MILES was nonplussed by the portrait. It reminded him a little of science fiction and a little of old-fashioned movie music and, most of all, of Jesuit sermons on Hell. It conveyed fury and conflict. It was, he supposed, what you might call program painting. “It represents fission,” said Warren. “I’m using that as the theme for this whole series of portraits.” Miles made an impatient gesture. Warren had explained the theory behind his painting before; he was trying to express the fourth dimension or the general theory of relativity or something of the kind—Jane’s father, a scientist, had put him up to it. This sort of talk did not interest Miles. Theory, in artists, did not matter to him, only results. “By their fruits, ye shall know them,” he always said, sententiously. He had first known Warren in his so-called quantum phase, which was succeeded by his galactic phase: Warren seemed to think that progress was mandatory in art and bubbled about advances and setbacks—he had lost three years, he had once confided, when he let Picasso lead him up the garden walk. Most artists talked that way nowadays—perhaps they had always done so; and most of them had a father-figure in the background who supplied the motor-ideas. They were all boy scouts in their corduroy fashion, eager beavers, following the leader, some jackleg critic or straw-boss philosopher.
But the work was something else again. Whatever nonsense he spouted, Warren was an able draftsman. He had got the hair just right—a fair skein of silk streaming across the canvas. In Miles’s desk drawer, at home, among the keepsakes of his previous marriages—a pair of tiny gloves, a ribboned garter, an old packet of fish-skins—there was a tress of Martha’s hair, now dulled, that had once shone and rippled like the hair in Warren’s picture. And Warren had caught something of Martha’s temperament in the blunt tilt of the nose and the tiny, staring eyehole of the nostril. “Why, it’s the best thing you’ve done,” Miles suddenly decided. The other three looked at him, wonderingly. Miles read Helen’s questioning gaze. “Isn’t it rather dark?” she murmured. She meant academic. There were two opinions in New Leeds on the subject of Warren’s painting—the one that called it too modern and the one that called it academic. Among the summer crowd, Warren’s quest for the fourth dimension was considered rather a joke, a sad joke, because he was a nice man. There was a lot of irony in the position, Miles had often reflected. If Warren had been a carpenter or a plumber, he could have made his marks as a naif painter with a scientific “vision,” but his art-school training rendered him funny ha-ha to the cognoscenti, among whom Miles did not number himself. In the days when the poor devil used to have exhibitions in the rug-and-craft shop on the village green, everybody turned up, out of friendship for the Coes, and quietly snickered into their sleeve at the sign hand-lettered by Warren—“Prices on Request.” He had never sold a canvas in all his years up here, which, Martha used to claim, was a sort of achievement, considering the local taste. He could not even give one away: people protested that they were too big or too dark for a seashore house.
Miles began to pace up and down. His present wife’s attitude annoyed him—she was too conventional in her responses. He stopped by the liquor tray and poured himself a fresh drink. He was thinking of Martha. He had always had a weakness for intelligent women, though he knew them to be bad for him, like drink or certain kinds of food. They disagreed with him, in both senses of the word. Now that he was older, he knew enough to leave them alone. He had organized his life sensibly, and the proof was that he was writing again, after fifteen years. But he had bouts of dissatisfaction, when he resented the choice that had been made for him. That was how he felt about it on his glum days, as if an authority had chosen for him, though the authority had been no other than Miles Murphy: he had prescribed for himself, as his own therapist, studying his character structure and deducing from it the qualities he required in a mate. He had given a woman friend his specifications—a girl approaching middle life but not too old for childbearing, not previously married, unencumbered by family, possessing an independent income and an open mind, with a sense of her own dignity, submissive, pleasant-spoken, and moderately pleasing to the eye. And his friend had produced Helen the first crack out of the box.
Helen was all woman, and he was damn lucky to have got her. They did not make them like her any more. Her father was a Greek wholesaler in Chicago, with a big import trade; Helen had stayed home to nurse her mother when the old man died and the older brother married. She had helped run the family business for a time, done her bit for war relief, and studied ceramics at the Art Institute. The family was cultivated; she had an uncle who was a Metropolitan. When the old lady passed on, finally, she was practically alone in the world, except for a raft of suitors—Penelope waiting for Odysseus. And she had had the patience to hold out till crafty old Odysseus came. She was not stupid, though stupid people thought so, but she had learned how to efface herself, in the European way. For the first time in his life (his mother had never favored him), he discovered that he came first. She could take his abrupt dictation and decipher his manuscript notes and hold the dinner till midnight if he did not feel like eating. She could keep the child quiet in the morning when he had been sleeping a binge off. When they read Aeschylus together in the evenings, as they were doing this fall, she looked up the hard words in the dictionary and put them down on a list for him. She kept the household accounts and never bothered him about money. If he felt like talking, she listened and asked intelligent questions. If he was nervous and morose, she left him alone. She never turned on the waterworks, like Martha; a little bird must have told her that he could not stand women’s tears.
She did not stimulate him—that was her only drawback. He did not notice this, he found, unless he had been drinking. Then, in a disgruntled frame of mind, after he had sent her off to bed, he would open the desk drawer, stare at Martha’s little gloves, and set himself to recalling her clever remarks. Martha always hated this habit of his—the desk drawer, she said, and everything it contained of him. She hated his remembering things she said. “You turn everything into the past,” she would tell him sharply. And she also used to complain that he remembered her worst mots, accidentally-on-purpose. “That isn’t funny,” she used to say coldly, when he was chuckling over one of her satirical strokes. “Please, Miles, don’t quote me.” It was all part of her general pattern of rejection and self-hatred. She could not stand to hear anything said twice. One habitual phrase of his used to drive her crazy: “I’m inordinately fond of pickles,” “I’m inordinately fond of potatoes.” “You’re inordinately fond of saying that!” she had cried out once. “I know you like potatoes. Don’t dwell on it.” Today, whenever he used the expression, it tickled him to think of Martha.
She was awfully good on people. He had to hand it to her, even when he was the target. And every time he saw the Coes, nowadays, he remembered the night when everybody was saying that Warren was too intellectual in his approach to painting and Martha had retorted that he was just as intellectual as Barrett, who kept asking “Why?” all day long. That had hit Warren off to a T, though Miles had not appreciated it at the time. He was not as noticing as Martha; she was very feminine that way. He used to tell people, confidently, that Warren had a genuine epistemological bent. He groaned, now, to think of what he had started when he had put him onto Whitehead and Russell and Sullivan.
This, he felt awesomely sure, was a deed he would have to answer for on Judgment Day. He had not dreamed, when he first undertook to supervise Warren’s reading, that Warren was utterly innocent of the nature of an abstract concept: he took everything he read with a happy literalness and supposed that modern science had fixed it so that two and two equaled five. He had pounced on that notion in Dostoevski, and came bearing it to Miles like a retriever, a few years back. “Haven’t the scientists proved that?” he had asked, with startled eyes, when Miles tried to unscramble him. The poor fellow could not get the idea of proof out of his noodle. Science and philosophy had deranged his common sense. “How do you know that?” he kept challenging when you let drop the most casual observation. And since he could not understand the only two fields in which proof was possible—logic and mathematics—he had fallen back, despondently, on the notion that everything was false. He had even, for a time, lost faith in his painting. His work, he had discovered, was a lie, just as big a lie, he said bitterly, as Rembrandt or Titian, who at least thought the world they were painting was real. The fact that you could never see time—the fourth dimension—had hit him amidships halfway through a volume of Kierkegaard; he realized he was a faker and illusionist and probably ought to be put in jail. This revelation had made him sick; Jane vouched for it. He lay in their outsize bed, shivering, under the electric blanket, for nearly three weeks, baffling the doctor and the Freudian analyst, who was piped in daily from New York.
And then, deo gratias, he had recovered. He had telephoned Miles to tell him the glad tidings. He had been cured, he confided, by relativity—the hair of the dog that bit him, as Miles remarked aside. Under the electric blanket, he had thought about outer space and reasoned that a lie could be true there, just the way parallel lines could meet. Miles had not had the heart to gainsay him. What was the use of explaining to him that a lie existed only in discourse? The little fellow, he saw, had fallen in love with the concept of outer space. He visualized it as a sort of scientific heaven in which all the false appearances of this earth were corrected by curving back on themselves and becoming their opposites. For him, in his current phase, relativity (which he identified with philosophical relativism) was a new and blissful absolute, the absolute topsy turvy, like a kid’s picture of China. If everything was relative, as he now felt assured, then his painting might be just as true as Rembrandt; truer, perhaps? What did Miles think, he inquired eagerly, a year ago on the breakwater. Miles had shaken his head. Given Warren’s premise, he pointed out, it would not be truer—let it go at just as true as Rembrandt.
And pragmatically, Miles now admitted, the idea seemed to be working out. Warren was feeling no pain. He had come a long way since last year, he had explained to Miles during luncheon. The fear that he might have to wait till after his death for recognition no longer troubled him, he declared. It was not really a postponement, if you thought of time as curved. “Just a question of time, eh?” said Miles, chewing on a chicken breast, and Warren had nodded, joyously, blinking his soft eyes like a bashful lover and wiggling his bare toes in the sand. Miles, to tell the truth, had felt a little disturbed by this new packaging of pie in the sky. And yet, like all religions, it had done something positive for the true believer; here in the studio, Miles could see that. Warren’s work, certainly, had taken a leap into freedom, or a plunge into necessity, if this portrait was typical. It had entered a domain in which you could not tell whether it was good or bad.
Which, he supposed, was in a way what Warren was aiming at.
“It’s supposed to represent an equation,” proffered Warren. “The one the atom bomb is based on. It’s Martha in a state of fission. In my next series, I’m going on to fusion—the hydrogen-bomb formula.” Miles nodded—he had begun to get the drift of the painting—but Helen had a little frown, like shirred chiffon, between her dark brows. “Would you like to see the figures?” said Warren, hopefully. “I got them from a mathematician who was staying in the Hubers’ cottage this summer.” “Oh, Warren, that’s boring,” said Jane, in a flat, comfortable tone, looking sidewise at Helen, who was sitting up, with an air of determination, on the old sofa and tightening her knotted scarf about her throat. “Isn’t your idea rather literary?” she said to Warren in an anxious voice. “Almost like illustration?” She had an air of helpfulness. “All painting is literary,” Miles corrected. “It makes a statement about the world. What we used to call the artist’s vision. The rest is wallpaper.” Helen pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes, tilting her head from one side to the other, as she strove to see the canvas from Miles’s deeper perspective. Miles nursed his chin and watched her. He repented his rudeness. Evidently, she did not like the painting, but this was a wholly natural reaction. Nobody, to Miles’s knowledge, had ever liked Warren’s painting, with the exception of Jane’s father, who, so to speak, was its onlie begetter and owned examples of every period. And people trained in the arts, like Helen, were positively upset by it. “Shall I take it away?” volunteered Warren, with a solicitous, inquiring look at Helen, as if a guest had shown uneasiness of a pet dog or cat. Miles was touched. “Leave it,” he said, shortly, raising a hand. “I want to think about it.” He flung himself onto one of the benches.
A strange temptation was assailing him. He wanted to buy the portrait. There was a stifled impresario in him; he liked to think of himself as a Renaissance tyrant-patron commanding his goldsmiths and his limners. He had a number of portfolios of drawings, chiefly of erotic subjects and strange beasts and mythical monsters; before the old house burned down he had owned a half-dozen paintings done by artist cronies from the Village bars he used to haunt. Yet all his wives, even the gentle Helen, disparaged his taste in art. He liked “magic” realism, Dali, the Gothic scenes of Max Ernst, the color of Reginald Marsh—paintings that gave him something to chew on—but his wives were always trying to educate his eye with Braque and Juan Gris and Mondrian. Ever since he had closed up his consulting-room, he had not had a free hand. Draftsmanship, a fine line, appealed to him, and despite what his wives said he felt himself to be a connoisseur of drawing. Moreover, he was a gambler—the year he had had a hit on Broadway, he had owned a piece of a race horse—and the fact that Warren Coe was a hundred-to-one shot played powerfully on his fancy. He was a little drunk and he relished it.
Staring at the painting, he gave himself up to reverie. With a certain somber irony—for he knew himself full well—he heard himself showing a visitor through his Coe collection. “Interesting little fella; lives up here all year round, in New Leeds; never had a real show or a criticism; doesn’t know himself what he’s up to; got a science bug; dominated by his wife’s family, scientists, Germans, from the Rhineland. Extraordinary draftsman, though; used to be a drawing teacher. Not a primitive; an isolate. Got a spot of Blake in him. I was the first to discover him. . . . That’s my second wife, the picture that got me started—my last Duchess, you might say, if you still remember your Browning. ‘There’s my last Duchess hanging on the wall, looking as if she were alive.’ ” A short chuckle broke from Miles. The humor of the purchase nudged him in the ribs, sardonically. Martha, he remembered, used to say that he would like her if she were stuffed and mounted, like a dead bird.
“Helen didn’t care for it at first,” he went on in a more serious vein to his fancied guest. “She’s got more taste than I have. But people of taste are at a disadvantage when it comes to a long shot like Coe. It’s what I like to call the fallacy of the trained eye. Art historians pretend that it’s the philistines that scoff at the new men. Pardon me if I say that’s horse shit. The philistines aren’t interested in art unless it’s called to their attention as something they ought to get sore about. It’s the boys and girls with the trained eyes that come to smile at the Armory show and the Salon of the Refusés—the ones who know better than the painter. Who laughed at Whistler? Ruskin. Who laughed at Socrates? Aristophanes. Who laughed at Racine? Molière.”
A hard green light glittered in Miles’s eye. His narrow lips compressed like scar tissue. He had a sense of astuteness, cunning, and clarity. Every analogue in the history of culture told him that Warren Coe was hot. Coe was an idiot, but most of the masters were simpletons, like Monet, or had a screw loose somewhere. Yeats’s spiritualism was just as balmy as any of Warren’s notions; the plan of Ulysses was nuts and academic as hell; pointillism, as a theory, was drivel. Your typical genius, of today, was some modest little goof, like Warren, plugging away in solitude at a mad scheme or invention that no reasonable person would give a nickel for: Duchamp, the early Schoenberg, Ives, that fellow who was a doctor in New Jersey. The more, in fact, Miles pondered the case, the more unaccountable it seemed to him that Warren had not been discovered already. And this, all at once, gave Miles pause; a morose suspicion overtook him. Somebody, he felt, was trying to deceive him; the wool was being pulled over his eyes. Some unidentified force was trying to maneuver him into buying a painting that nobody else would have as a gift. Or was it the other way round? Was a hidden force trying to dissuade him from answering the knock of opportunity? He heard his wife and the Coes talking and shot a mistrustful look in their direction. It seemed to him that they might be ignoring him for some purpose. All his ideas began to seesaw; he could not tell which side of the inward debate he was on. More and more, in recent months, he had found it difficult to think in his customary rapid, purposeful style. The more clear his ideas became, the less he could choose between them; it was as if he had floated into Warren’s relativity and hung, confused, over vast profundities.
“How much?” he said suddenly, in a thickened voice, jabbing a thumb at the portrait. The others turned and stared. Warren’s soft, driftwood-colored hair seemed to rise slowly on his scalp. They had not understood him, evidently. “Much?” Miles repeated, with an effort, pointing to the picture again. The liquor had half-paralyzed his tongue but he did not allow this to deter him, for he understood that art-collecting was conducted in terse signs and monosyllables. “You mean the price?” asked Jane. Miles nodded, heavily. They all sat there, goggling. “Why, gee, Miles, I don’t know,” said Warren mildly. “It’s ten years since I’ve put a picture up for sale. Mr. Carl—Jane’s father—is the only regular Coe buyer. And that’s in the family. . . .” He went bubbling on, but Miles interrupted him. “Set a price,” he said. “You don’t mean you’re thinking of buying it?” cried Jane. “Why, Miles, where would you put it?” murmured Helen. “In the gymnasium,” retorted Miles. Last year, they had bought an old windmill and turned it into a gymnasium for Miles to work out in; up above, he had a study, where he wrote.
Roses bloomed in Warren’s fading cheeks; boyish tears stood in his eyes. “Golly,” he said. “Golly, Miles,” and he came over and shook Miles’s hand. “I don’t know what to say,” he added, staring bashfully up at the portrait. Jane intervened, with a sharp glance at Helen. “Why, Miles,” she cried, “you don’t want to buy a picture of Martha! People would think you were crazy.” Miles’s tongue loosened. “They wouldn’t know it was Martha,” he said playfully, with a fraternal wink at Warren. Jane was aghast. “I shouldn’t think Helen . . .” she began, but her voice faded away, uncertainly, as Helen, beside her, merely smiled and picked up the baby. “Why, you’d get awfully tired of it,” Jane resumed. “I mean I would, if it were my ex-spouse. I wouldn’t want Warren around to haunt me if I were happily married to another man. Why don’t you take something else? Get Warren to do a portrait of Helen and the baby.”
Miles thought he saw what Jane was up to: she was trying to obstruct the sale. Like so many of the New Leeds women, she wanted to keep her man in a state of financial dependence. Painting Helen and the baby, as Jane very well knew, was out of the question. Helen was far too busy, as a wife and mother, to give time to the sittings. “Helen has her hands full,” he said sharply, with a meaningful look about the studio, “taking care of her house and family.” He set his drink down, unfinished, and pulled himself to his feet. “Name a price,” he said to Warren. Warren looked at his wife. “You’d better think it over, Miles,” he said, smiling a manful smile. “Are you ready to go, dearest?” asked Helen, getting up. They were all trying to obstruct him; they thought he was in his cups.
“I don’t think Warren should let him do it,” Jane was saying to Helen, in her loud, schoolgirl whisper. “Martha wouldn’t like it at all. Why, Miles might be tempted to deface the picture.” Miles got the point: once, years ago, when he and Martha were first married, he had cut up one of her dresses with the kitchen scissors; he still had a piece of it, somewhere; it was among the things, ironically, that they had saved from the burned house. “All that’s in the past,” he said gruffly. “I don’t hate her any more.” Jane giggled. “I don’t know why you laugh, Jane,” said Helen. “Martha means nothing to Miles. He forgave her long ago.” Both the Coes were silent. Warren drew a deep breath. Under Miles’s eyes, he had turned into a wan little old man. “Jane’s right,” he said. “I have Martha’s friendship to consider.” “You mean Martha would mind?” Miles said to Warren, incredulously. The thought completely sobered him and he felt strangely hurt. In his own heart, he had repented. If he had not driven her away, she would never have gone off with Sinnott, he often told himself, tenderly, now that he was married and the bitterness was gone. “Mind!” cried Jane. “They both would. You should hear the things they say.” “Shut up, Jane,” squealed Warren. “You shouldn’t tell Miles that.” “I’m telling him for his own protection,” went on Jane serenely. “Why, if he took that portrait, John Sinnott might come down to Digby with a knife or a gun.” “Stop it, Jane,” begged Warren. “John Sinnott is a friend of yours. And you don’t know that about him. Why, John was a pacifist during the war.” “They can be the most violent,” said Jane. “After all his father was a brigadier general in the army. And his mother was from West Virginia. He’s very primitive underneath. He’s the type that harbors a grudge—anybody can see that.” “You’ve got it all twisted up,” said Warren. “His father was in the Medical Corps and he was only a colonel.” “Probably a surgeon,” replied Jane, astutely. “And everybody knows about surgeons.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Miles, lighting a cigarette. “I don’t give a frig about Sinnott’s heredity. Stay out of this, Jane. Sit down, Helen. I’ve asked Warren to put a price on the picture. Naturally, I’m not going to insist on it if he honestly thinks Martha would object. Not Sinnott. Martha.” He looked steadily at Warren and spoke in a calm, patient tone. He was much more interested, now, in eliciting the real state of Martha’s feelings than in the picture, which he looked on coldly as bait for Warren to rise to. The conversation, for him, had taken on the character of a judicial inquiry, but he hid this from the others behind a casual mien. “It’s true,” admitted Warren, with a peaked smile. “She might not like it. You never know how people will react. And, darn it, she has a stake in the painting. After all, she sat for it as a favor to me.” “We all have a primitive streak,” put in Jane, eagerly. “Why, you know how Indians are about having their pictures taken.” “Why, yes, Miles,” cried Warren, excited by Jane’s analogy. “In Mexico, they’ll break your camera if you try to take a picture of their dances. They believe you’re stealing their soul. And there’s a lot of that in all of us, let me tell you.”
Miles laughed. “And if I stole her soul?” he suggested. “If I know Martha, she’d be flattered. She’s probably still attracted to me, at bottom. Helen thinks so. Why else do you think she came back here?” The Coes eyed each other. This question, Miles perceived with interest, had been the subject of controversy between them. Warren forestalled Jane’s answer. “Maybe,” he said, defiantly, “because she doesn’t care any more. That’s why she could come back. After all, she loves the landscape here.” Miles pondered this thought. He was selfish and egotistical, but not, he believed, vain. He considered it possible, psychologically, that a woman could cease to respond to him. “But Jane says she talks against me,” he observed. “That argues a residue of feeling.” Helen nodded. “Miles never talks against her,” she explained. Warren clenched his hands. “Excuse me, Helen,” he said, “but that makes me blow my top. I’m sorry, everybody, but I can’t let that pass. What was Miles doing, just now, on the beach? Do you realize what you did, Miles? You accused her of arson. Why, she could be arrested and tried if that was brought to the authorities.” He whirled about, like a little prosecutor, and pointed his index finger at Miles, who would have been taken aback if he had not been familiar with the mechanism of transference. Poor Warren was merely discharging his pent-up aggression against Jane; he must have wanted to sell the painting badly. “Arson?” mildly drawled Miles. “I don’t think I said that, Warren. I was talking in analytic terms; perhaps I didn’t distinguish clearly enough between fantasy and reality.” Warren clapped his hand to his mouth. “Pardon me,” he said. “Excuse me for living, but that’s not what I heard. From what I heard, let me tell you, Martha could sue you for slander. And win. Amn’t I right, Jane?” “Yes,” said Jane, thoughtfully, rubbing her jaw. “You ought to be careful, Miles. You know how people carry things back here. Why, she could have Warren and me for witnesses.”
The complacent, calm stare of Citizeness Coe, arranging her shawl on her shoulders, sent a chill through Miles. He recognized that Jane, fantastic as it seemed, was quite serious in what she said. If Martha were unbalanced enough to charge him, Jane and Warren would step responsibly in the box to witness for her; and not because they disliked him; they would do the same to Martha or to each other. Between them, he thought, staggered, they made a dangerous couple: Jane was a tale-bearer, and Warren had total recall. For the first time, Miles perceived that Martha’s return was going to be a limiting fact in his existence. As long as she was here, he would have to watch his Ps and Qs, even in little things he let drop to Helen about her, lest Helen repeat them to Jane or one of the other local busybodies. And yet her return was a sort of provocation, needling him to tell the truth, if only to defend himself against the things she and Sinnott might be saying. He was between two stools and every eye would be on him to see how he was “taking” it; that, he suddenly realized, was why he and Helen had been asked down here today. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he whispered, remembering his remarks on the beach. The fat was in the fire already, if Warren could not be persuaded to keep Jane’s eager tongue still.
“Don’t worry,” said Warren, kindly, as if divining his thoughts. “We all say a lot of things we don’t mean. We’re not going to tell Martha, I promise you.” “OK, old chap,” said Miles, feeling moved. He drew out a paisley handkerchief and wiped his brow; the room had become quite warm. “Another drink?” said Warren. Miles declined. “You’re not going to stay and talk?” asked Warren sadly. Miles shook his head. “Another time.” “Come back next week,” proposed Jane, “and we’ll take a long walk, out to the point.”
Miles shook his head again. Once in a season was all he could take of the Coes, as a general rule, unless brutal loneliness overtook him; there was nobody to talk to in Digby, except Helen and an old Marine boxer, the real-estate agent and a stripling with a crew haircut who got out the weekly newspaper. “Or come and read Bérénice next Friday with the vicomte,” urged Jane, with a funny look in her eye. “We’ll have some drinks and music afterwards.” “Martha going to be here?” queried Miles, sharply. “I don’t think so . . .” said Jane. “Don’t say that, darling,” expostulated Warren. “You don’t know that. They said they might come, after all.” And they began to bicker, excitedly, as to what John Sinnott had said, on Tuesday, and whether it contradicted what Martha had told Warren in the post office. Miles watched with a saturnine grin. “No,” he said flatly.
“You don’t want to meet her?” Jane’s round blue eyes grew big and naively wondering; she jerked her head back on her neck. “No,” said Miles. This decision had just matured in him, and he caught Helen’s troubled, surprised gaze. “That’s awfully unusual,” pronounced Jane, waggling her jaw and looking up sidewise at the portrait. “I mean, why would you want to have her imago in your study if you won’t see her socially?” “Yes,” chimed in Warren, “where’s the logic in that, Miles?” He had a look of profound disappointment on his bright features, like a child who sees a treat wafted away from him. “Gee,” he said, “it would have been fun to get you and Martha together again. I thought, down deep you really wanted that when you took a shine to the picture.” He turned a sweet, pleading face to Miles. “Please,” he begged. “Come do Bérénice. Come to dinner first. A week from tomorrow.” “No,” said Miles, curtly. “It wouldn’t be fair to Helen.” Rebuked, both the Coes directed their widened eyes to Miles’s better half, who smiled serenely and murmured, “Whatever you say, dearest.” Warren sank his cheek into his palm. He was torn, Miles could see, between his sociability and his sense of delicacy toward a woman’s feelings. But Jane was staring boldly at Helen. “You don’t want to see Miles’s ex?” she exclaimed. “I don’t mind,” said Helen, in a faint voice, looking to Miles for guidance. “I mind for her,” said Miles, grandly, letting the cat out of the bag; he took it for granted, as a mere matter of propriety, that Helen would feel jealous of Martha, and he saw no harm in letting the Coes know this. In his opinion, it reflected credit on her.
Jane cogitated, looking from one to the other. “Everybody does up here, you know, Helen,” she chided. “I mean divorced couples meet their ex-mates. They all go to the same parties, and nobody thinks a thing of it. There wouldn’t be any social life if everybody felt like Miles.” “I am different,” said Miles. And in truth he felt a million light years distant from the New Leeds people. Old, soured, boiled as an owl a good deal of the time, bored to desperation except when he was working, he nevertheless had passions, he told himself, that let him know that he was a man still, among senile adolescents. Like an old lion, he nursed the wound Martha had given him because, as Jane ought to realize, he held sex sacred. “Why, Jane, isn’t that funny?” he heard Warren twitter. “What?” said Jane. “You remember, darling,” her husband prompted reproachfully. “Martha said the same thing, right here in this room. Only she said, ‘I’m different.’ Remember that?” Jane nodded. “When they first thought of buying the house,” she mused. “She didn’t want to meet you, Miles,” she continued, with a giggle of innocent malice. “That was the reason she gave for not buying it. We all told her she was a nut, that everybody met their ex-spouses here. But she claimed she was different. . . .” Miles smiled disbelievingly. “Martha,” he observed, “is a woman of words.” “Oh, she meant it all right,” averred Warren. “She fought buying that house, let me tell you.”
Miles’s face reddened. He felt a ridiculous stab of pain. She refused to meet him while he, sentimental fool, had been on the verge of buying her portrait! The anger that had been accumulating in him during the past discussion suddenly boiled up and he wanted to hurt somebody. “Let’s go,” he said harshly. “Forget about the picture.” As he took a step toward the door, a knock sounded. There was a stark moment of silence; no one moved. The conviction that it must be the Sinnotts was graven, Miles saw, on every face. “It can’t be them,” whispered Jane. “It might be,” whispered back Warren. Another knock came. “They know we’re here because of the cars,” whispered Jane. “Answer it, man,” said Miles, in his normal voice. As Warren skipped to the door, Miles turned aside, steadying himself. Very likely, he said to himself, it was not Martha at all.
But it was Martha, in a gray cloak, accompanied by her husband and a strange tall girl with short blond hair, wearing slacks. As soon as the door opened, Miles felt a release of tension in his belly. Now that she was here, he could say it: He had known they were going to meet today, ever since he got up this morning, and all his talk of not wanting to see her had been a protective mechanism, against disappointment. Wise Helen must have guessed when she saw him before his mirror, clipping the hairs in his nose while he was shaving, for she had said nary a word when he put aside the old coat and tie she had laid out for him in favor of the new tweed and the paisley. Jane Coe must have known that it was in the cards too as she sat there like a witch in her black shawl, urging him to stay. He would not put it past her to have cooked the whole thing up with Martha; he had never trusted the two of them when they got together.
Martha herself, he noticed, was very formally dressed, for New Leeds. She had on a pair of smart black walking shoes, stockings, a black skirt, and some sort of white silk blouse, under the cloak, which he moved forward to take from her, doing the honors, while the rest of the party milled about in confusion. Sinnott was the only one who retained his self-possession, coming forward to shake hands briskly, ignoring the portrait—a very considerable feat, for, the sixty-six square feet of canvas had magnetized every eye but his. Nobody could miss the fact that Martha had been the chief topic of conversation. It was, as they said, a situation. Martha was shaking all over. Miles could feel it, as he lifted the cloak from her shoulders; he remembered that she had trembled, the first time he saw her, on the stage of a hapless summer theater production, so badly that the scenery shook.
Her nervousness put him at ease. “I’m glad to see you,” he announced, taking her frightened hand in his firm, friendly grip. And he meant it. Whatever he might have expected to feel, seeing her at last, pleasure and cordiality were his prime sensations, as if he had caught a glimpse of a familiar face in a crowd. “It’s good to see you,” he reiterated, looking her over. But she, in a characteristic movement of rejection, began to apologize. They had thought, outside, that it was the Hubers’ car, she said; the Hubers had a new Cadillac too. Otherwise, the inference was, they would not have come in. Miles suppressed a smile. Wild horses, in his opinion, would not have kept her out, once she had guessed that he was inside: she had had to see him, just as he had to see her. But she was alleging that they must go, that they had dropped in, just for a minute, to have the girl in slacks meet the Coes, who were going to be her neighbors. Dolly Lamb, she explained, with a jerky nod at the tall girl, was a painter who had taken the house on Tern Pond for the winter; she did not know anybody up here; that was why they had brought her.
Miles patiently listened, looking down into Martha’s eyes, like brown topazes, he used to say. There were faint wrinkles around them now, and she had a distrait, slightly careworn air. “Cool off,” he felt like telling her. “You don’t have to account for yourself to me any more.” As she named Tern Pond, she colored and hurried on with her exposition, for she and Miles used to picnic there, at this time of year, and once or twice, after bathing, they had made love, over her protests, on the sand, by the deserted house that this girl must now be occupying. Martha had claimed that somebody would come and catch them; she had had a lot of sexual defenses, though she always liked it, in the end. Her look, now, kept dodging his and flying nervously to her husband. Miles turned his head to examine him—a thin, high-colored young man in old flannels and a whipcord jacket with leather-patched elbows; not the New Leeds type. He had never paid him much heed in the days when Martha used to talk to him, before she ran off; there were always young men, on the beach, actors or poets or anarchists, that the young wives liked to gab with. Sinnott, the women used to say, was exceptionally good-looking, which was why Miles had not bothered to notice him. But he now conceded that he had been wrong. There was something in the tall, scowling fellow that was out of the common run, something of the old-fashioned gentleman, a kind of knightly quality that Miles found appealing. To his surprise, he felt no jealousy. From his vantage point of seniority, he found, he could look on Sinnott and Martha almost paternally, as if he had sired this marriage. He found himself wishing them well and hoping, for Sinnott’s sake, that Martha was behaving herself. She seemed, as Jane Coe said, to be genuinely in love, and the Coes evidently liked him. Whenever Sinnott spoke, Jane Coe giggled responsively and Warren Coe beamed, as he had at the baby on the beach. Yet there was something unstable there, underneath the nice manners and the glowing cheeks of the chevalier à la rose. If Miles had had him as a patient, he would have diagnosed an hysterical fixity, very rare in men, nowadays.
Martha had changed a great deal. She was more unsure of herself and at the same time she had more dignity. There was less of the wayward modern girl and more of the bohemian lady in her. She had even changed her hair-do; that little knot at the nape was new. In the old days, she had had braids, wound around her head, unbecomingly, and she had worn peasant skirts, sometimes, and stripes and bright colors. Sinnott must have taught her how to dress. She had a frail look that Miles had never associated with her before, despite her small hands and thin waist. During their marriage, he had always been conscious of her tensile strength and durability—her Scandinavian side. Now it seemed as if the poetic side—the Italian mother—had got the upper hand. She appeared to be living constrainedly in some sort of romance: a projection of Sinnott’s, probably, a borrowed ego-ideal.
The fact that she had changed so was an eye-opener to Miles. It troubled him to think that he, in the past, might have handled her wrong, on the theory that what she wanted was a strong father-figure, whereas perhaps all along it had been a brother she was looking for. . . . And yet she was tenser than ever, he was disturbed to see. When he refilled his glass and brought her a strong drink from the table, to encourage her to talk, he was startled by the laughing sharpness with which she spoke of the local people. He would have said shrill, except that she spoke in such a low voice that he had to lean closer to catch the anecdotes she was relating. He was a critical man himself, but she made him feel old and tolerant, by contrast. Yet it puzzled him to remember, as he listened, that it was Martha’s arrogant intolerance that he had loved most about her. He shook himself a little as it occurred to him that it was he who had changed, grown soft and torpid from age and creature comforts. Listening to Martha now, he had the same unpleasant sensation that he got from leafing over his early plays when he was alone in his windmill with a gale blowing and a glass by his side. Is this I, he asked himself, or was that I, back there?
“Let’s sit down,” he said, interrupting her. He drew up two chairs and arranged them, a little apart from the group. On the couch, just to the right of them, Warren had cornered Miss Lamb, who sat upright and edgy, with a scared look, while he, leaning forward, his head to one side, was explaining the theory of his work to her. Miles motioned to Martha for silence. “Picasso,” they heard Warren’s modest voice say, “uses a succession of images, like the animated cartoonists to express linear time. I’ve gone a long way beyond that. Last year, I showed the continuum by painting both sides of the canvas. You get the idea? A mathematician up here suggested it to me. What you have is a continuous painting that curves back on itself. It’s the real break with easel painting.” “Why don’t you try sculpture?” the girl interposed, in a demure murmur, edging back from him on the couch. Mentally, Miles slapped his thigh, but Warren took the question literally. “I may,” he said, thoughtfully nodding. “I never thought of that. I guess it’s pretty obvious to an outsider.” The girl said something indistinct. Warren’s high laugh rang out. “Of course,” he cried, “I know it’s absurd that I should be ahead of Picasso—ever read Kierkegaard, by the way? Oh, you should, darn it; he taught me to accept the absurd. I’ve learned to accept a lot of things since I took up science and philosophy. The first thing I found out was that just about everything I thought was true wasn’t. Ever have that experience? I owe it mostly to Miles here.”
Miles turned his head and deliberately winked at Martha. “You remember,” he said in a whisper, “what you used to say about our host here and a six-year-old child? ‘Why?’?” Martha nodded. She smiled, like her old self. Then, all at once, she turned pink and dropped her gaze to her lap. Miles felt himself flush too. He knew what she was remembering. It was impossible, it seemed, to find a subject of conversation that did not contain an oblique reference to their common past. He decided to take the bull by the horns. “Thank you,” he said, in a low voice, “for writing to me about Barrett. I ought to have answered.” “Oh,” she said, hurriedly. “It was nothing.” Her glance scurried off to her husband, who had paused in the midst of a conversation with Helen to watch Miles and Martha laughing and whispering. Helen was looking the other way. “I’m glad,” said Martha, loudly, “that you have a baby. It’s a boy, isn’t it?” “Yes,” said Helen from across the room, picking up the child and dandling it on her lap. There was a silence. “What are you writing?” said Martha, with a desperate look, again in a voice that was meant to carry.
Everybody turned to hear Miles’s reply. “A philosophical work,” he said, shortly. “It would bore you to hear about it.” John Sinnott raised an eyebrow. “Not at all,” said Martha, with a queer little smile; a strand of fair hair had escaped from its knot and fallen across her forehead. For a moment, she looked strangely like the portrait, dissociated, fissionized. She had come apart, poor girl, Miles said to himself, as he watched her raise her hand to brush the stray lock back. There was a bandage on her finger and, stealing a look at Sinnott, he observed that he too had a bandage, a fairly large one, on his right hand. What was wrong between them, he wondered. Was it her failure to have children or the failure of her work as an actress? He looked shrewdly at Sinnott. Had he forced her to leave the stage?
“Why, Miles,” said Jane, goggling, “didn’t you know? Martha is a philosopher too.” “Not a real one,” said Martha, as Miles turned to stare at her. “I never took my degree.” “We told you about that, Miles,” put in Warren. “Don’t you remember?” Miles shook his head. “Oh, yes,” said Jane. Miles frowned. Either he was losing his memory, what with the drink and age, or people had ceased to interest him, except perfunctorily. He could see from Helen’s face that he had just had a bad lapse; the Coes must have told him about this development in Martha, and yet he had clean forgotten. “You don’t say?” he muttered, and began to ask her whom she had studied under. But he scarcely heard her answers for thinking how strange it was that any detail about Martha could have eluded his notice, when he had once put detectives on her, not even to get evidence—for he had plenty—but just to learn what she was doing and whether his friends were seeing her. “What are you up to now?” he interrupted. “You doing your dissertation?” Martha smiled. “You just asked me that,” she pointed out. Miles pulled himself together. “The answer is no,” said Martha, with a pert little twinkle. “I decided not to do it two years ago.” Miles nodded. His curiosity stirred. “What are you up to?” he demanded. To his surprise, Martha colored. “I’m writing a play,” she confessed.
Miles gave a start. For a moment, he was violently angry. There it was again, that pattern of imitation. She had not changed in the least; she had come back here to compete with him again. He no longer considered himself a playwright, but that was how the public remembered him. She must have read his thoughts. “I’m not going to take up boxing,” she murmured, twitting him, with a little air of apology, which he thought was in poor taste. He rose on his dignity. “Don’t apologize,” he said. He had always been a magnanimous man and he took comfort in the thought. He had always told Martha, he recalled, that she had a wonderful ear for dialogue. He had no doubt, once he thought about it, that she could write a very clever little comedy. “That’s great,” he said, warmly. “You’ve found yourself at last. I always said you could do a play.” “I remember,” said Martha.
“And you’ll bring something to it that I never had,” he continued, his friendliness increasing, for he truly loved the arts and suffered here in this sterile region from the absence of young shoots of talent to spring up around him. He was nearly fifty-five, now, and Warren Coe, who was close to his own age, was the only bud of promise he had been able to detect in the area; the rest were all blasted. Everybody was “artistic,” and nobody was an artist. “Yes,” he nodded. “Practical experience of the theater. That’s the thing. I don’t mean exits and entrances—anybody can manage that side of it. I mean a feeling for the medium—the grand imposture of the whole thing. It’s a make-believe world that the layman doesn’t get the hang of. Nobody can write a real drama who hasn’t smelled the grease paint; it’s like somebody composing music who’s never played an instrument.” Martha gave a deprecating shrug. “I don’t know,” she said. “Actors and actresses have written some terrible plays. Bernhardt, remember?” “Ah,” said Miles, “but there was Shakespeare, and Molière and O’Neill.” “On the other hand, there was Shaw,” she answered. “And Congreve and Wilde.” “Wilde was a lifelong actor,” protested Miles.
The others had turned again to watch them. Unconsciously, they had both raised their voices, as if they were alone together and the rest of the room were blocked out. “What was that, Miles?” wondered Warren. “Say that again.” “Yes, let us in on it,” pleaded Jane. But Martha had risen, with a little grimace. “We must go,” she said. “Oh gee,” sighed Warren. “Just when it’s getting interesting.” But Martha shook her head. John Sinnott had fetched her cloak and was on his way to her with it like a galleon. Dolly Lamb stood up. Miles frowned as he watched young Sinnott put the cloak on Martha’s shoulders. He himself, he thought sourly, ought to have been the first to leave. Yet he had been having a fine time, sparring with Martha, before the others broke it up. It was like a bit of the old days. But it was frustrating to talk to her like that, with Jane Coe’s big ears flapping and Warren’s nose twitching for crumbs from the banquet, Helen looking tense and worried on his behalf, and John Sinnott’s warrior’s eye on them and his biceps flexed to defend Martha. Miles rose and stretched. “Maybe I’ll come to see you one of these days,” he said to Martha, with a slight yawn. Martha seemed taken aback. Was it possible that she was afraid of him still? “Umm,” she said, noncommittally.
Everybody was on the move, all at once. They were picking their way out to the cars, guided by Warren’s flashlight. Miles stood in the parking space, waiting for Sinnott to move his old open Ford out of the way of his Cadillac. Helen and the baby were in the car, and Miles was watching the girl painter drive off first in her jeep, when, in the glare of Sinnott’s headlights, he became aware that Warren Coe was beside him, batting his eyes and wiggling his eyebrows and smiling an urgent question in the direction of Martha. For a minute, Miles could not divine what had got into him. Then he remembered the portrait. What Warren was saying in pantomime was that Miles should ask her, now, if it was all right for him to have it. Miles inwardly shrugged. Sober, he was not sure whether he wanted the painting, but he did not mind asking, just for the hell of it. He strolled up to the Sinnotts’ car and indicated to Martha that he wanted to speak to her. Martha rolled down her window. “I like that portrait of you,” he said in a casual tone. Martha’s eyebrows rose; she turned to her husband, who merely raced the engine. “Seriously?” she said in a lowered voice, looking back to where Warren was standing. “Seriously,” agreed Miles. “It’s far the best thing he’s done. In fact,” he continued, leaning his elbow on the little car’s window sash, “I’ve had the notion of buying it.” Martha stared. “You’re crazy,” she said. “Where would you put it?” She bit her lip. “Excuse me,” she corrected herself. “It’s none of my business.” “Warren tells me,” said Miles, “that he’d have to have your permission to sell it.”
Martha looked at her husband. “Why not?” he said lightly. “You don’t want it.” “This isn’t a joke?” demanded Martha. “No, of course not. Why should it be?” returned Miles, rather irritably. “You really think Warren has something, then?” Miles nodded. “Why, then,” said Martha, gaily, “I think it’s marvelous. John, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Warren could be discovered after all these years?” John smiled briefly. “Yes,” he said. Miles had the feeling that Sinnott was inwardly laughing at him, and that Martha too would burst into merriment, the minute he turned away. She was peering at him critically as if to make out whether he was drunk. “Sleep on it,” she suggested, after a moment. Her voice was gentle and solicitous, but he felt the old rage rising in him at the notion that she was trying to manage him again, the first chance she got. In the eyes of this superior pair, he was nothing but a maudlin jackass. “Good night,” he said abruptly and moved away from the car.