The Wars of Love Page 11

  We left the hotel together, and in the street she kissed me swiftly. “Until seven, darling,” she said. Darling was her public endearment, and her use of it now gave me pause.

  They picked me up at seven, the three of them, as we had arranged. We had dinner together, and there was much of that word darling, then, as always when we were all together, perhaps more than always. They drove me to the airport. And when at last my plane had been called, and we stood together at the end of the runway, and the handshakes were over, and only our good-by kiss remained, I gripped her arms and my mouth touched her cheek, and I whispered, “I mean it. Get rid of Freddie! It’s Freddie or me.”

  Too loudly she cried, “Good-by, darling, good-by,” and “Good-by, good-by,” the men echoed, and I went.

  She would not let me do that for her.

  Our communications during the summer were few, and they were for and from the group, and said nothing. I came back late in September, and when I saw them next, it was in their new apartment. Freddie had moved, too; he had moved in with them.

  Do you remember? That was the month of hurricanes and Munich, and people, I said, are as much like countries as they are like weather.

  4

  She would not let me do that for her, but I had loved her, and I loved her still, yes, although now in a different way again (for passion, like poetry, cannot live by itself alone; it needs the bread of daily habit, the stuff of humbler actualities than itself to feed it and be transfigured by it), and I could not let her harm herself and Dan without some further effort to help her. Not yet, at least, even though now some more elaborate strategy was needed, since now she had drawn away from me again, had withdrawn more completely than ever into the Freddie-persona, and Freddie himself was there now, always pompously present and more officious than ever, and Dan was frailer, less steady even than before. They had all changed. Only I, it seemed, was the same.

  They had changed with their surroundings. Their new apartment was high over the East River. You rose to it in an elevator that was lined with watered mirrors colored like a pool of the sea on a bright day, strange lucid green, pale and ripply, in which your reflection wavered like a monster fish as silently you rose and rose, until you emerged in their citadel of air and emptiness.

  Here there were great walls of glass through which you looked out upon nothing at all but sky, or back upon the towers of Manhattan, and these, whether ghostly in evening mists or cut out in hard, isolated, daytime clarity, seemed unreal, an abstract fantasy of a city on a poster. Or these windows could be covered by pulling across them yards and yards of pleated gauze that fell from ceiling to floor in always slightly stirring folds, as if they should give forth whispers, and tinted, like the walls, in graded shades of gray. There were low, spare sofas with deep pillows and no arms, upholstered in rough materials of gray and beige and pale blue, all shot with silver, and in one wall, a low rectangular fireplace was cut, without mantel, without ornament, and there, on chromium irons, a fastidious log could blaze. Out of one wall burst a chamber (what can one call such a room that is not a room?) that was like a great shell or bell of glass, and here stood a round dining table, two tall plants with uneasy, savage leaves, and heavy tapers in ascetic standing racks. The walls of this establishment were entirely bare except for two pictures that hung with geometric precision on one wall—early Chiricos that looked out upon space as emptily as dead eyes. Every vestige of the elder Fords had been dismissed, every suggestion of their ostentatious clutter. Here was a new and terrible purity, sterility wrought into a style.

  I came there as a friend, and saw at once the difference in them and in my status. Milly treated me with a gust of cool, swift verbiage that was like mockery, it was at once so intimate and so disengaged. There was no way of meeting her, or of laying the groundwork for what was to come next, either, except by boldness, and as soon as we were alone, I said, “Now you dislike me.”

  “Darling!” she cried. “Don’t be absurd!”

  “I think I’ve hurt you.”

  “How?” High incredulousness.

  “That business about Freddie.”

  “Freddie? But darling, Freddie’s no problem!”

  I spoke softly, dejectedly. “You understand, I hope, that I’m fond of Freddie. I like him fine, it’s only—”

  “But of course! Of course!”

  “Please, Milly—”

  “But who would suggest that you don’t?”

  “No one, I hope. But what I want to say is—the reason that—I would never have—I said that—”

  She laughed. “Why are you making things so difficult for yourself, darling? No one’s accusing you of anything.”

  “I want to be plain. I want this all to be straight. I did drive you away from me, and by one remark. My reason was: I do honestly think that Freddie’s bad for Dan. Also for you.”

  Her chin sharpened a little but she never ceased to smile. “Darling, Grant, I seem to remember that you were worried only about losing me.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you haven’t lost me, have you?”

  “Haven’t I?”

  “Dear Grant, why would you be here?”

  “All right,” I said.

  “And I haven’t lost you, have I?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then—Everything’s lovely.”

  “But Freddie—”

  “Freddie! Freddie! He’s not lost to us.”

  “No, certainly not.”

  “Well—?”

  She was as impossible as that. And how I had miscalculated! Some consolidation of temperament had taken place: gone, really, were both the cold agitation of speech that I had associated with Freddie, and the friendly composure that seemed to have belonged to Dan; or rather, part of each had gone and the two had come together in a cold composure; but what was wholly gone was the deeper, warmer grace that briefly had been mine. More simply, one can describe the change in action: some net had been drawn closer. Into it she had pulled those of whom she could be sure. She could not be sure of me, and I was now outside it, perhaps I was even viewed as dangerous. I think that already she wished that I would leave them, but nothing had reached the necessary stage of clarity at which she could say so plainly, and thus I was to be tolerated while we executed, for how long I could not know, this fantastic verbal dance in which all realities were denied.

  But presently another opportunity presented itself, and I began again. “Consider Freddie then,” I said. “Think of it from his point of view.”

  “Of what, Grant?”

  “Of the situation he’s in.”

  “You mean his living here? It’s a convenience for all of us, an obvious convenience.”

  “Not that, particularly, but that too. It rather denies him the possibility of a private life, doesn’t it, if he has any such inclination? But really I mean the constant secondary role that he plays in every way.”

  “Secondary role,” she reflected. “In which ways?”

  “Is it good for a man to have no life of his own, not even a professional life, to be so completely identified with the interests of others?”

  “Grant, Freddie’s a free man. He can choose anything for himself that he wants.”

  “Yes!”

  “But, of course, he can.”

  “He’ll need some help, I’m afraid, at this stage.”

  “Help?”

  “Help.”

  “From you, Grant?”

  “After a period in which the morale has been sapped—”

  She stopped me, and for the first time with an impatient speech. “Grant, it’s dangerous for men to try to play God.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said quickly. “But isn’t that your wish—to be some kind of goddess?”

  The sharpened chin, the fine, tightened nostrils relaxed. All hint of impatience flowed away. She stood up and smiled at me with positive benignity. “I hope that I’ll always be a goddess for you, Grant,” she said in the kindest voice, and laid he
r hand lightly on my shoulder.

  I turned my head swiftly and kissed her fingers, but she drew her hand away at once and laughed. “Only a goddess, please! Only a goddess!” And she walked away from me across that large, spare room, walked silently on the thick, pale carpeting, and chuckled as she went. Yes—a warm, low, complacent, nearly self-congratulatory sound for which, ridiculous as it may seem, I can think of no other word: she chuckled.

  Through these skirmishes I began to catch glimpses of a means. Indeed, in those skirmishes I was clarifying the situation for myself, and directly it was clear, I would know how I should move, what I could do, being outside her interests, as I now was.

  Now and until the end, my motivation lay almost entirely in Dan. As Milly was more composed in a certain electric way than she had been before, Dan, as I have suggested, was less so: frailer, less steady, rather fallen in upon himself, more querulous, his happy summer face pinched and paler, his hair rapidly graying. And, with Milly, Freddie, growing rather portly, wove and wove about Dan in his curious protective dance. All that winter this went on: they wove him in, they wove me out.

  One evening in December I was there in that high uncluttered place, sitting through desultory conversation, staring at the surrounding darkness in which the lights of the apartment picked out gusts of snow funneling down on low, moaning winds.

  “That’s bitter-looking snow,” Dan said.

  “Freddie, dear, draw the draperies, won’t you?” Milly asked.

  I thought of ragged Republican troops, ill-equipped, outnumbered, nearly routed, and when Freddie sat down again, I said, “It’s colder in Spain than it is in here.”

  Milly glared at me and Freddie quickly said, “I went to see Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ again today. What a pretentious mistake!”

  “Borax, Freddie?” I asked, using a piece of cant that he liked to throw into his remarks on pictures.

  “Of course not.” He said it impatiently. “Picasso can’t paint badly. But he can paint so much better.”

  “You don’t like it, Freddie? You’re practically alone in New York.”

  “Such political painting is, in its way, as irresponsible as his political remarks.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you think of what he can do,” Milly said.

  “When you think of something like the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon,’” Freddie went on, “and then of this—well, this cartoon! That’s what it is, of course.”

  “It’s overrated,” Dan said. “Interesting, but not very rich, is it?”

  “It’s rich in idea,” I said.

  “I mean, of course, in the painting, as painting.”

  “Is there something like that?”

  “That’s about all there is in painting,” Freddie said. “How the painter puts on paint.”

  I looked up at the pictures by Chirico, and thought of his allegiances, and of the connection between them and the dead world he had always seen in his imagination, and the heavy, glistening paint seemed to me to have the sheen of death. How a painter puts on paint, I would have ventured, is finally, in the whole human mystery were we but able to observe it, as much a matter of motivation by idea, or allegiance to idea, however negative, as any other action in the world, as for example, putting down in words statements of ideas themselves. But I had no interest in pursuing this line; we had been over it before, and there was no possibility of deflecting either Dan or Freddie from their stubborn aestheticism. I had, furthermore, a wish to turn the conversation to another subject, deliberately, for a change, to test this situation; for what I had by now come to think of as the shutting in of Dan from the world outside, as the purposeful limiting and cushioning of his experience, was still a matter mostly of impression. When I asked myself for particulars, they were elusive; I had a conviction, a feeling, but I wanted evidence.

  So I said as mildly as I could, “Have you seen the evening papers?” and at once felt a tightening in Milly and in Freddie. “There’s a story,” I went on, “that would interest you, Dan, especially—”

  Milly cut in with quite inappropriate finality. “We take two morning papers, and really, with everything in the world so dreary, that’s more than enough for me.”

  And Freddie, in his old maneuver: “Let me fill your glass, fella.”

  Fella! How did he really feel about me? As comradely as that? I was not sure. So expert had been Milly’s deceit in the spring that he had never suspected what went on then between us. And what else was there to suspect? I think that it was only Milly who was made uneasy by my presence, fearful that somehow I might now let him know. A pointless fear. Dan was, of course, impervious, as essentially unaware of me as, I am convinced, he was of Freddie. We were both simply there, objects that raised no questions for him. And so perhaps Freddie did feel friendship for me, or at least as warm a friendship as his uncertainties about me allowed. Some such uncertainties he must have felt, for that I was not a partner in his alliance with Milly, whatever that might be, must have been perfectly clear to both of them. I said, “Thanks, Freddie, why not?” and smiled at him.

  “What was it, Grant?” Dan asked.

  I toyed. “What?”

  “You started to say—”

  “Oh, Dan,” Milly cried. “Did Mrs. C. buy the drawings I sent her to look at?”

  “Perhaps tomorrow,” he said, and then to me again, “Something about a news story.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “I thought perhaps you’d heard about it. It’s about a theft at the Behn Studios—early this morning.”

  “Behn’s? Really? No, I didn’t hear anything about it.”

  “Here, Dan,” Freddie said, and interposed himself between Dan and me with the inevitable pitcher. When he straightened up again, he said to Milly, “She did come in. I’m sure she’ll want the drawings. She’d be a fool not to, at the price we’re proposing.”

  Milly went on rapidly. “But Mrs. Cummings is so whimsical in her buying.” In her agitation, she had named a client’s name, and in their mysterious and secretive professional world, that was a laxity never permitted, even with only me to hear.

  Freddie rushed ahead. “She holds out and holds out. And then is furious when she loses something that’s been urged on her and that she really does want. First she must always persuade herself that the entire negotiation rests solely on her judgment. In the meantime, someone else may very well have acted on ours. Will you have a cocktail, Milly?”

  “No more, thank you, darling,” she said, and looked eagerly toward the dining chamber, where a servant was lighting the white tapers.

  Dan had, for a change, maintained his interest in a chopped-off topic, and he said, “I want to hear the rest of Grant’s story. What was stolen, Grant?”

  “A small Cézanne. But it wasn’t that so much that was interesting, as the way the fellow tried to bring it off.”

  “He didn’t get away with it?”

  I glanced at Milly, who was studying me with a rigid eye, and I said, “Well, no, he didn’t,” and now I was certain that Milly knew the story I was trying to tell. The thief, it seemed, was a young art student who wanted the picture for its own sake, and he had worked out an elaborate scheme for getting it, which involved his entering the gallery by a skylight and letting himself down by a knotted rope. He had cut the picture out of its frame, rolled it, strapped it to his back, and gone back up the rope, but when he was about to escape by the skylight again, he slipped and crashed to the tiled floor of that high room, where, quite thoroughly smashed up, he lay until a night watchman found him, and died a few hours later in a hospital.

  “How late we are with dinner,” Milly said impatiently. “I will have another cocktail, Freddie. You’d better give us all one.” And so once more the story was interrupted.

  “But what happened?” Dan asked as Freddie busied himself again. I went on with the story, and when Freddie turned to Milly to pour her drink, she rose to receive it, and then spilled it.

  “Damn!” she
cried. “All down my dress.”

  Dan pulled out his handkerchief and, kneeling before her, wiped at her skirt.

  “How silly of me!” she said.

  “It’s nothing,” Dan muttered.

  “So clumsy.”

  “Then what, Grant?” The handkerchief moved more slowly over the skirt.

  “When he was about to get out of there again—”

  Then Milly said it plainly. “Please, Grant!”

  Dan looked quickly up at her, at Freddie, and then at me. “What is this?” he asked rather shrilly. “Some kind of plot?”

  “Darling, don’t be foolish. I want Grant to stop interrupting you until you’re finished.”

  “I am finished,” he said as he straightened up. “What is all this? Has it something to do with me?”

  “Darling, I don’t know the story. I don’t know what Grant’s talking about.”

  “What are you talking about, Grant?” Freddie asked ominously. He was standing, too, holding his pitcher, and his eyes, like Milly’s, were not so much looking at me as trying to compel me.

  I said, “There’s not much more. Just as the fellow was about to escape, a night watchman came in and caught him. The police have him, and the gallery has the picture, only slightly damaged.”

  “Oh,” said Dan, as the three of them sat down again and the tension drained slowly out of their faces. Over her glass, Milly smiled at me with a suggestion of the old warmth, as though she could count on me after all, and Freddie said, “Good! To Cézanne!” Then dinner was announced, and we went in to that round table, where there was no longer any suggestion of a head or a foot or sides, and at which we sat in all the meaningless equality of childhood, while Freddie talked quite brilliantly of Cézanne. But what preposterous thing was being done to Dan in the name of love and kindness?

  Freddie’s talk at dinner, following so immediately upon that demonstration of Dan’s predicament, showed me in a flash not only the desperate need for action in his behalf, but the possible action itself. After dinner I said casually to Freddie, “You talk so well about pictures, and once you said you’d thought of writing about them. Why don’t you?”