False Entry (60 page)

During this period also was when she haltingly gave me those light histories of old love affairs—not many—which are traditionally a woman’s sign that she is ready for the new. I learned then why the Mannixes still spoke of Austin Fenno as they might of an absent member of the family or of an associate so close that he could never hope to be really absent, why Ruth could visit him and his wife, and all without the slightest embarrassment. It had been the marriage, lasting for eight months when Ruth and Austin were each twenty-five, which had been the embarrassment—once the unfortunate mistake was over, the waters of friendship could reseal. Could anything be more natural? Even Ursula, the second wife, couldn’t summon up any jealousy over that small, submerged shipwreck. Even she could understand the conjunction, so fostered by the well-meaning, of two childhood friends come of age without other lasting preference, who, finally embarking in a crowd of huzzas, found out only then, in their two-in-a-boat darkness, how fatally all that they had married “because of” could keep them disjoined.

“We never would have,” she said, “if we each hadn’t had a couple of other disappointments, in both cases people our own people never thought too much of. He was always like another brother to me, and now that that’s over, he still is. Oh I know, in some cases that childhood sort of thing is supposed to flower, but not with us. Left to ourselves, we would never have made that mistake. Why—Austin is considered extremely handsome, you know—the girls used to sigh at my having him around all the time through David. Even my father could never get over the fact that such a perfect physical specimen should have brains in the bargain. But I never saw him that way. Nor he me.” She smoothed a bracelet, one sent her by David from Palestine, that she often wore. “It wasn’t even a tragedy,” she said gently, “just a mistake,” and then went quickly on to something else, lest I notice, perhaps, how precisely she understood the difference. Of my origins and history she knew the sparse, public outline and never tempted my reserve further, seeming to take it for the acceptable male silence. A woman’s part was to chatter, on whatever could be made to seem harmless, so she did so, but in a way that almost said to me then as she did much later, “I won’t trespass. I will manage—not to.” Behind our backs, the neatest paradox was forming. I refused to see that she was a person to be feared; she refused to fear what she had already seen.

For the night I slept with her—the night that also dates the beginning of this memoir—she already knew that I was a pretender. Afterwards, absorbed in my own need, I did not examine her bravery, or if I had, I should have put it down to the congenital bravery of women, Nanettes in some way most of them, bearing within, like a secondary egg, an eager tenderness to be torn. A woman takes up her role of
mater dolorosa
half for humanity’s sake, half for personal glory, exactly as her object, the male, goes off to war. And these means, so separate at the start, by which each hopes to find some comet-path out of time and change, are what will drop them both, tired and old, at the same wayside point where, having eaten of those unities, they must die of them. This is the human condition and she was playing the woman’s part of it, I’d have said until now—nothing more. But the memoir, dredging up one’s own truth, brings up that of others, alongside. If we’d had bystanders that night—our owls gazing down at us from their dimension—what would they have said to one another? “Look at the two of them lying there in each other’s arms. See how she resembles him. She too has something to conceal. They are twins.”

For several nights past, I’d brought her home to an empty house but had done nothing about it. Anna was on holiday, for the Judge, taking Charlie the chauffeur with him and, on impulse, Mr. Somers, had finally departed, much later than usual, for his customary cure in Hot Springs. Ruth had not gone with him, as in the past. The word “finally” had hung between us unsaid, until the night before.

“Are you afraid of my father?” she had said, teasing, when I stood up to go.

“A little,” I had answered. “Now that he’s gone.” I had no idea what I meant by that. Coyness and savagery run hard by each other. The next night, standing in the same posture we had for nights past, saying nothing, we sank down. Behind us, the Chinese horse marshaled its shadows. The light burned.

Only a puritan takes the love act for a describable entity; the rest of us know it to be, in its knotting of philosophy with tissue, as ineffable as any other compulsion between creatures who so incurably coexist as we. Like most men, I suspect, I’d devised a few mottoes of inner reference, that was all, and by these I remember it. As it perfected itself in spite of us, there was nothing new under the sun, or needed to be. Afterwards, we lay without grotesquery among the flung clothes. How did I record it before? I look back:

Lying together
,
palm to palm
,
after love
,
is like lying in another country which some Dives had allotted for ten minutes or more. The voices that speak there are already the voices of paradise lost. I remember what I thought when I withdrew my palm. I thought—I could love her
,
if it were not for myself. We spoke then
,
or she did
,
of how we had met
,
of all the stages that had brought us to this night
,
in the way women love to do
,
exactly as children ask again for a story
,
secure in the fairy-tale end. Her hair was across my forehead. I was only half listening. The moment
,
with its treble of voices
,
was over. I watched it as it sped away
,
pluming into the gathering distance
,
leaving one of its voices behind.

What a strange disloyalty repeats itself next, as from a split lip.
If it were not for myself
,
I could love her.
What sex is it, am I, that asks more of sex than love?

Go on. Remember. But this time, watch her also, if you can.

She was speaking of the circumstance that had brought us together, the encyclopedia soliciting her father for an article, the discovery that I had known David. I was thinking of Walter, sitting up in bed with his hump clinging between his shoulders.
I thought of all those whom we leave for dead
,
either in the grave or in the past
,
who grow again between our shoulder blades. I thought of the great hump of memory I had made for myself
,
of such a shape that I could never hope to lay it down. And then I made the accidental slip. I spoke unaware; I was listening
,
but not to her. And found myself with the enemy lying beside me
,
in the flesh still quivering in communication with mine. I discovered why I had never looked behind me.

“You’re not listening,” she said.

“Yes, I am.” For my own ends only. I had kept that vow. “I’m listening.” I heard voices black, voices chaste, in a great, impure choiring of all I had not done, all I had.

“And when David left on that plane,” she said (as I thought), marveling, “it was just by chance you weren’t on it also.”

I nodded into the dark. That was how Walter had told it. Delayed at the last minute himself, he had stood on the runway and waved to David.

“And you called out good-by to him. And he turned around and waved.”

And again I nodded. “I suppose one shouldn’t take these things too mystically,” Walter had said. “But of all things, to take it into my head just then to call out to him. He couldn’t have heard me. They were already revving up. And besides—” After a long pause he had spoken again. “Yet, he turned.”

“Tell me,” she said then, her mouth at my breastbone.

“What?” I said, as absently as to a child. “What shall I tell you?”

She raised herself on an elbow and looked down at me, her eyes lustrous and fixed. Delphine in the hallway, I thought—how women at times resemble one another.

“What I already know.”

I drew her head down and hid it. She was pleading, I thought, for the three words I had not yet said—so that she might say them. “About what?”

After long silence, her answer came, muffled. “About you.”

And mine, after as long. “No, you. No, you do.” And when no answer came—“What do you know about me?”

She had so twined herself against me that she was one warm, felt line. Her words came from below, a puff from my own breast. “That—you never knew David.”

Her nape was beneath my hand. If I were a murderer. Yes, they are brave. My nakedness shivered with hers; then I sprang from her. Trembling, we faced each other. The real danger walks toward.

She sat up, her arms dangling. Her eyes were tightly closed. “It doesn’t matter. If you aren’t—who you are supposed to be. Nor am I.”

“Cover yourself,” I said. “Cover yourself!” Or open your eyes.

She drew something toward her, then opened her eyes to look down at it, my coat. “I have.” She replaced it with the blanket we had taken from Anna’s room. “Can’t we love?” she said. “No matter who we are. Or what?”

If I had not jumped up, would she have known for sure? What does she know?

“What did you mean, about David?”

She didn’t answer at once. In the growing light from outside, that had downed the other, her face looked ugly and sad. “I can lie to everyone but myself,” she said. “That’s what father won’t understand.” Within the coarse cowl of the blanket she shrugged or shivered again. One hand turned itself up and down, up and down on her bare thigh. “Though I try. Though I try.” I thought she wasn’t going to answer me further. When she spoke, it was so listlessly that her words were half echo before I heard them. “There was a friend of David’s who—who thought he loved my brother. But after David’s death he would never mention the one thing that spoiled his dream of him. That David was deaf. Stone-deaf.”

My lips were dry over my teeth. We bring ourselves, I thought, we bring ourselves.

“You’re just like Walter.” She is staring through my neck, I thought, to the hump on the other side. Her hand was at her mouth. She spoke from behind it. “You know nothing about us. Nothing at all.”

I’m still at Lasch’s. The trees are still there. Behind them, the black is paling before the gradual creation; a lost divinity patiently makes its statement again, today perhaps being the one on which we shall understand it; it will try. Though I try, though I try. My first encounter with the Mannixes held the germ of all the others, then, of the last. But that night, fleeing down their steps like a masked lover in whose silken face the lamp had been thrust, I was still too self-contained to see the germ in its entirety. I had all I could do to carry my bulging sack of terror home with me, drag it inside. She’d said everything, it seemed to me then; she had held the blinding lamp high, looked down. All the three months since, bent at my desk under my own incubus, this had seemed enough. When we spoke yesterday afternoon over the wire stretching from these trees to her sea, she said even less—what did she say?—only a phrase, a catch of breath, and a phrase—but then I began to see the whole of it. I could not have written of them as I have, otherwise. Take nothing for granted, on either side.

I heard what she said through the fly-cries of the people in the room behind her, steady as the climbing tone of the telephone itself, then caught, then righted, then gone. Why she watched me, how she knew me, said to my face in her mirror, You are honest; said to her twin, You are not who you are. “Yes, I’ll come,” she said. “Day after tomorrow. I—I can’t keep it to myself any longer. There’s something I must tell you, about us.”

Sitting here, I make a different guess as to what it is with every pulse beat. The Judge can walk more than he does. She does not marry. Who is punishing who? The Judge never wrote that article. They speak so little of the mother, whose picture is everywhere except in his study. Who hates there, who loves, who lies? One never sees children there. David did not marry the mute. They married Ruth to Austin, her brother. To what end are they all arranged? She is right. I know nothing about them at all.

It must wait for tomorrow, when I meant to give her this.

Can nothing, not even the memoir, ever be for itself alone, nothing, nothing, nothing? Her explanation does not belong here. And still she approaches, to her own threading of drums. Time is the bystander. Innocent, we approach one another. That murder we seek.

I
AM IN A
plane, flying back. Jet flight 119, six and a half hours to London, cruising at an altitude of twenty thousand feet, is carrying me back to my beginnings. Along with me are eighty or ninety others on all the range of human errands. We fly trajectories that once belonged to thought. The small voice of the intercom conscience falls silent. The steppes below us are cirrus. The motto glows:
Unfasten seat belts.
God bless our home.

Today is Wednesday, or when I left still was. Early Monday morning, before the morning wave of secretaries should find me at Lasch’s, I drove home dead beat, fell into bed and slept out the day. It was night when I awoke; peering out at the tiered lights, I dropped the curtains again and in an answering exhilaration lit lamps of my own. As I prowled about at my feeding and washing, I felt the hung-over, animal restlessness that comes from having disturbed the inner clock. A hangover has its clarity too. Conclusions swarmed toward me as they do to the drugged, and I watched them with a stiff intentness that might be joy. The memoir was gathered up on the desk, not that it was finished, nor that I had moved one millimeter away from what had been enunciated there—only that a shadow, as if from some stagecraft, had fallen upon it. Hers? I knew better than to think that its story could end in that warm, self-congratulatory haze of lovers who feel themselves star-pushed toward one another. We were not such a pair, or ever could be. One by one I watched the truth-bubbles float from the pipe. What sex is it, are we, but that solitary non-sex (once called the soul) which, from the moment it takes up the black dialogue of itself, starts hunting a place to lay it down? A man who has no place—hunts for a person. But we are not star-pushed; we choose our surrogates for the good, for the bad. Standing in the hall of mirrors, before the judges who may be ourselves, we give each other our weaknesses to hold.