The Unpossessed

by Tess Slesinger

  O darling I do feel sick. O darling hold out a little longer.

  “And the R-r-russian ambassador was criticized” “what can it possibly matter” “because clothes are a symbol” “if you start to compromise you’re lost” “so snobbish not to attend a charity ball dressed in your best,” said Bruno bitterly. “It will be a party no one will ever forget,” cried Merle.

  “How do we know there will be a Hunger March this year,” said Al. “Maybe nobody is planning to be hungry enough to march. . . .”

  But there was a small cry, a timid crash, and Cornelia lay in a heap on the floor. Norah, awakened miraculously, was as quick as Firman to reach her side. Deftly she and Firman unloosed the collar of her blouse. “My salts,” moaned Merle, “ring for spirits of ammonia, Emmett. Ring for March. Where is Vammie? oh I sent him to look at Dickie. . . . What could be the matter with Miss—Miss—”

  “Over-eating,” said Firman briefly; and shook his girl with a fierce tenderness by her slender shoulders.

  Al hurried with his whiskey bottle, Miles ran for water, Jeffrey flung the windows up—Merle was busy with her heart, her hands, her moans. But Bruno couldn’t move. The fight for full bellies . . . a property war . . . that can’t mean anything to us . . . you’re either in favor of them for everybody or you’re not . . . they had reached, he and Elizabeth, for the world in which only the intangibles were goals . . . Philosophic truth, artistic integrity, open forum . . . all the precious things that glimmered with a sudden cheapness, brought suddenly face to face with a vulgar staring empty belly. B-b-bruno, Bruno! Emmett shivered beside him, as helpless as himself. Bruno stood there paralyzed.

  Cornelia’s eyes were slowly opening. “Fainting,” she muttered angrily. “Pulling a Goddamn 1870. Sorry, everybody.” She grabbed her side. “Oh Jesus.”

  “But what is it, what is the matter, Miss—Miss—” cried Merle, wringing her hands in anguish.

  “Nothing at all, my pearl,” said Al; “the girl has no manners, she has had the bad taste to faint of hunger on the petit point.”

  “Oh oh,” sobbed Merle, covering her eyes with her hands, “I’m going to faint myself. I never can bear the sight of someone suffering, I had to hide my eyes while Vammie bound Dickie’s leg . . . perhaps she’d like some food, would you like some food, Miss, Miss . . .”

  “No thanks,” said Firman. He was busy picking Cornelia up, putting her together tenderly. “She really fainted out of spite—just to end the meeting. A mean girl.” Her eyes had closed again. He shook her by the shoulders. “Cornelia!” He slapped her briskly. “Cornelia. Pull yourself together. We’re going. You won. You broke up the party. Very effective strategy.” He laid her head against his shoulder and rose. “Come on darling, show them you’re hungry enough to march.” No one spoke. Al fell back to let them pass. Miles stood with his head lowered as though he were taking part in a religious ceremony, as though the prostrate Cornelia were some Christ who had died for him. At Bruno’s side stood Emmett, his shoulders shaking like a sobbing child’s. Bruno couldn’t move. Young Firman stepped proudly down the aisle they made for him, his girl’s arms going weakly round his neck; Norah fell calmly in the rear of their procession, carrying Cornelia’s fallen few belongings.

  And so, he thought, the room stood still, lined with corpses as though a multitude of living people had taken up their lives and carried them away to some more fitting place. It seemed to him suddenly that he and his friends were ridiculous, doctors who had passed examinations in a correspondence course; that when suddenly they were faced with a suffering patient, the patient had more concrete knowledge than they, for all their learning. The uncomplicated physical had no reality for them; its unexpected presence had one chief effect—while their busy abstract minds worked to reconcile it with some preaccepted doctrine, some maxim of their own, their emotions were stricken in a harsh new way which argument would fail to solace; their bodies (his own was numb) were paralyzed by this sudden failure of their minds, this wretched cancelling of emotions they were unaccustomed to. What they had seen was hunger; deep as was his own tortuous unwilling scepticism, Bruno knew that before the last ten minutes he had been sceptical even of hunger. Nor was there any place for it (now that he perforce accepted it) in the academic scaling in his mind. It didn’t fit. It was irrelevance. It was some other language than his own. But all the time through the numbness of his body, his own belly ached with a fierce imitation of Cornelia’s.

  They were turning aimlessly to go, afraid, because each one knew what his fellows were thinking, to look each other in the eye. Miles was white as though he had experienced some awful revelation. Jeffrey’s hands were feverishly trying to weigh things, to balance things, to put this new idea into a decent resting-place; for once his fluent tongue was failing him. The whole thing, the meeting, the Magazine, this roomful of ghosts, his own whole life, seemed to Bruno farce. “B-b-bruno, Bruno, take me with you, don’t leave me here,” sobbed Emmett; and his weakness was only putting into words the wretchedness that all of them were feeling. It took all of Bruno’s strength to reach out and put an arm on Emmett’s shoulder; it would have taken more than he possessed (despite a shrinking in himself) in order to refrain. “So perfectly awful,” sighed Merle; “I felt all evening—since the Dickie-bird’s little accident—that something awful was going to happen, I’m a little psychic that way. . . .”

  “Curtain,” said Al. “Shall I ring for March, my angel, and order up some sandwiches?”

  10. THE CONSCIENCE TICKS

  HURRY, MILES wanted to shout at the man in the subway change-cage; and hurry, he wanted to scream down the empty curving tracks to the next train sliding so coyly into the station; hurry up, I’ve got to get home to my wife.

  For the thing that had happened at the Middletons’ had frightened him, startled him, like some canny premonition of his lurking guilt, the end of his illusion of joy. He knew he dared not travel far from Margaret, not and keep this strange new peace he had submitted to. Now he closed his mind to what had happened and pinned it ahead to Margaret. She would be asleep; he would gently waken her, thrust a lighted cigarette in her sleepy mouth; she would open her eyes wide, glad to be awake, glad of him, glad (eternally glad she was, grateful for such simple things) that they had “each other,” her consciousness returning like some joyous gift she had forgotten—and he would talk, endlessly perhaps, through the dawn, into the next morning if need be; he would never let go of her, sitting in her rumpled nightgown with her tipsy cigarette, until she had eased the terror in his vitals (that anyone was hungry, that anyone fainted in his sight from hunger, was a personal, a damnable reproachful fact), until they had given each other strength and more strength, separately, together, until they were the strongest two people in the world.

  His own street frightened and reproached him, empty and baleful in the early morning light; one beggar drunk or sleeping on the curb, the lamps ironically glowing over his head; Mrs. Salvemini’s window dark and gaping, the curtains blowing, shrinking, in. He took the stairs in a frightened leap, and his heart pounded until he stood quietly by the side of the bed where Margaret lay sleeping, her face gray and beautiful in the cold dawn, her hand curled on the empty pillow beside her own.

  His peace, his warmth, his only chance for happiness lay waiting. But still he stood there looking down, his bones growing dry, his heart contracting. That was death! that was surrender! cried the part of himself that to this day held out against pillows. Save me! cried the little boy who turned from love as Uncle Daniel turned from drink; save me from plunging like a coward into that warm oblivion. Margaret lay waiting; his bed lay waiting. It was too easy. It brought back the Magazine to be baptized in champagne, the world struggle fought in dinner jackets. He drew back sternly.

  Womb versus world, he thought, silently removing his shoes, his clothes, in dread of waking her. For Margaret, women in general, lived in their wombs; put their womb before their wits; all things grist to their wombs, all the time dr
awing their men to those rapacious female caverns, striving to make them forget the world, their rival.

  A part of him wanted to go and fling down at Margaret’s side, crying that he wronged her, crying that he had come from the world outside and nothing there was palatable, that nothing was worthwhile but that they two hide and hide in ever smaller corners until at last they had hidden themselves from any onslaught from the world; then they could creep beaten but unashamed into each other’s arms and curl still smaller until at last they would be utterly, shamefully safe, for there would be nothing left to breathe but each other’s flesh. For a passing second he felt nothing for her but tenderness and compassion, as though she were a day-old kitten curled for comfort, that would never dare open its eyes and see the world. A man could devote his life to shielding such a kitten, to guiding it down safe paths to safe bowls of milk, and in doing so could forget perhaps his tortured longing to be of meaning to the world, to work out by giving his life the sentence of endless guilt pronounced in childhood. No, no! he cried to himself, and it was as if his Uncle Daniel stood above him, exacting promises again. Margaret, he thought in a flash of insight, has wisdom, more than I; but she has the intelligence only of a homing bird.

  He climbed unwillingly into the bed beside her. She stirred like a faithful watch-dog ever on her guard; he knew that he could wake her easily. But he lay with his head (on the pillow, his childhood’s symbol of unmanliness) turned from her and closed his eyes to shut her out. For if he let her wake, if he acknowledged her, she might reach and touch him, might soothe and lull him, might carry him back to that shameful world-obliterating peace. Her end was peace and his was truth and they must be enemies (he discovered it again as a fact he would never in future ignore) as their ends were enemies. They could not both win. In the bottom of her soul Margaret wished him to lay aside his restlessness and his fine nervous seeking (though they might be the very things she loved him for) and in exchange she offered him oblivion, an entirely personal world of vegetables; in which only a vegetable could endure. She wanted him to surrender.

  Like his aunts, he thought, she wanted to frame him, to shame him. Afterward she would in her soul despise him, she would have crushed out the man in him and subdued him to merely the father of her child. Outwardly he would seem then more of a man; he could bow and smirk in public; he would be gallant, flying to pick up her handkerchief—he would be the puppet of a man and she could pull his strings, dangle him this way and that. Inside he would be nothing. And she, having narrowed their world, having furnished it with a baby’s crib, flooded it with soothing syrup, would sit back satisfied.

  The larger fight went on without her. Being a woman she was capable, he thought, of only a personal revolution, a sex revolution, having its boundaries in her own air-tight world. She offered him a sop, a compromise; permitted him to play with Magazines and politics; and stayed herself plotting at home, preparing a downy cage to catch him in. So he had stepped out, tonight, without her, into that larger world, gone with his faith and his eagerness; and found it lacking, found his friends scarcely nearer than she to the reality of one empty stomach that had sent them all reeling home to defeat. And here he was, on the brink even now, with her female body curved so close to him, of seeking consolation (he thought with horror of Jeffrey), of hiding in a woman’s insides from a world he couldn’t face.

  A world where friends did not trust friends (but it was a sinking ship, the ship that the intellectuals were afloat in, and perhaps it must be a case of each man for himself?) The terrible compromises, the endless postponements . . . his mind went over irresistibly into the rutted treadmill of the evening’s happenings. It struck him with full force for the first time that all their arguments were loaded; they were engaged in continually proving to themselves that activity was futile. And the evening, the constant meetings, the Magazine itself . . . were they not all of them rationalization, an elaborate plan on his part and his friends’ (the old triumvirate! he bitterly thought) for postponement of some stand? For clearly if they felt a common cause (like the Sheep who knew what it was to go hungry) they would sink their differences and act in common. He saw them suddenly, coming together less from their belief in revolution (did any of them really believe a revolution would take place?) than from some terrible inner need in each of them to lay out his own personal conflicts in terms of something higher, to solve his private ends camouflaged as world-problems, secretively in public. Had Bruno or Jeffrey or himself listened to each other, except in a desperate sort of way, for reassurance, for purpose of identification with some other human, some stick on which to pin a banner? The Black Sheep came the nearest to his notion of what revolutionists should be; but he thought with distaste of their taciturnity, of their coldness, their matter-of-factness . . . Miles was looking for something higher (higher even than Bruno’s search for what he called “integrity”), something that would sweep him, lift him, as nothing had done since the look on his Uncle Daniel’s face when he killed his own dog without flinching: some faith, some belief that enabled men to act sharp and decisive and know the reason why.

  And he himself, Miles Flinders? He loathed his daily job; he kept his job. He talked bitterly of what he hated, righteously of what he favored; and bought his tobacco of a communist. He condemned Bruno, condemned Jeffrey, couldn’t swallow the hard materialism of the young Black Sheep; and threw up smoke-screens between himself and himself so that he could never come to action. He longed with all his heart for Mr. Pidgeon to fire him so that he might be prodded to life again against the jutting rocks of reality like the stones in his childhood’s earth. Let the world struggle be brought to his door, injected in his veins; let him come to grips with that struggle, let the struggle be his own. Let there be but two sides, without this intellectual’s no-man’s-land in between, let him believe in one side or the other as he had once believed in God (as the youthful triumvirate had believed in pacifism), let him fight for it, live for it, die for it, with all his Uncle Daniel’s strength. . . .

  The pillow was unbearable beneath his head. He remembered Margaret’s cry, in the early days of their marriage: I’m going to make you so happy, Miles, I’m going to teach you to sleep with pillows, we’re going to be so happy darling. Happy! his Uncle Daniel always said his pigs were happy. And now she planned to soften him further, melt him down further, provide him with the irrelevance of a child. Ignore the lumps in the mattress, lay a pillow over them; ignore the world and bring forth a child to hide it further from their consciousness. The world at which she never looked, a world where people starved, where friends did not trust friends, where nobody believed in anything—into such a world she would dare to bring a child: to satisfy her inner physical needs; to compromise; to veil; she would bend and stoop and take what was not the real thing and feed it and nourish it and take it to bed with her and never know (with her blind passion for peaceful ignorance, for living what she called a personal life), that it was not the real thing, that she had brought forth a counterfeit planted in filth, to grow stunted and unwholesome in the tainted air. The pillow underneath his head was hot and soft, a bribe, a snare, reeking of the feminine . . .

  He turned from Margaret, from her generous warmth (her body stirred lightly as though even in sleep she was conscious of him); and felt again the fervor, the high hope, with which, a frightened, stoic child, he had locked away his pillow in the closet. More joy in those early nights of unaccustomed hardness than in a thousand pillows, more valid peace than in a thousand women’s arms. He moved away further, and her arm followed him out; he slid away until his head, leading the way back to loneliness and courage, to the endless search for God, had left the pillow quite behind, till it hung like a severed fruit upon the edge.

  11. BRUNO AND EMMETT

  “COME ON,” said Bruno sternly; “one for mama, one for the Dickie-bird, and one for mama’s psainted psychoanalyst.” He took the bottle from his own lips and held it to Emmett’s, tipping it so the whiskey ran like tears d
own the boy’s white cheeks. Emmett gasped and choked, spluttered like a helpless baby. In a pair of Bruno’s large pyjamas he looked about five years old and faintly girlish. “Are you tight yet?” said Bruno grimly.

  “Not m-me,” said Emmett, wavering proudly, “I guess I inherit a cap-p-pacity from my . . .”

  “All right, keep going. One for Commissar Jeffrey. One for the Reverend Miles” (the memory of Miles’ stricken face was something, like Cornelia, which Bruno wanted blotted out), “one for Uncle Bruno, the tiredest radical of them all. And one for poor Miss Diamond.” He raised the bottle and saw that it held just one more swallow. “And one to bigger and better opiates”; he forced the last drop between Emmett’s laughing lips and crashed the empty bottle against the filing cabinet: which remained blind and impervious, and though shattered a little, though ringing metallic and insulted, righted itself at once and went on doing its duty. He remembered its duenna, the patient Mr. Harrison; and remembered how though he had denied to Mr. Harrison almost the existence of filing cabinets, Mr. Harrison (because the cabinet was his living) had gone on quietly unwrapping it; just as Cornelia, to whom he had carefully expounded the non-validity of hunger, had quietly and insolently fainted from it.

  Emmett shook with laughter as though someone had blasphemed in church. “If he is my f-f-father,” he stuttered with a kind of lewd irreverence, and shivered like a dissipated baby.

  The boy filled him with loathing and pity and a keen sense of his own depravity. He didn’t know what urge (conquering repulsion, conquering a half-wish to be alone), had let him answer Emmett’s cry and bring him home. His mind leaped forward to Elizabeth. But he discovered himself, now that so few hours remained to their meeting, totally unprepared for it; a bridegroom who had rehearsed, who had dressed himself, who had got ready too far in advance—so that when the hour was at hand and his mind, like his tie, impeccably in place, some extraneous event served to shatter his composure. Take Emmett home? when Elizabeth was coming? Preposterous! but why not, he thought the next moment, in defeated relief, in drugged tranquillity. The symphony he thought he heard had died; Elizabeth had been a part of it—when he thought of her now he thought of her as he did of himself and his old triumvirate, as static, as ironic ghosts, as dead beyond recall. Why not? he thought (glancing with a pang at the room he had with childish pleasure got ready for Elizabeth; the flowers shaking in a vase; her own brand of cigarettes scattered liberally to make her feel at home; even the piano, long unused, was open for her)—why not? and with an unhappy knowledge that he took Emmett not so much from pity as for his own protection he put his arm around him, and loathed the boy and loathed himself.