The Company She Keeps (8 page)

Fortunately for Mr. Sheer, as a student he did not make rapid progress. Our lessons would take place at lunch, at dinner, at the theater, or, often, late at night or on Sunday afternoon, in the dark, empty gallery. I tried to teach him terms like Byzantine and baroque, but, as I soon discovered, he was chiefly interested in acquiring a string of hyperbolical adjectives to describe his stock. And it was more important to him to learn how to pronounce
Longchamps
correctly than to memorize the parts of speech.

It was something different from good English, I began to realize, that he wanted from me.

When he passed into the final stage of his business development and became a partner, Mr. Sheer achieved his ambition—to enter a rich man’s house by the front door, as a guest. First there had been stag evenings with visiting Middle Western businessmen, but before long, at Aiken, at Palm Beach, on Long Island, Mr. Sheer would now and then be included in the larger cocktail parties. Deeply as he desired these invitations, he could only enjoy them in anticipation and in retrospect. The parties themselves were torture for him. His fear of committing a solecism combined with his shyness in crowds to bleach his conversation to an unnatural neutrality. On the offensive, he restricted himself to the most general statements about politics, the weather, the women’s dresses, the state of business; on the defensive, he held off his interlocutor with all the Really’s and You-don’t-say’s and the Well-isn’t-that-interesting’s of the would-be Good Listener.

Still, this was the apogee of his career, and he knew it. What puzzled him, what at first he could hardly believe, was the fact that he was unhappy. He grew more and more dependent on the evenings we would spend together, exchanging stories of the disreputable old days. “Margaret,” he would tell me, “it’s a funny thing, but you’re the only person I have a good time with any more.” He explained this by saying that he could “be himself with me, but there was more to it than that. For one thing, I was dear to him because I was the only one who
knew.
In my mind he could see as in his own the two Mr. Sheers, the pale, perspiring Mr. Sheer of the past and the resplendent Mr. Sheer of the present. The wonderful, miraculous contrast was alive in me as it was in no one else. What was becoming infinitely saddening to him in his own success story was that he could never allow anyone to know what a success story it was. The old Mr. Sheer had to be kept under cover, and his new friends could only presume that the present Mr. Sheer had sprung full-blown from the head of the Hermitage Galleries.

Moreover, though in the first flush of success, at the time of his greatest happiness, the two Mr. Sheers must have been equally alive and equally vigorous, now in the daily atmosphere of respectability, the old Mr. Sheer was atrophying. Mr. Hyde had turned into Dr. Jekyll, and it required the strongest drugs to get him to go back to his original state. The reminiscences we exchanged were but one of the drugs. Mr. Sheer tried a number of other methods.

In the first place, as I have said, he liked to haunt the gallery out of business hours. Where he had once felt genuinely like a trespasser, he now tried to revive that feeling by imitating the behavior that went with it. But no policeman, no Holmes Protective man, ever halted him, no matter what time of night he came, for now the Fifty-seventh Street police knew him and greeted him with respect.

He produced another imitation of his former character by moving back and forth from one hotel to another. One week he would be at the St. Regis, the next at the Gotham, the next at the Weylin, and so on, until he had made the rounds of the second-string fashionable hotels, when he would start over again. But this elusiveness was synthetic, for now his secretary could always find him. His position as a successful man required that.

In the same way, he would try to inject a little color into his business life by the practice of minor chicaneries. Any large-scale operations were out of the question, for the bookkeeper kept the accounts and handled the money. But he could concoct fabulous histories of the pieces he sold, could suppress an undesirable attribution, could add a signature where none had been before, and happily obliterate what he felt were picayune distinctions between period replicas and originals by a master. He could also reveal business confidences and make promises that were impossible to keep. If he could have had his way, every sale would have been a little conspiracy: in his eyes, the price being equal, it was better to sell a Gobelin tapestry as a Beauvais than to sell it as a Gobelin. I have even watched him trying to persuade himself (and this was the inevitable first step in the process of deception) that a Degas bronze was not a Degas at all, but a Rodin.

Yet, like his personal elusiveness, this slipperiness in business was largely unreal. In the first place, it was unnecessary: he had reached a point in his career where the things he handled could be sold on their merits. In the second place, though it should have been dangerous, though indeed he desired it to be dangerous, his secretary and his partners kept a diligent watch over him to prevent him from hurting himself. They were always ready to intervene with “Mr. Sheer made a mistake, he has so many things on his mind, we will correct the error.” He was in the position of a rich kleptomaniac whose family is perpetually on hand to turn her thefts into purchases.

As time passed, it became increasingly difficult for Mr. Sheer to regard his life as an imposture. He still believed that he could “be himself with me, but actually our conversations were more and more taken up with politics, the weather, the women’s dresses, the state of business, till the outlaw Mr. Sheer I dined with was practically indistinguishable from the Mr. Sheer one met at the gallery or at a hunt breakfast somewhere in New Jersey. It was plain, at last, that Mr. Sheer had not imposed on the business world and used it for his own delight, but that the business world had used Mr. Sheer, rejecting the useless or outmoded parts of him. He had not, as he first thought, outwitted anybody, but he had somehow, imperceptibly, been outwitted himself.

Yet masquerade was life to Mr. Sheer. He could not bear to succeed in his own personality, any more than an unattractive woman can bear to be loved for herself. So he began, indirectly, unwittingly, to try to fail. It was distressing to watch him, for even here he was conforming to the conventions of the businessman’s world. This Mr. Sheer who had once hunted danger, joyously, down a hundred strange byways, was now walking glumly down a well-trodden road into the jaws of a respectable ruin.

He had a love affair with his best client’s wife, and he played the stock market. Both of these ventures he pursued with a terrible listlessness. He could hardly bother to follow his stocks in the newspaper, or to telephone the lady for whom he was risking so much. It was only when his broker sold him out, and when he brought the lady home to her husband with her evening dress wrong-side-out, that his spirits revived, and he would dwell on the two misfortunes with his old rueful delight.

The Hermitage Galleries, however, saw him through, and the client, who had been looking for a pretext to break with his wife, readily forgave him. Mr. Sheer grew more despondent than ever, and his health began to worry him. He had a masseur in the morning, and he went to a gymnasium in the evening; he subjected himself to basal-metabolism tests, urinalyses, blood counts, took tonics to pep him up and bromides to quiet him and was still, unaccountably, tired. Last year they took out his appendix and his teeth; when he recovered, he had not lost that daily, dragging fatigue, but only acquired an appetite for the knife.

I saw him off to the hospital recently to have his gall bladder removed.

“It’s a very dangerous operation, Margaret; it may be the death of me,” he said.

And for the first time in many weeks he giggled irrepressibly.

*An extract from memoirs begun by the heroine.

T
HE NEW MAN WHO
came into the club car was coatless. He was dressed in gray trousers and a green shirt of expensive material that had what seemed to be the figure “2” embroidered in darker green on the sleeve. His tie matched the green of the monogram, and his face, which emerged rather sharply from this tasteful symphony in cool colors, was blush pink. The greater part of his head appeared to be pink, also, though actually toward the back there was a good deal of closely cropped pale-gray hair that harmonized with his trousers. He looked, she decided, like a middle-aged baby, like a young pig, like something in a seed catalogue. In any case, he was plainly Out of the Question, and the hope that had sprung up, as for some reason it always did, with the sound of a new step soft on the flowered Pullman carpet, died a new death. Already the trip was half over. They were now several hours out of Omaha; nearly all the Chicago passengers had put in an appearance; and still there was no one, no one at all. She must not mind, she told herself; the trip West was of no importance; yet she felt a curious, shamefaced disappointment, as if she had given a party and no guests had come.

She turned again to the lady on her left, her
vis-à-vis
at breakfast, a person with dangling earrings, a cigarette holder, and a lorgnette, who was somebody in the New Deal and carried about with her a typewritten report of the hearings of some committee which she was anxious to discuss. The man in the green shirt crowded himself into a love seat directly opposite, next to a young man with glasses and loud socks who was reading Vincent Sheean’s
Personal History.
Sustaining her end of a well-bred, well-informed, liberal conversation, she had an air of perfect absorption and earnestness, yet she became aware, without ever turning her head, that the man across the way had decided to pick her up. Full of contempt for the man, for his coatlessness, for his color scheme, for his susceptibility, for his presumption, she nevertheless allowed her voice to rise a little in response to him. The man countered by turning to his neighbor and saying something excessively audible about Vincent Sheean. The four voices, answering each other, began to give an antiphonal effect, Vincent Sheean was a fine fellow, she heard him pronounce; he could vouch for it, he knew him
personally.
The bait was crude, she reflected. She would have preferred the artificial fly to the angleworm, but still…. After all, he might have done worse; judged by eternal standards, Sheean might not be much, but in the cultural atmosphere of the Pullman car, Sheean was a titan. Moreover, if one judged the man by his intention, one could not fail to be touched. He was doing his best to
please
her. He had guessed from her conversation that she was an intellectual, and was placing the name of Sheean as a humble offering at her feet. And the simple vulgarity of the offering somehow enhanced its value; it was like one of those home-made cakes with Paris-green icing that she used to receive on her birthday from her colored maid.

Her own neighbor must finally have noticed a certain displacement of attention, for she got up announcing that she was going in to lunch, and her tone was stiff with reproof and disappointment so that she seemed, for a moment, this rococo suffragette, like a nun who discovers that her favorite novice lacks the vocation. As she tugged open the door to go out, a blast of hot Nebraska air rushed into the club car, where the air-cooling system had already broken down.

The girl in the seat had an impulse to follow her. It would surely be cooler in the diner, where there was not so much glass. If she stayed and let the man pick her up, it would be a question of eating lunch together, and there would be a little quarrel about the check, and if she let him win she would have him on her hands all the way to Sacramento. And he was certain to be tiresome. That emblem in Gothic script spelled out the self-made man. She could foresee the political pronouncements, the pictures of the wife and children, the hand squeezed under the table. Nothing worse than that, fortunately, for the conductors on those trains were always very strict. Still, the whole thing would be so vulgar; one would expose oneself so to the derision of the other passengers. It was true, she was always wanting something exciting and romantic to happen; but it was not really romantic to be the-girl-who-sits-in-the-club-car-and-picks-up-men. She closed her eyes with a slight shudder: some predatory view of herself had been disclosed for an instant. She heard her aunt’s voice saying, “I don’t know why you make yourself so cheap,” and “It doesn’t pay to let men think you’re easy.” Then she was able to open her eyes again, and smile a little, patronizingly, for of course it hadn’t worked out that way. The object of her trip was, precisely, to tell her aunt in Portland that she was going to be married again.

She settled down in her seat to wait and began to read an advance copy of a new novel. When the man would ask her what-that-book-is-you’re-so-interested-in (she had heard the question before), she would be able to reply in a tone so simple and friendly that it could not give offense, “Why, you probably haven’t heard of it. It’s not out yet.” (Yet, she thought, she had not brought the book along for purposes of ostentation: it had been given her by a publisher’s assistant who saw her off at the train, and now she had nothing else to read. So, really, she could not be accused of insincerity. Unless it could be that her whole way of life had been assumed for purposes of ostentation, and the book, which looked accidental, was actually part of that larger and truly deliberate scheme. If it had not been this book, it would have been something else, which would have served equally well to impress a pink middle-aged stranger.)

The approach, when it came, was more unorthodox than she had expected. The man got up from his seat and said, “Can I talk to you?” Her retort, “What have you got to say?” rang off-key in her own ears. It was as if Broadway had answered Indiana. For a moment the man appeared to be taken aback, but then he laughed. “Why, I don’t know; nothing special. We can talk about that book, I guess.”

She liked him, and with her right hand made a gesture that meant, “All right, go on.” The man examined the cover. “I haven’t heard about this. It must be new.”