I'm Dying Laughing (28 page)

He soothed and consoled her.

‘Oh Maurice, I know that you are always there. The thought of you consoles me. I know you are my friend. I don’t see you often; but you stand there, in my heart, good and kind. If you knew my gratitude to you. You help me to live. My life is such a struggle. Thank you, dear Maurice, for being my friend.’

Maurice stood back, eyeing her quietly, but with shining eyes and a faint smile. They stood looking at each for a few moments; then both turned and went towards the guests.

When they had all gone, Emily, who was very tired, could not sleep. Her ideas, both for a new book, for a chapter of her present book and for a movie, restlessly moved about in her skull. She had to go upstairs and work on the typewriter. It calmed her and made her feel worthwhile and fit. She wrote a letter to one of her friends who had been at the party. This finished, she sat thinking of Maurice, how kind he was, how he helped her to live. She intended to play him, keep him always by her side. She needed someone and someone in the family was better still.

Stephen, in his flannel dressing-gown, opened the door and stood there. He said weakly, ‘Come to bed. You’re doing nothing. Are you going to stay up all night thinking of your romance with that fellow?’

She broke into a smile. ‘Oh, he’s out. He’s a nasty little man. I’ve got to have some time to myself, after the people have raged and gone. I’ve got such a good idea for a book.’

‘You can think of it just as well in bed. I must sleep and I can’t sleep when I think you’re here with puerile, giddy, spoony nonsense between your ears.’

She burst out laughing, and said meekly, ‘Oh, all right. Not a minute to myself.’

In the bedroom, she undressed fast, then sat in her dressing-gown before the mirror looking into her own face, though not at herself. After a while, she said in her warm crusty tones, ‘I’ve got the characters mixed, I must untangle them. With three girls you have to do a superb storytelling feat, so it’s not We Three, or Girls Together. One is led into a first sordid adventure, more from exasperation than curiosity even, just so as not to be cheated; and one believes all the rules, no necking on the side; she holds out till the fellow marries her, she has children, she follows all the rules and then smash-up, something goes wrong and she never knows what hit her. She read the ads, she washed her kids’ clothes with No-work, she didn’t have telltale grey. And now? It’s too bitter, eh? Or so real they’ll lap it up? No. No.’

She cried, crushing out her cigarette. ‘No, it’s cheap and wrong. I want a human book people will read. Would she be exhausted in the end—the vital one? Or would she just subside into a normal life, take it all for granted? It’s a grand ironical end in a way. But my public’s used to the consolation end.’

Stephen screamed, ‘I’m ill, I’m ill, my ulcer’s playing up. For God’s sake, come to bed!’

‘The other. Would she relapse into some kind of sex racketeering or social success? Or whine, be embittered or sick or suffer a fatal boredom? Would she too lapse into the wife and mother game? Then suppose she could. Think of the meaning of it! That all she went through, her sorrows and struggle meant nothing. We put up the youth, energy, hope and agony but society gives us nothing in return, only the age-old treadmill? One becomes a prematurely aged cynical sex-racketeer, though of course she’s married. One tries everything and is a success and then, just when life opens out—well maybe it does. Let’s have a picture of all the hopes offered to any young one who wants to take them, the wave of the future, Poh-poh! Pshaw! As they used to say and with truth. Take the living pants off all these chattering pompous sinister dopes, these semi-skilled radicals. A capsule analysis … and oh, the freckled one, the valedictorian, her deleerious sweeping through those easy long ago days of youth, the
élan,
the bravado and the packaged millennium for tomorrow, the enthusiasm, the easy success of belonging and belonging to heaven and the angels. Oh, my God!’

She burst out crying.

‘What’s the matter, you goddamn nuisance, stop shouting and come to bed! I’m so sick, I’m ill,’ said Stephen.

After waiting for some time, Stephen said drily, ‘It’s nearly three in the morning. Don’t you think it’s time you got some sleep?’

Feeling callous towards her husband and with some contempt for him, Emily got into bed and, thinking of the incident with Uncle Maurice, she slid into a blessed sleep, full of light and harmony and without sound. She woke an hour later, in the middle of a dreamed conservation about a classic figure of a young girl in America, a sort of figurehead for our ship, for all her tragedies are explicit in the dying corrupt civilization of our times. ‘She is a victim, I am a victim but I have grown up—’

No, no: she must sleep. She thought again about Maurice, whom she now suddenly called ‘saviour’ and again suddenly fell into the same magnolia-white sleep. She woke an hour later, with early dawn, and her brain went to work at once, for work was calling; but fatigued with the dreary soulless writing she had to do, she began to think once more impatiently of her new ideas.

‘She is a victim, an American woman, exactly as an exploited steel-worker is a victim of the American modern imperialism he cheers for. He cheers for it because it feeds him. Her husband sees she’s exploited, but he thinks she gets away with it. And who is there to sympathize? Greed is the recognized value; greed is personality, quantity is success, possession is what prevails. Any hopes she had as a child are crushed, foolish as kites which only fly when there’s a breeze. She’s Mrs Blueberry-Pie now, prematurely white-haired with a big white apron over her big white stomach … Freckles is her daughter—she tries to escape and evade. Must this struggle forever end in nothing? Their sufferings are real but are laughed to smoke and powder. Who says any one of us is cheaper than the others? We spring from the same fresh dark water of tragedy. Well, some of us are cheaper: those who know, like me. Alas! Oh, hell, I’ve got to get up in the morning—oh, hell, I must sleep. Oh, hell, hell. And I’m a success! What would you call a failure?’

Supposing she had married Maurice and not Stephen? She thought of Maurice, the kisses, the kindness, and was asleep again before she knew it. Coriolis had asked her to telephone him. She did not know what to make of it. She was tired of his teasing. She had to compose menus for that week, get up the laundry list, check Olivia’s clothes because she was growing out of them, call up Bonwit’s about some new clothes for Olivia, telephone Giles’s teacher at the break to see if he was getting on all right at school, telephone dear Anna out of courtesy. She should, she knew, have been telephoning people about their manifesto, as they called it, finding out their ‘reactions’. Now that it had gone out, she could think of a dozen things wrong with it, or that would sound a false note with others. She could recite many of the passages by heart. She would think of them for a moment:

William Z. Foster states in his report to the national committee that the most important of all questions is the fight to maintain world peace. There is no world peace. There is already in the east a focus of world war being fanned into fire by the United States. The civil war in China is already an international war—the diplomatic or so-called Cold War being waged by the US against the Soviet Union and all workers’ governments, consisting in some part of the occupation of territory which is now or would at once turn democratic if not socialist, without American military occupation and intervention and is tantamount to shooting hot war—what is the use of speaking of preserving peace? Let us fight for peace but not pretend that peace exists … The fact is that the flabby, vague and perhaps disingenuous announcements of the committee conceal only very slightly an intention to do nothing at all, to bide their time, to pursue the old line of ‘notorious reformism’, to quote. Browder has gone, Browderism remains. Indeed Browder himself is only the casualty of the Duclos letter … We must mobilise labour’s allies in other sections of the population. What sections? And what elements in the labour movement itself? They are all porkchop chauvinist when not self-satisfied, scared for their deep-freezes.

She remembered it hopelessly. All was lost. This manifesto of theirs would get nowhere. ‘Forget it. I’ve got Olivia’s party and Anna coming and the whole house to turn upside down. I’m crazy, I guess, I guess.’

That day she did not work on the typewriter at all. But all day she had ideas. Supposing, she thought, while ironing a Swiss muslin for Olivia, I wrote about a woman’s life in 1946? At last she hastily put aside something she was doing and ran upstairs to her workroom. She wrote two-thirds of a page of a letter to Maurice, inspired, joyful words; and then downstairs, full of gratitude to Maurice; and she thought, ‘What is wrong with our current morality? It deplumes all joy. Look how I can work! Why, with my energy—I could turn out ten times the work if I were happy and in love. What is wrong with passion for others? Our lives are dull and Stephen and I even fight, because our lives are drained of all true joy, the kind you are allowed to have in adolescence before you’re tethered to one adult. Then everyone smiles, beams with fellow-feeling. And now it’s wrong. We grow up longing for men, we slowly and with what miseries get to know them; and then just when we know them, we must never know them again. Men and women meet each other all day. They talk and laugh and kiss. But how can they know each other except by sex or divination, and I’m no mind-reader. Sex is easier and surer. Oh, how stupid now my wails and gnashings of teeth and what I said about married women who fell in love. Maurice, oh, my darling, you’ve cheered me up tremendously. I’ve written a beautiful page which you won’t see, but I’m full of ideas, I’m rich, I can work, I’m a full nature, a joyous woman, a full-grown fruiting tree, fruits and flowers and leaves. I’ve found out a secret and if ever I lead a dull monogamous bachelor life again I’m crazy. No more guilty feelings for straying from the pen. Oh, a crown of roses for you Maurice and even for poor Coriolis, dead stinking roses, and of laurel for me and even for Stephen—poor Stephen, who’s so glad when I feel strong, but I don’t give a damn for him! He’s my jailer. He caught me and he’s going to keep me. As a dog-owner can’t bear to observe that his dog likes anyone who hands him a bone. A good old nag between the shafts, the blinkered ox treadeth out the grain. Love story. Boy meets girl, but girl mustn’t nip a mean husk. Oh, poor Stephen, there he lies asleep at last, poor angel, with his nerves, his flu, his rheumatics, his clinging love, such a darling—101.2° fever, I ought to worry; but oh, well, he’ll get better. In the meantime, I must love and work hard; there’s only one way. It’s economic. Only, Jehoshaphat, how I’ve ridden women who’ve gone astray.’

Stephen got out of bed. He came down to lunch because he had to go to the dentist’s. A tooth had begun to gnaw in the night. He was for the moment feeling better. They laughed at lunch and wondered if they might not carry the decision in the Branch.

Stephen said, ‘You look well, you look simply sparkling this morning. I guess I’m wrong about you. I ought to let you go your own way. But I’m afraid you’ll break down one of these days. Of course the secret, you poor old horse, is that yesterday you had a good day’s feed and hunger’s always the explanation of your deep psychological revolts, your mental abysses.’

Emily said, ‘Ha-ha. I don’t mind work, one can say. I worked like a demon yesterday and all morning. I’m glad you’re going to the dentist. I can clean out the bedroom. Paolo and Maria-Gloria are off today. I don’t know what we pay them for. Maria-Gloria simply scamped the bedroom last time. I wish we could pay on result, but that’s unproletarian. I should have the stern nature of my stepmother. Why don’t I pay myself at $350 monthly as I pay them? On myself I don’t spend half that much each month, not a quarter. Listen, Stephen, stop toying with that milk and go to the dentist. Clear off. I’m busy.’

‘Oh, I hate to go to that sadist and you’re a sadist to send me. I see a regular gleam of pleasure every time I enter his office. He knows I’m a milksop when it comes to teeth. I’m going to find a tender-hearted dentist who has a nervous breakdown every summer from seeing his patients suffer. Last time I told him, “Ben, I know you’re a sadist. Don’t save on drugs with me; I’ll pay you extra. Why should I suffer? If I were a pretty girl you wouldn’t make me suffer. If you hurt me, I’m going to squeal, the first prick and you’ll get a thin and pathetic squeal, and if you really hurt, I’ll roar. It may please you but it’ll drive away your clients.” It’s so funny, but there are no masochists among dental patients. He promised he’d never hurt me again. I said, “No, and you’re not going to hurt my children either.” Now he’s probably going to give me a damn good jab. I can see his milk-fed, white jowls faintly smiling. He’ll keep me waiting while he strokes his hair back and smiles at himself in the surgery.’

Stephen was lounging in his chair with a self-satisfied pretty languor. Full of coaxing petulance and gentle graces, he lounged about the house for a while and then went off to the dentist’s. He said, ‘Ring me up in about three-quarters of an hour. Find out how I am. If he fills me full of dope, perhaps I’ll want you to drive me back.’

Off he went, strolling down the path along the street, in the sunshine, with a small snap-brimmed hat, the picture of the elegant young college man, a very youthful forty. Emily, running upstairs to look at the bedroom, watched him from the small-paned window through the curtain frills. She saw his curly blond head, shining like a dog’s coat, gliding along the fence in the side-street. When he turned the corner she went and telephoned Uncle Maurice. After waiting, she got him.

‘Oh, Maurice, I want to thank you for coming yesterday and the wonderful time we all had, oh, how lovely. You were lovely, Maurice darling! Oh, how happy you made me with your trust. Listen, darling, will you try to come up for the next weekend? You know the political crisis I told you about? You know nothing about that, but I’m going to need a friend. We’re not having a big party; this is select, practically only you, darling, and Anna of course, and the Oateses, they know Europe. It will be the last time we cook outside, this year and maybe forever. We bought citronella and will spray the whole place with DDT in the morning and midday and it is definitely not one of these big routs we seem to have been perpetually getting up this year, with all kinds of people undesirable to each other and sometimes even to us.’