by Alfred Hayes
O you prize horse’s ass!
Would Howard, too, overwhelmed by the first sight of her, kneel? I thought not. I was more the kneeling type. I had a real talent for little exhibitions like that. Just show me a floor and down I went. He, the poor bastard, stayed upright and suffered. His money held him up, like a corset. He diminished her reality, did he? He treated her like bric-a-brac? He was the perfect stranger? I’d diminish her reality, I’d perfect stranger her now. She had no idea how I’d bric-a-brac her.
And so I watched her, moving determinedly ahead of me, intent upon herself, and I could almost see into that busy little brain as it prepared itself for the evening’s adventures, and I could almost hear the fragmentary decisions she was so actively making, the little scenes she was playing out inside her mind. And I thought, suddenly, that all these women, accompanied or unaccompanied, alone or on the arms of men, going somewhere now on the street, must be enacting within themselves little dramas of copulation as equally calculated as hers. That, really, the city was nothing but a huge bedroom, with some office buildings attached, as they said in the army, for rations, and that for each of these women there was an absolute conviction that the universe was arranged for only one end: her in bed. That even to the withered dug of this old bat who passed me now, in furs, with her thin greedy still painted mouth, some man still clung and whimpered mama. She had turned a corner now, and I watched her as, with a nod to the doorman, she disappeared into a large imposing apartment hotel, and I was alone on the street, staring at a dog urinating against a fire hydrant, a boy on a bicycle, the banked windows any one of which in the nineteen stories could be his, my mouth twisted in a smile that tried to pretend what had happened was only what I had expected to happen. I thought a little wildly of storming past the switchboard; of breaking in on them. Disguised as what, a Fuller Brush man? The doorman shooed the investigative dog away; again, I hesitated. The agitation mounted in me. I was actually trembling; that coldly ill disastrous feeling had begun again in that vulnerable stomach of mine, and again some part of me had detached itself, and floated now, a short distance away, observing sardonically the picture I made standing there near a French hand laundry trying to X-ray those windows behind one of which she was now. Again, the sense mounted in me of having become something I was not, of having some creature emerge who inhabited me but was not me and who appeared only when I suffered. I could feel all sorts of idiotic plans and counterplots forming themselves in my mind: a childish confrontation of the doorman; an idea of purchasing flowers, and pretending I was to deliver them; entering the house boldly and announcing, in a self-assured voice, that I had an appointment: would they ring Mr. X? Then I suddenly realized that I had apparently arrived in a position I had prepared for myself; for there had not been any need for me to be here now, on the street, pretending that I was an idle pedestrian, lurking in the shadow of the hand laundry, and that I could have intercepted her on the avenue if what I had really wanted was to intercept her and to prevent her from making the visit she was making or keeping the obscene appointment she was keeping. How simple it would have been to have stopped her on the street! And yet I hadn’t; more, it had not even occurred to me. Again there was that inexplicable thing about my behavior! I had allowed her to go; I had, possibly, even wanted to have her go; and briefly again, it seemed to me, that in some horribly involved way it was I who was responsible for her being now where she was, in that house with him, and that I had wanted it, and had arranged it subtly so that she should be there. I walked abruptly away, and caught a taxi, and went back to my hotel. I knew now what I was going to do, and with it was the knowledge that in a way I had always known this would be what I would do, and that the denouement was not at all an accidental thing, something that chance had arranged, but that it was something which I had always known from the very first time she had told me about Howard and about the evening she had met him in the Club Paris. I went through the telephone directory until I found the house number of that imposing residence she had entered and then I telephoned. The house switchboard connected me, and I could hear, probably on its stand in the foyer, if there was a foyer, his phone ringing, and then somebody, I supposed it was the maid, answered, and when I asked for her there was a hesitant pause as though the maid wasn’t sure that she ought to summon or interrupt them wherever they were, then evidently she decided it was after all none of her business and she called her to the phone. She came to the phone and when she said hello I knew that she knew intuitively that the voice would be mine, that I had managed somehow to reach her, and I could hear the anxious and placating note in her own voice. She was so thoroughly caught. I realized then that it was what I wanted: to have her pinned like that, and wriggling, on a hook. To have her where she could not any more escape. I told her exactly what I intended to do, the letter I intended to write, the details I intended to make clear; the choice was hers. She could stay there and have a lovely evening, and the letter would be delivered in the morning, or she could be at my hotel in twenty minutes. What, of course, I wanted, was to tear her away and if it was in the middle of an interrupted kiss all the better. It was all like something in a bad movie, if they still did things like that even in the movies; but mostly it was like something in a bad life. I hung up, and sat down to wait for her. I was quite confident that she could invent a sick grandmother or a cousin from out of town to explain the call. And confident, too, that with a little ingenuity she could convince him that she had left his number with her phone service, and that the call was one she expected. In the half hour I waited for her to arrive, knowing that she would arrive, and knowing I would despise her if she did and despise myself even more for having made her, there were moments when my illness became so acute a wave of dizziness passed over me, when I thought that it was impossible to endure any more. I put my head down upon the table as though even to hold myself erect had become too much. I wanted to crouch down somewhere in the darkness, to make myself into a fetal ball. And always the other thing, that detached eye, watched me, and was unalarmed. That levitated sense of myself was not touched, and did not suffer; it sat up there, on a stalk, as though nothing of any real consequence was happening, as though I, writhing, was nevertheless shamming, as though it neither believed nor disbelieved in my pain. When I thought that perhaps I had been wrong, and that she was not, after all, coming, she knocked on the hotel door.
10
SHE WAS being very thin-mouthed when she came in the door. My confidence in her ability to find an effective excuse had not been misplaced. She had invented a Fred from Los Angeles, a favorite cousin. She was somewhat frightened, too, I could see, because once again she imagined I was about to strike her, or might later strike her, and while she seemed willing to risk that, because it was after all only the normal sort of chance a woman took in so dangerous an enterprise as love, and even accepted the possibility, I could also see that she did not really believe that I intended to do what I had so carefully threatened to do over the phone. She had, in the taxi probably, convinced herself that I was incapable of anything so low as what I had threatened her with. She released now, like an injured bird, a smile that took off from her mouth, fluttered badly in the air, and sank unnoticed somewhere on the rug. A pot of coffee was percolating slowly on my small electric range. She gave up smiling—for Lent, I thought.
How did you find me? she said. Indignation seemed the more immediate tactic. Do you have detectives following me? Can’t I do anything or go anywhere without having you trail after me, or telephone me, or come banging on a door?
(Banging on doors terrified her. There was something so public about it. She’d settle, I could see, for a black eye. Of the two, the black eye seemed the lesser consequence.)
She hesitated. I hadn’t, after all, banged on the door.
Would you have, she said, if I hadn’t come here? Would you have—she searched for the word as she did for the misplaced keys in her handbag—demeaned yourself that much? Demeaned surprised me; I hadn
’t anticipated demeaned. That she had found an appropriate word, however, seemed to renew her confidence and her indignation, which had faltered for a moment.
I suppose, she said, I’ll never have a life of my own again simply because I was in love with you once. Isn’t it permitted to end an affair with you? Do I have to be hounded and threatened and persecuted the rest of my life for it?
I thought she ought to sit down. She could be just as indignant seated. She refused a chair; she rejected the sofa. She had no intentions of staying. She was honoring me with a flying, and final, interview.
Her gloves annoyed her; as long as she had them on, she had an air of being about to decisively go. She removed one glove.
That was very stupid, she said, the things you said to me over the phone.
Were they?
She searched my face. Somewhere, I must not be entirely serious. I could hardly have meant those shameful alternatives: either she went to bed with me now, which of course she would rather die than do, or I would mail that letter, which of course was just as unthinkable.
She waited.
You can’t be that low, she said. Somewhere, in that forbidding face of mine, there must have been still some trace of the me she knew and had loved. I could not possibly want now to spoil everything that had ever existed between us, and leave her with a memory of an evening as base as this. I must have somewhere the remnants of a sense of honor. I had been kind in the past, I had been thoughtful, I had cared for her. This wasn’t me. She knew me better than that; she was so sure she knew me better than that. She walked across the room, nervously, glancing blindly at the coffee percolating on the electric range, as though it were an object she could not immediately identify. She searched the dustier corners of the room as though she were looking for an advocate to plead her cause. She was beginning to have difficulty believing I would not send the letter. What was it, she asked, that she had done that was so terrible and for which I was exacting this penalty? She had gone to his house. Hadn’t I behaved abominably at the hotel? Hadn’t we driven for five terrible hours together in the car without speaking to each other? It was impossible between us: the trip to Atlantic City had convinced her forever that it was impossible between us. Surely, I knew that too? But she was neglecting something; couldn’t she, with the slightest of efforts, recall it? That wounded look, that persecuted air, that hysteria of innocence, contrived somehow to ignore what Vivian, sitting at the bar with a hot toddy, had told me, that the evening she had telephoned and I had come ignorantly to her side, it had been because he had not wanted to marry her, and I was, how should I put it: a patsy, a choice of desperation, second best, something rescued from the junk pile? How would she like it phrased? I had swallowed my own required number of toads, and I had found them not exactly the choicest item on the menu, and what I was doing was simply passing the taste for toads on to him. He loved her: he wanted her: he could afford swallowing a toad or two, as I had.
She looked at me: You think I’m a whore, don’t you?
Think? I was sure.
She sat down on the sofa, now, and began to cry. Don’t you touch me, she said: don’t you come near me. There were admirable little choking effects between the tears. She couldn’t, of course, find her handkerchief, and mine, which she refused, had ink on it. Seeing the ink she assumed I had already composed the letter. She appeared crushed.
In the smallest of voices she said: It’s what I deserve for having fallen in love with you.
She blotted the tears with her glove.
I could send the letter now if that was what I wished. I could send it if that was the satisfaction I wanted. I had always doubted her. I had always thought as all men did that the woman they loved was a whore. Behind all my protestations had been that thought always: that she would cheat, that she wasn’t to be trusted, that she was a whore. I could think what I liked now. It no longer mattered. I was being horrible. I enjoyed being horrible. It gave me some pleasure she would not even try to understand to be as horrible as I was being. She wished now only to forget I ever existed. She wished now only never to fall in love again. She swore she never would. She would enter a convent, she would stuff it up, but please God no more men. Never, never. It was horrible of me to give her that choice. To even dare think that she would allow me to blackmail her into going to bed with me. I was doing it only out of hate. Out of some horrible desire for revenge. It was no revenge. It would only humiliate us both. What pleasure could I possibly find in forcing her to undress the way a whore would undress and to get into a cold and unwanted bed? Why did I wish to wound myself so? Why did I want to dirty her and to dirty myself?
She should allow me then to send the letter, I said, and spare both of us that experience. He would forgive her. If he loved her he would forgive her as I had in the past. Or did she believe that forgiving her was a talent only I possessed?
But she was afraid to have me send the letter. I had no idea really what I would say in it. I could hardly have said much. And she could have always denied it. She had, I supposed, considered quickly how effective a denial would be. She had not very much faith evidently in its effectiveness. He would be suspicious even if she succeeded in making him believe that the letter was malicious and untrue. She had very little confidence in his forgiving her. It was something I contemptuously knew. It was that stiffness of his and that conviction of how right he was about his world. It was that night in the George Cinq and his unsureness about the women he chose. She could see however that there was something ridiculous in the whole idea of my writing a letter or even of a letter being written and mailed to him. It was dangerous but it was also ridiculous. The fact that I had thought of something as an instrument of revenge which was at once ridiculous, shameful and dangerous must have given her the hope that there was some way out of her dilemma. She felt that I could be prevented from doing anything at all if she could only summon up from some secret recess the words or the gestures or the expressions which would allow both of us to escape from a trap I had set for both of us. She seemed aware that it was not something quite real which was being played out between us but some necessary unreality which had to be dealt with as though it were real.
Besides, I said, I asked very little of her. She had only to go into the bedroom and prove to me conclusively how much she wanted him and how much she was prepared to do in order to have him. I wanted it as a simple demonstration that I had not been wrong about her. She could consider it if she wished as a morbid need on my part for demonstrable evidence. I wanted the pleasure of knowing something to be finally true. She ought not to feel quite so bad about it as she did: I was not, after all, a stranger, and I was not, after all, offering her the indignity of a thousand dollars. It was a transaction of a different kind, involving the education of an idiot. I was, of course, that idiot.
She no longer was quite ready to die rather than do it.
She said: Hit me if you want to. Or tear my clothes. Or anything. But you mustn’t make me do this.
She looked inexpressibly weary. She showed only the color of her lipstick. She now saw that it was useless to talk to me. She would refuse to do what I so insanely wanted her to do not for her own sake but for mine. She had nothing now to look forward to. She had always been unlucky with men. She supposed it was her fate. I wished to destroy her. Very well, she would be destroyed. That too she would accept as her destiny, to be destroyed by someone she had loved. It was true that the night she had telephoned she had been frightened. She deserved what had happened because she had trusted Vivian. She had thought Vivian her friend. She knew now nobody was her friend and nobody truly loved her. Vivian had been envious of her good fortune and I was horrible. She had a right to be frightened. She was alone. She had thought I loved her. She knew now I didn’t. I never had. She was only a girl and she had a right to be frightened.
You don’t believe me, she said. You think I’m lying.
It was because she had wanted so much to be happy. Why was that so d
ifficult for me to understand? She was a girl. She was defenseless. She wanted to be happy. I might laugh if I wished at something so stupid. Stupid she might be. She felt worthless enough as it was. She knew now she had no talent. That she was useless. That she could neither play well enough nor sing well enough nor do anything well enough. And it was not for her own sake she was doing what she had to do. It was for Barbara’s sake. She had been so frightened when her father left. She had not let her leave her bedside for a long time at night. She had had to stay with her and promise her that she would not ever go away or leave her with anybody until the child fell asleep. She had been a failure as a wife and a failure as a singer. The least she could do was try not to be a failure as a mother. She had felt so terrible during the divorce. I had no idea what it meant to feel that one was responsible for depriving a child of its father. Was that what she was guilty of, not wanting to be that kind of a failure too? Was she a whore, was she bad, was she dishonest? She no longer knew. She knew only that everything had ended.
