So Little Time (44 page)

The one thing he wanted was to try to meet her without a sense of that gap in age, to try to talk to her naturally as he sometimes talked to Gwen—but what would there be to talk to her about? Nothing except Jim.

When he reached the Echelon, he had doubts as to whether he should have asked her there. The Echelon was one of those restaurants for people who understand the art of eating, one of those little places, self-consciously transplanted from France, with a tiny and uncomfortable lounge just off the coatroom where you could wait for your companion if you wanted, and then the main room, two steps down with red leather seats along the wall where you and your companion would sit side by side, tête-à-tête, or perhaps a little more than tête-à-tête. There was a little bit of a bar, made to look like a
bistro
with some slightly off-color Parisian illustrations and a great many tables on wheels so that salads and
crêpes Suzettes
could be prepared right under the noses of you and your companion. Jeffrey had entirely forgotten that the Echelon was so intimate.

When he arrived there were already a few companions at the tables. In one corner there was a redheaded girl, toying with her cocktail glass and talking softly to a man who was obviously not her husband although she looked as though she had one. There were also two corpulent French refugees speaking in their native tongue and two young men seated very close together, one of whom wore a bracelet. Jeffrey had never been so conscious before of the atmosphere of the Echelon. It had not seemed like that when he had last taken Marianna Miller there to lunch.

“Good day, Mr. Wilson,” Jacques, the headwaiter, said; and then he added, because the Echelon was Continental, “
Bien bon jour, Monsieur Wilson, vous portez-vous bien, monsieur
?”

“I'm expecting someone,” Jeffrey said, “I won't order yet.”

“The corner table, then,” Jacques said. “
Pssst
.”

Jacques's smiling mask changed for a second into a malignant threatening expression which shocked a waiter who was lounging near the bar into nervous action. A busboy also came running and all of them began pulling back the corner table. Jeffrey sat down cautiously on the red leather bench. Wherever you sat in the Echelon, your legs were curled around a table leg.

“Can't you move it a little sideways?” Jeffrey said.

“But certainly,” Jacques said. “
Pssst
.… An
apéritif
while you are waiting, Mr. Wilson? A little cocktail?”

He sounded like one of those books describing a French scene where the French words were always repeated in English for the benefit of the ignorant reader.

“Dry sherry,” Jeffrey said. “I'm expecting a—young lady.”

He was curious about her, but at the same time, he wished that he had never attempted it. Even after the sherry he felt old. He was the man about town, the gentle, cynical roué who had tasted life. He kept looking across the room toward the little vestibule and the revolving door out front so that he saw her just as soon as she came in, and so did the other patrons. He saw the two Frenchmen look up with the hard, appraising glance that Frenchmen bestow on women. The redheaded girl and the man beside her looked with momentary curiosity, and then they must have thought it was a father taking his daughter to the matinée. At least Jeffrey hoped that was what they thought, for she was as young as that. Her complexion was very fresh and fair. Her mouth was a little large, with too much lipstick on it. Her hair was the color of pulled molasses candy, very fine with little crinkles in it. Her legs looked a trifle large and she walked with a slightly shambling gait. She was wearing a black-fur-trimmed coat, and her dress was green wool trimmed with the same black fur cut round at the neck. She was utterly indistinguishable from any other girl her age. He had forgotten that anybody could look so young.

For a moment Jeffrey struggled behind the table. It was always difficult to stand up in those places, where they pressed the edge of the table into the pit of your stomach. He had to push it out, and the glasses rattled.

“Hello,” he said. “It's ever so nice of you to come.”

Then she smiled. Her voice was high and unmusical.

“It's swell of you,” she said, “to ask me, Mr. Wilson.”

The waiter and the busboy were pulling out the table. He had not thought of her sitting on the bench right beside him. It was difficult to see her, turning sideways.

“Well,” he said again, because he had to say something. “It's swell you
could
come.”

Then he saw that she was nervous and frightened. They were pushing the table back, now that she was sitting down. They were handing them menus, written on huge pieces of paper in indistinguishable characters. “
Canapé,” “Entrée,” “Roti
.” He saw her hand shake when she took the card, and he saw her swallow.

“Perhaps,” Jeffrey said, “you'd like a drink.”

He saw her glance at him, frightened, but trying to be as nice as she could.

“I shouldn't,” she said, “but, yes, thank you. I'd like a little sherry.”

Then she was looking helplessly at the lunch card.

“Never mind,” Jeffrey said, “I'll read it. They fix it so you can't understand it. They like the chance to explain.”

When he ordered the lunch, he was sure that he was not appearing well. He knew that he was more emphatic and more artificially gay than was absolutely necessary, behaving as he sometimes did with someone whom he did not know and wished to impress favorably. It was a part of a shyness which he had never entirely lost. Now that he had seen her, he did not know what to do next, any more than she did. It all reminded him of something, he could not remember exactly what, until he noticed the color of her hair again. All his shyness was a part of that past, some half-forgotten pattern of behavior. Just as the clear soup was coming on, he remembered—Louella Barnes.

Sally Sales looked just enough as Louella had looked once to set the train of habit stirring. Her hair, voice, the way she held her head—it was as though he were living through an encounter with Louella again, vicariously.

He had been wondering what on earth Jim saw in that little girl and why Jim liked that undeveloped sweetness. She had seemed so young, so devoid of poise, but now she assumed her own individuality. He could understand Jim better, now that he remembered, although it was disconcerting, eating fillet of sole with her there at the Echelon. She had been talking and he had not even been listening.

“But I liked the World of Tomorrow best,” she said.

Jeffrey wished that she had been sitting across the table, so that he did not have to turn his head to see her. He did not know at first what she meant by “the World of Tomorrow.”

“Everyone does,” he said. “That is, when they're your age.”

Then it came to him that she must have been talking about the World's Fair, which seemed as old as his own thoughts, gone like a dream, as though it had never existed, a sad, materialistic fantasy of peace and plenty, a sort of satire which should have had no place in the world of today or any other world. He thought of the Moscow subway and of the red workman holding up his star, and of the Japanese pavilion, with its silkworms, both slightly dubious monuments to international good will, and he thought of those other buildings around the Lagoon of Nations, glorifying nations which had already fallen, while that fantasy was going on—Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, France.

“Did you see the Houses of Tomorrow?” he asked.

Yes, she had seen the houses, too, and the Kodak Building and the Telephone Building. It had been funny at the Telephone Building. It still made her laugh before she told about it. A boy in the booth on the stage had been talking to a girl in San Francisco.

“Herbert,” the girl asked, “do you still love me?”

“Don't ask that, Myrtle,” the boy had said, “there's five hundred people listening.”

Then Sally's cheeks had a higher color. She glanced away from him and looked hard at her plate.

“I don't see why he minded,” she said, “what difference did it make?”

It was the first thing she had said which gave him any idea of what she might be like.

“Did you see the Midget Village?” he asked, “and Bring Them Back Alive?”

She had seen them all, and the Panda and the Seminole Indians.

“But I liked the World of Tomorrow best,” she said.

He looked at her again, wondering what she had seen in it, trying to discover some taste that they might possess in common. It was hard to find one because Sally Sales was the world of tomorrow, not even the world of today.

“I wonder—” he said—“did Jim take you to the Fair?”

“Yes.” Her voice sounded startled. “Yes, didn't he tell you?”

“No,” he said. “You see, Jim comes and goes. He never tells me much.”

He was thinking of Jim and Sally Sales on one of those clear, hot August days perhaps, wandering over the crowded bridges with all the pennants waving, walking down those endless streets, stepping aside for the little cars whose horns caroled “The Sidewalks of New York,” walking endlessly, walking in a dream. It was not for him, but it gave him vicarious pleasure. He could see Jim looking at it as he would have once, and he could imagine he was Jim sitting with Sally Sales in the dark, holding her hand and gazing down at the roads and streets and cities of the peaceable World of Tomorrow. And now he knew, and everyone must have known, that the world of tomorrow would never be like that, for it was gone, exactly like his world of yesterday.

“It must have been a nice place to take a girl,” he said.

“Yes, it was,” she answered. Her voice was softer, and she smiled.

“You remind me of a girl I used to know,” he said.

He glanced up from his coffee and saw that she looked startled.

“Was she nice?” she asked. “I hope she was.”

“Of course she was,” he said. It was not the way he had intended to talk to her at all. “Her name was Louella—Louella Barnes.”

He was walking up the tar path off Center Street again, not that it made any sense. He was sitting on that rocking chair again, looking at the iced-tea glasses. There was a magic in it which he had entirely forgotten.…

“Perhaps I should have married her,” he said.

Then he came to himself abruptly. He was back in the Echelon again talking to a rather gauche little girl in a green dress with hair like molasses candy, with hands a little too large, with too much lipstick, and not enough powder on her nose.

“Oh, Billy,” the young man with the bracelet was saying, “oh, Billy, say you
like
it, but you simply can't
adore
it.”

Jeffrey frowned. He had never told anyone in the world that perhaps he should have married Louella Barnes. All at once he felt very warm, and kindly. He wished she had not spoken of the World of Tomorrow because he could not get tomorrow from his mind.

“I wonder—” he said, and he hesitated—he was never good at sentiment—“if you would mind if I asked you something.”

She turned toward him enquiringly, and then looked frightened.

“It's none of my business,” he said. “It's about Jim. I hope you'll be nice to Jim. I mean, let him be what he is. Don't turn him into something that you think he ought to be.”

He saw her eyes grow wider.

“Mr. Wilson,” she said, “you—you're awfully nice.”

“Not really,” Jeffrey said, “I'm only thinking about Jim.”

Then he knew she liked him. He had wanted her to like him, but now it was disconcerting because he was still not sure whether or not he liked her.

“Mr. Wilson,” she said, “I think you're swell.”

He wished that she had not used the word “swell.” There was nothing swell about him.

“It's been swell seeing you,” he said. “Perhaps you'll come again and see me, now you've found the way.”

28

Your Sister, Not Mine

There had been a time when a winter in New York had seemed utterly devoid of pattern, always containing an infinite promise of variety, which was difficult now for Jeffrey to visualize. He knew that this was the way Jim now felt about New York. Jim said everything was in New York. Jim said that he was happy, just standing in Grand Central Station, catching scraps of people's conversations. Jim said that he would not mind standing all day on Sixth Avenue where they had the joke shops and the Orange Drinks, just watching the crowds go by. Jim said he would not mind standing all day in Radio City, where the French and British shops and the travel offices were, and the evergreens at Christmas and the tulips in the spring and where the fountains in summer sprayed ceaselessly around Mr. Manship's golden boy and where exhibition fancy skaters salved their egos in the winter. If he grew tired of the skaters, Jim said he would not mind standing and staring up and up, watching the mass of building cut into the sky. It made him know what people wanted and what they thought. It taught him more about geology and astronomy and history than he had ever learned at school. Then, Jim said, there was Central Park and the pool with the sea lions—that was something you could always go to; and when you got tired of the sea lions, there were the Fifth Avenue busses and the Madison Avenue shops, and at night there was La Rue where you met everybody you knew, and if you were too broke for La Rue, there were places like Hamburger Heaven. Jim said there was everything in New York, everything. When he was in New York, Jim hated to take time out for sleeping. Jim could not understand why Jeffrey could not see it. He hoped when he was Jeffrey's age he would not be blasé about New York.

Jeffrey had seen it that way once, and still could up to a certain point. Sometimes in the dusk when all the taxis jammed the cross streets, starting, stopping, starting, he could feel a little of the old excitement, but again, sometimes, he would think that he had seen too much of it. When he had been Jim's age, he remembered how he had felt about books—Plutarch,
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, Balzac, Montaigne, Molière, the British poets, the Five Foot Shelf of Books which would turn you into a man of culture if you gave them fifteen minutes a day. Once when he saw a wall of books, he had been sure that he would read them all, someday. There had been nothing impossible in that assurance because he knew that he would have the time—someday—when he could get through with what he was doing. Now he knew he never would read them all. The realization did not make him exactly sad. He had simply grown sufficiently wise to know that there would eventually be an end to himself and everything around him. It was the same way about New York. He would never know it all and he was not young enough to think he would, and what was worse, he was so old that he knew New York did not have anything. There was not the clear cold winter's silence that he used to know when he was a boy; the snow did not belong there, and neither did the moon.