Textures of Life, page 10
“I saw them in the Soviet bookshop—that kind of frozen place on Lower Fifth, and I had to have them. I think I had a set once, as a kid. I sort of—recognized them. They won’t do for a spice set, really. You can’t see through them.” The voice took him a moment to place. It was the way she spoke to other women.
“I think they’re just fine, just fine,” he said. He shouldn’t have said it twice. She saw so near—without glasses. She saw so much that she confused things. “Anyway, it doesn’t look anything like an apartment. Was there a particular effect you were trying for?” Oh, Christ. “Can I turn around now?”
“No.” Coolly, so that he couldn’t tell which it was the answer to—and about three feet away. She confused him.
“Anyway—it doesn’t look like your mother’s.” Oh—double Christ. “Oh Christ!” he said, turning. “Let’s go to bed.”
She was standing not three feet behind him. Of course she was standing—even in the brown semi-dark, he saw the gold slippers she wore. But she had looped the thick rope about her neck this time. Above it and her black sweater, her face seemed to be hanging, tilted forward, the way a face would be if its neck were permanently bent by a rope that disappeared upward, behind it.
“What the hell…do you think you’re up to!” His voice came out a snarl; he had seared himself. He shook her hard, her and his fury; they were the same. The rope flapped. She went limp, self-careless in his grasp, her face so unchangingly sad, as if any change in it were beyond her. “Say—isn’t it about time—” he said, and of course he had already stopped shaking her. He even heard his own suddenly conspiratorial tone, as he had been hearing himself ever since the guests had gone. This often happened to him, happened between the two of them, after a party or when they had each returned from being with other people—for a while they continued to see themselves as mirrored in others. Often, he could see that she was doing the same—hearing herself—after he had been away the long day with Barney, as if he might be seeing her with Barney’s eyes now, and must be won back. Whatever happened to him, happened to her of course. “Say, I know. It’s about time for your period, isn’t it. You’re just about due.”
“Just—about.” She spoke as if her throat were sore from the rope. “But it’s not that, really not.” As he well knew, she disliked having him think of her as an object swung helplessly on that oestral tide, nor was he ever to baby her for it, or so she always intimated—while she was being. While she was—she had no humor at all. Afterwards, she often discussed very learnedly her own irrationality of the week before, describing how it came upon her, corroborating this from the lore of other girls, and all in the highest intellectual interest, like a bluestocking informing him of the habits of chorines.
But this was not one of those times. For now she fell forward on him, opening his shirt to rub her face there. “I didn’t want it to be done, isn’t that awful. I want to go on doing it instead. I’m not glad like you, I’m sorry.” She raised her face. The tears were sliding down it in utter gravity and quiet. She made no show of them. He’d never seen anybody cry like that, staring—maybe the blind did. He’d never seen her cry at all. “Instead, see?” Her sob was the only sign that hurt was working its way out; her face was almost thoughtful. A tear slid into her mouth, unlocking it. “And so I’m scared.”
“Why Liz. Why Liz, I’ve never seen you cry.”
A storm of quite ordinary tears burst from her. When it was over he still held her, and they were still outside the door.
“You were crying in the strangest way,” he said. “As if you didn’t know quite why.”
“I—do and I don’t,” she said.
“You looked very beautiful though. I’d have liked to have—” Taken a picture. But it was scarcely the thing to say.
She nodded. Gravity crossed her face, then puzzlement, as if she too would have liked to have seen for herself just what had been in that face.
“Imagine, I never saw you cry before. What a woman. And we’ve been married almost a year.”
Almost a year. She didn’t say it aloud.
They stood regarding it, the tide that swung them both.
“You should’ve taken a picture,” she said, but there was no malice in it. She waltzed away from him, only to show that things were sunny now. “And well hang bells on all the ropes, when it’s a year. Liz Pagani, housewife and interior decorator, hung by her own rooftree.”
“No more of that.” He held the door. “In!” He patted her fanny. “Bed.”
She straight-armed him, locking her fingers behind his neck. “I love you,” she said, conversationally. The role had changed now, and he was to know that, if not quite to what. “You’re the mo-ost under-stand-ing—”
When he leaned into the kiss, her hand came up behind them, but this time, extending the noose to include him, she looped the rope around them both. “Cliché, cliché,” he murmured, but loved her for it. She had caught his very thought, and was giving it back to him. Whatever happened to her, happened to him.
In bed, though she was cozy, she still wanted to talk, and he would almost settle for that now. The moment, so tenuous, had passed, exchanged for one in which to hunger briefly for a time when, stronger than anything it depended on, it would not have passed. He punched the pillow and lay back. It would return. Marriage gave that certainty as it took away the other—the pillow in place of the bare floor. From where they lay, he could see the whole joint in the paleness shed from the large pleated-paper globe, on an iron chain, that she had hung from the ceiling. It gave a poor light, but its occasional motion interested him—a shiver from a truck three avenues away, or from an earthquake half across the world?
“I was trying for an effect,” she said, “but for the life of me, I don’t know what.”
Honesty was the role then. “Oh I can tell you. You wanted to bedevil me, until I made you cry. Women often do that. At the end of the month.” He lit a cigarette, in the pleasure of this. Beyond an affair in college, from which no insights had been got or asked, and in fact had ended in less than a month, his sole knowledge of women came from her.
“I didn’t mean on you. And you know it. I meant—” She waved an arm. “This!”
“Oh that. Well I can tell you that too.” He blew smoke luxuriantly. “Women can’t stand a pure globe. They have to—what is that thing!—hand-pleat it.” It was an aphorism worthy of his father. He made note of it, for the next letter. Women can’t stand a pure globe.
She sat up. “You don’t like the lamp?”
Honesty was now basic. Once they had cried. “Like I said before. I don’t really care.”
She made no immediate answer, staring at the long expanse. Then she nodded. “Imagine!” She said it lightly. “Imagine us having a sofa.”
He was so touched at this that he put out the cigarette. She was trying to imagine herself over on his side, look as he was looking.
“Not a real sofa.” His voice soothed. “What’s a sofa you can’t sit on. Only surreal.” A six-foot-long, molded thing, it was covered in some slick black plastic on which a human being couldn’t keep traction; unless he wore asbestos perhaps, inexorably he found himself at the edge. And especially the girls, in the thin, sliding stuffs they wore. He’d taken some angle shots of the crowd, as, two by two or in groups, the sofa’s unease crept over them—like people gradually aware that they were conversing on a raft. “A lot of these plastic things, they aren’t really objects at all. Just ideas for objects.”
He sat up. “Say, I’m going to be able to use those shots I took tonight, say, am I! I haven’t told you yet, what Barney and I are up to, have I.” He kept his voice low, a secret agent for a far power—and that was the way he felt. “Well, come over here.”
Crossing his legs, he made his old place for her; it was harder to do this on a bed. Cradling her from behind, he spoke over her head, drumming up his unseen for her. The light was just right for it, conveniently bad. “It’s hard to say in words, but mainly we want to do a picture about people, mainly…by means of the objects they live through. You’ll never see the people themselves, that is. A man and woman to begin with maybe, later maybe more, as we can handle it. You’ll hear their voices of course, be able to differentiate them that way…see through the camera what the voice is seeing. That’s the only way you’ll know them. Each will be a…vortex, centered in the objects he lives through. Bounded by them. That’s how the viewer will come to know his identity—the character’s. And no character will ever quite know the other one’s vortex. That’ll be the continuity of it, d’yasee? It’ll be like a succession of stills only all the time moving, never really still. God, film is wonderful! The way it’s always moving. Barney and I are agreed on that, we could never work in any other…That’s what kills us both…the way it moves.”
“Now that we—” she cleared her throat, “now that I…have this all set up…I mean to work in stone.”
Above her head, he nodded. “Not that the technique…it’s the old first-person one. Even TV uses it, all the time. But sooner or later, they always pan in to the person, or from him. We won’t. But how you’ll get to know him! Barney says, what we’re really trying to photograph is meanwhile. He wants to call it that. Meanwhile.” He laughed deeply, squeezing her. “It’s new. It’s never been done before.” The words came out as the holy ones they were. “Let Beatty and Dil put that in their—” This was what they all kept themselves ready for, in the van. “Of course…it’ll be something of a tour de force. We wouldn’t want to do more than one that way….” His voice trailed off.
“Smell the spring,” she said. “Today was that first day, you know, windy, but the air just reminds you? I left the window open, you don’t mind?…No, you wouldn’t want to repeat. That’s what I…what I’m so…”
“You don’t mind?” he said. “That I’m keeping the darkroom at Barney’s? It leaves you more…”
“If you lean out the window—” she said. “There’s a little triad of lights down there—two down low, one high.” She said it in the voice for secrets. “I think it’s a boat. They came just after dark. They came just tonight.”
“Yes, you framed the window,” he said. “Yes, I noticed that.” He cradled her gently. Quiet as they sat, a motion beneath, from the bedspring it must be, made him feel as if they were rocking.
“No, I don’t mind,” she said. “I like mine all in one place though, the house and—the other…All my things.”
“It feels so good to tell you,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to let you in on it before this, but you were temporarily so—It’s wonderful always to be able to talk like this. Other men’s wives—even some of the kids tonight, did you notice? To be able to talk together like this. It’s wonderful.”
“Look at that shadow,” she said. “It’s like a palm tree. I’m glad I left that studio wall bare…Oh darling. If we couldn’t talk like this I would die.”
They were silent in tribute.
He chuckled suddenly. “‘Come into the Drawing Room!’ Remember?”
“Sh-hh,” she said. “It is a palm tree. I wonder if it comes every night. I wonder if it’s us…Drawing room?”
“You remember. You said we were talking as if we were in one. On our wedding night. In the old place. We were sitting just like this.”
“Shhh, don’t move,” she said. “We’re in Florida. We’re going to be in Florida here every night!…Oh, were we? No, I don’t.”
“Well, I know damn well I didn’t dream it. You don’t remember your own wedding night?”
“Oh—you moved!” she said. “Oh, it was us. The palm tree…Oh, that night, the public one. No, what I remember is—the first one. In my bedroom, at home. The real one. I remember everything in the world about that.”
So must he, of course. His forefinger traced again the patch of down. But the memory that came of itself, without prodding, was always of the one she called with such disdain the public one, his long night’s vigil. What she remembered best was the drama of her virginity and its loss, the same as any girl who had worn a bridal veil, the same as any girl.
He turned her face up to his. If he’d grown up with a mother, sisters, perhaps he would know for certain whether a woman’s face always looked so plumped and renourished after tears. He turned hers from side to side. Perhaps he would take much more for granted. “You’ve lost your house-face. D’you know that?”
“Have I?” Above her parted lips, her eyes looked back at him; they could be innocent; they could be frightened; they could be knowing. He hadn’t an idea on earth of what they saw. He kissed them. The mattress springs shifted queasily.
“I remember the subway,” she said.
“So do I,” he said, in the greatest relief. “So do I.”
On the same impulse, they lay back. Up on elbow, he regarded her. “Imagine,” he said. “Imagine us, having a bed.”
He put his face down on her stomach. Outside, in this end-of-the-island cove, the diorama of the world crept past them, its furnishings endlessly attitudinized. Inside even the quietest room, by the hint in the lamp chain, from the port-sparkle at a window, in the coil of a mattress, something shifted ground. Only they two stood firm. “We don’t move,” said the calm rise and fall of her navel, and his hands answered, smoothing, “We don’t change.” Only they two stood still, eye to Gargantuan eye. When the phone rang, he was already inside her; they were joined.
They hung rigid, under the affront of it, her neck arched. Once before, interrupted so, they had answered it, spending the rest of the day sheepish and reduced; they could not get back. Don’t answer. But that had been the middle of the afternoon.
“Don’t answer.” Against his chest, her hands closed to fists.
The phone rang and rang; it rang.
“I—can’t—” It was the long-distance ring. “—My father.” By no will of his own, he was already outside her. Shrunken and cold, he stumbled to the windowsill where the phone was.
“California calling. Hold on, New York.”
He already knew the worst, then. His father disliked the telephone, never used it merely for company or sentiment. Mrs. Jacobson called thriftily on Sundays from wherever she might be, or at the coastal dinner hour, as she had last week from San Francisco. It would be Jacques, on that death-call by whose prospect all his own dorm years had been haunted, during which he could always be depended on to run for any insistent floor-call the others ignored—“There goes Pagani again—who’s the girl?” With luck, his father had not been alone.
Across from him, hiked up naked in the bedclothes, she questioned him dumbly and he nodded back. It was the call that, since his marriage, had not so much haunted him. His father would not have had him feel guilty for that, and he did not—only older—in a sudden acknowledgment of the way we all have to live. With luck, a friend would have been with him. With luck, it would be Jacques.
It was Margot.
“Hello? Hello. Hello, David.” Then there was a silence, through he had already said hello and yes. Usually she burbled.
“Yes, Margot?” She had been at the house for the weekend, as she sometimes was. Jacques sometimes drove her down from San Francisco. As luck had it, they both had been with him.
“I—hope it’s not too late—” she said. “I thought—the party’d still be going on.”
“No, they’ve gone.” Even as he said the dull words, a heavy joy stroked him. “You’re in New York!” That’s all it was. She’d flown home.
“No—I’m…still out here.” She paused. “Matter of fact…I’m down at Big Sur. We are.” And she stopped again.
“Oh,” he said. “Yes, Margot. Yes.” The road to the weekend cabin was high over the Pacific and hairpin. He or Jacques had always driven his father there. It was a male place. And she did not drive. But now, she would have thought it a duty, as family—“Margot, please let me talk to—”
“I will. I thought maybe I’d catch Liz, first. And then…she could—I really ought to talk to Liz first—”
“Put Jacques on, will you!” He shouted it.
“Jacques? Why—Jacques’s not here, David. We…I’m alone here. We came down alone. Just—just a minute…I guess I’m no good at this, after all…” She seemed to have left the phone.
He cupped his head in his hand, wondering how best to deal with hysteria three thousand miles away, death that far. There were neighbors down the road there, whose lights were visible, would be. Somehow that image brought home to him how far death was.
“No, she isn’t very good at it. Hello, Dave,” said his father. “How are you?”
“Fa—” He was able to make the right answers, noises, in time. A lifetime with that casual voice now served him well. He was even able to send a reassuring nod across the room to Liz, crouched there. “Fine, Dad.” He cleared his throat. “How are you?”
“Still a night owl. Hope we haven’t—Margot insisted a housewarming was just the time to call you.”
“Sure not. She want to talk to Liz?”
“Actually, not,” said his father. “She just thinks she ought to.” His words brought him almost into the room—his manner of saying, without dash, what often reverberated later as daring; the contrary look of youth given him by his silver hair. Over the very clear connection, his father now made a sound so slight that even the telltale wire could not quite calibrate it as chuckle or sigh, but David could see him as he might be standing, in the way that he himself was unaware of, that perhaps only his son saw—a sturdy enough body, almost too compacted and very slightly alop, carried as a body would be if it were a shield. “I’m no good over the phone,” said his father. “And you’ll get my letter tomorrow. So I’ll be brief.”
He was brief.
Just before he rang off, David roused himself. “Who drove you?”
“What’s that?”
“Who the hell drove you up there?”
“Margot.” This time it was clearly a chuckle. “She learned.”
When he had hung up, he went over and sat on the sofa that could not be sat on. It slid him forward, coolly as a pinball machine, and he let it deposit him on the floor, where he sat with his shanks stretched nakedly in front of him. If he’d had the will, he’d have got up on it again and let it dump him even harder; he needed somebody to douse his head or bang it, or turn him ass-upward, as his father had once done, when he swallowed the parcheesi button in the middle of a game. He sat there.
