by Alfred Hayes
So, little by little, she was being absorbed into another life. I suspected, of course, that he must have made a pass of some sort at her; but she denied it. Besides, I knew her better than that; I knew, or I must know, that it was not in her nature to have affairs with two men at identical times; that was, if anything was, the one unforgivable thing. And in addition, she loved me; more than ever, she was certain she loved me; and while she loved me how could she possibly permit another man, no matter how nice, to touch her? Oh, a kiss goodnight perhaps, on a proffered cheek, as she was stepping out of the car; I surely didn’t think a goodnight kiss was important? But there were, she explained, things she simply couldn’t be guilty of; and I was left to believe, as I was only too anxious to believe, that while she loved me I was safe, and that her relationship with him was simply a convenient one; for, after all, it was nice to go out to a club in the evening, or a smart restaurant, places I could neither afford, nor desired, to take her; I’d be so bored at places like that, she assured me; knowing me, she knew how bored I’d be.
So there were evenings when they drove to Long Island, to one of the gambling casinos on the Point; evenings when they were invited to dinner at some friend’s in the East Fifties. She found his friends not quite so stuffy as she had thought they would be. And she found, too, that they were taken with her. She looked so modest, tender, young, innocent; and yet she had a child, and yet she had been married; she gave off, for them, her own little aura of pathos. She aroused little currents of sympathy. She dressed simply; she arrived without a mink coat; she wasn’t blonde; she had good manners; she could be prevailed upon to play the piano and to sing. She began to see that he was pleased with the impression she made upon his friends. And then, she had a quick childish enthusiasm: when the curtain at a musical was about to rise, when the lights came down and the orchestra vamped into the opening bars of the overture, she seemed about to clap her hands, her eyes sparkled, a charming spontaneity took possession of her; and that pleased him, too; that he could take her to the theater and see the evidence of her delight in being taken. She, on her part, made her own constant revisions about him. She began to see him as less boring than solid. When he spoke of his family, she discerned in him a strong devotion to the idea of a home, of children, of an interrelated social unit. She realized that he was less frightening than she supposed. She began to lose some of the intimidation she had felt about his money. She was very careful, too, not to accept gifts that were too large. He had offered many times to exchange the shabby fur she wore, and which she claimed to be so attached to, for something more presentable in at least beaver, but she resisted his kindness and continued to wear the fur, which continued to shed, and as it shed continued to bring to the mouths of the wives of the friends whose expensive flats they dined at curiously sympathetic and knowing smiles.
I think that, in losing her, for it was inevitable that I should lose her, what bothered me most was that I lost her to somebody I could not feel superior to; that, secretly, the bristling idea of his money had intimidated me too. I suppose if she had simply left me and there had been a temporary vacuum, a decent space her devotion to knitting or a trip to Chicago had filled, I might not have behaved as I did. It was, of course, silly of me to assume that she wouldn’t have, when the time came, provided herself with a more than adequate replacement, for it is hardly natural for a woman to dispose of a man until accident or design has already provided her with the promise of another. For a while, I imagine, she was torn; before she could make a decision of any kind she had to be sure. There must have been a moment, therefore, a sign of a special kind, an expression of a distinct sort of concern on his part (a night she had been unhappy, and had cried, and he had comforted her; an unusual pressure upon her hand as they said good-by; a revealing tenderness in his voice as he asked if she had a headache) that had convinced her she could at last be sure. Of course a woman always seems to choose, with a dismaying instinct, the god-damnedest moments to end a love affair. Her dismissals always seem to come the way assassinations do, from the least expected quarter. There will be a note on the kitchen table, propped up against the sugar bowl, on exactly the day when most in love with her you arrive carrying a cellophaned orchid; or walking along the avenue, one arm about her waist, and talking with great enthusiasm about a small house you saw for sale cheap thirty minutes from New York. They seem timed to arrive during birthday parties, when you are apparently happiest, or relaxing in a hot bath, when the house is most peaceful, or taking a short walk in the garden, enjoying what promises to be a beautiful evening. She waits until that precise moment you are bending down to sniff the roses, and thinking that, after all, she is a wonderful girl, and you are really absolutely sold on her, and that the life between you has been, for all the small quarrels and differences, really fine, when bang: she fires from behind the rosebush. Her own particular shot was discharged on an evening when I was having dinner, the classic quiet one, with a friend, at a small Italian restaurant downtown, which had a back yard over which an awning had been stretched. A dozen tables were set out on the cement floor, and the walls of the tenements of the neighborhood reared up on all sides. A mechanical fan stirred the heavy late summer air; a spiral of flypaper hung from one of the iron props of the awning, and twirled, with its bag of dead flies, slowly in the wind the fan made. An elderly waiter, in a short-sleeved white shirt, with a spotted black cummerbund, sweated his way from the kitchen to the tables, carrying the steaming plates of spaghetti and lasagna. It was a setting beautifully arranged: shabby, peaceful, deceptive. It required only that I should be in the act of reaching for the bread in the bread basket; that I should nod, a bit surprised, when George mentioned that she had telephoned him earlier in the evening; that I should explain, with a rather fatuous pleasure, that I was going to meet her later; that I should turn as the waiter approached, and that George should say: But she doesn’t want to meet you later. Then it required only that I should hesitate, that I should not believe I had heard what I heard, that I should believe that what she had said on the phone was that she had been delayed and wanted to see me at a later time, and that George should look uncomfortable, even a bit pitying, since he was the unlucky transmitter, and repeat to me again that no, I didn’t understand, that wasn’t what she meant; to be exact, then, as though the message had come in code and had to be accurately translated by the experts on messages in that cipher, men of long experience, trustworthy too, and to say that the message meant she did not want ever to see me, not that night and not any night. Not ever again: that was the exact translation.
When I looked at the tenements, now, and at the windows from which clotheslines were strung, and in which women, stout and thick-armed, in chemises, moved between the kitchen tables and the stoves; or looked at the sky, darkening now, and pinched between the roofs; a sky neither distant nor near; or stared again at the tablecloth on the table, stained with wine or stained with sauce, it seemed to me as though something had shifted, or been violently moved, for everything, in those few moments after I understood what the message really meant, appeared to be in a different focus, to be at once clearer and emptier than I remembered it. Everything seemed abruptly sharper than before, and duller, as though something had been in those few minutes drained out from the world to which I was accustomed. I was, apparently, shaken, who had never expected himself to be shaken. But then anger came to steady the bad pitch of my voice. To have it end like this! With a telephone call, and a spiral of fly-paper slowly turning. With a message she had not had the courage to deliver herself. With so dull a thud, and so lame a conclusion. I had always assumed that when it ended it would end with a certain gracefulness, a sad and thoughtful charm, a tender farewell. But there were only the dead flies, here, and the blank tenements, and the elderly waiter. She had deprived me of an exit I had planned a long time, and carefully. Then it seemed to me I was being badly treated. God, the days I’d worried about her! The concern I had displayed! For she was, I saw now, quite c
apable of taking care of herself; and I, who had postponed for so long a time the decision to leave her, who had (I thought) been so careful of her feelings, so reluctant (I thought) to hurt her, so solicitous (I thought) of her welfare, had been the one to be shunted aside with so little consideration. Well, I was quite sure, now, that I was glad it was over; I was free again. There was a surge of possibility, a brief (and illusory) sense of well-being. Then, abruptly, I was dispirited, and wanted to be alone.
I left the restaurant, passing the hot kitchen, where the woman who owned the place cooked, a cheerful woman in an apron, who nodded to me as she nodded to all the departing customers. It was now close to ten o’clock. A wind had sprung up. I began to walk toward Fifth Avenue.
5
ODDLY enough, I continued to believe that she had not gone to bed with him.
I had been in the way, and she had dispensed with me. It was a bitter enough fact to accept. The sense of well-being which had flooded through me as I sat at the table and thought of not having now the burden of another’s life on me had almost entirely vanished, and the humiliation of the choice she had made, and the quickness with which she had discarded me, had deepened. There were the beginnings of an unfamiliar anguish inside me now. I told myself, of course, that she was not worth even the small suffering I was beginning to experience, and that, finally, now that I could see it in perspective, the long year together had been largely waste. But the suffering, if it was suffering, for I was not yet sure that I was suffering, continued on its own ambiguous level.
In the park there were moths whirling within the circle of the lights of the street lamps, and there were old men still playing checkers in the difficult light. I turned uptown.
Did I want her? I thought to myself. Suppose, now, she were to change her mind: did I want her? Of course not, I assured myself. Was her loss important? How stupid to imagine it was. Nothing of any significance had happened. It was simply that my own life was so barren, or seemed so barren; the temporary possession of her had given me the illusion that it was not, while I had her, barren; now that she was gone, the barrenness that she had temporarily helped conceal lay exposed. It was because we thought so much that love could save us, that having nothing else but the dry labor of our work we looked so anxiously toward love. It was our ridiculous phoenix. Somebody had reported that its nest had been discovered. We were waiting for the apparition, for the feathered resurrection, for the bird of endless hope with the imperishable plumage, quite sure the bird did not exist, eager for the slightest rumor it did. To suffer, or to experience a suffering for the loss of a girl who had no importance, was absurd; I was absurd because I was suffering; it was something that required hiding away because of its absurdity.
It was becoming painful to think. There seemed to be inside me whole areas I had to be careful of. I could feel my mind, like a paw, wince away from certain sharp recollections. I contained, evidently, a number of wounded ideas.
So, with the only face I had, I continued to walk uptown, imitating a man who is out for some air or a little exercise before bed.
Had I lost her because of cowardice? Because of too little desire? Was I unable to hold or possess anyone?
Sad and preposterous, I thought. It seemed to me that was what I was most: sad and preposterous. It was not that I had been happy with her; I was quite sure I had not been happy. But there were images of her which turned stiffly in my mind as though they were little lead figures attached to a mechanism: images of her on the green daybed, images of her combing her hair. I knew that she had wanted what I was not prepared to give her: the illusion that she was safe, the idea she was protected. She had expected, being beautiful, the rewards of being beautiful; at least some of them; one wasn’t beautiful for nothing in a world which insisted that the most important thing for a girl to be was beautiful. Perhaps now, I thought, she would have some of the things she imagined she wanted: the cocker spaniel, the nursery with the wallpaper that had little sailing boats on it and flying fish, the lawn with an automatic sprinkler, and somebody else to do the dishes. And it wasn’t only the money. Possibly the money was not so important to her as I contemptuously told myself it was. She was tired. At twenty-two she was tired. They tired young nowadays. They were willing to call it quits at twenty-two. She had been a little too young for me, and a little too desperate. Women in their blossoming thirties were better for what I wanted women for; a little more experienced, a little less intense; women for whom a love affair wasn’t any longer so desperate an enterprise. What there was of it, I told myself, I’d had; what I was entitled to I’d got; I’d never get more, being the man I was, and living the life I’d chosen for myself.
A clock in a jeweler’s window said eleven. I had walked all the way uptown. I was again at that familiar corner with its subway kiosk, her tenement with the bar and grill on the street level, her delicatessen with its imported groceries, the great bulk of her office building. I looked up: the windows were dark. She was still not home; or was she home?
Once around the block, I thought. Give her until midnight.
In the bar and grill, there was a communal shabbiness of a sort. The customers ranged along the bar, almost looking as though they knew each other, almost looking as though they were there together. You ought to get drunk, I said; at least that would be a place to be, the bar. But you can’t, I said; you get ill, you know that, it’s your stomach, you can’t get drunk even if you want to. I really didn’t have a good vice. Liquor in moderate quantities. Love on the installment plan. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could really cultivate some impressive vice? Some excessive cruelty or some astonishing sacrifice. But not even that. Instead, we complain in small voices. Complain we’ve married the wrong girl, taken the wrong job, lived the wrong lives.
And what pitiful attempts we make at cures: we raise vegetables in ridiculous gardens, we apply for membership in athletic clubs, we promise ourselves to read again all the important books we’ve neglected. We think that what we want is a simpler life, and a more active, a more external one, and every Wednesday we diligently attend the square dances at the local schoolhouse imagining that a Virginia reel is the way back into a friendly community, and that denims and a checked shirt will restore communication with the stranger who lives next door.
The only thing we haven’t lost, I thought, is the ability to suffer. We’re fine at suffering. But it’s such a noiseless suffering. We never disturb the neighbors with it. We collapse, but we collapse in the most disciplined way. That’s us. That’s certainly us. The disciplined collapsers.
Suicide quietly with sleeping pills in a tiled bath. Neat gassings in a duplex. No trouble to anyone; the will notarized and the floor swept and the telephone on its hook.
Your only vice, I thought, is yourself. The worst of all. The really incurable one.
It was twelve o’clock. There was a light in the windows. I went into the bar. As I went toward the telephone booth, the phone rang. I answered it. It was somebody wanting somebody named Eddie Cohen. I said to the bartender: is there somebody here named Eddie Cohen?
The bartender called: Eddie Cohen here?
There was no Eddie Cohen.
I told whoever it was at the other end of the phone that there was no Eddie Cohen. He’s there every night, the voice said, and then hung up. I dialed her number.
6
THE DOOR opened cautiously on its length of chain, and one eye, the eye of my favorite Cyclops, regarded me.
Are you drunk? she said. You smell drunk, not knowing whether she should open the door or risk my making a disturbance there in the hall. She thought she knew me well enough to suppose that if she did not open the door I would make a disturbance. The possibility of my making one was enough, for I had acquired somehow the reputation of being occasionally violent, and she did not want that sort of a scandal, with me knocking at the bolted door, and all the neighbors out in the hallway, and somebody perhaps going for the police. I looked to her, I suppose, through the narr
ow aperture, bleak enough at that moment to seem capable of assaulting her door knob; but I wouldn’t have. Had she closed the door firmly, had she threatened to telephone the police, stiff with a ridiculous contempt for her I’d have turned and descended the dirty stairs again. For I was not the lover who strangled her; I was not the demented pounder on doors. She knew me badly, really. She overestimated the violence in me. She took the chain off, and opened the door.
I looked quickly over the living room; the bed was not disturbed. She wore a skirt and a high turtle-neck black sweater. She had evidently just come into the house. I had intended to be cold, but somewhere a pulse was beating away uncontrollably.
Why didn’t you wait until tomorrow to tell me? I said.
