The Early Stories (55 page)

It was too harsh a thing to say, too bold; he was too excited. Macy said nothing, did not even look up, but her face was tense with an accusatory meekness.

“No, I don't mean that,” Arthur said. “It's all lies, lies, lies, lies. My family was very close.”

Macy said to Leonard softly, “Don't you believe it. He's been telling the truth.”

“I know it,” Leonard said. “I've always felt that about Arthur's home ever since I met him. I really have.”

And though Leonard could console himself with this supposed insight, something uncongenial had been injected into the gathering, and he became sullen; his mood clouded the room, weighed on their temples like smog, and when, hours later, he left, both Arthur and Macy were unwilling to let him go because he had not had a good time. In a guilty spurt of hospitality, they chattered to him of future arrangements. Leonard walked down the stairs with his hat at an angle less jaunty than when he had come up those stairs—a somehow damp angle, as if he had confused his inner drizzle with a state of outer weather.

Suppertime came. Macy said that she didn't feel well and couldn't eat a bite. Arthur put Benny Goodman's 1938 Carnegie Hall concert on the record-player and, rousing his wife from the Sunday
Times
, insisted that she, who had been raised on Scarlatti and Purcell, take notice of Jess Stacy's classic piano solo on “Sing, Sing, Sing,” which he played twice, for her benefit. He prepared some chicken-with-rice soup for himself, mixing the can with just half a can of water, since it would be for only one person and need not be too much thinned. The soup, heated to a simmer, looked so wholesome that he asked Macy if she really didn't want any. She looked up and thought. “Just a cupful,” she said, which left him enough to fill a large bowl—plenty, though not a luxurious plenitude.

“Mm. That was so good,” she said after finishing.

“Feel better?”

“Slightly.”

Macy was reading through a collection of short stories, and Arthur
brought the rocking chair from the bedroom and joined her by the lamp, with his paperback copy of
The Tragic Sense of Life
. Here again she misunderstood him; he knew that his reading Unamuno depressed her, and he was reading the book not to depress her but to get the book finished and depress her no longer. She knew nothing of the contents except for his remark one time that according to the author the source of religion is our unwillingness to die; yet she was suspicious.

“Why don't you ever read anything except scary philosophy?” she asked him.

“It isn't scary,” he said. “The man's a Christian, sort of.”

“You should read some fiction.”

“I will, I will, as soon as I finish this.”

Perhaps half an hour passed. “Oh,” Macy said, dropping her book to the floor. “That's
so
terrible, it's so awful.”

He looked at her inquiringly. She was close to tears. “There's a story in here,” she explained. “It just makes you sick. I don't want to think about it.”

“See, if you'd read Kierkegaard instead of squalid fiction—”

“No, really. I don't even think it's a good story, it's so awful.”

He read the story himself, and Macy moved into the sling chair facing him. He was conscious of her body as clouds of pale color beyond the edge of the page, like a dawn, stirring with gentle unease. “Very good,” Arthur said when he was done. “Quite moving.”

“It's so horrible,” Macy said. “Why was he so awful to his wife?”

“It's all explained. He was out of his caste. He was trapped. A perfectly nice man, corrupted by bad luck.”

“How can you
say
that? That's so ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous! Why, Macy, the whole pathos of the story lies in the fact that the man, for all his selfishness and cruelty, loves the woman. After all,
he's
telling the story, and if the wife emerges as a sympathetic character, it's because that's the way he sees her. The description of her at the train—here—‘As the train glided away she turned toward me her face, calm and so sweet and which, in the instant before it vanished, appeared a radiant white heart.' ” The story, clumsily translated from the French, was titled “Un Cœur blanc.” “And then, later, remembering—‘It gladdens me that I was able then to simulate a depth of affection that I did not at that time feel. She too generously repaid me, and in that zealous response was there not her sort of victory?' That's absolutely sympathetic, you see. It's a terrific image—this perceptive man caged in his own weak character.”

To his surprise, Macy had begun to cry. Tears mounted from the lower lids of eyes still looking at him. “Macy,” he said, kneeling by her chair and touching his forehead to hers. He ardently wished her well at that moment, yet his actions seemed hurried and morbid. “What is it? Of course I feel sorry for the woman.”

“You said he was a
nice
man.”

“I didn't mean it. I meant that the horror of the story lies in the fact that the man
does
understand, that he does love the woman.”

“It just shows, it shows how
different
we are.”

“No we're not. We're exactly alike. Our noses”—he touched hers, then his—“are alike as two peas, our mouths like two turnips, our chins like two hamsters.” She laughed sobbingly, but the silliness of his refutation tended to confirm the truth of her remark.

He held her as long as her crying remained strenuous, and when it relented, she moved to the sofa and lay down, saying, “It's awful when you have an ache and don't know if it's your head or your ear or your tooth.”

He put the palm of his hand on her forehead. He could never tell about fevers. Her skin felt warm, but then human beings were warm things. “Have you taken your temperature?”

“I don't know where the thermometer is. Broken, probably.” She lay in a forsaken attitude, with one arm, the bluish underside uppermost, extended outward, supported in midair by the limits of its flexure. “Oog,” she said, sticking out her tongue. “This room is a mess.” The Bible had never been replaced in the row of books; it lay on its side, spanning four secular volumes. Several glasses, drained after dinner, stood like castle sentries on the windowsill, the mantel, and the lowest shelf of the bookcase. Leonard had left his rubbers under the table. The jacket of the Goodman record lay on the rug, and the Sunday
Times
, that manifold summation of a week's confusion, was oppressively everywhere. Arthur's soup bowl was still on the table; Macy's cup, cockeyed in the saucer, rested by her chair, along with Unamuno and the collection of short stories. “It's always so awful,” she said. “Why don't you ever help to keep the room neat?”

“I will, I will. Now you go to bed.” He guided her into the other room and took her temperature. She kept the thermometer in her mouth as she undressed and got into her nightgown. He read her temperature as 98.8°. “Very, very slight,” he told her. “I prescribe sleep.”

“I look so pale,” she said in front of the bathroom mirror.

“We never should have discussed
Camille
.” When she was in bed, her
face pink against the white pillow and the rest of her covered, he said, “You and Garbo. Tell me how Garbo says, ‘You're fooling me.' ”

“You're fooling me,” she said in a fragile Swedish whisper.

Back in the living room, Arthur returned the books to the shelves, tearing neat strips from the
Times
garden section as bookmarks. He assembled the newspaper and laid it in the kitchen next to the trash can. He stood holding Leonard's rubbers for ten seconds, then dropped them in a corner. He took the record off the phonograph, slipped it into its envelope, and hid it in the closet with the others.

Lastly, he collected the dishes and glasses and washed them. As he stood at the sink, his hands in water which, where the suds thinned and broke, showed a silvery gray, the Sunday's events repeated themselves in his mind, bending like nacreous flakes around a central infrangible irritant, becoming the perfect and luminous thought:
You don't know anything
.

Incest
 

“I was in a movie house, fairly plush, in a sort of mezzanine, or balcony. It was a wide screen. On it there were tall people—it seemed to be at a dance or at least
function
—talking and bending toward each other gracefully, in that misty Technicolor Japanese pictures have. I
knew
that this was the movie version of
Remembrance of Things Past
. I had the impression sitting there that I had been looking forward to it for a long time, and I felt slightly guilty at not being home, you know. There was a girl sitting down one row, catty-corner from me. She had a small head with a thin, rather touching neck, like Moira Bryer, but it wasn't her, or anyone we know. At any rate there was this feeling of great affection toward her, and it seemed, in the light of the movie—the movie was taking place entirely in a bright-yellow ballroom, so the faces of the audience were clear—it seemed somehow that the entire chance to make my life good was wrapped up in this girl, who was strange to me. Then she was in the seat beside me, and I was giving her a back rub.”

“
Uh
-oh,” his wife said, pausing in her stooping. She was grazing the carpet, picking up the toys, cards, matches, and spoons scattered by their daughter, Jane, a year and seven months old. Big Jane, as she had dreaded being called when they named the child, held quite still to catch what next he had to tell. Lee had begun the account ironically, to register his irritation with her for asking him, her own day had been so dull and wearing, to talk, to tell her of
his
day. Nothing interested him less than his own work day, done. It made his jaws ache, as with a smothered yawn, to consider framing one sentence about it. So, part desperation, part admonishment, he had begun to describe the dream he had been careful to keep from her at breakfast. He protected his wife here, at the place where he recalled feeling his hands leave the lean girl's comforted shoulder blades and travel thoughtfully around the cool, strait, faintly ridged
sides of the rib case to the always surprising boon in front—sensations momentarily more vivid in the nerves of his fingers than the immediate texture of the bamboo chair he occupied.

“Through the blouse.”

“Good,” she said. “Good for you both.”

Jane appeared so saucy saying this he was emboldened to add a true detail: “I think I did undo her bra strap. By pinching through the cloth.” To judge by his wife's expression—tense for him, as if he were bragging before company—the addition was a mistake. He hastened on. “Then we were standing in back of the seats, behind one of those walls that come up to your chest, and I was being introduced to her father. I had the impression he was a doctor. He was rather pleasant, really: gray hair, and a firm grip. He seemed cordial, and I had a competent feeling, as if I couldn't help making a good impression. But behind this encounter—with the girl standing off to one side—there was the sadness of the movie itself continuing on the screen; the music soared; Proust's face was shown—a very young face—with the eyelids closed, and this shimmered and spun and turned into a slow pink vortex that then solidified into a huge motionless rose, filling the whole screen. And I thought,
Now I know how the book ends
.”

“How exciting, sweetie! It's like ‘The Dream of the Rood.' ” Jane resumed cleaning up after her daughter. Lee was abruptly oppressed by a belief that he had made her life harder to bear.

He said, “The girl must have been you, because you're the only person I know who likes to have their back rubbed.”

“You find my neck touching?”

“Well, for God's sake, I can't be held accountable for the people I meet in dreams.
I
don't invite them.” He was safe, of course, as long as they stayed away from the real issue, which was why he had told her the dream at all. “That girl means nothing to me now. In the dream obviously I was still in high school and hadn't met you. I remember sitting there and wondering, because it was such a long movie, if my mother would give me hell when I got back.”