New Yorkers

by Hortense Calisher

  Now she was giving his body the stare; one in the open, so to speak, she was clinically accurate. But in the matter of preservation he too had done as well as Pauli had said.

  “Good show.” Her feet, pampered cripples of art, were crossed fastidiously at the ankle, as he was sure they would be if a whirlwind sucked her up to heaven—to a full house of balletomanes. Or found herself escorted downward—by a sextet of Don Juans on pointe. Without moving the feet a minim, she expelled his hand. “But now I must be off. Afternoons I should be free about six. Why not call me then?”

  “So businesslike, so soon?”

  “Not me. No theatre business gets done here until past noon. And I have no rehearsals. All rosebuds this time, and money talk.” She stretched, harmoniously. “The nicest kind. Not ours.” She gripped both ankles, bending in the legs until the soles of the feet touched, in that cult of the body which never stopped. To a man, it was still inattention. “No, not me. But it’s getting light.”

  “This is my house.” He sat up, magisterial: let her eyes rove him. Then he remembered that just as he read lips, she read limbs; she thought in posture, and spoke in it.

  “Why did you take me into the other room?” she said.

  “Part of a ballet,” he said. “The oldest vengeance in the world.” To say, Mirriam, you voyeur, don’t wait up any more. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen it.”

  “Yes,” said Madame—that was her tone. “You talked about her all evening.”

  “Who?”

  “You—who never talk.”

  “Some say I never stop.” It was a relief to be with those whose prime language wasn’t words, an honesty, like copulation. “You can’t want to talk about her. My wife.”

  “You do.” She shrugged. “So then…I.”

  She reached for a cigarette pack on the night-table and took one.

  “Never knew you smoked.” It was forbidden the troupe.

  “An early habit. Comes back—at times.”

  Taking the matches from her, to strike one for her, he saw she was trembling. The slope of the shoulders was familiar—complaisant, distant. In the other room, the blind flapped at a front window, always kept open in these houses for the cross-current. Even back here, the milky diffusion of night by dawn had begun. He could have sworn he smelled the feathers-and-pork of a charcuterie getting its early takeouts ready; no, it was all the hotels of convenience, from the Rue de Bellechasse to the East Seventies. All the jolies laides in them, pretty uglies pushing back the breakfast tray, lighting a fag, to talk—you all want to talk.

  “You were once in the business,” he said on impulse. “I always knew.”

  She reached over her knees almost awkwardly, picked his shirt from the bottom of the bed, and slung it kimono around her. Hunched there comfortably, she smoked; that was her answer. Above the man’s collar, the salon-curled hair—that was familiar too.

  He had the wit not to apologize, not to touch.

  She turned bright eyes on him. Tears? Mirth. “What a relief. In almost fifty years…nobody’s ever brought it up.”

  “You were—twelve?” An age that peculiarly horrified him. At which everything happened to them.

  “See you’ve seen the documents. Oh, I don’t mind, I lie about it for the fun of it. And because it’s the thing for us to do, you know.”

  “You have the body of a woman of forty.”

  “Forty-five or so,” said Madame, measuring herself. “Except for the veins—I always had them too prominent. I saw Pauli looking at them, tonight. The gloves, I mean. He gave me forty pair of long white ones once. From Trefousse.” She cast him a glance. “Before Leni, of course; you don’t fancy she’d speak to me without scratching, otherwise. And who else but him would have got me into the bally?”

  She passed him the butt to puff on. He puffed it obediently.

  “Twelve to fourteen,” she said. “They’d turned me out, you see. Then for a while I’d no need to—schools in the profession are like convents. Then later sometimes, when I was down on me luck.”

  “You have a child?” He said it unsentimentally, as they did.

  “I’m barren, shouldn’t wonder. Dancers often are—or until they give it up.” She took back the cigarette—held it, staring. Her sudden puff of laughter sent sparks all over the bed. After they’d spatted them out, she, still on her energetic hands and knees in the bedclothes, shook her head at him. “Good God—you meant a child by the first one?”

  “You did say—they threw you out.” At twelve.

  “An old balls of a boy—he was seventy.” She carefully brushed her hand together over the ashtray, leaned across him to set it back on the table. “Next question—don’t I mind? Or it used to be.” When she smiled, her nose, not quite as pink as in her native air, still moved with the lip. “After him any man was young. And a man.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not you, you clot.” She passed a light hand over his outline six inches above, as he had seen it down in the rehearsal room, correcting a muscle, a position—with the dancer’s surety that it was also correcting a soul. “The silhouette, that’s what one sees. Your body’s very little older than mine, to look at. Broad at the pectoral, long at the waist. Actually, two or three years younger, I should think.”

  “Ah, you’ve seen the documents.”

  “Aged—I should say—about forty-eight.”

  “Says Madame. You should tell fortunes, Ninon.”

  “You think ensembles are put together by lot? S’truth, though, we smaller blokes have better economy. We live longer—a long middle age. Tall ones have got too much to carry about—for the long pull. Like that young man tonight—the one in uniform.”

  “You looked greedy, never mind. I saw you.”

  “Going to get heavy in the hams, he is.” But she grinned.

  “You mix the generations all together.” He sighed. “I’m not able.”

  She shook her head. “Besides—he’s not for me.”

  A pause. “You do tell fortunes. You’re a lot like Anna, all that ham and kidney talk.”

  “Your concubine? Yes, she sees things.” Twisting a foot, she regarded it like a vis-à-vis. “The kitchen sees a lot.”

  “Woman stuff.” Idly he smoothed her inner elbow, where there was a tender patch left over from a girl. “Like that recipe for the skin, you once told me.”

  “To pee in your own bath? Very good for it. Go on, laugh. But it is. Asses’ milk—what else did the old saws mean by it. Go on, laugh.”

  “Heredity, more likely. Good Channel air.” He cupped her chin. “Calais side, of course.”

  “We’re a pair, Simon. Aren’t we. You still scratch your crotch in public. I saw.”

  He did laugh.

  “Go on, go on. I’ve cheered you up now. Say it.” She arched pleasedly above him, near enough for him to put a mouth to, if he slid an inch or so down. He saw the two of them in London—not married, for she would never, nor perhaps he—but in the state he had carefully phrased; they would “have each other about.” Even women with histories came to say it: “We’re a pair.”

  “I’ve not been dancing,” he said. “Either…Oh, yes, you have. Immeasurably…Oh, go on then. You laugh.” “Just that you’re so much the same. How wild we’d have sent each other, when I was—”

  “Twelve? Don’t be so elegiac.”

  “Eh?” she said. “Smarty went to a party.” She saw his face change. “Ah, I see. You would rather. That I’d lied.”

  “Not for what you think.”

  “What, then.”

  “My wife always told the truth. For the fun of it…No—that’s not fair. Not true.”

  “Still sorting her out, aren’t you.” Back to him, she gathered up her underwear, slowly making a hens nest of it around her. “After the garden, I had a look-see in the house. Wasn’t sorting her out, I can tell you. But there she was, in every room I saw. And I didn’t believe a one of them, not even the cabinet photo on the piano. Not till I saw th
e one in there.” She pointed.

  “Tell me about—Ruth.”

  She tossed that aside. “Must have been very tall, wasn’t she? Your son’s so tall.”

  “Yes. My son is tall.”

  “So you’d rather not talk, after all…. Or—” In the odd way her unconscious—what there was of it—made use of her, the r had a Parisian roll to it. “Or-r, you wish me—” She scattered the lingerie and ran off into the other room, buttocks and toed-out feet at their exquisitely broken-jointed angle.

  “Caricatures are best,” she said, returning. He saw that if her hands appeared to clasp at her loins more than ordinarily, it was because the arms had been trained to their eternal wreath, and the arms were long. She was holding the drawing by its corner—it weighed only the few ounces of the cheapest mail rate, Paris-New York, 1924. She came and crouched over him. He rose to receive her.

  “Wait.” She put a finger across her mouth, withdrew it. “Why did I do that, eh? But listen.” She cradled the picture in her lap and bent over it, eye to eye.

  “Done by a friend,” he said.

  She turned the thing over, then put it aside, casually. That pleased him. “Listen. This woman here…No matter what Leni says. She killed herself.”

  “You are supposed to lie,” he said.

  She turned away and began to draw on a chemise. In the depths of the house they heard the street door open and close.

  “The concubine?” She drew on a stocking, picked up the dress.

  “No, she goes for the night. The children, one or the other.” He lay watching her. “Don’t go.”

  Shoe in hand, she swung round, to stare. She would do what he wanted, without protest. She wouldn’t whip a man; a less perverse woman he had never known. But for what he wanted of her she was perfect, not in danger herself, long since safely attitudinized. He leaned forward, softly took the shoe from her hand and dropped it.

  “What do you want of me?” Her voice didn’t hush. With Mirriam, daring had always been amateur.

  “Family…life,” he said. “How can I explain to you?” More than love or hate—this rhythm implanted in him, never to be dispossessed, called a house rhythm because he knew no better name for it, had enraged the other against him, against herself because she was the same. “Once—” On another long night. “—once I was going to say to my wife on the telephone…‘Bring him here’…I was at a friend’s, an old man who’d have understood it well…And I had an impulse I didn’t obey…To say that. ‘Come on over. Bring your lover here.’” Scenes without intellect, without reflection, those were the ones that were at the heart of family; everything else was afterthought. Scenes that the rhythm made, or halted before aghast—mindless in an old marriage bed, or on the cuckold telephone.

  He reached over and took hold of one of her feet, scrutinizing that carefully maimed foot as if it could explain itself. “I mean to make you public.”

  She lay back on elbow; no, she wasn’t ordinary. “For whom?”

  He didn’t answer at once.

  “It’s getting light,” she said after a while. “In there.”

  “For myself,” he said, as if he had just thought of it.

  “Not—for her.”

  He looked down at the drawing. “We hung it together,” he said.

  When she spoke next, her voice was businesslike; she understood these things, as a matter of business. “What did you think, then? Did you think I could gnaw you free?”

  “You can tell me—about Ruth.”

  She sat up, threw up her hands. “Look. This is what I tell them all. The parents.” She drew up her foot, the same one, took it between her thumbs. “For us there are three kinds of feet. First the strongly knit one, little or no arch, short or medium toes. Here you have it, mesdames et messieurs—many in the corps de ballet have the same. Or they may even have type two—a foot with what appears to be a high arch but is really a loose ankle joint with long forefoot and toes. Quick in action, delicate in makeup.” She was singsonging. “Lightly built dancers have it—”

  Forward, in his wife’s room, night was lifting away in an ebbing whiteness which barely fogged the central reaches of these houses, but from the façades was like a great window blind raising on a nameless city, here two centuries of forever, yet each dawn cast on an emptied pain, in new hexahedrons of web and roof-glitter and black-dotted humans, the total name of all of which by nightfall must be relearned. Meanwhile he and this woman, crouched absurdly in bed, were revealed in their own quattrocento cone of light extending backward through the flattened perspectives of themselves, through the foot bent upon by both as over a holy child, on and back through another window rear, giving out on the precise olive of the beyond; the world would not be held in abeyance to be returned to; they were enmeshed in the world. Behind her foot was the Place de L’Opéra, whether or not she’d ever seen it, in a line of coryphées jigging down the cadres of history until they met hers. Behind him was that plane he tried so hard to define as middle—in a latitude somewhere between the Metropolitan Club, an armoire and a water tower, the stamps with which he tried to sail the world—and the Pribilofs of a memoir not his own. On a desk there was the paper he’d begun in tremor and hope only two days ago, meanwhile staring at his unplumed pen as if it came from a sarcophagus, at the ink bottle which held the arrogance of those who dared to add to a Bible, and at the page itself, on it a first and only sentence which he might bend to as if it were holy: “Almost every political question in these United States sooner or later becomes a judicial one.”

  “—the third type of foot,” said the voice beside him. “Which gives the real trouble.”

  “Yes?” he said, returning. “The foot that gives the real trouble. Yes?” All expertise was holy, a holy kaleidoscope.

  “In which the bones of the tarsus are piled into a high arch loosely knit, long ligaments—and weak foot muscles.” Her face told him nothing, blankly courteous as a magician’s, intent on elsewhere. “A foot requiring more work than either of the other types…and alas—”

  “Yes?” he said on the instant. “Alas…Ruth?” She sat back on her haunches, with one quick move dispersing it all, as she had the lemon. “Never have to tell the parents—what kind of bones they think they have given their daughters. They always tell me.”

  “Alas what?” he said, crouched beside her.

  “So beautiful.”

  “That I know,” he said.

  She leaned back on the pillows, once more only a woman in bed.

  “Are they right, the parents?” he said. “Are they always right?”

  “Watch out.”

  He’d almost knelt on the glass of the picture tumbled there in the bedclothes. She freed it, handling it to him. Neither gave it a look. “Who’re you trying to sort out?” she said. “Can’t be done. She’s alive.”

  Because the drawing belonged to the dead, and to the dead when still young in a life than scarcely crept into his own, he got up, took it back into the other dulled room and hung it on its faded square, doing for it what he had done for his mother’s stout dressing-table secrets, his father’s slender artifacts. The truly dead had a right to linger, for healed old men to eulogize. My wife was a remarkable woman, Simon. The dead should be sat up with in company, boy—the women too.

  And only for one night. Through the half-blue of the front window, he saw many cars now, anonymous at the curb. That other night had been in a winter city. This was going to be a dead-hot morning, the color of harbor water. It was a truism of cities, or of humans, that one season couldn’t be vitally remembered in another. And of the healed, that all seasons took on the same demi-vierge light. Why he should think of it that way, he couldn’t say. He went quickly out of the room. The insoluble rhythm went on. He walked with it, limping not quite ahead of it.

  Still on her pillow, she watched him dreamily. “Got to have a bath.”

  “In there.” He came and sat on the edge of the bed. She made no move to get up.

&nb
sp; “And I’m to breakfast here? In that?” The dress on the floor gleamed fastidiously at them, doll-empty, its bodice bent. “Public is all very well, Simon. Whatever it means to you—I don’t mind.” She wasn’t perverse, merely obedient—Will you be whipped before, sir, or afterward? She stretched. “But one should never make oneself uncomfortable, really now, should one?”

  “Right.” Again he congratulated himself.

  “Get me a cab then, do. Soon as I dress.”

  “I could go with you to the hotel, have breakfast there. No, it doesn’t matter, really. Just so long as I never again have to think—” Of what others may think. “Much more comfortable. And it doesn’t matter when we leave.” He rubbed his face on her thigh, smelling himself there. Home births.

  “Times three?” she murmured back. “Afraid I can’t.”

  “Just being nostalgic.” He raised his head, smiling. “Coo, the bally. I’m thinking of joining it.”

  “Are you now. What about your third leg?”

  “My—?”

  “Cane.”

  “So you noticed. You would of course. No one else did, much, did they? Except Edwin.”

  “Who?”

  “The other young man.”

  “Your protégé.” A nostril wrinkled.

  “You and Anna—”

  “Yes. The kitchen knows.”

  “Kitchen?” he said. “Ah. I see. Where else could you have been thrown out of? At twelve.”

  He waited. But she didn’t tell him he was clever.

  “Does he know what’s wrong with you?”

  “No one does. Nerve ends maybe, the doctor said. Or nerves.” He grinned, shifting up until he was even with her on the pillow. “Edwin I’m sure thinks it’s age.”