Textures of Life, page 15
And this was the sum.
Though the young couple never spoke it aloud, it seemed to both that they now had everything. They saw their way clear to seeing life clear, in just those antitheses they had often glimpsed in the lives of others, and no longer thought of as grooves: the country, the city; leisure, work. On Sunday afternoons, on the last lap of the fifty miles between them and the discovered woods they thought of mystically as theirs, while they mused in the line of traffic that stretched ahead of them to the George Washington Bridge and the city, May nodding in her sling between them or blanketed safe in the back, all fours clutched to her bottle, they often spoke of the logic of someday buying a cottage or camp—terms for what resided in the mind of each as a piece of habitation untethered by price or drains, as mystic a refuge as their forest. They enjoyed a forward sense of this as probable but not yet possible, in the way one savors a night’s anchorage in a place where one would not want to stay forever, taking a double enjoyment in their sense of themselves as being on a temporary plateau but steadily climbing; the angle of incidence that their life was to take, though free and always to be spreading, was set. In time it occurred to them, laughing at themselves incontinently, that they really didn’t have to make these trips on Sunday, like people who worked a week of nine-to-five; thereafter, drawing imperious breaths as they loaded the car, they made it a habit to go on weekdays. After this, whenever they came across similar examples of the freedom which kept them special, they were careful to observe any gestures that went with it, in order to mark the fact that though they lived within the terms of other people, they chose theirs. It was at these times, when people saw them walking with that gait, that they appeared most united—one. Having another child was never voiced even in thought, since their triumvirate was still so ideal—this was one of the terms. But the warmth of people who have everything often overflows into a charitable desire to add to it. So they got a dog. A small tan mongrel, short of leg, long in the tail and utter in faith, it understood them immediately.
The loft was their center; it was their way. As they approached the bridge, in this the third year, the city, hung there on the late blue in its stencils of sunlight, stepped forward to them like their own creation, weighted down at its farther end by that homestead, reached by its ropes, which they had long since come to call—in a gesture forgotten—either the Slip or the Cove. Elsewhere in the city, when they parted from friends or each other, on the steps of the Main Library perhaps, or inside the Modern, meanwhile looking like anybody else—for Elizabeth dressed “uptown” when she went there, and the child was kept a picture by its grandmother—nonchalance thrilled to pleasure as they murmured, “Back at the Slip at six” or “See you kids Thursday, at the Cove.” The wealth of what she had down there often overcame her right in the middle of Lord & Taylor’s; David still saw his own address with awe. Someone told them that it was mentioned in Moby Dick. Though they could not help anticipating the cachet of this at parties, David, always quicker at sensing pomp in himself, usually nullified it—once sending her into stitches by drawling, “Mm-hmmm. That’s where all the young marrieds.” In matter of fact, although, on streets nearby, they once or twice passed couples who resembled themselves enough to merit a second look, no one they knew or had heard of lived within a mile of them—any nearer than the new bohemia of the “East” Village. As they glided down the West Side Highway, under the “Heights” that now belonged to “the Germans” (refugees of thirty years ago, who had nothing to do with the Yorkville of Elizabeth’s parents), past the tired ballpark area of the newest Harlem, they thought of the city, like all New Yorkers, as utterly theirs—Elizabeth for having been born here, and David for having its ichor all the more in the veins because he had come. As evidence of this was the fact that each part of it had for them a social meaning which it took years to know. Impossible for them to live elsewhere than in its context—fish who would die out of these haunts that fed them a unique alga. In its godmotherly waters, even if they personally faulted, the city, friendly old savager of artists, shark-mother, helped them to keep on knowing who they were. This they took for granted.
And impossible to live in it except where they did—now that they had found it. Like any pioneers, they wanted no one else too near them, though there were other areas which by social meaning were right for their friends. On lower Riverside Drive, where the high-windowed towers gave back the gold in blobs and flashes, and one front was caught to a lurid, entire bronze, they exchanged smiles of scorn as they sped by. Here two couples of the crowd had defected to the solid apartments now returning to borderline bourgeois favor—and to all that went with this—baby-carriage mornings for mother, home on the bus for papa, and a half-time maid. Local contexts could not be shrugged off; these molded. If they themselves had not recently become privy to a circle that now seemed home to them, the melting of that first, early crowd would have been more alarming—one pair to the suburbs, two changes of heart (and profession) toward graduate school, two couples last seen grappling with an interest in their commercial jobs. As it was, Elizabeth was often frightened at the thought of it—they had all been so close. David, used to dormitory living, took these severances more stolidly, but she was not sure he saw the real tenor of them—it was not so much that the crowd had melted as the way they had, out of their own intention, back into life at large. Of the originals, only three had remained stalwart, two bachelor painters and a girl doing rather well in off-Broadway theater. They themselves were the sole couple—outside of Beatty and Dil, of course, those two who had moved on to new fringes but still were sometimes to be met and avoided, their experienced hanger’s-on eyes watching, ever more brightly purist, waiting for the Paganis, now that the latter were in the family way, to slide.
Luckily, they themselves could now return the look with some sophistication. The people they saw now, of whom one would never use that adolescent word “crowd”—though they gathered as self-protectively and excluded far more severely—had almost all taken that indefinable step, however small, past intention, into practice. Ah, what a difference, and oh the relief of it, now that they both had done—particularly for Elizabeth. For once David had given up (on which day?) any idea of being a painter, he had stepped forward with the lighthearted confidence of one who pursues his avocation, plus perhaps the confidence of the male—of whom vocation, whatever it may be, is expected. She hadn’t given him a hard time about it, turning it rather more harshly upon herself. For, six months after May’s birth, she still had not started to work again—she was afraid to begin. At times she blamed the school for abetting her too early in her misconception of herself—and saw them all back there, teachers and schoolmates both, expecting things of her, waiting for her to fulfill or fail. Some mornings she was sure she had risen in ardor to a workday that the baby had then eased away from her, piecemeal. Then, slowly it was borne in upon her, like a soundless clap of thunder of which she was not aware until it echoed, that no one (possibly not even David) was really awaiting anything else from her—at least not on the heights of what she demanded of herself. For this, she had no audience. Luckier than David (as some would see it), even in this day and age no other vocation was really expected of her. All her life long she could blame the baby, plead the house.
Strangely enough, once more it was Sonsie who helped her. Even while Sonsie shrank back a trifle, like an alert sponge, before a certain new dryness in Liz, as audience she insisted, she expected, and not for her own vanity. The afternoons went on, less intimate than they had been, teaching Liz something of the help to be drawn from the ignorant, when they admire. When Sonsie left to go “upstate for a time” after a bout with Joe, she brought down a substitute, one of the shy homosexuals who lived in the shrouded loft above the Baileys—who rose at four to cook breakfast for a partner who worked nights, and then was left to himself like a childless wife. A country boy from Georgia, who proved unable to pose but was content to watch her work at something else while he sipped coffee grayed with his tin of “condensed,” he was both fond and deft with children, and liked to sit with May when they went out, exchanging jollities with her until she slept, grateful adjunct of family ways he was not quite loosed from, pleased with his role of senior child.
During this time, Liz worked on studies of the baby in mediums from ink to clay, but the sketches and figures she turned out always kept to a stubborn abstraction, concept babies, genus “infant”—she could never make an identifiable May. She began to tour the museums, their libraries, purchase her books of plates. For the first time, school appeared to her not as a wishing-well or a theater of approval, but as the fountain where the water was. Once a week, she now attended classes in the studio of an old sculptor of Bauhaus days, superannuated but still famous, where she rarely ever saw the master but was exposed to all that really lay before her. To any casual queries as to what she “did,” she could no longer bring herself to say “I’m,” but sometimes, as some half-accidental success quirked from her fingers, she felt an apprehension of joy—she was learning. She was learning of the power to be drawn from her own ignorance. Gathered up, it must be what might make her an artist. It was surely not a power to be wasted on the daily event.
And for closer kinship, they had the cherished company of the people they saw now—whom they were going to see at tonight’s party—who numbered among them several painters who had been shown in groups, the scene-designer and cast of a play shortly to open in an old auditorium in Chelsea, a group of art photographers who were sponsoring a gallery on East Tenth Street, and one whose film short was to be shown next season, at Cannes. Though the entree to this clique had been David’s—whose combination of small works paid for and magnum opus promised had set just the right tone—Liz’s new-found modesty quickly made her the pet of those who had only just acquired their own confidence—and they had no sculptor. And after a while, by a process not unlike the old crowd’s, her familiar presence made her talent assumed. Anyone who was associated with them!—their voices and miens delivered verdicts, exchanged gossip all in the consciousness of who they were; they were the coming ones; they were “next.” Singly none of them could have said how it was achieved. The group had its acknowledged stars; newcomers swiftly learned to live at the same altitude. The effect on a neophyte was just that: first the blood-stir of the sudden climb, then the calm of the view. And in no time, the network of influence, mention, notice—modest as it was—was set going for her. She was encouraged to send work into competition, instructed where.
On opening day of the large, indiscriminate group show where the torso of Sonsie had made its debut, David, escorting the girls to the jammed gallery—two joined storefronts on East Tenth Street—had been lost to them almost at once in the buzz of some confreres from the camera gallery down the line. Liz, fearful of dressing wrong, at the last moment seizing something from a surer time, had worn her wedding dress. Here and there she had seen someone she knew and was nodded to, but everybody had had his back to the work on display, as if by design. Faces were tilted to other faces or bowed deeply into a glass, and one had a constant sense of chins averting, eyes shifting, as if some notable had yet to fill the doorway—or as if the same message for all, from Ganymede the cup-bearer, was still to arrive. She saw all this freshly, now that it was hers. When she saw the torso, she felt her own nakedness. No one was looking at it; no one had ever noticed the lines on its hips except Sonsie, with whom, by this secret, she suddenly felt once more warmly allied. She whispered to her. “I feel as if it’s me,” she said. Sonsie giggled back at her, “Think of how I feel.”
David, just passing, gave them a brotherly leer. “’T’s okay keed,” he said side-of-the-mouth to Sonsie, “they’ll never recognize you. Not in that hat.” The subtlety of this almost overcame them. Stiffening their faces, they gazed devotedly at his back, like younger sisters. Later they saw him leading an unknown man up to that exhibit whose listing Liz for days had carried about with her like water in the ear: Torso, Jacobson, 124. She made Sonsie duck out with her. From the window of an espresso house opposite, they watched the crowd thin while they gorged themselves on cannoli—safe as two housewives conning the passing show from the tearoom at Gimbel’s, delaying their return to the sitter and their collective children. A vengeful delight overtook Liz as she watched people of whom she could have been one now emerging, exposed in the momentary caricatures of leave-taking. At the same time she tasted a present rich as the custard, the rich mixture of the chapter now. “Phonies!” she had said proudly. “What crap!”
Now, outside the building in the Cove—it could have been any day in the week but was Sunday, any day of the last year—they parked the car, went through certain other routine motions, with the silence of sleepwalkers, doomed but serene. She, the child and all the paraphernalia of their day, bottles and baskets and the finds of pinewood or maple to be mused over afterwards, were set down at their door, the child sometimes awake with a cry sent up like a skein of mourning, or on her feet toddling half-forward into sleep again, clutching a drained bunch of flowers. Then David ran to garage the car, which could not be left where it was because of vandals, and was therefore kept, at half the rental of the loft, in the basement of the “development” from which some of the vandals undoubtedly came.
This was a flaw, but like others in the scheme, was no longer regarded. When the loft was entered, if it no longer quite resembled either its exact first self or even their present memory of it when away from it, it now was pliant enough, old enough—as they were—to give way a little, and still stand. In it they no longer felt the presence of that network of intangibles which once had plagued. Its flaws were not to be held against it or even up to the light, any more than the nubbins in cloth of natural fiber were—any more than her own monthly intensities were held against her, or David was held to account for his solitary afternoon walks, on one of which he had now departed. Lightly suspended in the mind of each, what the one did not ask, the other did not notice, no longer was counted against him—it served to keep him separate. Lightly, scarcely yet coddled into being, there was the need for it.
Meanwhile, there were such beauties. As she went about preparing the evening meal, the dog fed, the child beating its spoon on its tray, the word revolved in her mind on a spit of gold and dark manufactured from the autumn effulgence at the windows and the room’s inner shadows, until she had to laugh for it, a riddle to tell him or not to tell him—how is the word “beauty” like a capon basting? In this quiet goodness, for days on end her thoughts gave up their lances, pattering down in a gentle rain of detail. She made toast points, grated cheese, set out capers in a design, a rosette of pimiento, all her senses transliterating; food was affection. The light was cider, as in an old stable, autumn in a bottle, with a dust in it as clean as country ordure, a stone air that filtered up from the marble being filed in the studio below; who would mind this mica air, glitter in corners, dusty pollen of old pianos. It was the fine, hard blue day of the first shiver in the shoulders, the day of the first blanket. The child, fine loin-fruit, was so good; it fed itself, crooning. By the time its father returned, it would be asleep again. She gave it the button-box to play with and sat down, with a shiver of the loins, to brood for him among her happenings, her weave.
On his walk, David as usual went cross-island, on streets narrow enough for the short-girthed carriages of Dutchmen, even, in a forked alley or two, for the long, saturnine ghosts of Indians. A certain habit of thought always accompanied his footsteps, in a way descended, as a man of the present might still flatter himself, from those silent figures whose long, aquiline feet took their intelligences from the ground. As was his habit, he ended up at Trinity churchyard, where he sat on a certain bench against the south wall, from which he could see, over the worn script of the earliest stones, the towering shaft of the Irving Trust.
On weekdays, the place was his seaside, under wave after wave of people. Rarely, he was here on a Sunday. In this deserted, dune air, one could almost hear the centuries architecturally colliding. On the other side of the church, behind the garlanded buttresses at his back, the first quarter of his own had crept for burial, brought up short in one large cenotaph, good as new, that he ignored as he would his own grandparents. On the façade of the Irving Trust, between window and concavity, dirt had washed a secondary streamlining that made the whole building flow upward, in a movement beyond what the builders had planned. At its base, the nubbins of the gravestones were not downed, but seemingly flowed into the ground and up again. Before the small thumb-push of these, the tower flattened and fell back, eternally falling away. Facing this optic, he often thought of his work as the documentation of what was always in the air in every century—of the movement that was not planned.
He thought of his work now with the gratitude of a man who had found it, his narrow escape up into that vital air which both encompassed and played above the dead flat of canvas and book. These days, he and Barney talked of air as if they were technicians of it—as indeed they hoped to be. Many were already talking of the art that way, some doing it—this filming of the images “in the air”—but they usually attached it, if tenuously, to persons, plots. Though he couldn’t always get his intent clear in his own mind as yet, he meant to do this—somehow collectively. He wasn’t sure that his partner saw that. Stretching on his bench, eyeing those stones, he was fairly sure not. Barney, who had been analyzed, wanted to film the conceptions that floated in his air. He had an idea for two sequences on the identity sickness of the age, one on a man who knew who he was but couldn’t get the world to believe it, and one, even more familiarly, of the man who didn’t know who—et cetera.
Well, that was Barney’s air, and who was to say whether another man’s was ever passé? But if Barney ever stopped being a rake, long enough to live with one woman for instance, he might come up against such an intenseness of identity as might give him pause, enough to wonder whether even this age, unless it lost its woman altogether—et cetera. Women had so much of it, this collective identity, that it was a constant trouble to them to get outside it, a question to him whether they ever could. Liz’s best work came from inside it, from what she saw in her own navel—all women’s as much as hers. Women saw with difficulty any movement outside it. When one came up against this intensity of theirs, it was wise to duck out for a bit, else a man would fall back, diminished. It was given only to men, perhaps, to stare at the navel of all the world.
