Two

“This sort of thing does go on,” she assured him as they mounted a flight of stairs even dingier than her own. She had told him before that she didn’t find the neighborhood in which he lived very appetizing. To which he had replied, “It’s the safest neighborhood in town. It’s protected by the Mafia.” His flat was over a Chinese restaurant, which Pete said had his favorite waiter in the world. Every time he spilled a plate of food or a bowl of soup all over you, he viewed the resulting havoc with Oriental resignation.

Then she was sitting in an overstuffed chair of russet brown, as nearly as could be judged in the light shed from a distant lamp, for the living room, at least, was a large one. Some kind of small doll-like trinket dangled from the lamp’s tasseled pull, one feminine touch undoubtedly left behind by a forerunner. There was an upright piano against the opposite wall, while in another corner sat another short, rather frightened girl wearing Tillie’s fun-fur coat of sheared rabbit, smiling tautly back at her from an oval mirror.

Pete took her coat, leaving her in her red wool dress. She felt as though she were being stripped for surgery, not, as it happened, altogether inappropriately. “I’ll whip us up a little anti-freeze,” he said, vanishing into what by inference would be the kitchen. She didn’t want to see it, right away. Out of the tail of her eye she caught a glimpse of an open bedroom with an unmade bed.

She rose to make a tour of this room, examining one by one a wealth of snapshots surely illustrating a sentimental turn of mind? There were some people picnicking in a field, a woman waving in bright sunlight from an open roadster with wooden spokes in the wheels, a fat boy humorously hugging the pillar of a white porch-rail on which he sat. Then she came upon a fleshy man in middle age, buttoned into a Chesterfield and holding a Homburg. His thick, not yet graying hair was short and brushed back, a cane was hooked on one arm, and Tillie could fairly smell the 4711 cologne she herself so loved, scent, label and all. The diamond eyes, though probably as blue as Pete’s, looked vaguely Irish rather than Teutonic. She was holding the picture, stroking its small gilt frame and its glass cover with her thumb when Pete returned with their highballs.

“Your father?”

“Yes. Cheers.”

Leaning back on the sofa with an arm characteristically spread along its back, he told her a story he’d just read in the medical section of a news magazine. A young woman nearly seven feet tall had had sections of bone removed from both legs—six inches in all. The operation was a success, making her a woman of at least reasonably normal height. The surgeons crowed. But they had forgotten one thing. When the woman got up out of bed, her arms hung down to her knees.

“That’s some story to tell a girl on her bridal night,” Tillie said. She set her glass down and put her ten fingers into her hair, in that tidying gesture with which women seem also about to claw themselves. She was really ready to grab her coat and run when Pete said, “Doctors have said they could fix my hoof, but what the hell,” so she stayed.

Walking to the piano, for he was going to entertain her, he saw that she was reading a large novelty-shop button lying on a table beside her. “I make friends easily. Strangers take a little time,” it said. “An out-of-town client gave that to me,” he explained. “Do you realize I had to wear the damned thing all through lunch?” He dropped it into a wastebasket and continued on to the piano.

He gave the stool a ceremonial twirl and, without further preliminary, hurled himself violently into Twelfth Street Rag. She had never heard anything performed at such breakneck speed. Hunched in shirtsleeves over the yellowing keys, he pounded them with a velocity and ferocity whose object seemed to be that of seeing how fast he could get through the piece. One chorus finished, he would negotiate the systematically stumbling, offbeat interpolation familiar to such low classics, and then instantly fling himself into another, as though determined he could clip a fraction of a second off his record, like a track athlete training for the fifty-yard dash. Also his two hands gave the impression of racing each other to the finish, somehow always winding up in a draw, as you did with Pete on the dance floor, and, happily, both did with the orchestra. The piano itself was more than a little out of tune—she was certainly seeing life—and that enhanced the “raw” effect prized in the honky-tonk and cathouse pianists on whom he obviously modeled himself.

As abruptly as it had begun the squall of syncopation stopped, and with a last flourish of a hand he rose, turning around with a modest smile.

“That’s terrific, Pete.” The adjective seemed for once right. “Do you play anything but ragtime?”

He gave a vague mumbling shrug intended to be modest, and the next thing she knew he was gone and there was water drumming into a bathtub somewhere. It was then, in his absence, her coat hanging in a closet from which it could be easily snatched, that the Dark Stranger reappeared to her in another of the cautionary visions to which she was subject.

He was that romantic personification of one’s schoolgirl dreams, visualized as approaching across the lobby of a European hotel to warn you against the local drinking water, as a pretext for next asking whether you believed in fate. He now stood at a gate overhung with eglantine, or some other old-world flower such as poets used to weave into their verses, a sad frown on his face as he gesticulated warnings to her. Raving, deploring, he called to her, but she could hear nothing, as he existed only in a picture with the sound track dead, or, still worse, a silent film with nothing but the splatter of piano music against it. His clothes were new, but old-fashioned: a gray frock coat, rich dark cravat with high collar, and the Homburg, clutched at breast level like a steering wheel. The figure had taken root in her mind when she was traveling abroad with her mother long ago, and was modeled on some of the men she had actually seen promenading in the streets of some of the smaller European towns from one to another of which she was whisked in her mother’s half of some kind of experiment her parents were conducting, called separate vacations. She was still not old enough to be a virgin at the time, but would, as she understood the term, become one. The phantom began definitely to haunt her at Oberammergau, where they paused to take in the Passion Play, which had sounded enticing enough. He had flickered and floated in and out of her thoughts these twenty years since, that one who after discreetly accosting you in the lobby asked your mother’s permission to “pay his respects” and then to take you to tea. She would have had to be at least twenty for that to seem feasible, and that was how the principals in the drama had proliferated into four. There was the girl of thirteen standing on tiptoe to peer into the tea shop to see herself at twenty sitting inside with the Dark Stranger, and now her thirty-three-year-old self watching all of that. It was intensely cinematic in flavor, and now it was all “wipe dissolved” except for one corner of the screen where the Dark Stranger remained, rocking his head in his hands, at the gate overhung with eglantine.

“You never turned up, you know,” Tillie told him hurriedly, “and now here comes Pete Seltzer, so if you’ll excuse me.” And with an eyeblink he was wipe dissolved.

Pete could be heard tearing the bed apart and remaking it with fresh linen. She finished off her highball, like a thirsty child gulping down a glass of milk. When he came to fetch her, she saw from his gleaming jowls that he had shaved into the bargain, and was sure that the bathtub had been scoured as well, in preparation for her. “I’ll go bathe now,” she said, but he checked her with a hand on her elbow, quixotically murmuring that not all flowers needed watering, as he steered her into the bedroom.

Shivering on the cold floor, as her last silks dropped like flags lowered in surrender, she told herself that ignorance was correctable, but innate delicacy such as his could never be taught. He was a gentleman to his fingertips—those now breaking the bread of her body. He worshipped on his knees, Pete, stroking her smooth sides and babbling skillfully as he sought the garden where the whollies grew. She broke and ran away from him, into the bed.

“Do you like Joyce?” she asked through chattering teeth.

“Joyce who?” he asked, popping in beside her.

“Well, your interest in language.”

It was clear to Pete how much tutoring she herself needed. After caressing her persuasively for a bit, he took her hand in his and guided it gently to what he called “the hardened sinner.” It was after he had spent himself that he realized how she was shivering, and became once more tender. “Why, what have we here. There, there.” He gathered her close into his arms, and was so solicitous that before she knew it he had appeased himself again. It was, all in all, though, not as bad as she had feared. Tillie had been overprepared for the Bridal Night by a mother given to the warning, “It’s something every woman has to go through.” And if Tillie had taken rather the inherited attitude of being stripped for surgery, she could now enjoy the sense of the operation’s having proved a success.

She was a little dismayed by Pete’s quick recovery. He was evidently not one to loiter with soft endearments in what the sex manuals called the Afterglow. He returned unclothed to the kitchen to whip them up a little jetsonflots. That was all right. The plate of largely unidentifiable odds and ends he had dug out of the icebox were brought to her, and, she lying in the bed with the sheet to her chin and he sitting on it side-saddle, they washed their snacks down with cold beer. Then he waddled away into the living room, where through the open door she could watch him again sitting at the piano with his back to her, playing Twelfth Street Rag at, if anything, even dizzier speeds than before. He finished with the flourish, faced her with a concert-hall bow, and came back to her applause. The hardened sinner drooped with contrition now, halfway to his knees. She no longer felt sorry for him; he just seemed to have three legs of unequal length, instead of two. “Isn’t that more than you need?” He gave the vague prudential grunt with which men try to acknowledge a compliment without looking too utterly like an ass, and removed the plate of midnight debris from her chest and set it aside on a table. It was amazing how quickly you became sophisticated. Our dear Tillie, once so up-tight, yes, fairly creaking with inhibitions, was now liberated, wide open to sex and its vested humors. Able to enjoy Pete’s story about a country doctor he swore he had known, who went around lecturing to youth groups on the evils of masturbation, advising any boy who practiced it to get a firm grip on himself. Tillie recalled the newspaper headline: “Bishop withdraws at birth control conference.” Pete said it was people who didn’t know what they were saying who spread the real sunshine. They were worth a hundred of your malicious wits.

Tillie closed her eyes, and now, smoothing the sheet to either side of her like a contented convalescent, had a very sweet sensation indeed.

She had a déjà vu. That is normally a phenomenon so characteristic only of the very young that to have one after thirty is rare. She had not had one in years. The moment was like recovering her girlhood, rather than losing it. Thus her delight at having absolutely known, as Pete turned away with the plate, that he was going to say: “Look, I don’t want to feel guilty about something. But are my suspicions correct?”

“Well, I like to think of a line from Hart Crane. The ‘Powhatan’s Daughter’ section of The Bridge, you know. ‘And she is virgin to the last of men.’”

“He the one who goes ape with the ink?”

“Yes. You’ve read him then?”

“I doubt whether you could call it that. Something I prolly saw in a paperback I picked up in an airport.”

“I suppose Beowulf is more your speed.”

“No, I haven’t read him either.”

“Silly, it’s the name of the poem, not the poet.”

“Who wrote it?”

“We don’t know.”

“Then nobody’s one up. But I want you to know how grateful I feel, hell, that’s not the word, well, yes, why not—grateful, and a little guilty,” he said and lowered his eyes in shame, to hide his smug expression, prolly.

Well, Diary, he’s not one of your dried-up intellectuals, always with their nose in a book—hah! not him—always analyzing everything to a fare-thee-well, she would mentally scribble while she buffed her nails or rinsed out a pair of hose. He doesn’t anatomize and define everything till there’s no fun left at all in it, including double talk. He doesn’t know that’s a series of pleasurable unexpected epistemological suspensions. Why should he? He lost twenty clams on the election, in which he thus had more interest than I had thought … But getting back to the fun, he doesn’t destroy it by vivisecting it, he is fun. After a movie we had a sandwich at one of those Prexy joints that have the slogan, “The Hamburger with a college education.” “Mine’s a dropout,” mutters he, lifting the bun from an underdone patty. Adjacent diners in stitches.

She continued to sleep with him to prove that she wasn’t promiscuous, as a single fling would have done. He was often short of funds those days, thanks, he said, to his saving so much a week toward a car of his own. Tillie was working at the time in a producer’s office, and sometimes took him out to dinner when he was broke. Once she insisted on their trying the Chinese restaurant, where he found all the wall mirrors unnerving. He said he never looked into mirrors, or had his picture taken if he could help it, “out of vanity.” She assured him that he was handsomer than he looked, just as Bartók’s music is better than it sounds, tapping him on the nose with a clean spoon as she did so. “Why do you have a glass hanging in your living room then?” she asked him playfully. He replied that it was an heirloom brought from the old country, which his mother made him promise to keep and treasure always. “That was before she died,” he said. Then he sighed and glanced at the ceiling. “Well, shall we go up to my place?”

Another déjà vu!

That was the night she saw a hairpin on the floor as she was drawing a stocking up. She didn’t use them. She picked it up and confronted him with it. “You have a cleaning woman come in, don’t you?”

“Yes, once a week.”

“Tell her to tidy herself up. Not to shed her hairpins all over the place.”

“Right.”

They sipped brandies as they gossiped, she in Pete’s robe and Pete in the raw. Gertrude and Burt Wilson were moving across the river into a New Jersey suburb where Jimmy Twitchell had a small country place. He had found theirs for them, and would undoubtedly “do” it for them—or for Gertrude, since Burt took no interest in his surroundings. Tillie and Pete laughed as they pictured him slumped in front of the television set while Gertrude and Jimmy twittered over fabrics and colors. Pete yawned, showing a single gleam of gold far back in his mouth. “Burt’s no intellectual,” he said. Then he rose and went over to the piano, where he played Twelfth Street Rag.

“Would—?” Tillie began when she thought he had finished, but it was only a pause between choruses. It took two or three more such attempts before she was at last able to say: “Would you like to meet my mother?”

“I already have.”

“Oh, you’ve been introduced to her, and you’ve heard her shuffling around in the back room while we try to neck, but that’s not really meeting her. I mean come to dinner. She’s crazy about ragtime. You’re just a buff, but it’s her past. Well then, how’s Friday?”

Mrs. Shilepsky, a thin gray women in a lilac dress of shot silk, pointed out, with a finger like an autumn twig, the merits of the tablecloth off of which they were eating the beef Stroganoff she and Tillie had fixed. It was an ancestral damask into which figures of the twelve disciples were embroidered, each of which Mrs. Shilepsky indicated by name as she rose and made a circuit of the table. Pete lifted his plate to discover Judas Iscariot underneath it. The cloth had been exhumed from a trunk for the occasion. “A trunk, Pete, not a drawer! So little do people care about these things any more.” Pete was relieved that it was the cloth that smelled of mothballs and not Mrs. Shilepsky, that is, her dress, though perhaps both did. Long before a complete orbit had regained for Mrs. Shilepsky her own seat at the head of the table, she had given off talking about the disciples and begun to mourn her husband’s indifference to familial treasures and the continuity they embodied. He had run away, nowhere to be seen these twenty years: he had made the separate vacations permanent. “I’d leave him in a minute if I could locate him!” Mrs. Shilepsky cried as she circled along behind Pete. He ran a finger under his shirt collar, like a bad actor illustrating discomfiture. But after a few glasses of wine he loosened up, and then Tillie made her first request.

“Talk some double talk for Mother, Pete.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “People don’t understand that your thoughts are just as hersensnerth as theirs, even though you may not abiquine them with the same perambisnath.”

“Well, don’t, then,” Mrs. Shilepsky said, patting him on the hand as a guest who was not going to be forced to do anything he didn’t want to do. She turned her head to look into the kitchen before rising to clear the plates and fetch the dessert, a strawberry mousse whose virtues she extolled well before they had begun to eat it. “Tillie made this herself. Young brides these days don’t care about cooking. They’d just as soon feed their man something dumped out of a can, like a dog.” She enacted a graphic pantomime of someone slapping an overturned tin with the heel of the hand, in order to release its contents, assumed to be adhering to the sides. It was obvious where Tillie had got her dramatic ability. “Well, you won’t find this one afraid to pitch in, I can tell you that,” she said, pointing the finger straight at Tillie as though accusing her of something like probity or diligence or something else hopelessly out of fashion.

After the mousse, which was all it had been cracked up to be, Tillie clapped her hands gaily, as though they were all having more fun than might at first blush appear, and said, “Now Pete’s going to play the piano. Won’t you play something for us, Pete? Anything.”

Pete played Twelfth Street Rag, ripping it off at a rate possibly never before equaled except by members of the Philharmonic seeing how fast they could get through The Flight of the Bumblebee. Mrs. Shilepsky sat on the sofa spanking her palms together to the rhythm of it, rocking her head from side to side as she exclaimed, “I always liked swing.” When he had finished a couple of choruses he was prevailed on to do another and then still another, in lieu of anything else in the way of encores. Then Mrs. Shilepsky rose to excuse herself, but Pete insisted she stay a while. He had begun to find her interesting, if not downright amazing.

That left only the question of his improvidence still unsettled—but not for long. He greeted Tillie one evening with the news that he had been kicked upstairs. No longer need he spend his days in the streets, buttonholing strangers in order to quiz them, clipboard and pencil at the ready. Now he had an office job as a supervisor, collating and organizing the data gathered by others. The promotion included a raise, and he was already spending the money. He had his eye on a new Buick, or, if that was too expensive for his pocketbook, at least a new Chevrolet. “I wonder how much a convertible would cost me,” he said.

“That depends on what they’ll allow us on mine,” Tillie answered, levelly.

She resented being taken for granted. But romantic avowal was not Pete Seltzer’s speed, and certainly the tableau of a ceremonial proposal on bended knee was more than could reasonably be expected in this case—or any, for that matter. This was a more casual era, whatever the Dark Stranger of her Oberammergau dreams might think, raving and despairing at the garden gate, there in the upper-right-hand corner of her fancy. How casual was driven home to her by the manner in which such elements now fairly regarded as having ripened between these literal lovers were, at last, brought to harvest.

Mrs. Shilepsky spent a weekend with her sister in Ohio. Tillie invited Pete into her bed that Saturday night. Sunday morning she fixed them a late breakfast, over which they dallied between the sheets. After clearing their trays away, she took a shower, and then came back into the bedroom for her robe. Seeing Pete lying there, a cigarette in his hand, with an air of lolling contentment, she said something not intended as a wisecrack at all, which, however, the instant it was out, struck her as quite a funny commentary on what could certainly be called the new era. She later claimed it as a witticism.

“The honeymoon’s over,” she said, throwing a pillow at his head. “Time to get married.”