Desperate characters, p.10
Desperate Characters, page 10
“A cat bit me.”
“Someone you know, I hope.”
“It was a stray.”
“Have you had it looked at?”
Sophie relinquished the stem of grapes and withdrew her hand. “It’s nothing,” she said.
“A llama bit me once,” said Leon in a dreamy voice. “I reluctantly took Benny to the children’s zoo when he was small—it was supposed to be the thing to do—and a dirty demented llama reached over the fence and clamped its jaws on my hand. It was like being bitten by dirty laundry.”
“Cat bites are always something,” Claire said.
“It’s much better,” said Sophie.
“The grapes are sour,” Leon complained.
“Let me see it. When did it happen?” Claire demanded.
Sophie shook her head, saying decisively, “It’s of no consequence.”
“You will duck into supermarkets, won’t you, Claire? God! If I had your leisure, I’d take my shopping sack all over the city before I’d settle for sour grapes.”
“Oh, Leon, shut up!”
He rose from the table with startling energy, considering he had seemed to be on the edge of physical collapse. He began to stack plates. Sophie pushed back her chair, ready to help. “No,” Claire said. “Don’t touch them. He always does them. It’s part of the agreement.”
The two women stood, for a moment, at the window. A truck went by, a car, a man carrying an empty pail; two short women in tall hats held each other’s arms tightly and moved defiantly through invisible crowds.
“Are you ever afraid around here?”
“No,” Claire said. “I’m not afraid of anything like that.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Not at the moment. Not this week, anyhow.”
Plates banged in the kitchen. “Let’s go sit down,” said Claire. They returned to the living room. “It’s this way,” Claire said. “If someone shoots me in the street, it will be quick, like that! I’d rather that than be waiting in a hospital operating room for someone to walk down the corridor from the laboratory with the dirty news on a piece of glass.”
“Your kitchen sponge looks like a spoiled liver,” Leon shouted from the kitchen.
“Use your shirt,” Claire said. She contemplated Sophie, who stirred uncomfortably, not knowing why she should feel so. She knew Claire was inclined, at times, to strike a somewhat oracular stance—something of a fraud, wasn’t she? Still, Sophie fidgeted.
“You haven’t called for so long,” Claire said at last. “I wondered what hit you. And you know me, I never call anybody.”
“I don’t know. I felt like seeing you.”
“Oh, I’m glad to see you. Things are pretty bleak around here, and there’s something luxurious about you that reminds me of nice things. But you’re so abstracted. I could feel it all the time Leon and I were doing our crazy show. We’ve known each other a long time now. Are you back with that man again? Can’t remember his name. Maybe you never told me. You were so angry when I told you I thought he sounded ignominious.”
“Because you thought I was bad to do what I did…”
“Bad, bad, bad,” Claire said, smiling. “Yes, I did think that. But it was easy for me to say, I never…” She hesitated and turned toward the kitchen, where they could both see Leon cleaning up with the single-minded, controlled ferocity of a performing bear. “I never had anything like that,” Claire continued. “I suppose the nearest I’ve come to it is him.” She gestured over her shoulder at the kitchen. “And not when we were married. Not then. But now. You must think it’s ridiculous…but he touches me, you see. I don’t feel that I have enough time left for anything but truth…about myself. I think I’ve never really liked sex. I’ll tell you something funny. Sometimes he sleeps here with me. We lie together all night long with our arms around each other, and I wake up in the night and I am happy. It is a kind of loving, isn’t it, Sophie? We can just be the way we are, with each other. If he didn’t come by to see me, I think I’d blow away like milkweed. Sometimes, in the late afternoons, I sit for hours until evening comes. When it is dark—not that it can ever be really dark in the city—I get up and make myself a little supper, a chop, some frozen lima beans. If he’s here, of course, I have to be a gourmet. Days like paper chains. All I’ve got is that old man whom I dumped twenty years ago after he knocked up a Trotskyite lady vamp named Carla.” She leaned forward with sudden intensity. “He’s scared,” she said softly. “He thinks one of his students might try to drug him. He says they harangue him about drugs all the time. Now he’s afraid to have coffee in the cafeteria at the university. He even thinks the faculty dining room might be dangerous. He told me just before you arrived that he now knows how scared old ladies are of being raped. He says that’s exactly the way he feels….” She looked back at the kitchen. The corners of her mouth turned down. “Although, God knows, he’s been on a trip ever since he married that sex-addled bluestocking of his,” she said disgustedly. “Oh…you see how it is. I started out with you and ended up with myself.”
Claire was waiting for her to say something but Sophie was silent, bemused.
“Sophie?”
“No, no. It ended long ago,” Sophie said. “I saw him once. He was polite. That’s all. I did want to see you and I was grateful when you asked me to come. I’m depressed by my idleness, I guess.”
“Neither of us had children,” Claire said, a note of wonder in her voice.
Sophie laughed. “Come off it!” she said brusquely, getting back at Claire for something, perhaps for waking up happy in the middle of the night.
“Well…how is Otto?”
“You already asked me that,” Sophie replied. “He’s fine, considering. I think he’s better off than some, perhaps because he’s not much given to introspection. He’s too preoccupied with fighting off a mysterious effluvium he thinks will drown him. He thinks garbage is an insult directed against him personally, and he’s still trying to wash the dishes before we’ve finished eating.”
“What bitchiness!” exclaimed Leon, who was standing in the door, wiping a glass. “No wonder men weep.”
“I haven’t seen any men weeping,” said Claire.
But Sophie felt a tremor that seemed to strike her heart. She knew her face had reddened and her breath was short. She had not meant to sound so…baleful. And last night, she had wanted Charlie to go on, implying Otto was inhuman, shut away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Leon is right. When I open my mouth, toads fall out. I’m sorry.”
Leon looked surprised, then embarrassed. He held up the glass. “Claire, this is the way to dry a glass!” But the hectoring tone was not in his voice. Claire, murmuring something about a chicken, got up from her chair and went to the kitchen, and Sophie, reluctant to be left alone with the echo of her own words, followed Claire.
“I’d better go,” she said dubiously, looking at Leon as he mopped up a counter, and then at Claire, who was staring down at a large roasting chicken in a pan. “No need for you to go,” Claire said over her shoulder.
“What are you going to do with that bird?” Leon asked.
“Tarragon and cream,” she answered.
“Who’s coming?”
“Edgar and his new friend, some hairdresser.”
“Can I stay?”
“No.”
“What lousy company you keep! And I suppose you’ll use those clams you’ve been torturing and my wine!”
Claire, a cigarette drooping from her lips, was sprinkling the chicken; a few cigarette ashes floated down to join the tarragon.
“Fairies!” exclaimed Leon, rinsing the sponge.
“Let’s have tea at the Plaza next week,” Claire said to Sophie. “I’ll dress up and we’ll sit in the Palm Court and talk about the war and movies.”
“Women that hang out with homosexuals are spiders,” said Leon, touching the chicken breast with one soft finger.
“Thanks for lunch, Claire. It was nice to see you, Leon,” Sophie said.
Leon laughed. “It’s never nice to see me,” he said. A hank of gray hair fell over one of his pouchy eyes. With a quick touch, Claire pushed it back over his forehead. He grunted and scowled.
At the door, Claire said, “Take care of your cat problem.” She handed Sophie her coat. “What a pretty one! Where is it from? Ireland? France? You carry the globe on your back, Sophie. Don’t forget to phone me and don’t worry about Charlie and Otto. Otto will be better off on his own. Which reminds me…wait!” And she left Sophie abruptly and went up the stairs, taking two at a time, her skirt flying above her white legs. When she returned, she was holding a book. “Otto loaned me that a year ago. Don’t tell him, but I didn’t finish it. He was so pleased when I said I was interested in reading it. And I was, at the time. I did start it.” She handed it over. It was The Common Law, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Holding it, Sophie felt she had misplaced Otto, and the book was the only tangible evidence of his continuing existence somewhere. She was filled with foreboding and sadness, and her good-bye to Claire was almost inaudible.
The door closed.
NINE
Sophie ran down the stairs and through the lobby, coming to a breathless halt outside the entrance of the building. A hairpin that had worked loose slipped down the back of her dress and fell out on the sidewalk. She looked at her watch. It was four o’clock. She didn’t think that the two of them, back up there on the second floor, would be talking about her. Her visit had been only a slight distraction for them, even a vexation, perhaps. She grew aware that someone was watching her, and looked up to see an old man staring at her idly. A gray poodle sat at his feet. How familiar he looked! A character actor? One of those familiar nameless faces she had seen a dozen times—the Duke, my Lord, is in the hands of the French. She smiled at him and he bowed.
In a hotel lobby on Central Park West, she found a phone booth. She dialed Francis’ office. There was no one there today, of course. She hadn’t indulged her little vice in a long while. Once again, by electronic extension, she moved among the battered file cabinets, the piles of books, beneath the meringue ceiling. She let the phone ring a long time. Then she called Charlie Russel’s number. A child answered. She had a sudden wistful memory of the Russel children years ago, small, profane, and brown, during a summer’s visit to Flynders. “Is this Stuart?” she asked. “This is Sophie.”
“Okay,” said the boy. “You want my mother?”
“Yes.”
She heard him shout, “Ma!” He breathed into the phone. “Wait a minute.”
“Yes,” said Ruth.
“This is Sophie.”
“Yes.”
“How are you, Ruth?”
“Extremely well.”
“I called because of all the trouble. I’m sorry about it.”
“What trouble? What are you sorry about?”
“Charlie and Otto…the end of all that.”
“I wouldn’t call it trouble.”
Sophie tightened her hand around the receiver.
“How are the children?”
“The children are fabulous.”
“Stuart sounded so grown up.”
“He is grown up. Fantastic. He’s going back to that tennis camp this summer. It’s incredible how his self-image improved. It’s a very serious camp. I mean, the director knows what tennis is all about. Three hours on the court, then an hour of constructive criticism.”
“And Bobby? Linda?”
“Bobby is going through a little phase of kleptomania. It’ll pass, of course.”
“Linda?” whispered Sophie.
“Marvelous! She certainly knows who she is.”
“Ruth? I feel terrible about the breakup.”
There was a long silence. “They’ll be better off,” Ruth said at last. “I’ve always thought there was something odd about their dependence on each other. They’re big boys now, you know, Sophie…mustn’t let them be babies. It castrates men.”
“And you? Are you really extremely well?” asked Sophie.
There was a click; the operator asked for another dime.
“Couldn’t we have lunch?” Sophie said.
“I’m on a diet. I don’t eat lunch any more,” Ruth said. And then she said—or did she?—Sophie wasn’t sure what she’d really heard but it sounded like, “Go away, Sophie.” In any case, the phone went dead and she didn’t have another dime.
When she got home, Sophie went directly to the phone and called their doctor. He would not be in the office until Tuesday at ten thirty. The answering service had no suggestion to make. She could leave her number, of course, and if it was an emergency…Sophie got out the Yellow Pages and phoned six doctors within the area. None was available. One woman suggested she call a policeman.
She poured herself a large drink of whisky and drank it down. Then she went to the back door. The gray cat was hunched up on the lip of the stone threshold, its head at an angle, asleep.
When Otto came home, he discovered Sophie off in a corner of the living room, sitting in a formal chair no one ever sat in, stippled with light and shadow. Her silence and the dining room table set for dinner, which he glimpsed through the living room doors, looked like a set piece arranged for some purpose that had subsequently been forgotten. He had the impression she was weeping without sound, and that perhaps the elements of this forlorn scene had been contrived for his benefit, a domestic lesson that was to elicit from him an apology. He spoke brusquely.
“Why are you sitting there like an orphan?”
She held up a book. “There’s a little note in your handwriting in the margin. You must have written it a long time ago. The ink has faded and your handwriting looks somewhat different. But I recognized it. It reminded me of how serious you are. It says ‘limitation of liability by statute.’ Here. Claire returned it.” She got up and came to him, switching on lamps as she moved, and put the book in his hand. She was not crying, the dining room table was set for two, not part of a set, only a detail of their routine. He considered what he thought he had seen, an outsider’s view of their life form, inaccurately judged perhaps, but for a second he had not been enmeshed in it, had not been oblivious.
“Let’s eat in the living room,” he said.
“If you like,” she said indifferently.
“How was Claire?”
“As always,” she replied. “Leon Fischer was there—you remember him? Her husband long ago?”
“I remember him, that yellow-skinned man who doesn’t listen.”
“Otto? The cat is back…at the door.”
“The cat!” He ran through the living room into the dining room, toward the back door. “Don’t open it,” she called out. “Please don’t.”
At Otto’s thundering approach, the cat stretched and eagerly pressed its face against the glass.
“I’ll have to open it,” he shouted, and cursed the elaborate sequence of steps needed to unlock the door—hook, key, insert, reach, turn again. The cat yawned and observed him, until he drew back his foot to kick it. Then it whirled away, down the steps, and disappeared soundlessly into the dark below.
“Otto, after dinner, we’ll go to the hospital.”
He turned quickly to her. “We’ll go now,” he said angrily, apprehensively.
“No. After we’ve eaten.”
“Then it has gotten worse?”
“Not worse. But no better. I thought it had this morning.” She appeared calm, resigned, yet her voice was thin, splintery, as though she were barely trying to conceal inner breakage. He put his hand on her arm. She drew away from him.
“It’s only a bite,” she said.
“You’re so worried.”
They ate from trays in the living room. Otto was afraid of spilling food on the Goum rug and he had to bend over too far to reach his plate. The room felt faintly hostile, as though it resented this misuse of its given function. Otto felt an obscure anger at the ineluctable force of custom. Why the hell couldn’t he eat off the floor if he chose to? Yet he knew it was a violation of his own sense of fitness that was making him irritable.
“It was a silly idea,” he conceded reluctantly.
“I guess…”
“I don’t know what I had in mind.”
She laughed shortly, two sharp notes like prongs.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing. Did you see Charlie?”
“I saw his tracks. He spilled a carton of coffee on the rug in his office while he was packing up some books.” He looked at her intently, as though trying to gauge her receptivity to what he was about to say, then he set down his tray. “I wonder what you really talked about with him.” The mild, speculative tone in which he asked the question suggested that he didn’t expect an answer.
“He was drunk and foolish and talked about himself. He was complaining, really, about everything. Ruth, his children—”
“How did we arrive at such a place,” he said despairingly, and for a startled second Sophie thought he meant the living room, that his impulse to eat here had been an aberration against which he was now protesting. But then he banged his tray down on the coffee table, and went on talking vehemently, his restless glance lighting on her, the floor, the books. His hands were tightly clasped in his lap.
“We agreed,” he said. “We agreed it would be best to dissolve the partnership. We were reasonable. Even Charlie was that…we had a meeting…discussed procedures. The next day, the very next morning, this rancor appeared, these recriminations against me began. It was like retribution, as though he were punishing me. It hadn’t been my idea to end the thing. Charlie was the one who was radical about it. I knew there were difficulties. You know I knew that! There always are. And I know it’s a failure of something in me, that I can’t feel more about what preoccupies Charlie. But I think about it. I care about justice…I care. But Charlie was at me. He said he could tell by the way I looked at them, that I had contempt for his clients. My God! It was Charlie I had contempt for.”
