Her Infinite Variety (16 page)

"Can a politician ever say what he thinks?" he demanded when Clara handed him back the draft of a speech now covered with red pencil.

"Yes, when he takes his seat in office."

"But will he still know how to do it then? I tell you what, my dear. You go and write me another speech on tax reform, and I'll spend the afternoon writing one to express what I really believe. It will be just an exercise, but it may help me for once to write something I like."

"As long as you don't become intoxicated with the sound of your own words. And deliver it!"

"That would be the day, wouldn't it?"

He enjoyed himself thoroughly that afternoon, expounding all of his favorite tax theories. He was Daniel Webster, at least to his Dictaphone. All meals at restaurants and drinks at bars, all tickets to theatres and sports events, all outings to country clubs and conferences held in Pacific or Caribbean paradises, would become the sole responsibility of the corporate or individual host with no allowable deduction on the income tax return. This would not hurt the spender, he argued, because equal treatment would be meted out to his competitors. All would be in the same boat, and all would soon give up these bribes to customers and clients. Why, he demanded, should sober citizens in the Bible belt be required to shoulder the burden of taxes increased by the huge deductions claimed for urban entertainments that they could not afford and of which they probably strongly disapproved? And necessary business travel should be limited to tourist rates, and charitable deductions confined to sums donated to strictly American causes. And contributions to religious organizations, he finally insisted, should be carefully scrutinized to ensure that the money was not being syphoned off into social clubs and fishing camps. He ended by citing a case where an entertainment deduction had been found on audit to include the expenses of taking a group of businessmen to a brothel!

Clara came in when he had finished with the revised draft of the tax reform speech he was to deliver that night at a dinner benefitting Legal Aid. She was not to attend the dinner, as she had an annual party (fully deductible, he observed) for the editors and staff of
Style,
but she would drop in later. He let her listen to his afternoon's dictated work. Her face was expressionless as she did so.

"Well, that would have done it, of course," she said when she had finished.

"Done what?"

"Eclipsed any chance you still had of obtaining the nomination. Oh, perfectly! It's tailor-made for that. Every man or woman having the smallest interest in a restaurant or theatre or hotel—or even a cat house—would be against you. The railroads, the airlines, the tax and limo drivers, the charterers of yachts and sailboats, would all want your head. And if that's not enough you'd have alienated all the religious nuts as well. It's a clean sweep! Even the foundations!"

"It does rather clear the air, doesn't it?"

She shook her head, but then, after a moment's reflection, she seemed to be trying a more sympathetic tone. "Poor dear man, it's what you'd really like to do, isn't it? Spit in the eye of the world and tell it to go hang."

"Oh, it's just a mood."

"Is it? Are you sure? Maybe I'd better skip my dinner and go with you to the Waldorf tonight. To keep an eye on you."

"Oh, I'll be good."

But when he dressed that night for his party he slipped the copy of the Dictaphone speech which Annie Hally had rapidly typed for him into a side pocket of his dinner jacket while placing the Clara draft in the one by his chest, where it would be most available when he rose to go to the dais.

When the time came for him to speak, and he was casting a prefatory eye over the filled tables, he noted Lucile in a shimmering white gown with diamonds, too many diamonds, seated directly below him. She nodded at him with a broad and somehow proprietary smile, as though his glance had been a personal greeting; her attitude seemed to proclaim that he had been given back to her and that the deed of gift contained a clause abrogating a lifetime of precarious, perhaps even querulous, independence. Eric Tyler had been returned to nothing from nothing.

The hand that reached not into the vest pocket but the side one and withdrew the oration of his fantasy seemed guided by an impulse not his own. He closed his eyes for a moment and then reached for the glass of water to take a sip; he could sense in his audience the immediate concern that he might be ill. He corrected this with a smile and then, recklessly, nervously, delivered his speech.

The applause, when he had finished, was perfunctory. People, he reflected as he resumed his seat, will always applaud. It is an instinct of good manners. But those at his table offered no comment, and when, a few minutes later, the room rose to leave, he encountered Clara waiting at one of the doors. She had come in late from her own party, but he could tell from her fixed countenance that she had heard his talk. Or at least enough of it. She followed him without a word to his limousine.

"Shouldn't I be taking Lucile home?" he asked her.

"That won't matter now," she retorted, getting into the back of the car. "You can drop me at my place."

It was raining as they drove up Park Avenue, and Clara spoke no word. The glass partition behind the chauffeur might have separated them as well; he wondered if he spoke if she would even hear. And then a strange and irrelevant memory intruded itself sharply on his mind. He was at home, his boyhood home, in the gray stone castle on Fifth Avenue, long torn down, on the day of his first Christmas vacation from Saint Paul's School, and he was telling Bridie, his old Irish nurse, no longer needed as such but charitably kept on by his father as an extra chambermaid, of all his adventures in his new life away from New York. And he was aware, painfully aware, despite all her enthusiastic smiles and nods, of her utter inability to take in any of the strange details of life in a boys' academy that she had never seen, much less understood. And he realized, with a rip in his heart, that what she
did
take in, with the humble resignation of a peasant woman in the chorus of a Greek tragedy, was that the gods, as had always been foretold, had taken her little boy away from her forever.

Now what, he asked himself, in the name of blazes did poor old Bridie have to do with the brilliant Clara? Was it simply that they both conveyed the message that he had done something to his life that could never be undone?

He spoke at last. "You think I did it on purpose to blow my chances for the nomination."

She did not avert her gaze from the rain on the window. "I'm not sure
why
you did it. All I know is what you succeeded in doing. They won't run you for dogcatcher now."

"You can't understand that I wanted to find out if a man can be in politics and still have principles?"

"Oh, don't give me that!" she exclaimed in sudden impatience. "You crafted that speech to outrage every voters' bloc in the city! That's not high-mindedness or even independence. It's suicide, plain and simple. If you can make something noble out of suicide, do so!"

"But if it was suicide it was only the suicide of the incipient politician. I hope you think there's a man left. Perhaps even a man of some guts." As she said nothing he continued in a voice that betrayed something like alarm: "Or is that not so? Was it only the politician-to-be that you cared about?
If
you cared at all."

"The man I thought I cared about would not have destroyed everything I've worked for to satisfy a whim." She turned to him now with anger in her eyes but then as suddenly relented. "Oh, I suppose it was a mistake to attach myself so strongly to the destinies of another. We all have our own lives to lead and only our own. You've listened to me, I admit. You may have even appreciated for a while what I was trying to do for you. But when it came right down to the point, you couldn't go through with it. Basically, you just wanted to be let alone. And why not?"

"I don't want to be let alone, Clara."

And at that moment the realization of what it would mean to be let alone by this wonderful woman struck him with a leaden force. To be let alone with nothing but the blackness of death before him and the radiant, comforting presence of Clara removed was suddenly intolerable. An atrocious pain seized his heart and entrails.

"Oh, Clara," he exclaimed, "you're not going to leave me?"

"Leave you?" she demanded with a note that struck him as genuine surprise. "How can I leave a man I'm not even with?"

"Then marry me!"

She turned back to the window as if she had not heard him. After a moment, however, she faced him again with a sharp question. "
What
did you say?"

"Marry me. I'll get a divorce. Marry me."

"And become Mrs. Dogcatcher? But no, they won't even run you for
that
"

"Oh, Clara, please! What do you want? Blood?"

"I'm not sure. But here we are at my building. No, don't come up. I want to be alone. Good night, Eric!"

***

Clara the next morning did not go to her office. She knew that her telephone would ring all morning with indignant, if not outraged calls from the party henchmen, and she did not care to have any part of them. All that was over now. She telephoned her friend Polly, who was again in town, this time to visit her ailing mother, and told her that she
had
to lunch with her. Polly was wonderful, as usual. She broke away from the maternal sickbed and came to Clara's house at noon for a drink and a sandwich.

When she heard about Eric's proposal, she raised her glass in a triumphant toast. "Well, it's about time! Cheers for Mrs. Tyler!"

"Don't be so hasty, Polly. Nothing's settled yet. Far from it."

"Oh, you mean about Lucile? She'll sign off, don't worry. Now that the Senate is out the window. Her price will be stiff, but Eric can pay it."

Clara shuddered. "All that is so sordid. The kind of triangular mess I never thought I'd get into. I was going to be myself, lead my own life, with everything fair and square. And now if this divorce gets into the fighting phase, which it surely will, for Lucile will want the moon, I'll be branded in every evening rag as a home breaker and a gold digger. And I'm not even sure I want to marry the man!"

"Oh, Clara, how like you! You've
got
to marry him."

"Why? He's rejected everything I've done for him. He's made a laughingstock of me. Why should I reward his dirty tricks with my lily-white hand?"

"Because he's decided to be a man, that's why, and not just
your
man. Look, my love. I know you like to feel you've accomplished the remarkable things you have accomplished all on your very own. And to a great extent you have. But not quite all, my dear, not quite all. If your nose had been half an inch longer, as they say of Cleopatra, and your ass half a foot wider, would you have had Trevor Hoyt or Eric Tyler at your feet?"

"Oh, Polly, please, not that old argument."

"Why not? Do you deny that we women don't
still
have to use Eve's weapons to get ahead? Maybe in the future we won't have to, but in the here and now, in the second term of the god Eisenhower, if a woman wants to lead in the
real
world—not just the arts and stage but in law firms and corporations and politics—she has to make herself attractive to the ruling sex. And don't pretend that you don't know it!"

"Eric and I have no obligations to each other. We have been entirely candid about that. Either of us is free to break off at will."

"And that's just why you must marry him! Your whole life, your very job, is totally precarious."

"Which is the way I like it."

"Supposing Eric dies. And that son of his takes over. Where will that leave you? Remember how the Hearst boys treated Marion Davies."

"Eric's not going to do any dying for a while."

"How can you say that? He's had heart trouble, hasn't he?"

"He's had fibrillations. I know all about that. He takes something that keeps them entirely under control."

"Well, that's fine, but you never can tell. It's only common sense to prepare for every contingency."

Clara rose to cross the room and stare out the window. She wanted to think, and she didn't care how Polly would interpret her silence. If Polly thought she was considering her financial position in the event of Eric's death, she was welcome to that opinion. It
was
a part of her thinking, but the greater part was her own surprise and shock at facing the fact that her attitude at the prospect of a fatal stroke or heart attack might be bathed in something like detachment.

Was she a monster? Or had his speech at the Waldorf killed her love? And if her feeling for him was so quickly overcome, could it be called love at all? Which raised the question of whether she had ever loved, or even if she could love. And yet maybe what she felt was what everybody felt; maybe it was only the poets and romantics who had blown it up beyond recognition. Surely there was no point reviling herself for feelings or lack of feelings that went on inside herself. Morality had to begin and end in
acts.
No matter what an outdated Bible prescribed.

It was Polly who at last broke the silence. "Do you know something, Clara? If you fail to execute the plan the gods have set up for you, you will be just what you once described Eric to me as being."

Clara turned from the window. "And what is that?"

"A child. A person who plays with life. Someone who's amused to see other people make a mess of things. Well, you'll be amusing yourself seeing yourself make a mess of your own life."

"How am I making a mess of it by simply not marrying one man?"

"Because it's your manifest destiny! Oh God, when I think what
I
could do with your opportunity! Look. You had a plan that you were going to work out
through
Eric. Well, as Mrs. Tyler you'll be able to work it out yourself. You tell me he's desperate to marry you. Doesn't that mean that your influence over him will be greatly increased as a spouse? You know it will! He's going to be anxious to make up to you for the mess he's made of the Senate business. He'll do anything you want. Maybe
you'll
be the one to run for office. I'll bet he'd be proud to back you."