Chapter II (2)

“Phil was your first husband, was he?” “Yes: he’s my ex,” she said.--She went on, after a moment: “Did you think I was really married to Ray?” “Yes,” I said, “I did.” “I guess a good many people really did. But we weren’t. It was a lucky thing, too: if I’d marriedum, it would have been harder to leavum.” “Did you have a pretty trying time?” I asked. “He wouldn’t let me do anything or go any place. If I went out with anybody else, he’d burn up one of my dresses--he was great on burning things up--I used to tellum that if he’d lived a little longer ago, he’d have been burning witches.--He’d say that he didn’t buy me clothes to have me go out with other men. And then when I did stay home withum, I’d just have to listen to-um read to me out of the _Oxford Book of English Verse_.--Finally, one night I got reckless and stayed out for two days with Pete Bird”--(Pete Bird was the little man with whom I had seen her talking at Ray Coleman’s and in whose company I had found her the night before)--“and when I came back, he wouldn’t let me in, so there was nothing to do but go looping again--I was plastered for a week. Finally Gus Dunbar offered to let me stay here--it was awfully decent ofum and he just did it out of friendliness. He helped me get a job, too. I understand that Myra Busch is telling it around the Village that I’m having a love-affair with Gus--but that’s just absurd--he’s my oldest friend in New York: I knew him back in Pittsburgh. He’s just my yes-man. He lets me sleep in the bed and he sleeps on the couch. And besides, he’s sick!--He’s gone out of town and I’m going to get a good rest. Oh, how I’m going to rest!”

We continued the conversation in a chop-house, with red-and-white checked table-cloths and the smell of a butcher-shop, where very large sour pickles were served with every order, on the side.

“What sort of a fellow is Pete Bird?” I inquired. “Isn’t he more or less of a twirp?” “Well,” she said, “he did pretty well the other night: he spent about a hundred and thirty dollars.” Even allowing for the tremendous prestige which always attached in New York to the spending of large sums of money, I felt a little that she was evading my question, but I didn’t pursue the matter further: I seemed to divine that Pete Bird was the man with whom she had broken her engagement to go to Myra Busch’s that night.

I asked Daisy how she had ever happened to run away with Ray. “I metum in the Ritz Bar in Paris,” she explained. “Phil and I didn’t care anything about each other, by that time--Phil was in love with a French girl. I didn’t resent his having affairs with other women, but he used to give her my clothes.--Besides, I didn’t want to have people saying: ‘That poor little Mrs. Meissner, sitting around crying her eyes out, while her husband goes with other women!’ Besides, Phil and I had just been thrown out of our hotel. Phil had a lot of money when I marriedum, but we spent it all. Ray came along and he seemed to be pretty affluent at that time, and I was so tired of not paying any bills.--I will say about Phil, though, that he did everything with a grand air. Ray would get worried if a bill ran for as much as a week--whereas Phil never thought of paying a bill, even if he had the money. It was funny: when you were with Phil, you felt that you were swell, even though you didn’t have a cent--but when you were with Ray, even though everything was paid for and all the bellboys and everybody tipped, you felt you were only trying to be swell.”

I asked what Phil did. “He was a photographer,” she replied. “Not an ordinary photographer, but one of these super-photographers. He only took a picture about once every two months--he’d charge a hundred and fifty dollars for a sitting. At least that’s what he did when he did anything. He had money--at least, he did till his family wouldn’t givum any more--so he didn’t really have to do anything.--He composed songs, too.--But what he really worked hardest at was getting up practical jokes. He’d spend hours sending out invitations to all the worst bums in Paris, asking them to come to dinner at the house of one of the social leaders of the American colony.” “What happened?” I asked. “Well, they all showed up--all the dope-fiends and deadbeats, and all the old drunken bozos that hang around the bars--all the most undesirable Americans in Paris--and Mrs. Tilford was furious and almost gottum arrested. Then another time, when he had to have lunch with some friends of his family’s from Pittsburgh, he put camphorated oil on the seats of all their chairs--well, camphorated oil makes you feel as if you were freezing--so they all had to sit there at the table with their fannies freezing and not knowing what was the trouble.”

I laughed. “Well, that sort of thing,” she explained, “can get to be pretty tiresome, if you live with it all the time. And I was his wife, so I felt partly responsible. When some guest almost broke his back on a chair that flattened out when you sat in it, I’d feel pretty humiliated.--And then he’d work his gags on me. One day he left a note for me, saying that he’d committed suicide. And I suppose he thought it was a joke when he took half my clothes away and told me that he was sending them to the devastated regions, and then gave ’em to-uz little French twirp!”

We had ordered ginger-ale, and had had some more gin: “You really look marvellous in blue!” I said. She knocked herself under the chin: “That sets me all up,” she said, meeting my gaze without blinking. Then she dropped her eyes and added: “Phil really had a lot of charm, though.”

“What shall we do after dinner?” I asked. “Take me to the movies!” she said, smiling. “I’ve had a yen to see some movies all day: I want to do something restful.--Take me to something funny.--I’m so glad you came to-night! I’ve been beginning to feel like a twirp. If I keep getting plastered like I have been, I’ll lose my job.--It’s so long since I’ve been alone or had any place where I could go and be by myself. It seems to me I haven’t done anything for weeks but sit around and be funny for people I didn’t really care about.--Gee, I don’t know what to do! When I begin to get paid, I can live on what I make. But I’ve been afraid to sober up, because then I’d have to face the future.” (She always gave to all her clichés--“facing the future,” etc.--a special ironic emphasis.) “I can’t think of anybody I care about--I haven’t even got a girl-friend any more: all the ones that I had are off me now because Ray wouldn’t let me have ’em around. So I haven’t even got anybody to laugh about things with.--Business of twisting handkerchief.--Let’s go, before I have you in tears!”

We had a reckless taxi-driver; but to me, strong with accelerations of gin and with my normal masculine self-assurance, which Rita had done so much to demoralize, now gratifyingly re-enforced by Daisy’s feminine confession of helplessness and distress--it seemed to me at that moment that I occupied a position of unchallengeable supremacy--it seemed to me now that it had become possible for our taxi, at its exhilarating giddy speed, to plunge through every opposition, to make every obstruction give way. I marked with intensest vision the objects which we seemed to ride down: an American Railway Express truck; a woman with a German police dog; other scuttling and inferior taxis. Rita had always been nervous about El posts; but, as we ripped our way through the traffic, Daisy merely remarked: “Madcap Joe: the Demon Driver!”--and as we erupted into Broadway: “You better stop him or he’ll drive into the lobby!”

I thought scornfully of Duff Burdan, who had been barking so long on Rita’s doorstep, and who, for the privilege of storing Rita’s furniture, for the certainty of seeing her again, had been willing to render his studio uninhabitable.

In the darkened moving-picture house, we found the news-reel passing before us like a gray inconsecutive dream, and its images, as I watched them, seemed to swell with the significance of dreams.--A handsome buxom Sixteen-Year-Old Girl winning a Florida yacht-race in a bathing-suit to the blaring triumphant pace of a red-white-and-blue Sousa march. “She’s cute,” whispered Daisy, “isn’t she?” Yes: there was the real native American poetry!--my spirit flashed again at the thought of it--it had the daring and excitement of a poem!--and such a spirit, which abandoned itself to the water and the wind, to the speed of the flying yacht, would she not give herself also to love beneath the nights of southern waters!--Mayor Hylan--_East Side, West Side_--making a speech in New York: the flat-faced official visage, the senseless savorless words of the American public figure--while the brave filled the air with words of fire or slashed with white sails and tanned arms the deep blue of Florida seas!--free America that flew above those drones, that never paused for a thought of Mayor Hylan and his imbecile servile speeches; in our eagerness, our taut attention, stimulated more by the drinks than the film, Daisy and I were sitting forward and our arms were pressing each other.--An aeroplane wafted by a waltz--I had missed the title, my mind ablaze with the beauty of poetry and sportsmanship--below, the city, flat as a map, a plane shifted, not haphazardly, but with some underlying harmony and balance, to a jerky succession of angles.--Laddy Boy’s Rival, a husky brought to Washington, to the gallop of some lolloping dog music, by one of Harding’s Secret Service Men--I whispered, “I believe that that husky would make good presidential timber!” I glanced aside at Daisy and saw her profile pale and clear as porcelain in the pale light from the film, in which her pert little nose and chin showed a fineness and purity of outline--an outline prolonged by the frail hand which, with the fingertips lifted to the chin, received also, along fingers and wrist, a pale porcelain border of light.--Members of the Municipal Council at Baka, Japan, to the tune of _We’re Gentlemen of Japan_, visit the city’s reservoir; they jump in and catch carp with their hands: “I should think it would be bad enough,” whispered Daisy, “to have to drink the carp, without drinking the municipal councillors,” and I so threw myself forward in laughing at this that Daisy became self-conscious about the pressure of our arms on the seat, and drew a little away.--A slow-motion diving picture of champion woman swimmers--they turned along the sweet lengthened rhythms of _All Alone with the Telephone_, curving wonderfully through the air in moulded recumbent postures and sending up, when they had slipped into the water, a slowly condensing cloud of spray--how Rita would have loved those slow parabolas, stripped clean of the flashiness of speed, as tight-strung as the curve of a bow--she would have exclaimed of the cloud of spray, “It’s like some lovely sort of punctuation--as if you could punctuate a statue with some solid effect of light!”--The Prince of Wales--_It’s a Long Way to Tipperary_--joking with a paralyzed soldier--I wondered whether Rita would find the Prince of Wales attractive, then reflected that, on the contrary, she would probably be just perverse enough to prefer the paralyzed soldier: it occurred to me now to consider that I was becoming too much preoccupied with Rita and not paying enough attention to Daisy, so I moved my arm back against hers.--Jo LeBlanc, Head of the New Central Ticket Office, playing tennis to the jigging tune of _Tea for Two and Two for Tea_, to decide who shall pay the religious expenses of one hundred Jewish children to aid the Jewish Education Association Drive--“I bet the other man loses, don’t you?” Daisy remarked. I wondered whether perhaps, after all, I hadn’t been unfair to Max Kaufman--whether, perhaps, what I had taken for complacency hadn’t been, after all, merely modesty--I had a pang as I was revisited by the feeling that I had behaved badly with Rita in the taxi.--Bishop Manning, to the firm exaltation of the _Pilgrim’s Chorus_, receiving an emblematic pastoral staff, a huge encrusted crozier, from the Chaplain of the House of Commons--Daisy and I thought that Bishop Manning had the look of a priggish baby being handed an enormous rattle: I put my hand gently over Daisy’s, which lay beneath it cool and friendly.--A Chimpanzee Chauffeur: roguish monkey music: _Yes, We Have No Bananas_; but I had fallen to reflecting that, like some hero of a mediæval legend--the _Pilgrim’s Chorus_ and the pastoral staff had made me see myself in that image--I had, for a dreamlike space escaping measure, been shut away with Venus under the hill, or, like Oisin, with some goddess of fairyland--that I had been gone from the world of men, and only now, still blinking from the Venusberg, still with the music of fairyland in my ears, still knowing how the ache for the ideal may torture us like the ache for a drug of which we have been deprived, beheld with joy, with bewildered relief, the vision of Senator Oscar W. Underwood, who--to the rousing music of _Dixie_--was making a speech at a Monster Barbecue in Montgomery, Alabama--and found myself almost safe again in that familiar American world, heterogeneous and absurd, which had ceased for so long to seem real to me, of which I had never for so long been aware save to repudiate it with scorn and impatience. The Oldest Human Remains, a Skeleton of the Stone Age Discovered in an Oyster Bed: black bones embedded in oysters: dull sombre chords--Rita could have done something with this--something bitter about the fatuity of the twentieth-century traveller who was pointing at the bones with his stick--or better--what I could never have done: it was I who would have made easy capital out of the traveller with the spectacles and the stick!--something simple, troubling and hard about the bare black bones themselves.

And the smoothly revolving globe, supported by a kneeling goddess and scrolling suddenly and rapidly out--as if in the burst of an exciting revelation--the title of the comedy that followed--affected me, in a drop equally sudden, as idiotic and insupportable: now that I had been brooding on those blackened bones, I had become impatient with everything again--and I crushed my way across to the aisle, over overcoats, seats, and knees. I got some waxed-paper cups from the smoking-room, and Daisy and I, in the half-darkness, had a drink of water and gin. The paper cups leaked, and we had to get it down at a draft.

On the screen, a dough-faced comedian with goggling horn-rimmed glasses was enlisting in a fire-brigade.--An alarm!--he is the first to respond--he rushes headlong for the fire-house pole, slides down it head-first and remains at the bottom stunned: the firemen who follow fall over him and pile up like a football scrimmage. We laughed at this; and, on the way to the fire, the long hook-and-ladder truck, whisking briskly around a corner with impossible nimbleness, caused Daisy to laugh so violently that I thought again, as I had done on the night when I had heard about her motor-cycle honeymoon, of that American sense of motor-traffic which we had developed to such an extraordinary degree--and which was now further played upon, in the film, when the hero, in goggling innocence, allowed his hook-and-ladder attachment to swing around at right-angles to the truck, so that it swept the boulevard like a scythe, mowing the tops off all the Fords, and never failing at every disaster to make Daisy laugh with delight.--On the scene of the burning building, the hero was contending with the hose, which enmeshed him like a boa-constrictor. The owner of the building appeared, a pompous and imposing dignitary, in a frock-coat and silk hat. “Oh, I hope he turns the hose on his hat, don’t you?” whispered Daisy. And in a moment, just as the dignitary was denouncing the clumsiness of the hero, an unexpected leak in the hose cleanly squirted off the silk hat, which landed on an organ-grinder’s monkey and gave rise to a fantastic chase.

Such was our wild exhilaration over this that I reflected, as the chase began to flag, how, only half a year ago, if I had gone to the same film with Hugo, I should, in laughing at the ruin of the hat, have been moved by something more than the impulse, the mischievous impulse of a child, which I shared to-night with Daisy: I should have laughed with both savagery and zeal. I should, like Hugo, have taken the silk hat as a symbol; I should have made of its destruction an issue. And now at last I became aware how completely my point of view had changed since I had fallen in love with Rita and ceased to see much of Hugo. Had I not myself, only a few days before, taken out my own silk hat to go with Rita to the _Rosenkavalier_? I knew now that I no longer cared to imitate Hugo’s intransigeance in matters of this kind: his rejection of all the amenities of that civilized life of which he was himself the product; his fixed belief that society was divided into two mutually hostile classes, a proletariat and a bourgeoisie; his unquestioning acceptance of the catchwords of the social revolution, and his hostile and suspicious unwillingness to arrive at a human understanding with people who lived by different catchwords--all this seemed to me to-night the product of a superficial point of view, or, almost, of an arrested development. For Rita, despite the revolt against conventions which all her life implied, despite her long association with radicals, had had really but little interest in politics: her revolt was a revolt of the individual--and I had discovered to my surprise, when I had come to discuss with her the personalities of the Village, her complete lack of interest in, and, in some cases, her positive contempt for, certain of the radical leaders who most generally commanded admiration; and that, despite the atmosphere in which she lived, it was actually possible to strike fire from her mind by reactionary or conventional views, if they were delivered with the right ring of bravery. And I had myself, oblivious of the film, taken to meditating so exaltedly on the vanity of people’s opinions beside the deeper realities of character, the insignificance of politics compared to clairvoyance and passion, that I began to laugh only belatedly when I had already become aware that Daisy was roaring over one of the captions. The hero with the horn-rimmed spectacles had just been bitten by a small bull-terrier, and had picked it up and bitten it back: the caption read, “See how you like it yourself!”

“Oh, I’m so glad you took me!” said Daisy. “I think it’s swell! I just wanted to see something funny!” I slipped my hand over hers again with sympathetic affection, and watched the rest of the comedy leaning toward her and paying closer attention. We followed the picture together, with a lively interchange of comment.

“Well, I suppose you want to go to bed,” I said to Daisy as we walked out into Broadway. I suggested that we might stop at a restaurant and finish up the gin. “No,” she said, “I’m too tired for a restaurant.--Why don’t you come up to my place and we can drink it up there?--‘Should she ask him in?’ If he’s got anything to drink: Yes!”

When we reached the room, the telephone was ringing. Daisy answered it, speaking with some vehemence: “No: I don’t want to come--I’m tired, I’ve gone to bed--well, I went out to get something to eat.--No, I _don’t want_ to come!”

She lay down upon the bed, propping her head on the pillow and crossing her feet: she was wearing lizard-skin shoes, light brown and very small, but quite different-looking, I reflected, from any shoes that Rita wore: Rita’s feet, like everything about her, seemed to manage to be attractive in a curious personal way quite apart from current fashions of prettiness, whereas Daisy’s feet were pretty in an almost perfect ideal way, like the small feet of the girls with slim ankles in the drawings in magazines.

“Well,” yawned Daisy, “this is where Mother takes a long refreshing rest!” I handed her her gin and ginger-ale and sat down beside her, drinking mine. “But I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to,” she added, after a moment. “That’s why I want a drink.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Are you worried?” “No,” she replied. “I’ve just got the heeby-jeebies!” “What’s the matter?” “I think everybody’s a twirp!” “Are you in love?” “No; that’s the trouble.” “You ought to be glad you’re not,” I said. “You have been, haven’t you?” she asked. “Yes.” “You still are, aren’t you?” “No,” I answered--“not any more.” She was trying to kick out of her shoes without unbuttoning the straps, and I undid them and lifted them off. “Thanks,” she said. “As soon as I lie down, I’m dead!”

I held her firm little insteps for a moment in my hands: in pale stockings, her tired and sweaty feet were like two little moist cream-cheeses encased in covers of cloth: her body, which seemed now so slight in its pale blue dress, lay as limp as a lettuce-leaf soaked by the summer rain.

“No,” I said. “You oughtn’t to be sorry if you’re not in love.” “I know: that’s what I keep saying to myself when I think what damn fools people make of themselves. But sometimes you feel the old aching in the arm-pits--and it’s not just because you want to sleep with somebody either.--You know the real reason that I asked you to come up here? It was because I knew it would give me the willies to come back alone. As soon as I get alone, everything seems so empty--I begin to get panicky. Of course, it’s just the heeby-jeebies, though--after I’ve had a good night’s sleep, I’ll be all right again.”

A deep tenderness of sympathy seemed to flush my very mind, and I almost felt she must feel its warmth as it brimmed from my soul and bathed her. I put one arm about her shoulders and with the other hand covered her breast--it was low and lapsed a little--Rita, for all her small head, her small hands and feet, had had the bosom of some divine being--and from Ray Coleman’s gesture at the party, when he had put his arms about Daisy, and from McIlvaine’s plump little Venus, I had been imagining Daisy’s breasts as little firm globes. I kissed her on the neck--which was round and short and had no sculptural contours like Rita’s--and she kissed me back on the cheek: it was like the kiss of a little girl, some cousin or playmate from next door, whom, at ten, one decides to marry, and the relief of that human kiss, that embrace of simple comradeship, soothed the strain with which my spirit, with which my body itself, had ached.

I stretched myself beside her. If I had ever had any idea--playing the part I had learned from Rita--of making love to Daisy that night. I knew now that it had never been real, I could not now even conceive it--it was so long since I had heard the boats as they moaned from the harbor in Twelfth Street and the thought of them no longer moved me, yet to try to love another woman on the day one had parted from Rita!... And there began to take music in my weary, in my half-drunken, mind the falling rhythm of a poem, the beginning of a sonnet of which, the night before in my wakefulness, I had with obstinacy fixed in their target the accurate shafts of the end. It took the form of an answer to Daisy, and I found now that what had then been unbearable, because written of myself for myself, now that I could write from the point of departure of another’s fate than mine, now that I could dramatize my fate for another--dignifying, or rather creating, for another person’s mind--another’s mind which I merely imagined, since Daisy, it seemed, hated poetry--a romance which should somehow console me for the wreck and defilement of romance--now I could bear to return to the poem, and to the pain which had stamped its images, putting another between them and me--“_Ah, never sigh for love, for love is death!_”...

She was asleep--I could hear her breath: it seemed so slight to supply the fuel for that warm body I felt against my arm, that engine of activity and desire!--I turned off the electric light, covered Daisy over with a blanket, and lay down myself on the couch--and with the silence of the mind, love was still.