Set This House on Fire (27 page)

“What are they rebelling against?” I asked.

“Against the H-bomb. A world they never made.”

“But, Mason, look here. If they just seemed to be having any fun, I’d—”

“Fun?” he said. “They’re too
desperate
for fun. They understand the legacy that’s been left us.”

I let it go at that.

Indeed, the more I saw of Mason in this dual role of daytime squire and nighttime nihilist, the more I saw working in him the antinomy of Carole-Celia, the more it became apparent to me that here was a truly distinctive young American—able in a time of hideous surfeit, and Togetherness’ lurid mist, to revolt from conventional values, to plunge into a chic vortex of sensation, dope, and fabricated sin, though all the while retaining a strong grip on his two million dollars. At the time it seemed to me not entirely unadmirable: at least it took more flair, more imagination than most rich boys have, or use.

The day before I left for Europe has a recollected purity that some rare summer skies have—hazeless, cloudless, with a flagrant immensity of blue that, at least for a moment, allays all the painful mistakes of the past and promises rewarding things to come. Never before or since has New York had such a magnanimous day, and as we drove out to Long Island even the dismal boulevards of Queens seemed odorous with spring. But it was not only the weather that made it so fine. It was Celia, fragile and mild, with a scarf around her hair, in broad daylight glowing like a candle. It was in the sports car, a Ferrari which Mason—always in the vanguard—had bought only the day before; such machines still attracted curiosity then, and as we drew up at stoplights (Mason and Celia in front, myself crouched behind, in a kind of nest of jacks and wrenches, much as I had been years before when I sat curled up in the luggage behind Mason and Wendy) we were the cynosure of Forest Hills. But more than anything, almost, it was in Mason; he was in command of the day: as we zoomed toward the far green reaches of the island he talked his head off, and with a sorcerer’s charm. Jokes tumbled from his lips, and witty wicked allusions, and airy ballooning puns; his spoofery was a marvel, so wild and preposterous that Celia, rosy with laughter, had to implore him to stop, put her head down in his lap and cried, “Stop!
Stop it!”
while I collapsed in merriment among the wrenches. The night-creature, the psychologist, the solemn apostle of the groin—he was no longer any of these. He seemed three times as alive as any other mortal could hope to be, brimful with warmth and wit, playing to the hilt that role which God alone knows why he did not work at harder, so much pleasure did it give to the people around him. Suddenly, as if aware of this gift to the two of us, and perhaps aware also of the source behind it, he wrapped his arm around Celia and held her close against him, purring gratefully—which gave me a spasm of envious pain.

Later, after a fine lunch with wine at a North Shore restaurant we sat far into the afternoon on a terrace splashed with dappled, leafy sunlight. Riders on horseback cantered past us; somehow again I thought of Wendy. Thoughtful, contented, stripped of the nighttime’s high frenzy, and holding Celia’s hand in his own, Mason told me what to expect in Europe—he’d been there, after all, and I hadn’t. “You won’t find it all pleasant, Peter, it’s still recovering from the war. And there’s a dead, dead feeling everywhere. Art really has come to a finish over there, and that’s why—though I love to travel—I could never live anywhere for very long, except in America. I don’t mean to sound platitudinous, but we
are
the nation of the future and anybody who
cares,
really, and who casts his lot with Europe—permanently, that is—is simply missing out, in my opinion. The so-called treasures of the past are all very well—a necessary experience, in fact, for anyone who pretends to culture—but significant form, as Clive Bell calls it, is dependent upon constant change, constant renewal from the resources of the present, a perpetual shaking-up and reordering, and this it is beyond the powers of Europe ever to do again. Which is why without any embarrassment at all I’m proud to call myself unswervingly modern.” Yet, relieved of this—about his only heavy statement of the day—he went on to describe the fine things I would find in Europe ( “If you look at it as a kind of stillenchanted playground, you won’t go wrong.”)—Paris and the sunny delights of the Midi and the Cote d’Azur, the fantastic beauty of the Alps, the Costa Brava, the Balearics. And I sat studiously, rapt, listening to this travelogue; he made magic of the scenes he described, the people he knew ( “Here, I’ll write a little note to Papa Albert. The greatest
coquilles St. Jacques
in Lyon, which is to say in all the world. A one-legged little fellow …”), the sanctums and hideaways, the cafes and beaches, the sheltered inlets unbeknownst to any American save himself… .

He made magic of these, and infused it all again with his own brand of bright hilarity; Celia would gaze at him with longing, tickled half to death, her teeth biting down charmingly over her lower lip, repressing laughter. Then out it would come, and all of us would laugh, and as we sat there in the lengthening shade of this gay spring day, with its smell of salt air and its white sails aslant against the distant blue and the nearby graveled spatter and crunching of riders along the paths, I thought how fortunate I was, after all, to know this vivid and inexhaustible young man, and count him as a friend. Rich, gloriously handsome, erudite, witty, gifted, a hero of the war, with a wife over whom the goddesses must grind their teeth in rage—what else could a man wish to be? Could the earth hold more youthful promise? Beside him that day, suddenly, I felt pitifully small, and I gloomed over all that was so paltry and commonplace in myself—that forbade me to see all that I disapproved of in him as a superb Renaissance spilling-over, manly as a stud horse, instead of corruption.

Of course—to mention only one thing that allowed me to view him somewhat less poetically—he was not a hero of the war at all. To be more exact, he was a draft dodger (the scar on his leg he picked up as the result of a bicycle collision at Princeton during his luckless semester), and as for Yugoslavia, he had come no closer to it than an enthusiastic reading of Rebecca West’s
Black Lamb, Grey Falcon
—from which he had acquired enough color and historical minutiae to gull far less credulous souls than myself. How did I know all this? Celia told me.

She told me that same night, during what I suppose you might call a visit to me. It was morning, rather—it must have been past three, while I was still packing for my trip, when it happened: a frantic rapping at the door, the door itself flung open without a pause, and there was Celia. It had been raining outside. Her hair was plastered down around her forehead and her cheeks. She stood there for a moment and gazed at me with a most stricken look of pain and anguish; her lips parted as if to speak, then her hand went up to the back of her head, came down again, covered with blood. She said nothing at all. After a moment she stared at her red and trembling fingers, once more opened her mouth as if to say a word, and then collapsed in a heap upon the floor. Sweet Celia. I was shocked.

I brought her around easily enough, with cold water on the brow and instant coffee, hastily made. As for the wound at the back of her head, there was a lump the size of an egg but the cut itself was small and shallow; soon the bleeding stopped of its own accord, and she lay back with a soft moan against the pillow, breathing heavily, and with one arm flung across her eyes.

“What happened?” I said.

“Oh, my head hurts!”

“What in God’s name
happened?”

“He hit me with a plate,” she said.

“A plate? What kind of plate?”

“A Lowestoft plate. A kind of platter. Oh, my head hurts!”

I gave her a couple of aspirin tablets and now (for she had begun to tremble violently) covered her with a blanket, insisting that we call a doctor. But she would have none of this: she would be all right—he had, after all, hit her before, and harder than this, much harder.

“The bastard,” I said. “The swine. Why did he do it? Has he hit you often?”

“Oh, I don’t know why he hit me, Peter.” She made a move beneath the blanket, as if to rise; I gently pushed her down. Now she opened her eyes and I saw how red they were from weeping. “I shouldn’t have come here, Peter,” she said. “I’m really terribly sorry. But I get so terrified of him sometimes. And you were so—well, you were close and I just didn’t know …” Her voice trailed off. “No, he doesn’t hit me often.” (A wifely remark, loyal even
in extremis,
if I ever heard one; you either hit your wife often, or not at all.) “I’m really very sorry, Peter,” she said again.

“Don’t be sorry, Celia,” I said. “Don’t be. I just wish I’d known about it sooner.” Inside I had begun to feel a great helpless stormy torment of outrage: that someone should do violence to this warm, gentle little lark of a girl seemed, at least then, in the midst of my distant infatuation, the foulest of all foul sins. “Where is he now?” I said bitterly. “Where is the bastard? I’ll lay him out.” I would have, too, or tried.

She had come around a bit and now, after easing herself up on her elbows, sat propped with her legs curled beneath her and with her head pillowed against the wall. In this pose—smeared hair, dirty bloodstained fingers, red-rimmed eyes and all—she looked both lovely and cruelly hurt, a flower upon which has been impressed the print of a dirty boot. For an instant I came very close to throwing my arms around her and telling her how madly and completely I adored her, but I was brought up short by her words, which mingled incredulity and desolation within me in equal parts.

“Don’t call him those names,” she said gently. “I love him, Peter. I love him, you see. So you mustn’t call him things like that. Please don’t. I love him.”

“You
what?”

“Yes, I do,” she said placidly.

“After
that?”

“Yes.”

“Why, for God sake?”

It was simple, she said. She loved him because he was funny (it certainly wasn’t money, her Long Island family was
terribly
well fixed), because he made her laugh, because he had taught her so much. And not the least—would you believe it?—because he was so good-looking! And she would go on loving him, no matter what. “I’m just
mad
for him,” she said. There was a preposterous, avid, debutante tone in her voice which for an instant made me want to show her the door. But of course I did nothing like that. I sat listening instead; for two hours or more I sat listening while she told me of her life with Mason—of what it was, and what it had been, and what even now (a shadow passed across her face, and her fingers went up lightly, though still trembling, to the place where he had struck her) she hoped that life could be. No, she was not going to whitewash him; she knew his faults as well as anyone. He was a liar, yes, that she knew; the Yugoslavia business was an example of that, and he had used—well, some kind of
influence
—to escape Army service. That scar on his leg? Oh, it was just some kind of traffic accident. But really, didn’t I see? Didn’t I see how all of his wild lying was only a part of that breadth and vastness of his whole personality, part of his
vision
of life, which was so broad and encompassing that it just had to include exaggeration and stretchings of the truth? Didn’t I see that? Didn’t I see how necessary it was for him to tell these things—they were harmless, after all, they could hurt no one but himself —if only because they represented left-over energy, expansion of his whole terrific imagination? Didn’t I understand that?

“I’m trying to, Celia,” I said.

And yes—well, Carole too. His sex life. No, she wouldn’t pretend that it made her happy. It had caused her worry, pain—all right, then, real
anguish.
Sometimes at night she had gotten into such a lonely and frenzied state that she could barely stand it. And Carole wasn’t the first. There had been Anya and Nancy and Kathy and—oh, she couldn’t count them all. But wouldn’t it be some kind of poor excuse for a wife who, married to a man of such incredible animal magnetism, such vitality and genius, couldn’t put up with a thing like
that?
Yes, those parties—she knew about them, all right. They were disgusting. Childish even, to get right down to it. And those pictures. He’d made her look at them (O.K., it was blind of him to think that that would excite her, when, as anyone should know, dirty pictures don’t excite women—very much anyway) and they’d done nothing but make her squirm. But after all, he was a
man,
and a different kind of man, too; he had needed those kinds of things, as the expression of
ambivalence
—the good and the bad—that is bound to be mixed up in such—well, in such a really enormous personality. He was an adventurer in the arts, a discoverer, and he just needed to have this kind of release, that’s all… .

I asked her how she knew he needed it. I had begun to pace the floor. Despite my passion for her, she was losing ground with me, steadily, each time she opened her mouth.

She said he just needed it, that’s all. He had told her he needed it, explained it all very philosophically from the artist’s point of view. And she had understood. And she had complied. It wasn’t too much of a sacrifice to make, was it?

Because otherwise he was so good to her. Oh, if I only knew how much he had taught her. And the places he’d taken her, and the books he’d made her read. Well, to be sure, it wasn’t all a bed of roses. What marriage ever was, really? Most of his friends bored her, especially the Village crowd, who were just a bunch of grownup babies, actually. And as for the rest—well, he had no
real
friends, she knew that. They were all dreadful spongers, mostly. Mason knew that, he’d told her sadly that a rich person has no real friend but himself… .

And—well, yes, their tastes weren’t exactly the same. And he
was
difficult about it sometimes. Music. Ever since she was a child she had loved music. Brahms. Chopin. Wagner. Especially Brahms. How she loved that wondrous sad finale of the C-Minor Symphony, and the
Academic Festival.
They reminded her of far-off, dark, sweet, autumnal things—twilight and woods with falling leaves and mountain lakes covered with evening mists. Brahms. He must have been a man who knew how to grow old, who welcomed growing, and maturity, and even age. And Mason —well, no, sometimes she found it hard to take. He never let her play those kinds of records—oh, every now and then, yes. But never it seemed when she was in the mood. And she remembered one time when she longed to hear Brahms so that she took a taxi all the way to Thirty-fourth Street and sat smothered up in a recordstore booth for a whole summer afternoon, listening and listening… .