The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Part 28

"Arietta!" said Helen Lampey. It was half command, half plea. "Do tell us the story about your zebra."

"Zebra?" said Robert. "Have you hunted them, Mrs. Fay?"

"No." Mrs. Fay addressed her small, clenched hands. "That's equatorial Africa." She heard Helen sigh. "Have you?"

Now, what none of them, what no one knew about Robert Bissle was that once in a while, under certain conditions, he lied. Not on the Exchange of course, or in any real situation. It was his only valve, his sole vice, and it escaped him, with the wistful sound of steam from an air-locked radiator, only when, as tonight, he deemed himself in the safe company of those even duller than he. He leaned back-on these occasions he always did. "Zebras are very beautiful creatures. I never molested them save to procure specimens for the museums, or food for the porters, who liked their rather rank flesh."

Mrs. Fay, for almost the first time, raised her eyes and looked closely at him. "Yes?" she said. Her nose, he observed, moved with speech. "Do go on."

"The hartebeest," he said slowly. "c.o.ke's hartebeest, known locally by the Swahili name of kongoni-were at least as plentiful and almost as tame."

"Why Robert!" said Miss Bissle. "I never knew you were in Africa."

"Oh yes," he said, still looking at his neighbor, in whose odd face-he had not noticed until now-all the lines went up. "One year when your back was turned." He plunged on. "A few months before my arrival, a mixed herd of zebra and hartebeest rushed through the streets of Nairobi, several being killed by the inhabitants, and one of the victims falling just outside the Episcopal church."

"Handy," said Helen Lampey, in spite of having been informed that the Episcopal was Miss Bissle's own. She was watching Arietta and Robert-Arietta with Robert, smiling her pawkiest smile at him, and saying, "Yes, yes, do go on."

Robert took off his gla.s.ses. No, there was no resemblance, not even if he imagined a napkin tied round her neck, although for a moment there he had almost fancied an echo saying, "and now, a little more claret." He shook his head. The company, whatever it was, was not as safe as he had thought. "Your turn," he said. "Your zebra."

Arietta unfolded her hands. They trembled slightly. Miss Bissle's cousin, and even richer one had heard-and even more. One of the old breed, she was sure of it-and she had almost missed him. "My zebra?" she said. "Mine was-" She had been about to say real. But one let people see one knew the truth about them only after one had won them, sometimes long after. And particularly these people. "Mine was-here," she said. "Right here in the Hudson Valley. In our garden."

"So help me it was," said Parker. "I saw it. Go on, Arietta."

So she did. It had been a Sat.u.r.day morning, she said, and she had been sitting in her bath, when Roger, seven then, had knocked at the door and said there were policemen in the garden and she had called back, "Tell Daddy." Minutes later, Roger had knocked again and said, "Mum, there's a zebra in the garden," and she had replied-"Tell Daddy." "Now," said Arietta, "Roger is not a fey child. I should have known." She knew every periphrasis of this story, every calculated inflection and aside; this was the point where everyone always began to smile expectantly, and pausing, she saw that they had. "I've never been able to afford to disbelieve him since." For then Carolingus had come up the stairs. "He looked," said Mrs. Fay, delaying softly, expertly, "well-like a man who has just seen a zebra in his garden." As, according to him, he had. She went downstairs-and so had he. She made them see the scene just as she had, the two policemen, Mack Sennett characters both of them, yelling "Stand back there!" from a point well behind Carolingus, and there, cornered in a cul-de-sac near the carriage house, flas.h.i.+ng and snorting, the zebra, ribanded in the rhododendrons like a beast out of the douanier Rousseau.

"The policemen," she said, "had had no breakfast, so there I found myself, carrying a tray with sugar and cream and my best coffee cake-luckily I had baked on Friday-to two policemen and a zebra, in a back yard twenty-five miles from New York." She rose, circled the room, holding the scene with her hands pressed lightly together, and as if absent-mindedly, poured Parker some coffee out of the Lampeys' silver pot. Outside, in the Lampeys' garden, a barn owl hooted-it was the atmosphere, conspiring gently with her as usual. She waited. At this point someone always asked, "But how?"

"But how?" said Miss Bissle.

"Ah, now," said Mrs. Fay, "I have to double back. I have to tell you that across from us, in one of those very modern houses with the kitchen set just under the crown of the road, the family gets up very early. They garden, and the mother-in-law is a past president of the Audubon Society of Atlanta, Georgia." Still circling the room, a diseuse gently fabricating her own spotlight, Mrs. Fay rested one hand, a brief wand, on Miss Bissle's shoulder as she pa.s.sed her. Robert watched, enthralled. There was nothing to it, yet she held them all. They sat like marionettes whom she was awakening slowly to a mild, quizzical sensation like the pleasure-pain in a sleeping foot. "And at about six o'clock that morning, the head of the County Police picked up the phone and heard a cultivated Southern voice say, 'Ah should like to repo't that jus' now, as we wuh setten at breakfas', we saw a zebra payss bah on the Rivuh Road.'" Parker laughed, and Mrs. Fay picked it up, wove him in quickly. "Ah yes," she said, "can't you hear her? And the chief thought to himself that the River Road is rather the bohemian part of his parish, and that Sat.u.r.day morning comes, well-after Friday night. So he calls our policeman and says, 'George, people down your neck of the woods seeing zebras.' George decides to wait until, well, two or more people see it. Then Joe Zucca, the old caretaker at f.a.gan's, telephones, babbling that a striped horse is cras.h.i.+ng around his conservatory. And the chase is on. And they bring it to bay in our garden."

Parker guffawed. "There are zebras at the bottom of my garden."

Arietta, reaching her own chair, sat down in it. Someone always said that too. She looked round their faces. Yes, she had them, particularly one. Quickly, quickly now, wind it up. And in a long, virtuoso breath, she wound it all up-how the village had filled the yard, a gold mine if she'd just had the lollipop concession, how her smart-aleck neighbor had stopped by the front gate, offering a drive to town, and when she'd said, "Wait a bit, Tom, we've got a zebra in the back yard," had smirked and said "Yeah, I heard that one at Armando's-and the horse said, 'I've been trying to get it to take its pajamas off all night.'" And how it had been one of the great satisfactions in life to be able to lead him round to the carriage house. And how the cops had finally got hold of the Hudson River Cowboys a.s.sociation-yes there was one, those kids in white satin chaps and ten-gallon hats who always rode palominos in the Independence Day Parade-and how they'd come, out of costume alas, but with their horse trailer, and how Carolingus and the cops had finally jockeyed the beast in, using a three-man la.s.so. And how, at the height of it-children screaming, yokels gaping, three heated men hanging on ropes, the whole garden spiraling like a circus suddenly descended from the sky, and in the center of it all, the louche and striped, the incredible-how Arietta's eighty-five-year-old Cousin Beck from Port Was.h.i.+ngton, a once-a-year and always unheralded visitor, had steamed up the driveway in her ancient Lincoln, into the center of it all. "Oh, Cousine Beck," she'd stammered-in French, she never knew why-"you find us a little en deshabille, we have us un zebre." And how Beck, taking one look, had eased her old limbs out of the car and grunted, "Arietta, you are dependable. Just bring me a chair."

Mrs. Fay folded her hands. Now someone would ask the other question. She gave a sigh. Next to her, her neighbor marveled. No, she was nothing like-no aureole. This one whisked herself in and out, like a conjuror's pocket handkerchief. But the effect was the same. Small sensations, usually ignored, made themselves known, piped like a brigade of mice from their holes. There was a confused keenness in the ear ... nose ... air? One saw the draperies, peach-fleshed velour, and waited for their smell. The chandelier tinkled, an owl hooted, and a man could hear his own breath. The present, drawn from all its crevices, was here.

"But where did the beast come from?" said Miss Bissle.

Yes, it would be she, thought Arietta. The cousin, his gla.s.ses still off, was staring at her with eyes that were bright and vague. "A runaway," she said in a cross voice. It always made her sulky to have to end the fun this way, with no punch line but fact. "There's an animal importer up the mountain; we found out later. He buys them for zoos." She turned pertly to the cousin. "Perhaps it was one of yours."

"I can't think when, Robert," said Miss Bissle. "I've always known exactly where you were."

Robert, before he replaced his gla.s.ses, had a vague impression that Mrs. Fay looked guilty, but she spoke so quickly that he must have been wrong.

"Parker," she said, "did you and Helen ever hear about Great-grandfather Claude, and Mr. Henry Clay?"

They hadn't. Nor had they heard about Louis's patron's gla.s.s eye. Robert, saved, sank deeper in his chair. He was his father's son after all, trained to fear the sycophant, and he brooded now on whether Mrs. Fay wanted something of him. Look how she had got round the Lampeys. Was she honest? Victor's tonic honesty, he remembered, had spared no one; he never flattered individually but merely opened to dullards the gross, fine flattery of life alone. And what did he, Robert, want of her? If he closed his eyes, prisms of laughter floated past him, flick-flack, down the long cloth of another table; he could feel, there and here, the lax blush of the present in his limbs. He slouched in it, while Arietta told how, when Carolingus spoke for her, her father had said, "You know she has no dot." And how Carolingus, who was slightly deaf, had replied, "I've no dough either." And how in after years, both always amiably purported to be unsure of who had said which.

And then Robert sat up in his chair. For Arietta was telling the story of the "beefies" and "les maigres."

So that's it, he thought. I knew it, I knew it all the time. And in the recesses of his mind he felt that same rare satisfaction which came to him whenever he was able to add to a small fund he had kept in a downtown savings bank almost since boyhood, money separate from inheritance, made by his own ac.u.men, on his own. I recognized her, he thought, and the feeling grew on him, as it had been growing all evening, that in the right company he was not such a dullard after all. He leaned back now and watched her-quiet now after her sally, un.o.btrusive whenever she chose. It was not wit she pretended to; her materials were as simple as a child's. What was the quality she shared with Victor, born to it as the Bissles were born to money, that the others here felt too, for there was Lampey, murmuring ingenuously into his brandy-cup "Wonderful stuff this, isn't it?"-quite oblivious of the fact that it was his own-and there even was Emily, her broad feet lifted from the floor? Whatever Mrs. Fay did, its effect was as Victor's had been, to peel some secondary skin from the ordinary, making wherever one was-if one was with her-loom like an object under a magnifying gla.s.s-large, majestic and there. She made one live in the now, as, time out of mind it seemed, he had once done for himself. But he did not know how she did it. Or whether she did. Watching her rise from her chair, begin to make her adieu, the thought came to him that he would not mind spending a lifetime finding out.

"Let me go with you," he said, standing up. "Let me drive you home."

But Emily had arisen too. "Mrs. Fay," she said, her blinking fluttered, "have you had any experience with birds?"

Arietta smiled between them. How lucky she had recognized him, the real thing, poor dear, even if his sad little blague-out of African Game Trails of course, old Teddy Roosevelt, on half the bookshelves in Nigeria-was not.

"Do," she said to him, "but let's walk." She turned to Miss Bissle, and let the truth escape from her with gusto. After all it was her own. "No, not really. Of course-I've shot them."

On the short way home, the river, lapping blandly, made conversation. Robert spoke once. "I don't really think Emily would have suited you," he said, and Mrs. Fay replied that it was nice of him to put it that way round.

At Arietta's doorway, they paused. But it was imperative that she find out what was on his mind. Or put something there.

"I'd ask you in," she said, "but I've nothing but dandelion wine."

"I've never had any," said Robert. "I'd like to try it."

She led him through the hall, past the rack where Carolingus's leather jacket hung, and her father's, and the squirrel-skin weskit they had cured for Roger, then through the softly ruined downstairs rooms, up the stairs and into the little salon. It was an educative tour; it told him a great deal. And this was the family room; he sensed the intimate patchouli that always clung to the center of a house, even before he looked up and saw them all above the mantel, hanging on their velvet tree. While Arietta went for the wine, he moved forward to examine them. What a higgler's collection they were, in their grim descent from ivory to pasteboard to Kodak, yet a firm insouciance went from face to face, as if each knew that its small idiom was an indispensable footnote to history, to the Sargents, Laverys, de Laszlos that people like him had at home. And there, in that small brown-tone. Yes, there.

"Take me round the portraits," he said when she returned, and here too, since she also was on the wall, he learned. He saw that Carolingus must have been of an age near his own. "And who are they?" he said. "You missed that one." They were sitting at a small escritoire on which she had placed the wine, and if he stretched a hand he could touch the faded brownstone.

"That's my father as a boy, and his older brother, Victor." What an absurd feeling happiness was. That must be its name. To feel as if such a sum, such a round sum had been deposited in that bank that he need never go there again. Not if he stayed here. As, in time, he thought, he could arrange.

Opposite him, Arietta fingered a drawer inside which the name of the desk's first owner was inscribed-Marie-Claire, who had married for inclination but had got the rose-diamonds too. She stole a glance at her vis-a-vis. After all, she had recognized him, and in time, as she did remember, this and inclination could come to be almost the same. It was strange that he was no "beefy," but she had already had one-and no doubt her tribe, along with the rest of the world, must move on. And he was very responsive. In time, she thought, the house would come to seem to him like his own.

"Wonderful stuff," he was saying, holding up to the light one of the old green bottles into which Carolingus and her father had put the wine.

"Is it really?" said Arietta. "I was never any help to them on it."

"What it wants," he said, "is to be decanted, for the sediment. One does it against a candle flame. I was thinking-I might come by tomorrow. And show you."

"Do-for company," said Mrs. Fay. "Actually, one wine seems to me much like any other. I've got no palate for it. Women don't, my father always used to say."

"No, they don't." He was looking at her so deeply that she was startled. "Perfume kills it," he said, and so intensely that, odd averral as it was, it hung over them both like an avowal of love.

Downstairs, she led him out the front door, and watched him to the end of the lane. Roger's spaniel yipped, and over the hill another dog set up an answering cry. In the darkness, as she closed the door, she smiled, one of old Teddy's sentences lumbering through her mind. "The hunter who wanders these lands sees the monstrous river-horse snorting, the snarling leopard and the coiled python, the zebras barking in the moonlight." As she went back up the stairs, she wondered whether she would ever tell him. Some truths, as an honest companion, one spoke in jest; others, as a woman, one kept to oneself. At the moment it didn't matter. Standing in the doorway of the little salon, she stretched her arms. "I've dined out!" she said to the pictures, to herself. "I've dined on zebra, and on hartebeest, and yes, I think, on ... husband. I've dined well."

Outside the hedge at the end of the lane, Robert watched the door close. He knew just how it would begin tomorrow; he would begin by asking her, as he had never asked anyone, to call him "Bi." There would always be a temptation to say more-who, for instance, would understand about that day on the Brandywine better than she? But he must remember; with all she was-she was also a woman. They liked to be chosen for themselves. He must always be as mindful of that as of his incredible luck. And what utter luck it was! He swelled with the urge to tell someone about it. But there were not many in the world today who could appreciate precisely its nature. It was even possible that he himself was the last one extant of all those who once had. Standing in the shadow of the hedge, he whispered it to himself, as once a man had whispered it to his grandfather, over the cigar. "Lucky man," he said to himself, "you have a Minot!"

Sat.u.r.day Night.

THAT SAt.u.r.dAY AFTERNOON, AFTER he had left the a.n.a.lyst's office for what might be the last time, he stopped in at the elegant little Viennese bakery in the same block, and bought a mocha cake for his wife. Although, even five years ago, Dorothy had been one of those out-of-towners who slipped into the ways of the city with only a little more emphasis than was natural, she had never lost her glee over the complicated, alien tidbits which were such a contrast to the pies and hefty layer cakes of her native Utica. The huge new "housing development" in which they had been lucky enough to get an apartment quartered only several glittering chain shops, which she had long since learned to snub.

Waiting absently at the counter for his change, he found that actually he could not fully realign Dorothy's face in his memory. Although he could summon a hundred images of their life together, before and now-the curve of her back as she offered the spoon to the child, the tilt of her head as she slumped, reading, in a chair-in full focus her face evaded him, remaining always in the rear, or to one side. A common enough occurrence, he knew. Nevertheless it left a curious hollow in his new-found a.s.surance.

As he left the store, he turned a last look on the block to which he had been coming for almost three years now. Although, when away from it, he could not have told between which two of the line of houses the one he visited was precisely located, the whole of the block reared itself in his mind like a composition, an ent.i.ty whose significance had become the foreground of his life. Up three steps, in at the gray entrance, into one of those self-service elevators within whose clicking, measured suspension one rode always with a sense of doom, no matter to what event. Then the anonymous room, whose stepped-down colors and noncommittal furniture offered only the neuter comfort of no stimulus to either approval or dislike. Then, finally, another installment in the long, delicate auscultation of himself, during which, sometimes clamped in resistance, sometimes irrigated with relief, he had been free to pursue the quality of his fear.

Turning away, he walked down to the corner and joined the vague group waiting for a bus. Wherever you went, at almost any time, on almost every corner, there would be such a group a.s.sembled. It was a deceptively impressive fact which, when elaborated on, he had long since learned, led nowhere. It was part of the provocative pulse of a city, of a world in which, if you did not learn to deflect the thousand casual contacts strewn at you, without attempting to seize upon them, to weld them into some philosophy of destination, you were lost indeed.

He wedged himself onto the bus, carefully protecting the cake. Looking down at the white box, he thought tiredly of what a funny symbol it was of that daily switch-off in which, laying aside the engrossing thread of himself, he bought a cake, he took a bus, and-rapped smartly back into the secondary-he deserted for another day the re-creation of himself as a working being. As a working being, he cautioned himself, he heard himself being cautioned by the dry voice from behind him in the anonymous room. For if the whole process had not helped him to hold himself untremulously at last in a world where others managed, what had it been but an infinitely seductive excursion into ego, after which, as cut off from others as he had been in the beginning, he would find himself twice alone, holding together the explored corners of himself?

Clutching the box in his cramped hand, he got off the bus at his stop. Less than a year ago, down here, there had been nothing but the great cylindrical gas tanks, nuzzled by tenements, slotted shops, and the exhausted outbuildings natural to the wharflike streets near an old river. Now the "housing development" loomed upward before him, an incredible collage pasted against the sky. Even remembering the excavations and the swarmed signs of contractors, even forcibly recalling the scores of families who were inside it going through their daily paces like tidy, trotting simulacra of each other, it was hard to believe that the whole organism had not been stroked from a lamp. Looking at it, the eye seemed always to be trying to wipe it away.

He and Dorothy had already been drawn into the imitatively suburban life of the young couples who lived there. Dorothy, of course, he thought, much more than he-since whatever time he had away from his university job was already so prescribed. Again he strove for a better picture of her, brus.h.i.+ng aside the recurrent blankness. In the mornings, waving to her as he pa.s.sed the playground on the way to his cla.s.ses, he had seen her sitting talking or reading or sewing with the other mothers, watching Libby as she played with the other beplaided and corduroyed toddlers in the austerely planned sandpit, already cluttered with buried rakes and spoons and lost tin fish. All of the mothers, still slender and attractive, looked like thirty-year-old versions of the college girls they once had been. Many of them had had careers or talents that marriage and children had interrupted or aborted, and to the memory of these they paid insistent and bitter homage, constantly totting up the frustrations of housewifery in remarks which were like a kind of bleak, allusive shorthand understood by them all. For now that they were women of the home, they felt an inferiority to their former selves, and so, too, they had constructed a technical patter full of words like "preschool" and "security" and references to "Gesell-and-Ilg," as if by this subaqueous jargon they would return motherhood, with all its inconvenient secretions and scullion duties, to the status of a profession.

With Dorothy, however, he thought thankfully, this defeated prattling never had been more than part of her half naive acceptance of the New York "line." She had been reared in a town where people, particularly the women, expected that life would deal with them according to those archaic truisms which, if no longer so hallowed as once, came to them, at least, without the friction of disappointment. It had been this certainty in her which had drawn him as much as her mild blond good looks, whose exact lineaments so curiously evaded him now; it had been to this sureness that he, already deeply flawed with irresolution, had clung and married himself, in the sick hope of transference.

How was he to have foreseen, he thought now, that this very ability of hers to cope, this health, would become formidable between them, sending him further into his cowl of preoccupation, leaving her beached on normality, so that, strangers now, too far apart even for conflict, they had gone on sharing the terrible binding familiarities of the joint board, the joint child, and, less and less often, the graceless despair of the common bed?

For in the world of the normal, he knew now-he heard the dry voice say-to those whose qualms were always based on the tangible, the active, the real, how could he have seemed otherwise than intransigent, when he had insisted that in his world there was a basic, roiling chaos, over which the footage was never more than a series of staircases that dissolved as one trod them, in the midst of which alternatives faced one like knives-and people were the only alternatives?

He walked on through the circuitous approaches to his own building. Light skittered, noise faceted from the hived buildings about him, lazily compounding a day, redolent of livelier Sat.u.r.days and more expectant springs, which was like a percussive recall to health. Fear was all right, it said to him, as long as one could bring it out into the light and give it a name. He was almost up out of the ditch now, almost up on the other, the safe side, with Dorothy and all the people who knew where they were going, and could manage.

He turned in at Number 6 Village Drive, noting, as always, the cozy term applied to the ma.s.sive clinical building whose entrance halls, all of nude beige marble enlivened only by b.u.t.tons, held the etherized silence of a museum. It was difficult to believe that on its upper floors hundreds of doors opened on interiors rumpled with living and the intimate sediment of people, on kitchens checkered with the aftermath of meals, bathrooms clotted with diapers and cream pots, at whose windows stockings hung swinging in the dust motes and the sun.

The door opened to his key and he stepped into the apartment, receiving the familiar impingement of the pictures, the chairs, the books serried just as he had left them. Everything waited for him like a box full of stale att.i.tudes, old grooves in which he both fitted and chafed. As always on Sat.u.r.days, the room had a cleanliness almost pitiable in view of the way Sunday's lax living jarred and crumbled it-almost as if Dorothy expected someone-or something. He hoped she was not going to expect too much of him at first. He hadn't really thought, he hadn't had time to think of it during these years, visualizing her, when at all, as a man in a ward visualizes the ordinary ones, c.u.mbered with health, who wait patiently in the anterooms of hospitals.

In the bedroom, Libby lay on his bed, her face locked fast in the upturned purity of sleep. Dorothy, face down on her own bed, turned her head toward him as he came in. Her mouth, drawn down at the corners at first, in the half-drugged enmity of the dreamer coa.r.s.ely awakened, quivered faintly in greeting.

Of course, he thought, feeling foolishly relieved. This is she. This is the way she is.

"Hi," he said softly, because of Libby.

"Hi."

He looked down at Libby, who was in pajamas. "She in for the night?"

She nodded. "I gave her an early supper. You know how it is otherwise." She raised herself up on her elbow and pushed back her hair.

"Mmm," he said. He knew how it was. In her voice, her att.i.tude, he heard the echoing plaint of the other women: "If you don't let them nap then they're cranky, and if you do then they never want to go to bed later on-and you have them on your hands till nine!" n.o.body seems to enjoy or glory in his children any more, he thought. We're always plotting, calculating how to have a personal life in spite of them.

"Thought you might want to go shopping or something," he said, trying on a smile. In his mood, composed half of his release, half of the infectious rhythm of Sat.u.r.day expectancy, he found himself thinking of the Sat.u.r.day afternoons she used to love-in the early days of their marriage, or when Libby had been a woollen-wrapped bundle carried jauntily on his shoulder-when they had been part of all the other families idling through the stores, trekking through Sears, perhaps-and coming out of that array of rose trellises and tires with a pair of curtains or a kitchen tool, they had returned home heartened and gay and somehow conquerors, through that device so feminine, so American-the purchase.

"I've done the shopping," she said, with a faint look of surprise. "The Ewarts asked us upstairs for the usual. I thought we would come down once in a while to check. It's too late for a sitter."

"Mmm." He put the cake-box down on the night table, stretching his cramped hand. "Mocha," he said.

"Thanks." She awarded it a brief, listless smile.

He sat down carefully on the side of her bed. His hand, braced on the bed, was near her waist. She edged away politely, careful not to interpret affection into the casual gesture. For both of them it had become a matter of pride not to admit, to solicit for the shaming need that was no longer closeness. Nightly, the tense waiting for the hand which did not come had sagged more and more often into sleep; in the infinitesimal edgings away they had built the routine of remoteness.

He put his hand in his lap, inspected it. "I'm through," he said. "At the doctor's." He gave her a quick, guilty look, and concentrated again on the hand. Except for the first of the month, when the bills came in, it had been a matter of rigid convention never to mention the doctor.

"For good?" she said.

"He thinks. I hope."

She swung her legs down to the floor on the other side of the bed. After a minute, she padded around in front of him and sat down at the dressing table with her back to him, opened a drawer, took out a hairbrush, ran a finger over the bristles. He waited for her to speak, turn at least, but she began brus.h.i.+ng her hair, slapping the brush against her head with a tired halfhearted stroke.

He gave a self-conscious laugh, and again, the surrept.i.tious look. "Ring out, wild bells," he said.

"I'm sorry-" She turned. He waited, he told himself, for her to drop the d.a.m.n brush.

"I'm sorry," she repeated, "sorry I can't be more ... oh well-" She looked down at the brush. "I know you expected me to be ... well ... waiting." Then she put down the brush and the words came with a rush, a bitterness. "At the door. Or a street corner, maybe. With a lei, or something."

The quick acid of the words surprised him. She was slow and honest in all she did, with no deft talent either with the paring knife or the tongue.

"Forget it," he said, the dread of a scene opening like a funnel before him.

"No," she said, laboring now. "I suppose ... in a way I was waiting." She raised her head. "Did you ever ask your doctor that ... ask him what happens to people waiting on the sidelines for people like you to-" She stopped.

"To what?"

"To get over their love affair-with themselves."

"Love affair!"

"Ah, you know you loved it," she said. "Spinning out yourself. Because meanwhile you didn't have to do anything-about anything or anybody."

"Would it have been better if I'd had T.B.? Something that showed?"

She put her hand out toward him, almost touching his knee, then drew it back. "I kept thinking of them all the time-all the wives, and husbands, and parents of the people going to your doctor. On the outside all the time, smoothing things over, picking up the pieces-holding their breath. What are we supposed to do? Stop living?"

"If you felt like that, why didn't you say some-"

"Oh no," she said quickly. "I wasn't supposed to interrupt-or intrude!"

It was true, he thought. What she had represented these three years had been the damaging real-which he had avoided even as he fought his way toward it.

"I know it hasn't been easy for you," he said humbly. "Perhaps that was part of my trouble ... that I didn't think enough about that. But now-"

"What's 'now'?" She looked down at her clenched hands. "People like me will always be on the outside ... with people like you."

He got up heavily from the bed and crossed to the window. G.o.d save us, he thought, us-the equivocal ones-from the ones who see life steadily, and see it whole. From those who can't bury or evade the truth, but have to drag it out and beat it like a carpet. Who can say the raw, the open thing, that can never be glozed over again.

He stared out the window, twisting one hand around and around in his pants pocket. "Come on," he said. "Let's go up to the Ewarts'."

"No. I don't want to go after all."

"Well, for G.o.d's sake," he said, sore with his new effort, "you're always the one who's trying to drag me!"