Summer Crossing (5 page)

“When do you have to go home? Not right away?”

He shook his head; then, telling her what she most wanted to know, which was why he had to go at all, he said: “It’s my brother. The kid’s having his bar mitzvah and it’s only right I ought to be there.”

“A bar mitzvah? I thought that was something Jewish.”

Stillness like a blush came over his face. He did not even look when a brazen pigeon sedately plucked a crumb off the table.

“Well, it
is
something Jewish, isn’t it?”

“I’m Jewish. My mother is,” he said.

Grady sat silent, letting the surprise of his remark wrap round her like a vine; and it was then, while splashes of conversation at near tables rolled in waves, that she saw how far they were from any shore. It was unimportant that he was Jewish; this was the sort of thing Apple might have made an issue of, but it would have never occurred to Grady to consider it in any person, not Clyde certainly; still, the tone in which he’d told her presumed not only that she would, but emphasized further how little she knew him: instead of expanding,
her picture of him contracted, and she felt she would have to start all over again. “Well,” she began slowly. “And am I supposed to care? I really don’t, you know.”

“What the hell do you mean
care
? Who the hell do you think you are? Care about yourself.
I’m nothing to you
.”

An antique lady with a Siamese attached to a leash was listening to them rigidly. It was her presence that kept Grady in check. The balloon had wilted somewhat, the swell of it was beginning to pucker; still clutching it, she pushed back the table, hurried down the steps of the terrace and along a path. It was some minutes before Clyde could catch up with her; and by the time he did it was gone, the anger that had provoked and carried her away. But he held her by each arm, as if he supposed she might try to break loose. Flakes of sunlight falling through a tree lilted about like butterflies; at a bench beyond them a boy sat with a windup Victrola balanced on his lap and from the Victrola the eel-like song of a solo clarinet spiraled in the fluttered air. “You are something to me, Clyde; and more than that. But I can’t discover it because we don’t seem to be talking about the same things ever.” She stopped then; the pressure of his eyes made language fraudulent, and whatever their purpose as lovers might be, Clyde alone seemed to understand it. “Sure, kid,” he said, “anything you say.”

And he bought her another balloon; the old one had
shriveled like an apple. This new balloon was far fancier; white and molded to the shape of a cat, it was painted with purple eyes and purple whiskers. Grady was delighted: “Let’s go show it to the lions!”

The cat house of a zoo has an ornery smell, an air prowled by sleep, mangy with old breath and dead desires. Comedy in a doleful key is the blowsy she-lion reclining in her cell like a movie queen of silent fame; and a hulking ludicrous sight her mate presents winking at the audience as if he could use a pair of bifocals. Somehow the leopard does not suffer; nor the panther: their swagger makes distinct claims upon the pulse, for not even the indignities of confinement can belittle the danger of their Asian eyes, those gold and ginger flowers blooming with a bristling courage in the dusk of captivity. At feeding time a cat house turns into a thunderous jungle, for the attendant, passing with blood-dyed hands among the cages, is sometimes slow, and his wards, jealous of one who has been fed first, scream down the roof, rattle the steel with roars of longing.

A party of children, who had wedged themselves between Clyde and Grady, jogged and shrieked when the tumult began; but gradually, awed by the swelling tide of it, they grew quiet and clustered closer together. Grady tried to push through them; midway she lost her balloon, and a little
girl, silent and evil-eyed, snatched it up and whisked herself off: both robber and robbery escaped almost unnoticed, for Grady, fevered by the lunging loin-deep animal sounds, wanted only to reach Clyde and, as a leaf folds before the wind or a flower bends beneath the leopard’s foot, submit herself to the power of him. There was no need to speak, the tremble of her hand told everything: as, in its answering touch, did his.

In the McNeil apartment it was as if a vast snow had fallen, hushing the great formal rooms and shrouding the furniture in frosty drifts: velvet and needlework, the fine patinas and the perishable gilt, all were spook-white in their coverings against the grime of summer. Somewhere far-off in this gloom of snow and drawn draperies a telephone was ringing.

Grady heard it as she came in. First, before answering it, she led Clyde down a hall so sumptuous that if you at one end had spoken no one at the other would have heard: the door to her own room was the last on a line of many. It was the only room that the housekeeper, in closing the apartment, had left exactly as it was in winter. Originally it had belonged to Apple, but after her marriage Grady had inherited it. Much as she had tried to rid it of Apple’s froufrou a good deal remained: nasty little perfume cabinets, a hassock big as a bed, a bed as big as a cloud. But she had wanted the room anyway,
for it had French doors leading onto a balcony with a view over all the park.

Clyde lingered by the door; he had not wanted to come, had said he was not dressed right; and now the ringing telephone seemed to agitate further uncertainties. Grady made him sit down on the hassock. In the center of it there was a phonograph and a stack of records. Sometimes when she was alone she liked to sprawl there playing sluggish songs that nicely accompanied all kinds of queer thoughts. “Play the machine,” she said, and, asking why in God’s name it hadn’t stopped, went to answer the phone. It was Peter Bell: dinner? Of course she remembered, but not there, and please, not the Plaza, and no, she didn’t want Chinese food; and no, really, she was absolutely alone, what merriment? oh the phonograph—uh huh, Billie Holiday; all right, Pomme Souffle, seven sharp, see you. As Grady put down the receiver she made a wish that Clyde would ask who had called.

It was not to be granted. So, of her own accord, she said, “Isn’t that lovely? I won’t have to eat alone after all: Peter Bell’s going to take me to dinner.”

“Hmm.” Clyde went on shuffling through the records. “Say, you got ‘Red River Valley’?”

“I’ve never heard of it,” she said briskly, and threw open the French doors. He at least could have asked who Peter Bell
was. From the balcony she could see steeples and pennants far over the city quivering in a solution of solid afternoon: though even now the sky was growing fragile and soon would crumble into twilight. He might be gone before then; and thinking so, she turned back into the room, expectant, urgent.

He had moved from the hassock to the bed; sitting there on the edge of it, and the bed so big all around him, he looked wistfully small: and apprehensive, as though someone might walk in and catch him here where he had no business being. As if taking protection from her, he put his arms around Grady and rolled her down beside him. “We waited a long time for one of these,” he said, “it ought to be good in a bed, honey.” The bed was covered in blue and the blue spread before her like depthless sky; but it seemed all unfamiliar, a bed she could’ve sworn she’d never seen: strange lakes of light rippled the silk surface, the bolstered pillows were mountains of unexplored terrain. She’d never been afraid in the car or among the wooded places they’d found across the river and high upon the Palisades: but the bed, with its lakes and skies and mountains, seemed so impressive, so serious, that it frightened her.

“You cold or something?” he said. She strained against him; she wanted to pass clear through him: “It’s a chill, it’s nothing”; and then, pushing a little away: “Say you love me.”

“I said it.”

“No, oh no. You haven’t. I was listening. And you never do.”

“Well, give me time.”

“Please.”

He sat up and glanced at a clock across the room. It was after five. Then decisively he pulled off his windbreaker and began to unlace his shoes.

“Aren’t you going to, Clyde?”

He grinned back at her. “Yeah, I’m going to.”

“I don’t mean that; and what’s more, I don’t like it: you sound as though you were talking to a whore.”

“Come off it, honey. You didn’t drag me up here to tell you about love.”

“You disgust me,” she said.

“Listen to her! She’s sore.”

A silence followed that circulated like an aggrieved bird. Clyde said, “You want to hit me, huh? I kind of like you when you’re sore: that’s the kind of girl you are,” which made Grady light in his arms when he lifted and kissed her. “You still want me to say it?” Her head slumped on his shoulder. “Because I will,” he said, fooling his fingers in her hair. “Take off your clothes—and I’ll tell it to you good.”

In her dressing-room there was a table with a three-way
mirror. Grady, unclasping a bracelet chain, could see at the mirror every movement of Clyde’s in the other room. He undressed quickly, leaving his clothes wherever he happened to be; down to his shorts, he lighted a cigarette and stretched himself, the colors of sunset reflecting along his body; then, smiling toward her, he dropped his shorts and stood in the doorway: “You mean that? That I disgust you?” She shook her head slowly; and he said, “You bet you don’t,” while the mirror, jarred by the fall of her chair, shot through the dusk arrows of dazzle.

It was after twelve, and Peter, lifting his voice above the pulsing of a rumba band, ordered from the bartender another scotch; looking across the dance-floor, infinitesimal and so crowded the dancers were one anonymous bulge, he wondered if Grady was coming back. A half-hour before she had excused herself, presumably for the powder-room; it occurred to him now, however, that perhaps she’d gone home: but why? Simply because he hadn’t applauded when she described, and evasively at that, the glories of romance? She should be grateful he hadn’t told her a few of the things he had a mind to. She was in love; very well, he believed her, though that he must do so exasperated him: still, did she
mean to marry whoever-it-was? As to this, he had not dared ask. The possibility she might was insupportable, and his reaction to it had so waked him that after these martinis and uncounted scotches, he felt still painfully sober. For the last five hours he’d known that he was in love with Grady McNeil himself.

It was curious to him that he had not before come to this conclusion from the evidence at hand. The cloud of sandcastles and friendship signed in blood had been allowed to obscure too much: even so, the evidence of something more intense had always been there, like sediment at the bottom of a cup: it was she, after all, with whom he compared every other girl, it was Grady who touched, amused, understood: over and again she had helped him to pass as a man. And more: part of her he felt was the result of his own tutoring, her elegance and her judgments of taste; the strength of will she so fervently possessed he took no credit for: that, he knew, was much the superior of his own, and indeed, it was her will that frightened him: there was a degree to which he could influence her, after that she would do precisely as she wanted. God knows, he had nothing to offer, not really. It was possible that he never could make love with her, and if he did probably it would dissolve into the laughter, or the tears, of children playing together: passion between them would be
remarkable, even ludicrous, yes, he could see that (though he did not see it squarely): and for a moment he despised her.

But just then, sliding past the entrance rope, she beckoned to him, and he hastened to join her, thinking only, and with an awareness that seemed unique, how lovely she was, with what excellence she dominated over the flashing squadrons of important cockatoos. Her everyway hair was like a rusty chrysanthemum, petals of it loosely falling on her forehead, and her eyes, so startlingly set in her fine unpolished face, caught with wit and green aliveness all atmosphere. It was Peter who had told her she should not use makeup; it was also his advice that she looked best in black and white, for her own coloring was too distinct not to conflict with brighter patterns: and it gratified him that she was wearing a domino blouse and a tumbling long black skirt. The skirt swayed with the music as he followed her to a table; en route, his eyes discreetly totaled the amount of attention she received.

People did usually look at her, some because she suggested the engaging young person at a party to whom you would like to be introduced, and others because they knew she was Grady McNeil, the daughter of an important man. There were a few whose eyes she held for a different reason: and it was because, in her aura of willful and privileged enchantment,
they sensed she was a girl to whom something was going to happen.

“Can you guess who I saw last week? At Locke-Ober’s in Boston?” he said as soon as they were seated under the glare of a white cellophane tree. “You remember Locke-Ober’s, McNeil? I took you to dinner there once, and you liked it because out in the alley there was a man with a banjo and a hat of brass bells. Anyway, I ran into an old friend of ours, Steve Bolton.” It wasn’t that he’d just remembered this encounter: rather, he’d selected to remember, intending it should recall for her the outcome of an old emotion which, regarded in retrospect, might give some doubt as to the merits of a current one: though what she may have once felt for Steve Bolton he merely suspected. “We had a drink together.”

Grady said, “Steve: Lord, it’s been years: or has it? No, I don’t suppose it has. But whatever was he doing in Boston?” and this expressed accurately the quality of her interest. The thought that she’d loved him did not lean with embarrassing weight, as Peter assumed it would; besides, she’d never been ashamed of that. But she’d not thought of him in months, and he seemed as uncontemporary as the songs everyone had sung that summer.

“Up there on some sort of business, I should imagine. Or a class reunion: he’s the type. I never liked him, you know, though I haven’t much reason now: he looked pretty drained-out, and not quite so Steve-ish. He said if I saw you to give you his best.”

“And Janet? How are Janet and the baby?”