NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (15 page)

Everything that the photograph revealed about this girl, yes, even her hair, was infinitely touching to Phil, and he paid her the tribute of saying to the man who claimed her, “She’s really lovely.”

“Isn’t she?” Bradley Holliday smiled gratefully. “She’s just that good in bed too. Sensational.” His smile broadened but did not become vulgar. “I know I can speak frankly to you, Sparks. A lot of sailors would blow their corks if I said anything like that to them. Once you sleep with a girl you’re not supposed to have any respect for her, unless she’s your wife; and then you can’t ever mention the fact that you lay her. The whole world is divided into the whores that you bang and the women you love. Some of these smart apples brag to me—they actually brag!—that they’ve never seen their wives with their clothes off. With people like that it’s useless to talk.

“But my problem is a little more complicated than anything those sailors ever encountered. For one thing, Phyllis is after me to marry her and I’m damned if I know what to do. Sometimes I think, go ahead, marry her. One of these days you may hit the beach and find her married to someone else. And then I say to myself, why look for trouble? She’s got a nice apartment and a
comfortable bed. Everything is fine as long as I come and go when I please. How do I know what will happen after we get married? Supposing I discover that we’re not compatible after all?”

It was really absurd. Philip had posed the same unreal questions to himself when he married Grace, and again when he met Natalie, and he had been unable to answer them sensibly. How then could he answer them now, when they were asked by a man who was not even aware of the meaning of the words that he used?

But apparently Holliday did not expect an answer. “I took the liberty,” he said quietly, as he opened the manila folder and drew forth a packet tied with string, “of bringing along Phyl’s letters, the ones she’s written me since I left on the last voyage. If I may—”

“Whose letters?”

“Phyl.” Holliday inclined his head toward the picture. “My fiancée.”

“You startled me. That’s my name too, you know.”

“Oh, is it? I’m afraid I didn’t catch it when we were introduced. What did you say your last name was?”

“Stolz.” Phil hesitated for an instant. “That means ‘proud’ or ‘pride’ in German,” he added, and hated himself as soon as the words were out. What a horror, he thought agitatedly, what a lurking horror to know that the hateful need of “justifying” one’s very name lay always hidden in ambush, like an ugly beast, ready to leap forth snarling whenever identification was demanded.

Holliday did not seem to notice Philip’s perturbation. He turned over the tied bundle of letters with curious caution, as though he were examining a stack of new banknotes. “Would it be too much of an imposition—” he glanced up warily, as if to say
We
know that I’m not worried about it being an imposition, “—if I were to read some of Phyl’s letters to you now?”

But if he had come to the radio room simply to read the letters, why did he bother to ask permission? Was it possible that he was troubled by pangs of conscience, that he desired simple masculine approval for what might otherwise be considered a betrayal of confidence?

Phil said, “I’m perfectly willing to listen. But do you think—”

“Oh, I know!” Holliday cried, almost gaily. “You’re afraid that
Phyl might be offended. But she’s not that type, not at all. In fact, I think she’d be rather pleased about my reading some passages to you. You’ll see what I mean; some of her letters sound as though she’d written them for an audience, instead of just for me.”

Phil studied the girl’s photograph. It was possible, wasn’t it, that Holliday was right, that this girl, with her determined brows and her smiling but fervent eyes, was fully capable of a public utterance of her feelings. … Or was he being swayed, as Phyllis very likely had been, by Holliday’s insolent charm?

Holliday clinched it by saying calmly, “Phyllis works for an advertising agency. Unfortunately, she takes it seriously, so …” His shrug was both worldly and cynical.

Phil felt baffled and powerless. Even if he too were to shrug in reply, the graceless motion of his shoulders could hardly compete with Holliday’s eloquent gesture. But before the silence could become awkward, Holliday had snapped the string and begun to read the topmost letter.

“Darling Brad, just a few hours since you’ve left
—this was last May—
and yet everything seems different. Isn’t it odd how you can go on doing the same things, and yet feel that all meaning has been sucked out of them, merely by virtue of one person’s departure from your life? The egg that was so juicy and tempting suddenly becomes an Easter egg, gaily colored still, but hollow and empty on the inside…”

So this was the prose that she had polished for Holliday and his chance acquaintances. Phil looked at the girl’s picture with compassion and contempt. If she had entrusted her private dreams to Holliday, she had no one to blame but herself for what became of them.

“… of course, I can hear you saying, isn’t it foolish of her to sit down and write to me when I’ve just left, and she hasn’t any news for me? But, darling, I only want to tell you that suddenly I understand how it is that there won’t be any news, not any at all, until you come back. The job isn’t going to have any flavor, even the apartment that I’ve been so proud of because you’ve been so comfortable here
…”

Phil knew now that he was going to have to listen to the entire series of letters. He reached for the bottle and poured two more
drinks. It was the first liquor he had tasted since the final night with the girl at Lennons Hotel, but it aroused only pictorial memories of that scene as it trickled warmly down his throat. This was going to be one of those occasions when he would remain sober, seeing everything with a cold and painful clarity, no matter how much he drank. Holliday, already absorbed in presenting the evidence of his manhood, gulped absently at the gin, drew forth another letter, and cleared his throat.

“Darling Brad,”
he read,
“here goes another letter off into space. I sometimes think that the worst thing about separation is this hollow routine of sending off a whole series of letters before I can even hope for a single answer. But then that’s not your fault, is it? If I had been shrewd and calculating I would have tied in with a junior executive type who would be here for dinner every evening at six-thirty sharp, instead of with a sea-going engineer. Perhaps things will be different when you return from this voyage …
dot, dot, dot,” Holliday said. “She puts three dots here, after voyage. That’s a little habit of hers.”

Phil nodded ambiguously. Was it really possible that with hardly anything more to go on than three dots (and God alone knew what they signified to Holliday) he could begin to construct for himself a portrait of the girl, not contradicting, but only paralleling the portrait that stood before him on the desk?

“…so that by the time I got home I was really too worn out to curl up on the studio couch with a box of stationery and write you all about the concert, as I really wanted to. Anyway, Serkin was simply magnificent, at the top of his form, and I wanted to cry—I would have cried—during that wrenching, indescribable slow movement, if only it had been you sitting next to me instead of Doris
. That’s the girl she shares the apartment with.
But I couldn’t very well hold Doris’s hand, could I, dear? … the result is that I’m stealing company time to write to you, and even, as you can see only too plainly, company paper. The folder that I’m supposed to be working up on California lettuce just doesn’t seem particularly intriguing to me now, especially when I think of you making for those sloe-eyed Oriental maidens. Tell me, Brad, are they really sloe-eyed?”
Holliday paused and cocked an eye at Phil. “She’s being eu-pha-mistic, you know,” he explained.
Phil did not answer. The badly pronounced interpolation was doubly offensive; he was just beginning to feel like an omniscient author who is presented the facts of the case by a nervous shipboard acquaintance. This pleasurable certainty that he was being given a series of facts, some essential and some peripheral, whose significance as fiction he would determine for himself at his leisure, was badly shaken by the engineer’s self-interruption. In a sense it recalled him to a gross reality that had been gratefully diminishing during the reading of the first few letters. He looked up from the scratch pad (on which he had been abstractedly jotting the weather report of a distant freighter as it cheeped from the earphones before him, high above Holliday’s voice), intending to say “Please go on reading,” or something of the sort, but en route to Holliday his eyes met the girl’s, smiling warningly at him from the picture frame, and suddenly he understood that he and Phyllis had become friends. Was she as much of a friend as an author’s newly developing character? More, perhaps, for with any luck at all he would now learn from her own pen, aided by his own retrospective surmises, those things which an author is never quite able to construct; and as he moved towards an identification so absolute that it emboldened him to forecast the entire course of the correspondence, he was gladdened by a sense of his own power and insight surely surpassing, he thought, even the vision of a skilled and inventive writer. He leaned forward eagerly to hear the ardent beginning of a new series of letters.

Holliday smoothed the sheets over his bare hairy knees.
“My own darling,”
he read, with an odd kind of detached fervor, like an actor reading for an audition,
“it’s a week today that you’re gone, a week torn out of my life, as useless and meaningless as the seven empty sheets of the calendar that I crumple up and throw away. It’s just impossible to write you a chatty letter about Doris or the new slip covers or what the supervisor said to me yesterday or those brutal cramps that started up this morning. I can’t, Bradley, because I am sick from thinking about you and about how I love your slow, hard smile and the way you smoke in bed with your arms clasped behind your head and the cigarette dangling down towards your chest and the smoke curling over your face
…”

Philip felt himself flushing. But Holliday, pausing only to replenish his glass, continued to read in an impersonal monotone, his voice gradually thickening as the gin slurred down his throat.

“…
one thing I can’t discuss with Doris, even tho’ she sleeps in the next room and is closer to me than anyone in the world but you. Precisely because she’s always slept alone, how could she know anything of that sickening loneliness on a Sunday morning in May? No one else could know the way it was when you and I lay here watching the sun sneak through the long window and crawl across the foot of the bed, while E. Power Biggs blasted away majestically at the organ all the way across the country, and we sipped coffee and listened to Bach and got ready to make love
…” Holliday flipped open his Zippo lighter with a metallic snap and lighted a fresh cigarette, then went on: “…
that dreadful thrashing about, which is at bottom I suppose the fear that everything is lost and irrevocably in the past. And then … la recherche du temps
—” He pronounced the word
temps
as though it were
Thames
.

Philip broke in furiously, “You’re pronouncing it wrong!”

“That’s possible.” Holliday nodded equably. “My French is pretty poor—although I’ve never had any trouble making myself understood by the babes in Marseilles. It’s different with Phyl. She takes it as a personal affront every time I mispronounce a word.”

It was fantastic. By admitting his inadequacy, Holliday succeeded in representing himself as a simple, straightforward fellow; while Phyllis became, to just that extent, the snob and the fake. But was that completely false? Wasn’t Phyllis being driven by anxiety and ambition to the kind of extreme attitudes that would entitle her lover to smile patronizingly, secure in the knowledge that he was by comparison more unassuming and more honest?

Holliday however could not rest content with having planted these seeds of doubt in his listener’s mind; he had to add, “Phyl claims that she prefers French movies to Hollywood movies. I think it’s just an affectation. We have to sit through all those arty movies instead of being able to see a decent show, just so she can discuss them afterwards with her intellectual friends. Let me read on a bit—you’ll see what I mean.”

As Holliday read on, the all too familiar words,
anguish, love, the hideous power of loneliness, the memory of you lying beside me in the dark
, falling dully from his lips like tarnished stones, Phil asked himself: Why did I become angry? Why should I care how he pronounces her words?

The answer lay not so much in Holliday as it did in the girl, and in Philip’s own attitude towards her. It was no longer possible for him to maintain the pose of the detached author, to listen to these revelations with the keen hopefulness of one who would hasten to note his impressions in his journal upon the conclusion of the reading. For he knew the girl too well already, and any further display of the literary efforts and the borrowed French phrases with which she exposed herself to this coarse man reflected less on Holliday than it did on her, or even on Phil himself.

Something very strange was happening. It wasn’t even necessary for him to regard her taut cheekbones, or her serious and sensuous mouth, in order to visualize her in any number of “honest” poses: listening to a Horowitz recording, semi-recumbent on a studio couch in her stockinged feet, her paired shoes standing neatly on the rug; leaning forward in a hard undertaker’s chair at a protest meeting for Spain, or Czechoslovakia, or Greece, or Palestine, her chin cupped firmly in her large white hand and her hair tied back behind her ears; lounging in an armchair with him, running her fingers easily through his hair and teasing him with a little private dirty joke about the similarity of their names, her legs lying fluidly athwart his lap while he plucked at the nylon hose, feeling the close grain of her neatly shaved shins under his thumb, and thinking cloudily of how it would be when he moved his hands upwards under her clothing to undefended smoother places. He shuddered …