Summer Crossing Page 4

  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?”

  Having discovered that Steve Bolton’s name did not set off any commotion, Peter was bored with the subject. But Grady, waiting to hear, found her interest in Janet genuine: Janet, unlike Steve, was not seen at the small end of a telescope, but sharply in the foreground, present and punishing; and she remembered the morning when she’d prolonged Janet’s agony (with a remorse never quite felt before). “Or didn’t he mention them?”

  “Yes, of course he did. Said they were fine. There’s another one, a girl this time. You can be sure he showed me a picture: whatever makes people do that? All those glossy snapshots of gooey brats! Perverse. I hope you never have any children.”

  “Why, for God’s sake? I’d like a little bowlegged baby: bathe it, you know, and hold it up in the light.”

  Here was a wedge and he used it. “A bowlegged baby? And what, my dear, would he think of that?”

  “Who?” said Grady.

  “You’ll forgive me, I don’t know the gentleman’s name,” he said, serving a point. “I’ll venture to say, though, that it’s one fairly well-known (come now, isn’t this why you don’t tell me?), that he is some sort of intellectual and at least twenty years older: nervous girls of extensive sensibility always get goose-happy over daddy-types.”

  Grady laughed, though laughter, she saw too late, authorized his making cartoons of her situation. She was willing to permit him this liberty, however: it was small payment for a service he’d done her this evening, one impossible to explain: it consisted simply in his now knowing Clyde Manzer existed; for his knowing it made Clyde dwindle to human size and exist, too. So long had she shrouded him in shadow and secret that he had come to loom greater than his actuality. To have another person know drained much of the mystery and lessened her fear of his dissolving: he was a substance at last, someone carried not just in her head, and mentally she floated toward him, ecstatic to embrace his reality.

  Peter was pleased with himself. “You needn’t bother answering: but am I right?”

  “I won’t tell you; if I did, then I shouldn’t have any more of your theories.”

  “Do you want really to hear my theories?”

  “No, as a matter of fact I don’t,” she said: as a matter of fact, she did: it gave back something of the excitement of having still a secret.

  “Tell me one thing.” Peter speared his palm with a swizzle stick. “Are you going to marry him?”

  She recognized the purposeful quality of his asking and, keyed to banter, was disconcerted by it. “I don’t know,” she said, with a resentful chop in her voice. “Does one always have to want to marry? I’m sure there are kinds of love in which that is hardly an issue.”

  “Yes: but aren’t love and marriage notoriously synonymous in the minds of most women? Certainly very few men get the first without promising the second: love, that is—if it’s just a matter of spreading her legs, almost any woman will do that for nothing. But seriously, dear?”

  “Seriously, then (though obviously you’re the one not being serious): I have no answer to give, how could I when I’ve never really thought of it? We came here to dance, darling. Shall we?”

  Awaiting them on their return was a photographer, surly with disinterest, and the Bamboo Club’s press agent, a sassy pouting man whose jeweled hands fluttered about the table arranging festive props: a champagne bucket, a vase of flowers, a monster-large ashtray on which the club’s name was brazenly photogenic. “That’s right, Miss McNeil, just a little picture, you don’t mind? Now, now, mustn’t stare at the camera, that’s right, look at each other: sweet, absolutely darling, couldn’t be cuter! Artie, you’re taking a great picture, capturing young love, that’s what you’re doing. Ah, Miss McNeil, I know better—listen there, even your young man says I’m right! Don’t you, young man? And who are you, anyway? Wait now, I want to write it all down. But isn’t that someone awfully old or dead or famous or something, Walt Whitman? Oh, I see, you’re Walt Whitman the second; a grandson, are you? Well, isn’t that lovely. Thank you, Miss McNeil, and you, too, Mr. Whitman: you’ve both been sweet, absolutely darling.” He did not forget to take with him the flowers, the champagne, the ashtray.

  Peter’s expense on whiskey had at last paid a dividend: which is to say, his sense of humor had reached a point that was without discrimination; and he was determined to push it even further: unfortunately, someone gave him an opportunity. It was a grey, inhibited little man who, goaded by his companion, a pink strawberry woman sipping brandy, leaned from the next table and gave Peter’s arm a diffident peck: “Pardon me,” he said, “but we wondered if you people are British royalty? My friend says because they took your picture you’re British royalty.”

  “No,” said Peter, with a patient smile. “American royalty.”

  Grady was persuaded they should leave: another minute and there would be a fight: it was with that expectation that Peter wanted to stay. He could at least be ashamed, he said, and got them as far as the dance-floor, but there he bogged down, insisting they dance and demanding the orchestra play his favorite tune: “Just One of Those Things.” She warned him to stop singing in her ear: “Just one of those fabulous flights”: so after a while she sang with him. A marathon of scarlet stars blinked on a circle of ceiling, and Grady, sprinkled by their light, dizzy in their whirl, drifted in the refuge of this sky: a voice, far down upon the earth, carried up to her: can you hear? that I say you are royalty? Dreaming, she thought it was Clyde, though how like Peter it sounded! And turning in space, her hair swung like a victory. They danced until all at once and as one the music dimmed and the stars went dark.

  Chapter 4

  “The doorman gave me these,” said Clyde, almost a week later. He held out two telegrams, but Grady did not take them until she’d turned on the kitchen faucet and rinsed her hands of waffle-batter. “I’d like to take a poke at that guy: a real schnook! You ought to see the kind of looks he gives me. And that kid on the elevator, he’s a little fairy: I’ll hand him something to nibble on.” She had heard these complaints before, they needed no comment from her, so she said: “Where’s the butter, honey? And did you get the kind of syrup I wanted?” She was making a very late breakfast: they had not got up until after eleven. For th
e last few days the parking lot had been closed; the owner was having some trouble over his license. And the day before, accompanied by Mink and his girlfriend, they’d driven up into the Catskills on a picnic. On the way back a tire had blown out, and it was two in the morning before they’d crossed the George Washington Bridge. “No soap on that syrup—so I got Log Cabin, O.K.?” he said, settling himself by the waffle-iron and unfolding a tabloid he’d brought back. His eyebrows, whenever he read, dipped like a scholar’s (and with a mumbling noise he chewed one after another of his fingernails). “Says here Sunday was the hottest July sixth since 1900: over a million people at Coney—what do you think of that?” Grady, remembering the blazing rock-strewn field where they’d scrounged around battling insects and eating unsalted hard-boiled eggs, didn’t think much. She finished drying her hands and sat down to open the telegrams.

  Actually, one was a cable, an extravagant two-pager from Lucy in Paris: Safely here stop horrid voyage as daddy forgot dinner suit and we forced to stay evenings in cabin stop airmail dinner suit at once stop also send my hair switch stop put out the lights stop don’t smoke in bed stop am seeing man tomorrow about your dress stop will send samples stop are you all right query tell Hermione Bensusan to mail me your horoscope for July and August stop am worried about you stop love mother. Grady creased the cable with a groan; did her mother really believe she was going to get her involved again with Hermione Bensusan? Miss Bensusan was an astrologist Lucy doted on.