Authors: Hortense Calisher
“I mean—I see what you mean by basic areas. You’ve certainly got—that feel to it. Basic.” Her word, it should mollify.
From her twitch, it hadn’t.
“You know,” he said. “Food, Love, Music. Work—which is Art. And Sleep. Which is after all, back to Love.”
She was not to be nudged. He withdrew his hand from any suspicion of it. When she wished to be taken seriously, nothing made her angrier than a suspicion that she was merely being taken.
“I mean that, seriously. It’s really a wonder, how you’ve kept all the—issues—so simple. Why, you know—it looks like one of those seventeenth-century masques, like a program for one. You know. ‘Enter Music left—with Lyre.’ Or a twenty-buck piano.” She had painted the old upright gray, gilded the scrolled stand. “‘Enter Food, back to audience.’” The food counter was reversed. “And now…let me see. I’d hate to think that sofa represents Love, even to old ladies. I think it represents Us, to Them.” They had finally spent the gift certificate from Mr. Pagani’s old cousins, drawn on the most modern furnishing store on Long Island. “And finally—” He surveyed it carefully.
The toilet, screened with that Moorish-style cutout to be bought anywhere, made a nice hutch somewhere between modesty and sense, not unlike a sedan chair. All wall surfaces had been spray-gunned with a misty recipe borrowed from Barney’s camouflage-unit days—his own sole contribution. All the rest, brooded over as if she were giving birth to her own fantasy, was hers. Its charms, rather changeling for a man to spend twenty-four hours in—but then, he would not be—were hers. Which was as it should be. The partition which reserved her studio space was spartan enough, the space itself still bare.
“Even Phantasy,” he said. “You know. Spelled with a Thuh.’ Why—it’s a real fine little old-fashioned
grotto
, that’s what it is!” He was delighted with himself; in the semidark, his glasses slid down. The place probably harbored all sorts of other little arrangements, privately pleasurable to her, sensed only in the ways she paused here, mulled there—which unless she pointed them out, he would not be able to see at all. But if a man’s far-sighted scope made it harder to see up close—he would not say trivially—the way a woman did, he must narrow his focus enough at least to honor that—what she saw, or thought she saw. He grimaced his glasses back, and permitted himself a delicate squeeze. A vibration answered them.
“Issues?”
she said.
“Areas,” he said. “Areas.” His fingers had already told him the vibration was wrong.
She disengaged herself from his arms. “Keep looking. Not at me.”
He obeyed.
“And keep talking.”
Uh-uh. Nix. A warning recall came to him, by sheer physical context, from his wedding night, of a moment when standing just so, holding the glass palette, he had rambled on in one of the flights that often took him when he was happiest, and had displeased—having just wit enough not to ask how. His father had used to kid him about these flights—“there goes David”—but had certainly never held him responsible for what he chanced to say in them. But women had such an extrasensory talent for putting distance between them and a man, even when they were glued to him. Then, swooping in near, they pounced.
“What else do you see?” From behind, his glasses were adjusted for him. It gave him the deserted, cloudborne feeling one had in blindman’s buff.
“Well—for instance—those Russian-doll things you have in the kitchen, where’d you get the idea for those?”
“I saw them in the Soviet bookshop—that kind of frozen place on Lower Fifth, and I had to have them. I think I had a set once, as a kid. I sort of—recognized them. They won’t do for a spice set, really. You can’t see through them.” The voice took him a moment to place. It was the way she spoke to other women.
“I think they’re just fine, just fine,” he said. He shouldn’t have said it twice. She saw so near—without glasses. She saw so much that she confused things. “Anyway, it doesn’t look anything like an apartment. Was there a particular effect you were trying for?” Oh, Christ. “Can I turn around now?”
“No.” Coolly, so that he couldn’t tell which it was the answer to—and about three feet away. She confused him.
“Anyway—it doesn’t look like your mother’s.” Oh—double Christ. “Oh Christ!” he said, turning. “Let’s go to bed.”
She was standing not three feet behind him. Of
course
she was standing—even in the brown semi-dark, he saw the gold slippers she wore. But she had looped the thick rope about her neck this time. Above it and her black sweater, her face seemed to be hanging, tilted forward, the way a face would be if its neck were permanently bent by a rope that disappeared upward, behind it.
“What the hell…do you think you’re up to!” His voice came out a snarl; he had seared himself. He shook her hard, her and his fury; they were the same. The rope flapped. She went limp, self-careless in his grasp, her face so unchangingly sad, as if any change in it were beyond her. “Say—isn’t it about time—” he said, and of course he had already stopped shaking her. He even heard his own suddenly conspiratorial tone, as he had been hearing himself ever since the guests had gone. This often happened to him, happened between the two of them, after a party or when they had each returned from being with other people—for a while they continued to see themselves as mirrored in others. Often, he could see that she was doing the same—hearing herself—after he had been away the long day with Barney, as if he might be seeing her with Barney’s eyes now, and must be won back. Whatever happened to him, happened to her of course. “Say, I know. It’s about time for your period, isn’t it. You’re just about due.”
“Just—about.” She spoke as if her throat were sore from the rope. “But it’s not that, really not.” As he well knew, she disliked having him think of her as an object swung helplessly on that oestral tide, nor was he ever to baby her for it, or so she always intimated—while she was being. While she was—she had no humor at all. Afterwards, she often discussed very learnedly her own irrationality of the week before, describing how it came upon her, corroborating this from the lore of other girls, and all in the highest intellectual interest, like a bluestocking informing him of the habits of chorines.
But this was not one of those times. For now she fell forward on him, opening his shirt to rub her face there. “I didn’t want it to be done, isn’t that awful. I want to go on doing it instead. I’m not glad like you, I’m sorry.” She raised her face. The tears were sliding down it in utter gravity and quiet. She made no show of them. He’d never seen anybody cry like that, staring—maybe the blind did. He’d never seen her cry at all. “
Instead
, see?” Her sob was the only sign that hurt was working its way out; her face was almost thoughtful. A tear slid into her mouth, unlocking it. “And so I’m scared.”
“Why Liz. Why Liz, I’ve never seen you cry.”
A storm of quite ordinary tears burst from her. When it was over he still held her, and they were still outside the door.
“You were crying in the strangest way,” he said. “As if you didn’t know quite why.”
“I—do and I don’t,” she said.
“You looked very beautiful though. I’d have liked to have—” Taken a picture. But it was scarcely the thing to say.
She nodded. Gravity crossed her face, then puzzlement, as if she too would have liked to have seen for herself just what had been in that face.
“Imagine, I never saw you cry before. What a woman. And we’ve been married almost a year.”
Almost a year. She didn’t say it aloud.
They stood regarding it, the tide that swung them both.
“You should’ve taken a picture,” she said, but there was no malice in it. She waltzed away from him, only to show that things were sunny now. “And well hang bells on all the ropes, when it’s a year. Liz Pagani, housewife
and
interior decorator, hung by her own rooftree.”
“No more of that.” He held the door.
“In!”
He patted her fanny. “Bed.”
She straight-armed him, locking her fingers behind his neck. “I love you,” she said, conversationally. The role had changed now, and he was to know that, if not quite to what. “You’re the mo-ost under-
stand
-ing—”
When he leaned into the kiss, her hand came up behind them, but this time, extending the noose to include him, she looped the rope around them both. “Cliché, cliché,” he murmured, but loved her for it. She had caught his very thought, and was giving it back to him. Whatever happened to her, happened to him.
In bed, though she was cozy, she still wanted to talk, and he would almost settle for that now. The moment, so tenuous, had passed, exchanged for one in which to hunger briefly for a time when, stronger than anything it depended on, it would not have passed. He punched the pillow and lay back. It would return. Marriage gave that certainty as it took away the other—the pillow in place of the bare floor. From where they lay, he could see the whole joint in the paleness shed from the large pleated-paper globe, on an iron chain, that she had hung from the ceiling. It gave a poor light, but its occasional motion interested him—a shiver from a truck three avenues away, or from an earthquake half across the world?
“I
was
trying for an effect,” she said, “but for the life of me, I don’t know what.”
Honesty was the role then. “Oh I can tell you. You wanted to bedevil me, until I made you cry. Women often do that. At the end of the month.” He lit a cigarette, in the pleasure of this. Beyond an affair in college, from which no insights had been got or asked, and in fact had ended in less than a month, his sole knowledge of women came from her.
“I didn’t mean on you. And you know it. I meant—” She waved an arm. “This!”
“Oh that. Well I can tell you that too.” He blew smoke luxuriantly. “Women can’t stand a pure globe. They have to—what is that thing!—hand-pleat it.” It was an aphorism worthy of his father. He made note of it, for the next letter. Women can’t stand a pure globe.
She sat up. “You don’t like the lamp?”
Honesty was now basic. Once they had cried. “Like I said before. I don’t really care.”
She made no immediate answer, staring at the long expanse. Then she nodded. “Imagine!” She said it lightly. “Imagine
us
having a sofa.”
He was so touched at this that he put out the cigarette. She was trying to imagine herself over on his side, look as he was looking.
“Not a real sofa.” His voice soothed. “What’s a sofa you can’t sit on. Only surreal.” A six-foot-long, molded thing, it was covered in some slick black plastic on which a human being couldn’t keep traction; unless he wore asbestos perhaps, inexorably he found himself at the edge. And especially the girls, in the thin, sliding stuffs they wore. He’d taken some angle shots of the crowd, as, two by two or in groups, the sofa’s unease crept over them—like people gradually aware that they were conversing on a raft. “A lot of these plastic things, they aren’t really objects at all. Just ideas for objects.”
He sat up. “Say, I’m going to be able to use those shots I took tonight, say, am I! I haven’t told you yet, what Barney and I are up to, have I.” He kept his voice low, a secret agent for a far power—and that was the way he felt. “Well, come over here.”
Crossing his legs, he made his old place for her; it was harder to do this on a bed. Cradling her from behind, he spoke over her head, drumming up his unseen for her. The light was just right for it, conveniently bad. “It’s hard to say in words, but mainly we want to do a picture about people, mainly…by means of the objects they live through. You’ll never see the people themselves, that is. A man and woman to begin with maybe, later maybe more, as we can handle it. You’ll hear their voices of course, be able to differentiate them that way…see through the camera what the voice is seeing. That’s the only way you’ll know them. Each will be a…vortex, centered in the objects he lives through. Bounded by them. That’s how the viewer will come to know his identity—the character’s. And no character will ever quite know the other one’s vortex. That’ll be the
continuity
of it, d’yasee? It’ll be like a succession of stills only all the time moving, never really still. God, film
is
wonderful! The way it’s always moving. Barney and I are agreed on that, we could never work in any other…That’s what kills us both…the way it moves.”
“Now that we—” she cleared her throat, “now that I…have this all set up…I mean to work in stone.”
Above her head, he nodded. “Not that the technique…it’s the old first-person one. Even TV uses it, all the time. But sooner or later, they always pan in to the person, or from him. We won’t. But how you’ll get to
know
him! Barney says, what we’re really trying to photograph is meanwhile. He wants to call it that.
Meanwhile
.” He laughed deeply, squeezing her. “It’s new. It’s never been done before.” The words came out as the holy ones they were. “Let Beatty and Dil put
that
in their—” This was what they all kept themselves ready for, in the van. “Of course…it’ll be something of a tour de force. We wouldn’t want to do more than one that way….” His voice trailed off.
“Smell the spring,” she said. “Today was that first day, you know, windy, but the air just
reminds
you? I left the window open, you don’t mind?…No, you wouldn’t want to repeat. That’s what I…what
I’m
so…”
“You don’t mind?” he said. “That I’m keeping the darkroom at Barney’s? It leaves
you
more…”
“If you lean out the window—” she said. “There’s a little triad of lights down there—two down low, one high.” She said it in the voice for secrets. “I think it’s a boat. They came just after dark. They came just tonight.”
“Yes, you framed the window,” he said. “Yes, I noticed that.” He cradled her gently. Quiet as they sat, a motion beneath, from the bedspring it must be, made him feel as if they were rocking.
“No, I don’t mind,” she said. “I like mine all in one place though, the house and—the other…All my things.”
“It feels so good to tell you,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to let you in on it before this, but you were temporarily so—It’s wonderful always to be able to talk like this. Other men’s wives—even some of the kids tonight, did you notice? To be able to talk together like this. It’s wonderful.”