Collected Fiction Page 5

  “No,” said Michael, “not with that introduction.”

  “The truth,” Parrish said, suddenly sober and unsmiling, “the truth is not for the likes of these.” He swung around and surveyed the room. For the first time, Michael could sense, in the cold, harsh, measuring eyes, something of what Parrish had been through. “The men running, the young boys that came five thousand miles suddenly surprised that they are actually dying, there, right there, themselves, with a bullet in their own sweet bellies. The French, stinking up the border and accepting bribes to let men walk on bleeding feet through the Pyrenees in the middle of the winter. The crooks and four-flushers and smart operators everywhere. On the docks. In the offices. Right up in battalion and company, right up next to you on the front line. The nice boys who see their pals get it and suddenly say, ‘I must have made a mistake. This is different from the way it looked at Dartmouth.’”

  A little plump forty-year-old woman in a school-girlish pink dress came up to the bar and took Laura’s arm. “Laura, darling,” she said, “I’ve been looking for you. It’s your turn.”

  “Oh,” Laura said, turning to the blonde woman, “I’m sorry if I kept you waiting, but Mr. Parrish was so interesting.” Michael winced a little as Laura said “interesting.” Mr. Parrish merely smiled at both women with an even, impartial lust.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Laura told Michael. “Cynthia’s been reading fortunes for the women and she’s going to do mine now.”

  “See,” Parrish said loudly, “if there’s a forty-year-old Irishman with false teeth in your future.”

  “I’ll ask,” Laura said, laughing, and went off arm in arm with the fortune-teller. Michael watched her as she walked through the room, in her straight-backed, delicately sensual way, and caught two other men watching her, too. One was Donald Wade, a tall, pleasant-looking man, and the other was a man called Talbot, and they were both what Laura described as “ex-beaux” of hers. They seemed constantly to be invited to the same parties as the Whitacres. The term ex-beau was one which Michael sometimes puzzled over uneasily. What it really meant he was sure, was that Laura had had affairs with them, and wanted Michael to believe that she no longer had anything to do with them. He was suddenly annoyed at the whole situation, although at the moment, turning it over in his mind, there didn’t seem to be very much to do about it.

  “The girls of America,” Parrish was saying, “are a song in a man’s testicles.”

  Michael couldn’t help laughing, as Parrish wagged his grizzled, solid head in solemn appreciation.

  “Have a drink,” Michael said.

  “Pal,” said Parrish.

  They pushed their glasses at the bartender.

  “When are you going back?” Michael asked.

  Parrish looked around him, his blunt, open face taking on a ludicrous expression of guile. “Hard to say, Pal,” he whispered. “Not wise to say. The State Department, you know … Has its Fascist spies everywhere. As it is, I’ve forfeited my American citizenship, technically, by enlisting under the colors of a foreign power. Keep it to yourself, Pal, but I’d say a month, month and a half …”

  “Are you going back alone?”

  “Don’t think so, Pal. Taking a nice little group of lads back with me.” Parrish smiled benevolently. “The International Brigade is a wide-open growing concern.” Parrish glanced at. Michael reflectively, and Michael felt that the Irishman was measuring him, questioning in his own mind what Michael was doing there, in his fancy suit in this fancy apartment, why Michael wasn’t at a machine gun this night instead of a bar.

  “You looking at me?” Michael asked.

  “No, Pal.” Parrish wiped his cheek.

  “Do you take my money?” Michael asked harshly.

  “I’ll take money,” Parrish grinned, “from the holy hand of Pope Pius, himself.”

  Michael got out his wallet. He had just been paid, and he still had some money left over from his bonus. He put it all in Parrish’s hand. It amounted to seventy-five dollars.

  “Leave yourself carfare, Pal.” Parrish carelessly stuffed it into a side pocket and patted Michael’s shoulder. “We’ll kill a couple of the bastards for you.”

  “Thanks.” Michael put his wallet away. He didn’t want to talk to Parrish any more. “You staying here at the bar?”

  “Is there a good whorehouse in the building?” Parrish asked.

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll stay here,” he said.

  “See you later,” Michael said. “I’m going to circulate.”

  “Sure, Pal,” Parrish nodded coolly at him. “Thanks for the dough.”

  “Stuff it, Pal,” Michael said.

  “Sure, Pal.” Parrish turned back to his drink, his wide, square shoulders a blue-serge bulwark in the froth of bare shoulders and satin lapels around him.

  Michael walked slowly across the room toward a group in the corner. Long before he got there, he could see Louise looking at him, smiling tentatively at him. Louise was what Laura probably would call an “old girl” of his, except that, really, they had never stopped. Louise was married by now, too, but somehow, from time to time, for shorter or longer periods, she and Michael continued as lovers. There was a moral judgment to be made there some day, Michael felt. But Louise was one of the prettiest girls in New York, small, dark and clever-looking, and she was warm and undemanding. In a way she was dearer to him than his wife. Sometimes, lying next to each other, on winter afternoons in borrowed apartments, Louise would sigh, staring up at the ceiling, and say, “Isn’t this wonderful? I suppose some day we ought to give it up.” But neither she nor Michael took it seriously.

  She was standing now next to Donald Wade. For a second, Michael got an unpleasant vision of the complexity of life, but it vanished as he kissed her and said, “Happy New Year.”

  He shook hands gravely with Wade, wondering, as always, why men thought they had to be so cordial to their wives’ ex-lovers.

  “Hello,” Louise said. “Haven’t seen you in a long time. You look very nice in your pretty suit. Where’s Mrs. Whitacre?”

  “Having her fortune told,” Michael said. “The past isn’t bad enough. She’s got to have the future to worry about, too. Where’s your husband?”

  “I don’t know.” Louise waved vaguely and smiled at him in the serious private manner she reserved for him. “Around.”

  Wade bowed a little and moved off. Louise looked after him. “Didn’t he use to go with Laura?” she asked.

  “Don’t be a cat,” Michael said.

  “Just wanted to know.”

  “The room,” Michael said, “is loaded with guys who used to go with Laura.” He surveyed the guests with sudden dissatisfaction. Wade, Talbot, and now another one had come in, a lanky actor by the name of Moran who had been in one of Laura’s pictures. Their names had been linked in a gossip column in Hollywood and Laura had called New York early one morning to reassure Michael that it had been an official studio party, etcetera, etcetera …

  “The room,” Louise said, looking at him obliquely, “is full of girls who used to go around with you. Or maybe ‘used to’ isn’t exactly what I mean.”

  “Parties these days,” Michael said, “are getting too crowded. I’m not coming to them any more. Isn’t there some place you and I can go and sit and hold hands quietly?”

  “We can try,” Louise said, and took his arm and led him down the hallway through the groups of guests, toward the rear of the apartment. Louise opened a door and looked in. The room was dark and she motioned Michael to follow. They tiptoed in, closed the door carefully behind them and sank onto a small couch. After the bright lights in the other rooms, Michael couldn’t see anything here for a moment. He closed his eyes luxuriously, feeling Louise snuggle close to him, lean over and softly kiss his cheek.

  “Now,” she said, “isn’t that better?”

  There was a creaking of a bed across the room, and now, with his eyes growing more accustomed to the semi-light, Mic
hael could see a figure heave itself clumsily up on one of the twin beds and reach out to the table between the beds. There was the unmistakable rattle of a cup against a saucer and the figure lifted the cup and drank.

  “Humiliation.” The one word punctuated two long sips from the cup, and Michael recognized Arney, sitting up, his legs swung over the side of the bed. Arney leaned over, nearly toppling, and peered at the other bed. “Tommy,” Arney said. “Tommy, are you up?”

  “Yes, Mr. Arney,” a ten-year-old voice came up sleepily from the pillow. It was the son of the Johnsons, whose home this was.

  “Happy New Year, Tommy.”

  “Happy New Year, Mr. Arney.”

  “Don’t let me disturb you, Tommy. I merely became sickened with adult society and I came here to wish the new generation a happy new year.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Arney.”

  “Tommy …”

  “Yes, Mr. Arney.” Tommy was waking up now and becoming more lively. Michael could feel Louise smothering giggles beside him, and he felt half amused, half annoyed at being caught dark and silent like this.

  “Tommy,” Arney was saying, “should I tell you a story?”

  “I’d love a story,” Tommy said.

  “Let me see …” Arney sipped from the cup once more, with a loud rattling of crockery. “Let me see. I don’t know any stories suitable for children.”

  “I like any kind of story,” Tommy said. “I read The Thin Man last week.”

  “All right,” Arney said grandly, “I will tell you a story unsuitable for children, Tommy. The story of my life.”

  “Were you ever knocked out by the butt end of a 45?” Tommy asked.

  “Don’t prompt me, Tommy,” the playwright said, irritated. “If I was knocked out by the butt end of a 45 it will all come out in its proper time.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Arney.” Tommy’s voice was polite and hurt.

  “Until I was twenty-eight years old,” Arney began, “I was a young man of promise …”

  Michael squirmed uneasily, feeling ashamed and idiotic listening to this, but Louise squeezed his hand warningly and he sat still.

  “I had been educated in good schools, as they say in novels, Tommy. I worked hard and I could recognize quotations from all the English poets. Want a drink, Tommy?”

  “No, thank you.” Tommy was wide awake now, sitting up, fascinated.

  “You are probably too young to remember the reviews of my first play, Tommy. The Long and the Short. How old are you, Tommy?”

  “Ten.”

  “Too young.” There was the clatter of the teacup against the saucer. “I would quote some of them, but it might bore you. However, it would not be vanity to say that I was compared to Strindberg and O’Neill. You ever hear of Strindberg, Tommy?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What the hell do they teach children in school these days?” Arney’s voice was irritated and sharp. He sipped at his drink. “The story of my life, Tommy,” he went on, somewhat mollified. “I was invited to all the best houses. I signed checks at four of the most expensive speakeasies in New York City. I had my picture in the papers on many separate occasions and I was asked to address committees and artistic organizations. I stopped speaking to all my old friends, and that was a relief, and I went to Hollywood and for a long time I made 3,500 dollars a week, and this was before the income tax, too. I discovered the bottle, Tommy, and I married a woman with a house in Antibes, France, and a brewery in Milwaukee. I betrayed her in 1931 with her best friend, and that was a mistake, because the lady was as bony as a mountain trout.…”

  There was the noisy sucking on the cup. Michael knew he would just have to sit where he was in the dark and hope Arney wouldn’t discover him.

  “People say,” Arney went on, musically now, his voice soft and nostalgic, “I left my talent in Hollywood, Tommy. And there’s no doubt about it, that’s the place to leave it if you have to leave it somewhere. But I don’t believe them, Tommy. I don’t believe them. I’m a has-been, and everybody avoids me. I don’t go to a doctor because I’m sure he will tell me I am going to die in six months. My latest play would be kept from the stage in a well-regulated state, but it wasn’t Hollywood that did it. I’m a weak, intelligent man, Tommy, and we don’t live in the right age for weak, intelligent men. Take my advice, Tommy, grow up stupid. Strong and stupid.”

  Arney moved around heavily on the bed and stood up, his outline wavering against the dim light fading in through the window.

  “Don’t think for a minute, Tommy, that I’m complaining,” Arney said in a loud, pugnacious voice. “I’m an old drunk, and everybody makes fun of me; I disappointed everybody I ever knew. But I’m not complaining. If I had it to do over again, Tommy, I’d do it just the way I did.” He waved his arms and the cup and saucer fell to the carpet, breaking there. But Arney didn’t seem to notice. “There’s only one thing, Tommy,” he said portentously, “one thing I’d do differently.” He paused, reflecting. Then he spoke, “I’d …” He stopped. “No, Tommy, you’re too young.”

  He wheeled, majestically, his shoes cracking on the broken saucer, and started toward the door. Tommy lay quiet. Arney passed Louise and Michael and threw the door open. Light streamed, in and Arney saw them sitting here. He smiled angelically. “Whitacre,” he said, “Whitacre, old boy, how would you like to do an old man a favor? Go into the kitchen, Whitacre, old man, and get a cup and saucer and bring it here. Some son of a bitch broke mine.”

  “Sure,” Michael said. He stood up and Louise stood with him. “Tommy,” he said, as they went through the door, “go to sleep.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Tommy, his voice sleepy but disturbed.

  Michael sighed and closed the door and went looking for a cup and saucer.

  The rest of the evening was confined to Michael’s mind. Later on he didn’t remember whether he had made a date with Louise for Tuesday afternoon or not, or whether Laura had told him that the fortune-teller had predicted they were going to be divorced or not. But he remembered seeing Arney appear at the other end of the room, smiling a little, whiskey dribbling down from his mouth on his chin. Arney, with his head slightly to one side, as though his neck was stiff, came walking, quite steadily, through the room, ignoring the other guests who were standing there, and came up next to Michael. He stood there, wavering for a moment, in front of the tall French window, then threw open the window and started to step out. His coat caught on a lamp. He stopped to disentangle it, and started out again. Michael watched him and knew that he should rush over and grab him. He felt himself starting to move sluggishly, his arms and legs dreamlike and light, although he knew that if he didn’t move faster the playwright would be through the window and falling eleven stories before he could reach him.

  Michael heard the quick scuff of shoes behind him. A man leaped past him and took the playwright in his arms. The two figures teetered dangerously on the edge, with the reflection of the night lights of New York a heavy red neon glow on the clouds outside. The window was slammed shut by someone else and they were safe. Then Michael saw that it was Parrish, who had been halfway across the room at the bar, who had come past him to save the playwright.

  Laura was in Michael’s arms, hiding her eyes, weeping. He was annoyed at her for being so useless and so demanding at a moment like that, and he was glad he could be annoyed at her because it kept him from thinking about how he had failed, although he knew he wouldn’t be able to avoid thinking about it later.

  They left soon after, with everyone very gay and offhand and pretending Arney had been playing a joke on his friends. Arney was lying on the floor, sleeping. He refused to go inside to a bed and he rolled off the couch every time he was raised to it. Parrish, smiling and happy, was at the bar once more, asking the bartender from the caterer’s what union he belonged to.

  Michael wanted to go home, but Laura said she was hungry, and somehow they were in a crowd of people and somebody had a car and everybody sat on everybody el
se’s lap and he was relieved when they drew up to the big garish restaurant on Madison Avenue and he could get out of the crowded car.

  They sat down in a shrill orange room with paintings of Indians for some reason all over the walls, and inexperienced waiters, hastily pressed into emergency service, stumbling erratically among the loud, still-celebrating diners. Michael felt drunk, his eyelids drooping with wooden insistence over his eyes. He didn’t talk because he felt himself stuttering when he tried. He stared around him, his mouth curled in what he thought was lordly scorn for the world around him. Louise was at the table, he suddenly noticed, with her husband. And Katherine, with the three Harvard juniors. And Wade, he noticed, sitting next to Laura, holding her hand. Michael’s head began to clear and ache at the same time. He ordered a hamburger and a bottle of beer.

  This is disgraceful, he thought heavily, disgraceful. Ex-girls, ex-beaux, ex-nothing. Was it Tuesday afternoon he was to meet Louise, or Wednesday? And what afternoon was Wade to meet Laura? A nest of snakes hibernating for the winter, Arney had said. He was a silly, broken man, Arney, but he wasn’t wrong there. There was no honor to this life, no form … Martinis, beer, brandy, Scotch, have another, and everything disappeared in a blur of alcohol—decency, fidelity, courage, decision. Parrish had to be one to jump across the room. Automatically. Danger, therefore jump. Michael had been right there, next to the window, and he had hardly moved, a small indecisive shuffling—no more. There he’d stood, too fat, too much liquor, too many attachments, a wife who was practically a stranger, darting in from Hollywood for a week at a time, full of that talk, doing God knows what with how many other men on those balmy orange-scented California evenings, while he frittered away the years of his youth, drifting with the easy tide of the theatre, making a little money, being content, never making the bold move … He was thirty years old and this was 1938. Unless he wanted to be driven to the same window as Arney, he had better take hold.