Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  “I’m studying you,” I said. “You look like a happy woman and I’ve always contended there was no such thing.”

  Mrs. Shapiro said she was going to bring me last month’s Woman’s Own. They had an article in there how you must give and give, and happiness would come back to you. She said it had always worked for her.

  The studio was at Broadway and Fortieth Street, in the middle of the garment district, which is within a block of the Crossroads of the world. During my lunch hour that autumn I walked systematically northward, and south, first along Broadway, then Seventh Avenue, and then east and west, and I was beginning to love New York. I had given up describing everything in letters to London. England had never replied.

  One day, Margery asked me to come to a Jewish Youth dance with her on Saturday. “I wish you would come,” she said. “I want to go, but I don’t want to go my myself.”

  When I met her on the sidewalk outside one of the dowdy Broadway hotels in the Seventies, I could see that she was frightened, and she told me she always threw up before she went dancing.

  “So do I! I throw up in the morning before work!” I cried, drawn to her by the coincidence. “I’m scared all the time that I’m going to paint something wrong and ruin Polacek’s designs.”

  “Me,” said Margery, “I only throw up before I go dancing. Grab those two chairs, quick! So we don’t have to stand around if nobody asks us.”

  The hall was large and badly lit. On the far side stood a grim stag line backed against the wall, from which we saw a man suddenly part and drift like a falling star toward us across the dance floor. I looked at my feet. But it was Margery he was coming for, and as he led her away she turned and gave me a desperate shrug. She was a head taller than he—a splendid woman beside that ferret-faced runt hiding his sad back and narrow shoulders in a loose-hanging, jazzy jacket three sizes too big.

  A man with a purple chin under a day’s growth of beard took me by the wrist and swung me around as if I were a gate he was closing upon himself. With an absent look, he pursed his mouth as if he were about to whistle a little song, and hooked his chin like Alice’s Duchess over my shoulder. We danced. I thought there ought to be conversation, and I told him that this was my first dance in America—that I had been brought up in England and had taught English in the Dominican Republic. I asked him what he did.

  “Electrician,” he said. I was trying to think up something more to say when the music stopped and he walked away.

  Ferret-face brought Margery back and sat beside her, and they seemed to be talking animatedly. They danced the second dance together. The electrician reappeared and claimed me without a word, closing me upon himself. He was breathing hard, and his hardening body crowded me so that I pulled back, but I thought, That’s what I oughtn’t always to do, and I tried to soften myself in his arms. My partner noticed neither my withdrawal nor my attempt at surrender, but I seemed to have given satisfaction, for when the dance was over he said I was a peach and walked off clicking his tongue.

  At the studio on Monday, Margery told me that her dancing partner had taken her home and got grabby in the subway. She said there was another dance uptown on Saturday—a much nicer crowd, attached to a temple—but when, the next Saturday, we met on the sidewalk outside the hall, we saw Ferret-face in the doorway, and out of the ground sprang the electrician, who yanked me around by the wrist, saying, “Peach! Where did you get to last Saturday? Peachy-peach.”

  I refused to dance with him a second time, which put it out of my power, as I said, quoting Jane Austen to Margery, to dance with anybody else.

  “Why does it?” Margery asked. “Why can’t you dance if someone else asks you?” Margery said she was going to Grossinger’s next summer. “I’m going to be twenty-nine next week!” she said.

  “What’s Grossinger’s?” I asked.

  On Christmas day, I had a phone call from a man who said he was Donald. I did not recognize either the name or the voice, which was thick as if he had a cold. The only man I could think of was the electrician, and I felt scared.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “How could you call me if you didn’t know my name?” I asked.

  “I just dialed,” the man said. “It’s Christmas and I’m a little drunk. Not drunk exactly. High. You don’t have to tell my your name if you don’t want. But would you talk to me a minute?”

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “You have a charming accent. You are not American?”

  “I’m from Vienna,” I said with a frightened sense that I was giving something away. “But I was brought up in England,” I added.

  “I’m a refugee, too,” the man said. “From San Francisco. Would you allow me to call and talk with you once in a while? Say once every two weeks?”

  “I think better not,” I said. “But I wish you a happy Christmas. Good-by.”

  “Good-by,” he said. “Carry on.”

  I was still listening when the receiver at the other end was placed in its cradle.

  I had an image that year of a city made up of badly lighted single rooms like the one in which I imagined my drunk sitting by his telephone, like the bedroom in which my grandmother sat by her television during the long winter evenings; of innumerable ballrooms lined with men, their backs to the wall, and girls like Margery, who threw up before she went to meet them. These days, I threw up, not only before going to work in the mornings, but Saturday evenings when I was not going anywhere, and one day when I finally got a letter from England, and frequently for no reason at all.

  With little Mrs. Shapiro I had a running argument. I tried to persuade her that she was not basically happy. “You just have moments, even hours, when you seem to feel happy.” Mrs. Shapiro said she had thought about what I said, but she could not discover that she was basically miserable.

  In May, I had a most enjoyable quarrel with Mr. Polacek and quit the studio for a new job, where I got sixty dollars a week.

  In July, I met Claire. As the number five bus on which we were both riding uptown bent into Seventy-second Street toward the river, she turned to me and said she was an actress. She said she had just arrived from Rome, where they had wanted her to do the main part in Bitter Rice, but her cousin Vittorio de Sica had explained the advantage of her working in Hollywood and so she had come over. She had a suitcase beside her, and a mackintosh over her arm. She wore her hair like a little girl, open and shoulder length, and her face, without a trace of make-up, was nothing less than beautiful. “I’m originally English,” she said, and I was very pleased, for I had feared I detected under the British accent a guttural Middle-European “r” very like my own.

  I said, “I haven’t spoken to a real English person in three years! I spent half my life in England.”

  “Come up to my digs. They must be around the corner here somewhere.” As we walked to West End Avenue, Claire told me that a painter friend of hers had offered her his room. “We happened to get talking at the airport in Rome as he was taking off for Greece, and when he heard I was coming to New York he gave me his keys.”

  The room smelled of heat and rancid oil. It was bare, except for a refrigerator, a couch covered with scarlet terry cloth, on which Claire, despite a certain dumpiness, disposed herself with a heartbreaking grace, and a telephone, which she picked up. She asked to speak to Elia Kazan.

  “Look in the freezer,” she said to me, covering the mouthpiece. “He said there was some ice cream.”

  Elia Kazan was out, and Claire left her name and number. “You must meet him,” she said. “I’m going to give a party as soon as I have a bit of money.”

  “Where did you meet Elia Kazan?” I asked.

  “I haven’t yet,” Clair said. “I want him to get me a part in something so I can get enough money to go to Hollywood. Vittorio won’t be there till the autumn.”

  The telephone rang. From Claire’s end of the conversation, I understood the caller to be a friend of the room’s owner. “In Greece,” C
laire said. “He won’t be back till September. But why shouldn’t you come and sleep here anyway. And maybe you could pick up some food on the way? I’ve got a friend here, and we’re finishing the last of the ice cream.… I don’t think he has any money for a hotel room,” she said when she had hung up. “And anyway I believe in free love, don’t you?”

  “Oh, of course,” I said, entranced by this free and world-wide intercourse in keys and beds and food, in which, however, I could not see myself included. I stood up.

  “Where are you going? You might like him. Or maybe he knows other men around town,” Claire said, getting shamelessly to the heart of my misery. “You have to go? Give me a ring.”

  It was on Saturday evening, quite three days before I had figured I might properly call Claire and invite her to an English tea, that she called to invite me to a party being given by two Pakistani students on her floor. I might like them, she said.

  “It’s after nine,” my grandmother said. She never asked me any more where I was going. “I wonder when your mother will be back?”

  “Quarter past eleven, Omama. The same as always.”

  “You have your money? Keys?”

  “Omama, I’m twenty-six years old. I’ve been getting out of the house and back, all by myself, since I was ten.”

  “Wait till I am dead,” she said. “I won’t bother you much longer,” and she returned to her room and closed the door. After that she never came to the door to see me off and check that I had my necessities, and I remember that I missed it.

  A very dark, very young man with eyes unnaturally long and large, and long languid limbs, wearing a pink plastic apron, opened the door and said that Claire was helping with the curry. He led me through a room full of chatting young people into the kitchen, which had a jungle temperature.

  Claire was standing on the drainboard, peering into the top shelf of the cupboard; her lovely head seemed to be floating just below the ceiling behind a cloud of steam that was rising from the sink. She said, “This is my friend Lore. She’s English, too. And this is Abdullah Shah.” She pointed to a second man, less dark, less beautifully tall, and less young, who was stirring a pot. “These poor lads have no dishes. Tomorrow, Muhammad,” she said to the young man who had let me in, “you and I go to Woolworth’s,” and so I knew that the beautiful young man was hers and that I had been invited to meet the other, who raised his eyes to look at me and said, “How are you?” in an accent straight from Oxford.

  Later, when I was sitting on the floor with an Israeli student and his Hungarian girl, eating the furiously spiced curry and drawing air into my burning throat, Abdullah came with his plate and sat in a chair just behind me. He ate intently in silence, but I had a sense that he was listening, so I launched upon an eloquent indictment of the American textile industry. “It is totally commercial,” I said. “This is the year of the ‘conversation’ print, with Roman theme. If the gladiators with the aqueduct in the background—aqua, pink, and black—sold last week, so this week everybody paints chariots with the Colosseum in the background, in pink, black, and aqua.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Abdullah yawn, rise, and carry his plate into the kitchen.

  But he returned presently, stood behind me, and said, “Let’s go.”

  At the door, we were intercepted by a fat young Indian, who said, “Where are you going? We were supposed to talk business.”

  “Come with us then,” Abdullah said without enthusiasm. “It’s too hot in here.”

  “I wanted to tell you about those washing machines,” the fat Indian said as we walked up Riverside Drive between the black trees and the night-populated benches. Couples were kissing in patches of darkness; an old man slept stretched out neatly; a student was reading a book under a street lamp. A middle-aged couple walking two little dogs passed by, the woman saying “Grauslich heiss” (“miserably hot”) with an Austrian intonation strangely familiar to me as I walked between my two Orientals. The fat young Indian was saying, “There’s a chap I know who has a friend who has one of these washing-machine places that nets him two hundred forty a week.”

  “That sounds good,” said Abdullah.

  “This chap must have money immediately. So he’s letting it go cheap, for five thousand dollars—two thousand down.”

  We walked in silence.

  “So what we need is three thousand dollars.”

  “Pink sky,” Abdullah said, looking up.

  “Pink-purple. That’s one of the first things I noticed,” I said excitedly.

  Abdullah breathed deeply and said, “We must have put too much curry in that chicken.”

  The fat young man became genial. “Well, I’ll be getting back to your party. I think we have something here. Think about it and call me.”

  “Right, I will. Good night.”

  “Spry for frying, Spry for baking,” I said. “All those ghastly advertisements.”

  “That’s what makes the charming purple sky,” Abdullah said. He yawned and begged my pardon. “I can’t remember when I slept the last time. Ever since I came to New York, I’ve been living this frustrating life—I work at the Voice of America all day without making any money; I give parties all night without making any friends. Every year I get another degree I don’t want. I’ve got a B.A. in English from Oxford, and then I came over here and got an M.A. in Geology from Michigan, and here I am at Columbia taking a Ph.D. in Political Science—”

  “All right, I’ll ask! Why are you?”

  “Because I’m in the U.S. on a student visa, and if I stop studying for half an hour they’ll send me home.”

  “And would that be so very bad?”

  “Terrible. I’ve been away for eleven years. I’m a westernized Oriental. If I talked to my people at home the way I’m talking to you, they wouldn’t know what I meant. Then there’s my family. Pakistani women are impossible.”

  “And American women?”

  “They are very charming,” Abdullah said, with the inward smile of a man looking back to many a tender history.

  Abdullah telephoned the following evening to ask if he could come up after his last lecture.

  “What, now he is coming up? At ten o’clock?” my grandmother asked. (She never got to approve of Abdullah and his strange hours.)

  He came bringing a book he had to read for a term paper, already two weeks overdue, and asked me if I would make a précis of it for him. He knew what he was doing: the more work I invested in him, the more attached I became.

  Claire had become a part of the Pakistani students’ household, filling their shelves with crockery and their icebox with food that she cooked, and ate with them. Then “Elia” took her to dinner at Sardi’s, where she met “Harold,” who lived in Stratford and was immensely rich. ‘He adores me, and his son-in-law is a V.I.P. in the Shakespeare company,” she told us.

  “And you think this Harold can do something for you?”

  “At eighty-three? Precious little, poor sweetheart, as you can imagine, but I adore him and he’s going to get me into the company next season. And I can live with him over the winter.”

  Claire packed her suitcase and took her mackintosh and borrowed traveling money from Abdullah—Muhammad was studying film making at the time and had no job—and we all took her to the Port Authority Terminal.

  “What does your cousin think of the new plan?” I asked.

  “What cousin? I don’t have any relatives.”

  “I thought you said Vittorio de Sica …” I said, and blushed scarlet as a sudden sophistication tied into one neat answer the many loose ends of Claire’s adventures.

  “Vittorio de Sica!” Claire said. “He’s in Hollywood.” And she stared in surprise at the name I had pulled out of last week’s dream when she was already in the full flow of today’s. She kissed Muhammad and Abdullah and me, and, waving and weeping warm tears, she rolled out of my life as she had come into it, by bus.

  About this time, I came to the conclusion that not only was American design terrib
le, but I was a terrible designer. My austere and fastidious eye watched my very own hand drip lines and figures of helpless vulgarity that were not even commercially successful because my interior quarrel kept me from developing an honest professional touch. I gave up “originating” and began to perfect myself in the skill of “repeating,” the technical part of textile design. It means the reworking of the designer’s painting in such a way that its top will meet its bottom without a break when engraved on the rollers that print it onto the lengths of fabric. Though I never became good enough not to be frightened of every new design, I began to freelance so that I could make room for a few hours of writing.

  In the fall, I enrolled in a course in creative writing at the New School. The people sitting around the long table were none of them particularly bright-looking, but in the course of the first class they spoke with individual voices, and, as the term proceeded, turned into persons. There was a couple called Herb and Louise, both very tall and both blond, who sat side by side, looking not so much at one another as out together, and they looked very kindly at me. After a story of mine had been read, they asked me to have dinner with them before class the following Thursday. We ate at a Mexican restaurant in the Village, and I talked a great deal. I said, “Do you know you are the first honest-to-goodness Americans I’ve ever sat down to dinner with?”

  Louise said she had come all the way to New York from a small town in Indiana to avoid having to eat dinner every day with honest-to-goodness Americans.

  Herb, who came from the same town, said, “If Lore wants to meet Americans, you should take her home to visit your family next year.”

  “Oh, I wish you would. I’m serious. All I’ve ever met in New York are Pakistanis, Indians, and Hungarians, and Israeli, German, and Austrian Jews.”

  “Pakistanis, Indians, and Jews!” Herb and Louise said with increased respect. “You must give a party and introduce us.”

  In class, before the instructor arrived, I paraded this interesting inability I had discovered—the inability to penetrate America—for the benefit of the oldest of the students, a middle-aged Negro called Carter Bayoux, who dominated the class with his powerful presence and silence. He invited me to dinner for the following week, after class. “We will go to a jazz place and give you an introductory course in Americana. I’m a great teacher,” Carter said.