Fling and Other Stories

by John Hersey

“Was I beautiful?”

  “You had a wart on the end of your nose, and your left titty sagged.”

  “Beast.”

  But the teasing joke has left Philip grave. “Darling, you’re thin. We really should have lunch.”

  “I’m not so bad. I weighed myself yesterday. A hundred and three pounds with nothing on but my shoes and bracelets.” I never was big.

  * * *

  —

  “Oh, yes”—it was easy to say it, leaning against the pillows at 514, on a foggy December evening, when you knew that the cheery lights on the Christmas trees along the archipelago of New York Central islands on Park Avenue were going to bounce off your bedroom ceiling and keep you awake until real light came, and then you’d sleep on a tide rip of dreams; it was easy to say it—“we’ll have one last fling, Philip. We’ll see your writer friend in our imaginations, riding a horse to Acoma.”

  But doing the thing was not so easy. Lifesaver or no lifesaver.

  The moment one stood on the platform in Albuquerque, and the heat waves came whispering around like a flock of Mediterranean beggars that won’t go away, you knew it was not going to be easy. But you knew you had to make a show of ease, for Philip’s sake. The price one pays for having a kind man at one’s elbow.

  Philip drove us in his drive-it-himself, the big Ford, out of Albuquerque’s small-townish main drag, with Pretz huddled in the back seat getting over the trots—“My heinie hoits,” he said in his city tongue, not aware of my problem—as we skimmed over dead terrain to Laguna. There were signs all along the road inviting you to come in and inspect live snakes. A stillness on the hills, as if all that glare were some kind of midnight on fire. I saw sand dunes lapping over one crest, and on one dusty razorback rise it looked as if a thin cloud were passing over, though the sky was an empty brass scuttle. Far off there were forests on the mountains.

  Gradually we moved into an earlier era, a time of mesas and buttes, and in a wink Philip, stopping the big Ford and checking his AAA triptik—one thing I loathe about our Philip is that he always plans ahead—suddenly turned off Route 66 onto a dirt road. All those frightful TV Westerns: hills of rock where the bad guys know the footholds—tan and brown, no reds. The Enchanted Mesa, standing alone in its trance; rounded shoulders, wrinkles and faults. Holes on the faces: gun emplacements? God, God, whom do we have to fight now?

  And then, before we had a chance even to imagine Willa in her double-breasted suit on a skinny packhorse, her eyes burning with a fever of perfect sentences, there it was. Acoma. A big dirty round rock with a dirty village perched up as high as it could get, like Enna or Troina or any of those hilltop Sicilian villages: you’d be led to guess that humanity was a woman who’d seen a mouse.

  I was thinking: Dearest Philip, I have so much pain. I am going to die. Except that I cannot bear to leave you, my close friend Philip. I’ll stay as long as I can, dear heart. I was thinking rather dramatic thoughts as he parked the Galaxie at the foot of the staggering cliffs whose rounded shoulders seemed to have been eroded, the way sea-washed boulders are, by the sun’s everlasting rays crashing down on the rocks like breakers.

  Parking? Do you mean we’re supposed to walk up? Ha! Thank you, not for the entire first printing of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Death came to a good place to find the old boy, I’ll say that, if this was where He found him. I slumped on the stone steps of the cabin at the foot, and I said to the big Indian woman selling pottery souvenirs there, “¿Cóm’ estás?” I knew it was the wrong language, I was teasing.

  She grunted. “Ugh.” This was to keep prices up on her junk.

  Afterward we had a picnic in a grove of cottonwoods beside the dirt road on the way back out to 66. Pretzel said in his fluty Manhattan dialect, “I catch why they call ’em cottonwoods.” He was picking up bits of lint off the forest floor like a cleaning woman. Philip opened a bottle of Almadén and, gnashing away at the sandwiches we’d had made up in Albuquerque, he told me about the rock of Acoma, where Death came.

  He and the Pretz had started up a sandy trail when an Indian woman had shrieked down from the cliff, “Go up the stairway!”—pointing. Twisting up through crevices, stone steps cut away, steep places with handholds. Telling this, Philip was in high spirits, chewing and regaling his Venus. By God, I love you, you difficult lusty man. The Indian woman was waiting for them at the top in a checked shirt and blue jeans, looking like a Jap high-school girl.

  “What’s dat boid?” Pretz said, pointing to a bedraggled, half-molted brownish bird.

  “Robin bird,” the Indian woman said. Guides all over the world tell lies. But the Pretzel lived in a city tower and didn’t know the difference.

  They registered and went around and saw everything: the great mud church for the glory of God with the primitive painting at the altar of St. Stephen, which, seen as magic, had been stolen by another tribe and the Acomans, or Acomites, or whatever they are, had had to go all the way up to the Supreme Court to get it back; the little Jap high-school girl posing as an Indian babbled her lies among the dirty houses with mica windows like sealed portholes. Where was Death? You see, Philip with his vitality simply pushed Him over the cliff, the way the Indians in the double-breasted-suit woman’s story carried Friar Balthazar from his airy loggia with its peach tree and threw him from the edge into eternity.

  My pain ebbed away as I listened to Philip.

  They went back in the registration house for shade. A man was there trying to give three boxes of apples to the registration woman. He was a white Protestant who for purest of reasons felt sorry for poverty-ridden pigmented natives, but he was angry at being taken for just another tourist. He had been there before. Didn’t she remember him? He was shaking, perhaps from the climb with the apples, perhaps from the cold bath of ingratitude he was taking. The woman curtly said it would be easiest to descend by the sand trail. He said he preferred the stone stairs; he’d been there before. Straining for control, he asked the woman if she knew how to fry apples, these were frying apples. They should be consumed in a certain definite order of containers. Some had worms. And you saw that he had kept the best apples at home.

  * * *

  —

  The bartender swishes a horse-tail whisk after the flies, greedy little beer lovers. I feel a flicker of anger.

  “Couldn’t we have let it go at that, when we’d seen Acoma?” After all, the idea had been to see that rock; the trip was to be a species of casual allusion, and that was all. We like this about our Philip: he’s an intelligent man, educated, one guesses, despite St. Paul’s and Yale, the school with little wooden cubicles and the college with the great mute tomb of Scroll and Key—big men went Bones, the right men went Keys, they said, the ones who wore tails so often that they developed a bit of billiard-table green in the serge of the suit. Those were white-tie days, and here was one possible definition of the best of breeding: a slightly moldy look to your tails. But our Philip liked books even then, and always had, convention be damned. As with the cummerbund, he was a jump ahead of the pack—Henry James under his belt in 1935, long before the surge of fashion; Kafka and, yes, Kierkegaard by 1945. He used to talk to me about each book. Now Willa Cather was only a fortnight’s going to sleep with a novel; he wasn’t mad for the story but he said he sort of liked her scrollwork. Acoma, a December thought over martinis.

  But no, once there we had to go on. And on. Canyon de Chelly. An overdrifted road, like a Robert Frost snapshot of melancholy, except for burning silicates in place of snow, to Dinnehotso, Kayenta, Monument Valley: Dior hats in stone. The Grand Canyon; I mean, really! Oak Creek Canyon, a sudden dampness, ivy growing so fast down the bedstead post you could almost hear it tick. Tuzigoot. Montezuma Castle. Endless, endless.

  And now this incredible barren barroom, with the round mirror with a wreath engraved on it such as Great Caesar sported, and our baby-boy President smiling at us from his shelf.

 
; “I’m tired, Philip. Let me go home to New York.” I want to die in my own bed.

  “Darling. You’d never have been able to justify coming all the way to the Southwest for Acoma alone.”

  “Everything comes out of a storybook with you.”

  “I mean, it would have been uneconomical, honey.”

  A peal of laughter. It is from my own throat. “You’re a funny man, my dear. You’re so quick about some things. You know, I never have been able to conceive how with all your brains you could sit there night after night at the Links in that atmosphere like the inside of an old velvet-lined violin case with such truly truly stupid men as Skilly Waters and Danforth Cochran. All right, you tell me they’re Chairmen of Boards, and Skilly’s a wizard helmsman, very shrewd about wind shifts on the Sound. And then I have to ask: Darling, how do those businesses survive? I mean, Skilly is dumb. What do you say with him?”

  “I say, ‘Five diamonds.’ And he says, ‘Pass.’ ”

  “Brilliant.”

  I worry about the future of American business. Skilly came for dinner once, and in the corner of the sunburned cockleshells of one of his ears he overheard our Philip say something about Henry Esmond; he’d taken up Thackeray. “Esmond,” Skilly said, barging in. “Belong to the Beach Club? He the one just bought Chub’s Atlantic? Stupid buy that boat. All pulled up at the bow. Not enough waterline. What you say fellow’s name that bought it?”

  Philip wants to appease me. “Skilly has clever little people working for him.”

  “Thank heavens. But why are all people who are clever, or industrious, always ‘little’?”

  Philip doesn’t answer that. He sees that we’re getting that old two-drink belligerence, comes on when you hardly hope for it, like a second wind. After that, third-drink thaw, an access of tenderness. After that—ah, well, by then it may be time to have a bath and a pretend nap before going abroad.

  It’s odd; for our Philip, the Links was a matter of course, he was asked to join and he did. But Skilly, who’d lasted two years, anyway, at Groton, and was much richer than Philip, and taller, and going right to the top in a business that didn’t even belong to his family—Skilly was frantic about getting in. Came to Philip and asked him to rally round some solid seconders. Kept telephoning: when would it be decided?

  When did I first think about dying? Long before Sylvia died by her own delicate hand with the ruby on it I always envied, a sweet sparkling drop of life on the cold bitch hand that would steal her away from us. Her hands and feet were always blocks of ice, and her nates. “Chilly ahss,” our Philip would say. Syllie’s shiver!

  “Do you think you could get the bartender to turn the air-conditioning down? It’s like the North Pole in here.”

  Philip goes over and tries; the bartender says the room isn’t air-conditioned. Philip looks at me closely as he sits again. Risking my little spurting tantrums, he says, as if to swoop me up and carry me off on his white steed, rescuing me from whatever austral wind has breathed on me, “Remember the night you thought the Age of Electricity had come to an end?”

  That was in my drinking period—God, how many years ago—and I was very drunk. A party at the Trotters’, I remember I’d just been dancing in the bay window with Charley, and I said, “Charley, you’re the hardest man,” and he pulled a big silver cigarette case out of his breast pocket to show me what the hardness was, when one of those sudden August line squalls came through; there was a sizzling thrill of lightning and a flat loud crack on its shirttails, and the lights went out, and I began to sob because I thought the Age of Electricity had ended forever. We were going to have to go back to pumping water by hand with long-handled pumps, and there’d be a faint odor of alcohol when you read a book by one of those bright lamps with gauze mantles which vanished at a touch when they were cool. I cried and cried.

  “You’re just trying to remind me that I was a drunken slob.”

  “Venus, you were charming. So worried about how I’d have to crank my car—wasn’t that the Diana?—to get home because the starter wouldn’t work, and when I said the spark plugs wouldn’t work either, you said you’d never liked the Diana anyhow.”

  “You bought the Diana because I was Venus. It was very ugly of you.”

  “You doted on it.”

  “Don’t you scold me about cars. Those Jag seats.”

  Philip used to have a different car every year. Pierce-Arrow. Packard. Cadillac. Imperiai. Continental. And earlier: a Cord, the Diana, a Maxwell, a Franklin, even a Jordan Playboy. Some years an affectation like a Chevrolet. Never intimidated by the fact that the Proper Thing was to stick to one not-too-gaudy make—say, Olds, the big Olds. Always claimed that each car he owned was the best-engineered bus in American industrial history. Then he bought a black Chrysler convertible and wanted some red leather seats installed in it that he’d seen on a Jag. The dealer said that would be out-of-sight expensive. “Tell you what,” our splendid Philip said. “Let me know when a hopelessly wrecked Jag comes in.” He’d pick up some seats for a song. He only had to wait three days.

  I ask, “Where’s your odious Pretzel?”

  “I don’t know. Out buying buildings, I guess.”

  Julius Shonekind Pretz came along for the ride. He’s one of the New Type. It used to be that white Protestants had almost all the money that counted; I mean, you didn’t count suits or shoes or slot machines; I mean oil, minerals, railroads. Fifth Avenue, along the Park. Collections of Impressionists. But now. There’s this New Type. It hasn’t gone to Hotchkiss. It hasn’t a prayer of getting into the Beach Club. It talks decidedly funny. But listen, it’s very bright, very amusing, very warmhearted, and so rich it makes you dizzy to think about it. A wonderful earthy quality that no one I’ve ever known ever had. Into everything. Mike Wallace interviews him, would Mike Wallace ever interview Skilly Waters? I make fun of the Pretzel’s accent; it isn’t that bad. He doesn’t say “boid,” he says something that’s ironically just off the edge of the fake-English-accent “böd” you used to hear the Brearley girls saying. Where did the money come from? Not entirely clear. The only thing that’s crystal is that it didn’t come from his daddy. He can talk about anything: breeder reactors, the other day. “Sounds like sending old atom bombs out to stud,” our Philip said. The trouble is, here we are à trois again. I want to be alone with Philip for this last fling, and that’s why I call the Pretzel odious at the moment.

  It’s all very well to joke about death, atomic bombs, but your jokes on that Topic have to have a certain innocence, as I think Philip’s do. Or Meredith’s. My poor son Meredith. That innocent thing he said, accepting death as a casual occurrence, God how many years ago, when our Philip took him, much too young, really, seven or eight, to the Bowl, evidently expecting to make a man of his son by exposing him early to the manly game. Masses of Yale players were hurt during the game, “shaken up” they say on television, that box of mendacity, but this was back long before TV when the Blue played places like Vanderbilt and Georgia, and the Yalies were carried off the field on stretchers in flocks. On the way out of the Y-Men’s special parking lot by Coxe Cage, we came to that big cemetery on the other side of Derby Avenue, and Meredith, after holding his breath till we were past, said, “Daddy, is that where they bury the Yale players?” He was serious: that’s the true innocence of discussing that certain Topic.

  But this trip in the desert: even if we’d left the Pretzel home, we’d have been à trois in the desert. The Topic rides along. Perhaps it’s only what Pam calls “it” that makes me obsessed with this idea. I wish I were in my own bed.

  For instance. Window Rock the other day. The rock window: the red of the rock makes a sharp jumpity edge against the blue of the sky. My pain is coming on. Our very whispers echo against the great concave pan of the red rock. We drive out through the picnic ground and around the Reservation headquarters. Along a newly surfaced tar road through a beautiful fo
rest of ponderosa pine on the way to Ganado. We stop and eat lunch under a gnarled juniper, and I refuse to crack my hard-boiled egg on my head, as Philip does his, saying my own shell is too fine, finer probably than an egg’s, but the truth is I’m afraid a bang on my noggin will knock all my guts out of my desperate bottom, which is now raging, raging. I am very brave. We have a bottle of rosé, and there is a cool breeze. I make Philip burn the trash; the day before, I insisted on taking it along, and we left it in the motel room. I don’t believe in strewing the wild places with our offal. Then, off the Ganado road, as I think I must die, must die, must die, we come to St. Michael’s Mission, where the perpendicular sun is the Topic’s emissary in the dusty courtyard. A Franciscan monk walks bareheaded across the yard in his brown habit and up onto the porch of the big building and puts a nickel in the slot of a Coke machine and takes a frosted bottle out. My pain ebbs away, and I give thanks to the God of that place, to whom I am, I guess, a stranger, for I have always been a heathen, but sometimes I thank God, so great is His bounty, whoever He is. Is He a Jew? A Jesuit? Does He have the Coke concession? Then why did the monk use a nickel?

  “Do you think Meredith is happy?”

  “Happy? Happy? What is ‘happy’? Honey, you’re so old-fashioned.”

  I’ve always wished he wouldn’t call me “honey,” it’s tacky, déclassé, none of our kind uses that word. Philip doesn’t care about certain lines of propriety, he cares terribly about others. But I must answer that urgent question of his. What is “happy”? I don’t know whether I can say it right, but “happy” is something you and I, Philip, have occasionally been when we were playing gin rummy, perhaps, I don’t know—when we’ve had that feeling of sneaking into each other’s secrets. “ ‘Happy,’ ” I say flatly, “is a game of gin rummy. See if the bartender has some cards.”

  The bartender has no more cards than he has air-conditioning. “Manuel!” I call across the bar as Philip comes back. “Su leche.” The nice man in a dirty monkey jacket—I almost said to myself the nice little man—can’t believe his ears. He shrugs his shoulders. I suddenly hope, hopelessly, that he hasn’t heard me.