The Company She Keeps (16 page)

“Meg is a violent Trotskyist,” he said tenderly. “She thinks the rest of us are all GPU agents.” The publisher, who had been concentrating on the English girl, looked across the table at you, sizing you up for the first time. “My God,” he said, “you’re certainly spirited about it.” Martin Erdman was watching you, too. He clapped his hands twice in pantomime and gave you a long, ironic smile. You bent your head and blushed, and, though you were excited, your heart sank. You knew that you were not a violent Trotskyist, and Erdman must know it too. It was just that you were temperamentally attracted to unpopular causes: when you were young, it had been the South, the Dauphin, Bonnie Prince Charlie; later it was Debs and now Trotsky that you loved. You admired this romantic trait in yourself and you would confess humorously: “All I have to do is be
for
somebody and he loses.” Now it came to you that perhaps this was just another way of showing off, of setting yourself apart from the run of people. Your eyes began to fill with tears of shame; you felt like Peter in the Garden, but yours was, you knew, the greater blasphemy: social pressure had made Peter deny the Master; it had made you affirm him—it was the difference between plain and fancy cowardice.

You held your eyes wide open to keep the tears from falling. The others, staring at you, must certainly think that your brimming eyes testified to the depth of your feeling for the murdered Nin. You tossed your head slightly and the tears began to settle.

“You
are,
” you said, “a lot of you, GPU agents. The trouble is you’re such idiots you don’t even get paid for it.”

It was a harsh joke, but it was a joke, and it was your peace offering. There was a cackle of laughter, and then everyone but John Peterson and Erdman was looking at you fondly, as if they were all much older than you were. Peterson cast you a malignant glance from his pale eyes, but he did not say anything. He was not too drunk to know that though the others actually agreed with him about Nin (or else did not care), temporarily, in some way, you had got them on your side. Erdman did not speak either; he nodded his head twice in the same tempo he had clapped his hands in, and kept smiling at you with that strange, mocking, affectionate expression.

You saw how profitable that exchange had been for you: it had earned you an enemy and, you thought, a lover. The first thing made you feel good, and the second saddened you. The next morning the phone would wake you and you would reach out and take it dreamily and it would be Erdman speaking very softly, asking you to have tea with him. You could see how it would all be. You would go to bed with him finally, but it would not last long, because you had both been compromised at this dinner party, and you had both understood this and understood each other. “Have you seen Pflaumen lately?” he would ask from time to time, and you would not be able to meet his eyes when you answered yes or no. He would not pursue the subject (you would never dare discuss Pflaumen together), but both of you would be silently asking the same question: what weakness, what flimsiness of character, what opportunism or cynicism had put the other into Pflaumen’s hands?

On the other hand, you would treat each other gently, with a special tenderness, as though you were both wounded. For if, in one way, your love would be full of doubt, in another, it would be over-full of comprehension, lacking in mystery, like the grave dreary love between brother and sister. You had recognized him in the scene about the wine; he had recognized you in the scene about Nin. You would have liked, both of you, to play a lone hand; but you had not been strong enough for it. In each case, your war of independence had been an inglorious
Putsch (“Excuse me, Officer, I was only fooling.”)

While the coffee and liqueurs were being served, new people came in, and the party broke up into smaller units. The publisher whispered in the English girl’s ear; the banker talked Bermuda with the publisher’s wife. John Peterson, glassy-eyed, exhorted the woman psychoanalyst—“But surely in his later years Freud played into Hitler’s hands.” You stood beside Martin Erdman, not talking, listening to the others, sharing an ironic smile between you. Pflaumen sat on a sofa beside the expectant mother; he was telling her about a new product he had just had trademarked, while she went through a pantomime of congratulation. Only she could afford to be polite, for she had nothing to gain now from social intercourse, and, being easily fatigued, nothing much to give. She was comfortable with Pflaumen; he took her hand and she let him hold it; he was one of her oldest friends.

What had happened to you with Erdman was happening with others all over the room. Men were taking out address books or repeating phone numbers in low voices. There was a slight shuffle of impatience; nothing more could be done here; it was time to go and yet it was much too early.

People got up and shifted around, like people in a railroad station when the stationmaster has come in to announce that the train will be forty minutes late. New combinations were formed. The publisher was sitting on the arm of your chair now, asking if you would like to write an opinion on a manuscript. You agreed, and for you, too, now the party was over. You had got everything you came for—a new lover and some work to do. Pflaumen came and sat at your feet on the floor. “You were wonderful,” he said, looking up at you with that over-energetic expression of delight. You had an unaccountable impulse to kick him exactly where the paunch should have been. “The Berolzheimers are crazy about you,” he went on, ignoring your angry look, putting it down to “temperament,” an inestimable commodity. “They want me to bring you to dinner next Wednesday.” You raised your eyebrows into circles of surprise; yet you had known, ever since that scene at the table, that the Berolzheimers would invite you. They were pleasant and they would have a nice house with good food, and there would be new people there; it would be interesting to see the world through a banker’s eyes.

“Are you having fun?” asked Pflaumen, drawing his knees up and hugging them with his arms in a real ecstasy of coziness.

“Yes,” you said. “It’s a very gay party.”

“Erdman is interesting …” he began tentatively.

You don’t miss a trick,
you thought, but you answered him impassively. “Is he?” you said. “I can’t really tell. I haven’t talked much to him.”

Pflaumen looked hurt.

“Of course,” he said, “it’s none of my business …”

“I don’t know what you mean,” you said, in a stubborn childish voice.

The warm, twosey smile had died on his lips, but he revived it with an effort.

“Personally,” he went on, “I should have thought Peterson was more in your line. I asked him specially because I thought he could do you some good …”

He paused. The unresolved sentence hung coaxingly in the air, begging your denial, your explanation, your attention. But cruelly you ignored it, and leaned back in your chair, as if to catch the words of the neighboring conversation. “Did you hear that?” you said finally. “They are picketing
The Tsar to Lenin.
”

Pflaumen glanced up at you, refusing the diversion. “Oh Meg,” he murmured reproachfully, “I thought we were such friends.”

“Don’t be tiresome!” you exclaimed. “Why don’t you get me another highball?” You put your glass in his hand with a decisive gesture.

“All right,” he acceded, scrambling to his feet. You thought you had won. At a single sharp word that hungry ego had scuttled back into the shell of function, where friendship and hospitality were identical and every highball was a loving cup. But he had taken only a few steps toward the bar, when he stopped, as if he had forgotten something, and turned back to you with an anxious face. “You’re not drinking too much, are you?” he asked, in a true stage whisper. Several people, including Erdman, turned their heads.

At last, you thought, the bill had come in. The dinners, the letters of introduction, the bottle of perfume, the gardenias, the new Soviet film, the play, the ballet, the ice-skating at Rockefeller Plaza had all been invoiced, and a line drawn underneath, and the total computed. How recklessly you had accepted, like a young matron with a charge account (“Take two, madam; the bill will not go out till after the first of the year”). Now, when you looked at it, the total was staggering; it was more than you could pay.

You remembered suddenly all the warning signs. How deep Pflaumen always was in the confidence of his friends, how offended if two of them should meet in his absence! How careful people were to serve the whisky Pflaumen’s client made—you recalled how a young husband had hurried out, unshaved, to the liquor store, so that the label on the bottle should be right when Pflaumen arrived for highballs; you remembered another husband pouring wine into a decanter so that Pflaumen should not know that it came from his client’s competitor. And how fond Pflaumen was of talking about loyalty! “It’s the only thing I expect of my friends,” he would say, sententiously. Loyalty, you now perceived, meant that Pflaumen should never be left out of anything. He was like an
x
that you can never drop out of an equation no matter how many times you multiply it or add to it this side of infinity. All at once, you saw how he could be generous and humble and look predatory at the same time; the hawklike mouth was not deceptive, for he was a true bird of prey: he did not demand any of the trifles that serve as coin in the ordinary give-and-take of social intercourse; he wanted something bigger, he wanted part of your life.

For the first time, you understood why it was that this apartment of Pflaumen’s affected you so unpleasantly, why you went there almost surreptitiously, not telling anyone, so that your closest friends were hardly aware that you knew Pflaumen. You saw that it was indeed a house of assignation, where business deals, friendships, love affairs were arranged, with Pflaumen, the promoter, taking his inevitable cut. When you had refused to tell Pflaumen about Erdman—though, so far, there was nothing really to tell—you had violated the code. You had tried to cheat him of his rightful share; you had been guilty of disloyalty. And he was going to crack down on you; he had, in fact, already begun.

When he came back from the bar with your glass in his hand, he was smiling, but the down-curved lips were strained and angry. You took the glass and set it down; Erdman in a cheap tweed coat was making his way toward you, ready to say good-bye. You smiled at him faintly, knowing that Pflaumen was watching you, and knowing, too, with a certain vindictive happiness, that of all the things about Erdman, Pflaumen was most envious of that baggy Kollege Kut coat with its raglan collar. You thought of your own poor coat, and you could see the two of them hanging side by side in Pflaumen’s closet, like two pairs of shoes outside a hotel room in a naughty French movie, sentinels to a private, serious world that Pflaumen could never—even vicariously—invade.

The two men were shaking hands. “Come again,” said Pflaumen, “and I’ll get Farwell from the Yale Law School to meet you. And bring your wife,” he added, in an emphatic voice. “You ought to meet her, Meg.”

“Yes,” you said thinly. “I didn’t know Mr. Erdman was married.”

“He tries to keep it dark,” said Pflaumen, suddenly very jovial. He slapped Erdman on the back and began to propel him toward the door.

You went quietly into the bedroom and took your coat out of the closet. By the time Pflaumen returned from the elevator, you were ready to go.

“You’re not leaving?” he said, looking alarmed. “If you wait till the others go, I’ll drive you.”

“Don’t bother,” you said. “I’m used to the subway.”

“But what about the Berolzheimers?” he asked breathlessly, in a sort of panic. Clearly he had not intended that things should go quite so far. “Next Wednesday?”

You had forgotten about the Berolzheimers. Now you hesitated, weighing the invitation. Sooner or later you would break with him, you knew. But not yet, not while you were still so poor, so loverless, so lonely. “All right,” you said, “you can pick me up at my place.”

The time after the next, you promised yourself, you would surely refuse.

T
O LOOK AT HIM,
you would never have believed he was an intellectual. That was the nice thing about Jim Barnett. With his pink cheeks and sparkling brown eyes and reddish brown hair that needed brushing and well-cut brown suit that needed pressing, he might have been any kind of regular young guy, anywhere in America. He made you think of Boy Scouts and starting a fire without matches and Wesley Barry and skinning the cat and Our Gang comedies and Huckleberry Finn. If he had ever been hard up, he could have been a photographic model, and one would have seen his pleasant, vaguely troubled face more often in
The Saturday Evening Post
than in
Esquire.
He might have done very well as the young man who is worried about his life insurance, the young man who is worried about dandruff, the young man whose shirts won’t fit him, the young man who looks up happily from his plate of Crunchies, saying, “Gee, honey, I didn’t know breakfast food could taste so good!”

In real life, his concerns were of a different order. The year he came down from Yale (where he could have been Bones but wouldn’t), he was worried about Foster and Ford and the Bonus Marchers and the Scottsboro Boys. He had also just taken a big gulp of
Das Kapital
and was going around telling people about how he felt afterwards. He would buttonhole a classmate after a few sets of tennis down at the old Fourteenth Street Armory. “You know, Al,” he would say, twisting his head upwards and to one side in the characteristic American gesture of a man who is giving a problem serious thought (the old salt or the grizzled Yankee farmer scanning the sky for weather indications), “you know, Al, I never thought so at college, but the Communists
have
something. Their methods over here are a little operatic, but you can’t get around their analysis of capitalism. I think the system is finished, and it’s up to us to be ready for the new thing when it comes.” And Al, or whoever it was, would be doubtful but impressed. He might even go home with a copy of the
Communist Manifesto
in his pocket—in that period, the little socialist classic enjoyed something of the popularity of the
Reader’s Digest:
it put the whole thing in a nutshell, let a fellow like Al know just what he was up against. Later that evening Al might remark to his wife that maybe it would be a good idea (didn’t she think?) to lay in a stock of durable consumers’ goods—in case, oh, in case of inflation, or revolution, or anything like that. His wife would interpret this in terms of cans and leave a big order for Heinz’s baked beans, Campbell’s tomato soup, and somebody else’s chicken à la king with the grocer the next day. This was the phenomenon known as the dissemination of ideas.