The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (9 page)

Coolly, Russell lit another cigarette. Marianne explained her life to him, in her brisk, whining voice, the earnest singsong of country preachers. “You see it’s not an academic scholarship, this thing that got me all the way up here, this award. I’m here on what you might call a business scholarship.”

“Hmm...” Russell said, appreciatively.

There was a nice man at home, a Mr. Miller, the owner of The Fair Store. She had worked there after school and in the summers, taking a real interest in the dress department. It was thought by Mr. Miller and some town people, “civic groups,” that she ought to study something and they took up the money for it.

“Well, you’re all set, huh?” Russell said.

Marianne considered. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you, with the kind of wonderful help and all I’ve had?”

It tuned out that Marianne, after her unbelievable journey, her extraordinary opportunity, after the confidence of the man who owned The Fair Store, felt it had all been wasted, that she had chosen the wrong work. She was crushed by guilt and regret. “Very, very few people, as I see it now, can make it as a fashion designer.”

Russell grunted sympathetically. He looked with perplexed interest on this little person with her doubts and what almost seemed to be grief. He felt called upon to lighten the scene. “With eyes like yours you could make it as the Queen of Sheba, in my opinion,” he said giddily.

She did not seem to hear this and went on thinking about her work, her future. “It’s not your fault,” Russell insisted, pardoning her as quickly as he would have pardoned himself. “You did what you thought was right at the time and more than that hardly anyone would expect,” he added sententiously.

“Yeah?” she said, gloomily weighing his words. For a moment, Russell was unnerved by the attention she gave to his thoughts, but he soon put all of this out of his mind because of his consideration for Marianne’s soft, wavy hair, her small, thin ankles. He loved the high heels and the narrow wool skirt she was wearing and admired the fact that she could wear them in what he thought of as an interesting manner, like a student in a secretarial school, or a receptionist in an insurance office.

Marianne looked about the shop. “There are some nice old things in Kentucky. Country antiques,” she said with a sigh. Russell gave a professional nod.

A week passed before Marianne came in again. Russell had been thinking about her and expecting her. He had known that she would come back and felt a little hurt that she hadn’t come sooner. She sat down with him at the back of the shop, at the worktable, sat with her hands in cream-colored gloves folded in her lap. He was full of wonder at her stillness, her stubborn concentration. Her body, in its desperate repose, excited him. He smiled at her, summoning what he hoped was an interesting hint of boyish protectiveness. He supposed her to be failing in school, but, no, she was doing very well. The trouble was that she would need to go to New York if she meant to have a real success. New York frightened her and her sense of obligation weighed her down. There was something plaintive and rural about Marianne that made Russell uneasy. Patches of cornfield on the hillside, played-out seams of coal, grange and union halls, mountain laurel in bloom, miners’ wives at a dress sale: she gave it all to Russell, who whistled through his teeth with a peculiar embarrassment before these memories. Nervously, he became jaunty and flirtatious.

“I guess I better not tangle with you. I hear those mountain people can hold on to a grudge. Their aim with a pistol’s pretty good too, huh?”

Marianne took this seriously. “My family is strictly against guns and always has been.”

Russell was trapped. He kept on smiling and waited for a new thought to rescue him. “I love your little shop,” Marianne said, responding at last to Russell’s jaunty smiles.

He warmed. “It’s not Fifth Avenue...just a little place with a few nice items. The man who owns it has other outlets.”

A blurred mirror lay on the worktable. A wooden rosette had fallen off the carved frame and Russell, in his wandering, stiff-fingered way, had been struggling to tie it back in place with a piece of wire.

“Here, I bet I can fix that thing,” Marianne said. A rush of pleasant feelings came over Russell as he watched her blue eyes squinting at work.

“There, you’ve got it!” he said after a moment.

Marianne tugged at the rosette. “No, it’s okay for now but wouldn’t hold. I’ll start over again.” She took the wire off the frame, straightened it, and once more began to tie the rosette in place. “It shouldn’t show any more than you can help,” she explained.

Russell disagreed. “Don’t you think that people who buy these things like to do them over themselves, to get them just the way they want them?”

“That I wouldn’t know,” Marianne said.

She took a longer time over the second mending than Russell would have liked. He wanted to talk, to flirt. It was a relief to have the rosette in place at last and the task forgotten. He would show it to Mr. Soferis tomorrow. The mirror was what the owner had called a “fast item.” “This piece,” he had confided to Russell, “could have been sold to a private collector. But I think the Charles Street Olympia needs a draw. Put it in the window.” Russell noted the expression, “private collector.” He felt the need from time to time for a few choice phrases. He liked to utter them, negligently, and felt when he had done so a sensation of labor preformed, effort sustained, services honorably rendered.

Marianne wandered about the shop, picking up things, running her fingers over them. “You sure can tell a man is in charge of this place. Things are very badly displayed.”

“A woman’s touch will be appreciated by one and all,” Russell said gallantly. Marianne smiled. Her lip trembled a bit. Russell could guess that she liked him. He was not always so quickly successful with girls and the conquest gave him something to think about.

“You’re one hell of a pretty girl,” he said, suddenly hoarse with the excitement of Marianne’s attraction to him. Then he added severely, husband-like, “The only trouble is you worry to damned much. You strike me as having too much to offer to stand around all day tearing yourself down.”

Russell was vexed already by Marianne’s earnestness. He didn’t know how to respond to it and didn’t trust it. He believed clever, successful persons showed their gifts and superiority by a restrained boastfulness, by assertions that made a point without going too far. Even a good bartender, his observations informed him, or a gas-station attendant knew how to fill the air with assurance and conceit. For himself, he did not boast because he had nothing to boast about, but he liked to think of good fortune, successful deals, useful connections, profitable investments. He liked to stand at a bar at night, drinking beer, listening to stories of success with women, wins at the races, loans that came at a desperate moment. Modesty, caution, realism sent a wave of dismay over Russell’s spirit; he felt these attitudes showed a lack of inspiration. They cast an unnecessary pall, like hints of disease. He admired Marianne’s journey from Kentucky to the school in Boston, her trim, neat figure, her capability. Still he was not quite sure how to take her. She was a change of taste, not a grand passion.

Russell was from Malden, a suburb of Boston. Now that he was working in town, at the Olympia, he had dropped his high-school friends and had taken to going around Beacon Hill alone at night. He had also dropped his girlfriend, Karen. There didn’t seem to be much point to Karen after he’d left home and set himself up on Pinckney Street. He furnished his room with crates, odds and ends from home, and more important to him than the bits of furniture was his effort to make real an idea that had seized his imagination: a smart bar in Worcester. In pursuit of the idea he painted his one unbroken wall black and put a reproduction of a pink-and-blue ballet dancer on it. He made himself a bar; he found a martini pitcher with the figure of a nude girl stamped on the inside of it; he had a cone-shaped copper light over his bed, which was a narrow cot that served as a sofa when he was not sleeping on it. Over this he had a black-and-white-striped spread and some rubbery-looking pink pillows. He was glad when he found plastic curtains with the Eiffel Tower printed on them.

In his new place, he felt himself to be a different person from the Russ Simmons who had liven in Malden with Mom and Dad. The new person entertained himself with record albums that bore name such as
Music to Dream By
and
Reveries for Lovers.
He had his old accordion upon which he still sometimes played “Amapola.” In an alcove of the room there was a small stove and a little icebox where he kept a can of condensed milk for coffee, bottles of beer, and sometimes a package of Velveeta. In the evenings, free of home and Karen, he drank beer and even occasionally went, with timidity, to the coffeehouses of “The Hill,” as this section of Boston is called. He stood around for hours every night, flicking ashes from his everlasting cigarettes, turning now and then to grin uncertainly at friendly faces, coughing, straightening his tie. He had few clothes, since he barely made enough for his room and for beer. He had only one suit and a loosely cut sports jacket with patch pockets. Day and night he wore white wash-and-wear shirts that were now turning gray.

The junk at the Olympia did not interest Russell at all. What he wanted was a little bar like the one in Worcester, the cool, sweet little pink-and-black bar that, once seen, remained to haunt him, like the unattainable virgin face that brings longing and inspiration. He saw himself presiding over the bar, sometimes gossiping discreetly, listening with the wise, manly air he had observed in bar owners. As he nervously walked over the cobbles of Boston, his brown hair brushed up in a stiff wave at the front, his manner restless and yet curiously torpid too, he would dream of what he would do with his life. Beyond that dream he hadn’t any plans and yet he was not worried. He felt protected as a part of a prosperous mass; his roots were buried in fertilized, well-watered soil in which even the weakest plant could live. Strangely, he did not feel alone, odd, a failure. He felt himself to be like most other people. Russell was very thin and still his face was surprisingly round and, at first glance, fresh-looking, despite his light, tired, sleepy eyes. He usually looked like a healthy man in a temporary state of exhaustion, like someone with a Sunday-morning hangover, not at his best. In truth the thinness was Russell and the round, fresh face was an illusion. He slept little, ate little, smoked all the time, drank a good deal, and had coffee at two in the morning so that he need not go home or if at home need not go to sleep.

In the Pinckney Street rooming house, Russell made a few new acquaintances. There were two girls, young hairdressers, eager for dates. They were always up after midnight, watching television in their dressing gowns, or frying bacon and eggs and making coffee. Sometimes when they heard Russell coming up the stairs they would ask him in or he, seeing the lights burning, knocked and went in for a chat. Often, on a Monday night, the exhausted girls would fall asleep at ten o’clock and Russell would feel forlorn as he passed their quiet door, even though he did not always want to see them and was careful not to involve himself too deeply. They reminded him too much of his abandoned, out-grown girlfriend, Karen. They were loud, obvious, fervently familiar. At the Café Vesuvius, where Russell often went to drink beer, he would never have dreamed of taking Linda, the one of the pair who most eagerly attached herself to him. The Vesuvius — Israeli records, cartoons on the wall, men in beards, college students, painters — frightened Russell. He well knew he hadn’t the pitch. He hardly opened his mouth except to talk to the man behind the bar and his girl, who sat for hours, waiting, scorning. “Characters!” she would say to Russell, her glance taking in the patrons of the Vesuvius. “Right, sweetheart!” Russell would answer, knowingly.

He found the Vesuvius interesting, even if for the purest relaxation he went on down the street to an Irish bar, where his uncle Walt was sympathetically remembered. Russell was interested in matters of “clientele.” His nightclub-owner’s spirit expanded under the dim lights and he mildly studied the types of people “catered to,” groups attracted, special needs understood and gratified. In his rooming house he talked to the shifting tenants, the male nurses, the countermen at cafeterias, men who had been all over the country. He liked to hear about rich dames, motels with swimming pools, cars with leopard-skin upholstery, power boats, gambling dens — the rich sights recalled by itinerant workers, the wonders beheld by old bellhops. He was thrilled by the large, busy, public place, the fabulous tip, the important telephone call, the little favor done on the side, liquor after hours, setups at dawn. Russell was skill-less but infinitely tolerant, a lover of the casual immoralities of night life. When he was not settling for his dream of his own pink-and-black bar, he could see himself in a warm, prodigal, free-spending climate. In Florida, in California: there he imagined himself, smiling politely, with his wanton discretion, quickly pocketing a large tip from a man on vacation for whom he had placed a bet or found champagne on Sunday morning or offered the telephone number of a young lady.

Into this dream life Marianne Gibbs came, a rural, hardworking realist, with the rational, accommodating manner of a brisk little slave. And she made an effort with Russell, right from the first. It flattered him, confirmed his own blurred optimism to find himself accepted by this useful person. She had, along with her sense of poverty and her desperation, a certain rock-bottom refinement, almost a gentility, because of her readiness, in her case a little anxious, to do the right thing. The rectitude of the gambler’s family, the sleazy rake with his Methodist wife in the suburbs — Russell too had hidden within himself the desire to win the love of a respectable girl.

One night they went out to a cafeteria for supper after the shop closed. Russell had barely enough money to pay for the check. After that Marianne cooked for him in her room — cans of soup, hamburger, boiled potatoes. When they parted at night, no matter how late it was, Russell could not bring himself to go home immediately. Marianne gave herself to him willingly, gratefully, even with an earnest and remarkable passion, yet he felt the same need for his cup of coffee, his beer alone, late, in a pleasant atmosphere of idleness and waste. He meant to have his freedom, he would think, even as he held her in his arms. Alone, exhausted at last, he would button his thin, cheap coat and with a cigarette hurting his throat because of the wind he would give up the quiet Boston night and climb the hill to his house, at two o’clock or so.