by Alfred Hayes
The sea. It was what we had come for, really. She pulled up a large chair, upholstered in roses, and sat there at the window with her fur coat still on and her face pressed to the pane looking out into the darkness loud with the sound of the surf. Below, on the late and now nearly deserted boardwalk, the lamps were hooded with mist. On the beach, shadowed now, there were stands of some kind, bleachers and a platform, arranged for what had been probably the Labor Day beauty contest and not yet dismantled, sad now with all the bunting gone from them, the judges, the girls in their bathing suits. Only the small motorized sedan chairs were left and I could see one or two chairs still being driven slowly along the boardwalk. Beyond was the water, nothing but water, dark under a dark sky, a sky with all its stars obscured, and fog blowing in across the sands. She sat there at the window, staring out at that darkness, as if looking long enough and being quiet enough would draw that wet, sad but not unpleasant silence and lightlessness into her, and spread it through her, until she shared it and was part of it, the far awayness of it, the being forever quietness of it. I turned off the table lamps the bellhop had snapped on, so that the darkness of the room moved out to meet the darkness of the sea moving in, and left her there at the window while I went into the bathroom to lay out my razor and toothbrush and to see if the water in the shower was hot. I took a shower, and when I came out of the bathroom she was still sitting there at the window and still looking out to where the water and the sky and the darkness all became one. I crossed to the window and kissed her.
Are you all right? I asked.
She was all right.
Then what was it?
It was nothing; it was just the ocean.
Because it’s sad?
It wasn’t sad, she said; no, that wasn’t it. Sadness was the wrong word. It was just the ocean, and the darkness, the great darkness, how it went on and on. It was the being lost in it for a little while. You’re tired, I said. There were at least fifteen taps in the bathtub, including one for salt water, and maybe one for taffy, but the water was hot. Why didn’t she go and take a hot shower? A hot shower would be fine. She would feel wonderful after a hot shower.
She rose obediently. She took her coat off, finally, then stepped out of her skirt, and removed her sweater, and went toward the bathroom. I heard the door close. I went to the window and sat in the chair she had been sitting in. Looking out, as she had done, I tried to imagine what it was she had felt; the darkness did really after a while possess you, with the hypnotic crash of the surf, and there was a feeling almost of knowing, or being on the edge of knowing, what had been hidden from you, a deceptive simplification, and later, when I thought about it, I realized it was just a feeling, and that whatever it was that was on the verge of being understood disappeared as soon as you turned away from the window and faced again the room you were in, with the furniture someone else had put there, and the rather ugly hard somewhat obscene chaise longue occupying the middle of the floor. The shower was going strongly in the bathroom. I went to one of the twin beds and drew back the bedspread and lay down. The pillows had a starched fresh look, and the room now was just warm enough. I wondered what it would be like if finally we ever understood everything. I thought of the times I had experienced something like the feeling the dark ocean had given me, a feeling that came when one was just on the point of falling asleep, and how in the morning you had a feeling that the night before you had really and finally understood something. But evidently it was too difficult a thing for the mind to hold or keep, or perhaps it was too dangerous a thing for the mind to hold or keep, and we always fell asleep just where the knowledge we were about to acquire became dangerous to us. The door opened and she came out of the bathroom, glowing a little from all the hot water, and crossed the rug barefooted to the other twin bed and got quickly under the bedspread. I thought that the impact of the shower had steamed out of her all that dark feeling. She was shivering a little, trying to get warm under the spread, though it was not cold in the room. I waited a while, and then I got up from the other bed and crossed to hers. It would have been nicer to have had a double bed, and I should have thought of asking the night clerk; but in any other country they would have had double beds in rooms like these without having to ask. I did not see how the hotel people, whoever they were, could actually think there were customers who came to someplace like Atlantic City and asked for a room facing the ocean and then expected to find twin beds in it. It was all that goddamn pretending it wasn’t so. Double beds, that was the first thing I was going to legislate for when I was President. Was I going to be President? Of course; and she was going to be, if she moved over, Congress.
I had forgotten in the weeks we had been separated how small she was, and I thought (the smallness made me think of it) how easily she could disappear again, how precarious my hold upon her was. She lay there, her back toward me, her face half buried in the clean laundered pillow, unresponsive. Everything depended, my sleeping peacefully, my being able to work, my confidence in myself, upon the only bond by which I held her, the words, extracted not always quickly from her, that she loved me. I had to assume that it existed, this invisible love which made itself visible not really too frequently in a gesture or a caress and showed itself not really too often in a softening of her voice or her eyes. But why, I said to myself, lying there, should I demand eternal proofs, eternal reassurance? She was not too demonstrative a girl; she said many times that it was difficult for her to show her feelings. Besides, this should be enough: that she was here, now, warm, with our legs interlaced, with my mouth against the skin, moist and smooth, of her back, with my hands touching all her moistness and smoothness. She was close, now, and actual enough, and surely this was a proof of a kind, a reassurance of a kind. If there was in me some fear of loss, some dread of abandonment, some anxiety which only reluctantly believed that I was loved, still there was something, also, which argued that she was not lying, that she did love me, that I had only to accept and to believe for the love to become real, so that doubt and belief, trust and distrust existed in me side by side, stretched out in me as we were stretched out together, their contradictory arms about each other.
She was so quiet, so still. She was far out there where the water ended and there was nothing but darkness. When I kissed her, or pressed against her, she did not respond. We had been driving six hours and there were all those weeks apart and now this. Outside, there was a long sough of wind; then the surf, growling; then a gull’s high thin sound. Once again I was being excluded. I was alone in the twin bed, really; she was somewhere else, where I could not follow or reach her, somewhere the ocean I almost now disliked had taken her. She was enduring my mouth, enduring my hands. I touched her throat, thinking of the teethmarks which no longer disfigured it; first the teethmarks, then the long weeks, then this. I knew what she wanted: I was to lie there, as inert, as silent as she was, to caress her gently, to be there and not be there. I was to act out the game of her own melancholy with her. I turned her roughly toward me, forcing her legs open; her head moved sharply on the pillow as though she had been awakened, and she gave a short cry that was half caught in her throat and her fingers clawed for a moment as I lifted her toward me. I thought that wherever it was she had gone to, this would bring her back, and wherever it was she had locked herself up, this would open it, and wherever it was she was hidden, this would bring her forth. She would reappear, like an apparition, with the scream of final satisfaction. But except for the short cry she had uttered as I turned her, there was nothing; no scream, nothing; and except for her clawed fingers she did not resist and she did not struggle; there was nothing; there was acceptance, nothing. I fell away from her, defeated. She lay with her face half buried again in the pillow, lost, boneless; my taking her as I had, had widened the distance between us; she was still there, wherever the ocean had her, and locked up wherever she was locked up, and I hated her now. I suspected that now she regretted having taken the trip at all, and I was sick of the endless di
sappointments I seemed always to experience with her, the endless silences into which she plunged us. I would have to go on forever enduring the weight of her melancholias: oceans, gulls, a run in her stockings, a sad song, an item in the newspapers about a child dying somewhere of sleeping sickness, anything anywhere could cloud her over, and leave me again with a choked disappointment, a hope turned dull and irritable. She expected a great deal from me if what she expected was that I would forever be there to patiently witness her silences, and patiently accept the isolation of lying like this on a bed in which she had abandoned me. I was quite sure that on those gala nights she had gone with Howard to whatever club it was they had gone to or whatever home, she had managed miraculously to summon up a passably pleasant laugh, she had unearthed somehow a small sparkle to carry with her for the evening. She did not answer; she looked still as though she had fallen from a great height; her face remained averted. Was it because of the hotel? Or the bellhop, or registering, or how the curtains looked? Or the ugly chaise longue? I wasn’t responsible for the interior decorating, nor had I designed the hotel, nor had I shrouded those dead chairs in the corridor. She had been cold in the car; asleep, hungry; there was nowhere else to drive this late at night. One ought at least to be discriminating about what one picked to be humiliated by. She said at last: I’m not humiliated. Then what in Christ’s name was wrong? Nothing. That endless nothing; that persistent nothing; that nothing that always turned out to be the cause of everything. It was true I often sulked; that I was sometimes sullen; that now and then I was morose. I did not (I was sure) burden her with the dark consequences of my moods; the vultures worked privately on my liver. Besides, she had called; I was beginning to be all right again, I was getting so I could sleep. She had, with that famous accuracy of hers, picked exactly that more or less auspicious moment to telephone. Shouldn’t I have? she said. Now it was I who did not answer. She said, at last: What is it you want from me? I lay there, in the darkness, wretched. She had looked into the mirror: O God, she had thought. She had screamed all right: perhaps she hadn’t with me. But she had all right when he had bitten her. Tenderly, in his bathroom, a luxurious one, she had applied cold cream; the bruised skin was already turning an inevitable purple. I was to forget all this; easily, of course; it was something that did not even astonish her that she expected me to forget. How fortunate it was that he did not wear false teeth. Imagine, just like that, finding a loose pair of uppers randomly attached to you. I’d bet, though, she hadn’t been distant then; nor melancholy; she reserved her melancholies for me; I had all the beauty of them. She managed, somehow, with him, to be fun, fun enough at least for him to bury his incisors a considerable depth in her. Then, having cold creamed that fleur de lis, she had returned to the bedroom, where on the pillow there were still traces of her warmth, and here and there, lost in the bed linen, a tiny curled black hair. That was the extraordinary indulgence I was to show, and that was the pleasant obscenity I was to forget. And you can’t, can you? she said. Something should have warned me; but it had become impossible for me to stop the machinery of my own venom. I heard her say in a voice that had flattened itself and was colder than any voice she had ever used with me before: What do you want from me?
Nothing.
Not a goddamn thing, now.
She got up and walked to the big ugly flowered chair on which her clothes lay disarranged. She began to get dressed. It was not what I had expected. I had expected tears, I had expected her to be unbearably goaded, I had expected her to confess some consciousness of her own guilt. But there were no tears; no reproaches. She had, at last, found the intricate comedy of our reconciliations intolerable. Some fatigue had hardened in her, and she was determined now not to endure any more those terrible cross-examinations to which I subjected her nor those theatrical torments in which I would be caught. I watched her, stupefied, draw on her sweater, snap the waistband of her skirt tight; I watched her step into her shoes. It was hopeless. I would punish her endlessly for that night. I would torment her forever. The forgiveness had been, after all, another ruse, another falsehood. I hated her, now, absurdly, for taking my suffering too seriously. I would have required only that she endure it for a while. Her punishment should have been in the enduring of it. But she was past enduring, or so she thought. She was finished with something, and she wanted nothing now but to be out of this overelaborate and over-flowered bedroom, and home again on her own couch, alone. I got up, stiffly, and dressed. We did not speak to each other. When I was dressed I went into the bathroom and packed again the few toilet articles I had only so short a time before unpacked. I left the closet door open so that the automatic light would, I hoped, burn itself out or at least increase the hotel’s electric bill, and we went down the corridor, and waited for the elevator. We were again enemies. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. I checked out at the desk and the night clerk, seeing we had registered only three hours ago, asked if there was something wrong with the room; and I said no, the room was fine, we were on our way to Florida and liked driving at night, while the boy took our bags and put them in the back of the car. It was very cold now. Outside, I looked toward the beach; a tired pennant still flew from the top of some pole erected on the sand. Dark, huge, the ocean swept out toward Europe. Ten miles out of Atlantic City we said the only words to each other we said the whole drive home.
I’ll tell you what’s wrong.
She said: What?
I said: Us. Them. It.
9
I’VE ALWAYS thought there is nothing quite like the sight of a man at eight o’clock in the morning, dressed in a business suit, and with his face shaved and his tie knotted and a brief case under his arm, having a quick coffee at an orange stand where already the frankfurters are glossily turning on a hot griddle. I’ve always thought there is no face quite like the face of a young girl, with her lipstick on and the exact pencilings of her eyebrows, coming up out of the subway and trying to make it to the office on time. I’ve always thought there is nothing sadder anyplace than seeing what people look like early in the morning as they go to work. I wasn’t going to work. I was driving home from a trip to Jersey a girl with whom I had had what I was sure was my final bitterness and my last quarrel, and she was sitting, small and tight and huddled up, in a corner of the car, waiting for an unendurable ride to be over. It was over at last, with my halting the car outside the door of the house she lived in, and she gathered her things up, her purse and the small make-up case in which she had so carefully folded a nightgown, while a man in a cap at a newsstand on the corner was crying the morning editions and in a department store you could see the salesgirls fixing the counters at which they worked, and she got out of the car, slamming the car door. She did not say good-by; still furious, if what she was was furious, she disappeared into the vestibule. I thought to myself: this is how you last saw her; disappearing, dirty, exhausted, angry, carrying a small make-up case, a street door swinging closed, and I didn’t think I cared. I put the car in gear, and went home, and fell asleep immediately, and slept thickly until late afternoon.
That was the morning I had the odd dream: I was in a sort of clearing, in a wood, and there was a semicircle of girls in white gowns, somewhat Greek, seated on the grass, watching somebody in the multicolored costume of an acrobat performing astonishing leaps in the air. The girls were very pleased with the performance as the acrobat succeeded in going higher and higher, twirling his ankles, with each leap. He had just performed a really stupendous one, possibly the greatest leap of his career, high above the lifted heads of the seated girls in white, when there was a sound like the air hissing out of a punctured tire, a distinct fizzing sound, and down he came to crumple on the grass. I could see him lying there, on the grass, and one of the girls came over to the acrobat, and touched him with the tip of a naked foot. She said: It’s empty. And it was. There was nothing but a costume there on the ground. I woke up thinking of her disappearing into the vestibule, and it seemed to me that I, t
oo, no longer cared how it ended, gracefully or ugly, that I had come to the end of all the possible feelings about her I could ever have. I ate breakfast, and then I thought vaguely of calling someone or going to see someone but there was no one I really wanted to talk to or see, and I went instead for a walk along the East River. I was determined not to call her, because while it was true that I had promised myself not to say anything to her on the trip and then I had said it in Atlantic City, still it was understandable, and the least she could have done in that hotel room was have realized that what I was doing was understandable. The drive along the river was still being paved, as it seemed always being paved, and the earth was everywhere excavated, and at the time they were still working on the skeleton of the United Nations building with a determination, apparently, to make it the really outstanding architectural horror of the day. I remember thinking that what they were evidently trying to do with it was get it real flat and when they had it flat enough why they would just slip the statesmen in sideways. That didn’t seem to me too bad an idea. In Tudor City there were the usual starched children playing with the usual dogs and watched by the usual nurses: I thought the number of Irish and English nurses had diminished, and there were more colored ones. That, too, might be, like the UN building, a sign of progress. I was beginning to feel almost invulnerable again, but it was a deceptive feeling, for I had neglected to notice that my anger had vanished, and as it vanished I was beginning to not exactly regret the abrupt termination of what would have been two really fine days, but to put a more charitable interpretation upon her fury with me, and her coldness. After all, I had tormented her. After all, it was an episode fixed in the past, and nothing, guilt or penitence, could change it; what I had done, really, was to destroy the possibilities of my own pleasure. We would have left Atlantic City in the morning, and the obscure melancholy would have gone with that grotesque hotel, and further down the coast we would have found some small place where she would have been cheerful and happy. But I had spoiled it all. There were twinges of something like remorse; a flash of something like shame. For a brief instant it seemed to me that I detected in myself something which had wanted deliberately to ruin the possibility of the trip’s being a happy one; that I had wanted it to end as it did, so badly; that it had not been unpremeditated. But it went away, quickly. Evening was falling now; the first lights came on, mild and autumnal; there were odors from the tenements of all the dinners being somewhere invisibly cooked, the sound of pots being somewhere rattled, and of women’s voices. Something like a sigh was being exhaled from the city; I thought of my mother, with her corset loosened. Perhaps I should, since she must be miserably unhappy now, and I, even if I had not entirely caused the unpleasantness between us, was at least partly responsible for it, perhaps I should be the one to make the conciliatory gesture now; she had, after all, made hers when she had telephoned me. It was impossible to expect any girl, her particularly, since she had her pride, to feel, because of a miscalculation, eternally humble; did I expect her to spend the remainder of her life on her knees? And was it really so unendurable, the thought of those teethmarks? Hadn’t I exaggerated their obscenity? She had tried to make amends as best she could; why should I insist upon amends she could not possibly make? I found myself thinking that among the things wrong with me was living at a hotel, and that it was the hotel that had somehow subtly caused the appalling way I had behaved. I told myself that someday soon I would move, perhaps to the West Side, near the Hudson. I ought to live somewhere permanently: a small room, high up, very simple, facing the river, with, late at night, long walks up the Drive. I had convinced myself that a life, severely simple, made up of hard work and solitude, was the life I really wanted, and I was experiencing in advance some of the healing effects of living near the river in that magically bare room, and I had thought that in an hour or so I would telephone and ask, not for forgiveness but for a truce of a kind, when, having walked over to Fifth Avenue, I turned toward Rockefeller Plaza. There were crowds heavily leaning over the stone rampart looking down at the skaters in the skating rink. There was a rather stout man, in a checkered cap, clowning on the ice, and a little girl, completely costumed, doing astonishing figure eights and leaps, and a couple, she in a mink coat, he in a tuxedo, arm in arm, who must have thought it would be fun skating before dinner. I went down through the people watching into the English Grill to have a drink, and there was Vivian, in a short black velvet skating skirt, having a hot toddy at the bar. Lover, she said, how nice to see you. The hot toddy, steaming in its thick glass, looking medicinal as hell, was wonderful on a cold night, and she really went skating because half the fun was sitting at the bar in the short flaring costume, ordering a toddy; besides, she loved the trouble it put the bartender to.
