Three Short Novels (2 page)

The white, frilly bassinet was set up on its stiff legs and rollers in a corner of her room, and, when the child slept, she listened to the radio by her bed or read the novels that her mother bought, and the magazines, and was restless for the use of her body. The use of her body was enough; the rest of it—the belief that somebody else could know her spirit as well or better than she knew it herself—was a delusion. She lay on the bed, listening to popular songs or reading, with the fantasy of her next embrace always in the back of her mind, her body always waiting for the fantasy to claim it. She saw no ending to this time in her parents' home with her child other than the beginning of a time with another man, and in her mother's crooning and clucking at the baby she sensed the wish for another man to come and take the daughter away. The wish was in the sweet, ardent, rather weary sounds as her mother bent over the basket, in the feminine ways of her body, ways exaggerated for the daughter to see and to imitate; since the daughter was now again at home and with a child, one must assume that she had not used and was not using her ultimate powers. As for her father, if Vivian were to run off with a man, he would not miss her, she knew. He lectured at medical schools on his specialty, the heart, saw his private patients, and spent almost every evening at his club or with his mistress; his family had become like a group of patients he had treated when he had been specializing in a branch of medicine that no longer interested him but whom he was obliged to look over once in a while. Her brother, Charles, Jr., six years older than she and interning in a hospital across the bay, although he sometimes came home for a night, did not visit with her or show any interest in the child. When he did come into her room, it was usually in the few spare minutes before he left the house, and the contempt in his manner made her stand away from him and answer him grudgingly. She could not bear his loud, drawling voice, his calves bulging importantly against his trousers, and the long legs nervously shifting in professional style from one crepe sole to the
other. When he asked her what she intended to do with her life, she told him, turning away from him, that she intended to take a course for charwomen.

She did, however, venture out, after a time. Her father's mistress, Paul's sister, was her good friend—a tall, almost harshly beautiful young woman, an advertising artist, who painted in oils and who had black walls in her apartment. Vivian often walked the two miles to Adele's to drink with her friends—newspaper reporters and commercial artists and actors. She sang for them one night, imitating a torch singer, perching herself on the arm of a chair, crossing her knees, languidly plucking at the drooping petals of a beige rose that Adele put into her hands. She sang again, a few nights later, for one of Adele's brothers-in-law, who owned a bar where the customers were entertained by singers and raconteurs at the piano. He had come over to Adele's apartment to hear her. She wore a dark brown silk dress that fit tightly and a long string of amber and jade beads, and her voice was insinuatingly low and warmed by the brandy.

The first night she sang in the bar, her parents came in together, hoping, she knew, that in spite of what they had learned about the lives of aspiring actors and entertainers, their daughter would be famous someday, bypassing the pitfalls. Her hair was cut short like a boy's, the shining paleness in startling contrast with her large, dark eyes; and her slender, young body affected the sensual indolence of the woman of experience, enticing yet seeming to remain aloof, waiting for the right one. The first few nights she was afraid that the patrons would suspect that she was fooling them. The gestures were not her own—she had learned them from singers in nightclubs and movies; the voice imitated that of an already famous singer, husky and plaintive with a controlled break in it; and the color of her hair was the color that was popular with movie starlets and salesgirls and carhops. As she repeated her act, it came to seem natural because the fixed, absorbed gaze of the audience and their applause led her to
believe what they believed, that everything was natural with her, that everything was not a matter of trickery but of her own nature, as if she, herself, had originated all that was imitative and the others were imitating her. And when certain men in the audience became infatuated with her, this was further proof.

She became infatuated, in turn, with a big and amiable radio announcer, a widower in his fifties. He had a small gray mustache and gray curls brushed slickly back with silver brushes. She chose this man to make her body known to her again because he, among the others, seemed most affected by her. When he sat with her at a restaurant table, his fingers trembled touching her wrist and fingers, and his bass voice shook. He was not, she knew, the one who would mean more than her husband had meant, the one to rid her of the desire for others, but he was the one to break the link, her body's link, with her child. On the unmade bed in his half-empty apartment, he uncovered her breasts that had given up the mouth of the child only a month before and still felt the communion with the child; now the mouth of the man destroyed the link and, though it had to be destroyed, under the excitement she was disturbed by its breaking. Where the child had emerged, the doctor had sewn her into a virgin again, and the pain that resulted in the man's embrace seemed like an attempt of her body to repulse the stranger who was destroying the link with the child. She went up to his apartment often, and they lay in each other's arms for hours, approaching a tender respect for each other that took faults and failings into consideration; but always, when he rose from the bed and she lay watching him dress, his shirt tentlike around his hips, he became troubling to her and futureless.

No word had come from her husband since the letter written along the route of his escape, and at her parents' promptings she sued for divorce. The erotic atmosphere of the lounge was not, they implied, to be denied its possibilities. The child, at this time, receded from the center of her life. The Swedish cook and housekeeper, who lived
in the servants' quarters off the kitchen, took the child to her room on the evenings that Vivian sang in the lounge, and her wages were increased for this extra service to the family. Sometimes, when Vivian had stayed out all night and slept all morning, she would go down in her robe, a sense of guilt upon her, and find the baby asleep in the bassinet in the sun filtering through the lace curtains in the woman's room, or gazing up at the canary in its cage. Although to sing and to be applauded was gratifying, and the nights with her lover exciting, she felt this was not enough to warrant her separation from the child. The separation seemed furtive, no matter how many accomplices she had. And she would make a show of love for the child, taking him up in her arms and carrying him through the house, laying him down on her bed or on a couch and nuzzling his belly and the soles of his feet; and the semblance of love passed over into the real.

3

W
ith a grudging look of curiosity, her brother came into the lounge with a friend, a young resident doctor. She had met him, her brother told her, at her wedding, and she pretended to remember him. The young man, George Gustafsen, came in alone a few nights later and, talking with her, accidentally knocked his glass off the table.

He declared his undying love for her the first time he took her out and made the demand of her to love him as much. This declaration and demand were made while he sat apart from her in his car, then, without preparatory caressing, he threw himself upon her. She resisted him because his sudden ardor struck her as comic and because he was not pleasing to her physically—his face plump, his hips high and jutting; and he had the pomposity of her brother, as if he were emulating the other. After a few times with him, however, when he did not throw himself upon her but continued to declare his love and to demand that she marry him, she felt that his choosing her to be responsible for his happiness the rest of his life elevated her higher than anyone else had ever done, and she fell in love with him because
of that oppressive honor and because a man so much in love, so possessive, so broodingly jealous, would surely take care of her forever and be true to her forever.

When she refused to go with the radio announcer to his apartment, he taunted her for her youth, predicting, with a pitiable meanness in his thick cheeks, her panic and loneliness at his age. She never saw him again. Even though she was sorry for him, some belief that no man was ever as helpless as he appeared to be, prevented her from feeling deeply about his condition. To think that a man was helpless was like thinking that the sun was helpless because it could not be other than a burning light.

The marriage to George Gustafsen took place in the home of her Aunt Belle, her mother's sister, in St. Francis Woods, the house strewn with red roses and a fashionable pastor officiating. The guests were relatives and close friends, but, reserved and small as the wedding was, Vivian felt that it was more than it ought to be, even as she had felt about the first wedding that it was not as much as it might have been. By this time she mocked all marriage ceremonies except the brief, civil kind, and made a practice of glancing derisively through the society section of the newspapers for nuptial items that told the fraternity of the groom, the sorority of the bride, the color and material of the bride's mother's gown, and for photographs of happy pairs, startled-eyed in all their trappings and suspicious of what the years were to bring in spite of blessings from God and pastors and parents and the bureau of licenses.

She gave up her singing in the lounge and sat at home evenings with her husband—the evenings he was not on duty—and with her son, who was at the time of her wedding almost two. She was again a wife, and although it was expected of her to be desirable to other men, she was to cease the overt demonstration, as in the lounge, of her desire for them. They bought a modest, two-story house in a neighborhood of narrow, stylish houses not far from her parents but
not as commodious as the houses of her parents' neighborhood. She selected the decor with her mother, who was greeted by every manager in the six-story store, and in this decor, while David slept in his room upstairs and her husband read his medical journals and his
Time
and
Fortune
magazines, she sat curled up on the couch, knitting. She was acting, she felt, the role of a woman who has caused something important to happen to herself, and she was convinced that her husband was also acting; that his was the role of the young husband on his way to prominence and prosperity, content to be at home evenings with his wife, and proud that he was a loving father to another man's child. His legs were stuck straight out to the velvet footstool as if ordered in that position by some director of the scene. It seemed to her that he was like a boy imitating some perfect adult in everything he did from paring his nails to lifting the child into the air, from clearing his throat to predicting Hitler's next move. She sympathized with him, for this need of his to perform as others expected him to, but again, as with her lover, as with Paul, her sympathy was baffled by the conviction that because he was a man he was not in real need of sympathy, that he got along very well without it, and that to grant it to him was to take away some of his maleness—the more sympathy granted him the more of his maleness was taken away, and the less she thought of him. It was this troubling conflict that led her one evening to sit on his lap, for to be close against him, to be enveloped by his presence, would rid her of her conflict, and she slipped onto his lap with the innocence of a woman in the sway of her own femininity, placing herself within his arm that held the magazine and laying her head against his chest.

She pretended to be as absorbed as he in the magazine, but the close-set type in narrow columns gave her the same feeling of ignorance and insufficiency that was given her by blueprints and the financial sections of the newspapers. When he turned the page and a picture of Mussolini appeared, of his big face haranguing a crowd,
she was instantly intrigued. She touched the dictator's chin with her index finger and the gesture was like taking a liberty with the man himself, repulsing him and flirting with him at the same time.

“What's that for?” her husband inquired.

“Isn't that a monster of a chin?” she asked, afraid that he had guessed her trick of access into the lives of famous men. The only way she could get close enough to them to see that they were human was to imagine them making love.

“It isn't that bad,” he said.

She waited for him to say something more and knew, unmoving in his lap, that there was to be some clash to enliven their evening and that both welcomed it and were tensed by it, and yet would have preferred to let the day go by without it.

“He excites you?” he asked, his voice as strained as if the Italian dictator were their next-door neighbor.

She felt a laugh readying itself in her chest at the comicalness of his jealousy, while her mind prepared itself for the seriousness of it. “I imagine he makes love like a bull,” she said placatingly.

“You've imagined it?”

She shrugged. “Don't you imagine things?”

“There are other things to think about. . . . ”

“Oh, yes,” she agreed.

“Let me ask you something,” he said, and asked her then the question she knew he had been wanting to ask her ever since he met her. “Did you sleep with any man besides Paul?”

“No,” she said, and laughed. “I was saving myself for you.”

Their bodies became intolerant of each other and still she sat unmoving, hoping with the closeness of bodies to force that satisfaction in union for which they had married.