In the Absence of Angels (3 page)

They heard his heavy breath as he dashed from the room. The slam of the outer door blended with Robert’s battering, louder now, on the door down the hall.

“What’s down there?” She was beside Peter, otherwise he could not have heard her. They took hands, like strangers met on a narrow footbridge or on one of those steep places where people cling together more for anchorage against their own impulse than for balance. Carefully they leaned out over the sill. Yes — it was down there, the shirt, zebra-striped, just decipherable on the merged shadow of the courtyard below.

Carefully, as if they were made of eggshell, as if by some guarded movement they could still rescue themselves from disaster, they drew back and straightened up. Robert, his face askew with the impossible question, was behind them.

After this, there was the hubbub — the ambulance from St. Luke’s, the prowl car, the two detectives from the precinct station house, and finally the “super,” a vague man with the grub pallor and shamble of those who live in basements. He pawed over the keys on the thong around his wrist and, after several tries, opened the bedroom door. It was a quiet, unviolent room with a tossed bed and an open window, with a stagy significance acquired only momentarily in the minds of those who gathered in a group at its door.

Much later, after midnight, Peter and Susan sat in the bald glare of an all-night restaurant. With hysterical eagerness, Robert had gone on to the station house with the two detectives to register the salient facts, to help ferret out the relatives in Ohio, to arrange, in fact, anything that might still be arrangeable about Vince. Almost without noticing, he had acquiesced in Peter’s proposal to look after Susan. Susan herself, after silently watching the gratuitous burbling of her father, as if it were a phenomenon she could neither believe nor leave, had followed Peter without comment. At his suggestion, they had stopped off at the restaurant on their way to her stepfather’s house, for which she had a key.

“Thanks. I was starved.” She leaned back and pushed at the short bang of hair on her forehead.

“Hadn’t you eaten at all?”

“Just those pasty sandwiches they sell on the train. There wasn’t any diner.”

“Smoke?”

“I do, but I’m just too tired. I can get into a hotel all right, don’t you think? If I can’t get in at Arthur’s?”

“I know the manager of a small one near us,” Peter said. “But if you don’t mind coming to my place, you can use my mother’s room for tonight. Or for as long as you need, probably.”

“What about your mother?”

“She’s away. She’ll be away for quite a while.”

“Not in Reno, by any chance?” There was a roughness, almost a coarseness, in her tone, like that in the overdone camaraderie of the shy.

“No. My father died when I was eight. Why?”

“Oh, something in the way you spoke. And then you’re so competent. Does she work?”

“No. My father left something. Does yours?”

She stood up and picked up her bedraggled gloves. “No,” she said, and her voice was suddenly distant and delicate again. “She marries.” She turned and walked out ahead of him.

He paid, rushed out of the restaurant, and caught up with her.

“Thought maybe you’d run out on me,” he said.

She got in the car without answering.

They drove through the Park, toward the address in the East Seventies that she had given him. A weak smell of grass underlay the gas-blended air, but the Park seemed limp and worn, as if the strain of the day’s effluvia had been too much for it. At the Seventy-second Street stop signal, the blank light of a street lamp invaded the car.

“Thought you might be feeling Mrs. Grundyish at my suggesting the apartment,” Peter said.

“Mrs. Grundy wasn’t around much when I grew up.” The signal changed and they moved ahead.

They stopped in a street which had almost no lights along its smartly converted house fronts. This was one of the streets, still sequestered by money, whose houses came alive only under the accelerated, febrile glitter of winter and would dream through the gross summer days, their interiors deadened with muslin or stirred faintly with the subterranean clinkings of caretakers. No. 4 was dark.

“I would rather stay over at your place, if I have to,” the girl said. Her voice was offhand and prim. “I hate hotels. We always stopped at them in between.”

“Let’s get out and see.”

They stepped down into the areaway in front of the entrance, the car door banging hollowly behind them. She fumbled in her purse and took out a key, although it was already obvious that it would not be usable. In his childhood, he had often hung around in the areaways of old brownstones such as this had been. In the corners there had always been a soft, decaying smell, and the ironwork, bent and smeared, always hung loose and broken-toothed. The areaway of this house had been repaved with slippery flag; even in the humid night there was no smell. Black-tongued grillwork, with an oily shine and padlocked, secured the windows and the smooth door. Fastened on the grillwork in front of the door was the neat, square proclamation of a protection agency.

“You don’t have a key for the padlocks, do you?”

“No.” She stood on the curb, looking up at the house. “It was a nice room I had there. Nicest one I ever did have, really.” She crossed to the car and got in.

He followed her over to the car and got in beside her. She had her head in her hands.

“Don’t worry. We’ll get in touch with somebody in the morning.”

“I don’t. I don’t care about any of it, really.” She sat up, her face averted. “My parents, or any of the people they tangle with.” She wound the lever on the door slowly, then reversed it. “Robert, or my mother, or Arthur,” she said, “although he was always pleasant enough. Even Vince — even if I’d known him.”

“He was just a screwed-up kid. It could have been anybody’s window.”

“No.” Suddenly she turned and faced him. “I should think it would be the best privilege there is, though. To care, I mean.”

When he did not immediately reply, she gave him a little pat on the arm and sat back. “Excuse it, please. I guess I’m groggy.” She turned around and put her head on the crook of her arm. Her words came faintly through it. “Wake me when we get there.”

She was asleep by the time they reached his street. He parked the car as quietly as possible beneath his own windows. He himself had never felt more awake in his life. He could have sat there until morning with her sleep-secured beside him. He sat thinking of how different it would be at Rye, or anywhere, with her along, with someone along who was the same age. For they were the same age, whatever that was, whatever the age was of people like them. There was nothing he would be unable to tell her.

To the north, above the rooftops, the electric mauve of midtown blanked out any auguries in the sky, but he wasn’t looking for anything like that. Tomorrow he would take her for a drive — whatever the weather. There were a lot of good roads around Greenwich.

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 brief case 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 brief case 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 brief case, and walked on toward the sure nepenthe, the comfortable glaze of the bar.