“All right!”
Walt turned, saw the doorman, tried to smile.
“Get on with you.”
“Sorry,” Walt mumbled, and he was about to explain how he was just a little bit punchy from rain walking and that he hadn’t meant to wake any of the tenants or anything like that but the doorman shook his head and started back inside.
“Nut,” the doorman muttered.
“You listen!” Walt said and he ran at the doorman. “You don’t know. You’ve got it all wrong. It started with the mistletoe. She had this mistletoe and she asked me if I wanted to kiss her—just like that. I didn’t know her, of course—never laid eyes on her—and this guy was yelling God bless people—oh, all kinds of people—” and he could have gone on a lot longer except by now he was listening to himself as the doorman retreated, so in spite of the fact that a vicious wind had started Walt gladly dashed back into the rain.
Forget about it, he told himself as he hurried along. It’s not important. In the morning you’ll see how funny it is and that’s all it is, just funny, so it’s very important that you don’t think about it because if you do, you’ll start thinking about how you’re not a kid anymore and it’s raining like hell and you’re catching your death in the middle of Lexington Avenue in the middle of New York in the middle of the night with tennis shoes on yet, at your age, and worse than that, nobody cares, and worse than that, the doorman thinks you’re a nut, and worse than that, the nuts think you’re their prodigal son, and worse than that, maybe they’re right, and worse than that, you’ve never yet called Imogene even though you told yourself fifty times you were going to and is this what you came to New York for, to end up kissing nuts under mistletoe on a subway car in October and what was it P.T. had said, about a fuckup being a fuck-up no matter where, and Walt stopped dead in the rain, looking around and around, thinking, I’m not a fuckup! I’m a winner! I’m a winner!
Then he began to run.
He ran along Lexington Avenue, ran by the doorman who had called him a nut, ran through the rain, then out of it and into the lobby of Tony’s building, then up the elevator and down the corridor and then he was pounding on her door, pounding and ringing, and when he heard her frightened voice ask who it was he said, “Me, Tony, Walt,” and she repeated his name, adding the question mark “Walt?” and then the lock clicked and the knob began to turn, so he threw his weight against the door and she gave a startled little cry, retreating a few steps while he closed the door again and then they were alone.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” Walt said.
“Where have you been?”
“Out. You’ve got to listen to me—”
“But you’re soaked.”
“It’s raining—now listen to me. This is very important. I want you to know something: you were right to send me away.”
“What?”
“You did the right thing. Before, I didn’t think so. I was pretty upset. When I said I thought you were doing the right thing? I didn’t mean it then. But I do now.”
“I don’t understand. What have you been doing?”
“Nothing. Just—nothing.”
“You’ll catch your death.”
“That doesn’t matter. You’ve got to listen.”
“Get in the bathroom and take off those clothes. Right now.”
“Not until we’ve talked.”
She hurried to the linen closet and grabbed a towel. “Move.”
“Tony—”
“My father’s a doctor, remember; I’m very up on modern medicine and they’ve just discovered that standing around in wet clothes is a no-no.”
“Dammit—”
“Not one more word.” She pointed to the bathroom.
Walt hesitated, sighed, turned. Then he closed the bathroom door behind him and started to undress.
A moment later, Tony knocked once and opened the door a crack. “Here. It’s the best I can do.”
“What’s that?”
“A brand-new pink flannel nightgown.”
“Yours?”
“Of course it’s mine; what’s wrong with that? I bought it big. It’ll fit you well enough. Take it.”
Walt took it.
“Now I’ll go heat you up a can of soup,” Tony said.
Walt nodded and continued to undress. O.K., he thought, so far so good. You got her interested and you got control but she thinks she’s got control and that’s great. But you’ve got to play it right. You’ll never score with her otherwise. Play it cool. Build the moment. Nice and easy. Niiiiiice and slow.
“Can you heat vichyssoise?” Tony called. “It seems that’s all I’ve got.”
“I don’t know.”
“Isn’t that ridiculous? I feel like such a fool. Vichyssoise.”
“I don’t really need any soup.”
“Yes, you do. I tell you what: I’ll heat it and if you don’t like it we’ll just pitch the whole thing.”
“Thanks,” Walt called, and he had to smile at the vision of Tony standing over the stove in her transparent white negligee heating up a can of cold potato soup. He finished undressing and slipped the pink nightgown on over his head.
“Well, the fat’s in the fire,” Tony said. “How you coming in there?”
“All done.” He opened the door and stepped out.
“Oh, Walt,” she said, going by him for a towel. “You haven’t touched your hair. Stand still now.” She moved up beside him and rubbed the towel back and forth, back and forth. “Well, that’s some better. Did you dry yourself at all? You’re such an idiot sometimes,” and she reached beneath his nightgown, running her hands over his skin.
Walt stood there patiently. “O.K.?” he said.
“Let’s just hope you don’t get pneumonia.” She turned and hurried to the kitchen.
Walt followed her, standing in the doorway.
Tony bent over the stove. “None of your tricks now.”
Walt opened his hands. “I’m five feet away.”
“Oh,” and she glanced at him. “Yes.” She poured the boiling white mixture into a cup. “Here.”
Walt took it, walked to the living room, stared at the rain. “Something happened to me out there,” he said.
“What was it?”
“I guess I shouldn’t say something happened. There wasn’t an incident or anything like that. What I mean is, I realized something out there.”
“At the risk of double pneumonia.”
Walt watched the rain. “That probably seems nutty to you, I know, but I do that. Not walk in the rain; it’s just that I had to think and it happened to be raining. I knew something important was happening to me and I had to give it a chance to get out. It was the same before.”
“Before?”
Walt timed his turn. “With her.”
“Your wife, you mean?” Walt made a nod.
“I thought you didn’t like to talk about it.”
“I don’t like to talk about it but sometimes you have to do things you don’t like to do. See, after what happened, after the ... incident—after she did what she did, I spent a lot of time around the house. Walking from one room to another, watching TV, reading a little, eating when I was hungry, sleeping at crazy hours, whenever I wanted to sleep. Well, that went on for a while. People got a little worried, I guess. Because they thought I was acting funny. But I knew different; something important was happening to me and I had to give it a chance to get out. Finally, one day, or night—I forget which—I realized that I’d blown everything, that I had to change my life, fast, so I changed it, left, came here, just like that. So maybe it was nutty, spending all the time around the house, but I had to do it, just like tonight I had to walk in the rain. See, what Blake did, it was, well, it was kind of unpleasant.” Kind of unpleasant? Did you just say that? How could you use those words? How can you play this scene? Hands just so, eyes just so, select the sad but brave face and freeze it on. How can you use what happened just to try to make this girl you don’t eve
n really care for? How can you sully your past like this, you polluting son of a bitch? “Jesus!”
“Don’t talk about it,” Tony said. “It’s just going to upset you.”
“Yeah-yeah-yeah,” Walt muttered. “Maybe I better stop. I’d like to.”
“I’m marvelous at changing subjects. Let’s talk about the vichyssoise—”
“I’d like to but I can’t! Don’t you see? I’ve got to tell you about what I realized out in the rain but if I just tell you, it’ll sound crazy; you won’t believe it, and you’ve got to. It’ll only make sense if you know about what happened. At the dance. It was a rainy Saturday night and there’s always a dance at the country club but we almost didn’t go, because of the rain. We sat around discussing it and finally one of us said ‘What the hell,’ so we quick got dressed and went. It was a typical club dance, just like all the others, nothing special, and we danced for a little and then broke for a drink and while we were standing around we got to talking with this guy. He was an ordinary guy, big, I guess, but not great-looking or anything. Just a guy. He was a guest at the dance. I don’t know, I think he’d gone to college with some member and was paying a visit or maybe he was in town on a business trip. Anyway, he was there. And we talked and drank and talked some more and then he asked would I mind and I said I was never too crazy about the rumba anyway, so off they went onto the floor. They danced well together. I remember noticing that right off. They glided, you know what I mean? I watched for a while and then I had another drink and made a little chitchat with the people there. It was pretty crowded—they are, usually—and I knew most of the people there. Either I’d grown up with them or they knew my father, so I was having a good enough time for myself. I’m not that sensational a dancer anyway, when you come right down to it. So I circulated, just shooting the breeze, and I wasn’t aware of anything until somebody slapped me on the back with a laugh and asked me what was going on. I didn’t know what he meant and he didn’t specify but then I thought about it and I realized that they’d been dancing a helluva long time, this guy and my wife, so I looked around trying to locate them.”
“And they’d gone,” Tony said.
“Gone?” Walt shook his head. “They were so visible I wanted to die. Right in the middle of the floor, and he had his arms around her and she had her arms around him and they might just as well have been in bed and I wanted to die. So I quick started toward them and right then I felt it—everyone, everybody in the goddam place looking at me, seeing what I’d do, and you can’t go around making scenes, not in public places, I mean, it just isn’t done, especially when all that’s happened is your wife is dancing with some stranger and you think that maybe the rest is all your imagination. But I couldn’t stop either. I had to keep walking, so I did, with this nutty smile on my face, I walked straight across the floor, right by them, and I made this happy little wave as I passed, as if nothing had ever been righter in the history of the world. And I didn’t stop walking until I was at this window and I stared out at the rain until I figured everyone wouldn’t be looking at me anymore, and then I made my way back, around the edges of the room. Smiling all the time. I mean, I just had to smile. And I was very up, making jokes and doing imitations, everything, standing by the bar. I was on that night, I was really funny, and a little crowd gathered around and I went on entertaining, not ever looking at the dance floor. I didn’t have to. The people around me, they were doing that, and I could tell from them just what was going on. As long as they kept laughing I knew the status quo was holding, but then, when I made a couple of good jokes and the laugh wasn’t loud, I knew there’d been a change and, sure enough, they’d stopped dancing and he was walking off one way and Blake was coming in my direction. I let her come. Everybody was watching her. She really looked great that night, I thought, one of those things, everything was right, the dress, the hair. And she came up and took me by the hand and started leading me onto the floor and I made with the protest, ‘I’m in the middle of a story,’ faked like she was dragging me against my will and the people laughed the way I wanted them to and then we started dancing. Or at least I think we did.”
“What do you mean, ‘you think’?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. Oh, we danced. But later, after everything had happened, it seemed so crazy that we had done that. Danced. Danced while we were having that talk. Danced and smiled and waved to people we knew and clapped for the band and dipped and turned. That’s inhuman. You can’t really do a thing like that. It’s so civilized. You sully everything when you do a thing like that.”
“Sully?”
“Did I say that? It’s not important, I don’t know.” Walt tugged at his pink nightgown. “Oh God, Tony, that was such a great thing you did. Tonight. Throwing me out. It’s probably one of the most important things that ever happened to me. You’ll see why. Where was I?”
“Dancing with your wife.”
“Oh, that’s right. That’s where I was. Yes.”
“Well, go on. What happened? What did you talk about?”
Walt laughed. “That was crazy too. We talked about my garters. See, I hate wearing garters, I almost never wear garters, and a lot of the time my socks fall down on account of that and she used to think that looked kind of grubby, so she’d bought me a pair of garters and I’d worn them that night. I didn’t want to, but she’d made a point about it and what the hell, I mean, she’d bought the damn things, so I couldn’t put up too much of a protest when she insisted I wear them and we talked about how they felt. And I had to admit I didn’t really feel them at all and she said how much better my socks looked, not all down around my ankles all the time, and I said I didn’t care, I still hated garters. On principle, you know what I mean. Garters, they’re like long underwear. There’s nothing wrong with long underwear, it just depends on how you see yourself. I never liked me in long underwear. The same with garters. I told her that. That I wasn’t the garter type and I didn’t care how much better my socks looked. It was insane. Here she’s practically put out for some guy in front of God and everyone and we’re dancing and talking about garters, and then she said ‘I’m sorry’ and I said ‘What are you sorry about?’ and she said ‘You know what I’m sorry about’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t, tell me,’ and she gave this long sigh and looked at me and said ‘I’m sorry about what’s going to happen,’ and I said ‘What’s going to happen?’ and she pulled me very close and she rested her head on my shoulder and she whispered, ‘The worst thing you can think of, that’s what’s going to happen.’ So right away I blurted out—I didn’t mean to, it just came—I said, ‘You mean you’re going to sack with that guy?’ and she snuggled up against me and said ‘That’s right.’ See, she knew, she understood that if she really wanted to get to me, really wanted to break things with a bang, that would be the thing to do, sleep around. I don’t go for that kind of thing. She knew that. See, there’s been a lot of that in my family—sleeping around—and it really upsets the hell out of me, more than anything—call me a prude if you want, I can’t help it, it just does. So after she said it we just danced a little without talking. Then she was whispering in my ear again. ‘Now I know this probably isn’t the time to say this because you’re probably upset, but I wish you’d try to remember that I said I was sorry.’ And then my voice started getting loud. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘sorry,’ and I was about to go on but the number ended, so we had to stop and smile and applaud the band and the bandleader bowed and turned to the musicians and they began some goddam waltz or other. We started waltzing, nice and slow, and I said ‘I’ll stop you,’ and she smiled and came up close to me and said ‘Oh, I don’t see how, unless you want to make a scene, right here, and you’re not about to make a scene, are you, not with everybody watching us, and besides, even if you made a scene I’d still do it.’ And I looked around and everybody was watching us, or at least I thought they were, I don’t know. And then I thought about how my father had hit my mother once. Right out in public. By the
pool. He hit her and I saw him. I saw. It was, I don’t know, kind of an unpleasant thing, I guess; anyway, everybody was watching us dance around the floor and I said ‘I’ll stop you’ again and she only shook her head and said ‘Oh, Walt,’ and then she asked did I want her to leave in the middle or did I want to wait till the end of the waltz, and then she said that she thought it was better that she just leave now and she asked would I dance her over toward the door please, and right then we bumped smack into another couple and we all had to laugh and I had to make some remark about eight left feet and we all laughed again and then we picked up the waltz again, turning and turning, waltzing toward the door, and all I could think of to say was ‘Why are you doing this?’ and after I’d said it she paused for a while and then she gave me the smile again, a sweet, distant smile, and she said, “Why? Maybe it’s because I want to have something to remember too! But I never touched her! Never! I swear!”
“You never touched who?” Tony said.
“Imogene. She went to Oberlin with us and one night she and I walked home together ...” Leave that one alone, you son of a bitch. Don’t sully that too.
“You walked home together and what?”
“Nothing. Nothing happened. But Blake, she thought—but I never even kissed Imogene. Not once. How could I? Blake and I were engaged. I was committed. That meant something. It meant something. Can you understand that?”
“Yes,” Tony said.
“Blake never could. She was all the time throwing it up to me. And after she’d gone, after she’d left the dance, I stood slopping down the liquor at the bar and I thought, it’s just so unfair because I never touched her. I was pretty squiffed by then, and I started getting funny again, and the people were back around, listening to me. I just went like sixty, making with the jokes, and everybody was having a gay old time and that was good, because you just can’t let on to people about things. I even got up on the bandstand. It was way after midnight and I remember getting up and clowning with the bandleader, doing a few imitations, a little soft-shoe, hamming it up like I was crazy. I couldn’t stop. My wife was in the sack somewhere with some guy but I couldn’t stop. I mean, if I’d stopped, someone might have thought something and you just can’t let that happen. I closed the dance practically. One, two o’clock. Everybody just about had gone, except there I was, screwing around on the bandstand, and I guess I drove home because I remember sitting on the front steps of our house, sitting in the rain waiting for her. For Blake. I sat there I don’t know how long and then I realized what a fool I was, sitting in the rain, so I went upstairs and showered and changed into dry clothes and had a drink of brandy and then I did this crazy thing. I went out and sat in the rain again.”