by Les Weil
"Don't be silly," she said, and she leered at me -I was astonished, observing such an expression on in that moderate, supervised light. "I'm Mrs. Kent," she said, "and you're late, dear. Don't play innocent, or I'll think you hate me."
"I'm sorry, Ma'am;" I said, staring at that face which had suddenly become unhappy. The face was pleading with me.
"Don't you see?" she said, in a light voice.
"Uh-oh," I said.
"We're making a scene," she said. "You bastards are all alike -"
"Rebecca Kent," I said. "Oh, Jesus, Peyton -"
"Don't make a scene, dear."
"I want a drink," I said, and then we were able to walk away toether: in the bar, I remained standing while my companion sat down, she crossed her legs, in gleaming stockings; evidently I was under an obligation to treat her politely, and so I said, "What'll you have? A Daiquiri? Rum Collins -"
"Order me a Martini, dear. Be nice. Rum is much too nasty to drink at luncheon." She stared straight ahead, over the bar, and got out a cigarette case from the bag she was carrying.
"Indulge me," she said. "Be urbane."
I ordered two Martinis, and looked down at the floor: and Peyton's voice, a rough, uneven tenor, whispering, said to me,
"Just don't pretend that you think I'm joking -and everything will be all right."
"Absolutely," I said, and I began to be amused. I was ready to carry on; and my companion sensed this, for she leaned toward me and said,
"I knew I could count on you." She put her right hand on my wrist, and leaned toward me; her manner was confidential. "I want to get to know you better," she said. "You have a splendid build, really." She was looking right at me -a pretty woman; and then something attracted her attention behind my back. She shook her head, and bit her lip, quite charmingly.
"Oh, dear," she said. "I'm afraid we're going to have to leave. You can take me for a walk in the park."
Outside on the street, she tugged lightly at my arm, and flounced along very competently on her high heels. We passed some expensive shops, and then came to an elegant little park that I had never visited. She turned up one of the walks, and stopped under a jacaranda tree that lightly, intermittently screened the sun. The shade was full of light; a bed of nasturtiums glowed at the border of the path. She turned to face me, in a lovely feminine gesture (it is a gesture of bestowal), and there were tears in her eyes.
"I have to leave you now," she said, "and I can't explain ... but you'll trust me, won't you?"
"Of course," I said.
She touched her lips with a gloved hand, and said, "It's wretched of me to treat you this way -can you imagine that I might be in trouble today?"
"Why, yes," I said.
"One day everything will be clear to you -but now I must run! Au 'voir! You've been so good to me."
She turned, and continued up the path, away from me: curious still, I followed, inspecting the park, since I was there. She went out of sight as I wandered along the paths, among the flowering shrubs, and finally I paused under an oak; I looked around me, and observed that I was at the edge of the park. Between me and the sidewalk was a thicket of oleander, in which I could hear a murmur of voices.
One of the voices was familiar; it was Peyton's ordinary speaking voice; I could not understand him. I stared into the thicket, and at a gap I saw a woman's legs, below the knee, propped on narrow, fierce shoes. She was on the sidewalk. Nearby were a man's legs, in trousers -black shoes. I could hear a man's voice say clearly, "We only want to protect you, Mister Carter," and the feet moved restlessly. The lady stamped her right foot.
"Ugh," I said, and turned away. I began walking, and I muttered, "I always did have trouble understanding women -"
Then I was pleased to be free; I went borne, and three days later, at four o'clock, while I was holding the house alone (the children and their mother having gone to a marionette show sponsored by the P.T.A.), Peyton appeared at my front door, in a modest blue suit and a felt hat.
I had to admit him: what could I say? I invited him to sit down in the living room. He seemed hectic; his composure was oddly loosened, as he kept his face turned toward me, and he would not meet my eyes. We needed a topic of conversation, and so I said,
"We've never had a chance to compare notes on the war, Peyton. The last time you wrote me, you were in an artillery outfit, I believe headed for Europe--"
"I don't remember that," he said.
"Maybe it was the Engineers," I said.
"I can't remember that time at all," he said. "Oh, what does it matter! I suppose you were a hero--"
"No," I said.
"I didn't mean that," he said. "I'm sure you -were a wonderful soldier! You've always been so brave, so masculine ...
He got up out of his chair and walked into the center of the room. "I've always admired you," he said, and sat down at my feet, he leaned his weight on one arm, and with his free hand lie touched my left shoe. "Even your shoes are masculine," he said. His fingers lightly tugged at the laces; then, abruptly, he was on his knees, his face pleading upward out of his awkward figure; for a moment I was perplexed -then I stood up, and pulled away from him, and he said,
"I've always loved you -must I be unhappy all the rest of my life?"
"Don't be absurd!" I said.
"Is it such a great thing that I ask?" he said. "Love -it's no great matter . . .
"Get up off your knees," I said. "It's undemocratic."
He looked at me reproachfully, and said, "Oh, that wasn't nice. I suffer. I spend a little of every day in a condition of pain."
Then he heard something. He rose; "Excuse me," he said. He tugged at his coat; he was presentable; he turned toward the front door, as I became aware that someone was moving along the front walk. The house belonged to me, and all its sounds.
I stayed where I was, and I could hear Peyton open the front door (he was around the corner, in the hall). Then I heard whispers, and judged that it was time for me to advance. I went to the door, and discovered a respectful-looking young man (in his late twenties, I judged), standing where visitors stood: he smiled at me. Over his shoulder I could see Peyton -he looked a little furtive, going away from me; he was being helped into a car parked in front of the house next door.
"I'd like to talk to you," the young man said. His face was lenient, he was confident --the effect was of a reliability that might resent being questioned.
I watched the car. Peyton was sitting in the front seat. The man who had assisted him went around the front of the car and got in behind the steering wheel. The car started forward -
"We take care of Mister Carter," the young man said. "May I come in? I'll show you my papers." He held out a large wallet.
"You're his keepers, is that it?" I said.
The young man set his jaw, and stared at me; his eyes were inquiring, faintly insulting. "That's it," he said. "I don't want to tprejuduce you against Mister Carter." He put the wallet away, and smiled again. "But I don't imagine you have anything to complain of, do you? We figured Mister Carter would be about done with his visit".
"I'll bet you have a pair of binoculars in that car," I said, and the young man permitted himself to look shy. "Do you also have a strait-jacket?"
"Of course not," the young man said. "Mister Carter is a gentleman." Then, quickly, "Did he do something while he was here?"
"Nothing you'll have to notice," I said.
"I'm glad to hear that!" the young man said. "And if that's the case, I'll be running along. I don't want to take up your time, Sir!"
"I expect not. I'll be quiet. I'm glad to learn that Peyton is being so well looked after!"
"You're very kind," the young man said. "Thank you very much, Sir."
He turned away, and walked down to the corner, where he looked both ways, and then he turned to the left, and went off out of sight.
I took a deep breath, and wondered if the story was over; and it was not quite over.
Three days later I had an inv
itation from Peyton to visit him at a sanitarium where, so he said, he was resting before he returned home. I was curious, and so I attended him, at the hour he suggested -three o'clock, in an afternoon for which the light was milky and diffuse. The sanitarium was on a inland away from the coast, in that brown region where the California oaks abide the powdery terms of their existence. Peyton was waiting for me beside some iron lawn chairs, under a glistening live oak. Above
us was a big white frame house with green shutters; a waiter in a starched white coat came down to take our orders for refreshment.
We asked for iced tea, and Peyton said, "I can't offer you a drlnk, that's against regulations, but the other things are very good. I'm quite comfortable here."
He ws dressed in a white suit, with a black tie, , and he was wearing a heavy straw hat which looked Mexican he made a handsome figure, and he said,
"I like to wear white suits when I'm working; they make me feel that I can be taken seriously. Mark Twain wore white suits, you know." He was silent for a time, and then be said, "Would you like to see my workroom? It's very pleasant. I think you'd be interested."
I followed him up to the house, where the door was opened for us by a butler; we went to a room on the ground floor, and there Peyton asked me to admire the north light and furnishings that were all property of his enterprise: an engineer's drawing table, a stool, a rack of pens and brushes on a metal stand, a typewriter on a sleek. little table, with a box of index cards, and two four-drawer filing cabinets. Under the window was a couch.
"I like to get my things out of sight when I'm done for the day," Peyton said. "The stuff I did this morning will be on its way to New York sometime next week."
I complimented Peyton on the room, and he said,
"It helps to have things right, but I can work under any cirrcumstances. I can work in the back of a car. Once I did one of my best sequences in a compartment on the Super Chief. It's a matter of getting into the right relationship with the past. Once I start remembering, all I have to do is keep on putting it down ...
"Right here, for instance, I've taken the strip through five and a half days, and I've planned a Sunday sequence. It's all over in the filing cabinet right now -money in the bank, you might say." He looked at his watch, and said, "We could go for a walk in the grounds, if you like. I imagine you might be interested to know something about why I live like this -I mean in an institution. I know what it is, alright. Upstairs they've even got some violent cases -
"I know what I do. In my closet I've got a wardrobe full of women's clothes, and I misbehave in other ways, I know-" He looked at me quite innocently, and said, "There's no use apologize, of course. It's not as if I understood why I do these things; and I'm not sure I want to understand them. Their emotional intensity is important to me . . . it helps my intuition-"
We went outside, and Peyton seemed to grow sad. "Let's not go too far away from the house," he said. "I might have to call a servant . . . if I decided to want something.
"I'm very melancholy, naturally. My life is in pieces. I'm like the characters in my strip, considerably older, of course -evidently I was unhappy a great deal when I was younger. I was very religious, you know -afraid of girls . . . Now I keep going back, trying to remember . . . that's how I happen to have such an original strip. It's honest. What should the young people want from life?"
I was invited to stay for supper (the butler brought me a hand-written note from the director), but Peyton seemed relieved when I refused; as I was leaving, he introduced me to his psychiatrist, and he said,
"Doctor Burling has my permission to talk about me. I admire the way he looks at things. Now you must excuse me -there's something I forgot to do." He then hurried away; Doctor Burling stepped down from the porch, and said,
"Perhaps I can answer some questions for you. We could go out on the lawn where we won't be disturbed."
He was a middle-aged, cheerful man who looked very well-paid, and he had excellent concentration. I asked if the sanitarium was expensive, and he said,
"It is, very. They all are. We like to think that this one returns value for the money, of course."
He then waited for me to ask more questions; I was reluctant; and he said,
"Mister Carter is a volunteer patient, you know. He hasn't been committed. He regards us as a hotel with some special services. When he's in the East, he stays at our place in Oneida County. I think it's an interesting program of life, don't you?"
I said it was; and Doctor Burling said, "He's an eccentric. I've been forced to use that term in thinking about him. Of course he's neurotic, too; but his employers, the news syndicate, have gone to great expense on his behalf, and the results are pretty conclusive -he's sane."
I wanted to ask, "Is he healthy?" but I was not up to it; the doctor was tolerant by profession, and would have tolerated that; he explained that Peyton left the sanitarium whenever he wished, to do his researches -he was accompanied by his two "assistants," who could serve, when needed, as chauffeur and valet.
"Surely it's a sensible procedure," the psychiatrist said, "for someone with a pattern of unsocial behavior."
It was time for me to leave: I felt that I had been properly disarmed; and as I started toward my car, the psychiatrist waved goodbye, and I looked up toward the great house, some sixty feet away now, in the evening light --
At one of the ground-floor windows I could see a waiter in a white coat, setting a table, and suddenly I wondered what might be glaring down at me from the upper windows.
Something stirred on the porch. A whiteness moved along near the railing; it was a lady, in a long white dress, and I recognized Peyton -the heroine of some lost popular song...
He was a beautiful woman, at that distance.
The Writer
Edward Loomis
1
Arthur Munson listened to what his wife had to say.
"Do something," she said. "It's your vacation -you've got time; stop talking, and go hit him or shoot him, or whatever it is you want to do to him."
She looked at him, briefly and vaguely, and then down at the newspaper.
"I believe you mean it," he said.
She did not answer.
"I'd really like to shoot him, as a matter of fact," he said. "Then go do it," she said. "You could take the Hudson; and I wouldn't have to listen to you."
The Hudson (one of their two old cars) would certainly go as far as New York; it might even return, and there were three months left on the Texaco credit card.
"Well," he said.
"Stop talking," she said.
"All right, then! God damn it . . . we'll see! . . . Stop talking, what an idea . . ."
2
The Hudson ran quietly at 75 miles an hour, with Munson slouched behind the wheel; and his thoughts were dark.
He was a disgruntled writer, angry at his publisher. While the firm of William Oblong, Inc., held the manuscripts of his last three novels, his reputation slept, paralyzed. Contracts existed for these works, but the firm refused to publish them, and would not release them because the author could not repay the 2800-dollar advance which he had accepted and spent quickly.
Munson had threatened a suit, and gotten a frightening letter from Oblong's attorneys; he had offered to pay on the instalment plan, and incurred only a formidable silence. His agent had left him as soon as trouble appeared.
Shortly afterward, he lost his place at the university, for failing to publish, and had then accepted a job at a junior college, vulgar and implausible: there he taught twenty-six hours a week of composition, guided the newspaper, and advised the annual. Exhausted every day, he had written little during the two years of his employment; angry, he could not manage the composure of spirit necessary to write well.
He was almost forty years old, and secretly he believed that his literary career was over, but he remained ambitious -he wanted to make a gesture; and so he found himself traveling far over the speed limit, with a Smith & Wesson .
38 caliber revolver on the seat beside him.
Several times he said to himself, "It's a good cause. If civilization is real, it's a good cause!"
He remembered phrases from the second of the incarcerated novels; a lawyer was addressing a court; he was eloquent on the harm that society can do to its children:
"They tell us what to do, the owners and the judges . . .They stare at us out of their sheltered lives, but they're foxes after all, and their eyes are burning in the lair. It's our hearts they feed upon . . ."
"Foxes," Munson whispered. He gripped the wheel, and accelerated up past 90; and the Hudson ran on without a shudder. "I know a fox who'll see the bunter coming . . . pretty soon ...
3
His chief antagonist was an editor named Bernard Wave. This was a plump and elegant middle-aged man with a membership in the Diner's Club and a taste for Upmann cigars. Author of seven novels, he had learned a style apt for revising the novels of others, and he had revised all three of Munson's (by correspondence), changing titles, chapter outlines, and even phrasing; but, when other editors had disapproved of the works, and wanted to suspend publication, he had agreed, silently and bleakly, and interested himself in other affairs.
He was the target; and so, on the very day of his arrival in New York, Munson called him at the office, and asked for a meeting.
"Art!" Wave said. "When did you get to town? Can you have lunch today? We could go to Colombo's --wonderful place!"
Munson agreed; he bought six one-pound sash-weights at a hardware store, distributed them in his pockets, and kept the appointment; and the lunch was interesting, for Wave had an idea for the three novels, and wanted to talk about it.
"You see, the fact is that nobody thinks they're bad," he said. "Well, not exactly, anyhow. We don't dispute your beautiful talent, Art. But we think -I think- that your name has been holding you back. Now it's a beautiful name, certainly; but we'd like to talk to you about using a pen name, just the same. You'll have to admit that we've changed just about everything else... why shouldn't we change the author's name, too?