The Hothouse by the East River

I

If it were only true that
all’s well that ends well, if only it were true.

She
stamps her right foot.

She
says, ‘I’ll try the other one,’ sitting down to let the salesman lift her left
foot and nicely interlock it with the other shoe.

He
says, ‘They fit like a glove.’ The voice is foreignly correct and dutiful.

She
stands, now, and walks a little space to the mirror, watching first the shoes
as she walks, and then, half-turning, her leg’s reflection. It is a hot, hot
day of July in hot New York. She looks next at the heel.

She
looks over at the other shoes on the floor beside the chair, three of them
beside their three open boxes and two worn shoes lying on their sides. Finally,
she glances at the salesman.

He
focuses his eyes on the shoes.

Now,
once more, it is evening and her husband has come in.

She
sits by the window, speaking to him against the purr of the air-conditioner,
but looking away — out across the East River as if he were standing in the air
beyond the window pane. He stands in the middle of the room behind her and
listens.

She
says, ‘I went shopping. I went to a shoe store for some shoes. You won’t
believe me, what happened.’

He
says, ‘Well, what was it?’

She
says, ‘You won’t believe me, that’s the trouble. You aren’t sure that you’ll
believe me.’

‘How do
I know if you don’t tell me what it is?’

‘You’ll
believe me, yes, but you won’t believe that it really happened. What’s the use
of telling you? You don’t feel sure of my facts.’

‘Oh tell
me anyway,’ he says, as if he is not really interested.

‘Paul,’
she says, ‘I recognised a salesman in a shoe store today. He used to be a
prisoner of war in England.’

‘Which
P.O.W.?’

‘Kiel.’

‘Which
Kiel?’

‘Helmut
Kiel. Which one do you think?’

‘There
was Claus, also Kiel.’

‘Oh,
that little mess, that lop-sided one who read the books on ballet?’

‘Yes,
Claus Kiel.’

‘Well,
I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about Helmut Kiel. You know who I mean
by “Kiel”. Why have you brought up Claus Kiel?’

Paul
thinks: She doesn’t turn her head, she watches the East River.

One day
he thought he had caught her, in profile, as he moved closer to her, smiling at
Welfare Island as if it were someone she recognised. The little island was only
a mass of leafage, seen from the window. She could not possibly have seen a
person so far away down there.

Is it
possible that she is smiling again, he thinks; could she be smiling to herself,
retaining humorous reflections to herself? Is she sly and sophisticated, not
mad after all? But it isn’t possible, he thinks; she is like a child, the way
she comes out with everything at this hour of the evening.

She
tells him everything that comes into her head at this hour of the evening and
it is for him to discover whether what she says is true or whether she has
imagined it. But has she decided on this course, or can’t she help it? How
false, how true?

It is
true that in the past winter he has seemed to catch her concealing a smile at
the red Pepsi-Cola sign on the far bank of the river. Now he thinks of the
phrase, ‘tongue in cheek’, and is confused between what it means and how it
would work if Elsa, with her head averted towards the river, actually put her
tongue in her cheek, which she does not.

And
Paul, still standing in the middle of the carpet, then looks at her shadow. He
sees her shadow cast on the curtain, not on the floor where it should be
according to the position of the setting sun from the window bay behind her,
cross-town to the West Side. He sees her shadow, as he has seen it many times
before, cast once more unnaturally.

Although
he has expected it, he turns away his head at the sight.

‘Paul,’
she says, still gazing at the river, ‘go and get us a drink.’

Their
son, Pierre, came to see them last night. He said, while they were discussing,
by habit, in the hail, the problem of Mother: ‘She is not such a fool.’

‘Then I
am the fool, to spend my money on Garven.’

‘She’s
got to have Garven.’ He uttered this like a threat, intensifying his voice to
scare away the opposition that he knew to be prowling.

Garven
Bey is her analyst. Pierre is anxious that his mother should not go back into
the clinic and so upset his peace of mind. Moreover, Pierre knows it was not
his father’s money that went so vastly on Garven, but the surface-dust, the top
silt, merely, of his mother’s fortune.

Last
night, Paul said, as his son was leaving, ‘What did you think she looked like
tonight?’

‘All
right. There’s definitely something strange, of course…’

Paul
said goodnight abruptly, almost satisfied that his son had still not noticed
the precise cause of the strangeness.

Paul
cannot acknowledge it. A mirage, that shadow of hers. Not a fact.

She
gazes out of the window. ‘Paul, go and get a drink.’

But
Paul stands on. He says to her as she sits by the window, ‘Are you serious
about this man in the shoe shop?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then,
Elsa, I should say you have imagined Helmut Kiel. This is in the imaginative
category, almost definitely. You couldn’t have come across him in a shoe store.
He died in prison with only himself to thank for it. You should tell Garven of
this experience.’

‘All
right.’

‘What
shoe shop was it?’

‘Melinda’s
at Madison Avenue. At least I think so.’

‘Are
you smiling, there?’

‘No.
Why don’t you make a drink?’

‘He
died in prison six, seven years after the war.’

She
laughs. Then she says, ‘I see what you mean.’

‘What?’

‘Plainly
you are not speaking literally.’

‘I
think I’ll have a drink.’ But he does not go. He thinks, she has become a
mocker, she wasn’t always like this. It’s I who have made her so.

She
sits immobile; and now, to his mind, she is real estate like the source of her
money. She sits, well-dressed with her pretty hair-do and careful make-up, but
sits solidly, as on valuable land-property painted up like a deteriorating
building that has not yet been pulled down to make way for those high steel
structures, her daughter and her son. So Paul’s mind ripples over the surface.

And he
thinks to himself, deliberately, word by word: I must pull myself together. She
is mad.

The Pan
Am sign on the far bank of the river flicks on and off. She seems to be
catching a sudden unexpected glimpse of the United Nations building, which has
been standing there all the time, and she shudders.

‘Are
you cold?’ he says. ‘These air-conditioners are too old. They aren’t right.’

‘They
can be treacherous,’ she says.

‘Elsa,’
he says, ‘do you feel chilly? Why don’t we get a modern system?’

She
laughs out of the window.

He
speaks again, meaning to win her round, meaning to insinuate an idea into her
head that might fetch her back to reason, presuming she is departing from
reason once more.

‘The
temperature touched a hundred and one at noon. The highways have buckled, many
places.’

She has
turned her head towards the dark mass of Welfare Island.

He
feels he has probably failed in his attempt to say, ‘You are suffering from the
heat, your imagination…‘ He feels he might be wrong, he is not sure, as yet,
if she is going to have a relapse. This has happened before, he thinks, here in
this room I have stood, she has sat, how many times?

He
says, ‘What’s the name of the shoe store?’

‘Melinda’s,
Madison Avenue somewhere near Fifty-fifth, Fifty-sixth — might be
Fifty-seventh.’

He
says, ‘Upper Fifties and Madison. It still can’t be less than ninety-eight.’

She
says to the East River: ‘He means ninety-eight degrees — the temperature.’
Then, still looking out of the window she says, ‘Paul, get me a drink. I’ll
have vodka on the rocks, please.’

She is
looking for something out there. The sun has gone down. Yes, she is looking out
for it again. Silently Paul says to himself: ‘It’s not there.’ And again,
‘There’s nothing there.’

‘The
heat out there has affected you,’ she says, her face still turned to the dark
blue river where it quivers with the ink-red reflection of the Pepsi-Cola sign
on the opposite bank. ‘It’s affected you, Paul,’ she says in her tranquillity.
‘You’ve been standing there in that spot since you came in.’ She has moved her
head very little to the right and now she is looking at the United Nations
building with its patches of lighted windows. ‘Since you came in,’ she says,
‘you’ve been standing there watching me, Paul. It’s the heat making you
suspicious. Today’s been the hottest on record for twelve years. Tomorrow is to
be worse. People are going mad in the streets. People coming home, men coming home,
will have riots in their hearts and heads, never mind riots in the streets.’

He
wants to go and prepare their drinks, and has been thinking, ‘This has happened
before,’ but he will not move lest she should think she has taunted him into
it. He says, ‘Why did you go shopping for shoes in the heat?’

‘I had
swollen feet. I needed a bigger size.’

The
cunning answers of the crazy… He turns, now, and goes into the kitchen for
the ice. Will she incline her face towards him when he comes back?

He
breaks up the ice in the kitchen, he lingers. Eventually he returns, with face
and eyes strained in the effort.

New
York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still
to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their
states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the
scars of resurrection: New York heaves outside the consultant’s office,
agitating all around her about her ears.

He
looks across from his armchair to hers (for he does not believe in the couch;
to relinquish it had been his first speciality) and says, ‘And then?’

‘I came
to Carthage.’

‘Carthage?’

She
says, ‘I could write a book.’

‘What
do you mean by Carthage?’ he says. ‘You say you came. You came, you say. Do you
mean here is Carthage?’

‘Here?’

He
says, ‘Well, sort of.’

‘No, it
was only a manner of speaking.’ She smiles to herself, as if to irritate him.
He is thrown, knowing vaguely that Carthage was an ancient city of ancient
times but unable to gather together all at once the many things he has probably
heard about Carthage.

She
says, in the absence of his reply, ‘I think I’m really all right, Garven.’
Garven is his first name. His claim is, ‘I get my patients right away on to a
first-name basis’; it is the second on the list of his specialities.

‘I’m
all right, Garven,’ she says again while he is still wending his way towards
Carthage.

‘Yes, I
hope so. But we’ve got a good bit of ground to cover yet, Elsa, you know.’

She
says, as if to irritate him, ‘Why do you say “cover”? Isn’t that a peculiar
word for you to use? I thought psychiatry was meant to uncover something. But
you say “cover”. You said “We’ve got a good bit of ground to cover yet”—.’

‘I
know, I know.’ He places his hands out before him, palms downward, to hush her
up. He then explains the meaning of ‘cover up’ in its current social usage; he
explains bitterly with extreme care.