37

Don’t Speak Any Lines

It was starlight outside. It was cool, but not cold. The first minutes outdoors gave Jeffrey the same sense of release which he used to feel on leaving a room where he had been struggling with a college examination. You thought and thought and you wrote the answers down in a blue copybook which was waiting for you on your desk with the printed examination form beside it; and when you had finished, you closed the book and gave it to the instructor in charge. If you finished early and walked down the aisle with that blue notebook, everyone in the room would stamp perfunctorily in time to your footsteps, because it was a custom. Outside, there was always relief and freedom because you had done all you could. Now Jeffrey had exactly the same sensation of being out with the answers all left behind him. He had done what he could in New York and now it did not matter what he did.

The wind was dying down. There was a damp, moist smell from the ocean, unlike the Atlantic. It came from the fog bank that he had seen at sunset. It might be misty in the morning, but now the sky was clear. They were standing on the lawn by the front door and the lights of the house were behind them. Marianna drew a deep breath of the fresh air, and reached up to fasten her light blue cloak more tightly. Over to the north, he could see the lights of the city against the sky, miles and miles of lights.

“It’s a nice night,” Jeffrey said.

“Yes,” Marianna said, “let’s go to the garden. The garden overlooks the sea.”

“Did you ever read Candide?” Jeffrey asked.

“Yes,” Marianna answered. “What about Candide?”

“The only way you can be happy,” Jeffrey said, “is digging in the garden. You don’t dig in your garden, do you?”

“No,” Marianna answered. “Why?”

“I don’t either,” Jeffrey said. “I never have the time. People always talk about a garden and then pay a man to do it.”

It was too dark to see more than the shape of the garden. He could see the outline of the hedges and the dark black of cypress trees.

“They have spotlights in the trees,” Marianna said, “and in the swimming pool.”

“Have they?” Jeffrey said. “Good God.”

Marianna laughed.

“Darling,” she said, “do you mind if I tell you something?”

“Please don’t,” Jeffrey said, “not right now.”

“Darling,” Marianna said, “it isn’t that kind of thing. You’re the only man I know who makes me feel completely natural. It’s because you think of me as a person, that is, when we’re not working.”

“You never bother me,” Jeffrey said, “when you’re not speaking lines. Marianna, don’t speak any lines tonight.”

“I’m not,” Marianna answered. “I never do when I’m with you.”

“You can’t tell,” Jeffrey said, “you can’t tell that.”

“Let’s sit by the swimming pool,” Marianna said, “by the wall, out of the wind.”

The swimming pool was exactly what he thought it would be. There was a lawn around it, and the high wall cut off the wind. He could see the water in the starlight, and the outlines of the dressing rooms which they called cabañas. He could see the shapes of reclining chairs on wheels and metal tables and folding umbrellas.

“Anything but going in swimming,” Jeffrey said.

“No,” Marianna said. “I only like it in the sun.”

“Then what are we doing at the pool?” Jeffrey asked.

“It’s out of the wind,” Marianna said. She undid the clasp of her cloak and tossed it on the lawn, close to the white wall, and patted the side of the cloak that lay dark on the grass.

Jeffrey felt that he should have been wearing a pullover and slacks and shoes like Jim’s with no laces in them, instead of his gray flannel business suit with a notebook and a billfold and a fountain pen in the pockets. He wished that he had been out there for a longer time and more adjusted to his surroundings, and he was very conscious of Marianna, but in a way which was not altogether comfortable. Her face as she leaned back on her elbows and looked up at the stars had a disturbing, unsettled quality.

He could recall all the roles he had ever seen her play. First she had been an ingénue in one of those boy-and-girl plays, something like Mr. Tarkington’s “Seventeen,” and that was quite a while ago. He remembered her in a drawing-room comedy, one of those English importations which were just lines, lines, lines. It had always seemed to him that there was nothing more sterile than an English drawing-room comedy, and yet the critics had said it was like the first fresh breath of spring at the end of a disappointing season. She had been in a Shaw play about marriage—he could not remember the exact one because so many of Mr. Shaw’s plays dealt with marriage—and that was when the critics realized that she was a great actress, as critics always did if a girl could take on a Shaw play and get away with it. She had played Ibsen’s “Lady from the Sea,” and thank God, Jesse Fineman had not had her do “Ghosts” or “The Wild Duck.” He could think of all the times that he and Marianna had gone over lines together. Although he was in no sense a director, he could always explain character to her, because for some queer reason they could both see it in the same way. When she was younger her taste had been as obvious as department store advertising, but now it was restrained. He had taught her not to be impressed by all the patter and he had taught her not to be spoiled. She seemed to welcome rather than resent the influence he had on her and it gave him a sense of possession when he thought of it. Now that he was sitting beside her on the grass he felt that she belonged to him, simply because he had done so much toward making her what she was.

“A penny,” Marianna said.

“What?” Jeffrey asked.

“A penny,” Marianna said again. “A penny for your thoughts.”

The triteness of the expression hurt him.

“Don’t use someone else’s lines,” he said. “Say it. Don’t be fancy. I was thinking about you in that Shaw play. Do you remember how I taught you to sit down? That’s the main thing about a Shaw play, isn’t it? Everybody must sit down all the time.”

He could not see her face clearly, but he knew that she was smiling.

“Yes,” she said. “Not slop down, but do it slowly. I can do it now. Do you want to see me do it?”

“No,” Jeffrey said, “you’ve learned it.”

“Darling,” Marianna asked, “what else are you thinking of?”

“I was thinking about Jim,” he said. She did not answer. He was glad she did not answer.

“There’s a girl,” he said. “Madge is afraid he’ll marry her. That’s all”

She did not answer, and he spoke again. “There’s nothing the matter with her. He likes her. She’s a nice girl.”

“You’re angry,” she said, “aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, “but never mind it now.”

“Then don’t think about it,” she said. “Of course, it isn’t Madge’s fault.”

“What isn’t her fault?” Jeffrey asked.

“That she can’t see things as you do, and that she tried to stop you from growing. She knows that you’re too kind.”

“Too kind?” Jeffrey repeated.

“You’ve never thought enough about yourself,” Marianna said. “You mustn’t always be thinking about other people.”

“No one does,” Jeffrey said, “not really. Only in terms of yourself.”

“Jeff,” she said, “please be happy. You were earlier. Please, I’m so happy.”

“You can’t make yourself, you know,” Jeffrey said. “No one ought to try. It’s silly to see everyone trying.”

“Then don’t think about it,” Marianna said. “You’re here and I’m here.”

“You’re here and I’m here, so what do we care.” He wished that his mind did not keep running into jingles.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe Jim’s too young. You can’t know exactly what you’re doing when you’re young.”

“You’re here and I’m here,” Marianna said again. “Jeffrey, darling, all that matters of you is here. The rest of it doesn’t matter.”

“I got to thinking on the train,” he said, “maybe there isn’t as much of me—not as much of me left as there used to be.”

It was not a consoling thought. There were Madge and the children and things he was used to, but none of it had any sense or value any longer.

“You don’t know,” Marianna said, “you can’t know. You’re better than you ever were. You’re better all the time.”

It was because she was younger. He could remember that same sort of faith in capability, that belief in an eventual happy ending.

“Thanks,” he said, “it’s nice that someone thinks so.”

She leaned closer to him, and her face was clearer in the starlight. “Don’t say it that way,” she said. “There’s everything here—everything.”

Suddenly everything seemed completely natural. There was a simple way to get away from all the rest of it and he kissed her. It was not entirely desire, it was because he knew that something of the sort was inevitable. There had even been some sort of graceless, perfunctory idea of getting it over with, now that they were there. Yet it was entirely different when the time came. He had never thought that anything would be like that for him again. When his arms were around her, everything that he had lost and forgotten seemed to come back to him from all sorts of distant places.

“Darling,” she said, “are you feeling better now?”

“Yes,” he said, “much better,” but he did not want to speak. He wanted to be silent, to deal with his own surprise that that sort of thing was not over with him long ago. What astonished him most was that he felt no qualm of disloyalty. Something in that talk with Madge seemed to him very final, leaving him free to do anything he wanted.

“Don’t,” he said to her, “don’t speak a line.”

“I don’t want to talk at all,” she said. “It’s never happened to two people just this way, ever.”

“No,” he said, “not just this way.”

It must have been what everyone had said. It was that sad human desire to keep individuality out of universal experience. Yet even so, he knew that he would always believe that nothing like that had happened in just that way before.

“You needed someone else,” she said. “Don’t worry, dear. It doesn’t have to be for always, unless …”

“I’m not worried at all,” he said.

There had been no one for a long while to whom he could tell everything and they must have talked for a long while about all sorts of things.

Some problem that he had been trying to reconcile seemed to be solved. He did not want to see Madge or any of it again.

“I brought a play out with me,” he said. “When I’m finished with this script, I might stay on and work on it.”

The truth was that he felt like someone else, someone he might have been if things had been different.