by Alfred Hayes
4
I TOOK a hot shower and went to bed. Occasionally, a car went by in the street; occasionally, there was the sound of a bird in a tree. I did not feel, in the darkness, lost or in despair or even unhappy. My throat burned a little, but that was because I smoked too much: it seemed somewhat ironic to have only that as a concern lying there in the darkness. I’d been coming here now, to this place, off and on for about five years. I’d work for a few months at one of the studios and then I’d go back to New York. It was not a disadvantageous arrangement. I did not feel, or at least I did not think I felt, superior to the things which concerned these people here. At this very moment, the town was full of people lying in bed thinking with an intense, an inexhaustible, an almost raging passion of becoming famous if they weren’t already famous, and even more famous if they were; or of becoming wealthy if they weren’t already wealthy, or wealthier if they were; or powerful if they weren’t powerful now, and more powerful if they already were. There were times when the intensity with which they wanted these things impressed me. There was even, at times, a certain legitimacy to their desires. But it seemed to me, or at least it had seemed to me in the few years I had been coming and going from this town, there was something finally ludicrous, finally unimpressive about even the people who had all the things so coveted by all the people who did not have them. It was difficult to say why. It might have been only a private blindness, a private indifference which prevented me from seeing how gratifying the possession of power or the possession of fame could be. Whatever money did, it didn’t do the things it was popularly supposed to do, and I thought I could speak with a certain minor authority on the matter because now for several months a year I earned a salary somewhat in excess of what they paid an aged vice-president of a respectable bank. I no longer spoke with the suspect voice of poverty. My hostility, if there was still hostility in me toward the rich, now seemed to flow from another source: a feeling, not quite identifiable, that there was something sinister about the way these people lived. But then, how could this life possibly be sinister? What harm could there be in the Braque bought in an art shop in Paris and now featured over the low couch against the pale wall? What danger could accrue from the immense albums of records stored in the living room or the den with the brick fireplace and the spotless desk? Why should it strike me darkly that a huge refrigerator, with Coca-Cola perpetually on ice, and grapes kept perfectly cold by a servant, stood on the patio beside the thirty-foot pool? Why did I persist in reacting so oddly to all their comforts, their acquisitions, their rarities, their cool, large and enviable homes? The fault, most likely, was in myself; they weren’t, perhaps, sinister at all. It was only a kind of voracity which struck me so, an insatiety that gave off, perhaps, a slight aura of the sinister. Well, I wasn’t going to be eaten, too. My head, on a platter at La Rue’s; my kidneys, in a pie, at Chasen’s.
Besides, I had an idea they’d find me indigestible: at least, so I hoped. But one had to be careful. One had to be exceedingly careful. They’d have you skewered and barbecued and on a dish in no time at all if you weren’t careful.
Meanwhile, outside, in the absurdly semitropical night, the geraniums grew. Snails, with their tiny horns, inched down the concrete driveways. Banana trees flourished at the edge of parking lots, and there were lovebirds, paired, in those garages renovated into bachelor quarters in the small canyons where, even now, bobcats came down to feed, and raccoons investigated the garbage pails.
I thought of my wife. She was at a distance. The distance was in itself beneficial. I supposed I was being again uncharitable. She was what she was: I was what I was. That, when you came down to it, was the most intolerable thing of all. If only she weren’t, now and then, what she was, always. If she’d let up a little or knock it off a little or hang it out for a good airing once in a little while. God, marriage. No: it wasn’t marriage. There wasn’t, even on close examination, any other available institution you could substitute. There seemed to be nothing but marriage, when you thought of it, and when you thought of it, my God, was that all there was? That, and raising a family. That, and earning a living. That, and calling the undertaker.
She’d wanted to come out here this time: I’d persuaded her not to. There had been difficulty with the persuasion. She didn’t much like the idea of my going off alone for the four months. She liked it less each time I went. The necessity for my going off alone was becoming, with the years, increasingly subtle. Now she had come to a point where she rarely argued the complicated reasons for my going; she’d become increasingly aggressive, now. I supposed somebody had told her to assert herself, somebody had suggested she ought to share my life, and the trips I took, which I only rarely took. Nevertheless, I’d managed, once more, to go off alone.
Alone; it was the one active passion I had left now, the only real obsession. I had acquired, I hoped, with the passage of the years, the bad years, a measure of patience, and I thought of myself as being somewhat tight-mouthed, and even persevering, virtues I had always so conspicuously lacked, and I thought the time was at last gone when I had exhausted myself with futile rebellions. The rebellions seemed now, from this cool distance, this slight eminence I had achieved, silly and wasteful, and it was cunning that now struck me as the valuable quality to have, the distinctive characteristic. There had been so much blind impetuosity in the past; there had been so many indiscriminate wounds inflicted; I had lacerated myself as well as others so unhappily so many times. Now I fought, or it seemed to me I was fighting, a much sounder although a much more limited and more circumspect war: it consisted mostly of careful withdrawals, of very conscious retreats.
I was almost asleep when I realized with a start that the cigarette had fallen out of my hand. The blanket was beginning to smolder. It was the third time this week it had happened. I put the cigarette out carefully in the ashtray beside the bed. The bird continued to call quite clearly in the darkness. I was glad that I was alone, that the other half of the bed was unoccupied, that the bird was calling, that when I awoke the apartment would be as quiet as it was now. There was, for a moment, a fleeting reluctance to fall asleep again, an odd sort of fear of sleep. I supposed it was the episode with the girl at the beach. I was holding on too tightly to something. That was silly: there was nothing to be afraid of; and then I began to feel myself drift away, slowly, the bird’s song diminishing, into the unguardedness of sleep.
5
I DON’T think I’d expected her to call. I’d wondered a little about her, at work, the day after, but it was only an idle sort of speculation. What struck me was the somewhat ironical idea that I’d rescued somebody. I’d actually jumped: and then, the business of resuscitation. I had almost the impression of having had something happen. When she did telephone, two days later (evidently she had debated whether she ought to or not), I discovered that my dragging her out of the sea was responsible for a strange influence which seemed to be at work on me: it gave an oddly proprietary air to everything I said to her. Rescuing her, I could see, had been an intimate act, and a relationship of a kind had come into existence between us. She’d strangled on the sea water; she’d lain exposed on the sand, with all affectation gone, vomiting; she’d been like that in my arms even before I knew her or had spoken to her, before there was any other knowledge or any other emotion between us.
When she called, I didn’t at first recognize the voice on the phone: I realized I hadn’t, that night on the beach, ever heard her speak. She was calling to thank me.
“How do you feel?”
“All right.”
She hadn’t, she said, had a chance to apologize, and she wanted to, now; it was why she was calling. The voice was quite low, quite shy, even diffident. She didn’t want to disturb me, I was probably busy, but she had felt she really ought to, and I got somehow the impression that she had asked someone, possibly Charlie, who I was, and possibly even what I did; and that it had had an influence of some sort. I said there was nothing, really, to thank me f
or, though it was a rather large ocean, quite extensive and demonstrably bottomless, and she ought, especially on occasions when I was wearing a decent pair of slacks, to stay away from it. She sounded a little stricken at that: she had been a bother, hadn’t she? As though what she had done was somewhat unforgivable because it had disturbed the normal drinking and the standard fun; and then she wondered if anybody had said anything.
She meant, of course, disapprovingly.
Because, after all, it wasn’t pleasant to think the next morning, as she obviously had, that you’d made some sort of spectacle of yourself. She supposed they had something to say, particularly the women. Besides, she must have looked awful in that chair, wrapped up in that blanket, with her hair drenched like that, sipping the hot coffee. I smiled at the phone. Was I sure that she wasn’t disturbing me? I reassured her that it was quite all right, her telephoning, and that at the party nobody had said anything uncomplimentary or really unkind; that everyone there had been more or less solicitous. Besides, she could hardly have expected to come out of the Pacific immaculate.
But she felt all right now, didn’t she? I asked again.
“Yes.”
So diffident a yes.
“And you’ll stay away from the ocean?”
She promised in that small, that hesitant voice, as a child promises not to climb again the dangerous fence from which it’s fallen. She had, of course, been bad, and bothered the people, and been a nuisance about blankets and coffee and wet clothes. She was waiting to be, there at the other end of the phone, as I remembered she’d been in front of the fire, reprimanded. A scolding would complete the incident for her. I recognized, too, that the conversation contained for me some odd element of phantasy. I didn’t entirely credit her with wanting to disappear permanently into that sea: at least, not with a yachting cap on her head and a cocktail glass in her hand. We were both, of course, pretending that she hadn’t been serious about it, that it was just an awkward kind of mishap, as though she’d tripped somewhere, carrying a tray, and my slacks were at the cleaners now because she’d been a little clumsy.
“Martinis aren’t very good with salt water, you know.”
“They’re not, are they?”
I imagined the smile she was giving the phone. A smile somewhat wan, somewhat difficult. I thought of her as she had looked huddled in the blanket: colorless, exhausted.
“Would you like to go to dinner?”
“Dinner?”
“Yes. But not sea food.”
She didn’t laugh even a little, dutifully, at the joke. She paused. Then: “You don’t have to,” she said.
“Tomorrow night?”
“If you like.”
“Give me your address.”
I wrote it down on the desk blotter.
6
SHE HAD a black cat. It regarded me yellowly through the window screen when I rang her doorbell. On the walk some kid had left a tricycle, and there was a cap pistol discarded beside it. There was a garage in the rear with the inevitable geraniums growing wild against it, and at the curb a stunted palm tree, its lower fronds dying.
She called: “Come in.”
She was standing in front of a long mirror attached to the bathroom door. She had the door swung half open into the living room and as I came into the apartment she was turned so that she could see how the seams of her stockings were and how her skirt hung. She glanced up and said hello, and smiled, a somewhat awkward smile, and then she said: “I’ll just be a minute.”
The place she lived in struck me bleakly. I’d expected, I suppose, a certain limited luxury: I’d become accustomed to the apartments I went to being somewhat more opulently furnished than hers. I’d forgotten, apparently, girls still lived like this.
“Won’t you sit down?” she said.
Since there was only a narrow bed, covered, against the wall, to sit on, and a green chair, I chose the chair. She’d evidently put the place together out of a second-hand store. The naked floor badly needed a rug. There was a drypoint etching over the bed, the room’s sole picture: two girls, in what seemed a Grecian background. One leaned on an elbow gazing into the slumbering face of the other. The girl asleep was naked.
Upstairs, someone ran across the floor.
She smiled apologetically. It was the upstairs neighbor’s boy: the owner of the cap pistol and the tricycle. Obviously, upstairs there were no rugs either.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” I said.
No; she didn’t mind. She did wish, though, they could persuade the little monster to go to bed before ten. Ten o’clock seemed to be the hour he ultimately collapsed.
She had for me, still, at this time, standing there at the mirror and adjusting a pair of earrings in the lobes of her ears, a somewhat disconcerting quality. I had expected her to look less a stranger. The thing was, I’d found her so completely transfigured: a pretty girl, getting dressed, when my last thought of her was of someone huddled in a blanket; I’d gotten, coming into the room, a quick impression of a trimness, a slenderness, and of very dark, rather fine eyes. The transformation was complete: there wasn’t anything here, visibly, of the girl, somewhat drunk, convulsively shivering in front of a fire. It was the first of the surprises.
“Would you like a drink?” she said. “I think there’s a little gin in the kitchen, and some vermouth.”
She went on adjusting the pearls in her ears.
I went into the kitchen. She’d been wrong; there wasn’t any gin: there were, though, two empty gin bottles under the kitchen sink, and on the stove a pot of crusted oatmeal. I went back into the living room. She was sorry about the gin. The black cat rubbed itself against the silk of her legs.
“What’s his name?”
“Morgan.”
“He is black, isn’t he?”
She’d found Morgan, mewing, lost, a few weeks old, out on the highway. She didn’t know how it wasn’t killed. It was so pretty. All black, and covered with fleas, wobbling on its legs, and not even able at the time to lap milk out of a saucer. She’d fed it with an eyedropper. Hadn’t Morgan grown up beautiful? Sleek and black, the cat walked between her legs. He’d grown up like any male, though: out all night.
“I didn’t want him at first,” she said. “I’d had one and a car killed it. I didn’t want to love this one too and then have something happen.”
She went into the bathroom, and I permitted myself a slower look at the apartment. She had the usual books. I could have guessed the copy of Emily Dickinson; and, inevitably, the Indian Love Lyrics. The ex-libris was dated ten years before. It would be the reading she had done at sixteen. There were exclamation marks, in heavy pencil, in the margins. Evidently someone named Paul had give her the copy: the inscription was in memory of “a certain night.”
Again, upstairs, the inexhaustible boy ran across the floor.
She hadn’t any money: that was fairly obvious. I’d wandered into an “unsuccessful” life again. I found I didn’t much like any more the way it looked, or the odor it gave off, or the barrenness it revealed. I frowned a little, surprised that I had somewhere learned to feel like that. Later, I discovered she was rather proud of having managed the apartment so; she gave, or tried to give me, the impression that she lived the way she wished to live, despite the bleakness of it, and she was not discontented. The lamp, picked up at a sale and painted, she thought attractive and ingenious; she was quite proud of the way she had manipulated the bed; the radio-victrola, with its albums labeled with strips of adhesive tape, was her most cherished possession. There was a noisy rush of water from the bathroom, and she appeared, ready for the evening, a smile she had chosen, I thought, from a small collection of smiles she kept for occasions like this, fixed upon her face.