Evening Performance

by George Garrett

  “So what?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t disapprove,” he said. “Some of the family wouldn’t understand, but I knew you would. Anyway, she is descended from Spanish Jews, and that makes it all right.”

  We went into a cocktail lounge and climbed a set of wide, carpeted stairs. She was sitting at a table waiting for us. She was a tall, handsome woman, a little gray, a little fat, but elegantly dressed. And you could tell she had been beautiful as a girl.

  “Hello, honey,” she said. “Raymond told me all about you. You work in a bank.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s about the size of it.”

  “You’re kind of cute,” she said. “Raymond said you were terribly serious, but I think you’re kind of cute.”

  Evidently she had been drinking steadily while waiting for us, but she ordered another to celebrate our arrival and to be sociable.

  “You know what?” she said to me. “Raymond dances divinely. He dances like an angel. He can dance even better than Rumpelstiltskin.”

  “Who the hell is he?” Raymond said. “I never heard of him. What kind of a name is that, anyway?”

  “He’s in a fairy tale,” I said. “But I think—I hope—Sonya has got him mixed up with somebody else.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I always mix them up. Like the names of popular songs. He was the first one I could think of. What I mean, I guess, is it’s all kind of like a fairy tale.”

  “I don’t get it,” Raymond said.

  “But you do,” she said to me. “You get it, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s something like Cinderella.”

  “Right,” she said. “That’s exactly right. More or less …”

  Everything was very pleasant until we started to leave. When we got up I noticed that she was wobbly on her high heels, but Raymond didn’t seem concerned about her, so I didn’t worry about it. At the top of the stairs she tripped and then over and over she went, rolling slowly down the stairs in a great soft blur of shiny clothes and pale flesh. When she hit bottom, she just curled up like a big comfortable cat going to sleep.

  The manager came tearing over waving his arms and shouting. He was terribly excited. He thought she might be dead or something.

  “Get up, baby,” Raymond said. “You’re drawing a crowd.”

  “Don’t want to,” she said. “Wanna go sleepy-bye.”

  “Go get a cab,” Raymond told me. “It will be a lot easier to get her home in a cab.”

  I walked up the street until I found a cruising taxi. When we pulled up in front of the place, Raymond and a couple of waiters heaved her into the backseat like a sack of meal. Everyone seemed calm and collected by that time. Strictly routine.

  “Listen,” Raymond said, “thanks a million.”

  “Anytime.”

  And I stood for a moment and watched the taxi drive away.

  It was the middle of summer before Raymond got in touch with me again. I was sitting in my apartment one Saturday afternoon considering what in the world to do with myself. In the morning I had walked in the park and watched the children playing and the old men on the benches sleeping or just staring. There wasn’t even the least ghost of a breeze to stir the listless leaves. I was thinking maybe I would take in a movie, any air-conditioned movie, when the phone rang and it was Raymond.

  “Hey, old-timer,” he said. “How’s it going?”

  “All right, I guess.”

  “Well, cheer up. We’re going for a weekend in the country.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said. “Grab your toothbrush and let’s go.”

  We drove out to Long Island in the sports car. It was fine with the warm air blowing over us and the trim feel of light-headed speed. Almost like sailing. Raymond looked good, suntanned, fit, and healthy. He had dispensed with the wig.

  “No hair again,” I said.

  “Why should I try and fool myself? I’m not a kid anymore. I might as well look my age.

  “By the way,” he added. “Don’t get the wrong idea about Sonya from last time.”

  “I didn’t get any idea,” I said. “She was drunk.”

  “That’s what I mean,” he said. “See what I mean? She drinks, sure, but getting drunk like that is a rare occasion. A very rare occasion.”

  “Okay, if you say so.”

  “Believe me, it’s the truth. Sonya is all right. She’s had her share of troubles, though.”

  “I expect so.”

  The estate we went to, carefully secluded by a few acres of piny woods, was fantastic. It was one of those turn-of-the-century châteaus. It had been added to since then and, in deference to the times, a couple of TV aerials perched like metallic scarecrows on the roof. The wide slope of the lawn had been gouged for a swimming pool. Sonya came running down a pine-needly path to greet us, bright in slacks and an Italian T-shirt and closely followed by two poodles. They gamboled awkwardly around her like a pair of spectacular wind-up toys. As she ran toward us through the light and shadow that flickered through the leaves, she seemed like a modern burlesque of Diana, the huntress. It wouldn’t have surprised me a bit at that moment if she had been carrying a bow and arrow. She seemed glad to see us there and she was quite sober. She led us inside into rooms that had an oaken heaviness and the gloom and clutter of too much furniture and too many things. It was almost as if somebody had won a whole lot of prizes at a carnival. Except, of course, that everything was very expensive.

  “This is a crazy, kooky place,” Sonya said. “But I love it. My mother was an Italian opera singer. My old man had some taste, I think, but he humored her. As a matter of fact, I don’t think he gave a damn about anything as long as she was happy. She was like a big overgrown child, a baby. Spoiled but beautiful, very beautiful.”

  “Wait until you see the plumbing,” Raymond said. “It’s better than a high-class whorehouse.”

  He was right. My bathroom was an extraordinary place. The walls and even the ceiling had colored mirrors so that the whole room rippled with a broken sourceless light. It was like being underwater. The toilet and the basin and the bidet and the enormous sunken tub were made of black marble, and all of the pipes were some kind of gold plate. The bedroom was a dream of the Orient filtered through the consciousness of the end of nineteenth-century America. I listened for the sound of a gong or the tinkle of little bells and sniffed for the only thing lacking, the odor of incense. On the walls there were a few small portraits of desperately ethereal pre-Raphaelite young ladies. And directly above the wide bed there was a painting of a boyish, almost sexless Pandora covering her slim nubility in shy, decorous astonishment as a swarm of evils ascended, batlike, from the open box.

  We settled on the lawn in deck chairs and enjoyed tall cool summer drinks. After a while a governess brought Sonya’s little girl to meet us. They were dressed to swim, the governess chaste and dumpy in a single-piece bathing suit, the pale child like a butterfly in her frilly swimsuit and water wings. She looked at us with sad questioning eyes as if she didn’t know whether she was going to be patted or spanked.

  “Say hello to the nice people, honey,” Sonya said. “Can’t you say hello? You can say hello to your Uncle Raymond. She’s shy. She usually speaks right up and says hello. I don’t know why, but she’s a little shy today. All right, honey, you run along and have a nice swim before your supper.”

  The little girl scampered away, immensely relieved, and we could hear her shrill voice as she shouted to her governess above the noise of splashing.

  “I invited some people for tonight,” Sonya said.

  “I thought you said this was going to be a quiet weekend,” Raymond said.

  “I thought it might be more fun for your cousin if we had some kind of a little party.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Anything is fine with me.”

  “These people,” she said to me, “are a little bit kikey, but you may find them amusing. I gather from Raymond that y
ou’ve had a kind of sheltered life.”

  “Sheltered?”

  “You know what I mean,” she said, smiling. “Going to a nice respectable college and then working in a nice respectable bank. I mean, it might be fun for you to see the other half. These people have lots of money, though. Oh yes, lots and lots of money …”

  I do not remember whether we had any supper or not. I think not. We just kept on drinking and before long things stopped being sequential and chronological and took on a montage aspect. I remember that when people finally began to arrive they were all dressed as hillbillies and cowboys. It turned out Sonya had invited them for a square dance. With a sudden reckless fury we cleared a large room—the music room, I guess, because there were two grand pianos—stacking everything on top of everything else in one corner in a heap as if for a huge bonfire. Somebody put on some square-dance records and Raymond began to call the dance. The room whirled and turned around us as we stomped and sweated. Everybody seemed to be as happy as can be. Then I remember crawling up under one of the pianos to get a little rest. I curled up there on a folded rug and watched the dizzy cycle of feet and legs, like a tribal dance, all around me.

  I must have dozed off because quite abruptly the room was empty and silent. I came out from under the piano to find the floor littered with shoes and odds and ends of clothing. A brassiere was festooned on the ornate chandelier and a record was spinning aimlessly on the turntable. I tried to switch off the hifi, but only succeeded in starting it again. Square-dance music roared in the room. I went outside for a little fresh air. Then I heard laughter and voices from the swimming pool. I walked down to have a look and stood teetering and unsteady at the edge staring into the darkness of the pool. There could only have been a few people swimming, but the pool seemed to be packed and swarming with bodies. It reminded me of a huge tank of fish.

  “There he is!” somebody said. “I knew he was still alive.”

  “Push him in.”

  “Push the sonofabitch in the pool!”

  I remember that it seemed desperately important not to be pushed into the pool. I fought off clutching hands and sprinted across the lawn to the house. Somehow I found my room. Leaning against the closed door in the dark, panting, I heard soft voices in my bathroom and the sound of splashing in the black marble tub with the gold-plated pipes. I flopped on my bed and, as the room began to spin around me, I fell asleep.

  Sunday was depressing. The guests had all gone home, and we three had hangovers and were a little on edge. There was a rather solemn luncheon outside on a terrace at which the governess and the little daughter joined us and we all strove to be pleasant to one another. Late in the afternoon Raymond drove me back to town. It was a long wearisome ride in the weaving, stalling lines of Sunday traffic.

  “Boy, you sure tied one on,” he said. “How do you like it? Some place!”

  “I think you can do better than that, Raymond.”

  “What do you mean? Didn’t you have fun? Didn’t you have a good time?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s not that. I just wondered if you really want to live that way.”

  “What way? We spent a weekend in the country, that’s all.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “The trouble with you is you’ve got no imagination. You’re so damn middle-class. You get all upset by anything out of the ordinary. If anything is fun, it’s got to be bad. You end up by moralizing everything.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  After that weekend I didn’t see or hear of Raymond for quite a while. I heard from her, though. She called me up late one night. She was drunk, but nevertheless she made good sense.

  “Why do you have to spoil everything?”

  “Who is this?” I said.

  “Sonya,” she said. “You come along and ruin a perfectly good thing. Perfectly good.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “Yes you do,” she said. “You damnwell do know. You know what Raymond wanted you to do? He wanted you to approve. That’s all he wanted out of you and you wouldn’t.”

  “What is all this?”

  “I said he wanted you to approve. The idiot! He wants some little sign of approval from that crummy Tobacco Road family of his.

  “Talk about life on the old plantation!” she went on. “You make me sick! Don’t you want anybody else to have a good time ever? For Christ’s sake, you would think it was royal blood or something. Who the hell does he think he is—the Duke of Windsor?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t believe he thinks that.”

  And on that happy note she hung up on me.

  I sometimes wonder about myself. I have no idea why, without even trying to, I manage to get involved in things. The truth is I really didn’t care what Raymond did with himself. But when I think about it, it seems worse somehow than caring strongly one way or the other. Just being neutral, disinterested, indifferent, just watching the things that happen to other people, you can acquire your share of guilt. That happens to be ironic, when you think about it, because that is the one thing—guilt, responsibility, call it what you want to—I was most anxiously trying to avoid by means of my neutral strategy. I guess the truth is that nobody but a saintly hermit can be really immune. And even that vocation is a career of danger and daring. Take St. Anthony, for example.

  When the summer was over I bought myself a dog, a little beagle pup. It was a selfish thing to do. A beagle is so full of natural energy and has such a fine sense of smell that it’s a shame to keep one cooped up in a city. But I wanted one, and in a way he reminded me of my childhood when there were always plenty of dogs around the place. I tried to give him enough exercise in the park. I used to take long walks there early in the morning and in the evenings when I got home from work. Early in October I was walking the dog in the park. It was foggy with chill in the air and all the paths in the park were strewn with the rich debris of autumn, the damp blown leaves, the broken twigs and branches. Into autumn’s melancholy and desolation came Raymond, stepping suddenly in front of me from behind a tree. He held up his hand to stop me, like a traffic cop. Or the Ancient Mariner …

  “I’ve been hanging around here all week long trying to get up the nerve to speak to you,” he said. “I’ve been following you every morning.”

  “That’s the silliest thing I ever heard,” I said. “Why didn’t you just come up to the apartment?”

  “I wasn’t sure you would understand.”

  We began to walk along the path together.

  “That’s a nice pup,” he said. “A real nice puppy dog.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s a good one.”

  “Listen,” Raymond said. “That gun. You remember that pistol I sold you last spring?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have to have it back.”

  “Why in the world …?”

  “I have to go out West.”

  “You won’t need a gun, Raymond,” I said. “The Indians are all on reservations and all the cowboys are on television.”

  “Very funny!”

  “If you need money,” I said, “why don’t you sell the car? You just can’t decide to go out and rob some place every time you’re a little short of cash.”

  “Oh I couldn’t sell the car. I just couldn’t do that. Go out to California without the car! Sonya gave me that car. It’s all I’ve got left.”

  “Whatever happened to Sonya?”

  “We broke up,” he said. “The last I heard she was running around with some musician. Probably a goddamn saxophone player. It seems like all my women end up with saxophone players.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “A couple of hundred, that’s all. But the thing is, I couldn’t just take it from you. I’ve got a little pride left.”

  “Okay, suppose we make it a straight loan?”

  “No, I’d feel like you were just giving it to me.”

  “We could write it all down and make it offi
cial.”

  “In that case,” he said, “maybe it would be all right.”

  “Come on up to the apartment and let’s have a cup of coffee.”

  We drank some coffee and I typed up an extremely official-looking statement to the effect that Raymond Singletree owed me two hundred dollars. Then I wrote him a check for it.

  “Well,” I said, “California ought to be great.”

  “It is great,” he said. “I always had a fine time there.”

  “I’d like to go there someday myself,” I said. “What do you expect to find out there?”

  “Find?”

  “Do?”

  “Oh, I haven’t got the slightest idea,” he said cheerfully. “Something will turn up. It always does.”

  I had no more news of him until the springtime when I received a scrawly letter from Los Angeles. “Things are going pretty good out here,” he wrote. “I am running around with this photographer’s model. She is really gorgeous. You ought to see her. She is a little mixed up, but who the hell isn’t? What would I ever do with myself if women weren’t so crazy about dancing? She makes a good living and we are planning to pool our resources and open up a fancy camera shop here. It ought to go over big and we will make a killing. We might even get married. I will send you a picture of her in my next letter. Take care of yourself, old time.

  “By the way,” he added in a P.S., “I have not forgotten about the money I owe you. I will enclose a check for the full amount in my next letter.”

  Naturally I haven’t heard a word from him since then, but I’m sure he will turn up again one of these days, broke, down on his luck, and still believing that his luck will change and something, some miraculous and shattering revelation, will occur to atone for all the sad waste of the past. And I imagine I will help him out again. Not that I believe the same myth that he does. Not that I think we could change things much one way or the other or would even if we could. I have been living alone and working in a bank too long to believe anything like that. Still, it makes me feel better that somebody I know believes it.