Collected Stories

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “You mean, you don’t care whether I tell him or not?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Yes what?”

  It seems she can’t tell whether he’s looking at her or not, whether he ever looked at her. He just stands there, doping, about twice as tall as she is. “When I was a little boy, we would have sherbet on Sunday,” he says. “Just a breath of lemon in it. Like narcissus smells, I remember. I think I remember. I was … four … three. Mother died and we moved to a city. Boarding-house. A brick wall. There was one window, like a one-eyed man with sore eyes. And a dead cat. But before that we had lots of trees, like you have. I would sit on the kitchen steps in the late afternoon, watching the Sunday light in the trees, eating sherbet.”

  She is watching him. Then she turns, walking fast. He follows, doping along a little behind her, so that when she stops in the shadow of a clump of bushes, with her face all fixed, he stands there like this dope until she touches him. And even then he doesn’t get it. She has to tell him to hurry. So he gets it, then. A poet is human, it seems, just like a man.

  But that’s not it. That can be seen in any movie. This is what it is, what is good.

  About this time, coincident with this second clinch, Roger happens to come out from behind this bush. He comes out kind of happen-so; pleasant and quiet from taking a little stroll in the moonlight to settle his supper. They all three stroll back to the house, Roger in the middle. They get there so quick that nobody thinks to say goodnight when Anne goes on in the house and up the stairs. Or maybe it is because Roger is doing all the talking himself at that moment, poetry having gone into a slump, you might say. “Moonlight,” Roger is saying, looking at the moon like he owned it too; “I can’t stand it any more. I run to walls, an electric light. That is, moonlight used to make me feel sad and old and I would do that. But now I’m afraid it don’t even make me feel lonely any more. So I guess I am old.”

  “That’s a fact,” the poet says. “Where can we talk?”

  “Talk?” Roger says. He looked like a head-waiter, anyway: a little bald, flourishing, that comes to the table and lifts off a cover and looks at it like he is saying, “Well, you can eat this muck, if you want to pay to do it.” “Right this way,” he says. They go to the office, the room where he writes his books, where he doesn’t even let the children come at all. He sits behind the typewriter and fills his pipe. Then he sees that the poet hasn’t sat down. “Sit down,” he says.

  “No,” the poet says. “Listen,” he says. “Tonight I kissed your wife. I’m going to again, if I can.”

  “Ah,” Roger says. He is too busy filling the pipe right to look at the poet, it seems. “Sit down.”

  “No,” the poet says.

  Roger lights the pipe. “Well,” he says, “I’m afraid I can’t advise you about that. I have written a little poetry, but I never could seduce women.” He looks at the poet now. “Look here,” he says, “you are not well. You go on to bed. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

  “No,” the poet says, “I cannot sleep under your roof.”

  “Anne keeps on saying you are not well,” Roger says. “Do you know of anything that’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know,” the poet says.

  Roger sucks at the pipe. He seems to be having a little trouble making it burn right. Maybe that is why he slams the pipe down on the desk, or maybe he is human too, like a poet. Anyway, he slams the pipe down on the desk so that the tobacco pops out burning among the papers. And there they are: the bald husband with next week’s flour and meat actually in sight, and the home-wrecker that needs a haircut, in one of these light blue jackets that ladies used to wear with lace boudoir caps when they would be sick and eat in bed. “What in hell do you mean,” Roger says, “coming in my house and eating my food and bothering Anne with your damned …” But that was all. But even that was pretty good for a writer, an artist; maybe that’s all that should be expected from them. Or maybe it was because the poet wasn’t even listening to him. “He’s not even here,” Roger says to himself; like he had told the poet, he used to write poetry himself, and so he knew them. “He’s up there at Anne’s door now, kneeling outside her door.” And outside that door was as close to Anne as Roger got too, for some time. But that was later, and he and the poet are now in the office, with him trying to make the poet shut his yap and go up to bed, and the poet refusing.

  “I cannot lie under your roof,” the poet says. “May I see Anne?”

  “You can see her in the morning. Any time. All day, if you want to. Don’t talk drivel.”

  “May I speak to Anne?” the poet says, like he might have been speaking to a one-syllable feeb.

  So Roger goes up and tells Anne and comes back and sits behind the typewriter again and then Anne comes down and Roger hears her and the poet goes out the front door. After awhile Anne comes back alone. “He’s gone,” she says.

  “Is he?” Roger says, like he is not listening. Then he jumps up. “Gone? He can’t—this late. Call him back.”

  “He won’t come back,” Anne says. “Let him alone.” She goes on upstairs. When Roger went up a little later, the door was locked.

  Now get this. This is it. He came back down to the office and put some paper into the typewriter and began to write. He didn’t go very fast at first, but by daylight he was sounding like forty hens in a sheet-iron corn-crib, and the written sheets on the desk were piling up.…

  He didn’t see or hear of the poet for two days. But the poet was still in town. Amos Crain saw him and came and told Roger. It seems that Amos happened to come to the house for something, because that was the only way anybody could have got to Roger to tell him anything for two days and nights. “I heard that typewriter before I crossed the creek,” Amos says. “I see that blue dressing-sacque at the hotel yesterday,” he says.

  That night, while Roger was at work, Anne came down the stairs. She looked in the office door. “I’m going to meet him,” she said.

  “Will you tell him to come back?” Roger said. “Will you tell him I sent the message?”

  “No,” Anne said.

  And the last thing she heard when she went out and when she came back an hour later and went upstairs and locked her door (Roger was sleeping on the sleeping-porch now, on an army cot) was the typewriter.

  And so life went on in its old, pleasant, happy way. They saw one another often, sometimes twice a day after Anne quit coming down to breakfast. Only, a day or so after that, she missed the sound of the typewriter; maybe she missed being kept awake by it. “Have you finished it?” she said. “The story?”

  “Oh. No. No, it’s not finished yet. Just resting for a day or so.” Bull market in typewriting, you might say.

  It stayed bullish for several days. He had got into the habit of going to bed early, of being in his cot on the sleeping-porch when Anne came back into the house. One night she came out onto the sleeping-porch, where he was reading in bed. “I’m not going back again,” she said. “I’m afraid to.”

  “Afraid of what? Aren’t two children enough for you? Three, counting me.”

  “I don’t know.” It was a reading lamp and her face was in the shadow. “I don’t know.” He turned the light, to shine it on her face, but before it got to her face she turned, running. He got there just in time to have the door banged in his face. “Blind! Blind!” she said beyond the door. “Go away! Go away!”

  He went away, but he couldn’t get to sleep. So after a while he took the metal shade off the reading lamp and jimmied the window into the room where the children slept. The door from here into Anne’s room wasn’t locked. Anne was asleep. The moon was getting down then, and he could see her face. He hadn’t made any noise, but she waked anyway, looking up at him, not moving. “He’s had nothing, nothing. The only thing he remembers of his mother is the taste of sherbet on Sunday afternoon. He says my mouth tastes like that. He says my mouth is his m
other.” She began to cry. She didn’t move, face-up on the pillow, her arms under the sheet, crying. Roger sat on the edge of the bed and touched her and she flopped over then, with her face down against his knee, crying.

  They talked until about daylight. “I don’t know what to do. Adultery wouldn’t get me—anybody—into that place where he lives. Lives? He’s never lived. He’s——” She was breathing quiet, her face turned down, but still against his knee—him stroking her shoulder. “Would you take me back?”

  “I don’t know.” He stroked her shoulder. “Yes. Yes. I’d take you back.”

  And so the typewriting market picked up again. It took a spurt that night, as soon as Anne got herself cried off to sleep, and the market held steady for three or four days, without closing at night, even after Pinkie told him how the telephone was out of fix and he found where the wires were cut and knows where he can find the scissors that did it when he wants to. He doesn’t go to the village at all, even when he had a free ride. He would spend half a morning sitting by the road, waiting for somebody to pass that would bring him back a package of tobacco or sugar or something. “If I went to the village, he might have left town,” he said.

  On the fifth day, Amos Crain brought him his mail. That was the day the rain came up. There was a letter for Anne. “He evidently doesn’t want my advice on this,” he said to himself. “Maybe he has already sold it.” He gave the letter to Anne. She read it, once.

  “Will you read it?” she said.

  “I wouldn’t care to,” he said.

  But the typing market is still steady, so that when the rain came up this afternoon, he had to turn on the light. The rain was so hard on the house that he could watch his fingers (he used two or three of them) hitting the keys without hearing a sound. Pinkie didn’t come, so after a while he quit and fixed a tray and took it up and left it on a chair outside Anne’s door. He didn’t stop to eat, himself.

  It was after dark when she came down the first time. It was still raining. He saw her cross the door, going fast, in a raincoat and a rubber hat. He caught her as she opened the front door, with the rain blowing in. “Where are you going?” he said.

  She tried to jerk her arm loose. “Let me alone.”

  “You can’t go out in this. What is it?”

  “Let me alone. Please.” She jerked her arm, pulling at the door which he was holding.

  “You can’t. What is it? I’ll do it. What is it?”

  But she just looked at him, jerking at her arm and at the door knob. “I must go to the village. Please, Roger.”

  “You can’t do that. At night, and in all this rain.”

  “Please. Please.” He held her. “Please. Please.” But he held her, and she let the door go and went back up stairs. And he went back to the typewriter, to this market still going great guns.

  He is still at it at midnight. This time Anne has on a bathrobe. She stands in the door, holding to the door. Her hair is down. “Roger,” she says. “Roger.”

  He goes to her, fast for a fat man; maybe he thinks she is sick. “What? What is it?”

  She goes to the front door and opens it; the rain comes in again. “There,” she says. “Out there.”

  “What?”

  “He is. Blair.”

  He draws her back. He makes her go to the office, then he puts on his raincoat and takes the umbrella and goes out. “Blair!” he calls. “John!” Then the shade on the office window goes up, where Anne has raised it and carried the desk lamp to the window and turned the light out-doors, and then he sees Blair, standing in the rain, without any hat, with his blue coat like it was put on him by a paper-hanger, with his face lifted toward Anne’s window.

  And here we are again: the bald husband, the rural plute, and this dashing blade, this home-wrecking poet. Both gentlemen, being artists: the one that doesn’t want the other to get wet; the other whose conscience won’t let him wreck the house from inside. Here we are, with Roger trying to hold one of these green silk, female umbrellas over himself and the poet too, jerking at the poet’s arm.

  “You damned fool! Come in the house!”

  “No.” His arm gives a little as Roger jerks at it, but the poet himself doesn’t move.

  “Do you want to drown? Come on, man!”

  “No.”

  Roger jerks at the poet’s arm, like jerking at the arm of a wet saw-dust doll. Then he begins to yell at the house: “Anne! Anne!”

  “Did she say for me to come in?” the poet says.

  “I—Yes. Yes. Come in the house. Are you mad?”

  “You’re lying,” the poet says. “Let me alone.”

  “What are you trying to do?” Roger says. “You can’t stand here like this.”

  “Yes, I can. You go on in. You’ll take cold.”

  Roger runs back to the house; they have an argument first because Roger wants the poet to keep the umbrella and the poet won’t do it. So Roger runs back to the house. Anne is at the door. “The fool,” Roger says. “I can’t——”

  “Come in!” Anne calls. “John! Please!” But the poet has stepped out of the light and vanished. “John!” Anne calls. Then she began to laugh, staring at Roger from between her hair brushing at her hair with her hands. “He—he looked so f—funny. He I—looked so——” Then she was not laughing and Roger had to hold her up. He carried her upstairs and put her to bed and sat with her until she could stop crying. Then he went back to the office. The lamp was still at the window, and when he moved it the light went across the lawn and he saw Blair again. He was sitting on the ground, with his back against a tree, his face raised in the rain toward Anne’s window. Roger rushed out again, but when he got there, Blair was gone. Roger stood under the umbrella and called him for a while, but he never got any answer. Maybe he was going to try again to make the poet take the umbrella. So maybe he didn’t know as much about poets as he thought he did. Or maybe he was thinking about Pope. Pope might have had an umbrella.

  They never saw the poet again. This one, that is. Because this happened almost six months ago, and they still live there. But they never saw this one. Three days later, Anne gets the second letter, mailed from the village. It is a menu card from the Elite Café, or maybe they call it the Palace. It was already autographed by the flies that eat there, and the poet had written on the back of it. Anne left it on Roger’s desk and went out, and then Roger read it.

  It seems that this was the shot. The one that Roger had always claimed to be waiting for. Anyway, the magazines that don’t have any pictures took the poem, stealing it from one another while the interest or whatever it was ate up the money that the poet never got for it. But that was all right, too, because by that time Blair was dead.

  Amos Crain’s wife told them how the poet had left town. And a week later Anne left too. She went up to Connecticut to spend the rest of the summer with her mother and father, where the children were. The last thing she heard when she left the house was the typewriter.

  But it was two weeks after Anne left before Roger finished it, wrote the last word. At first he wanted to put the poem in too, this poem on the menu card that wasn’t about freedom, either, but he didn’t. Conscience, maybe he called it, put over the old haymaker, and Roger took it standing, like a little man, and sent off the poem for the magazines to jaw over, and tied up the papers he had written and sent them off too. And what was it he had been writing? Him, and Anne, and the poet. Word for word, between the waiting spells to find out what to write down next, with a few changes here and there, of course, because live people do not make good copy, the most interesting copy being gossip, since it mostly is not true.

  So he bundled the pages up and sent them off and they sent him the money. It came just in time, because the winter was coming and he still owed a balance on Blair’s hospital and funeral. So he paid that, and with the rest of the money he bought Anne a fur coat and himself and the children some winter underwear.

  Blair died in September. Anne and the children were still awa
y when he got the wire, three or four days late, since the next batch of them had not arrived yet. So here he is, sitting at his desk, in the empty house, with the typewriting all finished, holding the wire in his hand. “Shelley,” he says. “His whole life was a not very successful imitation of itself. Even to the amount of water it took.”

  He didn’t tell Anne about the poet until after the fur coat came. “Did you see that he …” Anne said.

  “Yes. He had a nice room, in the sun. A good nurse. The doctor didn’t want him to have a special nurse at first. Damn butcher.”

  Sometimes when a man thinks about them making poets and artists and such pay these taxes which they say indicates that a man is free, twenty-one, and capable of taking care of himself in this close competition, it seems like they are obtaining money under false pretenses. Anyway, here’s the rest of it, what they did next.

  He reads the book, the story, to her, and her not saying anything until he had finished. “So that’s what you were doing,” she said.

  He doesn’t look at her, either; he is busy evening the pages, getting them smooth again. “It’s your fur coat,” he said.

  “Oh,” she says. “Yes. My fur coat.”

  So the fur coat comes. And what does she do then? She gave it away. Yes. Gave it to Mrs. Crain. Gave it to her, and her in the kitchen, churning, with her hair in her face, brushing her hair back with a wrist that looked like a lean ham. “Why, Miz Howes,” she says. “I caint. I reely caint.”

  “You’ll have to take it,” Anne says. “We—I got it under false pretenses. I don’t deserve it. You put bread into the ground and reap it; I don’t. So I can’t wear a coat like this.”

  And they leave it there with Mrs. Crain and they go back home, walking. Only they stop in broad daylight, with Mrs. Crain watching them from the window, and go into a clinch on their own account. “I feel better,” Anne says.