No Place for an Angel (2 page)

The woman pointed, directing him. “She's probably wrong,” he said, carelessly loud enough to be heard. At the movie house he bought the tickets and drove the group ahead of him like so many children.

“See? What did I tell you? It's Betty Grable.”

“It is not,” said Irene, provably right, in the largest of letters, directly in front of their eyes. “It's Virginia Mayo.”

“Same thing,” said Charles, undismayed, and bought popcorn for everybody. “All in glorious Technicolor,” he gloated. “All the color of a strawberry ice cream soda.”

It was after nine before they were released from this plush nonsense. Barry, who had contrived to sit on the end, had slipped out after ten minutes and gone for a walk around the town. He was waiting in the smelly little lobby for them when they filed out. “It's raining,” was all he said.

The parkway was fairly empty when they approached the city, and loose traffic skimmed in easily, rapidly, over the soaring bridges. “A good idea of mine,” Charles boomed, driving as fast as possible.

“How lovely it was to see so much green,” Ruth Gifford said.

Irene laughed. “Yes, that's what I'm remembering too.” She rode on the front seat, beside Charles. The grey vertical landscape of the great city moved forward to enclose them. But the smell of rain on the green roadsides lingered and the picnic still lingered sunlit in their heads; their skin was still warm with it.

“Do you remember,” Ruth Gifford went on, determined, it would seem, to put everyone in some sort of human mood, “how we used to long for green growth in Italy? Strong big heavy trees, shaggy roadsides . . . I used even to wish for weeds.”

“Yes, I remember, too,” her husband at last agreed.

“You could get all that,” said Barry, after an even longer pause, “up in the Alban hills, up near Lago Albano. And then there was always the Aniene beyond Tivoli, and there was the countryside near Ostia Antica.”

“I know what she means, though,” said Irene. “One always felt that country to be used up in some way, as though the prime of it was over.”

The city opened up to them, shifted with grey abstract angularity to close them in behind. It was a homecoming, like others. Details came back to them: was the delicatessen still open for milk? Would someone have stolen the Sunday
Times?
The sink was full of dishes.

Charles drew up on East 55th, beside a tiny tree. “We'd ask you in for a drink,” Ruth Gifford said, “but the children—”

This was really too nice, Irene thought impatiently. Everybody knew, didn't they?, that all of them were browned off with Charles. Now she had to make appropriate purring noises. “No, no, of course not.”

“I'll get out here,” said Barry, when the Giffords had alighted on the sidewalk. He had put his tweed jacket on over his crumpled, tieless shirt. His khaki trousers looked like army pants. “I have to make a stop near here,” he explained, looking bare to the elements, vulnerable to bad colds and fevers, a portrait of the artist dying young. Charles reached out, inexplicably, and took his hand to give it a shake. “Nice, nice,” said Charles, as though Barry had given the picnic. Irene gave them all a smile and a wave, and so they parted.

What good was it ever, Irene thought, as they drove away, taking a rapid corner, what good did it ever do, to fight with Charles? She would only wind up saying things like he had spoiled the picnic, such a perfect day, as perhaps indeed he had for the Giffords and Barry, though not, she realized, for herself. She had loved it; the sun had warmed her heart; she was happy. She had, of course, herself ruined Barry's pleasure, saying what she had about angels. It was why he had left the movie, it was why he had got out of the car. But did it really displease her to think she had this power over him? It took more to displease Irene than it did to please her. And Charles, if he was not getting a tongue lashing for his miserable taste and overbearing manners, was at least being silently deprived of knowing what she now knew, that Barry Day was, for some reason, not Barry Day, nor had he ever been.

Charles liked to learn things like this, and sooner or later she was going to break down and discuss it with him. But she wasn't going to now, and when she did he was going to know that she had kept it from him for a time. Thus contemplative, her gaze had wandered to his reflection in the rear-view mirror, whence his eyes suddenly turned to hers, except for brows and bridge of nose so disembodied as to seem, out of the narrow rectangle of the glass, an apparition, a highly personal spirit.

“We should go to the movies more often,” he said. “A damned good idea.”

When Irene did not hear either from Barry Day or the Giffords in the two weeks that followed, she was given to momentary anxiety. Charles had succeeded, again, in losing all their friends. No one, no human, would tolerate his arrogance. Then she got letters from members of both sides of the family: everyone was all right, getting better, looking forward to something, prosperous, reasonably pleasant. Irene became very happy, went shopping, had lunch at Schrafft's, had her hair done and came home. The letters still lay on the breakfast table, and the phone was ringing. It was Barry, calling from a drugstore below. The world was as perfect as it could be; the day was warm, burgeoning. She went down to meet him, at a corner table in the sun, and heard his troubles.

Barry always had troubles.

“So what's with him?” Charles wanted to know at dinner.

She had made lasagna and there was Chianti—they were, for a rarity, alone.

“Well, let's see: he said my new make-up was archaic.”

“Great.”

“That's what I said, but he explained that archaic was not an uncomplimentary term—it refers to Greek art before the age of Pericles. The faces look monolithic.”

“Great,” Charles repeated. He squinted at her. “You do look odd.”

She giggled. “I feel glamorous as hell.”

He poured himself more wine. “So what's with Barry?”

“He's having to change studios. Short of money again. Anyway, I seem to have offered to keep a few things here, as there isn't room at present in the new place. I do wish he could get a show.”

“But he had one offered him.”

“With other people he didn't care for.”

“But why be so godawful exclusive?”

“I don't know . . . I understand how he feels.”

She went to grate some cheese wearing a long robe of white crepe. “I assume,” said Charles, “that you went and spent a fortune for that robe after Barry told you you looked archaic.”

“It's three years old,” she returned. “How unobservant can you get?”

“Has Day ever tried making love to you?”

“Of course not. Why?”

“Why? If I don't ask you, somebody else will.”

“I mean why ask me now? All I did was have coffee with him downstairs in that drugstore that's like a cardboard box with picture windows.”

“I had a feeling of something like that on that picnic a week or so back. There was something damn peculiar going on.”

“Well,” said Irene, “the peculiar thing was that he suddenly told me, while you were gone with the Giffords, that all this time he's been going under an assumed name. His name isn't Barry Day at all.”

Charles gave a snort. “A likely tale. If it isn't Barry Day what is it?”

“Bernard Desportes.”

Charles snorted again.

“Well, it might be,” Irene said.

“So what difference does it make if it is or isn't?”

“I don't know,” said Irene. And indeed, asked it that way, she was uncertain. “But why,” she pursued, “don't you believe it? I mean if it doesn't make any difference, why should he make it up?”

“It makes him molto più interessante, especially to you.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Charles. We've known Barry for years.”

“But have we known this mysterious stranger, this Bernard Deschamps?”

“Desportes,” Irene corrected. “Anyway,” she continued, “as long as you're being like this, you needn't look my way for the woman in question . . . he's got somebody now. She looks existentialist and wears black stockings, low heels and a black wool top with powder specks and bits of hair stuck on it. He says she's extremely talented.”

“What a character.”

Irene always felt as if Charles was going to drop Barry, whom she knew to be touchy. If we really succeed in doing the wrong thing to him, he'll never come back once he's gone, she thought. She needed Barry's particular kind of sensitivity. It was fulfilling to her to have somebody like him to talk to. If they could raise the money anonymously, or use influence, perhaps do both. . . .

“But that would put him off worse than anything, if he found out.”

“What would?”

“To help him get a show.”

“That's true,” said Charles. “It would.” It was his admission, not at all begrudged, of Barry's true worth.

“I'll try to pick something out of his stuff that we can stand to live with. I know you don't like it.”

“I'll not take this role of husband-who-knows-nothing-about-art, Irene. I just won't do it. I do know a hawk from a handsaw. Barry is not going to wring from my lips that a handsaw is aesthetically satisfying even if he sculpts one out of golden coathangers.”

“He's started an angel now,” Irene recalled, by way of reassurance.

“That's the best news I've heard about him.” He passed the candle toward her, lighting her cigarette, and changed the subject.

Bernard Desportes, alias Barry Day, was scared, but then he thought that perhaps everybody was. He could not be sure, that was all.

He sat in bars in the late evening listening to people talk. Sometimes they gave themselves away. They were scared, too, and admitted it. He felt relieved. It was the time of one of the worst bomb scares. The papers said it daily: the world hung on the brink of World War III. Every day he must at some point have crossed the very crux and center of the target, the biggest one in the free world. Daily, he felt a Russian pointer reach out and touch his spine.

“It will either happen or it won't happen,” he said out loud at parties. Everyone agreed. “That's what I think,” they all said. He grinned jauntily. His stomach turned upside-down. Am I really a coward? Was I, all this time? he wondered.

He sat in his favorite bar down near West 12th Street and watched television. “This will be a show about people,” a voice said. “It will not tell any one story, for there is no story to tell. You will see what you see, hear what you hear. That is all.” He was startled. The camera roved beautifully, over rooftops, lowered to a street where a woman at a distance walked thoughtfully. He had sat straight up really to pay attention. “Turn that off,” somebody said. “Perry Mason is on six.”

Barry, for one, could never get Perry Mason straight. There were people in the bar who did it easily, even after six beers. “Thought so,” they muttered, nodding to one another when the murderer was pointed out or, seeing what was coming, broke down, or bolted. For himself, Barry thought he would never understand what had happened if he saw it four times through cold sober.

Somebody had left a loaded gun by a sleeping man and a woman came in and thought the gun was empty and the man was dead and called the police; then somebody else came in and found the man awake and the gun handy and shot him, but was it that gun or one brought for the purpose and did they switch guns and why was the man asleep if he hadn't been doped and what was the woman doing there in the first place? Perry Mason always reconstructed the whole event, but Barry Day could never follow it. He got too busy watching the sleeping man, the alert lovely startled woman, the hand of the man hanging toward the floor, his shirt rumpled and head pillowed on his elbow, the tiny frown beginning between the woman's big velvet eyes, the sudden dawn of alarm, then terror. A car drew up to a rainy door. Then cabs, the police, the district attorney, Perry, Della Street, Paul, all came spilling out like face cards in a worn, familiar deck. He could never understand what they were saying or doing. Who can follow a story any more? What story is worth following? He didn't know.