“Are you implying that I’m addicted to alcohol or something?” she said.
“Well,” he said, “it’s better than dope.”
Henry opened a bottle and poured sparkling burgundy into five glasses. He distributed the glasses and sat down on the arm of the sofa beside Annie.
“What have you been doing lately?” he said.
“Painting,” she said.
“She’s painting a picture of me,” Clara said. “It’s a nude. I’m absolutely naked.”
“It’s ghastly,” Ben said. “She looks like a skinned mink.”
“Are you saying, actually, that I looked like a skinned mink naked?” Clara said.
“Just in the painting,” Ben said.
“Ben has no artistic judgment whatever,” Annie said. “It’s an interpretation. You have to feel her.”
“I prefer to feel her as she really is,” Ben said.
“Besides,” Annie said, “how many skinned minks have you ever seen?”
“Well,” Clara said, “I think that was a sweet thing to say, just the same. The part about preferring to feel me as I really am, I mean. Ben, that was really a sweet thing to say.”
“I only said it because it’s true,” Ben said. “As you come naturally, you’re very feelable.”
“Oh,” said Clara, looking around, “isn’t he the sweetest thing?”
“I think I’d better pour some more sparkling burgundy,” Henry said.
He got up and gathered the glasses and filled them and distributed them again. He got them mixed up in the process, but no one seemed to care.
“This party is rather dull,” Annie said. “What we need is some music to dance to. Henry, why don’t you have a phonograph? If you are so damn poor you can’t afford a phonograph, I’ll give you one as a present for Christmas.”
“I have a phonograph,” Henry said.
“In that case, let’s put on some records and dance.”
“I don’t have any you can dance to. They’re all symphonies and concertos and things like that.”
“Long-hair stuff,” Clara said.
“What would you expect?” Ben said. “It’s characteristic of geniuses to listen to nothing but long-hair stuff.”
“Get off the genius kick,” Henry said.
“Why do you object to being called a genius?”
“Because I’m not one, and you don’t think I’m one. Just because you’re getting fat selling your stuff to the slicks, you don’t have to be so goddamn patronizing.”
“And you don’t have to be so goddamn sensitive either, when you come to that. If you’re going to get red-assed over a little joke, you can go to hell.”
“Merry Christmas,” Clara said. “A merry, merry Christmas.”
“Do you have a radio, Henry?” Annie said. “We could find a D.J. on the radio.”
“There’s a table set in the bedroom.”
“A table set will do. If you would be so kind as to quit quarreling with Ben long enough to get it, maybe we could get this dull party on its feet.”
Henry got up and went into the bedroom, and Ben followed. Clara watched them go with an expression of concern on her pretty and rather stupid face.
“Do you suppose they will have a fight in the bedroom?” She said. “Ben has such a violent temper. He’s perfectly ferocious when he imagines he’s been offended.”
“Oh, hell. How could you have been sleeping with this man for ages without learning that he’s a perfect puppy? All you need to do is pat him on the head, and he starts licking your hand immediately.”
“Really? Honest to God, Annie, I admire you tremendously. You are so truly clever at analyzing people and knowing just how they are. What I would like to know, however, is how you know what is to be learned about Ben from sleeping with him.”
“What we had better do,” Annie said, “is combine our strength and move the furniture back for dancing.”
“You would do well,” Clara said, “to concentrate on sleeping with Henry and quit thinking about what is to be learned from sleeping with Ben.”
“Darling,” Annie said, “if you will get off your tail and take the other end of the sofa, I’m certain we can push it back out of the way easily.”
“It serves you right that Henry has taken up with someone else.” Clara turned to Ivy. “Is it true that you’ve been staying here with Henry?”
“Yes,” Ivy said.
“You see?” Clara turned back to Annie. “While you have been being so clever, Henry has taken up with Ivy.”
“She’s welcome,” Annie said. “Ivy, you are more than welcome.”
“It’s a practical arrangement,” Ivy said. “He has only given me a place to stay for a while.”
“Everyone keeps trying to explain everything,” Annie said. “It’s quite unnecessary.”
At that moment Henry and Ben returned with the radio. Ben had said that he hadn’t meant to sound patronizing, and Henry had said that it was all right, and everything apparently was. Ben got a D.J. program, the top tunes, and Henry began to push the furniture around. When a space had been cleared, Ben began to dance with Clara, and Henry began to dance with Annie. Ivy sat and watched. Clara danced beautifully, even in the congested area. She was not very bright, but she always did beautifully anything that was purely physical. Between one tune and another, Ben approached Ivy and asked her to dance.
“No, thank you,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “If you don’t, I’ll think you find me offensive or something.”
He had been a little drunk when he arrived, and he was now a little drunker on the sparkling burgundy, and she felt for a moment a powerful compulsion to tell him that she did, indeed, find him offensive, though not for the reason that he had been drinking or any reason that would have occurred to him, but she remembered that she had promised Henry to be good, which seemed little enough to be in return for what he had been to her, and she was determined to keep her promise if she possibly could.
“I don’t know how,” she said. “I’ve never learned.”
“All you have to do is move with the music,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
Rising, she began to dance stiffly, resisting his efforts to draw her close. It was not true that she didn’t know how, and she was really rather good at it, with a true sense of time and rhythm, but the dance was, nevertheless, somewhat more unsatisfactory than a simple failure. When the tune ended, she sat down in the place and position she had held before and was ignored again thereafter, except when her glass was filled and handed to her. Covertly, through her lashes, she watched Henry under the influence of the burgundy and the music and the two girls. Her own head was strangely light, and she had the most peculiar sensation of becoming detached from her familiar emotional moorings. It frightened her a little, but at the same time she was acutely aware of concomitant excitement. She wished with sudden intensity that the intruders, this man and these women whom she did not know or wish to know, would go away and leave her alone with Henry. They were drinking, she noticed, the last of the four bottles. Perhaps, when the bottle was empty, they would go.
Although Ivy did not know it, Henry also wished that his guests would leave. At first he had been pleased to see them, especially Annie Nile, but after a while he began to get bored and to feel unreasonably irritated by things that were said and done in all innocence and good humor. He had been, in the beginning, uneasy in the fear that Ivy would say something to offend the others, or that she might, even worse, deliberately and defiantly expose herself for what she was, but then, when she had stepped forward from her corner to be introduced, he realized suddenly that it was really she for whom he was concerned, for she was the vulnerable one, after all, who would certainly be hurt the most by casual affronts or her own inve
rted cruelty. He felt for her a painful possessiveness, an exorbitant desire for her to come off well, and he was not alienated even by her brazen admission to being picked up in the street, which was, he understood, no more than abortive defiance of anticipated rejection. Later on, after they began dancing, he kept watching her as she sat primly apart with closed knees and folded hands, and all at once her thin and vibrant intensity under a pose of quietude reminded him so powerfully of someone else that he was for an instant in another place: in another time, and the wine in his glass and blood was sweet port instead of burgundy.
The last of the four bottles was empty at last, and he went, about midnight, into the bathroom. He did not go because it was necessary, but only because he wanted to get away for a few minutes by himself. Closing the door, he sat down on the edge of the tub and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. The radio continued to play in the living room, and he heard a shriek of laughter from Clara in response to something that amused her, which would not need to be, for Clara, anything very amusing. He liked Clara, and she could be very amusing herself in certain circumstances, especially in bed, but he wished she would go home. He wished she would go home and take Ben with her, and that Annie Nile would go alone to wherever, leaving here, she intended to go. He knew that Annie had not, when she came, intended to go anywhere, at least not until tomorrow, and he felt in the knowledge a vague regret for something else lost that could not be recovered. He had met her about a year ago at a party Ben had taken him to, and his relationship with her since had been generally agreeable and sporadically passionate, but it could not be, after tonight, anything at all, and he did not care.
But Annie had behaved quite well in a difficult situation, he had to admit that. It was no more than the way he would have expected her to behave, though, and it was certain, aside from a slight sense of shame and humiliation, that she cared less, if possible, than he. She had liked him for her own reasons, and he had amused her and given her pleasure in his turn among other men who had done the same in the same period of time, but she had always considered him, as he knew, quite impossible for permanence or other purposes. She would not have cared in the least if he had made love to a dozen women besides her, for she was fair enough not to deny him what she allowed herself, but she would never forgive him for letting her intrude in a situation that was humiliating. She had carried it off well, though. You would never have guessed, not knowing, that she was a bit humiliated or had any reason to be. She would merely sustain the pretension, which she had already established tonight, that no intimacy had ever existed between her and Henry Harper, and soon it would seem actually incredible to both of them that any ever had.
Well, Henry thought, he had better get back to the others. Standing, he went out of the bathroom into the bedroom and found Ben Johnson in his hat and overcoat seated on the edge of the bed.
“Are you leaving, Ben?” Henry said.
“Yes,” Ben said, “you can stop stewing now. We’re going.”
“Cut it out, Ben. You know I want you to stay as long as you please.”
“Do you? I’d have sworn you began itching for us to get the hell out of here an hour ago. Not that I blame you, you understand. I must say, however, that you’ve played a damn dirty trick on Annie.”
“I haven’t played any kind of trick at all on Annie. Damn it, this is the first time in weeks that I’ve even seen her.”
“Oh, I know there’s never been anything between you and Annie except a night now and then, but that’s not the point. The point is, you let her walk into an embarrassing situation. You’ll have to admit it’s not pleasant to walk in with your shoes off and find someone else in your half of the bed.”
“I didn’t let her do anything of the sort. Will you kindly tell me how I could have prevented it when I had no idea you were coming?”
“I suppose that’s true. It isn’t fair to blame you when you couldn’t know. I wouldn’t be acting like a friend, though, if I didn’t say that I consider this a very questionable arrangement.”
“Thanks for acting like a friend.”
“Well, go ahead and be sarcastic. I can understand your bringing a girl home, and I can’t deny that I’ve done the same thing more than once myself, but do you think it’s wise to make an affair out of a pick-up?”
Henry understood that Ben meant well and was trying to be helpful, but he was only irritated by the necessity for making concessions to Ben’s good intentions. What he wished was that Ben mind his own goddamn business and not try to give advice in matters where his only qualification was ignorance. He had an urge to employ the shock tactics that Ivy herself sometimes found useful, and he wondered what Ben’s reaction would be if he were to spell out his arrangement with Ivy clearly.
“She isn’t a pick-up,” he said. “You don’t understand.”
“Sure. I know. She doesn’t have any place to go, and you’re only being a lousy Good Samaritan. Okay, pal. I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
“Look. I’m trying to tell you. She’s not like Clara. Not like Annie. You danced with her tonight, lover. Did she act as if she enjoyed it?”
“As a matter of fact, she made me feel that I needed a bath.”
“Well, there you are.”
“You mean she’s queer?”
“That’s one word for it. She was living with a girl cousin and ran away. I happened to meet her, and she had no place to go, and I brought her here. That’s all there is to it.”
“Pal, it may be all there is to it, and it may not be. I always knew you were crazy, but not this crazy. You could get yourself involved in a pretty sticky mess.”
“That’s not your problem. If you want to do me a favor, you can keep this to yourself.”
“Sure, pal. At the moment I don’t feel a hell of a lot like doing you any favor, but I doubt that it would make very good conversation to go around telling people I’ve got a friend shacked up with a queer.”
“You can be a pretty bigoted, intolerant son of a bitch when you want to be, can’t you?”
“Thanks, pal, and a merry Christmas to all.”
“Maybe you’d better finish the line.”
“And to all a good night. Good night, pal.”
Ben stood up and walked into the living room, Henry following. Clara and Annie were standing near the door in their fur coats and hats, and Ivy still sat on the sofa in the posture of primness. Clara said good night to Henry, kissing him, and Annie said good night also, not kissing him, and Ben opened the-door and walked out into the hall and stood there waiting with his back turned.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Henry listened to the three of them go down the stairs, and then he walked over to a window and looked down upon them in the street as they crossed to the other side and moved away toward the corner where the black pot hung from its tripod. Behind him, Ivy continued to sit primly, her eyes downcast. No one had said good night to her, and she had said good night to no one.
“They didn’t like me,” she said, and her voice had a tone of arid acceptance.
“You didn’t give them much reason.”
“I admit I wasn’t very congenial, although I wanted to be and tried my best to be, but I don’t think it would have made any difference, however I was. They wouldn’t have liked me anyhow.”
“What makes you think that?”
“It’s not something I think. It’s something I feel. There’s a difference between us, and everyone feels the difference and knows that nothing can be done about it, even though no one knows what the difference is exactly.”
“You’re exaggerating. Most of what you say is only imagination.”
“Is that what you believe? I wish it were true. It’s kind of you, at any rate, to encourage me. Is that girl who was here in love with you? The dark one, I mean.”
“Annie? God, no. Whatever gave you such a fantastic idea? Annie loves only herself. Not even that. She loves the picture she has of herself.”
“I’m not so sure. I could tell that she was angry because I was here. She treated me very courteously on the whole, however. Rather she ignored me very courteously. I shouldn’t have been nearly so admirable in her place. I’m sure I’d have made an unpleasant scene.”
“Forget it. She isn’t in love with me, whatever you think, and never has been.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been?”
“No. Maybe I thought I was for a little while, but I wasn’t.”
“Have you ever made love to her?”
“Yes.”
“More than once?”
“Several times.”
“Where? Here?”
“Here and there. Her place, I mean.”
“I wish you’d never done it here. I don’t mind so much there.”
“I don’t see why you should mind at all. Besides, you’re far too curious. It’s none of your business, you know.”
“You didn’t have to tell me if you didn’t want to.”
“All right. You asked, and I told you.”
“She wanted to stay tonight, didn’t she? That’s what she intended to do, wasn’t it?”
“Possibly.”
“Would you have let her?”
“Probably.”
“You mean surely, don’t you?”
“Yes. Surely.”
“And now I’ve spoiled it for you. Are you angry?”
“No. You haven’t spoiled anything that wouldn’t have spoiled anyhow, sooner or later. It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m glad you’re not in love with her. Have you ever been in love with anyone else?”
“Yes. Once. A long time ago.”
“Who was she?”
“Her name wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
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