Summer Crossing (10 page)

“I haven’t been feeling awfully well,” she said, and Peter, already in the bathroom, paused to ask if it were anything serious. “Not really, no. The heat, I suppose. I’m never ill, you know that.” Only yesterday. It was after Brooklyn; she remembered crossing the bridge, then stopping for a traffic light. “Only yesterday, I fainted,” and as she said it something inside her turned over, fell down: a sensation not unlike what she’d felt when the traffic light had started to spiral and darkness happened. It had lasted a moment, the light, in fact, had scarcely changed; even so, there had been a blasting of car horns: sorry, she’d said, jumping her car forward.

“Can’t hear you, McNeil. Speak up.”

“It doesn’t matter. I was just talking to myself.”

“That, too? You are in a bad way. We both need some sort of soothing, a martini or two. Can you remember not to use sweet vermouth? I’ve told you so often, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.”

Glistening, altogether revived, he came out of the bathroom, and found an arrangement: a shaker of satisfactory martinis, on the phonograph “Fun to Be Fooled,” at the glass doors sunset fireworks and a postcard view. “I can’t enjoy
this for long,” he said, falling among the hassock cushions. “It’s stupid, but I’m having dinner with someone who may give me a job: in radio, of all things,” and so they made a toast that wished him luck. “It isn’t necessary, I’m lucky anyway, wait, by the time I’m thirty I will have had the worst kind of success, be able, organized, someone who laughs at people that want to lie under a tree,” which was not a frivolous prophecy, as Peter, sipping his drink, wisely knew, knowing, too, that it probably was the happiest thing that could happen to him, for the man described he secretly, irrevocably admired. And the lady with a flower garden, this was Grady, the wife worthy of pearls for Christmas, who entertains at an impeccable table, whose civilized presence recommends the man, that is what she seemed in his expectations, and, watching her pour him another cocktail, just as she might some dusk five years hence, he thought of how the summer had gone, not seeing her once, never calling, all days dragging toward the day that, having exhausted herself with whoever he was, she would turn to him, saying Peter, is it you? And yes. Passing him his drink, Grady noticed with dismay an unwarranted apprehension in Peter’s eyes, a greediness about the mouth very foreign to the exuberant plan of his face; as their fingers touched around the glass stem, she had a sudden preposterous notion: is it possible, are
you in love with me? And this skimmed like a gull, which presently she shooed out of sight, it was such a silly creature, but it came back, kept coming back, and she was forced to consider what Peter meant to her: she wanted his goodwill, she respected his criticisms, his opinions mattered, and it was because they did that she sat now half-listening for Clyde, more than dreading that he should arrive, for Peter, passing judgment, would make her reckon with what she’d done, and she had no heart for it, not yet. They let the room darken, and the surface of their voices, soft, yielding, stirred and sighed around them, what they talked of seeming not to matter, it was so much enough that they could use the same words, apply the same values, and Grady said, “How long have you known me, Peter?”

Peter said, “Since you made me cry; it was a birthday party, and you dumped a mess of ice-cream and cake all over my sailor suit. Oh, you were a very mean child.”

“And am I so different now? Do you think you see me as I really am?”

“No,” he said, laughing, “for that matter, I wouldn’t want to.”

“Because you might not like me?”

“If I claimed to see you as you really are, it simply would mean that I dismiss you, that I think you shallow and a bore.”

“You could think much worse of me.”

Peter’s silhouette moved against the deepening green doors, his smile flickered, like the lights across the park, for, feeling her dishonesty, a sense of ghostly struggle had seized him: it was as if they were two figures pummeling around in wrapped sheets: she wants to excuse herself from blame without confessing why it is I might have cause to blame her. “Much worse than being a bore?” he said, jacking up his smile. “In that case, you were right to wish me luck.”

He left soon afterwards, leaving her alone in the dark room, illuminated time to time by shocking leaps of heat-lightning, and she thought, now it will rain, and it never did, and she thought, now he will come, and he never did. She lighted cigarettes, letting them die between her lips, and the hours, thorned, crucifying, waited with her, and listened, as she listened: but he was not coming. It was past midnight when she called downstairs and asked the doorman to have her car brought around. Lightning jumped from cloud to cloud, a sinisterly soundless messenger, and the car, like a fallen bolt, streaked through the outskirts of the city, through humdrum night-dead villages: at sunrise she glimpsed the sea.

Leave me the hell alone, he told Ida when she came hunting him out at the parking lot, and Ida said: you’re a fine one,
aren’t you? Hit your own mama, and there she is in bed with a broken heart, not to mention Becky, and she says her brother says he’ll kill you, so listen, I’m just warning you, that’s all. But he hadn’t hit his mama, Ida was only saying that to make it worse; or had he? He’d gone blind there a minute, seeing those tricksters in the hall, and oh how he’d fixed them: this is my wife, he’d said, and after the way they’d carried on by Jesus if he’d ever set foot in that house again. As if he didn’t know why they held on to him; sure, an extra paycheck was a good thing to have around: love, had they loved Anne? except he was sorry if he’d hit his mama, please God, he hoped he hadn’t hit his mama. All his boyhood he’d stolen Baby Ruths and taken them to her; and Milky Ways that they put in the icebox and cut into little slices: my Clyde is an angel, he buys his mama candy bars. My Clyde will be a famous lawyer. Did she think he liked working in a parking lot? That he was doing it just to spite her, when all the time he could be a famous lawyer, a famous anything? Things happen, Mama. And Grady McNeil was part of the things that happen. But what of Grady? She’d walked out the door, and that was the last time he’d seen her. Bubble said: lay off that phone, save your nickels, she’s just sore. Only she hadn’t been sore, so it didn’t make sense, unless it was because he hadn’t shown up that night: well, so he
had gone to the bar where Bubble worked and had one helluva time: sometimes you got to be by yourself, right? And if she was going to stay married to him, then they’d have to find a new way of living. For one thing, he wanted her to get out of that apartment. He knew a house on Twenty-eighth Street where they could get a couple of rooms. Now where was she? Aw, sit still, said Bubble. Bubble was over thirty, he worked as a bartender in an out-of-the-way nightclub; he was a friend from army days, and he was like his name, round, bald, thin-skinned.

One morning, it was the fourth day of the heat wave, Clyde woke up and felt an arm around him; he thought he was waking up with Grady, and his heart began to kick: honey, he said, snuggling deeper, gee baby, I missed you. Bubble let out a big snore, and Clyde pushed him away. He was living in Bubble’s place, a furnished room far uptown; there was a Chinese laundry downstairs, in the street summer-wilted children were always crying chink! chink! and some mornings there was an organ-grinder, he was there now, his penny tunes clinking like the coins housewives tossed to the pavement. He missed her, colored balloons, flower wagons reminded him of that, and he rolled to the far side of the bed; he lay there, nursing an image of her, and with a gliding hand he stroked his parts. Cut it out, said Bubble, leave a guy get
his sleep, and Clyde moved his hand away, ashamed, but Grady remained, wavering, unfulfilled, and he remembered another girl, one he’d seen in Germany: it was a spring day, clear, cloudless, he was walking in the country and, crossing a bridge that spanned a narrow crystal river, he looked down and saw, as though they were riding below the surface, two white horses attached to a wagon, their reins twisted around the arms of a young girl, whose drowned broken face glimmered under the dancing water; he took off his clothes, thinking he would cut her loose, but he was afraid, and there she remained, wavering, unfulfilled, beyond him in death as Grady seemed in life.

He gathered his clothes on tiptoe, then crept out the door; there was a pay-phone in the hall, he dialed her number, as usual no one answered. A swarm of kids buzzed around him on the stoop downstairs, hey, mister, give me a cigarette, and he barged through them, swinging his elbows, and one smart aleck, a skinny girl in a moth-eaten bathing suit, said hey, mister, button up your fly, and she ran after him, pointing. Jesus, he said, and grabbed her by the shoulders: her hair flared, floated, her face, pasty with terror, seemed to undulate, like the face of the girl in the river, to blur, as Grady’s did when he tried to see her hard, whole, as his own, and his hands went limp, he ran across the street, the
kids hollering: pick on somebody your own size. And who would that be, somebody his own size, when he felt so small and mean?

Seating himself at the counter of a White Castle, he ordered orange juice; it was too hot for anything else, not that he minded the heat, for in weather like this, New York, disowned by half its population, seemed to belong as much to him as to anyone else. While waiting for the orange juice, he rolled back his sleeve cuff and examined a stinging fresh tattoo that circled his wrist like a bracelet. It had happened the night before, banging around town with Gump; Gump and his damn reefers, let him smoke a stick or two and he always came up with some crazy idea, such as: I know a character will give us a swell tattoo for free. Gump knew some characters all right, this one lived in a coldwater flat in Paradise Alley, and he lived alone except for six Siamese and a stuffed python called Mabel: oh my dear boys, you should’ve known your old mother in those days, when Mabel was alive! What mad camps we were, so jolly, such fun, everyone adored us, several kings and all the queens ha ha, yes, we played the world together, dancing, dancing, twelve weeks in London alone, Waldo and Sinistra, Sinistra, that was Mabel’s stage name, poor darling, she’d be alive this very minute if it wasn’t for those filthy airlines, it really is too sick-making;
you see, they wouldn’t allow Mabel on the plane, this was in Tangier and we’d had an imperative call to Madrid, so I simply wrapped her around me and put on an overcoat; everything was fine until somewhere over Spain she began to squeeze, I know how she felt, poor smothering baby, but it was absolute agony, Mabel getting tighter and tighter until finally I simply fainted, whereupon they hacked her in half with a knife, said it was the only way they could get me loose, those butchers! Ah, well—a flag, a flower, your sweetheart’s name? This isn’t going to hurt a bit. But it had hurt; G-R-A-D-Y, the letters of her name, blue and red and linked with a line, were still afire, so he bought a bottle of baby oil, and sat on an open-top Fifth Avenue bus massaging it into his wrist. He got off the bus near the Frick museum; walking park-side and under the trees, he started downtown, his eyes darting over the diamond-squared stones, an old habit that meant he was searching for lost valuables, money: twice he’d found rings, once a twenty-dollar bill, and today he stooped to pick up a nickel; straightening, he looked across the street, and he was where he wanted to be, opposite the McNeils’ apartment house.

Look at Mr. Fat Ass: the doorman, swallow-coated, cotton-gloved, who does the bastard think he is, puffing like a pigeon? Ah, no sir, Miss McNeil is not at home, ah, no sir,
I’m afraid she left no message. But he could not face the doorman down; he could only spit behind the bastard’s back. He crossed the street again, and paced up and down under the trees, hitching his shoulders. Then he saw little Leslie, the elevator boy, a cherub with pink cheeks and a sugary mouth; he came darting under the trees: hey there, he said, love furtively filling his eyes, look, I know where she is, only don’t tell
him
I told you, and he said the doorman had been forwarding mail to Miss McNeil at her sister’s house in East Hampton. He seemed hurt when Clyde offered him a half-dollar. So what d’ya want me to do, kiss you? said Clyde, and little Leslie, retreating, said fiercely: who d’ya think you’re kidding?

He’d thought he would go crazy, there alone on the glaring acre of scorched gravel, and the afternoon like a greasy bubble that would never burst; but Gump showed up with a handful of real Havana cigars and a bottle of gin. Gump was on vacation, and they sat in the parking-lot shack enjoying the treats he’d brought and playing two-handed stud. Clyde couldn’t keep his mind on the game, he lost twenty-two consecutive deals, so he threw down his cards and leaned in the doorway, sulking; late-day shadows surged, swayed, he saw night coming toward him, and he said, listen, you want to make a little trip with me? Because he was afraid to go alone.

•  •  •

All this would go on, these waves, these sea roses shedding sun-dried petals on the sand; if I die, all this will go on: and she resented that it should. She raised up among the dunes and drew a scarf across her thighs, then let it slide down again, for there was no one to see that she was naked. It was a coarse, unprofessional beach, crudely vast and scattered with old bones of driftwood. Grand people, preferring the club’s beach, never used it, though some, like Apple and her husband, had built houses along the line. Every morning after breakfast Grady packed a box lunch and stayed hiding among the dunes until the sun kneeled sea-level and the sand grew cold. Sometimes she stood by the water, letting foam rinse around her ankles. She’d not ever distrusted water, but now each time she wanted to plunge out between the waves, she imagined them concealing teeth, tentacles. Just as she could not advance into the water, so she could not cross the threshold of a crowded room: Apple had given up asking her to meet anyone; twice they’d quarreled over this, once especially when Grady got all dressed for a dance at the Maidstone Club, then changed her mind and refused to go: and Apple said, I just think you’d better see a doctor, don’t you? Grady could have answered that she had: Dr. Angus Bell, a
cousin of Peter’s who practiced in Southampton. Afterwards, she felt she’d known the truth longer than was possible—considering that she was not quite six weeks pregnant. In the house she’d found a medical book, and at night, locking the guest room door, she studied the portraits of lurid, fist-tight embryos, the lace-like veins, veil-like skin and coagulating eyes, which, curled as in sleep, hung to the roots of her heart. When? at what moment? the afternoon it rained? she was sure it had happened then, it had been so much the best: lying there, safe from the cool shadowy rain, and Clyde kicking back the covers to join her with a gentleness more gentle than the closing of an eyelid. If I died (in Greenwich she’d heard so often about Liza Ash, the much loved Liza who knew the words of every song: and Liza Ash had bled to death in a subway toilet) all this will go on. Shells in the tide, ships far off and going farther.