The Troubled Air

by Irwin Shaw

  “Dandy, isn’t it?” O’Neill asked. He had been staring at Archer’s face as he read, studying it for hints of what Archer was feeling.

  “Delicious prose style these fellows have perfected,” Archer said. “Can I keep it so I can study it?”

  “Sure,” O’Neill said. “But burn it when you’re through with it.”

  “You’re jittery, Emmet,” Archer said. “Maybe you ought to join Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  “Yeah,” said O’Neill. “I’m jittery all right. And I don’t join anything.”

  “Thanks,” Archer said, “for the two weeks. I hope it doesn’t cost you your job.”

  “Who knows?” O’Neill stared at him sourly. “You marked me lousy tonight, didn’t you?”

  Archer hesitated. “A little, maybe. Around the edges.”

  “It’s always nice to have honest friends.” O’Neill let his breath out in a long, sighing sound. He looked truculent and embarrassed, like a boy who has just been taken out of a football game by the coach for allowing himself to be blocked out of a play. “Honest friends,” he said ramblingly, “in this day and age …” He put his head in his hands.

  Archer stood up. “I’m going home,” he said. “I’ve had enough fun for one night. Can I give you a lift?”

  “No,” Emmet said, still with his head in his hands. “I’m going to stay here and drink. I’m having a fight with my wife and I’m waiting for her to fall asleep.” He picked up his head. “Sometimes,” he said unsmilingly, “I wish I was back in the Marines. On Guam.”

  “Good night,” Archer said. He patted O’Neill’s shoulder lightly. Archer went out. O’Neill, sitting alone in the dark and empty restaurant, ordered a double Scotch.

  3

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER ARCHER OPENED THE DOOR OF HIS HOUSE. He saw that there were lights on upstairs and he knew that Kitty was awake.

  “Kitty,” he called from the hallway, closing the door behind him. “Kitty, I’m home.”

  “Clement.” Kitty’s voice floated softly down the stairwell. Even in merely calling his name, there was the private tone of pleasure and welcome with which she always greeted him. “I’m in bed, darling.”

  “Do you want anything?” he asked, throwing his coat and hat over a chair in the hall. “Before I come up?”

  “Well …” He could picture her sitting in bed, pursing her mouth, slowly making up her mind. “Well … There’re some fresh cookies in the jar. And a glass of milk. Half a glass.”

  “On the way up,” Archer said. He went through the living room to the kitchen. There were some freesias in a bowl, a tropical, summer scent, and the maid had fixed the room before she had left for the night and all the cushions were crisp and perfect on the couch and chairs. The room was a pleasant hodgepodge of furniture styles, with some early American tables and Victorian chairs in bright silk upholstery and you could tell that an interior decorator had never been allowed past the front door. Home, Archer thought comfortably, home. He could feel himself relaxing, forgetting O’Neill, forgetting the program, forgetting the folded galley sheet in his pocket.

  When he entered the bedroom, carrying the milk and cookies, Kitty was sitting up in bed, the pillows piled behind her, her head in a blue bandana, because she had washed her hair during the evening. She looked absurdly young with her bare, full shoulders and the brilliant handkerchief tied in a bow around her hair, like the pretty girls driving through vacation towns in the summertime on the way to the beach. Archer put the tray down and leaned over and kissed her shoulder. “That’s for lying in bed half-naked,” he said.

  “Ummn,” Kitty said, patting the bed beside her, indicating that she wanted him to sit there. “The service in this establishment is getting better every day.”

  Archer took off his jacket and tossed it over a chair and opened his collar and took off his tie before he sat down on the bed. Kitty sipped her milk, looking like an obedient little girl at early dinner. “I’m gluttonous,” she said. “I’ve been lying here all night, thinking of food. You know what I kept hoping?”

  “What?”

  “I kept hoping somebody would have a flash of inspiration and go into Schrafft’s and buy a pint of ice cream. Coffee ice cream.”

  Archer laughed and patted her knee under the quilt. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I promise tomorrow.”

  “I kept using mental telepathy,” Kitty said, crunching on a cookie. “I said to myself, Now he is walking down the street and he is passing Schrafft’s and the message stops him in his tracks. ‘I hear a voice,’ he says to himself. ‘It says coffee-flavor.’ ” She giggled. “I’m going to weigh three hundred pounds before this is over.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Archer said. “You never looked better in your whole life.”

  “I’m ashamed of myself when I go into the doctor’s office and he puts me on the scales.” Kitty took another cookie. “I can tell from the way he looks at me, he thinks I’m a woman without any self-control.”

  “That’s exactly the kind of wife for me,” Archer said. “Without self-control.”

  “You’re perfect,” Kitty said complacently. “You’re the absolutely perfect husband.”

  “Did you have a good day?” Archer asked. He got up and began to undress.

  “I stayed in bed most of the time. I’m getting real lazy. I didn’t read. I didn’t sew. I didn’t answer the telephone. I didn’t tell Gloria what to order for dinner. I didn’t think a single thought. Are you ashamed of me because I’m so lazy?”

  “Uhuh.” Archer took off his shirt and held it indecisively in his hand for a moment.

  “In the closet,” Kitty said warningly. “Hang it up. I can tell you’re deciding to throw it on the chair.”

  Archer grinned as he went into the large closet, with his clothes hanging on one side and Kitty’s dresses a row of colors on the other. “Some day,” he said, as he hung up his clothes and put on his pajama bottoms in the closet, “you’re going to go too far with your mind-reading act.”

  “Isn’t it infuriating?” Kitty agreed complacently.

  Archer came out of the closet, putting on the pajama jacket.

  “What a nice thing,” Kitty said, watching him.

  “What a nice thing?”

  “You have no belly. The first sign I saw of a belly, I’d have to leave for Reno. And I’d hate that. And be careful of your neck, too.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my neck,” Archer said, defensively, feeling it with his two hands.

  “All I said was, be careful. I hate the way some men’s necks jut out past their ears.”

  “My,” Archer said, buttoning his pajamas and looking down at her, smiling, “you’re a hard woman to live with.”

  “I want you to be beautiful,” Kitty said. “That’s not much to ask for, is it?” She put the empty glass on the table, sighing. “Oh, those cookies are sinful,” she said. “Was it nice out in the world today?”

  Archer hesitated. No, he thought, what’s the sense in telling her?

  “OK,” he said, sitting on the edge of his bed, a table’s distance away from Kitty’s. “Did you like the program?”

  “Oh, darling,” Kitty said guiltily. “I forgot to listen. I was just dozing here and I forgot. Will you forgive me?”

  Archer chuckled. “Just don’t tell the sponsor.”

  “I’m getting so rattlebrained,” Kitty apologized. “I never remember anything. I guess becoming a mother at such an advanced age is a drain on the brain. I just lie here thinking whether I want the child to have blue eyes and whether he’s going to be bald by the time he’s twenty-five.” She put out her hand and touched Archer. “Am I offending you, darling?” she asked.

  “I’m going to my club,” Archer said gravely. “Please have my mail forwarded.”

  “You’re perfect, Clement, you know that,” Kitty said. “But it isn’t really disloyal to hope the boy keeps his hair, is it?”

  “No,” Archer said. “How do you know it’s going to be a
boy?”

  “The way he kicks. He marches up and down all day like a company of Marines. When I had Jane she just used to give me little ladylike nudges from time to time. Oh—Jane’s coming down from school for the week-end. A boy is taking her to the theatre, but we have to give them dinner tomorrow night because the boy is poor, Jane says. If I’m feeling tired, do you think you can manage it by yourself?”

  “If the boy doesn’t patronize me,” Archer said, “like the last one she had here. The organic-chemistry boy.”

  “Oh,” said Kitty, “she’s through with him. He did something boring at a dance. Isn’t it nice, Jane’s not being ashamed of having a mother who’s pregnant?”

  “Now, Kitty,” Archer said, “that’s preposterous.”

  “She’s so grownup and modern, Jane,” Kitty said. “Everything amuses her, even her parents. I know if my mother had started to swell when I was eighteen, I’d have hidden in the corner of the church for days.”

  “You were pregnant yourself by the time you were nineteen,” Archer said. “Let me remind you.”

  “That’s an entirely different matter,” Kitty said primly. “Aren’t you going to wash your teeth before you go to bed?”

  Archer rubbed a finger reflectively over his front teeth. “No,” he decided.

  “Why not?”

  “My mouth tastes so good,” he said. “All the nice food I’ve had, all the good liquor. I like to wake up during the night and run my tongue around my teeth and remember how well I’ve eaten all day. Instead of that miserable peppermint and disinfectant flavor.”

  “You’re a dirty man,” Kitty said. “I’m married to a real dirty man. Isn’t this nice?” she said. “Isn’t this the best part of the day, just sitting here gossiping like this at night?”

  “Yes, dearest,” Archer said gently.

  “I think I’m going to stay in bed most of the time now,” Kitty said. “I get tired when I walk around and I don’t want anything bad to happen. And I’m not interested in anything else. I just want to lie here and doze and wait for you to come home.”

  “You ought to take up something,” Archer said. “Knitting, needlepoint, something. A hobby.”

  “I only have one hobby,” Kitty said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You.”

  They chuckled together.

  Archer reached over and put out the light.

  “You coming in here for awhile?” Kitty’s voice was elaborately arch in the darkness.

  “I can’t sleep that way.”

  “But I can.” Kitty giggled, as Archer got into bed beside her.

  She lay on his outthrown arm and kissed his neck. “Clement, Clement,” she whispered, then stretched out on her back. “I feel so good today,” she said. “This is the first day I felt really good. I could even bear the taste of the lipstick today and I tried smelling my perfume and there were actually two bottles I could stand.” Her voice rambled off and in a moment or two, close beside him, she was asleep.

  Archer listened to her breathing and the domestic rustle of the curtains at the window. No wonder women live longer than men, he thought. They know how to sleep.

  Conscientiously, he closed his eyes and pretended to himself that he was drowsy. I mustn’t think about it now, he thought. I’ll be up all night and then, tomorrow, when I really have to make decisions, I’ll be uncertain and exhausted. Not now, he thought, not now. O’Neill. Pokorny, Weller, Atlas, Motherwell, Herres. Archer. Herres. Keep your eyes closed. You have two weeks. Take ten deep breaths and put your hands flat on the blanket. Archer. Herres. What do you really know about your friend? Is accuracy possible after the blunting years of habit and affection? Who knows his friend? Who dares to add up the facts of fifteen years, the jokes, the conversations at night, the journeys, the parties, the crises and disasters, and say at the end—“Here he is. This is what he is like …”?

  Archer had first seen Vic Herres in History 22, Europe from the Renaissance to the Congress of Vienna, Required for Degree. An Indian summer afternoon, with the windows of the classroom all open and the trees still deep green and everybody a little sleepy after lunch. Fifteen years ago, with the old creased map of Europe in 1600 hanging from a hook behind Archer and the smell of the lawn and all the girls with bare brown arms. The academic year lurking ahead like a beartrap. Everybody dreamy and still attached to the memories of summer and wishing they were swimming or taking a nap in the sun or walking through the woods. Everybody resentful of Europe from the Renaissance to the Congress of Vienna. Archer, thirty years old, fiddling with his notes on his desk, waited for the bell to ring and the year begin, glancing surreptitiously out over the class, wondering what they were thinking of him. Especially the girls. (“Why, he’s bald! A true, historic, ancient, old crock.”) He must remember, Archer thought, waiting for the bell, and regarding the class with hostility, not to keep rubbing the naked top of his head. Keep that ammunition, at least, out of the hands of the remorseless imitators in the class.

  Then a tall boy wearing a bow tie had sauntered in, holding hands with a pretty girl. That was Herres. The boy and girl had seated themselves in the last row of chairs, on the end. They were expecting to talk about a lot of other things besides history for the next five months, that far away from his desk, Archer thought grimly, and looked at Herres closely. Flunking material, he decided. Then he saw that the boy had a big raw bump on the bridge of his nose and a black eye. Unreasonably, he was annoyed with the boy, as though it was deliberately rude to approach Louis the Fourteenth and Robespierre with a black eye. Also, he was wearing a better suit than Archer. And rather than disfiguring him, the swelling on his nose and the purple lines around the eye socket gave him a dashing and mocking appearance. A wealthy rowdy, Archer judged, probably with an open roadster of his own, and a big hand with the campus girls and the waitresses downtown. And thick straight blond hair, cut very close, to crown it all. And the girl next to him looking up at him as though she was ready to melt into her seat at a kind word from him. The secret stresses that instructors were exposed to, that no course on education ever took into account.

  Then the bell rang and the year began and Archer called the roll. Herres answered with a clipped, “Here” and Archer remembered the name. Quarterback on the football team, another mark against him. Probably there’d be a hearty, embarrassed visit from Samson, the coach, in a month or two, with a plea to keep the boy eligible until Thanksgiving, even though he cut half his classes. Not this time, Samson, old boy, Archer resolved in advance, not for this particular young hero in a bow tie. He can come in with both eyes closed and swinging on crutches after scoring twenty touchdowns on Saturday afternoon, but I won’t give an inch.

  That was how he saw Vic and Nancy Herres, who was then Nancy MacDonald, for the first time.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Archer had said, after reaching Zimmerman on his alphabetical list and ascertaining that Mr. Zimmerman was present and ready for knowledge, “ladies and gentlemen, we are all the captives of history. In a double sense. First, we are all here in this room on this pleasant afternoon, when we would prefer being some place else, because this is a required course and autumn has officially begun.” There had been the usual tentative polite chuckles, although not from Herres or his girl, and Archer went on. “And second, because, here in the middle of America, in 1935, all our actions are in some measure the result of certain decisions made in Paris in 1780 and certain books written by dead foreigners in the early part of the nineteenth century …” Well, it was all banal enough, but you had to begin somewhere, and every teacher of anything had his own standard openings to lead the way into the routine of a term.

  Herres had surprised him. He cut no classes, listened carefully, whispered very seldom to the pretty girl at his side while others were talking, seemed to take no notes, but answered swiftly and easily in his cool, confident voice, was witty on occasion without being a clown, and obviously had read a great deal more on the subject than anyone els
e in the class. Archer was first surprised, then suspicious, and finally grateful to have someone like that in his class. He began to look forward to History 22 and prepare it more thoroughly than any other of his courses and allow many more digressions and tangential debates because the whole class seemed to learn more quickly and interestedly because of Herres’ lead. When, in the middle of the season, Herres came up to his desk and in his casual and offhand manner offered Archer two tickets for the next football game, he was pleased and said he’d be delighted to go, although he had been religiously devoting Saturdays and Sundays to writing a play on Napoleon III that he had high hopes for.

  The stadium was really nothing more than two sets of field stands with a wooden fence around them, but there was a gala air about it, with the stands filled and the bands playing during the pre-game practice and the flags snapping in the raw October breeze. Herres had given Archer tickets high up in the stands, saying, “It’s the only place you can make any sense out of a football game. Down low, it’ll just look like a mob of ruffians beating each other over the head for two hours.” Seated in the last row, between Kitty, who had bought herself a yellow chrysanthemum for the occasion and who looked younger than most of the students this afternoon, and Nancy MacDonald, who was playing hostess in a grave, adult manner, Archer could see over the fence through the bare trees, down the hill to the buildings of the college. They looked peaceful and solid in the gray afternoon and for a moment he felt deeply attached to them and glad that he was spending his life here.