by Alfred Hayes
What difference would one day have made? she answered.
And what difference would it? I knew, too, in that common knowledge we shared, that we had come to the end of it; that nothing, the delay of a day, kisses or going to bed again, would have changed it; nevertheless, it seemed to me that I would have had some mysterious satisfaction and would have accepted it more easily if we had, this one final night, gone to bed together. It seemed to me that this was all I wanted, and that it was not too much to have asked or expected. My bitterness seemed all based on the fact that I had been deprived of that very final night. Her face, the room itself, its details, the bed covered and against the wall, pressed on me with an intolerable weight. The pulse continued to pound; I was aware of my hands, how hot they were, and dry.
Now she was searching my face anxiously to see how agitated I was, and what it was I intended to do. She did not believe that I would hurt her, and yet she was afraid that I might hurt her. But she was in no danger. She would have been struck by nothing heavier than a laborious adjective. She was quite safe, and needed only to have permitted me to exhaust the not very effective phrases with which I clumsily tried to transfix her, and to empty myself of all the exaggerated accusations I made against her, and have allowed me to drain the cisterns of self-pity, and I would have turned, satisfied, and have made, or tried to make, an exit appropriate to the moment: the door theatrically slammed, and my footsteps going loudly down the stairs. She should have, had she been penetrating enough, even permitted me the luxury of a bitter and conclusive: whore.
I had said now all the outrageous things I could summon up; drawn for her that picture of myself waiting anxiously for midnight, huddled in a doorway on a dark street, wanting to be with her, waiting for the light to appear in her window; how I had been, particularly today, so much in love with her; how I had thought, at last, that what was wrong between us would be finally straightened out; how shocked I’d been to hear from someone else the decision that she had not had the simple courage to give to me herself; how she had owed me at least that. Were there tears now in my eyes? I had conjured them up. How satisfactory their warm salt tasted on my mouth. She could not disbelieve the tears.
And with the tears, softening, she said: Oh, darling, I couldn’t tell you. If I saw your face, if I had to look at you, while I told you, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. You know I couldn’t look at your face and tell you. I did the only thing I could, the only way I could, darling, darling.
(For I had crossed, suddenly, to where she sat on the edge of the bed, and put my head in her lap.)
Why did you drink? she said. You shouldn’t drink. And you mustn’t call me. It has to be over. (How reassuring to lie, like this, in a pretense of utter defeat and complete helplessness, in the comfort of her lap.) Were you really, she said, stroking my head, standing out there all this time, waiting? How terrible. Suppose there were someone here? You’d hurt yourself more. It’s better like this, you know that. I couldn’t go on, just drifting. I don’t know who I am any more, or where I’m going. And I loved you. Truly, believe me, I loved you. No matter what you think now. It’s because of Barbara. And it wouldn’t have worked out, you know that, darling, and I have to be practical, I have to think of my future. And muffled in her lap, the tearstained voice that was hardly mine agreed that yes perhaps it was better this way, the way she had chosen, and we would avoid the delayed farewell, the protracted departure, the postponed breakup. For she had, she said, to comfort me, not wished to cause me any pain. I was dear to her, and she would not, if it were at all possible, cause me any pain. And I’d forgive her, because I understood how it was, what necessities drove her. I would forgive her, here, now, this final time we were to see each other, this tear-swept moment, as we drew apart, dividing from each other. What was I to forgive her for? Oh, everything. For everything was wrong; everything needed forgiving. I embraced her; fiercely. As though to add to all the ancient embraces this last unforgettable one. This one that would endure in memory. This imperishable clasp. For already I thought of her as ghostly. Her eyes acquired a sympathetic mist. Her small childish mouth, endeavoring to be firm, trembled in the bittersweet drama. And so, holding her, this, which was to be the last of all our kisses, crawled from her cheek to the small ear, then to her throat. She moved in my arms; frightened, almost. And I imagined it was because she did not wish to respond to me; that to feel desire now would be almost a violation of the very tender membrane of emotion that was stretched between us. But I’d kissed her there so often. It was where she was most vulnerable. A delicate shudder always went through her when my mouth touched her lightly there. I could taste the rough wool of her sweater now, and reaching up, thinking perhaps I could revive some ghost of passion in her, I slid the sweater down on her throat, and she cried, no! no! Embedded there, where I had moved the sweater, were the swollen and purple markings of teeth.
She was out of my arms, and there I was, stupidly on my knees, staring at her. My mouth worked; I made some unfinished gesture with my hand. He hadn’t, after all, needed the thousand dollars. She was trying quite hard not to appear frightened. It was why she had worn the sweater. I said: not a cat. Not a cat at all. A little mouse in heat. I got up from the floor where I had been kneeling. I think that I had been kneeling made it worse. I said: You powdered it, didn’t you? You put cold cream on it. It didn’t help. There’s only one position a man can get himself into to achieve a bite like that. I mimicked her voice. I repeated her denials. He had only kissed her, a tender good night. I said: Why bother to cover it up? One on the other side would make a nice pair.
She had started to scream.
It was stupid to scream. I wasn’t going to kill her. Not exactly.
Besides, she should have been beaten. A little. I think that would have been just: to beat her, a little.
Halfway across the room, she picked up the tear-gas pen, and fired it.
7
A FEW DAYS later, there was a disturbance down the corridor. Mr. Lanzetti, a round man, who was the hotel’s assistant manager, explained when I opened my door that it was a woman. The occupant of 615 had thrown her out.
She was outside 615 now, kicking at the door. She was red-haired.
You son of a bitch, she shouted at 615, you’ll pay for this.
Mr. Lanzetti fluttered to her.
Madame, Mr. Lanzetti said, you’ll just force me to call the police. Is that what you want, I should call the police?
Shut up, the red-haired woman said. Fatface.
All right then, Mr. Lanzetti said. Bob.
Yes sir, the elevator boy said.
Telephone the police.
The police, the red-haired woman said. She slung her purse which she wore on a shoulder strap out of the way. Go call the sucking police. I’ll cut your balls off, she shouted at the locked door.
The door of 615 remained wisely closed.
Madame, Mr. Lanzetti said. You’re just making a spectacle of yourself. You’re just disturbing our tenants.
Screw your tenants, the red-haired woman said. Throw me out. He’s got another guess coming if he thinks he can just lay me and throw me out. I don’t go that easy. I’ll cut his balls off. So help me Mary. Sidney! she screamed. Open this door!
Madame, Mr. Lanzetti said.
Madame your ass, the red-haired woman said. She began methodically to kick again at Sidney’s door.
Then someone called the police and they took the lady away.
So that others and elsewhere were having difficulties with love. Madame your ass. She was quite right, the lady in the corridor. I wished that I too, having been betrayed, could kick at the door of outrage. That I could howl somewhere in an empty corridor. I closed my own door, wondering if Sidney had ever had a tear-gas pen fired at him.
I was sleeping badly. In the mornings I would awaken from some dream in which, again, I had lost something, and would again, with great anxiety and rage, try to recover it. She wore, in one dream I had, a red beret. It was raining. I fol
lowed her in the rain and called to her. Apparently she didn’t hear me. She walked rapidly away and then disappeared into a penny arcade. I remembered that the bus she took had a terminal behind such an arcade. There were men standing at the pinball machines and the various games under hot lights. I looked for her where the mechanical gypsy read fortunes. I had lost her somewhere among the intent and unlucky players. When I woke up I could remember very distinctly how she had looked in the red beret hurrying away in the rain.
I made spasmodic efforts to work, assuring myself that once I began working I would forget her. The difficulty was in beginning. There was a feeling of weakness, a sort of powerlessness now, as though I were about to be ill but was never quite ill enough, as though I were about to come down with something I did not quite come down with. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I had been in love, and had lost, because of the grudgingness of my heart, the possibility of having what, too late, I now thought I wanted. What was it that all my life I had so carefully guarded myself against? What was it that I had felt so threatened me? My suffering, which seemed to me to be a strict consequence of having guarded myself so long, appeared to me as a kind of punishment, and this moment, which I was now enduring, as something which had been delayed for half a lifetime. I was experiencing, apparently, an obscure crisis of some kind. My world acquired a tendency to crumble as easily as a soda cracker. I found myself horribly susceptible to small animals, ribbons in the hair of little girls, songs played late at night over lonely radios. It became particularly dangerous for me to go near movies in which crippled girls were healed by the unselfish love of impoverished bellhops. I had become excessively tender to all the more obvious evidences of the frailness of existence; I was capable of dissolving at the least kind word, and self-pity, in inexhaustible doses, lay close to my outraged surface. I moved painfully, an ambulatory case, mysteriously injured.
I began, too, to experience the conceit of suffering. It conferred upon me a significance my emotions had previously lacked. It seemed a special destiny. Because I suffered I thought I loved, for the suffering was the proof, the testimony of a heart I had suspected was dry. Since happiness had failed me, it was unhappiness that provided me with the belief that I was, or had been, in love, for it was easier to believe in the reality of unhappiness when I had before me the evidence of sleepless nights and the bitterness of reaching in the dark for what was no longer there. The sick constriction of the heart was undeniable; there was a melancholy truth in the fact that it was suffering which made me, I thought, at last real to myself.
There were times when I would forget her, though they were rare, and it would be for a time as though she had never existed; and then some passing girl’s inadvertent gesture, or an accidental profile, or a hat like hers, would restore her, and restore the suffering too, and I would long again, somehow, to encounter or to see her. I would recall her melancholias. I would recall how she would say: don’t look at me when I put my lipstick on, for it made her nervous. How there was always something she had just lost or just misplaced, and the desperation with which she would dig into the cluttered depths of her purse. How it always required persuasion to have her wear boots on a rainy day. And the fear of age. How she thought her prettiness would go and how she saw herself withered at thirty-five. Now she had passed into another life. She inhabited a world from which I was excluded, and she had left me in an immense empty space.
The world she inhabited now was one which I, privately, thought of as superior to my own, and I would expect sometimes, when I passed under the canopies of the big clubs, with their uniformed doormen, that I might encounter her, or as the dark powerful cars swung into the curb that perhaps she would be issuing from a vehicle like that. My failure to hold her was simply one more of the failures I had to endure in the struggle with that world, and I really should not have expected a victory. That she should have finally chosen that life, the life those powerfully hooded cars and the canopies and the uniformed doormen represented, seemed to me now inevitable. It contained all the attractions; it held all the promises. I supposed that by now the violent markings of his teeth had vanished, and she was again wearing her usual dresses.
She spoke to George, whom she thought of as a friend, once a week or so, over the phone, and she seemed happy, at least she seemed happy over the phone; she had spent the weekend horseback riding, and it had been fun; or she would mention, George said, openly now, a friend of Howard’s who had a plane, and she was going to learn to fly it; or she would be on the phone, yawning, because they’d been out so late the night before. She slept later than ever, as the last pretenses of work fell away from her, and she told George that she had had Howard drive her home one weekend and she introduced him, quite formally, as she supposed she should, to her family. It must have been quite an occasion, I thought, when the big Cadillac had pulled up on the quiet shady street and she had gotten out of it. Barbara had liked him, she said, and George said that she was obviously preparing herself and him and everybody else for the announcement of a marriage, or at least an engagement. Of course he hadn’t said yet, she told George, anything definite, she did not want him to feel she was rushing anything, but she was quite sure that in time he would come to it. He was going away for a few days to Utah: there was a mine he had bought into, and they had found, in addition to the lead and silver, a vein of gold or something, she wasn’t quite sure, and she thought that when he came back she would speak to him. I could tell from what George said that she felt reasonably confident now, and that she had secured herself enough with him to think that it was only a question of time. It was true that they had had an argument or so, now and then, but it was not important. She told George what the argument was, and I suppose she told her other friend, Vivian, too. He had been reading the late paper, sitting in his big living room, and she had been in a chair, opposite, eating an apple and glancing through a copy of Vogue, when he said: They’re floating the Big Mo. She said: What? He said: They’re floating the Big Mo. She said: What in God’s name is the Big Mo? He said: Don’t you read the papers? She said: Well how am I supposed to know what the Big Mo is? Is it a gangster? So he’d been mad, and then she had gotten mad at him, with his old papers, because it was true that she never did look at the front page, after all there was almost nothing on it that concerned her, and she told him he was opinionated, that he never thought anybody was right but himself, which he’d taken offense at, so that it had been a bad evening, but he’d called in the morning and apologized and she, to show him that she forgave him, promised she’d look at the front page after that so at least they’d have something to talk about. But she told George that both of them had been so angry she had forgotten to ask what the Big Mo was, and George had to tell her.
Meanwhile, I continued to endure as best I could the silence of my own living room, the emptiness of my own bed. I thought, intermittently, of leaving town; a trip would be good, George advised me, and I had wanted for some time to see Bermuda. I did go so far as to collect the travel folders and ask about the fare and the accommodations, and to think about how it would be walking through Hamilton, looking at the policemen in their khaki shorts and sun helmets, but the enormous lethargy which chained me to my sofa would not release me, and I did not go to Bermuda or anyplace. I did go one night to a house on Riverside Drive. There were four gentlemen in the living room, which was sunken and very nicely rugged, playing gin rummy in their shirt sleeves, and there was a large multiknobbed blond television set which was broadcasting the fights at St. Nick’s and now and then one of the gin rummy players would turn away from the game which was being played for a dollar a point and look with a not entirely interested eye at the boxers, and then turn back for the next deal. In the kitchen I could see there had been arranged, or a caterer had arranged, neat stacks of corned beef sandwiches, a green hill of dill pickles, and a dozen or so bottles of celery tonic. In the bedroom, which was just off the foyer, there were two girls posing on a pair of twin beds w
hile a photographer took flashlight pictures of them. An elderly smiling gentleman in black and white sport shoes and a forty-dollar pair of gabardine slacks was admiring, as I glanced in, the two girls, one of whom was a large blonde and entirely naked, and the other a thin dark Spanish girl who wore still her black lace panties which had little red bows on them, and they were both smiling for the camera, and possibly also for the elderly gentleman who was being very helpful with the flashbulb apparatus. You could smell the spiced odor of the corned beef all the way into the bedroom. I went down the two steps into the sunken living room to watch for a while the gin rummy game and the fights at St. Nick’s. In a little while the elderly gentleman appeared, his shoelaces untied. Is there any cherry soda? he said. She wants cherry soda. He disappeared into the kitchen, smiling, I thought, more than ever. I left the living room when even a dollar a point did not make gin rummy a game you could watch very long, and entered what I suppose the host sometimes called a den and sometimes a library, but which was, I could see, the really fascinating room in the apartment, much more than either the living room or the bedroom, though of course they were fascinating too, but not quite in the way the library-den was. For while it contained a few Book of the Month Club books, its most striking feature was a powerful telescope on a tripod eternally pointing its eye through the Venetian blinds toward the bedrooms of the city. The telescope was, naturally, adjustable, and must have been a lot of fun, and I suppose the people who used it often thought of how really entertaining it could be if there were a sound track attached. I used the telescope for a while but there was nothing really happening anywhere, and then I discovered the stereopticon, which was three-dimensional, and the cases of colored slides, and I spent twenty-five minutes dropping the slides into the viewer looking at what must have been a considerable part of the female population of New York. I had no idea there were so many girls in the business. I remember trying to find some relationship other than statistical between the inexhaustible nakedness of the girls on their tiger skins and beside their pools and on the equally inexhaustible beds and what was causing me so constant and inescapable a suffering. I was sure that there had to be a connection of a kind, for how vast could the possible difference be between what my eye, fixed to the viewer, saw, and what my mind, fixed to her image, imagined? The difference could not be in the tiger skins and the illuminated swimming pools, and there was not, really, enough anatomical distinction to make a point about. I felt as though I were close to some important and possibly influential discovery, but I never made it. The door of the bedroom was discreetly closed as I left the apartment, but I thought I could understand why, now, the gin rummy game absorbed the players so.
