The Company She Keeps (13 page)

For ten years, he confided, he had been visited now and then by a queer sense of having missed the boat, but it was all vague with him: he had no idea of when the boat had sailed or what kind of boat it was or where it went to. If he had married Eleanor? But she was not the type; after eight years they had both seen that and were still good friends. Would he have done better to take the teaching job? It hardly seemed so. Plainly, he was no scientist—the steel company had seen this at once—and, had he taken that other road, at best he would have finished as the principal of a high school or the head of the chemistry department in a small-time state university. No, she thought, he was not a scientist
manqué,
but simply a nice man, and it was a pity that society had offered him no nicer way of being nice than the job of buying materials for a company in Little Steel. The job, she saw, was one of the least compromising jobs he could have held and still made money; by regarding his business life as a nexus of personal friendships he had tried to hold himself aloof from both the banks and the blast furnaces. He was full of fraternal feelings, loyalties, even, toward the tin salesmen and iron magnates and copper executives and their wives who wined him and dined him and took him to the latest musical shows over and over again. (“Don’t mistake me,” he said, “most of those fellows and their women are mighty fine people.”) Still—there was always the contract, waiting to be signed the next morning, lying implacably on the desk.

Here he was, affable, a good mixer, self-evidently a sound guy, and yet these qualities were somehow impeached by the commercial use that was made of them, so that he found himself, as he grew older, hunting, more and more anxiously, for new and non-commercial contexts in which to assert his gregariousness. He refused the conventional social life of Cleveland. At the country club dances, he was generally to be found in the bar, shooting dice with the bartender; he played a little stud poker, but no bridge. In New York, he would stay at the Biltmore or the Murray Hill, buy his clothes at Brooks Brothers, and eat—when Leonie was not with him—at Cavanagh’s, Luchow’s, or the Lafayette. But the greater part of his time he spent on trains, talking to his fellow-passengers, getting their life stories. (“Golly,” he interjected, “if I were a writer like you!”) This was one of his greatest pleasures, he said, and he would never go by plane if he could help it. In the three and a half days that it took a train to cross the continent, you could meet somebody who was a little bit different, and have a good long visit with them. Sometimes, also, he would stop over and look up old friends, but lately that had been disappointing—so many of them were old or on the wagon, suffering from ulcers or cirrhosis of the liver….

He spread his hands suddenly. There it was, he indicated; he was sharing it all with her, like a basket lunch. And, as she accepted it, nodding from time to time in pleasure and recognition, supplementing it occasionally from her own store, she knew that the actual sharing of his life was no longer so much in question. During this afternoon of confidences, he had undergone a catharsis. He was at rest now, and happy, and she was free. He would never be alone again, she thought; in fact, it was as if he had never been alone at all, for by a tremendous act of perception, she had thrust herself back into his past, and was settled there forever, like the dear companion, the twin, we pray for as children, while our parents, listening, laugh. She had brought it off, and now she was almost reluctant to leave him. A pang of joy went through her as she examined her own sorrow and found it to be real. All day she believed she had been acting a tragic part in something called
One Perfect Night,
but slowly, without her being aware of it, the counterfeit had passed into the true. She did not understand exactly how it had happened. Perhaps it was because she had come so very, very close—
tout comprendre, c’est tout aimer
—and perhaps it was because she was good at the task he had assigned her: at the sight of his life, waiting to be understood, she had rolled up her sleeves with all the vigor of a first-class cook confronting a brand-new kitchen.

“I love you,” she said suddenly. “I didn’t before, but now I do.”

The man glanced sharply at her.

“Then you won’t get off the train …?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, for now at last she could be truthful with him. “I’ll certainly get off. One reason I love you, I suppose, is because I
am
getting off.”

His dark eyes met hers in perfect comprehension.

“And one reason I’m going to let you do it,” he said, “is because you love me.”

She lowered her eyes, astonished, once more, at his shrewdness.

“Hell,” he said, “it’s a funny thing, but I’m so happy now that I don’t care whether I ever see you again. I probably won’t feel that way after you’re gone. Right now I think I can live on this one day for the rest of my life.”

“I hope you can,” she said, her voice trembling with sincerity. “My dear, dear Mr. Breen, I hope you can.” Then they both began to laugh wildly because she could not call him by his first name.

Still, he had not quite relinquished the idea of marrying her, and, once, very late in the afternoon, he struck out at her with unexpected, clumsy ferocity.

“You need a man to take care of you,” he exclaimed. “I hate to see you go back to that life you’ve been living in New York. Your father ought to make you stay home in Portland. In a few years, you’ll be one of those Bohemian horrors with oily hair and long earrings. It makes me sick to think about it.”

She pressed her lips together, and was amazed to find how hurt she was. It was unthinkable that he should speak of her way of life with such contempt; it was as if he had made a point of telling her that her gayest, wickedest, most extravagant hat was ugly and out of fashion.

“But you fell in love with me because I
am
Bohemian,” she said, forcing herself to smile, to take a wise and reasonable tone.

“No,” he said, in a truculently sentimental voice. “It’s because underneath all that you’re just a sweet girl.”

She shook her head impatiently. It was not true, of course, but it was hopeless to argue with him about it. Clearly, he took some cruel satisfaction in telling her that she was different from what she was. That implied that he had not fallen in love with her at all, but with some other person: the whole extraordinary little idyll had been based on a misunderstanding. Poor Marianna, she thought, poor pickings, to be loved under cover of darkness in Isabella’s name! She did not speak for a long time.

Night fell again, and the little dinner that was presently served lacked the glamour of the earlier meals. The Union Pacific’s menu had been winnowed out; they were reduced to steak and Great Big Baked Potatoes. She wished that they were out in the diner, in full view, eating some unusual dish and drinking a bottle of white wine. Even here in the compartment, she had hoped that he would offer her wine; the waiter suggested it, but the man shook his head without consulting her; his excesses in drink and love were beginning to tell on him; he looked tired and sick.

But by ten o’clock, when they were well out of Reno, she had warmed to him again. He had been begging her to let him send her a present; the notion displeased her at first; she felt a certain arrogant condescension in it; she refused to permit it, refused, even, to give him her address. Then he looked at her suddenly, with all the old humility and square self-knowledge in his brown eyes.

“Look,” he said, “you’ll be doing me a kindness. You see, that’s the only thing a man like me can do for a woman is buy her things and love her a hell of a lot at night. I’m different from your literary boy friends and your artistic boy friends. I can’t write you a poem or paint your picture. The only way I can show that I love you is to spend money on you.”

“Money’s your medium,” she said, smiling, happy in this further insight he had given her, happy in her own gift of concise expression.

He nodded and she gave her consent. It must, however, be a very
small
present, and it must not, on any account, be jewelry, she said, not knowing precisely why she imposed this latter condition.

As they moved into the last hour of the trip, the occasion took on an elegiac solemnity. They talked very little; the man held both of her hands tightly. Toward the end, he broke the silence to say, “I want you to know that this has been the happiest day of my life.” As she heard these words, a drowsy, sensuous contentment invaded her; it was as if she had been waiting for them all along; this was the climax, the spiritual orgasm. And it was just as she had known from the very first: in the end, he had not let her down. She had not been wrong in him after all.

They stood on the platform as the train came into Sacramento. It was after three in the morning. Her luggage was piled up around them; one suitcase had a missing handle and was tied up with a rope. The man made a noise of disapproval.

“Your father,” he said, “is going to feel terrible when he sees
that.
”

The girl laughed; the train slowed down; the man kissed her passionately several times, ignoring the porter who waited beside them with a large, Hollywood-darky smile on his face.

“If I were ten years younger,” the man said, in a curious, measured tone, as if he were taking an oath, “I’d never let you get off this train.” It sounded, she thought, like an apology to God.

In the station the air was hot and thick. She sat down to wait, and immediately she was damp and grubby; her stockings were wrinkled; her black suede shoes had somehow got dusty, and, she noticed for the first time, one of the heels was run over. Her trip home seemed peculiarly pointless, for she had known for the last twelve hours that she was never going to marry the young man back in New York.

On the return trip, her train stopped in Cleveland early in the morning. In a new fall suit she sat in the club car, waiting. Mr. Breen hurried into the car. He was wearing a dark-blue business suit and had two packages in his hand. One of them was plainly a florist’s box. She took it from him and opened it, disclosing two of the largest and most garish purple orchids she had ever seen. He helped her pin them on her shoulder and did not appear to notice how oddly they harmonized with her burnt-sienna jacket. The other box contained a bottle of whisky;
in memoriam,
he said.

They had the club car to themselves, and for the fifteen minutes the train waited in the station he looked at her and talked. It seemed to her that he had been talking ever since she left him, talking volubly, desperately, incoherently, over the long-distance telephone, via air mail, by Western Union and Postal Telegraph. She had received from him several pieces of glamour-girl underwear and a topaz brooch, and had been disappointed and a little humiliated by the taste displayed. She was glad now that the train stopped at such an outlandish hour, for she felt that he cut a ridiculous figure, with his gifts in his hand, like a superannuated stage-door Johnny.

She herself had little to say, and sat passive, letting the torrent of talk and endearment splash over her. Sooner or later, she knew, the law of diminishing returns would begin to operate, and she would cease to reap these overwhelming profits from the small investment of herself she had made. At the moment, he was begging her to marry him, describing a business conference he was about to attend, and asking her approval of a vacation trip he was planning to take with his wife. Of these three elements in his conversation, the first was predominant, but she sensed that already she was changing for him, becoming less of a mistress and more of a confidante. It was significant that he was not (as she had feared) hoping to ride all the way to New York with her: the business conference, he explained, prevented that.

It never failed, she thought, to be a tiny blow to guess that a man is losing interest in you, and she was tempted, as on such occasions she always had been, to make some gesture that would quicken it again. If she let him think she would sleep with him, he would stay on the train, and let the conference go by the board. He had weighed the conference, obviously, against a platonic interlude, and made the sensible decision. But she stifled her vanity, and said to herself that she was glad that he was showing some signs of self-respect; in the queer, business-English letters he had written her, and on the phone for an hour at a time at her father’s house, he had been too shockingly abject.

She let him get off the train, still talking happily, pressed his hand warmly but did not kiss him.

It was three weeks before he came to see her in her New York apartment, and then, she could tell, he was convalescent. He had become more critical of her and more self-assured. Her one and a half rooms in Greenwich Village gave him claustrophobia, he declared, and when she pointed out to him that the apartment was charming, he stated flatly that it was not the kind of place he liked, nor the kind of place she ought to be living in. He was more the businessman and less the suitor, and though he continued to ask her to marry him, she felt that the request was somewhat formal; it was only when he tried to make love to her that his real, hopeless, humble ardor showed itself once more. She fought him off, though she had an inclination to yield, if only to re-establish her ascendancy over him. They went to the theater two nights, and danced, and drank champagne, and the third morning he phoned her from his hotel that he had a stomach attack and would have to go home to Cleveland with a doctor.

More than a month went by before she saw him again. This time he refused to come to her apartment, but insisted that she meet him at his suite in the Ambassador. They passed a moderate evening: the man contented himself with dining at Longchamps. He bought her a large Brie cheese at the Voisin down the street, and told her an anti-New-Deal joke. Just below the surface of his genial manner, there was an hostility that hurt her. She found that she was extending herself to please him. All her gestures grew over-feminine and demonstrative; the lift of her eyebrows was a shade too arch: like a
passée
belle, she was overplaying herself. I must let go, she told herself; the train is pulling out; if I hang on, I’ll be dragged along at its wheels. She made him take her home early.