The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (22 page)

She walked up the steps of Paul’s house and hunted for the bell in the dimness of the not quite seedy vestibule. It was no wonder that Paul had gravitated here, to the acquiescent company of other pensioners. In an age which demanded that money be accompanied by personal achievement, a young man with a small private income was an anachronism, unless he had other directives or talents that made the money only accessory. And for Paul, with neither, and a pensioner since twenty, it had indeed been the touch of ruin. He had made the grand tour of the talents in a time when the mere possession of the means to do so was already antiquated. He had dabbled in painting in southern Italy, had written for and later supported a magazine in the Village, where he had been pitilessly marked for exploitation by those with greater needs and coarser drives, and all along the way he had dabbled in women and in wine, not so much out of lechery or a compulsion to alcohol as because these were good ways to pass the time—and of time he had so much to pass. Whatever his inner lack, his lack of need had enlarged it, making of him, at thirty-six, a “young man” whose every activity, foredoomed to the dilettante, was tolerated by his elders and suspect to his contemporaries. So finally, as some might say, he had dabbled in disease. And if so, even here he had been lucklessly dilettante too, for tuberculosis, that mordant parlor wound which had once bred so many gallantly ethereal heroines and interesting, smoking-jacketed heroes among the people of his class of another day, had now become, for such people, almost an anachronism too.

Mrs. Ponthus pressed the bell next to the nameplate, which still said “Paul Ponthus—Helen Bonner,” although Helen had been gone for months. Helen had been Paul’s “girl,” as Paul’s crowd would have put it, in the way they had of using the catch phrases of juvenility to convince themselves that they had all remained indecorously young. In and out of Paul’s life for years, although he had never married her—perhaps because he hadn’t—Helen had been one of those girls who yearly assaulted the city with a junior-executive energy, quickly learning to adulterate their wheaten, somewhat craggy good looks with a certain uniformity of style—women who, if they did not conventionally marry or brilliantly succeed, plodded hopefully along at the careers that kept them girls, often with some attachment in the background, some man with a talent to be nourished, a weakness to be supported, who always seemed to be earning less money than they.

Mrs. Ponthus pressed the bell again, with a longer ring. Paul usually slept late, in the drugged burrowing of a man without pressing appointments. Poor Helen, she thought. To her, at first, Paul’s aimless round would have seemed Bohemian, their affair cosmopolitan. With the pitiable eagerness of those who seek love she would have mistaken for passion what might never have been much more than the heightened sexuality of the man without a job; later, too deeply entangled, she would have refused to face the fact that Paul’s variety of joblessness was for life. With him she had gone through all the fantastic travail of the woman’s end of such an affair, his rebellions against possessiveness, his ego-driven nights out with other women, his reluctance to give her any certainty except the abject one of his return. And her Griselda devotion had had its reward. For even as she became that background against which he could most serviceably revolt, her lap had become that confessional in which his head felt most at home. She had become that familiar woman who stands behind the “artistic” man, patches up his vagaries and explains him to a misunderstanding world—particularly, in Paul’s case, to those malicious ones who noted that Paul had all the sufferings of the artistic personality without having anything to show for it. And finally, now that she had left him—for he had always before done the leaving—she had achieved wifely status at last, as the person by whom he was most misunderstood. For now that she had found the will to leave him, they no longer said of her, “Poor Helen.” “Poor Paul,” they said now. Poor, poor Paul.

The buzzer rang suddenly, stopping before she had time to press in the door. Then it rang again, a long, sustained ring. She walked slowly up the stairs. Remember not to be disarmed this time, she told herself. Not this one time. He had never let her be the conventional aunt but had wooed her knowingly, as a confrere, drawing out her own susceptibility to that, attaching her to him with her own sticky, spidery thread. For, knowing so much about weakness, he disarmed people with his delicate appreciation of theirs, and before they knew it, like a child pressing his one grubby treasure into their hands, he had given them his own weakness to hold.

His hall door was open. She stepped inside and closed it. Dusty sunlight from the avenue ribbed the empty front room. Back of her, the high, sliding doors to the bedroom were almost completely closed.

“Helen!” said a bemused voice from behind the doors. “Helen?”

She bit her lip, already disarmed. “No, it’s Mary, Paul,” she said. “No, it’s Mary.”

She walked toward the doors, letting him hear her footfalls on the bare floor, waited, then slid the doors back.

He stared at her, raised up on one elbow in bed, the other hand still pressed near the buzzer, against the wall. Then recognition woke him and he dove back under the covers, so that she could only see the back of his head. “Don’t look at me,” he said, muffled. “Don’t look at me for a minute.”

She turned her back on him. After an interval she heard him get up and turn on the shower in the bathroom. She walked over to the window and looked out, feeling as if she were collaborating in the byplay of a child. This was his talent perhaps, that one could collaborate with him only on his own basis, drawn in a trice into his world of willful charm and egocentric fears, forgetting that this was a dangerous juggernaut of a child with the body and impulses of a man.

“Sorry, Mary. I had a rough night.” He had come from behind her, putting his hands lightly on her shoulders and turning her around. She inclined her cheek, but he shook his head, stepping significantly back with the courtesy of his disease.

“Were you sick again?”

He twisted the towel he held. “No more than usual. As a matter of fact—I broke training. Went on a party.”

“Oh. Oh, Paul!” She knew those parties, which he ferreted out with professional desperation, calling up all over town, hoping to catch all the other busy, busy people on the prong of some momentary idleness, persuading them to take time out with an ardor like that of a drunkard who feels better when others are drinking.

He shrugged and sawed the towel back and forth on his wet hair.

“Ought you to get your head wet like that?”

“Now, don’t go auntie on me. You women—at bottom you’re all nannies.”

“So I’ve heard,” she said. “Usually from some man who’s looking for one.”

“Touché,” he said, sitting down rather too quickly in a chair and smiling up at her. Certainly no special weakness appeared, Lombroso-like, in that face, in the wide brow, firmly jutting nose, the cheekbones joined to the square jaw by the long, concave dimples of his illness. How wrong we are, she thought, to believe that character always sneaks into the lineaments of a face. This is what people would call a strong face, whose strength was only sapped if you knew its age. Then, indeed, it seemed almost criminally young.

“Come on,” he said, “take off your hat. Such a nice, sensible hat. Ah, I’m glad to see you, Mary.” He stood up and lifted the hat lightly from her head, bent to set it on a table wooled with dust, blew futilely at the table and finally hung the hat on the finial of a chair that held a pile of clothing. “Sit down, if you can find a spot. And don’t say I ought to have a woman in. I’m working on that. Hard.”

“I’ve no such intentions, Paul.” She felt suddenly weary and sat down.

“I know, I know,” he said, hovering above her. “But don’t declare them, whatever they are, till I’ve had coffee. Have you had breakfast?”

“Of course I’ve had breakfast.”

“Of course,” he said. “Such a sane, sensible hat!” His voice faded, and he had to sit down on the nearest chair. She started toward him, but he waved her back. “Not what you think. It’s just a dirty old hangover.”

They looked at each other from chair to chair. “You fool,” she said. “You fool!”

“Ah, Mary, you
are
good for me,” he said.

Here it comes, she thought. The sweet bait that works on any age, any sex. The terrible, tricksy intimacy of another’s need, saved up just for you. Thus is the thread spun—and to any comer. “I’ll make, you coffee,” she said.

She crossed the room and opened the folding shutters of the kitchenette. Its sparse equipment, ranged stiffly, was grimy with disuse. On the drainboard a dishcloth, frozen into a contortion of days back, gave off an odor of mildew.

“Smell it?” he said. “The odor of celibacy. Varied by an occasional woman—and an occasional mouse.”

“Spare me the details,” she said, her back to him.

“No, that’s one of the reasons you are so good for me. You and Helen. You’re the lucky ones. You don’t have to be spared.”

“We have our limits,” she said. “Such as making coffee when there is none.” She picked up her bag. “I’ll go get some. You better stay to let Jamie in.”

“He’s not coming. He’s washed his hands of me.”

“But I spoke to him yesterday! Yesterday morning.”

“So did I. Yesterday afternoon, in his office. He wanted me to go back to that magic mountain of his. No, that’s not for me. What’ll they do? Patch up the lesion in my chest? So I can hang around a little longer, to rot of the one in my head?”

“Paul.” She sat down again, heavily. The handbag slid to the floor. “Paul … what
is
for you?”

“You tell me.” His short laugh turned into a cough. He leaned forward and took her hands in his, staring at her with the mesmeric shine of the devotee. “It’s Helen. I know that now. I haven’t any shame about it. I’ll turn somersaults. I’ll lie, I’ll be honest, just so she comes back. But she won’t see me. I haven’t even talked to her in five months. I don’t even know where she’s living, and when I call her office she’s got them primed to say, ‘Miss Bonner’s not in.’ ‘Miss Bonner’s not at her desk.’ I’ve written, I’ve had friends badger her …” He sat back, closing his eyes. When he opened them again she saw that the shine in them was actually tears. “She let me lean on her for years,” he said, in a voice almost without breath. “She got me into this straitjacket. Now she can damn well get me out of it.”

For a moment she was rigid with anger, on the part of a woman she had never known well. “Perhaps she has other plans.”

“No,” he said. “I was her first. I’ll be her last. Without me she doesn’t feel the need. That’s why she’s afraid to see me, don’t you see that?”

“I’d rather not tell you what I see.”

“Oh, go on,” he said, “tell me I’m a bastard. I don’t know why I have such trouble getting people to believe it.”

Because they see the real straitjacket, she thought—and know it in part for their own. Because, locked in yourself, you are to the nth degree that sad monstrosity which we are all in part. “No … you’re not a bastard.”

“No?” he said. “Sometimes my own cleverness sickens me. Your coming today—I was pretty sure Jamie had asked you to stop the money unless I went up to that place. And you know what I thought?” He gave her the intense, open stare of the man who, despairing of gulling one with lies, tries the truth. “I thought, all right, let them turn the house cat into the jungle. Then he’ll really touch bottom. Then Helen will take him in.” He gripped her hands again. His own were burning hot. “She’ll listen to you. Just do that for me. Just get her to see me—see the spot I’m in. I’ll take it from there.”

She stood up, wrenching her hands away, and walked to the window. One of the shades was uneven. She straightened it without seeing it. “I wish to God the money’d been left to you in one sum. So you could have stood or fallen on it. As it is, I blame myself. For not stopping it. Years ago.”

“Oh, let’s face it, Mary. No matter what chances I’d have had—something’s been left out. I can’t manage. The best I can do is to cling to someone who can.”

She turned from her view of the meager street in time to see him stand up, take a step toward her and falter with a look of surprise. “As now,” he said. His knees buckled and he slid to the floor. She ran toward him. “Blankets …” he said through chattering teeth, but by the time she had torn them from the bed and helped him into a chair, the chill had subsided and his pajamas were dark with sweat. She went to the phone and dialed the doctor’s number. When she had finished she sat down at Paul’s side and put her hand on his forehead.

“He won’t come.” His whisper held a note of satisfaction. “He’s given me up.”

“He’s coming right away. On his way to the hospital.” After a few minutes she looked secretly at her watch, which said two. She was due at the university at three-thirty, robed and in place for the procession.

“What’s the time?”

“Two, Paul.”

He nodded gravely, as if she had given him a fact of importance. “Helen used to say I watched the clock more than anyone she knew.” He moved his head from side to side. His hurried breathing was like a pulse in the room. “You and Helen, most people, you get up in the morning, you go through the day—as if … there were a plan. Maybe you don’t know what it is either, but you all act …
as if
…”

She found herself breathing with him as one did leaning over the feverish bodies of children. “Better not talk.”

He rolled his head impatiently. “When I was a kid—I used to think grown people had some gimmick that kept them pushing through their days—it was a gimmick they had and I would get it too.” He turned his head away from her and was silent. There fell between them that suspended communion of the sickroom, in which conversation was only a recitative against the forces of dark. Street noises crowded into the room, poignant with health. She raised her head and found him looking at her.

“What is it?” he said.

“That—? A car. A truck.”

“The gimmick,” he said. “I meant the gimmick.”

“Sh.” She put her finger against her lips, with the tic-like smile with which one cajoled the sick. For if now, in his fever, he brought up truth like phlegm, there was no way to treat it except as fever.