by Howard Fast
“You’re a strange man.”
“More or less, we all are, aren’t we?”
“I don’t mean that way. I mean for me. You know what’s happening to me, don’t you? I feel awkward and foolish and frightened of myself and then I’m so afraid—”
“What are you afraid of, Phyllis?”
“This is the wrong way, isn’t it? The worst possible way, isn’t it?”
“Why do you worry about a right way or a wrong way?” I asked her gently.
“Because it’s not mine to say that I think I’m falling in love with you. That’s the worst thing in the world for me to say, isn’t it? At least I should have enough sense to keep my mouth shut and then I become so afraid because I’m convinced it’s going to stop.”
I didn’t say anything to that—only sat and looked at her and after awhile we both stood up and I put my arms around her and kissed her. That was all right. I had done something for myself and not for Comaday or for Fredericks or for New York or for Moscow, but having done it I didn’t care to think about it or probe into it or examine it and weigh the pros and cons and the circumstances and the morality.
We were still early for the evening in Great Neck. So on our way out we stopped at the cafeteria and had coffee and smoked a cigarette. During the few minutes we were there Professor Vanpelt stopped by, leaned over the table, and observed that we made a consistent twosome. Either Professor Vanpelt haunted the cafeteria or his hours coincided exactly with ours or else he kept his benevolent eye upon us with remarkable obstinacy.
We were in the car and driving across town toward the Triborough Bridge when I asked Phyllis what had been her cousin’s reaction to her bringing me to dinner tonight. She gasped and discovered that she had forgotten to call. “I meant to call,” she said. “I started to call during lunch and then something happened and I was going to call just now. I think we’d better stop now.”
I thought not. I pointed out to Phyllis that since we were on our way, we might as well continue, admitting to myself that there was more than one reason why I didn’t want anything to break up this evening. By this time we were on the approach to the bridge and calling would have meant turning back; and Phyllis began to enjoy the notion of doing something unexpected and very likely irritating to her cousin. As we crossed the bridge and came onto the Grand Central Parkway, she told me about her cousin, whose name was Rita Golden and who had married Jack Golden, who had $3,000,000 or $4,000,000 or $5,000,000 that he had made in the business of importing sugar. She told me about their house, their pretensions, their aspirations, their three-car garage and their Bentley; and I was glad that she recounted it matter-of-factly with neither envy nor annoyance. I can tolerate poor people who don’t like rich people, but when the dislike is ninety per cent envy, I tend to move the other way. Phyllis wasn’t envious; if anything, she was indifferent to the fact and substance of their wealth; however, she was uncertain as to whether or not I would be indifferent. She explained to me, and it came as a sort of apology, that she went out there because she had very few relatives. She didn’t want me to think that she went out there because they were rich or because she envied them their riches or because she enjoyed having some of it rub off on her. She was nervous and uncertain and becoming aware of the fact that she had flung herself at a man and exposed herself to a man about whom she knew very little indeed. She was not a simple person or an obvious person—except in relationship to a man with whom she had found herself falling in love. She knew a great deal about a great many things, but very little about men; and I found myself saying things to myself about myself and about Comaday and about the whole rotten, lurid, distorted turn my life had taken.
Then, after that, Phyllis was silent for a long while and we drove on together in silence, the road darkening as night came, the inside of the car becoming a cave in which we sat, each of us alone with our thoughts. When she finally spoke, she said that she had been making a fool of herself.
I didn’t argue with her about that; I only pointed out that this was not easy for either of us and that the best thing we could do would be to let it happen in whatever way it would happen.
“You won’t like these people tonight,” she said. “They’re cheap and they’re vulgar and you won’t like them and then you’ll have to turn it into something about me.”
“It has nothing to do with you,” I said to her. “No matter what they are, the best thing to remember is that it has nothing to do with you. You are yourself. That’s what I am. That’s all that any of us are. I like you a great deal, Phyllis. I want to be with you tonight. If I wasn’t with you tonight, I’d be home reading a book or sitting and staring at a blank wall or in a movie house without seeing what goes on on the screen. I don’t have anything to give or at least very little and very little joy to give it with, but we should neither of us ever apologize to the other again—never again. Do you understand?”
“I think I do,” she said.
It was quite dark when we reached the Golden’s house. But two bright lamp posts lit a sweeping half circle of driveway into which I pulled, parking my Ford behind a Chrysler Imperial that nudged the rear fender of a Cadillac convertible. The house was a huge sprawling single-story affair of graystone, white clapboard, picture windows, and split levels. When we sounded the chimes at an enormous front door, which hung on brass hinges and had enormous brass decorations splattered all over it, a brass door knob and a brass knocker, it was opened for us by a butler or a converted chauffeur or a houseman or whatever he might be, in a black coat, who took our coats and then led us into the living room that was large enough to be impressive, carpeted from wall to wall with dusty blue carpet, filled with French antiques or with what looked like French antiques to my untutored eye, a grand piano, a big ornate bar, and five people. The one of the five who was Rita Golden swept toward us. She was a tall, brittlely groomed woman, good-looking, self-possessed, with a flashing patchwork quilt of brown and blond hair. The other woman in the room, whom we were later introduced to as Jane Carlton, had the same patchwork head of hair, sprigs of pale yellow alternating with sprigs of brown, and as much like Rita Golden’s as if they were twins. They were twins in other ways—they moved alike and spoke alike and reacted alike and through the evening they said, for the most part, the same things.
Only Rita Golden was not delighted to see us—at least she was not delighted to see us together—and as Phyllis introduced her to me she had a difficult time covering her surprise and her indignation. She said that she was delighted to see me and in the same breath she was unable to understand why Phyllis had not called her or informed her that she would not be coming alone. In fact, at this very minute, her car was at the station and her chauffeur was looking for Phyllis; and Phyllis was no match for this; she was no match for any of them there. She was stricken with guilt and unhappiness as she tried to explain a series of circumstances that had brought me with her. I let her explain and smiled and stood there with the foolish smile printed on my face and presently her cousin gave it up and accepted both of us and introduced us to the other people in the room.
Jack Golden, Rita’s husband, was a solidly built, overweight man in his middle forties. Even with his weight, he was good-looking and comfortable among his French antiques. He was less disturbed than his wife and he made me feel that, even if my coming there was a blunder, I was welcome. Fred Carlton, the husband of the other woman present, was a skinny wisp of a man who, I later learned, was an important figure on the Sugar Exchange. Jane Carlton was a woman whose pleasure increased with martinis and with men. She had a martini in her hand when we were introduced and from the manner in which she clung to my hand, I guessed that it was not the first drink. She was delighted to see me, she said pointedly, and she looked at Phyllis defiantly.
The cause of our hostess’s discomfiture was the extra man in the party. His name was Maximilian Gomez. He was about thirty-five years old, six feet two inches tall, almost cadaverously thin, with honey-colored s
kin, a charming smile that was by no means inhibited by my presence, and a flashing set of teeth, white enough and perfect enough to make me wonder whether they were dentures. He, at least, won my vote for making Phyllis welcome. He appeared as delighted to see her and meet her as if she were Marilyn Monroe. He took her hand and bowed and kissed her without self-consciousness; with just a trace of a Spanish accent, he informed us that he was charmed to meet both of us, but let it be known plainly that he was much more charmed to meet Phyllis.
Unfortunately, at the moment, this meant little to Phyllis. She excused herself and, as I learned later, went to the powder room to weep over the abysmal disaster that her evening had turned into. I also learned later that Rita Golden had followed her there and had demanded to know what she possibly could have been thinking to bring a dull clod like myself with her when she, Rita, had gone to such trouble and to such pains to have Gomez here on this evening to meet Phyllis. Phyllis pleaded that she didn’t know what she had been thinking and had certainly had no idea that Rita had planned anything of this sort. As a matter of fact, as we eventually learned, Rita was a liar and had not planned it. Gomez had begged his own presence, but that was something for later.
When Phyllis and Rita returned to the living room, I was half through a martini and flattered by a general interest in physics. I had learned that physics was not an abstruse and rarefied area of science, but a matter of intense concern to anyone who had ever set foot on Wall Street or any extension of Wall Street. I had also learned that the path to riches and happiness was no longer smoothed by oil or steel or aluminum but by transistors, diodes, and vibrating crystals; that atomics was not simply a source of power, but the fastest growing source of profit in the United States, and that a simple-minded professor at Knickerbocker University was a source of wonder and gratification to three men whose involvement with sugar did not preclude them from a much broader and more catholic interest in the microcosmos of the electron. Even in that short time I had come to envy them, for a meticulous dollar-and-cents appraisal had taken the edge of horror off the atom bomb. In their world there was nothing to worry about except the problem of backing the right atom.
At least it cheered Phyllis. Evidently it did not occur to her, as it did to me, and certainly not to her relatives or to the other guests, that she knew more about atomics and physics in general and particles in particular than I had ever known or would ever know if I had a lifetime to live instead of an uncertain two weeks. She was not only a woman, she was a poor relation, and she was unmarried, which made her a failure on every level which would entitle her to their respect.
In all truth, however, she didn’t mind. She listened to their curiosity and observed their attention with increasing pleasure and bit by bit, the muted misery which she had returned with from the powder room began to disappear. Gomez confined his attentions to her. By the time we were ready to go to the dinner table, she was able to smile.
They seated Phyllis between Gomez and Carlton; on my side of the table I had Jane Carlton on my left and Rita Golden on my right. Jack Golden sat at the head of the table, alone, and free to cope with the food, which was rich and plentiful. He received the eating honors. He was at least fifty pounds overweight, to begin with, and I could see that he treated each meal as a challenge. Jane Carlton ignored the food, finished another martini, and then gave her attention to the wine. Rita Golden attempted to recollect that she was the hostess and to talk to me. Perhaps it was not as hard as talking to her husband—something she avoided completely—but it was not too successful. She attempted one or two questions about my relationship with Phyllis and then more or less gave it up and resorted to pressures under the table.
Phyllis, on the other hand, had the consuming attention of Maximilian Gomez—and it was consuming. Gomez talked to her, whispered to her, bent toward her, filled her wine glass, and almost hovered over her—if such a thing can be accomplished sitting down. He claimed her entirely and never gave Fred Carlton an inch. Carlton talked to Jack Golden about business, which was mostly sugar and very much on the brink of some kind of disaster—so much I was able to gather from fragments of phrases that I was able to pick up. Now and again Phyllis looked at me hopelessly. When she did, I smiled back encouragingly. I neither liked nor disliked Gomez, but I was pleased at the picture of a man giving all of his attention and all of his charm to Phyllis, particularly since he was, at the same time, almost indifferent to the two other women present.
At the same time I was trying to sort out of my memory file of names the name of Maximilian Gomez. Even a bad cop learns to file names, to remember them, and to recall them; and the name “Maximilian Gomez” was certainly not a common name. I watched him; he was very handsome—much too handsome—much too obvious and much too glib to be enchanted by Phyllis. Either his face, his manner and his clothes were a whole lie or else his enchantment with Phyllis was. Unless I was a fool and a failure as even a primitive psychologist, his taste in women would run in very different directions. Then I placed him. He had been married to and divorced from a second-rate Hollywood star. He had made a small sensation in Havana, pre-Castro, by dropping $900,000 in one night in a single casino. He had been photographed with a yacht, with race horses and high-powered cars, and he was connected with an unsavory dictator in Latin America. Additional facts emerged from my memory and filled in the picture. He had made the headlines of the newspapers some years ago when a political opponent of the dictator had disappeared in Miami, under very suspicious circumstances, from the hotel where Gomez had an apartment. I worked my memory on the details surrounding the disappearance of the dictator’s political enemy—and I realized with the kind of uneasy wonder that a seemingly far-fetched coincidence provokes, that this man, the political opponent who disappeared, had been a physicist; and of course, to frame it nicely and to put each thing into its proper place, the major crop and sustenance of the Latin American dictatorship was sugar.
My face must have been dreamy-eyed, benevolent, even wistful as I watched him now, considering the fact that here he was in a house in Great Neck, paying court to Phyllis Goldmark, a guest of an overstuffed man who had become a power as a sugar importer. It worked gently and nicely and precisely, and I sympathized now with Rita Golden’s anger and consternation when she had discovered that Phyllis was not alone. The utter grotesqueness of the concept added a smile to my benevolence—that and the thought of Phyllis Goldmark as an object of matrimony for Maximilian Gomez.
He looked at me at that moment and tore his attentions away from Phyllis for long enough to observe that I appeared unusually contented.
“Oh?” I said.
“As if you had some remarkable and pleasant fancy, Mr. Clancy.”
“The food is very good,” I said.
Jane Carlton said, “I never met anyone before who was actually named Clancy; in fact, I thought the name was an invention. You are the first Mr. Clancy I ever knew—only you don’t look like a Mr. Clancy. Do you know what you look like—”
“For Christ’s sake,” Fred Carlton said.
Mrs. Carlton’s voice faltered and ceased. She spoke no more.
“I was putting together the pieces of a puzzle.” I smiled at Gomez.
“I am intrigued by that.” Gomez spoke soberly and thoughtfully. “I would imagine that much of a physicist’s life consists of that kind of activity. All of existence is a puzzle to you, and you must eternally try to put it together—or am I being romantic, Mr. Clancy?”
“A little romantic, I think.”
“All of existence is so much,” Phyllis said softly.
“I would leave that to the philosophers,” I agreed. “You must understand, Mr. Gomez, that a scientist will spend a lifetime trying to understand a part of the structure of a single atom.”
“Yet we live in times when a single atom becomes all of existence. Or do I speak in riddles, Mr. Clancy?”
“Not at all,” I smiled.
“I mean that there was a time,” Gomez we
nt on, “when all of existence was an endless thing. Now it can be compressed into the small space that a single atom bomb occupies. So the very large and the very small come together, so as to speak. Wouldn’t you agree to that, Mr. Clancy?”
I decided that in composing my mental file I had been ready to misjudge Maximilian Gomez. He was something in addition to the sum of the racing cars and the polo ponies and the West Coast wives. “I think I would agree with that in a manner of speaking,” I nodded. “But you see, Mr. Gomez, a physicist can’t afford to be a philosopher.”
Gomez smiled and wondered whether a physicist could afford not to be a philosopher.
After dinner we went back into the living room. Jane Carlton complained of feeling ill and Mrs. Golden took her upstairs to rest for awhile. Gomez continued to pay his attentions to Phyllis, and for a half hour I sat and listened to Jack Golden and Fred Carlton discuss the various intricacies of the sugar market. I gathered that the hopes and the dreams and the aspirations of a good many people rested on fractional changes in the price of sugar and that a deep and pervading interest in these fractional changes could become the basis of a man’s existence. At ten o’clock Rita Golden joined us again and informed Fred Carlton that his wife was asleep. He received the news with the same indifference he had displayed to her all evening. Phyllis joined me, Gomez trailing after her, and for a few minutes more there was small talk about the weather and life in the suburbs and the local school situation. I gathered that there were children somewhere in this large household, but throughout the evening I had neither seen them nor heard them. Then Jane Carlton, shoeless, came stumbling down the stairs and became very sick in a corner of the living room. Rita Golden’s face tightened with anger; Gomez and Jack Golden pretended not to notice; and Fred Carlton, swearing under his breath, went to the aid of his wife. Phyllis excused herself, pleading the long drive and an early class in the morning. The only proper good-by when we left came from Maximilian Gomez, who said with devotion that he hoped he would see Phyllis again.