by Alfred Hayes
This partner, then, with whom I slept, in a manner of speaking, increased my holdings, secured my financial, or her financial, or our financial, wellbeing, and for several years devoted herself to me and to our marriage as she would have to any fledgling business that needed her complete attention.
Sitting in a restaurant with Aurora, I thought then of the death of my second wife’s father. There are episodes to which one always returns not quite believing that one participated in them. The death of my second wife’s father was such an episode.
When we had been married five years, and had begun the occupancy of the sugar heir’s former home, my second wife’s father decided to visit us.
I liked the old man. He was a little man and he wore wide-legged baggy trousers. Once, because he was in California and in such an elegant house, he appeared in white flannels. They were white flannels he had probably worn to Asbury Park in the summer of 1918. He felt quite the sport in his white flannels. My second wife couldn’t endure the sight of them. They made, not her father, but herself, ridiculous. Up went Papa to the bedroom and changed meekly back to his dark baggy trousers. He ate breakfast like a man in a corrective institution.
Everything, it didn’t have to be the Grand Canyon, was a source of wonder to the old man. The garbage disposal unit? He clucked and shook his head. Such an invention! No more trolleys in the city? Amazing! The world, in Papa’s opinion, had become incredibly clever. In his time nobody thought of such things. Ergo: the world was indisputably cleverer than it had been, and maybe his daughter was right: the white flannels of Asbury Park were ridiculous. He submitted to the superiority of the world that had invented garbage disposal units.
The second week her father was about the house my second wife started to get her pinched look. I took the old man to the track, to the ballgame, once to the studio. He was, of course, delighted. There’s nothing better to prove how much cleverer we’ve become than the manufacture of motion pictures. Anyway, if the old man had sat in his upstairs bedroom and watched television and read his True Detective magazines, everything would probably have been all right. That is, his humiliations would have been minor. But he was lonely and he liked to talk to people. He’d come downstairs at a party or a dinner. When she had sort of implied he shouldn’t. And buttonhole some actor. Then the clucking and the marvelous shaking of his head began.
That watch told the day of the month as well as the time?
Incredible.
A what kind of car? It cost how much? Up and down, automatic?
Unbelievable.
There is such doctors? Fix breasts? Bigger?
He goggled. He was benumbed by these amazing lives and these amazing gadgets.
My second wife was getting more pinched about her famous and fine nostrils. Papa was impossible. She cringed with embarrassment. There was only one thing to do. Out! That was the thing.
She rented a nice apartment. A little dark. A little shabby. The window looked out on a stunted palm. Listen: it had a sundeck. Papa could sunbathe with people his own age. Except people his own age were not a source of wonder to Papa.
The old man submitted. She moved the color TV into his tiny living room and packed up his True Detective magazines. Twice a week she ran up to visit him, between appointments. I got reports on how much better off Papa was watching television and sunbathing in a deckchair with people his own age.
Then Papa got sick.
This, really, is the point of the story. Not so much his death. He was an old man. Papa got sick and she had to call a doctor. That’s the point of the story. Our doctor. Who had this suite of offices and booked you into the Cedars of Lebanon for a skin rash. Papa got sick and she got scared and she had to call our doctor.
Well. One couldn’t have our doctor see Papa in so undistinguished a setting. It had a sundeck, all right, and a color TV, but you couldn’t honestly say it wasn’t a little dark and a little shabby. My second wife hastened to redecorate Papa’s apartment. She bought new drapes. She had the carpets hastily cleaned. She put gay slipcovers on the slightly battered chairs. Papa got a haircut. With a hundred and four temperature, Papa got a haircut. The barber had a funny look. Then our doctor, he had a taste for foreign cars, drove up and attended the refurbished sick man. Papa never got well. I was there. He didn’t cluck. He didn’t shake an amazed head. He turned to the wall, where he couldn’t see his clever daughter and her clever world, and he died.
I thought of the story of the death of my second wife’s father as I sat in a restaurant having dinner with Aurora. A worm of discontent had certainly eaten at the heart of my second wife. But as I looked across the table it seemed to me that nothing ate at the soft and female center of this girl.
Taking her to a restaurant was in itself a pleasure. I would watch in fascination as a pair of thick French lambchops were stripped of their meat, as the potatoes vanished, as the salad went, as the dessert disappeared. I thought of her gastric juices admiringly. Her teeth celebrated themselves as teeth. My god; how nice it was not to see a woman pick at a plate. And when she had eaten, she would settle back against the wall of the booth, and smile at me, as though now the lambchops or the rare steak or the lobster fra diavolo were gone she were allowing me to come back into the frame of her attention.
Oh, it wasn’t that she was gluttonous. Everything was just delicious. And she was it: I mean, the whole mechanics of eating. She didn’t devour things. I watched closely. The steak wasn’t gobbled up. Eaten was the only way to describe it. She was a creature who was there to eat. It was why there were restaurants at all. Why the chef bothered. Why the spits turned.
She was, I thought, having my coffee, enormously impressed with what had happened to the menu, a goddam healthy girl. And then with a shock I thought of how rarely it had seemed to me the girl or the woman I was with had been truly healthy. And how in a dim way I had longed for them to be. More than I wished them to be clever or efficient or even pretty. A perfectly natural, unembittered, untwisted, healthy girl. A girl with sunlight in her and a firm stride and a rich unencumbered laugh. Not off some bloody analyst’s couch. Not some bony thin-cheeked furious-eyed bitch to whom if you handed the world on flat silver it still wouldn’t be enough. Because there wasn’t any bitchiness in Aurora. I was sure of that.
Oh, she acted. She played complicated games. As at the French film. Perhaps she even lied a little. Or teased me a little. Amused herself with me. But why not? I was the damaged one. Damaged by age, damaged by the profession I had chosen, damaged by marriage. She was whole, and young, and there wasn’t anything of value I could really offer her. I wasn’t going to fall in love with her; it would be absurd to expect her to fall in love with me. Besides, there was Michael: she was, in some way they accepted among themselves, by their definitions, his girl. Whatever being one’s girl at the moment meant. I wasn’t really too anxious to find out. I was being, by some consent, allowed to share her. I might hope, now and then, that my share in her might increase: something alter, or even stop, those afternoon bouts in the studio with its skylight; but I didn’t permit myself to enlarge on those hopes. What I told myself was that Aurora was simply a piece of luck for me. To hold her arm, on Fifth Avenue, to feel at least some contact with that vibrancy, to sit, across artificial candles, in some restaurant, to slump beside her in a moviehouse, to watch her, legs tucked under the fantastic skirt, in a chair or on the couch in my hotel suite, turning the pages of The New Yorker or absorbed in the ads, was good for me. It was lucky. It might not have happened at all. I had been, I thought, unlucky for a long time, the disasters had followed each other with a numbing monotony, and the odds-maker, in his mysterious way, might now be posting a price a little in my favor.
23
And she was marvelously candid, I thought.
Take the fur coat.
She adored her fur coat. She felt so rich, she said, so secure inside it. She couldn’t wait for the weather to go to zero. It was muskrat, dyed beige. And once (before Michael,
and of course long before me) she had known a man who was in the cemetery business. The man was fat, tall, married, his name was Ben, and he had explained to her that of all the possible businesses to be in, the cemetery business was the best. This was because in the cemetery business you bought it by the acre and sold it by the foot. Ben, she said, while I listened, was very nice even if he was tall and decidedly fat and thoroughly married and preferred taking her to the Stage Delicatessen and ordering a huge steaming hot pastrami sandwich to a chateaubriand at a fashionable place. He could afford the chateaubriand but he preferred the hot pastrami. When she made up her mind she had to have a fur coat or she’d just die she knew that she simply could not go to the tall fat man in the cemetery business and say I want a fur coat, Ben. Ben was delicate about things like that. He got awfully gruff if you ever said to Ben, Ben, I’m poor, I’ve a hundred and fifty dollars in the Amalgamated Savings and Loan but I want a fur coat, Ben. Ben hated being told you were poor or that anybody was poor. Ben thought it was bad taste to tell people in the cemetery business who sold it by the foot precisely how emaciated your bank account was. She knew she couldn’t just assault Ben like a fortified town garrisoned by money.
She waited until the weather got real zippy and the barometer started to come down and one afternoon when Ben was in town and had invited her to lunch she went to the Amalgamated Savings and Loan and drew out her hundred and fifty dollars. They had lunch. Ben was feeling particularly Roman by the time the dessert came and then she said, Ben, you know a lot of people, I mean in the wholesale business, do you know anybody in the wholesale fur business, Ben? Sure baby, Ben said, what are you looking for? Well, she said, it is getting cold, Ben, and I thought if you knew somebody in the wholesale fur business I might get an inexpensive fur coat. Well sure, baby, Ben said, we don’t want you freezing your pretty little ass off come December, do we?
I’ve got the money with me and all, she said, quickly picking up her handbag, and I thought if you’re not busy this afternoon you might call somebody, I mean you know so many people and go down with me to wherever it is and pick out a nice fur. Ben knew so much about furs and all. She did not say anything about Ben’s wife’s beaver or anything about how she wanted to look nice when she went some place with Ben because they might just be going to a delicatessen.
Well they went down to this place off Fifth in the wholesale fur district with the skins tied and baled and the peculiar tools they used to cut and scrape and stretch, and she listened wide-eyed and demure while Ben and his friend in the wholesale fur business exchanged pleasantries and the friend looked her over and said, enviously, he’s a picker, that Ben. Then there was a more or less inevitable joke about how it now took the friend all night to do what he had once done all night and then he started to bring out the coats. She fell in love with the muskrat as soon as she saw it. She had to have the muskrat. She said: Oh, Ben, it’s exactly what I dreamed of. She took out the hundred and fifty dollars and put it on the long wooden table on which the skins were cut and stretched. She said: I’ll wear it now.
The friend looked at the hundred and fifty dollars and he looked at Ben, the picker, and then he said to her: Miss, wholesale it’s seven hundred and fifty.
She looked stricken.
She said: Oh, Ben, I told you I wanted an inexpensive coat.
A hundred and fifty dollars for a fur coat, that ain’t inexpensive, young lady, the friend said dryly. That’s impossible.
She looked at the muskrat. She looked at the beavers. She looked at the caraculs. She looked at the sables. She didn’t say a thing about what Ben’s wife wore. Nor what she looked like wearing it.
She picked up the hundred and fifty dollars. The friend looked at it as though it had been printed during the Civil War.
She said: I’m sorry. Ben knows how silly I am. I just thought wholesale . . .
She put the money into her purse. Ignorance never looked more beautiful. She’d wandered into Fort Knox and said: but I don’t really see why I can’t take a sample home. She faced the door and shuddered inside the cloth coat she wore. She looked as though she were about to step out into a howling gale, wearing nothing but a bra and high-heeled shoes. Ben paid the other six hundred dollars.
Here was the fur. Wasn’t it adorable? Poor Ben. She’d gotten tired, finally, of the hot pastrami. She put up the collar. She buried her chin in the soft beige animal fur: over it, her great dark eyes laughed at me. Wasn’t it a love? I looked at her, and something actually turned over inside of me. A love. A love. Well: wasn’t it?
24
As I said: she played games. Complicated games. Both of them did. And they played the games together, she and Michael.
For example: her birthday present. The one Michael bought her on her twenty-second birthday. The thing was called “The Visible Woman.” It was an educational toy.
There were seventy-nine parts. The guarantee covered any defective or missing component. She thought it a marvelous present. It came, Michael said to her, unwrapping the box, with an illustrated instruction booklet on how to put the lady together.
Shall we assemble her? Michael said.
I could see it. In very clear detail.
They put the transparent shell on the bed between them and crouched over it. Perhaps they were dressed at the time; I felt a bit squeamish, and didn’t ask. She would have told me, I suppose, if I had asked.
Place right and left lungs into rib cage as shown, the instructions said, and Michael read, then place urinary and reproductive organs into pelvic cavity. She was fascinated. I certainly could see it. And hear them. In that studio. With the skylight slanted and the drift of cloud and smoke. She looked at the illustrated booklet. It looked just like the inside of a machine. With all the thingamajigs. She was just thingamajigs, too. Wasn’t that fascinating? Michael was inserting the plastic organs. The heart was divided into two halves. Now locate the small intestine below the large intestine, it said, and Michael did so, with all the precise care of a garage mechanic. It was absolutely marvelous watching yourself being assembled. Michael felt just like God if God went to M.I.T. Now put liver into place as shown. Insert rectum behind urinary and reproductive organs. It was absolutely the greatest birthday present. The rib cage fitted over the collar bone. Hook the breast into position as follows.
There you are, Michael said. The toy was assembled.
And you know? You did feel, once the thing lay there on the bed all put together, just like a toy. You know? Not exactly educational. But it was the queerest. Just godawful scientific or something. That stuff inside you.
And, as she spoke, glowing, with a little giggle now and then, as she described it to me, I kept seeing the two of them, crouched over, engrossed and fascinated and impure children. And I knew, without asking or being told, that they’d gone to bed after that. It would follow. With the toy between or near them. Color the uterus green. The sum of all those jointed hooked-in pin-secured numbered parts. Was that why he’d bought her the toy? A polystyrene girl. Color the vulva gold. They called her Fannystein. Naturally. Replacements (worn-out, defective, missing, lost, manhandled, broken by age) were available by writing to the company. Zip code 217. East of the land of Eden.
Oh, yes. They had complicated games. It was way beyond strip poker, that triumph of the innocent orgies of my youth. I felt queer about it. Or as Aurora said, in their superlatives: the queerest. But that might be just some inhibitory thing in myself. I mean: something that prevented me from seeing the measure of a freedom they had achieved that was, perhaps unfortunately, not available to me. Apparently, there were a few more sacred objects left in my tabernacle than I believed were there. I may have been too solemn about the forked creature we are. I couldn’t quite see, yet, man and all he was or did as the funniest thing since vaudeville. It was possible that he was, but it took something I didn’t have to hang a vulva instead of mistletoe on even the most contemporary and the most metallic of Christmas trees.
25
But then again it wasn’t all that merry. It wasn’t all that zingy. There were times when Michael frightened her.
“When?”
“Oh: times.”
What did Michael do that frightened her?
Well.
For example.
Take one afternoon
She’d been asleep. In that bed resting on its patient bricks. Then she wasn’t asleep. But she didn’t open her eyes. Michael was squatting beside the bed. She could see him through the flicker of her lashes.
She knew Michael knew she wasn’t asleep. She knew Michael knew that something kept her from opening her eyes. The afternoon light was dying. Her hair was in disorder on the pillow. Her legs were flung wide. The air dried the small sweats on her body. She felt a suspension of things in the room in the dying light.
Michael was listening to her breathe. She became aware of her own breathing. That she did breathe. She knew or she felt that Michael was looking at her breasts as though rose-nippled they were the breasts of a peculiar enemy. That his brows had gone hard. That a ferocity of a kind had come into his eyes. That he was glaring. At the tiny sunken depression of her belly-button. At the tufted mound between her legs.
She couldn’t stand it. It began to frighten her. That ferocious scrutiny. That X-ray silence. She opened her eyes. For a moment it held: the animosity. Mingled with something else. Then he smiled. The white large square teeth smiled at her. He reached over. He plucked gently at a single dark hair.
