by Alfred Hayes
She hardly listened to what was said to her. She seemed concentrated on some news or some announcement that was about to come. She listened for a knock that was unaccountably delayed or a messenger somewhere detained.
Now the conviction grew that there existed behind all her suffering a plan of some sort. The men in power who operated the giant Studio intended something for her. This was not a random or an accidental ordeal. It was engineered. It was governed. She was being closely watched. She was being tested. She was being subtly tried. It was only what all the great stars had had to endure in their climb to the top, where suffering ended, and they had all been subjected to ordeals as rigorous and as terrible as hers. The fan magazines contained clues; the gossip columns. She read them feverishly. At some unimaginable moment the hand of power moved. The hidden mechanism revealed itself. The darkness parted, revealing the secret face.
On that day a limousine would draw up at the curb of the street where she lived. Two men, one a chauffeur in livery, and the other anonymous and with no expression on his face, would dismount. The upstairs boy’s bicycle lay on the walk. Possibly she had just gone for the mail. The man with the unchanging face knocked; the chauffeur waited at the limousine.
Oh, she said, it was so clear. I could see it so clearly, she said.
They’d drive her there, then, in that immense limousine. The front desk knew she was coming; the arrangements had been made; she was ushered in. For they’d be waiting, then, behind their desks, those vast desks, the men, the inaccessible men, the enigmatic titans, the perverse masters of her world. They smiled at her.
It had been such a difficult ordeal, and you were so exhausted. Now at last they were kind, now at last everything was to be explained.
How, from the very beginning, from the moment descending the train you arrived in town, those sleepless eyes had watched you. Now the incident of the glass sliver became finally clear; the pain endured at the dentist was at last explained; the neighbor’s hostility and the loneliness and the men who approached you or the men who avoided you, were stripped of their mystery. There was no malice here, ever; there was only a grueling examination, a fiery testing. They had arranged it all so: and now at last having emerged from the furnace, here were the rewards at last. Because they smiled, then, and pushed a small button, and a door opened, and you could hear them say in their strong, their decisive voices: Miss V? and you followed, bewildered still, somewhat frightened, not sure of yourself yet, down the private elevator to where the limousine waited; and drove out of town, up into the softly landscaped hills, to a place shaded by great trees, up a gravel drive, and there was a house at the end of it; a beautiful house, simple, secluded, with a swimming pool and a private tennis court on which the leaves had fallen, and a garden in the rear; kept by servants who appeared now, smiling and deferential, nodding, recognizing you for whom they’d waited; and the house was yours; all of it; pool, tennis court, the badminton net, the trees, the cabañas to dress in, the fireplace and the candlesticks and the tall draperies; all of it kept for you, looked after for you, waiting for you, all during that terrible time when you’d had nothing. They were pleased; they liked the effect it had upon you; and later, they showed you the file which they’d kept in the vault, the secret file; and the reports from their various agents; and in the file, too, was a bankbook: the money deposited in your name, a weekly check put there for you, and in the two-car garage, low and shining, a lovely convertible, and that was yours too: so that they’d not been vindictive or ignorant of your existence after all; they had never intended to deny the great gifts which so many others (read about, or briefly glimpsed) had been given. It was simply how things were organized; how their stars were chosen; how they selected, from the vast and anxious throngs, those few shining beings who were theirs, and who, groomed finally and luxurious, they presented to the world, complete, with the convertible and the house in the hills, and the tiled pool: with racks of gowns and soft fluffy immense bath towels: with a garden of camellias and a kitchen that was all chromium and a bar that was paneled and shaded and a fireplace that was brick and magnificent: the very special one, who was to be theirs, their creature, and they had not ever forgotten you: inevitably, someday, the limousine drove up, the emissary knocked, and it would be over, at last, the great trial by loneliness and hunger.
15
SHE HAD told her story haltingly; with, it was apparent, a certain amount of embarrassment and shame. What I felt as I listened to her can be described best, I suppose, as a kind of stopped sympathy. I was concerned because she’d been ill, because the story was a fairytale of illness, and I was a little puzzled and not altogether sure I quite understood the sort of person who was capable of manufacturing a dream of that kind. I realized, later, that one of the difficulties arose from the fact that something in me did not, even then, altogether believe her; that there was in me something which continued, below the surface of my mind, to believe her story suspect, too pat, too theatrical. But then, I told myself, the mad were theatrical; they were the most theatrical of all; the girl, with the wilted flower, beyond the barred gate; the gentleman, watched by the burly attendant, wearing the eye patch he’d wear at Trafalgar.
So she had gone to Dr. Ritter. He hadn’t been at all the sort of person she’d expected him to be. He looked so utterly different; so, she confessed, commonplace.
“God knows what he thought of me when I walked into his office. I was all eyes; and so thin.”
And the doctor had been kind.
“Every Saturday afternoon he goes out to the track, and I thought that was awful, somebody who was supposed to be the sort of doctor he was, and going to the track.”
It had ebbed, gradually: the dream of the men watching her, and the limousine that never came. Reality, that thin membrane, covered the exposed nerve; the world, for what the world was, became again the recognizable world. Her dentist collapsed into a simple man in white; again the waitresses carried innocent trays.
“It was so slow; and sometimes I didn’t want it. To know, I mean, there wasn’t any limousine at all. I was so empty for a while; empty, and the world empty; and then, a kind of hope. In myself, I mean.”
And I thought: what is it I really feel? Why is it that even now I don’t quite believe her, and the sympathy, what there is of it, isn’t quite what sympathy should be? Is it because she’s introduced, here, into my rented apartment, this love nest subleased and hung with those ludicrous Chianti bottles, the vocabulary of the abnormal? She cannot possibly be lying: this is true, something that happened, a way she felt and was, and thinks now she doesn’t any longer feel and no longer is. Meanwhile, the fire in the fireplace; the table arranged for dinner.
She saw herself, at the end of the time she would be with the doctor, as reappearing in a world she had, as it were, temporarily abandoned. And she’d be changed, then; strengthened and changed. It was what she had said before: it was something she wanted very much to believe. I was curious what the change was that she expected.
“Oh, simpler, I guess is what I mean.”
Simpler? Yes: why not? That would look attractive: to be, at last, simple and serious, and the emotions she would have then, when the transformation was complete, when the end of the interminable tunnel was reached, would be truer and more profound than the emotions she had now.
I saw that she saw herself at the end of that time as somebody at last admirable. I saw that she saw herself, when the weekly visits were finally over, as somebody people would care to know. I saw that she saw herself in that time as somebody at last enviable, a thing she wanted very much to be.
And it would be the mysterious Dr. Ritter, back from a Saturday at the track, with the disappointing face and the dull exterior, who’d accomplish all this.
“Shall I fix another drink?”
She nodded.
There was an expectation of a kind in the air now. The room was warm, and I sensed that now, with the fire low and a hush upon the furniture, and th
e confession done, she was waiting for some gesture on my part, a kiss perhaps; wasn’t the fire, after all, and the dinner, and the small apartment, so conscientiously put together by my landlady in Paris, arranged for this? I’d kissed her before; she expected to be kissed again; but I was oddly reluctant. Was it some fleeting compunction about her “illness”? But I didn’t, really, consider her ill. Was it a hesitant wish to avoid that sexual entanglement even the simplest of my acts seemed to involve me in? But it was ridiculous to think that a casual, an offhand, a (so I thought) reasonable pleasure should so inevitably involve me. Other men managed it without the involvements: other men had, without consequences, a quick pleasure when they wanted it. I didn’t, I thought, really like her, for really she wasn’t the sort of girl to whom I was usually attracted. I’d always thought that the girls who appealed to me most were the rather energetic, rather vigorous, rather healthy girls I saw on the tennis courts or on the beach. The girls who swam well, and whose skins were beautifully tanned, and who had broad shoulders. The girls who looked well in white. The girls with clear, straightforward eyes. The girls who laughed a great deal.
I’d always thought I preferred a girl like that, and it was only an unfortunate set of circumstances which prevented me from meeting one.
For her, I suppose, the fact that I sat there, on the floor, with my knees up, slowly finishing my Scotch, and did not now, at the historic moment, extend toward her an exploratory hand, or try, with what deftness I could muster, to maneuver her into a more convenient position, was somewhat inexplicable. Both of us were curiously frozen. I knew that she was waiting for some tentative gesture; and yet I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, make it: the initial move from which there could be no retracting, no withdrawing once it was made. I thought at that moment of Baudelaire’s poem: how love, from its shadowy retreat, bent his fatal bow. The arrows were crime, horror, folly. But, ah—it was only a girl, somewhat unhappy, here on an inexpensive rug before a small fire. We exaggerated, Baudelaire and I. Sexual disaster was only the invention of our own reluctance, of our own inverted natures. She was only a girl, and expected something: a simple something, the conclusion of a moment like this, the kiss that followed an intimate silence, the love-making that went with the loneliness after dinner. Why should I hesitate? Why should I be withdrawn, and why did a smile, that wasn’t a smile at all, hover so oddly in my eyes? She stirred, restlessly. She was, I suppose, finally piqued. She was accustomed to being desired. Odd that I shouldn’t, or shouldn’t seem to. She put it down to awkwardness, or to some scruple. She could not understand the slight, the vague, the rather silly fear which possessed me; not wanting my life (so patched together, so uneasily maintained) to be shaken or disturbed. She turned, in the silence between us, and reached toward me, and with a small deliberative movement began to unfasten the buttons on my shirt.
16
I AWOKE. It was about four o’clock. She was moaning beside me, grinding her teeth in some obscure anguish. She was having a bad dream; there was sweat upon her forehead. Outside, a bird sang in the plum tree. Everywhere, the silence: and then she moved her head and cried out, a disembodied “no, no” and then she was asleep again, her lips making those small nibbling movements.
I thought: it’s all wrong. I was aware of having committed some terrible blunder. Then I reassured myself that in the morning she would be gone, and it would not happen again.
Meanwhile, the grinding of her teeth.
She had the look, asleep, of a younger and a smaller girl. She was not flushed with sleep, but pale with it. One arm, too thin, was flung out, defenselessly; a hand, curled, was under her cheek. It was a terrible sound to listen to, lying beside her, the grinding of her jaws, as though something were being ground and destroyed in her sleeping mouth. Looking at her, I couldn’t seem to remember who she was.
I thought: she shouldn’t sleep with anybody if she doesn’t wish them to know her secrets. It was something more than her nakedness: more than the exhaustion after love. She was in the bed as she would be in a ditch or a field. She slept like someone who could not go any further and had already come too far. I stretched myself out beside her, a stranger, a spy, sharing the warmth of the bed. Morning seemed immeasurably far.
17
WHEN I awoke again, she was gone. I did not at first remember she had been there; she had slipped out from beneath the blankets and left them carefully arranged as though she had wanted to create the impression, for herself too perhaps, that she had not occupied at all the other half of the bed. I remembered her with a small effect of shock. When had she gone? There was the pillow, indented; in the bathroom, a scrap of tissue with lipstick; on the floor in front of the fireplace, two glasses with what remained of the Scotch. But that was all; only the smallest sort of disarrangement, only the merest trace: she had been careful, as well as quiet.
I was, for the moment, glad; the night had been an error. She had awakened, knowing it; she’d fled. Sunlight (were there errors committed in sunlight, blunders at noon?) lay warmly in the apartment. I’d been a fool. A girl like that; and without any affection, really; something done, a compulsive ritual. She had gone, a naked interloper, with her hair uncombed, and the clothing put hastily and silently on, and then the cautious unlatching of the door, and the mist coming off the lawns. I made coffee, washed and shaved. She really needn’t have gone without coffee; I wouldn’t have minded if she’d stayed for coffee. How had she gotten home? The taxis cruised infrequently. She must have had difficulty finding a taxi. I thought of her awakening, and confronting the sad mardi gras of her own clothes discarded on the floor; and of myself, a stranger in the strange bed; of the sour mouth and the night’s bruises. She had wanted only to reach back, to feel herself a woman again, desired and capable of desire, and then the morning had come, with its confrontations. I thought, having my coffee, I understood what it was she had felt, and why it was she had gone from the apartment, obliterating as she could all traces of herself.
She answered the phone, I think, knowing I’d call. It struck me, as her voice answered, that she had more or less expected me to call; that the calling was inevitable, as what I had thought having my coffee had been inevitable, and that she had done this before, the disappearing act, and that the men, whoever they were, thinking as I had thought that not to call her or to be concerned was to be a bit of a brute, when she vanished from some hasty bedroom, had always called. And that their voices, as they stood, in a living room or a foyer, with an after-breakfast cigarette in their hands and the telephone to their mouth, could not have been too dissimilar to mine: making now its own cumbersome effort to be deft, making now its own effort to be friendly, mildly chiding, somewhat puzzled, and at ease.
“What happened to you? I woke up, and there you were: gone.”
“Yes.”
“You needn’t have run off like that. I’d have unlocked the leg irons. I always do, when I feed the prisoners.”
She paused, then, distant. “I had to,” she said.
Her voice wasn’t diffident now as it had been when first she called the office to thank me and to apologize for the thing at the beach; it had another quality which the man on the phone, in the morning, resembling me, would begin inevitably to interpret as her having not liked at all the night she’d spent; and he, the man on the phone, hearing that reluctance in her voice, and sensing how the night had become something she did not wish to discuss, and seemed to wish to forget, quickly, would begin to think then that what she had done, after all, was to escape from him; that she had found the bed, narrow or wide, intolerable; that his being there had been less for her than the traditional delight it should have been. He would be nettled, then, the man on the phone, and somewhat sharper.
“It was a bit stupid, you know. I’d have taken you home if you’d wanted so much to go. Did you get a taxi?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“I walked until I found one.”
In the early morning; damp
, uncomfortable; with the street gray. I saw her looking for the difficult taxi. My God, it must have been six o’clock. She supposed so; about six, yes. And out of a warm bed; and without coffee; and no good-by. It was neither civilized, nor polite. She hesitated; I could feel her hesitation. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.
Why? Hadn’t the bed been comfortable? My landlady, in Paris, had been very farsighted about the bed.