The next Saturday morning, a florist’s boy brought me a bouquet from Gondych; he himself came at four sharp, appearing at the door in his usual, charming, gay way and rushing in, like a whirlwind, to give me a kiss and dispose his things, in an interesting, lively way about the place. I saw that he had a lot of charm. He made an appointment with me for later in the week. Thus, I had the chance to see whether Jacky was seriously in trouble.
I acted out of curiosity, without morality. With regard to sex, I have never been able to see where moral behavior began; it seems to me that everyone is for himself; yet, in this case, I know that I betrayed poor Jacky. I said to myself that no good could come out of her schoolgirl love for the great professor. He was happy with me, but even with me I observed his habit of looking around, in all public places, to find the most beautiful and youngest girls, and I felt rather humiliated. Of course, I was not old, but through Gondych I had first had the sensation of aging. There were others younger than me; he picked them out and showed them to me. He was fifty-nine. I wondered sometimes if he was Old Scratch. He was sharper than a needle. His anecdotes were not only the ones Jacky had repeated to me, but newer, more secret ones, that he had dug out himself, and that he brought to me, like a victor with the spoils.
When he did not telephone me, after receiving my kisses, I was disgruntled; I began to long for him myself. Yet he was a very strange person, attracting undesirable attention in public places; and he was so clearly not of my generation. People would think he was my father or uncle, even grandfather. Then he made love boldly— he was ashamed of nothing; and he would say, He was ashamed of everything, he was gentle, meek and timid. The affair was irritant, intriguing; and he was gallant and generous. He treated me always with unusual respect, and seemed, at times, somberly distracted. I was curious about what the love of a man like that could be.
One evening, after we had been to a movie together, and he was bringing me home, I began asking him in the taxi to come upstairs and have tea or a glass of beer. He said nothing to this, but held my hand and pressed close. When we turned into Twenty-first Street, it seemed to me that he hesitated. At my gate (an iron fence with gates ran before three or four houses in a row), he shook my hand and said good night, but I held him by the arm, “Come upstairs with me, Simon; I want you to stay with me a while.”
“It’s too late, Letty.”
“I want you to—please—”
With my hand on his sleeve, I brought him through the gate. At the door, where I was obliged to insert my key, he turned back again, “No, my dear, you are very kind, but it is too late and you are a young girl; this makes it wrong—you understand—”
“Simon, I’m not a child, we’re not children, I know what I’m doing.”
“No, no, my dear—”
But he came into the hall and began to ascend the dark, long staircase. At the top of the first flight, he stopped again, after following me quite softly in the dark, “No, I must not.”
“Simon, are you mad? What are we? What are you doing? What a noise you’re making, too.”
He whispered, “We shouldn’t, we shouldn’t—”
“We should, we will, are we children? It’s the age of reason—”
He giggled softly under his breath; but on the top floor, where I lived, he made a last stand, as I fumbled for the old-fashioned iron key which would let us in.
“But, Letty, you know what it will mean—”
“Why shouldn’t it mean it? Oh, gracious, what a man, what a man—”
I looked at him with rage and bit my lip as I fitted the key in the door, “The way men are—and the reputation they have—if anyone knew—”
He came in, drooping, not daring to say any more. He took off his hat and coat which he put on a chair, and sat down pretending to read a magazine till I had made him some tea, then, taking it, he said, “Letty, dear, I’ve got to get out of here. I’ll just drink this and leave.”
“Do what you like,” I said amiably, handing him the cup.
His eyes were fixed on my breasts in my low-cut ruffled dress. When I had gone behind him, he said, “You tempt me, you should not.”
At these charming words I came back behind him and kissed him, where I had already yearned to kiss him, on the neck, behind the ear, around the soft fringe of hair. I said in a low voice some words which I did not intend him to hear, a mere murmur, and he turned quickly, seizing my hands and kissing them. I then left him, saying, “You will sleep here with me—I’ve another couch.”
And presently he came after me, after he had made up his mind to it; and caught me in the passageway, “Very well, get undressed, my darling; I shouldn’t do this, but I will.”
He pressed me to the wall and kissed me all over the neck, arms, face, and breast. I went out tranquilly, smiling to myself. He came after me and showed himself quite simply, naked; and I saw he had not, as I had thought, any fear of me at all. I said to him all the foolish, untrue things I had said to others, and he thanked me for them all. I never had a more agreeable lover; he was grateful, obliging, and well-mannered. He wished to go home but I kept him; and in the morning, as he had a great rage for sweet things, I made him a large breakfast. Afterwards, he kissed my face and hands again, with gratitude and respect, and said to me, “I’ll never come back, my dear girl, because I should not have stayed in the first place; you are a sweet young girl and I am a wicked old man; I am glad you like me though, and I shall never forget you. But because of your family I must not come back. That is all. I regret it.”
With this he went, and I felt pleased at what I had done. I believed he would come back. I was wrong. I did not see him again that summer, or, in fact, till the birthday party which Grandmother Morgan, for reasons of her own, gave me in February. Meanwhile I heard both from Jacky, who was quite ignorant of my intrigue, and from Lily Spontini, who had now taken to visiting me regularly, that the mysterious Jacky-Gondych friendship had broken, but now continued. They laughed overmuch at Jacky and her professor. Indignation and jealousy kept me silent. I had also to suffer from Jacky’s naïve confessions, when she came to visit me. She now thought of me as her confidante. Some might think I behaved dishonestly toward her; if so, I paid for it, hearing her ravings, that summer, about Gondych. I could say nothing but, “All this is lost; men of that age cannot even make love, you know.”
She would look at me sadly, “I suffer, but I love him.”
“And if it comes to nothing—?”
“All my life I only lived for one thing—a great love; and this is it. I can’t be mistaken, because I’ve thought of nothing else. I never could tell you my ambition. That was it.”
“You ought to be a bit more practical.”
“Well, he is not married and what do we know about it? We are too young. We only know old wives’ tales about the other generations.”
“Good—but it’s a risk I wouldn’t take.”
“No—but I would die for him, you see.”
I can’t say why these words cut me so deep; I wanted, for a mad moment, to give my life, too, for some man; but I knew I never would.
40
I gave up my job on the racial equality magazine. I had had an affair, not worth mentioning, with the young Zionist, and now that he had transferred to another girl in the office, I found everything intolerable and resolved not to stay in a place where I was daily disgraced. I therefore seized the first honorable pretext to leave my employ.
I spent several months lounging at home and wondering if I were not sinking from bad to worse; but I made an attempt to write a play, a novel, and some pieces for the New Yorker and the Yale Review, and so on. In trying to sell these, I met a number of midtown people who could help me, including one or two young men, who made good companions for a while.
The European war had opened officially with the entrance of Britain and France over the Polish question. This, of course, is still the official muddler of mid-European affairs. At that time, we were all mad for neutrality,
and I even went to Washington to picket the White House and Congress and felt again for a time that my role should have been political, for it was really here that I felt at my best. Not only was I able, with a good memory, apt in quotation, sharp in repartee, unkind to enemies, but a natural strong-arm machine politician, believing in the steam roller, the goon, the lead pipe, unfair practice. Such is life! There I’m in my element and only need, in fact, a salon, which is the intellectual side of the business, to realize myself. That is what I felt. I flung myself into this political action with all my nature and neglected the small-fry, the blond wolves, and cheesecake merchants of the Forties and Fifties (I refer to streets in New York), with whom I had been passing the last few months. It was the fire in the nostrils of a fire-horse, blood in the nostrils of a charger, I suppose. Not that I cared for war and blood, what we were fighting for was peace of course. But how happy I was to abandon paper-and-ham-shifting at the call of some office boss, and the love affairs that trail around such offices, like lost paper streamers, trodden and torn, from a departing steamer. What a grand trip the passengers are taking and how bad the quays look the morning after. Yes; to me, my life was, and was intended to be, a grand tour. Meantime, as for the mad whirl, I went to several parties and enjoyed myself with two literary gents, an author, and an editor in a publishing firm, which made me think I was getting on in the literary world. I went into the office of a small publishing firm which employed non-union office labor although the manager was a radical. The fact was that he was quite poor and as a businessman had a good reputation. I had the notion that I would organize the girls and received some reproofs during the first two weeks for my rabid talk; I began to lose myself in the usual lively office scenes, quarrels over precedence, over extra work, over gossip, smut and religion, which was engaging the attention of the girls more and more, as politics went into decadence. This was during the war, when, as usual, everyone became quite distracted with conflicting loyalties; to intoxicate themselves meanwhile, every bright girl took to sexual corruption, fortune-telling, and drink, while the stupid, home-staying girls began to confuse and intoxicate themselves with religion and race-mania, which are always coupled, at least in these circles. I was accused of being an agitator, but this did not trouble me. I converted no one, but I soon became the battleground of the office. I let no one get away with an undisputed prejudice. I was no prude. On account of the sophisticated life I led outside the office, I was a perfect treasury of the stories of the town, both obscoena and fantasy, and the charge that I wasted many hours entertaining my colleagues was not ill-founded. However, I was popular, and this consoled me for many miseries which I had gone through before I came to the office. I was guilty of telling all the gossip I knew about the love affairs going on, not only in this office, but also all through the publishing world, the publishing world, of course, because of the material they handle, being one of the favorite secret gardens of sexual folly in the town. My informant was usually this editor, Erskine, who worked in one of the big firms and who generally invited me to meet authors and magazine editors in various showy bars uptown, on Madison and on Park avenues. Erskine and I were soon intimates and I made rather a parade of our acquaintance. I knew his reputation, but fell into one of the oldest illusions, perhaps it is the Grand Illusion in the love affair; that is, that if you have an affair with a Don Juan, it is a triumph, even though all his other women seem to you fools. Erskine’s marriage was in a state of dissolution—that sounds dissolute, and that is what it meant for him; but I mean, dissolving. I didn’t want to be a contributing factor in that dissolution, however, and was primmer at first than I wanted to be. I waited to hear that the angry wife had her co-respondent. I did not want to start off in life as the other woman; I still aimed at some fate flourishing and not dishonorable and thought I deserved it.
Well, there was a really complicated story that delighted me no end there, or so I pretended; and in the process of pretense, I had a lovely time with Erskine and some stray associates of his, I partied forever during this time, twelve nights in a row, was always answering the phone when in and missing calls when out, and I met dozens of nice people. That is one of the chief virtues of an eligible escort and especially of a married one. I had a lot of fun with very involved people—and they are the best. One of these days, said I to Erskine, we’ll quit kidding, honey, and get down to serious talks, such as, “Where do you and I stand?” But until then, let life, wine, and toi-et-moi flow merrily. The trouble with a lot of men I knew at this time was that they were married, all but Bill van Week, a likely prospect, really a man made for me. He was not married, but he had already been married too often, and I didn’t want to have my name on a bill of divorcement as long as the call of members at a new Congress. The fact is, with a young girl, with at least some attractions and experience, that if she meets men, they are married; and if they’re prepared to do something about it, she’s not such a fool but that she asks herself, “Isn’t this, maybe, perhaps, a life-long policy?” I didn’t want to start with a commuter, at twenty. Add to this the reappearance of a few persons I had known, such as Amos— but I stymied those attempts. I know how to cut a loss, especially when I have other investments in view; and then, I live for the day (that is, when I have a date for that day). The fact is, I’m a fool of a girl, and if I get married, as I hope, I’ll have to give up all this; for I would be ashamed for my daughters to know such a fool as I have been. So I thought.
I became, for several merry weeks, almost sick of men. I had seen too many of them; and only arrived home from job hunting (for Solander kept me at this), to answer the phone and become the escort, so to speak, of some weak willy or other, who fancied I was all aglow at his call. Except for the two, the author and the married editor, I was almost sick of hearing the phone ring, for there were a great many misprints in my little red address book. How transient are women’s moods! Ah, me! This was my mood at that time. Once more, I was hopping on and off a merry-go-round at their will! What a mad ex-virgin I was! Naturally, I forgot Simon Gondych (who was perhaps having moral struggles over me). But, ah, youth, if you knew your brightness—and, of course, we do and profit by it; and we expect our victims to take it into account, for we’re certainly so tough with each other that we have no time for salving the feelings of the old.
I attended the family get-together at Christmas, New Year, and on my birthday in the early season; and on the last occasion, at which Jacky and Gondych were present, I was surprised to have my father and mother ask me separately what I thought of the Gondych-Jacky affair. I said, “What? It’s still going on?”
My heart sank. It’s true, of course, that those who love or favor me, love or favor others, but I’ve never been able to face it. It’s the bitter, hard core of bad luck to me. I tried to argue Jacky away from it; for example, in February, I said, “But, Jacky, what can he offer you?”
“What can he offer me?”
“Good. All right. We’re in the ideal plane. I see that. Jacky, do you want to live with him?”
I thought I had her there, for to me she was just a school child. But she said, “After a week, when I was out with him almost every night, I suddenly thought of physical love. I prayed, I really prayed, that I should never want him. How terrible—an old man, everything in him is repugnant. A week later, I was afraid because already the idea had come to me. For I wanted and didn’t want. I know by the symptoms, it’s hopeless, dangerous—”
She began to laugh, lifting her charming, radiant face out of her long hands, “To think I was born for this! It doesn’t sound possible, either, does it?”
“To me it seems to be just an obsession.”
“When I’m by myself, in my room, I laugh, I feel such madness, of joy; when I’m lying down on my bed I kick my legs out. I fly, I float, this is love. He’s the God of Love. Naturally, he’s very old, the God of Love.”
I laughed, “It’s not a question of getting over revulsion; love is not a dream, it’s physical;
even Faust had to have Mephisto to make him into a young man.”
Jacky said, “I have no sympathy for the story that Marguerite fell for a young good-looking man; what’s the interest of it? No, Marguerite fell in love really with a very old, wonderful man, magical, a genius, the first man in the world, and it was because of that it was a wonderful tragedy and her life was ruined; but she knew what she was doing.”
“Well, how are you going to ruin your life with Gondych?” I said, laughing.
She tossed herself about in her chair, making big eyes and her skin taking on a bluish shade, “I suffer. He tells me, This one loved me, this other one sacrificed for me, this third one threw me flowers, a fourth one gave me her diamonds for safekeeping, a fifth one used her fortune to game for me, although I did not want it; and a sixth one came from the mountains to the plain, a long, long way, leaving her husband in suspense, only to shake my hand. He tells me all this, with his big eyes popping out of his head, and his hair shining, like thousands of little glassy snakes of fire, if he’s sitting in the light, I mean his cheeks are red like a boy’s and his mouth is smiling, and if I say anything to him, he becomes silent, and a modest expression, a flush comes into his face, for he only babbles like a boy, because in his private moments he is frank and boyish and pure in heart—”
Letty Fox Page 58