by Howard Fast
“How ungallant!” she exclaimed, and then added, “No, I will not talk this nonsense. Please come, Breck. You don’t mind if I call you that—Breck? Isn’t it what your friends call you?”
“When I have friends, yes. And I’ll come, if—”
“If what, Breck?”
“If you have lunch with me.”
“But I’ll see you this evening, Breck.”
“That’s this evening,” I said. “I want to see you now—or in an hour from now. Do you have more pressing things to do?”
“Do you always come directly to the point like that? I shouldn’t see you alone—you know that, Breck.”
“If you want to see me, you should.”
“All right, then,” she said, almost tiredly. “Where?”
“There’s a French restaurant called Henri’s on St. James’s Street on the corner opposite King Street. It’s walking distance—”
“I know the place, Breck.”
“I’ll call and book a table for the two of us. Or will you be recognized?” I added.
“I suppose so—possibly. I don’t care.”
“One hour?”
“One hour,” she agreed.
There had been a mist of rain, but it was over now and the sun was out, and I felt strangely light-headed as I walked down Park Lane to Curzon Street to Piccadilly. I reached King Street first and waited there in front of the restaurant. She must have changed, because she had to take a cab, and I saw her get off at Ryder Street and then come down toward me. She wore a red woolen outfit, skirt and cape, the kind of woolen things one buys on Princess Street in Edinburgh and which are right in England and nowhere else on earth. She walked quickly, with a long, firm stride, her body supple and erect, her sandy hair blowing in the wind from the Thames; and she did not smile but looked at me very strangely and directly as she took my hand and said, “Hello, Breck. It’s good to be with you.”
“It’s good to be with you,” I said.
Henri, who owns the restaurant, looked at me with some faint glimmer of recognition—but not enough to have my name. I ordered some Irish smoked salmon with capers for the first course and then some veal sauté and with it some very dry Vouvray, but if the food were the best in the world, we didn’t know it, and I remember very little of what we ate or how it tasted, whether we finished our food or left it. I had not been there for ten years or more, and it irritated the proprietor that he couldn’t remember my name. Then he heard Patience use it, and he remembered and said, “Ah—Mr. Breckner.”
He was very satisfied and sent us a bottle of wine we did not want.
It was right that she should call me Breck. I really had no other name—and I had no name for her yet, and we sat in silence for a time and I suppose we tasted the salmon.
“What did they call you before you married Quigley?” I asked her.
“You mean my maiden name? It was Selkirk, and Patience is an odd name if you’re not an American. I suppose it does seem odd to you.”
“It seems right.”
“Does it? I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not. It’s a prissy sort of New England name, and it has a kind of empty status, I suppose. If you were Patience Selkirk, you married someone like Quigley, and then—”
She allowed that to hang for so long that I prodded her, “And then?”
“And then you lived the rest of your life in a lousy nightmare, Breck. Have you ever lived in a nightmare?”
“Yes.”
“Long?”
“Yes, Patience—long.”
“No, don’t call me Patience,” she said. “That name is no one.”
“What do they call you?”
“Pat.”
“All right, Pat.”
She escaped into silence. She studied her wineglass, sipped at it, and studied it again.
“No wife—no, you told me that before,” she said at last. “You had one and she died. No wife now.”
“No.”
“I have a husband. How old are you, Breck?”
“Forty-seven.”
“And I am forty-two and falling in love—a forty-two-year-old New England virgin with two kids. If I were pretty, I could be Doris Day.”
She had her third glass of the Vouvray now. She didn’t have to plead for compliments. She was a damn sight better looking than Doris Day.
“Are you in love with me, Breck?” she asked simply.
“I don’t know what love is.”
“You don’t—no, you don’t. You always tell the truth. You always say what you must say. I don’t know what kind of a man you are. You could be anyone and any kind, couldn’t you?”
“I could.”
“You could even be a murderer, couldn’t you, Breck?”
“I could.”
“Because in the film you shot that man—was that murder, Breck? Am I sitting here with a murderer?”
“Perhaps.”
Her smile was engaging, contagious. “Oh, Breck,” she said, “you do make me feel good, you and the Vouvray. I haven’t felt so good and relaxed for the longest time. Before I was about to say that I feel I have known you the longest time, but what a dreadful line that is! I really don’t feel anything of the kind. You’re new and strange and exciting and even a little comforting in a way I absolutely do not understand. Do you feel that way about me?”
“I don’t know how I feel about you.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“Because—because it’s something else.”
“What is something else?”
“Something that wasn’t ever a part of me. I don’t know. Must I talk about how I feel?”
“Heavens, no! Talk about anything. Talk about the war. What did you do in the war, Breck?”
“I killed people,” I answered flatly.
“Oh, there we are,” she said, making a face. “Back with it. But we went through all that on the plane and it was tiresome. Just see how I can change a subject. Do you like London?”
“I come home to London,” I told her.
“Oh? But you’re not British.”
“No.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“I am simply home, that’s all.”
“And you’ll never go away from here again?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Now you’re not Breck who tells the truth,” she said, smiling. “But you’re right. Do you know, there’s no other place in the world where two dull, middle-class, middle-aged people could meet and fall in love. But of course you’re not dull. I meant myself. And you’re not annoyed because I keep presuming that you are in love with me?”
“No, I’m not annoyed.”
“You see, I am very sure of myself, Breck. For the first time,” she added ruefully. “But I shall never leave this place either.”
“You have two children.”
“I shall send for them.” She saw how amused I was and asked me, “Why do you laugh at me so much, Breck?”
“Have I been laughing at you?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose because you’re so like a kid living in some kind of kid dream.”
“Now you’re putting me down.”
“You mean denigrating you? Oh, no,” I said. “Not at all. If you are like a kid, then it’s right for you to be that way and true.”
“I like that.”
“But the fact remains that you have a husband and you have children and friends and family—”
“Yes—all of that.”
“And you know nothing about me, absolutely nothing—only a few hours of the forty-seven years I have lived. Yes—you know that I killed a man. Maybe I have killed other men.”
“There are worse things than killing men, Breck.”
“Are there?”
“Don’t you think so?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know what better and worse are.”
“And what do you really know about me?” she asked.
Chapter 9
WE walked down Marlborough Street and then through the park to the Embankment. I had forgotten what it was to walk through a street or a park with a woman. I was dead and yet I was listening to her, so a part of me must have been alive. She had said flatly that she had fallen in love with me, and I was trying to understand that. “Do you love me, Breck?” I repeated to myself, and it became annoying. “Just define love to me,” I said to myself. I had known a Catholic missionary in Africa many years ago who talked a great deal about loving God, and I suppose I called him a liar flatly and insultingly. Where was his love object? Myself, I was a dot in emptiness, and then the single point dissolved. Patience Quigley spoke from vast distance, and to comprehend I had to tune a voice, as if I were using a radio. She was explaining her relationship with her friend, Helen Adams, who was the wife of the ambassador, and who understood, and thus there were always two rooms for them. I had to return to make sense of it. I had to return from the edge of the universe to ask her what she meant. She told me that Helen Adams always provided two bedrooms, one for herself and one for Norton Quigley.
“I mean I don’t have to explain to Helen. She knows. How can you explain the feeling of being naked in the same room with a man you loathe?”
I felt suddenly sick and strange—as if it had been spelled out that I walked naked in the world.
“Poor damn Quigley,” I said.
“Don’t pity him.”
I had not pitied anyone in as long as I could remember. “You’re his wife,” I said. “Why do you hate him so?”
“I said I loathed him. Is that the same as hate?”
“I don’t know. I don’t hate.”
“You don’t love either, do you, Breck?” It was a sad discovery. She hadn’t lost her strength, her cockiness, her skinny little challenge to the world, but something inside had broken. “I’m sorry I said that, Breck. That was a rotten thing to say. But don’t keep telling me that I’m his wife. You make me feel like one of those brainless women who get their kicks out of falling into bed with every other man they meet. I don’t do that kind of thing. You know it. You must know it.”
I knew it. I said that I knew it.
“I haven’t been his wife for twelve years, Breck. That’s the truth. I haven’t been to bed with him or any other man in all that time.”
“Why?”
“How do I know why?” she cried, her spark fanning back to a little blaze now. She stopped to face me, pushing the sandy hair out of her eyes, her blue eyes stinging into me. “I didn’t want to. That’s why.”
“All right, you didn’t want to. That makes sense.”
“What sense does it make? He’s public friend number one, isn’t he? He loves mankind, but he doesn’t love people. Norton Glee Quigley, he’s the biggest copout of our time—”
“Copout?”
“It’s my kids’ talk, right to the point. Their father promises and sells out. He wraps it all up in fancy prose, and he’s all things to all men of good will, a sort of political ‘Poo Perplex’ that runs in circles—”
I shook my head.
“That makes no sense to you, does it? You don’t promise and you don’t break promises, do you, Breck? Well, let me spell it out plain and dirty. On what is called the nuptial night, he discovered that I wasn’t a virgin. Not that I ever told him I was, although the extent of my degradation was some mutual exploration with a shaky sophomore from MIT, but Quigley takes such things for granted. Who else but a fine Protestant virgin from an old New England family would presume to marry a Quigley? So he found out and called me a number of things and then slapped me around a bit when I tried to get out of the room, and then he did me the honor of raping me. Lest I forget, his private name for me became whore-bitch. His finest moment was the night he made his great speech on the Democratic Tradition at the convention and then came back to the Chicago hotel room at three in the morning and decided he wanted me. I didn’t want him, and it took a month for the bruises to disappear. I had an inch of pancake over them when Ed Murrow came into our happy home with the television cameras and allowed the peasants to see how true aristocrats lived in their lovely and perfectly appointed Connecticut house. The mere sight of Quigley in his book-lined study, literate, gentle, knowledgeable, was calculated to make the heart of any American intellectual beat with joy and relief. If Quigley was silent, it was because Quigley was waiting for the right moment to speak out. If Quigley did nothing, it was because Quigley knew when to act. When we were alone for a moment the night they wired the house for sight and sound, he threw in gratuitously, ‘So far so good, whore-bitch, but make one break and I swear I’ll leave you marked for life.’ Oh, he’s better now, much calmer. He found himself a playmate, bless his heart. But am I permitted to loathe him, Breck?”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I have been married seventeen years and I’ve never told another man one blessed word of it. Oh, I suppose my mother knows or suspects and Helen Adams knows, and that’s it. I told you because I want to tell you. It doesn’t elevate me, does it? It makes nothing out of me—”
“Do you feel that way now?” I asked her gently.
“How?”
“Nothing. Without yourself, without any being?”
“No. I feel good. I feel alive.”
“I know.”
“Do you feel alive, Breck?”
“Yes.”
“And is it a long time, Breck, since you felt alive?”
“Yes, a long time.”
“I know that. I think I knew it the moment you sat down beside me on the plane.” She looked at her watch now and cried out, “Oh, Breck, it’s four o’clock, and I am not dressed and people will begin to come an hour from now.”
I signaled a cab and took her back to the Embassy and then walked to my hotel.
I picked up my key at the desk and went up to my rooms, and when I opened the door—indeed, when I began to open it—I smelled the cigar smoke, and then kicked the door the rest of the way, flung myself feet first and low, hooking a foot over the chair in which the man sat and reaching for the Schmidt I didn’t have. I had toppled the chair, and now I threw myself on him and, with his throat in my hands, saw that it was Gorivich. I let go of him, upended the chair, and helped Gorivich back into it. I found his cigar broken and burning a hole in the hotel rug, and I put the two pieces into an ashtray at the side of his chair. Meanwhile he was rubbing his throat and gasping for breath, and finally managed to croak, “God damn you, Breckner—have you lost your mind?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gorivich,” I said. “For some reason I try to stay alive—not for any good, explainable reason. I suppose it’s action and reaction. I don’t want to be presumptuous—but how the hell did you get into my rooms? If I had a gun, you’d be dead now.”
“With a key.”
“My key?”
“Don’t be an ass, Breckner. Do you suppose that with all The Department’s capabilities, it cannot furnish a hotel room key? What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
He lit a fresh cigar, one of those Dutch things, and said, “You damn near broke my neck,” rubbing it all the while. “You’re too edgy. None of it squares with what you’re supposed to be.”
“What am I supposed to be?”
“One of the best men in The Department.”
“You could have waited for me in the lobby.”
“Don’t be a fool! Would I sit in the lobby of the Albert Hotel, waiting for an assassin?”
I felt my face tighten, and I said to him coldly, “Don’t use that word to me, Gorivich.”
“Ah! Now it’s Gorivich. Very democratic. And why shouldn’t I call you an assassin, Breckner? Isn’t that what you are?”
“We all are.”
“Oh—all of us?”
“Yes.”
“I see. And what will you do, Breckner,
if I persist in calling you what you are, an assassin?”
“Become irritated and angry.”
“And then?”
I shrugged.
“Am I the first committee member of The Department whom you have ever threatened, Breckner?”
“I do not threaten you.”
“Perhaps not. We must work together, so neither of us should threaten the other. I must ask you something bluntly, Breckner.”
I waited.
“Are you a homosexual?”
“No.”
“Just like that?” he inquired, smiling slightly. “No shades, no degrees, only black and white, yes and no?”
“You asked me a question. I answered it.”
“Have you ever been?”
“No.”
“Not even as a boy?”
“No.”
“Very admirable—if true.”
“I don’t lie.”
“Also very admirable, if true. I am told that The Department provided you with a beautiful prostitute, whom you rejected.”
“I am not enamored of prostitutes.”
“I see. Are you at all enamored of Mrs. Quigley?”
“What in hell business is that of yours?”
“Oh, come now, Breckner—don’t get your ass up at me. I can be as hard and nasty as you. You should know by now that men who run The Department are neither fools nor weaklings, and I’ll thank you not to ask me again, ever, what business of mine anything is. As for yourself—you belong to The Department, flesh and blood and mind and body and soul, too, if there is such a thing. So suppose you just answer my questions.”
“I don’t know what you mean by enamored.”
“When you used the term yourself?”
“I used it about a whore.”
“I don’t follow these “delicate differentiations in the female sex,” Gorivich said. “I am asking you what are your feelings about Mrs. Quigley?”
“I find her an interesting woman.”
“You are not falling in love with her? I ask you bluntly.”
“I don’t know what love is.”
“No?” He nodded slowly and stood up. “You have never been in love?”
“No,” I replied.
As he walked toward the door, he threw back at me, “And yet you married.”