The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Part 29

"Because it was better than being alone together." She shrugged, smiling crookedly up at him. "Besides ... Sat.u.r.day night ... one always hopes for the best."

"Come on then." He met the smile with a placating one of his own.

"No, It's just more of the same."

"The same?"

"You know," she said. "Like a record we all play once a week. Jim, hanging around, waiting for Esther to get drunk enough so she'll go home, and Karen watching Lou for her reasons, and me watching you for mine. I just don't want any part of it any more."

He watched it almost jealously, that soft, flexible look of hers, which concealed the enviable cert.i.tude, the stubborn strength to reject, to decide.

"Well, what do you want to do?"

She looked away from him consciously. "I thought I'd go back home for a while. If you're really on your feet now."

"For a while? Or for good?" he said. For good, he thought. That's what she asked, only a little while ago.

She was silent.

"What makes you think Utica, or any other place, isn't more of the same, these days?" he said.

"It doesn't matter where. I just can't go on being an adjunct-any more!"

"And Libby?" He softened his voice suddenly, as if their joint concern might wake her, where their forgetfulness had not.

She put her head down in her hands, rubbing her concealed face back and forth. She'll cry now, he thought, although he could not remember when he had last seen her cry, and he waited, almost with relief, for with women, the lucky women, this meant the dissolving of an issue, the haggled end of emotion-but she went on defeatedly rocking.

"Come on," he said, after a moment. "I'll fix us a drink." He waited, and then put a hand on her shoulder. "We'll have a party by ourselves."

In the kitchen, his hands took over the mixing of the Martinis, picking out and combining the gin, the vermouth, the lemon peel, with disembodied competence. "This is real enough for you!" he thought. "Isn't it? Isn't it?" he said defensively to the dry voice in the anonymous room.

He thought of the crowd upstairs now at the Ewarts', in the pattern, as Dorothy had said, pooling all their uncertainties of the week, drowning them in the fabricated bonhomie of Sat.u.r.day night. The Ewarts, Syl and Harry, were a few years older than the average couple in the building and were both "in business"; perhaps it was a combination of these facts which led them into great spurts of energy, in which droves of people must be enlisted to help them kill the weekend's frightening acreage of time. To their coa.r.s.e-grained parties there came, patronizingly, the fledgling physicists, the writers on their way to a foothold, the confused but verbose young men with their foetally promising jobs in the government, in the State Department, or, like himself, in the universities. They came because they were at loose ends, or at odds with themselves or the wife, or roughened with the loneliness of the city, or, let it be said, because the Ewarts could serve the liquor they themselves could infrequently afford. And with each of them came the wife, in the new hair-do, the primary colored dress with its attempted primary appeal-all the intelligent, frustrated girls, fleeing from the diapers toward an evening in which they could forget their altered conceptions of themselves.

He held the Martini mixer up to the light, and stirred, forestalling the thought of Dorothy and himself with critical thoughts of the others. It's true, what she said, he thought. Esther, having to drink herself into insensibility more and more often, with Jim doggedly watching, and Karen, flitting grimly, un.o.btrusively into the kitchen now and then to see that Lou's reflex skirt-chasing doesn't get him in more trouble than he can handle. And me, wrapped up in a corner. "For once let's not think about me!" he said defiantly to the voice in the repudiated room. And through it all the Ewarts hurried like high-cla.s.s orderlies, bright with rea.s.surances to the sufferers, administering gla.s.ses, plates of food, or winks in the direction of the bathroom.

The sufferers, he thought. The prowlers in retreat from themselves. He put two gla.s.ses on a tray and looked at the light through the mixer for a last delaying time. It stared back at him like an unanswerable, viscous, lemon-watery eye.

He walked back with it into the bedroom. Dorothy was stretched out on the bed again, staring into the pillow.

"Want to go in the other room, or stay here?"

"Oh leave me be. Leave me be."

He put the tray on the dressing table and sat down beside her with a brisk, overemphasized resolve.

"Come on," he said, urging her up to a sitting position. "This'll fix you up. We'll rustle up some dinner later."

They sat on the side of the bed together, sipping, not saying anything, as if they both sucked desperately at some potion of last resource. After a while he put a drink-loosened arm around her, using his other arm to refill the gla.s.ses, and they sat on in the growing dark, finishing the second drink, the third, watching with careful fixity the lambent points of their cigarettes. Outside the window, the light-studded evening converged, ramified, without them.

A tremor in her shoulder made him know, suddenly, that she was crying, and trying to conceal it. He was cleft with pity, and even a kind of possessive pride because she was the sort of woman who did not cry for show.

"Ah don't," he said. "Ah don't."

She gave her head an angry, backward shake. "I'm not trying to ... oh you know!" she said, in a strangled whisper.

"I know." He tightened the arm that was around her, and put his other hand blindly toward her. It met her face. She moved her face back and forth in his palm, and he felt the hot sidle of tears through his fingers.

"I'm afraid," she said. "That's all it is."

"Afraid?" he said, delicately handling the sharp tool of the word. "What are you afraid of?"

"That's it. I don't know. I never used to be."

He held her as she sobbed, knowing that for this, on which of all things he should have been most knowledgeable, there was no answer that he could give. But it seemed to him that the edged word, coming through the sweetish, gin-fogged air, came like a bond, a link which slit through the coc.o.o.n around himself. He began to kiss her with a kind of heavy sympathy for them both. Turning, they stretched out on the bed and made use of one another in a final spasm of escape.

Long after she slept he lay awake in the dark, which had a pallid incompleteness from the deflected street lights outside. After a while he got up noiselessly and looked at the glowing disc of the clock. It was only nine o'clock. He crossed to the other bed, his own, near the window, and picked up the sleeping child. Holding her, on his way to the crib in her own room, her warm, inert weight seemed to him like a burden he was inadequate to carry. "Parents like us!" he thought. This must be why we avoid them, the children, because they are the mirror we make for ourselves. They are the alternative of no evasion, on whose knife we are impaled. He put her down, tucking the light blanket carefully around her, and went back into the other room.

Through the window he saw and heard it-the Sat.u.r.day night pattern-its neon blotted by haze, its multiplying, loose roar jingled into softness by the tricky distances of spring. It seemed to him that he heard in it, in that heightened blend of the hundreds of gurgling, cheeping noises of daily living, some of which were quickened for him by memories of aspiration or love, but now never more than quickened-that he heard all around him the endless echolalia of his time, his world, his trap. They were all down in the ditch with him, the prowlers, and the weak alarums of their malaise lacked even the dignity of the old ecclesiastical cry: "Father, what are we? And whither do we go?" For, in our cleverness, he thought, we know what we are, and in the sadness of no mystery, we know where we are going.

He looked down at the other sleeping figure, wondering what there was in the construction, the being of a face, that had once made it his vital necessity, and that now, by some combination of circ.u.mstance and familiarity as brutal as it was quiet, had been attenuated past recall. He looked down, waiting, wishing for a sense of ruin. For ruin implied salvage; it implied the loss of something dear. Where there was a sense of ruin, there might also be a sense of hope.

Little Did I Know.

AT NIGHT, FLORENCE HAS no tourists. All along the tables dotted in front of this particularly famous cafe, people sat close together in the half-light, musing, chatting-though it was midnight-in little infernos of talk that celebrated the hour. On the pavement before the tables an unending line of strollers repeated its themes; how many times, for instance, had there not seemed to pa.s.s the same pair of high-stepping, black-crepe-and-honey women-or were they girls?-the pout of their calves and pompadours drawn by the same dusky brush, between shoulder and chin always the same long, half-agonized line of throat? Both sitters and promenaders were alike in that each line thought itself audience to the other; for each, its side was the land of the living, the other side the stage.

"I must have been about your age, about nineteen"-the woman speaking, hidden in the shadows beyond the high-backed chair of her invisible vis-a-vis, either thought them both concealed, or did not care who saw or heard-"maybe nineteen and a half, for we were still counting our years in halves then. That gorgeous spring I spent whirling through first love with a boy named Ben. And planning to murder a professor named Tyng. You ever notice, incidentally, that 'gorgeous' has quite dropped out of the language? Must have gone during the depression; we all came out of those years so very stripped and staccato, cleansed of everything from fake Renaissance furniture to the acting style of Sir Henry Irving. And slang had to be just like the plays-short words, full of compa.s.sion.

"Anyway ... it was the spring of my junior or senior year. I'm not good about dates and time, and that goes for geography too; facts of when or where don't interest me. A person like me's memory is likely to be long, but schoolbook accuracy is seldom its forte. Right in the middle of a conversation, an experience, it goes on selecting, exaggerating, and what we're doomed to remember-believe me, doomed-is ... Oh, well, not so much the facts as the feeling. ...

"But that's just the sort of thing you have to keep in mind about people like us, about me ... in what I seem to be going to tell you. Yes, I know you're interested, or you wouldn't have looked me up. Just remember, though, that even when we're at our quietest-and we can be quiet-words are our reflex. We spend our lives putting things into words."

Contrarily, before the voice began again-not with a sigh, for there seemed no sighs in this clear-thinking reed-there was a silence. And then the voice again.

"For instance, I'm willing to bet when you go back home you'll have a far better idea of where this terrace was in Florence, and of what we saw today at the galleries, than I-and I've been here before. How I'll remember, dunno-not till I sit down someday to write about it. And then maybe it'll turn into a dialogue between two women of different ages, sitting here watching the other unaccompanied women go by, and wondering which of the well-dressed ones are-see that ladylike one; she's a very well-known one-and pinning us all down in our separate terms."

The occupant of the chair opposite the speaker must have leaned forward, uncurling feet that had been tucked under, for there was now visible one pale slipper of uncertain color, of the kind known as "ballerinas"-a tentative, young shoe.

"Or," said the voice, "I might use you discovering Italy, turning you round and round, seeing you with Italy at your edges, or Italy vice versa-though I won't necessarily use what you told me happened between you and the boy in Stamford. ... Hmm? No, of course I won't. If I'm lucky, you'll be true to life, that's all. Not necessarily true to yours. And I shan't apologize; the odds are I'll be in there too somewhere, on just as sharp a pin.

"Notice I'm not the least interested in what you'll remember. My way of talking's a habit I can't shake. Keep that in mind, won't you, that I warned you? For I've reached an age, you see, where I notice people try to undazzle the young. ...

"Thank you, you're very sweet, but I'm almost forty-one. There are women who falsify their age and women who ask you to guess; I'm too old to be the first sort and not old enough to be the other. And if you think that remark has been made before-well, it has! Oh well, thanks. The hair's a tint of course, but at least I started out a real blonde. And we small-boned types wear better than average; I'll live till ninety and die of a broken hip. And of course n.o.body who is anybody fattens anymore. A social comment, that-maybe you'll use it someday when you use me.

"Anyway, there are at least a half dozen of us who might be me. All of us have done enough to be looked up, the way you looked me up, all about forty, forty-five. All with at least two husbands too, although mine were better than most. A painter so handsome you wouldn't believe his work could deserve such success-until you saw it-and a banker of such charm that n.o.body minded his money. Too good to have let go, both of them. And of course I didn't, though they let me think so, right up to the end. Absolute opposites, those two men were, never even met; yet when they left, it was with the same parting words. ...

"Don't flinch. You said you wanted to be one of us, didn't you? From the pieces you showed me, maybe you will be. That's why I'm telling you this. Get it straight, though-I loved them, and they me. My first used to say he'd never seen a woman as pretty and s.e.xy as I was who was so tough to paint. Maybe you're thinking that's because one can't paint a verbal shimmer. But I don't talk very much with men actually, and I never talked at all in bed; I knew enough not to do that, even before I'd read about it. And I suppose it's not surprising they both made the same remark when they left-after all, they were both expressing the same thought. Of course, it wasn't my intelligence that bothered my husbands, though I'm grateful people think so. When asked, I take the line that the painter wouldn't cope-engage-with it, and I couldn't stand that. And that the banker wanted to promote it-and of course I couldn't stand that either. That's the line I take."

In the chair opposite, the one pale slipper, twisting, was joined in its movement by the other; then both were set flat, suggesting that the chair's occupant was nervously in thrall.

"So," said the voice quickly, "at last, back to that spring. Couldn't do without the preamble, though; you'll see why, if you haven't begun to already. In fact, because you're so smart-so much smarter than I was at your age-I'll even give you the key to it all, though I expect it'll sound like kitchen-maid stuff to your collegiate ear. That spring was the last spring she really lived. Sorry, this is one of those. What I call 'little did I know' stories. Anyway-in case I made you uneasy back there-I still haven't quite murdered Professor Tyng.

"William Tenney Tyng. He was a tall, monk-skulled Anglophile, who opened his Daily Theme course every year by reciting "The policeman's lot is not a happy one.' In private life he was known to be writing an epic poem. He hated to see the student eye in a fine frenzy rolling, and his highest accolade-I never got it-was to put 'Neat but not gaudy' on modest little themes about cats. I suppose his real trouble was he wanted to be teaching young Oxonians, not second-generation American girls who were floundering in a tumescent pa.s.sion for the language and spoke it mostly in the accents of the Midwest or the Bronx. And I suppose I should feel sorry for him, now that I know he directed his irony at us only because he didn't dare direct it at the sublime. But I can't. Oh, I've used him, now and then, as people like me will use, over and over, those who have humiliated them, and I once said he didn't 'teach the young idea how to shoot,' as the quote says; he shot it, wherever, green and trembling, it arose. Let that stand.

"For you see, I'd set myself to handing in poems as themes. Five a week we had to hand in-and almost always I was his target. And I was drunk on language, the way kids used to get on jazz at Birdland. I ran all over the pasture, wondering how I could ever eat all the books there were; I was out of my mind with delight at what some people had been able to do to the world with words. And the words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes, and hung them like bangles in my mind. To this day I've never seen a snaffle, but I remember sitting for hours once wondering what made it twinkle-twinkle-on the page; a lot of those double-consonant words do it. Lots of times I never even knew how the words sounded out loud, and I rarely looked up the meanings-the words simply hung up there, waiting. It wasn't a bad way, really; you don't have much of value to say at that age; what can anybody do but hang up the words and wait?

"So, of course, I was a setup for Tyng. If he hated, as he did, the exotic in Sir Thomas Browne, De Quincey, Coleridge, what couldn't he do with me! 'Now, let us see what our young wallower in the beauties of English literature has for us today! Hmm, a sonnet: "Let me touch the terrace of the dream, /Soft set foot upon the fragile stair ..." Hmm. I'm rather a stupid man. Perhaps the author will explain this to me. Most of the terraces I'm familiar with happen to be in Scarsdale.'

"I might have cut his cla.s.ses-we had free cuts-but I found I couldn't; I had to sit there, in defense of I didn't quite know what. He wasn't just preaching against excess; I knew that. He was saying that all ardor, aspiration, was a disgrace.

"When I was most sunk, I started reading detective stories. Dostoevski and Baudelaire were too much for me; in their company I didn't need Tyng to tell me I was a serf. I don't know how the idea of writing a theme in which a professor was safely murdered merged with the idea of murdering a professor-maybe because the plot was so close to hand. During vacations Tyng had us mail themes to him with a self-addressed envelope enclosed for their return. He was a bachelor with no secretary, and the themes always came back marked in his own crabbed script. If one could find a strong poison to put under the flap of the return envelope-a delaying poison, of course, which wouldn't be fatal until the envelope was safely away in the mail-then 'twere done. Of course, one would have to gamble that Tyng didn't use a sponge.

"You laugh; I don't blame you. I would too, if I didn't know how close I came to the deed. I scared myself, because I knew the intense way I brooded on it wasn't normal. And I had a girl friend whose father ran an untidy, neglected drugstore; we often stopped by of an afternoon and made sodas for ourselves. I found myself one day looking up poisons in the pharmacopoeia, and I tried to rea.s.sure myself by recalling that, no matter how many times I'd read Crime and Punishment, I'd always hoped that Raskolnikov wouldn't. Still, why had I avoided the school library and gone to the city one downtown?

"Then, one day when Tyng stood up to dismiss me after having been particularly vicious to me in the conference hour, he said: 'Easter vacation coming up. Such a strain on poets. Perhaps you might curb your elan a little, during the Lenten season. Try not to drink quite so deep of the Pierian spring. Otherwise-' Then he shook his head, licked the flap of an envelope he'd been fiddling with, and set it on the desk, as if for me to see. REPORTS, it said. RETURN TO REGISTRAR.

"I walked out of there holding my breath, but not because I was worried about the mark. I'd done the work, and for all its spotty precocity it wasn't the kind he could openly give an F or D; what he'd do would be to purge me with mediocrity as he'd done last term, cupping my overheated blood with a C.

"No, what made me shiver, even as I pa.s.sed girls in light jerseys on the tennis courts, was that licked envelope, falling to my lot as the knowledge that the old woman would be alone fell to Raskolnikov's. Dozens of times I'd heard someone say, as we left Tyng's course in Room 242: 'Couldn't you kill him?' Now I realized that what I'd been saying to myself was 'I could kill him.' I don't know what I'd have gone on to do if Ben Bijur hadn't been waiting for me at the dorm-as he usually was, in spite of his best resolutions, almost every other day. He was waiting, though, in one of those chintzy cubicles they made boys wait in. In a way it was like being saved from jumping out the bedroom window by happening to be in the center of the room, thinking about it, when the plaster falls.

"I suppose I was in love with Ben Bijur because he was the first man who'd ever touched me. In later years I've seen words swarm about an idea just the way my spongy dreams cl.u.s.tered about Ben Bijur's head the minute he put a hand on me and I let it stay. At home, in Ontario, I'd been a day student at a convent in a small town; the few local boys I'd known had been as fair and corn-fed as myself. This boy was enticingly swart and world-weary; he had splendid teeth and a fine baritone, but at twenty-two he was already losing his hair-a fact that he and I both looked upon, at the time, as an effect of character-and he was fond of saying quietly that he had been born old.

"The sad truth was that he had; his was one of those temperaments that never, even in senility, take the form of youth. At twenty-two, he was already a disappointed man, sulking at authority instead of flying at its eyes, carrying his hypersensitivity around with him the way a would-be suicide carries a knife-hoping to hurt himself. Even his frustrations seemed secondhand, as if he'd got them only through reading of Prufrock and Leopold Bloom. But at the time I was much impressed by the experiences at which Ben hinted-though he was, no doubt, as virginal as I-and when he repeated his fantasies of affairs with older women, I smoothed his poor, shedding scalp in awe. He was a word collector too, and used to tell me mournfully that he was afraid he was already putting life into footnotes without ever having enjoyed the text. Whereas, he used to say, there was something about me, young as I was, which marked me for the success that would pa.s.s him by. Sometimes he drew little word pictures of how, when ten years had pa.s.sed, I would open the door of my penthouse and find him fainting on the doorstep, his feet wrapped up in burlap bags.

"Ben called me four or five times a week and dropped by during the day, but he would never make a date ahead, and he had a way of not phoning on Sat.u.r.day night-this was to preserve his freedom and keep me from knowing where I stood. Marriage was never mentioned, of course-he was getting his Ph.D. on an allowance from his father-but neither of us saw anybody else. Nights when he hadn't called, I hung near the phone in agony; when he did call and we went somewhere to neck, it often ended with me crying like mad on his shoulder-I didn't know why. Sadness interested him, and he treated mine with great deference, kissing me with a kind of scientific respect and muttering words like Sehnsucht into my ear. The farthest he'd ever gone was to lean against my blouse and quote into it, but this seemed to me very far.

"I'd never told Ben about Tyng, and I didn't this time; I was in such a high state of dejection I hardly noticed him. He'd got me out of the cubicle, bought us both hot dogs, and walked me to our favorite stretch along the river, before I realized that he was hanging on to my arm and looking at me with a humility I'd seen on the faces of young husbands walking their pregnant wives.

"I wasn't noticing him, you see; it must have been clear to him that I was swept up in some powerful emotion that was bigger than I. And for people like-well, like Ben-the sight of another person in the throes, divorced from reason, offering a breast for the eagles to pick at and so on, has an attraction just as strong as s.e.x. That's why lots of times you'll see a weak man or an ugly woman with an entourage otherwise hard to explain; it's because they have this talent for letting life blow through them, for seeming to be swept away. And the people who hang around them don't even hope to get into the act; all they ask is to get close enough to be shaken a little themselves-something like kissing the Pope's ring, or being touched by the king for pox.

"Of course, there's another, simpler explanation for the way Ben acted-that he thought I was thinking of some other boy. Whichever it was, between it and the evening, he was done for.

"It was a gorgeous evening, one of those b.u.t.terfly-blue ones. Every once in a while the river gave a little shantung wrinkle and then lay still; there was one sailboat low in the foreground, like Whistler's signature. Behind us, the windows of the Alpha Delt house were open, but there was n.o.body in them; everybody was off for the Easter holidays. Ben knew the grad student who acted as janitor in exchange for an apartment in the bas.e.m.e.nt, an older man who was doing some kind of endless project on the Risorgimento and went off now and then with the merchant marine, until he had enough funds for another go at research. His door was always unlocked, and we'd been there once or twice alone. That evening there was a note tacked to the door: 'Back next Wednesday at eighteen hours.'

"Ben led me inside, murmuring, 'Say something, darling; you look so sad. I've never seen you look so sad!' By this time I wasn't, of course-he'd never called me darling before, and I knew that for him words spoke much louder than action-but I had the sense to hold my tongue and keep my sad expression, and on a young skin I suppose the wish to murder and the wish to love look much the same.

"He took off my dress, and the sight of me in my long cotton slip sent him down on one knee, his arms flung wide; it was a pose like the gallants in those slightly shady, ill.u.s.trated editions of Mademoiselle de Maupin or the Heptameron-both of which Ben had. I was in an odd rig for seduction; there was a fashion on then for Oxford gla.s.ses, silver-rimmed ones that snapped open like lorgnettes, and mine hung down over my chest on a chain. My shoes were much too sedate for me too-terribly long, pointed ones, like dachshunds' muzzles-and my stockings, heavy gun-metal silk, were rolled. Despite all this, we were able to lose our heads. Or at least we thought we had-this generation can have no idea of the innocence of mine. When, we left the apartment, I was under the confused impression that I had been seduced-an a.s.sumption that wasn't corrected until two years later, when I was. Ben must have been under the same misapprehension, because he insisted on taking me back to the dorm, ten blocks away, in a cab. And on the way he asked me for a date-for Sat.u.r.day night.

"And when Sat.u.r.day night came, he surprised me by taking me to the Baxter. Unlike the campus joints where we'd always gone for c.o.ke or coffee, the Hotel Baxter was downtown, dull and semiofficial; couples went there dutifully the minute they got engaged, for a splurge a la carte. Poor Ben! It was his only way of saying that if necessary he'd do right by me, but I was as insulted as if he'd bought the ring without asking me. It seemed humiliating that only sin had got me to the Baxter-and besides, I wasn't dressed for it.

"To this day those starlight-roof places always make me think of babies born out of wedlock, for of course that's what was on Ben's mind. He ordered Alexanders-in those days that's what you started girls drinking on-and when I said mine made me feel positively sick he turned white, not knowing I'd said it only because at home in Ontario my grandfather had taught us early to disdain anything but Scotch. 'What-what about Banjo?' he said.

"Banjo was one of those terrible whimsies that lovers have, like those letters beginning 'Dear Poodles ...' that stockbrokers always seem to get held up for; you and your Stamford boy probably shared something of the same. Ben was always plying me with anecdotes I didn't yet know were cliches, and once-after he'd told me how Isadora Duncan wrote Bernard Shaw suggesting what a paragon any child of theirs would be-we'd spent an afternoon concocting a paragon of our own. It was to have Ben's teeth, my hair, and-since this was also a very feminist era-both our brains. We'd dubbed it Ben-Jo, corrupted in time to Banjo.

"And for some reason that wasn't clear to me at the Baxter, his choosing that way to ask me infuriated me. Why did he always have to remove himself from everything, from the most important things, by putting them into quotes!

"'Oh you!' I said. 'You're so literary you make me spit!' Then I stood up, burst into tears, and we went home.

"Extraordinary, isn't it? There it was, a warning out of my own mouth, and I pa.s.sed it by, the way you can speed to your death right past a warning from Burma-Shave.

"During the next few weeks Ben scarcely left my side. Vacation was well under way, but by this time I was glad I hadn't had the money to go home; I couldn't have borne being at home feeling like Hardy's Tess. Day after day went by and-it must have been nervous strain or self-hypnosis-I still couldn't a.s.sure Ben we weren't going to have a baby. Luckily I had term papers to do, and Ben had his thesis; we spent most of our time in the library or walking by the river, holding hands numbly but not kissing. I was finding out how the world both heightens and darkens under a single, consuming anxiety; normality goes on rattling around you, and your trouble is like a goiter in your gullet that no one else can see. Ben and I couldn't bear to be out of each other's sight; it was such a relief to be with someone who knew. At the same time, I couldn't help feeling a certain excitement at being one with several heroines of history. Once, when we were down by the river, I referred darkly to An American Tragedy and, to my surprise, Ben gave me a dreadful look and dropped my hand. It hadn't occurred to me until then that he might be having heroic feelings of his own. I wasn't afraid of them, but I was rather miffed at the idea of his enjoying them, and for the first time I wondered whether it would be a bore to marry someone whose reference books were the same as mine.

"Meanwhile, I'd forgotten all about Professor Tyng. Then, the last night before school began again, I remembered I hadn't sent him my ration of themes. I'd enough back poems to choose from, and after Ben and I had parted, I sat up until three retyping them. As I slugged them out I kept thinking of how I might never have been in the situation I was in, if it hadn't been for Tyng. When I'd finished, I went down the hall to wash out some underwear, and in the bathroom I saw the bottle of stuff the maids used for the drains. It was marked POISON in large, navy-blue letters.

"I picked it up and read the fine print on the label: Antidote: Drink teaspoon or more of magnesia, chalk, whiting or simple wall plaster-or small pieces of soap softened in water-in milk, or raw egg. Quite a rhythm the first phrases had, each with its feminine ending, then that nice little dactyl: or raw egg. Neat, but not gaudy. I went back for the envelope I'd addressed to myself, carefully used an old toothbrush to paint some of the stuff from the bottle onto the underside of the flap, carried the envelope back to my room, and set it on the blotter to dry. I never once thought of using the poison on myself. Indeed, I had never felt more surgingly alive, and for the first time in days I fell asleep like a lamb.

"And the next morning I discovered I wasn't going to have Banjo after all. The world immediately lost that intent, outlined look and went back to being its usual astigmatic blur; I'd never before felt how glorious the ordinary was. Ben had a nine-o'clock in philosophy; I raced over there to tell him.

"The elevator in Philosophy Hall was one of those old-fashioned wire-cage ones that held only about six people. I'd squeezed in and faced the door before I saw that Professor Tyng was one of the six, his height looming over us all. I must have looked wild. My hair was tousled, and I'd just remembered the envelope on my blotter in my room.

"'Ah, good morning, Miss-er,' he said. He had a very commanding voice. And you know that conscious stillness people have in elevators. 'Tell me,' he said. 'Have you quite deserted poetry?'

"The elevator girl, an old university hand, closed the door softly and waited; she knew as well as I did that he hadn't finished. I lowered my eyes, but I could feel the ma.s.s smile all around me.

"'Ah, well,' said Tyng, 'I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself and a nuisance to one's friends.'

"That elevator must have been the slowest in the city; it rose in exact time with the blood in my ears. I didn't answer Tyng and I didn't look him in the face. I just stared at the cords in his neck. Someday I'll murder you, I thought, but not with poison. No, I'll remember what you taught me, that only irony is safe. Just you go on talking, and someday I'll murder you-with words. Some day I'll hang you by the neck with them, until you are alive.

"Cla.s.ses were already on, but I got Ben out of his; he was an awful color and kept saying, 'What is it? What is it?' out of the side of his mouth as we went down the hall. When we got outside on the steps, I told him. At that moment, all I felt was a horrible, female embarra.s.sment at having to tell him.

"'It's Banjo,' I said. 'He isn't.'

"The most peculiar expression crossed his face. There was relief there first, of course, but then something else took its place. Regret after catharsis is the only way I can describe it-the way people's faces sometimes look when they come out of the theater after a wonderfully harrowing play.

"I didn't understand it until later that afternoon, when we were sitting quietly together over a c.o.ke, in the rear of the soda parlor.

"'You know,' Ben said, 'when we were so worried, back there ... Nevertheless that was living, though, wasn't it? That was real.'

"I knew what he meant, of course; I'd seen the world shift that morning too. But to say it, to put it into ... maybe even while it was all going on ... or even before! Poor footnoter, I thought, poor self-murderer. At the same time I shrank back from the table, from him-the way one leans away from someone with a bad cold.

"'I'm alive!' I said. 'I'm still alive.' I stood up. 'Afraid I've got to run,' I said. And I ran.

"The minute I got back to my room I sat down and wrote him a letter saying I didn't want to see him again. I didn't understand quite why yet myself, so I lied and said I was in love with another man.

"Two weeks later, Ben came to see me; I suppose he thought it just another dodge to bring him to his knees. Anyway, that's just what he did-went down on his knees again, without even saying h.e.l.lo first, and asked me to marry him. Later he told a friend of mine that from the way I'd refused him-I knew I hadn't been sad enough-it was clear I'd never be a woman of the world. I haven't seen him since, but now and then I hear he's around somewhere, technically alive. I sure don't want to see him. Little does he know the very particular way he could crow over me-fainting on my door-step or not, with or without his feet in those burlap bags. ..."

An intensity of silence reigned now, a contest of quiet in which the speaker herself must have been wondering if she was to be allowed to get away with it like that-or whether the girl across from her was going to let her know that she was not.

We can be quiet too, the silence said now. People like us ...

"What?" Was the voice relieved at not being let off? "Don't mumble so. ... Ah, you want to know what it was-what both my husbands said when they left. Now, really! The listener ought to do some of the work. I've been telling you, actually, all the way along. OK, guess, then. Don't be shy; go on, try.

"Oh. You think it was more or less what I said to Ben-just before I ran? That's very clever of you; you're a very clever girl. That would be a twist, wouldn't it? You've got talent, no doubt about it. Well, I shan't say, but you listen now. You listen very carefully.