No Place for an Angel (3 page)

Before taking up sculpture, he had been a painter. Surfaces drew him as if many magnets had been secretly installed in them, the way Russians installed tiny microphones any and everywhere. Door sills, the full firm limbs of girls, their knees, ankles, etc., babies' heels and eyebrows, the slippery hexagonal surface of a beer stein, the flat composed length of the bar, a man's shoulder beneath an unpressed coat . . . anything he clapped his eyes on he seemed to stick to. The only way to get rid of what he saw was to sketch it, paint it, mould it, farm it off onto something else. Out of this impulse he had started, quite young. And this, he now suddenly realized, was why he was scared of bombs. To see those surfaces break and crumble, tear, shatter, burst, dissolve, sink into rubble and carnage. Irreplaceable, every one of them, and irreplaceable, too, the eye of Bernard Desportes, alias Barry Day, who saw them as they were. He steadied himself on beer and television. What would the show have said, the one they turned off?

He worked all day, lunched on peanut butter, needed to find a girl.

“You from the South, ain't you?” the bartender asked him after three months.

“That's right,” he said.

“What line you in?”

He said something, worked uptown crating dress goods, that would do. It was true he had done this for a while, when he got back to New York after a time in Rome. Once he had told somebody who asked him this that he was a jockey. Though far from home, having left himself wide open for getting run out of the South ten years ago, he still knew himself by what had been said about him in his childhood, and once when he was about twelve his uncle had taken him to the races in New Orleans and had said on the way home, guzzling beer from one roadhouse to the other, all the way back to the Gulf coast: “Boy, if you don't grow any more you going to make a good jockey.” He had grown some more, but not much, and he would still make a good jockey, he often thought, could see himself sometimes in that Lautrec picture of the horse with the big satin behind galloping off on an inside track. But down in New Orleans, not the Champ de Mars.

Barry kept himself from calling Irene too much. He had a compulsion to call her from a not uncommon reason. She knew the woman he loved and wanted to marry; she had been in on it all. It wouldn't work and was never going to. It made him hurt to think about it, but around Irene he felt more at home with it. When alone, he could not think about it, nor could he think too much about what he saw around him since the bomb was about to land on it all. How not to love too much, not to suffer for, what is threatened and may be about to crumble utterly? When he really got going, trees on a corner caused him a stab of pain, just by standing there, as did cats sleeping precise in their habits on sunny windowsills, children playing in a poor street, a girl with a pony-tail flying out for milk or bread. The list was infinite, and he had to stop for it. He stopped it by thinking about the angel.

The angel was all his contemplation could bear. What we meditate on is the most important thing in our lives: he knew that much. It is the source of strength or the root of ruin. What sort of angel? He sat over his beer stein and watched it form, blotting out the TV screen, towering up in crumpled, wind-beaten clothes just above floor level, a great bird creature whose intelligence and innocence went far beyond the human potential, jet-powered, superb, and yet searching. Bright-eyed, self-careless, without fear, yet always looking for something. He had finally broken down and mentioned it to Irene and she had obliged him by banishing them all. You had to be careful whom you spoke to. It was a rule.

The next day he met a girl. Her name was Joanna—she was a mixture of English and Slav, and would wait for him on spring afternoons near the corner of Sheridan Square. She didn't mind meeting him on corners, something he would never have asked Irene to do, nor the woman from the South he was in love with. They would have felt there was something not quite good enough in this, and so did he. But Joanna had a real gift: she didn't think anything about it one way or the other. Thus he could look her over before getting to her and notice her broad feet in run-over shoes and how she never looked completely clean. However, he decided not to quarrel with blessing.

The warm spring afternoon brought them instantly into their best mood; they clasped hands and there was a lot to laugh about. They took the subway to the park and walked around. Some days they went to a movie or an art gallery, then took the bus back to his place and stayed there till after dark.

When he woke one afternoon he saw a long line of heads, torsos, arms, along with some small abstract structures, lying in a row across the floor. He remembered that he was moving in a day or so. Joanna was up eating peanut butter and bread. She was near the window, where late light stood between the slats of the blinds, but did not enter. She was assuming he was asleep. Should he mention marrying her?

It seemed a pleasant enough thought. He immediately began to recall the endless queue of Joannas there had already been in his life. He could not remember their names now, or just where he had met them, but once he had either dreamed or fancied that they were all of them on a train and the train was pulling out of some station, like Rome, perhaps, or Milan, for certainly it was a European train in a warm country. As far down the track as he could see, they were leaning out like a chorus line, out of all the windows, waving handkerchiefs and calling, “Goodbye, Barry, goodbye, Barry!” He looked and there went the last one, on the observation car, waving: it was Joanna.

“That bread is stale, isn't it?” he asked.

“Delicious!” she assured him, smiling through a density of peanut butter.

Because of Joanna, he put the angel aside, though it returned from time to time to nag him, like a sciatic nerve. Again, easing, it drew a misty elegiac horizon around the green edges of the park, hovered above the lake, back of flowering apple trees, or mingled in the shattering color of redbud; it had just left skyscrapers at dusk.

In his boyhood near New Orleans there had been a place for angels. His Catholic father had sometimes taken him to church and he had seen them as gilded wood, holding candles. And his Baptist mother had sung about them, how they trod on bright feet by some river or other; he saw in his mind a lot of barefoot blond high-school-looking figures with wings strung awkwardly down their backs wading around at a spring picnic. Over in the French Quarter after a certain hour of the night and the drinking, they came in a band for to carry the Negro musicians home, or so you could get them to say in a song if you asked for it.

The weather turned hot and humid; asphalt patching went gummy on the streets, and people had begun to creep out on doorsteps on the first evenings when dark did nothing but intensify the heat, just as neon stabbed it, and odors of buses, sweat, exhausts, coffee steam and cigarettes pressed down like silt, toward the stone sea floor, at last pervading and mastering, as evening came definitely on, the clangor of traffic.

Irene rang up. He couldn't afford a phone, but the boy in the bar below came up to tell him. He came down in his T-shirt and went into a phone booth which smelled of all humanity. The number was not hers. It was another phone booth, he supposed, that she was calling from. Was something wrong? It must be, and it was. Charles had lost his job. “Why? Did they give a reason?” He knew, of course, perfectly well why, but was surprised to hear Irene come right out with it, meaning that “they” had come right out with it, too.

“He can't seem to get on with people. We thought all these people in his division were our friends. They entertain us. We entertain them. God, when I think of the meals I've stuffed them with. They weren't worth a decent plate of spaghetti. The complaint was, verbatim: He can't take his army boots off. It seems now you have to apple-polish everybody. Then, the other thing was—this'll kill you—his department was too far ahead of the others! Too far ahead. We could understand behind, but not ahead. The big word is coordination.”

“He'll land something in no time,” said Barry.

There was a pause. She had been drinking, probably to keep Charles company, he supposed. She laughed. “We may have to move into your old studio.”

“Nothing is going to happen. I bet he has a job in three days.”

“Barry, do you remember Clint Gifford?”

“Yes, on the picnic that day.”

“Well, he's got something incurable. I wondered why they didn't ring up. I thought they were angry with Charles and me. Now we hear through the grapevine that— So you never can tell, can you?”

“I have the evil eye,” said Barry. “Mal occhio.”

There was a silence in which he knew he did not care profoundly about Irene and Charles. He had been interested in them, but it was more interesting to see them in action with their money, their energy, their taste and clever friends and good fortune, moving at full speed, cutting the blue surface of life. Their misfortunes did not affect him deeply. For one thing, he never had enough money himself, and it seemed only just that they should at least, once in a great while, feel that especial cold wind at their backs. But news of someone incurably ill. . . . “What is it? Cancer?”

“I think so.”

“Can I call you?”

“Yes, but don't let on to Charles I called you.”

“I get it. Irene? Coraggio.”

“Oh, Barry, thank you, thank you.”

That was June.

In September, Barry was back in the Mercury with the Waddells, riding down to Florida. Charles, who still had not found a position that suited him, was determined to spend his last thousand in some memorable way. He had charged in one evening, so Irene related, saying:

“Florida! The Keys! That's the place!”

He had read or remembered reading about Hemingway in Florida, and envisioned in those coastal waters the beauties of September. The delicious repose of out-of-season places. Their mystery. The clear distant light. He had even thought of hurricanes. “The warnings are out days ahead now; we can easily pack up and leave before there's any danger.”

What was said in the inner enclave when they decided to invite Barry, he would never know. They wanted to take along their two boys, twins, who had spent all summer in camp and were now visiting some of Irene's family in Maryland. If the boys had not been too old to need it, Barry would have thought they wanted him to baby-sit. He said he would go without inquiring too closely into the devious Waddell motives. He had worn thin with the heat, had had weekend invitations out on Long Island, but nothing better or farther away, was tired of the sound of the electric fan at night, could not afford air conditioning, was tired of the smell of little metal filings and gilt paint in his studio. Joanna had left him.

She had flounced out of a 23rd Street movie house when they were sitting in the air-conditioned foyer, waiting for the feature to be over. She had been telling him a long story and he must have said, “Yes, I know how it is,” instead of, “Don't underrate yourself,” because she had burst out, “You never listen to anything I say,” and walked out. He went to the movie anyway, as it was something he had really wanted to see and had missed on the first go-round, and when he came home she had moved out of the studio, suitcase and all. He guessed she must have waited an hour for him to rush in and make up, had seen he wasn't going to (not, at least, until the movie was over), had cried up two Kleenexes, and then had made her big decision. He found a note: “Dear Barry, I
repeat
, in case you didn't hear me, you never listen to anything I say. See you around. J.”

When Irene called up and started about Florida, he actually consented to go far too quickly for her. She had been prepared to talk a great deal more, persuading him. She loved making plans—but he said he would drop in one evening during the week to talk it over. Yet a shadow, even then, walked in his mind, and before he hung up, he said:

“This has nothing to do with Catherine, has it?”

“I don't even know where Catherine is,” said Irene. “Why?”

“I was thinking about that other time. In Siracusa.”

“But you hadn't met Catherine then.”

“I know, but I—”

“You what?”

“I just wanted to clear it, capisci?”

“Six, caro. Ciao.”

“Ciao.”

But just the mention of Catherine to Irene would have tripped a switch. Now she was telling Charles, “You know what he asked me? The oddest thing—” The incident would be good for perhaps an hour's speculation, mainly on Irene's part, before the Waddells got back to their favorite subject—themselves. As for Barry, having had to speak of her because she had apparently by her own choice, wherever she was, popped into his head at that juncture, he had opened the door on entirely too much. He meant to be sensible about it and get it over with quickly, so bought a bottle of cheap whiskey and drank most of it up, giving himself an awful head the next day. The cure was worse than the disease, he decided, and in even being able to decide that, he realized that he had succeeded. He had stumbled on the verge of an old crisis, but had not fallen into it.