They went on to dinner. More cocktails were ordered, along with wine and the richest food. “If Mrs. McBride can go out on a heavy date,” said Benjamin, “so can I.” The poor nurse, who as of tomorrow would be on duty at the hospital, was spending the evening with a cousin’s widow.
An hour later Mr. Tanning had ordered crepes sujette. Beneath so many half-empty plates and glasses the tablecloth couldn’t be seen. “And clear away this mess, please,” he told the waiter. Then, turning to Francis, “Do me a favor, Sonny,” he said dully. “Put in a call to Xenia tomorrow morning and ask her, as politely as you can, to limit her visit to another ten days. I never dreamed the sittings would be such a strain on my system. I’d understood they were to last only a week or so, also that I’d be able to move about, talk or write letters. Instead, I’m put in a baby’s high chair and told to keep perfectly still. I like your friend, Francis. You know that. She’s a fine woman. But it’s like eating goose or venison; after a while you just can’t take any more. Tell her whatever you like, that I promised her room to another guest—I don’t give a damn what you say. I expect to be back there in a week’s time. Tell her she can have two more sittings, but that’s the limit. O.K.?”
These words, uttered slowly and wearily while the women looked elsewhere, appalled Francis. It was true, he wanted never to see Xenia again; but, once away from her, he had easily persuaded himself that by seducing him she had suffered wrong at his hands. The pity was that he couldn’t recognize the classic remorse of a young man brought up to believe in—if necessary, to invent—some kind of surpassing purity within even the unlikeliest woman. Experience had taught Francis—at least Vinnie’s experience had, his own amounted to so little—that “the man” was invariably to blame in these matters. He saw no way of complying with his father’s request.
“What about the bust of Lily?” he objected feebly.
“That’s between Lily and Xenia,” said Benjamin.
“You commissioned it, though.”
“Francis, I’m sick and tired of the whole question.”
“Can you see how it’s rather embarrassing for me?”
“Don’t let it be. Blame it all on the Monster,” Benjamin grinned, alluding to Fern’s name for him since the divorce. People who saw Fern brought back word that she was still very bitter, to the point of forbidding you to speak of the Monster in her hearing. An enormous basket of snapdragons and smilax, accompanied by a letter in the old man’s round careful hand, had gone unacknowledged. At times you wondered, or Francis did, if he’d done anything in life but give offense to women.
He looked helplessly at his father. He wanted to say, “Please! I can’t be the one to send her away! She’ll think it’s my doing—I’ll be the monster!” But he held his tongue, flattered by the novelty of a direct request from Benjamin. He would have to find some way of his own not to carry it out.
It was late when they parted on the street. Lady Good said, “I’ll escort Benjamin to the hospital, Francis, whilst you and Jane go dancing, or whatever young people do. That fearsome ordeal lies ahead of him in the morning, and look at him, he’s worn out!” Benjamin gave them all a crumpled smile. He shuffled forward to kiss Jane, then Francis, on the cheek, contriving to slip a bill into his son’s hand. “Go on now,” he whispered, “paint the town red!” Francis checked a movement of protest. He was shocked not so much by a gift of money, which just then he lacked wit to refuse, as by the implication that he was caught up with Jane in the kind of romance that fed on dance bands and expensive corner tables. Paint the town red! Hadn’t Benjamin understood that Jane was married? Indeed he had. From the car window he waved and Prudence blew a kiss. And then she tenderly kissed the old man, before their very eyes. The last thing Francis saw his father do, as Louis Leroy drove away, was wink at them over his companion’s shoulder. That was how you behaved (the wink said) with married women.
“What a dear old man.” Jane spoke in a dreamer’s voice.
“He wanted you for a daughter-in-law.”
“Yes, that was sweet.”
“How is Roger?”
“You’ll see him Friday. He thinks they’re going to draft him.”
“Into the army?” cried Francis. “But he’s married!”
After thinking it over, she said indulgently, “There are lots of things being married doesn’t prevent.”
He stopped and stared. “Aren’t you happy?”
“Oh, of course!”
“Of course?”
“I mean, I’ve known Roger all my life,” said Jane, a shadow of impatience crossing her face. “Whether or not he makes me happy isn’t the point.”
“But you make him happy?”
“Oh, of course!” she said a second time.
“I see. Have I said that I like Roger? I do.”
“I’m glad you do. He’s a wonderful person. Francis? Are you all right?” He had stumbled, somewhat.
“I’ve had a slight fever these days ….”
“We oughtn’t to be standing here.…”
“Would a taxi be wise?” He watched Jane hail one, seeing her, for all their drinking, a bit embarrassed now by what she had conveyed. Francis hadn’t cared to hear about her marriage, had in fact come close to falling flat on his face, he so much hadn’t cared to hear about it. Both of them leaned back against the creaking leather, frowning. He gave the driver her address. Unaccountably Jane’s mood changed to one of atonement.
“When I think what a pig I made of myself!” she groaned. “Letting your father order that second bottle of champagne! Eek! Why didn’t you stop me?”
“Cálmati, cálmati.”
“Oh dear, you still remember!”
“What?”
“Your Italian. I’ve forgotten all of mine. They just stare at me in the fruit store!” In this way Jane recovered her girlishness of before dinner. But Francis had had his glimpse of what dark machinery kept the merry-go-round revolving. While they sped across the river he studied her profile dim against ten dozen watery lights. She was once in love with me, he reflected, letting his eyes glaze as over some ancient irrelevant bit of gossip.
She ushered him into the apartment. He saw a room spacious but bare; a bed, two chairs, bookshelves partly built, unpacked boxes—all lit by a kerosene lamp in the middle of the floor. The building, it seemed, was being rewired. Sheets had been tacked for privacy across the lower halves of windows. It made Francis think of a setting in which children played at keeping house. Here and there he recognized, perhaps by their look of having been promised a better home, objects acquired by Jane in Europe—art books, a stylish umbrella, the worm-drilled Negro king from a Neapolitan crèche and, slumped in the lamplight, a straw doll with a felt bean pod for its head. There were three faces in this pod. The first looked out on the world and smiled; above it a smaller one slept, eyes closed, as though waiting its turn; the topmost bean had as yet no features of any description. Francis shivered in spite of himself. The thing gave out an uncanny air of clairvoyance. If he had had such a doll as a child, he would have told secrets to the little faceless head at the top, then let them filter slowly down into the head that smiled.
“Here.” Jane handed him a tumbler. “Tell me if you like it. It’s apricot brandy.” He noticed that her hand was trembling. “What do you think about it all?” she added vaguely.
He had been wondering at her nervousness. He wasn’t going to touch her. Still—thanks to Xenia—the idea had crossed his mind, angering him. “I think we are drunk,” he said.
“Be serious! I mean, tell me what colors I should use.”
“Violet. Violet on this wall. Perhaps a gamboge pouf below.”
Her brow puckered.
“And at the windows something blue and gauzy, so people outside may know that the room is filling up with tears.”
“Oh, Francis …”
“What’s wrong?”
“Aren’t you happy?”
The question caught him off guard. He’d fancied
her on the verge of some further confidence. “Of course!” he replied quickly, but missed the natural note she had sounded with the same words.
Jane didn’t miss it, evidently. She gave him a strange calm smile and brought out for the occasion her flattest idiom. “I’m glad,” she said. “Because you deserve to be.”
It provoked Francis to say more. He couldn’t bear to have her take him at face value.
“You ask if I’m happy,” he declaimed, “when you’ve given yourself to another man!” Whereupon he grasped her by the shoulders and shook her, insolently, the way he’d seen it done in the movies. Even then Jane didn’t understand it as a joke. For a moment her puzzled face wobbled back and forth, eyes seeking his own until, puzzled now himself, he had to turn miserably away. “I’m too conscious to be happy,” he began, addressing the bean-pod doll. “If I were to fall nobody would catch me. I have to keep dodging people on the street. They never look where they’re going. They could walk right into me and knock me down. It’s always my consciousness. He sits in that house like a Pasha in his harem, while I run to and fro delivering messages, making peace, like a—like a … I’m sorry,” Francis lowered his voice and sipped the sweet liquor, “I mustn’t talk about myself.” But Jane was gazing at him with parted lips.
“I should like,” he pursued therefore, “to do something at cross-purposes, something against my consciousness. I should like to feel, no matter what I thought I was up to, that the real meaning of my action was hidden from me. I want—”
“Please!” Jane held up a hand. “This isn’t you talking.”
“Isn’t it? So much the better!”
“You’re so wise and sure of yourself,” she almost pleaded. “When other people are with you they feel that what they do makes sense. Roger said this, though you’d hardly—”
“I’m not talking about other people,” said Francis. “They have their lives. I want mine to be like the ship that seems to sail for a certain mark, but instead gets sucked miles and miles out of its course by an unseen current.”
“You wouldn’t enjoy that,” said Jane unhappily. “It sounds too much like what I go through every day.”
“I’d enjoy it. Other people would have to watch out for me, for a change. No,” Francis managed a dark gleam, “better yet: someone who resembles me as I am now would have to watch out for me.”
They were sitting on the floor by now. “Besides,” Jane presently said, “I’d never describe you as specially conscious of things.” Francis looked up amazed. Why, she was arguing with him!
“Of what things, pray?” he snapped.
Not answering, Jane bent sideways, towards the chimney of the lamp, to light her cigarette from its invisible uppouring of heat. She was asking to be let off, but the damage had been done. It remained for Francis to show her something about his consciousness.
“If you’re trying to say I never noticed,” he said, pleased by his own cunning, “how close you came—how close we came, in Rome, to … to loving each other …” He stammered to a halt, however, in the gentlest, mournfullest of voices. Each sat silent with surprise. These might have been the first intimate words ever to be spoken between them. For Francis, who felt he’d given himself away, the moment held an unbearable anxiety. It was easier for Jane, he supposed; that is, she could fall back upon her new role of matron, “lady of the house”: she would rise now offended, show him firmly to the door, quite as any woman in his mother’s world, confident that he would obey out of his regard for Forms. But to Francis’s astonishment, to his despair—he took it as the clearest sign yet of the power he had over her—Jane did no such thing. Far from stiffening with outrage, she seemed to have gone weak, acquiescent, sadly nodding over what he had said. She actually untied the ribbon in her hair. The black curls, shaken, fell below her shoulders.
“Yes, I know,” she sighed, “your ship put off its course—that’s what I go through every day. Maybe it doesn’t happen to men, that drifting feeling, day after day being beside the point.” She wrung her hands in the lamplight, not absurdly. “Of course I loved you in Rome. I love you still—”
Had he ever heard these words from anyone? He all but fainted with apprehension.
“—though not in the same way—”
His eyes closed with relief. Jane haltingly completed her thought: “—yet life’s so strange. A year from now I’ll be an army wife, maybe. I’m already so far from where I once imagined being, I wait for it to start making sense ….”
“That’s it!” he breathed. “You’re afloat!” She was. Little Jane, he mused, grown up now, married, in midstream suddenly, on her way to the fulfillment of her own mysterious nature—some green and growing island arrived at over deep waters, or so he pictured it from where he loitered on the mainland, risking at most the lukewarm shallows. “I think it’s glorious,” he said; “it makes you so tremendously real.” Though Francis couldn’t have explained his meaning—was reality that which floated further and further from his reach?—it appeared to please Jane. She blinked, looked away, might have turned pink in a stronger light. He had a vision of how enjoyable it could be, this business of giving pleasure to women. How easy, simply, to give! Provided the woman didn’t, like Xenia, begin by taking, why, there was nothing to it!
He felt a real gratitude towards Jane, which he mistook for love long enough to wonder why he’d never loved her before. In Italy they’d spent whole days together, without his feeling the first tremor, the first ache started in him by the sight of her, now that he could never possess her. That made the difference: it was too late, it was wonderfully, blessedly too late! It might as well have been love he felt, after all. The dark side of love, the whole degrading panicky sexual side, was what she would never endure from him and what he’d never dream of asking her to endure. How joyously he intended to protect her marriage! The naked sword dangled no longer over their heads; it had fallen, cutting him free, and would lie henceforth between them. He saw himself throughout a long life giving her comfort, an angel helping her to bear no matter what earthly union. This was something Francis knew how to ask of women; he remembered Enid, he remembered Lady Good. He held out his hand, which Jane took gently, chastely. A spot of color in her cheek made him think: carnation. They needed one another, he knew then, in exactly the same way.
After a while she whispered, “Put your head in my lap,” and there he lay, mindlessly, for how long he couldn’t tell, her fingers stroking his hot brow. A thousand infant impulses toward food and sleep drifted over him like snow. “It’s been so long,” he mumbled incoherently.
Then on the very edge of sleep—just as in nightmares, when he had frantically barricaded himself from the approach of footsteps, and, panting, back to the door of his retreat, thought, “At last, at last!” only then to catch sight of the insane face of his pursuer filling up the open and forgotten window—his whole body, like a tuning fork or crystal goblet flicked, began to tingle with lust. It was horrible. He had never felt desire so urgent.
Without pausing to see whether there mightn’t have been something of the sort on her side, Francis scrambled to his feet, trying clumsily to hide from Jane what had already betrayed him to himself. He made a stab at excuses, that it was late, that his head ached, that he’d hope to see her the next day. If he didn’t leave at once all would be spoiled. All was spoiled, her silence told him, by his haste and confusion. Still he dawdled, stammering, lying, until he perceived that she was in no way detaining him. Her eyes were fixed upon the glowing chimney of the lamp. A minute later Francis found himself outdoors, walking, then running through the pools of brilliance shed at intervals by streetlamps, and, in between, the wells of darkness rustling under the tall trees.
14. At the end of an avenue he came to a subway station. “Will this take me anywhere near the Common?” he asked the old man behind bars in the change booth, who wearily named the appropriate train and stop. Francis paced the platform, past thought; he felt each internal organ, turned to iron,
grind dully against its neighbor. The train arrived, its green gothic cars unexpectedly crowded with old and young, white, yellow and black, some evidently married and accompanied, Francis noticed frowning, by children so young they were hardly able to walk. The only vacant seat was next to the mother of such a one, a tiny boy with skin like quartz, clinging to her flowered skirts. He sat down. The whole group struck him as wrong. Each face wore the dazed look of a person in a state of shock, limp and unresponsive. A young girl moaned as the train got under way. Each might have recently died, Francis among them, heading now for his predestined place in hell. But this suspicion no sooner crossed his mind than the train swung upward into the starry night. The air blew warm and fresh, the river glistened beneath them—there would be no easy way out of life. Far from any real world his companions had abandoned, it had been (a chance word from the young mother to her husband explained) the world of a late movie that had released its patrons to joggle listlessly home. The train clattered and shrieked, causing the woman to stroke her child’s colorless hair. The child itself showed no sign of hearing or feeling. Too young to talk, too small to think, it lurched back and forth in the alert stupor of infancy. When the train slowed down for a stop the little thing lost balance briefly, recovering itself by resting a hand not much larger than a postage stamp on Francis’s knee.
Collected Novels and Plays Page 17