by Alfred Hayes
“What makes you so sure I’ll never leave?”
Oh, men like me didn’t. She didn’t mean it as a reproach, or an accusation: it was a simple fact, a law as determined as a gravitational pull. Still, she’d wondered, in the weeks we’d been together, what I’d be like if I ever should; what I’d do, free. Did I ever think of it?
“At reasonable intervals.”
She smoothed her skirt. “What would you do, travel?” she said. She gave it a detached interest; we might have been sitting, not on the couch, but in a bus station. “I suppose you’d travel, wouldn’t you? Where would you go if you were free and you could travel?”
“Peru.”
I’d chosen it blindly.
“Why Peru?”
“Why not Peru? The important thing is the distance, isn’t it? I’d want it to be far from the scene of my crimes.”
I would get a house in Peru, on a mountain; I’d read, somewhere, in a travel article, of a small town perched beautifully on a mountainside in Peru, and that’s where the house would be, the house I’d get when I was free to travel, a house with a broken fountain in the courtyard, flowers that exploded noiselessly in the Andean air, a house accessible only to goats.
“You’d need a housekeeper.”
“Are you applying for the job?”
“By mail.”
“I’d probably want to sleep with the housekeeper now and then. When the accessible goat was inaccessible.”
“It could be arranged.”
“It would be nice, wouldn’t it? Peru.”
We both thought, then, in a small silence, about Peru. For a brief moment, something surged through me. A violent something. My god: why not Peru? Why not anywhere? When had my world shrunk so? All I had to do was go: a moment of volition. I saw myself, miraculously, on a mountain in Peru. Bearded, changed, another man. It wasn’t, at the moment, absurd; it wasn’t, at that moment, one of the infinite things forever denied me. I ached with longing. Then, abruptly, that indulgence collapsed. The fountain expired; the faraway flowers withered. I was alone, with her, in a silly room.
“Well: don’t rush out for your passport.”
Peru!
23
SHE WAS driving the car; traffic was heavy, and there was a sudden insistent honking on an automobile horn. I heard someone calling. When I turned, a face I did not know, or remember having anywhere seen, was leaning out of a car window and a hand was somewhat frantically waving. It was a signal directed at her.
It was a Saturday afternoon, and the street was full of shoppers. We had come from a department store. On the seat behind us was a box in which neatly wrapped was a dress I’d bought her. She had at first refused the dress with a show of independence; but she’d allowed me finally to persuade her into the store. I’d spent the afternoon leaning upon glass showcases while she’d stalked the immense racks of fabrics.
She’d heard the voice; and apparently seen the signal. I saw her cast one frightened look at the traffic going by in the opposite lane, and then she stepped on the accelerator. In the rear-view mirror the man, whoever he was, desperately and violently tried to make a U-turn in the afternoon traffic. She obviously didn’t want to be seen. “Who is it?” I asked.
“Oh, somebody.”
The corner of her mouth twitched.
“Is there anything wrong?”
“Nothing. My nerves.”
But I remembered how frantic the attempted U-turn had been.
24
NERVES: it was only nerves. It was the explanation she gave for so many things. Afterward, she’d be quickly apologetic; she’d take my arm, conciliating me, if we were in the street; or press against my side, if we were in a restaurant. She was easily wounded; she was a little too quickly repentant. And I would find myself thinking that she was being rigidly on some sort of good behavior, that each time she was irritable it was as though a mask of a kind slipped. She would be, then, suddenly another girl. I would have the sense, too, at those moments, of being blind to something; something that would have been apparent to anybody else less involved with her than I was, but which was quite invisible to me. Still, the disagreeable moments were not too frequent, and as the weeks went by she seemed palpably to change. It was flattering to me to witness these transformations. I had, in a way, resuscitated her twice: the sea had been the simpler rescue. She seemed animated now: the inarticulateness seemed to go; her skin was better. She didn’t sleep quite as late; she talked of renting a bicycle, and of riding it every day; even, at last, of getting out into the sun more, a thing she had always detested. Of course, the important thing was work; and work, for her, was an immense sound stage, hung with cables, the coming out of the morning sunlight into a theatrical gloom; it was the few lines of dialogue, the anxiety of a cue. I thought that I might, after all, if she wished me to, talk to Charlie; or to someone at the studio. It was a bit awkward. You did get a certain kind of look asking a job or an audition for a girl. Yet it was what she really needed: that solidity; and it would complete, I thought, the curious obligation that rescuing her had laid upon me.
So I arranged whatever there was to be arranged, and had Charlie call her, and set the appointment, and I expected her that evening. I supposed she’d dress herself very carefully, and there would be all sorts of decisions that morning about what she’d wear; and that, coming in, she’d want a drink badly. I made the martinis and put them in the icebox. Odd that at home I hated to be in the kitchen; yet here I was, the anxious cook. I found myself wishing the afternoon would be successful for her; she’d come in then glowing with the pleasure of the success. It would be nice to see her with that glow, and to be responsible for it. The evening would be, as it hadn’t been yet, a celebration of a kind.
When it was seven o’clock, I began to be uneasy. She was late. There wasn’t any reason, it seemed to me, for her to be late. The interview could not have endured very long, or been too elaborate. I’d made dinner; and when I telephoned, there was no answer. I hadn’t wanted, really, to be concerned about her; but now, with the dinner waiting and the doorbell silent, I found myself concerned. Concerned; and annoyed. The furniture watched me. She hadn’t done—I stopped abruptly at the idea. She couldn’t possibly have. The clock moved toward eight. My uneasiness increased. When I telephoned again, and there was still no answer, I got into the car, leaving the house lights on and the steaks in the oven, and I drove to her apartment. I parked, and walked up the little path, with its geraniums, and as I got to the door of her place I could see behind the venetian blind a sort of flickering light, and I could hear a subdued music. The door was locked, and I tried to look through the blind; I could see a candle burning, and the music was evidently her victrola, and I had at first the impression that the music was going on and the candle burning in a room that was empty. I got over, then, to the very edge of the blind, so that my vision was slatted too, and then I saw her: crouched, or huddled, in a far corner of the bed, against the wall. She’d been drinking. The glass (of gin, I guessed) was in her hand. She seemed to have gotten, or have tried to get, as far away from something as she possibly could; to have gotten, in that forlorn position, to wherever the wall allowed her. The record played; the candle, in the neck of a bottle, flickered. It would burn down, the gin would empty, the record end; then it would be dark. Strange, how I thought that the scene at which I was looking must end in darkness. She was dressed as she must have been dressed when she had gone that afternoon to see whomever Charlie had arranged for her to see: with earrings still in her ears, and a white silk blouse, and a tight straight black skirt; she’d taken off apparently only her shoes. I knocked then; and was forced to knock again. She came reluctantly to the door, summoned from the wall. She’d have sat there, I thought, if I hadn’t come, until the diminishing candle died, staring into some pit. She let me into the apartment as she’d have let the police in: retreating from the door.
“I telephoned. Why didn’t you answer?”
“I didn’t w
ant to see anybody.”
“Is that gin?”
“Yes.”
“I had two martinis made.”
They were in the icebox; and the steaks in the oven. We weren’t going to celebrate anything. One never did.
“I was worried.”
She’d gone back to the wall, her refuge. Above her, I saw the lithograph of the two girls. It wasn’t difficult to guess the afternoon had not been the success I’d hoped.
“What happened?”
I wanted the lights on, and not the silly candle; but I didn’t dare touch the switch. Or disturb the muted victrola. She’d arranged the scenery of her defeat. The evidence was all of some defeat. Nevertheless, I was irritated.
“It’s not that important.”
I meant whatever it was that had happened; the reading, or the interview, such as it was. Still, I knew it was poor cheer: I couldn’t really calculate the importance for her. Between what she wanted, and what she got, a gulf loomed. Possibly that was the pit into which she’d been staring.
“It would have been only a bit part.”
It was awkward, and fatiguing, too, to sit there, as I sat, on the bed beside her, attempting a bleak consolation. I couldn’t make myself feel the enormity of failure that she felt. My god, a silly part in a silly moving picture. It shouldn’t crush her so. She looked at me then with what was unmistakably a sort of hatred. It startled me: to have that come out of the depths. I knew, of course, the contours of the pit into which she was looking. I’d looked into it in my own time; the pit of one’s own incapabilities. It never really closed over. But I felt she’d come so far; she’d been so much better. I was involved in any defeat she suffered now. Or thought I was involved; thought I was willing to be involved. So I tried. It was necessary to say something. To find the confident, the reassuring thing. My own fund of confidence and assurance was not that large; I could spoon out only what there was to share. She let me talk: with the candle dying, and the records succeeding themselves. I suppose they were, the things I said to her, as she sat there on the bed, with her face averted, inert, despairing, meager enough; I had to find, because of her, the hard things that I myself believed in, and only at the most infrequent times permitted myself to think of. Failure was always present; it changed its aspect, it acquired new forms. Did one ever go from success to success? But one went, simultaneously, from failure to failure. What was it that I’d once thought intolerable? In a few years, it had become tolerable. The reasons for living changed. At the end, the great pang would be that death deprived one of the very, very simplest things: the simpleness of sight, the mechanical marvel of breathing. Ah, she mustn’t feel the way she did. Nothing catastrophic had really happened. What one was good at didn’t always and continually give one pleasure. Appetites died; ambitions expired; desire put on a different skin. She’d see, if she’d only give it time. That was the thing: time. It was the one genuine gift we all had: a conceivable measure of time, and the certainty that having it would alter what we already had. She’d so much more than other girls had, as well as her conviction that she had so much less. She might not believe me now, feeling as she did, with this momentary despair so heavy upon her, but she need only wait and see. Wasn’t it, after all, a great thing that we could wait and see? That we were permitted to learn about ourselves, however distasteful the lessons might be? That the possibility remained always open? She was beautiful. Even now, in the darkness: and my fingertips traced the shape of her cheekbones. It was only a question of values. I disliked the word: but it would do. A value: something that time proved, and stamped, and which remained in the end negotiable. Her silk blouse glimmered; she’d become a shadow, with only a warmer substance than a shadow. I’d said so much; she’d been silent so long; the candle had been so long dying; the air itself in the small room had become so charged with something; that, holding her in my arms, and forgetting now who I was, and who she was, too, in that compounded moment I heard somebody murmur “I love you,” somebody who resolved himself into me.
I froze.
She appeared not to have noticed the words, the words which quickly took on a lingering and disastrous echo, and lay there breathing quietly on the pillow, seemingly deaf to them.
I’d been so circumspect. I’d guarded myself so.
She’d been the one who’d reached across the intervening space to unbutton the reluctant buttons, and I told myself that she would not misinterpret the words and that she would understand the circumstances in which they had been spoken. She would understand that they were words which had been addressed to someone not here in the room at all. We could be to each other only what we’d been: something the doctor recommended.
Nevertheless, I had said them. And I thought: does it matter? The words had forced themselves past my obdurate lips. Did it really matter that I’d said them here, now, having denied myself so long the saying them, or to whom or where they were finally said, and that accident had voiced them under this etching (so ambiguous) of the twinned girls, naked and somnolent, looking with so long a look into each other’s veiled eyes? My actual arms were about her. Why not here, now, at this instant, no more propitious, no more sincere, no more eternal, than any other providential instant? To say: to say, at last, somewhere, “I love you.” To think (even for this small, this false instant) that it had been said.
And she didn’t contradict, or question the words.
They hovered between us, and dissolved, like a secret. I had a sense as of some weight being at last lifted. As though a series of doors, one after another, slowly opened. It was I, now, who reached across whatever divided us, and began in the darkness, my hand a conclusion to something, to unbutton her white silk blouse.
25
BUT THE doors were not to stay open. One evening, when I drove up to my apartment, there was mail in the mailbox: a bill from the gas company, something friendly from an investment broker, and a letter from my wife. Her father had died.
He was an old man in his late sixties, always scrupulously clean, and he had died in a hospital, among nuns, unshaven, and after a week of intense suffering. She thought it particularly cruel of death to have taken him unshaven. She remembered him shaving with an old-fashioned straight razor standing in the bathroom with the bathroom door half open. Death should have given him time, she thought, to go to a mirror and to take the familiar razor and to have shaved himself for the very last time that he would ever shave.
She had stood at the window the night after the funeral thinking that now she had no father. She had been a child, and he had been her father, and now, close to middle age, she was an orphan. She was alone.
I remembered something then, she wrote in the letter, that I had forgotten all these years. I must have been about eight, and there were always terrible quarrels going on in the kitchen; I’d hear them in bed. I didn’t know what they were about: it was only a violence taking place in that abyss that exists between children and the people who are by some accident of nature their parents. Papa left the house that night; he was going to be divorced. In the morning he was gone. I didn’t know what divorce was, except that it had an ominous, a final sound to it. Mama had been up all night standing at the window, as I stood, and in the morning she called some hotel Papa was staying at. She made me go to the phone and say Papa please come home and I didn’t want to, I was sorry for Papa, I thought it right for him to go away because of all the quarrelling: now she made me go to the phone (and stand on a chair and talk into it in the candy store because we didn’t have a phone) and say what she’d repeated and repeated I should say: Please Papa I love you come home. He wouldn’t have answered her; I was the terrible obligation he could not break. I never forgave my mother that, and I think I despised Papa, too, for coming back because of me. And I remembered it so sharply, how I’d brought back to a house he could not endure a man who was my father and who was dead now.
She had recalled the episode after the funeral, feeling alone in the world, and she had thought
she would never use a child as she had been used. She would not be what her mother had been. She was leaving New York Sunday night. She would be in on the morning plane. Our life was going to be different. I was to meet her Monday at the airport, and there was so much for us to talk over, so many misunderstandings that now, being alone and older, and with her father dead, she felt capable of dealing with at last.
26
SHE GUESSED quickly that evening there was something wrong. Possibly, I had arranged my face so that she could not help knowing there was something wrong. She sat in the car, wearing a white woolen stole I’d bought her, and she thought that I was being awfully quiet as we drove down the boulevard toward a restaurant. I’d known, of course, that I’d eventually, before the evening was over, have to tell her. I hadn’t anticipated her guessing so soon. Or quite so accurately.
“It’s your wife, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“She’s coming out here.”
“Monday morning. I’m to meet her at the airport.”
She turned a long, somewhat blank stare upon the clock on the dashboard. She considered the illuminated time. I had nothing to contemplate except the signals, changing their insistent colors. One could feel whatever it was between us actually break. It hadn’t, I thought, been much: nevertheless, it broke. With a more disastrous feeling than I’d foreseen.
“Perhaps you’d rather not go to dinner,” I said. “I’ll take you back home if you’d like.”
She reached forward, turning on the car radio. The music ruptured the small silence between us. She meant it to. She wasn’t going to have, now, any significant silences between us. No, she thought: she’d rather not go home. It didn’t matter much, did it? She meant this final evening out, this inconsequential dinner. When was I to meet my wife? The eight o’clock plane. Really? I’d have to get up at an ungodly hour. I couldn’t afford to be late, could I? Not for that plane.