Authors: Hortense Calisher
“Rice!” said the uncle-by-marriage, from the other end. “Whassama no rice?”
Mrs. Jacobson sent him a smile. Parents and children, she told herself, were always strangers in the end of course, but staring now at the daughter who felt herself so original, she had an awful sense that it was the school that had made Elizabeth, the newspapers, all the Tini-books, Tini-records she had been fed with, to whom, along with her schoolmates, she had been ceded up. Whereas, whatever the dark plague-spots in Margot’s own make-up, the influences that had molded her had at least
seemed
personal—a dark dowry which the college, where she had been a run-of-the-mill fine arts major, had subverted perhaps, but could not change. She could even see how her own parents, in their simple, Dutch-interior fanaticisms, had been that very middle class whose next or next generation would bring its scrupulosities to art. Hence Elizabeth, who was a sculptor—who was not “going to be” or “wanting to be,” but with the confidence she had been molded toward, had studied it, had picked it; at not yet twenty, therefore
was
. Hence Elizabeth, to whom her in-between parents had given “everything” precisely because they could not afford to—including the right to call them unspiritual.
Mrs. Jacobson hid the hand holding the box in her lap. Now that she could see their lives as clearly as two heads seen enclosed in the lens of a raindrop, she could see too how stupid it was—that frilled, heart-shaped replica—for a child brought up on mobiles.
“’Bye, Mums.”
At least Elizabeth had not made use of her usual, detached “Mother.” Mrs. Jacobson put her arms up to her daughter; the box fell. At her side, Mr. Pagani, leaning carefully, his leaky heart a chalice, picked up the box and set it on the table beside his own. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that David, an affectionate boy, motherless since birth, had put both hands on his father’s shoulders. Dropping her arms, she let one fall so that the nearer box was pushed directly under Elizabeth’s gaze; there was no doubt that she saw it. Take it, her mother said silently. Instead, Elizabeth joined hands with her husband. “Good-bye, Mother.”
At the door, the couple turned, odd pair in their un-bridal clothes, hands still joined against the festive enemies behind them. Before turning away again, the boy waved with his free one. The avenue sun came through the open door, enveloping them in its aura as they paused. Behind them, the air in the room darkened to plum, as if particles of its own plush had gathered to take the place of the rice which had not been thrown. A lozenge of yellow fallen across the hotel carpet barred their way. They stepped over it, and were gone.
In the room behind, people leaned back, guests shortly to be on their way, but—now that the couple themselves were gone like a symptom—able to dream for a moment, hypochondriacs all fixed on the same ailment, of a world that was still in health. Each secretly wondered, also, how the night would be for this generation. The bride’s mother was crying, but this too was now appropriate. “She’ll see!” she said fiercely. She’ll see what life is, Margot said to herself, through the tears which could not bear that she should.
Her neighbor leaned toward her, with the care of a man whose disease has already been confirmed. “Dine with me, Mrs. Jacobson—Margot,” said Mr. Pagani.
Outside, the couple walked on past the Square without speaking, unlinking arms after the first curb. They could afford not to touch, having so much else in which they were joined. It was some blocks before either of them spoke.
“Brr-r-r,” Elizabeth said. Their pace continued even.
After half a block or so, David answered. “Brrrrr-r.” This was their only comment on the wedding.
At the subway entrance, Elizabeth suddenly halted under the kiosk, tossed back her hair and smiled at him; swinging her book-bag for her, he smiled back. Serious again, they tripped down the stairs together, matching their steps in a rhythm of threes.
They got out at Spring Street.
Above them, a liverish warehouse, tall for these parts, converged to a sharp point at the street’s corner. Modeled on the Flatiron Building, once offices perhaps and once stone, its cornices hung now on what seemed the softly compressed grime of the city itself. Its triangular shape made it a crossways, excited up from the pounded dust of the nearby machine shops, reared above other low, long-lying stretches housing nail oil, tanners, ink. In its shadow, the air was snuff, the passers-by eternally mulatto. Passengers from uptown rose out of the ground here, smelled the labor-sweat at once, and said to themselves, “This is the part where things are made; this is real.” And now once again, as the couple looked at it, they joined hands. From far off, perhaps in the heart of the financial district, a carillon struck. Under its spreading bands of iron Victorian sound, they walked slower, faces illumined, as if down an aisle.
To get to their entrance, one had only to go round the side of the building past two stores not much more than counters set diagonally in its point, a cigar store huddled under its broad
LA PRIMADORA,
and a lunch stall from which came the familiar short-order smell of raw cookery bubbled in tallow—both 9
P.M.
oases in a district where curfew came around five. This meant, as Elizabeth, who had found the place, had pointed out, the coziness of late packs of cigarettes, last-minute cartons of milk, and a telephone. All was quiet now to their turning key. Their entrance was private, after five.
The loft itself was four stories up, exactly in the center of the building. Light came through a small hole in its door, from which the tenant before them, a painter like David, must have removed the heavy Yale lock; they quite understood his taking it. A gaunt boy, evicted by the city marshal for nonpayment of the $47 rent, he had found an even cheaper place for which he would not pay either. With the collusion of the rent laws, this was the way he lived, posing as model at the League for artists whose work he would not even spit on, doing his own on brown paper or cardboard, with samples of deck paint, or a rare gallon of the casein for which he claimed to know the exact limits and nuances of water dilution. “Going to write a book on it,
Secrets of the Old Masters
,” he had smiled, whistling through the gap left by four or five missing uppers—ceded to art, for their admiration—when he learned of David’s part-time income from photography and allowance from his father.
His
father, a banker, gave him nothing. And now, with the same admiration, they quite understood about the lock; he meant to sell it. His valuables, like theirs, could not be stolen.
“See, there’s still light.” She spoke in awe, her hand still in his, before they pushed in the door.
The room, some forty-five feet at its far base, converged steadily toward them, narrowing to an apex, little wider than its door, whose point seemed to pass through their breasts, leaving these lightly pinked, and on to the other side. David gave her a pat forward, but she stayed as she was, her arm around his waist, fixing in her mind forever the room as it now was, before clutter. Windows lined the three walls, interspersed with spade-shaped outcroppings that shafted to the factory-high tin ceiling. Under a torn patina of plaster held up by remnant Sanitex, repatched paint, the dank wood floor looked almost as wise as earth. To their left, water dripped into a sink from a single tap, flanked by a toilet in a half-open stall and a laocoön of pipes tipped with a butterfly cock that might once have meant gas.
“Ten of them,” she said, waving at the windows. “One, two three, four. Five six seven. Eight nine ten. Ten!” Some trick of the late afternoon, poised in that air, sent the light through the narrow factory windows as if they were clerestory. Here were all her things. In a pile at the far corner, their possessions announced themselves like the signature at the bottom of a canvas—an old camp bedroll of David’s, his worn carry-all marked
NORTH-WESTERN AIRLINES
, her old cloth hatbox from college, with two of its rubberized initials gone. She intended never to make her possessions her only signature on life. Space lay in the sharp room like a weapon, barred with light. She leaned her breast on both. All her things were here.
David gave her a pat on the backside. Looking down at the threshold, she stepped over it, in the new way, into her new condition, and stood there bemused.
“My God. A home away from home.” Peering into the book-bag, he set on the floor, one by one, a small Genoa salami, a plastic bag of the long rolls used for hero sandwiches, a round red-and-white tin of Dutch chocolate, and a Manila bag from which he drew a bunch of Malagas, slightly crushed. He held these high over his head, in the bacchante position, before he replaced them. “Don’t see how the American woman does it! Between facials, too!”
She grinned at him. He had backed her up in her refusal to do anything bridal. But other times, they had shopped together, on their way to the borrowed places, strange rooms. She was embarrassed at having been caught so soon in the role of domestic forethought—and proud. “I wasn’t sure—what we could get down here.”
“And what’s this, Madam X?” He held up a parcel which, from its shape and gurgle, could be a bottle only. He raised one eyebrow, sending his heavy glasses sliding down his nose. Many of his gestures were still the exaggerated ones of a high school boy at a party, under them the sweet awkwardness of the motherless one, and though she meant never to mother, she loved this circumstance. She could see he was really astonished, though. Beer was their drink, their crowd’s drink. Whisky was for the arrived.
“Surprise. No—omen.”
When it was unwrapped, his exploding laughter touched off hers. Only last week, David’s photographer friend and employer had taken them to a party where the guests, in their late twenties or early thirties, were already one or two rungs up—painters who had been shown in groups, the playwright and cast of a production in rehearsal in a downtown church, two boys whose non-objective film had been shown at Cannes. The hosts themselves, owners of a “studio” whose white fur rugs and Nubian concert grands already had an old-fashioned nineteen-fortyish solidity, were even older—two jazz pianists who earned, and were ignored. In the talk of their guests, reassuringly bull-session, art still predominated over money, but their heroes, no longer the great, dim figures of the past over whom David’s crowd brooded, were those more touchable greats who were alive to be met and sometimes had been, and their judgments, no longer ranging with the imprecise passion of the unpublished or unshown, had the consanguinity of what the talkers felt themselves about to be—the important flying wedge of the almost present. They were what David and Elizabeth’s crowd might be five years from now. And most of them had been drinking a cheap brand of domestic crème de menthe that must be this year’s
syrop du jour
at the studios of those still blown by the absinthe-colored winds of youth, not yet rich or dull enough for whisky—the brand that was in the bottle here.
Above the bottle, their smiles met in the shrewdest sympathy, like two children so precocious that, trapped in a roomful of adult poses, they could catch themselves in the mutual act of adopting one. Above the smile, their eyes met in a vow more serious. They knew the difference. On the
qui vive
brink of life, they would carry forward what was uniquely theirs. They knew the difference between the artificial and the real.
“Want some?” he said aloud.
“Mmmm-mm. Too full of champagne.” Her lips made a puritan moue of the word, but that life was already behind her. She walked past the toilet stall. “Have to get a door on it. Salvation Army, maybe, when we get the furniture.” She knelt, peering under the basin. Her voice came, muffled. “Oh, look. He’s left us a present. Some t.p.”
“Some
what
?” He held the half unwound bedroll in front of him.
Bending over had made her face pink. “Sorry. A Margot expression. Toilet paper, of course.”
“Of course. Takes marriage to teach a man the real facts of life.” He thought this such a subtle inversion that his glasses slid all the way down, but she had already turned away.
“And oh look—he’s left us a painting.”
“Canvas?” he said thriftily, his back to her. Into the room’s one light-socket, which hung bulbless on a long wire from the ceiling over their bed-corner, he fitted a double socket into which he plugged the extension cord that led to the record player.
“No, glass. Guess it’s just a palette, really.”
He took it from her, a sheet of cheap windowpane, encrusted with swirls of color. “Yeah, I guess.” He held it at arm’s length, screwing up an eye, hamming it. “
Ah-hah
. Upside down, Miss J., that’s the test.” She giggled. Clearly the thing had no axis. “See,” he said, encouraged, “how it holds, how it ve-ry def-initely holds. Influence, early—” He peered closer. “By God, no. You know what this is? Honey, this is the newest. This paint hasn’t been dripped, or even thrown.” He took his glasses off, knowing she knew he saw almost nothing that way. “It’s been
fed
on. By one of those intravenous feeders.” He put the glasses on again. “You got a valuable find here, Mrs. Pagani.”
The expression on her face was obscure to him. Not the disapproving sharpness of a few hours ago, the sour, assured masque that he’d learned to recognize in their earliest dates, even surprising her to laughter by saying, once they were down in the street, “Still got your house-face on, Liz. Shift.” Girls had their own brand of the rub between the generations, the latter something he knew less about than most anyway, because of always having been so close with his father, with a father so remarkably knowing and relaxed. He meant to make it up to Liz for that, not to be fatherly, but just for not having had that kind of thing at home.
He rubbed a finger softly over the place on her neck, just over where the Adam’s apple would have been, where she had, unnoticeable except to a mouth, a little tuft of long, silky, almost invisible down, of which she could not be persuaded to be unashamed. A suggestion of his father’s, once over lightly, about women, made him suspect what her look meant. “I know something about you.”