Watchfires

by Louis Auchincloss

  "Is that all you want to see?"

  "It might do for a beginning."

  "You men are so crude."

  Was she joking? He had no idea.

  "Perhaps you will allow me to raise your veil?"

  She moved back in alarm as he approached. "Don't touch me!"

  I'm sorry.

  She relaxed, and he sat in a chair beside her, but at a respectful distance.

  "May I hold your hand?"

  She stretched out a small black-gloved hand which he took in his. After another moment she allowed him to remove the glove. But when he reached for the other hand she drew it sharply back.

  "Maybe this is enough. For the first day, anyway. You must learn to be very gentle with me!"

  Dexter felt almost sick with frustration and disenchantment. Was this the bold dryad of his fantasies? Should he be firm with her? Should he even be rough? But no, no, perhaps all women were like this in the beginning. He would have to play it her way.

  But as soon as he rose, to conclude the interview, she raised her veil. Her eyes were laughing at him.

  "Where is the bedroom, Dexter?"

  When, trembling with apprehension and desire, he opened the door to it, she turned to bar his entrance. "Come back," she said softly. "In exactly fifteen minutes. You needn't knock."

  "My darling!"

  She snickered. "Lucky Rosalie! Fifteen years of a husband's total fidelity! How many wives can boast of that?"

  His hand held the closing door. "How do you know I've been so faithful to Rosalie?"

  "In affairs we can make statements. But we never ask questions! Remember! Fifteen minutes exactly."

  And then, firmly, she closed the door.

  ***

  It seemed to Dexter, in the weeks that followed, that his life had simply erupted, like a rocket on the Fourth of July, into bright little pieces, yellow and blue and fiery red, all over a black and starless sky. It was not only that he seemed never to have lived before those passionate encounters in South Vesey Street; it was as if he no longer lived anywhere else. He went through his days like a somnambulist. He got through his work at the office adequately, but very slowly. He found that he was more patient with subordinates, caring less as he did now, about the results of their labors. He was able to talk at breakfast with his sons on general matters and on their personal ones, and he could chatter away with his lady companions at dinner parties. The eternal topics of slavery and secession seemed to him like the banal, tinkling music of a hotel band playing behind potted palms while the customers dined. Existence was a comedy, a rather dreary comedy pacing its slow way through a second season. Life had reduced itself to South Vesey Street.

  Annie's emotional life was less constricted by their new relationship. If she enjoyed their lovemaking, as she certainly did, she enjoyed the drama preceding it and the drama following quite as much. She liked putting on her veil and making her mysterious way to Grace Church; she liked making friends with the dazzled old housekeeper of the rented house; she liked dressing herself in shawls that only partly covered her nudity and approaching Dexter like some Eastern princess. She liked to undress him and to say obscene things and laugh at his shocked expression. The act of love that was so completely, so almost stunningly satisfying to him, was only a climax to her. Whereas he wanted to be either in bed with her, in the closest embrace, or altogether away from her to think back on it, she wanted to linger and dally, to lie naked on the bear rug, to talk and giggle and sip wine. When she taxed him with being a brute who wanted only one thing, he admitted it freely.

  "But it's because you're so consummate an artist in the rites of love! You make everything else seem trivial."

  She did not appear to consider this altogether a compliment. "Maybe that feeling is a family characteristic. Charley is a bit that way. Oh, I don't really compare him with you, darling. He lacks your forcefulness. But he does have a way of rolling off into a snoring sleep after he's satisfied himself."

  Dexter jumped up indignantly and tied the ends of the belt to his silk robe tightly together. He averted his eyes, in frank distaste, from her sprawled nakedness.

  "I beg you not to talk about Charley. The subject revolts me."

  "Really, darling, at times you can be an awful prude."

  "I am what I am. Our room here is sacred to me. I don't see how you can bring in such thoughts, such images. Charley snoring! My God, Annie! Have you no sensitivity? Or no respect for mine?"

  "I don't ask about you and Rosalie. Oh, la, la!"

  "Annie!"

  "All right, all right. Don't look at me that way. I know you don't like me lolling about in the nude." She sat up in a pet and slipped into her dressing gown, buttoning it carefully up to her neck. "There! Am I decent enough? Now that his lordship has taken his pleasure?"

  "Annie, I am a brute. Forgive me. Take it off, and we'll make love again."

  "No, no! Enough is enough! I don't want you to have a heart attack. Not here certainly. Besides, I know you want to get back to your office. And I have a fitting at four-thirty."

  "You say I'm unromantic. How can you think of a fitting at a time like this?"

  "A woman can always think of a fitting. And do you know something else? I hate the huggermugger of all this. I'd like to flaunt you to all New York!"

  "Dearest, you know, we've had all that out. We can't do it to our children, our spouses, your father..."

  "Father!" Annie gave a little scream of laughter. "He's probably smelled us out long ago, the old fox. How you worship him! But no, I don't mean for you to go over all those grounds again. I've accepted them! Still, a girl can dream, can't she? I like to dream of being a courtesan in Paris."

  "I guess lots of girls dream of that. But it's a rotten life, really. Those poor creatures may have jewels and carriages, but they end up in the wards of public hospitals."

  "Oh, a truce to your public hospitals! I want to tell you about the dream I had last night. You were a duke or a field marshal or something frightfully swell, and I was a grande cocotte who was costing you millions. Yes, darling, millions! Not just a little house in South Vesey Street that you'll relet for a spanking profit the day after you tire of me. And I rode through the Bois at noon with diamonds bigger than the Empress's! I was the toast of the Jockey Club! Oh, yes, I was ruining you, the way I ruined all the men I loved. The way I should probably even ruin the muscular little dancer with the beautiful thighs from the opera ballet, whom I saw on weekends when you were off with the Emperor at Compiègne!"

  He placed his hands over her lips.

  "Annie," he pleaded. "Is nothing sacred to you? Nothing at all?"

  "Don't you know what's sacred to me, silly? Let me go now. I have to get dressed."

  14

  HE FOUND ROSALIE a continuing enigma. He had no idea whether or not she had divined the existence of the house at South Vesey Street. On the day after she had accepted the five thousand dollars she had complained of a cold and had suggested that he avoid contagion by sleeping on a cot in his dressing room. He observed that she manifested no signs of illness and made no move to reinstate their old sleeping arrangements after her supposed indisposition should have run its course. A separation from bed, if not from board, had been effected, and without the exchange of a single reproach. How many lawyers could have accomplished that?

  Her daily manner with him was carefully natural, a bit matter-of-fact, perhaps a touch dry. She would discuss household and family plans in front of the boys and the maids, but when they were alone together she always had a book or a newspaper or a work basket and did not try to make conversation.

  Their arrangement, if arrangement it could be called, was at once a relief and a torture to him. He wanted to ask her what she was really feeling. He wanted to explain to her that what had happened was perfectly consistent with his love for her. That it might even be consistent with continued sexual relations. But how could he say anything at all without revealing the existence of a relationship of which sh
e might still be ignorant? And how could she, if it were flung in her face, not resent it? Not denounce it? All she seemed to be asking of him was that he should maintain the appearance of decency, and how could he refuse a betrayed wife that?

  It helped, anyway, that she was so busy. He suspected that she was somehow breaking the law, and although he had lost most of his interest in national events in his absorption with South Vesey Street, he almost felt that he would welcome an exposure, even an arrest—any incident that would give him the chance to stand out publicly as Rosalie's supporter and to share her punishment. It might make the load of his debt to her less intolerable.

  One day when he happened to be uptown in the middle of the morning and had gone to Union Square to spend an hour in his library between appointments, he had an experience that made him think that such a crisis was not entirely fantastical. He had let himself into the house with his latch key, so that his presence at his desk was presumably unknown to the household. Hearing a step in the corridor he called out:

  "Is that you, Bridey? Don't worry. It's only me."

  As total silence followed, he walked to the door and found himself facing a negro boy of some fourteen years of age. For a long moment the two simply stared intently at each other. Dexter observed that the boy was dressed in one of Fred's suits. It was obviously too big for him.

  "And who may you be, my lad?"

  The boy without a word turned and fled upstairs. It was as if history had broken rudely into Dexter's personal preoccupations. He promptly quit the house and passed the balance of his hour walking rapidly on Broadway. That evening Rosalie faced him with a different expression, one that almost suggested contrition.

  "You saw that boy today. I'm sorry. It won't happen again. He and his mother were in a place that had become suspect. I had to take them in here for the day."

  "Please, Rosalie! Do it again! Do it whenever you want."

  She glanced at him with a faint smile. "Dear me, are you as guilty as all that?"

  "I only want to help!"

  "Very well. I accept your help."

  Charley was almost as enigmatic as Rosalie. He had developed what to Dexter was the odious habit of addressing him in the office in a half-bantering, half-sarcastic tone, always implying that Dexter, whenever he left the office earlier than usual, had a "secret conference" with an "important client uptown." Dexter would stolidly ignore his implication and give a coldly literal construction to everything his cousin said. He no longer tried to moderate Charley's drinking or to stimulate him to greater industry. He simply saw to it that his partner's legal duties were fulfilled by associates.

  Did Charley know? Did Charley even care? Had Annie thrown her infidelity in his teeth? She was quite capable of it. She was beginning already to be careless about her trips to and from South Vesey Street. Once she had come in her own hired cab without waiting for their private one.

  "Do you know something?" he asked her, after they had made love and were having the now customary glass of wine. "You didn't have your veil on when you got out of that cab."

  "You were watching for me from the window? I like that!"

  "But you were exposing yourself. Supposing someone saw you?"

  "Oh, do let's suppose it! What do you think would happen?"

  "I'm afraid it might be the end of the world. Our world, anyway."

  "Would it be in all the papers? 'Adultery in Manhattan society!' 'Insular incest!'"

  "Charley would certainly divorce you. Rosalie would probably divorce me. My law practice would be ruined."

  "Decidedly, I must remember to don my veil!"

  But something in her tone made him now wonder if he, too, might not try to see their situation in terms of high comedy. Was it really essential to be so grave? Might he not learn from her not only the delights of love but a more balanced view of the universe?

  "Maybe I'm worrying about the wrong thing," he mused. "Maybe such a discovery would help to liberate us. We could snap our fingers at the world and say: 'All right! So we are lovers. Do your worst!'"

  Annie still smiled, but her eyelids just flickered, "What has made you so suddenly bold?"

  "You!"

  "I promise to be more careful."

  But her hesitation had only the effect of making him more precipitous. He saw his whole life collapse under a raging, cleansing stream.

  "We could go abroad! I could learn to practice international law. We could live in Paris. Oh, Annie, we'd be free to start all over again!"

  She made a little face. "How can you forget all the things you told me about that? People slamming doors in my face? The misery of second-rate acquaintances in third-rate watering places? Is that what you're offering me now, Dexter?"

  "But it would be different with me!" he cried indignantly. "I'm no Jules Bleeker! You and I would have the kind of life together that would make serious people respect us. In time, anyway. And while we were waiting for that, we'd have ourselves. My boys will soon be old enough to make up their own minds about what parent they'll see or not see. I'm sure I could persuade them to accept our love!"

  "And what about my Kate, who's only five?"

  "Well, why wait till we're discovered? Why not go off now? Then we could take Kate with us!"

  Annie rose and firmly took his glass away from him. "I think we'll go on as we're going, thank you very much. I have never heard a better argument for a clandestine affair!"

  Deflated, he managed nonetheless to continue their talk on a joking level. But he was aware that he had been bitterly hurt. It was a distinct shock to have to recognize that just as he was making, however tentatively, the emotional preparations to build their affair into an independent universe, she was making hers for keeping it well within its original bounds. If he had begun to be ashamed of treating her as something private, something secret, something "owned," it was a dubious solace to his conscience to discover that she was perfectly content to go on treating him the same way!

  When she had gone he chose to walk all the way home, although the day was overcast and drizzling. It gave him the opportunity to assemble and analyze his impressions of himself. The strange new heaviness at the bottom of his heart, as he now began to make it out, was the result of his recognition that his asylum from the world was no asylum at all. In the very violence of his physical satisfaction he had been professing, paradoxical as it might have seemed, to perceive a kind of spiritual rebirth, at least in the sense that it had created a new Dexter Fairchild, who existed apart from the tensions and frustrations that had beset the old. And Annie had seemed a kind of goddess, embraced by a mortal, having no existence, at least for him, outside of South Vesey Street. The love between them had been an entity complete in itself, existing, so to speak, in a void, a love that knew neither jealousy, nor falling off, nor bickering, nor even simple ennui. But now the doors of his foolishness, his stubborn, deliberate foolishness, had been thrust apart, and he was back again with all the misery of a merely human relationship.

  On Monday, the day of their next appointment, Annie did not come at all. In an agony of jealousy and resentment he broke one of their primary rules and called at her house in Union Square. Word was brought to him that Mrs. Fairchild was resting in her room, but when he insisted on seeing her, she came down to the drawing room, irate, in a dressing gown.

  "Will you kindly tell me why you have taken leave of your senses?"

  "You didn't come!"

  "I had a headache. There was no way of sending you word."

  "You could have had a nap in our house. I wouldn't have disturbed you. As it is, I've been half-crazed, wondering if anything was wrong!"

  "But that's perfectly ridiculous. You've got to get hold of yourself. And now you must go. I'm going out to dinner tonight, and I have to rest."

  "Where are you going?"

  "I don't know why that's any affair of yours. But, as it happens, I don't mind telling you. I'm going to the Fearing.'"

  "The Henry Fearings?"

&nb
sp; "Yes."

  "That ... that ogler! Is Charley going?"

  "As a matter of fact, he's not. He'll be at the Patroons'. Charley and I have been rather going our separate ways these days. As you, of all people, should know."

  "Well, I suppose it's all right. Mrs. Fearing will be there, of course."

  "No, she won't. She's with a sick aunt in Trenton. Henry has asked me to be a good friend and act as his hostess."

  "But that's not decent!"

  "Dexter, you're being absolutely idiotic. Henry and I are second cousins. One does that sort of thing for cousins."

  "Not for second cousins. I can't allow it."

  "You can't allow it! Go home!"

  She turned away abruptly and hurried upstairs. To have followed her would have been to create a scandal, and Dexter had no alternative but to leave.

  He was horribly afraid that she would not appear at their next appointment, but she did. She made no reference to their argument until after they had made love and he was pouring their wine.

  "We have to get something straight, my dear. Outside this house you are to have no say whatever over my actions. It's bad enough to have one husband. I have no idea of being saddled with two."

  She smiled as she said this, but her tone had a touch of frost.

  "How can you expect me to turn my love on and off?"

  "That's your business. All I'm telling you is that if we are to continue meeting, we are each to have complete freedom of action, except under this roof."

  "You don't love me!" he cried in anguish.

  "Did I ever say I did? What I feel for you you should know by now. There is no point in giving it a name. I don't think I could ever feel anything for a man at the cost of being his slave. That was one of my troubles with Charley. I shall certainly not make the same mistake with another. Particularly not with another Fairchild!"

  "You want to go to parties! You want to flirt with men!"

  "Certainly. If I choose."

  "You want to make love with them!"

  "No, you are quite enough for that. Almost too much, if anything. You may rest assured that you will be my only lover."