The Troubled Air

by Irwin Shaw

  “And all that,” Archer said nervously, not wishing to be thanked.

  “All right.” Nancy smiled, recognizing Archer’s self-consciousness. “I won’t praise you. I won’t tell you that you’re a lovely friend and the perfect godfather and that if you only had hair you’d be too good to be true …”

  “Nancy, darling …” Archer put the pipe into his mouth defensively. “The old man is in pain.”

  “But I have one thing to say,” Nancy said growing very grave again. “About tonight. You’ve done enough. I don’t want you to be hurt. Not for Vic or for me or for anyone else. Think hard, Clement. Tonight may turn out to be very bad. Awful. It may take years to recover from. Or maybe you’ll never be able to recover from it. Think of yourself. Please. If you think you have to go for your own reasons, OK. But not for Vic. Do you hear me, Clement? Not for Vic.”

  Archer stared down at her for a moment, puzzled. Without taking his eyes from the youngish, delicately lined, intense face so close to his, he put his pipe down behind him. Then he took her softly in his arms and kissed her. She was rigid next to him, and her arms around him gripped him with convulsive force.

  He kissed her cheek gently again, holding her lightly. There was the sound of Kitty’s slow, heavy footsteps and Kitty came into the room.

  Archer patted Nancy’s shoulder, then dropped his arms. “You still smell delicious,” he said, smiling.

  The phone rang when they were all in the hall, saying good-bye. Archer picked it up, watching the two women at the open door.

  “Archer?” A voice asked.

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “None of your God-damn business,” the voice said. “It won’t be long now, brother, that’s all I wanted to say …”

  Archer made himself smile because the two women had stopped talking and were watching him.

  “We’re going to get you and every bastard like you,” the voice said, not very loud, not very excited, sounding almost as if the man were slightly bored with what he was saying, as though he had said it many times before. “Watch out now, brother, because we …”

  Archer hung up. “The man from the telephone company,” he said, going over to the door. “He wants to know if the reception is clear.”

  The women didn’t say anything. He stood with his arm around Kitty at the open door, watching Nancy go down the steps, slender, wonderfully pretty and youthful-looking at this distance in her silly, charming hat. Cassandra, he thought, half-humorously, still puzzling over the veiled warning Nancy had given him. Cassandra in silk stockings and a funny hat, going off to hire a children’s nurse after her obscure prophecy. Was Cassandra pretty too, and what occupied her time between warnings?

  The telephone was ringing, and he closed the door and went back into the hall with Kitty. He picked up the phone and by the tone of the voice which asked for Clement Archer he knew what it was. He put the phone down on the table and watched it placidly as louder and louder noises came from it.

  “At a distance of four feet,” he said mildly to Kitty, who was looking frightened again, “it’s no worse than a bad cold.”

  He let the voice shout away, not hearing any of the words, just getting an impression of senseless truculence and exasperation from the instrument. Kitty passed him, almost running, as though even that undistinguishable small flood of mechanical sound was too much for her to bear. Archer watched Kitty disappear into the living room. The man on the phone must have been shouting at the top of his voice, because now and then Archer could just make out words like “Communist” and “bastard.” I wonder, Archer thought, what the fellow who is monitoring this phone is going to make out of this day’s conversation. If he’s a well-brought-up young man with a distaste for profanity and blasphemy, he’s going to have a bad hour or two.

  The voice stopped and there was a click on the phone. Archer picked it up and listened for the dial tone. Then he called the operator and asked for the business office.

  A crisp, pleasant young woman’s voice spoke in the name of the telephone company, eager for service.

  “I’d like to disconnect this phone temporarily,” Archer said, after giving his name and number. “I’m going out of town.”

  “Yes, Mr. Archer,” the voice said. “When would you like us to cut the service?”

  “Immediately,” Archer said. “As soon as I hang up.”

  “Would you like us to have the calls transferred to another number,” the young lady asked, “so that you can get any messages?”

  “No, thank you,” Archer said. “I don’t expect any messages.”

  “When would you like us to resume service?” the young lady asked.

  Never, Archer thought. In the year 2000. On the first date that civilization sets in. “I’ll call you,” Archer said. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Archer. Have a pleasant trip.”

  “Thanks.” Archer hung up. Did she say that, he wondered idly, out of the goodness of her own heart or is it something she’s told to do by the company in the interests of better relations with the subscribers?

  He went into the living room. Kitty was carrying a large wooden armchair across the floor to a spot near the window. It was heavy and she had to carry it very high to avoid knocking over a vase of flowers that was on a coffee table. She was panting and her face was strained.

  “What’re you doing, Kitty?” Archer went over and tried to take the chair from her.

  “Oh, no,” Kitty said. “Leave it alone. I want to do this myself.”

  Archer fell back a little. “What’re you moving the chair for?” he asked again, feeling puzzled and helpless.

  “I want to change this room around,” Kitty said. She put the chair down near the window and stepped back several feet and regarded it critically. “I’m bored with the way this room looks.” She picked the chair up again and carried it to a position in front of the other window. Archer watched silently while she made two more trips across the room for an end table and a lamp. She bent to get the lamp plug out of the wall socket and had to push herself up laboriously to stand erect again and he could hear her breath coming short and hard.

  “You shouldn’t tire yourself, darling,” Archer said carefully. He didn’t like the intense, distant expression in Kitty’s face as she bustled about, her full skirt swinging, bumping clumsily into tables and the backs of chairs. Kitty didn’t answer him. She didn’t seem even to have heard him.

  “I told the telephone company to disconnect the phone,” Archer said, trying to gain her attention. “We won’t be bothered by those hoodlums any more.”

  “That’s fine,” Kitty said, painfully sinking to her knees to put the plug into the new socket. “Now we’re completely cut off from everything. Modern living.”

  Archer stared at her. When she sounds like that, he thought, there’s no sense in talking to her. He started into the study, but at the door, he couldn’t resist trying one more time. “Kitty, darling,” he said plaintively, “I wish you’d leave the room alone. I think it looks great just as it is.”

  Kitty was carrying a screen now to put behind the armchair. “Don’t you have some work to do?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you take care of your department and let me take care of my department, please.” Her tone was sharp, annoyed, unreasonable, and she kept fiddling with the screen, moving it a few inches one way, then another, never looking over at Archer. Archer shrugged and went into the study, closing the door behind him.

  There was still a faint fragrance from Nancy’s perfume in the study and Archer decided not to light a pipe for a moment, so that he could enjoy it. On the other side of the door, he could hear Kitty moving furniture around. The sounds were sudden and nervous, as though Kitty was jerking irritably at things that were too heavy for her.

  Archer sat down at his desk and got out some sheets of paper. He decided against using the typewriter. This should be simple and personal, he thought. Somehow, using pencil and wr
iting by hand seemed more personal.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he wrote. He stopped and closed his eyes, trying to imagine what the room in the St. Regis would be like that night, and who would be there. There would undoubtedly be some ladies and gentlemen, among the others. There would also be thieves, plagiarists, gossips, Communists, non-Communists, anti-Communists, Fascists, nymphomaniacs, drunkards, pederasts, and several persons who, everyone in the room would know, were certain to be committed for the rest of their lives to lunatic asylums within the next few years. All these would be sitting there, waiting to be convinced—of what? Many of them would gladly stand by and watch various other of the assembled artists put to death. The only thing that linked them was that they made their livings from the radio, television and the theatre.

  Archer opened his eyes. He put a neat pencil line under the words, Ladies and Gentlemen. For emphasis.

  He began to write, slowly at first, then more fluently as the arguments developed in his mind.

  “As I look around me,” he wrote, already envisioning himself standing on a platform in a crowded room, “I am struck by one fact—how different everyone in the room here is from everybody else. This is a more or less typical American group, so there is bound to be a typically American difference of opinion and belief represented here. All shades of political thought are collected here and I am sure that at election time every conceivable, party finds support from certain sections of this audience. There are Communists here and there are Fascists here, although I trust there are very few of either of these persuasions, and there are Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, prohibitionists and single-taxers. The divisions among us are easy to find. What we have to find here tonight is the tie that has collected us in this room and which unites us.”

  There was a muffled, sliding sound from the living room, and Archer frowned as he heard it, thinking of Kitty, restless and unhappy, pushing too-heavy furniture from place to place. He reread what he had written and decided it was too stilted. The best thing, he decided, would be to jot down the topics he wanted to cover, with a phrase here or there for further guidance, and speak extemporaneously from his notes when the time came.

  “One link,” he wrote. “All artists. Some craft as Melville. Duse. Stanislavski. Examples of repression other times. Dostoyevsky. D. H. Lawrence. Obscenity. Different issue. Vindictiveness of penalty. Victor Hugo. Published from exile. Worse now. Concept of limitless punishment. …”

  He wrote slowly and neatly in his orderly handwriting, numbering topics, Roman numeral One, Roman numeral Two, sub-heading A, sub-sub-heading Arabic one, dimly conscious as he was working of how many times in the past, when he was preparing his lectures in college, he had sat like this in a quiet room, writing, “Causes of the French Revolution, Roman numeral One, Literary. Sub-heading A, Rousseau. Influence of. Sub-heading B. Voltaire. Roman numeral Two. Political. Luxury of Court. Excessive Taxes. Lettres de cachet …”

  He worked methodically, enjoying his trained, academic ability for organization, remembering the quiet pleasure of distant afternoons. One thing is different, he thought wryly, as he glanced over the long yellow pages. At the end of those lectures I didn’t have to tell the student to do anything. I didn’t have to advise them to find a barricade or put their heads under the guillotine. The advantages of history, past, to history, present.

  There was a crash from the living room, and the tinkle of glass. Archer jumped up and ran over to the door and threw it open. Kitty was standing in the middle of the room, looking down at a lamp that lay broken into dozens of pieces on the floor.

  The room looked torn apart. Chairs were piled together at one side, the couch was out from the wall at a crazy angle, end tables were scattered haphazardly around, the rug showed flattened, lighter patches where pieces of furniture had been standing for years. Kitty stood in the middle of the confusion, staring down at the pieces of broken glass, saying, “Damn, oh, damn.” She was flushed an alarming red and her hair was disarranged, with tendrils of it plastered to her forehead, where she was perspiring.

  “Here,” Archer said, going over to her, “you sit down. I’ll pick this up.”

  “Leave me alone,” Kitty said. She got down heavily on one knee and began to pile the bits of jagged milky glass together. “I’m doing this.”

  “I’ll help you,” Archer said, bending and carefully picking up some of the larger portions of the glass.

  “I don’t need any help,” Kitty said loudly. “I don’t want your help. Go back to your work.” She lifted her head and stared angrily at him, collecting the wrecked pieces of the glass together without looking at what she was doing.

  “Now, Kitty,” Archer said gently. “I know you’re upset but there’s no reason …”

  “Oh!” Kitty cried out. She looked down at her hand. A long thin seam appeared pink on the palm, then turned red, then the blood began to seep out of it and run down her wrist. She held her hand up stupidly like a child who has been hurt, but hasn’t decided yet how badly.

  “Here,” Archer said quietly. He stood up and helped her to her feet. “Let’s fix that. Sit down and hold your hand up so it won’t bleed too much. I’ll get some bandage.”

  Kitty sat down obediently on a wooden chair next to a table that was standing out in the middle of the room. Archer put her elbow on the table and she sat there, with her hand pointed up, the blood running in a thin stream down her arm, which was bare now that the loose sleeve of her dress had fallen back. The blood was coming slowly and spreading out into little new streams like the tributaries of a river on the map.

  “Oh,” Kitty said, “I’m so silly. I’m so damned silly.”

  Archer hurried upstairs to the bathroom and filled a basin with water and found the iodine and some bandage. When he got down to the living room again, Kitty was sitting as he had left her, resting her elbow on the table, looking curiously at the palm of her hand and the slowly lengthening red streaks down her arm. She didn’t say anything as Archer gently washed the blood away and she didn’t even wince when he put the iodine on the long, shallow cut. He bandaged the hand swiftly and made a neat bow to hold it in place.

  “Now,” he said, “will you sit still?”

  “Look at this room,” Kitty said. She almost smiled. “We look as though we’ve had two different sets of movers in here with two different sets of instructions. One to move us in, the other to move us out.”

  “I’ll tell Gloria to put everything back where it was. You go up and lie down.”

  “I had to do something,” Kitty said, turning her head away from him. She didn’t move her hand. She kept it in the same position, like a child proud of her bandage. “I couldn’t sit still in here today, expecting the phone to ring, then remembering that it was turned off and that nobody could reach us.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Archer said. “In one day you’ll probably get to love not having a phone.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek lightly. Her skin was warm and damp.

  “You put on such a lovely bandage,” Kitty said gravely. “And you were so fast and efficient. And you didn’t yell at me at all.”

  “You were very brave,” Archer said, smiling, “during the entire operation.”

  Suddenly Kitty shivered, as though she had a chill. “I don’t want to be brave,” she whispered. “I never want to be brave.” She stood up and touched Archer’s arm with her bandaged hand. “Clement,” she said, in a very low voice, “you’re not going to that meeting tonight, are you?”

  Archer hesitated. “Let’s not talk about it right now, darling.”

  “When should we talk about it?” Archer was surprised at the violence in Kitty’s voice. “After we’re on relief?”

  “We won’t be on relief,” he said softly.

  “Grow up,” Kitty said harshly. “Come out of the nursery. For once in your life, look at things realistically. What do you think is going to happen to you after you stand up in public tonight and defend Communists? Do you think the N
ational Broadcasting Company will pin a medal on you and sign you to a ninety-nine-year contract?”

  Kitty was holding tightly onto his arms now. He pulled away gently and she released him. He turned and walked back into his study. He couldn’t stand the disordered living room any more, with the piled chairs and the pale spots showing on the carpet and the broken lamp all over the floor. He hoped Kitty wouldn’t follow him. For her sake, he didn’t want to hear what she was thinking. All during their married life she had taken chances with him unhesitatingly and he had always congratulated himself on having a wife with that kind of trust and blind courage. He despised timid women who drained the courage out of their husbands, and he’d told it to her again and again. In the study, he went over to the desk and picked up the pages on which he had been writing his speech. His hands shook a little as he tried to read them, and he didn’t turn around when he heard Kitty follow him into the room.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Kitty said, close behind him. “You can’t hide this time.” She came around to the other side of the desk and faced him. “What’s that you’re so interested in—the speech you’re going to make? Do you want to make sure that you’re making it strong enough, so that if there’s the slightest chance for us now, you can ruin it?”

  “Kitty,” Archer said, with a firmness he didn’t feel, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave me alone today. I …”

  With a sudden, fierce movement, Kitty leaned over and ripped the pages out of his hand.

  “I want to read this,” she said.

  “Give it back to me, Kitty!”

  “I’m interested in my husband’s literary production,” Kitty said, backing off a little, as though she were afraid Archer would wrestle with her for the sheets of paper. “That’s reasonable enough, isn’t it? You were always after me to read those miserable plays of yours and tell you what I thought of them. Why do you want to change now?”