by Alfred Hayes
And was this, we say, later, when it’s over, really us? But it’s impossible! How could that fool, that impossible actor, ever have been us? How could we have been that posturing clown? Who put that false laughter into our mouths? Who drew those insincere tears from our eyes? Who taught us all that artifice of suffering? We have been hiding all the time; the events, that once were so real, happened to other people, who resemble us, imitators using our name, registering in hotels we stayed at, declaiming verses we kept in private scrapbooks; but not us, surely not us, we wince thinking that it could ever have possibly been us.
And I suppose that she, too, in some obscure and difficult way, experienced, in spite of everything, the feeling of her own unreality. She, too, knew the words that came easily or fumblingly were never the true words; everything may have been for her, too, somehow suspect. And yet, by all the orthodoxy of kisses and desire, we were apparently in love; by all the signs, the jealousy, the possessiveness, the quick flush of passion, the need for each other, we were apparently in love. We looked as much like lovers as lovers can look; and if I insist now that somehow, somewhere, a lie of a kind existed, a pretense of a kind, that somewhere within us our most violent protestations echoed a bit ironically, and that, full fathoms five, another motive lay for all we did and all we said, it may be only that like a woman after childbirth we can never restore for ourselves the reality of pain, it is impossible to believe that it was we who screamed so in the ward or clawed so at the bedsheets or such sweats were ever on our foreheads, and that too much feeling, finally, makes us experience a sensation of unreality as acute as never having felt at all.
4
ONE NIGHT she had a funny thing happen. Summer had come quickly, the way it always seems to now in New York. The mercury had boiled all day in the public thermometers, and there was an intolerable glitter from the chromework of parked cars. At the traffic intersections, waiting for the signal to change to what seemed a murderously delayed green, you could almost hear the stretched human nerve snap. The city had become, once more, impossible. There were only two habitable places in town that night: an air-conditioned restaurant or a movie, and we had gone into a Lexington Avenue Childs. I’d ordered iced coffee.
The evening before, an evening I had not seen her, she had been out to the Club Paris with a couple she knew, the Whites, Charlie and Isabel, and although she did not like nightclubs, she had always wanted to go to the Club Paris. She had watched the floorshow with an astonished, even slightly awed expression, for it was unbelievable that girls like the girls at the Club Paris, in their feathers, their rhinestones, their pinkness and whiteness, really existed, or that anywhere in the world there were bosoms quite like those which, in quantity, the chorus displayed; it gave her, she said, describing their perfection, the feeling of being almost deformed. Besides, she had gone dressed in a skirt and sweater, because she hadn’t expected it to be any sort of an evening, just dinner and a drink, but the Whites knew so many people, and the people just drifted over. First there was somebody else at the table named Jack who had a girl with him, a rather mannered girl he was supposed to be engaged to, and Charlie White kept making fun of her. It had started out as that sort of an evening, with champagne cocktails, which she loved, and Charlie White saying to Jack’s girl, when she talked of some movie actress, Are you an actress? and the girl saying no, she wasn’t, she was just sort of interested; and then she’d mention something about the piano player’s technique and Charlie White said: Do you play the piano? and it turned out she didn’t; and the girl said she liked snow, she was absolutely crazy about snow, and Charlie White asked her: Do you ski? and it turned out she didn’t do that either, or paint, or model, or anything: the only thing she apparently did do was have Jack keep her; and then Jack, as he got drunk during the evening, kept saying, She wants me to pay for having her teeth capped but I keep telling her I’ll cap them if she’ll let me cap the rest of her. Then Charlie White told a story about a guy who unscrewed his navel and his behind fell off and Jack’s girl laughed so hard Jack had to pound her back to stop her coughing.
It was that sort of evening, quite brilliant, the kind you groaned at the next day wondering how you could have possibly been that stupid, and then she noticed there was somebody else eating a fillet quietly at the table while the laughter and the jokes continued, who apparently only smiled when he was required to, a rather heavy solid sort of man whom Isabel called Howard, and now and then while he ate, with a steady undisturbed champing of his jaws, he would look at her. Isabel was saying something in reply to something Charlie had said, about men not being any different than women, they all cheated and connived, didn’t they? and Charlie answered: Well, they don’t suck them dry the way a woman does, when, apparently having finished his fillet and ready now to digest it with a bit of activity, the man Isabel called Howard leaned across the table and asked her to dance. He danced well, but rather heavily; dancing was not, she felt, as he fitted her into his arms, something he particularly enjoyed, but had, obviously—when it became apparent to him that a good part of his life was going to be spent in places where women expected to dance—set himself to reduce as much as possible his natural lack of feeling for it. There were evidently an expensive number of hours at a studio catering to businessmen behind it, but he danced, she thought, rather like a handball, a prescribed sort of movement. For a while, he was silent, concentrated on the music, and she felt, in his arms, quite small, light and fragile. She felt, too, vaguely trapped, the arm about her being somehow too firm and too possessive. The air was layered with cigarette smoke and shot with the colors of a roving spotlight. She hardly knew what to use to begin a conversation; she began to wish the number would be short; and then quite unexpectedly, as though having digested the fillet, and having settled the rhythm of the dance, he had come to what on the agenda was indicated as conversation time, he began to speak to her. Did she go very often to nightclubs? No, she didn’t, she replied, but he apparently didn’t believe her; a pretty girl like her, and she wasn’t invited out frequently? He supposed that all pretty girls were invited out frequently for, after all, that really was why clubs like the Club Paris were built, and why the lights, faint rose or soft yellow, played across the dance floor; didn’t she think the lights were romantic? Yes, she did, quite romantic, and then he asked her not to be offended. She wondered briefly what in the world he possibly intended to say that could offend her. But what he said was that she was beautiful, quite beautiful, and obviously meant it; and he pointed out, not intending I suppose any genuine irony, but rather enunciating one of his fixed maxims, that one should be born either beautiful or rich, everything else was a handicap, so that she was left with the feeling that ugliness, poverty, lack of talent, were misfortunes almost all the world, except herself and he, had suffered, and that they were, by these gifts, his money and her beauty, divided from all the unlucky millions. She looked up at that, a little sharply. It was very nice of him to think of her as beautiful, and very flattering, but she did not feel as fortunate as all that. The girls, the magnificent girls in the chorus, the girls in the feathers and rhinestones, who looked so much like creatures one dressed in uncut diamonds; if she looked like the girls in the chorus perhaps what he said might be true, and everything then, perhaps, would be easier than it was.
Was everything difficult now?
She did not know. She guessed not. Difficult? Well, no. Things were, she thought, vaguer than they were difficult. It was just that, looking at the girls, whose navels were perfectly placed, each with its little winking jewel, well one thought that if, by some miracle, one looked like that it must follow that everything must naturally (like a cornucopia pouring out men, automobiles, fur coats, trips to Europe in the spring) come to you.
And he was insisting now, politely: she was beautiful. In a way (though he did not explain how, and allowed her to think she understood without it being explained) he found her kind of beauty preferable; more appealing; she mustn’t think that wha
t she had, he said, was less desirable than what the other, more public girls possessed. It was then that she heard him offer her a thousand dollars. And he was quite serious, quite simple about it, it must have seemed to him the most normal of transactions. He was still astonishingly earnest, astonishingly sincere, or apparently sincere, so that the offer, voiced with no more change in him than if he had invited her to dinner, confused her, and he was being, incredibly, she could see, what he thought was genuinely honest and direct, and the money he was offering was, to her, so immense, so unthinkable, that its very size prevented her from being shocked or even offended. She was simply astonished.
Well! she said.
Is that enough? he asked, almost anxiously. He was certainly not trying to cheat her, his concerned face bending toward her as, still dancing, they moved among the couples in each other’s arms, intent upon fixing the price fairly, upon not cheating her, and even attempting to convey to her that he wished the dimensions of the money itself to indicate how desirable he thought she was, how genuine his feeling for her was, how honorable he was being.
Enough? she said, incredulously. Oh, dear. And wanted to return now to what seemed the perfect security of the table. But he held her arm a moment longer. Let me give you my card, he said extracting, absurdly, a neatly engraved oblong, and you think about it, pressing it upon her. She experienced now an irresistible desire to giggle. A thousand dollars! For her. Whom nobody ever thought of dressing in uncut diamonds. And his hand, as she tried to disengage herself, on her arm, so that she thought how large it is, imagining it, by some unexpected association, both on the steering wheel of a large powerful hooded car and on her thigh. I won’t try to contact you, he said now, softly, as she moved away, through the swirling couples, still being absurd, with that heavy disconcerting thing he thought of as honesty; you decide, he said, my office number’s on the card, expecting her to glance at it which she found herself almost doing as, smiling brightly, they approached the table and Isabel, looking up, the pearls about her throat not really masking the faint creases (which she, too, in time, beautiful or not, for Isabel had been as pretty once, still was, would acquire but probably without the masking pearls), said: You looked wonderful together, didn’t they, Charlie? and bald, stout, smiling too, with the mustache like a grenadier’s, Charlie agreed.
A smile, which identified itself as mine, drifted in the refrigerated air between us; I shook the cubes floating, like miniature bergs, in the tall coffee glass.
You’re not intending, I said, to use the card?
Idiot, she said. Of course not. How could I? I was just so overwhelmed by the idea of all that money.
I imagined I would have been, too.
Would you? she said. It is enormous, isn’t it? If you were a girl, what would you have done?
Accepted it.
No, she said, seriously. What would you have done?
I didn’t know.
A thousand dollars! Oh, God. Barbara (aged five) would have all that money in the bank. She wouldn’t touch it. That she wouldn’t touch it would purify the money, and she’d put it away, securely, in a safe deposit box somewhere, lock it up, the most secretive of nest eggs, and Barbara would have it when she was seventeen. And that would be nice, wouldn’t it, to be Barbara, to be seventeen, and to have, as she had never had, that fine secure feeling of a thousand dollars all her own sitting there waiting in an indestructible bank?
Exceedingly nice, I thought.
Perhaps, she said, as I watched the small blocks of ice diminish in my coffee and invisibly somewhere the machinery that cooled the intense air whirred, I could do it if I were hypnotized, or took some sort of a pill. Was there some sort of a pill or something she could take?
There probably was. I would ask a pharmacist for her; would she like it candy-coated? They made almost all the disagreeable pills nowadays candy-coated, and I was sure that, with a little exertion, I could probably find a pill for her sweet enough to make it all easy. She laughed; and then asked, wide-eyed, if I were jealous; how silly of me to be jealous. How could I, knowing her as I did, and being so perspicacious, imagine that she ever possibly could. Besides, wasn’t it I who had insisted that she had a perfect right to go out to dinner with other men, and hadn’t it been I who advised her to be independent of me, and assured both of us we were free to do as we chose?
It most certainly had.
He was, she said then, speaking again of Howard, a president of some company. Textiles, she thought, or chemicals, something like that. She wasn’t quite sure. But Isabel said he was very rich. Isabel always knew things like that. The first thing Isabel always managed to find out were things like that, how rich they were and pretty exactly too, and I thought Isabel was probably right because he’d have to be, and checking carefully over my memories of even the most munificent night I’d ever spent, in my limited way, of course, and with my modest means, a thousand dollars did seem quite more than even the most luxurious haystack was worth.
Oh, she said, you. How would you know what a woman was worth?
And still I wore that smile that somehow would not fit my face, a smile distributed now among the chicken salads and the stewed vegetables. We both understood that the money, however tempting, was unthinkable, and that what she was being light and gay about, here, in the restaurant, was simply the fact that what had happened was an unusual experience, to be somewhat amazed at, obscurely flattered by, and a little amused with. She looked up now, brightly.
But just think, she said. It would all be over in a night. It was only a night he wanted. I could just forget it and pretend it never happened, couldn’t I? And you wouldn’t really mind, would you, darling? Because I’d still love you. It wouldn’t affect the way I felt about you at all.
She picked at the salad she had ordered.
Reflectively now:
He’d want though, probably, to stick pins in me or something. Don’t you think? There must be, it’s impossible otherwise, not for a thousand dollars, something funny about him. Pins, that would be horrible.
She sighed.
The small teeth tore at the infinitesimal strips of pallid chicken.
Funny though, she said, how I don’t feel outraged. Or disgusted. How I accept it. How it seems perfectly normal for a man I never met before nor even saw, on a dance floor, a Sunday night, to offer me that much money out of the blue. I must be really awful. Suppose my mother knew? She’d die. Tainted money. It would be tainted, wouldn’t it?
Yes.
Tainted. What a funny word, she said. And looked at me now, tenderly.
But you’d take me back, wouldn’t you, darling? You’d forgive me. After all, I’ve been nice, haven’t I, and I haven’t caused you too much trouble, and it’s really such a lot of money. Tainted. It is a funny word, isn’t it? It sounds like a word my grandmother used to use. What does tainted really mean? Is it like fruit, rotten a bit? But not completely spoiled? Tainted, she said. I’d take the money and I’d be tainted.
She reached across the table, and squeezed my hand. Silly, she said. Stop looking like that. You know I wouldn’t.
And it seemed then, with the affectionate gesture, the reassuring smile that accompanied it, the pleasant walk home, that the episode was closed, the incident over; but what incident, where flattery, even of a dubious nature, is involved, is ever over for a woman? What episode, in which she’s admired, however obliquely, is ever really ended? She will reopen what seems to you a finished chapter, and manage, somehow, to add a disconcerting epilogue to some drama you assumed was done with quite some time ago.
The heat continued. The city, an enormous pot, cooked its inhabitants over a slow fire. She had gone, as everyone had, through the stunned hours, waiting for the night to obliterate the sun; but the nights were as difficult to endure as the days. She ate little, because of the heat, and slept naked in the tiny living room, and then she had, again, one of her bad dreams.
In the dream she was crossing a street in the small tow
n in which she had been born and to which she returned occasionally, when she noticed a box lying in the gutter. It was a sort of small packing box, and in the dream she realized that her child was in the packing box. It wasn’t quite clear to her how the little girl had gotten into the box, although it seemed to her quite logical in the dream that the child should be in the box; she thought, with that odd reasoning with which one accepts the contradictions of a dream, that the child had been playing a game of some kind and had crawled into the small crate to hide; and as she watched, a huge truck came down the street. She found herself powerless as the truck, with a terrible casualness, went over and crushed the crate; and then, when the truck had gone on without stopping or caring, she had rushed into the gutter and had, as she said, the action having some obscure meaning, slid the lid of the crate back, although a crate would not have had a sliding lid. She lifted the little body up, saying Barbara, O Barbara, you’re not hurt, although she knew the child was dead; and then she found herself somehow carrying the body in her arms down an endless flight of stairs. She could tell by the way the child lay in her arms that her neck was broken; she was not injured visibly except for the fatal way her neck was, and that was strange too; and as she carried the child she kept saying, O baby, you shouldn’t play in the streets, it’s so dangerous, you might have been hurt, to reassure the dead little girl because, she felt, if she pretended to the child that she wasn’t injured she would not be dead, although she knew the child was. Meanwhile, the endless stairs; and, as she said, the awful atmosphere that surrounded her in the dream which was more terrible, she felt, than the things which the dream actually made happen; and then she woke up. She woke up crying, alone in the room, with the curtains drawn. It was another hot morning. And on the coffee table, where she had forgotten it, close to the fountain pen that contained the capsule of tear gas, lay the engraved card he had given her that night at the Club Paris. She did not think there was any connection between the dream and the decision she made; what she did say was that the dream had exhausted her so much that when she woke up and saw the card lying on the coffee table it seemed so much less terrible than all the other terrible things in the world that could happen to her.