Without a stitch in time, p.15
Without a Stitch in Time, page 15
When the waitress came up and thrust menus at us, he consulted his for only a moment. His face lit up and he said, “Ah, the New England bawled dinner today. Bring me that, please, ma’am?”
“Make it two,” I said, handing my menu rather wearily back to her.
TILL THE SANDS OF THE DESERT GROW COLD
I RECENTLY found myself with a wedding anniversary coming up, my nineteenth, with the usual attendant problem of a gift for my wife. I had been racking my brains intermittently for the better part of a month when I suddenly remembered a Broadway play she had mentioned particularly wanting to see. So I bought her a ticket to that. She gave me a shuffle sander, a small power job for use in my woodworking, and as we sat admiring our presents we polished off a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and talked of old times.
“Nineteen years,” I said. “It seems much longer somehow. Twice that.”
She regarded me across her champagne glass, sipping.
“So packed with incident, so rich in experiences shared,” I went on. “This whole business of time and tedium is very little understood, as Thomas Mann points out in the passage in The Magic Mountain where he goes into it, you may recall. It is only over the short haul that a crowded interval seems short — an eventful day, say. When it comes to a long span looked back on, the more there’s been in it the longer it seems. Monotony stretches the passing moment while pleasure makes time fly, yes; but over a past viewed in retrospect this illusion is reversed. Lack of content will shrink the interval, eventfulness expand it. What is true of time is also true of space. An empty room will seem smaller than a full one. Remember how we left the house on Woolsey Lane when we had it on the market? Furnished, so it would look bigger to clients. What a chapter that was, eh, ducks? Well, here we still are, all right, and so here’s to us again. Cheers.”
She was tickled pink with her ticket, and implored me to help her remember the evening for which I’d got it — a Saturday eight weeks hence — lest it slip by unnoticed, as things often do when planned that far in advance. We did not forget. I had the car gassed up and ready in plenty of time, for she had decided to drive in from the suburb where we live, rather than take the train. I saw her off with every good wish, waving to her from the driveway as she rounded the bend toward the Merritt Parkway. I heaved a sigh of pleasure for her before turning back to the house in anticipation of my own evening there.
First, I opened a can of beer, and then I sat down to watch a little television. Then I got Proust off the shelf to reread some of that “Overture” and see how his narrator was making out with the jellied madrilène or whatever the hell it was. Then I paged through the local phone book till I found an Upjohn, dialed the number, and asked the man who answered, “Are you Upjohn?,” and when he said “Yes,” replied, “At this hour?,” and was hung up on in a thoroughly satisfying manner. Then I wandered into the kitchen, where I got out of the refrigerator all the meats and cheeses I could find and made myself a proper three-decker sandwich (lingering with special affection over the slices of Kraft’s Genuine Switzerland Swiss cheese). I ate it slowly, with another can of cold beer. It was now around eleven o’clock. I looked at television for another hour, this time hitting a revival of an old Jimmy Stewart and Rosalind Russell movie that I remembered with particular fondness. Very charming, very cute. When it was over, I turned in.
My wife got home around 2 A.M. She woke me up when she entered the bedroom and snapped the light on. I smiled drowsily from the bed, scratching myself and yawning. “How was it?”
Her dress was awry, her stockings were twisted, and she must have been trampled by more than the normal quota of latecomers, judging from the expression with which she sat nursing her feet after removing her shoes. The havoc wrought to her person suggested even a spot of audience participation. Her cheeks wore a vivid flush. Her hair offered the final testimony to an exciting evening in the theatre.
“Well, it’s not something you’re supposed to enjoy,” she said.
“Of course not.”
“You’re galvanized, you’re shaken to your roots, you’re repelled. When you come out, you feel you’ve been through it all with the characters.”
“What was this one about?”
“Well, there’s this couple going through a crisis. They hate each other, but it’s not enough. At one point, she empties the garbage pail on his head while he’s sitting reading Pascal.”
“Why?”
“Well, they’re sensitive people, which puts a special strain on them, and on their marriage, too, I suppose.”
“What happens next? What does he do?”
“He throws up his hands.”
“I understand there’s quite a lot of vomiting in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, too. There’s a new vital theatre, they tell me. Out there. Well, come to bed. You look as though you’ve been pulled through a hedge backward.”
She joined me inside of five minutes. I slung an arm around her in the dark and nuzzled her ear. “Marriage is a give-and-take,” I said. “Each doing his part, each respecting the other’s individuality. I’m sorry those two couldn’t make a go of it.”
She took my hand and laid it on her brow. “Splitting headache,” she said. She was given the expected soothing strokes by way of ministration. I knew well that Merritt Parkway katzenjammer, the product of fatigue and oncoming headlights, that sets the homebound suburbanite to wondering whether the train wouldn’t have been better — just as the Penn Central inaugurates the reverse line of thought.
“I love you,” I said. “You’re a jewel. I love you and I’m going to tie you down with good stout cord and suck out your eyeballs with the muzzle of the vacuum cleaner to show I care. To show I’m not indifferent. What else happens in the play? Are her feelings reciprocated?”
“Tomorrow. I’m too dead now.” After a moment, she murmured, “Glad I went, though,” stirring pleasurably against me.
“Makes a person appreciate their home more when they get back to it.” I yawned, and mumbled, “Love is the ideality of the relativity of the reality of an infinitesimal portion of the absolute totality of the Infinite Being.”
“What was that noise?”
“Hegel.”
Her breathing became slower, and more measured. But after a few minutes she raised her head and said, “Do I smell smoke?”
“That’s the stuff. A woman should smell smoke. When a woman smells smoke, you know everything is all right, everything is in order. You go right on smelling smoke. God, what a doll.”
She was soon asleep, and then I turned over and dropped off again myself, as, like a loose hubcap, the old earth spun on toward morning through the perilous and promissory night.
FROM THERE TO INFINITY
(After reading “From Here to Eternity,” by James Jones)
We all have a guilt-edged security.
—Moses
“STARK ROMANTICISM” was the phrase that kept pounding through his head as he knocked on the door of Mama Paloma’s, saw the slot opened and the single sloe plum that was Mama Paloma’s eye scrutinizing him through the peephole. “Oh, you again,” the eye grinned at him, sliding back the bolt of the door. “The girls are all pretty busy tonight but go on up.” A dress of sequins that made her look like a fat mermaid with scales three-quarters instead of halfway up tightly encased the mounds of old snow that was her flesh. She glanced down at the must-be-heavy-as-lead suitcase in his hand as she closed the door. “I don’t dare ast how many pages you’re carting around in that by now,” she grinned.
He mounted the steps with that suffocating expectation of men who are about to read their stuff, the nerves in his loins tightening like drying rawhide, the familiar knot hard in his belly. Shifting the suitcase from one hand to the other, his head swam into the densening surf of upstairs conversation, above which the tinkle of the player piano was like spray breaking all the time on rocks. Standing in the upper doorway, he reflected how, just as there can be damned senseless pointless want in the midst of plenty, so there can be the acutest loneliness in the midst of crowds. Fortunately, the thought passed swiftly. The whores moved, blatant as flamingos in their colored gowns, among the drinking-grinning men, and his eye ran tremulously swiftly in search of Dorine, gulpingly taking in the room for her figure moving erectly womanly through it all.
“No Princess to listen tonight,” Peggy grinned toward him. “The Princess went away.”
He could have slapped her. It puzzled him to find that beneath that hard, crusty exterior beat a heart of stone. What was she doing in a place like this? He turned and hurried back down the stairs.
“Come back soon, there’s listeners as good as the Princess,” Mama Paloma laughed jellily jollily as she let him out into the street.
With Dorine not there he couldn’t bear Mama Paloma’s, and he didn’t know another place. Yet he had to have a woman tonight. Another woman would have to do, any woman.
Colonel Stilton’s wife, he thought. Why not? She was from Boston, but there was no mistaking the look of hard insolent invitation she gave him each time she came to the Regimental Headquarters to ask if he knew where the Colonel had been since night before last. He hated Stilton’s guts, or would if he, Stilton, had any. Hated that smirk and that single eyebrow always jerking sardonically skeptically up, like an anchovy that’s learned to stand on end. Why not transfer out, why be a noncom under that bastard? he asked himself. I’m a non-compoop, he thought. He tried to make a joke of it but it was no good.
He knew where the Colonel lived from the time he’d taken him home stewed. He got out of the cab a block from the house. As he approached it walking, he could see Mrs. Stilton under a burning bulb on the screened terrace with her feet on a hassock, smoking a cigarette. She had on shorts and a sweater. Her slim brown legs like a pair of scissors made a clean incision in his mind. He went up the flagstone walk and rapped on the door.
“What do you want?” she said with the same insolent invitation, not stirring. He was aware of the neat, apple-hard breasts under the sweater, and of the terse, apple-hard invitation in her manner.
“I want to read this to you,” he said, trying not to let his voice sound too husky.
“How much have you got in there?” her voice knew all about him.
“A quarter of a million words,” he said, thickly.
She came over and opened the screen door and flipped her cigarette out among the glows of the fireflies in the yard. When she turned back he caught the screen door and followed her inside. She sat down on the hassock and looked away for what seemed an eternity.
“It’s a lot to ask of a woman,” she said. “More than I’ve ever given.”
He stood there shifting the suitcase to the other hand, the arm-about-to-come-out-of-its-socket ache added to that in his throat, wishing he wouldn’t wish he hadn’t come. She crossed her arms around her and, with that deft motion only women with their animal confidence can execute, pulled her sweater off over her head and threw it on the floor. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” she said.
“You with your pair of scissors,” he said. “When you can have a man who’s willing to bare his soul.” He gritted his teeth with impatience. “Don’t you see how much we could have?”
“Come on in.” She rose, and led the way inside. Nothing melts easier than ice, he thought, sad. He watched her draw the drapes across the window nook and settle herself back among the cushions. “I’m all yours,” she said. “Read.”
The female is a yawning chasm, he thought, glancing up from his reading at the lying listening woman. He found and read the passage explaining that, how she was the inert earth, passive potent, that waits to be beaten soft by April’s fecundating rains. Rain is the male principle and there are times for it to be interminable: prosedrops into rivulets of sentences and those into streams of paragraphs, these merging into chapters flowing in turn into sectional torrents strong and hard enough to wear gullies down the flanks of mountains. After what seemed an eternity, he paused and she stirred.
“What time is it?” she sat up.
“A quarter to three.”
“I never knew it could be like this,” she said.
Each knew the other was thinking of Colonel Stilton.
“He never reads anything but Quick,” she said, rolling her head away from him.
“The sonofabitch,” he said, his fist involuntarily clenching as tears scalded his eyes. “Oh, the rotten sonofabitch!”
“It’s no matter. Tell me about you. How did you get like this?”
Bending his head over the manuscript again he readingly told her about that part: how when he was a kid in downstate Illinois his uncle, who had wanted to be a lawyer but had never been able to finish law school because he would get roaring drunk and burn up all his textbooks, used to tell him about his dream, and about his hero, the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in those great early days of this country was working on a manuscript which he would never let out of his sight, carrying it with him in a sack even when he went out courting or to somebody’s house to dinner, setting it on the floor beside his chair. How his uncle passed this dream on to him, and how he took it with him to the big cities, where you began to feel how you had to get it all down, had to get down everything that got you down: the singing women in the cheap bars with their mouths like shrimp cocktails, the daughters-into-wives of chicken-eating digest-reading middle-class hypocrisy that you saw riding in the purring cars on Park Avenue, and nobody anywhere loving anybody they were married to. You saw that and you saw why. You had it all figured out that we in this country marry for idealistic love, and after the honeymoon there is bound to be disillusionment. That after a week or maybe a month of honest passion you woke up to find yourself trapped with the sow Respectability, which was the chicken-eating digest-reading middle-class assurance and where it lived: the house with the, oh sure, refrigerator, oil furnace and all the other automatic contraptions that snicker when they go on — the well-lighted air-conditioned mausoleum of love. She was a better listener than Fillow, a middle-aged swell who had eight hundred jazz records and who would sit in Lincoln Park in Chicago eating marshmallow out of a can with a spoon with gloves on. Every time he tried to read Fillow a passage, Fillow would say “Cut it out.” Fillow was a negative product of bourgeois society just as Stilton with his chicken-eating digest-reading complacence was a positive one, whom his wife had and knew she had cuckolded the minute she had let the suitcase cross the threshold.
“It’ll never be the same again, will it?” she said fondly softly, seeing he had paused again.
He read her some more and it was the same. Except that the thing went on so long the style would change, seeming to shift gears of itself like something living a hydramatic life of its own, so that side by side with the well-spent Hemingway patrimony and the continental cry of Wolfe would be the seachanged long tireless free-form sentences reminiscent of some but not all or maybe even much of Faulkner.
The door flew open and Stilton stood inside the room. His eyes were like two wet watermelon pips spaced close together on an otherwise almost blank plate (under the anchovies one of which had learned to stand on end).
“So,” he said. The word sailed at them like a Yo-Yo flung out horizontally by someone who can spin it that way. It sailed for what seemed an infinity and came back at him.
“So yourself,” she said. “Is this how long officers’ stags last?” she said.
“So he forced his way in here,” the Colonel cued her, at the same time talking for the benefit of a six-foot MP who hove into view behind him.
Realization went like a ball bouncing among the pegs of a pinball machine till it dropped into the proper slot in his mind and a bell rang and a little red flag went up reading “Leavenworth.” He remembered what he’d heard. That an officer’s wife is always safe because all she had to do was call out the single word rape and you were on your way to twenty years.
Why did he just stand there, almost detached? Why wasn’t his anger rising from his guts into his head and setting his tongue into action? But what could you say to a chicken-eating digest-reading impediment like this anyhow, who with all the others of his kind had gelded contemporary literature and gelded it so good that an honest book that didn’t mince words didn’t stand a chance of getting even a smell of the best-seller list?
“This is my affair,” he heard her say coolly, after what seemed a particularly long eternity.
The Colonel lighted a cigarette. “I suspected you were having one,” they saw him smokingly smirk, “and since Klopstromer was seeing me home from the club I thought he might as well —” He stopped and looked down at the suitcase. “How long does he expect to stay?”
“I have something to say,” he said, stepping forward.
“Sir.”
“I have something to say, sir,” he said, picking up the suitcase to heft it for their benefit. “When Justice —”
“You’ll get justice,” the Colonel snapped as Klopstromer sprang alertly forward and bore down on him and wrested the suitcase from his grasp. “If you won’t testify,” the Colonel went on to his wife, “then Klopstromer at least will. That he assaulted a superior officer. It won’t get him Leavenworth, but by God six months in the stockade will do him good.”
“But why?” his wife protested. “You don’t understand. He’s a writer.”
“Maybe,” they saw the Colonel smirkingly smoke. The anchovy twitched and stood upright. “Maybe,” he said, motioning to Klopstromer to march him out through the door to the waiting jeep, “but he needs discipline.”
OVERTURE
AS MY WIFE lay writhing contentedly into wakefulness in the next bed, I lay quietly in mine trying to evolve some morning pleasantry with which to greet her, some dallying, companionable nonsense. Not, I reminded myself, that that is easy; nonsense may be one of the lowliest of the arts but it is certainly one of the trickiest, since the penalty for its failure is silliness.
