Another Country (38 page)

She walked into the center of the room and stared about her, seeing nothing; then they stared at each other, terribly driven, terribly shy, not daring to imagine what came next. He was frightened, but very self-contained. She felt that he was studying her, preparing himself for whatever this new conundrum might prove to be. He had made no decisions at all as yet, was trying to attune himself to her; which placed her under the necessity of finding out what was in his heart by revealing what was in hers. And she did not yet know what was in her heart— or did not want to know.

He took her bag from her and set it on the bookcase. The way he did this made her realize that he was unaccustomed to having women in his room. The Shostakovich Fifth Symphony was on his record player; the play,
Happy Hunting Ground,
lay open on his bed, under his night light. The only other light in the room came from a small lamp on his desk. His apartment was small and spare, absolutely monastic; it was less a place to live in than it was a place to work; and she felt, suddenly and sharply, how profoundly he might resent the intrusion into his undecorated isolation of the feminine order and softness.

“Let’s have a drink,” he said, and took the bottle from her bag. “How much do I owe you?”

She told him, and he paid her, shyly, with some crumpled bills which were lying on the mantelpiece, next to his keys. He moved into the kitchen, tearing the wrapper off the bottle. She watched him as he found glasses and ice. His kitchen was a mess and she longed to offer to clean it up for him, but she did not dare, not yet. She moved heavily to the bed and sat down on the edge of it and picked up the play.

“I can’t tell if that play’s any good or not. I can’t tell any more, anyway.” Whenever he was unsure, his Southern accent became more noticeable.

“Which character are you playing?”

“Oh, I’m playing one of the bad cats, the one they call Malcolm.” She looked at the cast of characters and found that Malcolm was the son of Egan. The script was heavily underlined and there were long notes in the margin. One of these notes read,
On this, maybe remember what you know of Yves,
and she looked at the underlined sentence,
No, I don’t want no damn aspirin. Man got a headache, why don’t you let him find out what kind of headache it is?
Eric called, “Do you want water, or just ice?”

“A little water, thanks.”

He came back into the room and handed her her highball. “I play the last male member of a big, rich American family. They got rich by all kinds of swindles and by shooting down people, and all that jazz. But I can’t do that by the time I’m a man because its all been done and they’ve changed the laws. So I get to be a big labor leader instead, and my Dad tries to get me railroaded to jail as a Communist. It gives us a couple of nice scenes. The point is, there’s not a pin to choose between us.” He grinned. “It’ll probably be a big, fat flop.”

“Well, just make sure we have tickets to opening night.” A brief silence fell, and her
we
resounded more insistently than the drums of Shostakovich.

“Oh, I’m going to try to pack the house with my friends,” he said, “never fear.” Silence fell again. He sat down on the bed beside her, and looked at her. She looked down.

“You make me feel very strange,” he said. “You make me feel things I didn’t think I’d ever feel again.”

“What do I make you feel?” she asked. And then, “You do the same for me.” She sensed that he was taking the initiative for her sake.

He leaned forward and put one hand on her hand; then rose, and walked away from her, leaving her alone on the bed. “What about Richard?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen between Richard and me.” She forced herself to look into his eyes, and she put her drink down on the night table. “But it isn’t
you
that’s come between Richard and me—
you
don’t have anything to do with that.”

“I don’t
now,
you mean. Or I don’t yet.” He put his cigarette down in the ashtray on the mantelpiece behind him. “But I guess I know what you mean, in a way.” He still seemed very troubled and his trouble now propelled him toward her again, to the bed. He felt her trembling, but still he did not touch her, only stared at her with his troubled and searching eyes, and with his lips parted. “Dear Cass,” he said, and smiled, “I know we have
now,
but I don’t think we have much of a future.” She thought, Perhaps if we take
now,
we can have a future, too. It depends on what we mean by “future.” She felt his breath on her face and her neck, then he leaned closer, head down, and she felt his lips there. She raised her hands to stroke his head and his red hair. She felt his violence and his uncertainty, and this made him seem much younger than she. And this excited her in a way that she had never been excited before; she glimpsed, for the first time, the force that drove older women to younger men; and then she was frightened. She was frightened because she had never before found herself playing so anomalous a role and because nothing in her experience had ever suggested that her body could become a trap for boys, and the tomb of her self-esteem. She had embarked on a voyage which might end years from now in some horrible villa, near a blue sea, with some unspeaking, unspeakably phallic, Turk or Spaniard or Jew or Greek or Arabian. Yet, she did not want it to stop. She did not quite know what was happening now, or where it would lead, and she was afraid; but she did not want it to stop. She saw the smoke from Eric’s cigarette curling up from the mantelpiece— she hoped it was still in the ashtray; the play script was beneath her head, the symphony was approaching its end. She was aware, as though she stood over them both with a camera, of how sordid the scene must appear: a married woman, no longer young, already beginning to moan with lust, pinned down on this untidy and utterly transient bed by a stranger who did not love her and whom she could not love. Then she wondered about that: love; and wondered if anyone really knew anything about it. Eric put one hand on her breast, and it was a new touch, not Richard’s, no; but she knew that it was Eric’s; and was it love or not? and what did Eric feel?
Sex,
she thought, but that was not really the answer, or if it was, it was an answer which clarified nothing. For now, Eric leaned up from her with a sigh and walked back to his cigarette. He leaned there for a moment, watching her; and she understood that the weight between them, of things unspoken, made any act impossible. On what basis where they to act? for their blind seeking was not a foundation which could be expected to bear any weight.

He came back to the bed and sat down; and he said, “Well. Listen. I know about Richard. I don’t altogether believe you when you say that I don’t have anything to do with what’s happening between you and Richard, because obviously I do, I do
now,
anyway, if only because I’m here.” She started to say something, but he raised his hand to silence her. “But that’s all right. I don’t want to make an issue out of that, I’m not very well placed to defend— conventional morality.” And he smiled. “Something is happening between us which I don’t really understand, but I’m willing to trust it. I have the feeling, somehow, that I
must
trust it.” He took her hand and raised it to his unshaven cheek. “But I have a lover, too, Cass; a boy, a French boy, and he’s supposed to be coming to New York in a few weeks. I really don’t know what will happen when he gets here, but”— he dropped her hand and rose and paced his room again— “he
is
coming, and we
have
been together for over two years. And that means something. Probably, if it hadn’t been for him, I would never have stayed away so long.” And he turned on her now all of his intensity. “No matter
what
happens, I loved him very much, Cass, and I still do. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone quite like that before, and”— he shuddered— “I’m not sure I’ll ever love anyone quite like that again.”

She felt not at all frightened by his lover. She remembered the name written in the margin:
Yves
. But it was better for the name of his lover to fall from his lips. She felt very strangely moved, as though she might be able to help him endure the weight of the boy who had such power over him.

“He sounds very remarkable,” she said. “Tell me his name, tell me about him.”

He came back to the bed and sat down. His drink was finished, and he sipped from hers.

“There isn’t much to tell. His name is Yves.” He paused, “I can’t imagine what he’ll think of the States.”

“Or of all of us,” she said.

He assented, with a smile. “Or of all of us. I’m not sure I know what
I
think.” They laughed; she took a sip of her highball; the atmosphere between them began to be easier, as though they were friends. “But— I’m responsible for him when he gets here. He wouldn’t be coming if it weren’t for me.” He looked at her. “He’s the son of somebody he can scarcely remember at all, and his mother runs a bistro in Paris. He hates his mother, or thinks he does.”

“That’s not the usual pattern, is it?” Then she wished that she had held her tongue, or could call the words back. But it was too late, really, to do more than blandly compound her error: “I mean, from what we’re told, most men with a sexual bias toward men love their mothers and hate their fathers.”

“We haven’t been told much,” he observed, mildly sardonic. “I used to know street boys in Paris who hadn’t had any opportunity to hate their mother or their fathers. Of course, they hated
les flics
— the cops— and I suppose some safe slug of an American would work it out that they hated the cops because they were father-figures— we know a hell of a lot about father-figures here because we don’t know anything about fathers, we’ve made them obsolete— but it seems just as likely to me that they hated the cops because the cops liked to beat the shit out of them.”

It was strange how she now felt herself holding back— not from him, but from such a vision of the world. She did not want him to see the world this way because such a vision could not make him happy, and whatever made him unhappy menaced her. She had never had to deal with a policeman in her life, and it had never entered her mind to feel menaced by one. Policemen were neither friends nor enemies; they were part of the landscape, present for the purpose of upholding law and order; and if a policeman— for she had never thought of them as being very bright— seemed to forget his place, it was easy enough to make him remember it. Easy enough if one’s own place was more secure than his, and if one represented, or could bring to bear, a power greater than his own. For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.

She stroked Eric’s hair, remembering how she and Richard, when they had first met, had argued over this very question: for he had been very conscious, in those days, of his poverty and her privilege. He had called her the icebound heiress of all the ages, and she had worked very hard to prove him wrong and to dissociate herself, in his mind, from those who wielded the knout of power.

Eric put his head in her lap. He said, “Well, anyway, that’s the story, or all the story I know how to tell you now. I just thought you ought to know.” He hesitated; she watched his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed; and he said, “I can’t promise you anything, Cass.”

“I haven’t asked you to promise me anything.” She bent down and kissed him on the mouth. “You’re very beautiful,” she said, “and very strong. I’m not afraid.”

He looked up at her, looking upside down, so that he was for her at that moment both child and man, and her thighs trembled. He kissed her again and took the two clips out of her hair, so that her golden hair fell over him. He turned and held her beneath him on the bed. Like children, with that very same joy and trembling, they undressed and uncovered and gazed on each other; and she felt herself carried back to an unremembered, unimaginable time and state when she had not been Cass, as she was now, but the plain, mild, arrogant, waiting
Clarissa,
when she had not been weary, when love was on the road but not yet at the gates. He looked on her body as though such a body were a new creation, still damp from the vast firmament; and his wonder infected her. She watched his naked body as he crossed the room to turn off the lamp, and thought of the bodies of her children, Paul and Michael, which had come, so miraculously formed, and so heavy and secret with promise, out of her; and, like the water which sprang in the desert when Moses struck the rock with his rod, tears sprang to her eyes. He glowed in the light which came from the lamp above her head. She could not bear to turn it off. She watched him as he bent to take the long-silent record off the machine, and the green eye of the machine clicked off; then he turned to face her, very grave indeed, and with his eyes darker and set farther back than ever. Now, less than ever, did she know what love was— but she smiled, for joy, and he answered her with a small, triumphant laugh. They were oddly equal: perhaps each could teach the other, concerning love, what neither now knew. And they were equal in that both were afraid of what unanswerable and unimaginable riddles might be uncovered in so merciless a light.

She switched off the lamp at the head of the bed, and watched him come to her in the gloom. He took her like a boy, with that singlemindedness, and with a boy’s passion to please: and she had awakened something in him, an animal long caged, which came pounding out of its captivity now with a fury which astounded and transfigured them both. Eventually, he slept on her breast, like a child. She watched him, watched his parted lips and the crooked teeth dully gleaming, and the thin, silver trickle of saliva, flowing on to her; and watched the tiny pulsations in the vein of one arm, the red hairs gleaming on it, thrown heavily across her hip; one leg was thrust out behind him, one knee pointed toward her: the little finger of the hand farthest from her, on the edge of the bed, palm upward, twitched; his sex and his belly were hidden.