The phone did ring, though, and it was Gloria, and the dialogue went like so:
“Hello?”
“Leo.”
“Yes, Gloria!”
“I’m coming up.”
“I’m waiting.”
And that was it. I met her at the door. I had never touched her before, except for that one brief contact of hands; and yet, with perfect confidence, with no idea of doing anything different, I took her in my arms and kissed her. This whole thing has its terrible aspects, and yet, sometimes I wonder if moments like that don’t justify the horror of it.
I took her hand and led her into the living room. The room wavered like an underwater scene because she was in it. The air tasted different. We sat close together with our hands locked, saying that wordless thing with our eyes. I kissed her again. I didn’t ask her anything at all.
She had the smoothest skin that ever was. She had a skin smoother than a bird’s throat. It was like satin-finished aluminum, but warm and yielding. It was smooth like Grand Marnier between your tongue and the roof of your mouth.
We played records—Django Reinhardt and The New Friends of Rhythm, and Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue and Tubby the Tuba. I showed her the Smith illustrations from Fantazius Mallare and my folio of Ed Weston prints. I saw things and heard things in them all that I had never known before, though they were things I loved.
Not one of them—not a book, nor a record, nor a picture, was new to her. By some alchemy, she had culled the random flood of esthetic expression that had come her way, and had her choices; and her choices were these things that I loved, but loved in a way exclusively hers, a way in which I could share.
❖
We talked about books and places, ideas and people. In her way, she was something of a mystic. “I believe that there is something behind the old superstitions about calling up demons, and materializations of departed spirits,” she said thoughtfully. “But I don’t think it was ever done with mumbo-jumbo—witches’ brew and pentagrams and toads’ skins stuffed with human hair buried at the crossroads on a May midnight, unless these rituals were part of a much larger thing—a purely psychic and un-ghostly force coming from the ‘wizard’ himself.”
“I never thought much about it,” I said, stroking her hair. It is the only hair that was not fine that I have ever touched with pleasure. Like everything else about her, it was strong and controlled and glowing. “Have you ever tried anything like that? You’re some sort of a sorceress. I know when I’m enchanted, at any rate.”
“You’re not enchanted,” she said gravely. “You’re not a thing with magic on it. You’re a real magic all by yourself.”
“You’re a darling,” I said. “Mine.”
“I’m not!” she answered, in that odd way she had of turning aside fantasy for fact. “I don’t belong to you. I belong to me!”
I must have looked rather stricken, for she laughed suddenly and kissed my hand. “What belongs to you is only a large part of ‘us,’” she explained carefully. “Otherwise you belong to you and I belong to me. Do you see?”
“I think I do,” I said slowly. “I said I wanted us to be together because we were both traveling together under our own power. I—didn’t know it was going to be so true, that’s all.”
“Don’t try to make it any different, Leo. Don’t ever. If I started to really belong to you, I wouldn’t be me any more, and then you wouldn’t have anything at all.”
“You seem so sure of these hazy things.”
“They aren’t hazy things! They’re important. If it weren’t for these things, I’d have to stop seeing you. I—would stop seeing you.”
I put my arms tight around her. “Don’t talk about that,” I whispered, more frightened than I have ever been in my life before. “Talk about something else. Finish what you were saying about pentagrams and spirits.”
She was still a moment. I think her heart was pounding the way mine was, and I think she was frightened too.
“I spend a lot of time reading and mulling over those things,” she said after a quiet time. “I don’t know why. I find them fascinating. You know what, Leo? I think too much has been written about manifestations of evil. I think it’s true that good is more powerful than evil. And I think that far too much has been written and said about ghosties an’ ghoulies an’ things that go ‘boomp’ i’ th’ nicht, as the old Scottish prayer has it. I think those things have been too underlined. They’re remarkable enough, but have you ever realized that things that are remarkable are, by definition, rare?”
“If the cloven-hoofed horrors and the wailing banshees are remarkable—which they are—then what’s commonplace?”
She spread her hands—square, quite large hands, capable and beautifully kept. “The manifestations of good, of course. I believe that they’re much easier to call up. I believe they happen all the time. An evil mind has to be very evil before it can project itself into a new thing with a life of its own. From all accounts I have read, it takes a tremendously powerful mind to call up even a little demon. Good things must be much easier to materialize, because they fall in the pattern of good living. More people live good lives than such thoroughly bad ones that they can materialize evil things.”
“Well then, why don’t more people bring more good things from behind this mystic curtain?”
“But they do!” she cried. “They must! The world is so full of good things! Why do you suppose they’re so good? What put the innate goodness into Bach and the Victoria Falls and the color of your hair and Negro laughter and the way ginger ale tickles your nostrils?”
I shook my head slowly. “I think that’s lovely, and I don’t like it.”
“Why not?”
I looked at her. She was wearing a wine-colored suit and a marigold silken kerchief tucked into the throat. It reflected on the warm olive of her chin. It reminded me of my grandmother’s saying, when I was very small, “Let’s see if you like butter,” as she held a buttercup under my chin to see how much yellow it reflected. “You are good,” I said slowly, searching hard for the words. “You are about the—the goodest thing that ever happened. If what you say is really true, then you might be just a shadow, a dream, a glorious thought that someone had.”
“Oh, you idiot,” she said, with sudden tears in her eyes. “You big, beautiful hunk of idiot!” She pressed me close and bit my cheek so hard that I yelped. “Is that real?”
“If it isn’t,” I said, shaken, “I’ll be happy to go on dreaming.”
❖
She stayed another hour—as if there were such a thing as time when we were together—and then she left. I had her phone number by then. A hotel. And after she was gone, I wandered around my apartment, looking at the small wrinkles in the couch-cover where she had sat, touching the cup she had held, staring at the bland black surface of a record, marvelling at the way its grooves had unwound the Passacaglia for her. Most wonderful of all was a special way I discovered to turn my head as I moved. Her fragrance clung to my cheek, and if I turned my face just so, I could sense it. I thought about every one of those many minutes with her, each by itself, and the things we had done. I thought, too, about the things we had not done—I know you wondered—and I gloried in them. For, without a word spoken, we had agreed that a thing worth having was a thing worth awaiting and that where faith is complete, exploration is uncalled for.
She came back next day, and the day after. The first of these two visits was wonderful. We sang, mostly. I seemed to know all her very favorite songs. And by a happy accident, my pet key on the guitar—B flat—was exactly within her lovely contralto range. Though I say it as shouldn’t, I played some marvellous guitar behind and around what she sang. We laughed a lot, largely at things that were secret between us—is there a love anywhere without its own new language?—and we talked for a long time about a book called The Fountainhead which seemed to have had the same extraordinary effect on her that it had on me; but then, it’s an extraordinary book.
&n
bsp; It was after she left that day that the strangeness began—the strangeness that turned into such utter horror. She hadn’t been gone more than an hour when I heard the frightened scramble of tiny claws in the front room. I was poring over the string-bass part of a trio arrangement I was doing (and not seeing it for my Gloria-flavored thoughts) and I raised my head and listened. It was the most panic-struck scurrying imaginable, as if a regiment of newts and salamanders had broken ranks in a wild retreat. I remember clearly that the little-claw susurrus did not disturb me at all, but the terror behind the movement startled me in ways that were not pleasant.
What were they running from? was infinitely more important than What were they?
Slowly I put down the manuscript and stood up. I went to the wall and along it to the archway, not so much to keep out of sight as to surprise the thing that had so terrorized the possessors of those small frightened feet.
And that was the first time I have ever been able to smile while the hackles on the back of my neck were one great crawling prickle. For there was nothing there at all; nothing to glow in the dark before I switched on the overhead light, nothing to show afterward. But the little feet scurried away faster—there must have been hundreds of them—tapping and scrabbling out a perfect crescendo of horrified escape. That was what made my hackles rise. What made me smile—
The sounds radiated from my feet!
I stood there in the archway, my eyeballs throbbing with the effort to see this invisible rout; and from the threshold, to right and left and away into the far corners of the front room, ran the sounds of the little paws and tiny scratching claws. It was as if they were being generated under my soles, and then fleeing madly. None ran behind me. There seemed to be something keeping them from the living room. I took a cautious step further into the front room, and now they did run behind me, but only as far as the archway. I could hear them reach it and scuttle off to the side walls. You see what made me smile?
I was the horror that frightened them so!
The sound gradually lessened. It was not that it lessened in overall intensity. It was just that there were fewer and fewer creatures running away. It diminished rapidly, and in about ninety seconds it had reduced to an occasional single scampering. One invisible creature ran around and around me, as if all the unseen holes in the walls had been stopped up and it was frantically looking for one. It found one, too, and was gone.
I laughed then and went back to my work. I remember that I thought quite clearly after that, for a while. I remember writing in a glissando passage that was a stroke of genius—something to drive the dog-house slapper crazy but guaranteed to drive the customers even crazier if it could be done at all. I remember zoom-zooming it off under my breath, and feeling mightily pleased with myself over it.
And then the reaction struck me.
Those little claws—
What was happening to me?
I thought instantly of Gloria. There’s some deadly law of compensation working here, I thought. For every yellow light, a purple shadow. For every peal of laughter, a cry of anguish somewhere. For the bliss of Gloria, a touch of horror to even things up.
I licked my lips, for they were wet and my tongue was dry.
What was happening to me?
I thought again of Gloria, and the colors and sounds of Gloria, and most of all, the reality, the solid normalcy of Gloria, for all her exquisite sense of fantasy.
I couldn’t go crazy. I couldn’t! Not now! I’d be—unfit.
Unfit! As terrifying to me, then, as the old cry of “Unclean” was in the Middle Ages.
“Gloria, darling,” I’d have to say. “Honey, we’ll just have to call it quits. You see, I’m off my trolley. Oh, I’m quite serious. Yes indeedy. The men in the white coats will come around and back up their little wagon to the door and take me away to the laughing academy. And we won’t see each other any more. A pity. A great pity. Just give me a hearty little old handshake, now, and go find yourself another fellow.”
“Gloria!” I yelled. Gloria was all those colors, and the lovely sounds, and the fragrance that clung to my cheek and came to me when I moved and held my head just so.
“Oh, I dunno,” I moaned. “I just don’t know what to do! What is it? What is it?”
“Syzygy.”
“Huh?” I came bolt upright, staring around wildly. Twenty inches over the couch hovered the seamed face of my jovial phantom of the street outside Murphy’s. “You! Now I know I’m off my—hey! What is syzygy?”
“What’s happening to you.”
“Well, what is happening to me?”
“Syzygy.” The head grinned engagingly. I put my head in my hands. There is an emotional pitch—an unemotional pitch, really—at which nothing is surprising, and I’d reached it. “Please explain,” I said dully. “Tell me who you are, and what you mean by this sizz-sizz whatever-it-is.”
“I’m not anybody,” said the head, “and syzygy is a concomitant of parthenogenetic and certain other low types. I think what’s happening is syzygy. If it isn’t—” The head disappeared, a hand with spatulate fingers appeared and snapped its fingers explosively; the hand disappeared, the head reappeared and smiled, “—you’re a gone goose.”
“Don’t do that,” I said miserably.
“Don’t do what?”
“That—that piecemeal business. Why do you do it?”
“Oh—that. Conservation of energy. It works here too, you know.”
“Where is ‘here’?”
“That’s a little difficult to explain until you get the knack of it. It’s the place where reverse ratios exist. I mean, if something stacks up in a three to five ratio there, it’s a five to three ratio here. Forces must balance.”
I almost had it. What he said almost made sense. I opened my mouth to question him but he was gone.
After that I just sat there. Perhaps I wept.
❖
And Gloria came the next day, too. That was bad. I did two wrong things. First, I kept information from her, which was inexcusable. If you are going to share at all, you must share the bad things too. The other thing I did was to question her like a jealous adolescent.
But what else could be expected? Everything was changed. Everything was different. I opened the door to her and she brushed past me with a smile, and not a very warm one at that, leaving me at the door all outstretched arms and large clumsy feet.
She shrugged out of her coat and curled up on the couch.
“Leo, play some music.”
I felt like hell and I know I looked it. Did she notice? Did she even care? Didn’t it make any difference at all how I felt, what I was going through?
I went and stood in front of her. “Gloria,” I said sternly, “Where have you been?”
She looked up at me and released a small, retrospective sigh that turned me bright green and sent horns sprouting out of my scalp. It was such a happy, satisfied little sound. I stood there glowering at her. She waited a moment more and then got up, switched on the amplifier and turntable, dug out the “Dance of the Hours,” turned the volume up, added too much bass, and switched in the volume expander, which is quite the wrong thing to use on that record. I strode across the room and turned the volume down.
“Please, Leo,” she said in a hurt tone. “I like it that way.”
Viciously I turned it back up and sat down with my elbows on my knees and my lower lip stuck out. I was wild. This was all wrong.
I know what I should do, I thought sullenly. I ought to yank the plug on the rig and stand up and tell her off.
How right I was! But I didn’t do it. How could I do it? This was Gloria! Even when I looked up at her and saw her staring at me, saw the slight curl to her lip, I didn’t do it. Well, it was too late then. She was watching me, comparing me with—
Yes, that was it. She was comparing me with somebody. Somebody who was different from her, someone who rode roughshod over everything delicate and subtle about her, everything about her that I l
iked and shared with her. And she, of course, ate it up.
I took refuge in the tactic of letting her make the first move. I think, then, that she despised me. And rightly.
A bit of cockney dialogue I had once heard danced through my mind: “D’ye love us, Alf?”
“Yus.”
“Well, knock us abaht a bit.”
You see? I knew the right things to do, but—
But this was Gloria. I couldn’t.
❖
The record finished, and she let the automatic shut off the turntable. I think she expected me to turn it over. I didn’t. She said, “All right, Leo. What is it?” tiredly.
I said to myself, “I’ll start with the worst possible thing that could happen. She’ll deny that, and then at least I’ll feel better.” So I said to her, “You’ve changed. There’s somebody else.”
She looked up at the picture molding and smiled sleepily. “Yes,” she said. “There certainly is.”
“Uff!” I said, because that caught me right in the solar plexus. I sat down abruptly.
“His name’s Arthur,” she said dreamily. “He’s a real man, Leo.”
“Oh,” I said bitterly. “I can see it. Five o’clock shadow and a head full of white matter. A toupee on his chest and a vernacular like a boatswain. Too much shoulders, too little hips, and, to quote Thorne Smith, a voice as low as his intentions. A man who never learned the distinction between eating and dining, whose idea of a hot time consists of—”
“Stop it,” she said. She said it quite casually and very quietly. Because my voice was raised, it contrasted enough to have a positively deafening effect. I stood there with my jaw swinging like the lower gate of a steam-shovel as she went on, “Don’t be catty, Leo.”
It was a studied insult for her to use such a woman-to-woman phrase, and we both knew it. I was suddenly filled with what the French call esprit d’ escalier—the wit of the staircase; in other words, the belated knowledge of the thing you should have said if you’d only thought of it in time, which you mumble frustratedly to yourself as you go down the stairs on your way out. I should have caught her to me as she tried to brush past me when she arrived, smothered her with—what was that corny line? “kisses—hard, toothraking kisses, that broke his lips and hers in exquisite, salty pain.” Then I should have threatened her with pinking scissors—And then I thought of the glittering, balanced structure of self-denial I had built with her, and I could have cried....
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