After a stretch of silence, Joan said, “I don’t know.” Her voice, unused for ten minutes, cracked on the last syllable. She cleared her throat, scraping Richard’s heart.
“What would they stuff them with?” Rebecca asked, dropping an ash into the saucer beside her.
BEYOND and beneath the windows, there arose a clatter. Joan reached the windows first, Richard next, and lastly Rebecca, standing on tiptoe, elongating her neck. Six mounted police, standing in their stirrups, were galloping two abreast down Thirteenth Street. When the Maples’ exclamations had subsided, Rebecca remarked, “They do it every night at this time. They seem awfully jolly, for policemen.”
“Oh, and it’s snowing!” Joan cried. She was pathetic about snow; she loved it so much, and in these last years had seen so little. “On our first night here! Our first real night.” Forgetting herself, she put her arms around Richard, and Rebecca, where another guest might have turned away or smiled too widely, too encouragingly, retained without modification her sweet, absent look and studied, through the couple, the scene outdoors. The snow was not taking, on the wet street; only the hoods and tops of parked automobiles showed an accumulation.
“I think I’d best go,” Rebecca said.
“Please don’t,” Joan said with an urgency Richard had not expected; clearly she was very tired. Probably the new home, the change in the weather, the good sherry, the currents of affection between herself and her husband that her sudden hug had renewed, and Rebecca’s presence had become in her mind the inextricable elements of one enchanting moment.
“Yes, I think I’ll go, because you’re so snuffly and peaked.”
“Can’t you just stay for one more cigarette? Dick, pass the sherry around.”
“A teeny bit,” Rebecca said, holding out her glass. “I guess I told you, Joan, about the boy I went out with who pretended to be a headwaiter.”
Joan giggled expectantly. “No, honestly, you never did.” She hooked her arm over the back of the chair and wound her hand through the slats, like a child assuring herself that her bedtime has been postponed. “What did he do? He imitated headwaiters?”
“Yes, he was the kind of guy who when we get out of a taxi and there’s a grate giving out steam crouches down”—Rebecca lowered her head and lifted her arms—“and pretends he’s the Devil.”
The Maples laughed, less at the words themselves than at the way Rebecca had evoked the full situation by conveying, in her understated imitation, both her escort’s flamboyant attitude and her own undemonstrative nature. They could see her standing by the taxi door, gazing with no expression as her escort bent lower and lower, seized by his own joke, his fingers writhing demoniacally as he felt horns sprout through his scalp, flames lick his ankles, and his feet shrivel into scarlet hoofs. Rebecca’s gift, Richard realized, was not that of having odd things happen to her but that of representing, through the implicit contrast with her own sane calm, all things touching her as odd. This evening, too, might appear grotesque in her retelling: “Six policemen on horses galloped by, and she cried ‘It’s snowing!’ and hugged him. He kept telling her how sick she was and filling us full of sherry.”
“What else did he do?” Joan asked.
“At the first place we went to—it was a big night club on the roof of somewhere—on the way out he sat down and played the piano until a woman at a harp asked him to stop.”
Richard asked, “Was the woman playing the harp?”
“Yes, she was strumming away.” Rebecca made circular motions with her hands.
“Well, did he play the tune she was playing? Did he accompany her?” Petulance, Richard realized without understanding why, had entered his tone. Clarifying the incident had become strangely important, as if his confused picture of it were the product of deliberate deceit.
“No, he just sat down and played something else. I couldn’t tell what it was. He didn’t play very well.”
“Is this really true?” Joan asked, egging her on.
“And then at the next place we went to, we had to wait at the bar for a table, and I looked around and he was walking among the tables asking people if everything was all right.”
“Wasn’t it awful?” said Joan.
“Yes, later he played the piano there, too. We were sort of the main attraction. Around midnight, he thought we ought to go out to Brooklyn to his sister’s house. Here I was, exhausted. We got off the subway two stops too early, under the Manhattan Bridge. It was deserted, with nothing going by except black limousines. Miles above our heads”—she stared up, as though at a cloud, or the sun—“was the Manhattan Bridge and he kept saying it was the ‘L.’ We finally found some steps and two policemen who told us to go back to the subway.”
“What does this amazing man do for a living?” asked Richard.
“He teaches school. He’s quite bright.” She stood up, stretching, and extended a long silvery-white arm. Richard got her coat and said he’d walk her home.
“It’s only three-quarters of a block,” Rebecca protested, in a voice free of any insistent inflection.
“You must walk her home, Dick,” Joan said. “Pick up a pack of cigarettes.” The idea of his walking in the snow seemed to please her, as if she were anticipating how he would bring back with him, in the snow on his shoulders and the coldness of his face, all the sensations of the walk she was not well enough to risk.
“You should stop smoking for a day or two,” he told her.
Joan waved them goodbye from the head of the stairs.
THE snow, invisible except around street lights, exerted a fluttering, romantic pressure on their faces. “Coming down hard now,” Richard said.
“Yes.”
At the corner, where the snow gave the green light a watery blueness, her hesitancy in following him as he turned to walk with the light across Thirteenth Street led him to ask, “It is this side of the street you live on, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I thought I remembered from the time we drove you back from the movies.” The Maples had been living in the West Eighties then. “I remember I had an impression of big buildings.”
“The church and the butchers’ school,” Rebecca said. “Every day about ten, when I’m going to work, the boys learning to be butchers come out for recess all bloody and laughing.”
Richard looked up at the church; the steeple was fragmentarily silhouetted against the scattered lit windows of a tall improvement on Seventh Avenue. “Poor church,” he said. “It’s hard in the city for a steeple to be the tallest thing.”
Rebecca said nothing—not even her habitual “Yes.” He felt rebuked for being preachy. In his embarrassment, he directed her attention to the first next thing he saw—a poorly lettered sign above a great door. “‘Food Trades Vocational High School,’” he read aloud. “The people upstairs told us that our apartment was part of a duplex once, and the man in it was an Englishman who called himself a Purveyor of Elegant Produce. He kept a woman in there.”
“Those big windows,” Rebecca said, pointing up at an apartment house, “face mine across the street. I can look in and feel we are neighbors. Someone’s always in there—I don’t know what they do for a living.”
After a few more steps, they halted, and Rebecca, in a voice that Richard imagined to be slightly louder than her ordinary one, said, “Do you want to come up and see where I live?”
“Sure.” It seemed implausible to refuse.
They descended four concrete steps, opened a shabby orange door, entered an overheated half-basement lobby, and began to climb four flights of wooden stairs. Richard’s suspicion on the street that he was trespassing beyond the public gardens of courtesy turned to certain guilt. Few experiences so savor of the illicit as mounting stairs behind a woman’s fanny. Three years ago, Joan had lived in a fourth-floor walkup, in Cambridge. Richard never took her home, even when the whole business, down to the last intimacy, had become formula, without the fear that the landlord, justifiably furious, would
leap from his door and devour him as they passed.
Opening her door, Rebecca said, “It’s hot as hell in here,” swearing for the first time in his hearing. She turned on a weak light. The room was small; slanting planes, the underside of the building’s roof, intersecting the ceiling and walls, cut large prismatic volumes from Rebecca’s living space. As he moved farther forward, toward Rebecca, who had not yet removed her coat, Richard perceived, on his right, an unexpected area, created where the steeply slanting roof extended itself to the floor. Here a double bed had been placed. Tightly bounded on three sides, the bed had the appearance not so much of a piece of furniture as of a permanently installed, blanketed platform. He quickly took his eyes from it and, unable to face Rebecca at once, stared at two kitchen chairs, a metal bridge lamp, around the rim of whose shade plump fish and helm wheels alternated, and a four-shelf bookcase—all of which, being slender and proximate to a tilting wall, had an air of threatened verticality.
“Yes, here’s the stove on top of the refrigerator I told you about,” Rebecca said. “Or did I?”
The refrigerator was several inches narrower than its burden, and the arrangement was T-shaped. He touched the stove’s white side. “This room is quite sort of nice,” he said.
“Here’s the view,” she said. He moved to stand beside her at the window, lifting aside the curtains and peering through tiny, flawed panes into the apartment across the street.
“That guy does have a huge window,” Richard said.
She made a brief agreeing noise of “n”s.
Though all the lamps were on, the apartment across the street was empty. “Looks like a furniture store,” he said. Rebecca had still not taken off her coat. “The snow’s keeping up,” he said.
“Yes. It is.”
“Well”—this word too loud; he finished the sentence too softly—“thanks for letting me see it. I hope—have you read this?” He had noticed a copy of “Auntie Mame” lying on a hassock.
“I haven’t had the time,” she said.
“I haven’t read it either. Just reviews. That’s all I ever read.”
This got him to the door. There, ridiculously, he turned. It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite inexcusable: not only did she stand unnecessarily close but, by shifting the weight of her body to one leg and leaning her head sidewise, she lowered her height several inches, placing him in a dominating position exactly fitted to the broad, passive shadows she must have known were on her face.
“Well . . .” he said.
“Well.” Her echo was immediate and possibly meaningless.
“Don’t—don’t let the b-butchers get you.” The stammer, of course, ruined the joke, and her laugh, which had begun as soon as she had seen by his face that he would attempt something funny, was completed ahead of his utterance.
As he went down the stairs, she rested both hands on the banister and looked down toward the next landing. “Good night,” she said.
“Night.” He looked up; she had gone into her room. Oh, but they were close.
[1956]
MAEVE BRENNAN
I SEE YOU, BIANCA
MY FRIEND NICHOLAS is about the only person I know who has no particular quarrel with the city as it is these days. He thinks New York is all right. It isn’t that he is any better off than the rest of us. His neighborhood, like all our neighborhoods, is falling apart, with too many buildings half up and half down, and too many temporary sidewalks, and too many doomed houses with big Xs on their windows. The city has been like that for years now, uneasy and not very reasonable, but in all the shakiness Nicholas has managed to keep a fair balance. He was born here, in a house on 114th Street, within sight of the East River, and he trusts the city. He believes anyone with determination and patience can find a nice place to live and have the kind of life he wants here. His own apartment would look much as it does whether he lived in Rome or Brussels or Manchester. He has a floor through—two rooms made into one long room with big windows at each end, in a very modest brownstone, a little pre-Civil War house on East Twelfth Street near Fourth Avenue. His room is a spacious oblong of shadow and light—he made it like that, cavernous and hospitable—and it looks as though not two but ten or twenty rooms had contributed their best angles and their best corners and their best-kept secrets of depths and mood to it. Sometimes it seems to be the anteroom to many other rooms, and sometimes it seems to be the extension of many other rooms. It is like a telescope and at the same time it is like what you see through a telescope. What it is like, more than anything, is a private room hidden backstage in a very busy theater where the season is in full swing. The ceiling, mysteriously, is covered in stamped tin. At night the patterned ceiling seems to move with the flickering shadows, and in the daytime an occasional shadow drifts slowly across the tin as though it was searching for a permanent refuge. But there is no permanence here—there is only the valiant illusion of a permanence that is hardly more substantial than the shadow that touches it. The house is to be torn down. Nicholas has his apartment by the month, no lease and no assurance that he will still be here a year or even three months from now. Sometimes the furnace breaks down in the dead of winter, and then there is a very cold spell for a few days until the furnace is repaired—the landlord is too sensible to buy a new furnace for a house that may vanish overnight. When anything gets out of order inside the apartment, Nicholas repairs it himself. (He thinks about the low rent he pays and not about the reason for the low rent.) When a wall or a ceiling has to be painted, he paints it. When the books begin to pile up on the floor, he puts up more shelves to join the shelves that now cover most of one long wall from the floor to the ceiling. He builds a cabinet to hide a bad spot in the end wall. The two old rooms, his one room, never had such attention as they are getting in their last days.
The house looks north and Nicholas has the second floor, with windows looking north onto Twelfth Street and south onto back yards and the backs and sides of other houses and buildings. The neighborhood is a kind of no man’s land, bleak in the daytime and forbidding at night, very near to the Village but not part of the Village, and not a part, either, of the lower East Side. Twelfth Street at that point is very narrow and noisy. Elderly buildings that are not going to last much longer stand side by side with the enormous, blank façades of nearly new apartment houses, and there is a constant caravan of quarrelsome, cumbersome traffic moving toward the comparative freedom of Fourth Avenue. To his right Nicholas looks across the wide, stunted expanse of Fourth Avenue, where the traffic rolls steadily uptown. Like many exceedingly ugly parts of the city, Fourth Avenue is at its best in the rain, especially in the rain at night, when the whole scene, buildings, cars, and street, streams with such a black and garish intensity that it is beautiful, as long as one is safe from it—very safe, with both feet on the familiar floor of a familiar room filled with books, records, living plants, pictures and drawings, a tiny piano, chairs and tables and mirrors, and a long desk and a bed. All that is familiar is inside, and all the discontent is outside, and Nicholas can stand at his windows and look out on the noise and confusion with the cheerful interest of one who contemplates a puzzle he did not create and is not going to be called upon to solve. From the top of a tall tiling cabinet near him, Bianca, his small white cat, also gazes at the street. It is afternoon now, and the sun is shining, and Bianca is there on the cabinet, looking out, only to be near Nicholas and to see what he sees. But she sees nothing.
What is that out there?
That is a view, Bianca.
And what is a view?
A view is where we are not. Where we are is never a view.
Bianca is interested only in where she is, and what she can see and hope to touch with her nose and paws. She looks down at the floor. She knows it well—the polished wood and the small rugs that are arranged here and there. She knows the floor—how safe it is, always there to catch her when she jumps down, and always very solid and familiar under her
paws when she is getting ready to jump up. She likes to fly through the air, from a bookcase on one side of the room to a table on the other side, flying across the room without even looking at the floor and without making a sound. But whether she looks at it or not, she knows the floor is always there, the dependable floor, all over the apartment. Even in the bathroom, under the old-fashioned bathtub, and even under the bed, and under the lowest shelf in the kitchen, Bianca finds the well-known floor that has been her ground—her playground and her proving ground—during all of her three years of life.
Nicholas has been standing and staring at rowdy Twelfth Street for a long time now, and Bianca, rising, stretching, and yawning on top of the filing cabinet, looks down at the floor and sees a patch of sunlight there. She jumps down and walks over to the patch of sun and sits in it. Very nice in the sun, and Bianca sinks slowly down until she is lying full length in the warmth. The hot strong light makes her fur whiter and denser. She is drowsy now. The sun that draws the color from her eyes, making them empty and bright, has also drawn all resistance from her bones, and she grows limp and flattens out into sleep. She is very flat there on the shining floor—flat and blurred—a thin cat with soft white fur and a blunt, patient Egyptian head. She sleeps peacefully on her side, with her front paws crossed and her back paws placed neatly one behind the other, and from time to time her tail twitches impatiently in her dream. But the dream is too frail to hold her, and she sinks through it and continues to sink until she lies motionless in the abyss of deepest sleep. There is glittering dust in the broad ray that shines on her, and now Bianca is dust-colored, paler and purer than white, and so weightless that she seems about to vanish, as though she were made of the radiance that pours down on her and must go when it goes.
Bianca is sleeping not far from Nicholas’s bed, which is wide and low and stands sidewise against the wall. Behind the wall at that point is a long-lost fireplace, hidden away years before Nicholas took the apartment. But he has a second fireplace in the back part of the long room, and although it stopped working years ago, it was left open, and Nicholas has made a garden in it, a conservatory. The plants stand in tiers in the fireplace and on the floor close around it, and they flourish in the perpetual illumination of an electric bulb hidden in the chimney. Something is always in bloom. There are an ivy geranium, a rose geranium, and plain geraniums in pink and white. Then there are begonias, and feathery ferns, and a white violet, and several unnamed infant plants starting their lives in tiny pots. The jug for watering them all stands on the floor beside them, and it is kept full because Bianca likes to drink from it and occasionally to play with it, dipping in first one paw and then the other. She disturbs the water so that she can peer down into it and see the strange new depths she has created. She taps the leaves of the plants and then sits watching them. Perhaps she hopes they will hit back.
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 27