Clement’s first story, which he expanded into his signature novel. Instead, the book described his faintly disguised mother’s adoration of him, and pictured his father as a basically well-meaning, if sad, man who had some difficulty with expressing affection, nothing more. Clement, in general, would always find it hard to condemn; Lena thought that for him the levelling of judgment in itself was a challenge to confront his father and symbolically invited a second entombment. And so his writing was romantically left-wing, a note of wistful protest always trembling in it somewhere, and if this quality of innocence was attractive in his first book it seemed predictably formulaic thereafter. In fact, he would join the sixties’ anarchic revolt against forms with enormous relief, having come to despair of structure itself as the enemy of the poetic; but structure in art—so Lena told him—implied inevitability, which threatened to turn him toward murder, the logical response to his father’s terrifying crimes. This news was too unpleasant to take seriously, and so in the end he remained a rather lyrical and winningly cheerful fellow, if privately unhappy with his unbudging harmlessness.

  Lena understood him; it was easy, since she shared his traits. “We are charter members of the broken-wing society,” she said late one night while cleaning up after one of their parties. For a while in their late twenties and thirties, a party seemed to coagulate every weekend in their Brooklyn Heights living room. People simply showed up and were gladly welcomed to smoke their cigarettes, from which Lena snipped off the filters, to flop on the carpet and sprawl on the worn furniture, to drink the wine they’d brought and talk about the new play or movie or novel or poem; also to lament Eisenhower’s collapsed syntax, the blacklisting of writers in radio and Hollywood, the mystifying new hostility of blacks toward Jews, their traditional allies, the State Department’s lifting of suspect radicals’ passports, the perplexing irrational silence that they felt closing in on the country as its new conservatism went about scooping out and flipping away its very memory of the previous thirty years, of the Depression and the New Deal, even changing the war’s Nazi enemy into a kind of defender against the formerly allied Russians. Some were refreshed by the Zorns’ hospitality and went into the night either newly joined or alone but, either way, under the influence of a forlorn time of lost valor: they saw themselves as a lucid minority in a country where ignorance of the world’s revolution was bliss, money was getting easier to make, the psychoanalyst the ultimate authority, and an uncommitted personal detachment the prime virtue.

  In due time, Lena, uncertain about everything except that she was lost, analyzed matters and saw that she, like his sentences, was no longer his, and that their life had become what he took to saying his writing had become: an imitation. They went on living together, now in a lower-Manhattan brownstone on permanent loan by the homosexual heir of a steel fortune, who believed Clement was another Keats. But Clement often slept on the third floor these days and Lena on the first. The gift of the house was only the largest of many gifts that people dropped on them: a camel’s-hair coat came from a doctor friend who found that he needed a larger size; the use of a cottage on Cape Cod year after year from a couple who went off to Europe every summer, and with it an old but well-maintained Buick. Fate also provided. Walking along a dark street one night, Clement kicked something metallic, which turned out to be a can of anchovies. Bringing it home, he found that it needed a special key and put it in a cupboard. More than a month later, on a different street, he once again kicked metal—the key to the can. He and Lena, both anchovy lovers, instantly broke out some crackers and sat down and ate the whole thing.

  They still had some laughs together, but mostly they shared a low-level pain that neither of them had the strength to bring to a head, both feeling they had let the other down. “We even have an imitation divorce,” she said, and he laughed and agreed, and they went on anyway with nothing changed except that she cut her long wavy blond hair and took a job as a child counsellor. Despite their never having been able to decide to have a child, she understood children instinctively, and he saw with some dismay that her work was making her happy. At least for a while, she seemed to perk up with some sort of self-discovery, and this threatened to leave him behind. But in less than a year she quit, announcing, “I simply cannot go to the same place every day.” This was the return of the old crazy lyrical Lena, and it pleased him despite his alarm at the loss of her salary. They were beginning to need more money than he could make, with the sales of his books falling to near nothing. As for sex, it was hard for her to recall when it had meant very much to her. Gradually, it was a four- or five-times-a-year indulgence, if that. His affairs, which she suspected but refused to confirm, relieved her of a burden even as they gnawed at what was left of her self-regard. His view was that a man had to go somewhere with his erection, while a woman felt she was somewhere. A big difference. But in a cruel moment he admitted to himself that she was too unhappy to be happily screwed, a condition he blamed on her background.

  Then one summer afternoon, while smoking his pipe on the rickety step of their donated beach cottage, he saw a girl walking all alone by the lip of the sea, looking totally immersed in her thoughts, with the sun flashing across her hips, and he imagined how it would be if he could get her naked and write on her. His soul quickened. It had been a long, long time since he had had any vision of himself that brought such a lift of joy. This picture of himself writing on a woman’s body was somehow wholesome and healthful, like holding a loaf of fresh bread.

  He might never have placed the ad at all had Lena not finally erupted. He was up in his third-floor workroom, reading Melville, trying to cleanse his mind, when he heard screaming from downstairs. Lena, when he rushed into the living room, was sitting on the couch pouring herself into the air. He held her in his arms until she was exhausted. There was no need to talk; she was simply dying of inchoate outrage at her life, the relentless lack of money, and his failure to provide some kind of lead. He held her hand, and could hardly bear to look at her ravaged face.

  She grew quiet. He brought her a glass of water. They sat together on the couch, waiting for nothing. She took a Chesterfield from a pack on the coffee table, snipped off its filter with her fingernail, and lay back inhaling defiantly, Dr. Saltz having seriously warned her twice now. She was having an affair with Chesterfields, Clement thought.

  “I’m thinking of writing something autobiographical,” he said, somehow implying that this would bring in money.

  “My mother . . .” she said, and went silent, staring.

  “Yes?”

  • • •

  This obscure mention of her mother reminded him of the first time she had openly revealed the guilt she felt. They were sitting at Lena’s rooming-house window overlooking a splendid street lined with trees in full leaf, with students idling past and the placid quiet of a Midwestern campus sequestering them from the real world, while back in Connecticut, she said, her mother was rising before five every morning to board the first streetcar for her eight-hour day in the Peerless Steam Laundry. Imagine! Noble Christa Vanetzki ironing strangers’ shirts so she could send her daughter the twenty dollars a month for room and board, meanwhile refusing to let her daughter work, as most students did. Lena had to shut her eyes and squeeze her unworthiness out of her mind. To make her mother happy, she had to succeed, success would cure everything—maybe a job in social psychology with a city agency.

  She was wearing her white angora sweater. “That sweater makes you glow like a spirit in this crazy light,” Clement said. They went out for a walk, holding hands along the winding paths through shadows so black they seemed solid. The clarity of the moon that windless night brought it unnervingly near. “It’s got to be closer than usual, or something,” he said, squinting up at its light. He loved the poetry of science, but the details were too mathematical. In this amazing glare his cheekbones were more prominent and his manly jaw sculpted. They were exactly the s
ame height. She had always known he adored her, but alone with him she could sense his body’s demand. Suddenly he drew her into a clearing beneath some bushes and gently pulled her to the ground. They kissed, he fondled her breasts, and then stretched out and pressed against her to spread her legs. She felt his hardness and tensed with the fear of embarrassment. “I can’t, Clement,” she said, and kissed him apologetically. She had never given even this much of herself to anyone before, and she wanted her gift forgotten.

  “One of these days we have to.” He rolled off her.

  “Why!” She laughed nervously.

  “Because! Look what I bought.”

  He held up a condom for her to see. She took it from him and felt the smooth rubber with her thumb. She tried not to think that all his verses about her—the sonnets, the villanelles, the haiku—were merely ploys to prepare her for this ridiculous rubber balloon. She raised it to her eye like a monocle and looked up at the sky. “I can almost see the moon through it.”

  “What the hell are you doing!” He laughed and sat up. “The mad Vanetzkis.” She sat up giggling and returned the condom to him. “What is it, your mother?” he asked.

  She was dead serious. “Maybe you ought to find somebody else. We could still be friends.” And then she added, “I really don’t understand why I’m alive.” Clement had always been moved by these quick mood changes—“the Polish depths,” he called them. She had a baffling connection with some mystery across the Atlantic in the dark Polish middle of Europe, a place neither he nor she had ever been.

  “Is there a poem about anything like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “A girl who can’t find out what she thinks.”

  “Probably Emily Dickinson, but I can’t think of a particular one. Every love poem I know ends with glory or death.”

  He wrapped his arms around his raised knees and stared up at the moon. “I’ve never seen it like this before. This must be how it makes wolves howl.”

  “And women go mad,” she added. “Why is it always women the moon makes mad?”

  “Well, they’ve got such a head start.”

  She bent forward to clear a branch from her line of sight, narrowing her gaze against the glare. “I really think it could make me crazy.” In a distant way, she actually was afraid of insanity. Her father’s mad death had never left her. “How close it seems, like an eye in Heaven. I can see it frightening people. You’d think it would be warm with this brightness, but it’s cold light, isn’t it? Like the light of death.” Her dear, childlike curiosity chilled him with anticipation of her body, which he still hoped to have someday. Was she blond down there? At the same time, she was holy and rare. Her only defect was her cheekbones, slightly too prominent but not fatally so, and the too broad Polish nose. But he was past comparing her to perfection. He opened her hand and pressed her palm to his lips. “Cathleen ni Houlihan, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Queen Mab”—now he had her giggling pityingly—“Betty Grable . . . who else?”

  “The Karamazov woman?”

  “Ah, yes, Grushenka. And who else? Peter Paul Mounds, Baby Ruth, Cleopatra . . .” She grasped him by the head and crushed her mouth on his. She hated disappointing him like this, but the more physical she tried to become the less she felt. Maybe if they did do it, some spring would uncoil inside her. He was certainly gentle and lovable, and if anyone was to enter her before she found a husband it might as well be Clement. Or maybe not. She was certain of nothing. She let his tongue slide over hers. Her welcoming mouth surprised him, and he rolled her back and lay on her and began pumping, but she slid out from under him, got up, and walked out onto the path, and he caught up with her and had started to apologize when he saw her intense concentration. Her frustrating mood changes dangled above him like a bright-colored toy over a baby’s crib. They walked in a nearly mournful silence to the road and then to her rooming house, where they stood below the deep Victorian porch, the brightness of the moon stretching their giant inky silhouettes across the grass.

  “I wouldn’t know how to do it.”

  “I could teach you.”

  “I’ll be embarrassed.”

  “Only for a minute or two. It’s easy.” They both burst out laughing. He loved to kiss her laughing mouth. She touched his lips with her fingertips.

  He stood on the sidewalk watching her incredible form going up the path to the house—her round ass, the full thighs. She turned in the doorway and waved and vanished.

  He had to marry her, crazy as that sounded. But how? He had nothing, not even prospects, unless he could win another prize or be taken on as a faculty assistant. But there were hundreds with degrees higher than his looking for jobs. He was most likely going to lose her. An erection was stirring as he stood there on the moon-flooded sidewalk, a hundred feet from where she was undressing.

  • • •

  “Why do you bother with her?” Mrs. Vanetzki asked Clement. Clyde, the white-and-black mutt, lay stretched out in the shade, dozing at her feet. It was a hot mill-town Sunday afternoon, the last day of spring break. Even the rushing Winship River looked oily and warm below the house, and in the still air shreds of the smoke of a long-departed train hung over the railroad tracks along the riverbank.

  “I don’t know,” Clement said. “I figure she might get rich someday.”

  “Her? Ha!” For Clement’s visit, Mrs. Vanetzki wore a carefully ironed blue cotton dress with lace trim around the collar, and white oxfords. Her reddish hair was swept up to a white comb at the top of her head, emphasizing both her height—she was half a head taller than her daughter—and, somehow, the breadth of her cheekbones and forehead. Beneath her defiant banter, Clement felt the scary force of the majestically defeated, something he could not reconcile with his hopes. A framed tinted photo in the living room showed her only ten years earlier, standing proud beside her husband, with his Byronic foulard and flowing hair, a fedora hanging from his hand. His misunderstanding of America’s sometimes lethal contempt for foreignness had not yet strapped him to the stretcher and made him into a paranoid, raving in Polish to the walls of an ambulance, cursing his wife as a whore and the human race as murderers. Only Lena was left her now. The responsible one, “the only one who got herself a brain in her head.” Lena’s sister Patsy, the middle child, had had two abortions with different men, one of whose surnames she admitted she didn’t know. She had a wild loud whine of a voice and helter-skelter in her eyes. A sweet girl, really, with a big heart, but simply barren in the head. Patsy had once heavily intimated to Clement that she knew Lena was not letting him in and that she would not mind substituting herself “a couple of times.” There had been no envy or spite in this offer, simply the fact of it and no hard feelings whichever way he decided. “Hey, Clement, how about me if she won’t?” Kidding, of course, except for the undeniable light in her eye.

  There was also Steve, the last-born, but for her he somehow hardly counted. He was dull and sweet and heavy-footed, the peasant side of the family. Steve was like Patsy, swimming around like a carp at the bottom of the pond, but at least he wasn’t sex-mad. Hamilton Propeller liked him, amazingly enough. They knew they had a serious worker, and had advanced him into calibration technology after his first six months—Steve, who was only nineteen, with but two years of high school. He would be all right, although his recent shenanigans troubled her.

  “Steve does a lot of walking in his sleep, you know. Lately.” Mrs. Vanetzki addressed this to Lena with an implicit request for her college-educated interpretation.

  “Maybe he needs a girl,” Lena ventured. Clement was astonished and amused at the irony of her speaking so easily about sex.

  “Trouble is there are no whores in this town,” Mrs. Vanetzki said, scratching her belly. “Patsy keeps telling him to go to Hartford for a weekend, but he doesn’t understand what she’s talking about. How about you, Clement?”

  “Me?” Clemen
t flushed, imagining she would be asking next if he’d slept with Lena.

  “Maybe you could tell him about the birds and bees. I don’t think he knows it.” Lena and Clement laughed, and Mrs. Vanetzki allowed herself a suppressed grin. “I really don’t think he’s even heard of it, but what can be done?”

  “Well, somebody has to teach him!” Lena exclaimed, worried by her brother’s persisting childishness. Clement was baffled that she could apply this level of energy to making her family face their dilemmas when she was fleeing her own.

  “He seems to have bent Patsy’s old bicycle,” Mrs. Vanetzki said, mystified.

  “Bent her bicycle!”

  “When we were all asleep. He seems to have been sleepwalking in the night and gone outside and bent the front fork in his two hands. It’s some kind of force in him.” She turned to Clement. “Maybe you could talk to him about going to Hartford some weekend.”

  But before Clement could reply Mrs. Vanetzki waved him down. “Ah, you men, you never know what to do when it comes to practical.”

  Lena quickly defended him. “He’d be glad to talk to Steve. Wouldn’t you, Clement?”

  “Sure, I’d be glad to talk to him.”

  “But do you know anything about sex?”

  “Mama!” Lena went red and screamed with laughter, but her mother barely smiled.

  “Oh, I know a thing or two.” Clement tried to brush off the woman’s bewildering near contempt for him.