by Alfred Hayes
We could go to bed now if that was what I wished. I would feel worse about it than she would. The degradation would be mine. The humiliation would be really mine. I had succeeded in dragging us both down together. Going to bed really made no difference any more. She would do it because she could see I was suffering so. Because it was a revenge I so mistakenly thought I needed. She would be cold. She would be colder than ice. But if that was what would help me because she wanted to help me she would do it knowing of course that it was insane and would not help.
The great mistake, she said, had been our ever falling in love. We had never been meant for each other. But that was not why now she was leaving me. I knew quite well why she was leaving me. I had always known.
Nobody was necessary to me, she said. Not really necessary. I was fond enough of people and some I loved but none of them were necessary to me. She had never been necessary to me. She wanted to be somebody’s sun and moon and stars. She wanted them to die without her. She wanted them to need her always and forever. That was stupid, too. I would think that was stupid, too. There was nothing she could ever really do for me but go to bed. It was the least of the things a woman wanted to do for a man. I would get tired of that and when I was tired there would be nothing else that she had to give me. I existed for myself. She did not mean that I was selfish. I existed for myself. That was what frightened her. It was what always frightened a woman. She was not a monster or bad or even calculating. I had made her out bad and calculating and a monster because she had slept with me and then with him and then ran back to me and then ran back to him. I had always insisted it was the money. It was partly the money. Yes, why should she pretend the money had nothing to do with it? But the funny thing was with all the money he still needed her in a way I never would and what he felt for her was something I would never feel for a woman. She meant something to him. She had lied about her being only a piece of bric-a-brac because she thought it was something I would think was true of them. But it had not been true: he needed her, she had an importance. A woman was not really important to me except perhaps when I was a little sick or a little lonely or a little frightened. She used to think it was because I was somewhat like her first husband: that she couldn’t touch me. But it wasn’t that. It was more serious. It was that I did not need women for what I really needed. What I had I could not share with a woman. I would want to share it but it was something which could not be shared. All I could really give were the unimportant things like a certain amount of kindness or a certain amount of sympathy or even a certain amount of real love. There was nobody anywhere I could miss enough for it to matter and the terrible thing for me was that even when I missed them I knew it was not important and that nothing had been really lost for me. That was why she had wanted it to be over. That was why she had gone back to him. She had watched me for such a long time: I loved dogs, children, toys, things like that: and she had been so surprised. She had supposed I wouldn’t. Then she had realized I could leave a child as easily as a pet dog. That my attachment to things was so different from hers.
I went to the window. It was dark below, those nine stories between myself and the street. From this height the city did not look habitable; and yet it was inhabited, and I had grown up in it, and it was my native city, as much as any city anywhere was native to me. It appeared to me not so much a city as a gigantic apparatus, a machine that required an island to house it. It rusted under the dark sky.
I suppose I had known I would not send the letter, nor would I finally insist upon the alternative. It was only another of the violent things I pretended I was going to do and then did not do. It was only another of the gestures I seemed about to make and then did not make. Finally I would always stand like this, at a window, staring down nine stories toward nothingness, with some gesture broken off in my hands. She was free to go. I would not any more interfere with the life she so passionately wanted. It was useless for me to try to hold her. I was not made to hold anyone. They escaped me or I lost them. I could not maintain a sense of injustice long, or even much of a sense of betrayal. She was right. Things were for me less real than they were for her. I existed among phantoms whose natures I chose to pretend were not phantom-like. I did not really believe in those injuries I seemed to have endured. Something in me dissipated them. The justice was really all on her side. I could no more be a villain than I could be the opposite of a villain. I was not all of anything. Somewhere all my desires came apart and all my justifications turned untrue.
She understood she was free to go. The little drama, she with her threatened virtue and I with my blackmail, was over. We had lapsed back into what we always were. Nevertheless, she hesitated. She seemed preoccupied with her glove, snapping and unsnapping the clasp. She began again to speak.
She was sorry it had all ended like this. She had wanted it so to end differently. She had caused me a great deal of suffering and she had loved me and she could not understand why when there was love there was always suffering. Possibly she still loved me. It was simply that she had to do what she had to do. We could be friends. There was no reason not to be friends. She would never have with him what it was she had had with me. There were so many things he was not. She wished desperately she could explain.
I stood there, not really listening to her, hoping now she would go. A terrible emptiness inhabited me. I was thinking that I had made what was for me a great effort toward love and I had failed and that I would not be able to make the effort again. That I had exhausted whatever strength to love I possessed. That there would be nothing for some time but this emptiness. That I would have to learn to live with it.
I became slowly aware of what it was she was saying. It took a while. She was already thinking of herself as married. She had accomplished it. The house was purchased and the sprinklers worked on the lawn. Barbara was at school. There were the long afternoons. She would miss me terribly. There was no reason for us not to see each other. I would have then no responsibility for her or for her life. I would neither have to house her nor feed her nor clothe her nor be concerned about Barbara. She would have achieved then the permanence of the order she had always wanted. It would not be as though she were being unfaithful. She would be faithful: with of course the sole exception of myself and she did not, by some logic I could not entirely follow, think of me as somebody she would be being unfaithful with. Rather I would be part of the odd scheme of how to be faithful.
So there would be the three of us, locked charmingly together, each in his necessary place. He would play the role of the solid husband, with whom she felt safe: she would be the wife, ornamental, lovely, who served the coffee to his friends: and I would occupy the special niche she was suggesting. It seemed to her so satisfactory a way out. I should really have no objections. It was so difficult for a woman to find everything she wanted neatly packaged into one man. I was quite sure that she even thought of it as one of her rights. She looked at me with a queer mixture of supplication and bravado. She was not sure how I would answer. It was something a nice girl was not supposed to suggest and she had been for so long a time a nice girl. It was how mother had reared her and how the little town she came from was organized and what one was at school and in chapel and riding in the subway and smiling across a dinner table. She was very hesitant about ending the little fiction now. She did not really feel that she was ending it. Rather she was extending the definition a bit. It was only that she wanted everything: the proper marriage and the improper love; the orderly living room and the disorderly bedroom; the sprinkler on the lawn and an appointment somewhere between two and four. I smiled. She had not expected me to smile. I smiled at her with an affection I had not experienced for her for some time. It reassured her. At least I was not being indignant or scornful or outraged. I looked at her curiously. I could see now that I had never understood her at all. She was not anything like the girl whose explanation I had sought lying on the sofa during all those terrible days I had missed her so. She was somebody who
se existence I had never suspected. I wondered now if our positions had been reversed and Howard was here in the room with her as I was would she have made a proposal of such a convenient nature to him? She, of course, would not. It was even a little funny to think of her making it to him. What made her think then that she could suggest so unique an arrangement with me and there exist in her the hope, for the hope obviously existed in her, that I would accept it? She looked at me then from under her lowered eyelashes. There was the hint of a peculiar sort of smile on the little mouth, that mouth which pouted somewhat, and was so childish, so easily wounded, so apparently vulnerable to all the world.
You’re different, she said. You accept things.
I looked at her fondly. She thought I was so right for the role she wanted me to play. I accepted things. I was after all an artist, that odd creature among men. I was not predictable like Howard was. I would not really harm her as he would should he ever suspect her or doubt her. I had a fatal but very accommodating tendency to forgive. I hardly ever meant anything too seriously. I did not condemn her for some unnatural desire she might show nor look at her horror-stricken when she admitted to some unorthodox sexual yearning. I was soft. My pride was of a thinner nature than his. I was perfect for that sort of afternoon when one was bored and had done all the possible shopping that could be done. I was a nice repository for her sense of sin. I was queer in the way men are who wore beards and joined walking clubs. I made her feel real the way a short stay in a brothel would: she would have always remembered how informal the life was. She would quickly establish me as an exciting stopover on her way home. I was what she could use to reconcile herself to what she thought of intermittently as dull. It was how she saw me. Really it was how she had always seen me. It was possibly how I had allowed myself to be always seen.
It was quite an overwhelming piece of character reading.
I crossed to her and lifted her from the sofa and drew her one glove back on her hand.
He’s waiting for you, I said. He’ll be worried about your cousin from Los Angeles. You better go.
What will you do? she said.
I’ll go out.
With whom?
(She was really incorrigible!)
My grandmother, I said. From Duluth. Beat it. Go get married.
What are you smiling at? she said.
Nothing, I said.
You’re smiling at something, she said. What did I say that was so funny?
I looked at her.
You’ll never know, I said.
I took her arm. At the door I kissed her good-by. I patted affectionately the small firm rump I would never pat again and then she was gone, the door closed, the apartment quiet, the coffee all burned away on the small electric range, my books, my papers, my radio, all the appurtenances of my life in place, even my razor when I went into the bathroom and began to shave.
11
Here I am, the man in the hotel bar said to the pretty girl, almost forty, with a small reputation, some money in the bank, a convenient address, a telephone number easily available, this look on my face you think peculiar to me, my hand here on this table real enough, all of me real enough if one doesn’t look too closely.
She’s gone now, and when later people asked me how she was and what she was doing, people who knew us, I always said cheerfully that she was happily bedded down with a textile company and several chemical subsidiaries, which of course wasn’t the gentlemanly thing to say. I think about her now and then, at odd moments, passing that crosstown street of hers, wondering how much chintz her bedroom has, and whether when it rains, or the earth steams around that Connecticut home she’s disappeared into, she thinks of me at all. But why should she? I was only a mistake she almost made.
But then again, the man said to the pretty girl who glanced now at her wrist watch, I might be all wrong, and the world is full of raging passions I know nothing of, and Tristram is even now taking the Bronx Express home to his Isolde, and hearts, slightly nobler than mine and hers, exist in profusion. I rather think though it’s the acrobat, as in my dream, with the dangerous, vanity-ridden, and meaningless life, who’s most like us. At least, so it seems to me: that paltry costume, that pride because the trick’s accomplished and once again he hasn’t fallen. The whole point is that nothing can save us but a good fall. It’s staying up there on the wire, balancing ourselves with that trivial parasol and being so pleased with terrifying an audience, that’s finishing us. Don’t you agree? A great fall, that’s what we need.
I wish, though, the man said to the pretty girl who, having glanced at her wrist watch, finished the last of her drink and looked expectantly at him, the story had been different. Touching perhaps, or tender. It’s odd though how few things are. One would have imagined there would be more. But the tenderness seems always to be incidental. It never is the main thing.
You’d like to go now, wouldn’t you? the man said to the pretty girl. It’s been such a long afternoon. It’s nice to have someplace to go, like home, and something to do, like eat dinner, and someone to see, like a woman, and something assured, like a bed to lie down on. It’s what we use as hope.
He stood up.
There’s a poem I always thought I’d someday use, the man said. Do you know it? He began to quote:
Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin. . . .
The pretty girl did not know the poem.
They went out together.
