by Packer, Vin
“As a matter of fact,” Harvey said, “I don’t know ‘old love-head.’” It seems to me he doesn’t give me a chance to know him. I’ve done everything too. What about that birthday party I gave him?”
“He was very appreciative, Harvey.”
“Well, he could have come to dinner, it seems to me.”
“He just couldn’t,” Lois answered. There seemed to be no retort for that one. Harvey let it go. He said, “Shall I put on the hi-fi?”
“I’m hungry, Harvey.”
“But we haven’t finished one drink.”
“Daddy’s picking me up at ten, and it’s eight-thirty now. I don’t want to keep him waiting.”
“At ten? Ten o’clock? That’s a fine thing. I mean, that gives us very little time, Lois.”
“I didn’t even have any lunch. We were over at Adair’s studio.”
“It’s a silly name for a man to have,” Harvey said. “I like it. Can’t we eat soon, Harvey?”
• • •
He had set a very smart table in the small dining alcove off the living room. He had bought a long fringe-edged table cloth, tangerine colored, with ruby-red napkins to accompany it. The young man in the store on Madison Avenue, where he made the purchases, said it was a daring color scheme, and with white plates, the table would be “simply smart.” He had bought a long wine basket, to cradle the bottle of Bordeaux, and he had memorized a little something he had read on a wine chart, which he would recite when he opened the wine. He did not feel very much at all like tangerine table cloths, ruby-red napkins, or memorized conversational bits any more; he worked in the kitchen at getting the dinner on, peeved and hurt at Hayden Cutler. At last he had managed to get Lois to call her father at his club, to ask him if he wouldn’t stop in when he came to pick her up. He could hear her in there talking with him.
“… not yet,” she was saying. “Oh, I will … Ummm, hmmm. Yes, dumkins … then you don’t think it’s a good idea?”
Harvey slammed the frying pan around on the stove at her last words, then hushed himself to hear still more.
“God bless me,” she was saying, “and God bless you. Keep each one and keep us two.”
Then she made that smacking noise with her lips. “Here’s a kiss!” she said, “Bye, bye.”
Harvey called in, “Then he’s not coming?”
“Nope. ‘Fraid not, Monsieur.”
“Dinner’s served,” Harvey said sourly.
“Sursum corda?” said Lois Cutler.
• • •
But he pulled himself together somewhere between the kitchen and the dining alcove. He even managed a smile. The way to Hayden Cutler’s heart could not be reached via his stomach this evening, but it could be reached via his daughter any evening. Harvey had to remember that. Still, he was slightly on edge. He had never realized before that he was not doing at all well, really. Badly, in fact. Again he remembered his bank balance. It had gone down very, very fast.
He picked up the bottle of Bordeaux by the neck, and smiled at Lois across the candlelight. “Burgundy is good with this dish,” said he, “but they had only 1955 Burgundy at my local place, and I’m afraid nature was not very kind in the gently sloping hills of Burgundy during the 1955 harvest.”
Lois said, “You should order from Sherry’s. They have all years.”
“So I got Bordeaux,” Harvey ended his speech feebly. Then Lois Cutler looked down at her plate and said, “Is this raw egg?”
“Spaghetti alla carbonara,” Harvey said grandly. “A Roman dish.”
“Well, maybe the Romans can stand raw egg yolks, but ugh and ugh! I can’t.”
“Just mix it in. You won’t even know it. There’s sage in there. The sage offers a little extra touch that …"
“Won’t even know it! I’ll know it! I can see it! Ugh, Harvey, mon Dieu! I can’t eat raw egg yolk.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Just get it out of my sight. Please! Honestly, Harvey, I think it’ll make me sick.”
“I’ll take the egg yolk off,” Harvey said, getting up and removing the plate from in front of her. “I’ll take it in the kitchen and remove the egg yolk.”
“It’ll still have egg slime on it. No, I’m sorry. The Romans may think it’s both divine and dav-oon, but pour moi, ugh! Oh, God, it’s just a good thing dumkins didn’t come! If there’s even the slightest leakage in his breakfast eggs, he always says, ‘Take it back, I can still see the chicken!’ “
“That must improve everybody’s appetite,” said Harvey.
“Well, that’s the way dumkins and I feel about eggs.”
“What’ll I do?” Harvey said, standing there with the plate. “Let me just take off the egg. There won’t be any slime on it. I’ll mix it all in for you.”
“No, really. Just take it away. Anyway, I think I’ve lost my appetite. I’ll have a roll and some butter.”
Harvey took the plate into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator, but there was nothing in it to offer her. He opened the kitchen cabinet, and there was nothing there either, not even a can of soup. He walked back into the alcove. Lois was buttering a roll. There was a lit cigarette on the ashtray beside her.
“I’ll just have some bread and wine,” she said.
“I can’t sit here and eat without you.”
“Go ahead, Monsieur. It’s my own fault if I don’t like raw egg yolk.”
Harvey sat down. “In Rome, it’s an everyday dish,” he said. “I think you’re going to be very disappointed when you go to Europe.”
“I’ll struggle along on lombatine di vitello at Alfredo’s,” she said. “I’ve been to Rome three times and I’ve never had raw egg yolk.”
“What’s lombatine di vitello?”
“Grilled veal chops. Very good.”
“Well, if you want to be a tourist.”
“Since love-head and I are New Hopeians and pas Romans, cheri, it seems a bit inevitable that we’ll be tourists, n’est-ce pas?”
“I mean, behave like tourists.”
“Ugh!” she said, “I can’t even watch you eat it.”
“It’s all mixed in now. You can’t even see the egg.”
“And I was even going to kiss you goodbye tonight,” Lois said. She picked up her cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke, sipped the wine and said, “Anyway, the wine’s trés bon.”
“What do you mean you were even going to kiss me good night. We always kiss good night.” “I said ‘goodbye’.”
“But you’re not going away until November. Besides,” Harvey smiled shyly and slyly, “I might see you over there.”
Lois got up from the table and walked into the other room. “I’ll be back directly,” said she. “Sit tight, Monsieur.”
She came back with her pocketbook. From it, she took a folded clipping cut from a newspaper. “Did you see last Sunday’s Tribune?”
“No.”
“I’ll wait until you’ve finished.”
“What have you got there? Show me now.”
“No, finish up, first.”
Harvey pushed his plate away. “I don’t enjoy the dish very much — not any more,” he said, in a poutish voice. It made no dent on Lois, who said, “I don’t wonder.”
“What do you have there?”
“It’s a clipping from last Sunday’s Tribune. Voila!” She handed it to him.
GARDEN WITHOUT A SINGLE FLOWER was the heading. Plangman looked at the picture to the side of the article. It showed a man seated sideways at a small round table, which contained a bottle of wine and one table setting. The man was holding a long cigarette holder. He was wearing a scarf of some sort knotted about his neck, a boat-neck sweater, slacks, and sandals. Under the picture, the caption read:
“Adair Trowbridge at lunch in his studio garden. Ferns, ivy, crab-apple, willow, and privet are planted by a sapling fence. Feather rocks and wooden ducks add to the setting. A four-tier fountain decorates the east side.”
The article began, “
Mr. Trowbridge, a horticultural photographer, is an authority on ferns and other plants. At his studio in New Hope, Pennsylvania, his garden does not contain a single flower….”
Two long columns discussed his flowering crab ensemble, his Spanish wrought-iron gates, his privet hedge divider, and his Hankow screw willows.
The article concluded: “Mr. Trowbridge has his lunch on the terrace each day and it is always the same — raw vegetables of several kinds with tuna fish and a pint of white wine, no bread, butter or anything else.”
Plangman handed back the clipping. “Well?” he said, “What about it?” “That’s Adair.”
“What has he to do with me?”
Lois Cutler smiled. “He has to do with moi, cheri. You see, Adair and I have been writing back and forth in French, while he was in Europe — you knew that, oui? That I was writing this man in French? Well, viola. I guess we just … we’re going to be engaged. He’s home now, and we decided it very suddenly.”
Harvey Plangman stared at her.
“That’s the reason Daddy felt it was better that he didn’t come tonight,” she said. “I told him I was going to tell you about Adair and me.”
FIFTEEN
AT THE top of the stairs that morning, little Chrissy Carson was sitting with her mother’s stocking in her mouth, singing to herself:
“Peck up all your cars and woe,
He I go, singing low,
Bye, bye, black-burd — ”
She called out to Raymond Battle, who was on his way to his mailbox, on the front porch. “Ga-mornin’ Misser Bat-ul!”
“Hullo!” Battle said. “Don’t fall down the stairs!” he added gruffly.
“Done faw down ‘tairs!” she called back. On Saturday, in his mailbox, Battle had found an envelope containing his left lens. Inside was a note:
Dear Mr. Battle,
This must be one of your eyes. I haven’t come across the other one yet. I think you are the rudest man I ever met!
Sincerely, Vacant Bunny Carson.
He had seen her (without her seeing him; he had peeked through his doorway at her) three or four times over the weekend. He knew her footsteps on the stairs very well — the rhythm was constant, a rush down three, a bounce where she skipped one, a rush down three more, another bounce — a crash at the bottom. He discovered that she had a whole wardrobe of those Ked sneakers, a pair to match every outfit. His glimpse of her was usually of her legs. He would see the hem of the skirt, the white freckled skin, then the bright blue Ked trademark on the white rubber, and the shoe matching the skirt’s color. Her legs looked like bowling pins turned upside down.
Once, she had come down the stairs with a man, and Raymond had guessed it was Scott Allen. From time to time during the long weekend, he had heard Allen up there singing. There was one song he heard over and over:
By and by,
By and by,
Stars shining brightly in the sky, by and by,
O Lord!
He would hear the sounds of Allen strumming the guitar, the sounds of all of them singing — Allen, the children, Mrs. Carson and Mrs. Hill. There was always a great deal of laughter and clapping of hands, and a few times Raymond Battle had to use all his self-control to keep from calling on the phone to complain of the noise. Sunday morning Battle had dreamed of Mrs. Carson. In the dream she was standing in a doorway on a New York City street. There was a familiar expression on her countenance. He had said, “You were in some other dream. What are you doing back?” That was all; he had awakened. He remembered when he woke up that he had seen that expression once long ago, on the face of an actual woman in a doorway in New York City. Or was it a man? It was something to do with two people looking at one another, one of them with love spelled out in all his features in such a strange, real way, that at the time Robert Bowser had felt as though something were being taken away from him — an emptiness.
By and by,
By and by,
Stars shining brightly in the sky, by and by,
O Lord!
He could not get the song out of his head; he went about humming it, and alternately telling himself it was his duty to inform Mrs. Plangman that Mrs. Carson was seeing men in her apartment. The trouble was there was no rule against it. Mrs. Carson did not come under University control, since she was only an auditor in most courses, and not under age or under the control of anyone. Her mother was living with her, and Battle was certain Allen was not spending the night there. It amounted to nothing.
Raymond had gotten one good look at Allen. He was an unkempt fellow who looked as though he never washed, and wore colored shirts unbuttoned halfway down his chest, and large belts with great brass buckles. His hair was too long; his pants were too tight; his eyes, too cock-sure. He was a fellow who would amount to nothing, Raymond Battle decided; a fellow, who in all probability, was at the high point of his life right now — what had come before and what would come after, was all downhill. “Banjo” Raymond called him, to himself: he would think: “… so she has Banjo up there again!”
On the porch, in his mailbox, there was nothing for Battle but a bill from the eye doctor in St. Louis. Nothing from Plangman, which was unusual for a Monday. He saw a car pull up in front of 702, the back seat filled with children. The car parked at the curb, the motor running, and then from the house came Mrs. Carson with Chrissy and Carla.
He stepped aside.
“Done faw down ‘tairs!” Chrissy said to him. She was still carrying the stocking, holding on to her mother’s hand.
Carla said, “You’re the man that sat with us. You’re Mr. Battle.”
Mrs. Carson went by him without a word.
Battle walked back in the house. When he was almost to his door, he heard the front door open and close, heard Mrs. Carson say, “I still haven’t located your other eye, Mr. Battle.”
The children were not with her now.
He said, “They’re not glass eyes, you know. They’re contact lenses. I have another pair, thank you.”
“You look much better without your baseball cap.”
He was not prepared for a nice word. He grunted something — made some sort of noise, and stood there. Then he said, “Where are the children? Out playing in the street?”
“Oh, you’re so sweet, Mr. Battle! Doesn’t everyone tell you what a sweet man you are?”
“Never mind. Your problem,” Battle mumbled, turning to go into his apartment.
“The children,” she said, “have joined a nursery. They Were just picked up, or couldn’t you see that far?”
She was wearing a cotton house dress — violet-colored, with violet-colored Keds. She seemed very short to Battle, who was extremely tall. He looked down at her, and she met his glance with clear, unsmiling eyes. She said, “Do you want to call a truce?”
“I’m not at war with you, Mrs. Carson.”
“Would you like to come up for coffee?”
It was Margaret who used to say it: that she could always guess the age of an author by the love scenes in his novel. In a young author’s novel they were always very long and suspenseful and tempest-tossed, described almost dutifully, as though the author had been to some country where no one else had been, and must capture its climate for the reader. “Like all travelogues,” Margaret used to say, “they please the narrator the most. And the author less young, middle-aged, was very likely to simply put it down in three words: They became lovers. Margaret used to laugh and say, “It sounds more obscene than all the youthful elaboration somehow, the same way coitus always sounded to me like a four-letter word.”
• • •
Raymond Battle remembered Margaret’s saying that over and over, in the week following the invitation for coffee from Mrs. Carson. She was Bunny now. He was used to sitting on the bed up in 3, watching her peel off her clothes and kick off her Keds prior to pushing him back on the mattress (always smiling; it irritated him); used to the daylight of the room which in the beginning inhibited him, so that he used to st
ay in his shorts, and accustomed, as well, to her periodic, triumphant reminders that he must not think she was vacant any longer. They had become lovers, just like in the older author’s novel, with very little fanfare and even less suspense. It was a little like morning gymnastics, Raymond Battle decided, and he didn’t wonder; hadn’t he read her diaries? When she fell on top of him; at approximately ten-forty-five every morning, he had the annoying memory of her “Me Again” and afterwards, “Nite! Nite!” The fact was, it was obscene. She had a body that ripped right through him when he saw it uncovered; she was one of those women who look fabulous naked, and not nearly so voluptuous clothed. She was also little interested in receiving any gratification herself, another factor that lent an air of obscenity to the proceedings; and then too, she talked about it too much. It was Raymond Battle’s own fault for asking questions, he supposed. Still, he wished she would have the good sense to put him off. Margaret had had such sense. He had only that much to go by for comparison. But after, when they would lie in bed and talk, it seemed to Raymond what little feeling there had been, went with their words.
“You don’t seem to really enjoy it,” he would say.
“I like it if you do, though.”
“But, don’t you see, I’d like it better if you would.” “It takes me too long. I have to think of things.” “What do you mean?” “You’ll laugh.”
“I certainly won’t. After all, nothing’s strange that accomplishes satisfaction. Don’t be so conventional.”
He was actually very much in the dark about what she had to think about; what was there to think about? He remembered the night in Paris, when Margaret had been unable to concentrate because of the street noises. He was not at all certain he wanted the puzzle solved.
“All right,” said Bunny Carson, “I have to picture something in my mind.”
He decided not to encourage her. She went on anyway. “You know,” she said. “Something from a book I’ve read or something like that.”