No Place for an Angel (8 page)

Only after Charles' letter came could she evaluate Catherine's visit. The city rushed with autumn rain, now white, now black. Soon the planet, tilting somberly like a lowering acquiescent head, would take its crown of chill stone with it, down into the long damp winter. She saw that Catherine had been able to seem important merely because she herself was alone. What difference did it make what I said or did? She thought of Catherine as a nice silk scarf which one folded and put away in a drawer. It slept there in the dark and kept the scent of something.

Late on the appointed day Charles appeared and dropped his suitcases, one from either hand. “There still isn't any job,” he said, embracing her. “There still isn't any money.”

“There're some letters waiting,” she said.

There were indeed some letters. They were from people she and Charles had known in Paris, one from a man who dated back as far as Naples during the war, having been a major to Charles' captain.

“Your being let out,” it ran, “merely affirms what we all know, that this new set of bright boys want all the cake and all the crumbs too; they want to be first at the punch bowl and when they leave there's nothing left but a weak lump of ice. They only confirm that by the time they give us these ever-loving tests and go Umm and Is that so? the only job we're going to be scientifically fit for is sweeping up after the party. Well, you and me, we ain't sitting around to take no tests. We ain't even coming to that particular blow-out. We're having our own—old style, best style, and the job is still going to get done. Which is to say, Come over to the office the minute you get back and we'll see what we can see.”

“That's real friendship,” said Charles, and his eyes filmed over. “I call that real friendship,” he said to Irene. She had gone to get him a drink, but he put it aside and pulled her to him, enveloping her hungrily, tight and always closer, burying his face against her neck and shoulder. “If you weren't here I'd walk a hundred miles to find you. No, I wouldn't either, I'd run.”

The rewards of famished love were now to be heaped upon her and their marriage reappeared like a triumphal procession with plumes and elephants, dancing girls and flowing wine, lions and tigers and captive queens and hordes of barbarian slaves. If either of them felt she had been badly treated, they never mentioned it. In the late hours while Charles slept, Irene, again at windows, saw life come streaming at her over every rooftop, past every TV antenna, a flood tide, welcome as rain after drought, giving every small tree along the street far below its true meaning, its very being. She had, all along, been conscious of more that was going on than she had realized. She knew, now that she thought of it, every new style trend, the set of a shoulder, the tilt of a heel, the play that was talked about most. There was a new make of china being brought out from West Germany, a new way of serving hot buffets without a lot of mess. For ages she had needed something done to the kitchen which would give her more space; for months she had been bored with the scent of her perfume. And in the spare moments one could consider the islands for future trips, for people were saying that Florida was overrun now and that everyone should have an island, one favorite little-known idyllic spot. She did not know how she knew people were talking this way since she had not seen anyone who would say anything like this since her return.

“Charles,” she said at breakfast, “did you know we were quite wrong about Clint Gifford? He hasn't any more got cancer than I have. He got a promotion, that's all, about the time they decided to shove you out the door. They were embarrassed to call us.”

“The son of a bitch,” said Charles, absently, reading the market pages. “If he's the kind they want,” he presently came to the surface to remark, “I'm glad they let me out.”

“It makes their bad taste uniform,” said Irene. “Something to be counted on.”

“Nice to know,” said Charles. “Encouraging.”

When he left she returned to the window, but now to see a world strong and sharp with cold sunlight. When she spread out her arms in her long robe and the sleeves slid back to her shoulders, the gesture was one of welcome to the return of absolutely everything.

“But you must have seen Irene?” said Barry, for the third time. “How would you know where to find me?”

“Yes,” Catherine admitted, “but she advised me not to see you. She said how well you were doing in your work. Perhaps I was wrong to come.”

He had entered to find her just sitting there before him in the twilight which seemed to close down thirty minutes earlier each day. At first he thought he was seeing things, then she got up and kissed him. She said she had found the door unlocked, one of those statements that teeter from side to side for quite some while in the mind before toppling over into truth.

“It would be worse to be in New York and not see me, wouldn't it?”

“Not if you didn't know it.” This was what he thought of as a Catherine-answer. They both smiled.

“I'd find it out from Irene, in case you saw her, or anybody she knew. It would be hard to avoid seeing at least one person Irene knew. I guess you have, though. I'll bet you've been here in town any number of times without letting us know.” He paused. She did not answer. He switched on lamps and she noticed that his eyes looked red, as though from drinking, work, sleeplessness, strain. “Is there something special now? Something the matter? . . . Well, anyway, you're here. I used to have a fairly nice-looking place.” He glanced around ruefully, aware for the first time in weeks of the odd smell of something gone bad in the kitchenette, of soot on the windowsill and the unlamented death of an ivy plant.

Catherine was folded silkenly in the only good chair. It did not make him suffer as much to see her in the flesh as it did to see her ghost. The thought that she had, after all, not forgotten him had blown his spirits sky-high for a moment. He had breathed the air of paradise. She herself had been shaky; wouldn't it turn out, after all, that Irene was right, and she shouldn't, for any number of reasons, do this? She had to be soothed with gin.

“I thought there would be someone here. Some girl—” She glanced around. “A friend perhaps.”

He laughed. “There's no one hung up in the closet, if that's what you mean.”

Catherine was too polite to ask him any more. If she had heard for certain that he had got married and divorced in the months since they had parted, she would have waited for him to tell her about it. Irene could ask him easily in two minutes what Catherine would never get around to in two years. She herself indulged in bursts of unrelated confidences.

“I told Irene I might go to Chile. I did think of it for a time. You see, I had a strange dream which made such an impression I couldn't forget it. It was about the—now, don't laugh, please—about the Antarctic.”

He laughed anyway. “Catherine, in a dream how on earth would you know the Arctic from the Antarctic?”

“It was
my
dream, and so I knew. Listen. All the ice and snow were gone; it was all green, a thin, fresh green, the kind you get in cold climates. There were a lot of rocks strewn on the ground where the glaciers had slid away and melted and then they made stone fences out of the rocks and a road went by along the wall.”

Crazy or not, she could give him a strong vision. He could see it; she could draw him in. There was some madness, he supposed, in everyone. One advantage of it was that he didn't have to work around to subjects with Catherine; he could just tell her, for instance, that he still loved her. “I still love you,” he said.

“I had to see you, Barry. Had to.”

They would soon go out and eat somewhere, wander far afield, he would go back to wherever she was staying. He foresaw it all.

Thirty hours later he wandered alone through a dark empty city of damp stone. He could seriously, for moments together, entertain the idea that the signal had been given, the sirens had sounded and everybody had heard them but him and Catherine. Or had the secret weapon struck and dissolved all available flesh, scientifically, properly, carefully preserving the valuable stone, the great New York apparatus, all intact? Only the worrisome human weed exterminated. Then he passed a late bar or two and saw a bus snarl by: he gained then his own vision of him-self as a grey heap of garbage; that stubborn glint of something battered, and perhaps useless, was his soul; that sawdust had poured out of the side of his head. The rest was not worth probing into, even with a stick. He was empty, exhausted, worthless, and at peace. She had, after all, not forgotten him—Rome where he had met her, the hills of Circe at the sea where he had taken her, the sand flats below Sperlonga, the moon beating on the sea. But she was not in love with him. She had had to see him. Why? To bring back those memories? Yes, and to get herself through something new, he guessed, something far nearer to the quick of her than he could ever get except to pinch-hit for—

Quick, he shut his mind to it. It was enough not to know. When the dead heap of peaceful garbage stirred to life, he would begin to ache again. Well, so what? he thought. He groped for his key and laughed, for he found the door unlocked just as she had found it. Within, two glasses sat on the dusty table. The cigarettes had been left to smoke themselves down to ash, with no harm, no damage done, insentient things being meticulous at such times, as though aware that humans have abandoned them perhaps to make a total mess of things.

Charles' new job was with a printing firm which had one or two small contracts with national political committees. Irene saw at once that, in a national election year, this particular branch might burgeon. She came home one day with a mass of books.

“You've gone and got pink hair,” said Barry Day, who was waiting for her downstairs.

“Don't you love it?” said Irene, fresh with some concentrate of winter sweetness, which doubtless cost thirty dollars an ounce. When they prospered they really laid it on, Barry thought. It almost made him sick.

He helped her with the books.

“I read all those at the office,” said Charles, who was at home with a cold, “but never mind.”

“Then I'll read them,” said Irene, “we have to know everything now.”

“Look,” said Barry, “I may as well tell you that I saw Catherine anyway, in spite of your advice.”

“Advice!” said Irene. “It was I who gave her your address.”

“She was on her way back to Dallas.”

“I thought she said Chile.”

“She did, but that was a dream she had.”

“Poor Catherine,” said Irene. The books were glossy and decorative; their bold, modern designs and strongly colored lettering made a splashy array just as she dropped them on the broad coffee table; in short, to Barry, a canvas. Charles sat muffled to the ears in a yellow towel, a hot water bottle on his head, drinking a hot toddy.

“I think it's a dangerous journey,” said Barry. “I guess all journeys are dangerous,” he added, as Irene, who was busy getting out of her coat, gloves and hat, did not say anything.

“The park smells cold and absolutely dead,” she said.

“I mean,” he said, “I think America is murderous in some respects. I think it is murderous to Catherine.”

“Yes,” said Irene, “but she—”

“She what?” he nagged. “She what?” When Irene only frowned without replying, Barry went on, flopping down in a huge comfortable chair. “We suffer more than any people on earth.” But the truth was he was happy to see Charles and Irene now they had got their good times back.

“It isn't true,” said Charles. “We're just brought up to play the happy-happy game, join the Optimist Club and the world smiles with you. Then we get unduly damaged when the facts of life emerge. We are unprepared. But that doesn't mean I wish to've been born a Sicilian peasant.” He sneezed.

“What do you think of Catherine?” Barry asked him.

“Catherine? I've never gotten her attention,” said Charles. “We were once marooned in Rome after a party and couldn't get a cab. She said she would walk home and was gone before I could offer to go with her. I must have had a few. After she left I was afraid something might have come out and eaten her.”