False Entry (32 page)

Through the park I met almost no one—a late mother wheeling one child and hurrying another, two mounted police, their heads and their horses’ eyes front, like monuments that moved, lastly five or six high-school boys with the slouch and sidewise peer of the slums, who shrank together, hands ganged in their pockets, conspired in excited whispers, and ran off in the self-induced paranoia of some imaginary, adolescent chase. After that I was alone until I reached the exit. There I turned and looked behind me, where there was no one. I listened for him, in the dark hollow of the archway. For him, for them, for whoever it should be. It comes so quietly, the counterstroke hidden in ourselves. I had never feared to be followed. Now I wished it.

Three blocks over eastward, I hunted up a stationery store where I might buy my paper. Nowadays a real stationer’s is a rarity in New York, except near the business districts. These crannies are something else again. Tucked in some narrow nook lopped off a larger one and soon to have their trade lopped off altogether by the drugstore and the supermarket, they survive like the last crazy-corners of the off moment, of the few beleaguered notion-needs that will not fit into bars. Small people necessarily keep them, sweatered old men and women, emerging from the mouse-life behind the rear partition, wiping the mouth with the back of the hand. As with a bar, they cater much to the intermediate; Charon perhaps must keep such a place, purveying the late news and the final, obsessive bit of tobacco, the envelope to catch the midnight mail and the last telephone.

There was no one behind the counter, but all its news wares lay disposed in front of it—these must be among the last stores in the city to dispense anything at all on neighborly trust. No doubt this is because of the article they vend; few who followed the news these days would not feel a grim, citizenly obligation to pay for it. I set down my coin, passed over the evening paper and took up a copy of the morning’s
Times
, feeling at the same time the dull, required guilt—dull because it was so abstract—that any conscientious man felt nowadays when, even once, he let the daily communiqués of cataclysm slide by without him. It was a hopeless guilt, the newsprint conscience, formed in him by being forced to attend the vast panoply of struggle, crimes international and small passional ones, at which he could not assist. He must be present at every agony in the garden, able meanwhile to bleed with only a few.

I folded the paper under my arm, thinking of how many such days I had let pass by unsifted through this strange, frustrate bookkeeping. Yet I had been no anchorite—at least outwardly; from my undergraduate days on I had made the average social gestures of my generation. In a mild way I had campaigned for certain of its enlightened causes that still seemed to have a center to be left of; later I had fought its war as every young man does, singlehanded even in the absence of single combat. Afterwards I had tried earnestly to catch hold of any discernible prong reared up now and then from the hetero-homogeneous mass of cause that remained. Along with most, I had learned to pay my bit of money, fealty or action; in a modest way my name was available to certain rosters, my voice to certain committees and salons; I had shouldered my share of those compromises by which the modern man of good will deluded himself that he was
engagé.
Except for my bachelorhood and my somewhat unusual version of the subterranean departure that is in each of us, I could be the very model of the average cenobite, the community man. And I knew that under the mass of evidence accumulated daily against him, tuned in as he was to an enormous rack of sufferings of which he could at best anoint only a few, no medieval man had ever had to be as calloused as he. This was the daytime world. Actually he was absconding from it. Deep down under its superficially hale crust, each of us was keeping what nucleus he could. One might begin to suspect that there had never been such a race of anchorites in the history of the globe. One might imagine a host of us, driven back upon the memoir.

In the rear of the store a man stepped halfway out of the one telephone booth, holding the coin returned to him by the coin box, then reconsidered and stepped back inside. He was a short man with a neat fringe of clipped, gray hair, a good suit that ciphered all of him except the wrinkled network of anxiety around his eyes. The booth had a seat in it and he sat there—after doggedly dialing what I fancied to be the same number—as if he had been tailored for it, gazing absently out the door, his free hand vacant on his knee. Suddenly he hung up and tried again. I could hear the signal, not the “busy” but the “don’t answer,” and I understood his compulsion; “not at home” but one dials again, persuaded that one has dialed in error; in lieu of that one dials someone else one owes a call to (if necessary going down the list of those one has neglected for years)—unwilling to accept the ultimate rejection from the air itself, by a machine. I held back an impulse to pass him the directory. Here, phone anyone—here’s a Mr. James Sugrue—no, that’s a forbidding name and a Maiden Lane number, won’t answer at this hour; here’s a more sympathetic one, Mrs. Anamaria Perez. Watching the hand on his knee, so open, patently waiting to be listened to, I all but addressed it. If all else fails, here’s my number; I’ll be home in ten minutes, and I understand this brand of telephonitis. Try this number in ten minutes, and at least for a moment there will be an answer, the blessed gap when the receiver is lifted. No harm in these surrealistic conversations with one another. In ten minutes, try me.

I was about to turn away when the man in the booth got up and left it, went by me with a tip of the hand that said “It’s all yours now,” and out of the store. The proprietor’s idle eye was on me. I am not always so craven to the conventional. But it is human to alternate, and at times the very fear of my own strangeness will as suddenly make me bow to what is expected of me. I went in. And once inside, I felt the satisfaction, both fierce and submissive, of one on whom circumstance has forced what he had not courage enough to do on his own. Taking out my address book, I riffled through it in careful pantomime. Some of the names were almost lost even to me, burning in the faintest of recollection. Others belonged to distant cities, although that was no drawback now in a world where the rictus of communication had been perfected, stretching all our mouths agape. Some were dead, except to address books like mine. I had never been able to erase any of them; I kept them all. Still others, fresh and unrubbed, belonged to the present, in various levels: “How nice to hear from you!” it would be, or “Well, you’re a fine one!” And spotted among them were numbers, not many, belonging to certain sorties of the past, through each of which I had drawn a line. Hers was among these, still uncrossed. I studied them, sedulously avoiding the one.

I’ll call Maartens, I thought suddenly, and putting in my dime, I dialed. He and Cecile were old hands; my wish to remain incognito in the city would be received without inquiry; no sudden conundrum in a friend’s nature could surprise them. The very bourgeois steadiness of the life they led made their place a beacon for certain tremulous acolytes of bohemia, less steady than they, whom one met there sometimes at dinner or of an evening—raw-eyed creatures (“a very fine sculptor,” Maartens might whisper) just getting over the drink, the dope, the breakdown, the girl. And like so many of my friends, they had never met any of the others. I grinned with relief as I waited, imagining Maartens’ huge laugh if I should take it in my head to say to him, with the proper wryness, “What do you think, eh? Yesterday I was at work.” All I needed was an interim away from the incessant scraping of my own awareness. Without a bit of company, the strongest of us sank into
Schwärmerei.
There was a certain justice in this day’s ending in a bit of his. Then I realized how long I had been listening without an answer. There was no one in.

Calm deserted me then, and I too began calling—first the Maartenses again, then a succession of numbers from my address book, at random. Hysteria forms, I suppose, at some point of refusal between ourselves and what we at last take to be implacable. And for me—as, I suspect, for many—a special hysteria resides in the machine, to which we have come to attach that final implacability which used to be reserved, with more dignity, for death itself. For the machine is still speciously half ourselves. And when we rage against it as I did then, we rage against this. For, as I can remind myself now, I did not really choose numbers at random. I chose numbers belonging to people not quite vanished but superannuated: a faddish man I had once worked with and had dropped for overpressing me socially toward his “circles”; two jolly, free-talking magazine spinsters of whom age, plainness and lack of much sexual impulse had made substitute aunts to the general; one or two former girls of mine who had lived in the Village, the village of chancy, evanescent numbers owned by a floating population of such girls. They belonged, all of them, to that useful company in whose members one would never dream of confiding. At this hour, if existing still as I had left them, they would all be drink-hazy, drink-valiant—if they were home at all. None was. As I hung up on the last of them, several customers, off some bus perhaps, came in, deposited their coins for papers and went out, leaving the store empty again of trade. Through the glass panels of the booth I could see the front windows, faintly barred with neon that cast a fakir’s light on the pens and ink-bottles beneath. Night air came through the doorway, soft and remote as an animal’s pad on the palm. At his counter the proprietor rang up a sum on the register, then subsided again on his high stool in a semi-alert drowse, his fingers poised on the glass over his wares like a man seated at a planchette. Once more I put in my dime and listened. For my own ends, I thought. And at last I dialed.

Three rings only, but already relief, alien as a blush, crept over me; because of her father in his wheelchair it was a household where there was always somebody there. And now that rescue was on its way I could afford, like most of us, to be contemptuous of it. The truth shamed me: that in this moment I would settle for anybody—only to be able to spell anyone, for a moment, into the hollow of my ear. Even my past sorties into a life here, a life there, had been more straightforward. They had kept the line of demarcation; they had come from choice. All that this day had brought me was what classically attacked the anchorite in his desert, the desperate itch toward the mirage of others. I could almost have hung up now, understanding Maartens in fraternal sadness, itching for the more honorable dominion of the nights when I searched for myself.

It was Anna, the housekeeper, who answered. The Mannixes are a family of a type that still persists in New York, finding its servitors early, while its own members are young, and keeping them on, often only one and for life, in a manner more steadfast and personal than that of the rich. One recognizes at once in such households the odor of stability, compounded of furniture polish and the other smells of good service, all blended with a faithfulness responsibly returned. Anna had come to them, a greenhorn fresh from Czechoslovakia, in the nineteen-twenties along with their own children; the brief interim of her own marriage and widowhood, long since quenched almost from conversation, had not changed her—certainly not her conviction that nothing which happened to her would ever be as important as what happened to them. When she answered, I had an impulse to hang up—it was almost enough that the machine at last had listened—but I had already said “Hello.” I did not identify myself but I could tell that she knew me, as I knew the waxy cool of the niche in which she stood—in the probable aura of one of the meals that unfolded as regularly from her as if she concealed a cornucopia of them in the wide, starched storehouse of her bosom.

No, she said, Miss Ruth and her father were not at home. He had gone to a convention in London, and she with him, about a week ago. That must have been when she phoned me, I thought, perhaps the night before she left. I too was familiar with those restless eves of travel when, brave with going, one plucked at the string one was to leave behind.

They would return in about a week, said Anna coldly, making it clear that any really loyal intimate of the household would know this. Only two months ago she would have teased at me like an auntie, her warmth guided, as all of her was, by what she saw on her mistress’s face.

I saw the two faces as I had last seen them together. Honesty impelled me toward the one in the absence of the other. In the small things, I thought, that do not matter. “This is Mr. Goodman Anna,” I said. “This is Pierre.”

“Well, my hosh,” said Anna accusingly, dropping all pretense. “Well, my hosh!” Her glottal, Czech version of “gosh” was a familiar expletive, long since affectionately adopted by both the Mannixes; I could hear them exchanging it over a book, a letter, across the back of a chair.

Yes, I had been away, I said. No, there was no message; I would get in touch with them when they returned.

“Come on to dinner,” said Anna, crafty duenna. “I got nobody to cook for meanwhile.”

I was tempted, as I am always tempted to that house. Then I recalled where years ago I had first heard that “my hosh!”—Walter Stern saying it absently from his hospital bed, then, cheeks flushed, eagerly, giving its derivation.

No, I was going away again, I said quickly, and thanking her, repeating that there was no message, I rang off. Other humps—like his—I thought, were inoperable too. Just then a jet plane soughed over the city, taking us all up for a second in its suction, and dropping us back again, each on his own mote of concern, each absurd pea. But it came too late to down me now; I had already had my bit of conversation, my balance, and striding out of the store without a backward glance, I walked rapidly home, exempted at last from the day.

This flat is four flights up, on the top floor. Years ago, when I first rented it, the old mansion, newly renovated, stood empty, and I could have had my choice of the garden floor or any, but, still the stylite on his pillar, I chose the top. An elevator has long since been installed, but there is a small spiral of stairs in the rear that I often prefer to use. During these weeks I have done so. Ritual has mildly obsessive uses for the solitary; as I climbed the steps on these evenings I liked to imagine that each one advanced me as it were backwards, into the relative composure of the past. And this time I leaned as carefully on habit as on a trusted arm. Night was here again, returning us once again to the illusion of a hiatus in which the world stopped moving and we could judge ourselves; over the chimney stacks of the city one could imagine seeing, if one had the proper ray for it, thousand upon thousand ellipses of memory circling like single birds. I am just on the crux of it—like a man bending over his own headstone—I thought; I cannot stop now. And walking up the last flight I visualized the shades half drawn and even, the desk cleared, the lamp set burning in the way invisible entities managed the task in a fairy tale.