On one of our postprandial promenades Hiram referred to the obvious problem in Arlina’s life.
“A handsome woman like that needs a different kind of love from what poor old Red can give her.”
“You don’t believe she’s sublimated all that into something higher?” I raised my eyebrows in jest.
He chuckled. “No more than you do, young man. What she needs is a warm body two nights a week.”
“What a disgusting old satyr you are, Hiram. How do you know she hasn’t got one?”
“Because I know Arlina. And I know the body she might pick if she had her choice.” Here he pressed his arm closer to mine. I pulled away from him.
“Well, I know no such thing. So far as I’m concerned she’s entirely devoted to her old Red. Who strikes me, by the way, as a man who might not hesitate to put a bullet through her if he caught her out. And one in her lover as well.”
“You see him bursting in on them in his wheelchair? Besides, he wouldn’t object. He’s told me as much.”
“Really?” I didn’t want to encourage the old bawd, but I was interested.
“Oh, yes. He told me he hadn’t been any good to her in that department for several years. And that he wouldn’t mind if she took a lover, so long as she was discreet about it.”
“And has he told her so?”
“Oh, no. That would outrage her. If it came at all, it would have to come as a passion strong enough to overcome her sense of duty. I agreed with Red. If it wasn’t big enough to do that, it wasn’t worth having.”
I said no more on the subject, but I gave it careful thought. The removal of Red as a jealous husband certainly cleared the field. I had little zest for violence.
One Saturday afternoon when Arlina and I were walking on the fields of her Bedford farm, she suddenly put a question to me which seemed to be aimed at a very personal aspect of my own life.
“My new novel involves an adultery in Gotham which the characters must keep very secret. My heroine is a Park Avenue matron, and her lover is a law partner of her husband’s. They wouldn’t go to a hotel, would they?”
“They might. A second-class one on the West Side. But she’d hate that, and if she were ever spotted on the street in that part of town, it would be fatal. No, they’d be more apt to meet in a rented apartment, still on the West Side but south of Central Park, near the shopping district, so her presence in that area, if noted, would seem natural.”
“And they’d arrive and leave, of course, separately.”
“Of course.”
“Would she have a cleaning woman for the flat?”
“He would arrange that. The woman would never see her, and she’d leave nothing in the room that could identify her.”
“And when the lovers met socially, they’d be careful to act naturally.”
“Unnaturally! The thing to avoid would be any appearance of avoiding each other. That’s always a sure giveaway.”
“I suppose if my heroine had an unmarried lover, they could meet in his flat.”
“Depending on where it is. Elevators are dangerous.”
“You do seem to know the ins and outs.”
Ah, that was what I had been waiting for! That had nothing to do with her novel.
“Well, you don’t suppose I’ve been living like a monk all these years, do you?”
“Far from it.”
“Would you have wished me to?”
“I?” She seemed startled. “Why, no, I don’t suppose I should. What right have I to be your censor?”
“The right I freely give you. The right of a friend I love and respect above all others.”
“But, dear Martin, your private life is your own affair!”
“Not anymore. Now that that life is under discussion, I want you to know I’ve been pure as Hippolytus since the day we met.”
We had been walking by the stile that separated the field from her neighbor’s. She turned now to lean against it, facing me, but with clenched fists raised to her eyes.
“What are you trying to tell me, Martin?”
“It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”
“Oh, dear friend, please don’t play games with me. I’m not up to that kind of thing.”
“It isn’t playing games to be in love with you.”
“Love!” She dropped her hands, and I saw something like terror in her eyes. “You can’t love me. You’re a mere boy compared to me. A dear, beautiful boy who should be loving some dear, beautiful girl. Do you want to drive me out of my mind? Do you?”
“That’s just what I want to do.” I stepped forward and seized both her hands in mine. I stared at her averted eyes until they turned to me. “There are eight years between us, which is nothing at our ages. Let me decide about that ‘dear, beautiful girl.’ The only woman I want is you, and I’m not too humble to claim we can give each other something that’s better than anything either of us ever had.”
Her eyes now wandered in what seemed an almost childlike confusion. “What about my husband?”
“He needn’t ever know a thing. Leave all that to me. If I can do it for your novel, I can do it for you.” I allowed a grave pause. “Let me kiss you, Arlina.” When she said nothing, I repeated the request. “I don’t want you to think I ever grabbed anything you didn’t freely accord.”
“Very well. Kiss me, Martin.”
Whereupon I did so. Her response was all I could have wished. When we got back to the house, Hiram Scudder leered at me disgustingly. He too had been walking, and I supposed he had espied us.
4
When Arlina surrendered to love, it was without reservation. She came to my little apartment in the Village quite openly, disdaining the maneuvers of her fictional characters, on certain weekday afternoons, and we had rapturous times together. At first. But I could not quite accustom myself to the almost reverential aftermaths to our lovemaking of which she made much point. She insisted that we read aloud famous love poems to each other. As she was planning to publish an anthology of these, I could not but note that the time was not, at least in her case, entirely wasted.
I sound like a cad, but what man wouldn’t who told the whole truth? The fact was that Arlina’s lovemaking, at first delicious, as she shyly and then rapidly more boldly accustomed herself to every intimacy, began at last to be the least bit smothering. She was too articulately romantic, too anxious to possess every aspect of my nature. She wanted me to agree on certain times of the day or night, when we were not together, when we would think passionately of each other. She wanted to penetrate into every chapter of my past, to learn about my old love affairs, to question me about the exact quality of my feeling for her, reaching rather too greedily, it seemed to me, for the smallest evidence that she represented a unique experience in my emotional life.
I had to fabricate almost all my responses. She would have been horrified by the truth. I was only too sure that the fantasies in which all lovers indulge to keep their libidos keen were very different in our two cases. Whereas she may have made love to the remembered rhythms of Tristan, I enhanced my lust with images of a proud Roman dame submitting helplessly to the rape of a barbarian, her aroused appetite actually whetted by humiliation and shame. At other times I likened myself to the villain Maskwell in Congreve’s Double Dealer, boasting how he “had wantoned in the rich circle” of Lady Touchwood’s love. That was more my inner style.
It was therefore not without a feeling of a needed recess that I greeted the news that Arlina was departing with Red on a two months’ lecture tour across the country to promote her new book. She was very emotional about our separation and made me promise to write her daily to the care of her trusted female agent, who would be traveling with her. I was only intermittently faithful to the task, but the many florid epistles that she indited to me were the ones that turned up in the “cache” at Sulka U.
In her absence I dropped in more often on Dan Carmichael in his studio. If I was not averse to being freed for a while from Arlina
’s sometimes fatiguing attentions, I missed almost at once the reassuring glow of her approbation, which had given me a novel but gratifying sense of success in life. I knew that I had aroused strong feelings in Dan, and I should have left him alone, but there you have me. My nature craved this new incense of admiration from the great.
His studio was reached by a back stairway descending to the service entrance, so I did not have to encounter his bleak and saturnine spouse, who, in Red Suydam’s mocking description, brooded about male models in the floor above discarding their raiment least of all to be sketched. I found Dan in a depressed mood; he complained that he could neither paint nor draw, and wanted only to talk and drink.
He did, however, one afternoon a sketch of me, executed with remarkable speed. It was a very fine likeness, and I flushed with pleasure when he said I could have it.
“But it’s too valuable for a gift,” I protested, more to please him than to offer it back.
“I can give what I like to my friends,” he growled. “Only promise me one thing. Don’t give it to Arlina.”
“Why should I do that?”
“Oh, some silly notion of how a lover should behave.”
“So you know about me and Arlina.”
“Everybody knows about you and Arlina.”
“Even Red?”
“Oh, Red indeed. He’s positively obscene about you being the smaller. He says you have to sling a bucket over her head and hang on to the handle for dear life.”
I was horribly mortified, but it was not my habit to show it. There had to be other ways of getting back at Arlina’s sneering court.
“You say you can’t draw these days.” I rolled up my sketch and put a rubber band around it. I wanted to be sure to take it away with me before he changed his mind, of which he was all too capable. “But this,” I added, holding it up, “is surely no example of artist’s cramp.”
He viewed me obliquely. “Maybe you’re my only inspiration now.”
My stare was cool. Had I really aroused a major passion? If so, I felt little sympathy. I needed to pay him off for the bucket crack. As I turned to go, I asked, “Is there anything I can do for you in return for my handsome present?”
He looked up at once. “Yes! Pose for me in the nude.”
I laughed. “Dan, you old lecher. You know I’m too modest for that.”
“You goddamn little prick teaser!” he exploded. “You’re afraid if you stripped you might give yourself away. You’re not half as straight as you like to make out. Oh, I’ve heard about you. Now get your hot little ass out of here!”
I laughed, with genuine good nature, and departed, taking my sketch.
But I returned only three days later, behaving as if nothing had happened. At this poor Dan broke down completely. He pleaded with me desperately to respond to his love; he blabbered about his obsession with me; he even wept as he threatened me with being the cause of the extinction of his art. It was appalling to see a great man reduced to such a state of uncontrol.
Now what was I up to? Was I still smarting about Red’s cruel image of me and Arlina? Did I suspect that it was really Dan’s invention and not Red’s at all? A little, perhaps. But couldn’t there be an understandable pride in seeing an artist of the first order (at least so he was still considered by many) grovel before you? And tell you that it was in your power and yours alone to enable him to pick up his brush?
Yes, but that was not all. There was still the idea of my pleasant little function in life to give some pleasure where I had received so much. And I had owed in the past year most of my pleasure to the circle to which he had introduced me.
Anyway, I did not keep Dan long on tenterhooks. I accorded him what he wanted, to my very mild and to his too furious satisfaction. Indeed, so ecstatic did he wax that, had I desired it, he would have kicked his poor old wife out of the house and established me in her stead. But of course I wanted no such thing, nor had I the least intention of continuing the liaison after Arlina’s return.
Arlina’s return, however, was to result in the end of both affairs. I had agreed now to pose for Dan as he had requested, and in doing so I had actually expected to be the subject of the greatest painting of his career, a nude portrait imbued with all the feeling that Dan poured into the love which, at least in his younger days, had not dared to reveal its nomenclature. But one afternoon, while I was posing, the back doorbell rang, and Dan pressed the buzzer to open it, expecting a delivery which could be left downstairs. Instead, two minutes later, Hiram Scudder pushed open the studio door without knocking and walked in.
The mistake I made was to grab a shirt and cover myself. Hiram’s beady eyes leered at me; his tone was malignant.
“Oh, go on, please, go on. Let me not interrupt so charming a seance. Or are such beauties to be revealed only to the artist?”
Of course I should have brazened it out, as if it had been a routine posing, and allowed the jealous Hiram’s lecherous eyes to feast on my bodily parts as we all three casually chatted. Instead, I protested that the session was over anyway and that I was already late for an appointment. Dressing hastily behind, a screen, I took my leave.
Five days later I received this epistle from Arlina:
“I have had a revolting letter from hateful Hiram which has made it impossible for me to continue my tour. I have told Red that I am suffering from migraines and cannot speak in public. And so indeed I am. I cannot find it in my heart to believe it of you, dearest, dearest Martin, though Hiram says that Dan actually boasted to him of his ‘conquest.’ I shall, of course, hear what you have to say. I will come to you on the afternoon of the 25th. My plane gets in that morning. Oh, God, God! Have I been a fool?”
5
Arlina stood before me in my small living room whose only first-rate objects of art were the three Whistler etchings of Venice which she had given me. She was very pale and sad and grave. I remembered my initial impression of her as a pagan priestess. I had not attempted to deny or even to palliate Scudder’s charge.
“You tell me it meant nothing to you. I cannot imagine a human being to whom such things mean nothing. Certainly not one with whom I have been so intimate. A man I loved!” At this she gave a little cry. “Oh, Martin, how could you? The moment I was gone! Did I mean nothing to you?”
“You know that’s not true.”
“How can I know?”
“Don’t you feel it? In the deepest part of you?”
“No!”
“Then how can I help you?”
“You can’t! Oh, I must face this alone. I see that.” She clasped her hands and shook them in her distress. “There’s no use talking. You’re simply not the man I took you for. That’s not your fault. There’s no reason you should have been. You never claimed to be. It was my folly to erect a pedestal and put you up on it. It would have been better for me if we’d never met.”
“Oh, don’t say that. We had good times.”
“Maybe you did. In your own way. Mine were illusions.”
“Isn’t love an illusion?”
“Ah, no cheap platitudes, please.”
“Look, Arlina. Give this time to heal. You say I wasn’t the man you thought me. But the man I am isn’t so bad a guy. Get to know him. He and you might still be friends.”
“So that’s it.” She shook her head sadly. “Friendship. It’s your métier, isn’t it? I suppose it’s all very well. If you’ve never known the other thing.”
And with this she left me.
But we did in time become friends again, mild friends perhaps, but still friends, and we remained such until the day she died.
And now let me put the question. Did I do her any real harm? If, as the critics claim, the affair deepened her insight into the passions that “consume mankind,” was she not the gainer and I a significant contributor to American letters? What did her suffering, or even Dan’s, amount to? Weren’t they both still on top of their worlds?
But the truth is that I had nothing to do with
the nourishment of their art. Passion in great artists is as much the product of their imagination as it is of their hearts. As a skilled paleontologist can reconstruct the skeleton of a dinosaur from a single bone in its toe, so could Arlina resurrect the love of Antony and Cleopatra from the mere memory of our poor fling of an affair. Nor, if the truth be told, did she need even that. Jane Austen could create Elizabeth and Darcy, and Emily Bronte, Heathcliff and Cathy, out of daydreams strolling in a garden or a moor.
And so they go, the great Arlinas, supreme in the delights and consolations of their celestial visions, deriving occasional niblets of nutriment from the lesser humans on whom they occasionally feed, yet receiving the lachrymose sympathy of academic researchers for every supposed pang of “disprized love” they may incur, which love is actually only further grist for their busy mills. While as for the poor partner of this “love,” well, out upon him! Who was he to play gross tunes upon the heartstrings of genius?
With scrupulous fairness, however, I append the lines which Arlina had underlined in the morocco-bound copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets which she gave me one Christmas:
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold and to temptation slow;
They righdy do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 52