And there was Margaret. Margaret was more or less Irving’s girl friend. She was only so-so looking (her eyes bulged, there was always a little lipstick on her teeth, she dressed like a child of ten), but she had a hectic brightness which Walter found attractive. He could not understand why she bothered with Irving at all. “Why do you?” he said, on one of the long walks they’d begun taking together in Central Park.
“Irving is sweet,” she said, “and he loves me very purely, and who knows: I might just as well marry him.”
“A damn fool thing to do,” he said. “Irving could never be your husband because he’s really your little brother. Irving is everyone’s little brother.”
Margaret was too bright not to see the truth in this. So one day when Walter asked if he might not make love to her she said, all right, she didn’t mind if he did. They made love often after that.
Eventually Irving heard about it, and one Monday there was a nasty scene in, curiously enough, the same bar where they’d met. There had been that evening a party in honor of Kurt Kuhnhardt (Kuhnhardt Advertising), Margaret’s boss, and she and Walter had gone together, afterwards stopping by this bar for a nightcap. Except for Irving and a couple of girls in slacks the place was empty. Irving was sitting at the bar, his cheeks quite pink, his eyes rather glazed. He looked like a little boy playing grownup, for his legs were too short to reach the stool’s footrest; they dangled doll-like. The instant Margaret recognized him she tried to turn around and walk out, but Walter wouldn’t let her. And anyway, Irving had seen them: never taking his eyes from them, he put down his whiskey, slowly climbed off the stool, and, with a kind of sad, ersatz toughness, strutted forward.
“Irving, dear,” said Margaret, and stopped, for he’d given her a terrible look.
His chin was trembling. “You go away,” he said, and it was as though he were denouncing some childhood tormentor, “I hate you.” Then, almost in slow motion, he swung out and, as if he clutched a knife, struck Walter’s chest. It was not much of a blow, and when Walter did nothing but smile, Irving slumped against a jukebox, screaming: “Fight me, you damned coward; come on, and I’ll kill you, I swear before God I will.” So that was how they left him.
Walking home, Margaret began to cry in a soft tired way. “He’ll never be sweet again,” she said.
And Walter said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, yes, you do,” she told him, her voice a whisper. “Yes, you do; the two of us, we’ve taught him how to hate. Somehow I don’t think he ever knew before.”
Walter had been in New York now four months. His original capital of five hundred dollars had fallen to fifteen, and Margaret lent him money to pay his January rent at the Brevoort. Why, she wanted to know, didn’t he move to some place cheaper? Well, he told her, it was better to have a good address. And what about a job? When was he going to start working? Or was he? Sure, he said, sure, as a matter of fact he thought about it a good deal. But he didn’t intend fooling around with just any little jerkwater thing that came along. He wanted something good, something with a future, something in, say, advertising. All right, said Margaret, maybe she could help him; at any rate, she’d speak with her boss, Mr. Kuhnhardt.
2
THE K.K.A., SO CALLED, WAS a middle-sized agency, but, as such things go, very good, the best. Kurt Kuhnhardt, who’d founded it in 1925, was a curious man with a curious reputation: a lean, fastidious German, a bachelor, he lived in an elegant black house on Sutton Place, a house interestingly furnished with, among other things, three Picassos, a superb musicbox, South Sea Island masks, and a burly Danish youngster, the houseboy. He invited occasionally some one of his staff in to dinner, whoever was favorite at the moment, for he was continually selecting protégés. It was a dangerous position, these alliances being, as they were, whimsical and uncertain: the protégé found himself checking the want ads when, just the evening previous, he’d dined most enjoyably with his benefactor. During his second week at the K.K.A., Walter, who had been hired as Margaret’s assistant, received a memorandum from Mr. Kuhnhardt asking him to lunch, and this, of course, excited him unspeakably.
“Kill-joy?” said Margaret, straightening his tie, plucking lint off his lapel. “Nothing of the sort. It’s just that—well, Kuhnhardt’s wonderful to work for so long as you don’t get too involved—or you’re likely not to be working—period.”
Walter knew what she was up to; she didn’t fool him a minute; he felt like telling her so, too, but restrained himself; it wasn’t time yet. One of these days, though, he was going to have to get rid of her, and soon. It was degrading, his working for Margaret. And besides, the tendency from now on would be to keep him down. But nobody could do that, he thought, looking into Mr. Kuhnhardt’s sea-blue eyes, nobody could keep Walter down.
“You’re an idiot,” Margaret told him. “My God, I’ve seen these little friendships of K. K.’s a dozen times, and they don’t mean a damn. He used to palsy-walsy around with the switchboard operator. All K. K. wants is someone to play the fool. Take my word, Walter, there aren’t any short cuts: what matters is how you do your job.”
He said: “And have you complaints on that score? I’m doing as well as could be expected.”
“It depends on what you mean by expected,” she said.
One Saturday not long afterwards he made a date to meet her in Grand Central. They were going up to Hartford to spend the afternoon with his family, and for this she’d bought a new dress, new hat, and shoes. But he did not show up. Instead, he drove out on Long Island with Mr. Kuhnhardt, and was the most awed of three hundred guests at Rosa Cooper’s debut ball. Rosa Cooper (nee Kuppermann) was heiress to the Cooper Dairy Products: a dark, plump, pleasant child with an unnatural British accent, the result of four years at Miss Jewett’s. She wrote a letter to a friend named Anna Stimson, who subsequently showed it to Walter: “Met the divinest man. Danced with him six times, a divine dancer. He is an Advertising Executive, and is terribly divinely good-looking. We have a date—dinner and the theater!”
Margaret did not mention the episode, nor did Walter. It was as though nothing had happened, except that now, unless there was office business to discuss, they never spoke, never saw each other. One afternoon, knowing she would not be at home, he went to her apartment and used a passkey given him long ago; there were things he’d left here, clothes, some books, his pipe; rummaging around collecting all this he discovered a photograph of himself scrawled red with lipstick: it gave him for an instant the sensation of falling in a dream. He also came across the only gift he’d ever made her, a bottle of L’Heure Bleue, still unopened. He sat down on the bed, and, smoking a cigarette, stroked his hand over the cool pillow, remembering the way her head had laid there, remembering, too, how they used to lie here Sunday mornings reading the funnies aloud, Barney Google and Dick Tracy and Joe Palooka
He looked at the radio, a little green box; they’d always made love to music, any kind, jazz, symphonies, choir programs: it had been their signal, for whenever she’d wanted him, she’d said, “Shall we listen to the radio, darling?” Anyway, it was finished, and he hated her, and that was what he needed to remember. He found the bottle of perfume again, and put it in his pocket: Rosa might like a surprise.
In the office the next day he stopped by the water cooler and Margaret was standing there. She smiled at him fixedly, and said: “Well, I didn’t know you were a thief.” It was the first overt disclosure of the hostility between them. And suddenly it occurred to Walter he hadn’t in all the office a single ally. Kuhnhardt? He could never count on him. And everyone else was an enemy: Jackson, Einstein, Fischer, Porter, Capehart, Ritter, Villa, Byrd. Oh, sure, they were all smart enough not to tell him point-blank, not so long as K. K.’s enthusiasm continued.
Well, dislike was at least positive, and the one thing he could not tolerate was vague relations, possibly because his own feelings were so indecisive, ambiguous. He was never certain whether he liked X or not. He needed X’s love
, but was incapable of loving. He could never be sincere with X, never tell him more than fifty percent of the truth. On the other hand, it was impossible for him to permit X these same imperfections: somewhere along the line Walter was sure he’d be betrayed. He was afraid of X, terrified. Once in high school he’d plagiarized a poem, and printed it in the school magazine; he could not forget its final line, All our acts are acts of fear. And when his teacher caught him, had anything ever seemed to him more unjust?
3
HE SPENT MOST OF THE early summer week ends at Rosa Cooper’s Long Island place. The house was, as a rule, well staffed with hearty Yale and Princeton undergraduates, which was irritating, for they were the sort of boys who, around Hartford, made green birds fly in his stomach, and seldom allowed him to meet them on their own ground. As for Rosa herself, she was a darling; everyone said so, even Walter.
But darlings are rarely serious, and Rosa was not serious about Walter. He didn’t mind too much. He was able on these week ends to make a good many contacts: Taylor Ovington, Joyce Randolph (the starlet), E. L. McEvoy, a dozen or so people whose names cast considerable glare in his address book. One evening he went with Anna Stimson to see a film featuring the Randolph girl, and before they were scarcely seated everyone for aisles around knew she was a Friend of his, knew she drank too much, was immoral, and not nearly so pretty as Hollywood made her out to be. Anna told him he was an adolescent female. “You’re a man in only one respect, sweetie,” she said.
It was through Rosa that he’d met Anna Stimson. An editor on a fashion magazine, she was almost six feet tall, wore black suits, affected a monocle, a walking cane, and pounds of jingling Mexican silver. She’d been married twice, once to Buck Strong, the horse-opera idol, and she had a child, a fourteen-year-old son who’d had to be put away in what she called a “corrective academy.”
“He was a nasty child,” she said. “He liked to take potshots out the window with a .22, and throw things, and steal from Woolworth’s: awful brat, just like you.”
Anna was good to him, though, and in her less depressed, less malevolent moments listened kindly while he groaned out his problems, while he explained why he was the way he was. All his life some cheat had been dealing him the wrong cards. Attributing to Anna every vice but stupidity, he liked to use her as a kind of confessor: there was nothing he could tell her of which she might legitimately disapprove. He would say: “I’ve told Kuhnhardt a lot of lies about Margaret; I suppose that’s pretty rotten, but she would do the same for me; and anyway my idea is not for him to fire her, but maybe transfer her to the Chicago office.”
Or, “I was in a bookshop, and a man was standing there and we began talking: a middle-aged man, rather nice, very intelligent. When I went outside he followed, a little ways behind: I crossed the street, he crossed the street, I walked fast, he walked fast. This kept up six or seven blocks, and when I finally figured out what was going on I felt tickled, I felt like kidding him on. So I stopped at the corner and hailed a cab; then I turned around and gave this guy a long, long look, and he came rushing up, all smiles. And I jumped in the cab, and slammed the door and leaned out the window and laughed out loud: the look on his face, it was awful, it was like Christ. I can’t forget it. And tell me, Anna, why did I do this crazy thing? It was like paying back all the people who’ve ever hurt me, but it was something else, too.” He would tell Anna these stories, go home and go to sleep. His dreams were clear blue.
Now the problem of love concerned him, mainly because he did not consider it a problem. Nevertheless, he was conscious of being unloved. This knowledge was like an extra heart beating inside him. But there was no one. Anna, perhaps. Did Anna love him? “Oh,” said Anna, “when was anything ever what it seemed to be? Now it’s a tadpole, now it’s a frog. It looks like gold but you put it on your finger and it leaves a green ring. Take my second husband: he looked like a nice guy, and turned out to be just another heel. Look around this very room: why, you couldn’t burn incense in that fireplace, and those mirrors, they give space, they tell a lie. Nothing, Walter, is ever what it seems to be. Christmas trees are cellophane, and snow is only soap chips. Flying around inside us is something called the Soul, and when you die you’re never dead; yes, and when we’re alive we’re never alive. And so you want to know if I love you? Don’t be dumb, Walter, we’re not even friends.…”
4
LISTEN, THE FAN: TURNING wheels of whisper: he said you said they said we said round and round fast and slow while time recalled itself in endless chatter. Old broken fan breaking silence: August the third the third the third.
August the third, a Friday, and it was there, right in Winchell’s column, his own name: “Big shot Ad exec Walter Ranney and dairy heiress Rosa Cooper are telling intimates to start buying rice.” Walter himself had given the item to a friend of a friend of Winchell’s. He showed it to the counter boy at the Whelan’s where he ate breakfast. “That’s me,” he said, “I’m the guy,” and the look on the boy’s face was good for his digestion.
It was late when he reached the office that morning, and as he walked down the aisle of desks a small gratifying flurry among the typists preceded him. No one said anything, however. Around eleven, after a pleasant hour of doing nothing but feel exhilarated, he went to the drugstore downstairs for a cup of coffee. Three men from the office, Jackson, Ritter and Byrd, were there, and when Walter came in Jackson poked Byrd, and Byrd poked Ritter, and all of them turned around. “Whatcha say, big shot?” said Jackson, a pink man prematurely bald, and the other two laughed. Acting as if he hadn’t heard, Walter stepped quickly into a phone booth. “Bastards,” he said, pretending to dial a number. And finally, after waiting a long while for them to leave, he made a real call. “Rosa, hello, did I wake you up?”
“No.”
“Say, did you see Winchell?”
“Yes.”
Walter laughed. “Where do you suppose he gets that stuff?”
Silence.
“What’s the matter? You sound kind of funny.”
“Do I?”
“Are you mad or something?”
“Just disappointed.”
“About what? ”
Silence. And then: “It was a cheap thing to do, Walter, pretty cheap.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Good-bye, Walter.”
On the way out he paid the cashier for a cup of coffee he’d forgotten to have. There was a barbershop in the building. He said he wanted a shave; no—make it a haircut; no—a manicure; and suddenly, seeing himself in the mirror, where his face reflected as pale almost as the barber’s bib, he knew he did not know what he wanted. Rosa had been right, he was cheap. He’d always been willing to confess his faults, for, by admitting them, it was as if he made them no longer to exist. He went back upstairs, and sat at his desk, and felt as though he were bleeding inside, and wished very much to believe in God. A pigeon strutted on the ledge outside his window. For some time he watched the shimmering sunlit feathers, the wobbly sedateness of its movements; then, before realizing it, he’d picked up and thrown a glass paperweight: the pigeon climbed calmly upward, the paperweight careened like a giant raindrop: suppose, he thought, listening for a faraway scream, suppose it hits someone, kills them? But there was nothing. Only the ticking fingers of typists, a knocking at the door! “Hey, Ranney, K. K. wants to see you.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Kuhnhardt, doodling with a gold pen. “And I’ll write a letter for you, Walter. Any time.”
Now in the elevator the enemy, all submerging with him, crushed Walter between them; Margaret was there wearing a blue hair-ribbon. She looked at him, and her face was different from other faces, not vacant as theirs were, and sterile: here still was compassion. But as she looked at him, she looked through him, too. This is my dream: he must not allow himself to believe otherwise; and yet under his own arm he carried the dream’s contradiction, a manila envelope stuffed with all the personals saved from his desk. When the e
levator emptied into the lobby, he knew he must speak with Margaret, ask her to forgive him, beg her protection, but she was slipping swiftly toward an exit, losing herself among the enemy. I love you, he said, running after her, I love you, he said, saying nothing.
“Margaret! Margaret!”
She turned around. The blue hair-ribbon matched her eyes, and her eyes, gazing up at him, softened, became rather friendly. Or pitying.
“Please,” he said, “I thought we could have a drink together, go over to Benny’s, maybe. We used to like Benny’s, remember?”
She shook her head. “I’ve got a date, and I’m late already.”
“Oh.”
“Yes—well, I’m late,” she said, and began to run. He stood watching as she raced down the street, her ribbon streaming, shining in the darkening summer light. And then she was gone.
HIS APARTMENT, A ONE-ROOM WALK-UP near Gramercy Park, needed an airing, a cleaning, but Walter, after pouring a drink, said to hell with it and stretched out on the couch. What was the use? No matter what you did or how hard you tried, it all came finally to zero; everyday everywhere everyone was being cheated, and who was there to blame? It was strange, though; lying here sipping whiskey in the dusk-graying room he felt calmer than he had for God knows how long. It was like the time he’d failed algebra and felt so relieved, so free: failure was definite, a certainty, and there is always peace in certainties. Now he would leave New York, take a vacation trip; he had a few hundred dollars, enough to last until fall.
And, wondering where he should go, he all at once saw, as if a film had commenced running in his head, silk caps, cherry-colored and lemon, and little, wise-faced men wearing exquisite polka-dot shirts. Closing his eyes, he was suddenly five years old, and it was delicious remembering the cheers, the hot dogs, his father’s big pair of binoculars. Saratoga! Shadows masked his face in the sinking light. He turned on a lamp, fixed another drink, put a rumba record on the phonograph, and began to dance, the soles of his shoes whispering on the carpet: he’d often thought that with a little training he could’ve been a professional.
The Grass Harp, Including a Tree of Night and Other Stories Page 17
