The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (66 page)

He put his hand in his lap, inspected it. “I’m through,” he said. “At the doctor’s.” He gave her a quick, guilty look, and concentrated again on the hand. Except for the first of the month, when the bills came in, it had been a matter of rigid convention never to mention the doctor.

“For good?” she said.

“He thinks. I hope.”

She swung her legs down to the floor on the other side of the bed. After a minute, she padded around in front of him and sat down at the dressing table with her back to him, opened a drawer, took out a hairbrush, ran a finger over the bristles. He waited for her to speak, turn at least, but she began brushing her hair, slapping the brush against her head with a tired halfhearted stroke.

He gave a self-conscious laugh, and again, the surreptitious look. “Ring out, wild bells,” he said.

“I’m sorry—” She turned. He waited, he told himself, for her to drop the damn brush.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, “sorry I can’t be more … oh well—” She looked down at the brush. “I know you expected me to be … well … waiting.” Then she put down the brush and the words came with a rush, a bitterness. “At the door. Or a street corner, maybe. With a lei, or something.”

The quick acid of the words surprised him. She was slow and honest in all she did, with no deft talent either with the paring knife or the tongue.

“Forget it,” he said, the dread of a scene opening like a funnel before him.

“No,” she said, laboring now. “I suppose … in a way I
was
waiting.” She raised her head. “Did you ever ask your doctor that … ask him what happens to people waiting on the sidelines for people like you to—” She stopped.

“To what?”

“To get over their love affair—with themselves.”

“Love affair!”

“Ah, you know you loved it,” she said. “Spinning out yourself. Because meanwhile you didn’t have to
do
anything—about anything or anybody.”

“Would it have been better if I’d had T.B.? Something that showed?”

She put her hand out toward him, almost touching his knee, then drew it back. “I kept thinking of them all the time—all the wives, and husbands, and parents of the people going to your doctor. On the outside all the time, smoothing things over, picking up the pieces—holding their breath. What are we supposed to do? Stop living?”

“If you felt like that, why didn’t you say some—”

“Oh no,” she said quickly. “I wasn’t supposed to interrupt—or intrude!”

It was true, he thought. What she had represented these three years had been the damaging real—which he had avoided even as he fought his way toward it.

“I know it hasn’t been easy for you,” he said humbly. “Perhaps that was part of my trouble … that I didn’t think enough about that. But now—”

“What’s ‘now’?” She looked down at her clenched hands. “People like me will always be on the outside … with people like you.”

He got up heavily from the bed and crossed to the window. God save us, he thought, us—the equivocal ones—from the ones who see life steadily, and see it whole. From those who can’t bury or evade the truth, but have to drag it out and beat it like a carpet. Who can say the raw, the open thing, that can never be glozed over again.

He stared out the window, twisting one hand around and around in his pants pocket. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go up to the Ewarts’.”

“No. I don’t want to go after all.”

“Well, for God’s sake,” he said, sore with his new effort, “you’re always the one who’s trying to drag me!”

“Because it was better than being alone together.” She shrugged, smiling crookedly up at him. “Besides … Saturday night … one always hopes for the best.”

“Come on then.” He met the smile with a placating one of his own.

“No, It’s just more of the same.”

“The same?”

“You know,” she said. “Like a record we all play once a week. Jim, hanging around, waiting for Esther to get drunk enough so she’ll go home, and Karen watching Lou for her reasons, and me watching you for mine. I just don’t want any part of it any more.”

He watched it almost jealously, that soft, flexible look of hers, which concealed the enviable certitude, the stubborn strength to reject, to decide.

“Well, what do you want to do?”

She looked away from him consciously. “I thought I’d go back home for a while. If you’re really on your feet now.”

“For a while? Or for good?” he said. For good, he thought. That’s what she asked, only a little while ago.

She was silent.

“What makes you think Utica, or any other place, isn’t more of the same, these days?” he said.

“It doesn’t matter where. I just can’t go on being an adjunct—any more!”

“And Libby?” He softened his voice suddenly, as if their joint concern might wake her, where their forgetfulness had not.

She put her head down in her hands, rubbing her concealed face back and forth. She’ll cry now, he thought, although he could not remember when he had last seen her cry, and he waited, almost with relief, for with women, the lucky women, this meant the dissolving of an issue, the haggled end of emotion—but she went on defeatedly rocking.

“Come on,” he said, after a moment. “I’ll fix us a drink.” He waited, and then put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll have a party by ourselves.”

In the kitchen, his hands took over the mixing of the Martinis, picking out and combining the gin, the vermouth, the lemon peel, with disembodied competence. “This is real enough for you!” he thought. “Isn’t it? Isn’t it?” he said defensively to the dry voice in the anonymous room.

He thought of the crowd upstairs now at the Ewarts’, in the pattern, as Dorothy had said, pooling all their uncertainties of the week, drowning them in the fabricated bonhomie of Saturday night. The Ewarts, Syl and Harry, were a few years older than the average couple in the building and were both “in business”; perhaps it was a combination of these facts which led them into great spurts of energy, in which droves of people must be enlisted to help them kill the weekend’s frightening acreage of time. To their coarse-grained parties there came, patronizingly, the fledgling physicists, the writers on their way to a foothold, the confused but verbose young men with their foetally promising jobs in the government, in the State Department, or, like himself, in the universities. They came because they were at loose ends, or at odds with themselves or the wife, or roughened with the loneliness of the city, or, let it be said, because the Ewarts could serve the liquor they themselves could infrequently afford. And with each of them came the wife, in the new hair-do, the primary colored dress with its attempted primary appeal—all the intelligent, frustrated girls, fleeing from the diapers toward an evening in which they could forget their altered conceptions of themselves.

He held the Martini mixer up to the light, and stirred, forestalling the thought of Dorothy and himself with critical thoughts of the others. It’s true, what she said, he thought. Esther, having to drink herself into insensibility more and more often, with Jim doggedly watching, and Karen, flitting grimly, unobtrusively into the kitchen now and then to see that Lou’s reflex skirt-chasing doesn’t get him in more trouble than he can handle. And me, wrapped up in a corner. “For once let’s not think about me!” he said defiantly to the voice in the repudiated room. And through it all the Ewarts hurried like high-class orderlies, bright with reassurances to the sufferers, administering glasses, plates of food, or winks in the direction of the bathroom.

The sufferers, he thought. The prowlers in retreat from themselves. He put two glasses on a tray and looked at the light through the mixer for a last delaying time. It stared back at him like an unanswerable, viscous, lemon-watery eye.

He walked back with it into the bedroom. Dorothy was stretched out on the bed again, staring into the pillow.

“Want to go in the other room, or stay here?”

“Oh leave me be. Leave me be.”

He put the tray on the dressing table and sat down beside her with a brisk, overemphasized resolve.

“Come on,” he said, urging her up to a sitting position. “This’ll fix you up. We’ll rustle up some dinner later.”

They sat on the side of the bed together, sipping, not saying anything, as if they both sucked desperately at some potion of last resource. After a while he put a drink-loosened arm around her, using his other arm to refill the glasses, and they sat on in the growing dark, finishing the second drink, the third, watching with careful fixity the lambent points of their cigarettes. Outside the window, the light-studded evening converged, ramified, without them.

A tremor in her shoulder made him know, suddenly, that she was crying, and trying to conceal it. He was cleft with pity, and even a kind of possessive pride because she was the sort of woman who did not cry for show.

“Ah don’t,” he said. “Ah don’t.”

She gave her head an angry, backward shake. “I’m not trying to … oh you know!” she said, in a strangled whisper.

“I know.” He tightened the arm that was around her, and put his other hand blindly toward her. It met her face. She moved her face back and forth in his palm, and he felt the hot sidle of tears through his fingers.

“I’m afraid,” she said. “That’s all it is.”

“Afraid?” he said, delicately handling the sharp tool of the word. “What are you afraid of?”

“That’s it. I don’t know. I never used to be.”

He held her as she sobbed, knowing that for this, on which of all things he should have been most knowledgeable, there was no answer that he could give. But it seemed to him that the edged word, coming through the sweetish, gin-fogged air, came like a bond, a link which slit through the cocoon around himself. He began to kiss her with a kind of heavy sympathy for them both. Turning, they stretched out on the bed and made use of one another in a final spasm of escape.

Long after she slept he lay awake in the dark, which had a pallid incompleteness from the deflected street lights outside. After a while he got up noiselessly and looked at the glowing disc of the clock. It was only nine o’clock. He crossed to the other bed, his own, near the window, and picked up the sleeping child. Holding her, on his way to the crib in her own room, her warm, inert weight seemed to him like a burden he was inadequate to carry. “Parents like us!” he thought. This must be why we avoid them, the children, because they are the mirror we make for ourselves. They are the alternative of no evasion, on whose knife we are impaled. He put her down, tucking the light blanket carefully around her, and went back into the other room.

Through the window he saw and heard it—the Saturday night pattern—its neon blotted by haze, its multiplying, loose roar jingled into softness by the tricky distances of spring. It seemed to him that he heard in it, in that heightened blend of the hundreds of gurgling, cheeping noises of daily living, some of which were quickened for him by memories of aspiration or love, but now never more than quickened—that he heard all around him the endless echolalia of his time, his world, his trap. They were all down in the ditch with him, the prowlers, and the weak alarums of their malaise lacked even the dignity of the old ecclesiastical cry: “Father, what are we? And whither do we go?” For, in our cleverness, he thought, we know what we are, and in the sadness of no mystery, we know where we are going.

He looked down at the other sleeping figure, wondering what there was in the construction, the being of a face, that had once made it his vital necessity, and that now, by some combination of circumstance and familiarity as brutal as it was quiet, had been attenuated past recall. He looked down, waiting, wishing for a sense of ruin. For ruin implied salvage; it implied the loss of something dear. Where there was a sense of ruin, there might also be a sense of hope.

A
T NIGHT, FLORENCE HAS
no tourists. All along the tables dotted in front of this particularly famous café, people sat close together in the half-light, musing, chatting—though it was midnight—in little infernos of talk that celebrated the hour. On the pavement before the tables an unending line of strollers repeated its themes; how many times, for instance, had there not seemed to pass the same pair of high-stepping, black-crepe-and-honey women—or were they girls?—the pout of their calves and pompadours drawn by the same dusky brush, between shoulder and chin always the same long, half-agonized line of throat? Both sitters and promenaders were alike in that each line thought itself audience to the other; for each, its side was the land of the living, the other side the stage.

“I must have been about your age, about nineteen”—the woman speaking, hidden in the shadows beyond the high-backed chair of her invisible vis-à-vis, either thought them both concealed, or did not care who saw or heard—“maybe nineteen and a half, for we were still counting our years in halves then. That gorgeous spring I spent whirling through first love with a boy named Ben. And planning to murder a professor named Tyng. You ever notice, incidentally, that ‘gorgeous’ has quite dropped out of the language? Must have gone during the depression; we all came out of those years so very stripped and staccato, cleansed of everything from fake Renaissance furniture to the acting style of Sir Henry Irving. And slang had to be just like the plays—short words, full of compassion.

“Anyway … it was the spring of my junior or senior year. I’m not good about dates and time, and that goes for geography too; facts of when or where don’t interest me. A person like me’s memory is likely to be long, but schoolbook accuracy is seldom its forte. Right in the middle of a conversation, an experience, it goes on selecting, exaggerating, and what we’re doomed to remember—believe me,
doomed—
is … Oh, well, not so much the facts as the
feeling.
…

“But that’s just the sort of thing you have to keep in mind about people like us, about me … in what I seem to be going to tell you. Yes, I know you’re interested, or you wouldn’t have looked me up. Just remember, though, that even when we’re at our quietest—and we can be quiet—words are our reflex. We spend our lives putting things into words.”