It did not have to happen. It could not be ordained. There was no such thing as fate (and even if there were, the author of the ‘Confession’ was not privy to it). He could not be made to do something he did not want to do.
But what if he wanted to do it? Suppose he was attracted to this girl, would he then have the will to ignore her? Suppose she was attracted to him (as the manuscript said she would be), would he then be able to ward her off?
He had to. There was no escaping that conclusion. If it all came to pass (it was impossible – it could not – these events could not possibly occur!), would he be able to withstand the temptation?
When Philip finished dressing, he lay down on his bed and tried to smoke a cigarette. He found that he was breathing too rapidly and too irregularly to accommodate the habit of smoking: he gasped and choked until his eyes watered. He threw the cigarette away and stared at the ceiling, his hands clasped behind his head. He waited. He could hear his wife moving about in the living-room, and he could catch occasional fragments of her conversation with the cook, who must be setting the table. He felt detached and lonely. As a boy he had often had the same feeling when visitors came to call on his mother and he hid himself in his room because of his reluctance to meet strangers. He had been modest and reticent in those days, and he suffered from feelings of inadequacy. Now, emotionally, he was the groping adolescent again. His mother’s face (she was long dead) hovered in his mental eye, a vague, disembodied face that seemed to be trying to tell him something, to communicate with him… He shut his eyes to concentrate on the evasive image; it enlarged in size and foreboding, but it became no more distinct. Warmth, an uncomfortable warmth, pressed down on him and, at the same time, he knew that he was sinking into timelessness, an unnatural kind of sleep. Then, all upon an instant, he was awake again, wholly alert, sitting forward, strained and tense with shock. He had heard the ghost of a tinkle, the last faint vibration of the doorbell – and now, voices – not a voice, not the voice he had come to expect to hear, a man’s voice and a woman’s voice… in the hall.
Not until Dorothy called to him, concerned about him, ‘Philip, are you all right? – Jeremy and Brent are here, Philip! are you about ready?’ did he go out to meet his guests.
As he entered his own living-room he was still existing partly in the emotional context of his youth; it was as if he had walked into his mother’s parlour: the warm, un-aired, shut-in odour oppressed him (the sliding doors had been kept closed, the windows shut and locked against the dust so that everything would look nice when company came). He found himself comparing Dorothy to his mother – the likeness about the eyes was particularly remarkable. He promised himself again that he would not look at Jeremy’s friend, even while being introduced to her. He glanced at Jeremy once; as soon as he saw how fat his friend’s formerly open, boyish face had become, and had seen the fold of flesh that bulged slightly above the purposely loose collar of his shirt, he turned back to Dorothy (remembering how as a child he had kept his gaze steadfastly on his mother while forcing himself to mumble the polite words, to say ‘I’m glad to know you’).
No one noticed his shyness. Jeremy was being boisterous, as usual. He had walked over and clapped Philip on the back, and had pumped his hand. ‘Where you been keeping yourself, Phil? Long time no see! Auld acquaintance shouldn’t be given the brush-off, you know!’
‘Philip has been kept very busy at the agency, Jerry,’ Dorothy was saying. ‘Neither of us meant to neglect you. It’s just that we hardly ever have a day to ourselves.’
Philip saw that Dorothy was frowning at him. Then she had noticed that something was wrong. He would have to do better than this. He would have to look at the woman, at least.
Jeremy again. ‘Phil, I want you to meet Brent Holliday, a little something special I’ve picked up since last we met. Smile your prettiest for the nice gentleman, Brent dear!’
Had Jeremy always been like this? Philip did not remember him as being quite so blatant, so downright vulgar. Had a year really made that much difference?
And then, thinking about Jeremy, trying to compare the man before him with the memory of a friendship that was over, Philip forgot and looked at Brent. His mind neglected its principal concern for the duration of an instant and, in so doing, dropped its defences of shyness and withdrawal. He turned and looked directly into her eyes, and he did it as much to get away from Jeremy as for any other reason. He did not look away.
Brent was not beautiful. He saw at once that she was even careless of her personal appearance: her mouth needed fresh lipstick, her long bob fell naturally, loosely, to her shoulders – it had not been trained to fall that way by a hairdresser – the gold pin above her breasts was fastened crookedly to the high-necked tunic of her dress. But her eyes were alive, brown flecked unevenly with a glinting, changing colour, commanding. She was half-leaning against the back of the sofa, regarding him mockingly. He realized that she had noticed his awkward reticence, too, and had been amused by it. Where, at first, he had thought no one was aware of his shyness, and he had been able to hope that it was but an inward state of himself, now he knew that both Brent and Dorothy had sensed his fear at once, and that only Jeremy was unconscious of it.
‘I’m glad to know you, Philip,’ Brent was saying, looking past him at his wife. ‘Tell me, Dorothy, is he always this shy? Why, he’s just like a little boy. A frightened, little boy!’
But as she said these cruelly jocular words, Philip saw her face change; or was it that he was seeing her as she was instead of the façade she wished him to see? The badly rouged lips were actually quite controlled; the slurred words were slurred consciously. Her eyes held his like a man’s; it was almost as if she had put out her hand, grabbed the stuff of his stiff shirt, held him at arm’s length and cried, ‘Here you are – I have you!’
‘Philip – shy?’ Jeremy exploded into laughter. ‘Oh, he’s shy all right. Tell her how shy he is, Dottie. Go on, tell her!’
‘It isn’t that he’s shy, Brent. It’s just that he had a dizzy spell before you came and he still feels a little shaky. Are you all right now, Philip?’
At this cue, Brent’s expression changed again, became demure, penitent.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Banter, I didn’t know you felt badly. I wouldn’t have said what I did.’
Philip thought he detected a sense of disappointment in what she said, as if he weren’t all that she had expected. Or was he reading too much into a few casual words? He looked away from her and went over to sit down next to Dorothy. Jeremy was still laughing. ‘Phil, tell her about how you met Dottie. Go on and tell her, Phil. Oh, he’s shy all right!’
Brent’s face stiffened. She seemed annoyed by Jeremy, sympathetic to Philip. ‘Do you have to go on so, Jeremy?’ she asked.
‘It is rather amusing, Brent,’ said Dorothy. ‘What Jerry’s referring to. You see I met Jerry before I met Philip. In fact I met Philip through Jerry. Jerry was always telling me about Philip. It was always “Philip did this” or “Philip said that” – so I got curious about this man I was always hearing about, but never seemed to meet –’
‘Do we have to rehash all that, Dorothy?’ Philip asked. He felt enough of a fool already.
‘He’s just shy, Dottie!’ Jeremy insisted. ‘Don’t let him stop you now.’
Dorothy looked at her husband. She smiled at him. ‘I suppose it’s really only amusing to us. It would only bore you, Brent.’
‘No, really, Mrs Banter.’
‘Call me Dorothy as you did before.’
‘I really feel like I’ve known you quite a while, Dorothy. Go on. Tell us about how you met Philip.’
‘I finally persuaded Jerry to take me to a party that Philip was giving. It was in one tremendous room that hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. There were scads of queer people milling around or being very quiet in corners. And Philip! The first time I laid eyes on Philip he was standing in the centre of this crowd, with his shirt torn and hi
s trousers sagging, ashes and cinders sprinkled in his hair and all over his clothes, reciting T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in sepulchral tones!’
‘Good old Phil! The life of the party!’ laughed Jeremy.
‘I tell you, Brent, I never saw a drunker man in all my life. I was mortified when Jerry insisted on taking me over to him right away and introducing us.’
Brent had nothing to say. She was watching Philip and smiling. He turned away from her deliberately.
‘But that was only one side of you, wasn’t it?’ Dorothy was smiling at him, too. Only her smile marked the indulgence of a wife, not the mocking acknowledgement of Brent’s manner.
‘I wasn’t always drunk,’ said Philip. He wished he could have kept Dorothy from dragging in that extraneous bit of his past. She meant nothing by it – her reasons were probably sentimental – but it annoyed him.
‘No, darling,’ she said. ‘And you made love beautifully.’ She turned to Jeremy and asked him coquettishly, ‘He took me away from you, didn’t he, Jerry?’
Jeremy seemed about to bulge out of his dinner jacket as he made a comic bow to them. A lick of his sandy hair fell onto his brow, and Philip could see beads of sweat on his forehead.
‘To the brave, the fair,’ he said.
Philip felt Brent’s eyes upon him, but this time he did not turn away from Jeremy. He did not dare look her way. He wanted to too badly.
They talked more naturally during dinner and Philip found himself taking part in the conversation. Jeremy seemed to forget his delight in retelling sensational details of Philip’s past. Dorothy was the inquiring, solicitous hostess. Even Brent ventured to talk about herself and her work. She was a writer who had been published in several of the ‘little’ magazines and was now working on a novel.
Philip drew her out about the novel, but cautiously. He could not forget certain lines in the prophetic manuscript. He felt that if he heard her say anything that was even an approximation of the predicted dialogue, then all of it would also come to pass, inevitably.
‘I feel vaguely uncomfortable when I hear someone say “I’m working on a novel”,’ he said, taking care to address the remark to them all, not to Brent alone.
‘Why say that, Philip?’ Dorothy asked. He could see that she feared he was going out of his way to be rude.
‘I think I know what he means,’ Brent interrupted. ‘I feel the same way at times. You’re wondering what the person has found to say.’
This was not what Philip had meant. Philip had not intended anything so definite. His question had been an attempt to draw Brent out about her writing, and it was succeeding.
‘There are so many kinds of novels,’ he said.
‘It is difficult, I admit,’ said Brent, ‘and if you asked me what it is I want to say in my novel, I don’t believe I could answer you. Not in so many words. I could give you the plot, of course. I could describe the characters for you…’
Brent lifted a spoonful of pudding as she said this, but it never reached her lips. She made a small gesture with the spoon and the chocolate stuff fell off onto the front of her dress. She stopped speaking and stared at the mess she had made, frowning. At the same time a lock of her dark bob slipped forward, obscuring one of her eyes and making her seem more than ever like a wilful child. Suddenly Philip wanted to kiss her, to hold her in his arms…
‘I’ll get some hot water,’ said Dorothy, getting to her feet. ‘If you apply it immediately it will come off.’
‘Never mind,’ said Brent. ‘I’ll just scrape it off. It doesn’t matter.’ And she did as she said, not too carefully, leaving a brown smear on the light cloth of her bodice. ‘I’m going to have to send this to the cleaner’s anyway.’
‘It would only take a minute.’ Dorothy continued to protest.
‘No really, Dorothy. It does not matter.’ She had become aware of Philip’s steady gaze and her own expression now changed, became serious, intent. It was as if she had only then made an interesting discovery. When she spoke, her words were made indistinct by the smile on her lips. ‘What was I saying, Philip? Not that I suppose it matters…’
‘You were telling us what your book was about.’
Brent laughed a little too loudly. ‘Or rather I was telling you what it wasn’t about. I was being awfully vague.’
‘You said you could tell us about the characters,’ Philip said hopefully. As long as she was talking to him, he could maintain the fiction that she was talking to the group. And he could look at her without rousing Dorothy’s suspicions.
‘They are very stuffy characters. I’d only bore you.’ She was teasing him. She wanted him to coax her openly, before his wife.
‘Let me decide that,’ he said.
Brent glanced at Dorothy – to see if she gathered what was going on? And if she did – to see how she was taking it?
Jeremy yawned. ‘Brent’s always going on about that damned book, but she’s never let me see it. I’m beginning to doubt its existence.’ He began to eat his pudding again. After making this one morose comment, he was definitely uninterested in the conversation.
‘It’s about a man and two women,’ Brent said. ‘The man is in his thirties and attractive. One of the women he has known for a long time; the other he meets in the subway quite by chance. He loves both of them and cannot choose between them.’ She paused.
‘There’s more to it than that?’ Philip asked.
Brent twisted the pin on her dress. ‘Much more. You see, he only meets the second girl in the subway. At first, he meets her accidentally, and then, later, he plans to. She talks to him, lets him kiss her, but she will never leave the train with him. He trails her, follows her, tries to see where she gets off. But she never gets off.’
‘She would have to leave the train sometimes, wouldn’t she?’ asked Dorothy.
‘No,’ said Brent, ‘she never does. She stays on the train. One night the man stays up the whole night with her on the train waiting for her to get off. But she never does.’
‘She’s a symbol?’ asked Philip.
Brent looked down at her empty plate. ‘Yes, you might call her that. You see, he talks to her on the train about everything, simply everything. The world, politics, art, the education of the young – just everything. She’s well-informed, intelligent, nicely dressed, beautiful… his ideal woman.’
‘But she never gets off the train…’
‘That’s right. She never gets off the train.’
‘What happens in the end?’ Philip asked.
Brent smiled secretively, and traced a pattern on the damask with her fork. Then she looked directly into Philip’s eyes. ‘He dies. He commits suicide by jumping under the train. He has realized his love is hopeless.’
‘And what about the other woman, the one he has known a long time?’ Dorothy asked. ‘Does she just stand by while all this is happening and… and let it happen?’
Brent turned to Dorothy. ‘She never knows what is wrong. She thinks she is at fault. At the end, she blames herself for his suicide. And, in a way, she is right…’
Jeremy jumped to his feet and threw his napkin down on the table. ‘Rot! Unpleasant, pretentious rot!’ He glared at Brent. ‘And what’s more. I think you were making it up as you went along!’
Brent made no response, nor did she seem discouraged by Jeremy’s comment. He excused himself, and they watched him leave the room. And then, since dinner was over, they followed him.
Coffee was served in the living-room. Philip and Jeremy could find little to say to each other, but this was not the case with Brent and Dorothy. They sat together on the sofa and talked about those subjects women always talk about and men never listen to, while Jeremy and Philip sat on either side of the fireplace, in the two large chairs, facing each other glumly. Jeremy, who had been boisterous before dinner, had grown surprisingly taciturn. Philip concentrated on beginning a conversation with him. He was glad that Dorothy and Brent were taken up w
ith each other – if he could get Jeremy to talk, perhaps he would be able to forget his obsession: Brent.
‘I have some brandy that should go well with this,’ he said to Jeremy, setting his coffee cup on a low table and getting to his feet. ‘Would you like some?’
Jeremy gazed vaguely at his own cup and slowly shook his head. ‘Never touch the stuff any more. My doctor advises against it.’
‘Ulcers?’ Philip tried to make his inquiry sound sympathetic.
‘No, palpitations. And high blood pressure. I work too hard.’
‘Still doing the same thing?’
‘I’m on sustaining. And then I get calls for extra shows at odd hours. I did ten extras last week. They pay well, but I’m on the go all the time.’
‘Do you still live down in the Village?’ Philip asked.
‘No. I found a place uptown last fall. It’s closer to the studio, in the Fifties near Madison Square Garden. It’s a loft that I fixed up. Roomy, and you can play the radio loud or have company to all hours. The only thing is you have to pay off the inspector.’
‘The inspector?’
Jeremy lighted a cigarette and drained the rest of his coffee. ‘The building inspector. You’re not supposed to live in lofts. I keep my bed covered with a studio couch cover and pretend to be an artist. When he comes around I say the bed is a couch for my models to rest on. I keep an easel under the skylight to further the impression that I’m an artist and I only work there.’
‘Where does the pay-off come in?’
‘The last guy who came around was nosy. He prowled into the kitchen and saw the stove and refrigerator and the dishes in the sink. He asked some questions so I made him a present.’
‘What’s the advantage of living in such a place?’
‘It’s roomy. The rent’s cheap. Nobody bothers you and I can walk to work.’
‘Sounds interesting.’
Jeremy nodded his head. ‘It is. You and Dorothy should come up some time.’ He was not enthusiastic.
‘We’d like to,’ Philip said. ‘I’ve been busy myself or we would have looked you up long ago.’ He hesitated, not knowing what else to say.
The Last of Philip Banter Page 6