Authors: Hortense Calisher
At once, like a child given permission to speak, she fell dumb.
“Well, what’s on your mind?”
“The same as—as on yours.”
He stole a glance at her. Her eyes were open. She gave a flat sort of laugh, almost a cough, utterly unlike her. Or at least he had never heard it. “I suppose—she takes care of him. Of his health. What else could they possibly—Strangers!”
“We were—strangers.”
“But we’re young!” Her voice went high. She lowered it. “Besides, we were never—” She raised herself to scrutinize him through the dark, flopped back again. Her voice came even lower. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be. We have all our lives—to get to know.” She lay back, stretching her arms above her. Again there was a silence. She broke it.
“What do you know…best about me, for instance?”
“I don’t think that way.”
“Don’t you want to know what I—?”
“What.”
“That—” she paused. “That you always fall right asleep, after love.” The merest whisper, it reverberated for some time.
As the darkness lessened, they could see each other. Noses, knees, toes pointed up, limbs articulated under the graven sheet, she lay like a thin crusader at his side, he at hers.
“When you were a kid—” It was her natural voice. “I suppose your father kept mistresses, or something.”
“No! Of course not.”
“How do you know? For sure.”
“I never gave it a thought.”
“Then, how
do
you know.”
“How do you know. About your mother.”
Under the marble sheet, she crossed a leg, as careful not to touch him with it as if it were bandaged. “Do you suppose—” She was trying not to whisper. “Do you suppose that they
sleep
together?”
“That’s—their business. It’s—not our wedding night.” He sat up, clasping his knees. The idea that another generation had an emotional life of its own was shocking to him, far below the level of distaste. It vied with his own supremacy on the stage. Easier to dispose of it as she did, by mocking any thought that it might be a profound one.
She sat up too. “
Can
he?”
In the moment that he understood her wholly, he felt himself redden, tighten from scrotum up—as if she had asked this of him. In pure, blind answer, he slapped her full in the face. “To me,” his father had said. “Even to me.”
Then they huddled each to each, in mutual repair. Now it was she who was monosyllabic, he who grievously wanted to talk. The night was still black at the window, but they could now see the place clearly from their vantage point the bed, sitting next to each other as if it and the night were a stage they were doomed to until dawn. Deep in a self-hate he could not help her shake, she had said that she had deserved it, that she had been gunning for it all evening, then had fallen mum. He had brought them some of the leftover drink from the party, the green bottle over which, only yesterday morning, when he had plucked it from the shelf in the liquor store, they had both smiled in their old clued way, without a word. Only a far morning ago—and they themselves, standing as still as the grass on a windless day, or as the flower opening in a slow-motion film, had not moved an inch, of themselves. If there were only some way to warn her, each other, of that slow, expanding—bloom. He couldn’t go beyond that, how he saw them both as all these past hours, playing about, with something most serious and theirs and still unknown to them—like two on a field somewhere, perhaps Africa, kicking back and forth between them a rock which, if they could only bend to it in time, they would see to be the Kohinoor.
“What I know best about you—” he said. At least he had got her attention. “I used to think it was because you were so fearless. But it was only because you were so angry, wasn’t it. At your mother, her house, even about money. Even at—your own work. And now you’re—not so angry, any more.”
One shoulder flexed, neither acknowledging nor denying.
“And that’s what scared you, isn’t it,” he said in a sudden flash. “Because you aren’t.”
She looked up just enough to look down again, like a woman interrupted at her ritual grieving over the dead loss in her arms, lifting her head just enough to nod at the comfort offered, and plunge again to what she held. Her hair was growing again to her shoulders as he had bidden her; she looked the same. He had a glimpse even of how women might live remembering best their losses, feeding on the intangible ones, living their lives by private stations of those very losses—of youth, of infatuation—which men, out in the public world, managed to hold up as gains.
The room stared him down. All these attitudes—they hung about in it like furniture. “I just wanted you to know,” he said. “That I feel what you feel. That I see…what you see.”
She smiled.
When he touched her, but only to comfort, she put a hard, swift hand on him. An hour ago, under that doubled image from the West, to touch had been gross—in sight of what he must still think of as those dark, northern wastes of parenthood where that other couple lay. Marriage now assisted him, with its simple favors. At the height of his pleasure, importance was returned to him; here he and she, not they, were in the van. In its declining shallows, he relaxed, still respectful of it. Often, after they had done well, as now, she clasped her legs tighter, saying with a quirk that she wished she could carry him with her like this always, that they could walk about always the way they were now. Other times, as this was to be, they sank into sleep without speaking. He slipped away from her. Behind him, she stirred. “Remember,” he thought he heard her say, “Remember the palm tree.” He thought he promised; he was not asleep.
When she was sure he was, she raised herself on the pillow, into this hour’s familiar cave. It was fluent with echoes. There was something in it that was new, but not wholly. After a while she spoke into it, to the dark. “There’s something we don’t know,” she said into the dark. “About us.”
F
AR BELOW THEM, THE
immense of the Pacific moved its colors or lay still thereunder—a cruel green either jagged or icy jade, a blue dizzying ozone where must lie the navel of the Good, and a purple which should have been the utter profound and was rock. Year after year, the dreadful seaside painters at Carmel caught the three colors infallibly. No good painter ever tried. She and he had several times, in earlier weekends here, made these observations. Now they sat at breakfast before the open window, exchanging them without speaking. The cabin, of redwood and glass, had been first a movie star’s hideaway, then a restaurant, and lastly, until Mr. Pagani had bought it years back, a boarded-up plateau for whatever gulls arrived that high, or eagles that low. At first, the heights here had terrified her. She had learned to turn her back on the ocean, leaning out the window on the garden side to steady her gaze on the foundation, which disappeared into the ground like that of any other house. The garden, set between it and the magnificently higher scar of the coastal road, had been reassured against the sky by shrubs and trees that pressed away from all but one glimpse of the sea, making an inland niche where one might rest from nobility. He had never made her feel that she must rest from his. They lived a quiet life together, never a sacrificial one on either side. Sometimes, with the fractional inner gasp of those whose lives have been halved, she was thrust not back but out, barely able to believe in this half—its reality went so deep. But they were not given to naming their state, any more than he the common enough disease he suffered from. In it, she and he were equal invalids just emerged from the examining room, stammering out to themselves, “Ah. So that’s what I’ve got, is it!” When they were at the window as now, however, she always fixed her eyes, with a steady, humming sense of ownership, on the blue.
“When he comes,” she said, “I’ll make myself scarce, eh.”
“It’s us he’ll be wanting to see.” As often, he was laughing at her. “Besides—where?”
Large as the room was, even sumptuous in plan because of the movie star, it had the atavistic hut-comfort of everything provided for in one. Having been a restaurant had been good for it, leaching it of the personal. Leftovers were its comforts, the richest from Jacques’s travels, but even these had the no-nonsense, quiet, saddlery tones of male usage. The long-haired Anatolian blanket, hanging from the gallery where David would sleep, hung there to air; shorter-curled Greek rugs, also goat, warmed the tiles. Presumably the air cleaned the place, working like a good slavey night and day, or else perhaps, now and then in their absence, the place shook itself all over, honest creature in its stall, and lay down again. She never thought of it as a house.
There was all outdoors, of course.
“No,” he said, anticipating her. “The way you look at grass, very respectful. ‘This is grass.’ And the way you look down there—sideways. And the way you look at the hills—I’m not yet sure what that is. But outdoors, you’re still a visitor from the city. And visitors must always be accompanied. It’s only polite.”
She grinned. She was his company. In the long night ranges, he often slept now. “The hills? I’m thinking, like any city person, that they’re only scenery, with the world behind them really—I have only to peel them back. That’s what going to the country meant for us. Two weeks of deep breathing and hard staring—and something tangible to come home with—like shells, or a tan.”
“Going to the country.” Behind them, the hills advanced like golden bears whom only an ocean could stop, down to a water-edge that farmed torn cypress and pelicans—she thought of this as “countryside.”
“Go on,” he said. “Go on, about your childhood.” What she went on about was secondary, though she could entertain him there also. But it was her constant domestication of the awesome that most often moved him, never failed to salve; he had perched for so long on the nether lip of awe. To do this was her lore, sifted from kitchen middens she often did not even know she was sifting—her mother’s and her mother’s mother’s lore.
“I’m beginning to feel at home on that road,” she said. “Though they’d never have believed it. Nobody drove. One uncle, from Hollis. Easters, he used to drive in for the whole pack, dinner, the cemetery, and return us. Later on, Ernest drove, of course—and the school taught Elizabeth. But lots of the people in the city were like that. Then.”
“If you can drive this road, you can drive any road in Europe,” he said, “even the Grand Corniche. I don’t know about Yugoslavia. But all the rest.” He repeated it with savor. “All the rest.”
“You want to go, we could,” she said. He often talked to her about Europe, what she would see, could do there. “We could take a boat.” Then, perhaps a cottage. From cottage to cottage, slowly. Travel was harder on him than he would admit.
“Someday,” he said. “For you must see it.” When he could spare her, she him. For she would not go without him. He was saving it for the time when she would have to spare him, in the way a clear-eyed old man might make what provision he could for his young darling, setting up the long Europe of time when he would be gone.
She kept her eyes from the purple, steadily on the blue. “To see us—together. That’s what he’s coming to see? So quick?”
“He’s doing some film he’s all excited about.” He was peeling an orange. “Wants to tell me. But I suppose the main reason is—simply because I asked.”
“Because you asked,” she said, on a sigh. “So simple.”
“I never allowed him to do much for me,” he said. “I couldn’t afford to. But now, because of you, it’s no longer crucial. So I can.”
“So now you do this for him too,” she said, with a smile that covered no jealousy. Rather, it kept her from dwelling, even for the most fleeting instant, on whatever he was planning to do for her.
He leaned forward in his chair. “It’s so still, today. I prefer it angrier. When I can see it moving.” The chair had been his mother’s. It was the only thing here that was much his, and then only because he sat in it, since it was high-backed and straight. It had no other distinction. Even she had noticed it merely because it was so un-Californian, belonging to none of the many modes here. It had been looking at one ocean or another for over seventy-five years now, he had told her. That was why it had seemed natural to bring it down here. “Let’s go into the garden, shall we? Where we can watch the road for him.”
“I like this place though,” she said, when they were settled again, their backs to the trees with that one crack of sea. “This house. It makes me feel like a Hindu.”
“Explain!” he said at once, always glad to be pulled into the delightful maze of her processes, a game that never left one as depressed as gin. They had not yet played the latter.
Usually she humored him, but this time she was direct. “No possessions. Isn’t that what they aim for? Nothing here belongs to me. Not a thing. It’s very restful.” She gave a little blurt of a laugh. “I’m absolved, you see. Washed clean.”
“It’s no sin to love the particular,” he said. “That’s your lore.” It was the first time he had said the word so often in his mind. She paid no heed to it.
“You are hurt then,” he said. “Because she isn’t coming.”
“A little. I’d like to see her. But I suppose it wouldn’t be of much use, she still has her old image of me. She hasn’t given
me
up, that’s for sure.”
“Maybe it’s still of use to her,” he said, wondering whether the girl still did those figures of exaggerated wax.
“To stick pins in? Maybe.” Her smile was wan. “All things considered, maybe it’s better just now to keep the four thousand miles between us.”
“Three,” he said, tongue in cheek. The orange lacked only the eighth petal now. “Anyway, her image of you certainly isn’t mine.”
“She wouldn’t see it. Or that it’s what helped me give her up.” Hair in topknot, anxious eyes rounded, she regarded him, short-waisted as a Bouguereau in her starched “country” dress, one slippered foot stretched as plumply on its straw cushion.
“She’d see us together too.” The orange was finished. “That might shock her.”
“Are they shockable?” There was the ghost of satisfaction on her face. “Girls her age were brought up not to be. She was.”