The Town and the City: A Novel

  “Oh, him? He’s a disgruntled Chicagoan who loves Bach, spaghetti, Cris-craft cruises, tubercular women, and paints at Carmel in the summer.” “Him, there? He just lives with his grandmother in Long Island City and writes novels. Very neurotic.” “But there’s a fascinating woman! Sold cocaine in the streets of Berlin in the twenties and married a Harvard boy to get away from the Nazis, and is now, I believe, having an affair with a famous ballet dancer’s sister.” “Her? … dull woman, a type, though. I think she once bound herself with chains to the Washington Square arch in broad daylight and finally got carted away to Bellevue. Knew Djuna Barnes.” “Now there’s someone you ought to meet! His translation of Isidore Ducasse is supposed to be the most beautifully sensitive. An intimate of Bauer the non-objective and Max Bodenheim and Eleanor Roosevelt. For some reason Joe Gould dislikes him.” “Who is that mystifying creature standing by the bookshelf with such a sad look? She’s looking at a book by Denton Welch. Well, isn’t that triangular somehow! Do you know she looks just like the portrait of Madame de Castaigne, only more decomposed? Introduce me.”

  In all these scenes the grave Francis was like some young minister of the church who had been defrocked early in his career after a scandal of tremendous theological proportions. He was refined, dark, reflective, aloof, mysterious. There was something about him somehow; young ladies from Iowa and Georgia who had come to New York to be intellectual, and were merely drunk all the time, looked at him with ravenous fascination and said, “But who is that cloistral-looking person?” With Dora Zelnick on his arm at these gatherings—she with her olive-skin Scheherazade look and her trinkets and bracelets and Persian sashes that made her look like every other girl in the Village except those who were built like sticks and had to look like Madame de Castaigne—Francis seemed all the more mystifying and devilishly subtle. Everybody eventually learned that he came from Galloway, Massachusetts, had worked his way through college, had done a “hitch” in the Navy, was “working on a book,” had a job in town, no money, and was just another joker like everybody else. Since Francis had not the gall to go around with a repertoire of mysterious ambiguous enigmas to perform—the technique of all intellectual stars—nobody trailed him to read the little scented meanings he might coyly drop.

  After a year and a half in Greenwich Village, Francis began to drift to the East Side uptown. There was something there that the Village did not have: intellectuals who disclaimed all ties with Greenwich Village, of course, even if they were driven there by the housing shortage; intellectuals who leaned towards more sophistication, a kind of Time and Life worldliness, warier, fingering at the hem of wealth and society, less “politically wild-eyed” but, in another sense, in no real way different from the others.

  The East Side “crowd” appealed to him more. He thought it was like the difference between Montmartre and Montparnasse, something like that. Through his friend Wilfred Engels he had managed to get a good job with the Office of World Information. He began to spend weekends at Connecticut estates where people casually dropped a remark that Secretary Morgenthau had made just the other day. Here at last, looming before him, was the opportunity not only to be superior in mind, but superior in advantage and position. He remembered the admiration he had for Balzac’s young heroes when they struggled up from the poverty and obscurity of cheap boarding houses to great positions in the Ministry and favorable situations among the greatest women in the world, the Parisian women of wealth, diplomacy, and high corruption. Every well-married woman he met at cocktail parties held the promise of some great ruse that she would be able to develop for him, the brooding young de Rastignac so penniless and undiscovered and talented. He began to dress exceedingly well. Loneliness of this foolish woebegone existence sometimes made him laugh, and wonder, and groan in his pillow, and what was he to do next?

  Wilfred Engels was head of one of the New York divisions at the Office of World Information. When he made trips to Washington on official business, Francis sometimes went along. He trotted after the bustling Engels like some young attaché trained in the very best diplomatic manner. Francis was thrilled, though he would never admit it, to meet the men who took direct orders from “top-level” Capitol figures.

  There was a time when he dined at a palatial home in Chevy Chase with a French legation official on one side of him and the wife of an Army procurement officer on the other, and spent that pleasant hour speaking bad French with the legation man and casting sheep’s eyes at the lady. To his utter and almost frightened astonishment he succeeded in finding himself alone with her at eleven o’clock that night in a little bar in Bethesda, and to her greater astonishment nothing happened.

  One weekend Dora’s brother Louis Zelnick, a Boston dentist, came down for a visit with his wife Anne, and all four of them got together on a program of theater and museums and French movies and that kind of thing. Dora and Francis met them at the train and they all had cocktails at a little Lexington Avenue bar.

  All the excitement that New York meant to Francis was suddenly concentrated in that one moment. It was a rainy Saturday afternoon in January of 1946. On the way to the bar Louis Zelnick had purchased a fresh new glossy copy of the New Yorker, which he casually threw on the table when they sat down in the cocktail lounge by the street windows. Outside people were rushing, the air was gray and dark and some of the neon lights were already glowing at three o’clock in the afternoon. It was a somber, deeply exciting, and important scene to Francis. He realized that this was the first fine, pleasurable, perceptive feeling he had had for years.

  He picked up the magazine with its fresh ink-smelling gloss, its new cover design for the week, the rustling, smooth, substantial feel of it in his hands, opened to a page casually and glanced at a few sentences. The sentences themselves were so fresh and glossy and new, “the latest,” the very smartest somehow, the last thing in the whole huge scene that was New York and even Washington and Boston and Chicago, all connected together somehow by networks of rails and dining-cars on which people read the New Yorker and sipped martinis, a world connected by rumor, excitement, news, style, opinion, fashion, smart talk.

  He looked up from the magazine and marveled at the chic look the two women had, Dora with her dark distinctive intensity, and Anne with her pale, fragile, intellectual look, her faint smile of reproach, vagueness, and withdrawn amusement. He loved their clothes and the way they wore them just as they wore the look on their faces. Francis sat there brooding happily and remembering the night long ago when he walked home from the Square in Galloway on New Year’s Eve, young and exasperated and dark with resentment at the crude ugliness of the milltown, the ribaldry and coarseness of the people in it. All his old life swam before him in a kind of momentary nausea.

  He sensed, though, that his present happy feelings were due perhaps to the fact that Anne was there, a married woman who had fascinated him so much in Cambridge. Every now and then they would exchange glances with a kind of faint amusement when the brother and sister argued heatedly about Yalta and such things.

  “I can’t seem to feel those things somehow,” said Anne after a few martinis. “They’re so far away and confused and unreal.”

  “My dear girl, those things should be of the greatest importance to you as a citizen of One World,” her husband reminded her with an embarrassed little grin. “Those are the realities of the day. I can’t think of anything realer.”

  “Oh, I suppose so. But I can think of realer things. Even this particular moment now,” she looked around vaguely, “this particular moment is like something reflected on water and any minute the water’s going to be rippled. That man at the bar seems as though he might ripple apart in an instant.” She smiled forlornly.

  “But that’s within the realm of art,” put in Dora Zelnick, darkly. “If it were ever carried into politics, we’d all be in a great Buchenwald concentration camp.”

  “But aren’t we?” asked Anne, almost meekly.

  Francis was amazed with her.

/>   Two weeks later the Office of World Information began to cut down on personnel and Francis lost his job. He suddenly thought of Anne and what she had said in the bar about the world becoming rippled, unreal, vastly absurd. With a pang of something that felt idiotically like love, he began to see everything through Anne’s eyes.

  One misty night he was browsing in a bookstore. There was a book he particularly wanted but a young woman stood directly in front of the shelf, glancing through another book. He waited, hoping she would move away eventually, but she stood there rigidly with a kind of entrenched desperation. So he sauntered over, edging nearer along another shelf, looking at books. When he finally, meekly, reached out his hand for the desired book, he realized that he was too far away and could never make it. He moved to the other side of the young lady. He suddenly had an impulse to reach around in front of her and snatch the book. And as he just stood there deliberating uncertainly, the young lady snapped her book shut with irritation, glanced at him, and suddenly they recognized each other. It was Anne.

  “But you know, you didn’t have to pretend that you didn’t exist at all when you tried to reach for the book,” she laughed, as they sauntered down the street. “That was the thing that irritated me so much, that coy apology for simply being and taking up room.”

  “And you didn’t have to bury your nose in your little sense of self as though the rest of the world wasn’t there either!”

  “Oh, nonsense, I wasn’t pretending to be invisible. I at least had a sense of—of being in the way.”

  “Is that why you snapped the book?”

  “That was wholly automatic.”

  “I’d prefer to think,” said Francis, “that I tiptoed all around you from a sense of sorrow.”

  “How romantic!”

  They talked a long while before it suddenly occurred to them to inquire about each other. Francis told her he was looking for a job. For a moment he almost told her that he had been thinking about her quite a bit lately, but he was rather afraid that she would say “Nonsense” again. She told him that things in Boston were dull and she had come to New York under the pretense of visiting her grandfather in Teaneck.

  “And does he live in Teaneck?”

  “Yes. But I always get a hotel room and go and visit him at the last minute so I can send the dentist a card postmarked properly.”

  “The dentist? Louis? It’s strange that you should call him the dentist.”

  “He is one, you know.…”

  With an almost lyrical feeling of freedom, Francis led Anne to his friend’s apartment—he had the key—and began brewing a pot of coffee in the kitchenette.

  “If you’re going to try to seduce me, I wish you’d let me know in advance,” called Anne from the front room. “Otherwise it would be terribly inconvenient to be caught unawares like a schoolgirl who’s misjudged her beau.”

  Over black coffee, without any preliminaries, they began talking with a great deal of earnestness and with a sudden sense of pleasant rapport.

  Anne looked around the room with a faint smile. “Do you know, it feels awfully strange to be here.”

  “Is the world rippling up?”

  “Not at the moment. It’s just a feeling of strangeness as though I’d been here before.…”

  “Maybe it’s because I’m going to inherit this apartment from my friend when he leaves New York next month,” said Francis gravely.

  In two months they were living together in that apartment in the East Fifties. Francis merely resumed an old argument with Dora Zelnick, built it up carefully over the space of a few days, and stalked out on her dramatically with his bag in the middle of a great flare-up. Again he had the feeling that he had experienced with a Navy psychiatrist, that it was really possible to be “clever” after all. Moreover, aside from some gnawing compunction at having broken up that deep sense of bitter kinship he and Dora had developed in their “Greenwich Village life” together, he felt he had a perfect individual right to break away completely from the past without lingering involvements.

  Anne for her part simply dribbled away from her husband’s home in Boston in small installments, without apologies, almost without a scene, leaving the earnest dogged dentist with the feeling that he had married some sort of ghost that eventually vanished from his life. There was no argument about the child; Anne simply went away and left the child in his care.

  Francis felt the sheer delight and almost idiotic wickedness that truly indifferent men feel when they “steal” another man’s wife without having given it much thought. Occasionally Francis held an astounded ecstatic grin on his face—but then he felt anxious too. He had managed to get a new job just about the time he inherited the apartment and he felt a certain sense of power from the whole unexpected situation.

  Wilfred Engels again assisted him in getting a new job—this time it was an independent relief agency, for which Francis did a lot of paper work in a cramped little office on Madison Avenue. He was lucky to get another phoney soft job, inasmuch as Engels had just been cited by a Washington committee on un-American activities and had to take a vacation in Mexico to lay low for a while. There was talk of something that appeared to be a passport fraud. But Francis had no interest in these things; he became engrossed in an entirely new life with his haunting Anne. He had just started being psychoanalyzed.

  Francis rushed home almost gleefully to tell Anne what happened every day. “Oh, God, if you only knew what happened to me today! What will my psychoanalyst do with it!”

  “Begin at the beginning and I’ll be the understanding wife,” she smiled, and she handed him the Benzedrine. “Would you like an uppy first?”

  “In a minute. It all started this morning when I had a benny depression from last night. Someone came in the office, one of the bosses, I guess, and he began talking most strangely, almost insanely. Gradually I understood that he wanted me to go to a certain hospital to pick up some supplies to be packaged—but, honestly, at first I couldn’t understand what he was saying, why he was saying anything at all, with that utterly stupid look of urgency on his face—”

  “I’ve had that feeling.”

  “So off I went! Down to the subway, where I had the most awful unreal feeling that my train would never arrive.”

  “How unpleasant!”

  “It lasted ages! Finally I got on some train or other and went towards my destination. People were staring at me it seemed, I kept wondering why they were staring at me, I knew quite well I was having a fit of Benzedrine depression. When I got out on the street I saw the hospital and went straight for it, right up the steps and inside—with a feeling of buoyant, almost jubilant certainty, you see, but gradually I began to see signs of the fact that it must be a school instead of a hospital, and with a horrible feeling of limping futility I began hurrying towards the nearest exit. I didn’t want to leave the way I came in, I just simply had to rush through my error and out another way!”

  “You poor darling, I should have been there!” laughed Anne.

  “Suddenly I encountered a whole class of children moving down the hall in formation. You know the way they all parade from one classroom to another? All of them were staring at me so curiously. Suddenly they all vanished, and on top of that I couldn’t find another exit, there was absolutely no other way of getting out of there but by the way I had come in. It was rather amusing to find myself in the chalk and crayon atmospheres of a grammar school again, you know, but at the same time you can imagine my horror and defeat and everything. The whole experience just shattered me.”

  “Did you ever find the hospital?”

  “Yes! But I got lost in it. It was a huge place, I was just simply lost, wandering along shiny corridors. I remember a nurse speaking to me solicitously, but she had to go away to do something else.”

  “Oh, you poor dear!”

  “Do you know what crossed my mind then? I remembered what you’d said about Nietzsche’s remark, ‘Nothing is true, everything is allowed.’ What was t
he way you had it? ‘Nothing is true, everything is equally absurd?’ Well, that’s what I thought and I kept chanting it to myself. Finally I found the man I was seeking and he handed me the packages and said something and vanished. I left the hospital, only by the wrong door and found myself in some sort of empty lot—”

  “Oh, God, just like Kafka!” screamed Anne with delight.

  One day, on a Saturday afternoon, the doorbell rang and Francis went to the door. There, of all people, was his young brother, Mickey Martin. Mickey had grown a great deal, but Francis recognized him by his bashful eyes and the same soft fall of brown hair over his brow. Everything else about him had become gangly, crude, and powerful, to the older brother’s incomprehensible amazement. The boy grinned at him with an astounded embarrassment and waved a big meaty hand in greeting.

  “Hi, Francis!” he cried. “Is this where you live? What a nice place this is!” When he saw Anne, he almost tripped over the rug.

  “Is there anything wrong?” wondered Francis out loud.

  Mickey slowly fixed him with a serious look. “It’s about Pa. He’s sick as anything and Ma asked me to come and tell you about it. He’s been sick a long time.” He said this with that earnest mournful note in his voice, so Martin-like, that Francis had not heard for a long, long time.

  “How long has he been sick? What is it?”

  “For two months now he’s been in the house and Ma’s working in a shoeshop in Brooklyn and I work after school in a store there. The doctor says it’s cancer.”

  “Cancer.”

  “Yeah. The doctor said he’s had it for a long time and didn’t know it. The doctor says he shoulda done something about it a long time ago. But Pa doesn’t know he’s got cancer, the doctor told him it’s something else.” And Mickey explained all these things with the same sorrowful, half-questioning, gravely troubled air that continued even at that moment to gnaw at Francis’ memory. The last time anyone had spoken like that to him was when his father had visited him in the Naval hospital in Chicago on that strange melancholy rattled night two years back.