On Saturdays, the street simmered gently. House owners wore their working clothes; old boys and girls in faded jeans and paint-spattered shirts cultivated the earth around the frail young trees on the sidewalk, or stood and gazed up at their houses with preoccupied stares. One carried a pail or a hose or a paint-brush, another, a scraper for the drops of paint spotting their new windows, another, a ladder to rest against the wall to climb and repair a weathered window strip. Both sides of the street were lined with cars, many of which were small and foreign, some bearing a prominent label indicating the car had been purchased in Germany or France or England.
Sophie, looking out from behind the living room curtains, saw a man hosing down a section of his sidewalk near his stoop. With rigid arms, he held the nozzle of the hose close to the pavement and his expression was stern. As she watched, he suddenly dropped the hose and retrieved from the earth around his maple the green airplane. He stuffed it into his garbage can, already overflowing, and went back to his hosing.
At the back of the house, dogs imprisoned in small yards ran in circles. Telephone cables, electric wires, and clothes lines crossed and recrossed, giving the houses, light poles, and leafless trees the quality of a contour drawing, one continuous line. The Bentwood yard was covered with gravel threaded by a narrow brick path which branched out to an iron bench painted white, a stone cherub carrying a barely discernible cornucopia and to the lip of a small cement pool. Here and there were several yew trees growing in tubs and patches of mountain laurel which the Bentwoods had stolen, cutting by cutting, from Route 9 on the Jersey shore of the Hudson. Bare spots in the even texture of the gravel testified to the hole digging of cats.
Sophie stood for a moment at the back door. A white-and-gray cat straddled a wooden fence and watched a sparrow, motionless on the limb of an ailanthus tree. She didn’t know what she was thinking about as she pressed her forehead against the glass, but she felt a quick apprehension as though someone had walked into the room behind her. The house was silent in a special way on Saturday; she went from window to window, wishing herself dressed and out, yet staring passively at the street as though she were waiting for a sign.
Indolently, she ascended the stairs. Languidly, she dressed. But once on the sidewalk, her mood underwent an abrupt turn; as she walked up Court Street to the Borough Hall subway station, she felt exhilarated. She hadn’t told Charlie anything, really. Francis had probably been right about her—she did have a taste for melodrama, and Charlie’s nocturnal visit had stimulated it. The cat was healthy. She was going to get away with everything!
Dressed in a coat of French tweed, shod by a Florentine, she waited on the subway platform, her real life as masked as those of the people who strolled past her or leaned against the blackened scarred shafts that supported the ceiling.
Then to her dismay, her eyes filled with tears. She found a handkerchief in her bag and sheltered behind a cold-drink dispenser. There, she found two messages; one, written in chalk, said: Kiss me someone, and the other, scratched with a key or a knife, said: Fuck everybody except Linda.
In the train she opened the book she had taken from her night table. It was an English edition of Renée Mauperin. She stared at a drawing of the Goncourt brothers all the way to Fulton Street. As she turned the pages, her eyes fell upon a sentence: “Illnesses do their work secretly, their ravages are often hidden.” It would sound, she thought, less medical and more ominous in French, more universal. She closed the book and tried to pull a glove over her left hand; the pain came at once. It had been there all the time, lying in wait inside her hand. The train was crowded now, and there was the stale, warm, soupy smell of crowds. She could have taken a taxi into the city, but it would have been self-indulgence, made more obnoxious by the fact that she could afford one. Sophie was plagued by a vision of herself sliding effortlessly toward a sickly dependence on bodily comfort. Now, she breathed resolutely of the odious air and covered the throbbing hand with the other. The less attention she gave it, the better.
Before going to Claire’s, where she was not expected until noon, Sophie stopped by the Bazaar Provençal, a small kitchen-equipment shop on East Fifty-eighth Street. She wanted an omelet pan—it sat, substantial as its own metal, in a hazy domestic dream: a middle-aged couple sitting together over their omelette aux fines herbes, two glasses of white wine, one half of a grape cheese, two pears in a milk glass bowl….
“This one is made better,” said an elderly woman, whose sacklike chin was covered with a bristle of stiff gray hairs. “Is it the size you wanted?”
“How big is this?” Sophie asked.
“I’d have to measure it. You’ve got to season the pan first. You know that?”
Sophie bought instead an hourglass egg timer. Useless. The store smelled of excelsior packing, oiled metal, and the faintly brackish odor of Vallauris pottery. She handed the woman money.
“Your hand is bleeding,” the woman observed coldly.
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes. See? You must have banged it on something.”
A single drop of blood oozed from the wound.
“Oh. Perhaps I did.”
The woman opened a huge black purse and extracted from it a Kleenex, which she thrust at Sophie.
“We don’t have much space in here,” she said. “All these new shipments arrived yesterday.”
“I didn’t do it in here. I’m sure I didn’t,” Sophie said.
“People have to watch where they’re going.”
The woman pushed some coins into Sophie’s hand. The hairs on her chin were like little metal filings; they appeared to vibrate like antennae in search of prey.
“I’m not blaming you for it,” Sophie exclaimed suddenly.
“What! What!” the old woman cried, and threw up her hands as though to ward off a hex. Sophie stuck the unwrapped hourglass in her bag and fled.
Claire Fischer lived in a studio apartment not far from Central Park West. The outer texture of the building suggested powerfully an accretion of natural matter rather than man-made material. The whole surface was covered with dollops of some substance that looked like solidified guano. Beneath the black beams of the lobby’s low ceiling, a trickle of light seeped through filthy stained-glass windows. The apartments were all duplexes and commanded enormous rents. Sophie walked up the service stairs to the second floor, where she found Claire’s door ajar. She went in and felt, as usual, a disquieting perplexity when she looked at the two-story living room, the oak staircase leading to bedrooms on the balcony above, the marble fireplace with its Victorian grate, the massive shabby furniture. Claire called it thirties-stupid. Sophie sensed that in its profound show of indifference to planning, to decoration, there was an element inimical to her own sense of order: for that same reason, she coveted it. On every available surface Claire had piled her assemblages of shells and stones, dried seaweed, leaves, bits of worn glass and dried plants. The total effect was that of an obsessive attempt to re-create the natural world in miniature, but without design. It was an accumulation, not a display.
“Claire?” said Sophie.
“In here!” came an answering shout.
Sophie went to the kitchen beneath the balcony. Here, the apartment narrowed into sordidness. The kitchen was awful; roach caravans trailed across counters and walls, and the appliances might just as well have been in the city dump. Claire was stooping over a pail near the stove.
“What are you doing? What have you got there?”
“Look at this,” Claire said, without changing her stance or looking up. Sophie stood beside her and looked down into the pail. “That’s cornmeal on the top,” Claire explained. “The clams at the bottom will come up for it, you see, thereby clearing the sand from their craws. Isn’t that ingenious? Of me, not the clams. Did you say hello to Leon?”
“I didn’t know he was here,” Sophie replied.
Claire straightened up and presented Sophie with her grave, heavily lined face. Her eyes were bright blue, the whites faintly bloodshot. A network of thin red veins spread out from the center of her short blunt nose. When she smiled, as she did now, touching Sophie on the shoulder with one finger, Sophie saw the dim pink inside of her mouth, and little patches of gold where her teeth had been capped. Her short-cropped graying hair stood straight up all over her head. She often ran her hand through that thicket as though to assure herself it was still there. Although she was a heavy woman, she did not look plump—sturdy, rather. Habitually she stood with her feet wide apart, frequently looking down at the floor as though she distrusted its stability. She was dressed in a man’s shirt, a skirt made from an Indian cotton throw, white socks and alpargatas; the rope sole of one was partly unraveled. A scarf was tied in a knot around her middle.
“He’s probably lying down upstairs,” she said now. “He’s dreadfully tired. I think his wife is driving him into the ground.”
“I didn’t know he was married again,” Sophie said.
“He married a graduate student of his last spring, a dull, dull girl who’s convinced herself she’s a creature of unbridled lust. That’s what he tells me, anyhow. Will you have gin or whisky?”
“Gin.”
“He tells me a great deal more than I want to hear about that side of things. Do you want vermouth or tonic or what? He does like to treat me like his charlady instead of his first bride. He’s like most of them though—passionate selflessness until he jumps on you like the old monkey he is.”
“Tonic. Why don’t you tell him to keep it to himself?”
“That would hurt his feelings. He says she fooled him by writing a very good thesis on Henry James…some peculiar angle on his relationship to his brother…I don’t know. He was lavish in his praise—I’ll say that for him, he’s generous that way—and the next thing he knew she was swearing there was more between them than a silly old thesis about silly old Henry. He’s always been a brain lover, swears he wouldn’t touch a woman unless she had a stylish brain. Well, she’s absolutely dippy. He hates to go home at night, hides out in the university library. She’s always waiting for him behind the door, stark naked, liberated from intellectual concerns, his beast, she calls herself. I met them in the lobby of a theater one evening and she sulked for days, Leon tells me. Sulked over me!” She sniffed. “Sometimes I think there’s a goat quartered in this kitchen. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
In the living room, Claire fell into a monstrous chair covered with a kind of brown bearlike fuzz. Her skirt flew up. In contrast to the rest of her, her legs were thin, and blue veins showed through the white skin.
“You look elegant, Sophie. How are you?”
“Fine…no, not so fine.”
“Look at those shoes! Made by some European slave for a lira, right? What multitudes we all recline upon! I thought my vanity would subside by the time I was fifty, but it’s gotten worse. That’s why I dress this way. I’d rather look like an aged go-go girl than a middle-class frump. There used to be a tribe in Africa that flung women who were fifty over a cliff. But I suppose they’ve become enlightened by now. How’s Otto?”
“The office is in a mess. Charlie Russel is leaving the firm. Otto doesn’t say much about it. Charlie is taking it very hard.”
“Otto didn’t kick him out, did he?”
Sophie hesitated. “No, it wasn’t that. They weren’t getting along.”
“Well, then, it’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. It’s been a long association. Charlie seems very bitter. He talks as if Otto had somehow betrayed him.”
“I don’t believe that. I wouldn’t believe anything Charlie said.”
“You don’t know anything about him.”
“That weekend I spent in Flynders with all of you was enough.”
“You sound like Otto,” Sophie said sharply. “He doesn’t think about people more than two minutes at a time, then by some supernatural agency presumes to arrive at total insight.”
“Total insight!” repeated Claire, laughing. “Sounds like a depot in North Dakota. Listen, I’m not claiming any such thing. In fact, I didn’t get Charlie at all—it was the way he offered himself, like a platter of antipasto, then stood back and seemed to watch one consume it. I didn’t like him. His attitudes were impeccable, all that good liberal stuff spread out before one, so reassuring, so appetizing, so flattering. I don’t like impeccable attitudes.”
“No holy fools enter paradise,” said a voice from the ceiling. Sophie looked up and saw Leon Fischer leaning against the balcony, looking down morosely at Claire. He was fat and yellowish skinned and his blazer jacket was too tight.
“Come on down, Leon,” Claire said. “Come and see Sophie.”
“I can see her from here,” Leon said crossly. “Claire, I knocked over a box on your dresser. What new madness has taken hold of you?”
“What box?”
“Full of horrible little instruments like bugs. They’ve all rolled away under the bed and the furniture. I started to pick them up but I was overwhelmed by the dust. Don’t you ever clean up around here?”
“No, I don’t, Leon.”
“What are you doing with all these misshapen little horns and flutes and drums?”
“I play with them,” Claire said complacently. “Since I can’t afford the large ones, I have small ones.”
Leon started down the stairs very slowly, gripping the banister with a hand that looked as soft as a glove full of water.
“Who is a holy fool?” Claire asked, watching his downward progress with a look of intense concern, as though he were a child whose first staircase venture this was.
“I was thinking of my son. I don’t know whom Blake had in mind.”
“Do you want a drink?”
“No. What have you done with the Château Margaux?”
“It’s taken care of.”
“What have you done with it?” He walked toward the sofa like a convalescent from surgery, sinking down next to Sophie and emitting an enormous quavering sigh.
“Are you working on anything?” Claire asked Sophie.
“Not at the moment. Perhaps I will, later on.”
“How pleasant it must be not to be working on anything,” said Leon. “How pleasant to read, uncompromised by purpose. You must be rich.”
“I don’t feel seriously about work any more,” Sophie said coldly. “It’s not a matter of money.”
Leon coughed up a creaking laugh. “If you didn’t have money, you’d find it a serious matter,” he said.
“I’ve done a Russian movie,” Claire said. “Thank God they’re still stuck in realism, Zola-crazy. Subtitling their films is like captioning a child’s picture book.”
“I’m Zola-crazy,” said Leon. “I’m crazy about everything up to January first, 1900. What did you do with that wine, Claire?”
“Why don’t you try a translation?” Sophie asked Claire.
“It takes too long. I have no patience for anything except cooking. And the pay is insulting.”
“That’s because you’re rich. The rich are always being insulted by money…. Why are you wearing your hair in an Afro, Claire? Why the hell don’t you pull yourself together?”
“Go back to your idiot wife, old man,” Claire said exasperatedly. “Are you hungry, Sophie? I’ve done a lovely lunch.”
“I should be home,” Leon announced to no one in particular. “I should be reading a ghastly M.A. thesis. It tortures me. You can’t imagine how it tortures me…. The woman is a teacher who wants to advance herself and she hates the subject, which she chose herself, and she hates me. It’s all a swindle.”
“When Leon and I were married, centuries ago,” Claire began, “we went to many meetings and sometimes a meeting turned into a party and I sat at Leon’s feet and listened to the men talk. Oh…how they talked! It was, I guess, civilized babble. It certainly didn’t resemble anything I’d ever heard in Concord where I grew up—and yet, what I remember, all I remember, is not what they all talked about, but the wives, especially the older ones, waiting like pensioners for a personal word or two.”
“Nonsense!” said Leon impatiently. “You’re being grossly sentimental. You always hated intellectuals because they made you feel like a Gentile poop!”
“Intellectuals!” she cried. “Those dilettantes! Those self-aggrandizing fops!”
“Oh, Claire!” he protested. “Oh, don’t talk like that!” He looked genuinely hurt.
“Don’t yell at me,” she said.
“You upset me. Those were serious people—”
“All right, all right, I’m sorry,” she said. He shook his head. They looked for a long time at each other, then Leon, speaking very softly, asked, “Did you put the wine in the icebox? You never learn anything. I’m sure you’ve stuck it in the icebox.”
Claire scowled and shifted in her chair just enough to give the impression she was turning her back on Leon. “Are you going to Flynders for the summer?” she asked Sophie.
“I think we will.”
“Your husband is a lawyer, isn’t he?” Leon said. “You have children? No? You’re better off. I have a son by my second wife. I’m sure you remember her, Claire.” He giggled faintly. “He’s twenty, with the mind of a newborn. I got a letter from him yesterday—he must have found a stamp in the gutter—which I made the error of reading before my first class—nineteenth-century American fiction—and it was supposed to be…a poem. About the great oneness of everything—you ought to read Freud’s letter to Romain Rolland on that, by the way—about his father, who denies the oneness of everything, about his prayer for his father to be liberated from his bourgeois bonds. It is his belief that history began in 1948, the year of his birth. I have tried to dissuade him of this delusion, but my knowledge is no match for his ignorance. At the very hint of an idea from me, he smiles at me gently as though I were eternally damned. He wears a rubber band around his hair to keep it out of his eyes when he studies the wall in front of him, where his visions arise, and he lives in a horrible slum house in East Orange. If only he wanted to save something, the world, for example. But he is stupid, stupid. The only foundation of his privilege, me, has to lecture forever on William Dean Howells, who bores me sick. Is that justice?”
“You have no memory,” said Claire sadly.
“It’s all I do have.”
“In 1939, you handed out leaflets on Sixth Avenue. There wasn’t a question you didn’t have an answer for.”
“And you and I lived together,” Leon said.
“We never talked about love.”
“It wasn’t necessary.”
“We were all of one sex,” she said, laughing wildly.
“Yes, yes….” Leon cried excitedly. “No one paid for us! On Fridays I went to the Bronx and lit candles for my mother, reading on the subway, happy, greedy. And I worked for the Podjerskis and, although they paid me next to nothing, sometimes they asked me for advice because I was a college boy! They drank tea all day long, leaving their greasy fingerprints on the glasses, and they knew all their employees by first name; sometimes they played pinochle with the old man—oh, what was his name?—who ran the turret lathe. On Fridays, they closed the shop early so we could all get home before sunset. Once I cut a slice of salami in front of them with a knife I had just used for cheese, and they screamed with horror, would have fired me outright if I hadn’t been going to night school.”
“I must reheat the Potage Fontange,” Claire announced. She retied the scarf around her waist, which had come loose as she smoked and listened, her glance resting on Leon, then on Sophie, with remote interest, like someone who does not particularly care for fish but finds herself imprisoned in an aquarium.
“Why must you dress that way!” Leon exclaimed irritably. “Mother Garbage! Do you think character is an excuse for anything? Oh, you should have seen her in the old days, Margaret…”
“Sophie.”
“Sophie. What a blue-eyed beauty she was! And moved like lightning, fixed leaking toilet tanks and knew how to repair electric plugs and painted like a pro…”
“It was Kemtone,” Claire called from the kitchen. “We moved into those awful rooms with busted windows and torn linoleum on the floors, ceilings the color of rotten peaches…. I painted everything with it. Remember?”
“She couldn’t cook then,” he said. “We lived on canned macaroni and bacon and whatever I could steal from my mother, like the salami I used to take for my lunch. What has become of us all?”
“Age,” said Claire from the kitchen entrance.
“And so many already dead.”
Sophie felt that she was sitting in a rain of ashes. She leaned forward, her head down, her eyes half closed, feeling the soft tide mounting to her knees. The ice had melted in her drink. Leon moved heavily on the sofa beside her. Suddenly she felt his ponderous hand on her shoulder. The fingers moved with the restlessness of an elderly person. She turned toward him. He was looking at her entreatingly.
“She says it’s age. No one wants to talk about that, do they? No. Humiliations of the bowels. My own body has turned against me. Did you hear how she said that one word? With that female coziness? Trying to neutralize it?” His hand fell away from Sophie’s shoulder.
“There’s nothing one can do about it,” Sophie said, but he didn’t hear her for at the same time he had begun to shout. “You never did pay any attention to me!”
“I always paid attention to you, Leon,” Claire said, coming back to the living room, drying her hands slowly with a towel. “I just didn’t listen. We are not married any more.”
“Damn you! Why didn’t you marry again!”
“I didn’t feel like it,” she said, smiling.
“Ah, the truth, at last!” he cried. “Behind all that frantic energy I thought was so admirable is nothing but monstrous sloth. It takes energy to live with someone else.”
“We always wrangle like this,” Claire said to Sophie. “Just ignore it, if you can. We can get along nicely when we cook together.” She smiled and returned to the kitchen.
“It’s all that’s left,” Leon said in a suddenly weak voice. “It’s what is left of civilization. You take raw material and you transform it. That is civilization. Physical love is all raw meat. That’s why everyone’s so preoccupied with it now. I have been told by a colleague ten years older than myself—as if it were possible for anybody to be ten years older than I am—that salvation comes from staring at the pubic region of strangers, and freedom, from inducing in myself, by the use of a chemical, the kind of ecstatic lunacy in which I spent most of my adolescence, a condition I attribute solely to the strength of my body at that time and the conviction I had then that I would see socialism in the United States during my lifetime. Now that my bones are weak, my brain is stronger. I don’t expect…anything. But I cannot bear the grotesque, lying piety of my own unhinged contemporaries. One man, a literary star”—and here he broke off, laughed once, choked and shook his head—“oh, yes, a star, told me he only regretted the pill had not yet been developed in his own youth. All those girls who might have been his! In this age of generalized cock, is this the whole revelation toward which my life has been directed? I would, in any case, prefer to contemplate the organ of a horse. It is handsomer, larger and more comic than anything my fellow man has to show. It is the age of baby shit, darling. Don’t kid yourself. My privacy has been violated—what I’ve admired and thought about all my life has been debased. Poor bodies…poor evil-smiling gross flesh. Perhaps we’re going downhill, all of us.” He reached out and pressed her shoulder. “Do you understand me?” he asked.
“A little,” she said, looking at his exhausted face, pitying him for his harshness which might be only an old habit of words. Do you understand my suffering? is what he had really asked her. She leaned toward him just a little. He patted her shoulder with something akin to tenderness—perhaps it was tenderness, grown clumsy from disuse.
“Come and eat my beautiful soup,” said Claire. Leon held Sophie’s arm, and she adjusted her pace to conform to his hesitant shuffle. The light which came through the dining room windows was so murky it seemed to have texture. On the bare table were soup bowls with covers shaped like artichokes and huge faded linen napkins of pale apricot. Leon, standing at the head of the table, was smiling. It was the kind of unconscious smile, Sophie thought, that touches the face in the same way that light falls upon it.
They ate the soup and Leon asked, in a tone of such gentle inquiry that Claire shot him a suspicious glance, where she had found fresh sorrel? When they had finished, Claire brought in eggs poached in black butter and a bottle of white Bordeaux. After a bowl of fruit was placed in the middle of the table and the espresso coffee was poured, Leon seemed to be dozing.
“He’s in a state of innocence,” Claire whispered to Sophie. Leon grinned sleepily. The strain around his eyes had momentarily disappeared and Sophie saw what he may have looked like so many years before when he had handed out leaflets on Sixth Avenue. She reached for a handful of grapes. Claire, looking idly to see what she had taken from the bowl, touched the back of Sophie’s hand with a roughened fingernail. “What’s that?”
“A cat bit me.”
“Someone you know, I hope.”
“It was a stray.”
“Have you had it looked at?”
Sophie relinquished the stem of grapes and withdrew her hand. “It’s nothing,” she said.
“A llama bit me once,” said Leon in a dreamy voice. “I reluctantly took Benny to the children’s zoo when he was small—it was supposed to be the thing to do—and a dirty demented llama reached over the fence and clamped its jaws on my hand. It was like being bitten by dirty laundry.”
“Cat bites are always something,” Claire said.
“It’s much better,” said Sophie.
“The grapes are sour,” Leon complained.
“Let me see it. When did it happen?” Claire demanded.
Sophie shook her head, saying decisively, “It’s of no consequence.”
“You will duck into supermarkets, won’t you, Claire? God! If I had your leisure, I’d take my shopping sack all over the city before I’d settle for sour grapes.”
“Oh, Leon, shut up!”
He rose from the table with startling energy, considering he had seemed to be on the edge of physical collapse. He began to stack plates. Sophie pushed back her chair, ready to help. “No,” Claire said. “Don’t touch them. He always does them. It’s part of the agreement.”
The two women stood, for a moment, at the window. A truck went by, a car, a man carrying an empty pail; two short women in tall hats held each other’s arms tightly and moved defiantly through invisible crowds.
“Are you ever afraid around here?”
“No,” Claire said. “I’m not afraid of anything like that.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Not at the moment. Not this week, anyhow.”
Plates banged in the kitchen. “Let’s go sit down,” said Claire. They returned to the living room. “It’s this way,” Claire said. “If someone shoots me in the street, it will be quick, like that! I’d rather that than be waiting in a hospital operating room for someone to walk down the corridor from the laboratory with the dirty news on a piece of glass.”
“Your kitchen sponge looks like a spoiled liver,” Leon shouted from the kitchen.
“Use your shirt,” Claire said. She contemplated Sophie, who stirred uncomfortably, not knowing why she should feel so. She knew Claire was inclined, at times, to strike a somewhat oracular stance—something of a fraud, wasn’t she? Still, Sophie fidgeted.
“You haven’t called for so long,” Claire said at last. “I wondered what hit you. And you know me, I never call anybody.”
“I don’t know. I felt like seeing you.”
“Oh, I’m glad to see you. Things are pretty bleak around here, and there’s something luxurious about you that reminds me of nice things. But you’re so abstracted. I could feel it all the time Leon and I were doing our crazy show. We’ve known each other a long time now. Are you back with that man again? Can’t remember his name. Maybe you never told me. You were so angry when I told you I thought he sounded ignominious.”
“Because you thought I was bad to do what I did…”
“Bad, bad, bad,” Claire said, smiling. “Yes, I did think that. But it was easy for me to say, I never…” She hesitated and turned toward the kitchen, where they could both see Leon cleaning up with the single-minded, controlled ferocity of a performing bear. “I never had anything like that,” Claire continued. “I suppose the nearest I’ve come to it is him.” She gestured over her shoulder at the kitchen. “And not when we were married. Not then. But now. You must think it’s ridiculous…but he touches me, you see. I don’t feel that I have enough time left for anything but truth…about myself. I think I’ve never really liked sex. I’ll tell you something funny. Sometimes he sleeps here with me. We lie together all night long with our arms around each other, and I wake up in the night and I am happy. It is a kind of loving, isn’t it, Sophie? We can just be the way we are, with each other. If he didn’t come by to see me, I think I’d blow away like milkweed. Sometimes, in the late afternoons, I sit for hours until evening comes. When it is dark—not that it can ever be really dark in the city—I get up and make myself a little supper, a chop, some frozen lima beans. If he’s here, of course, I have to be a gourmet. Days like paper chains. All I’ve got is that old man whom I dumped twenty years ago after he knocked up a Trotskyite lady vamp named Carla.” She leaned forward with sudden intensity. “He’s scared,” she said softly. “He thinks one of his students might try to drug him. He says they harangue him about drugs all the time. Now he’s afraid to have coffee in the cafeteria at the university. He even thinks the faculty dining room might be dangerous. He told me just before you arrived that he now knows how scared old ladies are of being raped. He says that’s exactly the way he feels….” She looked back at the kitchen. The corners of her mouth turned down. “Although, God knows, he’s been on a trip ever since he married that sex-addled bluestocking of his,” she said disgustedly. “Oh…you see how it is. I started out with you and ended up with myself.”
Claire was waiting for her to say something but Sophie was silent, bemused.
“Sophie?”
“No, no. It ended long ago,” Sophie said. “I saw him once. He was polite. That’s all. I did want to see you and I was grateful when you asked me to come. I’m depressed by my idleness, I guess.”
“Neither of us had children,” Claire said, a note of wonder in her voice.
Sophie laughed. “Come off it!” she said brusquely, getting back at Claire for something, perhaps for waking up happy in the middle of the night.
“Well…how is Otto?”
“You already asked me that,” Sophie replied. “He’s fine, considering. I think he’s better off than some, perhaps because he’s not much given to introspection. He’s too preoccupied with fighting off a mysterious effluvium he thinks will drown him. He thinks garbage is an insult directed against him personally, and he’s still trying to wash the dishes before we’ve finished eating.”
“What bitchiness!” exclaimed Leon, who was standing in the door, wiping a glass. “No wonder men weep.”
“I haven’t seen any men weeping,” said Claire.
But Sophie felt a tremor that seemed to strike her heart. She knew her face had reddened and her breath was short. She had not meant to sound so…baleful. And last night, she had wanted Charlie to go on, implying Otto was inhuman, shut away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Leon is right. When I open my mouth, toads fall out. I’m sorry.”
Leon looked surprised, then embarrassed. He held up the glass. “Claire, this is the way to dry a glass!” But the hectoring tone was not in his voice. Claire, murmuring something about a chicken, got up from her chair and went to the kitchen, and Sophie, reluctant to be left alone with the echo of her own words, followed Claire.
“I’d better go,” she said dubiously, looking at Leon as he mopped up a counter, and then at Claire, who was staring down at a large roasting chicken in a pan. “No need for you to go,” Claire said over her shoulder.
“What are you going to do with that bird?” Leon asked.
“Tarragon and cream,” she answered.
“Who’s coming?”
“Edgar and his new friend, some hairdresser.”
“Can I stay?”
“No.”
“What lousy company you keep! And I suppose you’ll use those clams you’ve been torturing and my wine!”
Claire, a cigarette drooping from her lips, was sprinkling the chicken; a few cigarette ashes floated down to join the tarragon.
“Fairies!” exclaimed Leon, rinsing the sponge.
“Let’s have tea at the Plaza next week,” Claire said to Sophie. “I’ll dress up and we’ll sit in the Palm Court and talk about the war and movies.”
“Women that hang out with homosexuals are spiders,” said Leon, touching the chicken breast with one soft finger.
“Thanks for lunch, Claire. It was nice to see you, Leon,” Sophie said.
Leon laughed. “It’s never nice to see me,” he said. A hank of gray hair fell over one of his pouchy eyes. With a quick touch, Claire pushed it back over his forehead. He grunted and scowled.
At the door, Claire said, “Take care of your cat problem.” She handed Sophie her coat. “What a pretty one! Where is it from? Ireland? France? You carry the globe on your back, Sophie. Don’t forget to phone me and don’t worry about Charlie and Otto. Otto will be better off on his own. Which reminds me…wait!” And she left Sophie abruptly and went up the stairs, taking two at a time, her skirt flying above her white legs. When she returned, she was holding a book. “Otto loaned me that a year ago. Don’t tell him, but I didn’t finish it. He was so pleased when I said I was interested in reading it. And I was, at the time. I did start it.” She handed it over. It was The Common Law, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Holding it, Sophie felt she had misplaced Otto, and the book was the only tangible evidence of his continuing existence somewhere. She was filled with foreboding and sadness, and her good-bye to Claire was almost inaudible.
The door closed.