I Could Go on Singing (17 page)

“Emotionally cold, Lois.”

“Emotionally realistic. Come now, Jason. What’s the next act? Now do you tell me that it’s healthy, that it’s really good for me?”

“Why the compulsion to cheapen things, Lois?”

“How do you cheapen something already cheap?”

“I am not cheap!”

“Neither am I, dear. But we were capable of a cheap relationship.”

He studied her. “What if I asked you to marry me?”

She looked startled for a moment, and then smiled. “You can’t make it into something special that way. That’s just an extension of the love rationalization. And, you know, you might even do it if I said yes, just to prove to yourself that you are right and I am wrong. What kind of a marriage would that be?”

He shook his head. “I give up.”

“Please do.”

“Lois, what kind of a relationship
will
you accept?”

She picked up a pencil and tapped her lips with it, holding her head on the side, looking at him with a rather cold amusement. “It would be sort of childish to say none at all, I guess. We started to be friends, but now we’re not. But I did like being your friend. Maybe, if we were very very careful not to remind each other in any way of what happened Thursday night, we could get away from this sexual rivalry thing and get to be friends again.”

“Do you think that if we do get to be friends, some time we can talk about it with … more understanding?”

“There’s nothing more to say about it, Jason.”

Her gray eyes looked into his, steadily, defiantly. The dark dress fit her figure beautifully, showing to advantage the slenderness of her waist, the firm round pressure of hips and thighs, the strong breasts. She looked brisk, tidy, immaculate and invulnerable. Already she was making it fade for him, making it difficult for him to believe that all of this warm fortress had crumpled and surrendered, gasping with urgencies,
making little broken cries as she sought total closeness, groaning his name.

In every truth, no matter how great or small, he thought, there is a crumb of paradox, a small and dubious erosion. And her life has somehow given her that kind of micro-vision which focuses entirely on the doubt, denying the existence of truth beyond her point of vision. So she can not ready herself for love until she can see that all things are a mixture, all things ambivalent, and life is a process of grasping the entirety, satisfying yourself with a net balance for good. Hers is the pitiful fate of untempered idealism which accepts nothing unless it is totally good—and because life does not strike such bargains—ends by accepting nothing. Yet thinks herself a cynic rather than an idealist. Senses her own waste of herself. Acted with sensual honesty, then feels shamed and tries to shame me. Cheapness is in the people, not the deed. Which, of course, is another kind of idealism, perhaps in its own way as spurious as hers.

“Are you free for lunch?” he asked.

“Things have eased off a little now. Unless George comes back and loads me up, yes.”

For a moment she looked very vulnerable. “And don’t try to be clever with me, Jason. I’m not very clever. You know that now. Just … be my friend.”

Lunch was difficult. There was so much awareness, and she wanted to bury it carefully under neat layers of polite talk, patting each one down, smoothing the edges, restoring all the strata to the way it was originally, so that eventually it could be covered with sod so scrupulously fitted that one could walk right on by it without knowing it was there. He tried to help her, because the concealment seemed such a necessity to her. But from time to time the talk would veer toward an inadvertent innuendo, and then she would go on too hastily, her voice a little thin.

It reminded him of something which had happened when he had been five or six years old, and he wished he could tell her about it, but he sensed she was in no mood to be amused by it. A woman had come to visit his mother, and he had never seen her before, but his mother had given him strenuous warnings beforehand not, under any circumstances, to stare at the woman or say anything or in any way show any awareness of the fact that she had a truly monstrous nose, a great fleshy appendage that dwarfed all the rest of her
face. After the first shocked glance, he had been very good about it. But that nose seemed to fill his consciousness. He tried to think of other things. But he marveled at the nose. His mother asked him to pass the little cakes, and he took the plate to the lady and avoided looking directly at her, and said, very politely, “Would you like another nose?”

There were the inadvertent innuendoes, and there was also the temptation to guide the conversation into areas where such allusions would be more frequent, keeping awareness alive without seeming to be trying to do so. But she was a subtle and clever woman, and he feared that if she guessed his intent, there would be no further chances to be near her. So he tried earnestly to do it her way. It was not easy. He had become so sensitized to her that he could be following what she was saying, and then notice a turn of her wrist or the shape of her mouth or the velvety look of the skin of her throat, and what she was saying would merge and blur into gibberish, and he would sit in a steamy and foolish agony, nodding, keeping the polite attentive look fixed on his face. It was easier for him when he kept talking, and he heard himself giving a learned lecture on why the eastern sections of most of the great cities of the world are the slum sections and why London was no exception and how the fifteen thousand bombs that fell onto the east end had given the planners and urban architects a rare chance to try to reverse the trend of hundreds of years.

George sat down with them and said, “If you’re with this character, Lois, and a mosquito bites you, he’ll tell you how they built the Panama Canal and whipped the yellow fever. Keep lecturing, pal.”

“I’d finished that one, George.”

“I got a little chore for you, Lois. Ida took the call. They missed the train. Now it’s the six fifty-six.”

“Call Aunty Beth?”

“Call that dear old lady,” George said.

“It isn’t going to be easy.”

“I’ve got a few little problems too. And so has Ida. We had her set up for fittings, for rehearsal on a couple new things came in. We got New York phone calls piled up for her. What she needs now is run around in the cold with that kid and get a nice cold in the throat. That would fix the whole wagon. Suppose you go call that sweet old lady.”

Lois hurried off. George ordered a bland lunch. Jason asked
for more coffee. George said, “How is it with you and Marney, pal?”

“We’re friends.”

George eyed him shrewdly. “That’s nice. For a while there she was working a lot of little questions in, about you. But she stopped.”

“Maybe she got all the answers she needs, George.”

“Needs for what?”

“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea.”

“And what would you have in mind?”

“To be a friend, George.”

“Everybody needs friends. Lois needs friends. Jenny needs friends.”

“I approve of your wholesome philosophy, George.”

“Lois was awful jumpy yesterday morning. And pale as a ghost.”

“I’d guess it was a little hangover, wouldn’t you?”

George studied him for a moment. “Okay. It’s none of my business.”

“What’s none of your business?”

“End of conversation. New topic, Jase. Last night was a smash. Rave reviews. So far I can’t find a bad one. Maybe the clipping service will find one, like in the
Manchester Guardian
or someplace, but it doesn’t seem likely. What it was last night, it was love. Big waves of it rolling out of her into that audience and bouncing on back to her. They asked for all of it and got it, and I thought she wouldn’t move a muscle until noon, but she was out early with the kid.”

“What do you think of the boy?”

“I think he’s trouble.”

“Personally, not professionally, what do you think of him?”

George shrugged. “Seems like a nice enough kid. Something about a kid talking in that accent, it makes them all sound a little upstage and snotty. Like they were having you on. I believe like Paar does, you shake an Englishman awake in the middle of the night, he’d talk just like anybody.”

“George, you are provincial.”

George grinned. “I’m an international hick. Here she comes.”

Lois slid into her chair. “That dear little old lady doesn’t flutter at all. She gets veddy veddy icy. She said she had had quite enough of this nonsense.”

“She’s not alone,” George said.

“She was very convincing. We had better get the boy on that train, George.”

“I am going to make a special effort.”

But Jenny did not return to the hotel with Matthew until half-past six. George, Lois, Jason and Ida were gathered in the sitting room of the suite, having a drink, trying to hide the growing tension when they heard Jenny and the boy coming down the corridor, singing some sort of school song.

They came into the suite, flushed and breathless and happy. The boy stopped singing the moment he saw the others in the room. They were arm in arm. The boy gently disengaged himself and pulled his cap off.

“We’ve been halfway up the Thames,” Jenny said joyously.

“Down,” the boy said.

“And all the way down the Strand.”

“Up,” the boy said.

“And we saw St. Paul’s and the Tower Bridge and a gorgeous old clipper ship and the place where they measure time from.”

“Greenwich Mean Time,” the boy explained politely, and helped Jenny off with her coat.

“And when I was freezing he was perfectly comfortable because they take cold showers at that school.” She sighed. “I don’t know when I’ve had so much fun.”

“And you missed the train,” George said.

“On purpose,” Jenny said blithely.

Matthew looked worried. “How did Aunty Beth take it, Miss Marney? I should have phoned her up myself, but …”

“She was upset,” Lois said.

Ida spoke to Jenny. “You haven’t much time. Shall I order dinner?”

“We ate,” Jenny said.

“Twice,” the boy said.

“You missed a few appointments here and there,” George said sourly.

She faced him with a look of indignation. “Come off it, Georgie. I was very very good for days and days, and I followed your little schedules to the letter, and we’re booked practically solid, aren’t we, and good reviews?”

“Okay, okay,” George said. “Come on, kid. We’re going to have to scramble if I’m going to get you onto that train.”

“Yes sir,” Matthew said.

“
Just
a moment!” Jenny said. “Did you forget our surprise,
dear?” she said to the boy. She turned to George. “I have persuaded Mr. Donne to be my guest for one more night and one more morning.”

The boy bit his lip. “But, Jenny, we didn’t
actually
 …”

“But, darling, we did talk about that exhibit thing at the Science Museum.”

“The ionic propulsion exhibit,” the boy said dubiously.

“It would be
very
educational. Your Aunty Beth would certainly understand about that. And we haven’t had a chance to get you that tape recorder you …”

“But Father promised to take me to buy one.”

“I’d love to get one for you, Matthew. Really.”

“I suppose he might not have a chance, really.…”

“And that exhibit would be educational, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh yes, but …”

“Then it’s settled. Come on, Lois. You call her and if it gets a little rough, you can turn her over to me, and I’ll explain.” They went into Jenny’s bedroom and closed the door.

The boy looked worried. “I do seem to be taking up so much of her time.”

“It seems to be what she wants, kid,” George said wearily.

The boy smiled. “She seems to make rather a habit of getting what she wants.”

“That’s a good word for it,” Jason said. “A habit.”

The boy looked at his watch. “I’ve missed the train. We couldn’t possibly make it now, Mr. Kogan.”

Lois and Jenny came out of the bedroom. Jason saw that Lois wore a strained expression. Jenny said gayly, “It’s perfectly all right with Aunty Beth.”

“Really!” the boy said. He smiled broadly. “That’s wizard.”

“Tonight you can be backstage, if you’d like.”

“Oh, I would like that very much, Jenny. I should go wash, if you would excuse me.”

The boy went to his room. As soon as the door closed behind him, Lois said, “You know, Jenny, he’s going to find out it isn’t perfectly all right with Aunty Beth.”

“What happened?” Jason asked.

“As soon as I told her what the plans were, she sniffed and hung up on me.”

“It has to be all right with her, doesn’t it?” Jenny said. “What can she do?”

George sighed. “I give up. All I ask, Jenny, don’t parade the kid.”

“I’m proud of him! I feel as if I want to wear him like a badge of honor.”

“That isn’t what the publicity would say.”

“All right, George. I’ll be careful. All day long, only three people recognized me, and they were very sweet.”

George beckoned to Lois. “Come on, girl. We got chores.”

As Lois left, she pointed out the clippings she had put on the coffee table. Jenny went over and began to look through them.

“I better be going along,” Jason said.

“Don’t go, Brownie. Ida has that look in her eye.”

Ida folded her arms. “Why should I save it because he’s here? He’s thinking the same things I’m thinking. He’s wondering the same things. So is George. We’re none of us against you, Jenny B. We’re all on your side.”

“Sure,” Jenny said. “Sure you are.”

“I want to know one thing. How long is this going to go on?”

Jenny studied a clipping. “How long is what going to go on?”

“The Jenny Bowman Day Nursery.”

Jenny put the clipping down carefully, straightened and gave Ida a long quiet look. “As long as I want.”

Ida did not answer. Jenny looked appealingly at Jason. He merely looked at her.

“So I took him out for the day!” Jenny said with forced anger. “What’s so wrong about that?”

“This is me. Ida. Remember? Eighteen years. And that fellow sitting over there is Jason Brown. Have either of us ever tried to do you any harm?”