by Alfred Hayes
3
SHE ALWAYS insisted that she could remember every detail of the very first evening we were together; how, for example, there was snow falling, and how the taxi meter, a little yellow glow above it, ticked, and how she felt, excited, in the interior of the heated cab, touching hands, but sad too, sad inside, the way you feel when you like a man, and when you know that with him it will happen, and you’ve made up your mind even before it happens so that he doesn’t really have to ask you, it’s something (she explained, explaining how a woman in so representative a circumstance feels) you feel and he feels, a pleasurable tension between you, a silken tightness, waiting to get to a place, his apartment or yours or a friend’s room or a hotel or even a deserted country road, so that you sink into a trance of waiting, a deliciousness that’s somehow sad, too, and you feel, because of the sadness, both there and not there, inside the cab and holding hands and not inside the cab at all and not holding hands at all.
While the fur on her fur coat was shedding.
She looked out of the window of the cab then at the falling and spinning snowflakes, and the dark store fronts, securely bolted against the night, and she said (it was the only phrase I, too, remembered, there were so many other things I had forgotten but the little truncated phrase I remembered) isn’t it beautiful sometimes, and I asked her what was beautiful sometimes, and she said: The snow, and everything.
So that there must have been, for her, a momentary pang of something lovely, something that the hush of whiteness and the somnolent heat of the cab gave her. Perhaps it was the anticipation, that moment sustained by the drive home, when one is in a taxi with a stranger who is about to be transfigured into a lover, and there is an interval, as in music, when the chord of desire has been struck, and the chord of the fulfillment of desire hasn’t; when everything remains suspended and anticipatory, and the snow falls through the air of a city whose ugliness is temporarily obscured, and the cab itself seems to exist inside a magical circle of quiet heat and togetherness and motion; and, I suppose, for that moment, it is beautiful: the snow, and everything.
It was a weekend I was staying at a midtown hotel. In the mornings I would walk down to a cafeteria on Third Avenue, buy the morning papers and have a slow breakfast, with the ball scores and the theater reviews, and after breakfast I’d walk slowly back to the hotel and try again to work. I was having at that time a great deal of difficulty writing. I could not seem to maintain, for the necessary number of hours, a belief in the thing I was trying to do, and I would sit there, at that tiny hotel desk, fretful and tormented, struggling to restore to myself a confidence I had apparently lost. I was sure that it was not lost forever, for I had had it once, that quick and absorbing fever, the buoyancy, that certainty that what I was doing was right and somehow important, somehow necessary, and I thought that if I were patient enough, obstinate enough, a lucky stroke or a happy image would restore it for me. So ideas, deceptively bright, would appear in the desiccated air, and I would hopefully follow them only to find the waterhole dry and the palmtrees dead; plots, seemingly foolproof, would exist briefly and then dissolve; and now the fear came, secretively, that possibly I had come to the end of what I’d had: that the axe, suspended so long above me, had at last fallen: there was my head, in the failure’s usual basket.
It was to this hotel I brought her. Downstairs, I recall, the salesmen, who had their regular suites, were sitting in the lobby, their hats on their knees, smoking cigars. The sound of the elevator penetrated the walls of the hotel room, and there was, in the room, one of those cumbersome hotel radios into which one dropped quarters, and whose dial seemed nailed to those smaller city stations which apparently had inexhaustible record libraries of South American music, so that in the room there must have been the sound, later, of all the professional rumbas and sambas, played with too much verve, to fill the silence our being alone made; and when she came toward me, afterward, half closing the bathroom door behind her (for she always needed to have a light somewhere, in the bathroom or in the kitchen, the light apparently giving her a sort of security), I realized I hadn’t until then seen how beautiful she was, as now, naked, with her hair unplaited, her arms crossed so that her slender hands inadequately concealed the little pointed breasts, and shivering a little, and anxious a little, and not too sure of herself and of what I would think of her as a lover, she approached the bed.
I suppose no evening is ever again like the very first evening, the nakedness ever again quite the nakedness it is that first time, the initial gestures, hesitant and doubtful and overintense, ever again what they were, for nothing we want ever turns out quite the way we want it, love or ambition or children, and we go from disappointment to disappointment, from hope to denial, from expectation to surrender, as we grow older, thinking or coming to think that what was wrong was the wanting, so intense it hurt us, and believing or coming to believe that hope was our mistake and expectation our error, and that everything the more we want it the more difficult the having it seems to be, though Howard said no, the man she married said no, he said what people wanted most was money, because money represented everything else, but that people were ashamed of having so exclusive a feeling for money, and they concealed this feeling, and in the end possibly even I agreed with him.
She recalled, too (we were sitting on the terrace of the cafeteria in the zoo in Central Park, and a lion was roaring), that when she was at school and was initiated into her sorority, she was blindfolded and somebody tied a string to an oyster and they told her she had to swallow the oyster and she could taste it in her mouth, the awful cold slimy dead taste and she gulped and gulped and when it finally lodged in her throat and she was about to swallow it they tugged the oyster back out and God the sensation was just awful and every time she even saw a plate of oysters sitting on a bed of ice she got ill remembering. And at fourteen (we were eating in a small Italian restaurant off Sixth Avenue and I had spilled some red wine) she had acne and she was fat and she thought she was never going to be slender like the ballet dancers whose photographs clipped from a magazine she had tacked to the wall of her bedroom and then at sixteen she was suddenly slender and very pretty and the acne was all gone and then she realized that her breasts would always be small, that she would never have any sort of an impressive bosom at all and the boys downtown standing outside the drugstore or the candystore would never whistle at her when she walked by and probably nobody would ever be mad about her, really mad, and shoot himself out of sheer love, and she sighed and reconciled herself to it and when she got older nobody ever really did, it would be sort of nice, she thought, to be really madly loved and have somebody actually threaten to kill himself about her, but she supposed it would never happen. And then at seventeen she was married. Incredibly married.
It was the first year (I’d brought flowers and a box of candy, and she was eating the candy, slowly, meditatively) she was really pretty, and New York seemed to her, coming from the small suburban town where her parents were now and where they had the child, the most wonderful city in the world. Nothing was ugly to her then, and all day long she shivered with excitement, the most wonderful things seemed about to happen, and then there was the boy, for she always thought of him as a boy, a boy she had married. And she used to sit, listening to him talk about his childhood, he had a family in Philadelphia, his mother drank, and he used to send her money every month, and she would pity him, her heart aching, there were so many burdens on him, her eyes shining with love and ignorance. She had been (she thought of it now with a little amused touch of bitterness and self-mockery) so willing to do anything, anything he’d ask her to do, take a boat to Africa, live at the Pole, outrage her family, scandalize the world, anything, all in the ache of love and self-sacrifice. (Would she ever feel like that again? She thought not; how could she possibly? The girl who had felt all that was dead. She was quite sure the girl who had glowed like that and been so radiant and such a fool was dead.) So they were married, the following spring, he
was only twenty, and they went to Philadelphia to see his mother, and it seemed to her it was what she had always waited so impatiently for: to be married and to have a child. She was only eighteen then, the ward (because they had no money at all, but she thought, being eighteen, that money wasn’t the important thing) crowded with women, feeling herself in the neat tucked-in hospital bed immeasurably small, the doctor smiling at her for she seemed hardly old enough to be lying there, a toy giving birth to another toy, and then there was the war, the long journey, carrying the infant and the formula bottles and the packet of diapers in the dirty overcrowded wartime train where she had to ask the porter please would it be all right if she warmed the bottles in the Pullman kitchen, and swaying through the train full of sleeping soldiers and rumpled civilians to the kitchen and back again to her seat where she had the child carefully propped in a basket, the journey to the airbase where he was stationed, and his odd feeling, when she saw him, about the baby, how now the baby too was a burden, another burden, like his mother in Philadelphia to whom inexorably every month part of even his army money was still sent.
She felt she had tried: it was so difficult, even now, three years afterward, when she no longer hated or blamed or accused him, to say why it had happened. Whether one had been too much in love, or not enough. Whether it was his childhood—that slum, and the boy helping a drunken mother into bed; or her inexperience—that shock when the wedding night was neither wonderful nor transfiguring, but only painful, and the world the next morning showed its old disfigured face; or their mutual inarticulateness—if she had been able to speak out, to reach and touch him, or if he had been able to reach and touch her. She was not sure, even now, why they had failed, and the marriage had failed. There was only, for her, the incredible fact, who had never believed anything of the sort would happen, that it had happened: and here she was, not yet twenty-two, a mother, divorced, alone.
And she would look at me: did I think what was wrong was marriage itself? Of course, she had married too young; she could see that, now. And there had been so much ignorance on both their parts; so much clumsiness; so much misunderstanding; she thought (sighing) that, after all, what was wiser was not to marry for love, that one always made a better wife when one was not in love, it was love that made marriage so difficult, the sense of failure was so acute then. As for me, she was quite sure that women had always been a little too good to me.
Too good?
Because they’d loved me.
But I’d been in love, too, or thought I had. And I’d spent, as most men had, that is men who cared about women, an unconscionable number of hours, out of the time I had available, loving them, indulging them, or persuading them to go to bed. And besides, love: there were so many other emotions which weren’t love at all, but which masqueraded as love, or assumed its name; didn’t she agree? And happiness: the suburban hideaway and the bedroom with the chintz curtains; wasn’t it possible to aspire to something else, wasn’t it conceivable that happiness might not be the single goal?
But what was it, then, I wanted? she would ask, almost angrily, not really believing me (as, possibly, I did not believe myself), thinking that the obstinacy with which I spoke of some vague freedom, without shape, without substance, was only another of my infinite poses; and that it was all bound up (she could not say exactly how or why) with my reluctance to proclaim I loved her (desperately, of course) and could not live without her (when, after all, there were so many girls I had loved and managed to live without). And something would move then in the depths of her eyes; some old resentment stirred. How could one possibly not want happiness? And what could I want from her, then, if what I wanted was not happiness? What else could she, who felt secretly that she had little enough to give, give me if not that which any man, coming to her, alternating the clumsiness of his rhetoric with the mute fumblings at her breast or hip, thought of as happiness? To ask nothing of her (as I was apparently doing) or to demand, or to pretend to demand, nothing, to act out while I kissed her some half-expressed comedy of independence, drew her to me and at the same time stirred in her some inarticulate antagonism, and made her feel, obscurely, some unvoiced denial of herself. So she would say to me, to test my sincerity: Wouldn’t it matter to you if I left you? (The smile would be fixed on my face; I would become, when she asked me, conscious of how fixed my smile was.) If I said to you, she would say, watching me carefully, searching my face, now that it was all over between us and I wanted never to see you again, would it make a difference to you? Suppose I said it now, she would say. I would glance at my wrist watch.
At ten-thirty?
And she would answer, yes, at ten-thirty, now, this minute, would I, if she insisted that it was all over between us, irrevocably over, just pick up my hat and go? But I, smiling, was quite sure she wouldn’t say it.
Nevertheless, suppose she did? Would it matter, would it matter at all? Yes, it would matter, I said, carefully, very much. How much would it matter? she said. I’d be miserable, I said, knowing that much was true, I’d miss her, very much, and I’d be unhappy, quite unhappy, she could be sure of that; but it was not the assurance that parting from her would upset me, or make me unhappy, which was compelling her, because then she would say that, though I might be miserable for a while, even genuinely unhappy, I’d survive.
Didn’t she want me to survive?
And I suppose she didn’t; only an absolute sort of incapacitation, if she left me, would have pleased her; nothing, I suppose (for at that time I did not think her going would have really occasioned in me more than a particularly sharp regret), but an extreme of suffering, or even possibly a gentle attempt to hang myself from some convenient chandelier, would have satisfied her that I was truly in love.
Was I?
Was she?
It was true that I was often bored; that she was frequently depressed; that there were nights I sat in the chair opposite her, listening to the radio, or her records, with absolutely nothing to say to her; and there were times when I was restless, when I regretted having begun an affair at all, times I longed to be someplace else than in this small apartment, engaged in those endless and not very interesting duologues that precede going to bed or are interspersed between the silent numbing kisses and the intervals when, exhausted, the bodies of the lovers separate and roll away, each to a side of a disordered bed, and in the dark air, of which one is again conscious, the sexual sweats slowly dry, and the heart, set off like a burglar alarm, finally subsides. Sometimes, hating the violent dispossession of myself which love brought on, I would wish to be elsewhere; and feeling me withdrawn from her, she would ask (as I would ask when I felt her withdrawn) what I was thinking of, and I would reply that I was not thinking of anything; but those fleeting resolutions I would make, as I lay in the darkness, to live differently, or those desires I’d experience for another sort of life, were absurd and untrue, for no sooner would I leave her and find myself ideally alone than I would begin longing for her again. Because I, too, was difficult, easily depressed, changeable, evasive, and perhaps not entirely honest. There was no weakness I did not obstinately maintain I possessed, and I was fond of talking at great length about all the defects of my character, and sometimes, not entirely joking, I would advise her to leave me, but she always suspected this concern on my part for her happiness. She was not sure, after all, that I might not feel a more profound relief at her departing than any grief I might claim. She could not really go until she could feel that her loss would be important. Perhaps if she had been completely convinced that I would be properly broken-hearted she might have been able to end the affair with less than the difficulty it ultimately cost us. The portrait I drew of myself was always unflattering (but was it really unflattering? Wasn’t it, actually, by insisting so on my inaccessibility making myself more attractive?); but always, of course, with just a touch of sadness to everything I said, a tincture of disenchantment, a slight dusting over my words of an attractive melancholy, as though I had suffered, lo
ng ago, some wound, some profound disappointment. Ah, the roles I played, sitting there in the green armchair of that dwarfed living room, that tiny birdcage with the fruit rotting on the inexpensive coffee table! For now I was the oracle on sex: experienced, objective, clinical. One had always (this with my serious face) certain difficulties due to such and such; there was a girl in Chicago (height, weight, general characteristics) I’d known during a tour; she had had exactly the same experience, in her case an uncle who owned a laundry; and, of course, I had cured her. Naturally. One always implied that there was nothing like a series of treatments, administered by the doctor at this fortunate moment so near one, this most tender of healers, with the miraculous touch, to cure one of a slight inability to enjoy what was really (of course it was!) the simplest, the most available, the nicest of human pleasures. Or again, I was the charming boy, the rosebud who had grown up in a tough neighborhood; or now, the misunderstood or the too much understood; and now, putting my head into her lap, I’d be grateful for the warmth of her flesh, for I was the tired man then, the exhausted hunter home, now love, like a warm laprobe, covered me, and my weary mind relaxed in this simplest of baths. Alternately, I was moody—what was I doing here? Or gay—let’s do the town! Or loved her—ah, baby, there’s nobody like you! Or mercurial again, did not love her—ah, honeybun, why kid ourselves? Or, retreating, like Hamlet, the distance of her arm, found her an enigma—who are you, after all? A stranger . . . we are all strangers, live, die, breed, stranger with stranger, the unknown copulating with the unknown, mysterious Mr. X, the local man in the iron mask, kissing on her palpable mouth the enigmatic Miss X, the beauty nobody knows!
