He had his defeatist laurels to protect. “Magazine? what Magazine? is there a Magazine?” He peered suspiciously about the room; lifted a corner of the rug; glanced briefly and salaciously under Norah’s skirt. “No; I don’t see any,” he sighed with relief. He lifted his glass (here’s to you, Elizabeth darling, have you really gone and married someone? then here’s to your God damned husband too): “Your imagination, Norah, touches me; here’s to the Magazine, to the existence of the nonexistent, long life to the still-born.”
“Defeatist talk,” said Jeffrey blandly. “Oh, take another drink, your field is sex,” cried Miles in irritation.
Bruno groaned, his memory rather than his mind aroused. “Trespassing again—and whose vocabulary have you muscled into this time, Jeffrey? Whom did he have lunch with, Norah? and was it in a cafeteria? In what phase do you find your husband at the present, madame? And by the way. A Mr. Harrison called on me today. A nice man, a lovely man; a pale man, with a splendid goiter. He dragged a large thing with him, which he referred to as a four-star pip; he insisted on garaging it in my study.”
“Why, I just happened,” Jeffrey said, “to be passing an office-equipment place.” “Next time drop in at a pet-shop,” Bruno said, “they have some cute things there.” “No, but really, Bruno, it really is high time . . .” “We’re speaking of a Filing Cabinet, Miles, you ought to know, since you’re its business manager.” “A what?” said Miles; “what for?” “That’s what I wondered; maybe Mr. Harrison is starting a Magazine.” “If it isn’t too much to ask,” said Miles, “since I’m step-father to a Filing Cabinet.”
Jeffrey’s hands mysteriously flickered, as though engaged in secrets with himself. (Norah watched him anxiously.) “The time,” he said, “I think the time is ripe.” He narrowed his eyes; and widened them; frowned into obscure and mystic futures; then smiled, his fingers picking harp-strings in the air. Spinning, thought Bruno, in reluctant admiration, on his own axis, the volatile Goy.
“The time,” Bruno said, “is always ripe.” “No, but seriously, Bruno . . .” “And think how much riper it will be next year.” “But the predicament of the intellectuals” “what predicament? intellectuals are always in a predicament, if there were no predicaments there would be no intellectuals” “and just what party,” Miles asked icily, “is our mystic lined with this week” “Oh politics,” said Margaret Flinders bitterly; “and Magazines; you talk and talk but I’d like to know what any of you do.” “When I come into power,” Bruno reassured her, “there will be a tax on words.” “What child is ready for another drink?” said Norah like a blissful deaf-mute. She walked among them, offering friendship skillfully distilled: friendship in a bottle—tempered by her own dumb warmth.
He couldn’t let her pass. He was seized with a need to touch her, to see if he could reach her through his fog. “And how does it feel, Norah, my girl,” he said gently, “to have your life an open book? did you pose for your husband’s racy demonstration chapter? Come here, darling; let Bruno see.”
She came and stood like an obedient animal in the circle of his arm. He sniffed at her shoulder, not daring yet to touch her; looked up with an air of imparting a confidence to Miles. “Not a tang,” he said, bewildered; “as little like soil as possible; ploughed or unploughed; she smells to me for all the world of soap and vegetables.” He wanted to lie like a little boy in her arms; to let her friendly womanliness impersonally embrace him. The audience of friends lent a faint, perverted sanction. His arm about her waist, he felt his head sucked gently, irresistibly against her breast. He could have closed his eyes at last and slept. But his friends were waiting. He moved his head slowly, investigatingly, like a doctor’s; and reluctantly lifted it. “As I thought,” he sadly said; “nature-faking. Apples indeed! I’d sue him for libel, Norah.” His head sank softly back. Norah laughed her rich, warm laugh; he felt it throbbing in his ear like quiet milk. “Apples! don’t you know apples from manna, Blake?”
“The merest euphemism,” Jeffrey said.
“Mistaking apples for such lovely, luscious euphemisms,” Bruno murmured from his soft warm nest. “And I never knew I had them,” Norah said.
“I’m sure,” said Margaret Flinders, “that Miles’ proletarians would never be guilty of such a mistake.” “Not if they were hungry,” Miles said coldly—(how Miles hated talk of sex!) “But I think I’d rather play post-office than fruit-store,” Margaret said, the trace of tartness vanished from her voice; her words trailed sadly.
“But this is literary criticism, Maggie,” Bruno lightly said. She nodded gravely, conveying that he (like Miles, like Jeffrey) were somehow failing her. There was something tonight aloof, pathetically ironic, unfulfilled about her, as though she preserved her little-girlhood unwillingly beyond its time; as though she waved it back for her protection; a strange defence—bred of the city perhaps (or bred of Miles’ inadequacy)—but not, he thought, inherently her own: the thing had grown over her like protecting moss, her soft parts vulnerably projecting. Faintly she reminded him of Elizabeth. And he tried to think of Elizabeth, to fix her through his fog. But he could recover little except the sensation of a memory: of a delicate little boat headed toward him which he firmly shoved away (loading it the while with Chinese adages concerning independence for a woman); and he could feel it floating pluckily where he had pushed it—yet with a backward glance, a tremulous keel; he felt the hollowed imprint in himself from where it floated off. He moved his head on Norah’s shoulder; there seemed to be room there for Elizabeth as well.
But life, his circus, must go on. “Now I don’t get you writer-fellows,” he used his petulant-pedantic tone. “Why can’t you take anatomy unadulterated? Apples!” he shuddered. “There never was a woman with breasts like apples, thank God,” he enjoyed Miles’ bashful misery. “Reminds me of my late lamented bourgeois past, where ice-cream was dished to resemble skyscrapers and poultry disguised as pastry. . . . Now if I were a writer,” he concluded modestly, “I should subscribe on this vital issue to the school of the absolute metaphor: ‘he placed his head against her breast and it felt like exactly nothing in the world but a woman’s breast.’ ” He closed his eyes in drowsy peace. “And it feels very nice, thank you, Norah.”
His touch, he thought, did not excite her. But she sat on his knee, utterly pliable, utterly acquiescent, like a female animal being stroked. He was perfectly certain that she would have sat so also if they had been alone (as certain as he was that, had they been alone, he never would have touched her); and sure that in the same dumb, kindly, acquiescent way, she would lie down and let him make love to her. He wondered if it were her simpleness, her total lack of coyness, which left him now, not cold but cool, pleasantly stirred and at the same time appeased, desiring nothing more. (Or was it drink, or was it anaesthesia?) Or was she, as he sometimes thought, lacking in all but maternal passion?
“You might define,” Miles seemed pressed to shut out from his vision the unit Bruno made with Norah, “tell us what in hell you mean—predicament” “a four-star word,” said Bruno, “from an old four-letter man” “Why, predicament,” Jeffrey wove in his joyful daze, “I mean predicament of course, the economic impasse, the function of the intellectual” “but the intellectual,” Bruno said, “doesn’t function—your boy has delusions of grandeur, Norah” “his immediate problem” “Ah, I have the solution to that,” said Bruno: “let not your left wing know what your right wing doeth, and lie to your neighbor as you would to yourself” “lie with your neighbor,” Jeffrey amended peaceably and looked to his Norah for approval. “All the same,” said Miles preparing to chew the intellectual cud.
“Now, comrades,” Bruno said (for the scene hit him with the dead force of something often played before), “let’s get back to sex and euphemisms. All euphemism,” he collected the disrupted circle by a mockery of his own professorial tone, “all metaphor, must spring from decadence. To an unjaded mind a metaphor would not enhance the quality of a thing but halve it. It’s onl
y the bored roué who calls for sauce with his meat.” Just as, he continued, less professorially, to himself, Norah by herself does not excite me, but my own words and the reflection in the eyes of my friends, may begin to. Have we grown so civilized that we are more excited by the idea which represents the fact, than by the fact itself? We must be afraid of the fact! and so we substitute apples—or adages—to make it kosher. Was that puritanism or satiety?
“Your lousy book,” said Miles (his quarrel, Bruno felt, not directed against Jeffrey, but springing from some plaintive inner need), “of all the un-classconscious tripe” “still, certain factions of the Left Wing,” Jeffrey said, “I have it on pretty good authority” “I suppose you felt their message mystically” “no, I’m in pretty close contact, it’s confidential, of course, a certain Comrade Fisher” and “Fisher, Fisher,” Norah murmured, “I can’t remember cooking dinner for a Fisher” “My God!” said Miles, “I never knew if I was reading about millionaires or travelling salesmen” “and now it turns out,” Bruno said, “it was just Fishermen—I wouldn’t trust even a comrade named Fisher, Jeffrey; sounds to me suspiciously like a Jew” “it happened, that in that book, I wasn’t primarily concerned with class-lines” “an artist,” Miles reiterated most severely, “ought to be concerned—with everything” “but my book,” Jeffrey said, tapping invisible keys with his fingers, “my book is about men and women, I don’t know myself if they’re farmers or millionaires or horse-thieves. I don’t even care.”
“It’s barely possible,” said Bruno in his scholarly tone, “that people feel a little different, necking in the back-seat of a Rolls or fornicating in a hay-rick. I don’t know of course, a girl feels just as good to me in either. But the ‘ploughing,’ Jeffrey, that’s what’s hard for me to swallow. Is that euphemism? or just plain nasty sadism? Me, I’m an old-fashioned southern gentleman, I treat my women according to the books, resting twenty-five percent of the weight respectfully on the elbows. I have, so far as I can see, absolutely no ploughing instincts.”
“Oh, ploughing,” Jeffrey said. “Ploughing’s fun.” He rose and lightly stretching as though in fine voluptuous retrospect, crossed the room for Bruno’s gin. The miracle, incredible, of human beauty, especially in a male, held them silent for a moment.
They sat thoughtful and withdrawn, all single vessels headed for the dark. His hands upon Norah, he longed like a dead man for sensation, envying in Jeffrey a purity of desire that he knew could never be his own. The dumb virility of the extrovert, he thought; needing no Idea to quicken it; whose sex-urge served no purpose but its own; Jeffrey’s virility an absolute, an entity, a thing untouched, uncomplicated, always lightly functioning. (So he had instructed young Elizabeth: the casual, the light; avoid the awkward depths, my dear. A tiny germ of pain pricked through his anaesthesia.) His own need seemed a thing belonging rather to his ego than his body; a thing tonight which he longed to create by force to establish some contact again with the living.
“Make them strong,” he called to Jeffrey; “I have my psychopathic difficulties, I can’t do justice to your Norah’s charms.” “Perhaps I haven’t got enough,” said Norah in her husky voice. But any other girl, he thought, amazed, would be insulted. She curled her rich body to one side on his knee. Was she unconscious of her own sensuous movements? of his hands attempting sly and intimate possession of her? For if she were unconscious, then his own faint pleasure must die a shameful death, like a sensitive youth perceiving himself unrecognized at a party; so intellectualized was he, he thought, and sighed, that he could no longer feel even sensation unless it were accompanied by a smile or wink to show the stimulus aware. Idea again! (and he had trained Elizabeth to thoroughly ignore it, preaching purity of sensation!) Deliberately he opened all his pores for Norah’s warm invasion; but they seemed clogged with some forbidding consciousness.
“Predicament or no predicament,” Miles walked the room’s length restlessly, turned and paced it back, “if we’re ever going to have a Magazine” “who said we were,” said Bruno “If any of us is ever going to do anything in fact” (Miles paused and kicked a chair as though it were himself) “it’s now or never,” he addressed the chair; pulled its leather seat to torture it. “Cigarettes and gin,” he muttered. (Margaret sighed.) “We talk and talk like an old Russian novel,” Miles cried bitterly; “I’d like to know what any of us do.” “Personally I don’t do anything,” said Bruno; his fog closed over him; he felt that he was dead; “and you?” “I don’t do a God damn thing,” said Miles; “I don’t do a God damn thing but talk.” In the quick silence they turned their heads from one another.
Like a play too often played before, the whole revolved in Bruno’s brain; a play with faulty continuity. What ailed them all, he wondered; and saw them, each in his separate groove, traversing parallels in an endless treadmill; a chorus composed entirely of temperamental first violins. Their energies combined would make terrific force, a powerful and vital symphony; but they seemed each to prefer being first violin in a small puddle to throwing in his lot with the common orchestra. So the strength of each, turned inward on himself, bored like a cancer in the tortured brain; his music, bursting and swelling, remained milling and unexpressed in his own private head. The women barren; the men dead; their common factors being negatives, rebuttals, refutations. (Perhaps Elizabeth was right? to go careening off in space, in any part of the world but home; attempting no rhythm but her own.) And himself? oh, loyal to the code, to the last defeatist ditch. He was dead.
But Norah, gratuitous remnant of an outworn wish, sat like a lump of dough on his lap. Norah, as an opiate, had failed. Tonight his mind forbade his body to react. He tumbled Norah off his lap.
“The investigation,” he announced, “is closed. The show is over. Poor Miss Diamond wants to go home. You may take those figures of speech away now, Norah.” He watched her cross the room, plodding, oblivious, through their dead desires. Poor womanly fool, he thought; she’s the only one that doesn’t know she’s dead; who goes on with her mild and meaningless andante while the rest of us (tongue-tied prima donnas, small-puddle first violins) hold our bows and wait to die.
The silence was suddenly terrible.
7. WHY CAN’T WE HAVE A MAGAZINE?
HER HEAD was simply spinning! did they all know what they were talking about? “I wish I had it down in Braille,” she said to Margaret Flinders; and passed on looking for glasses to refill and pondering the shortage of cookies. And what did they mean, “not a God damn thing but talk”? didn’t they eat, sleep, make love—God knows her Jeffrey did! (But life, for people who were clever, was no such simple thing.) Norah liked talking over gates. The best talk she had ever known was hanging over her father’s gate and greeting villagers passing down the road. Short; friendly; to the point. “Hi there, Alice May, how’s that new puppy of yours?” “Just fine, thank you, Norah, she’s doing mighty nicely—the mother too. Have you seen Mary Pickford’s latest?” “Why no, I guess I’ll be seeing it though, before the week is out.” “Well, I’ll have to be jigging. So long, Norah.” “So long, Alice May.” Then swing back on the gate with no thoughts in your head but who will come next, the mailman maybe, or old Man Tilton or the Grierson’s little girl. Not that there wasn’t plenty of talk too, in the Meadows’ household; at supper, for instance—she didn’t think theater-hour in Times Square could hold a candle to the Meadows family sitting down to one of Mama’s stews. I can’t hear myself think! the Captain used to roar. What a school of them there were! Two big Meadowses (and I mean big! thought Norah proudly) and seven smaller ones; with Norah second to the oldest. And whatever had become of them all, Norah couldn’t imagine, stopping to think, was it Johnny, was it Sebastian, who had earned them all a fine spring holiday with the whooping-cough? She’d scarcely heard (they were a large family; but not what you might call a letter-writing family) since they wrote to say that John had married Fanny Stillwater from Cupper’s Road. The scab! thought Norah, chuckling; could he have forgotten how t
he Meadows brood had boycotted Fanny for going on with her hair down her back in curls after the rest of them had looped their braids three times back and forth from ear to ear. . . . Well anyway, she thought (and wondered what had happened to make them leave off talking?) anyway, talk back home was plain; maybe nobody ever said much worth remembering; but down to the baby everyone spoke to be understood. But they were cleverer than she; and of course, if they didn’t talk the way they did, they would come to the end of talk too soon. But this silence was peculiar; it must be twenty minutes after something . . .
Well then, thought Margaret, they had been for so long silent that they might have taken root in silence. It welled from all of them. It beat upon her ear-drums. Echoed in her blood.
But this silence was not death, Bruno knew. It was not so much a case of life must go on; but on it went; there was no stopping it. And there was no silence. For if they did not beat their drums and draw their bows across their violins (his old triumvirate!), there was a fearful throbbing in the air, of all their muted instruments; of pallid wings upon the windowpanes; of fear; of death; of life itself.
She was tired, Norah was, after the long day of work; after washing up in haste to make ready for their friends. But she wouldn’t let herself drift off till she was sure that Jeffrey didn’t need her. Every time the weather changed he started something new; and here was fall and Jeffrey needed watching. Her eyes wandered back to her handsome Jeff (they never left him long), sitting wrapped in his complacent secrecy; his fingers fitfully fluttering, keeping time to the rhythm of the silence. She knew that he was playing games he loved, dashing about doing mysterious things so rapidly that in the end they mystified himself. He never explained things much to her of course (indeed, why should he? she was not clever like the rest, like Margaret, who although she was a woman, often entered conversation with the men—and then, they had sweeter, more wordless things to say when they were alone); only, when his activities collided or contradicted each other, when people called him on the mat for things he had forgotten, then he brought her home the whole mess to untangle, laying it like a broken toy in her lap. Then was her sweetest time; then he cast off the cleverness he wore before his friends, shook himself free of his mysterious games (alone with her his hands were often quiet), and lay like a happy child in her arms. And somewhere in him, though he might ignore her before the others, he never forgot that it was Norah whom he needed most. She never forgot it either. The knowledge was a soft melodic undercurrent to her life. She was sleepy, Norah was. But this was not the stillness of the barnyard, this odd, protracted silence; it was not a respite; the pillow was soft to her head, but the silence kept her from sleep.
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