It was as though Grady were abruptly transferred to a harsh and damaging altitude; with a ringing in her ears, she waited, not knowing by what path to descend.
“Rebecca is angry?” said Mrs. Manzer, the merest seed of concern planted in her tone. “Why is that now, Ida?”
She lifted her shoulders: “I should know? What do I know that goes on between those two? Anyway, I said she should come around today.”
“Ida.”
“So why do you say Ida, Mama? There’s plenty enough for everybody to eat.”
“Jesus, you’re just going to have to get a new icebox: nobody could fix that one anymore.” It was Clyde, who, having approached unnoticed, stood at the edge of the room, smeared top to bottom with grease and holding a frayed Frigidaire belt. “And look, Ma—can’t you make Crystal step on it: you know I’ve got to be back to work at four.” Right behind him, Crystal appeared with a rushing defense of herself: “I’m asking you, Mama, what do you think I am? a horse? an octopus? All day I’ve been in that kitchen while you people loll in the cool parts of the house—and Bernie sent in there to drive me wild, and Clyde with the icebox all over the floor.” Mrs. Manzer held up her hand, which brought everyone’s grievances to a halt; she did know how to handle them. “Hush now, Crystal darling. I’ll come in there and do it myself. Clyde, clean yourself; and Ida, you go set the table.”
Clyde lingered after the others: dim, at a distance, a statue; his shirt was silk-wet with sweat and pasted to him like a thin plating of marble. Long ago, in April it was, Grady had taken of him a mental photograph, an intense, physical picture, emphatic as a cut-out on white paper: alone, often isolated by midnight, she let it emerge, an intoxicating symbol that set her blood to whispering; now, as he came closer, she closed her eyes, and retreated toward the beloved image, for her husband, looming above her, seemed a distortion, another person.
“You all right?” he said.
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“Yeah?” He slapped his thigh with the Frigidaire belt. “Well, remember, it was you that wanted to come.”
“Clyde. I’ve thought it over. And I think we’d better tell them.”
“I can’t do that. Aw, honey, you know damn well I can’t, not yet.”
“But Clyde, but something, I—”
“Take it easy, kid.”
For minutes, like a circulating presence, the sour sweet sweat smell of him stayed in the air, but a trifling breeze passed through the room, taking him with it: so she opened her eyes, lonely. She stopped by a window and rested on a cold radiator. Screeching roller-skates rubbed the street like chalk squealing on blackboard; a brown sedan cruised by, its radio loudly playing the national anthem; two girls carrying bathing suits tripped along the sidewalk. Inside, the Manzers’ house was much the same as it was outside, where, divided from the sidewalk by a runt-sized hedge, it was one in a block of fifteen houses, which, while not exactly alike, were still more or less indistinguishable assemblages of prickly stucco and very red brick. Similarly, Mrs. Manzer’s furniture had this look of anonymous adequacy: chairs enough, plenty of lamps, a few too many objects. It was, however, only the objects that reflected a theme: two Buddhas, splitting their sides, supported a library of three volumes; on the mantel, tipsy jug-toting Irishmen laughingly jigged; an Indian maiden, made of pink wax, carried on a dreamy smiling ceaseless flirtation with Mickey Mouse, whose doll-sized self grinned atop the radio; and, like comic angels, a bevy of cloth clowns gazed down from the tall heights of a shelf. Such was the house, the street, the room: and Mrs. Manzer had lived between a green river and a mountain’s white summit in a city of birds.
Trilling his tongue, and with a model aeroplane suspended above him, Bernie scooted into the room. He was a whiny, worm-white, unwilling child, with banged-up bandaged knees, a baldy haircut and daredevil eyes. “Ida said I should come talk to you,” he said, whizzing around like a bat out of hell; and Grady thought, yes, Ida would. “She dropped Ma’s best plate and it didn’t break but Ma’s mad anyway on account of Crystal’s burnt the meat and Clyde’s let the icebox flood.” He collapsed and squirmed on the floor as though someone was tickling him. “Only why is she mad about Becky?”
Grady, feeling slightly unethical, smoothed her shirt and, surrendering to impulse, said: “I wouldn’t know; is she?”
“I hope to tell you; and it just seems funny to me, that’s all.” He flipped the propeller of his aeroplane, then said: “Ida said Crystal dared her, and that just seems funny ’cause Becky comes here all the time without nobody daring her. If it was all my house, I’d tell her to stay home. She don’t like me.”
“What a beautiful little plane! Did you build it yourself?” Grady said suddenly, for there were footsteps in the hall which made her anxious. Actually she did admire the plane, it was unusual; its fragile skeleton and stretchings of delicate paper were joined with Oriental care.
He pointed proudly to an imitation leather frame in which several Kodak pictures were placed together. “You see her? She made it. That’s Anne. She made thousands and millions, all kinds.”
The gnomish, spook-like little girl, whom Grady assumed to be a playmate of his, held her attention not an instant, for, to the left of this child, there was a picture of Clyde, smartly turned out in an army uniform and with his arm slung cozily around the waist of an indistinct but vaguely pretty girl. The girl, wearing a skirt much too short and a corsage far too large, was holding an American flag. As she looked at the picture, Grady felt a chill echo, the kind that comes when, in an original situation, one has the sensation of its all having occurred before: if we know the past, and live the present, is it possible that we dream the future? For it was in a dream that she’d seen them, Clyde and the girl, running arm in arm, while she, on an escalator of voiceless protest, slipped past and away. It was to happen, then; she would suffer in the daytime; and thinking so, she heard Ida’s voice, which fell like a long crashing tree: pinioned by its weight, she cringed in her chair. “I took all these myself, just nuts about taking pictures: aren’t they cute? That one of Clyde! It was right after he was in the army, and they had him down in North Carolina, so Becky got me to go down on the train with her, a lot of laughs! And that’s where I met Phil. He’s the one in the bathing suit. I don’t see him anymore; but the first year he was out of the army we were engaged and he took me dancing thirty-six times, the Diamond Horseshoe and everywhere like that.” There was a history attached to each picture, and Ida recounted them all, while in the background Bernie played cowboy songs on an ancient phonograph.
What infinite energies are wasted steeling oneself against crisis that seldom comes: the strength to move mountains; and yet it is perhaps this very waste, this torturous wait for things that never happen, which prepares the way and allows one to accept with sinister serenity the beast at last in view: resignedly Grady heard the doorbell ring, a sound that, when it came, jabbed into the composures of everyone else (except Clyde, who was upstairs washing his hands) like a hypodermic needle. Though she had at this moment every reason to walk out, she was determined not to make a poor show, and so when Ida said, “Here she is now,” Grady only looked toward the host of angel clowns, surreptitiously poking her tongue at them.
Chapter 6
The next day, Monday, marked the start of a memorable heat-wave. Although the morning papers said simply fair and warm, it was apparent by noon that something exceptional was happening, and office-workers, drifting back from lunch with the dazed desperate expression of children being bullied, began to dial Weather. Toward midafternoon, as the heat closed in like a hand over a murder victim’s mouth, the city thrashed and twisted but, with its outcry muffled, its hurry hampered, its ambitions hindered, it was like a dry fountain, some useless monument, and so sank into a coma. The steaming willow-limp stretches of Central Park were like a battlefield where many have fallen: rows of exhausted casualties lay crumpled in the dead-still shade, while newspaper photographers, documenting the disaster, mo
ved sepulchrally among them. In the cat house at the zoo, the suffering lions roared.
Aimlessly Grady moved from room to room, where at many angles clocks winked maliciously, all dead, two proclaiming twelve, another three, one saying a quarter to ten; out of mind, like these clocks, time flowed in her veins—thick as honey, each moment refusing to be used up: on and on, like the prowling golden cryings of the lions, which, fading at the windows, she heard but dimly, a sound she could not identify. Nostalgic, gingery hints of Spanish geranium wafted in her mother’s room, and Lucy, diamond-studded, an ermine stole crushed around crinkling evening glitter, swept spectrally past, her artificial party voice reaching back: go to sleep, my darling, sweet dreams, my darling; and the after-scent of Spanish geranium said laughter, fame, said New York, winter.
She waited on the threshold. The green sublime room was in appalling disarray: its summer coverings were stripped back, a spilled ashtray sprawled on the silver rug, there were crumbs and cigarette ashes in the bed, which was unmade: mixed in among the sheets was one of Clyde’s shirts, and a pair of his shorts, and a lovely old fan that belonged to a set Lucy had collected. Clyde, who stayed over in the apartment three and four nights a week, liked the room, and had taken it for his own; he kept his extra clothes in Lucy’s private closet, so that his khaki trousers always smelled faintly of Spanish geranium. But Grady, as if she didn’t understand why it should have this invaded, burglarized look, cussed the room with an aghast expression; she could only think: something ruthless has happened here, so heartless I shall never be forgiven; and she finicked about, attempting to straighten up, and she picked up his shirt, then stood there, stroking her cheek with the sleeve of it.
He loved her, he loved her, and until he’d loved her she had never minded being alone, she’d liked too much to be alone. At school, where all the girls had crushes on one another and trailed in sweetheart pairs, she had kept to herself: except once, and that was when she’d allowed Naomi to adore her. Naomi, scholarly, and bourgeois as a napkin ring, had written her passionate poems that really rhymed, and once she’d let Naomi kiss her on the lips. But she had not loved her: it is very seldom that a person loves anyone they cannot in some way envy: she could not envy any girl, only men: and so Naomi became mislaid in her thoughts, then lost, like an old letter, one which had never been carefully read. She had liked to be alone, but not, as Lucy accused, to spend her time in listless moping, which is a vice of the highly domesticated, the naturally tame: there pumped through her a nervous wild vigor that every day demanded steeper feats, more daring exertions: the police warned Mr. McNeil about her driving; twice she was caught on the Merritt Parkway making eighty and over. It wasn’t a lie when she told the arresting officers that she’d had no idea how fast she was going: speed numbed her, turned out the lights in her mind, most of all it deadened a little the excess of feeling that made personal contacts so painful. Others struck the keys too hard, and too loud were the chords she played back. Think of Steve Bolton. And Clyde, too. But he loved her. He loved her. If the telephone would ring. Perhaps it will if I don’t look at it; it does that sometimes. Or was he in terrible trouble, was that why it never rang? Poor Mrs. Manzer, weeping, and Ida, shouting, and Clyde: go home, I’ll call you later, those were his exact words, and how long could she endure it, alone among stopped clocks and heat-hushed sounds that faded at the windows? She sank on the bed, her blue-flooded head slipping sleepily downward.
“Christ, McNeil, doesn’t the bell work? I’ve been standing here a half-hour.”
“I’m asleep,” she said, peering at Peter with sleep-sullen, disappointed eyes. She wavered at the door: suppose Clyde should come while Peter was here? All things considered, it was no time for them to meet.
“You needn’t stare at me as though I was a nightmare,” he said, amiably pushing past her. “Though I must say I feel like one—having spent this filthy day on a day-coach, and surrounded by little hoodlums, all just bursting with energy after their two weeks of fresh air. I hope you don’t mind if I use your shower?”
She did not want Peter to see into the plunder of her mother’s room, and so she hurried along the hall ahead of him. “I remember: you’ve been on Nantucket,” she said as they went into her room, where immediately he unbuttoned a sticky seersucker jacket. “I got your card.”
“Oh, did I send you one? That was thoughtful of me. As a matter of fact, we wanted you to come; I called a thousand times but no answer. We went up on Freddy Cruikshank’s sailboat, and it was really rather fun, except that I got bitten by a crab—in a place I can’t show you: speaking of which, turn around, I want to take off my pants.”
Sitting with her back to him, she lighted a cigarette. “It must have been fun,” she said, recalling other years, seaside summers white with sails, starfish, reverse summers. “I haven’t been out of town since I saw you.”
“Which is fairly apparent, wouldn’t you say? You look like a lily: a little funereal for my taste.” He was bragging: his own neat, very cared-for body was a color like tea, and sun streaks whipped through his hair. “I thought you were a devotee of the great outdoors; or did that belong to your tomboy days?”
“I haven’t been feeling awfully well,” she said, and Peter, already in the bathroom, paused to ask if it were anything serious. “Not really, no. The heat, I suppose. I’m never ill, you know that.” Only yesterday. It was after Brooklyn; she remembered crossing the bridge, then stopping for a traffic light. “Only yesterday, I fainted,” and as she said it something inside her turned over, fell down: a sensation not unlike what she’d felt when the traffic light had started to spiral and darkness happened. It had lasted a moment, the light, in fact, had scarcely changed; even so, there had been a blasting of car horns: sorry, she’d said, jumping her car forward.
“Can’t hear you, McNeil. Speak up.”
“It doesn’t matter. I was just talking to myself.”
“That, too? You are in a bad way. We both need some sort of soothing, a martini or two. Can you remember not to use sweet vermouth? I’ve told you so often, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.”
Glistening, altogether revived, he came out of the bathroom, and found an arrangement: a shaker of satisfactory martinis, on the phonograph “Fun to Be Fooled,” at the glass doors sunset fireworks and a postcard view. “I can’t enjoy this for long,” he said, falling among the hassock cushions. “It’s stupid, but I’m having dinner with someone who may give me a job: in radio, of all things,” and so they made a toast that wished him luck. “It isn’t necessary, I’m lucky anyway, wait, by the time I’m thirty I will have had the worst kind of success, be able, organized, someone who laughs at people that want to lie under a tree,” which was not a frivolous prophecy, as Peter, sipping his drink, wisely knew, knowing, too, that it probably was the happiest thing that could happen to him, for the man described he secretly, irrevocably admired. And the lady with a flower garden, this was Grady, the wife worthy of pearls for Christmas, who entertains at an impeccable table, whose civilized presence recommends the man, that is what she seemed in his expectations, and, watching her pour him another cocktail, just as she might some dusk five years hence, he thought of how the summer had gone, not seeing her once, never calling, all days dragging toward the day that, having exhausted herself with whoever he was, she would turn to him, saying Peter, is it you? And yes. Passing him his drink, Grady noticed with dismay an unwarranted apprehension in Peter’s eyes, a greediness about the mouth very foreign to the exuberant plan of his face; as their fingers touched around the glass stem, she had a sudden preposterous notion: is it possible, are you in love with me? And this skimmed like a gull, which presently she shooed out of sight, it was such a silly creature, but it came back, kept coming back, and she was forced to consider what Peter meant to her: she wanted his goodwill, she respected his criticisms, his opinions mattered, and it was because they did that she sat now half-listening for Clyde, more than dreading that he should arrive, for Peter, passing
judgment, would make her reckon with what she’d done, and she had no heart for it, not yet. They let the room darken, and the surface of their voices, soft, yielding, stirred and sighed around them, what they talked of seeming not to matter, it was so much enough that they could use the same words, apply the same values, and Grady said, “How long have you known me, Peter?”
Peter said, “Since you made me cry; it was a birthday party, and you dumped a mess of ice-cream and cake all over my sailor suit. Oh, you were a very mean child.”
“And am I so different now? Do you think you see me as I really am?”
“No,” he said, laughing, “for that matter, I wouldn’t want to.”
“Because you might not like me?”
“If I claimed to see you as you really are, it simply would mean that I dismiss you, that I think you shallow and a bore.”
“You could think much worse of me.”
Peter’s silhouette moved against the deepening green doors, his smile flickered, like the lights across the park, for, feeling her dishonesty, a sense of ghostly struggle had seized him: it was as if they were two figures pummeling around in wrapped sheets: she wants to excuse herself from blame without confessing why it is I might have cause to blame her. “Much worse than being a bore?” he said, jacking up his smile. “In that case, you were right to wish me luck.”
He left soon afterwards, leaving her alone in the dark room, illuminated time to time by shocking leaps of heat-lightning, and she thought, now it will rain, and it never did, and she thought, now he will come, and he never did. She lighted cigarettes, letting them die between her lips, and the hours, thorned, crucifying, waited with her, and listened, as she listened: but he was not coming. It was past midnight when she called downstairs and asked the doorman to have her car brought around. Lightning jumped from cloud to cloud, a sinisterly soundless messenger, and the car, like a fallen bolt, streaked through the outskirts of the city, through humdrum night-dead villages: at sunrise she glimpsed the sea.