1

“TO THE HAPPY COUPLE!”

The toast was acknowledged with faintly disowning smiles from both family sides of the twenty-five people at table—as coming merely from a Chicago aunt-of-the-bride’s second husband, whom nobody had ever seen before and was the only one of the party who was getting drunk.

The couple themselves did not appear to notice him at all. The bride was the thin girl with stork neck and messily naiad hair, her dress no more than the shift in which they all slouched about the streets these days as if proclaiming that to be nineteen was chic enough. Beside heir, the stolid, blond boy, nice-looking enough behind thick lenses, wore his unmatched jacket and trousers with the same arrogance. Confronting the garb of the guests, theirs had the value of an affectation. The two of them stood ready to go now, outside the celebration as they had been from its beginning.

The girl’s mother, a widow, had pleaded for it, carefully not for herself but for the boy’s father who, alone like herself, but with only a year or two to spare now, was said to be dying. The father headed the table, that dark-eyed, still quick-moving man whose features, though tanned, were—even to the casual eye—of a certain saintly tightness, phosphorescence, whose deft fingers, if one knew their sentence as they played with a heart-shaped box in front of him, seemed already ringed with St. Elmo’s fire. The widow was at his side, a sleek woman, still pretty, only fortyish, turned out in those subtle tonalities, stolen from modern art, which one could pick up now in the department stores. Through those there came nevertheless a certain Jenny Wren-ness, ingenuous plumpness of the girlhood one would still be able to see in her face if raised—but she too had her eyes lowered to her white, silver-stamped, frilled heart-box.

“Good champagne!” said the flushed uncle-by-marriage, then glanced apologetically at his wife, the widow’s sister. A shrewd, good fellow, he hadn’t meant to sound surprised, to press in any way what must be known to all here: that he was worth enough (when he let himself think of how near a half-million it was, his pulse nearly stopped in awe of what had happened to him, a half-million) to buy and sell everybody here, singly or together—certainly at least those on his wife’s and the bride’s side of the family, on the New York side. There was no telling for sure about Pagani, the groom’s father and almost sole representative, for if there was any special way of rating Italians from California, it hadn’t yet reached Winnetka, but fashionable photographers made a mint these days, and this one (like his own father, the Pagani before him, it was even said) was the best children’s one in a town where even the toys were gold-plated. The boy’s dead mother had been Jewish, just like Jacobson, the girl’s dead father. Not that Jews or any other kind meant anything for sure one way or the other these days. The uncle himself was probably the only full Protestant in the room, not that he wished to make anything of that either, live and let live; his own wife was a Catholic—lapsed. All it meant was that the happy couple were about even on the racial mixture, just as well matched there as they seemed on everything else. It made him uncomfortable just to look at them, that girl who hadn’t been to a hairdresser even on her wedding day, the boy neat enough, with a build that could even have been football, but with something indoors about him, not four-square—the thing, whatever it was, that let him stand there so coolly united with her, letting the way she looked speak for him, that had made him choose this girl.

Glancing aside, the uncle saw that his wife’s glass, next to his, was still full. He drained it. No surprise that it should be good; though Margot Jacobson, the widow, and his wife were no longer close, he’d seen at once how like the sisters still were—thrifty, spendthrifty New York-bred women who knew how to cut a thousand corners—not too fine. The scene was good enough, too—private dining room of a small hotel on the Square (one he’d never heard of but might be no worse for that), with only as seedy-velvet a look to it as all such rooms, and on the embroidered tablecloth, at each place set with the silver that must be Margot’s own, there was a natty roses-and-violets nosegay. The guests, the usual lot, were nice and chatty enough, or had begun so. Then why was this the chilliest damned wedding lunch they had any of them—he could see that—ever been to in their lives?

It had nothing to do with the recognizable chill of generation that came over the older guests even at the high jinks of the weddings he was used to—four hundred strong at the country club in a hot, yellow June—as they waved off the clear-eyed pairs, the Easter-in-Nassau tanned girls risen for a day like Venuses on their scallops, the boys with that short-lived glow to the flesh, like a stallion’s nostril—waved them off, off, ruddy in their white, to fecundity. That sort of qualm came from knowing the score too absolutely ever to want to go through it again—and from being left behind, never to go through it again. The chill in this room came from the couple themselves, fragile with youth as they still were, that city-rat pair. From the lack of awkwardness between them, he suspected that they already knew the score in one way. But, leaning together, their attitude suggested that they knew it in all, by prevision if not experience—and it was the success of this that made older eyes in the room glide sideways, genial voices die. The vibrance that joined this pair, looked at him out of their eyes, was contempt—not for his half-million, which he could have understood—but for any such sentiments as he, the room, was prepared to offer them. The two didn’t make him feel old, but rather: angrily, clumsily young. It was the girl Elizabeth, really; either she led, or the boy showed it less; he had left her for the moment, going down the line to say good-bye affectionately enough to his father. The girl remained where she was, her gaze lowered on one of the nosegays. One of her ears shone through hair, poodled at the front, that straggled down her back like a guttersnipe Alice’s. The earlobe, pierced with a tiny earring, like an immigrant baby’s, looked as young—but he would not dare pity it. He thought he had never seen anybody stare so venomously at a rose. Shocked, he drained the next nearest full glass, and heard himself say, with the same loose surprise, “Good champagne.”

“Chateau D’ay, Ayala. Really remarkably good for the price. Sherry’s stock it.” This was from Margot, the girl’s mother. Acquaintances cherished her as one of those animated little women who, not too obtrusively, always knew a “little” place to find anything from amethysts to eggs, but today the tip came automatically, like the cardboard ticket from the set smile of a glass-enclosed Princess Fatima at a fair. Only Ernest, her recently dead husband, would have known that she felt like crying, and why. In a dim way not quite apart from intelligences she had been given in the municipal college twenty-odd years ago, and had drunk in renewed, through the modern private school for which they had sacrificed to send their only child, she understood that her daughter’s animosity toward her—against the way they’d brought her up, against this very occasion—was connected with her own very blamable dependence on nice things. “Things!” Elizabeth called them simply, and sullenly. For if, at nineteen, she could see any of her mother’s needs with clarity, this lay in her awareness, scornful as it was, that “things” were not merely a taste or a boastfulness in her mother’s life—or even a love—they were her gravitation.

“I can’t help it,” Margot had replied once, during the short week finally granted her for wedding fuss, “I was brought up that way,” and her voice, wavering toward excuse, had resolved, as it so often did, on pride. Her family, first established here uptown in Yorkville by her grandfather, a young chiropodist trained in Vienna, had brought with them the finest merchant-fingered sense of their own small dynasty, as real to them as that of the monarchs of the empire from which they had come, and based like it on the clearest image of a certain standard of noblesse from which, even in a cellar, they must not fall. Naturally, they, not being monarchs, must try rather harder to keep out of cellars, and had—this was part of it. Theirs was that lower-middle-class noblesse which had had to build not on lineage, but on the living itself—on a cookery never below butter, linens fit enough for any Hapsburg injured on their doorstep, and on a fanatically embroidered cleanliness—below which combined surfaces lay always the dark turds of shame. Yes, there’d been that too, of course, in the stony tone of her grandmother’s “Schmutzig!”, in her whisper to the five-year-old Margot’s mother, when the little girl had wet herself publicly, “Meta, the child has shamed herself!”, in her own mother’s hiss to the short skirts of sixteen, “Knees together, you shame!”—below that moral surface, poverty, dirt and what went on between the legs were all somehow tangled together. Above it were the nice and their “things,” objects which in time acquired their own minor heraldry, if as nothing more than as tokens of safety. Such a family, never risen to rentiers, never dropped into poverty, had known only the middle-class terror. Even now, if Margot chanced on the catchword “security” in a newspaper, what she thought of at once, before thinking, was a large pseudo-Sèvres candy dish always reared on its ugly pedestal in the bay of her grandmother’s parlor-floor-front, the dominant center—below a dado of beer steins and grotesques from the Tyrol—of a room in which even the shadows were scrubbed, and always (even on the day of her grandmother’s funeral) filled.

Through three generations it had remained so, down the dark days of her father’s failure in the wholesale bakery business, through all Ernest’s ups and downs as a manufacturers’ agent, when the household had often fattened on every sample of his trade except money—for Ernest, son of a German-Jewish auctioneer on University Place, had been even closer to her, in their mutual faith in things, than many a couple of the same religion. She would have brought the dish here today, to be set out for the family td recognize, if he had only been with her to dare Elizabeth’s scorn.

“Candy!” Elizabeth had said, looking down on it—just refilled with the bright pastilles Mrs. Jacobson always kept there—on that day, not a week ago, when she had come in from life-class to report that she and David would be getting married next week, now that they had found the very loft to live in. “Candy! I’ll smash that thing for you yet.” As she turned to survey the whole overscrupulous room, the great swinging book-bag that was her reticule, purse and home had almost done so. Eyes hard on her own dreams, she had shrugged and gone out again—now she didn’t need to. As it was, Margot, reminding herself that lofts could be chic now, grateful that celebration was to be allowed at all—even if an impending death had had to be invoked to alter her daughter’s stark plans—had consoled herself with her own last-minute hunt, almost hysterical at the end, as real pre-bridal days should be, for the object she now held in her hand.

It had taken all her ingenuity to find it, and when it had been passed to her over the Armenian caterer’s zinc counter, she had not known, in her grim-soft mood, whether to weep or laugh. It was exactly like the one at her own wedding, the one from her mother’s for that matter—in her childhood always kept in a drawer of the sideboard, together with the 1910 caterer’s bill for that wedding in the parlor-floor-front—a bill which she still had. Louis Mazzetti, Cordon Bleu. Then the menu, for forty guests, complete service, 2 Candelabras, 2 Waiters, 1 assistant, 36 Camp Chairs, 6 Round Tables, and down at the bottom, Extra—40 Wedding Cakes in boxes Heart Shape, “M.C.” in Silver and Gold. In her mother’s saved one, sometimes opened for her to see, the cake had been black as lava; she had therefore not kept her own. Except for the initials, the box she now held was the same as the other two, but if Elizabeth had noticed its resemblance to the often described others, she had not said, and now that she was leaving without having done so, her mother was glad. She saw that her daughter, well-mannered enough in some things, was now making her adieux, coming toward her down the far line of relatives, inclining an ear, a cheek, with a reserve that Margot knew to be as hard as the dried-clay busts Elizabeth was leaving behind in her bedroom, but hoped that relatives would mistake for poise merely—on Elizabeth’s lips the small smile that even they must see to be a mocking one.

“Rice!” said the uncle-by-marriage, from the other end. “Whassama no rice?”

Mrs. Jacobson sent him a smile. Parents and children, she told herself, were always strangers in the end of course, but staring now at the daughter who felt herself so original, she had an awful sense that it was the school that had made Elizabeth, the newspapers, all the Tini-books, Tini-records she had been fed with, to whom, along with her schoolmates, she had been ceded up. Whereas, whatever the dark plague-spots in Margot’s own make-up, the influences that had molded her had at least seemed personal—a dark dowry which the college, where she had been a run-of-the-mill fine arts major, had subverted perhaps, but could not change. She could even see how her own parents, in their simple, Dutch-interior fanaticisms, had been that very middle class whose next or next generation would bring its scrupulosities to art. Hence Elizabeth, who was a sculptor—who was not “going to be” or “wanting to be,” but with the confidence she had been molded toward, had studied it, had picked it; at not yet twenty, therefore was. Hence Elizabeth, to whom her in-between parents had given “everything” precisely because they could not afford to—including the right to call them unspiritual.

Mrs. Jacobson hid the hand holding the box in her lap. Now that she could see their lives as clearly as two heads seen enclosed in the lens of a raindrop, she could see too how stupid it was—that frilled, heart-shaped replica—for a child brought up on mobiles.

“’Bye, Mums.”

At least Elizabeth had not made use of her usual, detached “Mother.” Mrs. Jacobson put her arms up to her daughter; the box fell. At her side, Mr. Pagani, leaning carefully, his leaky heart a chalice, picked up the box and set it on the table beside his own. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that David, an affectionate boy, motherless since birth, had put both hands on his father’s shoulders. Dropping her arms, she let one fall so that the nearer box was pushed directly under Elizabeth’s gaze; there was no doubt that she saw it. Take it, her mother said silently. Instead, Elizabeth joined hands with her husband. “Good-bye, Mother.”

At the door, the couple turned, odd pair in their un-bridal clothes, hands still joined against the festive enemies behind them. Before turning away again, the boy waved with his free one. The avenue sun came through the open door, enveloping them in its aura as they paused. Behind them, the air in the room darkened to plum, as if particles of its own plush had gathered to take the place of the rice which had not been thrown. A lozenge of yellow fallen across the hotel carpet barred their way. They stepped over it, and were gone.

In the room behind, people leaned back, guests shortly to be on their way, but—now that the couple themselves were gone like a symptom—able to dream for a moment, hypochondriacs all fixed on the same ailment, of a world that was still in health. Each secretly wondered, also, how the night would be for this generation. The bride’s mother was crying, but this too was now appropriate. “She’ll see!” she said fiercely. She’ll see what life is, Margot said to herself, through the tears which could not bear that she should.

Her neighbor leaned toward her, with the care of a man whose disease has already been confirmed. “Dine with me, Mrs. Jacobson—Margot,” said Mr. Pagani.

Outside, the couple walked on past the Square without speaking, unlinking arms after the first curb. They could afford not to touch, having so much else in which they were joined. It was some blocks before either of them spoke.

“Brr-r-r,” Elizabeth said. Their pace continued even.

After half a block or so, David answered. “Brrrrr-r.” This was their only comment on the wedding.

At the subway entrance, Elizabeth suddenly halted under the kiosk, tossed back her hair and smiled at him; swinging her book-bag for her, he smiled back. Serious again, they tripped down the stairs together, matching their steps in a rhythm of threes.

They got out at Spring Street.

Above them, a liverish warehouse, tall for these parts, converged to a sharp point at the street’s corner. Modeled on the Flatiron Building, once offices perhaps and once stone, its cornices hung now on what seemed the softly compressed grime of the city itself. Its triangular shape made it a crossways, excited up from the pounded dust of the nearby machine shops, reared above other low, long-lying stretches housing nail oil, tanners, ink. In its shadow, the air was snuff, the passers-by eternally mulatto. Passengers from uptown rose out of the ground here, smelled the labor-sweat at once, and said to themselves, “This is the part where things are made; this is real.” And now once again, as the couple looked at it, they joined hands. From far off, perhaps in the heart of the financial district, a carillon struck. Under its spreading bands of iron Victorian sound, they walked slower, faces illumined, as if down an aisle.

To get to their entrance, one had only to go round the side of the building past two stores not much more than counters set diagonally in its point, a cigar store huddled under its broad LA PRIMADORA, and a lunch stall from which came the familiar short-order smell of raw cookery bubbled in tallow—both 9 P.M. oases in a district where curfew came around five. This meant, as Elizabeth, who had found the place, had pointed out, the coziness of late packs of cigarettes, last-minute cartons of milk, and a telephone. All was quiet now to their turning key. Their entrance was private, after five.

The loft itself was four stories up, exactly in the center of the building. Light came through a small hole in its door, from which the tenant before them, a painter like David, must have removed the heavy Yale lock; they quite understood his taking it. A gaunt boy, evicted by the city marshal for nonpayment of the $47 rent, he had found an even cheaper place for which he would not pay either. With the collusion of the rent laws, this was the way he lived, posing as model at the League for artists whose work he would not even spit on, doing his own on brown paper or cardboard, with samples of deck paint, or a rare gallon of the casein for which he claimed to know the exact limits and nuances of water dilution. “Going to write a book on it, Secrets of the Old Masters,” he had smiled, whistling through the gap left by four or five missing uppers—ceded to art, for their admiration—when he learned of David’s part-time income from photography and allowance from his father. His father, a banker, gave him nothing. And now, with the same admiration, they quite understood about the lock; he meant to sell it. His valuables, like theirs, could not be stolen.

“See, there’s still light.” She spoke in awe, her hand still in his, before they pushed in the door.

The room, some forty-five feet at its far base, converged steadily toward them, narrowing to an apex, little wider than its door, whose point seemed to pass through their breasts, leaving these lightly pinked, and on to the other side. David gave her a pat forward, but she stayed as she was, her arm around his waist, fixing in her mind forever the room as it now was, before clutter. Windows lined the three walls, interspersed with spade-shaped outcroppings that shafted to the factory-high tin ceiling. Under a torn patina of plaster held up by remnant Sanitex, repatched paint, the dank wood floor looked almost as wise as earth. To their left, water dripped into a sink from a single tap, flanked by a toilet in a half-open stall and a laocoön of pipes tipped with a butterfly cock that might once have meant gas.

“Ten of them,” she said, waving at the windows. “One, two three, four. Five six seven. Eight nine ten. Ten!” Some trick of the late afternoon, poised in that air, sent the light through the narrow factory windows as if they were clerestory. Here were all her things. In a pile at the far corner, their possessions announced themselves like the signature at the bottom of a canvas—an old camp bedroll of David’s, his worn carry-all marked NORTH-WESTERN AIRLINES, her old cloth hatbox from college, with two of its rubberized initials gone. She intended never to make her possessions her only signature on life. Space lay in the sharp room like a weapon, barred with light. She leaned her breast on both. All her things were here.

David gave her a pat on the backside. Looking down at the threshold, she stepped over it, in the new way, into her new condition, and stood there bemused.

“My God. A home away from home.” Peering into the book-bag, he set on the floor, one by one, a small Genoa salami, a plastic bag of the long rolls used for hero sandwiches, a round red-and-white tin of Dutch chocolate, and a Manila bag from which he drew a bunch of Malagas, slightly crushed. He held these high over his head, in the bacchante position, before he replaced them. “Don’t see how the American woman does it! Between facials, too!”

She grinned at him. He had backed her up in her refusal to do anything bridal. But other times, they had shopped together, on their way to the borrowed places, strange rooms. She was embarrassed at having been caught so soon in the role of domestic forethought—and proud. “I wasn’t sure—what we could get down here.”

“And what’s this, Madam X?” He held up a parcel which, from its shape and gurgle, could be a bottle only. He raised one eyebrow, sending his heavy glasses sliding down his nose. Many of his gestures were still the exaggerated ones of a high school boy at a party, under them the sweet awkwardness of the motherless one, and though she meant never to mother, she loved this circumstance. She could see he was really astonished, though. Beer was their drink, their crowd’s drink. Whisky was for the arrived.

“Surprise. No—omen.”

When it was unwrapped, his exploding laughter touched off hers. Only last week, David’s photographer friend and employer had taken them to a party where the guests, in their late twenties or early thirties, were already one or two rungs up—painters who had been shown in groups, the playwright and cast of a production in rehearsal in a downtown church, two boys whose non-objective film had been shown at Cannes. The hosts themselves, owners of a “studio” whose white fur rugs and Nubian concert grands already had an old-fashioned nineteen-fortyish solidity, were even older—two jazz pianists who earned, and were ignored. In the talk of their guests, reassuringly bull-session, art still predominated over money, but their heroes, no longer the great, dim figures of the past over whom David’s crowd brooded, were those more touchable greats who were alive to be met and sometimes had been, and their judgments, no longer ranging with the imprecise passion of the unpublished or unshown, had the consanguinity of what the talkers felt themselves about to be—the important flying wedge of the almost present. They were what David and Elizabeth’s crowd might be five years from now. And most of them had been drinking a cheap brand of domestic crème de menthe that must be this year’s syrop du jour at the studios of those still blown by the absinthe-colored winds of youth, not yet rich or dull enough for whisky—the brand that was in the bottle here.

Above the bottle, their smiles met in the shrewdest sympathy, like two children so precocious that, trapped in a roomful of adult poses, they could catch themselves in the mutual act of adopting one. Above the smile, their eyes met in a vow more serious. They knew the difference. On the qui vive brink of life, they would carry forward what was uniquely theirs. They knew the difference between the artificial and the real.

“Want some?” he said aloud.

“Mmmm-mm. Too full of champagne.” Her lips made a puritan moue of the word, but that life was already behind her. She walked past the toilet stall. “Have to get a door on it. Salvation Army, maybe, when we get the furniture.” She knelt, peering under the basin. Her voice came, muffled. “Oh, look. He’s left us a present. Some t.p.”

“Some what?” He held the half unwound bedroll in front of him.

Bending over had made her face pink. “Sorry. A Margot expression. Toilet paper, of course.”

“Of course. Takes marriage to teach a man the real facts of life.” He thought this such a subtle inversion that his glasses slid all the way down, but she had already turned away.

“And oh look—he’s left us a painting.”

“Canvas?” he said thriftily, his back to her. Into the room’s one light-socket, which hung bulbless on a long wire from the ceiling over their bed-corner, he fitted a double socket into which he plugged the extension cord that led to the record player.

“No, glass. Guess it’s just a palette, really.”

He took it from her, a sheet of cheap windowpane, encrusted with swirls of color. “Yeah, I guess.” He held it at arm’s length, screwing up an eye, hamming it. “Ah-hah. Upside down, Miss J., that’s the test.” She giggled. Clearly the thing had no axis. “See,” he said, encouraged, “how it holds, how it ve-ry def-initely holds. Influence, early—” He peered closer. “By God, no. You know what this is? Honey, this is the newest. This paint hasn’t been dripped, or even thrown.” He took his glasses off, knowing she knew he saw almost nothing that way. “It’s been fed on. By one of those intravenous feeders.” He put the glasses on again. “You got a valuable find here, Mrs. Pagani.”

The expression on her face was obscure to him. Not the disapproving sharpness of a few hours ago, the sour, assured masque that he’d learned to recognize in their earliest dates, even surprising her to laughter by saying, once they were down in the street, “Still got your house-face on, Liz. Shift.” Girls had their own brand of the rub between the generations, the latter something he knew less about than most anyway, because of always having been so close with his father, with a father so remarkably knowing and relaxed. He meant to make it up to Liz for that, not to be fatherly, but just for not having had that kind of thing at home.

He rubbed a finger softly over the place on her neck, just over where the Adam’s apple would have been, where she had, unnoticeable except to a mouth, a little tuft of long, silky, almost invisible down, of which she could not be persuaded to be unashamed. A suggestion of his father’s, once over lightly, about women, made him suspect what her look meant. “I know something about you.”

“What. My moustache?” That was what he had called it. She caught at his finger.

“Nope. Should think you’d recall the day I found that out.”

The corners of her mouth were still down, but once again their eyes exchanged glints, like two thieves in congratulation over what they had filched from the general. “What, then?”

“You don’t like to be called Mrs. Pagani. So quick.”

Her burst of laughter was honest, in relief louder than intended. “Silly. Why should I mind that. Half our crowd is.” True enough. More than half the coterie they felt themselves to be forming, some verging toward the professions but most of them with their eyes hot on the arts, were already paired off, most of them legally. It was the other thing that was old-fashioned. Theirs was the van. “Listen,” she said, still hearing her own echo. “Listen how quiet it is. You ever heard the city so quiet? What time is it?”

“Half-past seven.”

In the late-summer evening, the light was still pure but as surely descending, as if it came to them mirrored from a great conflagration somewhere else. The silence up from the trafficless streets, seeping toward them from the deserted building, came to them that way also, not a calm but the uneasy, industrial silence of things that have stopped. Neither wished to be the first to speak. They felt themselves to be the only life beating inside that great shroud.

One of her hands stole into his, hollowing for warmth. She’d been on the point of saying it to him, hadn’t known she was, until now: I don’t like it when you kid about it—about painting. Not that she doubted his seriousness. If he wasn’t as angry as she against what he came from, it was because he didn’t have to be, and not only because of his father, who had once been a painter himself. Obscurely, she felt that his other circumstance—two men keeping house alone—had left him, made him already unordinary enough. He had his whole childhood to show, for difference. But with herself, under all the serene, teacherly reassurances of her gifts, only her anger, harbored like a gift, reassured her. Frightened now by her own thoughts, almost wishing to be back in school where nothing had begun yet, she looked up at him dumbly. Let’s never kid it—ever. Otherwise we shall be the ones to slip—from the van.

“Talk—sounds queer here.” His voice was strained. For no other reason than that, she was as comforted as if she had spoken and he had answered her, explaining what the “it” was that hung over them, showing her the path through the orb of their life to come.

Suddenly he was brisk. “Come on, whyn’t we hang this acquisition of yours, huh? Christen the joint.” Cradling the pane in his arms, he time-stepped the length of the room with it. “A-bmm. A-bmm. A-bmma, bmma, bmm. A-bmma, b-mma, B-MM, bmm—” He stopped, looking down. Somewhere along, he had taken his shoes off. “Hey, this is neat. Hey, listen. This floor answers you.” He cocked his head. “Take yours off.”

She did so, but now they no longer needed the soles of their feet to feel the rumble far below, a long anaconda of sound that drew a faint double-bass from the window frames, faded, and was gone.

“Oh. He said we’d only notice it at night. It’s the subway.” She looked at him doubtfully, but his slow head-shake of admiration was honest, if a little absent.

“Neat.” He had drawn close enough to squat on his haunches beside her, placing the palette at a safe distance; then, with one of those lax, elongated changes of posture which made him such an other being to her, he stretched himself at full length on one elbow to regard her, from which he raised himself to rake a palm along the outline of her breast, her hip. “A-bmmm. And a-bmmm. Very neat.” He tugged at the hem of her dress, whose tight tube, catching her knees, prevented her from falling. With a sigh, pretending to walk up her body with his hands, he stood up. They remained so for some moments.

“Excuse me.” He made as if to break away, toward the stall, but murmuring his name, she held onto him. “Mmm?”

“What’s your house at home like?” she said. He had been rooming up here.

“Why bring that up now?” He held her away from him, squinting. “Oh, they warned me,” he said to an audience seated just above her head. “They warned me. And after I’d given her everything. Everything!”

“I never thought of it until now.”

He considered. Built for them when he was about twelve, by an architect crony of his father’s, who had given it a cathedral ceiling, sectional walls that formed a few causeways, a bar-kitchen that swiveled between two of them, and no inside doors anywhere except on the can and on a combination darkroom-studio that was not in the basement, it had two Hollywood bathrooms and every known appliance, had never offended or surprised the conventions of its neighbors—or of anybody else, including himself (until recently)—and had cost, much like theirs, about forty-five thousand dollars. Nothing in it was irreplaceable; everything in it worked, and out of this it had achieved a sort of character—it was a house to be ignored. Women envied it, verbally. His father said that none of them would be able to leave it as it was for more than a week. Because he himself had lived in it so long, if he wasn’t very careful now to leave its remembered corners unpoked by too exploratory a finger, he might find out that he was very fond of it. Under her round gaze, so faithfully expectant beneath that swamp-angel hair, he rejected it. “Oh—it’s just—a package.”

She nodded gravely.

“Excuse me,” he said again, and made for the toilet-stall.

Behind him, she waited with interest for that basic sound, made by a man, which she happened never to have heard, certainly not in her parents’ house. Even the borrowed flats had had bathrooms. But he was being very delicate, perhaps waiting for her to move off. She did so. Kneeling over their pile of goods, she wondered whether to plug in the record player, and giggled; they weren’t going to be able to do that every time. Crouched in the growing shadow-play, watching, down the long marvel of the room, the gradual drama of any room that was bare, she wished it that way forever.

“Jesus, that guy had hidden depths.” He was still in the stall. “Come look.”

“Feelthy pictures?” She came to look over his shoulder. The two wallboard sides of the stall were unmarked, even clean. He moved aside. The toilet bowl was set directly under one of the windows looking out on a building opposite—there was no third side. Vaguely she recalled that. But now, shielding the window as far up as it could, a heavy white shower curtain hung there, its thick miracle fabric shining in regal folds. Obviously it was very expensive—the best. A chromium expansion rod held it, through rings of silvered glass which matched a broad border-design that glimmered luxuriously in the twilight—a silver Greek-key scroll.

“Something, isn’t it!” he said. “Suppose he was a queer? And we thought he took the lock because he needed it.”

“He did. Oh he did!” she cried, so passionately that he stared at her. She thought she would never get the words out. They came in a wail. “Why does she always have to do it? Why does she have to follow me!”

“Oh.” Now he could see that there was still a ticket on the curtain, as if the giver were saying humbly: You can take it back, you know—I’m only suggesting. “She means well,” he said.

“Oh, I know what she means,” said the girl. “She means to start us off right. Her way.” She reached for the curtain, to tear it down.

“Come on now,” he said. “Come on.” He held her wrists pinioned behind her. “After all—it serves a purpose.”

She bent her head sullenly. “She must have done it yesterday. That’s the only day I didn’t come here.” She kissed his breast with small kisses. “I came every day, you didn’t know that, did you. Just to look.”

Raising her head, she felt his answering warmth, wanting both to be and not to be a child for him. Why should he take her side. She’d be here right now, between us if she could, saying “Elizabeth! Keep your legs together!” But he was romantic about mothers, women in general, always discomfited by the shock-value lingo Liz herself had picked up in school. “Don’t talk like that!” he would say in answer, “she did you a good turn, then. That’s why I noticed you, the day I fell for you. Sitting there in life-class, hanging on to your pencil like a teaspoon.” It had been her first life-class.

But you’re the one who’s shyest when we’re naked, she thought—and said none of any of this.

He had dropped his arms, looking up. “You happen to notice any light bulbs then, around this place?”

She clapped a hand over her mouth, shaking her head. In the spectral instant before dark, she could just see him. “Maybe—there’ll be a moon.”

“My little housewife.”

She could hear him smiling. All that silent dialogue, with him right in the room there—she had never done that before. And he had not heard her. She took his hand across a distance.

“Watch out for that glass.” The dark made them whisper. In the far corner, the pile of goods, as they picked their way to it, looked like an oasis. They settled themselves in its circle like people at a picnic ranging themselves against the wild. He made a lap for her, crossing his legs almost in the lotus position, and she curled there, as was their custom. They sat for some minutes that way, regarding the view.

“Tell me what you saw,” he said, “when you came and looked.”

“Oh—.” She had seen that the room’s shape had its drawbacks, and had shifted her glance—to the windows. She had shied from the list in her purse, feeling the sudden burden of a taste whose judgments were still mostly negative, and had fixed her gaze on the floor, in whose timeworn blend all possibilities had already drowned themselves. “This!” she said fiercely. “This.”

After a while, he reached over and plugged in the record player. A disc already on it began to revolve, one of the old, fake records of the Forties they were collecting. Haitian drumbeat eddied through the room, enlarged by its empty sounding board. He rapped a heel-and-hand rhythm to it. She matched a body-rhythm to it, in the crook of his arm. “A—ten!” he sang. “And a tennah ten. Ten stone windows in de mar-ket AND. And a one, one door.”

“And a five,” she sang. “A five, and. And a five. And-a five stone chimneys in de market. And a ONE—one door.” He turned up the player until it thundered, dragged her to her feet, and stamping and shuffling, bumping hilarity like a beanbag between them, they danced to the end. In the silence, formal as a couple at a ball going back to their chairs, they returned to their spot on the floor and rewound themselves. Whatever waited for them, past lovemaking, not even to be delayed by it, was still there.

“Not many in town who can afford to do that,” he said conversationally.

“Not many with five chimneys, either.”

“Considering the cost of firewood—” he said, “we’ll have to burn rather brightly.”

“You talk like a householder.”

They were silent again.

“Why are we talking like that!” said the girl. “You know. Like in a drawing-room comedy. Repartee. We been doing it on and off since we got here.”

“I understand it’s the customary thing. For the first two weeks.”

She had to laugh. “There, though. See?”

“After all…” she said. “Isn’t as if we’d never—been together before.”

“No,” he said. “No.”

Entwined together as they were, his hands at her breasts, his mouth on her ear, they sat stiffly as idols. No—his voice had just not added—but not here. They both had heard it. Certain intelligences were closing off forever, others rising—and it was the room that caused it. This room, that they themselves had chosen and in bright of day would choose again, held something inimical to them. Something anti-intelligent lay there. Smart as they were, knew themselves to be, the room was a lair of attitudes not yet encountered nor imagined—and they were already inside it. They themselves were what was couched in the lair.

“Let’s—only whisper again,” said the girl.

He was asleep when the moon rose in the third window. In the winters, where would it rise? At the thought of this, of his always falling asleep first, leaving her to wake alone to this islanded silence, she tried to weep, meaning to wake him with her wet face, call him back to endure with her all the noble frictions of this night. Sleep felled her, one soft blow from a woman’s white boa, in which a final thought frivoled. They couldn’t have drunk from the bottle. They had no corkscrew.

Sometime later he woke, very hungry. Rummaging as noiselessly as he could, he ate some of the sausage, half the bread, none of the chocolate, then, skirting her quiet form, he tiptoed to the stall, rinsing his face afterward under the drip from the faucet. There was no glass. Returning, fully awake, he saw that she lay wholly off the bedroll, spread-eagled in deep sleep, face upturned, on the bare floor. He resettled them, edging the bedroll deep in a corner, bracing the thicker end of it between his back and the brick wall, stretching his feet in front of him. She moved with him, unresisting as a good child still asleep, at the last moment falling dead-weight, her shoulders across his knees, her face again upturned. He wrapped an arm about her, doubled the covering over them both, searched with his other hand for the grapes, found them. One by one he ate them, quenching both his thirst and the night-anxiety he had learned to deal with very early from his father—always a night-prowler, even before his illness. “Insomnia?” his father had answered not long ago, when pressed by a solicitous neighbor. “Treat it like ten o’clock in the morning—tea, logic, work.” Never really didactic, his father’s talk had the compression of one who had reached his conclusions. But as a child, he had known only that if he woke alone, his father, if not elsewhere, would be in the darkroom, whose door, opening behind him, would draw no comment other than, “Hey, Davy, come look at this.”

Well, logic told him now that this loft would barely run to studio space for one plus the living, much less a corner for the darkroom he was ashamed of missing most. He would cede the work-space to Liz, use his friend’s darkroom and paint as he could, careful not to let her see how little this worried him. She was so sure of his painting, far surer than he, reared as he had been in a journeyman closeness to it, with an ability to draw that he’d had since the age of six. She was as sure of him, of what he’d just got past merely liking to do, as he was of her—intensity. Too young yet to have shown, even as far as he, what she might have, it was a dead cert that she would never let go of what she did have. Even in the arrangements of their life, this room, she was not to be deflected, with a purpose against which his agreement seemed merely mild. She meant their very life to be a significant arrangement—of the best. They both meant. Scrabbling in the bag, he found that he had finished the grapes. Neither of them was old enough to show what he had, for that matter. All of their crowd were in the same boat—this was what made them a crowd. They were sure about each other’s talents. He and she. The crowd, too. That was the important thing. He found a last, shrunken grape. Some things were taken out of our hands, his father often said, not with any implication that he knew which. But Liz would never buy that. It troubled him, not to know whether he did himself.

He put his glasses on the better to see her, marveling at the distance he had roamed from her, even in thoughts that concerned her, even with her weight on his groin. His watch amazed him—not yet eleven. In the same moment that he bent to take her to him for the long hours which were not to be endured alone, he felt that the night’s solstice had passed, just as it does for a season, leaving no course but to endure. Braced against his wall, mentally he paced off the loft, knelt with his carpenter’s level, calculated inches between shelves. Running on nimbly through his maze of wire and wood to the finish, he opened the door—to the crowd—and laughed suddenly in his drowse. “Come in,” he said to them. “Come into the Drawing Room!” In that pleasant lightness, he thought he slept, while the moon outsoared their roof, leaving them in the never-quite-dark that is the comfort of cities. Head sunk on his chest, he did not look like a boy who had dozed off laughing. Now and then the subway, coiling below, stirred their island like that one; in an old mythology, whose castaways woke to find themselves on the hump of some mammoth of the deep. Fallen so, with all his family goods around him, he looked like a man uneasily drowsing at his post but still sentinel against his Indians, his burden across his knees. He looked like a householder.

And this is the way the night was, for that generation.