Ex-wifePart 15
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Part 15
I did tell Kenneth about Peter, not in one evening, but over many evenings. He could not help me. I could not help him when he talked of that girl dancing in the moonlight of a garden in Algiers. But we were curiously happy together.
He had a little money; enough, he said, to last his lifetime, an inheritance from an uncle who seemed to have felt that Hungarian dancers are among men’s inescapable destinies.
He spent it on theatres and the merrier night-clubs. He went to every new moving picture from Germany, and was fascinated by the technique of their photography. That was a single interest surviving from the four years he had dreamed, between the dancer’s kisses and their consequences, of directing a moving picture that would be a really significant contribution to modern art.
So near the end of dealing with things significant or not, done with ambition and desire, he was sometimes completely gay.
Then we went to Harlem. Not the Harlem of the big Negro cabarets frequented by whites, cabarets notable principally for good orchestras, indifferent chow mein, a carefully sinister atmosphere, and a general air of everyone self-conscious except those who are so drunk they should go home, but the Harlem of the little unpretentious dance halls.
There, the very few white people who enter are ignored more or less, are given service no better and sometimes slightly worse than the service given negroes. Whites are not particularly wanted. But, if they are unobtrusive, they can travel a thousand miles south in latitude and as many years back in time, while a bass drummer remembers his ancestors who rubbed the tomtoms calling the tribes to war, and a girl dancer struts muscles no European woman’s used since Rome was old.
There, Kenneth woke to animation over absinthe, and discoursed on Stravinsky’s music or Mussolini’s future, the style of Marcel Proust, or the eyes of his lost dancer, or the meaning of love and death.
He bought his absinthe from an Italian boat. For a long time, he would not let me drink it. Then one night, with him, across a theatre lobby I saw Peter and Judith, looking happy, looking absorbed in each other, not seeing me. Kenneth watched my face change.
That night, and on rare nights after, he gave me absinthe. At first, he was dubious as to whether I was a type that would react happily to it. I was.
Drinking it, I could summon to life and warmth days, incidents, moments out of other years when Peter loved me. I could go farther back, and summon the look and the voice and the laughter of Roger. Even live again the gay breathlessness of tobogganing, and the exciting feeling of skating along a shining river as the stars came out, while that child who I had been knew guiltily that she should have started home an hour before.
Sipping slowly, slowly, watching Kenneth’s gold head droop above his glass, listening to saxophones and drums and shouting of dancers that seemed very far away, there was neither pain nor regret nor weariness. I sat wrapped in peace as in a Spanish shawl.
Kenneth asked me to promise not to drink absinthe except with him; a long time afterward he asked me never to drink absinthe at all, because I was not as nearly freed from life as he.
I never have, since.
Besides Nathaniel and Kenneth, there was Bill. On a night soon after I went to live with Lucia, a night when nothing was happening, Lucia said, “Let’s summon Bill.”
“What is it,” I said, “a bootlegger?”
“It’s a gentleman of the old school, darling, and a great help in small doses.” She telephoned the Racquet club.
In ten minutes Bill appeared, with Scotch and soda and Racquet club cigarettes, and three medium grade club stories he told before he had his coat off.
When he looked at me, he said, “Lord, you remind me of a woman I knew in Honolulu in 1906. Damn nice woman too, she was.” He sighed, gustily, sat down, and talked to us about how he made gin, where he bought Scotch, how far and how fast he had driven through Rhode Island the Sunday before, the condition of the stock market, and how pretty we both were.
He was bald and pink-cheeked as a baby, had a smile that must have been irresistible in 1906 and thereabouts, and manners as nice as his manicured hands.
After an hour, Lucia stifled a yawn. He got up, kissed us both matter-of-factly, thanked us for letting him call, and trotted off.
“It’s all right, but I don’t see exactly why—” I began.
“Oh, he’s as comfortable occasionally, as an old rocking chair,” said Lucia. “There’s a man who never got lost among the nuances, for he wouldn’t know a nuance if he saw it. His life’s been good wine and good food and a good-sized quota of pretty women, and the code of a gentleman of his time, defined as paying his card debts, carrying his drinks well, and never letting his wife and his current mistress meet.”
“What would he do if you began to talk to him about the single standard—or the single tax for that matter?”
“Pat me on the head, and say a girl as pretty as I shouldn’t bother her head with nonsense. If I kept on, he’d go to sleep. Bill’s grand and healthy and simple.”
“What does he think about modern women?”
“Never heard of ’em. Thinks women are three sorts, the women one marries and keeps, the women who should have got married and kept, but gummed their chances somehow, and the women one takes to bed for a night and pays well.”
“Is he ever interesting?”
“Yes, he was being up to date tonight to impress you, that’s why he was so awful. Take him back thirty years, and get him to tell you how the young bloods rode to the Brevoort Sunday mornings, and tied their horses outside while they breakfasted on a magnum of champagne and a beefsteak apiece. On things like that he’s good.”
In time Bill told me that story. He told me also the story of the woman in Honolulu in 1906; also of a Chinese girl he bought in Shanghai, in the course of that trip to the Orient that summed up far horizons for him. “You know,” he said of her, “she couldn’t speak a word of English, yet I felt always she was the best-bred woman I’d ever met in my life.”
Some men at sixty are the total of experiences had and philosophies considered. Bill was the total of recollected meals and wine, and of women kissed. Now, contentedly, he surveyed other people’s youth.
Among complex and tiring and tired men, he was solace to the heart, asking no more of me or Lucia or any woman, than that she be pretty, and speak in a “lady’s” voice.
Nathaniel, Kenneth and Bill were my three friends. Stepan was a man who hated me.
He was handsome, if you like the heavy-jowled, close-clipped black-moustached type, that is so stockily built it looks lumbering, but walks, disconcertingly, like a cat. He was a Russian, obviously—Russian Jew, perhaps. His last name was not revelatory, neither was he. I heard that he had a good deal of money—he was seen about at theatres and good restaurants and the more conglomerate parties.
I met him at one of those. He was quite drunk, but that was not apparent as he circulated about a room full of guests. He was introduced, danced with me in a manner too intimate, but difficult to protest against, and took me into an empty room adjoining, on the pretense of finding cigarettes.
There, with no preliminaries, he enclosed me in arms that felt strong as an ape’s, kissed my shoulders, and said, “You were made to my measure. You’re going home with me tonight.”
I said, “How do you get asked to places anyway? I suppose you bribe the butler to let you in, and trust that the hostess will remember your face, without remembering that she saw it in some inferior speakeasy.”
“Don’t underrate me, stupidly,” he said. “I am cosmopolitan. I have no illusions about you American women with your pretense of superiority. Like any women, you have one function. What do you make a month . . . in your silly job? Two hundred dollars? Three hundred dollars? I will pay you that. I can pay for my satisfactions. Get your wraps.”
“I know now,” I said, “what they mean by ‘scratch a Slav and find a Tartar.’” And then I wished I had not said that, for it flicked something in him, and he regarded me with such hate in his eyes I was frightened.
A man and a girl came in looking for privacy. I walked past Stepan and said, softly, “If we meet in some theatre lobby, please don’t bother to bow,” and found Lucia.
Later that night he came to me for an instant, while I was waiting for the men who were taking us home. “You will come with me, I am very sure,” he said, “but, perhaps not this week.”
Thereafter, he watched me, on the occasional evenings when we met.
I thought him absurdly melodramatic; forgot him when he was not present; and tried to ignore him, when he was. Yet, he affected me for months with a sense of uneasiness.
Then, one night, a man named Henry decided to devote himself to me. I had met Henry a dozen times. People told unpleasant stories about him, to the effect that he had been kept by a succession of women approaching dowagerdom, while he was in process of writing a novel still unfinished. He was a pretty-faced, curly haired blond boy, with something rather tragic underlying the obvious weakness of his mouth and hands.
On the evening when I noticed him following me about like a helpless sort of pup in search of ownership, I was feeling very tired. I had an especially trying week at the office. Nat was on Long Island, and Kenneth had vanished on one of his occasional three-day absinthe binges.
Henry progressed to: “You are so warm and clean-looking, and young. You can’t imagine how it helps me to talk to you.”
That was average inanity, yet he was the sort of young man most women would pity. That trait must have been very useful to him, on many occasions beside this.
“I’m staying alone in a friend’s apartment for the week-end,” he said. “If you would come there, for an hour—just let me talk to you, it would be kindness more than you could guess.”
I was appallingly tired and thought he was innocuous, and went. At the door of a rather magnificent apartment on Madison Avenue, it occurred to me that Henry was curiously nervous. I wondered if he expected either a telephone call or a personal descent by some woman or other; decided that if it happened, at the worst it could only result in an amusing tale to tell Lucia, and took off my coat and hat.
I laid my gloves and purse on a desk, glanced down, and was confronted by a snapshot of this man Henry, and Stepan. I felt as if a little cold wind had blown, suddenly, across the back of my neck.
“Is this Stepan’s apartment by any chance?”
“Yes, he’s gone to Chicago for two or three days.”
I wanted to go home, instantly. I thought then, that I was being silly. Ultimately I stayed with this man Henry. Because he had said: “If I could hold someone clean and strong and young in my arms, I believe it would make me feel clean and strong and young, again.”
No one was any good for me. There arose, occasionally, the desire to be good for someone.
I woke, to find the bed empty beside me; thought Henry had gone to get himself a drink; and slept again. I woke to strong arms around me, a mouth kissing mine, a horrible hard voice saying, “It’s just Stepan, don’t be frightened, lie still.” He put a heavy hand across my mouth.
I thought I should die of terror in the dark. I bit his hand, I struggled. In the end I lay still.
He brought me some brandy. I blinked at him in the light. He was wearing a red velvet robe with ermine on it, and I thought that he had bought it among the bloody loot of some old-regime Russian palace, and it made him more dreadful than he was.
“Now we can talk,” he said. He talked. “You young women think you can be, in the American phrase ‘hard-boiled.’ You don’t know what ‘hard-boiled’ means. I do.”
I did not answer him.
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