The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (68 page)

“Your trouble, Martin, is that you are lazy. You should
make
yourself write. You should assign certain hours of the week to composition and stick to your program no matter what.”

“Do
you
do that?”

“No, because I don't have to. I can afford to wait for the mood, because I now know that the mood will come. But when it does come I give it full sway. Even if Red and I are traveling in Europe on a fixed schedule, and I feel the mood, then I must stay where I am and write. Red is an angel about changing accommodations.”

“But he's still a taskmaster. He
makes
you write.”

“He doesn't make me do a thing. He simply insists that I follow my bent. I tell him we should hang a sign on our door: ‘Arlina and Red, Makers of Fine Fiction.'”

What
was
their relationship? It was obvious that it couldn't have been a physical one for several years. And before that? They had no children, which was no proof of anything, but it struck me that there was something virginal in Arlina's air. Dan Carmichael, who delighted in sexual speculations, claimed to have had it from Red himself that Arlina had been so frigid and inexperienced at the time of their wedding that it had taken him three months to consummate the marriage. But Dan's imagination was an embroidering one; I did not trust it.

The first time Arlina and I discussed the relation between the sexes was when we were seated on a bench in Bryant Park, whither we had strolled on a mild early spring afternoon following a matinée of
Tristan und Isolde
. I had been asked to fill Red's subscription seat because he hated Wagner. He had missed, however, one of the great performances of all time—Flagstad and Melchior—and Arlina, who had been deeply affected, was moved to speak of the “tragedy” of illicit love.

“Is there anything in art more shattering than the surprising of the lovers in Act Two? They have almost escaped the harsh dry world of daylight—the meanness of things too clearly delineated—into the enchantment of night—death, if you will—I don't care—and bang! Melot breaks in. Marke breaks in. All hell breaks in.”

“Just before their orgasm.”

Arlina paused—judicially—as if to consider whether I was being crude or merely explicit. “Well, yes, if you choose to construe the music that way.”

“Isn't it unmistakable? Those rhythms?”

“I know what you mean, of course. But to me Wagner is expressing more than just that. The lovers have reached a point where their relationship is the only reality. Marke and Melot and even the warning Brangàne are irrelevancies. The terrible thing about unsanctified love—unsanctified, that is, by law or religion or mores or even by a decent regard for one's spouse or betrothed—is that these irrelevancies are always bound to intrude. Even if they're not actually intruding, they may be intruding in the lovers' minds. The lovers are never
free.”

“But isn't that just what makes their love so great? The difficulty? Even the danger?”

“Oh, Martin, what a superficial view! How
can
you?”

“Because it's true! Look what's happening today. People everywhere are obsessed with removing the impediments to love. Easy divorce threatens the very existence of adultery. Our most respectable debutantes are permitted love affairs, and every kind of sexual perversion is freely tolerated, at least in the best society. And is anyone happier? Of course not! Because the pleasure of love is diluted with its availability. The nun in a convent who nurses a guilty passion for the priest who officiates at mass gets as much kick out of it as the busiest Don Juan on Park Avenue!”

“You can't be serious!”

“Never more so. If King Marke, stumbling on the lovers, had said, ‘Go to it, kids. I only quit the hunt for a date with Brangane,' there'd have been a terrible let-down. I bet they wouldn't have got going again until they'd quaffed the rest of that love potion.”

“Don't be so disgusting.” But the reproach in her voice was mild. The topic intrigued her. “It's all very well for
you
to talk that way. There are no impediments for a bachelor.”

“Are there not, Arlina?” I turned to look into her eyes with an expression of mock ardor.

“Don't be silly.”

And she rose to walk on.

But the sudden rigor in her tone gave me my first notion that perhaps what she minded was that the ardor was mock.

And was it? My feelings about the wonderful Arlina were mixed indeed. On the lowest level—and that was where I always started—there was the itching yen of a small randy male for a fine large female figure, the lust of a Nibelung to pollute a Rhine maiden, or, translated into terms of literary competition, the drive of a scribbler to equate himself in the only way he could think of with a novelist of the first rank.

But that was far from the whole. By my own half-serious philosophy of love, just enunciated, I might have diluted such intensity as I was capable of in a series of easy affairs, but I still know that I was more devoted to Arlina than to any other woman in my life. She had become the warmest of friends, a kind of sisterly mentor to a man rejected by his own mother, and I cannot think of her even today without a return of something like the old heartache.

At any rate, after our Bryant Park chat, I began seriously to entertain the idea that it might be one of the delightful functions of my idle life to make some contribution to her deeper happiness.

It was Hiram Scudder who first hinted to me that my project was not entirely unfeasible. I had become a great favorite of the paunchy, bald old boy, who was always asking me to lunch, ostensibly to discuss my writing but really to hold forth about his own, and he would walk slowly down the avenue afterwards, his arm entwined with mine, while he chanted about what he would do if he had again, like me, “a manly vigor and youth.” In parting he would seize my head with both his hands and plant a wet kiss, presumably of benediction, upon my forehead. Perhaps he thought of the emotion I aroused in him as paternal. Unlike Dan, who, though married, was a notorious wooer of young men, Hiram was a bachelor and very possibly a virgin to both sexes. Such things were not uncommon to his generation. Arlina's court had a decidedly androgynous note, although Red himself was given to tasteless antipederast jokes. But then Red, perhaps out of bitterness at his own incapacities, was anti everything. Except, of course, Arlina.

On one of our postprandial promenades Hiram referred to the obvious problem in Arlina's life.

“A handsome woman like that needs a different kind of love from what poor old Red can give her.”

“You don't believe she's sublimated all that into something higher?” I raised my eyebrows in jest.

He chuckled. “No more than you do, young man. What she needs is a warm body two nights a week.”

“What a disgusting old satyr you are, Hiram. How do you know she hasn't got one?”

“Because I know Arlina. And I know the body she might pick if she had her choice.” Here he pressed his arm closer to mine. I pulled away from him.

“Well, I know no such thing. So far as I'm concerned she's entirely devoted to her old Red. Who strikes me, by the way, as a man who might not hesitate to put a bullet through her if he caught her out. And one in her lover as well.”

“You see him bursting in on them in his wheelchair? Besides, he wouldn't object. He's told me as much.”

“Really?” I didn't want to encourage the old bawd, but I
was
interested.

“Oh, yes. He told me he hadn't been any good to her in that department for several years. And that he wouldn't mind if she took a lover, so long as she was discreet about it.”

“And has he told her so?”

“Oh, no. That would outrage her. If it came at all, it would have to come as a passion strong enough to overcome her sense of duty. I agreed with Red. If it wasn't big enough to do that, it wasn't worth having.”

I said no more on the subject, but I gave it careful thought. The removal of Red as a jealous husband certainly cleared the field. I had little zest for violence.

One Saturday afternoon when Arlina and I were walking on the fields of her Bedford farm, she suddenly put a question to me which seemed to be aimed at a very personal aspect of my own life.

“My new novel involves an adultery in Gotham which the characters must keep very secret. My heroine is a Park Avenue matron, and her lover is a law partner of her husband's. They wouldn't go to a hotel, would they?”

“They might. A second-class one on the West Side. But she'd hate that, and if she were ever spotted on the street in that part of town, it would be fatal. No, they'd be more apt to meet in a rented apartment, still on the West Side but south of Central Park, near the shopping district, so her presence in that area, if noted, would seem natural.”

“And they'd arrive and leave, of course, separately.”

“Of course.”

“Would she have a cleaning woman for the flat?”

“He would arrange that. The woman would never see her, and she'd leave nothing in the room that could identify her.”

“And when the lovers met socially, they'd be careful to act naturally.”

“Unnaturally! The thing to avoid would be any appearance of avoiding each other. That's always a sure giveaway.”

“I suppose if my heroine had an unmarried lover, they could meet in his flat.”

“Depending on where it is. Elevators are dangerous.”

“You
do
seem to know the ins and outs.”

Ah, that was what I had been waiting for!
That
had nothing to do with her novel.

“Well, you don't suppose I've been living like a monk all these years, do you?”

“Far from it.”

“Would you have wished me to?”

“I?” She seemed startled. “Why, no, I don't suppose I should. What right have I to be your censor?”

“The right I freely give you. The right of a friend I love and respect above all others.”

“But, dear Martin, your private life is your own affair!”

“Not anymore. Now that that life is under discussion, I want you to know I've been pure as Hippolytus since the day we met.”

We had been walking by the stile that separated the field from her neighbor's. She turned now to lean against it, facing me, but with clenched fists raised to her eyes.

“What are you trying to tell me, Martin?”

“It's pretty obvious, isn't it?”

“Oh, dear friend, please don't play games with me. I'm not up to that kind of thing.”

“It isn't playing games to be in love with you.”

“Love!” She dropped her hands, and I saw something like terror in her eyes. “You can't love me. You're a mere boy compared to me. A dear, beautiful boy who should be loving some dear, beautiful girl. Do you want to drive me out of my mind?
Do
you?”

“That's just what I want to do.” I stepped forward and seized both her hands in mine. I stared at her averted eyes until they turned to me. “There are eight years between us, which is nothing at our ages. Let
me
decide about that ‘dear, beautiful girl.' The only woman I want is
you
, and I'm not too humble to claim we can give each other something that's better than anything either of us ever had.”

Her eyes now wandered in what seemed an almost childlike confusion. “What about my husband?”

“He needn't ever know a thing. Leave all that to me. If I can do it for your novel, I can do it for you.” I allowed a grave pause. “Let me kiss you, Arlina.” When she said nothing, I repeated the request. “I don't want you to think I ever grabbed anything you didn't freely accord.”

“Very well. Kiss me, Martin.”

Whereupon I did so. Her response was all I could have wished. When we got back to the house, Hiram Scudder leered at me disgustingly. He too had been walking, and I supposed he had espied us.

When Arlina surrendered to love, it was without reservation. She came to my little apartment in the Village quite openly, disdaining the maneuvers of her fictional characters, on certain weekday afternoons, and we had rapturous times together. At first. But I could not quite accustom myself to the almost reverential aftermaths to our lovemaking of which she made much point. She insisted that we read aloud famous love poems to each other. As she was planning to publish an anthology of these, I could not but note that the time was not, at least in her case, entirely wasted.

I sound like a cad, but what man wouldn't who told the whole truth? The fact was that Arlina's lovemaking, at first delicious, as she shyly and then rapidly more boldly accustomed herself to every intimacy, began at last to be the least bit smothering. She was too articulately romantic, too anxious to possess every aspect of my nature. She wanted me to agree on certain times of the day or night, when we were not together, when we would think passionately of each other. She wanted to penetrate into every chapter of my past, to learn about my old love affairs, to question me about the exact quality of my feeling for her, reaching rather too greedily, it seemed to me, for the smallest evidence that she represented a unique experience in my emotional life.

I had to fabricate almost all my responses. She would have been horrified by the truth. I was only too sure that the fantasies in which all lovers indulge to keep their libidos keen were very different in our two cases. Whereas she may have made love to the remembered rhythms of
Tristan
, I enhanced my lust with images of a proud Roman dame submitting helplessly to the rape of a barbarian, her aroused appetite actually whetted by humiliation and shame. At other times I likened myself to the villain Maskwell in Congreve's
Double Dealer
, boasting how he “had wantoned in the rich circle” of Lady Touchwood's love. That was more my inner style.