The Unpossessed (10 page)

“Better than a show?” He turned indignantly to Miles. (Have I clowned enough for their benefit, he thought. Have I lacerated myself enough? have I parodied myself enough?) “Better than three shows, my good man,” (yes, he had clowned enough, he had talked too much—a terrible weariness lay over his brain; but something drove him on), “I'm the Bruno Leonard all-purpose one-man three-ring self-kidding self-perpetuating exhibitionistic circus divided like all of Gaul into partes tres. One part sour grapes, one part wish-fulfillment, nine parts subconscious. And the greatest of these, according to the antediluvian Chinese, is the subconscious. This way, ladies and pessimistic gents, for the J. J. stream-line crooner, for old Doc Leonard the campaigning fool, watch him frisk, watch him scamper, watch him catch his fleas in public. Don't feed him peanuts feed him opiates, buy your tablets at the gate from Miss Diamond who has given many years of service, who sacrificed her vacations, her virtue, that this firm might go on.” He subsided, to his own relief; collapsed in the chair that Norah drew up for him. “To sex and its many ramifications,” he said; and raised his glass.

But he had wanted to find the Blakes alone. For coming to the Blakes' when one had the luck to find them by themselves was like stepping beside them into their eternal conjugal bed; he had the feeling that they never lost the aura of a recent love. They were the only pair he knew (he remembered telling Miles) who lived together, undisguised, frankly as man and woman, their quarrels and he supposed their loves, on the genuine, primitive basis. Jeffrey scattered his ideas and his hypocrisies outside his home, conceding Norah only his emotions; Norah, if she
had
ideas (one never knew, with Norah) left them folded at peace inside of her; he liked to picture Norah, not accompanying Jeffrey on his mental peregrinations but trudging absently after with his mending and his lunch. They took the struggle straight, in other words: substituting no fake intellectual battlefields, no fake intellectual beds. A little, he had admitted then to Miles, whose puritanism, ruefully offended, shrank from perceptible warmth—a little, perhaps, like living on roots and berries in the midst of the machine-age. But wholesome, vicariously refreshing to himself; who leaped (his muddled memory sighed) from one woman to the next just as Jeffrey did (but never lightly, never casually: cumbersome, rather, dragging all of his ponderous bulk instead of a satchel-full of light-weight week-end charms), but who had no placid harbor such as Norah was to sail serenely back to; and standing out in his mind, like Jeffrey's novels, as a miracle of simple, undiluted, inferior yet pure, un-Jewish success. But finding the Flinders present when he had meant to bask in borrowed Blake felicity sent a coldly intellectual draught through the blanket of his fog.

“Hell with the ramifications,” cried Jeffrey happily—and held his glass to Margaret's. “To the spirit of St. Lawrence,” she answered dryly; she wore an odd, accusing look as though against the whole male sex she harbored some unwilling grudge. “To cuts and castrations,” Miles bowed bitterly; “and the little women all over the country who send their husbands back for more.” (Clearly the Flinders were bound together; but by a string, it seemed, of sour negatives.) “Thank you, thank you,” Margaret's brows made little tortured crescents in her forehead.

“Why not to the Magazine,” said Norah, comfortable, and possibly obtuse. One never knew with Norah whether she was canny, or whether, like some placid stream she found her way instinctually in the dark, flowing simply where she had to flow. Whatever quality she had he found a comfort in it, felt his dampness warmed; and turned to her from Margaret—who was too unfulfilled, too wistful, to be endurable tonight. But Norah stood beside his chair, offering him her toast.

He had his defeatist laurels to protect. “Magazine? what Magazine?
is
there a Magazine?” He peered suspiciously about the room; lifted a corner of the rug; glanced briefly and salaciously under Norah's skirt. “No; I don't see any,” he sighed with relief. He lifted his glass (
here's to you, Elizabeth darling, have you really gone and married someone? then here's to your God damned husband too
): “Your imagination, Norah, touches me; here's to the Magazine, to the existence of the nonexistent, long life to the still-born.”

“Defeatist talk,” said Jeffrey blandly. “Oh, take another drink, your field is sex,” cried Miles in irritation.

Bruno groaned, his memory rather than his mind aroused. “Trespassing again—and whose vocabulary have you muscled into this time, Jeffrey? Whom did he have lunch with, Norah? and was it in a cafeteria? In what phase do you find your husband at the present, madame? And by the way. A Mr. Harrison called on me today. A nice man, a lovely man; a pale man, with a splendid goiter. He dragged a large thing with him, which he referred to as a four-star pip; he insisted on garaging it in my study.”

“Why, I just happened,” Jeffrey said, “to be passing an office-equipment place.” “Next time drop in at a pet-shop,” Bruno said, “they have some cute things there.” “No, but really, Bruno, it really is high time . . .” “We're speaking of a Filing Cabinet, Miles, you ought to know, since you're its business manager.” “A what?” said Miles; “what for?” “That's what I wondered; maybe Mr. Harrison is starting a Magazine.” “If it isn't too much to ask,” said Miles, “since I'm step-father to a Filing Cabinet.”

Jeffrey's hands mysteriously flickered, as though engaged in secrets with himself. (Norah watched him anxiously.) “The time,” he said, “I think the time is ripe.” He narrowed his eyes; and widened them; frowned into obscure and mystic futures; then smiled, his fingers picking harp-strings in the air. Spinning, thought Bruno, in reluctant admiration, on his own axis, the volatile Goy.

“The time,” Bruno said, “is always ripe.” “No, but seriously, Bruno . . .” “And think how much riper it will be next year.” “But the predicament of the intellectuals” “what predicament? intellectuals are always in a predicament, if there were no predicaments there would be no intellectuals” “and just what party,” Miles asked icily, “is our mystic lined with this week” “Oh politics,” said Margaret Flinders bitterly; “and Magazines; you talk and talk but I'd like to know what any of you
do
.” “When I come into power,” Bruno reassured her, “there will be a tax on words.” “What child is ready for another drink?” said Norah like a blissful deaf-mute. She walked among them, offering friendship skillfully distilled: friendship in a bottle—tempered by her own dumb warmth.

He couldn't let her pass. He was seized with a need to touch her, to see if he could reach her through his fog. “And how does it feel, Norah, my girl,” he said gently, “to have your life an open book? did you pose for your husband's racy demonstration chapter? Come here, darling; let Bruno see.”

She came and stood like an obedient animal in the circle of his arm. He sniffed at her shoulder, not daring yet to touch her; looked up with an air of imparting a confidence to Miles. “Not a tang,” he said, bewildered; “as little like soil as possible; ploughed or unploughed; she smells to me for all the world of soap and vegetables.” He wanted to lie like a little boy in her arms; to let her friendly womanliness impersonally embrace him. The audience of friends lent a faint, perverted sanction. His arm about her waist, he felt his head sucked gently, irresistibly against her breast. He could have closed his eyes at last and slept. But his friends were waiting. He moved his head slowly, investigatingly, like a doctor's; and reluctantly lifted it. “As I thought,” he sadly said; “nature-faking. Apples indeed! I'd sue him for libel, Norah.” His head sank softly back. Norah laughed her rich, warm laugh; he felt it throbbing in his ear like quiet milk. “Apples! don't you know apples from manna, Blake?”

“The merest euphemism,” Jeffrey said.

“Mistaking apples for such lovely, luscious euphemisms,” Bruno murmured from his soft warm nest. “And I never knew I had them,” Norah said.

“I'm sure,” said Margaret Flinders, “that Miles' prole
tar
ians would never be guilty of such a mistake.” “Not if they were hungry,” Miles said coldly—(how Miles hated talk of sex!) “But I think I'd rather play post-office than fruit-store,” Margaret said, the trace of tartness vanished from her voice; her words trailed sadly.

“But this is literary criticism, Maggie,” Bruno lightly said. She nodded gravely, conveying that he (like Miles, like Jeffrey) were somehow failing her. There was something tonight aloof, pathetically ironic, unfulfilled about her, as though she preserved her little-girlhood unwillingly beyond its time; as though she waved it back for her protection; a strange defence—bred of the city perhaps (or bred of Miles' inadequacy)—but not, he thought, inherently her own: the thing had grown over her like protecting moss, her soft parts vulnerably projecting. Faintly she reminded him of Elizabeth. And he tried to think of Elizabeth, to fix her through his fog. But he could recover little except the sensation of a memory: of a delicate little boat headed toward him which he firmly shoved away (loading it the while with Chinese adages concerning independence for a woman); and he could feel it floating pluckily where he had pushed it—yet with a backward glance, a tremulous keel; he felt the hollowed imprint in himself from where it floated off. He moved his head on Norah's shoulder; there seemed to be room there for Elizabeth as well.

But life, his circus, must go on. “Now I don't get you writer-fellows,” he used his petulant-pedantic tone. “Why can't you take anatomy unadulterated? Apples!” he shuddered. “There never was a woman with breasts like apples, thank God,” he enjoyed Miles' bashful misery. “Reminds me of my late lamented bourgeois past, where ice-cream was dished to resemble skyscrapers and poultry disguised as pastry. . . . Now if I were a writer,” he concluded modestly, “I should subscribe on this vital issue to the school of the absolute metaphor: ‘he placed his head against her breast and it felt like exactly nothing in the world but a woman's breast.' ” He closed his eyes in drowsy peace. “And it feels very nice, thank you, Norah.”

His touch, he thought, did not excite her. But she sat on his knee, utterly pliable, utterly acquiescent, like a female animal being stroked. He was perfectly certain that she would have sat so also if they had been alone (as certain as he was that, had they been alone, he never would have touched her); and sure that in the same dumb, kindly, acquiescent way, she would lie down and let him make love to her. He wondered if it were her simpleness, her total lack of coyness, which left him now, not cold but cool, pleasantly stirred and at the same time appeased, desiring nothing more. (Or was it drink, or was it anaesthesia?) Or was she, as he sometimes thought, lacking in all but maternal passion?

“You might define,” Miles seemed pressed to shut out from his vision the unit Bruno made with Norah, “tell us what in hell you mean—predicament” “a four-star word,” said Bruno, “from an old four-letter man” “Why, predicament,” Jeffrey wove in his joyful daze, “I mean predicament of course, the economic impasse, the function of the intellectual” “but the intellectual,” Bruno said, “
doesn't
function—your boy has delusions of grandeur, Norah” “his immediate problem” “Ah, I have the solution to that,” said Bruno: “let not your left wing know what your right wing doeth, and lie to your neighbor as you would to yourself” “lie
with
your neighbor,” Jeffrey amended peaceably and looked to his Norah for approval. “All the same,” said Miles preparing to chew the intellectual cud.

“Now, comrades,” Bruno said (for the scene hit him with the dead force of something often played before), “let's get back to sex and euphemisms. All euphemism,” he collected the disrupted circle by a mockery of his own professorial tone, “all metaphor, must spring from decadence. To an unjaded mind a metaphor would not enhance the quality of a thing but halve it. It's only the bored roué who calls for sauce with his meat.” Just as, he continued, less professorially, to himself, Norah by herself does not excite me, but my own words and the reflection in the eyes of my friends, may begin to. Have we grown so civilized that we are more excited by the
idea
which represents the fact, than by the fact itself? We must be afraid of the fact! and so we substitute apples—or adages—to make it kosher. Was that puritanism or satiety?

“Your lousy book,” said Miles (his quarrel, Bruno felt, not directed against Jeffrey, but springing from some plaintive inner need), “of all the un-classconscious tripe” “still, certain factions of the Left Wing,” Jeffrey said, “I have it on pretty good authority” “I suppose you
felt
their message
mystically
” “no, I'm in pretty close contact, it's confidential, of course, a certain Comrade Fisher” and “Fisher, Fisher,” Norah murmured, “I can't remember cooking dinner for a Fisher” “My God!” said Miles, “I never knew if I was reading about millionaires or travelling salesmen” “and now it turns out,” Bruno said, “it was just Fishermen—I wouldn't trust even a comrade named Fisher, Jeffrey; sounds to me suspiciously like a Jew” “it happened, that in that book, I wasn't primarily
concerned
with class-lines” “an artist,” Miles reiterated most severely, “ought to
be
concerned—with everything” “but my book,” Jeffrey said, tapping invisible keys with his fingers, “my book is about men and women, I don't know myself if they're farmers or millionaires or horse-thieves. I don't even care.”

“It's barely possible,” said Bruno in his scholarly tone, “that people feel a little different, necking in the back-seat of a Rolls or fornicating in a hay-rick. I don't know of course, a girl feels just as good to me in either. But the ‘ploughing,' Jeffrey, that's what's hard for me to swallow. Is that euphemism? or just plain nasty sadism? Me, I'm an old-fashioned southern gentleman, I treat my women according to the books, resting twenty-five percent of the weight respectfully on the elbows. I have, so far as I can see, absolutely no ploughing instincts.”