The Last of Philip Banter

by John Franklin Bardin

  Jeremy hung up the telephone and walked to the long windows that overlooked the street. He did not stand too close to their sills, even though they were shut tight, because these sills were flush with the floor and this always made him dizzy and filled him with the crazy urge to jump. At the moment he was especially upset. Why had he found Dorothy’s request so disquieting? And why did he feel he was being dishonest by accepting her invitation and not letting Brent know about it? Of course, he could tell Brent. No harm would be done, but it would do no good either. Not that he thought Brent was jealous of Dorothy – she had said she was net – but only curious about her. Nor was there any cause for jealousy on Brent’s part, he was sure. If once he had been deeply in love with Dorothy, and had continued to love her even after she had married Philip, he no longer cared for her. A year’s absence had effected that. Last night, a fugitive impulse had forced him to embrace her; it had been a childish passion and a wholly irresponsible one. He knew – he was certain he knew – that it had been only an incident, an inconsequential by-product of a dull evening. Nothing would come of it, because he did not want anything to come of it.

  Or did he? As he stood at the window looking down on, but not seeing, the busy street – in his own apartment with the woman he told himself he loved, and with whom he had spent the night, only a few paces away – suddenly, he was a part of another reality, intensely aware of another presence. Now Dorothy stood between him and the window; Dorothy’s aura, a combination of fond memories and the actual, physical pressure and warmth of her body as he had held her to himself the night before, surrounded him and overwhelmed him. Her scent was in his nostrils; her dark hair brushed lightly against his brow, cobwebby, enticing…

  He stiffened and forced himself to withdraw from the dream that had seized him. Had Dorothy had a similar experience that morning? Was this why she had telephoned him and insisted that he spend an hour or two with her? Jeremy was afraid this was so. Faced with the possibility that Dorothy might desire to renew their love, he was not nearly as sure that he would be able to will it otherwise as he had been an instant before. Then he had thought of his action the previous night only in terms of his own wayward, selfish impulse. Would he be able to stand up against her longing as well as his own?

  A sound made him turn quickly about to stare at the other end of the room. Brent had just come from the sink and was wiping her hands on her apron; her face was flushed with the heat of the water she had been using, and this unnatural colouring heightened the sensuality of her wide mouth and her brooding, changeable eyes. As he regarded her, he knew that for him Brent, too, was very desirable.

  He continued to stare at her while she walked to the sofa, which the sheets and blankets still disguised, took a cigarette from the pack lying open on the end-table, lighted it and with a sigh of satisfaction bent over to unmake the bed. He watched her work, rapidly and efficiently peeling the sheets off, folding them, unmasking the pillows and fluffing out the dents made by their heads in the night. He felt a lump rise in his throat, and thought himself a sentimental fool.

  ‘That was the studio,’ he said.

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Joe’s still sick. He has four shows this afternoon.’

  ‘And they want you to work them? Jeremy, when are we going to have some time to ourselves?’ She straightened up and let a pillow drop to the floor. He could see that she took his words at their face value, and did not suspect that the call might not have been from the studio. But then, why should she? He had never lied to her before.

  He looked at his wrist-watch. ‘I’ll have to be there inside a few minutes. The first show’s at noon and I’ll have to work it up.’

  Brent had returned to her work. ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘This evening. They’ll have to get someone else for tonight. I’m as tired of this as you.’

  She did not answer him. He went to the closet for his hat and coat. As he was leaving, he asked, ‘Will you stay here this afternoon?’

  Brent looked up again, and smiled. Jeremy wondered if the guilt he felt had expressed itself in his voice. But if it had, Brent said nothing to indicate it. ‘I may try to write this afternoon,’ she said. ‘If I do, I’ll go home since I can never get into the mood here. If I’m not here when you get back, you can give me a ring.’

  Jeremy shut the door and went down the stairs. Now that he had actually left the apartment, he felt he was making a mistake. He stood outside the building, hesitating. He could telephone Dorothy from the drugstore on the corner and make some excuse for not keeping his appointment, and then return to the apartment and Brent. But if he did that, he would have difficulty explaining why he had decided not to go to the studio. Or he could go back and tell Brent that he had lied, and that instead of going to the studio he was meeting Dorothy for lunch. Brent would be jealous of Dorothy if he did that, though, and angry at him for lying to her. The simplest thing to do was to keep his appointment. So, having reached this decision, he set off down the street, walking a little faster and with a little more determination than usual.

  As soon as Jeremy had left the apartment, Brent had gone to the windows. By opening one of them, steadying herself on the ledge and leaning out a bit, she saw Jeremy leave the house and then pause momentarily as if he had not made up his mind which way to go. Brent watched him intently, her face strained with quick anger. Only when he began to walk up the street did she turn and go back into the room. She went over to the couch and lay on it and tried to cry.

  Many times in past months Dorothy had thought of Jeremy, and had remembered his boyish, open face, his quick enthusiasms, with an uncomfortable nostalgia. Finally, she had called him and asked him to dinner. He had tried to refuse her invitation – she knew this was because he had been hurt by Philip’s neglectfulness – by saying he had a date that evening and would be busy every other night that week. He had described Brent to her over the telephone, and Dorothy had insisted that he bring Brent along. Once done, she had delayed telling Philip that she had invited Jeremy and Brent, had delayed so long that she realized she did not want to tell him… that she feared his meeting Brent. She had not told him until the evening before, and she had been frightened by the effect her news had had on him. But she soon forgot this in her joy of meeting Jeremy again. All evening she had been afraid Philip would notice that she could not keep her eyes off her old friend. But what difference would it have made if Philip had noticed?

  Dorothy knew that she had made a mistake by marrying Philip instead of Jeremy. Not that she had been unhappy with Philip during the first years of their married life. No, then, she had been almost unreasonably happy. But later, especially in the last year, she had felt Philip eluding her – slipping from her grasp. Philip was so relentless. He always had objectives he was working towards, but he seldom made them known to her. Frequently, she guessed them. Many times she had been angry, but it was a kind of ingrown anger that she could not express. ‘I am as much to blame for my husband’s immorality as he is,’ she told herself. ‘Yet this self-shame makes me hate him. But would life with Jeremy, if I had married him instead of Philip, have been so different?’

  Dorothy was enough of a realist to sense that it might have been much the same. Any good-looking man flirts. Yet she felt Jeremy had a straightness in his character that was alien to Philip, a kind of self-restraint that recognized a law that had been freely accepted and cleaved to it. Besides, Jeremy was friendly; he liked people for what they were, not for what they were worth. Jeremy had loved her, while Philip had only recognized her value to him… and had set about to obtain it and her.

  When she thought of Philip and Jeremy, Dorothy also thought of her father. He, too, was a handsome man, erect and tawny even in his old age. As a child, her father had been a god, a bronzed, golden-haired image of majesty. She had seen him usually at a distance: at the foot of the table when she was allowed to dine with him, on the polo field at the championship matches which she had obser
ved from the grandstand, standing by the fireplace, tall and unbending, when nurse brought her in to say good-night. To this day she perceived her father through the wrong end of an imaginary telescope; there was a barrier to scale or a distance to span between them at all times. Of course, she knew, it had not always been so. There had been times when her father had taken her in his arms and held her, one of them as recent as her wedding. But this was a memory that her consciousness usually denied, a holy thing to be kept in a safe place and reverenced, not a well-worn pocket-piece to be fondled at odd moments and perhaps mislaid. Only in the stillness of calm and peace or at the height of euphoria, did she ever think of that wedding-day embrace. Her father, rigid in his dignity, had closed her into his arms with inexorable strength and had kissed her acceptant mouth with lips and tongue; there had been greed in his ardour and immeasurable satisfaction. Philip’s husband kiss, a breathless moment later, had been father-like.

  This was the way Dorothy thought – compulsively, circularly – about her life and Philip. And each time her thoughts reached the same, questioning impasse: would Jeremy have been different? Then, the night before, she had seen him, talked to him, and had grown jealous of Brent. Jeremy was just the same as he had always been, a little effusive, perhaps, and getting slightly stout – but good-hearted and still youthful. When Philip had passed the time by being impolite to Jeremy and paying court to Brent, Dorothy had at last decided that she had had enough. As Jeremy was leaving, she followed him into the hall, interposed herself between him and the door, and smiled and waited. He had kissed her and held her in his arms while she whispered in his ear. Later, she had to leave the house, to get out on the streets and feel the cold wind on her face. She had not returned until late in the night, and she had not been surprised to find that Philip’s bed was unoccupied. She had waited until the middle of the morning, suffering a kind of dry-mouthed terror, before she had picked up the telephone and dialled the number of Philip’s office. She intended to speak to him of her feelings, tell him that she doubted her love for him and that she wanted to leave him. It had come to that; which is not to say it was easy for her to do. Her pulse pounded in her ear while she waited for the connection to be completed, and she gasped with great relief when the switchboard girl told her that Philip had left and had not said when he would be back. But, as soon as she had hung up, she was alone again and miserable. She went over to the piano and played a little Mozart, but this did no good either. She lighted a cigarette, and then let it go out. Finally, she went back to the telephone and called Jeremy. When he answered, she spoke brightly, affectedly, begging him to have lunch with her. She would tell him about Philip and ask his advice – it would be the sensible way to let him know that she now considered herself free and unencumbered. Philip would not mind if she had an affair with Jeremy. The thought of Philip’s minding made her smile bitterly to herself. The chances were he might even be pleased.

  Dorothy had told Jeremy to meet her at the Three Griffins. This was a small café that Philip and she had visited often during the first months of their marriage, and she felt it somehow fitting that she should go there on the day she had decided that she must end their relationship. She put on her silliest hat, a tiny perky affair with a wild-eyed peacock’s feather stuck in it, and daubed her fingernails with a gaudy polish that she had bought once when she was feeling gay and had never dared to use. She spent an inordinate amount of time dressing: taking a long, long bath, brushing her hair for many minutes before her mirror, carefully painting her mouth with lipstick that matched her nails; so, of course, she was late to her appointment.

  Jeremy was sitting in a booth at the rear of the long, narrow, dimly lighted café glumly considering a martini. He did not see Dorothy until she was standing beside him, then he jumped to his feet and smiled quickly. Dorothy was suddenly nervous. She dropped her purse as she sat down; Jeremy stooped for it at the same time she did, and their heads bumped resoundingly. The mutual, ridiculous pain established a bond; by the time Jeremy had ordered a martini for Dorothy, and the waiter had brought it, a warm feeling existed between them and Jeremy’s hand was groping for hers beneath the table. They talked about small, topical things at first: the weather, Dorothy’s hat, the fact that the martinis Were rather good – at this point they ordered two more – gossip about a mutual friend, the latest shows they had seen. Then Jeremy remembered a Gershwin show and Dorothy hummed its tunes, her head tilted back, her dark eyes glinting; and Jeremy’s hand became bolder.

  They had seen that show together on a weekend in New York when they had happened to meet; it had been a rainy, miserable day and they both had been unhappy about a party that had been a frost the night before. Now, that day came to life again and with it the Thirties. Jeremy remembered the words of a Cole Porter song, and Dorothy reminded him of a dance they had gone to together at which another mutual friend had gotten very drunk and made a scene. It was all of a piece, a mood that owed much to the martinis – they were now drinking the third round – and to that queer feeling of opportunities missed and illusions mislaid that comes upon us all when we try to remember. It was very inappropriate, too, they both realized, for what they were doing in actuality was endeavouring to escape the cage of the present by admiring and reconstructing the bars that had made the cages of the past. Neither of them mentioned Philip or Brent; Dorothy delayed because she was not at all sure that now was just the time, and Jeremy forgot on impulse because it was pleasant for the moment and he was confident that this hour would never influence the future. At last, they ordered lunch, although they were not hungry; Jeremy came around to Dorothy’s side of the table and they ate off each other’s plates – soon she was in his arms and he was kissing her, and getting the tulle from her hat in his mouth and her mouth, and feeling her warm form go soft and supple in his grasp.

  He stiffened. ‘Dorothy, I don’t think we should.’

  She did not answer, but only looked at him and then dropped her head. He glanced down at her bowed head and was taken by surprise by the whiteness of her part. It was difficult to speak. ‘I’m not a prude, Dorothy. But I don’t think we really should.’ (All the while staring at her dark and complaisant head, feeling the vague outline of her soft warmth.) ‘We are older now, mature, with responsibilities to think of. Don’t you see, Dorothy, it’s really not the same?’

  Dorothy did not understand herself what had come over her, except that she felt that Jeremy welcomed her and wanted her, in a way that Philip never did. She inched closer to him and laid her head on his shoulder. Her voice crooned softly to him in a broken, murmuring sing-song. ‘It is the same… that’s why I had to see you. You see, he’s been so strange… so distant… he never looks at me any more… he never comes to me. I’m used up… no good… a formality. I tried to tell him… today… before I called you. He wasn’t in. I thought that it mattered that I tell him first… but it doesn’t… no, it doesn’t. It’s you I must tell. You’re the one who has to know… before it’s too late…’

  She pressed her mouth against his, her tears dampening his cheeks. He saw the shielded lamp on the wall through the diffusion of her dark hair. He felt the points of her breasts against his chest and the oblique pressure of her thigh across his hip. Brent, he thought, Brent. He tried to remember her face, the soft slur of her voice. But Dorothy was whispering again. ‘Hurry, darling… let’s go some place… away from here… oh, dear!’

  4

  Philip was afraid. He tried not to think about what George Matthews had said, tried to distract himself by carrying on the small matters of life just as if nothing had happened. Since he had slept in his clothes, and badly, he stopped by a barber shop for a shave and a facial. The barber talked monotonously while he kneaded his face and applied hot towels; Philip tried to concentrate on the barber’s patter, but it was no use. His mind kept reverting to its central problem: who was writing the ‘Confession’? He remembered the dream with which he had awakened and saw again the faces of Do
rothy, Brent and Jeremy ringed around him pointing accusing fingers. He began to tremble. Soon he was shaking uncontrollably. The barber put his hand on his forehead, but said nothing – Philip was grateful for the firm, cool fingers, yet he could not help but wonder what the fellow was thinking. He might have decided that this particular customer was recovering from a binge – what would he say if he knew what was really wrong? Had he looked out of his mind when he entered the shop? Was his confusion so readily perceptible?

  What was it that distinguished the aspect of the sane from that of the insane? Surely there was a difference. He knew that many times in his life he had encountered psychotics, casually, in buses or on the subway, on the street, almost any place. They were not all locked up by any means. Some he had known by their peculiar attire, such as the man who was in the habit of making incoherent speeches at Columbus Circle wrapped in the flags of the United Nations; others had a compulsive gesture or an eccentric characteristic: they jerked or swayed, they shouted strange sounds, they talked continuously to themselves. He doubted if he had acquired suddenly any of these symptoms. But hadn’t he occasionally identified madness in others by some other, subtler sign? Yes, he remembered a reporter who used to work next to him in the city room of the Herald-Post, a quiet, sensible chap who had a pretty wife and a bright little boy. He had gone queer overnight. They had all noticed it, and had talked it over amongst themselves – Philip and the other reporters and the men at the desk – so it had not been his imagination. Yet there had been nothing obviously wrong with this fellow, except that those characteristics that had always been his had asserted themselves to a greater and greater degree: he had been quiet to begin with – he grew quieter; he had been affable and polite – he grew extraordinarily apologetic; he had frequently paused in his work to gaze out the window – he got so that he did little else. Then, one night after work was over, he went down to the Lexington Avenue Subway and stepped off the platform in front of an express.