Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  “Don’t worry,” said Warren, kindly, as if divining his thoughts. “We all say a lot of things we don’t mean. We’re not going to tell Martha, I promise you.” “OK, old chap,” said Miles, feeling moved. He drew out a paisley handkerchief and wiped his brow; the room had become quite warm. “Another drink?” said Warren. Miles declined. “You’re not going to stay and talk?” asked Warren sadly. Miles shook his head. “Another time.” “Come back next week,” proposed Jane, “and we’ll take a long walk, out to the point.”

  Miles shook his head again. Once in a season was all he could take of the Coes, as a general rule, unless brutal loneliness overtook him; there was nobody to talk to in Digby, except Helen and an old Marine boxer, the real-estate agent and a stripling with a crew haircut who got out the weekly newspaper. “Or come and read Bérénice next Friday with the vicomte,” urged Jane, with a funny look in her eye. “We’ll have some drinks and music afterwards.” “Martha going to be here?” queried Miles, sharply. “I don’t think so . . .” said Jane. “Don’t say that, darling,” expostulated Warren. “You don’t know that. They said they might come, after all.” And they began to bicker, excitedly, as to what John Sinnott had said, on Tuesday, and whether it contradicted what Martha had told Warren in the post office. Miles watched with a saturnine grin. “No,” he said flatly.

  “You don’t want to meet her?” Jane’s round blue eyes grew big and naively wondering; she jerked her head back on her neck. “No,” said Miles. This decision had just matured in him, and he caught Helen’s troubled, surprised gaze. “That’s awfully unusual,” pronounced Jane, waggling her jaw and looking up sidewise at the portrait. “I mean, why would you want to have her imago in your study if you won’t see her socially?” “Yes,” chimed in Warren, “where’s the logic in that, Miles?” He had a look of profound disappointment on his bright features, like a child who sees a treat wafted away from him. “Gee,” he said, “it would have been fun to get you and Martha together again. I thought, down deep you really wanted that when you took a shine to the picture.” He turned a sweet, pleading face to Miles. “Please,” he begged. “Come do Bérénice. Come to dinner first. A week from tomorrow.” “No,” said Miles, curtly. “It wouldn’t be fair to Helen.” Rebuked, both the Coes directed their widened eyes to Miles’s better half, who smiled serenely and murmured, “Whatever you say, dearest.” Warren sank his cheek into his palm. He was torn, Miles could see, between his sociability and his sense of delicacy toward a woman’s feelings. But Jane was staring boldly at Helen. “You don’t want to see Miles’s ex?” she exclaimed. “I don’t mind,” said Helen, in a faint voice, looking to Miles for guidance. “I mind for her,” said Miles, grandly, letting the cat out of the bag; he took it for granted, as a mere matter of propriety, that Helen would feel jealous of Martha, and he saw no harm in letting the Coes know this. In his opinion, it reflected credit on her.

  Jane cogitated, looking from one to the other. “Everybody does up here, you know, Helen,” she chided. “I mean divorced couples meet their ex-mates. They all go to the same parties, and nobody thinks a thing of it. There wouldn’t be any social life if everybody felt like Miles.” “I am different,” said Miles. And in truth he felt a million light years distant from the New Leeds people. Old, soured, boiled as an owl a good deal of the time, bored to desperation except when he was working, he nevertheless had passions, he told himself, that let him know that he was a man still, among senile adolescents. Like an old lion, he nursed the wound Martha had given him because, as Jane ought to realize, he held sex sacred. “Why, Jane, isn’t that funny?” he heard Warren twitter. “What?” said Jane. “You remember, darling,” her husband prompted reproachfully. “Martha said the same thing, right here in this room. Only she said, ‘I’m different.’ Remember that?” Jane nodded. “When they first thought of buying the house,” she mused. “She didn’t want to meet you, Miles,” she continued, with a giggle of innocent malice. “That was the reason she gave for not buying it. We all told her she was a nut, that everybody met their ex-spouses here. But she claimed she was different. . . .” Miles smiled disbelievingly. “Martha,” he observed, “is a woman of words.” “Oh, she meant it all right,” averred Warren. “She fought buying that house, let me tell you.”

  Miles’s face reddened. He felt a ridiculous stab of pain. She refused to meet him while he, sentimental fool, had been on the verge of buying her portrait! The anger that had been accumulating in him during the past discussion suddenly boiled up and he wanted to hurt somebody. “Let’s go,” he said harshly. “Forget about the picture.” As he took a step toward the door, a knock sounded. There was a stark moment of silence; no one moved. The conviction that it must be the Sinnotts was graven, Miles saw, on every face. “It can’t be them,” whispered Jane. “It might be,” whispered back Warren. Another knock came. “They know we’re here because of the cars,” whispered Jane. “Answer it, man,” said Miles, in his normal voice. As Warren skipped to the door, Miles turned aside, steadying himself. Very likely, he said to himself, it was not Martha at all.

  But it was Martha, in a gray cloak, accompanied by her husband and a strange tall girl with short blond hair, wearing slacks. As soon as the door opened, Miles felt a release of tension in his belly. Now that she was here, he could say it: He had known they were going to meet today, ever since he got up this morning, and all his talk of not wanting to see her had been a protective mechanism, against disappointment. Wise Helen must have guessed when she saw him before his mirror, clipping the hairs in his nose while he was shaving, for she had said nary a word when he put aside the old coat and tie she had laid out for him in favor of the new tweed and the paisley. Jane Coe must have known that it was in the cards too as she sat there like a witch in her black shawl, urging him to stay. He would not put it past her to have cooked the whole thing up with Martha; he had never trusted the two of them when they got together.

  Martha herself, he noticed, was very formally dressed, for New Leeds. She had on a pair of smart black walking shoes, stockings, a black skirt, and some sort of white silk blouse, under the cloak, which he moved forward to take from her, doing the honors, while the rest of the party milled about in confusion. Sinnott was the only one who retained his self-possession, coming forward to shake hands briskly, ignoring the portrait—a very considerable feat, for, the sixty-six square feet of canvas had magnetized every eye but his. Nobody could miss the fact that Martha had been the chief topic of conversation. It was, as they said, a situation. Martha was shaking all over. Miles could feel it, as he lifted the cloak from her shoulders; he remembered that she had trembled, the first time he saw her, on the stage of a hapless summer theater production, so badly that the scenery shook.

  Her nervousness put him at ease. “I’m glad to see you,” he announced, taking her frightened hand in his firm, friendly grip. And he meant it. Whatever he might have expected to feel, seeing her at last, pleasure and cordiality were his prime sensations, as if he had caught a glimpse of a familiar face in a crowd. “It’s good to see you,” he reiterated, looking her over. But she, in a characteristic movement of rejection, began to apologize. They had thought, outside, that it was the Hubers’ car, she said; the Hubers had a new Cadillac too. Otherwise, the inference was, they would not have come in. Miles suppressed a smile. Wild horses, in his opinion, would not have kept her out, once she had guessed that he was inside: she had had to see him, just as he had to see her. But she was alleging that they must go, that they had dropped in, just for a minute, to have the girl in slacks meet the Coes, who were going to be her neighbors. Dolly Lamb, she explained, with a jerky nod at the tall girl, was a painter who had taken the house on Tern Pond for the winter; she did not know anybody up here; that was why they had brought her.

  Miles patiently listened, looking down into Martha’s eyes, like brown topazes, he used to say. There were faint wrinkles around them now, and she had a distrait, slightly careworn air. “Cool off,” he felt like telling her. “You
don’t have to account for yourself to me any more.” As she named Tern Pond, she colored and hurried on with her exposition, for she and Miles used to picnic there, at this time of year, and once or twice, after bathing, they had made love, over her protests, on the sand, by the deserted house that this girl must now be occupying. Martha had claimed that somebody would come and catch them; she had had a lot of sexual defenses, though she always liked it, in the end. Her look, now, kept dodging his and flying nervously to her husband. Miles turned his head to examine him—a thin, high-colored young man in old flannels and a whipcord jacket with leather-patched elbows; not the New Leeds type. He had never paid him much heed in the days when Martha used to talk to him, before she ran off; there were always young men, on the beach, actors or poets or anarchists, that the young wives liked to gab with. Sinnott, the women used to say, was exceptionally good-looking, which was why Miles had not bothered to notice him. But he now conceded that he had been wrong. There was something in the tall, scowling fellow that was out of the common run, something of the old-fashioned gentleman, a kind of knightly quality that Miles found appealing. To his surprise, he felt no jealousy. From his vantage point of seniority, he found, he could look on Sinnott and Martha almost paternally, as if he had sired this marriage. He found himself wishing them well and hoping, for Sinnott’s sake, that Martha was behaving herself. She seemed, as Jane Coe said, to be genuinely in love, and the Coes evidently liked him. Whenever Sinnott spoke, Jane Coe giggled responsively and Warren Coe beamed, as he had at the baby on the beach. Yet there was something unstable there, underneath the nice manners and the glowing cheeks of the chevalier à la rose. If Miles had had him as a patient, he would have diagnosed an hysterical fixity, very rare in men, nowadays.

  Martha had changed a great deal. She was more unsure of herself and at the same time she had more dignity. There was less of the wayward modern girl and more of the bohemian lady in her. She had even changed her hair-do; that little knot at the nape was new. In the old days, she had had braids, wound around her head, unbecomingly, and she had worn peasant skirts, sometimes, and stripes and bright colors. Sinnott must have taught her how to dress. She had a frail look that Miles had never associated with her before, despite her small hands and thin waist. During their marriage, he had always been conscious of her tensile strength and durability—her Scandinavian side. Now it seemed as if the poetic side—the Italian mother—had got the upper hand. She appeared to be living constrainedly in some sort of romance: a projection of Sinnott’s, probably, a borrowed ego-ideal.

  The fact that she had changed so was an eye-opener to Miles. It troubled him to think that he, in the past, might have handled her wrong, on the theory that what she wanted was a strong father-figure, whereas perhaps all along it had been a brother she was looking for. . . . And yet she was tenser than ever, he was disturbed to see. When he refilled his glass and brought her a strong drink from the table, to encourage her to talk, he was startled by the laughing sharpness with which she spoke of the local people. He would have said shrill, except that she spoke in such a low voice that he had to lean closer to catch the anecdotes she was relating. He was a critical man himself, but she made him feel old and tolerant, by contrast. Yet it puzzled him to remember, as he listened, that it was Martha’s arrogant intolerance that he had loved most about her. He shook himself a little as it occurred to him that it was he who had changed, grown soft and torpid from age and creature comforts. Listening to Martha now, he had the same unpleasant sensation that he got from leafing over his early plays when he was alone in his windmill with a gale blowing and a glass by his side. Is this I, he asked himself, or was that I, back there?

  “Let’s sit down,” he said, interrupting her. He drew up two chairs and arranged them, a little apart from the group. On the couch, just to the right of them, Warren had cornered Miss Lamb, who sat upright and edgy, with a scared look, while he, leaning forward, his head to one side, was explaining the theory of his work to her. Miles motioned to Martha for silence. “Picasso,” they heard Warren’s modest voice say, “uses a succession of images, like the animated cartoonists to express linear time. I’ve gone a long way beyond that. Last year, I showed the continuum by painting both sides of the canvas. You get the idea? A mathematician up here suggested it to me. What you have is a continuous painting that curves back on itself. It’s the real break with easel painting.” “Why don’t you try sculpture?” the girl interposed, in a demure murmur, edging back from him on the couch. Mentally, Miles slapped his thigh, but Warren took the question literally. “I may,” he said, thoughtfully nodding. “I never thought of that. I guess it’s pretty obvious to an outsider.” The girl said something indistinct. Warren’s high laugh rang out. “Of course,” he cried, “I know it’s absurd that I should be ahead of Picasso—ever read Kierkegaard, by the way? Oh, you should, darn it; he taught me to accept the absurd. I’ve learned to accept a lot of things since I took up science and philosophy. The first thing I found out was that just about everything I thought was true wasn’t. Ever have that experience? I owe it mostly to Miles here.”

  Miles turned his head and deliberately winked at Martha. “You remember,” he said in a whisper, “what you used to say about our host here and a six-year-old child? ‘Why?’?” Martha nodded. She smiled, like her old self. Then, all at once, she turned pink and dropped her gaze to her lap. Miles felt himself flush too. He knew what she was remembering. It was impossible, it seemed, to find a subject of conversation that did not contain an oblique reference to their common past. He decided to take the bull by the horns. “Thank you,” he said, in a low voice, “for writing to me about Barrett. I ought to have answered.” “Oh,” she said, hurriedly. “It was nothing.” Her glance scurried off to her husband, who had paused in the midst of a conversation with Helen to watch Miles and Martha laughing and whispering. Helen was looking the other way. “I’m glad,” said Martha, loudly, “that you have a baby. It’s a boy, isn’t it?” “Yes,” said Helen from across the room, picking up the child and dandling it on her lap. There was a silence. “What are you writing?” said Martha, with a desperate look, again in a voice that was meant to carry.

  Everybody turned to hear Miles’s reply. “A philosophical work,” he said, shortly. “It would bore you to hear about it.” John Sinnott raised an eyebrow. “Not at all,” said Martha, with a queer little smile; a strand of fair hair had escaped from its knot and fallen across her forehead. For a moment, she looked strangely like the portrait, dissociated, fissionized. She had come apart, poor girl, Miles said to himself, as he watched her raise her hand to brush the stray lock back. There was a bandage on her finger and, stealing a look at Sinnott, he observed that he too had a bandage, a fairly large one, on his right hand. What was wrong between them, he wondered. Was it her failure to have children or the failure of her work as an actress? He looked shrewdly at Sinnott. Had he forced her to leave the stage?

  “Why, Miles,” said Jane, goggling, “didn’t you know? Martha is a philosopher too.” “Not a real one,” said Martha, as Miles turned to stare at her. “I never took my degree.” “We told you about that, Miles,” put in Warren. “Don’t you remember?” Miles shook his head. “Oh, yes,” said Jane. Miles frowned. Either he was losing his memory, what with the drink and age, or people had ceased to interest him, except perfunctorily. He could see from Helen’s face that he had just had a bad lapse; the Coes must have told him about this development in Martha, and yet he had clean forgotten. “You don’t say?” he muttered, and began to ask her whom she had studied under. But he scarcely heard her answers for thinking how strange it was that any detail about Martha could have eluded his notice, when he had once put detectives on her, not even to get evidence—for he had plenty—but just to learn what she was doing and whether his friends were seeing her. “What are you up to now?” he interrupted. “You doing your dissertation?” Martha smiled. “You just asked me that,” she pointed out. Miles pulled himself together. “The answer is no,” sa
id Martha, with a pert little twinkle. “I decided not to do it two years ago.” Miles nodded. His curiosity stirred. “What are you up to?” he demanded. To his surprise, Martha colored. “I’m writing a play,” she confessed.

  Miles gave a start. For a moment, he was violently angry. There it was again, that pattern of imitation. She had not changed in the least; she had come back here to compete with him again. He no longer considered himself a playwright, but that was how the public remembered him. She must have read his thoughts. “I’m not going to take up boxing,” she murmured, twitting him, with a little air of apology, which he thought was in poor taste. He rose on his dignity. “Don’t apologize,” he said. He had always been a magnanimous man and he took comfort in the thought. He had always told Martha, he recalled, that she had a wonderful ear for dialogue. He had no doubt, once he thought about it, that she could write a very clever little comedy. “That’s great,” he said, warmly. “You’ve found yourself at last. I always said you could do a play.” “I remember,” said Martha.

  “And you’ll bring something to it that I never had,” he continued, his friendliness increasing, for he truly loved the arts and suffered here in this sterile region from the absence of young shoots of talent to spring up around him. He was nearly fifty-five, now, and Warren Coe, who was close to his own age, was the only bud of promise he had been able to detect in the area; the rest were all blasted. Everybody was “artistic,” and nobody was an artist. “Yes,” he nodded. “Practical experience of the theater. That’s the thing. I don’t mean exits and entrances—anybody can manage that side of it. I mean a feeling for the medium—the grand imposture of the whole thing. It’s a make-believe world that the layman doesn’t get the hang of. Nobody can write a real drama who hasn’t smelled the grease paint; it’s like somebody composing music who’s never played an instrument.” Martha gave a deprecating shrug. “I don’t know,” she said. “Actors and actresses have written some terrible plays. Bernhardt, remember?” “Ah,” said Miles, “but there was Shakespeare, and Molière and O’Neill.” “On the other hand, there was Shaw,” she answered. “And Congreve and Wilde.” “Wilde was a lifelong actor,” protested Miles.