“You don’t have to gargle for me, or take the pills either. Doc says you’re malingering.”
“Is that serious?”
“It could be.”
“How long will I have to stay in bed?”
“It’s twelve o’clock. Mrs. Mash will be here in two hours.”
I turned over from supine to prone. I lay for some time after my wife left, thinking, through the hum of a vacuum cleaner, about Augie. To begin with, how did he himself feel about pressing a deposition out of me, knowing what I knew? You assumed it was basically Isolde, his wife, who wished to adopt a child, though he protested he wanted one just as bad. But even if he didn’t, Isolde’s wanting one was enough, for he was devoted to her. I knew he liked me too, with perhaps a special amused affection for the wholesome advices with which (speaking of the fate of having met him at all) I had tried to brief him on our community after he and Isolde had moved into it. Such as, “If you get mixed up with that crowd you’ll spend every night of your life at some damned party.” Such homilies performed the function served by the inverted directions which used to appear on those wine bricks manufactured during prohibition: “Caution, do not immerse in water as it will turn to wine.”
My wife and I were—to undertake as systematically as possible the task of putting the sinner in that perspective that is required by charity no less than by narrative—neighbors of the Pooles as well as friends. That made everything twice as ticklish: People are allegedly forever parting friends, but how can you part neighbors? From the time we and the Pooles first met to the morning I turned over from supine to prone was three years. Augie had in that period touched me for sums of which I had lost count; but the fact that I could estimate them as upwards of two hundred dollars can be taken both as a measure of my friendship for him and my anxiety at the thought of his acquiring additional pecuniary strain. After all I had mouths of my own to feed. I never expected to get any of my departed tens and twenties back: I saw them as gone in a flutter of jockey silks. Now, Augie was not a “sporting” type—not a bit; he understood perfectly that I was paraphrasing Shakespeare when, catching him out with a Turf Guide after a period of professed reform, I flung out something about a man who could “post with such dexterity to racing sheets.” The effect on him could not have been more tonic than it was. No, Augie’s interest in the sport was part of your intellectual’s colloquial underside. A kind of fine self-consciousness made him lapse into some convenient dialect or other every time he put the bite on me. “Man, Ah ain’t just flat—Ah is concave,” he would say by way of preamble, or, “Divil a penny it is I’ve got on me this day. Is it a sawbuck you could be helping me out with?” He strove by these means to give my every fresh financial nick and scratch a quality of gay inconsequence, or nothing to worry about.
Of course it would be straining at a gnat to deny Augie Poole his “character” on the ground of thriftlessness alone. It was the trouble I had swallowing camels that undid me as a witness. My situation was not unlike that of the marriage guest who must, if he know any just cause etc., speak now or forever hold his peace. That I could do neither of these accounted for my being still in a horizontal position when Mrs. Mash arrived, and for my astonishing behavior when she walked unexpectedly into the bedroom.
My wife had worked herself into a state of suspicion by the time the doorbell rang. “You know something you’re not telling me,” she said. “I insist you do. Is it about Augie?” I shook my head. “Is it money? Is he head over heels in gambling debts?” I shook my head. “Is it that he doesn’t really want a family?” I shook my head. “Has he fallen in love with another woman?” I closed my eyes like a wearied saint.
“Mrs. Mash is here. Go answer the door.”
She did. “Surely you can get up for a minute,” she said as she went. “The woman coming all the way from Haversham and all. . . .”
I heard the front door open and a voice say, “I’m Mrs. Mash from the Crib.” There was an exchange of greetings and then, our children being dispersed among neighbors, the women spent an unmolested hour in the living room. The data fell softly and steadily from my wife’s lips. “Isolde Poole is really a swell sort. Fine with kids from what I can judge . . . took care of mine several times . . . seem to like her . . . nice roomy house and all. . . . Oh, about three years . . . income? . . . Well, my husband knows more than I about the Mr. Poole side of it.”
I crept out of bed and stood with my ear to the crack of the closed door. Suddenly I heard my wife say in answer to something of Mrs. Mash’s, “I don’t see why not . . . not that sick . . . your head in the door anyway.”
I popped back between the sheets just in time. I lay with my eyes shut tight, like bars against which my caged conscience fluttered, when the door opened. My wife said, “He’s not asleep. This is Mrs. Mash. She has only a question or two to ask you, and I think it would be a shame to have her make a special trip. She’ll have to see you sometime.”
“I can—”
“Nonsense, Mrs. Mash. Come in.”
My eyes blinked open. “Oh, hello,” I said, in a very husky voice. “You’d be Mrs. Mash.”
Mrs. Mash was a tall woman with a mouth like a mail slot and eyes the color of soy sauce. She stole apologetically in with the assurance that the merest word was all she wanted from me concerning Augie.
“They tell me you know him well. What say, do you think he has the makings of a solid citizen and a good father?” she put to me humorously.
A peal of cracked laughter broke from my lips, and then, sitting bolt upright, I pointed helplessly at my throat, from which no further sound issued. Not a peep. Mrs. Mash looked inquiringly at my wife. I sat gesticulating for some seconds, my legs plowing the covers in my effort to recover the power of speech, which had indeed quite fled. My wife burst into tears and left the room, followed by Mrs. Mash who marched out pad and pencil in hand.
At five o’clock that afternoon my vocal chords were still dead as a doornail. And I responded to my wife’s hysterical displays by snatching up a sheet of paper and scribbling on it:
Now stop this, damn it! Can spill beans about Augie in ten words, but that not fair to him. Or to me—I deeply involved too. Only fair way is to tell all from the beginning. Will do so at earliest possible moment. This throat condition like when people victims of stick-up or frightened in some other way. Voice back in few hours. Now pull yourself together. This is no way to act in front of children.
Two
WHEN I try to analyze Augie Poole, I generally get about as far as recalling a movie I once saw about a man who could dive but not swim. Having tumbled adroitly through an aerial sequence, the man would be fished, threshing and coughing, out of the water by servants and friends before he drowned. Augie is something like that in his knack for the fancier turns of life, with little or no sense of its rudiments. I remember the first time he and Isolde had dinner at my house. We were eating at a table set with some imported place mats of which my wife was especially proud—Oriental mats, I think, with some kind of cryptic figure in the center. Twirling his fork between courses, Augie peered at his, lifting a plate to do so, and said, “I do believe these are prayer rugs.” Augie knows about as much anthropology as whoever it was wove the mats, but that’s not the point; the point is he could just as easily have said, “I love your prayer rugs.” As it was, his pedantic flourish left enough doubt in the minds of his hosts so that their eating off the mats any more was out (even if they said grace). My wife answered with a mock mock wail, “Oh, and I was so fond of them—whatever can people like us do with prayer rugs?” Isolde said, “Shoot craps,” and turned her beautiful China blue eyes on her husband like two gun barrels.
I began purely as a spectator of Augie’s affairs. But I became so rapidly drawn into them, and was in the end so narrowly grazed by the absurd calamity which crowned them—of which the business that rendered me mute before Mrs. Mash was not even yet the last—that I felt a little like the Kansas farmer must have felt who saw
his neighbor’s house picked up and deposited elsewhere by a cyclone which then, crossing the farmer’s own premises, swiveled his cap around on his head, leaving the peak behind. No more of that for me.
We met the Pooles not in Avalon where we all live but forty miles away at a New York cocktail party, as befits Eastern commuting culture—those numberless intact globules of metropolitan life that float on the surfaces of numberless New Jersey, New York State and even New England country-town populations. My first glimpse of Augie at this party is sharply chased on my memory. Reedy and handsome in chalk stripes, he stood talking about Kierkegaard with gestures perfected at El Morocco, waving his drink so it just didn’t spill. Near him was an exquisite creature with a face like tinted Dresden, sipping a Martini. I have always prided myself on a gift for spotting people’s vocations by circumstantial evidence. When I see a girl bent on standing at right angles to herself—a heel against an instep to form a T with the feet, or her chin lined up along her shoulder as though she’s slightly out of touch with herself—I know we have a model striking the photographic poses of her trade. The Dresden beauty was so patently a magazine manikin to my practiced eye that I was interested to hear the hostess say at my elbow, “That’s Isolde Brown, the actress.” As we watched, the object of our regard broke into animated conversation. Isolde Brown’s smile was a plagiarism. It gave me no trouble. Joan Fontaine. Of course. The sort of half-smile, a one-cheek smile, the lips just parted. . . .
“And that’s her husband over there—Augie Poole,” the hostess said.
“Is he in advertising?”
“He’s a cartoonist. Why, he must send his cartoons in to you, come to think of it.” This was not my day, but what my hostess was referring to was The Townsman, a weekly whose picture jokes happens to be my editorial responsibility (to take care of the occupations for the moment). “I don’t seem to place the name,” I answered, not making the slight mental effort that would have spared me so much embarrassment later. I was mesmerized by the virtuosity that went into Isolde Brown’s small talk.
“They’ve just moved out to Avalon, so you must come meet them,” the hostess said, taking my hand.
I permitted myself to be towed across the room, reflecting on the basic connection between modeling and acting, the latter being but a series of successful postures, etc. I was soon at Isolde Brown’s side, hearing her introduced as Mrs. Poole. “Tell him your story about Helmholz,” the hostess said, after the presentation, and was off in a gasp of taffeta. Helmholz was a half-baked theatrical character who was then in the news in connection with a fashionable gambling raid. “I’ll tell you about Helmholz,” Isolde said, settling herself in an unoccupied chair and patting the ottoman for me. The woman she had been talking to had twisted off through the crowd, leaving us together.
In the press of a cocktail party everyone is in bas-relief. Friends lose a dimension; their talk, nervously disbursed for quick consumption, becomes all surface in a way that curiously drains them of characterization. Familiarity is undone—even one’s wife appears at times a chattering alien. With strangers the trick is reversed. Having nothing previous to go by, you take at face value what account they give of themselves, and out of small details erect a character, for whatever it may be worth in accuracy. Quite quickly I had a full-blown version of Isolde Brown, which took a lot of checking up on later. For the moment, I could but let her represent herself as she would.
“Helmholz,” she began, running the ball of a forefinger around the rim of her glass, “is a fool, sure. But then perhaps ambition makes fools of us all, at one time or another.”
I have by no means yet lost the capacity for wonder, and I hung on her words, which her pretty mouth fashioned with a somewhat overprecise diction, like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter. And for the benefit, no doubt, of any producer who might be within earshot.
“I went to see him about, oh, seven years ago, when he was a producer, or trying to be. He said he wanted to know how well I could project an emotion without saying anything. So he gave me an assignment from real life. He wanted me to go to the Empire State Building and be rejected.”
“He wanted you to go to the Empire State Building and be rejected?” I said softly.
She nodded, drinking. “The Observatory. That was before they had the high fence around the roof, and they were more careful about jumpers. At the window where you had to get your ticket, they watched for people who seemed moody or preoccupied. Anyone who answered that description, no ticket. That was my exercise—to be refused a ticket. If I couldn’t convince the people at the ticket window that I was brooding about something, Helmholz said, how could I convince an audience in the theater?”
“This isn’t what they call the Boleslavski Method, is it?” I inquired.
“The Stanislavski? No. Oh, I forgot to tell you—he wore felt slippers in his office.”
“And did you do it?” I asked, flabbergasted by an image of a girl shuffling up to a ticket window to register anxiety with a mouth that reminded me of nothing but that fine old-fashioned simile about snow in a rose.
She tipped the dregs of her Martini into it. She was a moment chewing the olive—business, as they call it in the theater. I relieved her of the glass and set it on a table with a little craftsmanship of my own.
“I left Helmholz’s office at one o’clock that afternoon. Two hours later, Helmholz got a phone call from a distracted girl who said she had not only been stopped at the ticket window but had been taken to the police station. I was there now, I told him hysterically, and would he hurry over in God’s name and straighten this thing out. Well, I was calling from a phone booth in the drugstore downstairs of his office. His office was on the second floor. I hurried out of the drugstore and met him as he came running down the stairs, felt slippers and all, and sort of clawing his way into his overcoat. ‘How was that for an imitation of a woman in distress?’ I asked him. ‘Did I convince you?’ His eyes went so.” She lowered her lids in a graphic rendition of reptilian menace. “I never got an interview with him again, let alone an audition.”
I was curious about one thing. “Did you do this with your tongue in your cheek or were you serious about it the way he was?” I asked.
“Hm? Well, Helmholz never did put on a play. His only plays were the plays he made for the gals. I don’t even know whether he had a script then. Oh well, so it was no loss. Poor old ham,” she said sympathetically, and again I saw the derivative smile.
Well, any number can play at that game, and while waiting to fall asleep that night I gave her her head as Joan Fontaine, playing myself the man Helmholz could never be. The action of many of my daydreams took place at an imaginary lodge I have on a remote promontory of the Maine coast, which I call Moot Point. “Because of some legal kink in the deed,” I told her, sucking in my cheeks in the manner of Clark Gable. We were strangers who had collided on the beach in a sudden downpour, and now she sat in the cottage propped among my hypothetical cushions, after a hot shower and dressed in my pajamas, which were way too big for her. I emerged from the bath myself wearing the terry-cloth “blotter” robe also essential to this scene, my neck scarved in additional toweling, and as I shuffled off in matching mules to the kitchen to brew some tea I drew taut the cord and said, “I probably don’t own the place at all.”
Sipping the steaming oolong we got better acquainted.
“I like to take absurdly long walks in the rain,” she told me about herself. “And I like Pogo and Edna Millay and those crazy puzzle shops along Sixth Avenue. I love those foolish little flower carts in the Village. And I like men who don’t worry about deeds to things, and smoke a pipe held together with adhesive tape.” The eyelashes swept downward and there was the half-smile, with perhaps a touch of some winsome and muted early wildness. “Oh, and deep woods and the smell of pine. I love pine.”
“I love yew.”
“We mustn’t.”
She was soon unmasked as an aspiring actress who had contrived the encoun
ter on the beach, knowing I was a noted producer holing in at my Maine retreat to read scripts. I had her recite to me in pear-shaped tones. Later we went to town and bought tone-shaped pears. Oh, we were silly like that for a month or more, silly and insanely lazy, knowing the hard work ahead, for I had decided to undertake her debut. More than merely talented, she had drawn me out of a husk of misanthropy into the sun and the fun again. . . .
This was among the reveries with which I detained myself in the days following the party, during which I wondered when I would see her again, of which I naturally had every expectation. Three weeks passed without my running into either her or Augie, whom I had met at the party long enough to shake hands with, and I forgot about them. I saw their house, once, for though it turned out to be on our road it wasn’t on the way to the station I commuted from. Then one afternoon as my train was rolling into the Avalon station I caught sight of Isolde swaying in the aisle. She flashed a smile of recognition down the length of the coach, over a shoulder draped with a scarf of crimson wool. That evening, my wife being dug in at the telephone, I settled down with an after-dinner bottle of beer and was soon far away at Moot Point, deep in divagations of a worldlier order than previously. Then, I had arisen to breakfast from a couch on which I had all night humorously revolved in search of a comfortable position, for I had given the girl my bed. This time it was another story, and she expected to be made an honest woman.
“Yes, I’ve given a lot of thought to marriage—that’s why I’m single,” I said, striding out to the porch and pitching my cigar into the disreputable sea.
Friends have noticed—or at least I have noticed—a resemblance between my diction and that of George Sanders. There is the same closed-mouth delivery, the same urbane sense of everything being murmured. These and a knowledgeable fatigue, a sort of offhand Weltschmerz, together with features at once fleshy and sensitive, complete the similarity, which is marked enough for purposes of meditation.
The Tunnel of Love Page 2