“What?” said Dora, smiling.
“I wish that you had someone you cared for more than anyone else in the world,” said Stella. “I wasn’t ever really happy till I had someone like that—a very special person of my own.” Again they both looked at Annette, cozily asleep. “I’d like you to have such a person,” Stella said to Dora in her weakened whisper, which made everything she said into a significant message.
Paul came in with Stella’s supper tray. He wanted to turn on the light, but Stella said it would disturb Annette. Now it was almost dark in the room, except for the warm and glowing space where Annette sat by the fire. The window framed the last gleam of winter daylight, through which snowflakes could be seen falling.
“We were just talking about you, Paul,” said Stella.
“Nothing but good, I hope,” said Paul with his stiff humor.
“Tell him, Dora,” said Stella. “Tell him what I wish for more than anything in the world.” She squeezed Dora’s hand. “Isn’t it lovely to be here all together? Isn’t it the coziest thing? God bless this house,” she said, “and all of you in it.” Annette stirred in her corner, and Paul and Dora remained quite still in the still room, with only their thoughts rustling inside their heads.
At night, in his bed, Paul slept like a lead soldier laid to rest in his box. He slept very soundly, so that Annette had to call him several times that night before he woke up. Then he sat bolt upright and called out like a sentry.
“Sh-h-h,” said Annette. “Sh-h-h, sh-h-h. Don’t be a fool.”
“Something’s happened to her,” said Paul, and jumped out of bed in a great fright.
“Nothing’s happened,” said Annette. “Not yet.”
Paul realized that Annette had come to him on a personal visit, which might be of some duration. He put on his dressing gown and sat down on a chair, facing her.
“And when it does happen?” she asked him. “What will you do? You’ll have to do something.” When he shrugged, she said, “Oh, I see. You’ll get another job in a restaurant and share an apartment with one of the other waiters. Off Amsterdam Avenue? Or downtown? One of those houses cut up into rooms, with very dark stairs and a lot of security locks? Charming. After this.” She indicated his room, which had two armchairs, three oriental rugs, a Persian wall hanging, and a walnut desk with an enamel inkstand on it. She leaned toward him and looked into his face. “The girl’s not bad,” she said, with a shrug. “Some would say you were very lucky. I think you are. My goodness, yes.” She gave her harsh laugh.
Paul cleared his throat. “It’s a very difficult position for me,” he said.
“I would like to be in such a difficult position,” Annette went on. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you like girls? I’ve wondered sometimes.” She continued to look into his pale, stubborn, handsome face. “That’s nothing,” she assured him. “It doesn’t matter a damn.”
He stared ahead of him. His Adam’s apple worked up and down very slightly; otherwise he was motionless.
She said, “You learn to ignore little things like your own personal tastes when you get to my age. Which is thirty-five,” she added in parenthesis, smiling at him broadly and tapping her foot. “When you get to that, you don’t care the teeniest little bit. Remember when I went off to London? I learned my lesson there, all right.”
“I’ve got nothing to learn,” Paul said, still staring over her head.
“You soon will have. You heard what the doctor said.”
“I thought you said that was all nonsense.”
“We have to be ready for all weathers—that’s another thing we learn.” She tapped his knee and leaned even closer. “I’m on your side, don’t you know that? I’m with you. I want to see you stay here, where you like it so much. Just look at you,” she said, amused, watching his knee twitching where she had kept her hand on it. “What are you afraid of? It doesn’t hurt with a woman—here, I’ll show you.” Dexterously, she slipped from her chair onto his lap, and, taking his face between her hands, she pressed her mouth against his. She kept it there a long while and did all sorts of expert things, and when she had finished she laughed and gave his cheek a little slap and said, “There. You see, you’ve got nothing at all to worry about. You’re doing it very well. Absolutely right,” she assured him.
Annette’s visits to Paul were repeated several times, and then one night she was pleased to find his room empty. She put her ear to the door of Dora’s room and heard Dora talking. Annette rolled her eyes in amusement. Dora was just the sort of girl to lead a discussion group in the midst of life’s business. Stella had had the same tendency, before Annette had taught her better.
If Annette had bothered to look through the keyhole, she would have been even more amused to see the two of them—Paul on a Victorian love seat and Dora on the carpet, with her arms clasped around her knees. Dora was talking as she hadn’t since she was a girl at boarding school. She was telling Paul everything about her life—which wasn’t much, except that she felt it all with such intensity. She told him about her family, too, and this was the part he liked best. She seemed to dwell mostly on their shortcomings—their conventionality, their narrow outlook—but what he wanted to hear about was her money and family genealogy. It made him shudder with pleasure to contemplate how the proper investments of one ancestor—a tea importer—had of their own accord and with great dignity (so he liked to think) grown and grown, so that there was now a river of money that flowed without cease for the benefit of the descendants. It gave him an emotion more profound than sexual pleasure to contemplate Dora in the light reflected from this river. But for her the thrill was to think that none of it mattered—the family, the family’s position, the family’s money. Only she and Paul mattered—Paul who possessed nothing except himself, and she, Dora, sitting there so simply on the floor, hugging her knees and revealing herself to him in her entirety, with whatever inward splendors she might have.
Dora’s mother was almost beside herself: “Why aren’t you in your apartment? Is she worse? Is that why you’ve moved in? Tell me, Dora.”
“She’s not worse,” Dora said, spacing her words. “You don’t have to come.”
“I can be there on the next plane.”
“You—don’t—have—to—come. Mother, please?”
Dora told Paul how her mother and Stella, although they were sisters, had never got on. They were different from each other in just the same way that Dora was from all the other girls in the family. It made her indignant that her mother should now wish to come into this house, as if she had a greater right to be there than those who truly loved Stella.
“Your mother doesn’t like me to be here,” Paul said, casting his eyes downward, as if admitting with shame that Dora’s mother had reason not to do so. “She doesn’t like either of us—me or Annette.”
“As if you had anything in common with Annette.”
Paul kept his eyes cast down.
Stella’s nights were restless now, and Annette made Paul install a bed in Stella’s room, so that she could be with her. Although by nature a very sound sleeper, Annette woke at the least sound from Stella. She seemed to be waiting and watching, not just for Stella but for the others in the house as well.
“What is it? What are they doing?” Stella asked one evening, noticing Annette alert for sounds from elsewhere.
“He is in her room,” Annette said.
“Ah,” breathed Stella, full of satisfaction.
She dozed off for a while, and when she woke again Annette was still sitting on the side of her bed, although it was very late in the night.
“How good you are, how kind,” said Stella, devouring Annette with eyes of love. There was a night light in the room; the snow had again begun to fall.
“The family won’t like it,” Stella said dreamily. “They’ll hate it. But I’ve told her, to hell with the family. When you’ve found a treasure for yourself, you don’t give it up for them. Wouldn’t I have been a fool to give you
up? And not have you sitting here now?” She squeezed Annette’s hand in gratitude and shut her eyes.
Annette kept her hand in Stella’s, but she didn’t pay much attention to her. She was still listening for sounds from the rest of the house. It disturbed her to hear the door of Dora’s room open downstairs and then Paul going softly up the stairs, past Stella’s door (Annette was so alert that she could hear him breathe), and up to his own room at the top of the house. She waited for Stella to doze off again, and then she disengaged her hand and went up to join Paul.
She was quite rough with him. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Why aren’t you with her?”
“We’ve said good night,” he answered defiantly.
She gazed down at him as he lay in bed in his striped pajamas. “Move over,” she said.
He was getting quite good with her—so good, in fact, that he had learned to put his hand over her mouth so that her cry could not penetrate the rest of the house.
After a while, she said, “Now go to her.” But he didn’t move from her side.
“What shall I do with you?” she said, in loving despair.
He had his eyes shut, stretched out beside her like a knight on a tomb. “Just stay with me,” he murmured.
“Yes, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?” she said sarcastically. She knew only too well that it would be glorious, but she could not afford to indulge herself.
“Get up!” she ordered. “Go down! Why not? You like her.”
“I respect her.”
She laughed. “And not me?”
He turned his face to her and sank his teeth into the soft, middle-aged, yet still full and luscious flesh of her naked upper arms.
She didn’t urge him any further but gave in to the luxury of staying beside him. She knew that Stella might wake at any moment, but she didn’t care. It was he who had to remind her.
“Let her wait,” she said. She was silent, and her thoughts made her bitter. “We can have these five minutes. We’re not going to get much else. Not if you don’t go down.”
“She doesn’t want to,” he said.
“Doesn’t she!” Annette gave her bark of a laugh. “They don’t know what they want, those parasites. We have to teach them everything—what to do with themselves, their time, their money. Even that they don’t know! When I first met Stella, I took her shopping. I made her buy all sorts of things: little purses and scarves and some nice pins and a lot of underclothes—mine were in tatters—and at lunch we got a little bit drunk on Martinis, and then I felt like going on one of those buggy rides around the Park, so we did that, and, my God, she loved it! Her big fat face went all red, and she said, ‘Isn’t this fun, Annette?’ Such a stupid, silly thing, which she could have done every day if she wanted! But they don’t know how to enjoy anything. And me, who was born to enjoy a lot more than a buggy ride around the Park, I had to sit there jog-jogging along with her. Tchk-tchk, tchk-tchk,” said Annette in disgust, making coachman noises, while her naked arms above the bedclothes pretended to hold reins.
“I think she’s calling,” Paul said, sitting up in bed.
“Who cares?” She pulled him down again. “All right, so you’ll go back to being a waiter. You’ll meet someone in a restaurant—a man, a woman—someone who’ll like you and want to take care of you, and you’ll start all over. But what’ll I do?”
“What you’ve always done.”
“I need to rest, Paul.”
The way she said that made him look at her, and he saw that her face was old. But he took no pity on her. He said, “She is calling. You’ll have to go.”
“I don’t want to. I’ve done enough for her.”
He pulled the bedclothes back from her, but still she wouldn’t get up. Stella was calling louder. Paul leaped over Annette’s naked body, and, struggling into his dressing gown, went to the door. At the same time, Dora’s door opened below. “Is Stella calling?” she asked.
Paul came down from his room and Dora met him on the stairs. “Something’s happened,” Dora said. “Where’s Annette?”
Then she looked up and saw her. Annette stood in the doorway of Paul’s room, plump and nude, filling it completely; she had one arm raised against the doorpost. “You’ll have to give her her pills,” she called down.
Dora went in and searched around for the right pills, but it was Paul who knew where they were. It was also Paul who got the water and supported Stella in bed to help her take her medicine. He spoke soothingly to her and said that Annette would be coming soon. Dora saw that Stella was in good hands for the moment, so she went to the telephone and dialed the Vineyard, and when her mother answered, she said, “You’d better come now.”
FIDELITY
When the doctor told Sophie that her disease was incurable, she would have liked to share the information with her husband. But she knew that Dave had many troubles—like his business and his creditors and his young girl friend—to which she did not wish to add yet another.
She also failed to confide in the other person closest to her—Dave’s sister, Betsy. But she kept thinking what Betsy would have done in her situation—how she would have thrown herself into everything that gave her pleasure: eating all the cream cakes she wanted, going back to her two packs a day, buying masses of wonderful clothes, even trying alcohol which she didn’t care for. On the other hand—and this too was part of Betsy’s nature—she might have done nothing like that but only exactly what the doctors ordered, so as to keep alive a little while longer and have the chance to enjoy everything again.
Sophie and Dave lived around the corner to Betsy, on Park, and after Dave moved out to be with his girl friend, he took another place nearby, on 79th. The three of them spoke every day and often saw each other, so that each always knew exactly what the others were doing and also, with Betsy and Dave, what they were thinking. Sophie didn’t have as many thoughts as the other two, nor their gift of volubly expressing them. Sometimes she imagined Dave’s reaction if she told him her present piece of news—how everything in his mind and heart would come rushing out, washed ashore on a flood of tears. Dave had this ability of bursting into tears—it was a facility almost, anyway it helped him to feel better, so that when the outburst was finished and the last tear wiped away, he seemed to be almost happy with himself.
The first time Sophie had discovered Dave to be unfaithful was when they had been married less than a year. They were living in her grandparents’ apartment, which was waiting to be sold—a vast old mausoleum stuffed with their heavy German furniture and thick with the smell of the heavy German meals they had eaten till they had sunk into their graves with repletion. It was an anomalous setting for someone as alive as Dave, but he soon filled it with himself, the way he did every place he inhabited. He was already running his family’s carpet business and expanding it beyond all previous limits. This kept him busy till late into the night when, to relax, he joined his friends in a poker game. He and Sophie often ate at midnight, and he told her about his whole day and mimicked the people he had met and himself talking to them. He was up early in the morning, and when he saw she was awake, at once began talking to her again. He also sang something like “I can’t give you anything but love, baby,” and performed a little dance shuffle in his underwear. His legs were hot hairy columns and his sexual organ bulged as though wanting to burst out of his tight shorts. He shaved with an electric razor, as closely as possible, though by late afternoon his beard had begun sprouting again. He doused himself in cologne and put brilliantine on his hair but dressed very quickly. He was always in a great hurry because of everything he had to do.
She didn’t mind being left alone all day, especially as he phoned her every few hours—yes, with all his business, she was always in his thoughts. He kept her informed of his whereabouts, usually rather vaguely; but if he was going to be very late, he would cite some particular place where he could be contacted. Once it happened that someone from such a contact place phoned to ask where he
was—people were always trying to find him—and laughed when she said, but he is with you. Then she became anxious and phoned several other places where he said he had been that day; none of them had seen him. When he finally came home—still shiny and scented and just a little bit more disheveled after his busy day—he found her sitting very still in a corner of her grandparents’ sofa. When he lied, she said nothing, and then he told her the truth, more or less—he wanted to tell it, to spill it into her lap together with his tears, until he felt the touch of her forgiving hand on his head.
In the beginning she had never analyzed why she loved him so much, and his sister Betsy too, though later she realized it may have been because they were so different from herself. They were full of a vitality that had been drained out of her before she was born. Dave and Betsy were exotic, semi-oriental—they were Sephardic Jews—whereas Sophie’s family were German Jews and had been comfortably settled in small Westphalian towns before migrating to America, at the beginning of the century, for even greater opportunities. Although they had married only among themselves, they had brought with them the prominent pale blue eyes and thick ankles of the German community whose hospitality they had enjoyed for so long. Sophie had inherited these; she was not pretty at all and was prepared for people to say that Dave had married her for her family’s money—which they couldn’t say for long, because he very quickly made (and lost) a fortune of his own.
During those early years Betsy was living in Los Angeles. She was married twice, and both her husbands were in films, one in production and the other on the distribution side. For a while she had enjoyed the premieres and the film festivals and the stars, but they had palled, especially as she was not at the glamorous center but on the commercial periphery. It might have been different if the husbands had been better, but they ate too many business lunches and had too many huge business worries that gave them huge ulcers. Finally, disgusted at them and at whiling her time away in her lovely Beverly Hills home vying with other wives in theirs, she had returned to New York with her son Michael and taken an apartment on Madison Avenue around the corner to Dave and Sophie. Michael was just starting college, so Betsy lived alone with not much to do once she had furnished the new apartment. Lavishly spending her alimony on it, she created a bower of fruits and flowers for herself—some real, in silver bowls and vases, others a cascade of glass grapes or silk hydrangeas; even the antiques she bought were of shiny gold and looked freshly made.
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