by Alfred Hayes
So there was that night, and another night when I did get drunk enough, and ill enough, to injure myself and woke up in the morning with two great inexplicable bruises on my ribs, and I remembered, after trying to recall where it was and how it was I had gotten them, that I had been in and out all night of telephone booths, ringing her, and that there had been no answer for which, now, sober and exhausted, I was rather glad. I had by now come to accept the state in which I was, the inertia and the dull suffering and the endless and useless recollections of her, and the endless thinking of how it would have been different had I done this or done that, and the alternations of an almost unbearable desire to see her with a hatred which seemed about to free me of her but then didn’t. Everybody, of course, assured me that I would recover. It was an illness each had, in his own way, they privately admitted, lived through, and had called the usual doctors about, and taken to the nearest drugstore the usual prescriptions, and they knew that I, too, would find myself one morning a well man again. Nothing, evidently, healed with such certainty as a broken heart; and even if the heart was not broken, as I was convinced that it was impossible mine was, but simply dislocated a little, there were infallible remedies of which the most infallible was time. Meanwhile, there were recommendations, advice, telephone numbers, little dinners arranged with myself solicitously placed between some sympathetic married couple, long walks in the park, insomnia. That morning when I would awake and find the pillows not lumpish nor the sheets twisted like nooses seemed still immeasurably distant. My greatest difficulty appeared to be that I could not determine in my own mind, with any certainty, what it was I myself felt about her. She escaped me; even now, after all that had happened between us, she escaped me. Did I actually believe that only the possession of that particular body, the act of kissing again those particular breasts and lying again close to those particular thighs, would ease this agony I was enduring? I thought of myself as I had been with her: delivering flowers, like an errand boy; kissing her, like an actor; tormenting her, like a villain; consoling her, like a doctor; advising her, like a lawyer; and they were all, all, somehow comic, somehow unbelievable, gestures hardly mine. It was impossible to understand! I was in the midst of ridiculous mysteries, great enigmas of need and bulking sphinxes of necessity. All I knew, really, was that she had taken away with her when she had gone something which in the past had held me together, some necessary sense of myself, something without which I seemed in danger of collapsing; and whatever it was, an indispensable vanity, an irreplaceable idea of my own invulnerability, it was gone and only she could restore it to me, or so I thought. For without whatever it was, I seemed poor, depleted, injured in some mysterious way; without it, there was nothing to interpose between the world and me. And now, more than ever, as the weeks went by, she seemed lost forever. My cowardice, my reluctance to declare myself, my habitual irony, myself in short as the years had made me, had lost her. How intolerable now the weight of what I was seemed upon me. How subtle a punishment life had devised. Often I felt as though my own pain had cornered me in some room and I was alone with it, like some animal that was inescapable. It was a terrifying experience to find oneself at last helpless, and to be made helpless by something for which one could not, anywhere, ask help. But when we have suffered long enough we adjust to the idea finally that we have always suffered, and that it was never any different, and a mock sort of health is eventually achieved. The suffering having endured so long seems at last through the simplicities of repetition to be less intense; we learn to move, in our crippled way, quite well, and one would hardly notice, if they were strangers, the difference the infirmity has made. We lower to the level of the wound, and begin to think we are fine again, as I began to think, and begin almost to find the world a less inimical place, as I began to find it, when late one night, after I had gone to bed, and was lying in the darkness, nearly asleep, she telephoned. It was about three o’clock in the morning. I had been reading and I had just turned the light off when the phone rang. There was a small humble diffident voice at the other end of the line that I almost did not recognize as hers; and then my heart gave a great swift bound. Cleopatra, I said. Are you alone? she asked, in that excessively humble voice, as though she had forfeited the right to call me at three o’clock in the morning, and if I were to hang up now abruptly it would be a fate she justly deserved. Alone? I said, no, Mark Antony was with me, we’d been reading together, a book on asps; and then I was tired of talking like that. I suspected that, for a moment, so concentrated was she on the decision to call me, she had almost thought Mark Antony really was someone I might possibly be with, because she said, to reassure herself: But you are alone, aren’t you? She, too, was alone; she, too, was lying in the darkness. She had not been able to sleep, and the voice diminished itself diffidently: she had been thinking of me. My heart gave another of its quick immense bounds. She had said just enough and said it in such a way that I knew something had happened between her and Howard. She would like, she said, to see me; tomorrow, perhaps, if of course I weren’t busy, at lunch, as though lunch were all she dared hope for; but tomorrow and lunch were too distantly away. I would not, I knew, though perhaps it would be wiser, be able to endure the long intermission until tomorrow; no, I’d come now. Will you really? she said, the voice eager and the eagerness flattering, as though I had promised to do the one great thing she had wished most for and had not dared ask; and I said yes, as quickly as getting dressed and a taxi could do it. Hurry, hurry, she said.
Twenty minutes later, there I was again, climbing those stairs I had not climbed in three months, noting how nothing had changed: that while I had suffered, her world had remained exactly as it had always been. This time the chain came off the door instantly when I knocked; and there she was, wearing (she had, I thought, put it on almost as soon as I had said I would be over) the knee-length terry-cloth bathrobe, and smoking, which she did rarely, a cigarette. I supposed she had rearranged whatever in the room needed rearranging. But I was seeing her; she was there, before me, real after all the phantoms of her I had conjured up: the imagined girls walking on the avenue who had resembled her, the girls talking animatedly in the front seats of Cadillacs who had had hair like hers, the girls I had expected to come issuing out of the doors that doormen held of night clubs. The smile she gave me trembled hesitantly on her mouth, a smile unsure of itself and asking to be reassured, a smile that was to take the place of all the words she did not trust and which might possibly betray her. I supposed she had prepared herself for all my possible reproaches; I supposed she had prepared, while I was dressing, those explanations she thought absolutely necessary. I had thought, too, that I would demand explanations, and that her telephoning me had given me an advantage I should not easily relinquish; that whatever it was that had happened between them, I would be cautious; but now as I entered the small familiar room, and she stood there, not even quite as beautiful as I had remembered her, her face cleansed and shining a little with cream, and the cigarette being awkwardly smoked, something welled up in me and broke, like a great bubble, and there, once more, I was kneeling before her, my arms encircling her small waist, my head against the warmth of her belly, wanting nothing but an interminable silence in which all my longing for her would be at last satisfied. She seemed as deeply moved as I was, as though only this inarticulateness could express the depth of feeling our absence from each other had created. I felt as though I had been starved for her; my hands told, or tried to tell her, the sort of hunger I had endured; the muteness of my arms about her, and my face buried in the cloth of her robe struggled dumbly to convey to her all the desperation of those nights in which, wanting her, I had not had her: dumbly, in a pantomime of longing. Had I been arrogant? Then, here, kneeling before her, I was no longer arrogant. The scorn which I had so often expressed for those men who became absolutely dependent on women had been put off, and kneeling so I wanted her to believe now that only a vast and inexpressible need for her existed, and that this submi
ssion was my repentance for all the doubts I had ever wittily or stupidly declared about my love for her. Possibly she had told herself that if I were cold, or too obviously triumphant, or nasty, when I came to the house, she would not endure it, or she would endure only a little of it, enough to show her own sincere desire to be reconciled, and had convinced herself that, really, all she was doing in telephoning me was giving both of us another chance. I supposed, if that was what she had thought or expected, the completeness with which I had knelt, and the long expressive silence, had convinced her that she was in no danger of having to endure my gloating over her. We were lying now, finally, together on the bed; the urgency had at last subsided. It had been terrible, she said, her voice low and her face averted, it had been terrible for her too; there had been so many times she had expected to encounter me as I had expected to encounter her: and with another girl. Hadn’t there really been another girl? Not that she would have minded; she would have understood, perfectly, she said, if some night I had taken another girl to bed, for she, too, had been persuaded everything was over. She had thought she had seen me once, riding a bus, and she had had such an awful pang; she had not thought, either, that she would suffer as much as she had. Of course, she had gone out, every evening as a matter of fact, but the going out made it easier, a little easier, because there were so many memories embedded in this room, and besides, in Howard’s set they went out every evening, it was just unthinkable staying home one night. To have stayed home would have been to admit that life was not quite so fascinating in the places they went to as everybody pretended it was, and there was really nothing to do, she said, for them but to spend money, and she had gotten so tired of that, all the spending. Nevertheless, that could hardly have convinced her, I thought, to break up with Howard; it would have required something more severe than her being tired, or even a little bored, if she had really been bored, for I remembered the horseback riding and the plane she was going to learn to fly. No, no; she really had been bored, utterly bored, even though the horseback riding had been fun, and she had never really gotten to the plane, it was only something the friend had promised her. She had been bored because the realization came to her, finally, how alien to her the sort of life he led really was; and there were so many differences between them, what he liked and asked out of life, and what she liked and asked out of life; and it had come to her most sharply one night when Isabel said to her: It’s so funny, I see you and Howard together, and you hold hands, and he calls you darling and you call him dear, and yet it’s as though you were perfect strangers. Isabel had been, because she was fond of her, and worried about her, frank; and then it presented itself to her as being so absolutely true: she did feel like a perfect stranger, despite the darlings and the dears, and they would always be, she realized with an awful suddenness, perfect strangers. She would be for him something he would add to the bric-a-brac on his mantelpiece, a porcelain princess to show his friends, and her own reality would be always diminished when she was with him. She knew now that despite the difficulties of our relationship I, at least, did not make her unreal to herself, and that the separation had been good because it had demonstrated to her where the only chance of her happiness lay, and we had both learned (the sky light now, the first pigeons cooing on the window ledge, an early truck backfiring in the empty dawn) how much we needed each other. I fell asleep with her in my arms, peacefully.
8
IT WAS late October. On the Jersey shore, an hour from Atlantic City, there was a small summer place. It had once been a fishing village, and then a harbor for yachts. They still raced boats there, now and then, but at this time of the year the white dunes would be deserted. Would she like to go, now, this very minute?
She would love to go.
We could drive down and stay a day or so. There was nothing she needed to pack except a toothbrush and a nightgown, and she could put the nightgown into her little make-up case. It would be so nice to go away. The dunes were something we owed each other.
Yes, she said. We owed each other something like the dunes.
So in the afternoon we began to drive. The traffic was thin going through the tile of the Holland Tunnel with its contained roar, and Jersey beyond, once we were out on the highway, seemed an opener and a cleaner world. We headed down the coast. Having her with me, I was almost cheerful again, and there was a sense, to which I had become very unaccustomed, of a distinct sort of happiness. Having her with me transformed the landscape; and the trees, in their dying colors, and the stands which sold steamed clams, and the chicken farms, all pleased me: a small town seemed a nice place to be, and once more I regretted living so completely in New York. I thought of the long white empty dunes and the wind blowing in from the ocean. We would stay in one of the small cottages or at a little hotel and take a long walk on the beach in the morning. She would like it. Autumn, she always said, was her weather. She was always happiest when the sky was clouded over and gray, and there was a fine delicate mist in the air. Summer with its heat and its unchanging sun depressed and exhausted her. She sat now, silently, in her fur coat, in a corner of the car, looking out at the view.
It’s a nice view, I said.
Yes.
Know what?
She turned slightly.
What?
I love view, I said.
The little deserted settlement would be a lovely place to be reconciled. Everything that had happened would be forgotten once we were out on the dunes, walking and watching the gulls, and once we were warm together in a big hotel double bed. Perhaps there would be a fireplace in the room. A fireplace would be about perfect. I had promised myself not to mention anything that could possibly distress her or distress me and I meant very much to keep my mind turned away from everything that had happened. I would not ask, for asking would only endanger us again, what she had done or what her life had been in all the weeks we had been separated. There was nothing any more to be insisted upon, or described, for I was quite sure that what I had suffered had changed and purged me, and that somewhere a man, better than the man I had been, was finally emerging. There would be these two or three perfect days of wind and sand and love between us. Even now, the quick countryside, the odor of smoke in the bright air, the thin early moon, were beginning the change. I turned to her. Happy? I said.
It’s wonderful to get away, she said.
From what?
Us. Them. It, she said.
We had been driving now about three hours. With the light failing, we turned inward toward the shore itself, and there, beyond a wooden bridge, and over the great flats of sand, and under a sky that was enormously empty, tiny beside the ocean, were the small white quiet houses that together made up the little settlement which I had remembered as being so beautiful and which I had always thought I would come back to someday. The road was bad now, the great beach deserted, there was nobody at the post office and the little general store was closed, the white four-square church locked up, and the one hotel I remembered, not really a hotel but a place to stay at, was shut down too. I had not realized that nearly all the houses were just summer houses. Everything, even the church, closed when the summer was over and the people who owned the houses went away. It would all reopen in the spring. She was very disappointed. It was as beautiful as I had promised her it would be. We got out of the car and walked along the dunes. Oh, she said, why do they have to be closed? I imagined that, later, in the deep winter, great gales must strike at this lonely beach, and the tides become huge. We watched the gulls awhile, as the sky darkened, and then we returned to where I had parked the car. The sand sprayed under the wheels. We drove back over the narrow wooden bridge, and the boards rattled as the car went over them. It was colder now, with the sun gone; and I had forgotten gloves; and there was no heater in the car. There was nothing to do since we had come this far but go on; and there was no place to stay at but the tourist cabins and the drive-ins along the highway, and she did not want to stay at a cabin or a drive-in, and
neither did I. It was beginning to go wrong; I could feel, in the car, as I drove, that she was disappointed, and tired, and cold; and the only place I could think of to spend the night was Atlantic City. I knew that it was bad to say Atlantic City to her: it was just the opposite of the kind of place we wanted to go; but it was dark now, and the countryside seemed barren of any life except the life of the beer taverns and the filling stations, and there was no place that I was sure of but Atlantic City. I thought that now she must be feeling that even when we planned a trip like this it went wrong, that it was hopeless to expect that anything we did together would ever go right. I thought if she had gone away with Howard he would have had all the conveniences arranged in advance. I thought that possibly she was thinking that too.
We’ll only stay the night in Atlantic City, I said, and then in the morning we’ll find someplace small.
She nodded. Atlantic City would be all right. But the look of pleasure had disappeared from her face.
My hands were freezing now on the wheel; and to warm it, I put my right hand under her fur coat on her thigh, and we drove like that, through the cold darkness. She fell asleep. It was ten o’clock when the highway broadened and the lights multiplied and there was Atlantic City, feeling all wrong as we came into it with its shabby dirty-sand look, but I was cold now, and hungry, and wanted a hot shower, and I woke her up. She looked blankly at the town; where are we? she said. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, and shivered. She stared at the boarding houses and the chain stores and the middle-aged people on the porches. It looks horrible, she said. I drove to one of the big hotels near the ocean, thinking that a big hotel would be at least something, and a doorman blew a whistle for the parking lot attendant while I went in and signed the hotel register. A bellhop took what small luggage we had up in the elevator. The lobby had been enormous, gilded, and deadly silent, and now the corridor, too, was enormously long, thickly carpeted and deadly silent. The season was over, except for the late conventions, leaving behind this somnolent hotel, like a huge animal that slept through the winter. The corridor was like that, dark and warm and sleeping and not quite alive. There were shrouded sofas and shrouded chairs they had moved out of suites they were redecorating, and the house telephone sitting on its small table under a gilded mirror looked about as lonesome as any instrument waiting to be used could possibly look. The silence, the not being used look everything had, the locked doors, door after door, all painted a hotel white and all with their one doorknob and their one keyhole and their one identifying number, made me feel as though she and I and maybe the bellhop were the only things alive in the hotel, and that if I listened carefully I would hear from these walls a deep subterranean snore. There were twin beds in the room. The bellhop opened the door of a closet which had an automatic light that went on when you opened the door. It was something the hotel seemed proud of. He pulled a window up and lowered a blind and snapped on two of the four or five table lamps and went out with a thank you sir after I tipped him. The room was comfortable enough, and warm, though, with the hotel steam hissing softly in the hotel radiator, and the hotel drapes, which were long and flowered and too vivid, like the pajamas a certain kind of girl would wear, billowed a little in the cold wind blowing in from the sea. She went to the window.
