Authors: Hortense Calisher
“What. My moustache?” That was what he had called it. She caught at his finger.
“Nope. Should think you’d recall the day I found
that
out.”
The corners of her mouth were still down, but once again their eyes exchanged glints, like two thieves in congratulation over what they had filched from the general. “What, then?”
“You don’t like to be called Mrs. Pagani. So quick.”
Her burst of laughter was honest, in relief louder than intended. “Silly. Why should I mind that. Half our crowd is.” True enough. More than half the coterie they felt themselves to be forming, some verging toward the professions but most of them with their eyes hot on the arts, were already paired off, most of them legally. It was the other thing that was old-fashioned. Theirs was the van. “Listen,” she said, still hearing her own echo. “Listen how quiet it is. You ever heard the city so quiet? What time is it?”
“Half-past seven.”
In the late-summer evening, the light was still pure but as surely descending, as if it came to them mirrored from a great conflagration somewhere else. The silence up from the trafficless streets, seeping toward them from the deserted building, came to them that way also, not a calm but the uneasy, industrial silence of things that have stopped. Neither wished to be the first to speak. They felt themselves to be the only life beating inside that great shroud.
One of her hands stole into his, hollowing for warmth. She’d been on the point of saying it to him, hadn’t known she was, until now: I don’t like it when you kid about it—about painting. Not that she doubted his seriousness. If he wasn’t as angry as she against what he came from, it was because he didn’t have to be, and not only because of his father, who had once been a painter himself. Obscurely, she felt that his other circumstance—two men keeping house alone—had left him, made him already unordinary enough. He had his whole childhood to show, for difference. But with herself, under all the serene, teacherly reassurances of her gifts, only her anger, harbored like a gift, reassured her. Frightened now by her own thoughts, almost wishing to be back in school where nothing had begun yet, she looked up at him dumbly. Let’s never kid it—ever. Otherwise we shall be the ones to slip—from the van.
“Talk—sounds queer here.” His voice was strained. For no other reason than that, she was as comforted as if she had spoken and he had answered her, explaining what the “it” was that hung over them, showing her the path through the orb of their life to come.
Suddenly he was brisk. “Come on, whyn’t we hang this acquisition of yours, huh? Christen the joint.” Cradling the pane in his arms, he time-stepped the length of the room with it. “A-bmm. A-bmm. A-bmma, bmma, bmm. A-bmma, b-mma, B-MM, bmm—” He stopped, looking down. Somewhere along, he had taken his shoes off. “Hey, this is neat. Hey, listen. This floor
answers
you.” He cocked his head. “Take yours off.”
She did so, but now they no longer needed the soles of their feet to feel the rumble far below, a long anaconda of sound that drew a faint double-bass from the window frames, faded, and was gone.
“Oh. He said we’d only notice it at night. It’s the subway.” She looked at him doubtfully, but his slow head-shake of admiration was honest, if a little absent.
“Neat.” He had drawn close enough to squat on his haunches beside her, placing the palette at a safe distance; then, with one of those lax, elongated changes of posture which made him such an other being to her, he stretched himself at full length on one elbow to regard her, from which he raised himself to rake a palm along the outline of her breast, her hip. “A-bmmm. And a-bmmm. Very neat.” He tugged at the hem of her dress, whose tight tube, catching her knees, prevented her from falling. With a sigh, pretending to walk up her body with his hands, he stood up. They remained so for some moments.
“Excuse me.” He made as if to break away, toward the stall, but murmuring his name, she held onto him. “Mmm?”
“What’s your house at home like?” she said. He had been rooming up here.
“Why bring that up now?” He held her away from him, squinting. “Oh, they warned me,” he said to an audience seated just above her head. “They warned me. And after I’d given her everything. Everything!”
“I never thought of it until now.”
He considered. Built for them when he was about twelve, by an architect crony of his father’s, who had given it a cathedral ceiling, sectional walls that formed a few causeways, a bar-kitchen that swiveled between two of them, and no inside doors anywhere except on the can and on a combination darkroom-studio that was
not
in the basement, it had two Hollywood bathrooms and every known appliance, had never offended or surprised the conventions of its neighbors—or of anybody else, including himself (until recently)—and had cost, much like theirs, about forty-five thousand dollars. Nothing in it was irreplaceable; everything in it worked, and out of this it had achieved a sort of character—it was a house to be ignored. Women envied it, verbally. His father said that none of them would be able to leave it as it was for more than a week. Because he himself had lived in it so long, if he wasn’t very careful now to leave its remembered corners unpoked by too exploratory a finger, he might find out that he was very fond of it. Under her round gaze, so faithfully expectant beneath that swamp-angel hair, he rejected it. “Oh—it’s just—a package.”
She nodded gravely.
“Excuse me,” he said again, and made for the toilet-stall.
Behind him, she waited with interest for that basic sound, made by a man, which she happened never to have heard, certainly not in her parents’ house. Even the borrowed flats had had bathrooms. But he was being very delicate, perhaps waiting for her to move off. She did so. Kneeling over their pile of goods, she wondered whether to plug in the record player, and giggled; they weren’t going to be able to do that every time. Crouched in the growing shadow-play, watching, down the long marvel of the room, the gradual drama of any room that was bare, she wished it that way forever.
“Jesus, that guy had hidden depths.” He was still in the stall. “Come look.”
“Feelthy pictures?” She came to look over his shoulder. The two wallboard sides of the stall were unmarked, even clean. He moved aside. The toilet bowl was set directly under one of the windows looking out on a building opposite—there was no third side. Vaguely she recalled that. But now, shielding the window as far up as it could, a heavy white shower curtain hung there, its thick miracle fabric shining in regal folds. Obviously it was very expensive—the best. A chromium expansion rod held it, through rings of silvered glass which matched a broad border-design that glimmered luxuriously in the twilight—a silver Greek-key scroll.
“Something, isn’t it!” he said. “Suppose he was a queer? And we thought he took the lock because he needed it.”
“He did. Oh he did!” she cried, so passionately that he stared at her. She thought she would never get the words out. They came in a wail. “Why does
she
always have to do it? Why does she have to
follow
me!”
“Oh.” Now he could see that there was still a ticket on the curtain, as if the giver were saying humbly: You can take it back, you know—I’m only suggesting. “She means well,” he said.
“Oh, I know what she means,” said the girl. “She means to start us off right. Her way.” She reached for the curtain, to tear it down.
“Come on now,” he said. “Come
on
.” He held her wrists pinioned behind her. “After all—it serves a purpose.”
She bent her head sullenly. “She must have done it yesterday. That’s the only day I didn’t come here.” She kissed his breast with small kisses. “I came every day, you didn’t know that, did you. Just to look.”
Raising her head, she felt his answering warmth, wanting both to be and not to be a child for him. Why should he take
her
side. She’d be here right now, between us if she could, saying “Elizabeth! Keep your legs together!” But he was romantic about mothers, women in general, always discomfited by the shock-value lingo Liz herself had picked up in school. “Don’t talk like that!” he would say in answer, “she did you a good turn, then. That’s why I noticed you, the day I fell for you. Sitting there in life-class, hanging on to your pencil like a teaspoon.” It had been her first life-class.
But you’re the one who’s shyest when we’re naked, she thought—and said none of any of this.
He had dropped his arms, looking up. “You happen to notice any light bulbs then, around this place?”
She clapped a hand over her mouth, shaking her head. In the spectral instant before dark, she could just see him. “Maybe—there’ll be a moon.”
“My little housewife.”
She could hear him smiling. All that silent dialogue, with him right in the room there—she had never done that before. And he had not heard her. She took his hand across a distance.
“Watch out for that glass.” The dark made them whisper. In the far corner, the pile of goods, as they picked their way to it, looked like an oasis. They settled themselves in its circle like people at a picnic ranging themselves against the wild. He made a lap for her, crossing his legs almost in the lotus position, and she curled there, as was their custom. They sat for some minutes that way, regarding the view.
“Tell me what you saw,” he said, “when you came and looked.”
“Oh—.” She had seen that the room’s shape had its drawbacks, and had shifted her glance—to the windows. She had shied from the list in her purse, feeling the sudden burden of a taste whose judgments were still mostly negative, and had fixed her gaze on the floor, in whose timeworn blend all possibilities had already drowned themselves. “This!” she said fiercely.
“This.”
After a while, he reached over and plugged in the record player. A disc already on it began to revolve, one of the old, fake records of the Forties they were collecting. Haitian drumbeat eddied through the room, enlarged by its empty sounding board. He rapped a heel-and-hand rhythm to it. She matched a body-rhythm to it, in the crook of his arm. “A—ten!” he sang. “And a tennah ten. Ten stone windows in de
mar
-ket AND. And a one,
one
door.”
“And a
five
,” she sang. “A five, and. And a five. And-a
five
stone chimneys in de market. And a ONE—
one
door.” He turned up the player until it thundered, dragged her to her feet, and stamping and shuffling, bumping hilarity like a beanbag between them, they danced to the end. In the silence, formal as a couple at a ball going back to their chairs, they returned to their spot on the floor and rewound themselves. Whatever waited for them, past lovemaking, not even to be delayed by it, was still there.
“Not many in town who can afford to do that,” he said conversationally.
“Not many with five chimneys, either.”
“Considering the cost of firewood—” he said, “we’ll have to burn rather brightly.”
“You talk like a householder.”
They were silent again.
“Why are we talking like that!” said the girl. “You know. Like in a drawing-room comedy. Repartee. We been doing it on and off since we got here.”
“I understand it’s the customary thing. For the first two weeks.”
She had to laugh. “There, though. See?”
“After all…” she said. “Isn’t as if we’d never—been together before.”
“No,” he said. “No.”
Entwined together as they were, his hands at her breasts, his mouth on her ear, they sat stiffly as idols. No—his voice had just not added—but not here. They both had heard it. Certain intelligences were closing off forever, others rising—and it was the room that caused it. This room, that they themselves had chosen and in bright of day would choose again, held something inimical to them. Something anti-intelligent lay there. Smart as they were, knew themselves to be, the room was a lair of attitudes not yet encountered nor imagined—and they were already inside it. They themselves were what was couched in the lair.
“Let’s—only whisper again,” said the girl.
He was asleep when the moon rose in the third window. In the winters, where would it rise? At the thought of this, of his always falling asleep first, leaving her to wake alone to this islanded silence, she tried to weep, meaning to wake him with her wet face, call him back to endure with her all the noble frictions of this night. Sleep felled her, one soft blow from a woman’s white boa, in which a final thought frivoled. They couldn’t have drunk from the bottle. They had no corkscrew.
Sometime later he woke, very hungry. Rummaging as noiselessly as he could, he ate some of the sausage, half the bread, none of the chocolate, then, skirting her quiet form, he tiptoed to the stall, rinsing his face afterward under the drip from the faucet. There was no glass. Returning, fully awake, he saw that she lay wholly off the bedroll, spread-eagled in deep sleep, face upturned, on the bare floor. He resettled them, edging the bedroll deep in a corner, bracing the thicker end of it between his back and the brick wall, stretching his feet in front of him. She moved with him, unresisting as a good child still asleep, at the last moment falling dead-weight, her shoulders across his knees, her face again upturned. He wrapped an arm about her, doubled the covering over them both, searched with his other hand for the grapes, found them. One by one he ate them, quenching both his thirst and the night-anxiety he had learned to deal with very early from his father—always a night-prowler, even before his illness. “Insomnia?” his father had answered not long ago, when pressed by a solicitous neighbor. “Treat it like ten o’clock in the morning—tea, logic, work.” Never really didactic, his father’s talk had the compression of one who had reached his conclusions. But as a child, he had known only that if he woke alone, his father, if not elsewhere, would be in the darkroom, whose door, opening behind him, would draw no comment other than, “Hey, Davy, come look at this.”
Well, logic told him now that this loft would barely run to studio space for one plus the living, much less a corner for the darkroom he was ashamed of missing most. He would cede the work-space to Liz, use his friend’s darkroom and paint as he could, careful not to let her see how little this worried him. She was so sure of his painting, far surer than he, reared as he had been in a journeyman closeness to it, with an ability to draw that he’d had since the age of six. She was as sure of him, of what he’d just got past merely liking to do, as he was of her—intensity. Too young yet to have shown, even as far as he, what she might have, it was a dead cert that she would never let go of what she did have. Even in the arrangements of their life, this room, she was not to be deflected, with a purpose against which his agreement seemed merely mild. She meant their very life to be a significant arrangement—of the best. They both meant. Scrabbling in the bag, he found that he had finished the grapes. Neither of them was old enough to show what he had, for that matter. All of their crowd were in the same boat—this was what made them a crowd. They were sure about each
other’s
talents. He and she. The crowd, too. That was the important thing. He found a last, shrunken grape. Some things were taken out of our hands, his father often said, not with any implication that he knew
which
. But Liz would never buy that. It troubled him, not to know whether he did himself.