The Unpossessed (18 page)

He felt at home now in the friendly drug-store, where one ate and smoked and telephoned; and leaning over the counter he engaged in whimsical banter with the soda-clerk—and wondered if somewhere, perhaps in his next book, he might use that banter; with an angle of class-consciousness. When at length the soda-clerk, as skilled as himself in whimsy, shot with a brief apology down a trap-door in his alley, Jeffrey felt he had lost a friend; and he sat for another moment, really puzzled now, on the customers' side of the counter, before he reached a rapid new decision. He moved back to the homelike telephone booth, which reeked of his own tobacco as his study did at home. Down went another nickel. Poor old Norah, he thought; she always worries so.

“Hello dear.” “Why
Jeffrey
!” Poor simple Norah! she was always where he expected to find her. He thought briefly but with no pain of the tedious office where she spent her days; with no pain because she didn't mind it, Norah never minded anything. “A hellish day,” he said, “but damned successful . . . tired? my God yes . . . my dear Norah, what do you mean, do you think I can just knock off any time and go home to sleep? I don't even know if I'll be back for dinner . . . oh possibly Comrade Fisher . . . bring her home? well maybe . . . a
sweater
?” he said, delighted; “you've started a sweater for
me
? Oh darling . . . you're such a fool, you never think of anything but sweaters and things . . . what color? well, I'll see it later, dear, I haven't time to listen now. I've got seven million things to do . . . goodbye, don't work too hard—I may be home, and then again . . .” Down went the receiver on Norah. And Jeffrey, feeling glad that he had made her happy, stepped out of the telephone booth (the good-natured clock had knocked off another twenty minutes) feeling as though he set out on adventure, with both the blessing
and
the cake from loving Norah.

He rummaged through his pockets and found that he had still a dollar from the two that Norah had given him; for his books of course scarcely made him anything. One dollar and approximately one hour left to spend. He bid the drug-store a brisk farewell; stepped out on the street in pleasant indecision, and hailed a taxicab and told the man to rush. To the Herald Office Equipment place where he had once spent a happy week selecting a Filing Cabinet; where now a quite delightful salesman (really almost a character out of Dickens) would stand him a drink and show him the respective merits of any number of . . . of . . . adding-machines, perhaps, or perhaps an electric fan against next summer's heat.

“BY GOD WE'VE almost got a Manifesto, Emmett,” Bruno said, speaking in the man-of-action voice that Emmett dreaded. “We'll have to do some piecing though—” he tapped the papers of the many-drafted Manifesto; Jeffrey's correc tions and Miles' interpolations and Arnold Firman's religious dialectic, Bruno's rewritings and Emmett's retypings covered the surface of the desk. “Can you spare another thirty min utes, Emmett—or will Merle withdraw her support if I make you late for dinner?”

Emmett nodded happily. Thirty minutes, thirty years, or thirty lifetimes—Emmett prayed that they would never end; that night would never fall; above all that Bruno would not suddenly remember, as he sometimes jovially did, the exis tence of some woman, that strange importance in his life. It was the one aspect Emmett could not reconcile with the Bruno he knew and loved, that only to imagine filled him with hollow after hollow of loneliness as though he lost his friend. He would have been content to wait, the door to Bruno's home securely locked, forever. Alone with Bruno he let himself forget that dinner awaited him at home, that Merle would raise a minor nervous hell when he arrived. For a strange thing happened to time in Bruno's presence; it lost validity as the world outside lost substance. Emmett's own life, when Bruno was not contemplating it, was nothing; these days he brought his life daily to Bruno, holding it in abeyance overnight, whisking it smugly past the eyes of jealous class mates, waiting for it to come real on being beheld by Bruno.

Emmett was disturbed by the new régime; by the influx of printers, machines, collaborators—his own colleagues, the Black Sheep, lifted to the rank of partners; by the unprecedented hurry in which Bruno had begun to move. He felt by instinct that his strongest hold on Bruno lay in Bruno's moods of inactivity. Of the Magazine he was profoundly jealous (he had liked it better when it lay in the realm of theoretic Project); yet, because Bruno suddenly and unaccountably wanted it, he urged his mother's help. But it wasn't just the Magazine that worried him; something underlay it; something which Emmett, spending his evenings alone in brooding, laid to the mysterious cablegrams, to the steamer whose progress home across the ocean Bruno followed in the daily papers.

But this was Bruno's
home
; where he retired by himself each night to live his secret, private life. He looked about with awe, with sadness; for though he had always known that Bruno must live somewhere, he had never visualized him except behind his familiar college desk. Now strange vistas opened out before him—how little he knew about his beloved friend; how little he might ever know. He took refuge in his favorite dream: himself and Bruno (Merle and his father become memories, or, if more convenient, dead)—himself and Bruno sharing an apartment, waking in the morning to chat like equals over coffee, the difference in their ages cancelled out by friendship. . . . If Bruno ever marries anyone, Emmett thought with sudden calm conviction, I shall kill myself.

“Something pretty damn funny,” Bruno shook his lion's head, “about me running around starting things. . . . Can this be Bruno Leonard? as his public has been taught to picture him? Don't tell anyone, Emmett—but I've caught myself
hurrying
.” The boyish something in his voice that frightened Emmett! spoke of something in Bruno's life, of how little he needed Emmett.

“Probably it's the influence of the Filing Cabinet,” said Emmett eagerly; and paused for adulation, feeling that he must have scored, speaking in Bruno's own language. But Bruno's eyes remained abstracted, intent upon the Manifesto. And Emmett, sensing with a pang that he was quite forgotten, withdrew respectfully into silence, his pencil searching errors in his copy.

But it mattered very little, as long as the door remained closed on himself and Bruno; as long as the telephone (filling him every time with chills of apprehension lest it be a woman calling Bruno) didn't ring; as long as Emmett wasn't dismissed to his home that had never been a home, where he never knew whom he might find, what man, ingratiating himself before his mother. His eyes went up in gratitude to Bruno's face, the safest harbor he had ever found. The heavy shaggy eyebrows, with their air of rising diffidently, marking to an infinitesimal degree the finest shade of meaning; the eyes which brooded bottomlessly or suddenly went opaque, shallow and brilliant like stones; and the long nose which wandered indiscreetly, only to lift unexpectedly at the end of its journey, stopping short as though stopping to sniff what it had come all that way to find.

“This business of decision,” Bruno said, and sighed; his eyes hung suspended like brooding lamps so that Emmett, in rapport with his slightest gesture, felt them to be hollowing tunnels through mysterious depths of thought. “Firman's death on art, Jeffrey's platform is sugar-coated propaganda as opposed to Firman's hammer methods—and Miles is death on anything that sounds like fun. We've got practically six different Manifestoes here,” he said bewildered; and lifted his eyebrows in ironic delight at the hopeless tangle before him.

“Your version,” said Emmett shyly, “is the best.”

“My boy! you must have overheard me talking to myself. Or else you've an infallible instinct for brewing the wine from sour grapes. . . . God damn this perfectionism of mine—or is it moral constipation? The Magazine to end all Magazines—or no Magazine at all; the Manifesto to end all Manifestoes. . . .” He shook himself into the man-of-action again; the new Bruno tossed off paper-clips and shuffled manuscripts and sent the terror into Emmett's soul. “Run along home, Emmett, indecision's bad for growing boys. Go home and keep our financiers in order.”

Emmett sat tight. He wanted nothing but to sit on in Bruno's presence. He wished that time would suddenly stop, that the Magazine would not emerge from the safe realm of Project, that the home-coming steamer would pause in mid-ocean forever. “Soppy,” he was, about Bruno. The Black Sheep (but they were jealous!) said so, termed him “Boswell”; called him Leonard's Shadow. It was Al, his father, first discovered what he called his “case” on Bruno. His mother's Hungarian psychoanalyst had termed it a “transference”; Emmett had blushed with rage at the ugly implications. Maybe he
was
soppy. Maybe he
did
have a “case.” But he had never had anyone in his life before to whom he had come so close. One could not belong to an extravagantly beautiful and modern mother who insisted on being called Merle, whom one half-suspected (but how Bruno had eased
that
pain!) of having an affair with Dr. Vambery (and only yesterday, he had seen her serving a cocktail tea to Jeffrey Blake!); nor to a father who was nothing but a lecher and cared more for his business than his life. Not until Emmett had sat in the front row of Bruno's freshman composition class and found Bruno's bright eyes falling rather more in his direction than his classmates', had Emmett known anyone he dared be soppy about.

“
We would favor
,” he read from the paper before him, “
a policy based on science and Marxist materialism
. . .” and then his eyes, his thoughts, began to wander, back to Bruno again, the harbor of his loneliness. The evening merged with that day last spring which he would not for the rest of his life forget, when Bruno had abruptly become his friend. Emmett had come with the newly organized Black Sheep (he had hoped for an end to his loneliness there, but the Sheep distrusted him because his father was rich) in the midst of the famous fraternity controversy. After the Sheep had won Bruno's promise of help (and Firman had pinned him down unmercifully!) and filed slowly out of the study, Emmett had found himself somehow going on sitting; Doctor Leonard merely nodding, as though he tacitly confirmed the rendezvous their eyes had made in class. Emmett had discovered for the first time the now familiar campus landscapes that hung marking the seasons on Bruno's wall; the perpetual restless throb of his nerves (which Dr. Vambery, to Emmett's infinite shame, attributed to adolescent sex) had gradually subsided, time had ceased to matter. He sat brimming with repressed confidences. But as their talk progressed, his need faded; it was clear that Bruno understood—how lonely a boy could be, on his own campus, in his own world, in the heart of his own family—and understanding, hedged; played delicately with allegories, never probing deep enough to wound. And to make them equal Bruno talked about himself, telling Emmett of his own dream, the Magazine, which last year was referred to as the Project; so that they parted, even that first afternoon, it seemed to Emmett, friends. Something had been released in Emmett's chest, as though he had found what he was always looking for and found that it was not, as he had told his father angrily, Poetry; nor, as he had beautifully written in his freshman themes until Bruno begged him not to, Beauty; but just a friend; just someone to talk to. . . .

“This stuff, my colleagues' contributions,” said Bruno in bewilderment, “is all so
positive
. It would take a microscopic scale to weigh it, to maintain an open forum. How in hell can anyone be so sure, so downright? When I read such positive statements, even—or especially—when they illustrate my own point of view, I begin to squirm and doubt, dodge around till I'm almost siding with the opposition.” He paused and rubbed the furrows in his brow as though they ached. “But this is retrogression, Emmett; Leonard atavism. Word salad blue-plate, by Bruno Leonard, constipated Chinese four-star chef—dash of Firman, touch of Miles, oil of Jeffrey, shake them all together they spell mother; m for soup, o for mustard plaster, t for umbilical. . . . Umbilical reminds me, Emmett; how is your private life these days? how are your parents behaving?”

“They're pretty awfully stupid,” Emmett said. He would gladly sell his family short for Bruno's entertainment. “Dr. Vambery's practically moved in now Mother's ‘graduated'—and he and Al aren't on s-s-speaking terms. As long as Al is home, Dr. Vambery plays Hungarian solitaire in a corner. . . . But Al is never home for long, I think he's got a new s-s-stenographer.” Remarkable how these things, for years so painful, sank to the level of comic relief, under Bruno's tolerant gaze.

“And no more ‘business'?”

“Father's given that up.” Emmett had hated the word “business” since he was three years old; it came out of his father's mouth tobacco-stained and dry, slightly nasal; the combination of the zz sound with the n went the wrong way up his nostrils like burning sulphur off a kitchen match. “He s-says I look too much like a girl scout for his racket anyway.” He thought with relief how since knowing Bruno he had relinquished the vain attempt to gain his father's approbation.

“And how does your father regard Merle's latest flyer into the angel business, supporting the Magazine?” Bruno's eyebrows pointed in delight as they always did at anything ridiculous.

“He says he's glad she's given up supporting opera stars, he hopes the r-r-revolution will be quieter. Last night Dr. Vambery said it would be a fine sublimation for Merle's creative instincts, so Al said the Magazine ought to be called ‘Mother's Outlet.' ” He grinned sheepishly.

“Al's all right, you know, Emmett,” said Bruno rather seriously. Like the side of him that went with women, his friendliness for Emmett's father hurt. “He's got some damn thing the rest of us haven't got. Thank God he's not an intellectual. Of course he'd cut his competitors' throats behind their backs; but in some ways he's a singularly honest guy—he's got some funny integrity; he's somehow no phony. But Merle! Merle's dangerous. In the first place she's too beautiful for a man's mother, seems indecent somehow. And if there's anything tougher than being born with a silver spoon in the mouth it's coming into the world with silver apron-strings about the neck—and every one of Merle's marked sterling at both ends. You'll have your job unsoldering, my boy. My own mother's umbilical,” he confided grimly, “was made of noodle-charlottes, I had to gnaw my way to freedom.” He made a gesture of impatience, as though someone were talking on and on and he condemned to listen. “But where is this getting us with the Manifesto to end all Manifestoes, my boy, or the Magazine to—
is
there a Magazine? I thought I told you to go home, Emmett,” he said sternly.