The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (58 page)

They gathered around to greet him. With the unfortunate sobriety of the latecomer, he noted, accepting a drink, that they were all, although not yet tipsy, a little relaxed, a trifle suffused, with the larger-than-life voices and gestures of men who had had a few. A table set buffet style in a corner, and a coffee urn, had apparently not yet been touched. Downing his first drink, he took another, and plunged into the babble of expected questions, the “where you been all these years?”—the “what’re you doing now?”—the “whereabouts you living?” One by one he remembered them all, even to the little personal tricks and ways they had had in the locker-room. Bates, whose enormous sweaty feet had been a loud joke with them all, was almost completely bald now, as was Goetschius, the polite quiet boy from upstate, who, politely as ever, bent his tonsure over Banks’ pictures of his house, his family.

Reassuringly, they all looked pretty good, as he thought he did himself, but he wondered if they knew any better than he did what had impelled them to come. “Horse” Chernowski, who stood nearest him, had driven up from Pennsylvania, beckoned on, Spanner wondered, by what urge to reasseverate the past? In his ill-cut, too thick tweeds, his great shoulders swollen needlessly by shoulder pads, the hocklike wrist bones projecting from the cuffs—his nickname fitted him still. He had been their dumb baby, stronger than any of the others, but dull of reaction; once they had lost a race because of his slowness in going over the side when he had jammed his slide.

“Ah, my God, Davy,” said Chernowski delightedly, “do you remember the cops picking us up for speeding after the big day—the night we drove back from Poughkeepsie?”

“Yes. Sure I remember,” said Spanner, but he hadn’t, until then. From across the room he saw Anderson, the stroke, nursing his drink at the mantel, staring at him ruefully, almost comprehendingly; encountering that blue gaze which had faced him steadily, in the inarticulate intimacy of three years of gruelling practice, faraway incident, and triumph, there was much that he did remember.

Handsome, intelligent son of a family which had contributed both money and achievement to the college for more than one generation, Anderson had more perfectly straddled the continuum of campus approval that stretched between “grind” and “hero” than anyone Spanner had known. Spanner remembered him, effortlessly debonair and assured, burnished hair spotlighted over the satin knee breeches of his costume as Archer in
The Beaux’ Stratagem,
or stripped and white-lipped, holding Spanner’s gaze with his own as the water seared past the shell. Although he had been as perilously near the prototype of campus hero as one could be without stuffiness or lampoonery, there had never been any of the glib sheen of the fair-haired boy about him, nothing in the just courtesy of his manner except the measurable flow of a certain
noblesse oblige.

He crossed now to Spanner, and took, rather than shook, Spanner’s hand.

“Davy!” he said. “Well, Davy!”

The crisp intonation had the same ease, the ruddy hair had merely faded to tan, the eyes stared down at him now straight as ever, but from between lids with the faint, flawed pink of the steady drinker, and Spanner saw now that there was in his posture the controlled waver, the scarcely perceptible imbalance of the man who is always quietly, competently drunk.

“You look fine, Davy,” he said, smiling.

“You look fine too, Bob.”

“Sure. Oh sure,” he said, with a wry, self-derisive grimace. He indicated with his drink. “Look at us. Everyone looks fine. Householders all. Hard to believe we were the gents who took it full in the belly—depression, social consciousness.” His accent was a little slurred now. “And wars and pestilence,” he said more firmly. “Even if we were a little late for that.” He downed his drink.

“You in the war, Bob?” said Spanner, somewhat lamely.

“Me? Not me,” he said. “My kids were. Lost one—over Germany.” He walked over to the buffet, poured himself a drink, and was back, swiftly. “Sounds antiquated already, doesn’t it? Over Germany. We’re back to saying ‘in Germany’ now.” He went on quickly, as if he had a speech in mind that he would hold back if he thought it over.

“Remember the house I used to belong to? ‘Bleak House,’ they used to call it, sometimes, remember? The one that got into the news in the thirties because they hung a swastika over the door. Or maybe somebody hung it on
them.
” He drank again. “Could have been either way,” he said.

Spanner nodded. He had begun to be sick of the word “remember”; it seemed as if everyone, including his self of the night before, was intent on poking up through the golden unsplit waters of his youth the sudden sharp fin of some submerged reality, undefined, but about to become clear.

“They were a nice bunch of fellows in our time,” said Spanner.

“You know … Davy …” Anderson said. His voice trailed off. The fellow was apologetic; in his straight blue look there was a hint of guilt, of shame, as if he too, the previous night, had half dreamed and pondered, but unlike Spanner had met the dark occupant of his dreamings face to face.

“I wanted them to take you in,” Anderson said. “A few of us together could have pushed it through—but all the others made such a God-damned stink about it, we gave in. I suppose you heard.” He looked at Spanner, mistaking the latter’s unresponsiveness for accusation perhaps, and went on.

“If we hadn’t all been so damned unseeing, so sure of ourselves in those days …” He broke off. “Ah well,” he said, “that’s water over the dam.” And grasping Spanner’s shoulders, he looked down at him in an unsteady bid for forgiveness, just before he released him with a brotherly slap on the back, and turned away, embarrassed. Standing there, it was as if Spanner felt the flat of it, not between his shoulder blades, but stinging on his suddenly hot cheek—that sharp slap of revelation.

A
FTERWARD, LEANING THEIR ELBOWS
on the mantel, they lit cigarettes and stared at each other warily. The late afternoon, seeping into the small apartment, pushed back its boundaries, melted them into shadow, intruding into the comfortably trivial box the long finger of space.

They were, she thought, like two people holding on to the opposite ends of a string, each anxious to let go first, or at least soon, without offending the other, yet each reluctant to drop the curling, lapsing bond between them. Always, afterward, there was the sense of a dialectic, a question not concluded; after the blind engulfment the two separate egos collected themselves painfully, slowly donned their bits of protective armor, and maneuvered once more for place.

It would be easy, good, she thought, to talk long and intimately afterward, to meet on close ground, divested of all pretense. But they never want this; they never do. The long, probing conversations that women tried to force upon them, getting closer to the nerve of personality—how they hated them, retreating from them brusquely into silence, sheepishly into the commonplace of the consolatory pat! Or, after the aura of wanting had ebbed, did they too feel a little bereft, bare, in front of the speculative, now disenchanted eyes opposite them; did they too conceal a fumbling need to linger a little longer in the dark recesses of emotion, to examine, to assess what had been separate, had blended, and now was separate again?

Doubting this, she could see him, so quickly, so expertly casual, leaving in a few minutes, gathering up his hat and his briefcase with a delicate assumption of reluctance, exhaling a last relieved whiff of tenderness into her ear. Out of some obscure pride she never went to the door with him; he never remarked on this but always closed the door very gently, like someone leaving a sickroom. She could imagine him standing on the doorstep downstairs, squaring his shoulders and making straight for a bar, eager to immerse himself quickly in the swapping masculine talk of baseball scores and prize fights, blow by blow—all the vicarious jaunty brag that sat upon him as inappropriately as a cockaded paper party hat, but that was indulged in alike, she knew, by the simple male and the clever.

Opposite, already a little absent, he stared at her a trifle wryly, pulling gratefully at his cigarette. Now, he knew, would begin the gentle process of disengagement that he had learned long ago, defensively, to perform so well. Now it would be like a game of gesture in which he excelled, in which it would be as if, smiling the tolerant smile of experience, he divested himself one by one of a series of clinging hands, until he stood again remote, inaccessible, free. Only later, when the warmth and almost all the conquest had worn away, would the slow rise of irritation with self and women begin, then the slight guilt of satiety that would enable the resolve to be made, and finally the shrug and the forgetfulness.

Regretfully, as if taking leave of a landscape that had pleased, he broke his glance from the eyes opposite him, looked down at the hand that lay perhaps intentionally near his on the mantel, curved upward, open. Warned, he had felt all afternoon the too recognizable air of intensity, of special pleading, that had surrounded her; in a woman of less taste it would have taken the form of a dress too tight, or a flock of bows in the hair. Intelligent women stimulated rather than repelled him, if they had the other attraction too; their withdrawals and defenses were heightened by subtleties that it was a challenge to explore and subdue. But in the end it was all the same—gazing up at you afterward with their liquid pained stare, detecting the coil of softness in you that half appreciated, half understood, they all pleaded for an avowal—of what?

The hand on the mantel brushed his, and was withdrawn.

“It’s pathetic, isn’t it,” she whispered, “the spectacle of people trying to reach one another? By any means. Everywhere.” There was a rush, a grating of honesty, in her tone that she deprecated immediately with a quick covering smile.

The remark hung too nakedly on the air. He nodded ruefully, and allowing his hand to touch hers for a moment, he stared into their palms, and they stood together for a moment, joined over the body of their failure.

Patting her shoulder in a light rhythm, one, two, three, he grasped her chin tight in his hand and looked down at her for quite a time.

“See you,” he said. “Better run for my train.” As he took up his hat and briefcase half embarrassedly, leaning against the mantel she was watching him silently, and it was so that he caught the last image of her as he let himself out the door, easing the knob to.

Blinking in the light of the outdoors, which was a lot stronger than one would suspect after that dim apartment of hers, he brought that image with him, but, shielding him, his mind shifted, rioting pleasurably among the warmer images of the early afternoon. All the way down the avenue from the park he carried these with him, until at Forty-second Street, sauntering toward Grand Central, he joined the streams of women carrying their light pastel packages of hose, ribbons, blouses—all the paraphernalia of women at the turn of a season. He was used to seeing them in the train, haggard after the day-long scavenger hunt for the hat to go with the shoes that went with the dress—riding home for the long ritual of unguents that would arm them once more. From his wife, and his sisters before her, he knew it well—the ritual that would transform the kimonoed, the oiled, the bepinned one into the handsome, curled, confident woman waiting at the door, Venus risen triumphant on a shell of empty boxes.

For a while now, out of a sense of the just, the cautious moment, he would be free, but inevitably he would be alert again to the puff of organdie at a throat, a mouth so richly, redly drawn over the scanter curve of lip beneath, a look, plaintive or ripe—the whole froth of femininity that they all put out like entangling scarves. They would be drawn to him too, often out of an awareness of his sensitivity to them, only to be confused by the proffered warmth for warmth of a relationship that ended, not in the conventional brutalities of a rejection they might have understood, but in the firm, knowing refusal to be involved in the abject spiritual surrender which they always ended up by demanding, for which they all longed.

Either they caught you young and eager, as he had been, and—nailed down by their allies, time and habit—incredibly, swiftly, you were a member of the country club, with a mortgage, while across the room, herded together with the others, in their unblushing, blatant discussions of the idiosyncrasies of husbands, they proclaimed your indenture to them—or else, in the byways of
sub rosa
relationships, there too, sooner or later, they strangled calm with their demoniacal need for finality, possession, grown all the stronger because it could not be socially displayed. Perhaps, he thought, it is the riddled period in which we live, in which people are driven endlessly upon one another, hoping to find, in the person of another one of the bewildered, the a priori love, the certainty, the touchstone.

He had reached Grand Central and the long sloping entrance to the suburban trains. Across the way his usual stop-in place beckoned with its promise of a muted jumble of light, noise, and clinking glassware in which feeling could be drowned. Perhaps it is worse for the women, he thought, but they
are
the worst—all of them Penelopes, trying to weave you into the fabric of their lives, building on you in one way or the other until you have to get out from under. Squaring his shoulders, he shifted his briefcase, and walked on toward the sure nepenthe, the comfortable glaze of the bar.

In the apartment, she stood still at the mantel, reluctant to acknowledge the gap in the room, to close it over finally with movement, change. At last she walked over to the sofa and sat down, shrinking into the cushion for its warmth. The room was always like this afterward, like a deserted theatre, and, half actress, half spectator, she sat and mulled over what had gone before, forming, as if into a stylized ballet, the whole interchange of responses that had been their meeting, forestalling, by this means, the sure humming rise of depression.

Her last exclamation, which had been as alienating to him, she knew, as the shock of a cry for help thrust suddenly into the most casual of conversations, had come from the heart, the heart that she knew, by unspoken agreement with him, with all of them perhaps, must always be held behind one. Only among the very young might it be otherwise, possibly … before they had acquired the destroying talent for compromise that eased—as it more and more deflated—the drama of experience.