The Group (12 page)

She glanced at her beans in the oven—not yet brown. In the living room, she opened the drop-leaf table and set two places, meanwhile stealing a look at Harald, who was reading the
New Yorker
. He raised his eyes. “How would you like,” he said, “to ask the Blakes in for bridge after dinner?” His negligent tone did not fool her; this, from Harald, was an apology. He was trying to make it up to her for nearly ruining their evening. “I’d love it!” Kay was delighted; it was a long time since they had had a foursome of bridge. “Shall I call them or will you?” “I will,” he said, and, pulling Kay down to him, he kissed her hard. She released herself and hurried to the kitchen. “I’ve got three bottles of beer in the icebox!” she called out. “Tell them that!”

But in the kitchen her face fell. It struck her, all at once, that there was method in Harald’s madness. Why the Blakes, of all people? Norine Blake, her classmate, was very left wing; at college she was always leading Socialist rallies and demonstrations, and her husband, Putnam, was a registered Socialist. And both of them had a complex about economy and living within a budget, though Putnam had a private income and came from a very good family. Kay could foresee what was coming. The Blakes, when they heard about Harald losing his job, would immediately start worrying the subject of the Apartment. Kay was already sick of hearing that Norine and Put had found a nice basement with a real garden for only $40 a month—why couldn’t she and Harald? She wouldn’t live in a basement; it was unhealthy. She glanced at her beans again and slammed the oven door. Put would argue (she could hear him!) that Harald was perfectly justified in going back on his legal obligation, which was what a lease was, because a lease was a form of exploitation and rent was unearned increment—something like that. And Norine would talk about carfares. She was hipped on the subject. The last time the four of them had played bridge, she had cross-questioned Kay about how she got to work. “You take the crosstown bus?” she asked, looking at her husband as if the crosstown bus were the most unheard-of luxury. “
And
the Sixth Avenue El?” Then she looked at her husband again, nodding. “That makes two fares,” she relentlessly concluded. Norine’s
idée fixe
was that all young couples should live near a subway stop. And she thought that Harald, because he worked in the Times Square area, should live on the West Side, not more than two blocks from an express stop. Kay and Harald had laughed at Norine’s transportation obsession, but just the same it had put a bee in Harald’s bonnet. And that very night, when Kay had served coffee and toasted cheese sandwiches after bridge, Norine had cried out, “What, real
cream
?” Apparently anybody but a millionaire was expected to live on evaporated. All these months Kay had been telling Harald that everybody bought cream as a matter of course (he wanted to use the top of the bottle), and she had turned red as a beet with confusion, as though Norine had exposed her in a lie. Yet Harald, strange to relate, instead of taking this amiss, had only teased Kay about it. “What, real
cream
!” he had murmured, afterward, squeezing her breasts.

Harald was always saying that she was transparent. Sometimes, like tonight, he meant it as a criticism, but sometimes he seemed to love her for being easy to see through, though what he saw or thought he saw she could not exactly make out. This reminded her of the funny letter she had found, night before last, when she was straightening up his papers to get ready for their move. It was a letter from Harald to his father and must have been written, she had figured out, the Saturday before she and Harald were married. She could not resist reading it when she saw her own name in the middle of the first page.

“Kay is not afraid of life, Anders”—that was what he called his father. “You and Mother and I are, all of us, a little. We know that life can hurt us. Kay has never found that out. That, I think, is why I’ve decided finally to marry her, though the cynics advise me to wait for a rich girl, who could buy me a piece of a show. Don’t think I haven’t thought of it. Between ourselves—this isn’t for Mother’s eyes—I’ve known a few such, in the Biblical sense. I’ve made love to them in their roadsters and raided their fathers’ liquor cabinets and let them pay for me at the speak-easies where they have charge accounts. So I speak from experience. They’re afraid of life too, have the death urge of their class in them; they want to annihilate experience in a wild moment of pleasure. They’re like the Maenads who destroyed Orpheus—do you remember the old Greek myth? In the last analysis, they’re afraid of the future, just like the Petersen family. You and Mother worry about your losing your job again or reaching retirement age; ever since the crash, the gilded girls worry that Papa might lose his money or have a revolution take it away from him. Kay is different; she comes from the secure class you never quite made, the upper professional class. Her father is a big orthopedist in Salt Lake City; look him up in
Who’s Who
(if you haven’t done so already!). That class still believes in its future and in its ability to survive and govern, and quite rightly too, as we see from the Soviet Union, where the services of doctors and scientists, no matter what their ‘bourgeois’ background, are at a premium, like the services of film directors and literary men. I see that belief, that pioneer confidence, in Kay, though she’s unconscious of it herself; it’s written all over her, the ‘outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual grace,’ as the Episcopal prayer book says. Not that she is graceful, except in outdoor sports, riding and swimming and hockey too, she tells me. Speaking of the prayer book (read it some time for its style), Kay wants us to be married in J. P. Morgan’s church; I’m agreeing, in a spirit of irony, and consoling myself with the thought that Senator Cutting (Bronson Cutting of New Mexico, one of my minor heroes—have I mentioned this?—a fighting gentleman progressive) worships there too when he’s in town. (His sister has something to do with the Social Register.)

“I don’t know how you feel out in Boise, but there’s a big change here in the East since Roosevelt came in., Probably, as an old Townley man, you distrust him; frankly, I don’t. You’ve read about the influx of professors into government; that is the key to the change, which may mean a bloodless revolution in our own time, with brain replacing finance capital in the management of our untapped resources. The Marxist boys here in New York make a mistake when they expect a final struggle between capital and labor; both capital and labor in their present morphology can be expected to dissolve. The fact that Roosevelt is a patrician is significant, and Kay tells me, by the way, proudly, that he was a trustee of Vassar. I’m wandering a little from the point, but I guess you see the bearing: I feel that my marriage to Kay is a pledge to the future. That sounds rather mystical, but I do have a mystical feeling about her, a sense of ‘rightness’ or destiny, call it what you will. Don’t ask whether I love her; love, apart from chemical attraction, is still an unknown quantity to me. Which you may have divined. She’s a very strong young woman with a radiant, still-undisciplined vitality. You and Mother may not like her at first, but that vitality of hers is necessary to me; it wants form and direction, which I think I can give her.

“By the way, would Mother mind asking Kay to call her Judith when she writes? Like all modern girls, she has a horror of calling a mother-in-law ‘Mother,’ and ‘Mrs. Petersen’ sounds so formal. Make Mother understand. Kay already thinks of you as Anders and is moved by the quality of our relationship—yours and mine, I mean. I’ve been trying to put the story of your life into a play, but Kay, who has studied theatre at Vassar under a funny, electric little woman, says I have no knack yet for dramatic construction; she may be right, I fear. Oh, Anders …”

Here the letter broke off; it had never been finished, and Kay wondered what he had said in the letter he finally wrote. There were other unfinished letters too in his rickety suitcase, some to her at Vassar, and several beginnings of a short story or novel, so old that the paper was turning yellow, and the first two acts of his play. The letter, Kay thought, was awfully well written, like everything Harald did, yet reading it had left her with the queerest, stricken feeling. There was nothing in it that she did not already know in a sense, but to know in a sense, apparently, was not the same as knowing. Harald, she had had to admit, had never concealed from her that he had had relations with other women and had even toyed with the idea of marrying them or being married by them. And she had heard all that about her social class (though, when he talked to her, he usually said it was finished) and Roosevelt and his not feeling sure that he loved her and “in a spirit of irony.” Maybe it was just that that made reading the letter so disappointing. It was finding that Harald was just the same all through, which in a funny way made him different. Curiosity was a terrible thing; she had started reading the letter, knowing she shouldn’t, with the thought that she might learn more about him and about herself too. But instead of telling her more about him, the letter was almost a revelation of the limitations of Harald. Or was it only that she did not like to see him “baring his soul” to his father?

Yet the letter
had
told her something, she reflected now as she listened to Harald on the telephone (the Blakes evidently were coming) and methodically tossed her salad. The letter explained, in so many words, what her attraction was—something she had never been clear about. When she had first met him in the summer theatre he had treated her like one of the
hoi polloi
, ordering her around, criticizing the way she hammered flats, sending her on errands to the hardware store. “You’ve got paint in your hair,” he told her one night when the company was having a party and he had asked her to dance; he had just had a fight with the leading lady, a married woman, with whom he was sleeping—her husband was a lawyer in New York. Another time, when they were all having beer in a roadhouse, he had strolled over to her table, where she was sitting with some of the other apprentices, to say—guess what—that her shoulder straps showed. Kay could hardly believe it when he promised to write to her after she went back to Vassar, but he had—a short, casual note—and she had answered, and he had come up for a weekend to see the Hall Play she directed, and now here they were, married. Yet she had never felt sure of him; up to the last minute, she had feared he might be using her as a pawn in a game he was playing with some other woman. Even in bed, he kept his
sang-froid;
he did the multiplication tables to postpone ejaculating—an old Arab recipe he had learned from an Englishman. Kay dished up her beans. She was “not afraid of life,” she repeated to herself; she had “a radiant vitality.” Their marriage was “a pledge to the future.” Instead of feeling chagrined by this and wishing he had said something more romantic, she should realize that this was her strong suit and play it; never mind those Blakes—a lease was a pledge to the future. No matter what people said, she would
not
give up the Apartment. She did not know why it meant so much to her—whether it was the Venetian blinds or the concierge or the darling little dressing room or what. She felt she would die if they lost it. And what would they do instead—go back to that sordid Village room across the hall from Dick Brown till Harald’s plans were more “settled”? No! Kay set her jaw. “There are other apartments, dear,” she could hear her mother say. She did not want another apartment; she wanted this one. It was the same as when she had wanted Harald and feared she was going to lose him every time she did not get a letter. She had not given up and said “There are other men,” the way a lot of girls would; she had held on. And it was not only her; for Harald it would be an awful disaster psychologically to relinquish his Life plan and go backward after a single defeat—not to mention losing the deposit, a whole month’s rent.

They sat down to the meal. The Blakes were coming at 8:30. Kay kept glancing at the lowboy, just behind Harald, where her pocketbook was lying stuffed with upholstery samples. She wondered whether she should not get it over with and show them to Harald before Norine and Putnam came. After bridge, it would be late, and Harald, she suspected, would be wanting to have intercourse; on a night like this she could hardly say no, even though it meant that after her douche, it would be one o’clock before she closed her eyes (thanks to those multiplication tables), and tomorrow morning before going to work would be no time to show him the samples; he would be snappish if she woke him up for that. Yet they would have to decide soon; two weeks on upholstery was the rule at Macy’s. The beds and pots and pans and lamps and a table and all that would have to be ordered too, but at least they were there in the warehouse and you only needed two days for delivery. She thought they should have hair mattresses, which were more expensive but healthier; Consumers’ Research admitted that. Her confidence fled as she passed the butter to Harald; only the other night, they had had quite a debate, ending in tears on her part, about margarine vs. butter—margarine, Harald maintained, was just as tasty and nourishing, but the butter interests had conspired to keep the margarine people from coloring their product; he was right, yet she could not bear to have that oily white stuff on her table, even if her reaction to the whiteness was a conditioned reflex based on class prejudice. Now he speared a piece of butter with a bitter smile, which Kay tried not to notice. Maybe she was not afraid of life, but she was certainly afraid of Harald.

She decided to edge in to the topic of the samples by a little light chatter about her day in the store; she was worried that if she did not talk Harald might sink into one of his Scandinavian glooms. “You know what?” she said gaily. “I think I was ‘shopped’ today.” That was like having a sprung test in college: a professional Macy shopper, pretending to be a customer, was assigned to evaluate every trainee at one time during his or her six months’ training. The bosses did not tell you this would happen, but of course the word leaked out. “I’m in ‘Better Suits’ this week, did I tell you?” Harald knew that Kay would be shifted around so that she would learn every aspect of merchandising, besides listening to lectures from the executives of the different departments. “Well, this afternoon I had this customer who insisted on trying on every suit on the floor and was dissatisfied with just about everything. It got to be almost closing time, and she couldn’t make up her mind between a black wool with caracul trim and a blue severe tweed, fitted, with a dark-blue velvet collar. So she wanted me to send for the fitter, to get her opinion, and the fitter said she should take both and winked at me, to give me a tip, I guess. They grade you on politeness, good humor, general personality, but the main point is whether you can sell. You flunk if the shopper goes away without buying anything. And, what do you think, thanks to the fitter, this woman in the end bought both suits. Not really ‘bought’ of course; instead of going down to the workrooms, the suits are returned to stock if the customer is a Macy shopper. That way you can tell. But on the other hand if a real customer buys something and returns it, that counts as a mark against you; it means you oversold. …”