Authors: Hortense Calisher
Water—basic hurdle for third sons and frog-princes, harbinger voice for the prettiest long-braided daughter—was what forced them from Spring Street. Broom won’t sweep; water won’t run. They already had their bed and table from the Salvation Army, their white dishes from the Japanese store—plus some tatami mats David had insisted on, and were admittedly handy. Whenever she could, in their sparse buying, she left such choices for him; for whatever came into the household that way she was not to be blamed. They had already had their first mishap, as in all legends more gargantuan with each recital—the night the bookshelves fell down. David, in consultation with the crowd over molly screws and old plaster, had about decided to use bricks. The wall must be used, separated shelves being the same stigma that glass-enclosed ones had been to their parents. The crowd, dropping by, brought in only those presents that were proper to them—a bunch of flowers, a six-pack of beer—nothing to impede. From their own weekly dinner-evenings with Mrs. Jacobson they had brought back only enough of Liz’s winter clothes to do until they built or bought a closet—it was now late October.
Going off to the first of these evenings, Elizabeth had sulked as before a chore; later she welcomed them. For once again over that threshold, she felt the tonic revival of all her antipathies; the house helped her to define what she was against; the doctrine of their own life in the loft—softened under the accidental rhythm of their days like a pure speech come to dwell among cockneys—once again became clear. This happened even though her mother’s protests against it, once so frontal, were no longer dependable; tonight she had not even remarked on Elizabeth’s dusty black leotard and lack of lipstick, and when they now dutifully suggested a return visit on her part, she smiled and said she would wait until they “got it all done.” “Done?” said Elizabeth. “We aren’t
doing
anything!”—and for a moment it was all as of old. Her mother was shortly off with friends who were driving to the Coast and Mexico, on a trip that might extend over the winter. She had several commissions, and thought she might turn these into a business; people were always asking her “where” and “how.” And on the way, they would stop off and see Mr. Pagani, who from his letters to David was back in harness and well enough, at least the same.
“Get old Jacques to take you round San Francisco when you buy,” said David, “don’t just settle for Gump’s. He’s a real scavenger.” And, oddly, it was not Mrs. Jacobson who asked, “Who is Jacques?” but Elizabeth, who had never heard of the old Frenchman, Mr. Pagani’s partner, who for so many years had carried the main load. Mrs. Jacobson was most interested in how he and David’s father had worked that out, but when that subject was over, fell back again, abstracted.
“What do you want to do about the wedding present?” she asked, when they were leaving.
“I wrote the thank-you notes,” said Elizabeth. “
You
keep them.”
“I’ve put them in your closet,” said her mother, smiling equably. “You can always come and get them. There’s some good flat silver, you know. And a steak set.”
“Steak!” said David. He dashed off to the bedroom and came back with both articles. “I’m queer for knives and forks, somehow. Always was.” He brandished them before Elizabeth. “She let me buy two sets in the dime store. We’re forever washing them. When there’s water, that is.” Both his and Elizabeth’s faces clouded over at this, but Mrs. Jacobson, smiling at him, did not take this up either.
Elizabeth went off to her old bedroom, which she hated to enter. Unlike her mother’s domain, there were things here that made her feel small, unsure. Let David and her mother connive together. Unfair as that thought was, its anger was helpful. When she came out, she carried the little wax figures, laid in a carton. “You can throw out the busts,” she said. “They’re no good. Besides, I’m thinking of wood.”
Throwing out anything had always been fighting words with Mrs. Jacobson; now she nodded absently. “That’s nice. And where will you get it—I mean the wood?” She smiled pleasantly at David’s account of the bookshelves; she did the same at her door when they were leaving. She smiled continuously.
In the subway, he set the carton on his knees. Since Liz had her house-face on, he reexamined the figures with interest. The grind and sway of the car made it hard to talk anyway. “So you’re thinking of wood,” he said, when they reached a station. “That’s great.”
“Great!” she flashed out at him, immediately. “What’s great about it? You don’t have to talk like that to me, butter me up. Great!”
“Well, it is.”
“Oh, you don’t have to encourage me. You haven’t started doing anything yet either, remember?”
“So you told her.”
She turned, aghast. It was incredible that he had taken the barb meant for her mother. “You know how I meant that—that we weren’t getting tangled up in—we aren’t, are we? It’s just that we have to get certain things—”
He sighed. “Guess you two shouldn’t see too much of each other. We always quarrel after.”
Her mouth opened in horror. The car moved again before she could answer. To her mind, they had never. That couples sooner or later did, she knew—but to a banging of doors, not come a-creep. Through the sinuous tunnel of sound, she heard again his light, accepting “always”; over the noise, his head, nodding with the car’s movement, seemed to be ratifying it. Three months of living together, and they already had an always; an attitude, creeping upon them, had all but frozen itself in.
When the next station arrived, they did not speak until the doors were almost closed.
“But not with each other. Not really.”
“No.” The car lurched, and he carefully recradled her carton and his bundle. “No.”
They got out at Spring Street. Going up these stairs last week, carrying her clothes, he had suggested the closet be done soon, and she, jealous of the order he had seen at her mother’s and coveted, had scorned both it and him. “I don’t want anything more!” Fearful that she might, she had added, “Nothing!”
Now, at the top, the air was colder, the night crammed with stars. They breathed in the dark, autumn elation. The pyre of the year was burning but they did not mind it; there was so much still to come. Because of his armful, they could not join hands. She touched her cheek against his shoulder. “When we get home, let’s start on the closet.”
He seemed to be smiling, but his glasses remained level. Recently he had discarded that gesture. “Of course. I just didn’t know how much you really cared.”
All the way to their door, she talked of the closet, but once inside, he dropped his bundles, they tossed their clothes after them and made love where they stood, stopping only to turn out the light. They were ashamed of making love in the dark, but the ten curtainless windows, even showing as few human lamps as spied here at this hour, were always too much for them. They always made love when they returned from her mother’s.
It was not until morning that they found the water pressure had given out for good. By nightfall, they had agreed to move. It was easier by night; the sun, pouring into the room like courage, displayed its strange proportions like a confidence man. At night, under the weak light bulb, the scattered coziness of their belongings pasted like collage on the seamy shadows, it was more possible to believe that some nothing-can-be-done or other unnamable had all the time been living with them in a corner—an old circus Hon, shabby but knowing, nudging them now and again with its paw.
“I’ll never forget this place, never!” said Elizabeth, her throat arched Joan-of-Arc against the shadows, so that he could see its patch of down. David, not daring to tell her so, was glad they had been forced to leave. And now they could start again from the beginning.
For some months, it seemed to them that they had. In Mrs. Jacobson’s apartment, an offer to caretake which—while they looked for other quarters—they could scarcely refuse, they were freed at one stroke from what they now saw to be the obsessions of nest-building. Looking at her crowded gallery, they congratulated one another on their small pile of salvage from their false start, on the wisdom of remaining as free. Meanwhile they basked in comforts conveniently not theirs, alternately savaging the house for several Grand Guignol days, then guiltily recleansing it; dining by borrowed candlelight, tumbling hotly in the parental bed, they were children left in command. Mornings, Elizabeth returned to class-work at the League; at off hours, in a corner of the photography studio where he worked, David sometimes painted. Evenings, like any wife to her businessman, she recounted anecdotes of the afternoon’s house-hunting—strange encounters in which the telling all but took precedence over the goal—and when they went to the movies afterward, as she walked at his side, her hair newly cut short, she had the well-brushed, almost burnished neatness of a schoolgirl at her first courting. They were going to the movies continually now, to everything from swollen Hollywood epics to flickering art-kinos, for now that television had siphoned off the tired, the middle-aged and the stupid, the cult of the film could once again be seen as both the youngest art-form and the art-form of the young—taking the same place, in their bohemia of nearly-poets-and-painters, almost-actors, that the record player had had for their fathers—a secondary bowstring which anybody could twang. David and his employer-friend Barney were thinking of making a film.
One night, after a French film on upper Madison Avenue, encountering a couple, the girl of whom had attended Elizabeth’s school, they were persuaded back under the marquee to the banquettes and potted vaudeville geraniums of the “Parisian” coffeehouse operated by the theater out front.
“It’s not really like Paris at all, really,” said Mitzi Halpern, too late remembered as a soft, stupid girl whose smugness had done her almost as well at school as brain. “Saul and I went there on our honeymoon.” She slipped her plump trotter from its glove, on it a marquise sliver of ice. “
That’s
from Paris, ooh no, the
glove
.” Her glance went to Elizabeth’s ringless hand. “Saul’s father gave us the trip, they do business there, Paris.” She tapped a crinkly tan boa worn around her neck like a dog collar, the exact color of her mocha eclair. “This too. He’s in business with his father, Saul.”
The heavy young man at her side smiled at them, as if lulled by the sound of his name, his collar lapped by his porterhouse jowl.
They were furnishing an apartment not far from here, said Mitzi. “Over near Carl Schurz Park where you know, those four-stories, you can still get three-and-a-half for one-sixty-five. That’s where all the young marrieds.” Her husband nodded at David, a boss approving his secretary’s shorthand. Met like this, with the women to do it for them, it was not necessary to speak.
The waitress served them and left, filling the pause that should have been Elizabeth’s turn.
“I adore those earrings,” said Mitzi. “Different but not arty. Not arty—but different. You changed your style since you got—” Her glance strayed from Elizabeth’s ring-finger. “You keeping on with your art work?”
“Mmm,” said Elizabeth, squinting. A minute ago she had even felt glad of not having slouched out to the movies in jeans or tights, as she would have done six months ago. “David and I have a loft,” she said suddenly, “on Spring Street.”
The young man woke up. “Our factory, we got a factory that neighborhood, near Lafayette.” He addressed himself to David. “Benjamin Novik and Sons. Feathers and Bugles.”
“Bugles?”
“Beads. Dress beads. Imported only.”
“On all the ballgowns at Dior this year,” said Mitzi.
The young man made as if to speak, then took out a cigar. Everybody watched while he manipulated it, his wife most of all. They seemed already too substantial a couple to be supported by such airy fancies of bugle and feather, her skin as fat and white as nougat, his neck so prime—yet at the same time like an Aucassin and Nicolette playing roles into whose scope they had yet to grow. At last the cigar puffed. He removed it. “Don’t forget Worth.”
Mitzi stared with dreamy enmity at the blob of whipped cream on her spoon. “I shouldn’t eat you.” She ate. “But Saul and I we’re dead, we went to all the rug houses, his father’s giving us the wall-to-wall.”
All this time, David had been watching Elizabeth. Now he took out a cigarette, tapped it, reversed it, rolled it for dryness. Finally he put it into his screwed-up eye and squinted at her down its length.
“Excuse me, cigar, Mr. Uh—David?”
“No thanks. Pagani.”
“Novik. You doing art novelties down there, Spring Street?”
David lit the cigarette, looking over it at Elizabeth. He blew the smoke to one side. “No. We’re not doing anything. What
are
we doing, Liz?”
Mitzi had turned bright red.
“It’s a living-loft,” said Elizabeth.
“Oh, artists.” He nodded, like a cosmopolite over a word learned in Paris.
“No,” said David, still eyeing Liz. “Matter of fact, I’m in films.”
Mitzi leaned forward quickly. “Simply adorable,” she murmured to Elizabeth’s earrings. “Saul honey, I should get my ears pierced. I mean really. Shouldn’t I?”
For answer, he removed her cake plate and set it in front of himself. The heavy intimacy of years together was already upon them. One could see them years hence, dressing to go out, he pausing absent-mindedly, cigar in teeth, at her bidding, looking out the window, not at her body, while he hooked her undergarment. “Have to watch her like a hawk.” He nibbled comfortably. “No, I
don’t
think. We running like mad to get the house ready for March the big event—she wants her ears pierced. Last week—a poodle.” No older than anyone at the table, he already bore a mantle cast on him from behind, from behind even the flickering image of his munificent father.
“Oh Saul! It doesn’t even
show
yet!” It was like an accent they had both agreed to adopt, which had as swiftly adopted them.
“Might as well get used to it.” His neck shifted in his collar. “We’re expecting, end of March,” he said. “A baby. A child.”
“In March.”
They were truly in chorus now, even to the smiles half hangdog, half smug, in the end suffused with the honest radiance of those who have never had to choose.