She grinned, fascinated. “Tell me about it. Was she married?”
“Oh, sure. The husband was gone; she thought he’d been captured or killed at Stalingrad.”
“How old was she—young?”
“About thirty, thirty-two.”
“Good-looking?”
“Well, kind of heavy.” In his gruff laugh she saw that he had probably decided not to be obsequious with her any more. His lovemaking since his return had been markedly overbearing but no less inept than before; he was better at handling her body, but her feelings seemed to have no space in his mind.
“And what happened? Tell me.”
“Well, Bavaria . . . We were stuck in this half-bombed-out town hall with the wind blowing through the windows, and I had a cold that was killing me. Coming into town, I’d noticed this house half a mile or so off down the road, and it’d looked tight and had smoke coming out of the chimney. So I went over. She gave me some soup. She was too stupid to hide the Nazi flag hanging over her husband’s picture. And it got late and I . . .” He pursed his lips cutely, stretched out his legs, and clasped his hands behind his head. “You really want to hear this?”
“Come on, dear, you know you want to tell it.”
“Okay. I said I wanted to spend the night, and she showed me to this tiny cold room near the kitchen. And I said, ‘Look, you Nazi bitch, I am sleeping in the best bed in this house . . .’”
She laughed excitedly. “That’s wonderful. And what did she do?”
“Well, she let me have her and her husband’s bedroom.” He left it at that.
She sensed the gap and grinned broadly. “And? Come on, what happened!” He was blushing, but pridefully. “Was she hot stuff or what? Come on! She grab for you?”
“Not at all. She was a real Nazi.”
“You mean you raped her?”
“I don’t know if you’d call it rape,” he said, clearly hoping she would.
“Well, did she want to or not?”
“What’s the difference? It wasn’t all that bad.”
“And how long’d you stay with her?”
“Just two nights, till we pulled out.”
“And was she anti-Nazi by then?” She grinned at him.
“I didn’t ask.”
His pride in it filled her with wonder, and release. “And did she have blond braids and a dirndl?”
“Not a dirndl.”
“But blond braids?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“And big breasts?”
“Well, it was Bavaria,” he said before he could catch himself, and they both burst out laughing. At the moment she did not know why, but suddenly now she was free, free of him, free of her past, of the Revolution, of every last unwilling obligation. She felt a happiness as she got up and walked to his chair and bent over and kissed his tonsure. He looked up at her with love and pride in his having scaled an inhibition, and she felt pain for his awkwardness, which she saw would never leave him. He was completed now, would not go beyond his present bounds.
“I’m leaving you, Sam,” she said, a touch of humor still in her voice. Suddenly she no longer had to reach down to sustain him. He would be all right.
After his disbelief, his shock and anger, she said, “You’ll be fine, dear.” She made a martini and crossed her legs under her on the couch as though for a nice chat. How excellent not to need anyone any more, not to feel either pulled or repulsed; suddenly there was time simply to be interested in him.
“But where will you go?” Truly, it was as though with a face like hers he was her only harbor in the world.
The insult was even worse because he was unaware of it, and she instantly raged at the time she had wasted with him. She had developed a way of chuckling softly when hurt, tucking in her chin and looking up at her opponent with raised eyebrows, and then unwinding her ironies as off a spool of wire. “Well, now that you mention it, it would hardly matter where I went, since to all intents and purposes I am nowhere now.” She waited an instant. “Don’t you think so, Sam?”
IV
In its seedy Parisian ornateness, the Crosby Hotel on Seventy-first off Broadway was still fairly decent then, at the end of the war, and it was wonderful to have a room with nothing in it of her own. How great to have no future! Free again. It reminded her a little of the Voltaire on the quay in ’36, with her father in the next room tapping on the wall to wake her for breakfast. She dared to call Lionel Mayer—“I wondered if you needed any typing done”—and bantered with him on the phone like a teenager, dangling herself before him and taking it all back when pressed; clearly, with no war to direct his life, he was as lost as she was, a deeply unhappy young man posing as a paterfamilias, and soon he was standing with crotch pressed against her head as she sat typing an article he had written for Collier’s on his Philippine experiences. But she had no illusions, or the merest inevitable ones that lasted only while he was in her, and when she was alone her emptiness ached and she felt fear for herself, passing thirty now, with no one at all.
Herman came one afternoon to see how she lived. He had lost some weight. “No more trains; I fly now. I’m buying in Chicago—you can pick up half the city for beans.” He sat glancing out disapprovingly at upper Broadway. “This is a dump, sister; you picked a real good dump to waste your life in. What was wrong with Sam, too intellectual? I thought you liked intellectuals. Why don’t you come in with me? We form a company, the cities are full of great buys, we can put down ten, fifteen percent and own a building, get mortgages to fix it up, raise the rents as high as you want, and walk away with fifty percent on your money.”
“And what happens to the people living in those buildings?”
“They start paying a decent rent or go where they can afford. It’s economics, Janice. The country is off welfare, we’re moving into the biggest boom there ever was, 1920s all over again. Get on board and get out of this dump.” He had eyeglasses now, when he remembered to wear them. He put them on to show her. “I’m turning thirty-six, baby, but I feel terrific. How about you?”
“I expect to feel happy, but I’m not terrific yet. But you can’t have my money to throw people out on the street. Sorry, dear.” She wanted to change stockings, still wore silk despite the new nylons, which felt clammy to her. Starting to open a drawer in the old dresser, she felt the pull come off in her hand.
“How can you live in this dump, everything falling apart?”
“I like everything falling apart; it’s less competition for when I start falling apart.”
“By the way, you never found those ashes, did you.”
“What brings that up?”
“I don’t know, I was just reminded because it was his birthday last August.” He scratched his heavy leg and glanced again out the window. “He’d have given you the same advice. People with heads are going to be millionaires in the next five years. Real estate in New York is undervalued, and there’s thousands walking around looking for decent apartments. I need somebody with me I can trust. By the way, what do you do all day? I mean it, you have a funny look to me, Janice. You look like your mind is not concentrated any more. Am I wrong?”
She rolled a stocking up her leg, careful to keep the seam straight. “I don’t want my mind concentrated, I want it receptive to what’s around me. Does that seem odd or dishonorable? I’m trying to find out what I have to do to live like a person. I read books, I read philosophical novels like Camus and Sartre, and I read dead poets like Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and I also—”
“It doesn’t look to me like you have any friends. Do you?”
“Why? Do friends leave traces? Maybe I’m not ready to have friends. Maybe I’m not fully born yet. Hindus believe that, you know—they think we go on being born and reborn right through life, or something like that. Life is very painful to me, Herman.”
/> Tears had flowed into her eyes. This ridiculous person was her brother, the last one in the world she would think of confiding in, yet she trusted him more than anyone she had known, as ludicrous and overweight as he still was. She sat on the bed and saw him by the slanting gray light through the dirty window, a young blob full of plans and greed’s happiness.
“I love this city,” she said, with no special point in mind. “I know there are ways to be happy in it, but I haven’t found any. But I know they’re there.” She went to the other front window and parted the dusty lace curtain and looked down at Broadway. She could smell the soot on the window. A light drizzle had begun to fall.
“I’m buying a new Cadillac.”
“Aren’t they awfully big? How can you drive them?”
“Like silk. You float. They’re fantastic. We’re trying to have a baby again; I don’t want a car that joggles her belly.”
“Are you really as confident as you seem?”
“Absolutely. Come in with me.”
“I don’t think I want to be that rich.”
“I think you’re still Communistic.”
“I guess so. There’s something wrong, living for money. I don’t want to start.”
“At least get out of those bonds and get into the market. You’re literally losing money every hour.”
“Am I? Well, I don’t feel it, so the hell with it.”
He heaved up onto his feet and buttoned his blue jacket, pulled his tie down, picked his topcoat off the back of a chair. “I will never understand you, Janice.”
“That makes two of us, Herman.”
“What are you going to do the rest of the day? I mean just as an instance.”
“An instance of what?”
“Of what you do with your days.”
“They play old movies on Seventy-second Street; I may go there. There’s a Garbo, I think.”
“In the middle of a working day.”
“I love being in the movies when it’s drizzling out.”
“You want to come home with me for dinner?”
“No, dear. It might jiggle her belly.” She laughed and quickly kissed him to take the sting out of that remark, which she had been as unprepared for as he. But in truth she did not want children, ever.
“What do you want out of life, do you know?”
“Of course I know.”
“What?”
“A good time.”
He shook his head, baffled. “Don’t get in trouble,” he said as he left.
V
She adored Garbo, anything she played in, could sit through two showings of even the most wooden of her films, which released her irony. She loved to be set afloat and pushed out to sea by these creakingly factitious Graustarkian tales, and their hilarious swan-shaped bathtubs and eagle-head faucets, their dripping Baroque doors and windows and drapes. Nowadays their glorious vileness of taste cheered her to the point of levitation, of hysteria, cut her free of all her education, rejoined her with her country. It made her want to stand on a roof and scream happily at the stars when the actress emerged from a noble white Rolls without ever catching a heel on a filmy long dress. And how unspeakably glorious Garbo’s languorous “relaxing” on a chaise, the world-weariness of her yard-long pauses as she moodily jousted with her leading men—Janice sometimes had to cover her face so as not to look as Garbo gave her ceramic eyelids permission to pleasurably close at Barrymore’s long-delayed kiss. And of course Garbo’s cheekbones and the fabulous reflectiveness of her perfect white skin, the carved planes of her face—the woman was proof of God. Janice could lie for half an hour on her hotel bed, facing the ceiling, hardly blinking as the Garbo face hung over her eyes. She could stand before her dressing table mirrors, which cut her off at the neck, and find her body surprisingly ready and alive with a certain flow, especially from a side view, which emphasized her good thighs.
VI
The creaky elevator door opened one afternoon and she saw standing before it a handsome man in his forties, or possibly his early fifties, with a walking stick in one hand and a briefcase in the other. With an oddly straight-backed walk, he entered the elevator, and Janice only realized he was blind when he stopped hardly six inches from her and then turned himself to face the door by lifting his feet slightly instead of simply swiveling about. There was a shaving cut on his chin.
“Going down, aren’t we?”
“Yes, down.” Her chest contracted. A freedom close by, a liberation swept her up as for one instant he stared sightless into her face.
At the lobby, he walked straight out and across the tiled floor to the glass doors to the street. She hung on behind him and quickly came around to push the doors open for him. “May I help you?”
“Don’t bother. But thanks very much.”
He walked into the street, turning directly right toward Broadway, and she hurried to come up alongside him. “Do you go to the subway? I mean, that’s where I’m going, if you’d like me to stay with you.”
“Oh, that’d be fine, yes. Thank you, although I can make it myself.”
“But as long as I’m going too . . .”
She walked beside him, surprised by his good pace. What life in his fluttering eyelids! It was like walking with a sighted man, but the freedom she felt alongside him was bringing tears of happiness to her eyes. She found herself pouring all her feeling into her voice, which suddenly flew out of her mouth with all the open innocence of a young girl’s.
His voice had a dry flatness, as though not often used. “Have you lived in the hotel long?”
“Since March.” And added without a qualm, “Since my divorce.” He nodded. “And you?”
“Oh, I’ve been there for five years now. The walls on the twelfth floor are just about soundproof, you know.”
“You play an instrument?”
“The piano. I’m with Decca, in the Classical division; I listen to a lot of recordings at home.”
“That’s very interesting.” She felt his pleasure in this nice conversation without tension, she could sense his gratitude for her company as they walked. He must be lonely. People probably avoided him or were too formal or apologetic. But she had never felt more sure of herself or as free in dealing with a strange person, and for a moment she celebrated her instinct.
At the top of the subway steps she took his arm with a light grasp, as though he were a bird she might scare off. He did not resist and at the turnstile insisted on paying her fare out of a handful of nickels he had ready. She had no idea where he was going or where she could pretend to be going.
“How do you know where to get off?”
“I count the stops.”
“Oh, of course; how stupid.”
“I go to Fifty-seventh.”
“That’s where I’m going.”
“You work around there?”
“Actually, I’m kind of still settling in. But I’m on the lookout for something.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have a problem; you seem very young.”
“Actually, I wasn’t really going anywhere. I just wanted to help you.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Janice Sessions. What’s yours?”
“Charles Buckman.”
She wanted to ask if he was married, but clearly he couldn’t be, must not be; something about him was deeply self-organized and not hostage to anything or anyone.
Out on the street, he halted at the curb facing uptown. “I go to the Athletic Club on Fifty-ninth.”
“May I walk with you?”
“Certainly. I work out for an hour before the office.”
“You look very fit.”
“You should do it. Although I think you’re fit too.”
“Can you tell?”
> “The way you put your feet down.”
“Really!”
“Oh yes, that tells a lot. Let me have your hand.”
She quickly put her left hand in his right. He pressed her palm with his index and middle fingers, then pressed the heel of her thumb, and let her hand go. “You’re in pretty good shape, but it would be a good thing to swim; your wind isn’t very great.”
She felt embraced by the sweep of his uncanny knowledge of her. “Maybe I will.” She hated exercise but vowed to begin as soon as she could. Under the gray canopy of the Athletic Club, he slowed to a halt and faced her, and for the first time she could look for more than an instant past his flickering lids directly into his brown eyes. She felt she would choke with amazed gratitude, for he was smiling slightly as though pleased to be seen looking so intimately at her in this very public place. She felt herself standing more erectly than she ever had since she was born.
“I’m in 1214 if you’d like to come up for a drink.”
“I’d love it.” She laughed at her instantaneous acceptance. “I must tell you,” she said, and heard herself with a terror of embarrassment but resolved not to quail before the need exploding in herself. “You’ve made me incredibly happy.”
“Happy? Why?”
He was beginning to blush. It amazed her that embarrassment could penetrate his nearly immobile face.
“I don’t know why. You just have. I feel you know me better than anyone ever has. I’m sorry I’m being so silly.”
“No, no. Please, be sure to come tonight.”
Presence: Stories Page 28