Pretending to be a competent judge of a motor has placed her in the sad and embarrassing position of having cheated Billy out of five hundred dollars. How can she make it up to him?
A whisper in the heart of Cora: I love him!
Whom does she love?
There are three persons in the cabin, herself, and Billy and the young man from the highway.
Cora despises herself and she has never been much attracted to men of an altogether physical type.
So there is the dreadful answer! She is in love with Billy!
I am in love with Billy, she whispers to herself.
That acknowledgment seems to call for a drink.
She gets up and pours herself another martini. Unfortunately someone, probably Cora herself, has forgotten to screw the cap back on the thermos bottle and the drinks are now tepid. No drink is better than an ice-cold martini, but no drink is worse than a martini getting warm. However, be that as it may, the discovery just made, the one about loving Billy, well, after that one the temperature of a drink is not so important so long as the stuff is still liquor!
She says to herself: I have admitted a fact! Well, the only thing to do with a fact is admit it, but once admitted, you don’t have to keep harping on it.
Never again, so long as she stays on the party with her companion, will she put into words her feelings for him, not even in the privacy of her heart…
Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas!
That is one of those little French sayings that Cora is proud of knowing and often repeats to herself as well as to others.
Sometimes she will translate it, to those who don’t know the French language, as follows:
The heart knows the scoop when the brain is ignorant of it!
Ha ha!
Well, now she is back in the cabin after a mental excursion that must have lasted at least a half an hour.
Things have progressed thus far.
Billy has stripped down to his shorts and he has persuaded the square-headed blond to do likewse.
Cora herself discovers that she has made concessions to the unseasonable warmth of the little frame building.
All she is wearing is her panties and bra.
She looks across without real interest at the square-headed stranger. Yes. A magnificent torso, as meaningless, now, to Cora as a jigsaw puzzle which put together exhibits a cow munching grass in a typical one tree pasture…
Excuse me, people, she remarks to Billy. I just remembered I promised to make a long-distance call to Atlanta.
A long-distance call to Atlanta is a code message between herself and Billy.
What it means is this: The field is yours to conquer!
Cora goes out, having thrown on a jacket and pulled on her checkerboard slacks.
Where does Cora go? Not far, not far at all.
She is leaning against a palm tree not more than five yards distant from the cabin. She is smoking a cigarette in a shadow.
Inside the cabin the field is Billy’s to conquer.
Billy says to the cyclist; How do you like me?
Huh…
(That is the dubious answer to his question!)
Billy gives him a drink, another one, thinking that this may evoke a less equivocal type of response.
How do you like me, now?
You want to know how I like you?
Yes!
I like you the way that a cattleman loves a sheepherder!
I am not acquainted, says Billy, with the likes and dislikes of men who deal in cattle.
Well, says the square-headed blond, if you keep messing around I’m going to give you a demonstration of it!
A minute is a microscope view of eternity.
It is less than a minute before Cora hears a loud sound.
She knew what it was before she even heard it, and almost before she heard it, that thud of a body not falling but thrown to a floor, she is back at the door of the cabin and pushing it open and returning inside.
Hello! is what she says with apparent good humor.
She does not seem to notice Billy’s position and bloody mouth on the floor…
Well, she says, I got my call through to Atlanta!
While she is saying this, she is getting out of her jacket and checkerboard slacks, and she is not stopping there.
Instant diversion is the doctor’s order.
She is stripped bare in ten seconds, and on the bed.
Billy has gotten outside and she is enduring the most undesired embrace that she can remember in all her long history of desired and undesired and sometimes only patiently borne embraces…
Why do we do it?
We’re lonely people. I guess it’s simple as that…
But nothing is ever that simple! Don’t you know it?
And so the story continues where it didn’t leave off…
Trade ceased to have much distinction. One piece was fundamentally the same as another, and the nights were like waves rolling in and breaking and retreating again and leaving you washed up on the wet sands of morning.
Something continual and something changeless.
The sweetness of their living together persisted.
We’re friends! said Cora.
She meant a lot more than that, but Billy is satisfied with this spoken definition, and there’s no other that can safely be framed in language.
Sometimes they look about them, privately and together, and what they see is something like what you see through a powerful telescope trained upon the moon, flatly illuminated craters and treeless plains and a vacancy of light—much light, but an emptiness in it.
Calcium is the element of this world.
Each has held some private notion of death. Billy thinks his death is going to be violent. Cora thinks hers will be ungraciously slow. Something will surrender by painful inches…
Meanwhile they are together.
To Cora that’s the one important thing left.
Cities!
You queens know places, but never know where places are!
No Mayor has ever handed them a gold key, nor have they entered under a silken banner of welcome, but they have gone to them all in the northern half of the western hemisphere, this side of the Arctic Circle! Ha ha, just about all…
Many cities!
Sometimes they wake up early to hear the awakening tumult of a city and to reflect upon it.
They’re two on a party which has made a departure and a rather wide one.
Into brutality? No. It’s not that simple.
Into vice? No. It isn’t nearly that simple.
Into what, then?
Into something unlawful? Yes, of course!
But in the night, hands clasping and no questions asked.
In the morning, a sense of being together no matter what comes, and the knowledge of not having struck nor lied nor stolen.
A female lush and a fairy who travel together, who are two on a party, and the rush continues.
They wake up early, sometimes, and hear the city coming awake, the increase of traffic, the murmurous shuffle of crowds on their way to their work, the ordinary resumption of daytime life in a city, and they reflect upon it a little from their, shall we say, bird’s-eye situation.
There’s the radio and the newspaper and there is TV, which Billy says means “Tired Vaudeville,” and everything that is known is known very fully and very fully stated.
But after all, when you reflect upon it at the only time that is suitable for reflection, what can you do but turn your other cheek to the pillow?
Two queens sleeping together with sometimes a stranger between them…
One morning a phone will ring.
Cora will answer, being the lighter sleeper and the quicker to rise.
Bad news!
Clapping a hand over the shrill mouthpiece, instinctive gesture of secrecy, she will cry to Billy.
Billy, Billy, wake up! They’ve raided the Flamingo! The heat is on! Get packed!
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Almost gaily this message is delivered and the packing performed, for it’s fun to fly away from a threat of danger.
(Most dreams are about it, one form of it or another, in which man remembers the distant mother with wings…)
Off they go, from Miami to Jacksonville, from Jacksonville to Savannah or Norfolk, all winter shuttling about the Dixie circuit, in spring going back to Manhattan, two birds flying together against the wind, nothing real but the party, and even that sort of dreamy.
In the morning, always Cora’s voice addressing room service, huskily, softly, not to disturb his sleep before the coffee arrives, and then saying gently, Billy, Billy, your coffee…
Cup and teaspoon rattling like castanets as she hands it to him, often spilling a little on the bedclothes and saying. Oh, honey, excuse me, ha ha!
1951-52 (Published 1954)
Three Players of a Summer Game
I
Croquet is a summer game that seems, in a curious way, to be composed of images the way that a painter’s abstraction of summer or one of its games would be built of them. The delicate wire wickets set in a lawn of smooth emerald that flickers fierily at some points and rests under violet shadow in others, the wooden poles gaudily painted as moments that stand out in a season that was a struggle for something of unspeakable importance to someone passing through it, the clean and hard wooden spheres of different colors and the strong rigid shape of the mallets that drive the balls through the wickets, the formal design of those wickets and poles upon the croquet lawn—all of these are like a painter’s abstraction of a summer and a game played in it. And I cannot think of croquet without hearing a sound like the faraway boom of a cannon fired to announce a white ship coming into a harbor which had expected it anxiously for a long while. The faraway booming sound is that of a green-and-white striped awning coming down over a gallery of a white frame house. The house is of Victorian design carried to an extreme of improvisation, an almost grotesque pile of galleries and turrets and cupolas and eaves, all freshly painted white, so white and so fresh that it has the blue-white glitter of a block of ice in the sun. The house is like a new resolution not yet tainted by any defection from it. And I associate the summer game with players coming out of this house, out of the mysteries of a walled place, with the buoyant air of persons just released from a suffocating enclosure, as if they had spent the fierce day bound in a closet, were breathing freely at last in fresh atmosphere and able to move without hindrance. Their clothes are as light in weight and color as the flattering clothes of dancers. There are three players—a woman, a man, and a child.
The voice of the woman player is not at all a loud one; yet it has a pleasantly resonant quality that carries it farther than most voices go and it is interspersed with peals of treble laughter, pitched much higher than the voice itself, which are cool-sounding as particles of ice in a tall shaken glass. This woman player, even more than her male opponent in the game, has the grateful quickness of motion of someone let out of a suffocating enclosure; her motion has the quickness of breath released just after a moment of terror, of fingers unclenched when panic is suddenly past or of a cry that subsides into laughter. She seems unable to speak or move about moderately; she moves in convulsive rushes, whipping her skirts with long strides that quicken to running. The whipped skirts are white ones. They make a faint crackling sound as her pumping thighs whip them open, the sound that comes to you, greatly diminished by distance, when fitful fair-weather gusts belly out and slacken the faraway sails of a yawl. That agreeably cool summer sound is accompanied by another which is even cooler, the ceaseless tiny chatter of beads hung in long loops from her throat. They are not pearls but they have a milky lustre, they are small faintly speckled white ovals, polished bird’s eggs turned solid and strung upon glittery filaments of silver. This woman player is never still for a moment; sometimes she exhausts herself and collapses on the grass in the conscious attitudes of a dancer. She is a thin woman with long bones and skin of a silky lustre and her eyes are only a shade or two darker than the blue-tinted bird’s-egg beads about her long throat. She is never still, not even when she has fallen in exhaustion on the grass. The neighbors think she’s gone mad but they feel no pity for her, and that, of course, is because of her male opponent in the game.
This player is Brick Pollitt, a man so tall with such a fiery thatch of hair on top of him that I never see a flagpole on an expanse of green lawn or even a particularly brilliant cross or weather vane on a steeple without thinking suddenly of that long ago summer and Brick Pollitt and begin to assort again the baffling bits and pieces that make his legend. These bits and pieces, these assorted images, they are like the paraphernalia for a game of croquet, gathered up from the lawn when the game is over and packed carefully into an oblong wooden box which they just exactly fit and fill. There they all are, the bits and pieces, the images, the apparently incongruous paraphernalia of a summer that was the last one of my childhood, and now I take them out of the oblong box and arrange them once more in the formal design on the lawn. It would be absurd to pretend that this is altogether the way it was, and yet it may be closer than a literal history could be to the hidden truth of it. Brick Pollitt is the male player of this summer game, and he is a drinker who has not yet completely fallen beneath the savage axe blows of his liquor. He is not so young any more but he has not yet lost the slim grace of his youth. He is a head taller than the tall woman player of the game. He is such a tall man that, even in those sections of the lawn dimmed under violet shadow, his head continues to catch fiery rays of the descending sun, the way that the heavenward pointing index finger of that huge gilded hand atop a Protestant steeple in Meridian goes on drawing the sun’s flame for a good while after the lower surfaces of the town have sunk into lingering dusk.
The third player of the summer game is the daughter of the woman, a plump twelve-year-old child named Mary Louise. This little girl had made herself distinctly unpopular among the children of the neighborhood by imitating too perfectly the elegant manners and cultivated eastern voice of her mother. She sat in the electric automobile on the sort of a fat silk pillow that expensive lap dogs sit on, uttering treble peals of ladylike laughter, tossing her curls, using grown-up expressions such as, “Oh, how delightful” and “Isn’t that just lovely.” She would sit in the electric automobile sometimes all afternoon by herself as if she were on display in a glass box, only now and then raising a plaintive voice to call her mother and ask if it was all right for her to come in now or if she could drive the electric around the block, which she was sometimes then permitted to do.
I was her only close friend and she was mine. Sometimes she called me over to play croquet with her but that was only when her mother and Brick Pollitt had disappeared into the house too early to play the game. Mary Louise had a passion for croquet; she played it for itself, without any more shadowy and important connotations.
What the game meant to Brick Pollitt calls for some further account of Brick’s life before that summer. He was a young Delta planter who had been a celebrated athlete at Sewanee, who had married a New Orleans debutante who was a Mardi Gras queen and whose father owned a fleet of banana boats. It had seemed a brilliant marriage, with lots of wealth and prestige on both sides, but only two years later Brick had started falling in love with his liquor and Margaret, his wife, began to be praised for her patience and loyalty to him. Brick seemed to be throwing his life away as if it were something disgusting that he had suddenly found in his hands. This self-disgust came upon him with the abruptness and violence of a crash on a highway. But what had Brick crashed into? Nothing that anybody was able to surmise, for he seemed to have everything that young men like Brick might hope or desire to have. What else is there? There must have been something else that he wanted and lacked, or what reason was there for dropping his life and taking hold of a glass which he never let go of for more than one waking hour? His wife, Margaret, took hold of Brick’s ten-thousand-acre plantation as fir
mly and surely as if she had always existed for that and no other purpose. She had Brick’s power of attorney and she managed all of his business affairs with celebrated astuteness. “Hell come out of it,” she said. “Brick is passing through something that he’ll come out of.” She always said the right thing; she took the conventionally right attitude and expressed it to the world that admired her for it. She had never committed any apostasy from the social faith she was born to and everybody admired her as a remarkably fine and brave little woman who had too much to put up with. Two sections of an hourglass could not drain and fill more evenly than Brick and Margeret changed places after he took to drink. It was as though she had her lips fastened to some invisible wound in his body through which drained out of him and flowed into her the assurance and vitality that he had owned before marriage. Margaret Pollitt lost her pale, feminine prettiness and assumed in its place something more impressive—a firm and rough-textured sort of handsomeness that came out of her indefinite chrysalis as mysteriously as one of those metamorphoses that occur in insect life. Once very pretty but indistinct, a graceful sketch that was done with a very light pencil, she became vivid as Brick disappeared behind the veil of his liquor. She came out of a mist. She rose into clarity as Brick descended. She abruptly stopped being quiet and dainty. She was now apt to have dirty fingernails which she covered with scarlet enamel. When the enamel chipped off, the gray showed underneath. Her hair was now cut short so that she didn’t have to “mess with it.” It was wind-blown and full of sparkle; she jerked a comb through it to make it crackle. She had white teeth that were a little too large for her thin lips, and when she threw her head back in laughter, strong cords of muscle stood out in her smooth brown throat. She had a booming laugh that she might have stolen from Brick while he was drunk or asleep beside her at night. She had a practice of releasing the clutch on a car and shooting off in high gear at the exact instant that her laughter boomed out, not calling good-bye but thrusting out one bare strong arm, straight out as a piston with fingers clenched into a fist, as the car whipped up and disappeared into a cloud of yellow dust. She didn’t drive her own little runabout nowadays so much as she did Brick’s Pierce Arrow touring car, for Brick’s driver’s license had been revoked. She frequently broke the speed limit on the highway. The patrolmen would stop her, but she had such an affability, such a disarming way with her, that they would have a good laugh together, she and the highway patrolman, and he would tear up the ticket.