Nothing That Meets the Eye (54 page)

“About what, for instance?”

Two minutes to go. George pondered desperately, imagining suddenly a woman rummaging through a sewing basket, looking for a thread of a certain color. “I had a woman friend—as I told you—during two years of my married life. That didn't cause me to be less kind to my wife.” He was not going to start the Maggie story, a teenage mistake. That was not on his mind. Neither was Harrietta, even. He and Harrietta had parted amicably, agreeing that they didn't care to see each other again. Somehow Harrietta's proposal of marriage and his agreement had extinguished even their affair. “I honestly think guilt is not the cause of these . . . hallucinations.”

Ping!

It was like the end of a round of boxing. The doctor stood up. So did George, already thinking about paying. The doctor indicated that his secretary could take care of that, and George understood that the doctor wanted to be free at once for his seven o'clock patient.

“You're under a strain of some kind,” the doctor said as George moved toward his open door. “Up to you to identify, if you can. And if you want to see me again . . .”

George signed a check for fifty dollars. He did not ask for another appointment, thinking he could make one in the next days, if he decided that he should.

He felt dazed, rather than enlightened. What had Dr. Kublick said, after all? And George had dumped all his problems into the psychiatrist's lap, confessed to some loneliness now. But just what were his sins, if he came down to it? Or rather, what had he done so wrong, in all his life, to warrant visitations from a specter which seemed (George couldn't get rid of the notion) to be bent on reproaching him?

The question was: Was he really deranged, to have seen that vision of himself? Or had he really seen it, meaning that it really existed (after all, some people believed ghosts existed), and had it some valid meaning in regard to his life? Was there some abstract judge who made an assessment of these things? The abstract judge in George's mind was not God, but some scale of value which perhaps not even a philosopher of highest rank had yet codified. Therefore one had to struggle and try to do it for oneself. George felt that he had not even tried as yet, and that therefore he was in a moral sense as low as an uneducated peasant anywhere, as low as any animal on four legs, though without that animal's innocence.

Maybe the vision wouldn't turn up again, George thought as he prepared a simple meal that evening. He was trying to take some fortitude from the fact that he had seen a psychiatrist and stated the facts. What else could a person do?

As he ate, George thought of something else he could do: speak to Ralph Foreman and say that he would be glad to meet the young man who was interested in joining the firm. Since this was more a social event than a business one, George decided to telephone Ralph now, even though he would see him in the office tomorrow.

Ralph's wife Nancy answered, spoke to George in a friendly way, then put Ralph on. George said he was sorry that he had not been able to make the dinner date the last time, and could they make another?

“I'd like you to meet Edna Carstairs, too,” Ralph said. “I'll see if we can get her for Friday. I'm sure Pete can make it.”

Pete was the young man. Had Ralph mentioned Edna Carstairs before?

George felt better, as if he had accomplished something, or at least set himself on a positive course. During that week, George kept to twelve cigarettes a day, counting them carefully. One had to make an effort. There was no “second” cigarette in the kitchen ashtray or anywhere else. Slowly but surely he would erase that apparition, that figment, and finally he'd laugh at the memory of it.

Friday after work, George came home to put on a clean shirt before going to the Foremans'. He chose another tie. As he was putting his jacket back on, he became aware of a dismal depression, as if he were exhausted, or had just heard a piece of bad news. George straightened up, even tried to smile at himself in the mirror. It did not help. He could have collapsed on the bed and stayed there all evening. He deliberately strode toward his apartment door, thinking that extra physical effort would wake him up. He glanced aggressively toward his kitchen, walked into it to prove to himself that it was empty.

In the round white ashtray on the kitchen table lay a lighted cigarette, half burned. Had he come into the kitchen when he got home? He didn't think so. He looked in the direction of the sink. Nothing there.

“Ha-ha.” It was a soft, dry laugh behind him, and George turned.

For an instant George saw himself beyond the kitchen door, in the hall that led to the living room. Then the vision vanished.

The laugh and the figure were both imaginary, George thought. But the cigarette? Well, he must have lit one when he came in, thinking of something else, not counting this cigarette, and it would have been half burned, as it was, by the time he had changed his shirt. Was he conquering, winning, just because the vision had disappeared so fast, because the laugh hadn't been so audible as before? George stared boldly into the empty living room, as if defying the thing to reappear. But he did not feel in a conquering mood. The depression still clung to him, and he could feel the corners of his mouth turning down, a frown clamping his brows.

“Damn it to hell and gone!” George said. In that instant he felt that his half hour with the psychiatrist had netted him nothing. George squared his shoulders, and smiled in order to erase the frown. He had an obligation to be pleasant this evening, because he was a guest. He took a taxi to East Eighty-fourth Street.

“George! Welcome—finally!” Ralph Foreman slapped George on the shoulder. “Come in and meet—Edna Carstairs.”

A pretty woman in a longish black and gold dress sat on the sofa, smiled at George, and said, “How do you do?”

“And Peter Buckler—from New York.”

A young man with reddish brown hair and a beaming smile got up and extended a hand to George. “How do you do, sir? Ralph says New York because I'm from upstate. Troy.”

“Graduate of Cornell Law,” Ralph added to George.

Ralph gave George a scotch and water, rather a strong one. Nancy had said hello, but excused herself to go back to the kitchen. The woman called Edna had lovely brown eyes whose lids seemed to turn up at the corners, probably due to makeup, but the effect was beautiful. For this reason George avoided looking at her often. She did not talk much, and laughed only when a laugh was appropriate. She was an editor somewhere, at a publishing house. Ralph maneuvered the conversation so that he could state Peter Buckler's qualifications: a promotion—recently, too—in a firm in which he was not happy, however, for reasons that Ralph made sound valid. George listened, but felt oddly rattled by the heavy colors—dark red with a bit of blue—of the floor-length window curtains, now drawn, opposite him at the street windows. Were they the street windows, or windows on a court? Did it matter? No. Why should he care what was behind those curtains? Did the dark red remind him of his dressing gown?

“We might speak to old Tub. What do you think, George? Introduce Pete. Old Tub can always think of a reason to say no, but I think we could use some new blood.—You with me, George?” said Ralph.

“Yes, why not?” said George. No harm in introducing Peter Buckler, who did look bright and promising. At this moment, the red and blue curtains behind Ralph whirled in a kaleidoscopic way, and formed an image, much vaguer than the others George had seen, of himself in his red dressing gown, with a hint of pajamas at the top. George blinked and looked down at his drink. George was determined: he was not going to countenance the vision tonight, not going to acknowledge its presence. Nancy came in to summon them to dinner, and George was the first to stand up. George felt he had won that round with his hallucination. The vision had been paler. If it ever appeared again, George thought a bit wildly, maybe he should try to seize it, crush it in his arms, join it somehow, or prove to himself that it was nothing but thin air. If there was a next time.

The dining alcove off the kitchen presented a different atmosphere, and George intended to be pleasant, alert, outgoing. The merry faces around him cheered him. And the red wine tasted delicious. Should he invite Edna Carstairs to something? Dinner? The theater? She looked about thirty-eight. Why was she single? What had happened? Well, what had happened to him? Was it a disgrace?

Edna was the first to leave. George thought that Ralph might want to talk a bit with Pete, so George got up also—by this time they had had coffee in the living room—and asked if he might drop Edna off somewhere in a taxi.

“West Sixty-ninth and Broadway?” said Edna, as if she weren't sure it would be convenient for George. “You don't have to, really.”

“A pleasure,” George assured her, then said his thanks to the Foremans for the evening.

In the taxi George asked Edna if she liked going to the theater. All kinds of theater, she told him, except stupid sex comedies. In answer to George's question, she said she was free next Tuesday evening, and George said he would see what he could do about either of the two plays Edna had mentioned. She gave him her card. It had her home address, plus the downtown address of the publishing house where she worked. George said he would telephone her Tuesday to confirm, and he would pick her up around seven
P.M.
George saw her into her apartment building, then returned to his waiting taxi. He felt happy.

His good humor lasted over the weekend. He and Ralph saw that Peter Buckler got an interview Tuesday with Tub, the outcome of which George did not ask.

George was home before six
P.M.
on Tuesday, took a shower and changed into a suit fresh from the cleaners. He felt optimistic and sure of himself, even thrilled by his first date with Edna. It was not that he had any intentions in regard to her. She might merely like him as a friend, as the saying went, but this kind of success, even the prospect of it, picked up George's ego. And she was pretty, the kind of woman he would be proud to escort anywhere. George was about to leave his bedroom when he saw the awful self-image standing to his right, in front of the tall windows, dressed also in the same handsome suit and dark blue bow tie that George wore now. George's shock turned at once to anger, to a desire to erase the vision, to walk out on it, so he started for the door.

“Optimistic,” said the vision cynically.

George stood up straighter. “There is such a thing as joining me. Joining me, physically,” George said, and moved toward the vision, arms outspread, thinking either to make the vision vanish by reaching for it or—or what? Press it into his own body? “What did I do that was so wrong?—I find you fuzzy—as fuzzy as you look!”

“Ah, the fuzziness of life,” said the vision in an amused way. It moved backward, arms also outspread. “What did you do that was so wrong? That's the question and that's for you to answer, isn't it?”

“Join me,” George repeated. “What's this joke all about?” George might as well have been talking to himself, but he felt full of courage at that moment. And as he came close, he could feel a slight resistance in the half-solid figure, as if he were finally touching something. He wanted to press the thing into his own body, and to get rid of it in that manner.

The vision seemed to rock in his arms, and George had the impression that it had several arms instead of two. George's frustration made him angry in a matter of seconds. He opened the French window with his left hand. There was a balcony too narrow to walk out on, and a rail waist-high.

“I'll throw you over if you don't!” George meant, if the vision refused to merge with him. George lifted his knee, but his knee hit nothing. Who was pushing or pulling whom? He seized the jacket front in his right hand and lifted, his left hand under the vision's right arm. “I'll get rid of you!” George said between his teeth, tugged the thing toward the balcony and lifted. He was hardly aware of a weight, yet there was something, enough to make George lose his balance, and the bulk of his weight in chest and shoulders pulled the rest of him over the rail.

George felt space, a quick sense of release. Then there was an instant's time for terror, and the realization that he had made an awful mistake. He hadn't meant to fall out the window himself, not at all!

He fell from the eleventh floor. George's death was attributed to accident, and the psychiatrist Kublick and the doctor Pallantz both suggested “dizziness.”

AFTERWORD

by Paul Ingendaay

I

P
atricia Highsmith's emergence as a writer is shrouded in mystery, ­perhaps unnecessarily so. If we look at her earliest stories, published between 1939 and 1949, we cannot but wonder why they were kept under lock and key for half a century. Highsmith herself may have been one of her harshest critics, as demonstrated by her decision on her twenty-fourth birthday to abandon a novel of almost three hundred pages, “The Click of the Shutting.” In a conversation with Austrian writer Peter Handke she characterized the fragment as “quite different from my later books” and “an odd stylistic mixture of Thomas Wolfe and Marcel Proust.”

Highsmith did not judge her early stories as harshly, and there was no need to reject them so formally. Since her school years she had been experimenting in this genre, so that by her middle twenties she commanded a considerable repertoire of narrative techniques. Among her favorite authors at that time were not only psychological realists such as Dostoevski and Joseph Conrad but also the canonic masters of the short story form: Poe, Stevenson, Henry James, and Hemingway. “What I like best when I write is economy,” she commented in her notebook at nineteen, “and that's why I like Maupassant. What an incredible satisfaction it must be to fashion a story like that!” She then goes on to explain why she uses the term “to fashion”: because in her eyes the technical process of shaping is far superior to simply writing. Because, she adds, it resembles the work of a sculptor, who only liberates his conception by reducing mass—chipping and chiseling away.

This idealism, which was largely based on an economy of means, was from the beginning a component of Patricia Highsmith's artistic thinking. Hardly less urgent was the far more prosaic problem of keeping her head above water in New York. After graduating from Barnard College in 1942, Patricia Highsmith found a position writing texts for comic books. On the side she had the time to do some minor editing and got assignments to write essays for which she was poorly paid. It was apparent from very early on that writing was her “
Lebensmittel
,” her means of living, as she noted in her diary in curious but appropriate German. But why, one wonders today, did it take her a good thirty years, until 1970, to first publish her stories in book form in
Eleven
? And why did she, with few exceptions, leave out her stories written between 1938 and 1949, which comprise the present Part I of her uncollected and mostly unpublished stories?

There is no clear answer to these questions; there are at best hints that require interpretation. Highsmith, who was born in 1921, strove to be independent, worked freelance, and therefore needed money. Whatever she aspired to had to be struggled for. Even when she was a student, we can assume that she had a sharp sense of the commodity value of literature. What she wrote, however, did not always turn out to be marketable, and her native land remained an unreliable partner throughout her life. It may even be guessed that the need for profit and the “impure” conditions under which she wrote her stories—repeated workings of drafts to satisfy editors, shortening the stories, changing the titles, not to mention countless rejections—may have vitiated her own perception of the quality of her writing. The present volume amply proves that her early work contains some remarkable stories.

Highsmith published her first important stories in the student magazine
Barnard Quarterly
, of which she was editor in chief in her senior year (1942). During her college years, she found the time to work with communist youth groups; read avidly in literature and philosophy; and take courses in Latin, Greek, German, and zoology, as well as writing courses on the short story and plays. She was curious, ambitious, and restless, her schedule always on overload. Surprisingly, the Second World War seems not to have entered her consciousness: Roosevelt's death in 1945 is noted in her diaries, but no details of the global earthquake that resulted from World War II. Private concerns, on the other hand, are a major theme. Frequently expressed is her sense of oppression, compounded by her need to return every evening to the constricting apartment of her mother and stepfather on the Upper East Side.

Not that she dutifully returned there every night. As a student Patricia Highsmith had an active social life for which she ultimately put even politics aside, and one can deduce from the earliest surviving entries that her mother was pleased neither by the company she kept nor the “masculinization” of her appearance. Remarkably, despite an imposing sequence of lesbian friendships and brief affairs, Patricia Highsmith could not summon up the courage to tell her mother (who suspected something but did not know) the truth about her sexual orientation. She even submitted for a while to psychotherapy in order to be “cured” of her “condition.” It is fortunate that the travesty of a bourgeois marriage, which she and a friend were considering for a long time, was never celebrated.

There is an obvious connection between her writing and her friendships. On the one hand, Patricia Highsmith wanted to earn money with her typewriter; she saw herself—correctly—as the “strong” half of all her relationships. Yet on the other hand, after a successful so-called conquest, she quickly became bored, jealously defending the time she reserved for writing, and complaining in her diary that she needed to endure the adventure of writing by herself. In 1943, after she was hired by the comics publisher Fawcett, she rented her first apartment, on Fifty-sixth Street on the East Side, quite near her parents.

We know from these first few months away from home a number of things about Patricia Highsmith: that she cleverly painted walls and furniture and in the evenings read Kafka; what she ate, how much money she spent; with whom she socialized, with whom she slept and how often. The picture is more diffuse if one tries to grasp her aesthetic ideas, not because they are unclear but because the insights that pour forth incessantly are not always coherent. Patricia Highsmith had not even decided whether she wanted to be a painter or a writer, a question that was not resolved until 1944.

She experimented with both short and long forms. At twenty she already realized that she was not interested in mere storytelling for the sake of plot and tension. Since she had become more reflective, she felt she would need to write less. Moreover, she was more inclined to the novel than to the short story, because she saw no value in even the best stories. Six months later, however, in August 1941, she is “very, very happy” and dreamily thinks of spinning out short stories as delicate as smoke rings. With these kinds of entries, her thinking seems to have drifted completely away from economic considerations. At twenty-six, she comments on her hope to reconcile at some future stage “commercial” and “artistic” writing, an idea that strikes us as profoundly American.

Commercialism as such, in any case, might have discouraged the author in later years from carefully reviewing the stories of this period and selecting some for book publication. She might have been similarly hesitant given the stories' multiplicity of tones, themes, and stylistic registers. The stories assembled here from posthumous papers in Part I are not mere detective or suspense or animal stories but complex psychological tales—about little girls, middle-aged women and middle-aged men, about accepted and illicit morality. They follow no pattern, no single method. In some cases, they do not even seem to emerge from the same hand.

Looking for the type of character most frequently encountered among the fourteen stories collected in Part I, the reader is in for a surprise. While her novels are mostly about men in their early thirties—the typical Highsmith hero is sensitive, cultivated, well bred, not necessarily handsome but not ugly either, and in no case fat—the young, twenty-five-year-old author finds her most interesting figures in fading women who have to assert themselves in dreary, boring lives. Three stories, which are among the strongest in the collection, present unattached, rather agitated heroines who risk the danger of being run over by the trauma of what has become everyday life. “Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out,” “Doorbell for Louisa,” and “The Still Point of the Turning World” offer three small portraits of souls, written with a mercilessly precise sense of daily routine, surroundings, and weather.

When Mrs. Robinson in “The Still Point of the Turning World” accidentally witnesses a scene on a park bench, she does have an intimation that because of her conventionality and narrow-mindedness she has missed out on much of life. Overcoming her curiosity, she takes her spruce, neatly combed son by the hand and walks past the pair of lovers out of the park. Her last glance as she leaves is the instant in which her character is momentarily revealed: a mixture of envy and pride, longing and self-righteousness.

Patricia Highsmith commented extensively on this story, one in which she repeatedly changes perspective in a way that she otherwise spurned. For one thing, “The Still Point of the Turning World” was written just after the author had separated from an important woman friend. The kiss of the lovers in this story, she wrote, is the kiss of this friend, which she, the author, will no longer experience (and the jealousy that she depicts so brilliantly was at the moment of writing already her own). But she was also happy with her work, and expressed this time and again—in German—in her diary: “God! I feel my power—if I can only maintain the good condition of my mind, my mood!” (This in August of 1947.) And a day later: “Am very happy and full of peace.”

Despite her own sense of accomplishment,
Harper's Bazaar
rejected the story. That October,
Today's Woman
expressed interest. In November, however, she heard from an editor at the magazine who advised “smoother transitions.” In the pages of her diary the author explodes: “Just what I did
not
want!” But she reconsidered and revised the text. In December, the story was sold to
Today's Woman
for eight hundred dollars. It appeared sixteen months later, in March 1949, under a different title. Quite a few compromises for eight hundred dollars.

In a certain sense, the two other stories about middle-aged women—“Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out” and “Doorbell for Louisa”—can be read as complementary interpretations of one and the same observation: What happens when a person gives herself over to the dictates of her compulsive work and organizing delusions? If she collapses, who notices it? If she holds out, who rewards her? “Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out” describes a minutely detailed defeat in a struggle against the big city, circumstances, and the clock. But here the woman, who in spite of the best of intentions makes a mess of everything, prefers to hang on to the life she has chosen for herself. Like a hamster on its wheel she will remain frantically in motion until her heart gives out. Louisa Trotte, the main character in the other story, is of a similar stripe. But here, in a story about sacrifice and solidarity, everything turns out well: Louisa's work is not in vain, but useful and appreciated. At the end, her employer even invites her out for dinner, which Louisa hopes will be at the Plaza Hotel— more than just a hint of a happy ending. And yet the two stories do resemble each other in that their final sentences are totally open to possibility, a kingdom in which the happy are apparently no happier than the failures.

The middle-aged women in Part I have a male colleague and comrade in misery, as in the story “Magic Casements.” Highsmith's male characters are somewhat more passive and melancholy. Such a person, sad and worked over by life (but not lacking for money), meets a woman who attracts and fascinates him. They start talking in his favorite bar, have a few drinks, seem to understand each other in some intuitive way, make a date on which their exchange seems to reach a note even more intimate. At the next rendezvous on the following day, in a museum, the woman doesn't show. The man finds out that she has left town. He stays behind, alone.

This is a recurrent theme throughout Highsmith's stories. Yet their desolate sense of daily routine, briefly interrupted by an enchantment brought on by a meeting of like-minded souls, only to be followed by disappointment—the deadened steps of a figure abandoned to mourning—has been captured in exquisite detail. “Magic Casements” is one of those stories sketched in the notebook with great precision, almost overelaborated, and the actual writing seeks to free the story from a plot that has become too complicated. There is no doubt that Patricia Highsmith's ambition in her early short fiction was to be a craftsperson, without regard to commercial success.

Some of Highsmith's older stories slumber in a dim past; others seize a later generation more strongly than they did their first readers, such as they were. The latter is the case with “A Mighty Nice Man,” written about 1940, a story from Highsmith's college days, and “The Mightiest Mornings.” At the center of both stories is the relationship between an adult man and a small girl he does not know. But the theme of pedophilia (in the 1940s one spoke of the “bad uncle”) plays no role on the surface of “A Mighty Nice Man.” Patricia Highsmith seems above all interested in what the little girl—and later, her clumsily flirting mother—sees in the stranger who owns the fine car. In this sense the story is quite radical. For with her innocent gaze, the child “recognizes” something that adults at best deduce as subtext: the conditions of sexual transaction.