by Alfred Hayes
I thought he wouldn’t remember me at all when I called, she said. It was four days ago, and I couldn’t seem to hold my voice together, but when I called him he seemed to recognize my voice immediately, as though he’d been waiting, as though he’d known I’d wake up and find the card and pick up the phone and call, as though there was nothing else I could do but wake up some morning and call him. He had only to wait, there, in that office of his, sitting in a leather upholstered chair, and I’d do it, just as sure as the sun, not even I suppose really feeling like he’d won anything because he isn’t the kind of man who behaves as though there’s such a thing as winning or losing, what he thinks is that the world and everybody in it are a certain way, a way he says they are, and when I called I guess I was only doing what he had expected me to do so that there was no question of his being triumphant, he’d just been proven right once again, that was all. And then he said: no, he hadn’t been drunk, and yes, of course he remembered what he’d said, and yes, he’d meant it, all as though he thought I was a little hysterical or was going to be hysterical and wanted to calm me down, and I kept saying I wanted to talk about his proposition. Funny, it was the only word I could think of, proposition, I’d never used it before or even dared think of it, but what else could I possibly call it, and that’s what it was, wasn’t it, a proposition? He didn’t seem to like my calling it a proposition, and then he said that it was difficult discussing a matter like we were discussing over the phone, couldn’t we possibly go somewhere for a drink? So I met him at the Crystal Room. I suppose there are people in this town that if you have to meet them never can think of any other possible place than 21 or the Stork Club. Do they always meet in places like that, 21 or the Stork Club or the Crystal Room, for everything they do? Business, and everything? I suppose they can’t even think of another place. I suppose it just never occurs to them that people do meet other places. I suppose if you insisted they’d think real hard, trying to imagine what place they could slum in, and then they’d say, well, if you like, we can make it at the Waldorf. Anyway, when he arrived, I was already there, and he came over to the table quickly now, smiling and polite, as though it were really an appointment. He had the same sort of blank pleasant earnestness that he had had that night at the Club Paris which upset me so much; I mean, he should have looked different to do what he was doing, or at least sounded different. I suppose I wouldn’t have felt comfortable until he twirled his mustaches, waxed ones too, and then I’d have known where I was. Meanwhile, he was ordering a drink; then there was the business of lighting a cigarette, all perfectly normal, but my voice wouldn’t change. It was so loud every time I opened my mouth, and I kept wanting him to talk about it. Facts and figures, cold, time, place, arrangements, draw the contract up fast so I could sign it, but he said, still smiling, turning me aside, it could wait, there was no hurry, we had all day.
Not to look at him, she said. That’s what I thought. He isn’t anything. He’s a suit of clothes. He’s something in a chair. Because I’d made up my mind to go through with it. He asked me questions. About my family, where were they, what my father did, was I married, was I in love with somebody. I told him it was none of his business. And he just smiled, a suit of clothes with a smile. I hated him for offering me the money. Now I first really hated him. I hadn’t hated him that night at the Club Paris because then it was just funny. Unbelievable, that’s all. But now I hated him. Because he had no right to make me think all that money was there and I could have it for something as stupid and as unimportant as going to bed with him. He’d made me think: Why shouldn’t I? He’d made me say: What difference does it make?
It would be at his apartment, she said. Dinner. I supposed the maid would cook. And candles. Then in the morning I’d leave. I’d have the money in advance. Simple, wasn’t it? How nice and simple. And the simpler it seemed, the more I hated him.
And why not, she said. I couldn’t think of why not. I go to bed with you, don’t I? For love. And you wouldn’t really care as long as you didn’t know. Who really cares about me? Who gives a damn what I do? Nobody came to me and said: We’ll take care of Barbara, don’t do it. No. They’d all be shocked. And they’d all envy the money. They’d all think to themselves: What would I have done? If only he’d take me, now, to wherever it was he lived. Quick. Instead, he asked me to dance.
Dance, she said. God, it was the last thing I wanted to do. I’d made him order me another drink. I kept thinking: I’ll buy Mother a present with some of it. She hadn’t had a present. And the rest I’ll put away for Barbara.
So we danced, she said. In the Crystal Room. Tea music, I suppose. He asked me if the ring I was wearing was gold. It was my wedding ring. I said Mother had given it to me. He asked me if I always wore clothes like that. Not that he didn’t like the way I dressed; just that it was different. Did I always wear off-the-shoulder things? I said I thought it gave me more height. I said I supposed he had all kinds of money. He said no, only the kind they printed in Washington. He asked me if I had many women friends. I said no. He asked me why. I said I preferred men. He said that he thought women were difficult to understand. I said a woman is what she is. That she has a right to love and a right to be happy and a right to be supported. He said: Why? I said because she bears the children. He looked at me. That doesn’t leave a man very many rights, does it? he said. I said he wouldn’t talk that way if he had ever been married, and he said he had had that pleasure. He got a funny look on his face. I wondered if his wife was beautiful. He said perhaps, but that all he could remember was that she was a woman. And that condemns her? I said. He didn’t answer. Obviously he hadn’t been married very long. Oh, he said, yes he had, a long time: almost two days. One day in New York and one day at the Hotel George Cinq in Paris. When they were in the Hotel George Cinq in Paris his wife sat up in bed, drunk on the bridal champagne, and she started to laugh. He had been reasonably sure she was a virgin, or if not precisely a virgin, a facsimile thereof. You poor son of a bitch, she said. I could tell you a cop I had more fun with. He listened to her about the cop who sang in a patrolman’s glee club. Then he went down into the lobby of the George Cinq and paced a while, trying to decide whether he ought to go back up to that bridal suite and strangle her, or radiogram his lawyers. He radiogrammed his lawyers and the next morning he took the first seat he could get on an Air France stratoliner back to New York. He had tried getting as far away from the Hotel George Cinq as he could. Now, four years later, he was evidently still trying.
Not that he blamed her, he said. He blamed himself. It was his mistake; he had forgotten, temporarily, how rich he was. But not all women were like that, I said. No? he said, polite. I’m not an angel on a wedding cake, I said, but I’m not like that and not all women are like that. He looked at me. He didn’t even smile. He just looked tired. I’m sure, he said, my wife would have insisted she was not like that either.
And all this time, she said, we had been talking. I suddenly realized we’d been talking. That he wasn’t, any more, a suit of clothes. He wasn’t something in a chair. I stopped dancing. I want to sit down, I said. Please. He took me back to the table. You can’t do it, can you? he said.
And I couldn’t, she said. Not any more. Because I could only do it while I hated him. While I didn’t think of him as a man. Or as anything. And I felt so sick. I thought you couldn’t, he said. You did your best to look as though you would, but I knew you couldn’t. He called the waiter, paid. They were still playing that goddamn tea music. And then he turned. I would like, he said, to see you again, his voice different. He had changed it. No, I said, wanting nothing but to get out of that place, and then I came home, and began to cry, and finally I fell asleep.
Then, later, when she awoke, she felt absurd. That she had cried, that she had been so overwrought, seemed to her ridiculous. Isabel, if she ever told Isabel, would say she was a fool not to have taken the money, a bigger fool to have cried about it, but the biggest fool was Howard: he could have gotten what he w
anted for half. And thinking of Isabel, and of Isabel’s pearls and Isabel’s blondeness, she felt better about it. She was rather glad she hadn’t gone through with it; after all, it was hard to believe that really all he’d have asked was to sleep with her, he must have some queerness somewhere; but there was a minute regret, too, that she hadn’t. Most of all, now, in the security of her own place, it seemed mildly funny and mildly insane. Life, she was inclined to feel, once more, in that imperishable phrase of hers, was certainly peculiar. She felt quite cheered up now about it all.
And I suppose she actually believed, as she told herself, that she did not want ever to see him again. It was something firm to tell herself, and it did help to re-establish her slightly shaken idea of what she was capable of, and it closed up the tiny abyss which had unexpectedly yawned in her. But she must have known then, with that prescience women have and that skill in reading their own sexual futures, that he would not permit the afternoon to end with so muffled a conclusion; that someday, soon, the telephone would ring again; that flowers would arrive; that a gift, possibly candy, in a larger box than she was used to, or roses, in a cellophane that bore a distinctive florist’s address, would be delivered. And have known, too, even while she shuddered a little delicately at the thought that she had come so close to what she called the brink, that the call would be answered, the flowers signed for, the candy accepted.
And I? A queer sort of paralysis seemed to descend on me during the following weeks, as the dinner engagements (all quite innocent, of course) began; the phone calls (pleasant and meaningless and friendly, of course) came; the telegrams (from Denver, where he had flown on business; or Florida, where he had gone for a few days’ fishing) were delivered. I would find her now, on the evenings I saw her, unexpectedly animated. She had acquired almost a glow. She looked prettier than ever. I had almost no knowledge of businessmen, and less of rich men; I had only supposed that they were different, and that almost nothing was attractive about them but their money, and that a girl such as she was, with a taste for music and vague artistic responses, would necessarily find them bores; nevertheless, as the weeks progressed, I was surprised to discover in myself other beliefs. Beliefs, for example, hidden away, and as commonplace as anyone else’s, that the penthouses of the city were inhabited by the mysterious and the fortunate; that, really, they were an enviable people, the rich; that there, in the big hotels and the clubs they patronized, life had an unsuspected charm; that for them the sun came up over a pleasanter horizon, and the day began with a purposiveness unknown elsewhere; that all their mothers were beautiful and cultivated; and that a floral centerpiece, and a view of the park at night, made a dinner for two memorable. She, meanwhile, would laugh at the notion that she was, or could be, attracted to him. She would repeat to me, then, as we ate dinner, conversations she had with him, or opinions he voiced. He disliked opera, she discovered; there was so much singing in it; but he approved of the ballet; it did have pretty girls, and they danced. Musicals struck him as what art ought to be; and he was quite violent about politics. She always had the uncomfortable feeling when he spoke about the administration in Washington that it was, in effect, a rival business concern. He played tennis, of course; and it was not difficult to see him on the tennis courts, in a T-shirt and white linen shorts, with spotless white woolen socks and double-soled sneakers, sweating satisfactorily. Or golf; for there had to be, I was sure, a golf day. Thursday afternoons were the golf afternoons. As for his smaller habits, they included a cigar cutter attached to a key ring he had a tendency to toy with, a liking for monograms on his cufflinks and his shirts, and a particular superstitious affection for a watch inherited from his father, the founder of his business, whom he admired so extravagantly that she asked me if it were possible to have an Oedipus complex about one’s father for she had always supposed one had it only about one’s mother. She found, too, and this, she said, disturbed her a little, that he had a conviction, more or less absolute, that what he believed was right. He was sure that the judgments he made were the only possible judgments one could make. He felt, she conveyed to me, some identification with the world which she and I lacked. He did not have to fumble (as, listening, I knew I always did) toward what existed. They were his creations, he somehow felt, and he was theirs. A rapport existed between them. What he himself, or his immediate friends, the people on Long Island and between Fifty-ninth Street and Fiftieth, or the oddly mixed set of businessmen, their wives, and (with allowances) the entertainers of the more luxurious cafés, did, he was inclined to think of as normal, acceptable, in short, true. Had he himself been driven to murder, or had it been brought to his attention that one of his acquaintances was living in a ménage composed of two women and a young horse, it would not have struck him as unthinkable; he would have nodded his large, well-groomed, dark head to indicate that he understood. Had the two ladies and the young horse been discovered living in a broken-down tenement, that well-groomed head would have gone the other way; the whole episode would then have become incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, she liked him. He was, she discovered, nice-ish. And kind, despite the experience with the thousand dollars. And quite different, now that she knew him, from what she had supposed. He had, after all, suffered at the hands of women. It was the experience in the George Cinq. She had to admit, in fairness, that it was rather horrible to have a thing like that happen. And naturally, now, she said, frowning, he assumed or had to assume all women were like that, and he was simply trying to guard himself against them; so that, really, he was sort of pathetic when one thought of it. It gave her a pleasant confidence to be able to think of him as sort of pathetic.
And I? Surely there was nothing I could object to; nothing I hadn’t myself approved of. Was she flattered by his attention? I could hardly deprive her of the pleasure of that flattery. Was she entertained? I could hardly insist, on the nights I did not see her, that she stay alone in the house, with the little gas pen on the table beside her bed. Then why did I begin to experience that peculiar paralysis? Why was I unaccountably depressed? I had simply to say that I did not want her to see him, or to accept his invitations, and that I loved her, and that I was jealous; nevertheless, I could not. I smiled; I pretended to approve, and pretended not to be alarmed; I entered into the endless comedy of self-concealment with her; and inside me, a slow petrification spread. I seemed incapable of a natural reaction. Was it because, sometimes, listening to her account of him, and of their conversations, and of the evenings they spent together, I saw unexpected resemblances between us, and in his efforts, as a man, to amuse, to impress, to entertain, to dominate and to win her, glimpses of myself? Echoes of what seemed a familiar insincerity came back to me. Or possibly, it was that I, too, found the advantages of knowing a rich man irresistible; that the seductiveness operated equally strong on both of us, and made me, half-willingly, her accomplice.
There was, really, only one incident that broke through for a moment the frozen role I had assigned myself: it was when I found that one of a pair of earrings, of an old silver, which I had given her, was missing. She said, at first, not really wishing to lie, that she had lost the earring; but seeing that I did not believe her, and that I was angry, and that I suspected something, she admitted, with a quick flush, that the earring was now, she guessed, at the bottom of the Hudson River. Which sounded even more unbelievable; but that was where it was, she thought: at the bottom of the river, where he had thrown it one night when they had gone for a drive, and parked, facing the dark Palisades. She had been very fond of the earrings. They were so lovely, and had looked so well with her small head and long neck; they had meant a great deal to her, I knew that, didn’t I? She had been absolutely furious with him. I knew that too, didn’t I? But there was nothing she could have done; it happened so quickly, so unexpectedly. For they had been sitting in the car, with the radio on, looking at the lights of the amusement park and listening to the music, when he had, without warning, reached toward her and taken the
earring from her ear and thrown it toward the river. She supposed it went into the river; she couldn’t really see where the ornament had gone; it would have been useless looking for it. She was so mad, and so upset, she almost got out of the Cadillac. But he said he’d rather, when she went out with him, if she was going to wear jewelry, wear his; he was quite willing to buy it for her, too. So that I could see, couldn’t I, that there was nothing she could have done about it. She was helpless. The earring was gone, down there in the dark, and he just sat there, undisturbed. He even seemed surprised that she should be so upset about it. He’d send her, he assured her, another pair; and after all, she could understand, couldn’t she, his disliking a woman he escorted, or admired, wearing another man’s jewelry? His position was perfectly clear; I suspected that she even liked the abruptness with which he had taken something of hers, and disposed of it, easily, quickly, into the darkness. But I understood something else, too: I knew, then, that she had not told him she was in love with me; that, as a matter of fact, she must have allowed him to think there was nobody she was in love with or tied to. The act had been a possessive one; he was throwing away what he thought was a gift from some man she had formerly known; he was, in a way, stripping her of her past. But just as, despite her anger, or the anger she assured me she had felt, and the indignation, she had remained in the car, so I too, because of some not entirely honest feeling, some obscure motive, found myself accepting the act, the disposal of the earring, found myself with an anger that was not entirely genuine, an indignation that something in me was rendering false. But I often saw the gesture repeated: his reaching toward her, and the earring thrown, and the darkness taking it.