The Pillow Fight

by Nicholas Monsarrat

  Later we would be in the mood to listen, and to look on while other people sang the songs and made the jokes. I was anti-theatre at this time, or rather, I didn’t want anyone else’s dramatic ideas crossing up my own; we therefore kept away from other men’s masterpieces, and enjoyed the best trivia we could find.

  Every night, there were dozens of such offerings waiting for our inspection; ‘club acts’ at the smart places, off-Broadway reviews, places like Upstairs at the Downstairs or The Establishment, where wit was irreverent, and guaranteed, and very funny. Or we would go in search of music – our kind of music, which was usually jazz; Dixieland at Eddie Condon’s, or wherever Wilbur de Paris might be ripping out with Wrought Iron Rag; or finding something cooler down in Greenwich Village, even if it was nothing more than a piano, a drum and a clarinet wandering up and down one’s spine, like an exploring hand; or meeting the edge of crudity on the edge of Harlem – a quartet of hopped-up Negroes singing That Chick’s Too Young To Fry; or watching George Shearing’s blind hands on any keyboard in town; or (by way of somersault) joining the operatic extroverts at the ‘singing tables’ of Chez Vito, where jazz gave way to the melodic line, and barber-shop to bel canto.

  When the weather grew warmer, we used to walk a lot, particularly homeward bound at the end of our evenings, through the many villages which made up this huge city. Like London, New York was sliced into segments, endless in number, utterly different in character, and (if one wished) completely self-contained.

  One need never leave the area of Sixth Avenue between 50th and 54th Streets; one could shop, eat, live and love in a narrow band of the East 70s; one could settle down in the Village below 14th Street, and never come up for any other kind of air. Crossing such boundaries on our way home was like wandering the length of Europe, through a succession of open frontiers.

  We usually finished up with a non-buying session in front of the glittering windows of Fifth Avenue, where Cartier and Saks were, at this time of night, available to rich and poor alike; and then we would move a little way across town again, past the doorway where lurked the huge blind man in the khaki Balaclava helmet, and into our last dive of all, the downstairs room at ‘21’; a retreat which, in the small hours of the morning, was not all tourists – and not all celebrities, either.

  Here, as in many other places all over town, I was unlikely to be anonymous, and Susan was enough to turn a score of heads anywhere she went. But I had grown careless, during all this time of love and dreaming and desire; I wanted this girl, I had her on a single string, and I did not give a damn who knew about it.

  At ‘21’, give or take a few knowing stares, we would merge into the background, and sign off our last public appearance with a drink, and a gossip with anyone we knew, and, if still hungry, with the eggs Benedict or oysters Rockefeller which custom dictated; and then, at one or two or three, we would saunter out again, night owls going back to roost; down the echoing street, up the wide deserted highway of the Avenue, and gently homewards, hand in hand, to bed.

  ‘Home’ was on 54th Street, where I had installed her in a very small apartment in a tall, run-down house which, if the traffic on the stairs were anything to go by, was tacitly given over to such arrangements. (My hotel, of course, was out; and, for various semi-admirable reasons, my own apartment did not appeal.) Susan had settled happily into this nest, and organised the milk and the groceries and the newspapers and the dry cleaning, like any blinded bride. I had moved a few of my clothes in, and a work table for my typewriter, and I spent a lot of time there.

  I was getting to know her much better. What had started as a cheerful fling in Barbados had developed, imperceptibly, into a liaison of a different sort. It had a continuing, almost domestic quality, and I thus had the time and the chance to observe her more closely. In the process, I was finding out much more about Susan, Susan in depth.

  I had never before been at close quarters with a girl whose beauty was so remarkable that it put her into the professional category, and it was strange to watch her as she went about the business of preparing to face the public gaze. Bathing, dressing and make-up never took less than three hours, even if she were just going down the street to pick up a can of beans (which was her most likely local errand); her hair alone, although in the severe and simple style which I had voted for, and which she had continued, was good for half an hour of combing and patting, fingering and lacquering.

  I remembered how surprised I had been, one morning, to walk into the bedroom and find her standing before the mirror, her whole head covered by an impenetrable gauze bag as she prepared to put on a mohair sweater.

  ‘Good God!’ I said, startled. ‘No one told me it was Hallowe’en. What on earth is that thing?’

  Her head came slowly out of the neck of the sweater, like some nightmare cork, and then she removed the bag, very carefully, and there underneath was a sleek head of hair and a brand new make-up, all ready to go.

  ‘It’s my head bag,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you ever seen one before?’

  ‘No. Did you invent it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Models use them. They protect your hair and make-up and everything.’

  ‘Why can’t you put on the make-up after you put on the sweater?’

  ‘It doesn’t work out so well.’

  I examined the bag, which was made, it seemed, of old nylon stockings tacked into the shape of a pineapple. ‘Does everyone know about those things?’

  ‘Models do. But you can’t buy them. You have to make them yourself.’

  ‘I must get the concession.’

  As with her hair, so with a lot of other things. There were professional ways of dealing with whatever might go wrong – dresses that wrinkled, stockings that sagged, girdles that bunched, straps that showed, mascara that caked, lamé that might tarnish, sequins that might shed, furs that might mat themselves into tufts; and she knew all the appropriate tricks, and could put them to work whenever necessary.

  She managed everything which concerned her appearance with meticulous skill; it was the sort of narcissistic devotion which one could never quarrel with, nor grow impatient about, since the result, when at last she stepped out onto the street, or walked into a restaurant, or nestled into one’s arms, was feminine perfection.

  But I could not help noticing that only this end result was shining clean and chic; the background from which it sprang was deplorable. Compared with Kate’s spotless, laundered elegance, Susan was grubby and disorganised; her flower-like appearance was rooted in a positive farmyard of untidiness, hit-or-miss housekeeping, and tawdry chaos.

  The apartment – our warm and cosy little home – was like a neglected zoo. Lipsticked towels littered the bathroom floor; rubber instruments of hair-raising complexity and dubious application swung to and fro behind its doors. Soiled Kleenex decorated the dressing- table; cupboards or shelves unwarily probed might reveal anything – rejected underwear, torn brassières, exhausted deodorant sprays, miniature yet rusty razors, squeezed-out tubes of assorted lubricants; all the dirty jetsam of cherished femininity.

  She made a bed in one swift movement; she left the bath just as it was, with a tidemark of scented bath oil clinging to it; the sitting-room was littered with every movable object – cushions, records, magazines, loaded ashtrays, used glasses. Neither bed nor bath nor sitting-room was ever more than fractionally mine.

  She was a dear girl, and a wonderful one to sleep with; but I would have hated to share an apartment with her, on a long-term basis. She looked, in public, like a million dollars; but home was a real slum, and she was an adorable, highly decorative slut.

  Wonderful in bed she certainly was; it made up for almost everything else, as, at Stages One and Two, it generally did. When I came to know more about her, this talent of hers was possibly more surprising than anything else.

  My main discovery in this area was almost ac
cidental, stemming not so much from research as from my own vanity – or, as the couch-concessionaires would put it, my need for potency reassurance. In bed, talking (as we sometimes did, without too much diffidence) of other men who had enjoyed these same favours, I asked her: ‘Who was best?’ and she had answered: ‘You, darling! You’re fantastic!’ so promptly that even a self-deluding male was bound to be suspicious.

  Something in her answer had seemed automatic, and therefore odd; when I questioned her, in the loving-nagging way which women must often find unfair, she finally said: ‘Sorry, Johnny. I didn’t mean it to sound like that. But everyone asks that question.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Sure.’ She was smoking a cigarette, lazily, propped high on the pillow, surveying the world from her own languorous slope of Olympus. ‘It’s usually the first thing they say, afterwards. Sometimes it’s the only thing they say, except “Look out!” or “Jesus!”’

  I digested this, without too much appetite. ‘Who was best, then?’

  ‘My husband.’

  Well, well, I thought: a fresh character; one learned something new every day. ‘I never knew you were married,’ I told her. ‘When did that happen?’

  ‘About two years ago. When I was eighteen, and miserable. But it worked out pretty well, for a time. Very well. He was a doll, in his own way.’

  ‘Mr Crompton?’

  ‘Mr Crompton.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Oh, just a little guy, a drummer in a lousy orchestra. “The Five Hotrods”. But he was all I had then. He was wonderful to me.’

  ‘How wonderful?’

  ‘He took all the trouble.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘You know, preparation. And he used to talk all the time it was happening. Sort of dirty talk, but on purpose. It was the first I’d heard. It was very exciting.’ She blew a smoke-ring towards the shadowy ceiling, and went off at a tangent. ‘You know that joke about talking in bed? The psychiatrist says: “Do you talk to your wife during sexual intercourse?” and the man says: “Only if I can reach the phone.” That was one of his.’

  ‘But what happened to him? Are you divorced?’

  ‘I don’t think so … Oh, he just got fed up with everything. Like, the trouble was too much trouble. And he used to think it was his fault that it didn’t happen more easily.’

  ‘Whose fault was it?’

  ‘Mine.’

  Then she told me all about it.

  She had had a curious, even grotesque sexual history. She had been wild about sex, from the age of eleven; but it was sex pictorial, sex sniggering, sex self-practised. ‘I’ll beat the hell out of you,’ her father had warned, ‘if I ever see you within ten feet of a boy,’ and he had beaten the hell out of her, once, and she had feared him, and boys, and men, for years afterwards. She was left to her own devices, and the devices had proved ruinous.

  Secretly ashamed, secretly delighted, frantic and then downcast, she had become her own lover. ‘It nearly drove me mad,’ she told me, her eyes wide. ‘But I had to do it, maybe ten times a day. I just couldn’t stop.’

  It had had a sadder effect than driving her temporarily to distraction. Now, she could never ‘get anywhere’ with a man, unless this service were first provided for her; and even then there was no guarantee. It might take two hours or more, so deadening and abrasive had been that earlier process. What man had the patience? What man, especially, was going to pay for this dubious privilege?

  And who cared, anyway? Girls were there to be used … It had been her final misfortune that her first true lover had been a textbook athlete who also concentrated on his own progress, and never gave a shadow of thought to hers. Others of the same kind had followed; a girl so beautiful positively invited swift conquest, and swifter disposal.

  Her husband had been the only man who knew of her problems, and had loved her enough to try to solve it. But there were limits to love of this sort; he had lasted no longer than any other radical reformer who tired of trying to persuade a dull electorate to rally to the poll.

  The result was with her now, as a permanent disability. Though in body co-operative and lively, she remained alone, and untouched by any spark of appetite. In the act of love, the important part of her lay back, isolated, dégagée, munching mental peanuts until the brief storm passed.

  ‘Men are so quick,’ she said, explaining some more of this, as if she had to justify her inability. ‘All that build-up, and then “Phtt!”, and it’s over.’

  ‘It’s sad,’ I said, and in truth I meant it.

  ‘Sad and silly. One misses the dwelling application of the soul.’ When she saw me staring at her she giggled and said: ‘It’s all right. I read that in a book.’

  Amazingly, she was still cheerful and undefeated, in this and as far as I could see, all other respects. She was also vulnerable, and did not seem to care about that, either. One might have thought that this constructive frigidity of hers would have put her in a strong position, not a weak one; that she could have afforded to ration or withhold her gifts, in an area which meant so little to her.

  But obviously she still liked men, and could not really do without them, and constantly invited a relationship which, in the carnal realm, amounted to no more than a cigarette, and much less than a square meal. It did not make much sense, but this only joined the long list of other things which, in the female world, did not make much sense, either.

  She remained, when all was said, a wonderful person to make love with, and she was, for me at that moment, just right. Indeed, she was almost too available, posing no demands, requiring no effort. She was always there, always wide open and suggestible, always ready.

  I suppose that, giving me thus nothing at all to measure up to, she was bad for me. But I felt I would survive such self-indulgence. This was all I really wanted: a girl who would lie down at the given signal, and was not the smallest trouble otherwise.

  Even the ‘rescue operation’, which I had planned with such nobility of purpose down in Barbados, had been no particular problem. I found that I knew enough people in the middle reaches of TV to win her a re-entry of sorts, into that silly section of television which, for pretty girls, involved trotting out the prizes on give-away shows, and holding up audience cues on cards designed by some nameless actuary to leave the chest and legs as principal features of the landscape.

  In pursuing this line of endeavour, she had modelled furs, and been chased across the screen by small agile comedians, and had pretended to faint when kissed by Dr Kildare, and been photographed winking at the late-night audience before composing herself for sleep. (She photographed very well, though she was really too big for the confinements of the 21-inch screen.) She had earned about $600, which delighted her, and spent it all on a nightdress and matching lace peignoir, which delighted me. It added up to a marginal living, the kind which gave her something to do, and kept her out of mischief. At least, so she assured me.

  ‘No passes?’ I asked her, when we were debating this aspect of her career.

  ‘Not really. Nothing desperate, anyway. The policy seems to be hands-off.’ She smiled across our dinner-table, which was in one of the darker corners of a restaurant known to the trade as the Almost Inn. ‘You’re really quite important, you know.’

  There were implications there which I did not welcome, but I let them go. ‘So everything’s all right.’

  ‘Oh yes. I’m doing another of those quiz show things next week. But–’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I really want to act.’

  ‘What sort of acting?’

  ‘You know. Real acting. On the stage. But I don’t know enough about it.’

  ‘You’d better go to school, then.’

  ‘Oh, Johnny!’ She was delighted, and showed it with a smile which, if there had been enough li
ght, might have ravished the entire room. ‘Could I?’

  ‘Why not?’

  She went to school, for three whole weeks, joining an establishment absolutely dedicated (according to its brochure) to the living theatre as an art form, an arm of the cultural crusade, and a fulfilling way of life. But three weeks was enough to determine that the omens here were not favourable.

  ‘It’s not for me,’ she reported, dispiritedly, when we met after one of her afternoon classes. ‘I’ll never be any good at Shakespeare.’

  ‘There are lots of other things.’

  ‘Oh, I know that. But I don’t think I’ll learn them at this place. The students are all so damned dramatic! And they’re such kids!’

  ‘But you could still learn something useful, all the same.’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s not for me,’ she said again. ‘The things I need to know, I know already. Let’s face it, I’m never going to be Katharine Cornell.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What I want is a small part, now.’ She saw my face, which I suppose was disappointed, or preoccupied with the instability of the world of self-expression. ‘But don’t you worry, anyway. You’ve been so good to me already. I don’t want to be a nuisance. Something is sure to turn up.’

  ‘It’s not so easy.’

  ‘That’s why I don’t want you to worry about it.’

  Of course, I did worry, a little. I hoped to make her happy, because she had made me so; and selfishly, because I did not want any frustrated actresses hanging round the foot of my bed, declaring that all they needed was one break – just one. I thought about the problem, on and off, for a day. Then I had a suitably unscrupulous idea.