The Troubled Air

by Irwin Shaw

  “I’m not talking like anything.” Kitty was staring at him harshly, the whole effect of frailty and youthfulness which her hair and the loose clothing had given her now vanished from her face. “All I said was actually. Actually. Simple, plain little word. Actually.”

  “I’m sorry about tonight,” Archer said, making an attempt to patch things up. “Maybe we can go tomorrow night.”

  “You might have to work tomorrow night,” Kitty said, feigning concern. “I would hate to interfere with your work. I don’t think a wife ever ought to interfere with a husband’s work, do you?”

  “Oh, cut it out,” Archer said, letting his impatience show. From time to time Kitty was given to jealous, suspicious moods, and they almost always ended in fights and took days to recover from. Tonight, she was obviously having one of her moods. Archer realized that with her uncomfortable pregnancy, she was more liable than ever to these unreasonable seizures and he knew that he should pamper her. But after the painful day he had spent, he felt the need of pampering himself. “Don’t be dreary.”

  “Maybe I can’t help it,” Kitty said, her eyes shining dangerously. “Maybe I’m just dreary by nature. I’m a dreary wife. I just sit home here, throwing up and getting jabbed with needles. I’m not out in the big world doing exciting man’s work. You have to expect me to be dreary.”

  “I’m sorry,” Archer said, resenting being forced into the apology. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Why not? That’s what you meant.”

  “I didn’t mean it.” Archer sighed.

  “Now we enter the sighing department.” Kitty smiled, her mouth making a brittle grimace. “The poor tired artist after a hard day at the office, or wherever he was, being badgered by his stupid wife.”

  “Now, look here, Kitty, what do you want? Do you want a minute-by-minute report on where I’ve been all day?” Even as he said it, he tried to arrange the history of the day plausibly, to account for his time without telling Kitty precisely how he had been involved.

  “I’m not interested,” Kitty said, essaying grandeur. “Not in the least bit.”

  “I had to see various people on the program,” Archer said doggedly. “Some things have come up that had to be cleared up.”

  “What things?”

  “Technical things. It would take too long to explain.”

  “Oh,” Kitty said brightly. “Technical things. That’s convenient, too. I couldn’t be expected to know how to understand technical things. That’s for big, smart, grownup men, not for backward women who only know how to sit home and have babies.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Kitty,” Archer said loudly, “stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “And I’m sure,” Kitty said, ignoring the jibe, “that tonight there are some more technical things to be attended to. Until what time? Eleven? Twelve? Five o’clock in the morning?”

  “I’ll be home by ten o’clock.”

  “Well, thank you, Mr. Archer,” Kitty said in a high, artificial voice. “Don’t trouble yourself on my account. I’ve been home alone all day and I’m sure I can keep myself amused all night. Look, Clement,” she said evenly, “I’m not blind. I’ve been able to see that something’s happening. You’ve been locked in yourself for days now. I haven’t been able to connect with you at all. If that’s the way you want it, that’s all right with me. Only don’t lie about it.”

  “I’m not lying,” Archer said desperately. “I had to see Motherwell today, and Atlas, and Alice Weller, and I went to Mrs. Creighton’s for a workout.”

  “Motherwell and Atlas,” Kitty nodded, pretending to be reasonable. “You’ve been doing the program for four years and seeing them once a week, on Thursday, and now you have to spend the whole week with them.”

  “It isn’t the whole week,” Archer said wearily. “And something special has come up.”

  “What?” Kitty challenged him.

  “Nothing important.” Archer started to sigh and checked it. “It’s too boring to talk about.”

  “Too boring. Of course. How good of you to spare me!”

  “Please,” Archer said. “I’m tired and I’d like my dinner. I have to be at Pokorny’s at eight o’clock.”

  “You’re hiding something from me,” Kitty said loudly. “I can tell. Something bad. You don’t have to tell me. I don’t want to know. I just want you to know that you’re not fooling me.”

  “I’m not trying to fool you. I …”

  “You’re pushing me out,” Kitty went on, her voice rising and bitter. “You’re building a wall and putting me on the other side. You’re mixed up in something, and I’m helpless here, stuck in this house, sick, looking like this …” She stared down bitterly at the ungainly swell of her skirt. “My skin’s bad and my hair is awful and I look terrible, and you’re escaping.”

  Then he knew he would have to tell her. He went over to her and gently took her hands. “Kitty, darling,” he said, conscious that she was keeping her hands limp and unfriendly within his, “listen carefully. You’re right. I have been hiding something. I am mixed up in something. I tried to keep it from you because I didn’t want to upset you. I’m sorry I was so clumsy about it and made you worry.”

  Slowly, the hard, suspicious expression on Kitty’s face was dissolving and Archer could feel her hands gripping his now as she looked into his eyes.

  “It’s about the program,” Archer said, choosing his words thoughtfully. “It has nothing to do with you or me.” Then he told her what had been happening, starting with the conversation with O’Neill on Thursday night. He spoke calmly, trying to make the situation sound annoying and unpleasant rather than dangerous, and he didn’t tell Kitty about his offer to quit his job. She listened intently as he told her of his interviews with Motherwell, Atlas and Alice Weller.

  “I haven’t been able to speak with Vic yet,” Archer said, “and I don’t want to make any move until I do. In the meantime,” he smiled ruefully, “when you see me sitting in a chair and staring at the ceiling, you’ll know I’m reflecting on Karl Marx and not about blondes or redheads.”

  Kitty smiled, too, but grew sober immediately. “Thank you for telling me,” she said. “You be as quiet and as moody as you want. If you want to talk about it to me at any time, I’m here. If you’d rather forget about it when you’re home, I’ll understand. And whatever you decide to do about it finally is OK with me. Whatever it is, I know it’ll be right …”

  “Kitty … Kitty …” Archer said softly. “Imagine a wife saying that to her husband after nineteen years of marriage!”

  Kitty kissed him swiftly. “I mean it,” she said soberly. “I mean it absolutely.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Archer said. “Oh, God, I hope you’re right.”

  He pulled her to him and kissed her, hard. They were standing that way when Gloria came in and said, “Dinner’s ready, Mis’ Archer,” and they moved apart, laughing a little embarrassedly, because people didn’t kiss like that in front of the maid after they had been married nineteen years.

  12

  ARCHER SAT ACROSS THE TABLE AND WATCHED POKORNY EAT. LUCKILY, Mrs. Pokorny wasn’t home, and Archer could not help glancing at the clock, hoping to get the discussion finished before she returned. The tendency to look away from Pokorny was strong, anyway. He was dressed in a bright orange rayon dressing-gown and had a rumpled towel around his neck. The dressing-gown was stained with old food, and as Pokorny brought up his spoon from the soup bowl before him, holding the spoon with all his fingers, his knuckles fistlike and clumsy over the handle, new drippings were added to the collection on the dressing-gown with each mouthful. Pokorny also ate very noisily, making avid sucking sounds as the liquid went in over his false teeth. With the soup he ate thick slices of bread, filling his mouth incessantly, as though he weren’t sure he would ever eat again. He needed a shave and his skin was greenish and lumpy under his uncombed gray hair. He kept shuffling his carpet-slippered feet constantly, in a hasty rhythm, in time wit
h the shovel-like motions of the spoon.

  How much easier it is, Archer thought, as he talked, to pity a man with good table manners.

  He had been brief, frank and thorough with Pokorny. Deception, he had decided, which might be kindlier at the moment, would be more painful in the long run. “So,” he said, concluding, “Hutt was absolutely firm about you. He says he has information that you perjured yourself to get into the country and that the Immigration Department is going to call you up on it. And to save the others, I had to agree about you.”

  “Yes. Of course.” Pokorny made a particularly wet noise with a spoonful of soup and a damp lump of bread. “I understand. It is necessary to try to save the others. You are my friend. I am convinced.” His teeth seemed to slide moistly behind his wet bow lips. Archer found himself looking away, fixing his attention on the carved cuckoo clock on the wall, trying to make no judgment on the unprepossessing face across the table. “It is good of you to tell me the truth. The others—the other agency—they didn’t tell me anything. Just good-bye. No explanation.” He took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth. “That is not polite. I worked for them for three years. I deserved better than that. And I knew the Immigration was investigating me again. They went to friends of mine, asking questions, and my friends called me.” Pokorny resumed the nervous, greedy rhythm of his eating. “I thought there was a connection, but I wasn’t sure. Mr. Hutt is my enemy.”

  “No,” Archer said gently. “It’s not that. He’s being careful, according to his lights.”

  “He is my enemy,” Pokorny said. “I know. I have seen the way he looked at me. I know how it is when people look at me like that.”

  Archer tried to remember if he had noticed any special expression in Hutt’s face when he talked to Pokorny. “That’s the way he looks at everybody,” Archer said, trying to make Pokorny keep from feeling singularly persecuted. “He has a cold manner.”

  “Very cold.” Pokorny nodded vigorously. “Very special for me. Also—the conservatory where I teach. Harmony and counterpoint. They are dropping me too for next term.”

  “I’m sorry,” Archer said, looking at the grand piano, messily covered with music sheets, that made the living room seem small and crowded.

  “I expected it,” Pokorny said. “When it begins to happen bad, everything goes bad.”

  “Don’t be too downhearted, Manfred,” Archer said, trying to sound hopeful, and forcing himself to look directly at the composer. “It’s not over yet. If you get a clean bill of health from the Immigration authorities, I’m sure you can come back and …”

  “I’m not going to get a clean bill of health from the Immigration authorities.” Pokorny leaned over and filled his plate again from the heavy crockery tureen in the middle of the table. “My wife. My ex-wife. She has been talking to them. She’s out of her mind. She walks the streets, but she is out of her mind. She hates me. I know some of the things she tells the Government. Finally, she will be happy. I’ll be sent back to Austria and she will be happy.”

  “Don’t be so pessimistic,” Archer said, annoyed at Pokorny’s quick surrender to despair. “I’m sure you’ll get a chance to give all the facts.”

  “All the facts.” Pokorny tried to laugh, but his eyes, behind his glasses, misted over by the steam from the soup, were frightened and sober. “Why do you think that all the facts will do me any good?”

  “The truth is, Manfred,” Archer said, as Pokorny bent low over his, plate, “the truth is I’ve known you a long time and I’ve never heard you say anything that anyone could possibly hold against you.”

  “Yes,” Pokorny said. “Maybe you will come and say that to the Inspector.”

  “Of course,” Archer said, feeling uneasily that he would rather not. “Anytime you need a witness.”

  “Oh, I will need a witness. I will need hundreds of witnesses. Let me advise you something, Mr. Archer. Be careful. Don’t be too good a friend to me. You will be hurt, too.”

  “Nonsense,” Archer said sharply. “I won’t tell any lies. I’ll just say what I know about you.”

  “What do you know about me?” Pokorny looked up from his soup, his mouth quivering. “If I may beg your pardon, you know nothing. What have we ever said to each other? We work on the program, you say, ‘Manfred, I need fifteen seconds of music here. The music last week was good. Or the music last week was just so-so, let’s make it better next week.’ You’re polite to me. You listen to me even when I am unreasonable and I talk too fast. You make a little fun of me, how excitable I am, the way I dress when I am not there …” Pokorny spread his hand and shook his head as though to forestall denial. “No, no. I don’t care. It is without malice, because you are not a malicious man, Mr. Archer. It is friendly, it is a human comment on my personality. But more fundamentally, have we ever touched? This is the first time you have ever been to my house. You have not met my wife. I have been to your house only to work once in awhile, and after the work is over, we don’t know what to say to each other. I wait for five minutes and I leave. Now, all of a sudden, you find yourself involved in my troubles. I wouldn’t blame you if you said, ‘What is that funny little man to me? He is a machine I take out of the closet every Thursday night. The machine is now out of order, I will get another machine.’ ”

  “That isn’t the way it is at all,” Archer said quietly.

  “No,” Pokorny said. “Of course not. I know it isn’t. All I was saying is that I wouldn’t blame you …”

  “I came up here, Manfred,” said Archer, forcing himself to look at the wild-haired little man, bent over the plate, inaccurately spooning up soup, “to help you if I could.”

  “Why?” Pokorny sat up, spoon caught in midair, and looked challengingly at Archer.

  “Because I admire you as an artist. Because you wrote music for me conscientiously and well for three years,” Archer said, feeling that this was only a small part of the truth, if it was true at all. “Because I know you. Maybe that’s it.”

  “Would you still want to help me,” Pokorny asked, bending down again, “if I told you that Mr. Hutt was right? If you knew that I did perjure myself to enter the country?”

  Everybody is guilty of everything, Archer thought sinkingly. Nobody is innocent of any charge. Describe a crime and I will find a friend to fit it. “That would depend,” Archer said, feeling that he was being evasive, “on all the facts.”

  “All the facts.” Pokorny pushed the plate away from him. He took out his handkerchief again and wiped his mouth, not quite catching all the leakage. “If I give you all the facts, will you keep them secret?”

  “I can’t promise anything. Don’t tell me anything you feel it would be harmful for me to know.”

  “Then you would feel I was hiding something from you,” Pokorny said, peering near-sightedly at Archer. “You would begin to believe everything you heard about me, because you could not check. I would be a question mark in your brain. ‘Pokorny,’ you would say, ‘he is a doubtful character. He must have plenty to hide.’ All right!” Pokorny stood up abruptly, the orange robe swinging open to reveal a pudgy, pale, hairless breast. “I will tell you everything. What’s the difference? I can’t lie, anyway. I don’t have the temperament to hide anything. My face is my own lie-detector. The portable model. Ask me a question, I get nervous, in a minute I give the answer, even if I know I should keep quiet. It’s the way I am. I am like the radio networks—I am on the air twenty-four hours a day.” He laughed weakly at his own joke, then padded over to a library table on which there was a plate of grapes. He offered the grapes to Archer. “Would you like some? In the middle of the winter. The American way of life. Refrigeration. From the Argentine.” He stuffed five or six of the grapes into his mouth, tearing them off the main stem with his teeth and chewing them, seeds and all. “Tasteless,” he said thickly, carrying the plate with him and coming back to the table and sitting down. “I eat all the time. It is a disease. I feel that there is a hollow in me. The doctor says I am overweig
ht. The arteries are undecided. They do not know whether they should continue working for me or give their notice.” He chuckled again, morbidly, as he put some more grapes into his mouth. “The doctor says I must lose twenty-five pounds or he cannot be responsible. I tell him I don’t like to be responsible for my arteries, either, but the doctor doesn’t laugh, he doesn’t enjoy the European type of humor in the medical field. The calories, he says, are disastrous, he predicts a stroke. I tell him about the hollow inside me, but he says it is all psychological. He is young, very modern, he is always saying ‘psychosomatic.’ When I die, he will try to perform an autopsy, I’m sure. He looks at me and I can see it in his eye. He is bothered already he will have to cut through so much fat. He will investigate and write a paper on the psychosomatic hollows in Viennese composers with blood pressure. See—I finally have found I can have a conversation with you. Trouble—it loosens the tongue, gives you subject for discussion. The facts.” Pokorny ran his tongue around his teeth, sucking at grapeskin. “I promised the facts. And you promised nothing. It is my kind of bargain. That’s what my wife would tell me. She is a woman who does not have any illusions about me. You will meet her later, but please do not take everything she says too seriously. She is disappointed in the world—for my sake. She thinks I am neglected and she hits back. Ah—I see you are moving your feet. You are impatient. You are saying, he is a disorderly fat man. Why doesn’t he come to the point?”

  “Take your time,” Archer said carefully, recognizing that Pokorny was nervously postponing the moment when he would have to expose himself. “I have nothing else to do tonight.”

  Pokorny pushed the plate of grapes away from him. “Don’t tell her that I had grapes. She is scientific, too, she knows all about sugar content and fat deposits in the blood vessels. All Americans are scientific, there are amazing articles every Sunday in the New York Times. She is opposed to my having a stroke. She calls the doctor on the phone and informs on me. She says, ‘He had two rolls and a quarter of pound of butter for breakfast.’ She tells me if I have a stroke and I am paralyzed I will have to find another wife. She is trying to frighten me into being young and healthy. She is very fond of me. She sits and listens to me play my compositions on the piano and she closes her eyes and cries. She has no more ear than a camel, but she cries just the same, out of loyalty. The doctor said sex was dangerous, too. He is very modern, he calls it relations. The strain on the heart muscles. Everything is dangerous these days, grapes, your wife, writing music for the radio. It’s the times we live in. When I was younger, it never occurred to us—food, love and music might be fatal.” Pokorny sat hunched over the table, restlessly playing with the stained towel around his throat, opening it, pulling it closer, talking more and more swiftly, as though his thoughts were rushing to his tongue, as though the necessity of talking on one subject to a man he had barely spoken to before this had freed a flood of other information that had to come out, in an eruption of confession. Archer tried to keep his face impassive. He listened carefully, attempting to catch and remember the word here and there that was useful in the spate of revelations. Conscientiously, he tried to keep himself from being disgusted or critical or pitying.