Authors: Hortense Calisher
“Even you have a head start on them, with the window wall. See? I took it all down to the brick.”
“It must have taken you forever.” Would he never be angry, beat his head against that brick?
“Even a little piece the river,” he said. “You don’t have to lean too far.”
“Oh, please—” I cannot bear it. They are different from us. They are the meek. “Oh, please
don’t
!” she said. “You know I’m going to take it.”
She stood up. It seemed awful to her now that she had gone on sitting there—like a friend.
“I wouldn’t have like them,” said the girl. Turning, Liz found her close behind, leaning against the dressing table, chest outflung. “Like their place? I wouldn’t have! Maury likes, because he likes
them
.” She took a step forward, another, in church rhythm. “What
I
would have—” She raised one arm in a prima donna gesture. One could see now that because of her short legs, she was perhaps very slightly—a misfit. The torso was normal, the arms too long, and against any backdrop, what occurred was that slightest shade of comparison, double-take of the eye, which made it comic. On the Fordham Road or any other, last year or next-as-might-be with her market basket, she would be merely one of the commoner forms through which life-in-general was transacted.
“I would have…here—an ochway.” She spoke softly, in that woodwind voice with which women project draperies on a bare window, children pretend a house. “And here—” In that voice, sweeping that arm, she waved into being the proscenium arch against which her story and Maury’s could best be acted.
“All right now, Few,” said Maury.
“Look!” said the girl, addressing Liz. Her circuit of the room had brought her back to the dressing table. She removed the Kleenex from it, took one from the box and began wiping the table’s surface with altar devotion. “She’s a girl likes nice things, Maury,” she said, staring past Liz like a somnambulist. “She’s a girl likes things nice. I want she should see one.” With a last flick, she whipped aside the towel that had hung on the table, concealing its upper portion. Freed of it, the table was revealed as mirrored both on flat surface and three adjustable portrait panels. But this was not the best of it. In the center, the middle mirror reversed itself to her touch, to magnifying, to plain. In it a woman could see herself too near, pitted as a desert, or—oh relief—far. Finally, the side panels, as she bent them in, out, were rimmed with small light bulbs. In the center of all these, to be trapped by them, a vision waited. At her finger on a switch, the bulbs went on, off. “Maury—he made me.” On, off. “From a magazine. Maury, he can do anything electrical. Anything.” On.
“Oh-h.” In echo, she heard how versatile an oh could be.
“You like?” The girl came closer. They were near enough, if of a height, to have seen the lights reflected in each other’s eyes.
“It’s—lovely. It’s just right.” It glowed in the room like a little fireplace of ego, and burning, it warmed.
“Even Sonsie, she don’t even use make-up—she wanted.”
And no wonder.—Until now, she had never known she wanted a dressing table. It wasn’t just a miniature stage—of vanity. A woman didn’t have to be an actress to crave it. She understood her mother’s phrase, used on the most peculiar objects. It was a perfect thing of its kind.
“Sonsie, she was even going to offer Maury—to make.”
The girl looked up at Liz. Was
she
offering—or did she only want to see what was hers, reflected?
Lowering her eyes, Liz saw the check, still in her hand. She felt the craving between her legs, almost sexual. For it—that thing—she would shame herself. She would exchange money for it. She would take advantage of her position in life.
“Whyn’t you tell me?” said Maury. “All they did for us. I would have made for her.”
“I—” said Liz. I would buy it. “If—” she said. If you want to leave it here. It was the other girl who saved her.
“I know.” Even with Few’s head held so high, it was hard to say where those fan-eyes were looking. Sauntering past Liz with a hip-thrust, she held the door open for her. What a help women were to one another! “I din want.”
At the door, Liz stopped. Fyush was standing just under her own poster.
“Oh, so that’s what it stands—your name, I mean.
Footie, Fyush
—I couldn’t think what—”
The girl nodded. She looked over her shoulder at the twice-the-size-of-life head on the poster, her neck flung back in the same arc. “Fyutcher,” she said. If it hadn’t been for the legend blazoned above her, the word would have remained an enigma. “Future Foley. My stage name.” Her face softened with the wonder of it. “Fyutcher.”
Maury stretched an arm behind her. Very delicately, as if not to offend, he slipped the check from Liz’s hand. “Well, ’bye, Liz. See you in Schenectady, hmm? And good luck!”
“’Bye, Maury, ’bye—” But she simply couldn’t bear to—just leave like that. “Oh—I don’t want—” she said. “I mean—we’re all just starting out. We’re all the same age. Isn’t there something
I
could—I mean—what can
I
do!”
But they knew her meaning better than she did. They drew together, bird to bird. “Don’t you feel bad about it,” said Maury. “It can’t be helped you was the one.”
Outside, walking to the subway, she found the direction at once. She seemed to herself on the strait path marked off for her by whatever it was she couldn’t bear to define. Now that the pair were out of sight, the terrible embarrassment to be felt in their presence was at least receding. It was too painful to be made to be audience to the stage set of another’s fantasy,
in
it, like a god almost, all the time knowing what really waited for them in the wings. Especially with such as Futtie of course, could one see it, not even needing to watch her herself, or hear her dropping her poor little near-obscenity verbs, that name. One had only to think of that other girl—the one at the party. As for Maury, his meekness was as much to Futtie as to life. If Futtie was angrier, it was after all more
her
plan. At certain levels of life far enough beneath one’s own, the muddle became clearer. For if she herself, of an age with them as she was, young as she was, was able to see ahead of them, it was only because of her position in life—and this was embarrassing. “It can’t be helped,” they said—of things-in-general—not of their vision of themselves. “It can’t be helped,” one said to oneself—about them.
She passed a beggar without putting anything in his cup, never able to decide in time. This time, she went back, and dropped a quarter in it. He didn’t thank her, for which she was somehow relieved. Her own father, a man of no unusual kindness, had never passed a beggar without giving. She hadn’t missed him to any degree; though he had so exactly shared her mother’s standards, he had never made her so angry. “Such is life,” he had been wont to say, “such is life in a great metropolis!”, this in as lighthearted a refrain as the ditties he sometimes hummed, from the operettas of his father’s day—
The Chocolate Soldier, The Merry Widow,
Balfe. Perhaps it had been some catchword of his own day. The harp that once through Ta-ha-hara’s halls—such is life. But once, when out walking with her, he had done both together—dropped his quarter in the cup and then, passing on, had said it, almost hummed it—“in a great metropolis”—in that same mild tone. She had held it against him ever since. It had seemed to her indefinably callous of him—to have done both. Perhaps it was callous of her to remember him best by it.
That was what she held against the couple back there. Life-pity—they had made her feel it. In the great metropolis of life that stretched before her, there was a pity to be felt for people over and above their situation, inextricably tangled with themselves, yet not themselves. The two back there were the first of her own age whose life she could see before them, as not utterly clear perhaps, but surely not to be as they planned. Until she got far enough away from them and their bareness, deeper, ever deeper into the good thick weaves of her own life, this is what she would remember them for.
Seated in the subway, she began to gather those to her, around the loft. If it was not the one above all but the compromise one below, from which one had to lean for one’s bit of the river, how that it was hers, she could weave rapidly round its flaw. A dozen plans for it occurred to her and she moved easily among them; she knew her tastes better now, and already saw herself trooping through the stores, tracking down her forevers. If she had a certain quality to her life, in it, she could compromise, still make the shape to suit her. If she made a certain shape of her life—she could live.
So, when David came home, he found her waiting there to tell him. She was not to be teased on her enchantment with the place, her sense of its fitness for them—which seemed to him exactly the same as she had had for the last one. At least, he saw no difference in her. By evening, she felt none. When he saw the place next morning, he agreed that she had had reason. It was swept very clean, beautiful in its bareness, nothing in it except the stove. To inquire who had lived there before did not occur to him; he was beginning to leave these things to her. So, she did not tell him. For the first time in their lives, she kept such a matter from him. It had been the first time, in any of the transactions of her life, that she herself was not the innocent.
A
FTER THE CROWD HAD
gone, hallooing down those stairs, their hosts turned on the dark landing like parents at a christening, first to each other, then to look in at their prodigy. Such a pother it had been, and on their first night here. But now they were confirmed in possession, together with it now an image in the eyes of others. For weeks they had worked at the place while staying on at Mrs. Jacobson’s, Liz resolved not to enter until all was perfected. To him, she had been obsessed, flying up from bed in the morning, working until past midnight, lips dry, hair hanging, until he shook her to a stop and then woke her again on the way home in the subway, never really at rest unless she was in the place, except perhaps in her furies of purchase in between. It was now as done as he cared about. He hadn’t particularly cared about the party after all—he and Barney were so busy on the fringe of a wonderful idea. But now that people had seen the place, it looked different, even to him. It was in effect. The phone, installed that day, crouched like a cat in its corner. And now the two of them were here. Standing in the door, a light desire blooming along his arms, he waited for her. She remained on the landing, looking in. “They liked it, don’t you think? They said they did.”
“Why shouldn’t they? You’ve done wonders.”
The crowd, usually hailed to a place at once, often helping later, had not been allowed in here until tonight—Liz, with a sequestered passion that was new to him, had kept them off. But this was what they always said to each other, even if they were in a way congratulating themselves. It was the formal recognition of what spiritually joined them, and so it had been said, with the slightest change, tonight. You must have done wonders, they said.
“I?” She swung a rope from hand to hand.
Was he accused of not being too much present in spirit? “Well—it was you, really.”
“I wanted it to be.” She said this calmly enough, winding the thick hawser round her wrist like a bracelet. “I hated having to use—those people.” They had discovered a race of nonunion plumbers, decayed carpenters,
sub rosa
jacks-of-trades, usually alcoholic, often subhuman, whose custom it was to work for “the lofters,” as these people called people like them. “Having to direct them. Like having servants, almost. I know the kids thought so.”
“Well, of all the artsy-craftsy,” he said. “I don’t see any of them spinning their own cloth. Just because they have more time than—or less money. Hell, not even that’s true—aren’t Dil and Beatty just back from the Grand Cayman? All very ‘on the road’ of course—freighters! And rucksacks.”
“Oh, David.” He could still make her laugh.
“Hell, we had to get it done, so’s we could get on with our real jobs. Now we’re free of it, aren’t you glad?”
“Mmmm.” She regarded the rope on her wrist.
“Just because, to tell the truth, they’ve nothing else to do. Fringe-artists like Beatty and Dil.”
“Oh, David.” This was disloyal. The crowd was against too many things not to be very pro-themselves.
“Well, they are. They’ll be leading the life of the artist when—when our grandchildren have gray hair.”
She had twisted the rope on the other wrist. “Won’t—won’t we?”
“Oh, Liz,” he said. “You’ve been as itchy, all this month. Listen, we’re in huh, the way you wanted. And out of that china shop, your mother’s.” He skittered away from that. Though she hadn’t replied to her mother’s recent letters, she had been annoyed with him for mentioning it. The subject of her mother was still to be avoided—he kept forgetting. For he and his father wrote regularly, were as close as ever. “Listen, they loved it. Come on in.”
“I know they did. They were even envious.”
“Oh, why should you care so much what they think!” he said. “I don’t.”
She turned toward him then. “I don’t
want
to. I wish—I wish I didn’t care about the place at all. That’s what I wish.”
He reached her in a bound. Gently he rubbed a finger on the downy bit under her chin. No, she wasn’t crying, not quite. But he would have to look in there as she was looking, try to see that fifty-by-a-hundred arena as she was seeing it—if he cherished any hopes, tonight, of getting her to look at him. And his hopes were of the highest; he was beginning to know how these matters went and even to enjoy it, suspecting that she did too—these variations of the original wooing, new positions halfway between drama and silence, between love and jiujitsu—that a married couple could practice without lechery. Marriage reportedly confused a man, making him glad enough to pedal forty miles a day between him and his home mystery, but this was the smoking-car version—it was not turning out so for him. His marriage was daily clarifying his life and his work, or leaving them free to be. During the party, for instance, he had taken movies of the crowd, mostly because he was always taking movies now, but meanwhile wishing that they would go home early, leaving him to make love to his wife. And now that he held her, waited for her, his mind dallied with the film he had shot this morning, would shoot tomorrow. Between the two, he had been powerfully elated all evening. Life ahead was to be had for the leaping—as she was. No doubt it had to do also with their at last being here. For, certainly, he had everything he wanted at the moment, and everything he had was in its place. Over her head, he looked in at it, taking it in as she must mean it to be, noting how she had set color against color, height (of partition) against darkness, breadth (of shelf) against light. The whole setup shone and receded, in a self-contained span that even nagged at him familiarly. “You’ve certainly got the knack,” he said. From his chest, the word was spat back at him.