The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (22 page)

“I don’t exactly remember our agreement, but you’ve got a damned good painting up there. It’s important. You could probably sell it yourself, tomorrow, for more than you’re paying for it. I don’t have the time to go around taking care of the business side.”

Palmer stared, and then, with a bleak sigh, said, “I’ve got to go. I’m late now.”

Frazier shrugged.

Back home, at five-thirty, Palmer found Alice wearing a new plum-colored dress. He kissed her cheek, which was soft from years of industrious creaming, and with gratitude met, as he did every afternoon, the sweet smell of her bath soap and cologne. Summoning his patience, he prepared to hear the tale of the purchase of the plum-colored dress, to feel the thrill of the moment when Alice, alert and excited as a stockbroker, had decided that to wait for a further reduction was financial folly. But she merely said, “Bendel’s. Tremendous reduction. Designer’s salon.”

Slices of carrot and sprigs of cauliflower sat in a dish on the coffee table, next to the cocktail glasses. On the chair facing the ones she and Palmer habitually sat in Alice had put Frazier’s canvas.

“I just got it out to remind me that we have to decide how to get it back to that egomaniac,” she said. “It frightens me, staying on and on here. They’ll sue us for a rental fee. Or make us feel we have to buy it. We aren’t going to let them take us in.”

“Good,” Palmer said. He felt Alice battling beside him to resist the young Fraziers.

“And the worst part is,” Alice went on, “he didn’t even pretend to be interested in
your
work.”

Palmer picked up a magazine and turned the pages. One of the great pains of having a wife loyal to one’s work was that she nearly always showed belligerent chagrin when other people neglected it. “No, we can’t buy it, and don’t want to. No!” he agreed violently.

That evening, he and Alice went to the movies, and walked home at midnight arm in arm.

Two mornings later, Palmer received a note from Mimi in the mail. It was written on the back of a postcard view of Times Square at night. It said, “We didn’t show you the drawings and Buck Sampson particularly likes those. Just call or come down, if you want to see them.”

Palmer didn’t telephone that morning — he had made up his mind not to telephone at all — but his resolution lasted only until one o’clock, and, with an uneasy feeling, and wondering what he would say if Frazier answered (or, indeed, what he would say to Mimi herself), he made the call.

Mimi answered. “Cripes, he’s just gone to bed!” she said, by way of greeting.

“Does Frazier sleep in the afternoon?” Palmer asked lightly.

“Dope! I meant the baby,” she said.

“Ah, the baby! Naturally you meant the baby.”

There was a pause, and Mimi said, in her tart’s voice, impudently, “There aren’t any drawings. But I don’t suppose you really thought there were. Tommy’s essentially a painter, and his drawings are just sketches — very elementary.”

Palmer was astonished. He had thought that there
were
drawings but that Mimi — knowing there was no special reason for him to look at them — had used them as an excuse to have a further meeting. Palmer was sorry there weren’t any drawings. He believed in having excuses for unnecessary meetings with young women. He said nothing, and for a moment Mimi herself seemed to retreat from the perilous path of utter candor she was adopting. Finally, she said, “Mother is here, you know.”

“Right there, you mean?”

“No, I mean in New York. My parents are divorced, and so she doesn’t live in Cleveland any longer. She’s got an apartment near Gramercy Park. She loves the baby, but Tommy hates to have her poking around. So I can leave Junior with her and take off more or less whenever I feel like it.”

Palmer hesitated. “Would you like to meet for lunch tomorrow?”

“Well,” Mimi said, sounding disappointed. “Yeah. Couldn’t we do something glamorous? My last date was at the Laundromat.”

Palmer turned over in his mind a number of luncheon possibilities, but Mimi cut his contemplations short with “I’ve had enough scallopine to feed the whole of Sicily.”

Palmer again hesitated, unable to call up in his mind the proper setting for Mimi. She said, “You’ve probably got a car, haven’t you?”

“I do have a car. Would you like to drive up the Hudson tomorrow? Does that appeal to you at all?”

“O.K.” Again Mimi sounded disappointed.

The tiresome arrangements for getting the car down from the upper reaches of the garage where it was parked depressed Palmer. He ordered it ready, filled with gas, for ten the next morning. Taking the car out of the garage was extremely distasteful. This projected excursion, foolishly compromising, he knew to be a thorough disloyalty to Alice. Alice was jealous. She might be able to forgive a luncheon engagement but never the fact of Mimi in the front seat of their beautiful little blue Mercedes.

At ten o’clock the next morning, Palmer picked Mimi up at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, and they drove off. The day was a failure. Palmer was occupied with remembrances of Alice’s jealousy, with his need to be back at home by four o’clock, with fears of traffic, engine trouble, accidents. His anxiety obscured the pure blue and white of superb skies. Absurdity exhausted him. Cocktails made him sleepy. Mimi talked about the first person she had been in love with — a boy named Bernie, who filled Palmer with gloom. Over brandy, she began to cry. Her tears were like the sniffles with a head cold; no mournful emotions brought them on. They were welcome tears to Palmer — a relief from her sharp, piercing comments, her impressive lawlessness and flamboyant indiscretion.

Mimi’s tears, her interminable analysis of the dull Bernie, her restlessness gave Palmer, on the way home, the feeling that he was now involved in her life. It did not seem much to the point that he hadn’t enjoyed the day with her. No matter. It had
been
a day, and he bore with him now the burden of knowledge. He had learned some of the conditions of Mimi’s life; her nature, he saw, was not circumstantial but intrinsic. Her air of delinquency was inexplicable, but much more real to him than her true circumstances — boarding school, a year at Goucher, arguments with a kindly grandfather. Mimi was urban and astute; she turned her pretty neck with the sullen, automatic effort to please of a tired model in a dress manufacturer’s showroom. She had beautiful legs, and large hazel eyes edged with long brown lashes; her intelligence was quick and cynical; and her candor — her terrible candor — unnerved Palmer. She won’t be married long, he decided. Her marriage did not matter to her. What, indeed, did anything matter to her, when she was only twenty-three?

It was just four o’clock when Palmer let Mimi off at a subway entrance. He hurried to put away the car. Once it was back on the second floor of the garage, he sighed with relief and his mood changed quickly. During the evening, he found himself thinking of Mimi’s lovely face, her tangled, multicolored hair, her stories. Everything about her seemed tenderly appealing. He began to feel uneasy over his own behavior, to worry about his coldness, his discouraging failure to dominate the day. That night, he slept badly, full of self-accusation and a curious impatience for the new day to come. He wanted to apologize, to find some way to withdraw his indifference and boredom, which had now, in his mind, grown to really distressing proportions.

With the dawn came some decline of his impatience. It was odious of him to intrude himself into that young couple’s life, he thought. In the afternoon, he walked down Third Avenue, idly looking in the shopwindows. Palmer was so much accustomed to popularity — to easy, gratifying relations with people — that he found his present situation wounding. He had never before been so much scorned as by the Fraziers, and at the same time so much sought after. To be treated as sheer
experience
by Mimi was intolerable. Situations had always come upon him — but lightly, sweetly, quietly. His affairs had nearly always been with pretty, gentle girls who had good manners — girls rather shy and well disciplined, a little disappointed by life, but gracefully cheerful. They had more often than not been unmarried or divorced; they had talked about their parents, and tended to prefer their fathers. They had fallen in love with Palmer; they had suffered, but somehow it had always ended, without violence, in a touching diminuendo. After all, his real love was Alice.

Palmer hated secret telephone calls, and waiting for the mail so as to intercept letters — all the embarrassments with which a foolish woman could torment a man. Nevertheless, he gave up; he was literally compelled to call Mimi. When she answered, he said, quietly, intensely, “I must see you.”

“You must, huh?” Mimi replied, her voice betraying nothing. “Hold on, I want to get a cig.”

She seemed to take a long time about it, Palmer thought, and when she took up the phone again, she said abruptly, “The baby’s gonna be with my mother Wednesday night and Thursday. I’m free, or I can be free....”

“I can’t get away at night!” Palmer said, astonished.

“Suit yourself, pal,” Mimi said. She spoke softly; Palmer could hear voices in the room around her. He hesitated.

“Well, I guess that’s that,” Mimi said.

“Wednesday?” Palmer said weakly. If only it were July, and Alice were safely in Tanglewood. “Well, perhaps...”

“You work it out,” Mimi said “I’ve got to go. ’Bye.”

Wednesday was five days away, and Palmer tried to eject it from his thoughts. Much as he hated the necessity for elaborate arrangements and imaginative lies, the fact that at present bothered him most acutely was Mimi’s indifference to what he thought of as his own nature. She had somehow deprived him of the qualities other people found in him — his charm, his knowingness, his intricate feelings — without supplying any discoveries of her own to take their place.

During the evening, he was quiet, subdued. Alice said that he was tired, that the winter had been hard. They were having dinner alone at home — a light meal of chicken soup and corn bread, carefully prepared by Alice. At seven-thirty, the phone rang. Their friends did not often telephone at the dinner hour, but, even beyond that fact, Palmer knew, with despair and with certainty, that one of the Fraziers was at the other end of the line. He let Alice answer, hoping she would somehow take his foolish situation in hand and relieve him of the need ever to see that young couple, singly or together, again. Alice talked for a few minutes. She looked unhappy when she returned to the table.

“It was that painter’s wife,” she told him, frowning. “She said she wished we would buy the painting now, if we’re going to buy it, or make a down payment. I said I thought we had made it clear that we couldn’t afford to buy it, but she didn’t seem to have understood that at all.”

That evening, Palmer went into his studio to lie down on the couch and read Malraux’s
Voices of Silence
. In the back of the apartment he could hear Alice humming Cherubino’s “Voi che sapete?” in her schoolgirl alto, which made the aria sound like a lively Wesleyan hymn. He smiled tenderly at the sound of her singing, at the click of her black satin mules on the hallway floor. And, still smiling, he got up and went to his desk. On the back of an old envelope he absentmindedly wrote out figures, and then, with a sudden decision, he found his checkbook and wrote — to Mimi, not her husband — a check for seven hundred dollars. He hadn’t earned that much money the whole year. He felt like a forger, an embezzler, but the check had to be written. It had to be seven hundred dollars; the amount was the resolution of questions raised by an extraordinarily intricate set of principles — beliefs about the value of pictures, the need to do a thing generously if at all. Utter gloom, depression, and suspicion settled upon him as, calling softly to Alice an excuse to explain his errand, he went out and dropped the envelope in the mail for the midnight pickup. Miserably, he faced the necessity of beginning to establish an alibi for Alice about Wednesday — that horrible day, which was coming upon him with stupefying rapidity.

1959

In the evening there was a moon in the eastern sky outclassing every miracle. It hung over Lexington Avenue where the stores were at last closed and where many little shoes and blouses were enchained for the night’s sleep. Sometimes while waiting for a taxi at Seventy-ninth Street, after midnight, it is possible, with a certain amount of effort or with a little too much wine, to imagine the city returned to trees, old footpaths, and clear, untroubled waters, returned to innocence and nautical miscalculations and ancestral heroics. The sound of a rubber-soled footstep — what is that but the oars of Verrazano slipping into New York Bay, silently, to see what is there, what can be deftly unlocked without rousing a soul? A lot was there; the pirates soon and the merchants in league with them and Captain William Kidd, the first embezzling stockbroker — and a great deal more.

Many voyages over the amiable waters of the bay and the Hudson, seeing the shore rich with hints. As for me, I do not miss the carriages or lament the old New York horse droppings in front of the mansions in the West Thirties. And not old New York itself with money made before the Civil War and the interesting names which librarians love. Still, there was an impudent dinner on horseback in Sherry’s restaurant with the riders and their mounts amid standing palms and the sylvan scenes on the wallpaper. You can find it on a postcard and imagine the outrageous clanging of the hooves on the marble tiles — and the Italians brought in at dawn to repair them.

Even now today the patroons have the tables set for sixty a block or so away. The plates that hold the thin goblets filled with an unsugared, lightly liquored dessert are of black-and-gold lacquer from China; and in a suite, perhaps in more than one, in the Waldorf Towers there is one of the many, many Renoirs that have made the emigration, and also an unfortunate Buffet, and also a Sienese primitive, or so they say, so they believe. Taste, arrangements, one of a kind. A huge piece of mineral, shaped like an obelisk, from the South American underground and weighing a ton, one of the earth’s outstandingly large beauties, has been crated and pulleyed from continent to continent and now stands in an entrance hall. All to the good since you cannot be a great world city without many, many surprises.