CHAPTER THREE

Restaurant

Carlos and Laura were first out of the elevator. They hurried through the lobby, their arms entwined, grinning, ogling each other, their heads bobbing, fowl-like with laughter, forsaking the others in a fit of mutual appreciation. Behind them, Desmond trailed; reluctance thickened his stride; he looked with contempt at the group of elderly women, who, for an instant, clustered about him, inquiring excitedly of each other the direction of some banquet hall. He could not bear the sweet, dusty odor of talc that wafted toward him from their bosoms and necks. Peter Rice paused at the tobacco and magazine stand and, realizing that Clara was watching him, explained that he always looked to see the new paperback books.

“They’re always the same, though the titles change,” he said. “Do you need anything? Cigarettes, chewing gum? Band-Aids?”

Her first thought was that Peter was perpetuating the mocking tone of the evening, but then she heard, as though her ears had cleared after an explosion, the obliging plainness of his voice. She thanked him and said no, she didn’t need anything. He disconcerted her by patting her shoulder, saying, “It’ll go better now. It will be all right in the restaurant.”

By now, Clara suspected all that was said to her was equivocal. She had never been able to control the self-betraying part of her nature awakened in her mother’s presence, compelling her to submit to a profound intent in Laura to destroy certainty. Clara’s ankles felt weak. There seemed no way she would ever get through the revolving doors ahead of her. Somewhere, unimaginably, was the other ordinary life she lived; she grieved for it as though it were lost, stolen. Wearied by division, she was as close to weeping as to laughter.

Peter, who had simply meant to reassure her—she had looked so confused standing there—was alarmed at the naked face of this unknown young woman whose body was inclining toward him so yearningly.

“Shall we move on?” he asked brusquely, and he began to walk toward the revolving doors. Clara followed, vaguely comforted by the touch of damp street air which each revolution of the doors brought into the lobby. She passed an enormous potted fern and, reaching out to touch it, found it to be made of plastic. A bellboy hurried in front of her. Only a few days ago, in another hotel, a bellboy had brought her a message: Room 314. Her silk slip on the arm of a chair, Harry Dana’s shirt crumpled on the seat, the outer chill and inner heat of an illicit meeting. She had said, “You wear a ring too?”

“You know I do.”

“She gave it to you?”

“It was a double-ring ceremony.”

“But who decided on that?”

“Shut up…”

“But you loved her, then, didn’t you?”

“Love…”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“You’re angry, not sorry.”

“No…no…I really am…sorry.”

But Harry Dana had been right. She had been angry.

Peter Rice was saying he wasn’t really hungry. “My appetite is simply fading away. I thought I had a fatal disease, but the doctor—” He went through the door, waiting for her just outside. She came through and breathed deeply. Oh, the sweet, rain-washed air! She was dazed with the sense of having been rescued, and she turned, smiling, to Peter.

“—the doctor said nothing was wrong. Age, I suppose. But I remember how nice it was seeing the table set, picking up the fork…. How funny! I had my first cooking lesson the day my mother was buried, right after the funeral. I was sixteen, I think, or thereabouts. My father’s brother took me off with him to a little stone house where he lived, not far from your mother’s mansion—”

“Well!” exclaimed Laura from the sidewalk. A doorman rushed past her to open the door of a taxi which had just drawn to the curb. Laura fell back as though she’d been struck, then she elaborately straightened up. Desmond put his arm around her but she shook him off, her face frozen. Carlos began to walk down the street.

“And,” Peter continued, putting his hands in the pockets of his gray coat, “my uncle thought it would distract me to make a pie. Poor fellow, a bachelor, he lived such a silent life there by himself. We decided on a custard pie.”

Laura stood unmoving, watching as they walked down the steps toward her.

“It was one of the finest hours of my life,” Peter continued. “The old man was so sweet, walking around in knitted socks my mother had made for him, while we waited for the pie to cook. I remember exactly how I felt—I felt that life was hilarious, infinite, glorious! Then we went to check on the pie—”

“Will you shut up!” Laura shouted. An elderly couple stopped dead in their tracks. A black woman of indeterminate age began to laugh loudly, disdainfully, as she passed Laura. Desmond waved his arms. “Puppy!” he cried. “Oh, darling puppy…”

“Actually, Laura, I wasn’t speaking to you,” Peter Rice said expressionlessly. “I was talking to your daughter.” And Clara, who had clutched his arm, felt it tremble.

Laura covered her face with her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She looked at the three of them. “It began to seem we would never get to the restaurant, never sail on the ship.” She smiled, took Peter’s hands in her own. “Oh, Peter! For God’s sake, forgive old Laura! Old fool Laura, Peter?”

He gave her a sign, some gesture of absolution, but he was unable to smile, only doing something vague with one hand, a nod of his head, all he could manage against the antipathy he felt. The savagery with which, a few moments ago in the corridor, she had delivered her “literary” comment had shocked him because, he had imagined at first, of her daughter’s presence. All evening, he had seen Clara as an outsider, somewhat pathetic, but young and attractive, and who wasn’t a little undone in the bosom of the family? Especially this family. But wasn’t there always a latent witness in the outsider? And on the face of this uneasy young woman as she had looked at them up there in the corridor hadn’t he seen an expression of utter repugnance? Wasn’t that why he felt at this moment, after Laura had behaved toward him with such atrocious rudeness, that he was the ignominious one?

Self-judgment came over him like a faint into consciousness; he saw himself, an imitator of birds, a middle-aged man on a strange kind of moral bender that cost him nothing, not even a conventional debasement of the flesh. As for his protests—prig’s squeaks—against Laura’s more obvious excesses, her absurd racial obsessions, what were they but a means of persuading himself of his decency? His one indulgence, that was how he thought of Laura, in a life grown bare of delight, narrowed to work and an exiguous care and feeding of his body….

Laura pressed her rain-wet head against his shoulder. “Darling,” she whispered, “you’re angry as hell…” and then sighed and asked Desmond meekly which was the way to the wonderful restaurant?

“Just a block or two south, then west another block,” he replied in an enervated way. They set off. Ahead of them, down the block, Carlos waited with bowed head. The rain fell steadily. Empty of the commerce of the day, the sidewalk was nearly deserted; only the traffic went on and on, a huge dull groan of machinery sounding through the drone of the downpour. In shop windows things sat on little spotlit platforms. Among a display of noodles in the window of a grocery shop, an orange cat stood up and arched its back. Desmond saw it out of the corner of his eye; Laura moved against him, large in her fur coat. He glanced up, above the store. There, silhouetted against a window, a young woman stood, her hands among the leaves of a hanging plant.

A rush of memory overcame Desmond, a dark, rich flood of sensation; a room, his first room away from home, away from college, a couch, a chair, a metal bookcase, his own stove, a table whereon lay an open book, The Magic Mountain, a set of keys, his own keys, a pair of wet and muddied boots which he had just yanked off after a walk through Boston Common in the first snowfall of the year, the steamy windows, himself standing in the middle of the room, twenty-two years old, rubbing his hands to bring back the circulation, laughing all by himself, still out of breath from the three flights of stairs up which he had fled taking two great stretching steps at a time. Now he knew what he had felt. But then? Had he known he had had the freedom to fly in any direction he wanted? And yet all the strength of that moment, of his youth, had led him to this moment, to the arching cat among the dusty boxes, the girl who was even now retreating like a dream behind the rain-streaked windows, to this woman beside him toward whom every motion, every deluded impulse of his life had brought him. There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one’s vision of the past. Caught up in the euphoria of his discovery, he turned to Laura to tell her about it all. She was huddled into her coat, her face tight and clenched against the rain. God! How drunk he must be, he realized in that instant, and with all the drunkard’s fatuous claim for the singularity of his feelings. He didn’t need to talk to Laura about whatever it was he’d been thinking; he needed drinks.

“What about the pie?” Clara asked Peter.

“The pie,” he muttered. He looked at her. “But what are you thinking about?” he asked her. “You look so—harrowed.”

Disarmed perhaps by such a personal question, she answered him truthfully. “I’m ashamed of myself,” she said. “For things I don’t do.”

He didn’t inquire what she meant. He gestured ahead toward Laura who was walking between Carlos and Desmond. “Yes—well, one has to take your mother seriously, but not in the usual sense. It doesn’t get one very far, trying to understand her. She is as she seems. But about the pie. I can’t think what we put in it, yeast it must have been, because the custard had risen a foot above the crust, like an egg top hat, and when we took it out of the oven and put it on the table, it tipped over—very, very slowly—and bowed to us, touched the oilcloth, and then simply exploded. I can’t think when I’ve laughed so—and my mother just dead.”

She had hardly listened. What had he meant? That her mother had to be taken seriously? How in God’s name did he think she took her? And then he said, “Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.”

Desmond paused. “I think we turn right here,” he said.

“What do you mean, Desmond, you think?” asked Laura quietly. They had stopped beneath a traffic light on the corner. Laura’s chin had a greenish tinge. Then she smiled, forgivingly, it seemed to Clara. It occurred to her that Laura was forgiving them all for being afraid of her.

“Darling, are your feet soaked?” asked Laura. Only Carlos refrained from looking down at his shoes.

“It is there,” Desmond said. “See?”

They looked down the street where he was pointing. A few yards away they saw a narrow awning and on it the words: Le Canard Privé.

“The private duck?” asked Clara.

Laura’s laugh rang out. “Be careful how you say that!” she cried.

“It means a decoy,” Peter said.

“Wouldn’t it be a good clue for a treasure hunt,” remarked Laura as she took Desmond’s arm. Carlos led the way, a renewed energy in his walk. Soon he’ll escape, thought Clara, he’s got his great cat’s walk back, he’s already left us.

Carlos was relieved. His anguished expectation that he would miss an appointment later that evening with a young man from Newark had been a waste of emotion. A minute ago, he’d caught sight of a clock in the window of the dry cleaner’s; the evening was not more than a few minutes off schedule, and his patience, though tried, had not yet given way. He would, after all, be able to meet Lance—who had recently changed his name from Leroy as a consequence of a horoscope reading—at the agreed upon hour. Yet he still feared Laura’s power to arouse in him a prodigious, engulfing indignation, one that had burst forth in their last meeting some months earlier and sent him cursing from her presence. Blundering into the street, he had run into a pyramid of garbage cans which had left him bruised and covered with rotting things.

“How nice it looks,” Peter Rice said, peering through the shadowy window of the restaurant. “Don’t you think so?” No one replied.

Inside the restaurant, Desmond Clapper straightened up, looked insolently above the heads of the diners, and spoke a few words to the maître d’; his tone was cold with the tyranny people display in an environment shaped by their ability to pay. Laura observed him with amusement. They were led to a table, chairs were pulled out, a waiter fussily moved into the exact center of the table a small china duck with somewhat wilted flowers poking out of holes in its back.

Along the walls of the narrow room banquettes were ranged; above them, painted on the walls, were portraits of bewigged young women who gazed down upon the consumers with expressions of faint disdain. Only an occasional clink of plate or tableware troubled the hush imposed by drapery, linen, and carpeting, and among the round tables in the center of the room, dark-jacketed waiters stood poised in the dim light, their pale faces like battered moons.

“Drinks?” asked Desmond importantly, his head raising to summon a waiter.

“Do you know the story of Schopenhauer’s porcupines?” Peter asked, smiling. “They were very cold, but when they drew together for warmth, they pricked each other, so they moved away. But they couldn’t bear the cold either. So they—”

“I hate aphorisms,” Laura said.

“That isn’t an aphorism,” replied Peter.

“They’re all so pompous,” Laura continued. “Like this—the impotent man detests the satyr—or—the satyr trembles in the presence of the impotent man—or—between the impotent man and the satyr there is no significant opposition.” And she burst into raucous laughter. “You’re impossible, Laura,” said Peter.

The waiter was bending over them like a beetle inclining earthward from a leaf.

“What’ll you have, beautiful kiddo?” Desmond asked of Clara who was sitting next to him. “Well—nothing, really,” she said.

“Oh, come on…have a bourbon sour. You and me, that’s what we’ll have,” Desmond said conspiratorially. “Right?” Peter wanted nothing. Carlos, reluctantly, asked for whiskey. Laura said they must have a bottle of good wine. “No stinting, Mr. Clapper,” she said archly.

“Don’t you want to know what the porcupines did?” asked Peter.

“I know what they did,” Laura said haughtily. “They compromised on a middle distance. I know how you fancy such things, Peter, but those silly tales have nothing to do with human lives. I’ll tell you a real story I read in the newspaper this morning. A man was trying to get into his apartment through a window. He’d had a fight with his wife and she’d hidden his key. It so happened he was visiting his lady friend whose apartment was next to his own. How do you like that! So he climbed through her window, toward his, and fell four stories to the ground.”

“My God! What a stupid story,” Carlos said.

Laura spread her fingers out on the tablecloth. “You see, the trouble was that he’d lost the fingers of his left hand in an accident. Now tell me a cautionary fable, Peter dear, about my life, about your life.”

“I can’t do a thing for you, Laura,” Peter replied. But Carlos looked at his sister with revulsion. “What a morbid story. I suppose you think there’s drama in it. Why, it’s about pure stupidity! You’re always trying to put something over, prove the pointlessness of everything…was the man killed?”

Laura, who had been looking at Carlos while he spoke with an odd intense expression of hope, suddenly threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek. “Yes, he was killed,” she said as though she pitied not the man but Carlos himself.

But Carlos wanted none of her pity. He moved back in his chair, a brooding look of calculation on his face. Laura’s story had cast him down, thrown a shadow across his expectations. He had hated both the relentless, triumphant way she had told the story and the story itself—the two females, wife and mistress in separate rooms, the maimed man swinging between them, falling, broken on the street. The future seemed already done with; his anticipation faded. He watched his sister’s fingers creeping toward him on the tablecloth. He’d always detested that morbid habit of hers, that staring at and fidgeting with her hands. He felt exhausted! When would Laura give up her pretense that they were a family? One grew out, away from family, the real connections of one’s life elsewhere. How sick he was of Desmond’s condescension toward him! There was his niece across the table, so milky and moist in her female youthfulness, but her face had the pallor of fear and strain. She was so humble with Laura. If he had believed in advice, he would have told her it was the worst way to be. Didn’t she sense the power of her youth? But she was still lying there, between her mother’s legs, still only just born, weak, helpless. And he thought of his own mother among the old women in the home; they would have been given their supper early like children, and he thought, the enormous voyages of our lives that lead us only back to the beginning.

No one had spoken for a while. Clara shivered slightly, and Peter, on her other side, looked at her questioningly. “Are you cold?” he asked. “No, no…it was that ghost that walks over graves….”

Peter unfolded his napkin with fussy care, but he was thinking about something else, hardly aware of what his hands were doing. Carlos saw that the fluttering white cloth had caught the attention of a small, pale young man at the table next to theirs. His head was covered with damp-looking curls, his cheeks and chin were hidden in black facial hair. Slowly, he turned his bespectacled eyes toward Carlos, they were large, expressionless. He was talking to a young woman, talking to her even though he was staring fixedly at Carlos. Carlos leaned to his right to hear what the young man was saying. He was talking about money; the young woman appeared enraptured. Suddenly, the eyes behind the large glasses narrowed and he shot at Carlos a look of dead dislike, at the same time lowering his voice.

Carlos felt cheered. Laura, staring pensively at the china duck, had not seen the little incident. “Peter!” exclaimed Carlos enthusiastically. “Laura mentioned you were going to be made a chieftain at that publishing house of yours? Gosh! Isn’t that wonderful?”

Peter looked at him in astonishment. The waiter placed the bourbon sours and the whiskey on the table. “Sure you won’t have a drink?” Desmond inquired of Peter.

“I’ll wait for the wine,” Peter said, still looking at Carlos in surprise. “My old liver…Where on earth did Laura get that idea?” he asked. “I’m just an editor, that’s all.”

“Why don’t we have champagne, darling?” Laura asked. “But—gee—I think you might have taken care of ordering wine earlier, you know, when you made our reservation, the way people order birthday cakes.” Then, to Desmond’s evident distress, Laura began to sing “Happy birthday, dear Desmond,” in a deep voice, her face bent toward the table.

“Send the sommelier!” Desmond cried to the waiter, attracting the attention of people at several tables. Carlos glanced at the young man. He was clearly making an effort not to look at Carlos. His small, neat hands like the paws of a mouse lay each on either side of his plate. Suddenly he turned, looked straight at Carlos, opened his mouth in a perfect O and bit down, then turned back to his lady friend. Carlos fell back against his chair, convulsed with suppressed laughter. His own childishness made him hilarious. He groaned under his breath.

“I think we’re all a bit tight,” Laura remarked. “Carlosito, stop trying to pick up that poor boy. Miss Clara, I want to hear more about your job. And as for you, editor Rice—by the way, I never said anything to my brother about promotions—I want to know how the devil you abide going to a job where you detest everyone? Crazed writers, you said. And then Desmond will give you our itinerary, which is marvelous….”

The sommelier, a small, frail man, came to their table. He looked as if he had been sleeping in an inclined position and had not yet straightened up.

“I’m feeling a little dizzy,” Clara whispered to Peter. “Do you think I should go outside and get some fresh air? It’s so close in here.”

“Now, don’t be cheap,” she heard her mother warn Desmond, who was looking at the wine card.

Peter said softly, “It is close but you look fine. Imagine a pond on a spring afternoon, a few trees around it, willow perhaps, a meadow….”

To her surprise, the image of just such a pond slid into her mind, and with it, a bittersweet recall of the outside natural world, the coarse shifting earth upon which squatted these hotel and restaurant strongholds, so close, muffled, airless. Clara breathed deeply and tasted vanilla. She saw the young man at the next table eating a pudding of some sort, taking little scoops with his spoon and after each one, wiping his mouth with guilty haste. He’s afraid a bit of dessert will hang from his beard, she thought, with impersonal sympathy—she found his hirsuteness unappetizing—knowing her own fear of mouth-droppings, nose-drippings, eye-leakings.

“Better?” Peter asked. She nodded. “That’s awfully good, your pond,” she said. “It took me years to find it,” he said. “Like the seagull?” she asked. “I invented the seagull in front of your mother’s hotel room to amuse her.”

Her mother’s room, her mother’s restaurant, her mother’s ship…

“What will you have to begin?” Desmond asked her with peculiar sentimentality as though she were some dear little thing.

“She wants something with mayonnaise, don’t you, Clara?” her mother said.

Peter pinched her arm lightly. She drew away, hearing him say almost inaudibly, “…get what you want.”

She glanced at the menu. “Hearts of palm,” she said loudly.

Slowly, her mother bent her head to stare at the basket of bread; slowly her right hand came out, its heavy, long fingers dropping and closing around a piece.

Clara did not really want anything, but it was a not-wanting full of desperate negative energy. But Peter Rice had been in error with his “get what you want,” as if between herself and Laura there was a battle of wills, the older fighting for domination over the younger, mother against daughter. Laura wouldn’t have cared if, for an entrée, Clara had ordered up a portion of vipers. Clara half understood—in her head, at least—that this not wanting of hers was a response, an effort to fend off a huge collapse that would bring her crashing down against Laura’s ultimate indifference. And what she couldn’t understand, what was unplumbed, she felt, but only as a shifting, bruising weight which so unbalanced her she could barely trust her voice.

The young man at the next table was drinking coffee now. A silver link bracelet dangled from his wrist, revealed each time he took a prissy little sip. Laura was speaking urgently, as though it were of great consequence to her, of the collapse of the postal services. But who are her correspondents? wondered Clara. And then of railroad travel. “You can’t get to, simply can’t get to, a tenth of the places you could forty years ago,” Laura declared dramatically, and who would she visit? Clara asked herself. But she experienced only fleetingly a mean triumph in her awareness of Laura’s isolation. After all, it was Laura who chose to keep herself apart.

Clara ceased to listen. She looked about the restaurant. The men looked so odd with their inflated haircombs, vaguely bovine, so dandified. She felt there was something insipid, hollow in all this dressing.

“Everyone wears costumes,” she remarked to Peter, then, with a defensive show of frankness, “Not that I don’t love clothes.”

Peter sighed. “Yes. Everyone gets themselves up like pimps or bums or prostitutes. I don’t know what’s being asserted…some dim idea about individuality, some claim that we can be anything we want…but then, I’m timid, and a snob to boot, so I shouldn’t—”

“Individuality!” interrupted Desmond. “Christ! They look alike, talk alike—”

“It’s the niggers’ revenge,” Laura said. “They’ve taken over the whole country with their clothes and their jail talk—”

“Please, Laura,” said Peter, bending toward her. “Don’t use that word.”

“What word is that?” she asked mildly.

“They’re so slow in here,” Carlos remarked.

“Now, now, now…” Desmond waved his hands doughily. “We’re not to misbehave—”

“But you already have misbehaved,” Laura said, still gentle, her voice a dying fall of regret.

“Look!” cried Desmond, “here it is! Oh—not for us this time, but it will be along, delicious things…” and he fell silent, looking at Laura as though struck with the hopelessness of any appeal.

“Don’t say nigger,” Peter said insistently. “I hate that word.”

“I will have another drink,” Desmond vowed.

Laura looked regally at Peter, then past him as though he were not there. “All right, my dear Peter. I know your sensibilities. They’re all about language, aren’t they?”

“I wish they’d bring something,” Carlos grumbled. He looked around somewhat wildly, then noticed the young man paying his check with a credit card. He was aware—he knew a great deal about the secret moments of men—that the young man was in an excruciating tension of uncertainty about the tip. His teeth tore at the cuticle of one little finger. The girl was staring up at the wall. “Fifteen percent, dear,” Carlos whispered across the few feet of space that divided them.

His sister’s hand clutched his. “Oh, don’t! Don’t…” she begged in a low, passionate voice. Her face was only a few inches from his; he saw tears start from her eyes; he felt an answering grief as though they lay wounded together among strangers who could not help them. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. And even as she shook her head fiercely, he knew her anguish was not about his teasing the young man, for which he had already condemned himself as senile, cruel, aimlessly self-indulgent. But he drew away from her; his distrust of her was too deep, too habitual, to be shaken off unless, as just now, he was taken by surprise. The unguarded moment between them had been like a flash of lightning which by its very intensity almost obliterates from sight what it illuminates. Whatever he had glimpsed, he was already forgetting it. He wasn’t even sure now that he had seen tears in her eyes. She was grinning at him. He felt a worm of self-disgust moving softly in him. The young man and his girl were passing behind his chair on their way out. His behavior had been too gross for an apology. He wondered how long it would be before he had to be kept out of public places. He looked from Peter, to Clara, to Desmond. They were watching the waiter twirl a bottle in a bucket of ice. Someone set a dish of stuffed mussels in front of him. He had forgotten he had ordered them.

“Wait! Wait!” cried Desmond. He held up a glass of champagne. “A toast to Clara!”

Glasses clinked. The moment was lukewarm, awkward. They had all, except for Desmond, been sunk deep in private musing, and the faces now turned to Clara were somewhat vacant. It was harder for her to acknowledge this spiritless amenity than it would have been had their attention been riveted on her. Carlos smiled brilliantly but as though rehearsing for someone not there. Desmond had simply used her as an excuse to get down a drink as fast as he could. He was already reaching for the bottle. The others were merely eating, but Clara felt a sudden conviction that each of them was bemused by an absence; for each of them, someone was missing. It was as if a high wind had dropped abruptly—there was that silence, and everything in a different place. Laura’s characteristic expression of always impending irony had given way to a shadowed somberness as she picked in desultory fashion at her dish of shrimp. Clara sensed in Peter a subtle, tenuous curiosity reaching toward herself, but from Carlos, nothing, no further interest, their ritual recognition performed hours ago in the hotel room.

Anxiously, she touched Peter’s arm. “I was interested in what you were saying—about clothes…do you really think people feel they can be something else, different, just because of what they’re wearing? And what is it they think they are to begin with? And what do they want to be?”

“It’s the absence of thought that makes this costume dressing so vulgar,” he said. “These masquerades—nothing but celebrations of the masks themselves, no idea—it becomes a matter of who has the most feathers.”

“Then there’s your plain blue suit,” remarked Laura. “Just snatched it off the rack, did you, Peter? Really! I’ll bet you ten dollars it took you a year to find a suit like that. What are you celebrating?”

“Listen, I’m sorry to press, but we haven’t ordered yet. I have an appointment—” Carlos began.

Laura snorted. “A what?”

“—and I’d rather not be late,” he went on imperturbably.

“And we must have more wine,” Desmond said quickly. He waved his hands in the air, averting his eyes from Laura. Several waiters converged upon their table. Desmond laughed benignly. “More of this!” he cried to the waiters, flapping his fingers toward the empty champagne bottle. “More of your special marked-up wonderfully overpriced blank de blank—right? Now ladies and gentlemen, what about—”

“I would like the trout,” said Laura to Desmond, but the others spoke directly to the waiters who repeated their orders to each other with gravity and precision. “That chicken is really ready, isn’t it?” asked Carlos. “I’m in something of a hurry—”

“Everything was cooked a week ago,” interrupted Laura, “in order to allow the waiters to go on strike should they wish—”

“Scallops?” Clara said to one of the waiters.

“Perfect,” he said. “Parfait,” murmured the other. Laura laughed softly.

“Well, Peter…let’s get on with it,” Desmond demanded. “Where’s our wine?”

“Veal chops,” said Peter.

“And I…” said Desmond, and fell silent. Laura gave him a look of mock wonder. “Oh, tell us, dear man! What?”

“A duck,” said Desmond, his eyes on the wine now being opened by a waiter. “No. Not a duck, but filet mignon.” He looked over at Peter. “How boring of you, really. Veal chops! For God’s sake!”

“You may order for me,” Peter said amiably.

But Desmond was drinking champagne, his eyes closed.

“There’s a farmer who lives near us,” Laura remarked after their glasses had been filled. “He wears brassieres under his work clothes. Now, what would you say was his idea, Peter?”

“I wasn’t talking about that kind of aberration,” Peter said.

Laura laughed scornfully. “Oh, you weren’t, were you? That kind of aberration, is it? Tell me about your plain, restrained, fastidious blue suit! You are a self-righteous, sententious bastard, aren’t you?”

Clara found herself smiling uncontrollably. Laura was awful! Awful. Yet Clara couldn’t stop smiling.

“The incidence of torture is rising all over the world. Did you know that, Laura? I’m beginning to suspect you’re behind it,” Peter said.

“Something to do with the dignity of man, isn’t it?” Laura asked pleasantly. “But your suit—”

“I would like to stop talking about my suit,” Peter said flatly. “It’s ten years old. It’s something to keep the rain off of me. As for my self-righteousness—it’s harder on me than it is on you, and if you like, I’ll take myself and my suit and leave.”

“Oh, Peter!” she cried, holding out a hand toward him. “Oh, I was only teasing. God! You know how glad I am you’re here! You know how foolish I am! Desmond! Will you stop throwing down that champagne? Peter, listen!” But she fell silent, her hand still held out, palm up, her eyes pleading. Peter reached out and touched her fingers with his own.

“It’s all right,” he said.

“Is it all right?” she asked wistfully.

He nodded. He’d known how she’d react to his threat to leave. It had been safe, a signal to her that she’d pushed him far enough. Sometimes she flew at him like that, but almost always about qualities he detested in himself. He was safer with Laura, he often told himself, than with people less suspicious of themselves than he was. Of course, there were some things she couldn’t do; he would not go along with nigger; he would not sanction the brute in her. But they understood each other; she was ruled by impulse, he, by constraint. And each pitied the other for their subjugation to opposing tyrannies. And this opposition between them—wasn’t it the reason for the durability of their connection? Their undiminished interest in each other?

Clara, against whose thigh Desmond had, perhaps accidentally, pressed his own, moved closer to Peter. He heard her breathing, caught a whiff of some mild floral scent she was wearing, and realized that his hands were clenched.

“You haven’t told them about the letter,” Laura said to Desmond.

“You’ve told them enough,” replied Desmond sulkily, his eyes on his empty glass.

“You should read it to them, darling. The former Madame Clapper’s daughter is so like her. The style is different, but not the temperament. God, Clara! I hope you’re not like me!”

“We all hope that, Laurita,” Carlos said playfully. She seemed not to have heard him. In any event, the waiter had just arrived with their orders, and Desmond was busy and important, ordering another bottle and announcing who had ordered what.

“It doesn’t look good,” he said. “I can tell it’s not hot, either.”

“It’s perfectly okay,” Laura said breezily. “But this fish looks a bit morbid, doesn’t it? Look how they’ve poked a bit of parsley through its eye. Well—about the letter—”

Desmond dropped his fork and bent heavily to find it.

“Don’t pick it up from the floor,” Laura said brusquely.

He looked at her with bleary uncertainty. “In my lap,” he muttered. His lower lip was hanging slightly open. Then the waiter came with another bottle of champagne, and Desmond smiled childishly. It wasn’t fair to judge him when he was so drunk, Peter told himself. But he couldn’t help being struck by how little variation there was in Desmond’s facial expressions. He was like some toy you could bend or wiggle, a little mannikin with blank painted features. He saw Laura glance at each one of them, then at himself, as though she were calculating their substance. He wished she’d drop the subject of Desmond’s daughter. What was she trying to make Desmond admit?

“She flatters poor old Desmond so, or tries to—all about the people he must have known in Paris….” She smiled companionably at Peter. Then in a falsetto voice, she cried, “Oh, Da! Tell us! And did you meet the great G. Stein?”

“Please stop, puppy,” entreated Desmond.

Laura scowled at her plate. Then she glanced at him mildly. “Oh, the devil with it,” she said.

Peter noticed that Clara was not eating; her hand rested near his plate. “Aren’t you hungry either?” he asked.

“Not very,” she said in a tired voice. She couldn’t very well explain to him how frightened she had been that Laura would go on and on about that unknown daughter, how strangely implicated she felt by Laura’s attack on that girl.

“We’re all beggars, pinching each other,” Peter said to her in a whisper. She looked at him in surprise. Had he meant Laura? She said, “I was just thinking—”

“You were, were you?” her mother asked archly. “And what thoughts were those?”

“Dinner thoughts,” Clara said quickly.

“I don’t think she is like me,” Laura said thoughtfully. “Do you think so, Carlos?”

“Not in the least,” Carlos replied decisively.

“Yet it’s hard to escape…you think you’re different, and you end up, fatally, so like them,” Laura said in a removed, dreamy voice. “When I was in the hospital years ago, Mamá came to see me.” She began to eat, not looking at anyone. Was that all? Clara wondered. For a while, no one spoke.

Carlos had eaten all the chicken he was going to eat. Soon, he estimated, he would be able to order coffee and make his getaway. There was no reason for Laura to make a scene at this point. He’d put in his time. And actually, when he thought of it, she wasn’t much given to scenes anymore. Her temperament had cooled, softened. And that astonishing discernment she had—the way she could sense in him a thought, a mood, gathering up in one intuitive flash the whole sum of his feeling—once the servant of her vindictiveness, had been tamed into an irony not inconsonant with his own.

Sometimes, late in the evening, she telephoned from Pennsylvania, and they often spoke at length, and companionably. He was often fond of her. He began to smile, recalling an incident from those old bandit days of hers. Then, he had thought it extravagantly comic, and told it to anyone who bothered to ask him what his sister was like. It must have been over a dozen years ago. Laura had found out Desmond was involved with some woman. She’d confronted him. He’d denied everything. She’d begun by breaking every dish in the apartment they’d been living in, smashing and tearing and ripping—“I razed the wretched place,” she told Carlos later. How well he’d known that depth of loathing, of violence in her. Even when they were children, he’d hidden from those great drowned eyes of hers and covered his ears to shut out the terrifying things she could say. Desmond had finally fled the apartment. She had torn her own dress into shreds; she had already destroyed whatever she could lift and throw. Then she’d gone through Desmond’s jackets and found his address book where he kept the names of various clients in stores all over the country. All the good shops carried a few pieces of the luxurious Clapper luggage. She’d had some money that Clapper had given her earlier to buy liquor the next day. She’d gone to a Western Union office. “You know how vain poor Desmond is,” she said to Carlos. “He’s furtive, too, you know. And the Shadow struck!” She had sent thirty telegrams—not enough money for all the names in the address book, she’d explained regretfully. The message had been identical: Am in desperate trouble. Please send $2.00, and signed it, Desmond Clapper.

“The Shadow…” he uttered with a certain rueful affection. Laura looked at him blankly. He began to fold his napkin.

“What are you doing, Carlos?” she asked. “You don’t have to tidy up. Desmond is going to treat us all!”

“Actually, I’m going to have to leave soon,” he replied pleasantly, socially.

“You’ll have some brandy with us,” Clapper urged. “Here, wait—”

“But Peter and Clara are still eating,” Laura said reprovingly.

“Shortly,” said Carlos. “I didn’t mean this instant.”

“I started to say something, didn’t I, Desmond? About Mamá? When I had the operation…” Laura placed her cutlery in the middle of the plate. “My memory…but, oh, I remember now. The day after the operation, that miserable second day, Mamá came to see me. I was nearly senseless with pain, and in that drug daze, you know. And she said, ‘In Cuba, there is an herb….’ In Cuba. And there I was, groaning on a hospital bed in New York.”

“Yes,” Carlos said. “I see what you mean.”

“I should think you would,” his sister said in a low bitter voice.

“‘Toma leche,’ that’s what she always told me,” Clara said eagerly, sensing a chance of some community of feeling. “Even after I gew up, when I’d go to visit her in Brooklyn, one time when I fractured my wrist, she looked at the cast and she said, ‘Drink milk,’ yes, that’s what she always said.”

“The futility of it,” Laura began. Then she grew silent, staring across the table at Clara who moved back into her chair, her eyes widening as though something had sprung at her and halted in mid-air.

Her voice metallic, serrated, Laura asked, “And did you? Did you drink milk?”

Desmond, half drowning, half swimming in the new wave of drunkenness brought on by his cunning appropriation of most of the champagne, was still sentient enough to feel a sudden, dangerous tension. He emerged from the liquid depths of his mind like a deep-sea diver bursting through the surface of the sea. “Eugenio!” he cried, offering this pearl to Laura. “He lives behind his office, did you know, Peter? Like one of those candy store fellows…and tells himself stories of the Maldonadas, how they fell out of the Pyrenees like cucarachas.” He laughed extravagantly—it had been the right move, they were all smiling at him—and gratified, he repeated, “Cucarachas…”

“Did you ever hear such an atrocious accent?” said Laura, “and just look how pleased he is with himself!” She patted his hand. He pulled it away, offended, but he was mystified by his sense of injury, and that made him angry too. Let them have at each other, he said to himself, I wash my hands of the lot.

“Has my sister mentioned de Rojas to you, Peter?” Carlos asked, grinning. “The other branch from Cadiz. Consider our noses, hers and mine. Nariz de Cadiz. And if today was Friday, well, then, some cousins of ours in Cadiz would light the Friday candles behind closed shutters—”

Laura interrupted him with a mirthless laugh. “My brother has a perverted sense of romance—among his other perversions,” she said. Carlos laughed as though Laura had paid him a compliment.

Clara observed the waiter looking at their plates. She’d left most of the scallops; they had been prettily arranged, but cool, overseasoned. At the front of the restaurant, the maître d’ bent over his list of reservations. A group of people suddenly entered, and his head rose up like an animal’s rising in high grass.

“She fancies herself an Arab,” Carlos said. “Laurita, you know the Arabs are Semites, darling, don’t you?” He couldn’t think why he was trying to provoke her, now that escape was so near. And he was nettled by her clear-eyed smile, by the caressing little chuckle she gave.

“Those poor Arabs,” said Desmond mournfully, thickly. “Nobody cares about those people—”

“That reminds me,” Laura said. “I saw a group of—” she paused and smiled at Peter, “—of Negroes marching along the street this morning. They were all wearing fezzes! Imagine! They seem to have a fatal attraction toward the world’s champion slavers, don’t they? Isn’t it comic? And they looked so self-important, shuffling along in their Arab getups. What a joke history is! I wonder where they were going.”

“And all these Jews,” Desmond said insistently, “living here and sending money there. What right have they got—”

“Desmond, you don’t know anything about it,” Laura said as though amused. “Why shouldn’t they be there? History is nothing but thieving and slaughter. Why shouldn’t the Jews have a go at it?”

“Laura,” he protested, “I do know—I—”

“Here’s our waiter,” said Laura calmly. “Clara, have some rich dessert.”

“No, thank you. I’m really full—it was delicious—but, I’ll just have coffee.”

“Hush,” said Laura cryptically.

“Coffee,” said Peter to Desmond who was clutching a menu. How grotesque Laura was, reversing herself like that, not that he wasn’t used to it. Her inconsistency was constant. But Desmond was something else. Peter realized how much he really disliked him, his bog anti-Semitism, that special kind of Irish bog-hatred, stinking of rank weed, eyes glittering with the conviction there were creatures even lower than himself.

“We’ll all have brandy, won’t we?” Desmond was saying, failing to hide his eagerness. “I hope you noticed that I’ve not been smoking, Laura,” he added.

“Then you forgot your cigarettes,” she said.

“Bring me some damned cigarettes,” Desmond said resentfully to the waiter.

“What sort, sir?”

“Anything.”

“It should be what kind, shouldn’t it?” murmured Laura to Carlos. He was lighting a cigar. He reached over and dropped the small paper band next to Clara’s champagne glass. He’d always done that, given her those little paper rings from his cigar. But her hands had grown too big now. She felt regret, but for what? The small hands of a child? For the lost illusion that Carlos was giving her something of value?

“The torte is excellent tonight,” the waiter said. But he was not looking at any of them, he was staring bleakly at the doors through which a large crowd of people had just now arrived. They were making a good deal of noise. The maître d’ did not even look up from the table where he kept his list of reservations, and Clara felt alarmed at his neglect of these new arrivals, almost as if they might blame her.

“Or the mousse,” the waiter said, barely restraining his impatience to be off. Laura looked up at him and smiled, waiting until she’d caught his attention.

“Are you in a hurry?” she inquired politely. “Do you want us to leave because all those ladies and gentlemen have come? Goodness! This must be a very famous restaurant!”

“Of course you don’t have to leave,” the waiter avowed in a low, urgent voice. Alarm had yanked him out of his waiter’s remoteness; he was suddenly too present; even his breathing was audible.

“And it is what kind of cigarettes,” Laura informed him evenly.

“I’ll have coffee, please,” Peter said quickly.

“We’ll all have coffee,” Laura said, “if you can spare the time.”

“And brandy,” Desmond said. “You’ll have brandy, won’t you?”

No one answered him. “A good brandy,” he muttered. But the waiter had gone.

“I wasn’t going to have him fired, Peter,” Laura said.

“Your quibbling frightened him,” Peter replied.

“I wasn’t quibbling.”

“You were bullying him,” Carlos said. “You were behaving like a peasant.”

Laura looked worried, humbled. “Carlos, no! It wasn’t bullying. But he was trying to rush us away! Did I really behave badly?”

She actually can’t judge her own behavior, Peter thought; she explodes, then wonders at the flying glass. But he didn’t believe anyone but Carlos could have spoken so severely to her, because the rest of us, even Clara, are foreigners, he thought, but Carlos, though she could be savage with him, could sway her merely because he was her brother, his presence invoking their common origin, that intense accidental intimacy like no other, the cruel affinity of family. He felt worn, frail; beneath the evening’s surface, something hidden was draining him of the capacity to respond. He had always counted on Laura to rescue him, for a little while, from shallow custom, to revive in him a memory of the life of feeling, but this night, the constantly erupting flares of a temperament he’d always thought to be without calculation or prudence seemed merely a mechanical display.

“Hines. I’ll get Hines brandy,” Desmond said. Then, an offended host, “I don’t understand you people. Do you or don’t you want—”

“Get it! Get it for yourself, for God’s sake!” Laura hissed at him.

Clara tore the cigar band she’d been fiddling with. There was a taste of butter in the air, and of meat. Desmond’s hand closed around her arm. “Hines brandy,” he whispered. “Good stuff!” She could think of nothing to say. Eventually, his warm, suety hand fell away.

“But we were talking about my brother Eugenio,” said Laura loudly.

“I wasn’t,” Carlos said, laughing. “I never talk about Eugenio if I can help it.”

“But you’ve seen him?” Laura asked.

Carlos looked guarded. “Well—yes. I don’t remember quite when—”

“I have a reason—”

“He’d bought himself a suit. Awful! Like an undertaker’s suit. He came to see me, as a matter of fact. I heard him tripping over the stairs. You know how he always trips on every third step?”

“Because Desmond is being driven mad trying to get hold of him. Do you know we had to send him a telegram last month about his share of Mamá’s expenses? His own mother! Why should poor Desmond be left holding the bag?”

“He takes frequent trips,” offered Carlos lamely.

“On every third step?” Laura asked with grim humor.

“Look,” Carlos began, “this isn’t a subject for general discussion—”

“General discussion,” cried Laura. “Peter. Excuse me. But this is unendurable. You don’t know how we have to beg those two to help their own mother! Clara, Clara! Do you know how she asks after you? How uncomplaining she is? How little she expects? Oh, how right she is to expect nothing…nothing. If it wasn’t for Desmond—”

“Stop it, Laura. Stop it! In fact, I’m going to visit her tomorrow—” Carlos protested.

“Tomorrow!” cried Laura, and her eyes rolled up, her mouth gaped, her hands went to her face where they pinched and kneaded her flesh as though to force it to the very bones. Desmond, snatched from his drunken reverie by his wife’s frenzy, shot enraged looks at the others—who was to blame for setting her off this time?

The waiter arrived with coffee which he served them with anxious solicitude. Then he held up a piece of dark cake and looked questioningly at each of them. No one had ordered it, but Peter claimed it hastily. Laura had let go of her face and sat, as still as death, staring down at the tablecloth.

“I was forced to go and plead with the welfare people,” she began in an expressionless voice as soon as the waiter had left them. “My mother’s sons are shiftless men—too tight to have gotten married. Imagine becoming a homosexual to avoid supporting a woman!”

Carlos’s expression of patience in defeat didn’t change. In a certain way, he seemed to have deafened himself to Laura’s words, although bearing the anger that shaped them as a familiar and ineluctable discomfort. He murmured something to her that no one else heard. A silence that contained a faint suggestion of a truce descended over them. Clara grew aware, with an easing of her spirit, that there were other people not much more than an arm’s length away, small islands of people at their tables, among whom waiters eddied and shifted, bent and straightened up. Some of the diners looked domestic, some festive, and some were silent. How, she wondered, did this table appear to all those others? In the subdued ambiguity of the restaurant lighting, the sustained clamor of conversation and eating, would anyone glancing casually at the Clapper table have observed the ravages of the battles that had raged among them? And was the apparent placidity and self-satisfaction of all those other people only a contrived show?

Clara had been frightened, but Laura’s reproach to her had been contained in the larger attack on Carlos. For the first time, she suspected that Laura had no real expectation she would visit her grandmother, but there was no consolation in the thought, no sense of freedom, only a feeling of being adrift.

By then, Desmond had finally managed to order brandy all around. Carlos and Laura were speaking somewhat listlessly about a movie they had both seen, quarreling a little but without interest.

“Do you have an extra cigarette?” Clara asked Peter. He pushed his uneaten piece of cake aside and handed her a pack, then took it back and opened it for her. She took the cigarette somewhat rudely, sticking it into a corner of her mouth, lighting it at once before he had a chance to. She looked at him slyly.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s disgusting, isn’t it? This getting the thing into the mouth?”

“How long have you worked for your agency?”

“Half a year,” she said.

“You don’t care for it?”

“No. I don’t see how one could be devoted to such work. It’s all deception, really. It’s not like publishing books. I imagine you must get something in you really like once in a while, don’t you?”

“Once in a while,” he replied. He watched her take a sip of brandy. She suddenly reminded him of someone—but, of course! She had Ed Hansen’s nose! How odd he hadn’t seen it before! Even odder that he hardly ever thought of Ed Hansen anymore. It must be over fifteen years since he’d seen him, and then, only briefly. It was not a period of his life he liked to reflect upon. He had just been separated from his wife, had just begun working for the publishing company, and had just abandoned a novel he had nearly finished. In the room he had rented after he’d left Barbara, there had been a small, cheap, heavily shellacked desk. Day by day, the pages of his story had mounted up. Then, when he’d come to the last chapter, terror overtook him. It was as though the pages had occupied a space in his body now left empty by their appearance on the desk, an emptiness into which he collapsed. He’d almost gone back to Barbara. Instead, he’d looked up the Hansens, who were in the city temporarily, and discovered them in an acrimonious, racking argument about whether to go to South Carolina or Long Island. They hadn’t been of much use to him then. And within a year or so of that night, they had been divorced. Hadn’t it been more like twenty years ago? For too long he had relinquished his own history; now he couldn’t separate out the years, the events. At best, his connections with other people were frayed; except for this long friendship with Laura, his life felt nearly motionless.

“Laura,” he said in sudden agitation, trying to push away the haunting feeling of time lost, times forgotten.

“I’m here, darling,” she replied at once, smiling at him with an extraordinary tenderness as though she sensed, and wished to assuage, his distress. But was it his distress which had elicited from her the thrillingly spoken endearment? He was not comforted, he was alarmed. Was it not that he had revealed, for an instant, a true state of feeling, had abandoned the posture of being her temperate adversary? And if it was that she had recognized, what difference did it make whether she called him bastard or darling?

“Well! Are we ever going to hear about this trip?” he asked aloofly. It didn’t work; he felt the weak core of his own voice, and so did she. Her gaze was knowing, amused.

“Why, yes,” she said. “If you’d like to hear about it….”

The radiant names of ancient cities blazed up among prosaic details of hotel and travel arrangements. Laura, with a peculiar, uncharacteristic thoroughness, seemed intent on giving them an odyssey of timetables.

Clara drank her coffee and smoked Peter’s cigarettes. The waiter returned to fill their cups as they were emptied, and when he was not occupied with his other tables he stood close by, glancing covertly at Laura.

Out of the conversation between Peter and Laura which neither involved nor implicated her, safe from any foggy overtures from Desmond—who sat beside her, half asleep, a feeble intermittent smile widening his mouth from time to time—she resolved to think about Harry Dana. She summoned him. He would not come. Silently, she recited certain features of her lover’s body, the tight white skin across his cheekbones, his nipples like bits of coral, a small, livid scar on the arch of his right foot, his large, clean, rather characterless hands. But these talismans evoked nothing of Harry. Instead, and unbidden, a figure came slowly down a long corridor toward the light of her recognition. It was her grandmother, one hand gripping the handrail which ran through all the halls of the old people’s home, an aid to aged infirmity, an iron insistence upon it. Clara glanced across the table at Laura. “By train, then we take a special bus…” she was saying.

The passionate accusations Laura had made against her brothers for their neglect of Alma might never have been uttered. Yet, by what right had she made such accusations? For years, she had been away; it had been as though she were dead. What could she have known of that street where Clara and Alma had lived? Stores closing one after another because of the robberies, the only market eight blocks away, the cars that didn’t stop for traffic lights as though it were a territory accursed, the piercing stench of abandoned cats who often sheltered in the foyer, the entrance doors always ajar, even in the cold weather, and in the summer, letting in a limp breeze charred by the exhaust of cars, carrying a faint, stale damp, smelling of wet ashes. People moved out; the heat was failing, the electricity intermittent, misshapen castaways turned up, announced themselves as the new janitor, then they too disappeared. But there were others; the wood panels of the elevator grew ever more scored with their proclamations—threats, sexual offers, names, numbers. Yet in the last year Clara had lived there, Eugenio was the only person she had ever seen in the long, narrow tiled halls. He always carried a briefcase; he would bow to her and step hastily away.

On Sundays, Carlos and Eugenio would come to a midday dinner, although if Eugenio was living in the apartment, he would leave early while Alma was still cooking. And often, when he did stay, he would leave abruptly at the meal’s end, giving a stiff salutation to each of them as he placed a small hat on his head.

They ate in the dinette, a space only large enough to accommodate a small round table and four straight chairs. There was a window there, but a thickly rusted fire escape deflected most of the light. The cooking area was a narrow passage between wooden cabinets stacked up like crates. The top ones had never been used, not even opened. Here, Alma moved arthritically, sometimes singing to herself, sometimes so wounded in her hopes that her crippled hands lost what strength they had to lift pots and set them down.

In the airless, tight space of the dinette, her two sons sat upright like prisoners about to be interrogated. They rarely spoke. Clara spent as much time in the tiny kitchen as she could to escape the dreadful tension at the table, the grim look of the two aging sons bent over their meal while Alma chattered of neighbors no one had ever seen, stories in pictorial magazines no one cared about, odd bits of information from radio programs no one wanted to know. Perhaps it hadn’t been simply tension which had driven Clara into the kitchen, perhaps it was the unbearable suspense, the torment of each Sunday, of whether Alma would, at last, get and hold their attention, win a reprieve from her recognition that they were merely submitting to her, that their filial piety did not dissipate an outrage that utterly baffled her. So she would redouble her efforts to please them, at the same time allowing the strain of those efforts to show, a reproach to their hardness of heart which, in turn, only grew harder. Sons and mother, a jigsaw of misery fitting together perfectly. Yet she required their presence, enforced it in a dozen indirect ways, battling against them with her smiles, her jokes, her helplessness. She knew of Carlos’s grave but somewhat ironic interest in monkeys. She cut out photographs of apes and gave them to him with flirtatious smiles.

Alma did not know—as far as Clara knew—that Carlos had once been arrested while, he had claimed, he was watching the antics of the monkeys in the Central Park Zoo. But a huge, fat youth had sworn that Carlos “fooled with my behind.” The charges were dropped; the youth, Ed Hansen had told Clara, had behaved repugnantly in court, the judge had dismissed the case. Actually, all the Maldonadas were diverted by monkeys which, after all, reflected a human ludicrousness in their simian antics. Why wouldn’t they appeal to people who held up even their own behavior as sardonic evidence of the profound silliness of humankind?

Once in a great while, Carlos would bring along a young man friend to a Sunday dinner. “Pero que sympatico!” Alma would whisper to Clara as the young man handed the old woman a bouquet of flowers smelling faintly of subway kiosks, or little boxes of glacéd fruit; later, the young man would hold her hand and tease her gently about her accent.

And sometimes Eugenio would break the granite monotony of the meal with a report from the world, a dinner party he had attended. Always, the silver was old, invaluable, worth a fortune. “A fortune!” he would repeat again and again, staring down at the rice and black beans on his plate, or at the thick, plebeian water tumbler, or at the mean cutlery. After they left, Alma would retire to the bedroom and undo the ties of her black shoes and lie down, staring up at the ceiling, and Clara, drawn there despite her reluctance by the old woman’s plaintive sighs, a fitful breeze of sorrow, the only sound that broke the silence of those late Sunday afternoons, would stand in the doorway repulsed, dismayed by the long white strands of hair which had worked themselves loose from Alma’s hairpins and fallen about her cheeks and neck.

What could Laura know of those Sundays, of the slow, soft dolor of Alma’s forlornness, of the daily life of those two rooms from which, each Monday morning, Clara made her escape to the public school classrooms? How dared Laura claim exclusive right to pity Alma now?

“It’s bad luck you weren’t born grown up,” Ed had once remarked to Clara. “Your mother detests natural helplessness.” When Ed was ill, he said, Laura often disappeared for days at a time. He seemed amused by that, as though it were merely idiosyncratic. Clara chose not to inquire what he’d really felt. And Clara had learned that it was not only “natural helplessness” that Laura hated. Her dread of any kind of insufficiency in the world was so intense that even what she judged to be bad taste could put her off someone, as though weakness of aesthetic judgment or simple ignorance in another person, placed her in mortal danger. But of what? She had taken care of old Mrs. Clapper, but even in her dissolution, the old woman sounded tigerish, and after all, there’d been an advantage in it.

“Clara?” Carlos was bending over. “Goodbye, darling,” he said. “I’m leaving you to your mamá.” He was smiling. He looked happy.

“Carlos,” Clara said pleadingly, “do you have to go?”

“Come and see me soon,” he said, turning from her, moving off toward the doors. No one, she thought, was ever more lighthearted at the moment of departure than Carlos. She felt chilled. Their party had been drastically altered, more, it seemed, than could be accounted for by one empty place at the table. Affectionate, secretive, swinish Carlos! It was always easy to miss him; he left behind him no bitter echoes.

Laura was rolling a bit of bread between her fingers. Peter tapped his brandy glass with one finger. The tiny clang was like the distant sound of a buoy. Laura began to speak to Desmond in a low voice, her words inaudible. Soon, Clara would leave. By the time she unlocked her own door, the evening would begin to be unreal—or unrealizable. She would, when she thought of it, remember what she always remembered, her uneasiness, Laura’s old thunder, and a sense of self-betrayal that would linger on a few days, a week, until it was buried away, yet persisting on in dreams of mortification or in moments when she could not look directly into someone’s face. She had tried to describe her mother to Harry Dana. She had not thought Laura would seem boring to him. He said he didn’t like the way her voice sounded when she talked of Laura. What did he mean, she had asked. He had said he didn’t know quite what he meant—portentous or elaborate, something like that. Thinking about that now, she felt irritated, restive, unjustly charged. She had only been trying to divert him.

Yesterday, Harry had stopped by in the early evening. They had embraced poignantly, as though in a great reconciliation. Their hands, as they fondled each other, had grown electrified, so sensitive that their fingers seemed to recoil from each other’s flesh. Clara cast a sly glance at her mother, who knew nothing of Harry Dana.

She grew aware of a murmur of conversation between Peter and Laura. His voice was strained with effort; her mother’s attention seemed elsewhere despite the fixity of her gaze on Peter. He was speaking of a Japanese woman writer with whom he had had lunch the day before. She had brought him a small perfect apple. “How poetic,” remarked Laura. They had published her novel a few months ago. It was the best one that had come across his desk in some time.

“Not still another report from the universal crotch?” asked Laura.

“No, no,” Peter said quickly. “Not at all. She’s serious. It’s a good book.”

“A money-maker?” asked Desmond and he gave a strange little giggle. “I know what that serious means, Peter Rice. No sale, that’s what it means.”

“Quite right,” Peter said lightly.

“There’s nothing wrong with making money,” Desmond asserted indignantly. Laura laughed. “Well—there isn’t!” he protested. “All these serious people, they’re the biggest fakers of all!”

“I know,” Peter agreed. “But this woman isn’t a faker.” He spoke of other writers, other books, ones that held no interest for him, sales figures to reassure Desmond, bits of gossip to entertain Laura.

But he kept to himself his true disaffection with the world he described with such coolness. It would have shamed him to have revealed to anyone at all his dislike for the work he did in the world, the thing he had come to feel he could do best. He no longer liked to read. The sight of a printed page filled him with a faint but persistent nausea. He read nothing except the manuscripts for which he was responsible. On weekends, he drove miles from the city, staying at an inn if he could find one, but more often at motels where he watched television programs, or, if there was a bar, nursing one drink for hours, or walking in any kind of weather until he was tired enough to sleep. But then, at least, he was away from the ceaseless din of publishing, out of reach of the culture experts, many of whose manuscripts ended up on his desk, and whose juices flowed, he had come to believe, for no other reason than the excitation of maintaining their names in print, who performed, deaf to their own failing voices so like the voices of aged singers, lest they faint into the sickness of anonymity, who could never be still but must add their own noise to the universal screech of opinion, their oppositions or agreements equally meaningless since both were only advertisements of their will to persist. Yet he knew that they were humble and depressed, too, like eternal suitors. They had entrusted their selves to public keeping, they were dependent on the careless, fleeting attention they got. When their books were published, Peter’s phone rang constantly, the authors calling, calling—why had they not been reviewed by so-and-so? Why had they been neglected by this one or that one? Why had the publishers placed so few ads in the newspapers, the magazines? Why were their books not in this store or that one? What the hell was the matter with the distributors? Had the salesmen been ordered to ignore their books because their views were unpopular? Unpopular! The public had a mouth so blind and avid it swallowed anything, its jaws frozen open in perpetual appetite. Peter could soothe these authors, reassure them. He was known in his department as “the soother.” And somewhere, he felt a fugitive sympathy with them, if only because of his lack of any sympathy whatsoever—and his helplessness—with the newer writers, the ones coming up, with their staged outrageousness and their shrewd grasp of business practices.

“Lunch is the great danger,” he was saying. “Do you remember when I was so overweight, Laura?”

“You were never that, you’ve always been thin,” she replied with peculiar emphasis on thin, meaning, he guessed, that he had always been dried up.

“It took me years to learn not to order what the writers ordered,” he continued. “They’re really hungry. I have to eat modestly but without giving offense. They’re sensitive, they don’t wish to appear like hogs. Now, I have a glass of white wine, an omelet, a good deal of black coffee to counterbalance their desserts.”

Again, he had caught sight of Clara’s nose, that fine narrow ridge, exactly like Ed Hansen’s. He wondered if her eyes were the same color as his? Mauve and bluish? But the largeness of her head, her lineless carved lips, her slow, defensive walk, owed nothing to Hansen, everything to Maldonada.

It was Carlos who had introduced him to the Hansens thirty years ago. He had driven with him out to Long Island where Ed was living temporarily in a rented house on Long Island Sound. His arrangements were always temporary—like life, he was fond of saying.

Peter and Carlos had walked through the French doors and found the Hansens in a ramshackle but comfortable living room. It had been a spring day, the room smelled of the unthawed earth and the first fresh greenness outside, of damp rattan furniture and coffee, of the leather harnesses of the two Hansen dogs. Shortly after their arrival, a man had come from the village with a case of liquor and stayed awhile to talk to Ed. Ed was already known in the village. He couldn’t bear not being known in a village. In Europe or the United States, he always found villages; they never lived in cities, only visited them. Ed and the delivery man had spoken of the advance of spring, of what fish could be gotten from the waters of the Sound, which rippled placidly just beyond the edge of the ragged neglected garden. The light had been so sweet, so clear! A pale, maidenly light that felt upon Peter’s cheeks as if it came from the cool petals of the crocuses that were already fading beyond the French doors but which he could see scattered around the peony plants whose fat, plumlike buds beat out a soundless tattoo when the breeze struck them. He had not known Carlos well, then, and he had never known a Spaniard before. Here were Spaniards. Laura in the light, clear air like a dark root, slender then, balancing her peony head, sitting quietly in a chintz-covered chair, the sunlight falling upon the rug at her feet and on the legs of the white rattan table on the edge of which her cigarette burned. She had said, “I suppose I ought to go and find an ashtray,” and smiled at him. He always, in recalling that room, the spring morning, thought that it was there he had experienced the most intense moment of joy, of optimism, in his life, because of Ed Hansen in his English jacket, because of Laura, her long arms crossed over the bodice of her light dress, rising and walking to the kitchen to get an ashtray, smiling at him, because of a sense of endless possibilities hinted at by Ed’s cameras in their leather cases, by the piled-up magazines and books, the still unpacked suitcases near the fireplace, because he had thought the Hansens brilliant and thrilling and extraordinary, because the air had never smelled so vividly to him of spring flowers.

A year later, he had married Barbara. Ed had introduced her to him. He had felt he was marrying the Hansens, too; he had wanted to marry them.

He heard himself talking but his voice didn’t feel as though it belonged to him. The air was dreadful in this place, with its contrived sentimental restaurant dusk. He started suddenly. Clara had touched his shoulder, but it was Laura who spoke.

“Oh, Peter, come with us!” she said. She spoke with a strange oppressive heaviness like one in a trance. The old hope rose in him that everything was still possible, that he could go back to his apartment and pack a bag and leave it all behind him, the necessity of earning a living—he was no heir—the loneliness of his life. But that hope was a knife that cut him down. He glanced angrily at Laura, then away from her to his own hands that were folding his napkin. She was always trying to get men to get it up! Always arousing them to empty purpose. He was too old to get it up. Then he told himself to calm down; she had spoken to his momentary delusion, but it was his, not hers. He was almost amused by himself, wanting now to explain to Laura how difficult it had become to get it up, for work, for talk, for thought, for showers and meals and bill paying, for keeping himself going from day to day. He only wanted to remain quiet, and allow himself this small indulgence of Laura now and then, a kind of holiday that made him forget for a while the settled, scant half-life he had bargained for and won. The holiday didn’t work its old wonders much anymore.

“Why should I do that?” Peter asked with a touch of spite.

Laura looked troubled, not, he knew, by his spite but by his question. Why never figured in her sense of things.

“Don’t be such a poop!” Desmond said, taking visible pleasure in his coarseness. The pleasure was fleeting. Sourness bubbled in his throat. He would be up half the night, staggering between his bed and the toilet. At some point, Laura would turn on the light and say, with a certain ghastly patience, “Can I get you something?” It was better, he supposed, than it had been in the early days, when she smashed a lamp against a wall or dropped a radio on its face, as though her rage could prevent him from emptying out his guts into the toilet bowl! Yes, it had all gotten much better. Only two to go now, first that tiresome prune of an editor, then Clara. Laura and he would return to their room—perhaps he could sleep right through his dizziness. In the morning, he would order their breakfast, Laura would read him a comic thing or two from the newspaper in a tranquil voice. She would be smoking her cigarette right to the end like a street kid did; he would be packing. He packed wonderfully! He had bought her a present he intended to give her when the boy came for their luggage, a small papier mâché Easter egg, inside it a tiny, perfect village she could peer at through a hole at one end. She would love that, she loved presents. He started to grin. He looked at her. She was bent forward, her hand clenched against her breasts, her face shadowed, saturnine, utterly unlike the woman of his reverie. Why was she opposing him? He wanted to shake her.

“I’m not a poop,” Peter Rice said pleasantly. “I’m a wage slave. But next time—perhaps next time…”

“Carlos never changes,” remarked Desmond irritably. Laura sat up straight and shook her head.

“Oh, yes. He changes,” she said. “We all do, we grow disfigured and hideous like my poor mother’s black shoes.”

Instantly, Clara saw the shoes on the floor of their closet in the Brooklyn apartment. On her one visit to the old people’s home, she had observed that Alma wore slippers. They were exactly like her roommate’s, old Mrs. Levy. Mrs. Levy had skin the texture and color of a water biscuit. Mrs. Levy was almost always in bed, her slippers on the floor, side by side like two old tabby cats. She imagined them asleep at night, the two female bodies motionless beneath institutional blankets. She supposed all the old people wore slippers. But were they permitted to keep one pair of shoes? In case they were taken out for a stroll? In case the world changed and they could live among others? Or for their burial? Or was it that the old were so detestable that the less noise they made, the better?

Clara feared that a further conversation about age might lead back to her. If she could only shout, “I don’t know why I don’t go to see Alma….” Let Laura tell her why! Let Desmond! She began to speak hastily about an article she’d read on oppossums. She was full of self-derision as she heard her own voice rise in feigned enthusiasm, doing what Alma always had done, beseeching them with animals, pressing up against a deepening chill, ordering their attention, even if it was as artificial as her claim upon it; but she would do anything to hide from Laura the confused, soft, self-accusatory core of her feelings about her grandmother. Now, when the evening was nearly over, she was more alarmed, more alien to herself, than when she had entered the hotel room where the very singularity of her rare meetings with Laura provided a kind of screen against which they could play out a show of sympathy. But the mist had begun to disperse hours ago, when Laura had turned up the hem of her dress revealing to them both Clara’s feeble lie. In her lay a vision of a barren landscape and of herself jigging across it, a mortified clown in an empty place.

She grabbed up a serving spoon. “When oppossums are born, you can fit a whole litter of them, five or six, into a spoon like this.” Desmond stared torpidly at the spoon. Clara brought it close to her eyes. “Here we are!” she squeaked. Laura burst into laughter.

“Oh, do that again,” she cried.

“Here we are!” Clara squeaked more shrilly.

Laura leaned back against her chair and flung back her head. The laughter flowed from her out beyond their table, great waves of wild sound full of such risibility, such gratification, that people all around them turned to look and smile. Desmond sat up excitedly and took Clara’s hand that held the spoon and kissed it and he too began to laugh, coughing and patting Clara’s arm. Tears were running down Laura’s face as she rocked back and forth until, at last, she grew quiet, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. “Oh, Clara…” she said once, softly, with a curious note of regret.

The unexpected felicity of the moment delivered Peter from memory and brought him smiling into ordinary unconsciousness. The evening had been a strain, but they’d all been cooped up so long in that hotel room, city weather was uncomfortable, dreadful, really, one had less protection against it than country weather, and there was certainly a point in one’s life—he had reached it some time ago—where tobacco and liquor and rich food were negative pleasures firing one up treacherously only to drop one into the ignominious realization of one’s age. And he had talked too much about his work, not just to be diverting but out of a somewhat shady desire to refute what Laura had said earlier in the evening, about his detesting his job, about how people in his office must feel about him. It had rankled.

But something had happened.

Peter looked from Laura to Clara. The young woman was stricken, Laura’s mouth was open, her teeth clenched as though in agony, her hands grasping the edge of the table. Desmond’s hands were up in the air, the girl was shaking her head violently. Laura was rising—

“You’ve stolen my voice!” she cried. “You’ve stolen it…I can’t bear it another moment…I can’t….” And she turned away from them, and pushed past waiters and tables and diners to the front of the restaurant where she appeared to hurl herself against the double doors, hurl herself into the street outside.

At the table, there was a stunned silence, then Desmond said dully, “She forgot her fur coat.”

“The Spanish secession,” Peter said, and regretted it at once.

“But I didn’t say anything,” Clara moaned, clenching her fists and pressing them to her cheeks.

“You must have said something,” Clapper snarled.

“But—I didn’t!” the girl cried piercingly. “Only all that about the goddamned oppossums—My God! What did I say!”

“She had too much to drink,” Peter said quickly, grabbing Clara’s hands which now fumbled weakly at the tablecloth. “She was overwrought. There’s more to leave-taking than cheerful goodbyes and packed suitcases. I could see she was distressed—it wasn’t your fault—don’t be foolish—”

“Shut up!” exclaimed Clapper, seizing the sugar bowl as though he intended to fling it at someone. Clara stood up, stared at them with an expression of unutterable woe, and left without a word. At the checkroom, she stopped and dug into her bag until she found her cardboard tag. As the woman laid her coat across the counter, Clara saw her mother’s fur coat, resplendent, on a hanger. She would carry it to Laura. But what if Laura didn’t go back to the hotel? Clara couldn’t take the coat; she might never get rid of it. And as she moved through the doors, her heart beating violently, sunk with hopelessness, she remembered where that coat had come from, from that wealthy South American relative of the Maldonadas who owned mines and grew orchids, who had kept a New York apartment on the east side of the city for his business visits, a penthouse, empty save a few days every year, but cleaned twice weekly by an elderly Finnish woman. She had seen him once, heard him telephone Berlin, then London. He had offered her a plate of dried fruit and had smiled unpleasantly when she’d refused any. He had been a small, plump man with dyed black hair and tapering, narrow fingers and he spoke to her in a corrosive, hectoring Spanish. Someone had told her last year that he had jumped out of a window and killed himself. And Laura had, she had said in one of those harrowing admissions of hers, “gone to bed” with him. “Let me tell you how I got that coat,” she had said. And then, “I’m terrible. Am I not? I was so tired of not having anything.” And she had shaken her head as though marveling. “I seem to be capable of anything,” she had said.

The rain had not abated. If Laura wasn’t in her room, Clara told herself she would wait in the lobby until her mother appeared. She didn’t know what she would do then. Perhaps something had really happened, at last. It was this sense of a new turn, wrenching everything out of its habitual place, an intimation of another way of being, that must account for the sudden lightening of her spirit, and an eerie joy as though she were about to be delivered from prophecy into chance.

When Clara was six, her father had taken her from Alma’s to see Laura in another of the Hansens’ borrowed apartments in New York where they were stopping a few days. In the empty living room, Ed had stood with his fingers to his lips, warning her to be silent as though someone were sleeping. He had led her to a couch where she had sat. At once, an enormous dog had loped in from another room, gone directly toward her, and leaped to the couch and sat beside her panting faintly, evenly. Then she had looked up and seen Laura standing in a doorway, holding a glass in which ice cubes floated, looking at her. It was as though a stone had looked at her. Suddenly, Laura had hurled the glass into the room. There had been no crash—it must have landed somewhere but something, rug or curtain, had muffled the sound. Clara had crouched beside the dog, and it seemed to her now she had been crouched all these years, waiting for the smash of glass as someone who has been made aware through a mute show that she has been accused awaits an explication.

It was more bearable to be charged—even if grotesquely charged—with voice-stealing than with the irreducible fact of her existence. But how could she help it if her voice was like her mother’s? She thought, then, of Harry Dana’s objection to how she sounded when she spoke of Laura. Perhaps there had been a grain of truth in Laura’s accusation. Clara spoke aloud as though on a telephone: “Hello? Hello. Is that you, Harry?” and hearing in her own voice the very intonation of Laura’s, was so startled, she laughed in self-deprecation, in chagrin, yet feeling an odd kind of triumph.

“Hello, yourself,” said a man who had stopped to look at her. The collar of his coat was held tight by an enormous safety pin.

She hurried on toward the hotel whose entrance she could see now a half block away. An overturned litter basket lay against the curb, evidence, perhaps, of Laura’s passage. The trouble is, she thought, I believe no one but Laura.

A postprandial calm had descended upon the lobby. A few people sat dozing in the dimness. Clara went up to the Clappers’ room. She passed the now silent, closed rooms where Randy Cunny had made her literary debut. A paper cup lay on the floor, all that was left. No one answered her knock. She listened for a long time, her ear pressed against the door. If Laura was in there, she was playing dead. It was unlikely. She was not given to sulking. What was likely was that she was flinging herself recklessly about the rainy streets, in a state of exalted outrage, an abandon that Clara almost envied, like the abandon of a dancer in a frenzy of pure movement, mind sunk into body.

In the lobby, she found a chair sheltered by a plastic plant and half hidden from the reception desk. Across from her, at the other end of the room, a great mirror hung from the wall, its frame a thick plaited design in gilt. She could see, reflected in it, a shadow that must be herself, and other shadows, undifferentiated, ambiguous, moving indolently back and forth. And she thought of Alma’s story of how she had glimpsed herself in a mirror for the first time in her life when she was a week or two past her sixteenth birthday, a story of such limpid innocence that Clara had hardly believed it, yet reverberating with the echoes of an era, a class, a way of living gone forever. One Sunday morning while she was cooking the Sunday dinner, Alma had told Clara about it, happy at the beginning of the day in her unavailing illusion that the end of the day would somehow be different this time.

In Havana, she had been met by her bridegroom’s cousin, La Señora Gonzaga, whom she had never met before. The journey from Spain, during which her sixteenth year had passed with the waves, had been arduous. She knew nothing of where she was going, of Cuba, of cousins, of her husband-to-be whose tintype she had become more afraid to look at with each day that passed on the sea. Then came the journey by land to the plantation, accompanied by this small, austere woman who often told her to sit with more “restraint” or to talk with less haste, and above all to breathe with more delicacy, less excitement—one should not be heard breathing.

The first thing she had noticed at the plantation were the stocks in which the slaves were punished, and she had exclaimed at their ugliness. La Señora had warned her that she must not notice such things. She did not discover what they were for until months later. She was taken through great silent rooms, up the broad, curving stairway to a room larger than the salon of her parents’ house in Barçelona. There was a strange, bitter, piercing smell everywhere—it seemed green to her, like the new bitter green leaves of spring. She was to rest; the coverlet of a huge bed had been turned back by a young maid who smiled at her as she helped her off with her clothes but would say nothing. When she had been left alone, she had gone to the wide windows. The fields of sugar cane spread as far as her eyes could see, unmoving in the windless air of late afternoon. The fan-shaped leaves of the royal palms in the garden seemed monstrous to her, unnatural. Although nothing stirred, the purpling sky was full of silent violence, the dusk a great wing spreading, shutting out all that was familiar in her life, the old far heavens of her childhood that was barely over.

When it was dark, servants had brought her a gown, carrying it tenderly as though it were an invalid. She was dressed, her hair piled on top of her head, and last, she was given an ivory fan upon which a parade of brilliant peacocks thinned or widened with the motion of her fingers. The two maids parted from her at the door of the room. She looked down a long gallery; at its end was the staircase. She heard a murmur of many voices rising from the floor below. He would be there too, Señor Maldonada. What on earth was she to say to him? How would she address him? But she moved lightly down the gallery toward her fate. She had an inquiring nature; unlike her sisters, she was full of questions. She saw, coming toward her down the long reach, a girl so beautiful that she had begun to smile with shyness and pleasure. She held her fan to her lips. The girl did the same. She realized it was herself, reflected in a large pier glass at the end of the hall. So she had traveled that unimaginable distance, sent on her way by a marriage pact in which she had no say, suffering the first violations of her privacy in the confines of the small ship, only to discover the reality of her person, glimpsed fully for the first time on the eve of her marriage to an unknown man of thirty-eight.

Clara stood up watching the blur of her movement of rising in the mirror. She looked only for an instant at her reflection, then bowed her head and left the hotel. It was futile to wait for Laura. What would they be able to say to each other? It was better to go home. When the Clappers returned from their trip, she would see them again; nothing would be said about this evening. It would be as if it had never happened. Clara had other things to think about. Tomorrow, she planned to take the day off from work. She was driving to New Jersey with Harry, who had a client there. It was the first chance they’d had to spend so much time together.

 

In the restaurant, Peter Rice was defending himself against Desmond’s sullen accusations.

“I didn’t do anything,” he protested angrily. “You know that I didn’t. You also know how Laura interrupts her own boredom—of course, she doesn’t pay any mind to anything but her own mood. That’s why she’s our darling. It’s that girl you ought to be concerned about—”

“That girl can take care of herself!” exclaimed Desmond. “What are you babbling about her for? She’s used to it. She’d better be. But I’m the one that will have a night of it. Laura won’t cool off till I get her in that cabin tomorrow. I’m the one that sees to Laura. All of you just sit around and watch her.”

“All of what? There’s hardly one of us left alive!” Peter erupted into outraged, noisy laughter. Clapper shook his arm.

“Stop it. Please stop it!” he begged. “My life with Laura absolutely exhausts me!”

Without liking Clapper any better, Peter felt a faint touch of sympathy for him. Then Desmond saw the bill the waiter had left. He snatched it up and held it close to his face, his eyes narrowed, his mouth tight with suspicion as he added up the figures.

“Let me take care of half of it,” Peter offered. Desmond shot him a glance of utter derision.

“Come off it,” he grunted. “This is my party.”

 

Laura had long since passed the entrance to the hotel. She had been running then, in a transport of rage, aware with bitter pleasure that the people on the sidewalk were making way for her, afraid of her, a coatless, rain-soaked fury, her teeth chattering with cold.

That girl! That girl with her open mouth, her idiot fearfulness—and Peter Rice, an insect husk, the goddamned vampire sucking her life away, that bloodless Christian sewing machine with his intolerable daintiness—what had she to do with such creatures, what did she have to do with thick-witted, thick-ankled old Desmond and his infant thieving of liquor, or with debauched Carlos—but at the thought of Carlos, Laura began to cry. She didn’t understand anything! The unyielding mystery of her impulses was punishment enough for whatever she had done—she thought she had put them to sleep so long ago, that they had withered away just as she was withering away, but they were awake, the old beasts of her life, so merciless, so cruel. She sobbed aloud, feeling her wretched hair pasted to her cheeks, the waves all gone now—she desperately needed to use a toilet—she felt she couldn’t speak to a living soul, that she was cut off forever from speech, that if she spoke, there would be no words, only a barbaric gibbering, that there was no language for the torment of what she was feeling, of her aloneness. But she wanted no one! Only animal presences, a dog watching her silently, a cat suddenly standing up, its paws resting on a windowsill, to follow the flight of a bird. The utter quietness of animal being, that slow sinking into the eternal present that was animal sensibility, and she remembered how she had once undone a knotted string in front of a lion’s cage in a zoo, never looking at the lion, fully aware of its interest as she slowly untied the string, she and the lion, rapt, inside the unity of their attention, alive in that moment in such a peculiar, ultimate way. Ed had loved what she’d done; he hadn’t believed her when she said she knew she could catch and hold the attention of a lion.

Lions! She had been going on a long journey to Africa!

An enormous grief rose in her. The knowledge of the death of her mother flooded her bloodstream, entered her bowels, her marrow. She felt she was about to urinate on the street—her bladder was giving way—that nothing stood between her now and a leaking away of her life. She tried to imagine the black-toned, echoing clang of the bells of Campostella, that clanging from the void itself. Then she saw the blue flicker of a neon sign that read: Bar.

Clutching her arms around her purse which she held to her chest, she pushed open the door into a dark room, and without glancing at anyone, made for the back, for the door which said: Little Girls. She heard the choking flush of a toilet, and just made it into the empty one of two cubicles. She groaned with relief, her arms across her knees, the wet purse sliding onto the tile floor. Still, she wept and coughed. But she told herself that, at least, she had not had to watch Desmond pay the bill. It was always offensive.