WHEN he telephoned to ask you to do something he never said baldly, “Can you come to dinner a week from Thursday?” First he let you know who else was going to be there: the Slaters, perhaps, and the Berolzheimers, and John Peterson, the critic. And he could not leave this guest-list to speak for itself, but would annotate it at once with some short character sketches. “Peterson’s a queer fellow,” he would say. “Of course, he’s moody and right now he’s too much interested in politics for his own good, but I hope he’ll get back soon to his book on Montaigne. That’s his real work, and I wish you’d tell him that. You may not like him, of course, but underneath it all John is a marvelous person.” He was deferential, ingratiating, concerned for your pleasure, like a waiter with a tray of French pastry in his hand. This one had custard in it and that one was mocha; the chocolate-covered one had whipped cream, and the little one on the side was just a macaroon. With Pflaumen you were always perfectly safe—you never had to order blind.
In a way, it was a kindness he did you, putting it like that. Other acquaintances made the opposite error, calling up to demand, “Are you free Thursday?” before disclosing whether they wanted you to picket a movie house, attend a lecture at the New School, buy tickets for a party for Spain, or go and dance at a new night club. Nevertheless, there was something too explicit about Pflaumen’s invitations that made you set down the telephone with a feeling of distaste, made you dress hurriedly, though carefully, for his parties, as if you were going to keep some shameful assignation, made you, stepping out of your door in the new clothes you had bought, look furtively up and down the street before starting for the subway. Pflaumen had taken the risks out of social life, that was the trouble; and you felt that it was wrong to enjoy an evening without having paid for it with some touch of uncertainty, some tiny fear of being bored or out of place. Moreover, behind those bland and humble telephone calls, there was an unpleasant assumption about your character. Plainly Pflaumen must believe that you went out at night not because you liked your friends and wanted to be with them, but because you were anxious to meet new people, celebrities, to enlarge your own rather tacky social circle. No doubt this was at least half true, since with your real friends you seemed to prefer those whose spheres of interest were larger rather than smaller than your own—or at any rate to see more of them, if you could—but in those cases you were able to be sure that you liked them for themselves. With Pflaumen, unfortunately, there was never any question of that. Yet every time you accepted one of his invitations you entered into a conspiracy with him to hide the fact that he was a foolish, dull man whom nobody had much use for. And though some of his friends—the rich ones, perhaps—could feel all right about sitting at his table (after all, they were doing him a favor), you poor ones knew that he had bought your complaisance with his wines and rich food and prominent acquaintances, and you half-hated him before your finger touched his doorbell.
Standing there in the apartment-house corridor, you listened for voices that would mean that other guests had arrived and you would not be alone with him and the unmentionable secret. If you heard nothing, you hesitated, considered hurrying back downstairs and walking round the block till someone else should get there; but perhaps he had heard the elevator stop, heard your heels click on the stone floor, and was even now on the other side of the door silently waiting to admit you. You rang, and by the length of time it took him to answer, you knew that he had been in his bedroom after all. He came to the door in a maroon-colored smoking jacket, evening trousers, and black patent-leather shoes; he was newly shaved and scrubbed and powdered, and there was a general odor of Mennen’s about him. His whole stocky, carefully exercised body was full of energy: well-directed arrows of delight and welcome shot at you out of his black eyes, and his mouth curved downwards in a strenuous, sickle-shaped smile that gave his face an expression of cruelty.
How ill-suited he was, you thought, to his role of élégant! What a tireless struggle he must wage against his own physical nature! Looking at him, so black and broad and hairy, you saw that his well-kept person must appear to him like a settler’s plot triumphantly defended against the invading wilderness. No wonder he took such pride in the fit of his coat, the shine of his nails, the whiteness of his sharp, jagged teeth. You saw the lines his body ought to have followed; he had the regular merchant’s build; though he was not yet thirty-five, you looked for the crease in the waistcoat, but it was always just absent. Whenever you really noticed Pflaumen, you became aware of an additional person, a comfortable, cigar-smoking, sentimental family man, a kind of ancestral type on which the man-about-town had been superimposed, so that his finished personality came out as a sort of double exposure that was very disconcerting. If you were in a sympathetic mood, you might think what a pity it was he had not given in to his real self, had not married some nice girl and had some children, and reproduced in modern terms that atmosphere of bay rum, whisky, spilled ashes, poker chips, potted plants, kindness, and solid comfort that must have been his father’s personal climate. How nice he could have been under those circumstances! But if you looked at him hard again, you realized that something else was being held in check, something that did not fit at all with this picture of easygoing German-Jewish family life—something primitive and hungry and excessively endowed with animal vitality. Though it was true that his figure had a mercantile cast to it, in other ways he did not look like a German Jew, but like a member of some early barbarous tribe, a Scythian on a Greek vase. In his habits he was soft and self-indulgent; yet you felt there was a furnace of energy burning in him, and you drew back from the blast. It was this energy that had made it possible for him to discipline his body and his manners into patterns so unnatural to him; and, ironically, it was at the same time this energy that undid him as a society man by making him over-demonstrative, over-polite, over-genial, like a comedian who produces an effect of fatigue in his audience by working too hard at putting his gags across.
He held out his arms to help you with your coat, and what might have been an ordinary service became a tableau of politeness. Your hands shook, missing the buttons, for you felt that the coat was getting too much of the lime-light. It would have been kinder to whisk the shabby thing inconspicuously into a closet. If you did not yet know him well, you did not realize that he loved you for that patched fur. It signified that you were the real thing, the poet in a garret, and it also opened up for him charming vistas of What He Could Do For You. He led you into his bedroom, where a new novel by one of his friends and a fine edition or two lay open on a table. A lamp with a pale-amber shade (better for the eyes) was burning beside them, and the cushion in the easy chair by the table was slightly mussed. An impression of leisure and the enjoyment of fine things was readily engendered, though you knew that he could not have been back from his office for more than an hour, and that he must have bathed, shaved, dressed, and arranged the final details during that time. Yet he was not a hypocrite, so undoubtedly he had been reading. Five minutes with a book was as good as an hour to him anyway, for he took literature like wine-tasting: you can get all the flavor in the first sip; further indulgence might only blunt your palate. The room was furnished in a half-monastic style; the bed was narrow, with a monkscloth cover. On the walls were pictures by Kuniyoshi and Reginald Marsh, some George Grosz water colors and the reproduction of a detail from a mural by Rivera. You sat down behind his desk, a good piece, a little too heavy for the room, in black walnut; it had a great many fancy paper-weights on it, and a large marble cigarette-lighter, gifts, obviously, from clients in the patent law business. He got out the cocktail shaker, and said, “Let’s try it before the others come.”
He was disappointed, always, if you pronounced it perfect. He wanted to tinker with it a little, add a dash of Cointreau or Curaçao at your suggestion. “You’re absolutely right,” he would agree at once. “I knew it needed something,” and, picking up the shaker, he would hurry out to the bar he had installed in what had once been a linen closet. When he came back the drink would taste exactly the same to you, but Pflaumen’s satisfaction in it would be somehow deepened. The process was familiar to you. You had gone through it with other people, at dress rehearsals, at fittings with a tailor or a dressmaker, in a painter’s studio, till you had become expert at discovering and pointing out some trifling flaw that in no way invalidated the whole, a prop that was out of place, a coat that wrinkled imperceptibly across the shoulders, sleeves that were a quarter of an inch too short on a dress, a foreground that seemed a little crowded. Once you had made your criticism, everybody would be very happy. It was a form of exorcism: some minor or totally imaginary error is noted and corrected, symbolically, as it were, with the idea that all real and major imperfections have thereby been dealt with—as if by casting out some impudent small devil you had routed Beelzebub himself. Perhaps, also, there was a hope of dispersing responsibility; that cocktail was not Pflaumen’s any longer, but yours and his together, as it would never have been if you had merely given it your approval. By arriving early, you had become his hostess, and, all at once, you were sure that Pflaumen had intended this to happen.
Yet this conviction did not disturb you. On the contrary, you felt slightly uplifted, like one of those “good” bums who voluntarily chops half a cord of wood for the lady of the house to square her for the meal she has just put in front of him. Pflaumen rarely gave you a chance to repay his benevolence, so that generally you were uncomfortable with him, dangerously over-stored, explosive, a living battery of undischarged obligations. There were, for example, those letters of introduction, a great pile of them now, lying unopened, gathering dust on your desk. If only you had not drunk too much that one night when you had first known Pflaumen! If you had not let him see that you were frightened because you had no job and almost no money left! Above all, if you had not cried about it! The next morning he had sent you a sheaf of letters of introduction, and you had been touched and a little amused by the lack of judgment behind them. But you had presented them all. You had interviewed a brassière manufacturer in Ozone Park, a crank lawyer downtown who wanted someone to ghostwrite a book on the sunspot theory of economics, an advertising executive who needed some soap slogans, a hotel man, a brilliantine manufacturer. When it was over you were relieved, for somehow you had never felt so out of step, so unwanted, so drably unemployed, as in these offices Pflaumen had sent you to.
But the next week there was a new batch of letters, some of them signed by people you had never heard of, friends of Pflaumen’s whom he had got to recommend you for a job; and while you were delivering these, still more letters came in, taking you on errands that grew more and more bizarre. There was a loft in the garment district with AMERICAN RESEARCH printed on the door and inside three large rooms that contained nothing but a filing cabinet and a little man with a cigar—you had never found out what his research consisted of. Then there was a bald man on the seventeenth floor of the St. Moritz hotel who wanted a girl to go round the world with him—he, too, was writing a book, on occultism.
After that, you had presented no more letters, but they kept coming in as relentlessly as bills, and there was Pflaumen’s voice on the telephone, patient at first, then hurt and puzzled, but always mysteriously complacent. Had you gone to see the man in the Squibb Building? No? Really, it was impossible to understand you. He had been under the impression that you wanted a job. You made explanations at first, halting and shamefaced (after all, you supposed, he was trying to help you). Finally, you had quarreled with him; but your rudeness had only added to your debt, and your air of bravado and Bohemian defiance had quickened his admiration. (Such indifference to the question of survival was impractical, of course, but somehow, he knew, in awfully good taste.) You were for him, you discovered, the perfect object of charity, poor but not bedraggled, independent, stubborn, frivolous, thankless, and proud. He could pity you, deplore you, denounce you, display you, be kind to you, be hurt by you, forgive you. He could, in fact, run through his whole stock of feelings with you. A more grateful beneficiary would have given him no exercise for his masochistic emotions; a more willing one would have left his sadism unsatisfied. He was not going to let you go if he could help it. You stood to him in the relation of Man to God, embraced in an eternal neurotic mystery compounded out of His infinite goodness and your guilt.
When the others came, you all went into the living room, which was done in honey beige. There were pieces of sculpture by Archipenko and Harold Cash, and the head of a beautiful Egyptian queen, Neferteete. Everybody praised the cocktail, and Pflaumen’s old friends, of whom there were always a pair, complimented him on a new acquisition—a painting, a vase, a lamp—he had made. All Pflaumen’s friends lived on terms of intimacy with his possessions; if someone did not notice a new object, it was as mortifying a slip as a husband’s failure to notice his wife’s new hat. Indeed, Pflaumen, opening the door of his apartment, often wore that look of owlish mystery that says, “What’s new about me?” and the guests, being warned by it, examined the premises sharply till they found the single ornament that was responsible for the host’s elation. This acquisitiveness of Pflaumen’s was, you thought, just another way of making it easy for his friends to appear to like him. He was giving them something they could honestly admire, and if the objects could be viewed as extensions of Pflaumen’s personality, why, then, it followed that his friends admired Pflaumen. It was on such questionable but never questioned syllogisms that his social life was built.
By the time the maid announced dinner and the party moved down to a refectory table set in the foyer, Pflaumen’s eyes were damp with happiness. Everything was going well. Voices had risen in lively controversy over the new play, the new strike, the new Moscow trials, the new abstract show at the Modern Museum. Nobody was incoherent; nobody made speeches; nobody lost his temper. Sentences were short, and points in the argument clicked like bright billiard balls. Everyone felt witty. Pflaumen made a great bustle of seating the guests, and finally plumped himself down at the head of the table and beamed at them all as if to say, “Isn’t this cozy?” The steak came in, with an orange and sherry sauce, and everyone exclaimed over it. Pflaumen himself kept casting joyous sheep’s eyes up at his maid, commending her for the success of “their” dish. (He had put into circulation a dozen anecdotes designed to prove that this Scotchwoman who worked for him, like the maids of all really smart people, was a Character, full of sweet crotchets, bons mots, and rough devotion. Nobody, however, had seen the slightest sign of this, and tonight, as usual, she paid no attention to her employer, but continued to make her rounds with a stony face.) Peas were served, new ones cooked in the French style in their pods, and then the wine was brought in, a Château Lafite Rothschild.
This was Pflaumen’s apogee. Having tapped on his glass to get the table’s attention, he read aloud the Château and the year, and then uncorked the bottle himself, standing up to do it. Somebody at the end of the table, a man with a hearty voice, called, “Look out, there, George Arliss may come out of that bottle!” Pflaumen, pouring a little into his own glass, laughed with the others, but he was not quite pleased—it was the sort of joke he was capable of making himself. “Give us a speech, about the wine,” said one of the ladies obligingly. “The way they do at gourmet dinners.” “Why,” said Pflaumen, still standing at the head of the table with the bottle in his hand, “it’s not one of the great Bordeaux. . . .” “I prefer the word ‘claret,’ ” someone else put in, “it’s so full of English history.” “You mean,” retorted Pflaumen, “English history is so full of it.” He waited for the laugh, which came reluctantly—it was said that Pflaumen had “a pretty wit,” but there was something chilling about it; he had never learned how to throw a line away. “Anyway,” he went on, with a little laugh, so that no one should think he took all this too seriously, “it’s a nice brisk wine, on the astringent side. I thought it would do well with the steak.” “Perfect!” exclaimed a lady, though the glasses were still empty. “Of course I think it’s silly,” continued Pflaumen, starting to go round the table with the bottle, “to be too pedantic about what you drink with what. I’ll take a good Burgundy with a broiler and a Rhine wine with a kidney chop any time I can get it.” Murmurs of approval greeted this unconventional statement, and Pflaumen passed on down the line, carefully decanting the wine into each glass.
Across the table from you someone refused, and all the rest raised their heads with an identical look of worry. It was the young Russian Jew, the instructor in law at Columbia, who wore a rather quizzical, sardonic expression on a pure Italianate face. His Marxist study of jurisprudence had created a stir. Still, perhaps Fleischer had made a mistake in him. Was it possible that he was not an eccentric but a crank? This act of abstention was a challenge to everyone at the table, an insult to the host. For almost a full minute nobody spoke, but muscles tightened with hostility. In different circumstances the young man might have been lynched.
“You don’t drink?” said a woman at last in a loud, bewildered voice.
“I drank a cocktail,” he admitted. “It went to my head. If I took any more I might make a fool of myself.” He twisted his head and looked up at Pflaumen with a disarming boyish grin. “You’ll have to give me a course in the art of drinking. That’s one subject that was left out of my proletarian education.” He pronounced the last words mildly, with a sort of droll self-mockery that deprecated, ever so faintly, his innocence, his poor Russian parents, his studiousness, the Talmudic simplicity of his life. There was a burst of relieved laughter, and after that everyone liked him. Thank God, was the general feeling, he had turned out not to be one of those Marxist prigs!
Once the wine was poured, Pflaumen took very little part in the conversation. He leaned back in his chair with the air of a satisfied impresario, embracing all his guests in a smile of the most intense and proprietary affection. Now and then, this look of commendation would rest particularly on you; whenever this happened, it was as if, in his delight, he had reached over and squeezed you. From time to time, his cup of bliss would appear to run over, and the smile would break into a short high giggle. When the spasm was over, he would take out his handkerchief and carefully wipe his eyes, and the old-fashioned masculinity of this gesture made a strange contrast with the schoolgirlish sound he had just produced. Sitting at his left hand, you looked down at your plate until this display was finished. There was something androgynous about Pflaumen, something not pansy, but psychically hermaphroditic that was always disconcerting you. It was as if the male and female strains in his personality had never blended, but were engaged in some perennial household spat that you were obliged to eavesdrop on. For, when you came to think of it, the Jewish paterfamilias was not the only figure that kept hovering behind your host’s well-padded shoulder; there was also a young girl, newly married to a man already coarse and comfortable, a young girl playing house all by herself in a fine establishment full of wedding presents that both astonished and saddened her. Most Jewish men were more feminine than Gentile men of similar social background. You had noticed this and had supposed, vaguely, that it was the mark matriarchy had left on them, but looking at Pflaumen you saw the whole process dramatically. The matriarch had begun by being married off to a husband who was prosperous and settled and older than herself, and her sons she had created in her own image, forlorn little bridegrooms to a middle-aged bride.
In most of the men, the masculine influence had, in the end, overridden or absorbed the feminine, and you saw only vestigial traces of the mother. There might be a tendency to hypochondria, a readiness to take offense, personal vanity, love of comfort, love of being waited on and made much of; and, on the other hand, there would be unusual intuitive powers, sympathy, loyalty, tenderness, domestic graces and kindnesses unknown to the Gentile. But with Pflaumen it was not a question of the survival of a few traits. Two complete personalities had been preserved in him, as in a glacier. Half of him was a successful businessman and half of him was playing house. These dinners of his were like children’s tea parties, and in this lay their strength and their weakness. They had the sort of perfection that can only be achieved in miniature. The groaning board was not in Pflaumen’s style at all: one exquisite dish, one vegetable, a salad and some cheese were what you got, rarely a soup, never a dessert. You thought of your little electric stove, your cambric tea or hot chocolate and your petits fours from the caterer. But more important than the perfection of the appointments was the illusion of a microcosm Pflaumen was able to create, the sense of a little world that was exactly the same as the big world, though it had none of the pain or care.
Each of Pflaumen’s guests had been selected, as it were, for his allegorical possibilities, and every dinner was presented as a morality play in which art and science, wealth and poverty, business and literature, sex and scholarship, vice and virtue, Judaism and Christianity, Stalinism and Trotskyism, all the antipodes of life, were personified and yet abstract. Tonight there was John Peterson, who stood for criticism and also for official Communism. There was Jim Berolzheimer, a bright young man in one of the great banking houses, who represented capitalism, and his wife who painted pictures and was going to have a baby, and was therefore both art and motherhood. There was Henry Slater, the publisher, very flirtatious, with a shock of prematurely white hair, who was sex, and his wife, an ash-blond woman with a straight bang, who kept a stable full of horses and had no opinions and was sport. There was a woman psychoanalyst who got herself up in a Medici gown and used a cigarette holder. There was a pretty English girl named Leslie who worked on Time. There was the young Jew, Martin Erdman, who did not drink. There was Pflaumen himself, who stood for trade marks and good living, and you, who stood for literature and the Fourth International. After dinner there might be others: a biologist and his wife, a man who was high up in the Newspaper Guild, a matronly young woman who wore her hair in a coronet around her head and was active in the League of Women Shoppers, a Wall Street lawyer, a wine dealer, a statistician.
And here was the striking effect produced by Pflaumen’s dinners: you truly felt yourself turning into an abstraction of your beliefs and your circumstances. Contradictions you had known in yourself melted away; challenged by its opposite, your personality hardened into something unequivocal and defiant—your banners were flying. All the guests felt this. If you asserted your Trotskyism, your poverty, your sexual freedom, the expectant mother radiated her pregnancy, the banker basked in his reactionary convictions, and John Peterson forgot about Montaigne and grew pale as an El Greco saint in his defense of Spanish democracy. Everybody, for the moment, knew exactly who he was. Pflaumen had given you all your identity cards, just as a mother will assign personalities to each of her brood of children: Jack is hard-working and steady, Billy is a flash-in-the-pan, never can finish anything he starts. Mary is dreamy, Helen is practical. While it lasted, the feeling was delightful; and at the dinner table everyone was heady with a peculiar, almost lawless excitement, like dancers at a costume ball.
It was only when you caught a glimpse of the author of your happiness, ensconced there, so considerate, so unobtrusive, at the head of his table, that your conviction wavered. To the others, too, he must have been a disturbing factor, for throughout the meal there was a tacit conspiracy to ignore the host, to push him out of the bright circle he had so painstakingly assembled. Once the dinner got under way, nobody accorded him more than a hasty glance. If he dropped a pun or a platitude into the conversation, it was just as if he had dropped a plate: there would be a moment of frozen silence, then the talk would go on as before.
Pflaumen did not appear to mind this; in fact, he seemed to accept it as natural. Here in this apartment, all the rules of ordinary politeness were suspended; and at first you were so caught up in your own gaiety that you hardly noticed this, and it seemed to you, too, perfectly natural that no one should speak to the host. But gradually, as in a dream, you became aware that the laws of the normal world were not operating here, that something was wrong, that nothing was what it seemed to be, that the church bell you were listening to was really the alarm clock. And, just as in a dream, the exhilaration continued for a little, but underneath it ran distrust and terror. You knew that it was not what it pretended to be, this microcosm of your host’s, for if it were actually so fine and first-rate, Pflaumen himself would not be in it, even on sufferance. He was the clue in the detective story, the piece of thread, the thumbprint, the bullet in the wainscoting, that stares up at the bright detective and tells him that the well-arranged scene before him is the work, not of Nature, but of Man. You had only to look at him to know that the morality play was just a puppet show, that the other guests did not represent the things they were supposed to, that they could be fitted into this simulacrum of the larger world precisely because they were small, unreal figures, and with growing anxiety you asked yourself, “Why am I in it too?”
The conversation around you began to sound peculiarly flat. “Cultivate your own garden is what I told her,” the publisher was saying. “She’ll never understand politics.” “She’d do better to cultivate her gardener—like Lady Chatterley,” put in the English girl. Next to her, John Peterson went on talking through her joke. He was a little tight. “This backstabbing that goes on here makes me want to vomit,” he said. “I can’t listen to it after what I’ve seen in Madrid. I’ve heard La Pasionaria sing. What do these petty political squabbles mean to her? She’s got a heart as big as the Spanish earth.”
Suddenly you knew that you must cut yourself off from these people, must demonstrate conclusively that you did not belong here. You took a deep breath and leaned across the table toward John Peterson. “God damn you,” you said in a very loud voice, such as you had once heard a priest use to denounce sinners from the pulpit, “God damn you, what about Andres Nin?” You felt your body begin to shake with stage fright and the blood rush up into your face and you heard the gasp go around the table, and you were gloriously happy because you had been rude and politically unfashionable, and really carried beyond yourself, an angel warrior with a flaming sword. Surely, there could be no doubt that you had put yourself beyond the pale. But when you looked up you saw that Pflaumen was beaming at you again, his eyes wetter than ever, as proud as if you had just spoken your first word to an audience of aunts.
“Meg is a violent Trotskyist,” he said tenderly. “She thinks the rest of us are all GPU agents.” The publisher, who had been concentrating on the English girl, looked across the table at you, sizing you up for the first time. “My God,” he said, “you’re certainly spirited about it.” Martin Erdman was watching you, too. He clapped his hands twice in pantomime and gave you a long, ironic smile. You bent your head and blushed, and, though you were excited, your heart sank. You knew that you were not a violent Trotskyist, and Erdman must know it too. It was just that you were temperamentally attracted to unpopular causes: when you were young, it had been the South, the Dauphin, Bonnie Prince Charlie; later it was Debs and now Trotsky that you loved. You admired this romantic trait in yourself and you would confess humorously: “All I have to do is be for somebody and he loses.” Now it came to you that perhaps this was just another way of showing off, of setting yourself apart from the run of people. Your eyes began to fill with tears of shame; you felt like Peter in the Garden, but yours was, you knew, the greater blasphemy: social pressure had made Peter deny the Master; it had made you affirm him—it was the difference between plain and fancy cowardice.
You held your eyes wide open to keep the tears from falling. The others, staring at you, must certainly think that your brimming eyes testified to the depth of your feeling for the murdered Nin. You tossed your head slightly and the tears began to settle.
“You are,” you said, “a lot of you, GPU agents. The trouble is you’re such idiots you don’t even get paid for it.”
It was a harsh joke, but it was a joke, and it was your peace offering. There was a cackle of laughter, and then everyone but John Peterson and Erdman was looking at you fondly, as if they were all much older than you were. Peterson cast you a malignant glance from his pale eyes, but he did not say anything. He was not too drunk to know that though the others actually agreed with him about Nin (or else did not care), temporarily, in some way, you had got them on your side. Erdman did not speak either; he nodded his head twice in the same tempo he had clapped his hands in, and kept smiling at you with that strange, mocking, affectionate expression.
You saw how profitable that exchange had been for you: it had earned you an enemy and, you thought, a lover. The first thing made you feel good, and the second saddened you. The next morning the phone would wake you and you would reach out and take it dreamily and it would be Erdman speaking very softly, asking you to have tea with him. You could see how it would all be. You would go to bed with him finally, but it would not last long, because you had both been compromised at this dinner party, and you had both understood this and understood each other. “Have you seen Pflaumen lately?” he would ask from time to time, and you would not be able to meet his eyes when you answered yes or no. He would not pursue the subject (you would never dare discuss Pflaumen together), but both of you would be silently asking the same question: what weakness, what flimsiness of character, what opportunism or cynicism had put the other into Pflaumen’s hands?
On the other hand, you would treat each other gently, with a special tenderness, as though you were both wounded. For if, in one way, your love would be full of doubt, in another, it would be over-full of comprehension, lacking in mystery, like the grave dreary love between brother and sister. You had recognized him in the scene about the wine; he had recognized you in the scene about Nin. You would have liked, both of you, to play a lone hand; but you had not been strong enough for it. In each case, your war of independence had been an inglorious Putsch (“Excuse me, Officer, I was only fooling.”)
While the coffee and liqueurs were being served, new people came in, and the party broke up into smaller units. The publisher whispered in the English girl’s ear; the banker talked Bermuda with the publisher’s wife. John Peterson, glassy-eyed, exhorted the woman psychoanalyst—“But surely in his later years Freud played into Hitler’s hands.” You stood beside Martin Erdman, not talking, listening to the others, sharing an ironic smile between you. Pflaumen sat on a sofa beside the expectant mother; he was telling her about a new product he had just had trademarked, while she went through a pantomime of congratulation. Only she could afford to be polite, for she had nothing to gain now from social intercourse, and, being easily fatigued, nothing much to give. She was comfortable with Pflaumen; he took her hand and she let him hold it; he was one of her oldest friends.
What had happened to you with Erdman was happening with others all over the room. Men were taking out address books or repeating phone numbers in low voices. There was a slight shuffle of impatience; nothing more could be done here; it was time to go and yet it was much too early.
People got up and shifted around, like people in a railroad station when the stationmaster has come in to announce that the train will be forty minutes late. New combinations were formed. The publisher was sitting on the arm of your chair now, asking if you would like to write an opinion on a manuscript. You agreed, and for you, too, now the party was over. You had got everything you came for—a new lover and some work to do. Pflaumen came and sat at your feet on the floor. “You were wonderful,” he said, looking up at you with that over-energetic expression of delight. You had an unaccountable impulse to kick him exactly where the paunch should have been. “The Berolzheimers are crazy about you,” he went on, ignoring your angry look, putting it down to “temperament,” an inestimable commodity. “They want me to bring you to dinner next Wednesday.” You raised your eyebrows into circles of surprise; yet you had known, ever since that scene at the table, that the Berolzheimers would invite you. They were pleasant and they would have a nice house with good food, and there would be new people there; it would be interesting to see the world through a banker’s eyes.
“Are you having fun?” asked Pflaumen, drawing his knees up and hugging them with his arms in a real ecstasy of coziness.
“Yes,” you said. “It’s a very gay party.”
“Erdman is interesting . . .” he began tentatively.
You don’t miss a trick, you thought, but you answered him impassively. “Is he?” you said. “I can’t really tell. I haven’t talked much to him.”
Pflaumen looked hurt.
“Of course,” he said, “it’s none of my business . . .”
“I don’t know what you mean,” you said, in a stubborn childish voice.
The warm, twosey smile had died on his lips, but he revived it with an effort.
“Personally,” he went on, “I should have thought Peterson was more in your line. I asked him specially because I thought he could do you some good . . .”
He paused. The unresolved sentence hung coaxingly in the air, begging your denial, your explanation, your attention. But cruelly you ignored it, and leaned back in your chair, as if to catch the words of the neighboring conversation. “Did you hear that?” you said finally. “They are picketing The Tsar to Lenin.”
Pflaumen glanced up at you, refusing the diversion. “Oh Meg,” he murmured reproachfully, “I thought we were such friends.”
“Don’t be tiresome!” you exclaimed. “Why don’t you get me another highball?” You put your glass in his hand with a decisive gesture.
“All right,” he acceded, scrambling to his feet. You thought you had won. At a single sharp word that hungry ego had scuttled back into the shell of function, where friendship and hospitality were identical and every highball was a loving cup. But he had taken only a few steps toward the bar, when he stopped, as if he had forgotten something, and turned back to you with an anxious face. “You’re not drinking too much, are you?” he asked, in a true stage whisper. Several people, including Erdman, turned their heads.
At last, you thought, the bill had come in. The dinners, the letters of introduction, the bottle of perfume, the gardenias, the new Soviet film, the play, the ballet, the ice-skating at Rockefeller Plaza had all been invoiced, and a line drawn underneath, and the total computed. How recklessly you had accepted, like a young matron with a charge account (“Take two, madam; the bill will not go out till after the first of the year”). Now, when you looked at it, the total was staggering; it was more than you could pay.
You remembered suddenly all the warning signs. How deep Pflaumen always was in the confidence of his friends, how offended if two of them should meet in his absence! How careful people were to serve the whisky Pflaumen’s client made—you recalled how a young husband had hurried out, unshaved, to the liquor store, so that the label on the bottle should be right when Pflaumen arrived for highballs; you remembered another husband pouring wine into a decanter so that Pflaumen should not know that it came from his client’s competitor. And how fond Pflaumen was of talking about loyalty! “It’s the only thing I expect of my friends,” he would say, sententiously. Loyalty, you now perceived, meant that Pflaumen should never be left out of anything. He was like an x that you can never drop out of an equation no matter how many times you multiply it or add to it this side of infinity. All at once, you saw how he could be generous and humble and look predatory at the same time; the hawklike mouth was not deceptive, for he was a true bird of prey: he did not demand any of the trifles that serve as coin in the ordinary give-and-take of social intercourse; he wanted something bigger, he wanted part of your life.
For the first time, you understood why it was that this apartment of Pflaumen’s affected you so unpleasantly, why you went there almost surreptitiously, not telling anyone, so that your closest friends were hardly aware that you knew Pflaumen. You saw that it was indeed a house of assignation, where business deals, friendships, love affairs were arranged, with Pflaumen, the promoter, taking his inevitable cut. When you had refused to tell Pflaumen about Erdman—though, so far, there was nothing really to tell—you had violated the code. You had tried to cheat him of his rightful share; you had been guilty of disloyalty. And he was going to crack down on you; he had, in fact, already begun.
When he came back from the bar with your glass in his hand, he was smiling, but the down-curved lips were strained and angry. You took the glass and set it down; Erdman in a cheap tweed coat was making his way toward you, ready to say good-bye. You smiled at him faintly, knowing that Pflaumen was watching you, and knowing, too, with a certain vindictive happiness, that of all the things about Erdman, Pflaumen was most envious of that baggy Kollege Kut coat with its raglan collar. You thought of your own poor coat, and you could see the two of them hanging side by side in Pflaumen’s closet, like two pairs of shoes outside a hotel room in a naughty French movie, sentinels to a private, serious world that Pflaumen could never—even vicariously—invade.
The two men were shaking hands. “Come again,” said Pflaumen, “and I’ll get Farwell from the Yale Law School to meet you. And bring your wife,” he added, in an emphatic voice. “You ought to meet her, Meg.”
“Yes,” you said thinly. “I didn’t know Mr. Erdman was married.”
“He tries to keep it dark,” said Pflaumen, suddenly very jovial. He slapped Erdman on the back and began to propel him toward the door.
You went quietly into the bedroom and took your coat out of the closet. By the time Pflaumen returned from the elevator, you were ready to go.
“You’re not leaving?” he said, looking alarmed. “If you wait till the others go, I’ll drive you.”
“Don’t bother,” you said. “I’m used to the subway.”
“But what about the Berolzheimers?” he asked breathlessly, in a sort of panic. Clearly he had not intended that things should go quite so far. “Next Wednesday?”
You had forgotten about the Berolzheimers. Now you hesitated, weighing the invitation. Sooner or later you would break with him, you knew. But not yet, not while you were still so poor, so loverless, so lonely. “All right,” you said, “you can pick me up at my place.”
The time after the next, you promised yourself, you would surely refuse.