My clothes were now not only soaked but steaming; at least it seemed so to me. I threw my coat away—or didn’t throw it away exactly, but chucked it under a culvert from which I could retrieve it when next I drove by. A wallet I had taken from it made a disagreeable bulge in a hind trouser pocket. I hit a long open stretch where lengthened exposure to the sun had rendered the tar in the road so soft that I had the feeling of slogging through rarebit.
I sat down on a large stone to take a small one out of my shoe. Nursing my foot a moment, I forlornly compared the trite hassle of which this was the fruit with those bright, deftly negotiated spats by which marriage is idealized in drawingroom comedies. I mentally revised parts of our wrangle with some better dialogue (such as might be heard most any night at Moot Point, as a matter of fact). In my breather, there by the wayside, I imagined it as an adroit exchange conducted before dinner guests, which, uncorking a wine or disheveling a salad, I would crown with, “Marriage, my dear, has driven more than one man to sex.”
I put my shoe on and rose, and, after pausing to draw fabric away from my person at various points, resumed my march. I sensed the birth of a blister on one foot. Presently, too, I began to have moments of vertigo in which I wondered whether I hadn’t perhaps punished my wife enough. I tried to divert myself by repeating over and over the pun, “You haven’t vertigo, you haven’t vertigo.” I had neglected to water myself at the waiting-room drinking fountain before setting out, and now a great thirst, which a little thought amplified into panic, parched my throat. My general condition, plus heat shimmers in the road and blinding flashes from the chrome of passing cars, resulted at last in a fogging of my vision. Fogging may not be precisely the word, for the change took the form of rendering commonplace objects adventurous, and objects visible that may very well not have been there. Thus distant elms and willows appeared for fleeting moments to have the look of date palms, and once I thought I saw a camel on the horizon.
I stepped off the road, crossed a ditch, and sat down on another rock. I ran my finger over my forehead in the manner of a squeegee. I noticed several burs on the cuffs of my trousers. I was breathing heavily and feeling a dense throbbing inside my head when a car approaching down the hill ahead of me slowed and came to a stop on the other side of the road. My wife was behind the wheel. I waited for her to speak, prepared to consolidate my gains.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked, through the open window.
“I’ll be all right,” I said, plucking at my shirt buttons. “It’s just my heart.”
She put her head out of the window and looked back up the road to make sure nothing was coming. Then she turned the car around and drew up near me. She reached over and opened the door on my side. I got to my feet, made my way across the ditch, and climbed in. I pulled the door shut and she put the car in gear. I made sure my window was all the way down and adjusted the wing glass so the draft would strike me the instant we got under way. “I tried to call you a couple of times but you were busy talking,” I said as we did. “So I had to walk. What brings you over this way now?”
“I tried to call the butcher several times—the cold cuts I ordered didn’t come—and our party line was busy. That meant you couldn’t reach me, and I got to worrying. I figured you might well have been on that three-thirty. I couldn’t be sure, but rather than risk keeping you waiting in the hot station, I thought I’d take a chance on a trip for nothing.”
We drove in silence for a stretch, and then she said, “Isolde Poole called just as I was leaving. She suggested we all have dinner together.”
“Well?”
“An air-conditioned restaurant sounds good.”
“I thought you didn’t like Augie,” I said.
She heaved a long sigh of resignation. “Well, it comes down to what you said,” she answered. And, glancing off across the frazzled fields, she added, “You’ve got to take people as they are.”
Seven
FAILING other certifications of his genius, Augie was deep in the long, symbolic process of building himself up as a son of a bitch. I was a willing witness: Curiosity could not resist what conscience must groan over. Our intimacy progressed from uncertain beginnings for Augie’s first revelations were not voluntary but the product of incitement. I threw the incident of the lawn party up to him in a sort of peeve for his picking my brains about the spat, as he presently did, not to mention its having been over his sins that I had spent the week-end in the doghouse.
“You’re not in any danger of splitting up, are you?” he asked the following Wednesday when he dropped into my office to leave some new cartoons (which I declined to look at in his presence following an editorial rule set up in deference to my nervous system).
“No, we’re not in any danger of splitting up,” I said with my head bent over my desk.
He set the drawings on a table, where I had motioned for him to put them, and sauntered to the window. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you and Audrey.”
“Just keep your nose clean and nothing will,” I answered.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“How does your garden grow?”
“My garden?”
“The blonde. You were quite smitten with her.”
“Oh, that.” He shot me a speculative look. “Anything she ever gets, she’s asked for. All that come-on.”
“Next time remember that water is a great conductor of sound. I speak as a friend,” I said. “And, also speaking as a friend, if you mean business put this down as rule number one: Never waste your time with a flirt.”
The sagacity of this so got his goat, especially as coming from a tenderfoot as I know he took me to be, that he asked me to lunch and was soon deep in accounts designed to assure me that he not only meant business but was and always had been fairly well established in it. I have listened to my share of males making a clean breast of their conquests, but Augie singled me out as a special confidant in a way that I always felt had something to do with the fact that I kept rejecting his drawings. Some special need must have driven him to play his own Devil’s Advocate to a man he knew was down for a character reference for him, even granting that that fact was all a byproduct of his wife’s having submitted mine. “I suppose I’m a bit of a cad,” he said, performing some surgery on a lamb chop. (Why does a man always look so smug when he calls himself a cad?) “But I pay for it.”
I fed him the expected straight line, after a leisurely pause. “How?”
“I—no, I’ve told you enough already.”
Tune in next week to this same station and see what happens, I thought. Next week was drinks on me at a Manhattan bar we began to frequent. I wheedled and needled more out of him by taking my wife’s line of disapproving; then out came the private psychology. For his explanations were, again, à lamode (it seemed to slip his mind for the moment that the artist didn’t need any explaining).
“You see, I have these devilish feelings of guilt,” he said. He talked in a quite standard vein for a few minutes and then my ear, practiced from all the Saturday-night strip teases, picked out a complexity it was not accustomed to, a slight offbeat in the popular rhythm. “You see, part of the idea is that I deserve this guilt and when I don’t have it I feel uncomfortable. As though I’m being delinquent? There’s this masochistic urge to go after the guilt by sleeping with as many women as possible—what other way is there for making myself feel rotten? I feel the guilt, it wears off, and then I get to feeling guilty because I’m not feeling guilty.”
“Why sleep around then, if it’s that much trouble?” I asked, masking my fascination by breaking a pretzel on the top of the bar.
“It’s the only way of getting back to the guilt.”
“Why should you want to get back to it?”
“Because I feel I have it coming to me.”
“What for?”
“For sleeping around.”
I took in a house cat that was arching itself against the leg of a p
atron in a booth. Augie bent a plastic muddler back and forth. “I’ve really got myself on my hands,” he said. What he wanted me to say was, “Augie, you’ve got to stop crucifying yourself.” Instead I said, “What time is it?”
He looked at me reproachfully. “What do you mean, what time is it?”
I shook my head when the bartender glared at my empty glass. “Isn’t it a little rear-end-to? Your complex.”
“It’s a vicious circle,” he agreed, nodding. He plied the swizzle stick a moment longer. Then he set it aside and revealed, “I’m going to an analyst.”
“Does he tell you all this? What you just told me?”
“No—I tell him.”
There was a pause. I glanced at a wrapped parcel of rejections on the bar, which he had just picked up from the office. Guessing my thought, he said, “This man is very reasonable. And he doesn’t dun me for what I owe him either. He’s interested in my case.”
“I can believe that,” I said.
“Not that the sledding isn’t tough enough without doctor bills.” He shifted his feet and hunched over the bar. He took a drink and for the moment looked the picture of a man with nothing much on his mind. “Divil a penny—”
“I’ve got to get back to the office,” I said. “I’ll see you at the P.T.A. thing tomorrow night. Be sure and come now, do you hear, because you’re being watched.”
Our local Parent-Teacher Association was putting on a fundraising jamboree for which I had been asked to write a skit preferably satirizing the town Board of Finance which, by cutting the school’s appropriation, had put them in the position of needing this benefit. I never went to P.T.A. meetings, they weren’t really my speed, but I agreed to turn out a little something for their do. I also let it out that I was not averse to playing the lead. Plans for the project had been some weeks afoot, and now the various committees involved were to get together to discuss the show, the food, the publicity, and the decorations for the school gym in which the shindig was to be held. There was to be an opening rehearsal too—all at the gym, which has a stage at one end.
My piece was a two-character diversion. By the time the evening of the rehearsal rolled around, I had spent many mental hours with my leading lady (Isolde), casting about for the right vein in which to approach my role, assuming she would do hers as Joan Fontaine. I had smoldered in the style of Olivier, had ground my jaws and talked with protracted blinks like Spencer Tracy. With something of Cary Grant’s animal charm I had taken advantage of that April heart. I had worked out a system of uttering all my labials with my upper teeth against my lower lip, similar to Humphrey Bogart’s, and had even whispered everything like Jimmy Stewart. None of these seemed right for the part. It was while driving to the school gymnasium that I lapsed into an improvisation that struck what seemed to me the indicated mood.
I dissolved to an ocean liner on which we met at table. It was as George Sanders that, taking leave of her in the dining room, I rose and, pushing back my chair said, “If you care to take a turn on deck, you’ll find me forward. Possibly even a bit unscrupulous.”
That was sailing to the States. When we docked in New York, we made a date for cocktails the next day. “Let’s make it fivish,” she said.
“Fine,” I said. “In front of the Biltmorish.”
Five-fifteen found her waiting alone before the hotel door. Five-twenty came and still no me. At five-thirty she found me a block away, browsing at Brooks Brothers’ windows. That was how I cured her of that suffix, and, oh, what fun we were going to have if this was any gauge.
I locked the door of my car and walked up the steps to the lighted gymnasium. There must have been forty committee members there, all jabbering away in groups from one end of the floor to the other. Isolde, sitting in the bleachers, raised her head from a script and waved. The P.T.A. secretary, a large woman named Mrs. Blenheim, had said she had connections in the theater and would get us a director. She saw me, and taking a tall, slim man by the hand, towed him across the floor and introduced him as Ernest Mills. He was a TV director who registered omniscience by shrugging one shoulder, and wore a white beret which, on top of a sunburn he had, looked like a poached egg on an order of hash. He was known as Putsi, though not by me.
Suddenly he turned around and, moving his arms above his head as though he were waving off flies, called out, “Kids, we’re going to run through the first sketch. So please go out in the hall for your confabs, or if you have to stay inside here, keep it down to a dull roar, so we can hear.”
About half of them stayed. Isolde and I mounted the stage. While we were waiting for comparative silence, I spotted Augie in the back of the gym, sizing up the walls for murals and posters with someone in a print smock. Evidently another P.T.A. officer had connections in the art world. But it was all right, I was later assured: two heads were better than one, and the newcomer and Augie were getting theirs together fine. Her name was Cornelia Bly.
The racket subsided and Isolde and I began our reading. Mills and Connections in the Theater sat together on a couple of folding chairs. The sketch was a what-if satire: what if a husband applied the same despotic methods to his family budget as our Board of Finance did to the town’s. The M.C. was to set it up with an introduction ending, “Now we meet him as he enters the terrace to join his wife for their annual budget hearing.” I explained all this to Mills who hadn’t yet read the script.
I strolled out in flannel slacks and a houndstooth jacket and extended an imaginary dry Martini to the lounging Isolde, murmuring as I did so, “One for the Gibson Girl.” I then kissed her and sat down with a cocktail of my own, whereupon “my wife” worked the conversation around to how much she had saved on redecorating the house and by skimping on clothes, with me deflating her at every turn in a way that was as foxy as it was deft. In the course of all the persiflage, I fetched her two more Martinis, kissing her each time I handed her one to show that I was flesh and blood beneath this fabulous exterior (and ad libbing repetitions of the Gibson Girl mot, which I assumed my hearers had not caught as they had not laughed). My wife tried to explain to me the difference between cord and seersucker. I reached for my glass and drawled, “I had supposed, my dear, that a seersucker was someone who spent all her money on fortune tellers.”
Mills clapped his hands for us to stop and came forward.
“This has been going on for twenty-two minutes,” he said. “Where’s the action?”
“Why, in the grain, the subtlety of the give and take,” I said.
“But this is a skit. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes at the most. It isn’t a three-act play.”
“It isn’t?” some card out front whispered.
I said, “There’s some conflict coming up in a minute. Where she says she’s going to Lord and Taylor’s tomorrow. I say, ‘What do you have to go to Lord and Taylor’s for?’ And she says, ‘Because I want to go to Hattie Carnegie’s next week and I haven’t a thing to wear.’”
“And your diction—” Mills continued with his strictures.
“I’m playing him with my tongue in my cheek,” I said.
“Maybe that’s why I can’t hear you.”
It got the first real laugh of the evening, and we resumed with some sense of the ice having been broken.
“One more important thing before we go on,” Mills said. “Just how do you see this character you’re playing?”
“As a sort of George Sanders type,” I said.
“George Sanders.” He turned with a frown to Connections in the Theater. “Does that strike you as right? For a P.T.A. sketch?”
Connections in the Theater rose and came down, shaking her head. “No,” she said, “it doesn’t. Not for what we want—local audience identification and all. And I agree with you about too long with too little action, now that I see it on the stage. It bothered me when I read it.”
Mills went on to say that he saw the man as a stuffy middleclass suburban husband. Another P.T.A. official joined the discussion and t
he three of them went into a huddle. I turned back from the footlights and had a cigarette with Isolde, while those with humbler chores looked on.
“Making headway with the Crib?” I chatted.
“Mmm,” she responded with an affirmative bob of her head, as she took a light from my match. “I’ve put your name in, so I expect they’ll have someone up your way soon.” She laughed. “If this isn’t where you came in.”
“It isn’t that,” I said quickly, “but I think you ought to get completely new references. For luck. We sort of jinxed you once. So you feel free to count us out, you hear?”
“You’re sweet.” She leaned over to kiss the tip of my ear. “And I think you’re an absolute genius getting us mixed up in this sort of thing. I hope the Crib has a representative snooping around here. The P.T.A.!”
He glances to the rear and sees that Augie and his collaborator have their heads together indeed, and as duenna it is his task to calibrate the distance between them as they bend consultingly over a sketch.
“I wouldn’t think of asking anyone else,” Isolde said.
He mops the stage with his withdrawing gaze and wonders, Does no shadow of suspicion ever cross that April heart? Maybe Augie’s very openness disarms it. Maybe she doesn’t personally condemn the tangents repugnant to Rock-a-Bye? Did these agencies put a tail on a man, like a private eye? He glances toward the bleachers again, and again calibrates the bent heads. The distance between them has dwindled since his last reading. He knows Isolde is looking at him, the tinted-Dresden face in its winsome half-smile, and something shoots along the surface of his heart like ice cracking, and he knows his role at last. It is as Herbert Marshall he must go down the infested years, the faithful friend, somehow loyal to both, suave, meticulous and dear.
The Tunnel of Love Page 7