Listening to Billie (12 page)

Daria is in a mood or perhaps a seizure of clairvoyance: she has described exactly what that young blond man in the
corner, whose name is Reed Ashford, has seen, what he is seeing. She has seen his view of herself and Smith. He, Reed, has met Smith that afternoon; he would like to meet Smith’s wife, and later on he will. He thinks she is lovely, the wife; she is rather like a woman in San Francisco (he lives there) with whom, at that time, he is much involved. A troubled young married woman, terribly in love with him. Daria is not so much like her as she is the same type, a dark cloudy wispy woman. His type.

Daria and Smith are having a surprisingly rational political discussion. Since Smith is a Republican and she disagrees with him, he has defined her as a Democrat, although Daria is not at all sure that she is that. What are you, if you dislike anything that is happening? She will have to ask Josephine, who will say, with a dismissing sort of laugh, “You must be an anarchist, my darling. A sort of Basque.” But now, reasonably, Daria is saying, “When you say fiscal responsibility, it seems to me that you really mean rich people keeping their money.” She clasps her long thin white fingers on the cleared table before her.

Across from her, Smith shudders very slightly. It has just flashed through his mind that he hates her hands; they remind him of white spiders, or something. He is afraid of her hands—but that is ridiculous. He loves Daria, his beautiful wife, her beautiful jeweled hands.

But Daria has seen, or felt, that hate-fear flash. She puts her hands in her lap, out of sight, and she stops listening to him.

Smith is saying, pleasantly, as he reaches for his pipe, “Well, of course, in a way you’re right. I’ve worked hard for my money,
our
money, and I would certainly prefer to keep it. But suppose I didn’t, suppose I gave it all away to charities tomorrow, do you really imagine that would improve the world?”

“—what?”

Daria has just had another view into Smith’s mind, or perhaps it is a vision of a later Smith: this Smith of the future is a man with a terribly sick wife (who must be herself, Daria?), so sick that she cannot be touched, assuredly not fucked, but Smith is gentle and sadly faithful to her; he loves his sick wife, he loves
being the husband of a sick wife. And she has to do nothing, nothing at all; it is an absolution.

“—very glad to meet you,” the dark-blond young man is saying, now standing beside their table.

Daria smiles, and gives him one of her hands, which he takes as though it were something familiar to him, and he smiles, narrowing dark blue eyes, flashing white teeth—as Daria thinks of the lake in Maine: dangerous.

“Join us for a brandy?” Smith is saying affably; this man must be someone he likes, rich and successful, fiscally responsible.

“Delighted to, but I think not brandy. I’ve become addicted to the local lemonade,” says Reed.

“What a wonderful idea,” Daria says, in an unusually spontaneous way, so that they both smile gently in her direction; she is for the moment an indulged and pretty child.

They all have lemonade, and they talk about how much they like it here in Amsterdam.

Daria observes that this man, this Reed Ashford, actually has two faces: a flashing, dangerous, hard face, and another that is mild and passive, almost sweet. And she has a curious urge to tell this young man about her sister, about Eliza, of whom she is so proud. She projects a conversation in which she tells him about Eliza, her poetry in all those magazines. (“I doubt if Reed subscribes to the
New Republic
, or the
Partisan Review
,” Smith would say. “No, but I’ve heavd of them, I even see them from time to time,” would certainly be Reed’s response. How she knows him!)

But at the moment that Daria is about to talk about Eliza, Reed looks dangerous again, although he is quite small—a small and perfect man—and so she does not.

He seems to like to talk about himself, this Reed, which could not be said of either Smith or Daria; they are rather charmed by his ingenuously confessional manner. Also, to them his background is exotic: Hollywood, his mother was a sometime movie star. Sally Ashford. Oh, yes, they remember her. Of
course, he looks exactly like her, the lovely hollow cheeks and wide slant eyes.

“I can’t imagine an unhealthier atmosphere for a kid,” Reed says, looking very young. “As a result, I was crazy about the awful prep school they finally shipped me off to.”

But he does not tell them the name of the school; after all, it wasn’t Groton, not a famous place. And so they do not discover what is an extraordinary, quite sinister coincidence: Reed Ashford was the boy whom Evan Quarles fell fatally in love with.

(Told of this much later, Eliza’s friend Harry Argent says, “Well, it’s really not so amazing. You American Eastern prep school types all seem to find each other eventually, especially if you’re anywhere near the same age.” “Reed is five years younger than I am.” “So? It’s really a question of class.” Harry sounds very Berlin as he says this, with harsh “r”s and flat vowels. He goes on, “But don’t worry, I’d never use this plot for a film.”)

It was a pleasant evening all around, for Daria and Smith and for Reed, in Amsterdam; and Reed was encouraged to visit them in Woodside. Telephone numbers were exchanged and noted down, time schedules given.

At some point in her middle thirties, Eliza, who for years had smoked a couple of packs a day, decided to stop. For every reason: health, and she disliked being addicted. Too, she saw that it was unpleasant for people who did not smoke. Harry, for example, a non-smoker, would be pleased at her not smoking.

She realized that she could only do it by stopping cold. And so she picked a day that was not far off, a day after which she would not smoke again.

She sat at her desk, in her pretty bedroom, not smoking but not working either; she was thinking only of cigarettes, craving one. Surely she could—only one? She tried to concentrate on the view, her prospect of sunny hills and streets, of bright water and slow ships, but she could hardly see.

Dull terrible sentences formed in her mind, such as: My life is not worth living. And she felt this to be true, she felt she had suffered a permanent loss.

But smoking doesn’t,
really
, help a person write, she told herself.

She didn’t smoke, and she continued, for weeks and months, to feel terrible: lost, deprived.

Sometimes, even, she cried, and then at other times she experienced a curious, unmotivated need to laugh; a hysteria
that was later explained to her as being caused by an increase in oxygen.

Worst of all for her was the hour or so before dinner. Then, as she worked around the kitchen, making food for Catherine and herself, it all came down on her, all her feeling of failure and frustration, all the loneliness of her life. Soon Catherine would leave home, and then where would she be?

A strong part of her mind was aware that what she was going through was “withdrawal symptoms,” like junkies have, and giving it that name was of some help. Still, her symptoms and everything in her mind were real; they were as real as names.

She got through the evenings with a lot of wine, although she had read that that was not a recommended course; still, it helped, and she treated herself to a case of good strong Italian peasant wine, from a North Beach delicatessen.

She found, too, that walking helped immensely, and she began to spend as much of her days as she could on walks. Covering the city. She took buses to remote areas, and then in those unfamiliar neighborhoods she walked, and walked. Mission Street: the multiplicity of South American groups, and cultures, the restaurants and stores all homogenized into something vaguely “Spanish,” vaguely tawdry.

Or Potrero Hill: great bare spaces, wide streets, industrial views of San Francisco, and of the declining harbor.

Clement Street, with Russian, Greek or Chinese restaurants, delicatessens, used furniture, junk.

One afternoon, lured into a junk store by a display of antique earrings in the window, she found a small Victorian armchair; its ornate, deeply carved roses were all horribly varnished over. And it was probably for the sake of the horrible yellow varnish that she bought it, paid too much, and then more money for its delivery to Russian Hill. Stripping it—in fact, rescuing the wood—would take hours, and all her skill and strength.

•  •  •

But her virtue was not rewarded. After not hearing from Harry for a considerable while, this letter came:

An extremely—an
outrageously
depressing note. How could he? And Eliza’s despair was made worse by her feeling that she had no right to it. Of course he could; he could do anything at all, and he had warned her of his tendencies toward marriage. They were classically uncommitted.

Now she couldn’t, wouldn’t see Harry, and she couldn’t help feeling that he had abandoned her when she needed him.

And she thought, too, that not smoking was making her crazy.

After a bad three months or so, she was writing again, was “cured.”

By now, although she had run out of unemployment compensation some time ago (with considerable relief, actually), Eliza’s income had increased; those safe old investments from her dead father’s firm, plus some new Xerox urged on her by Smith, had gone up to a point at which, if she exercised great care—few clothes, no trips or expensive wines and
no cigarettes
—she could live on that income without a part-time job. This realization at first made her a little nervous: so much freedom, she was almost guilty about it. But then she decided that the gift of time was wonderful—was possibly deserved? Less sure of that, she was thrifty with those hours, as well as with her money. She worked hard, four or five hours a day. Producing new poems, revising old ones.

And she sold them! Not too often: four one year, six the next, but steadily, so that slowly she began to believe that she was a poet; she was not famous, but she was a published poet.
And that was a source of steady happiness to her, that work, that small success.

With the poems themselves she was not entirely satisfied. (But should a poet be satisfied?) They seemed to her, sometimes, too small and cautious, too “well made.” And she had, sometimes, a dizzying sense of other, larger and stronger poems that she could be writing; but perhaps she would. For the most part she was content to work, and to let the direction and the scope of her poetry change as it would.

Then she and Catherine both had sore throats, requiring doctors and drugs. There were plumber’s bills, an increased property tax. All in all, she was about seven hundred dollars in debt. Not terrifying (not quite), but too much to owe. She went to a temporary-employment agency and got a job. Since she was a Medical Secretary, and had admitted to literary skills (not mentioning poetry), she was sent to “help out” a psychoanalyst named Dr. Bout, who, in addition to his practice, was writing a “psycho-biography” of Douglas MacArthur. Dr. Bout, a tiny, feisty, pale young man, with an energetic, somewhat truculent manner, a pipe—and two thousand pages of manuscript, which his publisher wanted cut down to seven-fifty.

Eliza would have liked to do the work at home, where she could think about it more peacefully; but no, he wanted her there, installed at a desk in the small room next to his office. She soon understood that he wanted to watch what she was doing, her dangerous activity.

He also wanted her to empty the ashtray, between patients, and to tidy up the magazines in the waiting room.

And he wanted his manuscript magically diminished to the proper length without cutting any words from the original.

She managed to stand two weeks with Dr. Bout. Two hundred dollars.

•  •  •

Four weeks in a Child Guidance Clinic, a much nicer place. Five hundred dollars.

Out of debt, she was more than ever aware of her luck: her small and almost adequate income, her small and perfectly private house.

Her sporadic “love affairs” were more like encounters than affairs, and they occurred at increasing intervals as she devoted less and less time to them. Often they left her lonelier than before. She missed Harry very much.

“I don’t know,” she said to Kathleen, who continued to call her, although often Eliza felt that their rather accidental friendship was over. Still, she had to say something. “I’m always attracted to men, some men, but it doesn’t seem to work out. Maybe I should have married Harry. He’s such a terrific friend.”

“He would have taken up too much of your time.” Kathleen had met Harry once and did not like him; he talked too much, even interrupting her. (Harry did not like Kathleen, either. “She’s really in love with you, and that’s what makes her so cross—can’t you see that, Eliza?”)

“How’s Miriam?” Eliza asked.

“Well, she spent the weekend in L.A., and I have the weirdest feeling that she got together with Lawry. I don’t know why, I’m just sure.”

“Kathleen, come on, that’s so unlikely—”

“Well, she was up to something down there, I know that.”

Not smoking, Eliza was acutely aware of those who did. She had observed that Kathleen’s style of smoking was as hostile as her conversation; she blew smoke everywhere, all over everyone, and she scattered ashes about.

How had she herself smoked, Eliza wondered, and she concluded that her own style had been simply greedy, a devouring. Josephine smoked in a discreet and ladylike way, while Daria’s smoking was furtive, and ashamed.

Daria was in a sanatorium in New Hampshire, being treated for a depression that had lasted since her last miscarriage. Josephine and Eliza discussed this on the phone: Daria was their subject matter. Smith commuted from Woodside to New Hampshire to see Daria, and to stop by Washington on some sort of business.

“I must say that Smith has been a saint” was one of the things that Josephine often said.