The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (68 page)

“Ben led me inside, murmuring, ‘Say something, darling; you look so sad. I’ve never seen you look so sad!’ By this time I wasn’t, of course—he’d never called me darling before, and I knew that for him words spoke much louder than action—but I had the sense to hold my tongue and keep my sad expression, and on a young skin I suppose the wish to murder and the wish to love look much the same.

“He took off my dress, and the sight of me in my long cotton slip sent him down on one knee, his arms flung wide; it was a pose like the gallants in those slightly shady, illustrated editions of
Mademoiselle de Maupin
or the
Heptameron—
both of which Ben had. I was in an odd rig for seduction; there was a fashion on then for Oxford glasses, silver-rimmed ones that snapped open like lorgnettes, and mine hung down over my chest on a chain. My shoes were much too sedate for me too—terribly long, pointed ones, like dachshunds’ muzzles—and my stockings, heavy gun-metal silk, were rolled. Despite all this, we were able to lose our heads. Or at least we thought we had—this generation can have no idea of the innocence of mine. When, we left the apartment, I was under the confused impression that I had been seduced—an assumption that wasn’t corrected until two years later, when I was. Ben must have been under the same misapprehension, because he insisted on taking me back to the dorm, ten blocks away, in a cab. And on the way he asked me for a date—for Saturday night.

“And when Saturday night came, he surprised me by taking me to the Baxter. Unlike the campus joints where we’d always gone for Coke or coffee, the Hotel Baxter was downtown, dull and semiofficial; couples went there dutifully the minute they got engaged, for a splurge à la carte. Poor Ben! It was his only way of saying that if necessary he’d do right by me, but I was as insulted as if he’d bought the ring without asking me. It seemed humiliating that only sin had got me to the Baxter—and besides, I wasn’t dressed for it.

“To this day those starlight-roof places always make me think of babies born out of wedlock, for of course that’s what was on Ben’s mind. He ordered Alexanders—in those days that’s what you started girls drinking on—and when I said mine made me feel positively sick he turned white, not knowing I’d said it only because at home in Ontario my grandfather had taught us early to disdain anything but Scotch. ‘What—what about
Banjo
?’ he said.

“Banjo was one of those terrible whimsies that lovers have, like those letters beginning ‘Dear Poodles …’ that stockbrokers always seem to get held up for; you and your Stamford boy probably shared something of the same. Ben was always plying me with anecdotes I didn’t yet know were clichés, and once—after he’d told me how Isadora Duncan wrote Bernard Shaw suggesting what a paragon any child of theirs would be—we’d spent an afternoon concocting a paragon of our own. It was to have Ben’s teeth,
my
hair, and—since this was also a very feminist era—
both
our brains. We’d dubbed it Ben-Jo, corrupted in time to Banjo.

“And for some reason that wasn’t clear to me at the Baxter, his choosing that way to ask me infuriated me. Why did he always have to remove himself from everything, from the most important things, by putting them into quotes!

“‘Oh you!’ I said. ‘You’re so literary you make me spit!’ Then I stood up, burst into tears, and we went home.

“Extraordinary, isn’t it? There it was, a warning out of my own mouth, and I passed it by, the way you can speed to your death right past a warning from Burma-Shave.

“During the next few weeks Ben scarcely left my side. Vacation was well under way, but by this time I was glad I hadn’t had the money to go home; I couldn’t have borne being at home feeling like Hardy’s Tess. Day after day went by and—it must have been nervous strain or self-hypnosis—I still couldn’t assure Ben we weren’t going to have a baby. Luckily I had term papers to do, and Ben had his thesis; we spent most of our time in the library or walking by the river, holding hands numbly but not kissing. I was finding out how the world both heightens and darkens under a single, consuming anxiety; normality goes on rattling around you, and your trouble is like a goiter in your gullet that no one else can see. Ben and I couldn’t bear to be out of each other’s sight; it was such a relief to be with someone who
knew.
At the same time, I couldn’t help feeling a certain excitement at being one with several heroines of history. Once, when we were down by the river, I referred darkly to
An American Tragedy
and, to my surprise, Ben gave me a dreadful look and dropped my hand. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that he might be having heroic feelings of his own. I wasn’t afraid of them, but I was rather miffed at the idea of his enjoying them, and for the first time I wondered whether it would be a bore to marry someone whose reference books were the same as mine.

“Meanwhile, I’d forgotten all about Professor Tyng. Then, the last night before school began again, I remembered I hadn’t sent him my ration of themes. I’d enough back poems to choose from, and after Ben and I had parted, I sat up until three retyping them. As I slugged them out I kept thinking of how I might never have been in the situation I was in, if it hadn’t been for Tyng. When I’d finished, I went down the hall to wash out some underwear, and in the bathroom I saw the bottle of stuff the maids used for the drains. It was marked
POISON
in large, navy-blue letters.

“I picked it up and read the fine print on the label:
Antidote: Drink teaspoon or more of magnesia, chalk, whiting or simple wall plaster—or small pieces of soap softened in water—in milk, or raw egg.
Quite a rhythm the first phrases had, each with its feminine ending, then that nice little dactyl:
or raw
egg. Neat, but not gaudy. I went back for the envelope I’d addressed to myself, carefully used an old toothbrush to paint some of the stuff from the bottle onto the underside of the flap, carried the envelope back to my room, and set it on the blotter to dry. I never once thought of using the poison on myself. Indeed, I had never felt more surgingly alive, and for the first time in days I fell asleep like a lamb.

“And the next morning I discovered I wasn’t going to have Banjo after all. The world immediately lost that intent, outlined look and went back to being its usual astigmatic blur; I’d never before felt how glorious the ordinary was. Ben had a nine-o’clock in philosophy; I raced over there to tell him.

“The elevator in Philosophy Hall was one of those old-fashioned wire-cage ones that held only about six people. I’d squeezed in and faced the door before I saw that Professor Tyng was one of the six, his height looming over us all. I must have looked wild. My hair was tousled, and I’d just remembered the envelope on my blotter in my room.

“‘Ah, good morning, Miss—er,’ he said. He had a very commanding voice. And you know that conscious stillness people have in elevators. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Have you quite deserted poetry?’

“The elevator girl, an old university hand, closed the door softly and waited; she knew as well as I did that he hadn’t finished. I lowered my eyes, but I could feel the mass smile all around me.

“‘Ah, well,’ said Tyng, ‘I always say that one’s poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one’s friends.’

“That elevator must have been the slowest in the city; it rose in exact time with the blood in my ears. I didn’t answer Tyng and I didn’t look him in the face. I just stared at the cords in his neck. Someday I’ll murder you, I thought, but not with poison. No, I’ll remember what you taught me, that only irony is safe. Just you go on talking, and someday I’ll murder you—with words. Some day I’ll hang you by the neck with them, until you are
alive.

“Classes were already on, but I got Ben out of his; he was an awful color and kept saying, ‘What is it? What is it?’ out of the side of his mouth as we went down the hall. When we got outside on the steps, I told him. At that moment, all I felt was a horrible, female embarrassment at having to tell him.

“‘It’s Banjo,’ I said. ‘He isn’t.’

“The most peculiar expression crossed his face. There was relief there first, of course, but then something else took its place. Regret after catharsis is the only way I can describe it—the way people’s faces sometimes look when they come out of the theater after a wonderfully harrowing play.

“I didn’t understand it until later that afternoon, when we were sitting quietly together over a Coke, in the rear of the soda parlor.

“‘You know,’ Ben said, ‘when we were so worried, back there … Nevertheless that was
living,
though, wasn’t it? That was real.’

“I knew what he meant, of course; I’d seen the world shift that morning too. But to
say
it, to put it into … maybe even while it was all going on … or even before! Poor footnoter, I thought, poor self-murderer. At the same time I shrank back from the table, from him—the way one leans away from someone with a bad cold.

“
‘I’m
alive!’ I said. ‘I’m
still
alive.’ I stood up. ‘Afraid I’ve got to run,’ I said. And I ran.

“The minute I got back to my room I sat down and wrote him a letter saying I didn’t want to see him again. I didn’t understand quite why yet myself, so I lied and said I was in love with another man.

“Two weeks later, Ben came to see me; I suppose he thought it just another dodge to bring him to his knees. Anyway, that’s just what he did—went down on his knees again, without even saying hello first, and asked me to marry him. Later he told a friend of mine that from the way I’d refused him—I
knew
I hadn’t been sad enough—it was clear I’d never be a woman of the world. I haven’t seen him since, but now and then I hear he’s around somewhere, technically alive. I sure don’t want to see him. Little does he know the very particular way he could crow over me—fainting on my door-step or not, with or without his feet in those burlap bags. …”

An intensity of silence reigned now, a contest of quiet in which the speaker herself must have been wondering if she was to be allowed to get away with it like that—or whether the girl across from her was going to let her know that she was not.

We can be quiet too, the silence said now. People like us …

“What?” Was the voice relieved at not being let off? “Don’t mumble so. … Ah, you want to know what it was—what both my husbands said when they left. Now, really! The listener ought to do some of the work. I’ve been telling you, actually, all the way along. OK, guess, then. Don’t be shy; go on, try.

“Oh. You think it was more or less what I said to Ben—just before I ran? That’s very clever of you; you’re a very clever girl. That would be a twist, wouldn’t it? You’ve got talent, no doubt about it. Well, I shan’t say, but you listen now. You listen very carefully.

“After I’d sealed that letter to Ben and put it into the mail slot in the hall, I came back to my room. The envelope for Tyng, stained brown and shriveled, was lying where I’d left it. I picked it up, rolled it in some tissue from an old stocking box, and threw it into the basket. Then I went to the window and leaned on the sill. It was the holy time, a beautiful evening. A dusky wind was blowing, and the west was the color of a peach. I could feel the cold touch of the pearls at my throat, the warm cuddle of the jersey I’d just thrust my arms into; I thought I could even feel the lovely tickle of the blood running in my veins. It was spring, and my whole future was opening up again, full of oysters, music, lovers. A few foghorns were sounding on the river, and I wondered idly whether I would ever be able to set down exactly the emotion that sound always called up in me—as I had tried and failed to do so many times before.

“And after a while, as I leaned there, the words came, began to shimmer and hang in the air about me. There they were, armies of them, ready to be made into ropes for necks, ready for lovers to be put into, husbands, life. They danced in my mind like wild ponies that moved only to my command, with hooves sharp enough to kill, but forelocks meek enough to me.

“It had been a day. All in one day I’d found out I wasn’t going to have Banjo, marry Ben, poison Tyng. It had been a day full enough for anyone. Except me—and perhaps you. …”

Was she leaning forward? The voice was low now, farther back in its own mists than it had ever been, yet near enough for the quick of any ear.

“So I sat down at the desk again—what I wrote was published the next year. The world stretched all before me that evening, in profuse strains of unpremeditated—life. But I left the window, and began to write about it. …”

No, it was the girl, leaning back, away, now stealthily rising. For a moment the figure stayed, a series of soft, dark ellipses lapsing to that poised, no longer tentative shoe. Then it ran. On the edge of the promenade it halted; then the wind, or a gesture of its own, tossed back the free-swinging hair and it was gone.

Did the voice know it was alone now? Had it planned it that way—to be left addressing that perfect, illimitable audience of one? For it was still speaking.

“So I left the window,” it said, “and began to write about it. Beginning with the word ‘I.’”

O
N SMOKY SPRING EVENINGS
, from the windows of the commuter’s train which rides through the lowlands of Jersey, the little bars, which are seldom more than a block or so from the stations, look like hot coals burning in the thin dusk. Spotted over the countryside, they send up their signal flares, promising the fought-off moment of excitement before you open the door—when it seems as if someone may just this minute have said: “Here is the place—
the place
,” and the flat, sold feeling after the door is open, and you see that this is just about like any such place anywhere.

If, having missed your usual train perhaps, you stop off at the particular hole-in-a-corner which clings to your station—Joe’s Place, or Morelli’s, or the Rainbow Tavern—and you sit there over your glass, after your phone call, waiting for the taxi or the wife with the car—then you may find, after the quick rash of one-shot commuters is over, that you are alone, or almost alone, with perhaps a solitary, leather-jacketed baggageman musing over his beer on his stool down at the other end. And you wonder what keeps a joint like this alive.