Collected Stories

  “I can’t have you check me out of my hotel and take my suitcase. Nobody is going to supervise me. And I suppose you went through my things.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. I was protecting you. You’re making the mistake of your life.”

  At that moment Clara’s look was hollow. You saw the bones of her face, especially the orbital ones. The inflammation of her eyes would have shocked Ithiel if he hadn’t been bent on teaching her a lesson. Time to draw the line, was what he was saying to himself.

  “You’re not going back to that horrible hotel!” she said when he picked up his bag.

  “I have a reservation in another place.”

  “Teddy, take off your coat. Don’t go now, I’m in a bad way. I love you with my soul.” She said it again, when the door swung shut after him.

  He told himself it would set a bad precedent to let her control him with her fits.

  The luxury of the Park Avenue room didn’t sit well with him—the gilded wall fixtures, the striped upholstery, the horror of the fresco painting, the bed turned back like the color photograph in the brochure, with two tablets of chocolate mint on the night table. The bathroom was walled with mirrors, the brightwork shone, and he felt the life going out of him. He went to the bed and sat on the edge but did not lie down. It was not in the cards for him to sleep that night. The phone rang—it was a mean sound, a thin rattle—and Etta said, “Clara has swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. She called me and I sent the ambulance. You’d better go to Bellevue; you may be needed. Are you alone there?” He went immediately to the hospital, hurrying through gray corridors, stopping to ask directions until he found himself in the waiting space for relatives and friends, by a narrow horizontal window. He saw bodies on stretchers, no one resembling Clara. A young man in a dog collar presently joined him. He said he was Clara’s minister.

  “I didn’t realize that she had one.”

  “She often comes to talk to me. Yes, she’s in my parish.”

  “Has her stomach been pumped?”

  “That—oh, yes. But she took a big dose, and they’re not certain yet. You’re Ithiel Regler, I suppose?”

  “I am.”

  The young minister asked no other questions. No discussions occurred. You couldn’t help but be thankful for his tact. Also for the information he brought from the nurses. Word came in the morning that she would live. They were moving her upstairs to a women’s ward.

  When she was able, she sent word through her clergyman friend that she didn’t want to see Ithiel, had no wish to hear from him, ever. After a day of self-torment in the luxury of the hotel on Park Avenue, he canceled his trip to Europe. He fended off the sympathy of Etta Wolfenstein, avid to hear about his torments, and went back to Washington. The clergyman made a point of seeing him off at Penn Station. There he was, extra tall, in his dickey and clerical collar. Baldness had just come over him, he had decided not to wear a hat, and he kept reaching for vanished or vanishing tufts of hair. Ithiel was made uncomfortable by his sympathy. Because the young man had nothing at all to tell him except that he shouldn’t blame himself. He may have been saying: “You with your sins, your not very good heart. I with my hair loss.” This took no verbal form. Only a mute urgency in his decent face. He said, “She’s ambulatory already. She goes around the ward and tapes back their IV needles when they work loose. She’s a help to old derelicts.”

  You can always get a remedy, you can tap into solace when you need it, you can locate a mental fix. America is generous in this regard. The air is full of helpful hints. Ithiel was too proud to accept any handy fix. Like: “Suicide is a power move.”

  “Suicide is punitive.”

  “The poor kids never mean it.”

  “It’s all the drama of rescue.” You could tell yourself such things; they didn’t mean a damn. In all the world, now, there wasn’t a civilized place left where a woman would say, “I love you with my soul.” Only this backcountry girl was that way still. If no more mystical sacredness remained in the world, she hadn’t been informed yet. Straight-nosed Ithiel, heading for Washington and the Capitol dome, symbolic of a nation swollen with world significance, set a greater value on Clara than on anything in this_ place, or any place. He thought, This is what I opted for, and this is what I deserve. Walking into that room at the Regency, I got what I had coming.

  It was after this that Clara’s marriages began—first the church wedding in her granny’s gown, the arrangements elaborate, Tiffany engravings, Limoges china, Lalique glassware. Mom and Dad figured that after two suicide attempts, the fullest effort must be made to provide a stable life for their Clara. They were dear about it. There were no economies. Husband One was an educational psychologist who tested schoolchildren. His name was a good one—Monserrat. On the stationery she had printed, Clara was Mme de Monserrat. But as she was to say to Ithiel: “This marriage was like a Thanksgiving turkey. After a month the bird is drying out and you’re still eating breast of turkey. It needs more and more Russian dressing, and pretty soon the sharpest knife in the city won’t slice it.” If there was anything she could do to perfection, it was to invent such descriptions. “Pretty soon you’re trying to eat threads of bird meat,” she said.

  Her second husband was a southern boy who went to Congress and even ran in a few presidential primaries. They lived out in Virginia for about a year, and she saw something of Ithiel in Washington. She was not very kind to him then. “Frankly,” she told him at lunch one day, “I can’t imagine why I ever wanted to embrace you. I look at you, and I say, Yuch!”

  “There probably is a. yuch_ aspect to me,” said Ithiel, perfectly level. “It does no harm to learn about your repulsive side.”

  She couldn’t flap him. In the glance she then gave him, there was a glimmer of respect.

  “I was a little crazy,” she would say later.

  At that time she and her southern husband were trying to have a child. She telephoned Ithiel and described the difficulties they were having. “I thought maybe you would oblige me,” she said.

  “Out of the question. It would be grotesque.”

  A child with classic Greek eyes. Listen, Teddy, as I sit here, what do you think I’m doing to myself? Where do you suppose my hand is, and what am I touching?”

  I ve already done my bit for the species,” he said. “Why breed more sinners?”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “These utility husbands are not the answer.”

  “But for you and me, it wasn’t in the cards, Ithiel. Why did you have so many women?”

  “For you there were quite a few men—maybe it has something to do with democracy. There are so many eligibles, such handsome choices. Mix with your equals. And why limit yourself?”

  “Okay, but it comes out so unhappy…. And why shouldn’t I be pregnant by you? Alistair and I aren’t compatible that way. Haven’t you forgiven me for what I said that day about your being yuch?_ I was just being perverse. Ithiel, if you were here now…”

  “But I’m not going to be.”

  “Just for procreation. There are even surrogate mothers these days.”

  “I can see a black dude motorcycle messenger in boots, belt, and helmet, waiting with a warm box for the condom full of sperm. ‘Here you are, Billy. Rush this to the lady.’ “

  “You shouldn’t make fun. You should think of the old Stoic who told his buddies when they caught him in the act, ‘Mock not, I plant a Man.’ Oh, I talk this way to make an impression on you. It’s not real. I ask you—and now I’m serious—what should I do?”

  “It should be Alistair’s child.”

  But she divorced Alistair and married Mike Spontini, whom she had threatened in Milan to burn with the dashboard lighter coil. For Spontini she had real feeling, she said. “Even though I caught him humping another woman just before we were married.”

  “He wasn’t meant to be a husband.”

  “I thought once he got to know my quality I’d mean more to him. He’d finally see_ it.
I don’t say that I’m better than other women. I’m not superior. I’m nutty, also. But I am in touch with the me_ in myself. There’s so much I could do for a man that I loved. How could_ Mike, in my bed, with the door unlocked and me in the house, ball such an awful tramp as that? Tell_ me.”

  “Well, people have to be done with disorder, finally, and by the time they’re done they’re also finished. When they back off to take a new leap, they realize they’ve torn too many ligaments. It’s all over.”

  Mike Spontini intended to do right by Clara. He bought a handsome place in Connecticut with a view of the sea. He never invested badly, never lost a penny. He doubled his money in Connecticut. The Fifth Avenue apartment was a good deal too. In the country, Clara became a gardener. She must have hoped that there was sympathetic magic in flowers and vegetables, or that the odor or soil would calm Mike’s jetting soul, bring down his fever. The marriage lasted three years. He paid the wretchedness fee, he did bad time, as convicts say, then he filed for divorce and liquidated the real estate. It took a stroke to stop Mad Mike. The left side of his face was disfigured in such a manner (this was Clara speaking) that it became a fixed commentary on the life strategy he had followed: “his failed concept.” But Clara was strong on loyalty, and she was loyal even to a stricken ex-husband. You don’t cut all bonds after years of intimacy. After his stroke, she arranged a birthday party for him at the hospital; she sent a cake to the room. However, the doctor asked her not to come.

  When you were down, busted, blasted, burnt out, dying, you saw the best of Clara.

  So it was odd that she should also have become an executive, highly paid and influential. She could make fashionable talk, she dressed with originality, she knew a lot and at first hand about decadence, but at any moment she could set aside the “czarina” and become the hayseed, the dupe of traveling salesmen or grifters who wanted to lure her up to the hayloft. In her you might see suddenly a girl from a remote town, from the vestigial America of one-room school-houses, constables, covered-dish suppers, one of those communities bypassed by technology and urban development. Her father, remember, was still a vestryman, and her mother sent checks to TV fundamentalists. In a sophisticated boardroom Clara could be as plain as cornmeal mush, and in such a mood, when she opened her mouth, you couldn’t guess whether she would speak or blow bubble gum. Yet anybody who had it in mind to get around her was letting himself in for lots of bad news.

  She was prepared always to acknowledge total ignorance, saying, as she had so often said to Ithiel Regler, “Tell_ me!” The girl from the backwoods was also sentimental; she kept souvenirs, family photographs, lace valentines, and she cherished the ring Ithiel had bought her. She held on to it through four marriages. When she had it appraised for insurance, she found that it had become very valuable. It was covered for fifteen thousand dollars. Ithiel had never been smart about money. He was a bad investor—unlucky, careless. On Forty-seventh Street twenty years ago, Madison Hamilton had goofed, uncharacteristically, in pricing his emerald. But Clara was careless as well, for the ring disappeared while she was carrying Patsy. Forgotten on a washstand, maybe, or stolen from a bench at the tennis club. The loss depressed her; her depression deepened as she searched for it in handbags, drawers, upholstery crevices, shag rugs, pill bottles.

  Laura Wong remembered how upset Clara had been. ” That_ put you back on the couch,” she said, with Oriental gentleness.

  Clara had been hoping to free herself from Dr. Gladstone. She had said as much. “Now that I’m expecting for the third time I should be able to go it alone at last. A drink with Ithiel when I’m low does more for me. I’ve already got more doctors than any woman should need. Gladstone will ask me why this Ithiel symbol should still be so powerful. And what will there be to say? When the bag of your Hoover fills with dust, you replace it with another. Why not get rid of feeling-dust too. Yet… even a technician like Gladstone knows better. What he wants is to desensitize me. I was ready to die for love. Okay, I’m still living, have a husband, expect another baby. I’m as those theology people say, all those divinity fudges: situated._ If, finally, you get situated, why go into mourning over a ring?”

  In the end Clara did telephone Ithiel to tell him about the emerald. “Such a link between us,” she said. “And it makes me guilty to bother you with it now, when things aren’t going well for you with Francine.”

  “Never so bad that I can’t spare some words of support,” said Ithiel, so dependable. He disliked grieving over his own troubles. And he was so highly organized—as if living up to the classic balance of his face; such a pair of eyes seemed to call for a particular, maybe even an administered, sort of restraint. Ithiel could be hard on himself He blamed himself about Clara and for his failed marriages, including the present one. And yet the choices he made showed him to be reckless too. He was committed to high civility, structure, order; nevertheless he took chances with women, he was a gambler, something of an anarchist. There was anarchy on both sides. Nevertheless, his attachment, his feeling for her was—to his own surprise—permanent. His continually increasing respect for her came over the horizon like a moon taking decades to rise.

  “Seven marriages between us, and we still love each other,” she said. Ten years before, it would have been a risky thing to say, it would have stirred a gust of fear in him. Now she was sure that he would agree, as indeed he did.

  “That is true.”

  “How do you interpret the ring, then?”

  “I don’t,” said Ithiel. “It’s a pretty bad idea to wring what happens to get every drop of meaning out of it. The way people twist their emotional laundry is not to be believed. / don’t feel that you wronged me by losing that ring. You say it was insured?”

  “Damn right.”

  “Then file a claim. The companies charge enough. Your premiums must be out of sight.”

  “I’m really torn up about it,” said Clara.

  “That’s your tenth-century soul. Much your doctor can do about that!”

  “He helps, in some respects.”

  “Those guys!” said Ithiel. “If a millipede came into the office, he’d leave with an infinitesimal crutch for each leg.”

  Reporting this conversation to Ms. Wong, Clara said, “That did it. That’s the anarchist in Ithiel busting out. It gives me such a boost to chat with him even for five minutes.”

  The insurance company paid her fifteen thousand dollars, and then, a year later, the missing ring turned up.

  In one of her fanatical fits of spring cleaning, she found it beneath the bed, above the caster, held in the frame to which the small braking lever was attached. It was on her side of the bed. She must have been groping for a paper tissue and knocked it off the bedside table. For what purpose she had been groping, now that it was discovered, she didn’t care to guess. She held the ring to her face, felt actually as if she were inhaling the green essence of this ice—no, ice was diamond; still, this emerald also was an ice. In it Ithiel’s pledge was frozen. Or else it represented the permanent form of the passion she had had for this man. The hot form would have been red, like a node inside the body, in the sexual parts. That you’d see as a ruby. The cool form was this concentrate of clear green. This was not one of her fancies; it was as real as the green of the ocean, as the mountains in whose innards such gems are mined. She thought these locations (the Atlantic, the Andes) as she thought the inside of her own body. In her summary fashion, she said, “Maybe what it comes to is that I am an infant mine.” She had three small girls to prove it.

  The insurance company was not notified. Clara was not prepared to return the money. By now it simply wasn’t there. It had been spent on a piano, a carpet, yet another set of Limoges china—God knows what else. So the ring couldn’t be reinsured, but that didn’t matter much. Exultingly glad, she told Ithiel on the telephone, “/лcredible, where that ring fell! Right under me, as I lay there suffering over it. I could have touched it by dropping my arm. I could have poked it with my finger.?
??

  “How many of us can say anything like that?” said Ithiel. “That you can lie in bed and have the cure for what ails you within reach.”

  “Only you don’t know it…” said Clara. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “Oh, I am. I think it’s great. It’s like adding ten years to your life to have it back.”

  “I’ll have to take double good care of it. It’s not insurable…. I’m never sure how important an item like this ring can be to a man who has to think about the Atlantic Alliance and all that other stuff. Deterrence, nuclear theater forces… completely incomprehensible to me.”

  ‘If only the answers were under my bed,” said Ithiel. “But you shouldn’t think I can’t take a ring seriously, or that I’m so snooty about world significance or Lenin’s ‘decisive correlation of forces’—that you’re just a kid and I indulge you like a big daddy. I like you better than I do the president, or the national security adviser.”

  Yes, I can see that, and why, humanly, you’d rather have me to deal with.” Just think, if you didn’t do your own spring cleaning, your help might have found the ring.”

  “My help wouldn’t dream of going under the bed at any season of the year; that’s why I took time off from the office. I had to work around Wilder, who’s been reading John le Carrщ. Sitting in the middle of his female household like a Sioux Indian in his wickiup. Like Sitting Bull. All the same, he’s often very sweet. Even when he acts like the reigning male. And he’d be totally at sea if I weren’t… oops!”

  “If you weren’t manning the ship,” said Ithiel.

  Well, it was a feminine household, and for that reason perhaps Gina felt less foreign in New York. She said that she loved the city, it had so many accommodations for women specifically. Everybody who arrived, moreover, already knew the place because of movies and magazines, and when John Kennedy said he was a Berliner, all of Berlin could have answered, “So? We are New Yorkers.” There was no such thing as being strange here, in Gina’s opinion.