False Entry (58 page)
Shortly after, the Judge went upstairs, as is his custom before dinner. He has one of those invalid seats which ride, elevator style, up the staircase. At the top, a second wheel chair awaits him. Ruth, Anna, or Charlie the chauffeur, if about, usually help him make the shift at ground level, but at the top of the stairs he always does so himself, as if this marks the transition to a world he willfully keeps private. By custom we don’t watch this, but happening to glance up, I see him, already chaired again, watching us; then, with a backward push to his wheel, he disappears.
“Lucky he’s still able to do some of that for himself,” I said, “else there’d have to be a lot more running back and forth.” I was running along myself at the mechanical level one does when one’s thoughts are elsewhere, unsure as I was of where these were leading me, not really guarded.
“Lucky?” Poised, she seemed to incline toward me without perceptibly moving. Her brows were raised. Should I have taken this to mean that the Judge, if he wished, could do more? Hung there, her head drooping, she was very near me. “It wouldn’t be bearable otherwise,” she said. But I was busy interpreting her movements in my terms, in ours, and didn’t think to ask, “For whom?”
Anna returned at that moment. “A message come from Miss Cooperman, Miss Ruth. Someone telephone it for her. She send you her love, but she ask you excuse her from dinner.”
“Oh. I see.” Scarcely seeming to move from me, she has. “Thank you, Anna. Then there’ll be just the one extra. Mr. Blount.”
But Anna doesn’t take her dismissal; stands there, hands pressed against her starched front, the fingers opened toward Ruth, old nurse looking at her grown child. Had she seen us, or even before we have, our status to be? That evening was the turning point, and Anna, in allowing herself this intimacy before me, was the first to show the turn. “Why you bodder?” she said. One would not have thought that Anna, all heavy Czech shrug and cackle, could speak so low. “Miss Ruth, what’s a use? Why you bodder him—now?” She glanced up at the stairwell. “Why you bodder yourself!” Recollecting herself, or me, she dropped her hands. Leaving, she flung back a warning more in her usual style. “You want change—that Mr. Ping-pong, he always come early.” Before we had a chance to feel the silence she left us with, her head came round the door again. “You look purdy ’nough, that dress,” she said with a side look at me, “you don’t need change.”
I break the silence. “Mr. Ping-pong. Anna knows all our habits to a T, doesn’t she?”
Ruth, leaning against the mural of stamps, tracing a finger from one to another, doesn’t look up. “Alice was a friend of David’s.” Six months later now, if she no longer adds “too,” I take it to be because I now have my own status here. “He was—thinking of marrying her, just before he was killed.” Her finger traces its way toward another stamp. “I’m not sure whether Alice—what Alice was thinking.” Again the finger moved on. “She’s—she’s a deaf-mute, you see. Or rather, she began life as one; she can speak well enough now, in that sort of strange voice they have. And she even works with others. But silence is still more of a habit with her than with—normal people. Not that it doesn’t become her. She’s exquisite to look at—very blonde, slender. Even after you know why she doesn’t speak more, it only makes her seem—enchanted. Natural enough, of course, that David should fall in love with her.” The finger stops. If she is waiting for me to say something, she waits in vain. “I don’t suppose—he ever spoke of her?”
I am ready enough now. “No,” I could say with truth, “I didn’t know.”
Still she does not look up, but I can feel her concentration. She is watching my every movement; she too is aware. I thought I recognized this moment of stillness, how well I knew it—for now she will confide.
No.
With dismay, I felt myself push against the moment usually so consummately arranged for. If I opened my mouth it would be to warn her. Let’s stay as we are. The listener is never the friend.
“Father couldn’t bear the idea,” said Ruth. “With the way he felt about David, it—it was the last straw. He thought—he thought it was David’s way of getting back at him.” These last words have come in a rush. I know the familiar pace of that too. I force myself to meet her look. Clear-eyed, frank of feature, she was the danger now—and the mystery—but I refused to see it. “I suppose—” she said, and there was a question in her voice, but I didn’t hear it at the time. “I suppose that’s understandable enough.”
“Yes.” I answered from the habit of caution, not really hearing. “Yes, I suppose.”
She is at the door now. What is she saying? “Perhaps,” she says, her voice hard. “But I don’t understand it. I won’t!”
After she’d gone up, I traced a finger along the path hers had, past the triangular stamp that, six months ago, the Judge had pointed out as the rarest. She had all but told me what I still did not know about David, even perhaps what she all but knew about me, but I had not heard her. It was the house I had come for, and if I waited I should hear it in all its restless undertones beneath the public one, a cage of wires, naked to the winds as any other, Walter’s wonderful house. It was time to leave. How canny a dilettante one had to be, how careful, just in time, to move on. Moving on was not as easy as it had been in the old days; I no longer had the anonymity of youth. Middle age luckily had its own powers and wisdoms; in the social way possible in cities I would manage slowly to detach myself from this world I had grown too fond of, mindful to do its inhabitants no harm for their imperfection’s sake.
Anna was just letting in Krupong as I left the library. On his heels, a second ring announced Blount. As Anna took their things, Ruth appeared at the drawing-room door, I opposite, the Judge, slowly descending the stairwell in his movable chair, hand outstretched, between us. To Blount and Krupong, we may well appear already the simulacrum of a family, each member relinquishing some happily unhaunted solo pursuit for the welcome social hour, each punctual at his proper door, and these orange lamps sprung up all about must have appeared to these two, outside on the stoop, quite as an hour earlier they would have seemed to me. I remember Ruth’s voice of six months ago, already gilding with memory now that I am leaving. “We are very beautifully arranged.”
But, of course, I did not leave.
Once two people are physically conscious of one another, only absence can stop that progression. Progression in some form it is, in whatever terms for the two are inevitable; the sexual clock, like any other worth contemplation, has no
status quo
, cannot be turned back. In the next few weeks I frequented the Mannixes less, but there seemed no immediate way to abscond entirely, my work at the time making it impossible for me to leave the city. Any “break” on emotional grounds was absurd; in the lightly choral tastefulness of our relationship to date there’d been nothing to peg such on. Only a hysteric might have tried to trump such up, and thereby illogically penetrated sooner past the soft diffusion of warmth on the Mannix hearth to whatever truer cold lay beyond—the careful nonviolence, perhaps, of an establishment whose harmonious planes, liming its coterie birds with so many minor attractions, on closer scrutiny dared offer no handgrips for the heart. All this is retrospect; I no more saw this at the time than I marked Ruth’s own attempts to put absence between us for what they were. Firmer than I and actually less free, twice during those same weeks she was off somewhere, the first time (despite a sickness of Anna’s which made her own presence even more than customarily ill-spared) on a visit to an old schoolmate now in Chicago, the second, on a visit of much longer duration, to London, where Austin Fenno, her former husband, now remarried, was living.
At the time, I connected neither of these departures with me. Since I’d met the Mannixes in spring and it was now autumn, their summer pattern was better known to me than their winter one, which might have variables natural to people who were not tethered to an occupation. And Ruth’s license to move about at will except as she was tethered to her father’s needs, which he never appeared to press, seemed to me much broader than most women of her age, and in spite of her own phrase, not at all Edwardian. Had flight still been the woman’s part of courtship, vanity might have made me see hers as such, but women no longer said no so elaborately, whether or not they meant it. In any case, I’d come to that point in my affairs—and in our affair, if it was to be one—where I saw her only as the “object.” In the most ordinary love affair, normal human solipsism grows beyond all bounds, the opposite person becoming the “object,” the “other,” whisked into imaginary beds and conversations while at the same time existing in absolute and peculiar stasis, a pawn swollen to power by the mere fact of being where it is, without motive of its own. And our affair, taken from my side alone, could be no ordinary one. The possibility of her side, therefore, passed me by altogether—and the first warning.
As it happened, I saw her both times she returned. In her first absence, by pleading pressure of work, I had already begun my withdrawal, and this particular evening was the first since that I had dined with her father, this time alone with him. The prospect that Ruth, home the day before and out tonight with Pauli, might come in before I took my leave did not trouble me. Balance had been recovered in the interval, and taking further precaution, I had resumed my visits to an old, if casual friend who in her time had used me to similar purpose. Nanette is a proper hard-soft businesswoman of the day, ruthless to the eye and lissome to the touch, stony as any courtesan where her career as vice-president of a department store is concerned, her secret cartilage appearing in the spot where one would expect it—in her cleavage, sticky and interminable, to an indifferent married man. Except for the added fact that we sleep together, I am her Pauli in those periods of lesser agony when, for one or other of all the reasons available in that sort of cat’s cradle, she is not seeing her part-time lover. In bed she is lively, matter-of-fact and much the good sport, her long servitude having trained her never to obtrude tears or confessions there, and I never advise her that this perhaps is the reason she cannot win her inamorato. In the morning after such a night, we go off from her flat to our separate jobs like two participants in a humdrum, not unamiable marriage which has never risen to rapture or anger, and never will. We had done so that morning.
To my surprise, Ruth, when met in the entrance hall just as I was leaving, appeared ugly to me for the first time. Her looks, so dependent on tint and grace, haven’t the flamboyant regularity or suburban peachiness that weathers all moods—she looked white-faced and rabbity, as some women did after crying, although the availability of Pauli’s shoulder (he had just departed) did not occur to me then. We chatted briefly in the nonsensical way one does in halls, the Judge meanwhile behind us, waiting to be able to comply with his strict, self-imposed bedtime. Her responsive, eager manner seemed to have vanished—I felt no thread between us. Absence, even such a short one, had done the trick—and perhaps Nanette. Taken aback at the suddenness of my cure, and apparently of hers, I felt the discomfort one does at the sight of the imagined person who has survived untouched all one’s inner dramas of them—or is not even the same. I awkwardly invited her to lunch, which in our early acquaintance we once or twice had done. I both dwelt on her face and avoided it.
“No—no thanks. I’m only here for a few days. I’m—thinking of going to London for a bit.” If this was a sudden decision, I was not quick enough in turning to see that on the Judge’s face. When I did, he seemed tired, and my knowledge of the rules of the house made me leave the more quickly. It had been a dull evening there otherwise, one of those yawning evenings after sexual satiety—Nanette, being desperate, had been particularly lively—when, nulled in the flesh, still nervously unquelled in the mind, one yearns for some improbable sensation beyond the sexual one, knowing well enough that there is none. Going down their steps, I congratulated myself on the satiety I now felt in that house. A musician could have told me better at what stage I really was—at that anomalous place in the fugue where the bouquet of the unfamiliar is subtly exchanged for a preoccupation with the known.
I walked home. It was spikily clear, under the crude blue heaven of one of the best nights of early winter, when walking in this city is a kind of expensive elation at all the brute energy it still shows, and at the same time a lonely tribute, as from some leftover pioneer, to all that it no longer is. On the way, I mused, with a pang, on her ugliness, and tried to excuse it. Most women had such times, and she was thirty—thirty-one. Two blocks from home I passed the florist—in courtesy I must either call Nanette tomorrow or send her roses. To have such a decision to make, to be able to make it clearly, enlivened me almost as much as the wind on my collar. I slipped an order in the florist’s letter slot, and straightway my elation brimmed over into calm. I had seen her. Meanwhile, if it could have done poor Nanette any good, I’d have signed the order for her flowers with the name of the other man, her lover—such bountifulness whelmed me. Going up my own stairs, I told myself that it was not ugliness I had seen in her face but—as in faces long known to one—the sudden, sad prototype of its aging. And having so reconsidered, I went to bed content, and ignorant. There are only two other faces—my mother’s and my uncle’s—that I have watched with the same generic sadness. When one looks that way at a face newly met, it is not the ending of love.
Two months later, I was again at the Mannixes when Ruth came home unexpectedly, and it was no accident that I was there. In the interim, I’d kept to a few afternoon visits there, until a call from Anna a few days before. She was worried about the Judge’s state of health and suggested that I invite myself to dinner and “speak” to him. “He don’t look good, and he don’t listen to no vwooman.”
I could understand his not listening to Anna, to whom people she was fond of so rarely did “look good.” And I could not visualize myself being avuncular to the Judge. But Anna’s pleas flattered, and the Judge liked to be sought after in just this way.