She was more beautiful than ever now. Like a mask long withheld. Mask or mask of a mask? Fragments that raced through his mind while he arranged harmoniously the inharmony of her being. Suddenly he saw that she was looking at him, peering at him from behind the mask. A rapport such as the living establish with the dying. She rose, and like a queen advancing to her throne, she approached him. His limbs were quaking, he was engulfed by a wave of gratitude and abasement. He wanted to fling himself on his knees and thank her blabberingly for deigning to notice him.
Her breath, warm and fragrant, filled him with terror and joy. Her low eager voice, throbbing and vibrant, smote him like a wilderness of stifled chords. While she excused herself hysterically he lowered his eyes as if to erase the confusion that had gathered there.
“You saw me, then, when you came in?” he asked, still somewhat abashed. His manner was like that of a lover keeping a clandestine engagement.
“Saw you?” she said. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t see me . . . ?”
“Didn’t see you?”
Her perplexity was perplexing. Mask of a mask. Sphinx and Chimera joined in a protean act. The riddle remained a riddle, the riddle became a gladiator massacring the table, a stone-faced automaton with the lungs of a gorilla and bellows in his entrails. “Hildred!” he yelled. “Hildred!” Voice like a lion’s yawn, deep, red mouth choked with rhododendrons.
“I’ll fix him,” said Hildred, rising quickly with white-surging anger. Her fingers twitched, as if they were already tearing the red mouth back to the ears.
He was still pounding the table when she approached.
“What is it, stupe?” she bawled out.
He recoiled—the gesture of a man trying to push a megaphone from his ear.
“What is it you want? Say something!”
“I want some attention, that’s what!” he wheezed. “What’s the matter, don’t I give you a big enough tip?” Silence. “Listen,” he chirped, and a roguish twinkle crept into his eyes, “who is that guy back there? Do you want me to bend him in half for you?”
“Idiot!” she cried, raising her voice. “Your brain is turning to muscle. Look at you . . . a wagonload of meat! Do you expect me to fall on your neck because you won on a foul last night? If you ever had a real tussle you’d fall apart. . . .”
There followed a few more gibes, galling, vicious, all of them directed below the belt. Big bruiser that he was, he wilted; there were tears in his eyes. He was silent as a clam; he put his head down, as though defending himself from a strangle thrust. Droll! The man of a thousand holds, giant with the body of a god, sinews of steel, flashing muscles, sitting there with his head drawn in like a turtle. Tame as a piece of putty. That’s what it amounted to—a piece of putty in her hands. Everyone could see it.
Tony Bring looked on with embarrassment. And yet, as one of the clients was remarking in smothered whispers, it was comical to see how the man returned every day for his punishment. He seemed to thrive on it. Big, blustering, good-natured brute that he was, he would doubtless stagger in on the morrow, look the crowd over with that stony eye of his, and blurt out a hearty greeting in a voice to make the room tremble. He had a notion, moreover, that he could sing. Seeing Hildred, he would go to the piano and, resting his heavy paws on the keys, empty his bowels of a soupy love lyric. “Song of India” was his favorite air. Desperately he strove to lard the words with tenderness. But they fell out of his mouth like loosened teeth.
“Look at him!” said Hildred, after the excitement had blown over and she had returned to her place in the corner by the window. “Look at him! He’s doubled up with grief and anguish. Good Lord, he’s not blubbering, is he?”
“Please, Hildred, that’s enough! Don’t gloat over it.”
“Don’t tell me you’re sorry for him,” she said, her eyes flashing.
“I don’t know. It makes me feel sick, like seeing a dog kicked in the stomach.”
“Ridiculous!” said Hildred. “You haven’t any idea what it’s like dealing with these idiots.”
“Perhaps. . . . But then I should think there were other ways. . . .”
A short, scornful laugh interrupted this. “You’re a chump!” she said. “The idea, slobbering over a dope like that!
“The way you defend people,” she added, “especially people whom you have no right to defend, makes me ugly.” Her voice had grown irritable and raspy. She turned abruptly and nodded her head. “See that woman over there with the white hair? If there’s anything in the world I detest it’s a prudish, sugar-coated bitch like her. She finds nothing but good everywhere. If you act nasty to her, if you insult her, she excuses you . . . tells you that you don’t mean what you say. The old pfoof, she just pees over me with her sloppy gush. I hate people like that. I hate you when you defend people you don’t know anything about. . . .”
Tony Bring made his usual efforts to control himself. She always talked this way when she got riled. The old woman was right—she didn’t mean what she said. She was good, Hildred. She was an angel, but she was more comfortable when people regarded her as a demon. She was perverse, that’s what it was.
“I don’t think you should come here anymore.” Hildred was talking again, more calmly now. “Really, Tony, I don’t think you should. I don’t.”
He stiffened.
“Oh, I know it sounds strange,” she continued, “but you mustn’t try to invent reasons for what I say. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”
An anxious look stole into his eyes. Hildred was annoyed. He took everything so seriously. She softened immediately, however, and her voice grew even more suasive.
“This is all so stupid,” she said. “I don’t like to see you coming here, Tony. You don’t belong here. Anyway, it won’t be for long. You’ll see. . . . I have a scheme up my sleeve. . . .” She looked at him sharply. “Aren’t you listening?”
“I’m listening,” he said. Schemes up her sleeves . . . traps . . . snares. Everything bitched up from the beginning. Climax upon climax. Meaningless . . . meaningless. Fragments pieced together in irrelevant sequence. Bad dreams. “Yes, I’m listening. . . .”
He began to dream more violently, her words beating in unison with his thoughts. Half-thoughts they were, issuing in a larval stream that circulated over all the earth and through the waters beneath the earth. Because he was blind and had only a man’s wisdom, because he humbled himself with truth and had no faith in her wiles, because in tomorrow he saw only the sordid chaff of yesterday . . . because of so many things foreign to his masculine comprehension the words that she tore from her breast came to him weighted with pain and bitterness.
Finally, in a voice from which all his manhood seemed to be drained, he said: “But aren’t you the least bit glad that I came?”
“We’re not discussing that,” she said.
Like a blow her words struck him. As if he were standing at the head of a long flight of stairs and she had pushed him with all her might, left him stunned and helpless, the whir of bat wings ringing in his ears.
SOMEONE WAS standing beside them, at their elbows. It seemed to him as if the person had been standing there for an eternity.
“Oh, it’s you!” Hildred exclaimed, looking up out of the corner of her eye. And immediately she grew flustered. “Tony,” she said, “this is my friend. . . . This is . . . Vanya.”
Later, when this incident had assumed its true proportions, Tony Bring attempted again and again to reconstruct the details of this interview which was like a glimpse into a world hitherto unknown. But all that he could succeed in recapturing was the impression of a face—a face he would never forget—brought close to his, so close indeed that the features dissolved into a blur, the only thing standing out clearly in his memory being an image of himself squeezed into a space no bigger than a tear.
From now on it was Vanya this and Vanya that. Great swoops of volubility from Hildred, whose soul had departed the body to soar amid regions celestia
l and remote. From Vanya silence, deafening silence.
So this, he thought, is the Bruga woman, creator of that sunken-visaged, leering rake of a puppet which grinned at him night and day like a skulking lout. Well, he had a chance now to take a good look at her. . . . She was neither mad nor sane, neither old nor young. She had beauty, but it was rather the beauty of nature, not of a personality. She was like a calm sea at sunrise. She neither questioned nor answered. There were incongruities about her too. A da Vinci head stuck on the torso of a dragoon; steady, luminous eyes that burned behind torn veils. He gazed at her searchingly, as if to tear from her skull the cocoons constantly gathering in her eyes. A vital, hypnotic quietude. The stare of a medium, and the medium’s voice. Her white neck was a little too long. It quivered when she spoke.
This meeting which, like an overture that threatened never to come to an end, left him hollowed out. His body was no longer an organism endowed with blood and muscle, with feelings and ideas, but a shell through which the wind whistled. Weird their language, like the flight of a whale at the sting of a harpoon when, quivering with rage and pain, it dives below the froth of the sea, its watery trail stained with blood.
He abandoned all effort to follow their words. His glance settled on Vanya’s long goosey neck that vibrated like a lyre. So soft and smooth, her neck. Soft as vicuña. If you were left at the foot of the stairs, stunned and helpless, with bats whirring in your ears and a neck like that to fasten on, to clutch, to pray to . . . if you suddenly got up with rhododendrons in your mouth, and your mouth torn back to the ears, if you had an organ in your entrails and the arms of a gorilla, arms that would crush blasphemously, ecstatically, if you had all darkness and night to roll in and curse and vomit and a neck beside you vibrating like a lyre, a neck so soft, so smooth, a neck sewn with eyes that pierced the veils of the future and spoke an unknown, an obscene language, if . . .
Part 2
1
DAY BY day the shadows grew longer and the colors everywhere merged into golden browns and deep russets. Here and there objects stood out against the dull horizon with skeletal vigor: gaunt oaks twisting their licorice boughs in the gray pigment of sky, frail saplings drooping like scholars overloaded with wisdom.
As the days advanced a pall spread over the city; the wind roared through the deep gorges, whirling the dust and litter of the streets into choking spirals. The skyscrapers rose up with sepulchral gleam amid a haze of gray and rust. But in the cemeteries there was green, grass of resurrection, of life eternal. The rivers, too, were green, green as bile.
Each day brought new faces to the Caravan: brokers back from the Riviera, artists who had done a little sketching in the provinces, actresses with fat contracts, buyers from the fashionable department stores who had picked up a few phrases of French and Italian during their sojourn abroad. All preparing to burrow in for the winter, resume again the nervous, unhealthy life in which they pretended to find release and exhilaration.
Vanya practically lived at the Caravan. When Hildred appeared in the forenoon Vanya was already there waiting to have breakfast with her. They met each day as if they had been separated for years.
Curiously enough, whenever Tony Bring dropped in they were gone. It was always the same story—Hildred has gone off somewhere with her friend. No mention was made of these visits until one day, just as Hildred was getting ready to leave the house, one of those tiffs occurred which were daily becoming more numerous. She accused him of spying on her. She knew only too well how often he had dropped in, the questions he launched, the sly insinuations. As a matter of fact, she had seen him herself now and then, pressing his nose against the windowpanes. God only knew where he didn’t poke his nose.
Finally Vanya’s name popped up. Vanya . . . yes, she was the one who had started all the trouble.
“You’re jealous of her, that’s what the matter!” cried Hildred.
“Jealous of her?” For a moment he was at a loss to find an epithet low enough to convey the full measure of his disgust. A fine friend she was, trying to worm her way in here and there with a pinch of dope, hanging out with whores and syphilitic poets. “Do you expect me to take her seriously?” he yelled. “A genius, you call her. What has she to show for her genius? I mean something more than dirty fingernails!”
Hildred heard him out in scorching silence. She was in the act of rouging her lips. Her face had a beautiful cadaverous glow; as she examined herself in the mirror she became intoxicated with her beauty—like an undertaker who perceives suddenly what a beautiful corpse he has under his hand.
Tony Bring was enraged. “Stop it!” he yelled. “Don’t you see what you look like?”
She peered at herself calmly in the mirror. “I suppose I look like a whore, is that what you mean?” she answered sweetly.
Finally she was ready to go. At the door, her hand on the knob, she paused.
“I wish you wouldn’t go yet,” he said. “I want to say something. . . .”
“I thought you had finished.”
He leaned against the door, squeezing her to him. He kissed her lips, her cheeks, her eyes, and the throbbing little pulse in her throat. There was a greasy taste in his mouth.
Hildred pulled herself away, and as she dashed down the stairs, she flung back: “Get a grip on yourself!”
MORE THAN once during the course of the night he jumped up, tossed aside the heavy volume he was reading, and dashed to the subway station. He waited in the arcade while one train after another pulled in. He walked over to the bridge plaza and waited some more. Cabs rolled by lugubriously. Cabs loaded with drunks. Cabs loaded with thugs. No Hildred. . . .
He went home and sat up the night. In the morning he learned that she had telephoned.
“What did she say?” he asked.
“She said she wanted to talk to you.”
“Didn’t she leave any message?”
“No, she just asked if you were home.”
“That’s all?”
“She said she wanted to talk to you.”
AS A reason for her absence Hildred explained that her mother had been taken ill.
O.K.
It was only several days later that he realized there were flaws in her story. When, acting on the impulse, he decided to telephone her mother he learned to his amazement that mother and daughter hadn’t seen each other for over a year, that furthermore her mother didn’t even know that her daughter was married.
When, several nights later while lying in each other’s arms, he repeated word for word the conversation with her mother she commenced to laugh, she laughed as if her heart would burst.
“So my mother really said that?” Another gale of laughter. “And you swallowed it!” More laughter, slaughterhouse mirth. Then suddenly, abruptly, it was exhausted. He drew her to him. Her body was all atremble, dripping with perspiration. She tried to speak but there was only a gurgling in her throat. He lay very still and pressed her to him.
When she had grown very quiet he suddenly grasped her by the shoulders and shook her. “Why would your mother lie to me?” he demanded. “Why? Why?”
She commenced to laugh again, to laugh as if her heart would burst.
2
A FEW nights later he was called to the telephone. It was Hildred. Vanya had been taken ill and she thought she ought to stay with her. “Do you mind if I don’t come home?” she asked.
“Yes, I do,” he answered. “However, do as you think best.”
A pause ensued during which he caught the remnants of a gabfest between two operators who had been on a bust the night before. When her voice floated over the wire again there was a strange quiver in it. “I’m coming home,” she said. “I’m coming right away. . . .”
“Hildred!” he called. “Listen . . . listen!”
No answer. A buzzing in his ears mingled with the confusion in his brain. Just as he was about to hang up there came a faint, questioning y-e-es?
“Hildred, listen to me. . . . You go ahead an
d stay with her. . . . Don’t worry about me.”
“You’re sure, dear? You’re sure you won’t feel badly?”
“Of course not! You know me . . . I’m just a big clown. Don’t think about it anymore. It’s all O.K. with me.” As he hung up he added: “Have a good time!”
When he got back to the room he felt as if his guts were dropping out. “I knew it!” he murmured. “I knew it was going to be something like that.”
THE NIGHT seemed endless. Every few minutes he awoke and stared at the vacant pillow. Toward morning he fell into a fitful sleep. Dreams came in kaleidoscopic fashion; between pulse beats they came and went. Some he dreamed over and over, one particularly in which he saw her rolled up on a horsehair sofa, her face decomposing. How could a human being sleep so soundly when the face was decomposing? But then he perceived that her slumber was only a sort of thick pea soup, which made everything right again. . . . There was another dream in which he lived with an old Jew who shuffled about all day in his carpet slippers. He wore a patriarchal beard that floated in majestic waves over his sunken chest; beneath the beard there were jewels, a thick cluster of them, arranged like those in the breastplate of the high priest. When they caught the light the beard took fire and the flesh burned away to the skull. . . . Finally he dreamed that he was in Paris. The street on which he stood was deserted, except for a pair of streetwalkers and a gendarme who followed them like a pimp. At the foot of the street, where there was a sprinkle of lights, he could make out a carousel under a striped awning and a patch of green studded with marble fauns. Under the awning the lions and tigers stood rigid, their backs enameled in gold and ivory. Immobile they stood, while the music played and the fountain dripped its rainbow tints.