The stage door slammed. “Who the hell is fooling with that switchboard?” called Wally, and his steps came running across the stage.
Noel grinned conspiratorially at Marjorie. “Take it easy, Wally. Just training up your replacement.”
“Oh. Sorry. You pulled the wrong switch or something, Noel. One of the pink spots on the catwalk came on—” He appeared through the curtain. His mouth opened when he saw them, and he stood holding an edge of the dusty black drape, staring.
“Hi, Wally,” Marjorie said.
“My replacement?” Wally’s voice was thick and queer.
“You’d be amazed. She knows plenty about lights.”
Wally came to her and touched her arm. His big head shook heavily. “Look, Marge, please don’t. Please. I never thought he’d ask you. I can do it. It’s a dirty messy job, you have to go climbing around on catwalks, staying up till all hours—”
“I love it,” Marjorie said. “There’s nothing I’d rather do.”
Wally said to Noel, “Forget it, forget I ever asked for a replacement. I’ll do the writing, I’ll do the lights, and I’ll pick up the directing when I can—”
Marjorie said curtly, “Wally, can’t you understand that I want to do this? I’m here at South Wind to learn, just as you are.”
Noel said, “You’re being silly, Wally. There’s no chivalry backstage. Lighting is dull hackwork for you now. Let her take it over. You have more important things to do.”
The boy looked from one to the other. Marjorie and Noel stood side by side at the board. Noel’s arm was around behind her, resting lightly on a switch. “Please. I’ll do the lights,” Wally said in a terribly melancholy tone.
Marjorie said sharply, “I’ll do them. It’s all arranged!”
“All arranged,” Wally said. He swung his head around like an animal and went out through the curtains.
Chapter 15. SHIRLEY
The sight of her own uncovered breasts in the lamplight shocked Marjorie out of the sleepy sweet delirium that was paralyzing her. She sat up. “God in heaven, what am I doing? What are you doing? Turn away, please, I want to dress.”
“I’ll do better than that. I’ll leave,” Noel said. He stood and strode out.
The drawing board and the lighting-plan sketches lay on the floor where they had fallen. A log had caved in on the fire, and a flaming chunk which had rolled against the screen was smoking into the room. As soon as she had buttoned her shirtwaist she pushed the ember back with the poker, thinking the while that she must have succumbed to the spell of Noel’s room; it was the most beguiling place on earth. The rough-plastered stone fireplace, the crude wooden walls crammed with books, the wagon-wheel chandelier in the high dusky ceiling, the smell of tobacco, books, green trees, and wood fires, all blended into a comfortable warm lulling maleness. The brass red-shaded reading lamp by which they had been working cast a round of yellow light on the Indian blanket covering the couch; the rest of the room was gloomy. Blue cold moonlight falling through the windows only made the lighted place by the couch and the fire seem cosier.
She had thought she was weeks away from having to plan for the possibility that Noel might want to neck with her. It had happened like a short circuit between live wires. She had abandoned herself to shocking freedoms unknown to her before; and the worst of it was that she did not even feel conscience-stricken. The sensible thing was to get out at once, of course. But she wasn’t angry at him, though she was scared, exquisitely and pleasantly scared in her remotest nerves. She thought she had better wait just long enough to tell him she wasn’t angry at him. She curled up in the armchair by the fire. The excitement which had made her fingers almost too unsteady to button her blouse died away, leaving a warm languor in her limbs as after a bath. Five minutes went by.
The door opened. “Good Lord, you still here?” he said. “I thought you’d have run off shrieking into the night. By now, you should be coming back with a policeman.” He dropped on his back on the couch, with his head propped against a cushion. His face was sombre and tired. “Go away, Marjorie.”
“Policeman? Why?”
“Impairing the morals of a minor would be the charge, no doubt.”
“Oh, cut it out, Noel.”
He reached for cigarettes, glancing wryly at the dump of papers on the floor. “Big mistake, obviously, asking you to come here to work.”
“May I have a cigarette, please?”
He came to her, lit her cigarette, and walked away, making nothing of the brief touch of her hand on his. Flinging himself on the couch, he said, “No, no. Not Shirley. Not again. I won’t have any part of it. I’m too old. I know better. I don’t even enjoy it…”
“Shirley? My name’s Marjorie, my friend—”
“Your name is Shirley.” He sat up stoop-shouldered, his hands hanging between his knees, and stared at her. The firelight and the lamplight shadowed his face; the lines were deeply creased along his bony cheeks. “Look, kid, just remember this, and remember I said it very early in the game, too, the first time I so much as made the mistake of touching you. I’m not going to marry you or anybody like you. Nothing can ever make me do it, nothing, is that clear—”
“Who in heaven’s name is talking about marriage?” She was alarmed, dizzied, delighted. “I don’t even like you particularly.”
“Oh, damn that bloody nonsense. Look”—he stood and walked toward her—”I trust you believe that when I asked you last Sunday to help with the lights I wasn’t subtly and fiendishly leading up to this. I’m not a college boy. Necking disgusts me. I can have all the sex I want, when I want it, with the pleasantest of partners—”
“Not with me you can’t,” she broke in without thinking.
“I haven’t the remotest desire for it with you,” Noel said. “I doubt that you could force me. In time you’ll probably try.”
She jumped out of the chair, tears storming to her eyes. “I stayed to tell you that I wasn’t angry, but I’m getting angry fast. I’ll do your lights and act in your shows and for the rest you can go to hell. Good night.”
His hand was on her shoulder before she had taken two steps. He held her away from him with his long arms, looking earnestly at her face. “How would you like to go for a nice walk? I think we ought to talk a little bit, maybe.”
“You think I’m just a stupid kid, don’t you, with a crush on you, the way Wally has a crush on me. Well, what if it’s true? Why should you insult me like a beast? What do you want of me? You won’t get me to do anything bad. I know all the women are dying to sleep with you. All right. All right! Let me alone then! Don’t ever kiss me again. Keep your hands off me, don’t talk to me, don’t dance with me, don’t ask me to have drinks with you, don’t torture me, that’s all I ask! I’ve wanted to kiss you ever since I saw you a year ago. I admit it. Now I’ve done it and that’s that. Let me go. I don’t want to walk with you.”
He dropped his hands. She walked to the chair where her leather jacket was lying, and put it on.
“Marjorie,” he said. He was smiling now, the warm and faintly sad smile about the ironic secret. “This won’t work. Willy-nilly we’re together for the summer. We have to talk a bit. Here, or walking, it doesn’t matter.”
Her hands were thrust in her jacket pockets. “Let’s walk, then. Let’s get out of here.”
At the end of the swimming dock there were benches. Marjorie and Noel walked out on the echoing boards in the moonlight, their faces red and green and red as they walked past the lamps. They sat on a bench, the grainy wood of which was dank in the night air, and lit cigarettes. Wavelets slapped at the dock, and from the golf course, far off, came floating the music of the band playing Love’s Old Sweet Song, accompanied by raucous beery group singing.
“We should have gone to the steak roast,” Noel said.
“Yes, indeed,” Marjorie said.
“I was eighteen,” Noel said—the moon was behind him, and his face was invisible except in red puffs of his cigarette?
??”when I first slept with a woman. I was dramatic counselor at a kid’s camp, and she was the mother of one of the kids. Most harmless-looking woman you ever saw, dark, demure—Gad! An education. Makes me feel dirty when I think back on her, which I try never to do—”
“Look, Noel, I don’t want to hear about your past. You’re nothing to me.”
“Take my advice, and listen. You’d better know all this…. Up till then I had been all tied up in knots of shyness with women, but Mrs. Dearing, that was her name, made it contemptibly simple, once for all. I turned into something of a young rake. My father sensed the change in me pretty quickly. Got to get you married, Saul, it’s the only thing that will straighten you out, give you some backbone. Seems I wasn’t getting good marks in college. This was after getting pretty near the highest high school average in New York State, and cracking IQ tests all my life with marks that showed me right up there with Einstein and Shakespeare. You see, my father wanted me to go to law school, and—well, you’d have to know my mother and my sister to appreciate my side of the story. Let’s take it as understood that I was a dissolute worthless loafer, on the verge of disgracing the great Judge Ehrmann by getting kicked out of Cornell. My father, Marjorie, and I say it with regret, is the stuffed shirt of the world, and has succeeded in overbearing everybody all his life, except me—though that’s his chief aim in life—
“But that’s neither here nor there. I was perfectly willing to do as he wished. I wanted to get some backbone and straighten out, if possible. I didn’t much like being a loafer. I didn’t understand myself at all then. So I dutifully began making the rounds of the West Side among the eligible girls. I must have had dates with nine tenths of them. That’s how I became such a connoisseur of Shirley. I went out with Shirley after Shirley. It was uncanny. She was everywhere. I would hear about some wonderful new girl—Susan Fain, Helen Kaplan, Judy Morris, the name didn’t matter. I’d telephone her, make a date, go up to the apartment, she’d open the door—and there would stand Shirley. In a different dress, a different body, looking at me out of different eyes, but with that one unchanging look, the look of Shirley. The respectable girl, the mother of the next generation, all tricked out to appear gay and girlish and carefree, but with a terrible threatening solid dullness jutting through, like the gray rocks under the spring grass in Central Park. Behind her, half the time, would loom her mother, the frightful giveaway, with the same face as Helen’s or Susan’s, only coarsened, wrinkled, fattened, with the deceiving bloom of girlhood all stripped away, showing naked the grim horrid respectable determined dullness, oh God.” Noel stood and walked back and forth, his heels making the hollow dock boom. “Oh God, Marjorie, the dullness of the mothers! Smug self-righteousness mixed with climbing eagerness, and a district attorney’s inquisitive suspicion—Judge Ehrmann’s oldest boy, they say he’s brilliant but I don’t know, not solid, wants to be a composer, something crazy like that, also I hear he’s been mixed up with women, doesn’t do his work at school—Marjorie, it’s amazing, absolutely amazing, how the grapevine works among the mothers. I was feared. The word was out that I was a fascinating loafer. It was quite true. The peculiar thing was that I affected Shirley the way whiskey hits an Indian. She knew I was bad for her, but I drove her crazy. Marjorie, I have my conceit, but it doesn’t extend to my romantic career on the West Side. I tell you soberly I was like a man with a cane walking down a lane of hyacinths, smashing flowers right and left. They all recovered, mind you. Shirley is indestructible. They’re all married now—to dentists, doctors, woolen manufacturers, lawyers, whatever you please—but I assure you they remember Saul Ehrmann. And it wasn’t always one-sided. I remember a couple of them. I’ve been ragingly in love with Shirley, you see. That’s the worst torment of all.”
Marjorie was astonished when a shudder broke through her frame. She realized that she was hugging herself, that the damp of the bench seemed to be going into her bones. “Noel, I’m cold.”
He stopped in his pacing and looked down at her. The moonlight made black hollows in his long face. His hair was still unruly from the thrusts of her fingers. “I’m boring you senseless.”
“No, no, no. But it’s so damp here—”
“You’re right. We need brandy. I’m damned near shivering myself.” He did not say another word until they were sitting in the dimmest booth of the empty Sirocco Bar. Then, after drinking off half his double brandy at a gulp, he said, “Shirley doesn’t play fair, you see. What she wants is what a woman should want, always has and always will—big diamond engagement ring, house in a good neighborhood, furniture, children, well-made clothes, furs—but she’ll never say so. Because in our time those things are supposed to be stuffy and dull. She knows that. She reads novels. So, half believing what she says, she’ll tell you the hell with that domestic dullness, never for her. She’s going to paint, that’s what—or be a social worker, or a psychiatrist, or an interior decorator, or an actress, always an actress if she’s got any real looks—but the idea is she’s going to be somebody. Not just a wife. Perish the thought! She’s Lady Brett Ashley, with witty devil-may-care whimsey and shocking looseness all over the place. A dismal caricature, you understand, and nothing but talk. Shirley’s a good girl, while Lady Brett was a very ready hand at taking her pants off. To simulate Lady Brett, however, as long as she’s in fashion, Shirley talks free and necks on a rigidly graduated scale, which varies from Shirley to Shirley, but not such a hell of a lot—”
“You’re so damned smart, aren’t you?” Marjorie said, increasingly uneasy at every word he was saying.
“Darling, let me make one thing very plain, I’m not blaming Shirley for anything. I admire her. She has one hell of a job. She’s turned loose at fourteen in a black woods. She can find no guidance anywhere. Her parents pretend she has no problem. Religion gives her milksoppy advice that nobody she knows pays any attention to. In literature her problem doesn’t exist. The old novels are all about Jane Austen and Dickens heroines who’d as soon put bullets through their heads as let a man kiss them. And the new novels are all more or less about Brett Ashley, who sleeps with any guy who really insists, but is a poetic pure tortured soul at heart. This leaves Shirley squarely in the middle. What can she do? She talks Lady Brett and acts Shirley, handling the situation on the whole with remarkable willpower—”
“It doesn’t take too much willpower,” Marjorie burst out, almost snarling, “with most of the boys, who are plain animals, and just need slapping down. And it doesn’t take much willpower either with the conceited intellectuals who try to disarm you by telling you that you’re frigid. They’re just amusing. I daresay that was your approach, hey?”
Noel blinked at her and slowly smiled. “Glory be, my sweet, are you taking any of this personally? It’s just abstract talk—”
“Well, blast you, you’ve called me Shirley fourteen times. You’re a damned intellectual snob, that’s what you are. You’re also a ratty bohemian and, if you want to know, a bit of an anti-Semite!”
“Indeed?” said Noel.
“Furthermore, I’m going to be an actress, not a fat dull housewife with a big engagement ring, whatever you say. And I’ll tell you something else. I could turn this thing around and tell you all about—about Sidney, who wants to be a writer or a forest ranger or a composer or anything except what his father is, because he’s ashamed of his father being a Jew, or because he thinks he’s too sensitive for business or law, whatever the damned Freudian reason may be—and he ends up in his father’s business just the same. I’ve opened my apartment door to enough of those.”
Noel crooked his head and hugged his elbow. For the first time since she had known him his face was discomposed. His eyes gleamed angrily, his mouth was open and smiling, and the lines were curiously erased from his cheeks. She had a flashing glimpse of what he must have looked like as a college boy; whiskey for the Indian, indeed! He said in an unusually slow easy tone, “Good shot. But you see, I really am a composer. Making cash and a name,
bit by bit, year by year. And having been thrown out of Cornell Law School with the lowest first-year grades of all time, it’s not likely I’ll end up in my father’s business. But let’s see. Intellectual snob? Certainly, it’s the breath of my life. Bohemian? Yes, sure. Anti-Semite? Not any more. I had a spell of it. But I broke out of the West Side, you see. I found that Shirley existed everywhere. It’s a general problem, not a Jewish one, the flux of the sex code. Shirley Jones has the same nature as Shirley Cohn and the same milieu, and is in the same jam. So she evolves into the same creature, essentially. Some time ago I stopped identifying all the evils in life with my father and therefore with being a Jew.” He signalled to the bartender for drinks. “Of course by that time I was Noel Airman, legally. It seemed pointless to change back. I wish now I’d yearned a little less obviously toward Noel Coward. I was not yet twenty-two. It’s rather ridiculous for a Jew to be named Noel. At this point of course I’m a Jew by birth only, but that seems enough, say, for Hitler—”
“Being a Jew doesn’t mean anything to me, either,” Marjorie said. “But still I don’t make fun of them the way you do, and I try to—”
“Marjorie, your lack of self-knowledge is fabulous. Being a Jew is your whole life. Good Lord, you don’t eat bacon. I’ve seen you shove it off your plate as though it were a dead mouse.”
“Well, I can’t help that, it’s habit.”
Noel shook his head, regarding her affectionately, and leaned back slouching, his arms crossed. “Ye gods, Marjorie, dearest Marjorie, you are such a sweet beautiful girl…”
“But a Shirley,” Marjorie growled, glaring at him.
“A Shirley. A complete, final, Raphaelesque, golden-haloed Shirley.” A shadow of sadness was on his face.
The bartender set the drinks on the table. “What’s the matter, Mr. Airman, losing your taste for steak?” Noel laughed. The bartender said, “Well, I guess there’s better things than steak in life, hey folks?” He leered at Marjorie, and went off wiping his hands on his apron.