One

When Tillie Shilepsky first laid eyes on her husband-to-be she thought, “No. Uh-uh. He’s out.” One’s school-girl fancies of course ran to dark, deferential strangers who accosted you in foreign lands to warn you against the local drinking water and then, Homburg in hand, asked whether you believed in fate. Such dreams are soon liquidated, but fate was at least not going to deal her a bloke with a cigarette on one ear who called everyone Frisbee. When he lit the cigarette it would probably be with a kitchen match struck on a thumbnail. There would almost certainly be that. “No, I’m sorry. He’s out. Thanks just the same though.”

The hostess responsible for this misguided piece of blind dating stood at her side, beaming on her catch. She was Gertrude Wilson, an old friend who was hardly one’s speed herself. “He’s called Pete Seltzer.”

“I’ll bet.”

Tillie meant that the name was so right it had the ring of an adroitly timed thrust. That was the joke, not that a woman so obtuse at matchmaking was likely to get it. Standing shoulder to shoulder in the blue smoke, amid the tinkle of highballs flourished in evening gestures, they watched the Seltzer knock out a couple of girls sitting on the floor at his feet. He was amusing them with double talk, a craft in which he was apparently quite skilled. The party was by now well on the boil.

“The reason I haven’t gotten married at the age of thirty is for fear of becoming a real person,” he was explaining. “To that in itself I have no objection. But the day-to-day togetherness can finally mucilaginate the smuffockles, if you know what I mean. Till it’s impossible to extropert each other’s thropplestance.”

“Come and meet him.” Gertrude took Tillie by the hand and towed her through the crowd.

It was the first time Tillie had ever heard anyone talk double talk in real life. Entertainers doing it had usually amused her, or at least fascinated her with the art as such, which calls for the most minutely calculated effects, the most perfectly timed deflations. Nonsense is such a difficult art! A mere handful of men have achieved it, while the centuries are stocked with Homers and Mozarts. An intellectual escort with whom she had once listened to some double talk in a night club had analyzed the laughter it provoked as “the pleasurable collapse of meaning.” One shook helplessly at having the epistemological rug pulled out from under one, at being dropped through a hatch into the logical void.

“Why isn’t he hauled over to meet me?” Tillie wondered. By the time they reached him he was smoking the cigarette. So she had missed the manner in which fire had been set to it. Well, perhaps another time.

“Oh, hi.” The Seltzer type rose from the sofa, also moving aside after the introduction to make room for Tillie on it. The routine was thereupon instantly resumed, the two girls being by no means ready to let it drop. Tillie took them in with almost as much interest as she paid the Seltzer, struck by the amazing similarity between them without their in the least resembling one another physically. They seemed blonde and brunette, thin and plump, tall and short versions of the same low-threshold risibility. Wet-eyed, they took turns egging the Seltzer on.

“What kind of work do you do, Pete?”

“Motivational research. We send canvassers out to discover what the public threeks. What they’re looking for in an after-shaving mint or an automatic contaminator. We’re very selective about our clients. We only take people who come to us.”

“What are some other products?”

“We’ve just completed a survey for a dietetic shampoo, and are now helping launch a reversible mayonnaise.”

The term rolling on the floor would not exaggerate the response of the two girls. Pete Seltzer, however, seemed more aware of his date sitting silently beside him, with her arms folded on her chest.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I disagree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it,” Tillie answered.

“Well said. A girl who deserves every thermonsenpoos.”

They were all presently engulfed in the general conversation, into an unfeatured role in which the Seltzer, somewhat to Tillie’s surprise, seemed perfectly content to sink. He had no interest in hogging the floor, as Gertrude’s interior decorator, Jimmy Twitchell, now did, adroitly steering the talk among matters of gossip in which he was wickedly versed. Pete Seltzer had no wish to cut a figure, or, apparently, to be the life of the party. He had no opinions about the human scene. He was more interested in personal relations, as Tillie concluded from the steadily solidifying pressure of his elbow against hers. Even the fractured girls took a brisker part in the political debate by which the initiative was at last wrested from Jimmy Twitchell.

“What do you think about the present administration?” Tillie at last asked Pete Seltzer, point-blank.

“I think they’re doing their best to bolster the economy and reassure the country by fiduciating the morsnorfles without negromifying the status quo.”

Either Olympian detachment or abysmal ignorance was on exhibit here, it was too early to tell which. A zealous member of the Americans for Democratic Action had come armed with a petition, which Tillie favored but refused to sign here because bringing it to a party had been rude, but to which the Seltzer had courteously affixed his signature without reading the contents. “Do you always keep your arms folded?” he asked as he reached past her for her empty glass, in order to refill it. She bristled, then sensed that no stricture was intended: he grinned at her in a sort of loose, lupine way, at the same time flicking blue eyes across her person. He didn’t expect an answer, but, plucking up his glass along with hers, rose and headed for the bar. It was then she saw that he was lame.

By the time he returned, worming and sidling eccentrically through the steaming congestion, the discussion had shifted to the beatniks, as they were then called.

“What do you think of them?” Tillie catechized.

“I don’t know any.” He leaned toward her with an easy familiarity, as though he felt he had known her for years, and with the slipshod grin reported out of the side of his mouth an encounter at the bar with Jimmy Twitchell. Jimmy was being terribly acid about the political pugilist who had brung the petition, not for that reason, but for wrenching the floor from Jimmy precisely when he was going so well about the London season. The A.D.A. organizer’s grasp of the international scene was by no means all he thought. “He doesn’t even know who’s at Cannes this year,” Jimmy had said.

“That rich?” Pete said, poking her with his elbow.

“Who’s our ambassador to France?” Tillie tersely asked, persevering in her quiz. She had a right to know precisely what she had been paired off with.

“Wait, that’s not all,” said Sneaky Pete, his duckbill nose seeming to broaden with his smile. “He not only did this place, you understand,” rolling an eye along the dapper walls, “he’s a damn good dress designer too, one of the best. So he’s a two-time loser. But—this’ll kill you—he sniffed and said, ‘What’s that cologne you’re wearing?’ To me. And I said, ‘Only some shaving lotion I picked up in a drugstore, and I’m not wearing it, for Christ’s sakes, I’ve just got it on!’ We don’t hit it off at all well,” he concluded rather smugly.

Tillie of course wondered whether any of her questions had been in the least answered by this certainly very slippery character; but another mystery soon supplanted that: how, since he had not asked, had he known she drank Scotch, and that she took water instead of soda, and how much? Had he gulped off her dregs on the way to see? These wonders yielded to others still. Toward midnight he leaned in her direction again and said: “Shall we go?”

“I have a car. Thanks just the same though.”

“But I don’t.”

Bygone ambitions to be an actress had caused Tillie Shilepsky to practice in private the double take, the almost imperceptible head twitch of which only the most skilled craftsmen are capable in its refined form. The art lies in not being too obvious—otherwise it is just mugging. The emotion is almost telegraphed rather than registered. She did such a take now, apparently quite successfully, for the Seltzer himself gave no sign that he had noticed anything. He was gathering himself up to go. “I’m your escort after all,” he said.

“You mean you want me to drop you.”

“No, no. I’ll take you home. I’m sure I can get a cab from there.”

The term unmitigated gall sprang to mind as she rose in response to his example, and said her goodbyes with him. She felt Gertrude’s speculative smile follow their departure, like something burning a hole in the back of her coat. Playing God was not the healthiest of signs in a woman; a regulatory interest in other people’s lives is never far from the urge to meddle in them, nor that ever wholly divorced from the taste for disaster. It was no accident that the most zealous matchmaker Tillie knew, namely Gertrude Wilson, was also the worst gossip. She’s talking to Jimmy Twitchell about us right now, Tillie thought as she reached the dark October street.

“Turn the clocks back tonight,” said Pete, clumping alongside her toward the parked Chevrolet. “Giving us all an extra hour of insomnia.”

“That’s right.”

He saw her settled behind the wheel, then hopped briskly around to the other side, as though afraid she might spurt off without him. Soon they were tooling along toward her place. “You needn’t have troubled,” she said, sensing the irony to be wasted. She thought she saw a way of turning her martyrdom to account, though.

Like many another woman, Tillie had been trying for years to learn Gertrude’s age. She now felt that putting up with Gertrude’s romantic selection in such stout fashion earned her the right to any information he might have on the score. So after a few circling preliminaries intended to be innocuous, such as how long the Seltzer had known her, etc., she asked negligently, “Have you any idea how old Gertrude is?” He threw out his hands with a comic grunt indicating the universal hopelessness of such a quest. “I don’t even think Burt knows,” he said, meaning Gertrude’s husband.

He spoke with a vague mumble so nearly indistinguishable, almost like some more double talk, that it was half a block before Tillie had deciphered it. Meanwhile he mumbled some more in the same fashion, so that she finally turned to see what the matter was. She thought at first he had a cigarette in his mouth, but closer scrutiny revealed a sickroom thermometer to be jutting upward out of the corner of his mouth.

“Aren’t you well?”

“I woke up this morning with a touch of something,” he said, removing it. “Headachy, and a kind of upset in the propinquity.” She asked him drily whether he realized that was an actual word with a specific meaning, at the same time glancing out her window to make it clear that she had little or no interest in the reply. “But I was determined to keep this date,” he said. “Something told me.” He tried to read the thermometer in the fitful light from streetlamps they were passing at increasing speeds, turning it this way and that. Finally he held it down in the glow of the dash. “No fever. I can come in.”

Then all her efforts to discourage him were nothing more than the time-honored technique for hooking a husband. Indifference, playing hard to get, all that business, were devices to which she had certainly never hitherto stooped, but they apparently paid off. For in the short walk from the garage to her place he hobbled adhesively along beside her, sometimes slipping a bit into her wake. One leg was just a tiny bit shorter than the other, was the thing, and Pete Seltzer amused her now by showing how he would have looked normal by walking with the good one in the gutter. That evened off the difference. Her heart went out to him. (“He doesn’t ask for sympathy”) then was abruptly recalled, like a Yo-Yo on a string (“That’s how he gets it”). He sauntered along in this fashion for a good part of the block, till an approaching car sent him back to her side on the sidewalk. There he continued to patter along like a stray dog that had decided to adopt her.

Waving a fresh highball, his free arm along the back of an otherwise unoccupied sofa, Tillie watching from an opposing chair, he talked about himself, his past, his family, slaking what would be a natural thirst for all the poop obtainable on a newcomer. His father had been a spiffy gink, enhancing a reputation as a man about town, rather than otherwise, by a succession of business failures. One had been a public gymnasium, or health club, from which a member was hurried with a heart attack a week after the Grand Opening, following a workout on the parallel bars. The stricken man’s family had sued, not successfully but with a publicity that put an end to the health club.

“Where is Seltzer père now?”

“Who?”

“Your father. Is he still alive?”

“Practically. He’s in a nursing home not far from here. I visit him every Saturday evening. This time I think I’ll go in the afternoon because I’ve got tickets to a dance that night. Would you like to go? It’s a benefit for my father’s burial society.”

“I think I’m busy then.”

“The customer eventually died.”

“Oh, all right.”

He was a surprisingly good dancer. His walking gait suggested the eccentric principle of the camshaft, with its regularly irregular rhythm. Dancing utilized that much more the motive strength inherent in it, as of something thrown into higher gear. He pumped them both across the floor with bursts of sure mechanical power. Tillie had trouble keeping up with him, as did the orchestra, which tended to lag a beat or two behind the pace he set. She was grateful for the intermissions, though the crowds were so dense there was no place to sit and they stood facing one another beside potted palms. It was a huge ballroom hung with a single colossal chandelier heavy with menacing reminders of The Phantom of the Opera. The Something-or-other room of a local hotel. They drew on cigarettes, ignited, as it happily developed, from a silver lighter Pete Seltzer carried, and not by a kitchen match struck on the thumbnail, much less swiped across the seat of the pants. He wore a rented tuxedo which he said he was going to sublet to a friend of the same shape and size who needed it the following night for a shindig being thrown here by the Ukrainian Sick Benefit Society. He shook his head with an expressionless snort, whether deploring man’s afflicted condition, or his venality in subcontracting suits of clothing not his own, was not made clear. He critically studied the cigarette given him with the remark that he preferred cigars, as did his father, but that they had for some time been unable to obtain the clear Havanas which were all they liked. He seemed puzzled by this difficulty. Tillie therefore now said, gazing at him above folded arms:

“That’s because we no longer trade with Cuba.”

“Oh?” He spoke as one interested in current events, eager to learn more. So she continued:

“For a while, I was afraid I might not be able to get my own favorite brand of tea, lapsang souchong, for the same reason. Because it comes from Red China, with whom we no longer trade either. But of course England does, and we import it from her. I don’t see why we allow in tea from there and not tobacco from Canada, but anyway there it is. Mainland China is now completely in the hands of the Communists. Chiang Kaishek only has Formosa.”

“Ah, I see.”

She had dropped her cigarette into the sandpot, and now he did his, and escorted her back onto the dance floor. There, as he drove her around the ballroom at breakneck speeds, he whispered into the pink shell of her ear, “How would you like to go bowling next Saturday?”

“Mustn’t you see your father?”

“He’s not having any visitors. I doubt whether he’ll pull through.”

“Oh, well, in that case …”

She was hot and wretched, convinced that things would get worse before they got better. She was both galled by the persistence with which he kept dating her, and gratified at the early hour in each evening at which he procured himself another. It showed an endearing uncertainty, and tended to indicate that she was needed. The realization filled a rather sharp necessity of her own.

These were her scrambled thoughts each time she plodded up the steps to her apartment behind him. He always preceded her, as though instinctively sensing she was one of those women who preferred this fine inversion of courtesy to being themselves trailed up a stairway. Such subtle filaments were always turning up in his nature, making it difficult to end this as she would have liked. He had more redeeming features than any man she knew—but should a man need that many! He bowled insufferably well too, his gimp in this case putting an extra thrust into his delivery at just the right terminal moment. He gave her pointers about her own, explaining that to hit the front pin head-on always resulted in a split, or railroad, while an impact slightly on one side or other of it gave you a better pin-mix. She continued aiming straight for the center, banking on a certain inaccuracy to get the ball slightly to the right or left.

It was that night over hamburgers that he criticized her on a scale, and with a candor, to which no man would resort who was not seriously interested in you. Such, at least, was the thinking with which she saved face for both of them—bailed both of them out of this rather nasty little dilemma.

“Want to know something about yourself? Don’t wear a girdle,” he said. “I mean give the whollies a chance. I mean you haven’t got that much that you need to go around with it in a sling, tightening in the natural curves and flattening out the wherewithal. Let it breathe. Same thing up here. Give the mercy-me’s a chance. Here,” he persisted when she looked away with an injured hauteur, silently eating. “Mezzanine. Ribbons, laces, notions. So give the Jaspers notions. You know what? You’re the kind of woman who could go without a bra altogether, let alone always folding your arms on top of it, like an Indian. With sweaters and even the right dress. Let the merchandise gallop a little.”

He’s got to go, she told herself as she tramped up the stairs angrily behind him. He knows nothing about the new emerging African nations—he thinks Cameroons are some kind of cookie—the ghetto problems, or what a megalopolis is. He seems to think that’s some kind of prehistoric animal. That the country was about to become three or four of them, one of which would spread from Boston down to Washington and be known as Boswash, was wholly lost on him. With each succeeding such topic that sprang to mind she trod the stairs that much more indignantly, her numb legs notwithstanding. She remembered her mother saying how awful her father was. Mrs. Shilepsky said she sometimes crossed the street to avoid him, or popped into a closet till he had passed her in the hall. Tillie didn’t want to get into that. No, she would break it off. Tonight.

“How old are you?”

The question stung her like a whip. Regret for her lost youth was so keen in Tillie’s unmarried case that to be asked her age was a threat of which she stood in actual physical fear. That was how she understood Gertrude as fiercely as she did. Her recoil was literally a reflex: her nerves jumped before her brain comprehended the words that had made them do so, as pain makes us withdraw our hand from a stove without the intervention of thought. A shock went through her, a blast of hot air, of cold wind.

“Thuh—thirty-two,” she said, compounding her sensation by catching herself in a Gertrude lie. Tillie had turned thirty-three, but so recently that the falsehood might be forgiven; it would have been accurate a week ago. I’m three years older than this Pete Seltzer, she told herself through gritted teeth.

The incident made her fear the telephone wouldn’t ring as, had it not occurred, she might have begun to hope it wouldn’t. Instead of making a date that night, he kissed her goodnight at the door with only the promise that he would give her a jangle. A week passed without his doing so. By Wednesday of the following week she was frantic. Then the phone rang.

“Care to chop some more wood tonight? I think this is the best night for a lane there. Not a league night.”

“Why, swell. But don’t bother to come all the way over here to pick me up. I’ll come by and honk.”

That was the night she dressed as he had suggested. But it was for only one reason, and that not to give the whollies a chance, or certainly to let the merchandise gallop a little, or whatever: it was to put Pete Seltzer to a very crucial test, one that entailed, for her, the very criterion of sensibility. Would he crudely comment, or would he have the grace not to?

He passed the test with flying colors. There was only the merest murmur of extra pleasure at what his loitering palm found under her coat when he kissed her goodnight at the door. “Dear Diary,” she mentally noted in the imaginary journal she kept, “he is incapable of the gaucherie of remarking that he saw I had taken his advice.”

So against his jazzy raffishness and political immaturity (he signed any petition thrust at him without reading it, on the ground that anyone stellar enough to pound pavements and ring doorbells deserved your admiration per se) must be balanced this innate delicacy of which she had now so many tenuous but none the less palpable proofs. He was a bad Jasper from one point of view, but what foraging male wasn’t, from that? Only the gray, proctoring presence of her mother with whom she lived kept him from “trying anything” there. The question was only when he would suggest they go “up to his place”—par for the course today.

But what was he really like all told? she asked herself again as, from the curtain of her third-story window, she watched him pump along home by way of the corner bus stop. She remembered something her mother used to say, in the humor of the spiffy-gink days of Pete’s father, now, at last, departed. “Men are like streetcars. If you miss one, there’ll be another along pretty soon,” Mrs. Shilepsky would tell Tillie. And Tillie now answered aloud, as though Hollywood cameras were grinding behind her, “Yes, but they don’t run after midnight.” She waited a moment, imbibing the pity of the night streets, till Pete had swung aboard the last bus and vanished, before dropping the upheld curtain and turning to bed.

So having been forced into giving him a hearing, she began to see that he had possibilities. He was something like an old barn standing in an open field, ignored by the hurrying passerby but irresistible to the discerning eye, its foundation found on scrutiny to be firm and its beams sound, and, for the rest, crying out to be remodeled.

“Why don’t you get your hair cut, Pete?” It was after all her turn.

He looked woundedly away across the restaurant, as the sheep before his shearers is dumb.

“All I mean is, I don’t think long hair is right for you, Pete. It’s still thick, and that wiry kind I think looks better short. I don’t mean crew cut, but what’s the term? En brosse. I think that would be right for you.”

She did not comment after he had made his long overdue trip to the barber, but noted to herself how cruelly young the high-clipper jobs made men look. Then it seemed a pity he hadn’t something better to go with the result than the frayed sport coat in which he kept turning up. So she accompanied him to a men’s store where they picked out a gray herringbone suit as well as a standard navy blue blazer. That gave her the courage to bring up the subject of his teeth. They were in visible need of repairs thanks in part to a habit of sucking lozenges in order to keep his mouth wholesome in the grapplethrocks.

“How often do you see your dentist, Pete?”

“My dentist died some years ago.”

“Aw, I’m sorry. I was looking for one myself.”

The hint was taken, and he wound up having his teeth not only filled but capped, which gave his smile a rather villainous air, at least until you got accustomed to it.

Instinct told her that now he was going to pop the question. All the signs pointed to it. She knew it was coming one night in a French restaurant, after a lot of good food and wine. He cleared his throat as he picked up the coins from a saucer, leaving a pair of bills for the waiter.

“How would you like to come up to my place for a spot of heavy breathing?” he asked.

“All right,” she said, gathering up her bag and gloves.

After all, if she was going to reform him, she would have to start mending her ways.