Nothing That Meets the Eye (5 page)

“Huy!” shouted the cripple, very close. “Huy!” He made a pass at the yellow coat with his gangling hand.

The shorter man bounded. “You want it? Take it!” he screamed.

“Huy! . . . I jus' . . . I jus' . . .”

But the man in the polo coat was far away, and the thock-thocks were running now, turning off, running eastward.

The big bony hands came down, groping over the sidewalk. They found the bag, lifted it, nestled it in the lumpy arms of the coat. Archie continued up the street, holding the bag so tightly against him that the affection sprang in him, making him warm and happy. The man in the polo coat faded from his mind. He smelt the damp khaki, redolent of clothiness. The fluted mouth spread serenely.

He kept going for four or five blocks, up to Twentieth Street, where he went east. He did not feel to see what might be in the bag. His face had returned to its usual expression of bland contemplation. He looked straight ahead of him, not noticing his shadow that the lamplights along the curb passed one to the other, the shadow whose head twisted now and again in bizarre design on the sidewalk.

At a certain brownstone he pulled himself up by a broad balustrade, produced a key and let himself in. The foyer was lighted by a small naked bulb at the ceiling. He climbed the stair, tugging at the shaky banister, turning at each landing with a dogged pump of his head. At the fourth floor he stopped at a low squarish door, so kicked and fingerprinted that the brown paint was almost all off. He opened the padlock with another key.

Inside, he went familiarly and turned on the gooseneck lamp that sat on the oilcloth-covered table beside the gas burner. The yellowish light revealed a cube of a room, furnished with a bed that sagged like a hammock, a spool-legged table, a straight chair, a bedtable made of an upended crate, and a battered chest of drawers. All around the walls were tiny notations, so closely and equidistantly written as to make almost a pattern: the names and addresses and telephone numbers of all the people with whom he had anything to do. There were the employees of the newspaper plant down to the scrubwomen, the names and particulars of the grocery men at the corner, of the cigar store and the drugstore, and many addresses of miscellaneous direct mail advertisers who had in past months sent him letters.

He hung his overcoat behind a cloth that made a closet of one corner. His head was quite long and flat on top, seen from the side, like the model profile beside a Mercator projection. The hair was blond and very fine, falling in big haphazard locks around his head. He moved gracefully in his room, as though he were completely at ease and knew the position of every article.

He carried the bag to his bed and sat himself gently on the bumpy quilt. The gold-colored zipper sent a chill of pleasure through his fingers. Its purr was a song of richness, of mechanical beauty. His fluted mouth spread wider, his blond eyebrows arched expectantly. He parted the sides of the bag and in the dim interior saw many columns of glossy blue and gold paper, and red and yellow and green and gray and mauve and white papers, each a block itself, but making one great block together. The regular and immaculate wrappings of hundreds of penny chocolates and chewing gums.

His eagerness subsided to a troubled, uncertain disappointment. The arched eyebrows dropped a little and the mouth hung loose. Then, caught by the spectroscopic colors, he lifted ten or fifteen chocolate pieces from their box, pressed one against the other between his thumb and forefinger, and laughed aloud until the column broke, tumbling over his legs onto the bed and the floor. He put his hand in again, this time drawing forth many green boxes of chewing gum, which he let cascade off his palm onto his pressed-together thighs. He took more chocolates and sifted them through his fingers like coins, dropping them onto the bedspread. And there was also, at one end of the bag, in a drab canvas sack, perhaps two dollars' worth of pennies.

He pulled up the spool-legged table, removed the alarm clock and the pencil stub and made a field of the chocolates on the top, arranging them in rows of dark blue, mauve, and green, squinting from all possible angles at this panoply of color, at these hundreds of pieces of candy which he would have bought only one at a time, and very rarely. Then, luxuriously, indulgently, he chose a certain piece and, unwrapping it, put the black cool candy onto his tongue. He pushed himself back against the wall, turned his flat-topped head to let the light fall on the little paper in his hand and, humming tunelessly, began reading the ingredients of the thing releasing flavor in his mouth.

MAGIC CASEMENTS

I

H
ildebrandt knew it was the magic casements that drew him each evening to the deserted bar, but he would have confessed this to no one but himself. The magic casements were only doors, made to look like the windows of the galleon's stern, which, looming absurdly from a wall of red brocade, formed the entrance to the gigantesque Pandora Room. Mid-Victorian was certainly not his style, yet the casements redeemed it all. Their brass-hinged, golden-hazed arms were influng casually, differently each evening, and had a tremulous, suspenseful look of being about to usher forth a miracle.

He turned from his brandy to gaze at them once more, and idly recited to himself, “‘That oftimes hath (something) magic casements, Opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! The very word is like a bell!'—”

Oh, when would someone, be it man or woman, walk through those magic casements and into his life? Or was he becoming one of those fixtures that had always roused his pity, sometimes his contempt, the brandy-fuddled, rather asinine gentleman-at-the-bar, eternally waiting?

He surveyed the Pandora Room dismally. His somber brown eyes were partially shielded by shriveling lids that drew over their outer corners. Though there was no one but the bartender to see him, he was conscious of the aristocratic lids as he straightened on his stool and inspected the room with an air of thoughtful superiority. Far away amid a cemetery of white-clothed tables, a waiter attended a lone dinner guest. Sources high in the walls, concealed by festoons of gray or red velvet, poured recorded music without cease into the ever-empty chalice lined with tapestry, Persian rug, and gilt moldings. Background music that backgrounded nothing, Hildebrandt thought. The gargantuan loneliness of the place seemed at times to dwarf his own. He wondered if that might be another reason why he came here.

“Pandora Room,” he whispered, “what a mockery of your name!”

He slumped lower on the tall, delicately legged stool and turned the stem of the brandy glass that resembled a mounted thimble. His slight black-suited figure looked insignificant as a candle wick. The amber bar that occupied only a corner of the huge room glowed around him like a fuzzy flame.

He began to stare critically at himself in the mirror behind the bar. The ingenuous hope of deliverance from boredom, which ordinarily only peeked now and then through the jadedness, confronted him plainly like an imprisoned but still spirited child that cried, “What have you done about me? . . . What are you going to do about me?” It was a face hard to notice and easy to forget, a wisp of a face unasserted by the broad, close-clipped mustache. Whatever distinction it possessed was inherited, his own contributions tending to its detriment. The eyelids, for example, might have been old when he got them, for they reminded him now of outworn lace curtains hanging at oeil-de-boeufs in a decaying mansion. He admitted that it was, already, the perfect face for a gentleman-at-the-bar of one of New York's largest and most conservative hotels, eternally ­waiting.

I am not lonely so much as terribly alone, he thought. For though he could honestly say he had many friends, old friends and new friends, to a man and to a woman they bored him and served only to impress upon him that the rut he was in, lest he think it only the sinecure of a job so comfortable he would never leave it, included the whole of what composed his life.

“Another brandy, sir?”

“If you please.”

He wished the bartender were not so attentive, but what else had the miserable fellow to do? Hildebrandt watched chips of bright yellow lemon peel drop from his knife into an old-fashioned glass, looked around the burnished oak curve of the counter and saw other such glasses, and wondered when all the martinis would be drunk and by whom.

Cluck!

Hildebrandt started, though he knew the bartender had merely vanished behind the small brass-latched door and would reappear in a moment bearing a box of sugar cubes or an armful of limes.

“A pretty girl—is like a melody—” the music droned, oversweet with strings.

What pretty girl? thought Hildebrandt. Did he want a pretty girl? Really the thought sickened him. He pulled his cuffs out just beyond the garnet links and turned again to the galleon's stern.

A plump woman in a large black hat came in, scanned the room for her party, fluttered a hand and plowed across the sea of Persian rug toward a distant table.

Cluck!

And the bartender appeared, struggling with an armful of limes. Hildebrandt turned his eyes away.

This was his last brandy. In another quarter hour or so, he should have watched the entry of two or three superannuated inmates come to take a late dinner, perhaps but not likely a pair of middle-aged men, well dressed but of that incredible colorlessness that only the Hotel Hyperion seemed to attract, come and stand a polite distance away from him at the bar and order bourbon old-fashioneds. In a quarter of an hour, he should have paid his check and walked leisurely back through the galleon's stern, not abandoning hope for some unimaginable and unimaginably exciting stranger, until he found himself suddenly on the sidewalk beneath the hotel's marquee. There a gust of desolation should divest him suddenly of poetry, tranquillity and will, and he would debate whether to take a taxi or the subway to his apartment or to walk to the nearest movie or to call up his friend Bracken, who lived just around the corner on Sixth Avenue. As yet he had never called up Bracken, but the possibility offered a modicum of comfort, so the thought always crossed his mind.

Actually, though, he was alone.

In the lobby beyond the galleon a man stopped, looked into the restaurant and walked on. The casements and the chandeliers sparkled like coruscating fireworks. The galleon floated in a blur of golden light. And abashedly realizing that tears had caused the distortion, Hildebrandt threw the brandy into his mouth. It flamed into his nose, and he saw the galleon through deeper tears.

A black line appeared in the center of the goldenness. It was the figure of a woman with hair of the same golden beige as the doors. Suddenly Hildebrandt felt a thrill of happiness beyond that which the magic casements had ever caused, a throb of recognition. It was the way he had expected to feel when the destined one arrived, but now he smiled to himself, afraid to believe. The tremulous, inexpressible promise which for two weeks had emanated from the galleon's stern seemed to have lifted from them and fixed itself on this woman whom the casements presented as its materialization.

He turned back to the bar, unable even to look for her in the mirror. Her presence behind him filled the room. Before he looked at her again he must know how he intended to approach her. And yet it was, somehow, foreordained and accomplished.

He paid his check, turned and walked, with the same leisured grace he would have walked toward the magic casements, toward the woman who sat at a table amid the field of empty tables.

She looked up as he came closer, and all Hildebrandt could realize, dazed as he was by nearness to her, was that she regarded him without surprise, as he had known she would. Surely she would recognize him, too!

He bowed slightly. “If I may, I should like to say good evening to you.” She was slim and stately as the casements, the heart of their poem. “My name is Oliver Hildebrandt,” he added.

She was older, more reserved than he had thought. He could not take in anything definite about her at once except a straight fall of light brown hair beneath a small hat with a veil. Her silence confused him.

“Are you waiting for someone?” he asked.

“Only for a waiter.”

“Would you mind if I sat with you a moment?”

Perhaps her brows went up a little. Then she gestured to an empty chair. “If you like.”

He slipped a chair out and sat down. She looked pleasant, he thought, though certainly she failed of the interest in him he had expected. Behind the veil her face was narrow and very pale, and Hildebrandt was shocked to see a thin scar that began under her right eye and curved out of his sight.

“You haven't been here before, have you?”

“No.”

Even her voice was as he had known it would be. The brandies bore him along, against her indifference. “Strange you should happen to come.”

“Is it? It does look like a very restricted place.”

Hildebrandt laughed. “I don't know why anyone comes here, really, but . . .” He hesitated between sophistication and honesty and, not knowing which he chose, said, “I come because of the casements.”

He would not have admitted then even to himself how he counted upon a sympathetic answer from her. He watched her gray eyes, which looked tired and not amused like her mouth, move to the entranceway, then back to him.

“They are rather romantic,” she said in low musical tones that thrilled him. Yet in a way, she had said it like a plain statement of fact.

“Yes. Absurd—and yet romantic.” He carried a match to her cigarette before she could use her lighter, took one of his own for himself and tossed his box of Players on the table. “Won't you tell me your name?”

“Oh”—she smiled—”that's the least important thing.”

“But I've told you mine.” He looked at the green lizard-bound lighter. “I know your initials—H.C. So I might as well know your name.”

“Maybe legion. That might do for both of us.”

Hildebrandt laughed uneasily, touched the brandy glass that had somehow appeared before him, and watched her sip at hers. This was the moment at which he should have had a toast to say. Yet more important it seemed to awaken her.

“Look here, I hope you don't think I've been rude,” he said, confident he had not been.

“Not at all. I'm glad you came to talk to me.”

Hildebrandt's assurance leapt, put him on the edge of his chair, inspired him to fix his eyes dreamily in space for an instant, as he often did before embarking upon a rehearsed story. “You know, it's strange, but I've so much to talk to you about—of trade winds and lapis lazuli seas, maybe the mosques of ancient Persia—and the way you came into this room tonight.”

“Talk to me, then,” she said quietly. “I should love it.”

She had relaxed and seemed suddenly dependent upon him. Hildebrandt felt enormously tender toward her. “Is something the matter?”

She smiled. “Later. Talk to me about everything or nothing.”

It was what he wished. She was delightful. Yet as his mind danced with anticipation of what he would say, he thought first of describing all the hours at the bar, the sense of rotting away, the absence of purpose and savor in all he did, the unwordable dream of the magic casements before she had come. And what else?

“Shall I talk about Austria?”

“I said anything.”

Where had Austria fled? He remembered a ski trip with thermos bottles of American black bean soup. The blond girl he had thought he had loved, but not enough to follow her to Hamburg. Or was it Bremen? The foreign scenes he could recall were seen through an atmosphere of drifting and gluttony combined. He could not re-create them in words now for her.

“There is Paris.”

“Yes,” she said.

The slow kaleidoscope of his past fifteen years revolved around him and the woman beside him like a thin sphere that enclosed them and kept the world out. Whatever he said now would be right, since all within the sphere was perfect.

“No.” He laughed. “Shall I tell you of the most terrifying adventure of my life? It was my adventure with aloneness. Here.” He glanced at the great coffered ceiling.

She smiled slowly. “I've had those adventures myself.”

“Then you know what they're about.” He was rather pleased. Then he added, “They're not nice, of course.”

“No. When did yours take place?”

“Until you walked in tonight.”

She was silent. The kaleidoscope turned slowly, its patterns blurred and forgotten. All that was clear was her narrow face behind the veil that made it seem he saw her at night, in some enclosed garden.

“Are you sure it ended when I walked in?”

“Yes.”

“How sure?”

“As sure as I am that you did walk in, that you are sitting here beside me.”

“That you are no longer alone?”

“Yes.”

She touched her hair with the backs of her fingers, wearily, as though to see if it were there, and looked away. “It's nice to hear. Yet it's hard to believe, because I am so lonely.”

“But now it doesn't have to be.” He smiled. “We've beaten it, don't you see?”

“Do you think?”

“Oh, absolutely!” Hildebrandt said with the English accent he affected in his most self-assured moments.

She rested her head against her fingers and gazed at him appraisingly.

“What's the matter?”

“I don't know. Perhaps I'm tired. Perhaps I'm already asleep.”

“I can guarantee you you're not. How about another brandy?”