Authors: Hortense Calisher
Strangely enough, once more it was Sonsie who helped her. Even while Sonsie shrank back a trifle, like an alert sponge, before a certain new dryness in Liz, as audience she insisted, she expected, and not for her own vanity. The afternoons went on, less intimate than they had been, teaching Liz something of the help to be drawn from the ignorant, when they admire. When Sonsie left to go “upstate for a time” after a bout with Joe, she brought down a substitute, one of the shy homosexuals who lived in the shrouded loft above the Baileys—who rose at four to cook breakfast for a partner who worked nights, and then was left to himself like a childless wife. A country boy from Georgia, who proved unable to pose but was content to watch her work at something else while he sipped coffee grayed with his tin of “condensed,” he was both fond and deft with children, and liked to sit with May when they went out, exchanging jollities with her until she slept, grateful adjunct of family ways he was not quite loosed from, pleased with his role of senior child.
During this time, Liz worked on studies of the baby in mediums from ink to clay, but the sketches and figures she turned out always kept to a stubborn abstraction, concept babies, genus “infant”—she could never make an identifiable May. She began to tour the museums, their libraries, purchase her books of plates. For the first time, school appeared to her not as a wishing-well or a theater of approval, but as the fountain where the water was. Once a week, she now attended classes in the studio of an old sculptor of Bauhaus days, superannuated but still famous, where she rarely ever saw the master but was exposed to all that really lay before her. To any casual queries as to what she “did,” she could no longer bring herself to say “I’m,” but sometimes, as some half-accidental success quirked from her fingers, she felt an apprehension of joy—she was learning. She was learning of the power to be drawn from her own ignorance. Gathered up, it must be what might make her an artist. It was surely not a power to be wasted on the daily event.
And for closer kinship, they had the cherished company of the people they saw now—whom they were going to see at tonight’s party—who numbered among them several painters who had been shown in groups, the scene-designer and cast of a play shortly to open in an old auditorium in Chelsea, a group of art photographers who were sponsoring a gallery on East Tenth Street, and one whose film short was to be shown next season, at Cannes. Though the entree to this clique had been David’s—whose combination of small works paid for and magnum opus promised had set just the right tone—Liz’s new-found modesty quickly made her the pet of those who had only just acquired their own confidence—and they had no sculptor. And after a while, by a process not unlike the old crowd’s, her familiar presence made her talent assumed. Anyone who was associated with them!—their voices and miens delivered verdicts, exchanged gossip all in the consciousness of who they were; they were the coming ones; they were “next.” Singly none of them could have said how it was achieved. The group had its acknowledged stars; newcomers swiftly learned to live at the same altitude. The effect on a neophyte was just that: first the blood-stir of the sudden climb, then the calm of the view. And in no time, the network of influence, mention, notice—modest as it was—was set going for her. She was encouraged to send work into competition, instructed where.
On opening day of the large, indiscriminate group show where the torso of Sonsie had made its debut, David, escorting the girls to the jammed gallery—two joined storefronts on East Tenth Street—had been lost to them almost at once in the buzz of some confreres from the camera gallery down the line. Liz, fearful of dressing wrong, at the last moment seizing something from a surer time, had worn her wedding dress. Here and there she had seen someone she knew and was nodded to, but everybody had had his back to the work on display, as if by design. Faces were tilted to other faces or bowed deeply into a glass, and one had a constant sense of chins averting, eyes shifting, as if some notable had yet to fill the doorway—or as if the same message for all, from Ganymede the cup-bearer, was still to arrive. She saw all this freshly, now that it was hers. When she saw the torso, she felt her own nakedness. No one was looking at it; no one had ever noticed the lines on its hips except Sonsie, with whom, by this secret, she suddenly felt once more warmly allied. She whispered to her. “I feel as if it’s me,” she said. Sonsie giggled back at her, “Think of how I feel.”
David, just passing, gave them a brotherly leer. “’T’s okay
keed
,” he said side-of-the-mouth to Sonsie, “they’ll never recognize you. Not in that hat.” The subtlety of this almost overcame them. Stiffening their faces, they gazed devotedly at his back, like younger sisters. Later they saw him leading an unknown man up to that exhibit whose listing Liz for days had carried about with her like water in the ear:
Torso, Jacobson, 124.
She made Sonsie duck out with her. From the window of an espresso house opposite, they watched the crowd thin while they gorged themselves on
cannoli
—safe as two housewives conning the passing show from the tearoom at Gimbel’s, delaying their return to the sitter and their collective children. A vengeful delight overtook Liz as she watched people of whom she could have been one now emerging, exposed in the momentary caricatures of leave-taking. At the same time she tasted a present rich as the custard, the rich mixture of the chapter now. “Phonies!” she had said proudly. “What crap!”
Now, outside the building in the Cove—it could have been any day in the week but was Sunday, any day of the last year—they parked the car, went through certain other routine motions, with the silence of sleepwalkers, doomed but serene. She, the child and all the paraphernalia of their day, bottles and baskets and the finds of pinewood or maple to be mused over afterwards, were set down at their door, the child sometimes awake with a cry sent up like a skein of mourning, or on her feet toddling half-forward into sleep again, clutching a drained bunch of flowers. Then David ran to garage the car, which could not be left where it was because of vandals, and was therefore kept, at half the rental of the loft, in the basement of the “development” from which some of the vandals undoubtedly came.
This was a flaw, but like others in the scheme, was no longer regarded. When the loft was entered, if it no longer quite resembled either its exact first self or even their present memory of it when away from it, it now was pliant enough, old enough—as they were—to give way a little, and still stand. In it they no longer felt the presence of that network of intangibles which once had plagued. Its flaws were not to be held against it or even up to the light, any more than the nubbins in cloth of natural fiber were—any more than her own monthly intensities were held against her, or David was held to account for his solitary afternoon walks, on one of which he had now departed. Lightly suspended in the mind of each, what the one did not ask, the other did not notice, no longer was counted against him—it served to keep him separate. Lightly, scarcely yet coddled into being, there was the need for it.
Meanwhile, there were such beauties. As she went about preparing the evening meal, the dog fed, the child beating its spoon on its tray, the word revolved in her mind on a spit of gold and dark manufactured from the autumn effulgence at the windows and the room’s inner shadows, until she had to laugh for it, a riddle to tell him or not to tell him—how is the word “beauty” like a capon basting? In this quiet goodness, for days on end her thoughts gave up their lances, pattering down in a gentle rain of detail. She made toast points, grated cheese, set out capers in a design, a rosette of pimiento, all her senses transliterating; food was affection. The light was cider, as in an old stable, autumn in a bottle, with a dust in it as clean as country ordure, a stone air that filtered up from the marble being filed in the studio below; who would mind this mica air, glitter in corners, dusty pollen of old pianos. It was the fine, hard blue day of the first shiver in the shoulders, the day of the first blanket. The child, fine loin-fruit, was so good; it fed itself, crooning. By the time its father returned, it would be asleep again. She gave it the button-box to play with and sat down, with a shiver of the loins, to brood for him among her happenings, her weave.
On his walk, David as usual went cross-island, on streets narrow enough for the short-girthed carriages of Dutchmen, even, in a forked alley or two, for the long, saturnine ghosts of Indians. A certain habit of thought always accompanied his footsteps, in a way descended, as a man of the present might still flatter himself, from those silent figures whose long, aquiline feet took their intelligences from the ground. As was his habit, he ended up at Trinity churchyard, where he sat on a certain bench against the south wall, from which he could see, over the worn script of the earliest stones, the towering shaft of the Irving Trust.
On weekdays, the place was his seaside, under wave after wave of people. Rarely, he was here on a Sunday. In this deserted, dune air, one could almost hear the centuries architecturally colliding. On the other side of the church, behind the garlanded buttresses at his back, the first quarter of his own had crept for burial, brought up short in one large cenotaph, good as new, that he ignored as he would his own grandparents. On the façade of the Irving Trust, between window and concavity, dirt had washed a secondary streamlining that made the whole building flow upward, in a movement beyond what the builders had planned. At its base, the nubbins of the gravestones were not downed, but seemingly flowed into the ground and up again. Before the small thumb-push of these, the tower flattened and fell back, eternally falling away. Facing this optic, he often thought of his work as the documentation of what was always in the air in every century—of the movement that was not planned.
He thought of his work now with the gratitude of a man who had
found
it, his narrow escape up into that vital air which both encompassed and played above the dead flat of canvas and book. These days, he and Barney talked of air as if they were technicians of it—as indeed they hoped to be. Many were already talking of the art that way, some doing it—this filming of the images “
in
the air”—but they usually attached it, if tenuously, to persons, plots. Though he couldn’t always get his intent clear in his own mind as yet, he meant to do this—somehow collectively. He wasn’t sure that his partner saw that. Stretching on his bench, eyeing those stones, he was fairly sure not. Barney, who had been analyzed, wanted to film the conceptions that floated in
his
air. He had an idea for two sequences on the identity sickness of the age, one on a man who knew who he was but couldn’t get the world to believe it, and one, even more familiarly, of the man who didn’t know who—et cetera.
Well, that was Barney’s air, and who was to say whether another man’s was ever passé? But if Barney ever stopped being a rake, long enough to live with one woman for instance, he might come up against such an intenseness of identity as might give him pause, enough to wonder whether even this age, unless it lost its woman altogether—et cetera. Women had so much of it, this collective identity, that it was a constant trouble to them to get outside it, a question to him whether they ever could. Liz’s best work came from inside it, from what she saw in her own navel—all women’s as much as hers. Women saw with difficulty any movement outside it. When one came up against this intensity of theirs, it was wise to duck out for a bit, else a man would fall back, diminished. It was given only to men, perhaps, to stare at the navel of all the world.
Someday, he would want to duck out from Barney, though such was the debt, neither financial nor tangible, he owed him, that he didn’t see how this was ever to come about. For what he wanted to do was not just to film the maggots in the brain of the age, but to record its floating healths as well—even if he had to document the obvious. Maybe even and only to do so. He’d even thought of doing this historically, for other ages—think of a film
The Fifteenth-Century Air
. And here Barney, for whom only the present was chic, who was as much a man of it as a robot was, would be altogether out of it. He himself would have to learn so much, would have to brood. He brooded. And now—it was time—he wanted to go home.
Stretching himself, he rose and left without risking a backward glance, always reluctant to leave this seminal place, wondering whether it would be so next time. For if the rumen he chewed there was only graveyard thought of a kind men had been having for hundreds of years, he rather liked fitting into that groove. Far back in the mind, it was a comfort to have some assignation with permanence, at least an attempted one. He had no idea why he did not go home for this sensation, as he would have done in the early days of his marriage, when all the romantic thrust and blaze of things-to-come lay behind his own door. Now the daily, once outside it, lay behind. He was in no sense out of sorts with the warm, tender certainties guarded by that door, but opening it now meant coming
out
of the heat of things into the cool, into the place where all he loved and would defend was still gathered—but where he no longer possessed his own singleness. Back there, in that still eddy in the streets, was a strangeness in the midst of which he could brood. Sitting on that bench, he saw himself pictorially, an ocean swimmer out beyond the breakers, steady, not lost, his back to the beach that was home, treading water in the regular, pointed rises of the sea. So he had taken to going there now and then, either straight from home or on the way toward it, never telling anyone, always returning to his own door refreshed—as by a swim in that singleness.
When he came home, the bliss of ordinary evening had settled in there also. They ate in quiet. It was not necessary to say aloud that they were not going to the party. It existed tonight so that he and she might draw together against it; this was what friends were finally for. When he took her in his arms, the child, not quite asleep yet, lay looking at them, its eyelids blinking down and opening wide again, like a great doll they had bought themselves. A time would come, they were forward-minded enough to know, when they could no longer reveal themselves so before her, but now they stood there naked, their backs to her. Elizabeth’s hair was long again on her shoulders. In the mirrors of themselves, they saw themselves the same as always. It seemed to them that they had everything. They had not moved an inch.