“All you have to do is cross a river and you’re in a foreign country?”
“That’s right, Venus,” Philip said.
“Let’s really have one last fling. Let’s go across the border. Let’s go abroad.”
Crossing that dirty little river to Ciudad Juárez would be, yes, a crossing. Ah, not quite a real one, not like the old days, going really abroad on the Ile—remember the food on the Ile?—sea bass farçi and those little paper-thin cucumber slices? That world of the heavenly ships was no more. Where had it gone? This crossing would be on foot, on a rickety bridge, in the dark of the night, and one would be trying to forget the pain. Never mind. “Let’s do it tonight. I can’t wait to tell Drua I’ve been abroad.”
Every crossing, she’d once said, is an act of imagination. Walking unsteadily across that shabby bridge, tonight, to a dusty town in Mexico, one would have to try to imagine an ocean, a stateroom on the boat deck, portholes with the brass fittings shining like the hopes of all those years. She’d said that thing about crossing the ocean, she distinctly remembered, on the night of the party for Charley Trotter and Pam, their sixteenth wedding anniversary, at Cold Spring—God, how many years ago! That was also the night when that other thing happened, when nobody could persuade our Philip to rise to his feet to make the obligatory anniversary toast, and he began to rumble along seated—he was awfully tight but still he had that knack of his for the mot juste—and the rest of us—we were all so sozzled—scrambled out of our chairs and sat down on the floor, to establish the appropriate spacial relationship between orator and audience—the speaker pouring his words downward to his listeners—and down there we could see that Philip had his legs crossed and was kicking the upper one, showing off because during drinks Pam had suddenly gone over and curled up on his lap, and she’d reached up to her thigh and taken off that atrocious ruffled satin garter, with appliquéd hearts on it—she’d announced she could do without it because she had a garter belt on, too—and she’d given it to him, and now it was on his calf, over his trouser leg, kick kick kick as he droned on even though his audience had all disappeared under the table. On the terrace, after coffee and too many brandies, Sylvia threw Pam’s slippers down the steep bank into the laurel, on account of the garter thing; Sylvia had a crush on our Philip even then, and she was jealous of Pam.
“Philip, darling,” she said, “do you remember that thing of the garter?”
“You mean about Pam, that time? And Syllie? And Pam’s shoes? Never forget it.”
“God, how many years ago. It’s all gone, darling.”
How had the subject of crossings come up that night? Hard to remember. Some memories are so clear, some slip away like thieves. It was that night, though; that night when Sylvia was jealous of Pam over my Philip.
This trip of filthy Indians. Our Philip’s romantic ideas were all very well when we were leaning against linen-covered pillows at 514, with a fireplace fire twinkling: Acoma! To see the rock of Acoma, where death came for the Archbishop! To see in one’s mind Willa Cather, that imperious young sack of gravel and style, riding all those dusty, sun-stretched miles on horseback in a double-breasted suit and a Cavanaugh fedora with her female companion to see the church on the startling mesa with the timbers two feet thick and fifty feet long in the roof that had been hauled by Indians under the priests’ whips from faraway Mount Taylor, what’s now called Mount Taylor. Philip with those liquid warlock eyes could put you in an ecstatic trance, and the first thing you knew you were in a drawing room on the Super Chief having dinner brought when the Chablis was chilled enough, on your way to his vision of Acoma.
But the reality. When one learned that one had to walk up the col to the top of the mesa, to pay to see a lot of dirty Indian mud huts, it was easier, while Philip and the Pretz boy panted onward and upward, just to stretch out in the dust against the adobe wall beside that simply mountainous harpy of a souvenir-selling Indian granny, as big as Sampy Ferguson, who can’t ride in taxis because the doors are too narrow. The old shamaness started out, waving her hands as if sprinkling dew over her junk on the cloth in the dust, with a couple of grunts of the sort she’d learned from movies that real live Indians use for conversing, but finally, when she saw I was just as tough as she, relaxed into some of the straightest talk you’ll ever hear about her racket: going native. She had a black blanket over her shoulders, and she looked like Vivien, the Lady of the Lake, only she was fat and her lake was dust, sand and dust, bones and dust and sand.
But the trip had been all all all Indians, Mexicans, Negroes—swarms and swarms of the colored ones, various colors but a monotone of resentment of us. That’s it, you see. It’s all gone. We’re the new minority. There was a time when a white Protestant person, with the backing of a letter of credit, was in charge of the whole tickety-boo, but now we’re moving into a shadowy area; you hear them crowding and whispering, and the next thing you know they’ll jostle you in the street and—unthinkable—spit. When you add the Jews, and the dark Irish—they’ve got that Moorish strain somewhere, and the sardonic lips. Oh, Philip, I tell you. “Darling, if I’m jostled by one more jig or spic or wetback or Big Chief Squattum-on-Ground! I’ve had it, my sweet.”
“What talk, Venus. Hush, honey. We’ll go abroad tonight and get a change of air.”
“And get heartburn on those disgusting tamales.”
“It’ll be charming, Venus. They’ll give us half a limón and some salt to suck off our wrist with the tequila.”
“You’re a fat shoat, just one interminable digestive system attached to a little suckling mouth.”
“Oh, now, Venus, honey, it was your idea to go abroad.”
“I know, but I’m tired of having all the ideas, Philip.”
Here we are sitting in the bar of the Whatyoumaycallit Hotel, in El Paso, with a picture of Kennedy among the bottles, imagine having a new President who seems to be half your age—for we are seventy-nine, and he, our Philip, is a tagalong seventy-eight. But Philip is married to us, in sickness sickness and in health, and is steady behind the wheel of a Hertz Galaxie, that’s the big Ford, he keeps saying, boring dear old stomach man, a dear, a dear. “You’re a dear, my dear. Please pardon your poor little hag wife. Sometimes I don’t think I can stand it.”
“Venus.”
“You’re really very sweet to me, you know. Do we miss Sylvia?”
“Now, honey, please let’s not have another quarrel.”
“All that was aeons ago, in Prohibition actually. Who cares anymore?”
“You do.”
“That’s true, darling, I do. Passionately. That’s why I’m so much younger than you are.”
Why did we always travel around à trois? Sylvia that day on the white ship under the rainbow going into Gibraltar with a billion dolphins playing around the bow. A flutter of a Hermès scarf at her throat. The water all yellow at the edge of the tide change off the breakwater. Syllie was good for Philip for a year. The ennobling effect of love; you simply cannot do anything ignoble when you are near the loved one—except, perhaps, cheat on your dearest wife. How playful he was on that trip! He phoned up from the lobby of the Aletti in Algiers, when one was so worried, and one simply blurted, “Oh, you’re there, Philip!”—relieved.
“No, I’m here,” he said, “and you’re there, Venus. You say I’m ‘there’—‘You’re there, Philip’—but I’m here, and you’re not here, so if you say I’m ‘there,’ and you’re not ‘there,’ because you insist that ‘there’ is here, and ‘here’ is there, then where are you, Venus?…I say, are you there?”
I was worried even though Sylvia was not really interested in bed; she broke into a cold sweat when a man touched her, even by accident, so Philip felt like a lion, and I felt safe, though Philip was in fact cheating again, all over the place, but not with Sylvia, she was his protective coloration; he was cheating on both of us. Syllie had that quick cutting edge. She learned the entire Culbertson system really in twenty minutes; knew by ESP where every card was around the table. Her voice used to tremble when she started arguing with a weak man, and she always did—like a cat that can’t help jumping into the lap of the only ailurophobe in the room.
“I have a headache.”
“Thinking about Sylvia, Venus?”
“Damn you.”
But you see, Philip is one of those rare people who are kind and good by nature, not one of those who become so after an extended inner struggle and may relapse. He has such odd dreams—of a motorcycle, just last night, in the shape of a tubelike red fire-enginey metal horse. The little Upmann cigar tube sticking out of his breast pocket. Dear Philip, a parlayer: he inherited money, married it, and made it, too. He exercises his money, as he does his kindly instincts, with a natural grace, for he’s unostentatious and yet unerringly correct: he sensed the cummerbund was coming back the year before it did. He’s sure of himself. I take partial credit for that. He knows he can count on his poor Venus. The night he gave me that nickname, before we’d ever even gone to bed together, we’d driven down after a party for a skinny-dip, and Pam, the bleeding heart, one charity committee after another, lost an earring, or said she did, in the sand, and squealed to Philip—they’ve all been after our Philip—to turn on the headlights, and by gorry she’d “lost” the earring right in their beam, and there she stood in her opulent Rubens altogether, bumping and grinding ever so subtly, her breasts like huge hot haggis puddings, but Philip, dear Philip, having no eyes for such a feast, met me as I came out of the water, with wet hair seaweed-runny on my face, to see what was going on, and he whispered, “You’re so beautiful, my Venus on the half shell.” Venus ever since.
I didn’t know what he meant by the half shell until years later, when he marched me up those long stairs at the Uffizi and showed me the Botticelli.
One of the reasons, I suppose, that I’m so tired is that I haven’t slept a wink—in bed, at least—on this whole trip; I doze and doze in the car, the red rocks a blur along the edges of the cinemascope, nodding through a budget Western. This really is the Sandman’s Land, but at night he doesn’t sprinkle my eyes, he grits my teeth. At Canyon de Chelly—which our traveling companion, the Pretzel, had told us was such a “dolling little crack in the earth’s crust,” he can’t say “darling”—they petrified you by setting out in a jeep with grotesque balloon wheels because, as they loudly announced, there was danger of quicksand in the foot of the canyon, gobbling up ordinary cars, a party of four from Minnesota had been swallowed just last Tuesday, nothing left but a visored straw cap. On the walls of the caves, above the primitive dwellings and the ancient pictographs, you saw the archaeologists’ signatures—was it Schliemann who dug up Troy signing the cavern wall like Kilroy Was Here? But the point was this generator, poppety poppety all the living night, across the way from us, and bourbon wouldn’t stop it, pounding wouldn’t stop it, weeping wouldn’t stop it; and even an offer of money by our Philip at two o’clock in the morning would neither stop it nor get us another bungalow. And little Pretz slinking around murmuring about the dolling canyon.
Money wouldn’t stop it. There are some things you just know in advance money won’t stop, but there’s no real harm in trying, our Philip says. Because, you see, we looked at the world and made a basic decision: spend it. Dump it at any cost. It’s poison, both to have and not to have. But if you don’t have it at least you have an incentive to get it—something to live for…. Oh, come now, one has really lived for moments like that one on the terrace at Agrigento, hasn’t one, Venus? Hasn’t one? When we first walked out on that shiny terrazzo Veneziano surface and almost swooned at that evening’s first look at the Sicilian hills and the enchanted sea? Wasn’t there a time when a mere view was enough to live for?
But think what has happened to the charming golden nymphs and fauns who were at that party for Charley and Pam. Syllie—a full vial of sleeping pills. Charley—a regular one in Reno, a quickie in Mexico, another full-term one in Reno, another quickie in Alabama, and constantly jobless, not that he ever needed a job: a rolling stone gathers no boss. And Pam, fighting for her causes and sleeping around up the ladder, until, poor ambitious girl, she married that battling liberal with the spongy nose, Senator Tadpole, or whatever his name is, who promptly got unseated the next November. Pam, Pam, you luscious Puritan! And Sue-Sue in and out of Riggs; and Frickie on the booze; and weren’t the Jellinans there?
“Darling, what ever happened to Hugo Jellinan?”
“He disappeared.”
“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”
“He dribbled all his money down some mine shaft in Chile. He just stopped being around. Someone told me they saw him in, he was living in, Quincy, Illinois, I think, some unbelievable hole like that.”
You see? Our Philip is the only survivor. He hasn’t changed one bit. Stormy strong man. Oh, darling, what I’d give to have one or two of these middling decades to do over again with you! Mephisto, come bargain with me. I’ll give you some delightful considerations. I wouldn’t want the very youngest decades; something riper.
“What would you think of being forty again?”
“Well”—what a responsive one he is!—“first we’d take that sailing trip down the Windward Islands, and at Tobago Cay we’d moor right against the sandbank in the gut there, and after dinner the crewboys would play for us—that out-of-tune guitar and the tiny flute-fife making a yellowbird’s song high in a banyan tree—and they’d sing; ‘Mary Ann’: I love that line, ‘All day long she’s sifting sand,’ I see her on a beach with little children crowding around her, she’s some kind of sex saint…. ‘All day long—’ ”
“Don’t sing, darling. You spoil the effect.”
Our eyes are closed. We are riding down the trade winds on a broad reach under the lee skirts of Martinique: the high cone of the Grand Piton with a cloud for a hat. A call for elevenses, rum and lime. A smelly cheese and some Huntley & Palmer water crackers. Blue sea like a lifetime ahead.
“Remember Ubo?” Philip says. Mulatto child we were told about, given name actually U-Boat, born the proper number of months after a Nazi submarine surfaced in Marigot Bay and a foraging party went ashore for fish and vegetables.
“Don’t keep talking about what the whites have done to the coloreds, Philip. It makes me jumpy. I told you I have a headache.”
“How about a pause that refreshes?”
“What time is it?”
“Two-forty.”
“We really ought to have some lunch. Bother, I’ve lost interest in lunch. Tell that dear man to build me a Grand-Dad highball, Philip.”
Philip, who cannot get the bartender’s eye, though we are the only ones in the bar, is too well-bred to snap his fingers or hiss or clap—there’s a sort of permanent Links Club hush about Philip—gets up and goes over. We can see from our seat that this El Paso mestizo barman doesn’t have the time of day for the highball bit, a fleeting moment of disgust, a shadow of buzzard’s wings crossing over his face. He pulls at the ears of his dirty monkey jacket. A glare on the glazed wall is reflected from a passing car in the street. There’s a circular mirror, with a border of wreathed leaves, and a portrait of our new President, Jack Kennedy, sitting on a glass shelf at the center of the mirror, grinning at us. Captive ambers of booze are lit from behind by a fluorescent light which flickers, sending coded messages to the moths of the world. Two or three moths flap in extremis among the bottle necks. We are overcome with sadness; we begin to weep.
“Venus! Venus pie!” Philip, coming back, flipping at the sight of tears, says in his baby-talk voice that is so incongruous coming from the end who caught Hobey Clark’s pass in the last quarter of the Harvard game in senior year and carried the ball—he says to this day it felt as heavy as a mail sack full of stock certificates, a crazy image, because he wasn’t a runner on the Street until the next year—seventy-three yards to score. He wants to know what’s got us sloppy.
“It’s the whole thing, Philip. Whatever do you suppose possessed Syllie?” To take enough pills to reach the longer sleep. Long ago.
“You and your headache,” Philip says, and there’s a bead on the edge of his voice; he hones it off with a single stone blasphemy. “Christ.”
At once the weight in my chest levitates, and I feel fine. “Did runners have to go in the mail room back when you first went to work for Peters, Silliman? I mean, they wouldn’t have those snippety little executive trainees doing anything sordid like that now, would they?”
“We didn’t have a mail room. It was all one big bullpen.”
“Why do you blow a gasket every time I mention Syllie?”
“Why do I? Darling, I think you got sunstroke yesterday when we stopped for that picnic.”
Our bottom hurts. We ask Philip to be an angel and go up to the room and get us our lifesaver, as we call it, a little tubular rubber ring our bottom-doctor prescribed for us that has a petit-point slipcover we made last summer with a motif of vine leaves. I think it’s darling; Pam tells me she thinks the petit point calls attention to “it,” as she calls my pain, but I ask her, Wouldn’t the bare rubber call attention to it more? I mean, carrying the object around, entering a room. You see, I think many people do things in the name of honesty that are really not quite straight. Certainly “honesty,” the way Syllie used to bandy it about, can become at times the moral equivalent of assault and battery. I don’t think it hurts to cover hurts—the bandage principle of human intercourse—maybe I’m Victorian but I can’t help it. Syllie couldn’t help it either. She didn’t mean to be cruel; she said she was honest.
While Philip is gone I wink at the bartender and he brings me a refill. He is charming. The Spanish s. “Escuse me, Miss. You ’ave esscotch?” Imagine the inborn courtesy, calling a ruined fortress like me “Miss.” No, that was my husband who had the Scotch, mine was bourbon. He gets the drink and chats with me; he has had a couple himself; don’t forget it, bartenders tell their own troubles just as much as they listen to others’. He is delightful. A sort of lugubrious pinchy behavior simply because I am a woman. I was beautiful once; Philip made me believe that. Venus. This Manuel sees it in me. When you deal with the coloreds individually, you can get along swimmingly, each one can be a joy. It’s the mass, the abstract, that’s so hard to think about. Of course this Manuel is only partly colored. He is talking about the Kansas City Athletics, for some reason, and I try to imagine what it would be like if we, the white Protestants, were the bartenders and mop women everywhere, and the coloreds were the tip givers. Of course our Philip would be splendid. Basically he likes people, and I really don’t think it comes from being rich; he received good tough fiber in his chromosomes. He would make a topnotch railway porter, for instance, truly first-rate. Oh, I can see him cheerfully flipping up the drawing-room berth along about Elizabeth, New Jersey, on the way in, with a jolly loud clankety-clank to waken the grumpy ace of spades in the lower in the next compartment who shouted in such an ugly way at Philip’s colleague, the white Protestant room-service waiter from the dining car, the night before. It certainly is a changing world we live in.
Philip is back. He notices I have forged ahead on my own; not a flicker of disapproval. Philip’s magnanimity has kept me from drinking too much. Sue-Sue was always frowning and shaking her head at Frickie, and look at him, you can’t call him a lush; lush is too soft. He’s a roaring souse. I can’t take him anymore.
When you thought about it, all of life had been one last fling. I mean, when you live with a man who lets live, it all has a rampant feeling, headlong, estral, tropical.
“Was I beautiful?”
“You had a wart on the end of your nose, and your left titty sagged.”
“Beast.”
But the teasing joke has left Philip grave. “Darling, you’re thin. We really should have lunch.”
“I’m not so bad. I weighed myself yesterday. A hundred and three pounds with nothing on but my shoes and bracelets.” I never was big.
“Oh, yes”—it was easy to say it, leaning against the pillows at 514, on a foggy December evening, when you knew that the cheery lights on the Christmas trees along the archipelago of New York Central islands on Park Avenue were going to bounce off your bedroom ceiling and keep you awake until real light came, and then you’d sleep on a tide rip of dreams; it was easy to say it—“we’ll have one last fling, Philip. We’ll see your writer friend in our imaginations, riding a horse to Acoma.”
But doing the thing was not so easy. Lifesaver or no lifesaver.
The moment one stood on the platform in Albuquerque, and the heat waves came whispering around like a flock of Mediterranean beggars that won’t go away, you knew it was not going to be easy. But you knew you had to make a show of ease, for Philip’s sake. The price one pays for having a kind man at one’s elbow.
Philip drove us in his drive-it-himself, the big Ford, out of Albuquerque’s small-townish main drag, with Pretz huddled in the back seat getting over the trots—“My heinie hoits,” he said in his city tongue, not aware of my problem—as we skimmed over dead terrain to Laguna. There were signs all along the road inviting you to come in and inspect live snakes. A stillness on the hills, as if all that glare were some kind of midnight on fire. I saw sand dunes lapping over one crest, and on one dusty razorback rise it looked as if a thin cloud were passing over, though the sky was an empty brass scuttle. Far off there were forests on the mountains.
Gradually we moved into an earlier era, a time of mesas and buttes, and in a wink Philip, stopping the big Ford and checking his AAA triptik—one thing I loathe about our Philip is that he always plans ahead—suddenly turned off Route 66 onto a dirt road. All those frightful TV Westerns: hills of rock where the bad guys know the footholds—tan and brown, no reds. The Enchanted Mesa, standing alone in its trance; rounded shoulders, wrinkles and faults. Holes on the faces: gun emplacements? God, God, whom do we have to fight now?
And then, before we had a chance even to imagine Willa in her double-breasted suit on a skinny packhorse, her eyes burning with a fever of perfect sentences, there it was. Acoma. A big dirty round rock with a dirty village perched up as high as it could get, like Enna or Troina or any of those hilltop Sicilian villages: you’d be led to guess that humanity was a woman who’d seen a mouse.
I was thinking: Dearest Philip, I have so much pain. I am going to die. Except that I cannot bear to leave you, my close friend Philip. I’ll stay as long as I can, dear heart. I was thinking rather dramatic thoughts as he parked the Galaxie at the foot of the staggering cliffs whose rounded shoulders seemed to have been eroded, the way sea-washed boulders are, by the sun’s everlasting rays crashing down on the rocks like breakers.
Parking? Do you mean we’re supposed to walk up? Ha! Thank you, not for the entire first printing of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Death came to a good place to find the old boy, I’ll say that, if this was where He found him. I slumped on the stone steps of the cabin at the foot, and I said to the big Indian woman selling pottery souvenirs there, “¿Cóm’ estás?” I knew it was the wrong language, I was teasing.
She grunted. “Ugh.” This was to keep prices up on her junk.
Afterward we had a picnic in a grove of cottonwoods beside the dirt road on the way back out to 66. Pretzel said in his fluty Manhattan dialect, “I catch why they call ’em cottonwoods.” He was picking up bits of lint off the forest floor like a cleaning woman. Philip opened a bottle of Almadén and, gnashing away at the sandwiches we’d had made up in Albuquerque, he told me about the rock of Acoma, where Death came.
He and the Pretz had started up a sandy trail when an Indian woman had shrieked down from the cliff, “Go up the stairway!”—pointing. Twisting up through crevices, stone steps cut away, steep places with handholds. Telling this, Philip was in high spirits, chewing and regaling his Venus. By God, I love you, you difficult lusty man. The Indian woman was waiting for them at the top in a checked shirt and blue jeans, looking like a Jap high-school girl.
“What’s dat boid?” Pretz said, pointing to a bedraggled, half-molted brownish bird.
“Robin bird,” the Indian woman said. Guides all over the world tell lies. But the Pretzel lived in a city tower and didn’t know the difference.
They registered and went around and saw everything: the great mud church for the glory of God with the primitive painting at the altar of St. Stephen, which, seen as magic, had been stolen by another tribe and the Acomans, or Acomites, or whatever they are, had had to go all the way up to the Supreme Court to get it back; the little Jap high-school girl posing as an Indian babbled her lies among the dirty houses with mica windows like sealed portholes. Where was Death? You see, Philip with his vitality simply pushed Him over the cliff, the way the Indians in the double-breasted-suit woman’s story carried Friar Balthazar from his airy loggia with its peach tree and threw him from the edge into eternity.
My pain ebbed away as I listened to Philip.
They went back in the registration house for shade. A man was there trying to give three boxes of apples to the registration woman. He was a white Protestant who for purest of reasons felt sorry for poverty-ridden pigmented natives, but he was angry at being taken for just another tourist. He had been there before. Didn’t she remember him? He was shaking, perhaps from the climb with the apples, perhaps from the cold bath of ingratitude he was taking. The woman curtly said it would be easiest to descend by the sand trail. He said he preferred the stone stairs; he’d been there before. Straining for control, he asked the woman if she knew how to fry apples, these were frying apples. They should be consumed in a certain definite order of containers. Some had worms. And you saw that he had kept the best apples at home.
The bartender swishes a horse-tail whisk after the flies, greedy little beer lovers. I feel a flicker of anger.
“Couldn’t we have let it go at that, when we’d seen Acoma?” After all, the idea had been to see that rock; the trip was to be a species of casual allusion, and that was all. We like this about our Philip: he’s an intelligent man, educated, one guesses, despite St. Paul’s and Yale, the school with little wooden cubicles and the college with the great mute tomb of Scroll and Key—big men went Bones, the right men went Keys, they said, the ones who wore tails so often that they developed a bit of billiard-table green in the serge of the suit. Those were white-tie days, and here was one possible definition of the best of breeding: a slightly moldy look to your tails. But our Philip liked books even then, and always had, convention be damned. As with the cummerbund, he was a jump ahead of the pack—Henry James under his belt in 1935, long before the surge of fashion; Kafka and, yes, Kierkegaard by 1945. He used to talk to me about each book. Now Willa Cather was only a fortnight’s going to sleep with a novel; he wasn’t mad for the story but he said he sort of liked her scrollwork. Acoma, a December thought over martinis.
But no, once there we had to go on. And on. Canyon de Chelly. An overdrifted road, like a Robert Frost snapshot of melancholy, except for burning silicates in place of snow, to Dinnehotso, Kayenta, Monument Valley: Dior hats in stone. The Grand Canyon; I mean, really! Oak Creek Canyon, a sudden dampness, ivy growing so fast down the bedstead post you could almost hear it tick. Tuzigoot. Montezuma Castle. Endless, endless.
And now this incredible barren barroom, with the round mirror with a wreath engraved on it such as Great Caesar sported, and our baby-boy President smiling at us from his shelf.
“I’m tired, Philip. Let me go home to New York.” I want to die in my own bed.
“Darling. You’d never have been able to justify coming all the way to the Southwest for Acoma alone.”
“Everything comes out of a storybook with you.”
“I mean, it would have been uneconomical, honey.”
A peal of laughter. It is from my own throat. “You’re a funny man, my dear. You’re so quick about some things. You know, I never have been able to conceive how with all your brains you could sit there night after night at the Links in that atmosphere like the inside of an old velvet-lined violin case with such truly truly stupid men as Skilly Waters and Danforth Cochran. All right, you tell me they’re Chairmen of Boards, and Skilly’s a wizard helmsman, very shrewd about wind shifts on the Sound. And then I have to ask: Darling, how do those businesses survive? I mean, Skilly is dumb. What do you say with him?”
“I say, ‘Five diamonds.’ And he says, ‘Pass.’ ”
“Brilliant.”
I worry about the future of American business. Skilly came for dinner once, and in the corner of the sunburned cockleshells of one of his ears he overheard our Philip say something about Henry Esmond; he’d taken up Thackeray. “Esmond,” Skilly said, barging in. “Belong to the Beach Club? He the one just bought Chub’s Atlantic? Stupid buy that boat. All pulled up at the bow. Not enough waterline. What you say fellow’s name that bought it?”
Philip wants to appease me. “Skilly has clever little people working for him.”
“Thank heavens. But why are all people who are clever, or industrious, always ‘little’?”
Philip doesn’t answer that. He sees that we’re getting that old two-drink belligerence, comes on when you hardly hope for it, like a second wind. After that, third-drink thaw, an access of tenderness. After that—ah, well, by then it may be time to have a bath and a pretend nap before going abroad.
It’s odd; for our Philip, the Links was a matter of course, he was asked to join and he did. But Skilly, who’d lasted two years, anyway, at Groton, and was much richer than Philip, and taller, and going right to the top in a business that didn’t even belong to his family—Skilly was frantic about getting in. Came to Philip and asked him to rally round some solid seconders. Kept telephoning: when would it be decided?
When did I first think about dying? Long before Sylvia died by her own delicate hand with the ruby on it I always envied, a sweet sparkling drop of life on the cold bitch hand that would steal her away from us. Her hands and feet were always blocks of ice, and her nates. “Chilly ahss,” our Philip would say. Syllie’s shiver!
“Do you think you could get the bartender to turn the air-conditioning down? It’s like the North Pole in here.”
Philip goes over and tries; the bartender says the room isn’t air-conditioned. Philip looks at me closely as he sits again. Risking my little spurting tantrums, he says, as if to swoop me up and carry me off on his white steed, rescuing me from whatever austral wind has breathed on me, “Remember the night you thought the Age of Electricity had come to an end?”
That was in my drinking period—God, how many years ago—and I was very drunk. A party at the Trotters’, I remember I’d just been dancing in the bay window with Charley, and I said, “Charley, you’re the hardest man,” and he pulled a big silver cigarette case out of his breast pocket to show me what the hardness was, when one of those sudden August line squalls came through; there was a sizzling thrill of lightning and a flat loud crack on its shirttails, and the lights went out, and I began to sob because I thought the Age of Electricity had ended forever. We were going to have to go back to pumping water by hand with long-handled pumps, and there’d be a faint odor of alcohol when you read a book by one of those bright lamps with gauze mantles which vanished at a touch when they were cool. I cried and cried.
“You’re just trying to remind me that I was a drunken slob.”
“Venus, you were charming. So worried about how I’d have to crank my car—wasn’t that the Diana?—to get home because the starter wouldn’t work, and when I said the spark plugs wouldn’t work either, you said you’d never liked the Diana anyhow.”
“You bought the Diana because I was Venus. It was very ugly of you.”
“You doted on it.”
“Don’t you scold me about cars. Those Jag seats.”
Philip used to have a different car every year. Pierce-Arrow. Packard. Cadillac. Imperiai. Continental. And earlier: a Cord, the Diana, a Maxwell, a Franklin, even a Jordan Playboy. Some years an affectation like a Chevrolet. Never intimidated by the fact that the Proper Thing was to stick to one not-too-gaudy make—say, Olds, the big Olds. Always claimed that each car he owned was the best-engineered bus in American industrial history. Then he bought a black Chrysler convertible and wanted some red leather seats installed in it that he’d seen on a Jag. The dealer said that would be out-of-sight expensive. “Tell you what,” our splendid Philip said. “Let me know when a hopelessly wrecked Jag comes in.” He’d pick up some seats for a song. He only had to wait three days.
I ask, “Where’s your odious Pretzel?”
“I don’t know. Out buying buildings, I guess.”
Julius Shonekind Pretz came along for the ride. He’s one of the New Type. It used to be that white Protestants had almost all the money that counted; I mean, you didn’t count suits or shoes or slot machines; I mean oil, minerals, railroads. Fifth Avenue, along the Park. Collections of Impressionists. But now. There’s this New Type. It hasn’t gone to Hotchkiss. It hasn’t a prayer of getting into the Beach Club. It talks decidedly funny. But listen, it’s very bright, very amusing, very warmhearted, and so rich it makes you dizzy to think about it. A wonderful earthy quality that no one I’ve ever known ever had. Into everything. Mike Wallace interviews him, would Mike Wallace ever interview Skilly Waters? I make fun of the Pretzel’s accent; it isn’t that bad. He doesn’t say “boid,” he says something that’s ironically just off the edge of the fake-English-accent “böd” you used to hear the Brearley girls saying. Where did the money come from? Not entirely clear. The only thing that’s crystal is that it didn’t come from his daddy. He can talk about anything: breeder reactors, the other day. “Sounds like sending old atom bombs out to stud,” our Philip said. The trouble is, here we are à trois again. I want to be alone with Philip for this last fling, and that’s why I call the Pretzel odious at the moment.
It’s all very well to joke about death, atomic bombs, but your jokes on that Topic have to have a certain innocence, as I think Philip’s do. Or Meredith’s. My poor son Meredith. That innocent thing he said, accepting death as a casual occurrence, God how many years ago, when our Philip took him, much too young, really, seven or eight, to the Bowl, evidently expecting to make a man of his son by exposing him early to the manly game. Masses of Yale players were hurt during the game, “shaken up” they say on television, that box of mendacity, but this was back long before TV when the Blue played places like Vanderbilt and Georgia, and the Yalies were carried off the field on stretchers in flocks. On the way out of the Y-Men’s special parking lot by Coxe Cage, we came to that big cemetery on the other side of Derby Avenue, and Meredith, after holding his breath till we were past, said, “Daddy, is that where they bury the Yale players?” He was serious: that’s the true innocence of discussing that certain Topic.
But this trip in the desert: even if we’d left the Pretzel home, we’d have been à trois in the desert. The Topic rides along. Perhaps it’s only what Pam calls “it” that makes me obsessed with this idea. I wish I were in my own bed.
For instance. Window Rock the other day. The rock window: the red of the rock makes a sharp jumpity edge against the blue of the sky. My pain is coming on. Our very whispers echo against the great concave pan of the red rock. We drive out through the picnic ground and around the Reservation headquarters. Along a newly surfaced tar road through a beautiful forest of ponderosa pine on the way to Ganado. We stop and eat lunch under a gnarled juniper, and I refuse to crack my hard-boiled egg on my head, as Philip does his, saying my own shell is too fine, finer probably than an egg’s, but the truth is I’m afraid a bang on my noggin will knock all my guts out of my desperate bottom, which is now raging, raging. I am very brave. We have a bottle of rosé, and there is a cool breeze. I make Philip burn the trash; the day before, I insisted on taking it along, and we left it in the motel room. I don’t believe in strewing the wild places with our offal. Then, off the Ganado road, as I think I must die, must die, must die, we come to St. Michael’s Mission, where the perpendicular sun is the Topic’s emissary in the dusty courtyard. A Franciscan monk walks bareheaded across the yard in his brown habit and up onto the porch of the big building and puts a nickel in the slot of a Coke machine and takes a frosted bottle out. My pain ebbs away, and I give thanks to the God of that place, to whom I am, I guess, a stranger, for I have always been a heathen, but sometimes I thank God, so great is His bounty, whoever He is. Is He a Jew? A Jesuit? Does He have the Coke concession? Then why did the monk use a nickel?
“Do you think Meredith is happy?”
“Happy? Happy? What is ‘happy’? Honey, you’re so old-fashioned.”
I’ve always wished he wouldn’t call me “honey,” it’s tacky, déclassé, none of our kind uses that word. Philip doesn’t care about certain lines of propriety, he cares terribly about others. But I must answer that urgent question of his. What is “happy”? I don’t know whether I can say it right, but “happy” is something you and I, Philip, have occasionally been when we were playing gin rummy, perhaps, I don’t know—when we’ve had that feeling of sneaking into each other’s secrets. “ ‘Happy,’ ” I say flatly, “is a game of gin rummy. See if the bartender has some cards.”
The bartender has no more cards than he has air-conditioning. “Manuel!” I call across the bar as Philip comes back. “Su leche.” The nice man in a dirty monkey jacket—I almost said to myself the nice little man—can’t believe his ears. He shrugs his shoulders. I suddenly hope, hopelessly, that he hasn’t heard me.
The reason the Topic throws me into such anger is that life has been so good to me. There’s a certain kind of hairy velvety weed on Long Island, with light green leaves and a big phallic something or other it erects in August, monstrous, whew; I sat down in a meadow and studied one of those, one summer—oh, it was after my drinking period but still a long time ago, God! But the point is, when you looked at it closely, it was so intricate, so cleverly done, really just as astonishing in its way as my expensive Shiro-fugen cherry tree when it gets all dressed up in its pink housecoat in the spring. A lousy weed. Manuel! I love you. I didn’t mean that. I don’t know what I’m saying when I swear in a foreign language.
“No, darling, what I mean about Meredith, he’s a Good Soldier, he had a fine career in the war, all those ribbons, and there weren’t many of his classmates who made chicken colonel, I hate that expression, but Philip, why did he stay in the Army? That was such a cautious outcome, such a mild thing to do. He’s so mild, Philip. You’re a slam-bang man, and I’m pretty keen on life, too, even if I have that tentative thing you’re always talking about, but what happened with our boy? What do you think happened?”
“Drua happened.”
Drua is now my maid. No one can pack a better bag, but I’m so blind without my glasses that I can’t see what she’s put in. I’ve been wearing this black sweater and these black slacks this whole trip; I don’t dare dig in because I can never find my glasses the first thing in the morning. Philip finds them for me. For years Drua was Meredith’s nurserynanny. I think Philip means not Drua affirmatively but that I neglected my son. Would that make him mild?
“Drua is a living angel. Don’t you try again to talk me into firing her. What have you got against her? Is she blackmailing you? Did you tweak her behind the pantry door?”
Drua is one of the coloreds, and she is also one of the few Good Guys that are left. No bitterness in her. Except lately she’s been having opinions about elections, she wouldn’t have dreamed of having opinions in the old days. You see. It’s beginning. They’re whispering. They’ve even gotten to my Drua, who adores me.
Somebody on some ship on some crossing quoted Horace to us—why does this come to me now?—Drua packing me off?—to the effect that “he who hurries across a sea changes only the sky, not his own mind.” I am afraid of this little river we are going to cross tonight. Oh, yes, and I remember now who said it, the great pianist, maestro of the ego, Anton Antonin, white lion’s mane and tipping forehead and knobby hammer hands with fingers like Jerusalem-artichoke roots. Maiden voyage of the Lizzy. Outwardly cynical, but what did he play best? Chopin ballades. He had a Grand Marnier soufflé for a heart and an athlete’s frame: fiercely sentimental. He spoke nine languages but hated “foreigners”—meaning anyone wherever he was—and was full of warnings about going abroad. I was young, and he took me on the deck tennis court between dances, it was my everybody-lies-down-with-everybody phase. One night in the salon he spoke of an Indian sage—was it Sardi?—who warned, “If you travel abroad, oh brother, carry your own stones, for there are dogs in every town. Do not suffer the anguish of the traveler who, arriving at a village, was greeted by barking dogs, and he reached down for a stone and discovered one, but to his dismay he found it fastened to a rock by a chain, and he cursed a village where fierce dogs run free and stones are chained.” I remember this warning more vividly than my unfaithfulness to Philip on the deck tennis court. I was unfaithful often.
And now I am unarmed with stones. I hear barking.
Philip is after me about our son, and I feel that I must think about Meredith.
“It’s normal for people Meredith’s age to be mild,” Philip is saying. “All of the middle generation now are mild. We older people are eccentrics, we are real, and the young ones have this Beat thing they don’t know what to do with—they’re unreal. But the in-between ones—they’re bland, Venus, they’re skimmed milk. Why do you worry so about Merri?”
“When I said ‘mild,’ I didn’t mean colorless, I meant unfeeling.”
“Don’t you think that might be control? Maybe there’s too much feeling rattling around inside there.”
It’s perfectly true that I didn’t know anything about being a mother. When Meredith was small he had a cloth bear with a painted clowny face, and it got too ratty for words, and I sent it to the cleaners, and it came back blank, so I got Tilman Furness, he did those smashingly clever illustrations for children’s books, he was a bit of a flit but he was the absolute tops in his line, to paint a new face on it, and what he did was so original, so sophisticated, as if a bear could be a sort of lech, raffish and sexy, and when I presented it to Meredith he screamed for three hours and promptly got croup that night. I was furious with him. After all, you didn’t get Tilman Furness for peanuts.
Why shouldn’t I have left most things to Drua? She was—she is—the salt of the earth. Meredith would lie with his cheek on that bosom of hers, an expanse of June, a bank whereon a wild thyme blew, and I just knew he was blissful, and it terrified me. Once on her day off I tried putting on her uniform, to see if he’d put his cheek where he could hear the pounding of my anxious heart, but it was bags too big for me, and anyway Meredith was always able to see through deceptions, even at two years old. He laughed as hard as if I were a Punch-and-Judy show.
“The mildness of the in-betweens,” Philip says, “comes from their hopelessness, I guess. They see that money isn’t it, after all. Whereas the young ones, the Beats and the off-Beats—”
“The whoozis?”
“As off-Broadway is to Broadway. Not the real thing but more interesting. I mean the talented upper-upper ones, good colleges. They just can’t believe everything is hopeless, and still they don’t know what to hope for.”
“And what, pray, does that have to do with poor Meredith?”
“I was thinking of Chum. I know you don’t like thinking about being a grandmama, Venus.”
Charles, called Chum, the youngest of Meredith and Sally’s three, got into Yale on the basis of the legacy, everyone says. His principal extracurricular activity is getting filthy. Fingernails like auto drippings on the garage floor. Never any shoes or socks, his big smelly feet propped up on Sally’s cloisonné cigarette box on the coffee table, reciting Rimbaud and Baudelaire by the measured mile. But Chum smiles at me over his lurid toenails. I’m onto him. His trouble is simple. He’s too much older than his years. Young people start everything so early now that they’re not nearly so young as parents treat them, as Meredith treats him. After all, African girls—I’m onto the coloreds again, they’re like ads, you can’t dodge them—get married when they’re twelve, thirteen. Our young ones could do that. Know what Chum wants? He wants a job: oh, he doesn’t want to be an enforced patriot sent to the Cameroons on a bloody lying Truth Mission in place of military duty; no, he wants to be given credit for being what he really is, a middle-aged square masquerading as a nineteen-year-old off-Beat, as our Philip calls him. Chum grins at me over his cruddy tootsies because he knows I know.
My complaint about Meredith is that he pussyfoots right down the middle. He’s neither Democrat nor Republican. Look at the ones he’s voted for—each time, as he said, “with misgivings”: Roosevelt over Landon, Willkie over Roosevelt, Dewey over Truman, Stevenson over Ike, Ike over Stevenson, and this last time Jack over who was that loathsome character? Cautious and doubtful every time. I like some violent zigzag in a man, I like extremes. Passion. The want of caution that results in discoveries, assignations, vivid Toulouse-Lautrec stuff, bouts of disgusting temper, sprees, big trombone passages, too much Peking duck, bankruptcy, divorce—don’t you dare, Philip—juicy headlines of all sorts. I like a man. Meredith reads the Times and Trib; Philip reads the News and Journal-American. You should see Philip reading the paper: he reacts like a tyke in the Fun House, bounces, cackles, roars with anger at Booby Sokolsky’s column, reads out loud: “Listen to this: ‘GIRL ELEVEN HAS BABY IN CLASSROOM—Little Schoolmates Assist in Delivery.’ ” He’s so rough and ready. And yet he’s so so tender with me; my Nurserynanny Philip.
“I just wish Meredith wouldn’t put on his rubbers every time a cloud appears.”
“Drua taught him that. Her wetness madness. Drua grew up on the edge of a cypress swamp. Bayou or something.”
“Wet didies. Do you think that pursy look around his mouth comes from toilet training? Maybe I can blame Drua. Wouldn’t that be nice?” I am now able to dismiss the subject.
It is getting dimmer in the bar, perhaps the sun has gone behind a building. Manuel is rattling and banging. Lemon squeezer, heavy soda-split cap remover, that nice spiral wiry thing that keeps the ice in the shaker when he’s pouring out marts, whankety-whank—he’s washing his implements, throwing them down. He has the Latin temper. He’s furious about what I said.
“Manuel!” I call.
“Essame all aroun’?”
“No. Ven acá, amigo. I want to talk to you.”
He looks doubtful but comes over.
“Listen, sweetie,” I say, “you mustn’t let an old old bad-tempered woman throw you.” I want to say, How breathtaking you are, you beautiful intricate hairy weed.
“Un Granddath, un esscotch,” he says, and turns away.
Philip puts his hand on mine. Philip always understands.
I was unfaithful often, and yet the thought of Sylvia, the one woman I’m fairly sure Philip didn’t cheat on me with, in the flesh anyway, still throws me into a loop-de-loop. The way they used to whisper to each other. On that Sewanahaka schooner, Frick Miller’s boat. There were five of us that time—à cinq, that’s where you get really complicated, there’s always a floater, so to speak. Frickie, Sue-Sue, Philip, Syllie, and Venus Surprised. We’d come along the Elizabeth Islands from Quisset. It had been so quiet in that snug little bay overnight except for Frick and Susan bickering; the bickers flew ashore from us like flocks of gulls. Anyway, the idea was to picnic and swim in Quicks’s Hole and then go around to Tarpaulin Cove for the night. I think the basic trouble was that Frick was making a halfhearted play for me; he didn’t mean anything personal, it was just a habit. Frickie was handsome in a pretty-boy way—dark hair that was perfect for cruising, it got sort of packaged in the wind, over a noble shrine of a forehead, peeky eyes, and a spoiled mouth. I forget his nose. There were no stinkpots in Quicks’s for once, and of course we swam in our skin-and-bones; we’d done this so much we knew each other’s bodies all too well—the big mole on Sue-Sue’s rib cage, Frickie uncircumsised and rather astonishing—so that on the rare occasions when for some reason modesty was enforced, it was rippingly sexy to see each other in bathing suits. Really sort of aphrodisiac. Clothes make sense. The human body is a bumpy, pale, hair-blotched affair under an August sun on a scimitar beach a few miles off Cape Cod. But oh, it was good to be young. Frick put up the awning. We had rum, the drink that’s so melty in the sun that you always brought the limit home from the West Indies, or especially from Cuba when you still could go to Varadero, and then you could never bear to touch it in New York; rum and March slush don’t mix. Sue-Sue made sandwiches, popping an ugly swift little gull out of her mouth every few seconds. After lunch, Sylvia—she was wearing, with her usual just-opened effect, a Basque thing and a big incongruous floppy garden-party straw hat because her skin was made of rolled-out candles—said to our Philip, “Darling, let’s go forward and take a nap.” It turned out she meant not the foredeck but the fore cabin. They disappeared down the forward hatch. I knew nothing could happen with her, but after half an hour, with Frick nuzzling me in a yawny way, I thought I’d scream with fear for my beloved Philip, so I pretended I had to go to the head, and there they were, lying crown to crown in the separate pipe bunks which made a V in the slice-of-pie crew’s cabin, just abaft the chain locker, whispering. Not touching, except for the fingertips of their maddening secrets. I went in the head and threw up, my cheeks crimson in the knowledge that that susurrating pair, veed together out there, could hear my retches. Then that damnable crapper pump, with its invalves and out-valves; I was in there half an hour sweating tanks and tanks, and they were out there softly whispering—about what?
“Darling, what did you and Sylvia use to whisper about?”
“Don’t think about Sylvia, Venus. Please. It gives you a headache.”
“I already have a headache.”
“About perfect you. We whispered about how perfect you were.”
“You make me sick to my stomach.”
“No, really, Venus. We did. I never told you this. Syllie had a little problem. She was in love with you.”
“Look,” I say sharply, “we came down to this sand-trap countryside to see Acoma. You’ve pushed me far enough.”
“It’s true, Venus.”
In all these years he has not given me this bulletin. I think I want to kill Philip. “You miserable pimp,” I say; and at once I am sorry.
Because Philip always understands. And because Philip is, and especially was, so beautiful—man-beautiful, Hermes-of-Praxiteles beautiful, you beautiful dog of a Michelangelic man. Sometimes I say, “You dog, Philip,” but what I mean is not a big hairy Irish wolfhound but a dog of kings, a runner, with a big but delicate nose, a bounding white streak on the acres of a royal park. And how he wags his tail!
Golly, I’m a little tiddly.
Beautiful Philip. On the grass court at the casino that summer, in white flannels—whatever became of the prettiest trousers men ever wore?—and a white shirt with long sleeves, and tennis shoes chalky with that stuff out of a tube that one put on (he, Philip, put on every day) with a tiny sponge, a real sponge out of the Mediterranean Sea, and brand-new white tennis balls, and point-winning cloudlets of lime flying up when he uncurled his back and got away one of those spinning parabolic services of his with the high, kicking bounce; and rushing the net, bending for a low volley, legs calipered, and his hair still in place without a lick of bear fat or axle grease or whatever those gigolos use.
“Why do they say ‘love’ when you have no points in tennis? What kind of love is that?”
“Search me why, darling.”
“I’d hate to think that I get no points for what I feel about Meredith.” It wasn’t Drua’s fault. It was our Philip’s fault—your fault, darling. Meredith is mild because he had a fool for a father. Yes, Philip. They all said it. Skilly said it. Frickie said it. They said everyone knew you were a damned fool at the office, and a person who managed the extraordinary feat of being a fool at Peters, Silliman must have been a fool across the board. They said that at the office someone always had to come along behind you and tidy up the mess you’d made of things: like those London street sweepers—remember that time?—following behind the procession with the maharajahs riding in the little houses on the backs of elephants, and do you remember the expression on the sweepers’ faces when they saw what the collapse of the British Empire was depositing on Regent Street? Oh, God, I’m on the coloreds again. Did we see that thing of the elephants, or was that in a movie? That’s the trouble with remembering, Philip: one can’t tell anymore what was real in the past. It has all changed so much. Look at this New Type, Pretz, who’s actually running things at Peters, Silliman nowadays.
“Philip, they’ll certify you and lock you up if you propose our Pretzel for the Links Club.”
“I don’t know, Venus. If he pulls off this merger he’s working on, they might consider changing the rules.”
“You’re a fool.”
“Venus!”
Where do I get such evil thoughts? I was always a good girl. Even by then—that summer—that tennis summer—I was still an innocent child. My mother and father had rented a house in Middletown, Rhode Island. Inasmuch as Philip’s parents were in the Social Register, my parents thought it would be all right for him to visit us for a whole month. He had just graduated from New Haven, his job as a runner wouldn’t start until the fall. Perhaps they—the old crusts in the big stone mansions—thought us fast. We stayed up “late,” we sometimes made a noise driving through town as late as nine at night, but we were pure in heart. Hurt no living creature! Unlike our off-Beat grandson Chum today—a premature adult masquerading as a child—we then were children pretending to be adults. We belonged to Bailey’s Beach, but we thought it very superior to swim instead by ourselves on Third Beach, which was deserted. We lolled there looking across at the Sakonnet lighthouse. We were much too modest to skinny-dip. I wore wool bathing suits with legs reaching nearly to my knees. Philip almost never touched me—a few sweet stolen kisses—because we lived by the code of the time. Necking wasn’t even invented until a decade later. We wouldn’t have dreamed of sleeping with people unless we married them. Our libidos blew a hot smoke through our bodies, which sometimes came billowing out of our mouths in the form of quarrels.
Oh, now a sickening thought: Philip was the one who wanted to swim on Third Beach. Was it really to “get away from all those Groton meatballs,” or did he know, somewhere in his mind, that all those others at Bailey’s Beach thought him, even then, a fool? I remember whispers, snickers. At the time I was somehow able to construe them as the sounds of envy and admiration. Poor Philip! Poor Philip!
“Remember Third Beach?”
As so often, our responsive Philip answers a question with a one-upping question. “Remember the telephone pole with a wagon wheel on top of it, and an osprey nest built there?”
“Philip, why did we swim on Third Beach?”
Philip is silent for a long time; he looks as if he had taken a sip of coffee that was too hot. Finally: “You and I have always run away from the crowd, Venus.”
Oh, no! I feel honesty sticking in my throat. I don’t want to be like Syllie, inflicting “truth” on the beloved—or even on myself. For the truth must be that Philip wasn’t the only fool. Another one loved him with a trusting child’s open heart.
I feel a stab of “it.” I hear barking. “Let’s get out of this damnable North Pole of a bar. I need a hot bath.”
“Then we’ll have a nice nap, won’t we, Venus pie?”
“Don’t you use that nurse’s ‘we’ on me, you idiot.”
“Venus!”
“I’m sorry, dear Philip. I’m sorry. You’ve taken me too far from home. I’m so used up. I yearn for a long long nap in my own bed at 514.”
“Never mind, darling. We’re going to have dinner abroad. Come along. I’ll wake you at eight o’clock.”
It is nine-twenty on a rather chilly March evening. Three persons in assorted costumes—two men and a woman—having cleared papers at the Immigration Service shack, start across the bridge. It is an old steel-truss affair with a springtime profusion of blossoms of rust along its beams; it has room for a single file of autos each way; there is very little traffic; an occasional car makes the whole bridge tremble. The three are on a pedestrians’ walkway on the right hand as they face Mexico. On the outer side there is a rusty railing, a bit more than waist high, with wire mesh fencing down to the planks of the pathway. The lights of Ciudad Juárez seem to slide sidewise on the sluggish current of the river, the surface of which is perhaps fifteen feet below the feet of the three.
The taller man, on the outside as they walk, is in a white linen suit, and he is wearing immaculate white buckskin shoes. He has on a white shirt and a tie with a subdued Paisley design in which the predominant colors are pale blue and yellow. He has broad shoulders and a rugged build, though he walks with a slight limp. His fluffy brindled brown hair, nowhere thinned, swoops low on his forehead, which therefore seems crowded down through a series of scored crosslines to two prominent bumps looming over full brown eyebrows; his cheeks recede beneath their high bones into hollows and deep lip lines; the chin is firm. This face would be fierce, were it not for the fact that the lights of the Mexican city glisten in decidedly soft brown eyes, which turn frequently toward the face of the woman on his arm.
The other man walks on the traffic side. Short and slight, he is in a shiny black silk suit, doubtless of Italian manufacture, with padded shoulders which make sharp angles over the sleeves; his necktie screams in a wildly incongruous splash of Marimekko colors. On his tiny feet he has sharply pointed black shoes, so highly polished as to seem to be made of patent leather. He is three-quarters bald, and his pointed face and eggish pate gleam with a tan so deep that it must go right through to the skull. The look of polished mahogany brings the word “magnate” to mind: a powerful creature with a marked talent for vacation. This gent has the ferret eyes of a mind reader. He turns his head nervously this way and that, as if afraid he may miss a trick.
The woman, between the two men, leans on the arm of the one in white. She looks like the ghost of a pirate. She is dressed all in black: black shoes, black slacks, a black sweater, and a wide-brimmed black felt hat, with the left side of the brim turned up to the crown, Aussie or buccaneer style, pinned there with a huge Tiffany gold scarab. A Liberty scarf is loosely tied at her throat, looking as though it might be pulled up over her chin and nose as a piratical disguise, if need should come. Heavy gold bracelets, like a disorderly heap of barrel hoops, pull her thin left arm down straight as a plumb line. The procession of the three has a funerary gravity, because the woman takes very small steps and seems to wait quite a while to gather her resources after each step. To the dim light from the far bank her face offers a memory of great beauty. She carries her chin high; she seems to be sniffing.
“You didn’t tell me how big the bridge would be,” she says to the tall man. The bigness is in the eye of the beholder. It is a small bridge.
The man in white says, “We’ll be there before you know it, Venus.”
The short man, looking ahead, says, “Jeez, what a mingy town.”
“You didn’t have to come,” the woman sharply says. “Why don’t you go back?”
“Now, honey,” the tall man says, “be sweet.”
“I don’t need his complaints tonight. Nothing is ever good enough for him.”
“I din’t mean anything,” the short man says.
“I think all that neon looks sort of cheerful,” the tall man says.
“Honky-tonk,” the short man says.
The woman takes a labored step. “Pretzel,” she says, “would you try to make the supreme sacrifice, and be still? Please don’t speak. I want to be with Philip.”
“My lips are sealed, dolling.”
Two steps require concentration. “Philip, why didn’t you think to bring my lifesaver? You know they’ll have hard wooden seats in this country we’re going to.”
“Would you like me to go back and get it?”
“I would not like you to go back and get it. I would like the Pretz to go back and get it.”
The short man says, “How can I say I’ll be glad to get it without speaking?”
The man in white gives the short man a set of car keys.
“Excuse all the talk,” the short man says, “but where will I meet you?”
The woman says, “Don’t worry, we’ll still be on this endless bridge.”
“We’ll wait for you,” the tall man says. “Thanks, old boy.”
The short man walks back to North America.
The tall man and the woman stand still for a long time. The woman is looking up at the man’s face, with the look of a votary unsure of her faith. “My good friend,” she says, her head canted by her obvious emotion toward the man’s shoulder. Then, after a pause, “Where did we go wrong?”
“Wrong?”
But she doesn’t explain what she has meant. She throws all of herself into taking a step. “I’m so cold,” she says.
“Was this a mistake, Venus? Should we go back?”
“There is no way of going back.”
“When Pretz comes—”
But she doesn’t answer. She takes two steps. Then, halted, she says, “There was one spring when I couldn’t bear to be indoors—remember, darling? The shadblow was out. A bluebird nested on the power-line pole at the west stone wall. The woodchuck was always after the clover at the end of the field. Buckie—the best Lab we ever had—ran away every day to see his friends. Meredith picked me some violets. The terrace of the lawn was finally almost clear of dandelions, I hated dandelions. The forsythia held on for the longest time. I remember waiting for the glossy leaves of the franklinia to come out—it was always last. The lettuce was up in the garden, the peas of course were up, but no sign yet of asparagus. Remember that owl that hooted in the pines? That spring?”
“I’m not sure which spring you mean, Venus.”
“There. You see. Which spring. Ah, Philip, where did we go wrong?”
“Now, honey, cheer up. We’ll have some nice hot Mexican food.”
One step. Another step. “Meredith owes me something more than violets,” the woman says.
“Did you lend him money, Venus? That was imprudent.”
“I don’t mean money. You have a mind like a safe.”
“Oh,” the man says, “I see what you mean. You mean—that business of tennis points? But honey, I’m afraid we never can collect debts of that kind.”
“Not till too late. He’ll want to pay. Merri keeps a very tidy checkbook, he’ll want to remit. It’ll be too late. He’ll be sorry. It’ll ruin his life.”
The woman’s sniffing is more definite now. She is shivering.
She says: “You pick this time to tell me that Syllie had a sn-sn-sneaker for me.”
“It was more than that.”
“Philip, I adjure you to tell me the truth. Did you have one for her? She’d scream if you touched her. Was that the allure?”
“Venus, you’re behaving in a very peculiar way.”
“I know I am. Are we halfway across the bridge? Have we crossed the border?”
“Almost. Not quite.”
She takes three steps, rather quicker than any of her previous steps. She seems to be having some difficulty breathing; it is as if she were climbing a steep hill.
“I want a little rest,” she says. “Let’s stand here a minute.” She moves toward the railing and leans on it. She gazes down at the dark river. “I adored looking down from the upper decks, watching the spume go by.”
“Venus, there was never anyone important but you.”
“I know, Philip. Thank you, Philip. Let’s go on now to the border.”
“I don’t know whether it’s marked.”
“You’ll want to pay, too, Philip, but it will be too late for you, too.” The woman’s breath catches, and the man looks sharply at her.
“Venus, are you all right?”
“The unimportances add up to importance, don’t they? I was bad to you, too, you know.”
“You’re trembling, dear heart. Let’s go back.”
“I wish we could, Philip.”
She takes a false step. It is as if one knee were rubbery. She lifts her head, and she takes several firm steps. Considering her previous pace, it is as if she were running.
“Whoa, Venus,” the man says, “this is the middle of the bridge.”
The woman takes three more steps, evidently to place herself for a certainty in alien territory. In the half-light one can see a change in her face. Is she smiling? “It always takes so long,” she says in a weak voice.
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘How divine.’ ”
Suddenly her legs give out, and before the man in white can react, she is sitting on the planks of the walkway. At this very moment, the short man comes along at a quick pace, with the circular rubber tube under his arm. “Jeez,” he says, “is she crocked?”
“Venus,” the tall man says, leaning down over her, “I don’t think we can sit here.”
She is panting, but he can make out her slowly spoken words: “I’m going to wait here in the salon, until the lighter comes alongside.”
The man in white makes a signal to the short man, who hands over the rubber ring. The tall man puts it on the planks behind the woman. Each man reaches under an armpit, and they lift the woman a few inches, the tall man pushes the ring under her with his foot, and they gently let her down.
“Go back to the customs shed and ask for an American doctor. The last thing she needs is a Mex at this point.”
The short man runs. The man in white leans down, and he hears the woman groan.
“Oh, God,” she distinctly says, “I knew it would be a dog.”
“We’ll have you in bed in a jiffy, Venus,” the man says.
Her lips are moving, she is mumbling.
The man spreads a handkerchief and kneels on it on one white knee and puts his ear near her mouth. “Say it again, Venus.”
He hears her. “Darling…tell Drua…”