The Tunnel of Love

by Peter de Vries

  Now Augie had remained an artist, not by selling his pictures, but by refusing to sell his jokes. Once he took a nickel for them his status would be confused and polluted, not to mention the unlikelihood of a gagman’s ever eluding those bourgeois moral laws from which the artist enjoyed exemption. But he was in a spot, and there was no alternative. Was a mistress to force him to take that first long step toward the estate of wage earner? . . .

  I stared at the stack. From my point of view, this was the bonanza for which I had been waiting—ours just when the magazine needed ideas, a good new jokesmith. How Blair would rejoice! I didn’t feel much like rejoicing now. “I hardly know what to—” I began.

  “Oh, the hell with that. You once made me an offer. The letter must be around here somewhere. Fifty dollars apiece for ideas if I went into production, with a quantity bonus if I sold over fifty a year. This is the same as production,” he said, waving at the masses of work. “Twenty usable ideas would cover the thousand and I’m sure there’s more than twenty there. Go on, take a look.”

  I could read the caption on the top one from where I stood. One missionary to another in a cook pot as they are about to be eaten by cannibals: “Our work hasn’t been entirely in vain. They’re going to say grace.”

  “Look here, I don’t see that it’s this much your responsibility,” I said. “If she wants to be a miss mother, let her be one.”

  “Don’t,” he warned me nervously. “I want to do this. The thousand should see her through—well, the first stage. Beyond that let’s not look. I owe her this much. So don’t go making any bones about this part of it.” I realized that he was scared of C.B.—scared, at least, of what she might do—and was determined to put himself in a position of owing nothing, and clear of provoking an erratic action. As he argued about it, he kept glancing instinctively toward the house, and it was vouchsafed me that the philanderer was scared of his wife too! Like any good American husband. “Cornelia can have hostilities. Masculine protest and one thing and another. Showing the world she could get along without a husband was undoubtedly part of that whole plan of hers, at bottom. I understand she’s overshadowed by her brothers,” he chattered, pacing the sweltering loft.

  “Will they be around too?” I asked him.

  “Well, they’re O.K., from everything I hear. A very cultured sort of family. One’s a musician, the other’s a literary scholar.”

  “What’s the other one? You said there were three.”

  “He’s a minister,” Augie said, looking for his cigarettes. “But they tell me he’s not orthodox.”

  So I had my work cut out for me. I knew what I was to be pitted against. But Augie gave me no time to think about my own problems. “So the poor kid’s probably been reacting to her environment. So handle her with kid gloves. Mean butter her up about her paintings,” he said. He was pale. Don Wan. The tilted blue eyes had a fugitive look, and the normally neat reddish-blond waves had been thoroughly plowed. Augie was really a very good-looking egg despite a somewhat spoonbill nose, and no doubt there were women who thought that gave him the look of an intellectual Bob Hope. He drew a deep breath and turned again to the drawings. “Now do you want to take these with you and go over them on the train in the morning? Because time is of the essence.”

  “I don’t have to look at anything first. I’ll have the agreement drawn up and the check for the advance ready by noon tomorrow. Then you can cash it and—do you want me to take the money along tomorrow night?” I asked.

  “I’d appreciate it. She’s got a cold and can’t meet me outside the house, and I don’t want to be seen there. I have other people to think of in this.”

  “Certainly. Bring the drawings with you when you come to the office tomorrow,” I said. I had started to say good night when I thought of something. “By the way, what are you going to tell Isolde is happening to all the money you’ll be getting? Because you’ll have to tell her you’re selling your jokes. It’ll be no time before she sees them coming out in the magazine, because I’ll be turning them over to the artists right away.”

  “God, I never thought of that. Yes, she knows all my stuff. What’ll we do?” he asked hollowly.

  I thought a moment.

  “Well, suppose I do this,” I said. “Suppose I make the advance a little more than a thousand—the best Blair’ll do, say—and you’ll have something to show Isolde. Or put in the bank. Keep dividing what you make between the two women, for as long as you have to.” I backed gingerly through the hatch and started down the precipitous stair. I paused with my head at floor level. “You’ll have to work like a son of a bitch now,” I said, and disappeared from view.

  The Blys lived in a large white rambling house on the outskirts of Norwalk, the address of which I found in the phone book, and to which I was directed by three cops. Norwalk is built on more hills than Rome, and nothing in it, uncannily, is descended to but only attained by climbing. I had the thousand dollars on me, but to keep in the mood I pretended I had cadged it from a rich uncle who had written me off as a rotter and was only doing it for my family. “This is the last wench I’ll buy off for you—from now on you can tidy up your own messes,” he’d said, and stridden from the drawing room. I parked the car a block from the house and walked up to the door, unregenerate still.

  Cornelia was, of course, expecting me, and it was she who answered the door. “Come in,” she said. She was wearing a loose-fitting artist’s smock like the one she’d had on at the P.T.A. business—maybe the same one. She led me into a living room lined with books from floor to ceiling, in which two men in their middle thirties were sitting, one sideways in a deep chair, with his legs slung over the arm, reading a book, of which he turned a page as I entered; the other on a sofa before a fire, reading a musical score. “This is my brother Carveth,” Cornelia said of him. “Are we interrupting a concert?” she asked, for it turned out that Carveth derived the same pleasure from reading a score as other people do from hearing the composition played—more. “And he’d rather read a recipe than eat the dish,” said a voice behind me. “This is my brother Hubert,” Cornelia said, indicating the reader who had risen with the book in his hand.

  Carveth had studied at Juilliard and Rochester, and abroad at the Paris Conservatory and in Germany and Italy. He was now at home working on a history of music which he said Knopf was going to publish in twelve volumes. He was married, but his wife, an anthropologist, was at present on the Zambesi on a Guggenheim, studying Rhodesian taboos. Hubert was another in a family who had jet-propelled themselves from one scholarship to another. “The best things in life are free,” he said, having, at thirty-six, never paid for his tuition. Carveth frequently taught between courses, but Hubert had never sat anywhere but on the student’s side of a lectern. No one in the family could enumerate his degrees on the spur of the moment, nor extemporaneously recall the colleges and universities he had attended, which included Oxford, the Sorbonne and the Free University of Amsterdam. He had grazed wide among the humanities, but would seem to have settled on literature, in which he would continue to conduct research until a suitable teaching post turned up. Faculties in the main tended to be chary of him because he appeared to have no specialty. The other two brothers gave him what aid was not supplied by scholarships and grants. He was currently in the East to catch some lectures at Yale, which was his alma mater and to which he had offered to bequeath his brain. He had made this offer several years before, but had not received formal acceptance, only a series of interim replies advising him of the status the matter had reached in the departments among which it was being bandied for consideration.

  “Won’t you sit down,” Cornelia said to me.

  We were given brandies in large inhalers, and cigars were passed round. Cornelia declined those Hubert proffered in a humidor, and lit a Between the Acts of her own. I took a cigar, but did not immediately light it. Setting aside his score, Carveth remarked that he’d have been farther along in his work if his old room hadn’t been sto
len from him by his brother. “You know—the one overlooking Norwalk Bay,” he said with a meaning glance at Hubert. “I had thought there was no advantage in the view,” replied the other, “since the Bay is something to be overlooked in any case.” The fire was prodded and Carveth was coaxed to the piano. He composed impressionistic pieces in the tradition of that pleasant homogenized dissonance come down from Debussy through Delius. He played a suite of three numbers called “Night,” being a series of sweet qualms on that subject, then struck out into a group of take-offs. Using the air of “Three Blind Mice,” he parodied first a Bach fugue. Then he did the tune as Berlioz would have done it, and lastly, Hindemith. We set down our brandies and applauded when he’d finished.

  “The Hindemith needs work,” he said, reaching for his own drink which he had set on the piano.

  “No, I like it best,” Cornelia said, taking another cigarello from its flat tin.

  “Oh, really?” Carveth said, rising from the bench. “I thought it needed touching up.”

  “Oh, come now, that’s pure affectation. You know it’s perfect,” Hubert said from the armchair, over one side of which he again had a leg slung. I saw that there was a tradition of family persiflage here, at which Hubert was most active. He had a way of bringing his head down when he laughed that resembled Cornelia’s, except that in his case it often took the form of appearing to dodge an expected blow for his jokes.

  “Hubert thinks everything is affectation,” Carveth said. “He takes nothing at face value.”

  “But nothing can be taken at face value. Least of all pure naturalness. That’s the ultimate affectation. It’s the attempt to cover our masks with a bare face.”

  “Nonsense. I appeal to the rest. What do you say?”

  Cornelia chose to follow the dispute with her musing slice-of-watermelon smile; so they all looked at me. I swirled the brandy around in my glass a moment. “There’s a lot in what he says,” I said.

  I set my glass down and suggested to Cornelia that I ought perhaps to see her paintings, for which I had prefabricated some remarks. She rose from her window seat and, letting Carveth give me another spot of brandy, I took my glass and followed her through a door to the rear of the house.

  Her studio was a large, high-ceilinged, sky-lighted room, the walls of which were as covered with paintings, etchings and drawings as the rest of the house was with books (there were bookcases along both walls of the corridor down which we had come).

  “Just go right ahead and look around,” Cornelia said.

  The canvases, which everywhere met my eye, gave me the sensation I often get from extreme modernity in painting—that of smothering under a crazy quilt. The succession of bisected squares and triangles and other mathematical forms were utilized in rendering man, machinery and nature alike. There was a Cubist study of three dancers; a mélange of gears and pistons suggesting visually the roar of many means of transportation; and everywhere color represented as refracted light. Having completed the tour, I took a drink of brandy and turned around.

  “These are excellent, but don’t you painters ever feel you’d like to break out of your prism?” I said, to find that there was nobody in the room but myself.

  I took a stiff slug of what remained in my snifter and returned to the living room, where I found Cornelia curled up on the window seat, listening interestedly to a discussion about poetry between Carveth and Hubert. Sitting down beside her, I leaned toward her and whispered, “They’re excellent but don’t you think—”

  “Oh, thank you,” she said. “Did you really like them?”

  “But they’re not for us. We can’t use that type of thing for a cover.”

  “No, I supposed not.” Our attention was drawn to the discussion. At the moment, Hubert was analyzing the transition from Victorian to modern poetry.

  “Poets used to be obvious with obscure words,” he said. “Now they are obscure with plain ones.”

  There was a silence in which he acknowledged my return by looking in my direction; it had the effect of an inquiry as to what I might think of this. I set my brandy to rocking in the snifter again, and said, “They go too far.”

  Carveth saw that there was precious little to rock, and came over with the bottle and gave me another splash. So the civilized evening wore on. Hubert walked the room, drawing on his cigar.

  “Of course the whole discussion, our whole view of poetry, is so restricted to what we know of the English that we don’t understand there are other traditions. The French, what an entirely new vista they open!” he said. “How much more pure poetry there is there. And how didactic and moralistic so much British poetry seems by comparison.”

  “The French for the simile of beauty, the English for the simile of health, as it were,” Carveth said, carrying the bottle back to the table.

  There was a sound of feet coming down a stairway.

  “Here comes Emory,” Cornelia said.

  I stiffened. This was it—the minister. These two chaps I could handle—broad-minded, educated, reasonable liberals both. But Emory was a horse of another color. I gulped down my brandy and steeled myself as he entered.

  The cleric was a roan. He had a billow of chestnut hair flecked with gray, and bright blue eyes like glazed berries. He wore a black velvet smoking jacket and carried a pipe in his hand. He was at forty a crystallized bachelor (unlike Hubert who was “interested” in a woman in nearby Stamford). He rapped out the pipe on the underside of the mantel, after we had been introduced, and said yes to Carveth’s offer of a brandy.

  “I’ve been on the phone the whole evening with the trustees about that new steeple. Ours blew off, you know,” he told me, “in that hurricane last fall. Act of God,” he added dryly, and there was a gust of laughter that could not have been less hearty than the gale which had toppled the spire. “I suppose,” he continued, spreading his hands to the fire, “I suppose the termites in the beams come under the same category, as well as that plaster that fell out of the ceiling in the committee room.”

  Hubert winked at us and said, “Maybe each is a punishment for not taking the last more seriously.”

  “Now, now, let’s not have any more of your stuffy theology, Hubert,” Emory said, taking the drink from Carveth. “I get enough of that from my parishioners.”

  So now I saw that the whole family represented the sophisticated progressive tradition, Emory as much as the rest, if not more so. I learned later how advanced he was; how he had no creed, refrained from public prayer, and was known to heckle street-corner evangelists for giving the church a black eye. “Don’t you know the Gospels don’t harmonize? Don’t you see you’re stressing nonessentials?” he would fling at them on Saturday nights.

  Hubert drew him into an argument about the existence of a personal Deity, which Hubert said there might be more evidence of than Emory admitted. “Tommyrot,” Emory said. “In any case, I have never thought of Him especially as a saint. He is a symbol of the whole world’s upward struggle—the hard knowledge, not the easy salvation.” He went on to say that his quarrel was more with the churchmen he was left of than the scientists he was to the right of. All science had given us is the the specter of a meaningless universe, but its very meaninglessness ennobles our own values, which are the bootstraps we raise ourselves with, and which must be love, not fear. Sacred must not be an anagram for scared, etc.

  He sat down and crossed his legs. “Well, getting back to our church problems, let us hope,” he said somewhat sardonically, “that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the Acts of God under which we have been laboring. But enough of my botherations.” He looked over at me. “So this is the chap who has our wench in an interesting condition?”

  Cornelia opened her mouth to set him right, but an impulse took hold of me. Squeezing my cigar from its cellophane sheath, I said: “Suppose I have.”

  “Why nothing at all, dear fellow,” he said. The others assured me they were not medieval about these matters either; that they did not regard t
he idea of seduction as psychologically valid. They vied with one another in not regarding the idea of seduction as psychologically valid. Hubert rose and went over to a shelf of books, at a row of which he peered. “Is it Faulkner who has one of his characters point out that women are not seduced, men are elected?” he said, running his finger along a number of titles. “Confound it, where is all my Faulkner?”

  “That’s beautifully put,” Emory said, producing pencil and paper. “I must use it for a text some day.”

  I sat up in my seat. “It’s not a view I share,” I said, reaching for my inhaler, which was empty. Carveth replenished it for me, observing that I was a brandy partisan. “I drink to make other people interesting,” I said, showing them at a stroke what their aphorisms were beside those of a man like George Jean Nathan.

  “Can’t find it. Oh, well,” Hubert said, coming away from the shelves. “That’s what comes of loaning books.”

  I bit off the end of my cigar and checked the draft. I was aware of Cornelia watching me with an anxious frown as I paused to take another drink from my glass. “You boys haven’t seen my latest picture. I’ve finished it. Why don’t you go have a look at it?” she said. “It’s still on the easel.”

  “I prefer the double standard,” I said, striking a match. “It enables one to retain the luxury of guilt.”

  A couple of the men rose. “I’d like to see the new picture,” Carveth said.

  Having lighted the cigar, I rocked my brandy, cradling my inhaler in one palm. “Affairs are like watermelons. They leave more mess than they’re worth.”

  “Yes, perhaps you two have things to talk about,” Carveth said. “Please remember we’ll do what we can, which of course isn’t a great deal. It’s a pity Cornelia lost the suit. She was banking on that rather, and now things have been knocked galley west. I guess she feels now she can’t keep the child. We realize you’re married—bit of a poser that. Agree with Shaw that mating shouldn’t have anything to do with marriage, necessarily. However, if she decides it’s best to relinquish the child, that’s probably the most intelligent and enlightened thing to do, from the child’s point of view as well as everyone else’s.”