Collected Stories Page 19

  And so for some time now, with Rachel gone, he had slept unquietly. The cumulative, unsatisfied want drew him gradually out of sleep. His eyelids opened. Above him stretched a ceiling with a network of fine silver threads and memorized patches of brown from pipes that leaked in the rented rooms above. The square window admitted a harsh brilliance which was like the insolent stare of someone he knew despised him but which he could not escape from.

  He closed his eyelids; pouted.

  “Jesus, I feel like I’ve got a mouthful of old chicken feathers!”

  Rachel said nothing.

  He turned and saw that her side of the bed was empty. The covers were neatly folded back, the pillow smoothed out as though she hadn’t slept there at all that night. For a moment he wondered stupidly if she had. Of course. His body that had recorded like an exposed film while his mind was sleeping gave back to him now the long, sweet history of her presence near him. And then he remembered also her restless tossing which kept him awake until he complained, “Rachel, why don’t you lie still?” and she had said, “Oh, my God!” and he had said, “What?” and she had said nothing more—and he had then fallen asleep.

  “Rachel.”

  The emptiness of the room replied to him with the desultory drone of a large horsefly; its wings flashed blue against the shining copper screen, as though his wife had been transformed into an insect.

  Slightly grinning at this fantastic notion, he pushed himself up on his elbows and squinted about.

  The prankish spirit of earlier years recurred sometimes in little tricks they played on each other, which made him think now that she might be hiding to tease him. But there was really not a place in the one-room apartment where a woman, even as tiny as Rachel, might conceal herself. The closet door was open; the kitchen alcove made a full confession from this angle.

  Grunting, he bent over—saw beneath his folding bed the pale-blue garters he had lost but not his wife.

  Through a series of hesitant, half-hearted movements, he got himself out of bed and over to their single window. Beyond its proscenium arch the world was presenting another hot day’s beginning. The street, which was a street in the Village, was narrow and vacant: you might almost suppose that during the night a plague had wiped out the entire population. No, there was a figure, a woman, yes, but not Rachel, coming out of an areaway. He watched her pad mincingly to the delicatessen whose windows bore a chaos of whitewashed signs and price quotations. That was very likely where Rachel had gone, an empty milk bottle in a paper bag—how much had she taken of their small cash under the Dresden doll on the bureau? He went immediately to see, recalling the precise amount there had been when they went to bed. A quarter was missing. A phone call? And a subway fare?…

  He chuckled a little uneasily: and then there was no longer anything to postpone the dreaded approach to the mirror. In his crumpled purple pajamas with white frogs on them, he moved anxiously to that soap-splashed glass over the sink to make the morning analysis of his looks. In his youth he had been very handsome indeed, an ideal juvenile type, and even at forty-three, not having permitted himself to exceed a ten-pound concession to middle years, he still had a fairly comfortable sense of being attractive. Ah, but his hair, they said it stopped thinning at forty and if you got it that far you had it for keeps. How true was this notion? He inclined his head as low as he could and still see into the glass. The crown was becoming more visible every day, yes, blooming forth pink as a rose. Ah, well. It was also said that thinning hair was a sign of superior male vigor. That could be; it cost him nothing to think so.

  Automatically he began to rotate his scalp beneath the close grip of ten fingers, halting at the count of sixty with a breathless grunt of relief.

  That completed, he went back to the window. He reached it just in time to see the spinsterish woman who had gone into the delicatessen coming back out of it bearing her package clasped tight against her flat bosom as though afraid that someone would snatch it from her. Have you ever noticed, he inquired of himself, how tightly anxious people hold onto things such as hatbrims while waiting in managers’ offices? Huh! Yesterday when he walked out of McClintic’s, his panama was so dented it had to be reblocked! Oh, yes. Now he knew what he had to do this morning. Call Edie Van Cleve about that part in the road company of Violets Are Blue! He took a dime and descended in his bathrobe to the downstairs hall. “Your reading was fine,” she told him, “but Mr. Davidson feels you’re a shade too young for the part.” Going back up the stairs his heart jolted strangely. A palpitation. He had them off and on. The doctor had told him there was nothing organically wrong, no pathological lesion. “If you took your heart out,” said the doctor, “you would find that it looked exactly like a normal heart, only a little overdeveloped because of the strenuous life that you’ve been leading.” This statement was meant to be reassuring, more so than Donald had found it. What strenuous life? He had never overextended himself at work or at play. Rehearsals could be a strain. But he always felt fine while working. It was only during the last two or three years, that held these long periods of unwanted inaction, that he had begun to decline from the pink of condition.

  Steps in the hall—Rachel? No, they contined upstairs…

  He began to curse her, teasingly, as though she could hear him, his eyes fixed on the framed photograph of the Glow Worm Ballet, girls in shimmering tutus going through some intricate dance routine. They had held tiny flashlights that winked off and on in the stage’s rosy dusk. At the end of the line was Rachel, a shade smaller, quicker, and more graceful than the others. His act had followed hers. He was the straight man in a vulgar dialogue with a comedian now dead of heart disease. Tommy Watson. Huh. There was Tommy’s picture. Kind of nice not having to compare it with the way he looked now. And there was his own picture in a straw hat and a bow tie. Not much older than his son would now be. But they had not had any children, he and Rachel. They had scrupulously avoided the chance of any for about ten years. And then one summer, about three years ago, Rachel had grown pensive. He couldn’t snap her out of it. They were playing in summer stock. All at once Rachel had started looking her age, and the manager said, “I’m sorry but we can’t light her anymore for ingénue parts, and we’ve got all the character women that we can use.” That was a horrible thing. Rachel went around looking half conscious for a number of days. And then one night she said, “I want a baby.” He demurred a little, but she was persistent. “We’ve got to have a baby.” They stopped the preventive devices, and waited six months. And when it still didn’t happen, they went to a doctor. Both were thoroughly examined, and at the end, the doctor talked to Rachel. Donald waited nervously outside. When she came out she looked at him sort of oddly.

  “What did he say?”

  “He says we can’t have children.”

  “There’s something wrong with you, honey?”

  “Not with me,” she told him. “He says you’re sterile…”

  This had struck Donald a nasty blow where it hurts a man most. The many flattering attentions which he had received in his youth had inflated his sexual vanity and it had never retracted to normal size.

  On the way home from the doctor’s he had been flushed and silent. At last he said huskily:

  “Rachel?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t let anyone know.”

  “Don’t be silly, Donald. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. But why advertise it?”

  “Exactly…”

  But their relations had been altered by the discovery. They laughed to think what trouble they had taken all those years to avoid something that couldn’t have happened. But the joke was on Donald, really, and it was hard to accept for that reason. For a while the psychic trauma was so acute that he found it difficult to make love to Rachel. But Rachel understood it better than he. She won him tenderly back and gradually the humiliation faded from his mind and things became almost the same as they had been before. Donald was not inclined to keep old hurts alive, and if Rac
hel was still brooding about her disappointment, she wore no outward sign of it. Donald got a fairly good part in a show that ran nine months in New York, and they saved a bit of mony. When it went on the road, it perished under Claudia Cassidy’s incorruptible justice in Chicago. Since that engagement Donald had had nothing but TV and not much of that.

  Donald had once read somewhere that the way to combat a feeling of depression was to take unusual pains with your appearance. “Dress Your Blues Away” was the stimulating title of this column of advice; he remembered having read it aloud to Rachel during a time when she seemed to be giving in to her moods. It had been addressed to female readers, but there was nothing about the theory that was not adaptable to a youngish middle-aged man who took a better than normal pride in presenting a good appearance, and so he took out Rachel’s manicure set and cleaned and trimmed and polished his nails; he powered his plumpish body with lilac talcum and applied cologne to his armpits, donned a fresh pair of faintly pink-tinted nylon boxer’s shorts, and removed from its laundryman’s sheath one of a pair of snow-white linen suits that he had been husbanding all summer against some days of importance that hadn’t arrived. “I’ve never known a man that looks as good as you in white linen,” someone had said to him once. But that was in another country and the wench was dead, for when he actually caught a full-length view of himself, outside, on the dazzlingly unreal streets, in one of those sudden mirrors sandwiched between shopwindows, he saw that the tightness which he felt in the linen and which he thought might be attributable only to its laundered crispness was indisputably owing to the expansion about his middle. He tried unbuttoning the jacket: this felt better, but when he passed another sidewalk mirror, he noticed that the starched jacket now flared behind him in a way that made him look like a bantam rooster strutting along the street in snowy feathers. It took no more than this to undo all he had done to “dress away his blues,” and he continued aimlessly through noonday brilliance, through crowds that all seemed to have appointments to keep, definite places to go, he noticed that no one seemed to be looking at him and this was something that he had never noticed before and he tried deliberately to catch the eyes of people moving in the opposite stream on the walk. He slowed his walk and stared hard into faces looming toward him, not only the faces of pretty girls tripping out for lunch hour, but faces of women of his own generation, and with mounting dismay a feeling close to a beginning of panic, he failed to hold their attention for more than a second and one girl, as she passed him, uttered a startled laugh, not necessarily at him, but if not at him, at what? She was walking alone…

  He turned, directly after this experience, into a drugstore and ordered a bicarbonate of soda which he seized the instant the boy at the counter released it and drained it down without pause. Ah, that did relieve the gaseous compression which he felt under his heart, and that irritable organ seemed to beat more evenly than it had on the street. The city is full, he said to himself, of people that talk and laugh to themselves on the street, it is full of completely self-centered people capable only of seeing themselves in mirrors, and even if strangers don’t gaze at you on the sidewalk as they once did, a summer or two gone by, that means only—that means only—what?—he failed to complete the reflection, having observed that the stool next to his at the soda fountain was now occupied by a girl whom he judged to be a young stenographer having her midday coke; she was probably dieting to keep her hips down, yes, they lapped somewhat over the chromium periphery of the stool, somewhat overhanging it like the hood of a mushroom, yes, he murmured encouragingly to himself as he met her eyes in the mirror at the moment when his fingers, the knuckles of his right hand, came gently into contact with her left buttock and gave it a couple of slight nudges. Her eyes blinked in the mirror but she continued to sip her coke without smiling or turning toward him. The blink and the unchanged expression were an equivocal reaction and so he tried it once more.

  The woman did not turn toward him, there was still no change in her expression, but she began to speak to him in a low, rapid voice like the buzz of a swarm of stinging insects.

  He preferred not to hear what she was saying to him, and he got up with a rapidity that made his head swim and charged out the door.

  He consoled himself, or tried to console himself, with the observation that the Village now was overrun with women who hated men.

  He knew not where he was going, but he was headed toward Washington Square.

  Whew!!

  He stopped.

  He was in front of the Whitney Museum…

  Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, went that abused organ, his heart! Abused by what? “Tensions of his profession,” said the doctor…

  Boom, boom, boom…

  In front of the museum was a cheerfully colored poster advertising a showing of nonobjective patintings…

  Rachel…

  What she had probably left somewhere in their room was a little note explaining that she had gone to spend the day with one of her girl friends, perhaps with Jane Austin, the one that lived uptown, on Columbus Circle, one that was equally friendly to them both. Well—

  A pair of youngsters, a boy and a girl of the longhaired Village crowd, came up alongside him and also stared at the poster, and he moved over a little, respectfully to hear their comments. He recognized the name Mondrian as one he had heard before, but the reproduction was still meaningless to him as a strip of linoleum in a clean, bright kitchen. There was a whole world of such things to which he had no entrance, and though he was vain, he was humble at heart, and never sucked at enthusiasms to which he was an outsider. He stood there respectfully listening to the young couple’s comments and then, God help him, the bicarb erupted in a belch so loud that the kids turned and burst into giggles!

  He wasn’t yet recovered from his lightheaded spell but had to move on…

  Arrived at the Square, he caught a Fifth Avenue bus to Jane Austin’s apartment, but there was no upper deck and it seemed to him, with disturbing vagueness, that maybe it had been a long time since there had been opendeck buses on Fifth Avenue; he couldn’t remember if they still had them or not, and—

  Thoughts trailed off without distinct ends or beginnings.

  Jane was at home with a white cloth tied about her somewhat large-featured head, which look startled at him when she opened the door. Her greeting was an odd one; she said, “Get you!” and though he supposed it was an allusion to the white linen suit and mermaid-figured pale-blue and white silk tie, it wasn’t as pleasant and warm a greeting as a caller might hope for.

  “Rachel here?” he demanded heartily.

  “Why, no! Should she be here?”

  “Well, I thought maybe—”

  “I haven’t seen you or Rachel since that party in June.”

  He thought there was something a little too clipped and short-winded in her speech, and she didn’t even apologize for her appearance. Evidently she had not suffered from depression that morning, or if she had, she had certainly no faith in the “Dress Your Blues Away” theory, but to give the devil her due, she was at least making some efforts to clean up the mess and disorder remaining from what must have been a very large party last night, to which, for some reason, she had omitted to ask them. But then New York is a place where everybody knows too many people…

  He waited a moment for Jane to say. Sit down, and since she didn’t, he walked casually past her and settled himself on the sofa.

  He thought about the party last month, wondering if it contained some clue to Jane’s altered attitude toward him. There had been a good deal of indiscriminate lechery, the sort of thing that Rachel never took part in but which he sometimes did, no more seriously than a man might join a bunch of kids playing baseball. Rachel had left early with a married couple, but he had stayed on. He remembered now that he and Jane and some other person had drifted into the bedroom and there had been some rather involved goings-on, in the course of which someone had gotten sore at someone and made a scene, he didn’t rem
ember about what or how it turned out except that he left soon after and stayed in a bar till it closed. Maybe the fight had been more serious than he recalled its having been. That would explain why Jane was behaving so coldly.

  “Rachel has disappeared,” he said to Jane.

  “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “Did she?”

  Her manner expressed no interest. The room was filled with the musty flavor of dust and heat and liquor and stale tobacco. He waited for Jane to offer him a drink. He saw at least one bottle of Haig & Haig which had several fingers of liquor still left in it. But Jane was being obtuse. She leaned on the handle of the vacuum with a slight frown and a faraway look. She lived by herself in this unpleasantly bright apartment. Donald could never quite imagine people living alone. It seemed less conceivable, somehow, than life on the moon. How did they get up in the morning? How did they know when to eat, or where or how did they make up their minds about any of the little problems of existence? When you came home alone after being alone on the street, how was it bearable not having someone to tell all the little things you had on your mind? When you really thought about it, when you got down to it, what was there to live for outside of all-encompassing and protecting intimacy of marriage? And yet a great many women like Jane Austin got on without it. There were also men who got on without it. But he, he could not think of it! Going to bed alone, the wall on one side of you, empty space on the other, no warmth but your own, no flesh in contact with yours! Such loneliness was indecent! No wonder people who lived those obscenely solitary lives did things while sober that you only did when drunk…