The Company She Keeps (23 page)

He longed to act, he told himself, yet the vague enormity of his situation furnished an apparently permanent excuse for inaction. He believed that he was waiting for an issue big enough to take a stand on, but now all issues seemed flimsy, incapable of supporting his increasing weight. In a curious way, his ego had become both shrunken and enlarged; his sense of inadequacy had made him self-important. He began to talk a good deal about “petty” squabbles, tempests in teapots, molehills and mountains. If he were to resign from the
Liberal,
he said to himself, he would have to do so in his own way, for his own reasons. To resign on behalf of some Eighth Street intellectual would be to accept that intellectual as his ally, to step off the high ground of the
Liberal
into the noisome marsh of sectarian politics. And, above all, Jim feared that terrible quicksand, which would surely, he thought, swallow him up alive, if he so much as set a foot over the edge. Here was the paradox: though his immunity from the Stalinist attacks was the immediate cause of his sense of shame (to be spared, ostentatiously, in a general massacre is a distinction reserved for spies, old men, children, and imbeciles), Jim nevertheless found it temperamentally impossible to venture directly into the melee. What he sought was some formula by which he could demonstrate his political seriousness without embroiling himself in any way—a formula which would, in fact, perpetuate his anomalous situation. It was an irony that Jim did not perceive. He only knew that he must postpone action (for the moment, at least), while he yearned at the same time to be acted
upon.

If the managing editor would only fire him, for example, he would be free, and nothing he did afterwards could be held against him. He might get a job in an advertising agency, or on one of the news magazines; he would be quit at last of leftist politics, and no one could blame him. “Jim Barnett lost his job over that Trotsky business,” they would say. “The poor guy is working for
Newsreel
now.” The picture of himself as a victim of circumstances, an object of public sympathy, did not displease him; in fact what his heart cried for was some such outcome for his dilemma, an outcome in which his own helplessness should be underlined.

The managing editor, however, seemed not at all disposed to give him this friendly push, and his self-regard would not permit him simply to disengage himself from the struggle as he might have done from a street brawl. In some way, he felt, he was condemned to “stick it out,” perhaps indefinitely, and to pay for his non-intervention by sleeplessness, indigestion, and outbursts of irritability with Nancy.

Nevertheless, when the moment came, Jim found it perfectly simple to quit. The managing editor came into his office one afternoon and told him that in accordance with the magazine’s new budget, Miss Sargent would have to go. It was purely a matter of seniority; she was the newest employee; it was only fair that she should be the first, et cetera.

“I wish it hadn’t worked out that way,” she continued, biting her lips and speaking in a confidential tone. “You know how excitable she is, Jim. She’ll be sure to think that it has something to do with politics. That letter, you know …”

Jim smiled grimly. The
Liberal,
after months of silence, had endorsed the Moscow trials, and “that letter” was a denunciation of the magazine. It had been signed by Miss Sargent, by a number of ex-contributors to the
Liberal,
and by Jim himself.

“But, of course,” the managing editor went on, “I forgot! You signed it too. So that shows …” She spread out her hands, leaving the sentence unfinished. “You know I would never deny anybody the right of criticism. I’m glad you spoke out if you felt that way. And Miss Sargent, of course, too. And the fact that
you’re
continuing on the paper speaks for itself. Still …” She paused. “It’s the effect on her I’m worried about. She’s too bitter already. There’s too
much
bitterness in the radical movement. I think we agree about that.”

She was silent for a moment. Jim waited.

“Oh, Jim,” she burst out at length. “I wish
you
would break it to her. Explain it to her. She’d take it all right coming from you, since you agree with each other politically. You could make her understand …”

“You go to hell, Helen,” Jim said. The words came as naturally as a reflex and even in his first joy, Jim found time to tell himself that it had been morbid to worry about the matter beforehand. You waited until the right time came and then you acted, without thought, without plan, and your character—your character that you had suspected so unjustly—did not betray you.

The managing editor gasped. Jim took his brown coat and hat from the stand and walked deliberately out of the office. He went down the street to a bar he knew and ordered a Scotch and soda. When he was halfway through the drink, he stepped into the phone booth and called up Miss Sargent at the office.

“Come on down here,” he said, “and help me write a letter of resignation.”

He went back to wait for her at his table, and suddenly he found himself thinking of a book he would like to write. It would deal with the transportation industries and their relation to the Marxist idea of the class struggle. He thought of the filling stations strung out over America, like beads on the arterial highways, and of the station attendants he had seen in the Southwest, each man lonely as a lighthouse keeper in his Socony or his Shell castle: how were you going to organize them as you could organize workers in a factory? He thought also of the chain-store employees as the frontiersmen of a new kind of empire: The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company—the name had the ring of the age of exploration; it brought to mind the Great South Sea Bubble. Monopoly capitalism was deploying its forces, or, rather, it was obliging its historic enemy, the workers, to deploy theirs. As financial and political power became more concentrated, industry was imperceptibly being decentralized. The CIO might find the answer; on the other hand, perhaps the principle of industrial unionism was already superannuated. There was a great book here somewhere, an important contribution, and now he would have the time to write it. It would have been out of the question of course, had he stayed on the
Liberal….

“Oh boy!” he said to himself, revolving the book in his mind, marveling at it, accepting it as a sort of heavenly tip for services rendered. He clacked his tongue appreciatively against the roof of his mouth. The bartender looked over at him in surprise, and Jim chuckled to himself. He was tremendously elated. He could hardly wait to get home to tell Nancy, and at the same time, he felt a large tenderness toward the girl who was even now making her way toward him through the snowy streets. He owed it all to her,
of course.
Hadn’t she told him from the very beginning that the
Liberal
was a dead end, that if he wanted to make anything of himself, he would have to get off it? And it was on account of her, in the end, that he had been able to do it. If they had not decided to fire her, he might never have … He stopped short in his reverie, momentarily sobered. In his excitement he had almost forgotten that she had lost her job. Here he was, ready to begin his real work, but for her the prospect was not bright. No doubt she would be glad to hear that she had made such a nuisance of herself that the managing editor could brook it no longer; there would be the surge of leftist piety, the joy of self-immolation. But, practically speaking, it was going to be hard on her. He himself had money saved, and, with Nancy’s income, he could get along well enough. The girl was not so fortunately equipped: he could guess without asking that she had not saved a cent (she was probably in debt), and it would not be easy for her to find another job.
She is going to have a tough time,
he said to himself. And she was not going to like it. She would dramatize her position for a week or so, but when it came down to it, she was not going to enjoy being poor, for Trotsky or anybody else. The thought of the discomfort she would have to endure bit into his happiness; it annoyed him that she should behave with such irresponsibility. She had no right, he told himself, to play for high stakes when she could not afford to lose; it was not ethical; it made the other players at the table uncomfortable. Already,
in absentia,
she had robbed him of a little of his joy.

With a slight effort he brought himself back to the projected book. The excitement revived as he imagined the gray winter afternoons in the public library, the notes on white cards in the varnished yellow box, the olive-green filing cabinet he would install in the spare room. “A second
Das Kapital,
” a voice within him murmured, but though he stilled it peremptorily, he could not help but grin in an awkward, lopsided way, as though someone had paid him an absurd, delicious compliment. The strange thing was, it was the girl’s voice that had spoken; perhaps, he thought, in years to come, she would read the book and
would
say that to him. By the time the door swung open and she stepped quickly into the bar, he felt very much pleased with her.

He rose to meet her; she extended her hands. He seized them both; they were very cold.

“I lost my gloves,” she said.

How feminine of her, he thought, how ungrammatical, how charming! In the last few weeks he had been very unfair to her. This was no Zetkin, no Luxemburg. If the truth were known, she was probably as much out of her depth in sectarian politics as he was. He squeezed her hands.

She sat down.

“Well,” he said. “You’ve lost your job.”

“Oh,” she murmured, looking grave for an instant. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose it was about time. But you—” He watched her get the idea. “Did you—?”

“I walked out,” he said.

He stared into his glass and hoped that she was not going to be effusive. When he finally looked up at her, however, he saw that she was blushing slightly.

“Thank you very much,” she said. “I suppose I ought to tell you that you shouldn’t have done it.”

“Never mind,” he said. “It was a good thing to do, anyway. I feel wonderful. I’m going to write a book. It all just came to me while I’ve been sitting here, though I guess the idea must have been in the back of my mind for quite a while.”

He told her about the book.

“It’s a very good idea,” she said at last.

“You ought to write a book yourself.”

She shook her head.

“A fortune teller told me I was born to fritter away my talents. I wouldn’t want to go against my destiny.”

He grinned at her. It was a silly remark, and characteristic, too, but it was no longer within her power to make him angry. He could barely recall a time when he had wrestled with her all night in a terrible ideological embrace, though it was not yet twenty-four hours since Nancy had spoken from the next bed and begged him to go into the living room if he could not stop tossing.

She went on talking excitedly and he ordered two more drinks. He had forgotten about the letter of resignation, and he did not want her to go. He had gradually become aware that he would like to sleep with her, but he did not know how to broach the suggestion. The fact that it would not be the first time made it more difficult. All those months in which he had not wanted to sleep with her would have to be wiped out with some brief, tactful sentence, but no satisfactory one occurred to him, partly because he was puzzled as to why, on the one hand, he should want to sleep with her now, and why, on the other, he should not have been sleeping with her all along, since she was undoubtedly an attractive girl.

“I was not free …” he muttered, experimentally, to himself. But it would not do. She might want to know in what sense he was free now, and had not been before. In relation to Nancy, he was still tied. Did he mean that his time was now his own, that an afternoon of love could—without too much difficulty—be occasionally slipped into his new schedule? No, he thought decidedly, he did not mean that. The idea of a systematic infidelity was offensive to him; the very notion of assignations, trysts, affected him in much the same way that the notion of crop rotation affects the American farmer. It would not be right, he told himself. You oughtn’t to plan a thing like that. Besides, he would be too busy. The new book would need all his energies. It was just this once that he wanted her. “I was not free,” he repeated, troubled by these words that had risen to his mind, feeling that they were true in some way that he had not put his finger on. It was as if he had paid off a nagging creditor, a creditor whom for months he had not dared to face, but to whom he could now open the door with the utmost geniality, knowing that there was nothing the man could do to him, knowing that his former fears had been groundless, that the creditor was just a human being like himself.

“You really are a sweet girl,” he said, “even if you do act like a Trotskyite dragon.”

After the third drink he took her home in a taxi. He decided not to say anything but merely followed her up the stairs and kissed her as she stood in the doorway. She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back with a look of astonishment; for a moment, he thought she was going to bar the way to him. She dropped her hands, however, and went on into the apartment. She sank into a chair. He shut the door behind him and waited.

“I’m sorry, Jim,” she said. “I’d like to celebrate your resigning and the book and everything, but I just can’t.”

“It’s not a question of a celebration,” he said stiffly.

“Well …” she conceded, as if not disposed to argue. Her whole aspect was vague and weary. There was a look of strained kindness about her, as she sat in the chair, her coat falling loosely about her; she might have been a schoolteacher kept after hours.

“Margaret,” he said, “I can’t explain, but the set-up wasn’t right before. Working in the same office …”

“Yes,” she agreed. “It would have been a terrible mess.” She smiled.

“It hasn’t been any picnic for me, Margaret,” he said in an aggrieved tone. “I still feel the same way about you.”

“That’s wonderful,” she said with her first touch of sharpness. “I would like to feel the same way about you (I really would), but I can’t. I don’t seem to be able to bank my fires. That’s a man’s job, I suppose.”