by Alfred Hayes
And why? the man said, having promised to tell her a story, smiling at her, with an odd sort of restraint, looking at the pretty girl who had all the advantages of being not yet forty, and all the disadvantages, why should I feel this way? What have I lost that cannot, supposedly, be recovered? What have I done, he said, to be so unhappy, and yet not to be convinced that this unhappiness, which invests me like an atmosphere, is quite real or quite justified?
Perhaps, the man said, frowning now, to the pretty girl, that’s the definite thing that’s wrong with me, if something’s wrong; I don’t know, any more, what things signify; I have difficulty now identifying them; a sort of woodenness has come over me. There they are, the objects that comprehend my world, and here I am, unable to name them any more—an ornithologist to whom all birds have identical feathers, a gardener whose flowers are all alike. Do you think, the man said, earnestly, that’s my malady, if it is a malady? My disease, provided it is a disease?
Yes, the man said, I’ve often wondered why I impress people as being altogether sad, and yet I insist I am not sad, and that they are quite wrong about me, and yet when I look in the mirror it turns out to be something really true, my face is sad, my face is actually sad, I become convinced (and he smiled at her, because it was four o’clock and the day was ending and she was a very pretty girl, it was astonishing how gradually she had become prettier) that they are right after all, and I am sad, sadder than I know.
He began the story.
2
SHE INHABITED a small apartment. Next door, I recall, there was a rather queer girl, New England-looking and tubercular; downstairs, there were a pair of elegant boys who were in television together, and had black candles over an imitation fireplace, and prints on the wall of the muscular guards at Buckingham Palace; a Mrs. O’Toole had a dog.
Tiny and high up, her windows faced toward a large office building, and there were always eyes, distantly lascivious, which lifted hopefully from desks or machines or shipping-room tables whenever her curtains stirred. At night she would lock her windows, as well as curtain them, because she had the idea that a prowler (in her dreams he was always a Negro) might lower himself from the roof (she would be asleep, of course, and alone, and it would all be done noiselessly) to the rather wide window ledge and break into the living room in which she slept. I used to try to reassure her about the prowler by pointing out how nearly impossible the feat was, and how close by people were. Mrs. O’Toole’s dog could bark; at what? she said, it hasn’t a tooth in its head; the girl next door could hear if she screamed; but there’s something wrong with the girl, she said: she never goes out of that apartment; well, there were the boys downstairs; my God, she said, who could they scare? So I would argue then that the street she lived on was a populated street, and noisy with trucks and buses, and it was not as though she were alone. She was protected, if people were a protection; she was hemmed about, if being hemmed about was a reassurance; she was guarded, if having neighbors who drank too much, and a subway at the corner, and a hack stand with sleepy-eyed hackies reading the late tabloids in their parked cabs were any sort of a guard.
But she had had the usual terrifying experiences. Once, in a local movie house, when she had used the ladies’ room; she had screamed then, in absolute panic, seeing the face lifting itself horribly above the edge of the door. And once, in her own apartment. She had heard footsteps in the hallway, very soft and guarded, the insistent creaking of the stairs, a low sound of human breathing. And then a knock. Her door was bolted (and later, when we quarreled, I remember her face appearing in the cautious slit) and chained. She stood there, I used to imagine her standing there, in the short white soiled terrycloth bathrobe she wore, on the scatter rug, forcing herself to ask in a voice that probably wasn’t far from hysteria, Who is it? And then (it was odd how unvariable the phrase was, how graven) the unidentifiable voice answered: It’s the man you asked for, and she could hear the doorknob being softly tried. She had, then, retreated swiftly to the telephone which rested on the small coffee table beside the studio couch on which she slept, and telephoned the operator, asking in a voice made quite loud and shaken by her terror for the operator to call the police, loud enough for it to penetrate the door, and the experimenting with the doorknob stopped and she could hear the footsteps, hurried now, going down the flights of stairs. But the image stayed with her of that unidentifiable voice disappearing into a crowd of ordinary-looking people coming up or descending into the subway or pausing for a newspaper at the corner stand or mingling with the heavy faces at the bar in the bar and grill, an unidentifiable voice that would insist, as it tried the doorknob softly again, poised there outside her not completely invulnerable door, It’s the man you asked for.
She would often think of moving, or of having bars put on her windows, or of somehow reinforcing her door; but in the end what she did was buy, in a store recommended to her by a doctor, a weapon of a kind which resembled a fountain pen but was actually a tear-gas gun, and this she kept also on the coffee table close to the studio couch, with the telephone and the fruit rotting in a black porcelain bowl and the pack of cigarettes and the cigarette lighter that was a gift from some man. It gave her, I suppose, an idea that she was somewhat protected to know it was there, looking harmless enough, an innocent pen; and she had worked out for herself a small manual of arms should the time come when it would be necessary for her to use it: she would, she thought, having gone over her own military strategy, blind the faceless and nameless and unidentifiable assailant with the gas, while her own mouth and nostrils were covered by a wet cloth, since it had been explained to her that a wet cloth was most effective, and then she would seize the phone and call what, of course, were the equally faceless and nameless and unidentifiable police. She had not yet been forced to use the dangerous weapon; and it lay there with, when one knew what it was, a mildly ominous quality beside the telephone and the bowl of rotting fruit.
The studio couch, with its excess of pillows, was arranged against the wall underneath a Japanese print; beside the radiator, there was a small radio; under the windows, bookshelves; in front of the bookshelves, an armchair; in front of the armchair, a hassock. The bathroom was also small, and always littered: from the curtain rods, her stockings were suspended as limply as hanged men; from the white rod above the sink, her brassiere, with its intricate look, dangled; the towels were not quite clean, and never entirely dry, the Kleenex protruded from its torn box, the toothpaste tube was nearly always uncapped. There were an infinite number of small, and to me, mysterious bottles in the medicine cabinet, jars, vials, peculiar pastes, half empty or almost empty, deodorants and salves, with all the disorder of a pharmacy about to go bankrupt. The kitchen, too, hardly larger than a closet, was littered: the cups unwashed, the icebox with a tendency to get out of order, evidences nearly always of a breakfast eaten too quickly or a dinner put together out of whatever was on the shelf, a bottle of Scotch or a bottle of brandy (somebody’s present, of course) in the cupboard. There would be, however, mornings when she would make sporadic and intense efforts to put her place into some sort of order, and once a month a colored girl would arrive to air and mop and ventilate and dust and reassemble; but when I think of her, she seems to exist for me in a debris of hats, jewelry, elaborate shoes, an inscribed book, telephone messages, fruit quietly rotting in a bowl, tasseled pillows, love letters tied with a ribbon and hidden away and taken out and read again and sometimes discarded, candy boxes, and of course portraits: portraits of her child, of herself when she was married, looking altogether like another girl, an ancestor who was remarkably pretty, of her mother on a trip to Florida, of a skating party or a Girl Scout campfire, with the girls in middies and laughing and the campfire in the background, and of a man or two. Everything tossed into the last position or the last hiding place it occupied, as though they’d all been looked at or used or picked up briefly and thought about briefly and the mystery they contained too difficult to unriddle, and thrown back aga
in wherever she happened to be, a drawer or a shelf or the edge of a table; but it seems to me now that all this disorder, so much in evidence, and so little cared about, came from the fact that she considered the life that she was leading then as only temporary. This house, the way she lived, was only a hasty arrangement, thrown together to cover a time in her life which she did not consider too important, and in which she did not feel any necessity for putting things into any sort of final order. The final order had not yet arrived; she was waiting for it to arrive.
She had a tiny scar over the ridge of one eye; an almost imperceptible scar; a bow-and-arrow had done that; and she had not been vaccinated on her arm: that was her mother’s desire not to have her marked. Her eyes were, I thought, a lovely blue: dark, and when she was angry, they darkened more. She wore her hair up, high and twisted, with a comb in it, and she never did her eyebrows quite right: they were nearly always penciled, I thought, too long. She claimed she could ride a bicycle. We rode one once, and I went into the back of a truck, but that was at the beginning when it was fun on a Sunday to hire a bicycle. She knew a dozen words in French; she had never learned to drive a car; I measured her once, against a wall, kissing her for each twelve inches, and she was five feet, four and a half inches, without her shoes on, or for that matter her stockings either. She had been born in Oak Park, Illinois, during a snowstorm, and she was the only child in the family, and her father had taught mathematics in a public school. Her father was dead now, and her mother had remarried, a man in the produce business, and the child was with them. Once a month she visited them.
O God, she would say, how mixed up I am, aren’t I mixed up? Because she wanted everything, and it seemed to her she had nothing. She wanted what was certainly not too much to ask of even a grudging world: a home, another husband, another child. True, the home, when she allowed herself to think of it, was rather modestly imposing, in the suburbs or near the ocean; and true, the husband, when again she would have one, ought to have money, not necessarily too much of it, but in reassuring amounts, for in her first marriage there had been almost no money at all; and the second child, when its small image took shape for her as she lay on the studio couch in her apartment, which now she did more frequently than ever (there seemed at times almost no reason at all to get up and only the telephone still connected her with hope and possibility and a life that existed somewhere outside), was to be a beautiful, talented, charming, healthy, thoroughly wonderful replica of herself. And, of course, to be happy; that was what she wished most for it; not deliriously happy, she was much too realistic, she told herself, to expect that; but happy, quietly happy, beautifully happy, genuinely happy. Wasn’t that little enough to ask? A world notoriously ungenerous could hardly refuse her that. The secret was, of course, to extend toward the invisible benefactor always a diffident palm. Besides, she was beautiful. Men, who said almost everything to her, and if she knew them long enough eventually the truth, always said to her that she was beautiful: it was something she remained for them, always, no matter how many other things she stopped being. Then why was everything so difficult? Why did the diffident palm return empty? Why were the alms she asked, the simple alms, refused her? Why, being beautiful, and why, being young, and why, being reasonably faithful and reasonably good and reasonably passionate, was it so hard to gouge out of the reluctant mountain her own small private ingot of happiness?
Palmists, graphologists, the elderly and slightly bizarre ladies in the cafés who read cards, exercised an irresistible fascination for her. Her eyes widened when they traced in her hand a familiar set of initials; or announced, darkly, her attraction for men with black hair; or found, revealed in her penmanship, a struggle between the impulsive side of her nature and the conventional side. When she was informed by the mystical lady in the sequined dress that her future held a marriage, a disappointment, two children, and that happiness, after a great sorrow, awaited her, as indicated by the cards, her handwriting, or the faint tracings of her lifeline, her small pretty face quickened with pleasure. She enjoyed divination; her character would become for her suddenly dramatic; and she could never be able to resist offering to Madame Clarice, the sympathetic ear, or Princess Silver Star, that faded belle of the inner mysteries, or Karghi, the Egyptian, in a tuxedo and a turban, her eager hand.
Everything that verified for her (even a slightly comic science, for she would say that she didn’t really believe those magical readings, although wasn’t it startling how Madame Clarice had known she had been divorced?) the importance of her own existence attracted her. There was nothing, really, that interested her more than her own future, and particularly which men would occupy it, what children would fill it, and how much happiness it contained.
And yet, though I smiled, though the eagerness with which she extended her willing palm across a checkered tablecloth amused me, did I have the right to smile? For, after all, this passion for prediction was perfectly natural for her: what she wanted more than anything else was some reassurance that tomorrow would be better for her; that some reward awaited her; that a fulfillment of the dreams she thought she kept so well concealed from others was possible. Suppose Madame Clarice was actually in contact with the unknown? Hadn’t she, when one considered it, discovered without any hint the former marriage, and hadn’t she seen in her palm the existence of a child? Suppose Karghi, the Egyptian, had a special insight? The universe was unknowable, she was unknowable to herself, doubt and accident surrounded one, nothing was certain; how nice if it were true that Princess Silver Star could read or trace or divine the secret future; how, she thought, fair it would be.
If only she were smarter, she’d say. If only she were wiser. (Because intelligence, too, was the possession of a magical instrument that made the world easier to control, an Aladdin’s lamp or a formula for making gold.) Or she would bewail the fact that she had so few friends: was it because of something in her, some coldness, some lack of good will, or was it simply that friends, true friends, by which she meant someone who did not disapprove of what you did, were so rare? She had grown, she thought, so tired of the actual life she led. Everyone seemed more fortunate than she was, luckier, possessing at least something she lacked. She would explain to me frequently how when she was alone or blue or the curse was coming on there were times when the attachments which held her to life seemed almost to have worn away; when she felt as though she existed nowhere, but hung, by a strange suspension, between the dull glare of heaven and the weightless heaviness of earth. It was almost as if, were she to close her eyes long enough, and lie perfectly still in bed, she would drift away, with a kind of levitation, as though she were all hollow and transparent. Then it seemed as though all the thoughts she had ever had, memories and recollections and ideas of people and things, were gone forever from her mind; and as though the beating of her heart had become completely inaudible; and as though the blood had stopped moving in her veins.
She was all glass then, through which she felt one could see, or a girl made of gauze that a breath, the slightest of winds, could blow away. And I, afraid that moods like these, for it seemed to me they were simply moods, were connected with ideas of death, would urge her to do something, for it seemed to me that it was idleness more than anything else which induced in her this sense of nothingness. But she had never really wanted to die; at least she said she had never really wanted to die; that, oddly enough, the drifting away was not connected in her mind with death at all, but with something else, an idea of a kind of joy, of being, finally, free, and that if she ever were to feel free it would resemble that sensation she had when she was least attached to the world. It was a difficult feeling for her to explain, although she tried to convey to me a sensation I rarely experienced, for it wasn’t being free from the world I wanted but being in control of it, and I would urge her then, hardly knowing what to recommend, to fill her days with something she cared about; and then she would try to think, deliberately, what it was she cared about.
She had
played the piano when she was small; now she no longer played the piano; she thought how nice it would be, how comforting, during the long afternoons, to have a piano again; but it was much too difficult to go about the intricate (or so it seemed to her) business of renting one, and besides, the apartment was too small. Nevertheless, one of her unhappinesses was the missing piano. She had also been an excellent swimmer when she was a child; or so it seemed to her now, thinking of the summers she had spent at the beach, or the country resorts; and she thought if there were something she could do again, like swimming or mountain climbing, something very active, how much happier she’d be. But the pools far down in the gloomy interiors of the big hotels were so damp, and so small, and so unattractive; and then, the getting out of one’s clothes, and the whole dreariness of renting a towel, and having one’s hair wet all day, it was too much; nevertheless, one of her unhappinesses was the vanished swimming.
Meanwhile, the traffic below continued as it always had: the trucks, ignoring her lack of joy, rolled their huge wheels up the dirty inclines of the warehouses; the buses, unaware of her melancholy, pulled up at their scheduled stops; the subway expresses came and departed, all without any knowledge of her.
I realize now that I had accustomed myself, without admitting it, to thinking of her as being always in this place, in these surroundings; that to me the studio couch and the drapes drawn to protect her from either the real or the imaginary Peeping Toms, and even the disorder of her medicine cabinet, were permanent. She would exist among these love letters and these portraits for as long as I loved her. I did not, of course, think of myself as loving her forever, but neither did I think of the time when I would stop loving her. No, what I thought, I suppose, really, was that this scene would remain forever unchanged: downstairs, in the vestibule, I would ring her bell, the buzzer would answer and release the door, I would climb the familiar stairs, noting the same odor in the hallway, hearing in winter the same concealed hiss of steam, and she would be always there, available, pretty, young, seated with her legs tucked under her on the studio couch among the colored pillows, the radio or the victrola playing; and we would, in those fixed ceremonials, go out to some restaurant, choose a place where we could dance, because she liked to dance, or bored, choose from the always diminishing number of movies we had not seen one that still remained to be seen, taxiing homeward later, and eventually, evening after evening, in the darkness, with the drapes drawn and the lights extinguished, on the studio couch, uncovered now and the pillows scattered on the floor, make love. It was a very convenient and fixed and unvarying idyll I had in mind, a simple sequence of pleasures that would not seriously change my life or interfere with my work, that would fill the emptiness of my long evenings and ease the pressures of my loneliness, and give me what I suppose I really thought of as the nicest amusement in all the amusement park: the pleasure of love.
