The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (3 page)

“Keep the ring at least,” he said. “Keep it until you marry. Until you do, girl with your looks and plans might find it useful. You can always tell them I died in a war.”

Though I never did, it’s true that both colleagues and lovers have sometimes murmured to me that one should not cling to the past, so perhaps his ring had been part agent of what he would never have done himself—helped me to hide the present that clung
to me.

When I tried again to return the ring, he grasped me, shook me, even repeated his cold remark.

“Ours could learn!” he added, shouting. He stood there, hirsute and flawless, as his cards show him yet, the rufous glints all over the backs of his hands, not a spot of baldness in him anywhere, far as I could see, either of the body or the heart. And he could say that to me. It was a beautiful declaration, and I have never yet had another like it. But I knew at that moment why I was right to refuse him. To be acceptable, such declarations must come to the bald—from the bald.

And so we arrive at the man from 128, if not for long.

In the meantime, I had had my further experiences in the dark, not many, and never with any candidate to whom I could see myself making any such avowal—despite which I sometimes found myself in serious need to repress the more ordinary part of my inheritance: almost any woman’s urge to avow. So I gave up such doings, and returned to the midnight safety of my old alleyways, to slouching in cool raincoats at the hot bedsides of their sick, sitting up at the wakes of their hardy sorrows, or kicking up the orange dawn in the circle of such derelicts as were too far gone to wonder at the presence of a lady at that fire. Weekends I spent emotion thriftily in the colorful melancholia of the museums and the Sunday exhibitions, quietly enjoying the arts and gems that were the property of the nation.

For this conduct, the gods duly corrected my position in life as they saw fit, from the rear. I received a salary increase, my largest block of securities held a stock-split, and there fell due a trust fund for which I had done nothing but get older. In one of the galleries I was in the habit of visiting, there was a small picture, not for sale, a Picasso of a certain period of his so in sympathy with my life that when I stood in front of it my flesh crept toward it as if it were my ikon. I went to see it again, the money shining in my head, making my brain all one large emerald. And there I met him, or rather, his rich voice, coming round a plush, impressionist corner. I fell in love with what he was saying before I saw him.

It was one of the tender, warm April afternoons that climb like vines from the most ruined steppes of a metropolis; rays of Central Park were falling all over the city and amoretti flew the wind. Any woman with verve in her veins was carrying her beauty like a cup. From my apartment, modestly high in Tudor City, I had seen that, and I was wearing my mother’s tourmalines, which are of a peculiar burnt color, like cream glazed by the cook’s salamander, plus a silk shift, sweater and sandals of the same, all designed to cast their tans against a skin that could not tan, and at the last minute I had put on the wig that was my bravest, most costly, favorite, if I could be said to have favorites among them, and unworn since I had last dined with my brother—a wig that was as flat to the face as a wig dares to be, and of a plain dark red. It was a wig that would not suffer a hat, nor would I have asked it to, but had anchored it instead with the best of many long-tried substances, pins not being possible for me. (If I mention these frail beauties, sands of makeshift, it is to remind myself, via all I have abjured, of the sterner exquisite I am to become.)

Anyway, as always happens in these fateful meetings, I got there just in time and properly rigged for it, in time to hear him say to the dealer, in a voice rich enough to buy Picassos, which is what he was there for: “Ah, come on, Knoller, you have me over the barrel, if you’ll part with it. Kept thinking of it all the time I was away. Most of all in Bangkok. Monks with shaved heads, widows too, often just the common people. Modern Giacometti, sculpture without curls. I tell you, you’ve never seen the glory of the unadorned human head before. Of course, set against all that incredible gilt temple-patchwork, maybe any passing human skull is a Buddha. And it may be the Asiatic head only or the African—or that you get accustomed to seeing it in both sexes. I certainly never think of it in Rome.”

There was a muffled remark from the dealer, and another rich, amused reply. “No, I guess the Western head can’t compete, not even the ones bared by nature.” And then, “Well, Knoller? What do you say?”

He was standing, as I knew he must be, in front of my picture.

“Here’s your rival,” Knoller said to him.

I saw the eyes change, lit as if passed over by the salamander. He smiled at me, a tall, powerfully set man not yet fifty and only partially tonsured by time, lean cheeks with a center vertical like a knifed dimple, the strong nostrils that were said to go with large organs of generation, a mouth with a firm ripple. In the end, it was only the dealer who held out.

An affair begun in that season, with the trees just on the point of flower, seems to keep pace with them, with the apple, the cherry and the peach. There was much that was invisible on both sides. His household, which I saw no point in entering, was being supervised for him by his French mother-in-law: I saw the dead wife’s picture, her gamine haircut and tiny phiz, like a stableboy in hornrims, and the two children, all three astride horses and wearing seedy clothes that did no justice to their mounts. They could live the preciously simple life that such money can, the kind that if one can forget what manages it at the top and sustains it from below, can sometimes even have a haystack whiff of the vagrant—and can make love in its own meadows. I was not seduced by its attractions, merely by him. When it rained, we stayed in the carriage-house, a mile from the main drive. I never stayed overnight, being always on the way to Boston, and when he came to the city we met, afternoons only, in the flat of one of his friends.

It was outdoors that I was most daring, though the wig I wore was never again the red one. I got him to tell me, over and over, about the monks in Bangkok, and the widows. His own hairline, receded to well back of the crown and worn in a rough tuft there, I persuaded him to have cropped close by the barber, as many men do. His cranial bump was large, and the effect not very fine, but in certain half-lights, country dusks, I thought I could feel a kinship, surely in my case not perverse. He began even to think of publishing, under the auspices of the museum he served without fee as curator, a monograph on the nude head in ancient entablature (and life, of course); there was even, he said, a question of such as having existed beneath the elaborate Etruscan …

“Ah well,” he said, breaking off and looking down at me fondly, “there’s always some question or other about the Etruscans. And why bother your pretty head—” Like any man, he thought that I was developing a flattering interest in his interests, and I, trembling on the verge of delight, thought that he—God help us, and all pairs of lovers. And, very gently indeed, the gods corrected us, from the rear.

I raised myself on elbow, in the lush grasses on which the first pinched windfalls were lying. “I’ll shave my head for you!” I said. “I’ll—” Pride shook me for what I could show him, for what I could at last bare to that perceptive eye. “Then you can see what a
Western
head … I mean it.”

His smile showed no incredulity at the depth of my devotion. Then he enfolded me. There flashed before me a sudden picture of the stripling wife, of those buried tastes which men, and women too, were said to have without knowing, but I blotted it out, blaming my over-educated inner eye. Yet I knew that for both of us it was the moment of the not impossible lover—or the moment just before.

“No,” he said afterwards. “I’ll be the bald one. That’s still a man’s job.” He reached for me again. “Silly curls. I like them.” He rumpled them, paterfamilias.

I gazed up at him from my end-of-summer headpiece, so artfully stained with sun-and-saltwater, and made myself remember, as I had been taught, that even in the love-duets of clods, the roles to be played are said to be endless. And then he asked to marry me. And then I invited him home.

He came down the next week, the first of my vacation, and, if we wished it to be, of our honeymoon. Despite this, I had done no extra shopping, having told myself that all honeymoons were—or should be—a mere matter of unveiling. I had asked him to meet me at a downtown theatre-club where an African singer he had never heard was appearing, and before I left my rooms I sat for a moment in their center, shivering in my décolletage, though it was warm September.

The apartment was no nondescript; I had done better than that. It was the proper guise for a professional woman of some means and culture, created for the pleased surveillance of my colleagues, with here and there a few endearing—and safe—touches of family. Before I left, I locked the wig closet which had been put in off the dressing room, feeling as always, as I did so, that in a way I enclosed a seraglio of my selves.

They are very human-looking: wigblocks. At least, mine were. And I had no intention of shocking my dear love by the sudden grotesque of such a lineup, or of in any way taking out on him whatever of the harsher facts had been dealt me. No, I only meant to break to him, by stages, what I already thought he suspected and was waiting for—as courtiers in the old tales waited, in the dark of the robing room or the bedhangings, for the queen’s maid to become the queen.

As I passed a bookshelf, I took up a little Parian bust, of some bewigged English jurist, picked up not long before in a junkshop, only because, aside from its flowing eighteenth-century curls, it looked for all the world like him. I smoothed its marble profile. By gentle stages, stages even of delight, I should lead us both, I to my avowal, and he—to his Etruscan.

Before I left, I paused to look out of my high window. The night sky stood at perfect cloud. Yet I shivered. Perhaps love makes mad only the completely normal.

In the club, he stood up as I approached his table. I saw his look of puzzlement; I had expected it. “You’ve changed your hair again!” he said. “No, that’s not it, you’ve had it done the way you were wearing it when we first … ah, that was sweet of you. I always thought too, that it was redder that day, but I could never be—”

We sat down against all the clashing, to a slow rhythm of our own. He stared at me closely. A nightclub table is built to just such a small radius across which couples may lean stalk to stalk, like negligently stacked flowers, or like two matches fused at the top.

I turned, as if on the swivel of vanity, so that he might see, even in that dusky jazz-light, all I was. A wig is the more risky the less swirls and curls it has to conceal the hairline; every wig has to have some—unless it would be like those poor nothings, the toupees; this wig had almost none. It was cut almost flat, like a young girl’s or a boy’s, almost gamine. Some wearers, of course, can pull out a little of the real hair beneath, to blend. I turned again, to an inner wish—but he was looking at my eyes.

“You’re always changing it,” he said; “if I didn’t know better, I’d say you spent half your time at it.” I looked out on the scene before us, where almost everyone else was pretending to be private right out in public.

“Why,” I said, “I’m in the habit of … wearing wigs.” For how many weeks I had planned that careful phrase, that gay plural! “Didn’t you know?” And when he looked blank—“Years ago, they used to call them … ‘transformations.’”

He said “Ah, is that it?” and after a moment, “Yes … I know that my mother-in-law—but I thought it was only older women—” He was still doting on my eyes, one of his hands, in nightclub manners, with mine a-playing.

And I said, to the same swing-a-ding of it, “Oh not any more, everyone’s doing it now.”

I grind my teeth now, to think of it, how I put my birthright down there with those others.

Then he said, “Well, I may be sentimental, but I like this one best. And tell me … I’ve an idea … I’ve a suspicion—”

A skin that can’t tan can blush the deeper; the hot, expectant dye rose from shoulders, to cheek—to scalp. I awaited him, steadily.

“Now, tell me,” he said, “isn’t this the
real
one? The original?”

I lowered my face, until that flush should ebb. “It was, once,” I managed to say hoarsely.

“And now?” His cheek was almost on mine.

“And now?” I said. “And now—almost. Not quite.”

Then the singer, Makeba, came in to sing. “Isn’t her head beautiful?” I said. “I wanted you to see it.” My wig, pat to my head as it was, felt clumsy. She stretched back her ebony head, that long, almost shaven head which needed no goldleaf behind it, on which there was merely the faintest blur, only a hairsbreadth of difference between it and skull, a head drawn all in one swelling line which completed itself again, into which setting the face receded like a jewel. He agreed to all these points, adding only that length of neck also was a point of beauty—that singular head, like a music box with a bird in it, on that neck poised. And once more, he doubted that ever a Western—And I stretched so that he could see that my neck also was long. And then we rose, to a rhythm of our own, and went home.

“Very good,” he said when we were inside. Travel-case in hand, he scrutinized the room as if it were a collection submitted to him for the museum, but I had pruned as close to the personality I wanted here as the most careful grower of dull plants, even among the prints permitting myself only that commonplace Cranach nude, the high oval of whose forehead flows endlessly from her other nudity, back, back into the dark, “—very good, but where’s the rest of you?”

I thrilled to the roots of my danger, like a cat in her suit of fur. “What do you mean?”

He put the case down, teetering on his heels, as if he were here for forever. “Come, come,” he said, “anybody talks to you for ten minutes knows you draw your imagery from some other world than the one you look like—I got it the first ten minutes I saw you. And it’s certainly not this one.”