Nothing That Meets the Eye (18 page)

“I was over to look at the house again,” Nicky said when he came home that evening. “There's a fellow from Mexico City in the hotel who knows about plumbing, so we went over. He said it wouldn't cost more than six hundred pesos to make those repairs on the bathroom. That's about half what we'd figured, you know.”

Florence gazed at him dully. Her face was shiny and tear-swollen.

Nicky talked on and on, oblivious of her expression. He was not clever in perceiving people's moods. In his business, he was used to sizing people up as easily pleased, irascible, or something in between, and he knew Florence belonged in the first category. If he noticed the despair on her face, he thought to himself, “Oh, she's worried about the car, but I've already told her it'll turn up.” So he talked on, until one of her sniffles was so loud it interrupted him.

“I'll not buy that house with my good money!” she said so suddenly that he jumped.

He stood up in alarm.

“I don't want to live here! I don't want to own land here! You just want me to sink my hard-earned money in property so I'll be anchored here, that's all. You want the car to get stolen, too, so I can't leave. But I'll show you!” She flung the sentences at him defiantly but a little fearfully, as a child might at an unjust governor.

Nicky turned half-away, undecided. It was as if a gale had blown through him, ruffling his tranquil inner being. He did not for an instant believe her threats. It was only her vehemence that shocked him. He was angrier than he had ever been in his life as he lifted his jacket from the hook, put it on, and went out.

Florence spent the rest of the evening weeping and writing a letter to her mother.

April 24th

Dearest Mama,

Something terrible has happened. Nicky borrowed my car to go to Mexico City with Mr. Sigismundo and Mr. Sigismundo has just kept it. This was three days ago. Nicky thinks he will bring the car back, but I don't. I think he has stolen it. I don't trust Mexicans one inch and for all his manners and education Mr. Sigismundo is still a Mexican.

Added to all this, life still isn't very pleasant down here. The drought is still on and will be for six more weeks. They are building a dam in the mountains to ensure a water system (supply) all year, but it will be two more years before it is finished. I can't tell you how it is not to have water in the house. You have to go through it to know. Everything seems to be dirty all the time and finally you just accept it and live like a pig.

Mama, I am tired tonight and can't say things very well, but I must tell you that I don't think I can stand it down here much longer. Nicky can because he is used to it, but I just can't. If I come home, it means leaving Nicky down here, because he won't come to the States to live. He thinks he cannot make the grade in American hotels and I can't even get him to try. I don't want you to think it is because Nicky and I are not getting along. He is very easy to get along with and is a fine husband. It is just the country I can't stand. I haven't even talked to Nicky yet about it, but I wanted to explain to you if I could. I'll write you soon when I decide something.

Ever your loving daughter,

Florence

P.S. My love to Clara and Ben and the kids. Most of all to you.

She put the letter in her top drawer under a stack of handkerchiefs, then fell into bed.

When she awoke, it was bright day. Sunshine fell through the single window onto the bed, onto the heap of dirty stockings, socks, and underwear that was collecting beside the bathroom door, onto her dry, dirty-nailed hands that she spread on the coverlet and looked at miserably. She had a headache and a bad taste in her mouth. She had not washed last night, because there was no water, and of course there was none now. She remembered last night, remembered her letter and her decision. Nicky had not come home. She supposed he had slept at the hotel. Tonight she would get things settled with him in a civilized way, and leave as soon as she could.

She drew on a bathrobe. She felt strangely relaxed and free already. Her feet padded across the tiles until her thighs struck the rail of the porch. Through old habit her eyes strayed to the parking lot.

There she saw—with an astonishment that shocked and thrilled her—her car in its usual place! She leaned far over the rail, not yet believing her eyes, but there was no mistake. It was a miracle that had happened in the night!

She got dressed as fast as she could, hurried without fear or mishap down the hill and up to the parking lot. She touched one of the shining fenders. She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. Then she trotted up the ramp and entered the Estrella del Sud's lobby before she remembered that after last night's quarrel, she ought not to call Nicky. But she was so happy, she could not control herself. She had to tell someone, and there was no one but Nicky. She went into a booth and dialed the number of Nicky's hotel.

“Está el Señor Spangli?” she asked, even taking pleasure in her Spanish.

A spate of Spanish came back at her, then silence, and she assumed they were calling him.

Finally Nicky's voice said, “Bueno?”

“Nicky, the car's back! It's in the parking lot!”

“I know,” Nicky said with a little laugh. “Alfredo got in early this morning.”

“I'm so glad it's back!”

“Yes. So am I. He said he was delayed because one of his relatives died and he had to go to the funeral.”

“Oh.—Are you feeling all right, Nicky?”

“I guess so. A little headache.” He laughed again, apologetically. “I've got to go now, Florence. Someone's calling me.”

She walked home rejoicing in her heart. Even as she climbed the hill, her thighs aching, her breath short, she felt she could endure the drought and make the best of things. How could she have thought of leaving Nicky! There never had been a divorce in her family, and it would have hurt her mother terribly if she had caused the first. The car was back! And she would never, never let Mr. Sigismundo use it again.

At the top of the hill, she remembered there was no water. She got two buckets from the house and went down the hill again.

The very next day, Florence fell down in the lane and bruised one knee severely. It gave her agonizing pain, and the doctor Nicky called in said she would have to spend two weeks or more in bed. The knee swelled to frightening size and turned black, purple, brown, and finally a mottled yellow. Nicky tried to comfort her by telling her that injuries always swelled in tropical countries and were not so bad as they seemed. Then during the second week in bed another accident befell her: something stung her over her left eye. She was sure it was the scorpion that lived in the crack in the wall just over the bed. The doctor corroborated her. It was a scorpion bite. The eye also swelled to great size and finally closed, except for a slit she could manage toward evening. The eye, too, went through a weird color cycle, but remained predominantly purple.

With the pain, her ugliness, and the inability to wash, the last ounce of morale left her. She suffered fever and anguish part of the day, and terrifying apathy the rest. At night she either could not sleep for pain or was too tired of bed to sleep. Nicky brought her bougainvilleas from the hotel garden, candy from the shop near the cathedral, but most of his evenings he spent in the cantinas. Florence did not blame him now. Lying there, thinking, she came to realize that there was not much else to do in San Vicente but drink, which was what almost everybody did. She tried to be thankful that Nicky drank only beer and not tequila. She had seen enough to know that in San Vicente drunkard husbands were crosses that many Mexican women and many American women had to bear.

She did not have the energy now to think of leaving. She lay in the state between sleeping and waking that is astir with fantastic dreams, and that finally makes a dream of reality. She believed herself nearer to death than ever before in her life. When she imagined she might die, she thought of leaving the car, her only legacy, and saw it battered and destroyed under Nicky's ownership. Then she would realize she was not dead yet, that the car was waiting for her, that someday she might get in it and go north. But most of the time she had no desire to do anything or go anywhere. She had not the energy to hold a mirror and comb her hair. Above all, she did not want to see her face.

It was on one of the nights in the second week of her illness that Nicky came in about midnight, his eyes pink with drinking. He announced that he and Alfredo and some friends had decided to go to Mexico City to see a bullfight the next day, and that they would need the car.

Florence had awakened from nightmarish half sleep, and she was propped on one elbow, watching dazedly with her good eye as he packed his valise.

“I know you don't like bullfights,” he said. “We'll be back day after tomorrow without fail. Alfredo, prince of drivers, will drive us.”

“No,” she said, and her voice quavered foolishly.

Nicky straightened and looked at her. “Florence, don't get excited.”

Florence had a vision of the cantina Nicky had just left, of Nicky treating the house to beers and tequilas and then expansively inviting everyone to go to Mexico City in the car he would provide. She saw the drunken, unshaven Mexican men greeting his proposal with drooling shouts. “Don't take the car.”

“I swear to you we'll be careful,” Nicky said patiently. He sat on the edge of her bed and stretched his hands toward her shoulders, but she twisted away and got out on the other side.

She slipped into her shoes and hobbled to the bureau where the keys were. Then she went to the closet and took a tweed coat off a hanger.

Nicky stood up slowly. “Really, Florence, you shouldn't be out of bed.”

She did not waste energy in replying. She felt nauseous and weak, and she was afraid if she did not keep moving fast, she might faint. She got up the steps to the door, slammed it behind her and plunged recklessly down the hill.

She held her breath and let herself go, bending the tortured knee, taking fast little steps that kept her just ahead of gravity, feeling the same terror she had felt once when someone pushed her off a high diving board. The night was moonless and pitch-black, and her good eye, wildly stretched open, stared at her feet and saw absolutely nothing. She slipped, went down on one hand and pushed up again, hurling herself onward, because she felt that Nicky would come running down any second behind her. Suddenly she felt the road drop as though she had walked off the edge of something. She fell on her side and rolled over twice before her sprawling arms could stop her. She got to her feet, trembling. The ground was level now, and by the bus station's lamp she could see where she was, all the way at the foot of the hill, near the fountain that was growing clearer to her eye.

She ran for the parking lot. No one was about, and she felt she was enacting one of her dreams. She climbed into the front seat with her coat all bunched under her, zoomed the car back, and shot out the gate. She felt strong in the car. Its power was unlimited, far more than she needed. She heard Nicky calling her name out of the darkness of the hill. Passing the plaza, she had a glimpse of Mr. Sigismundo's tall figure rising from a bench under one of the lampposts. There was a woman on the bench also.

Now she was out of the town. The wind came strong and clean through the open window, and the tar highway hissed under the tires. Her eyes, one wide, the other a slit in a mound of purple and yellow, watched the road at the farthest reach of the headlights. It was a two-lane road that wound around mountainside after mountainside in a general westward direction toward Mexico City. After Mexico City, she would go north on the road to Juarez. She pressed the pedal to the floor and the car leapt like a fish, took a long hill at a smoothly increasing speed, turned abruptly and began another climb.

Then, at a curve to the left, the car leaned in the opposite direction, going too fast for the turn it had to make. The rubber shrieked at Florence's sharp turning, the wheels on the right side struck gravel, dropped, and then the car shot over the edge and began to fall. It turned over and over, bumping down the mountainside with Florence inside it, and burst into flame before it quite came to a stop in the valley.

THE STILL POINT OF THE
TURNING WORLD

T
here is a small park, hardly more than a square, far over on the West Side in the lower Twenties, that is almost always deserted. A low iron fence runs around it, setting it off from a used car lot, a big redstone public dispensary of some sort, and the plain gray backs of shabby apartment buildings that share the same block with it. Three or four benches stand in pleasant places along the two curving cement paths that one may enter by, and that meet in the center at a cement drinking fountain forever bubbling an inch or so of cool water.

From quite a distance up or down the avenue the little park shines like an emerald isle, a bright and inviting surprise in a sea of drab grayness. Mrs. Robertson noticed it one day from a corner of the Castle Terrace Apartments three blocks away, where she lived. She took her small son Philip to play there that afternoon. It was a splendid place for him, because the low iron fence kept him within bounds even when her back was turned, and it was quiet and sunny, unlittered and untrodden. For a city park it was unusually pretty, too, as if the gardeners had been inspired by a special and personal pride when they made it. The fine close-cropped grass extended into the very corners of the four vaguely triangular lawns. If the grass was not to be walked on, there was no one about to tell her so. Of course, the neighborhood was an abruptly sordid contrast with nearby Castle Terrace, but so was the neighborhood in every direction around Castle Terrace. Its square block of apartments stood like a feudal castle in the center of vassal land in which even the dingiest shops and restaurants bore sycophantic names like the King George, the Crown Tavern, the Belvedere Bar and Grill, as if to curry patronage from the manor. The only people Mrs. Robertson saw near the park, however, were the busy truck drivers who came and went around a diner a block away, and an occasional old man in a pinned-together overcoat who shuffled by too drunk or too tired even to glance at the park. Mrs. Robertson read her book until she grew tired of it, then picked up some knitting she had brought, and after a while just sat and daydreamed in the tranquillity. She debated the item she always left until last in her dinner, the vegetable she would buy in a frozen package on the way home.

She had just decided on mixed carrots and peas when a young woman with a child about the age of Philip came into the park and sat down on one of the benches. The little boy was dark-haired and had a blue and white beach ball which interested Philip.

The dark-haired little boy climbed over the scalloped wire fence into the lawn where Philip played. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” said Philip.

In a minute they were playing together, Philip with the beach ball and the dark-haired little boy with Philip's tricycle. Mrs. Robertson did not like Philip's playing with just any child, but this had happened so quickly there was nothing to be done about it. She intended to leave in about fifteen minutes anyway. Idly, she studied the other woman, surmising immediately that she was rather poor and that she lived in one of the shabby apartment buildings close by. She had very light blond hair that did not quite look bleached, though, and she was rather pretty. She sat with her hands in the pockets of her black polo coat, her knees close together, almost as if she were cold, and she paid little attention to her child, Mrs. Robertson thought, if it was hers. She stared straight before her with a faint smile on her lips, as if she were miles away in thought.

Soon Mrs. Robertson got up and went to get Philip. He and the dark-haired child had become such good friends, Philip cried a little when she loosened his hands from the beach ball and drew him and his tricycle toward the path. Mrs. Robertson and the blond woman exchanged a smile of understanding, but they did not speak to each other. Mrs. Robertson was not given to speaking to strangers, and the other woman seemed still lost in her trance.

The next afternoon, the blond young woman was in the park when Mrs. Robertson arrived, on the same bench, in the same attitude in the black polo coat.

“Dickie!” Philip shrieked when he saw the little boy, and his baby voice cracked with joy.

It gave Mrs. Robertson a tweak of surprise, somehow of unease, that Philip knew the other little boy's name. She watched Philip run totteringly along the path to meet Dickie, who stood with a wide smile, holding his beach ball toward Philip in two outstretched arms. Philip's rush of greeting knocked the other little boy down, and they both scrambled after the rolling ball. Mrs. Robertson knew suddenly in that instant they were together, bound up as one being in play, what had made her uneasy: she was not sure the other little boy was clean. He might even have things in his hair. Mrs. Robertson had lived until recently in a suburb of Philadelphia, but she had heard about the unsanitary conditions of New York's tenement apartments. The dark-haired little boy looked washed enough in his pink-and-white striped play overalls, but one never knew what kind of disease a child who lived in a tenement might carry, and Philip would not have the resistance of a child brought up in such an environment. She would have to watch to see he did not put things in his mouth.

Mrs. Robertson gave the blond woman a nod and a smile as she sat down on the bench where she had been the day before. The other woman responded with a nod that Mrs. Robertson could just detect, and her eyes resumed their vacant gaze, quite above the figures of the two little boys playing on the grass. Her expression was so completely oblivious, it aroused Mrs. Robertson's curiosity. Her smile suggested that she saw into some pleasant and fascinating spectacle in a definite place in space. She was quite young, she decided, probably about twenty-one or -two. What was she thinking of? she wondered. And what would her little boy have to do to make her pay him any notice?

On the bench across the path, nearer the fountain than Mrs. Robertson, the blond young woman was awaiting her lover. She was thinking what a beautiful sunny, quiet day it was, and wishing, almost, that these meetings in the little park in April afternoons were all that he and she would know, could know, or would want to know. She was thinking that a mood came upon her every afternoon as she and Dickie left the house, as she descended the brownstone steps, feeling the warmth of the spring sunlight and its calm clarity upon her before she could take her eyes from Dickie's feet to look around her. The street where she lived was especially free of traffic, and at two or three in the afternoons almost as tranquil as the park itself. It presented two smooth parallel walls of brownstone, and even the gray-blue band of street between them was sharp and clear. Here and there a window was dotted by a white bottle of milk on the sill, or a pair of arms at rest on a flattened pillow. Above the arms, resigned and mildly curious eyes gazed down, athirst for any movement on the street, and there was so little: a woman in a housedress airing a nondescript white dog along the curb, a solitary child bouncing a ball beside a stoop post, maybe a boy with a rattly laundry cart, a passing cat. Everyone except the aged and a few women were off at work. Like her husband, Charles, who drove a bus on Broadway, who was gone by eight in the morning and generally did not return until after five. To her, the street seemed empty even of people, because she did not think the woman with her white dog or the arms on the two or three windowsills were alive in the way she knew she was alive. She did not believe they were aware in the same way of the serenity of the street, an odd kind of serenity that clamored to be noticed, or even of its dazzling cleanliness at that hour of the afternoon in the month of April. The woman with the dog did not feel the same as she, coming down her own steps onto the sidewalk, did not sense that the afternoon there belonged to women, to the wives who were alone now with the chores they were complete mistresses of, whose schedule they could rearrange with the flexibility of a woman's day, to an hour earlier if they chose, an hour later, or perhaps not until tomorrow—a woman's world, the street and its two or three reedy trees in iron cages, their thin heads green once more, the street and its unutterable peace. She did not, however, consider herself an ordinary housewife. And there was not the stillness of the street or of the park inside her on the afternoons when he was to come to meet her, though her perception of its stillness and the park's were dependent upon him. On the afternoons she was to see him, she saw beyond the street and the park. She would look eastward where the street disappeared in a huddled jagged mass of buildings, and imagine noise and seething people. She would look west and something in her would leap at the sight of the pier on the river, at a ship's high short mast rising in a cross like a strong and mystic promise above the sooty front of the dock building, above the squared top where the pier's number was written. From this very pier, so close to where she slept every night, she might leave for any corner of the earth, she supposed. And she would wonder if she and Lance would ever really make voyages to foreign places. If she asked him, of course, he would answer such a firm “Certainly we will. Why not?” she would believe and not wonder any longer. Did the woman with the dog ever lift her eyes to look at the pier? Or the woman who had come to the park again today, with the washed and combed little blond boy, who must live in Castle Terrace, did she ever get chills at the sight and smell and sound of the river? But she had probably been all over the world already, been to Europe so many times she knew how each thing would look, what was going to happen next. She would not care to look at the pier.

The blond young woman looked at her now, sitting reading her book, glancing once in a while to see if her little boy was safe. What could happen to anyone in this park? The sweater she wore over her dress was beautiful in the sunlight, the color of a stick of grape ice held to light. Cashmere. She was young, too, she thought, but her manner was so formal she seemed older. She had not talked with her, she supposed, because she considered her an inferior, but she did not care at all. She was not in a mood for talking. She was not in a mood for reading, either. She could have sat all day happily, dreaming on the bench and gazing into space with the green of the park beneath her eyes and reflecting up into them. She was waiting for Lance. And in this park, wasn't she able to sit like this even on the days when he could not come? After the hours here, she could smile, very quietly, as if it amused her, when Charles came in very drunk and cheerful late at night, having drunk up all his pay. Strangely, she did not even blame him, if she had spent the afternoon in the park. His job had ruined his nerves—the pushing crowds, the making change, stopping and starting, the schedules to be met, the dodging of darting pedestrians that made him start up in his sleep at night—so he drank to deaden his nerves. He drank to find the stillness that she found in the park. Once, months ago, before she had met Lance, she had brought Charles to the park and he had not liked it, because he could not sit still anymore anywhere. Now the park belonged to her and Lance. After the hours in the park, she could not blame Charles or herself for what had happened. They simply had stopped loving each other, first Charles, then herself. It might have been the lack of quiet that had exhausted them, from the very first when they lived in the ground-floor apartment on the East Side, that had left Charles not enough energy to love her any longer. If he could be bathed in stillness, drink it and hear it, see it and breathe it, sleep for hours in it, she could imagine his forehead smooth again, his eyes opening to look at her again as if he loved her. But she did not even want this now, it was too late. She had found Lance and she loved him. And Lance would love her no matter where he or she were, together or apart, in silence or noise, movement or stillness. Lance had something within him that Charles had not and never had. She knew now. She was not eighteen any longer, as she had been when she married Charles.

“Philip!”

Philip stood up and looked guiltily at his mother, who was waiting for him to say, “Yes, Mama,” which he did, with the accent on the last­­ ­syllable.

“Don't get mud on your playsuit, darling! Be careful, now.”

“Yes, Mama.” And he turned back and squatted down by his friend and finished pouring the Dixie cup of water from the fountain into the little pit they had dug in the smooth grass. Dickie had found the discarded cup at the end of the path, and Philip had automatically kept it out of sight when he spoke to his mother. They did not know what they were going to do with the little pit that kept drinking the water, but they were happy and they found something to say to each other every second, so that both talked at once almost all the time. Neither of them in his life had ever found anyone he liked so much as the other.

Mrs. Robertson looked up immediately when the man came into the park, so few people ever came into the park. He was bareheaded, in a dark suit, and he stopped and stood for a moment on the cement walk, looking at the woman on the bench. Mrs. Robertson's first reaction was the least sensation of alarm: there was something sinister in his intensity, in his half-smiling observation of the blond woman, in his hands rammed into the pockets of his jacket almost as if he were cold—and as she recognized this single similarity between them, she recognized also that they knew each other, though neither made a sign of greeting. Now he walked with a kind of rigid caution in his shortened step toward the woman and sat down easily beside her, not taking his hands from his pockets or his eyes from her face. And the woman's expression of bemused content that Mrs. Robertson had remarked both yesterday and today did not alter even in the least. The man's lips moved, the woman looked at him and smiled, and Mrs. Robertson again felt subtly disturbed by what she beheld. It was vaguely disturbing that a man had come in and sat down on a bench at all. That he was a stranger making advances had flitted into her mind and out, because of the aura of intimacy that wrapped them both. Both looked before them now, leaned very slightly toward each other, though between them was one of the iron arms that divided the bench into four or five seats, and then the man reached over and took the young woman's hand gently from her pocket, drawing it by the wrist beneath the iron bar until he held it in his own hand, resting it on his crossed leg. And suddenly Mrs. Robertson knew: they were lovers. Of course! Why had it taken her so long to guess? Now she began to watch fascinatedly, covertly. For a few moments she was captured by the obvious and attractive happiness in both of them, by the pride in the lift of their heads as they gazed, he, too, now in the sightless, half-smiling way she had seen first in the woman, straight ahead of them as if at something far beyond the park's iron fence. They were certainly unlike husband and wife, she thought, with a strange rise of excitement, yet neither did they behave quite as intensely as she thought lovers should behave, though she reminded herself she had probably never seen a pair of clandestine lovers, only read about them. And these were certainly clandestine lovers. She saw it all: a husband (with dark hair) who worked during the day and came home at six o'clock, all unsuspecting that his wife had spent the afternoon with another man. Mrs. Robertson felt a pang of compassion for the deceived husband. Yes, the blond woman was clearly rather cheap—her high-heeled pumps, her hair lightened with peroxide probably. Would she take the lover home with her? Mrs. Robertson hoped she would not have to witness that. And in the next moment, she admitted to herself she would like to see just that, see them go away together. She turned a page she hadn't read, conscious of the sound of her thin gold bracelet touching her watch. She looked over her reading glasses again. The man was talking, but so low she could hear not even a murmur. His head was back, resting on the back of the bench, and the woman watched his face, more alert now than Mrs. Robertson had yet seen her, though still with her soft unconscious-looking smile. The man spread his fingers and took firmer grip on her hand, and Mrs. Robertson felt a small wave of pleasure break over her. What did he talk to her about? she wondered. Or could she possibly be wrong about the whole thing? Was the woman not the child's mother, only a paid sitter, or a nursemaid? But both the woman and the child did not look well enough dressed for such a relationship to be likely. And as if to asseverate her opinion, the child suddenly came running across the path, she watched the woman gather him in her arms, take a handkerchief from her bag, and wipe his nose with a twist, and she caught a quality, in both of them, beyond a shadow of doubt now, that was like a statement that they were mother and child. The man had brought his other hand from his pocket with a handkerchief, too, and having put the handkerchief back, he held now, as if he had just discovered it, a small blue automobile on his palm. The woman said something, and the little boy threw his arms about the man's neck, kissed his cheek, and darted away, so quickly Mrs. Robertson could hardly believe she had seen it. Yet she had seen it, of course, and there had been in that, too, an unmistakable look of its having been done before. She stared at the two unabashedly as they leaned forward together, smilingly watching the children.