The trouble was that she hadn’t the faintest desire to do it. She was, she supposed, scared; how scared, she wasn’t sure. Mainly she was out of the mood for sex. She couldn’t have been less in the mood had she been in the middle of baking a cake. She thought of taking a shower, pleading sudden fatigue, and going home. But in plain fact she was too embarrassed at the idea of backing out. All her reasonable objections to sleeping with Noel were gone. If she could have thought of a good argument against it, she might have come out of the bathroom and argued with him, even at this point, and argued herself inviolate back into her clothes and out of his apartment. She couldn’t think of a reason. An appeal to morality was nonsense. She couldn’t say she didn’t love him; not after her performance on the sofa. Nor could she demand a guarantee of marriage, having started up with him again of her own accord, knowing full well how he felt, and what he was.
She knew she shouldn’t have come to the dress rehearsal. She shouldn’t have come to the hotel suite. She shouldn’t have lingered—this was fatal—after the others had left. She shouldn’t have responded so readily to the first kiss in a year. She shouldn’t have used the coy excuse of staying to watch the eclipse. She shouldn’t have gone to the sofa with him. But she had done these things.
She pictured herself putting her clothes back on, emerging from the bathroom, and announcing, “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind, dear. I’m going home. Please forgive me.”
It was a temptation. It was much more of a temptation, actually, than getting into a bed with Noel Airman. She could have forgone that treat with the greatest ease. But the thought of announcing a change of mind made her feel like a damned fool. She could do it; but she feared she might actually forfeit Noel forever. He wouldn’t be likely to forgive such childish inconsistency and whimsey, at this point. He had been all too patient with her, too long. It might well be the end. She didn’t want an end with Noel. She wanted him for her husband. The estrangement of a year seemed never to have existed. Reality was only being with him, with Noel Airman, and life was most real and most sweet and most true when this lean blond clever man was holding her and kissing her. That was as certain as the night outside the windows. She had no other certainty to cling to. All other certainties had faded or eroded away in growing up; or she had been talked out of them; or she had read books that had disintegrated them. The certainty that there was anything praiseworthy in virginity had long since been ridiculed out of her. There was nothing to believe in, except that she loved Noel and wanted him. If her only chance of getting him was to sleep with him—and Marsha was right to that extent, things were at that stand between them, and had been for a year—so be it! She would pass through this tunnel somehow and look for daylight on the other side. Fighting it off longer was pointless.
She put her hand on the doorknob and saw herself in the mirror, barefoot, her hair combed loosely to her shoulders, in the ludicrously big man’s robe through which the pink of her slip peeked. She wrapped the robe close around her and tied the cord. She stood and stared for a few seconds at the mirror.
She had a race of last thoughts. What had plunged her over the line so suddenly and so finally? Marsha’s tirade? The theremin, which had given him an excuse to hold her and hug her, and then to kidnap her from the wedding? The enchantment of Princess Jones, the knowledge that it probably would make him rich and well known?
It wasn’t one thing. She had been working toward this moment for two years. She had been moving toward her first sex act, in this bedroom, in this hotel, with this man, like an asteroid moving to collide with a comet.
What of her mother, her father? What of Seth? How would it feel after this to go home, to sleep in a bed in a room in her family’s apartment?
She snapped off the light and opened the door.
At first she could see nothing but a glowing cigarette in the gloom. It made a red arc in the darkness and went out, and Noel’s voice said, “Hi, darling. I was beginning to think you’d found a fire escape.”
She went to the bed and sat on the edge. She could see him dimly now in the faint light from the window. It startled her to see that he wore pajamas. She untied the robe, threw it off, and got into the bed beside him. It was all very clumsy. Her movements were hurried, his were uncertain. They poked each other with elbows and knees. They kissed awkwardly and unsatisfactorily. Then somehow they settled down.
“You love me?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you suppose we’ll ever be married?”
“I don’t know, Marjorie. I just don’t know. If it has to happen, it will.”
“You love me more than you know. You’re going to marry me. You’ll be a wonderful wretch of a husband, and we’ll be the two happiest people in the world.”
“You think so?”
“I know it.”
“Okay, darling. Maybe you can read fate. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you. That, I know.”
She wanted to kiss him then. For a while it was tender and sweet. There was something peculiarly pleasant in the comfort and nearness of being undressed. It was not so much exciting, as cosy and intimate.
Then all changed. It became rough and strange. She was powerless to stop it. She tried to seem pleasant and loving, but she was very uncomfortable and unhappy. It became rougher and more awkward. It became horrible. There were shocks, ugly uncoverings, pain, incredible humiliation, shock, shock, and it was over.
So it was that Marjorie qualified at last to portray true emotion on the stage. Her age was twenty-one years, four months, and seven days.
Noel said, “All right, darling?”
“Just fine,” she answered, trying not to sound sick.
“The cigarettes are there on the night table. Toss me one, honey.”
She groped on the table. There was a clinking and a crash. Instinctively she reached for the lamp cord and pulled it. Blinking in the blaze of light, holding the blanket to her bosom, she saw that she had knocked over a drinking glass. The pieces lay glittering on the marble top of the table. “Well, that’s fine,” she said. “We’re supposed to break a glass, aren’t we? Only you should have done it with your heel, I guess. Good luck, darling.”
His lipstick-smeared face, white and tired, with the hair falling over his forehead, took on a pained alarmed look. She said hurriedly, “Good Lord, sweetheart, that was a joke. Smile, for heaven’s sake.”
He smiled. “Let’s have the cigarettes.”
She passed the pack to him. With her first puff she leaned back and sighed. Her glance went to the window. The moon hung in the sky over the buildings, a solid disk of reddish bronze, without a trace of white. “Well, bless me,” she said, pointing. “Look, the eclipse is total. I got to see one, after all. Makes it easy to date this night, doesn’t it, darling?”
“Marjorie,” Noel said, in a strained tone, “I would appreciate it just as much if you weren’t quite so brave and pathetic about all this. You’re a big girl. It could have been more fun, and it will be, I promise you. I love you.”
She looked at him, smiling, while tears came from nowhere and ran down her face in streams. “Why, darling, I wasn’t being pathetic. I’m very glad. I love you too.”
She put her face in the pillow. The tears were pouring; she could not possibly stop them, and she was ashamed of herself because she was crying.
PART FIVE
My Object all Sublime
Chapter 37. THE NIGHTMARE
One year later, almost to the day, Marjorie Morgenstern was frantically fighting her way up the third-class gangplank of the steamship Mauretania, against a solid stream of people leaving the ship. She was clutching the rail, panting heavily, murmuring excuses and apologies with every step, her breath smoking in the raw fishy-smelling air. She was not halfway up the plank when gongs sounded, and a loudspeaker bawled, Last call. Visitors ashore. Last call. The ship’s officer at the head of the gangplank held out a hand to stop her as she set foot on deck. “So sorry, miss. You’re too la
te.” The accent was like a movie Englishman’s, the manner pleasant but firm.
She looked him straight in the face. He was red-faced and lean, no taller than she. “I have to talk to my—my fiancé. Just for a minute. But I have to talk to him.” She stood her ground with difficulty, jostled by dozens of visitors funnelling into the gangway.
He took in her smart clothes with a glance, and looked over his shoulder at a clock. His voice became less formal. “Very important, I guess it is?”
“As important as anything can be.”
With a bleak grin he nodded her past him, and she went running down stairs to the lower decks.
The stateroom number was correct; she recognized Noel’s luggage piled on the berth. It was a tiny dim interior cabin on the lowest deck, stuffy despite a roaring ventilator. She glanced up and down the passageway; he was nowhere in sight. Hurriedly she began a search of the passageways, turning here and there, not knowing which turn might luckily lead her to come upon him. Past bashfulness or diffidence, she shouldered into noisy cabins where farewell parties were breaking up, looked around to make sure he wasn’t in the room, and went away without a word, leaving people snickering behind her. The gongs kept sounding with startling loudness; over and over the loudspeakers called, Visitors ashore, please. Last call. All ashore at once, please. The passageways had been crowded when she came aboard, but they were rapidly emptying; she walked through several that were deserted. She began to run. She ran through empty writing rooms, through a lounge, through a dining room, through a bar. She made another panic-stricken tour of the passageways, finding herself in the same ones over and over, like a rat in a maze.
She had had several nightmares like this: nightmares of looking for Noel through endless twisting corridors. This might almost have been another nightmare, except that it was too coherent, too vivid, too matter-of-fact. It was really happening; she knew that. But an eerie dreamlike feeling possessed her, a feeling that she had actually looked for him—or had dreamed that she had looked for him—in just this way, through these very passageways, long, long ago. She turned corners knowing in advance that she would see a queerly shaped fire extinguisher on the wall, or a bearded steward in a white coat walking toward her; and the extinguisher, the steward, were there. She had had this weird illusion before, but never half so strongly or so persistently.
Somebody touched her arm. In the instant before she turned, she sensed it would be a rosy-faced cabin boy in a blue uniform; and it was. “You a passenger, miss?”
“No, I—”
“All visitors have to leave this minute, miss, sorry. They’re taking in the gangplanks.”
She looked around desperately. The passageway was empty except for herself and the boy. “Thank you.” She hurried to the gangplank.
“Find your friend, miss?” said the little red-faced officer.
She gave him a harried smile, and followed a solitary fat man down the gangplank. She walked up and down the pier behind the fenced-in visitors, staring up at the colossal steel side of the Mauretania, scanning the waving, laughing, shouting passengers lining the rails. Great cranes reached down and plucked up the gangplanks. Sailors on the ship began hauling in the huge manila lines. A band started to play a brassy march, but the music was nearly drowned in the snorting and clanking of the cranes, and the cheers and yells that filled the immense shed.
She wasn’t sure it was Noel when she first saw him, because he wore a new dark green hat of an odd flat shape; but she recognized the loose camel’s hair topcoat, and the slouch of the shoulders. He was at the rail of one of the lower decks, far forward. She hurried to a point opposite him and waved from the back of the crowd. He didn’t see her. He held a highball glass in his hand, and he was talking to a plump woman in a red suit, who also was drinking a highball. Marjorie worked through the jammed-together people to the fence, alternately pushing and apologizing. As she came to the front of the crowd, there were three horrifying whistle blasts. She waved her arms and shrieked, “Noel!” in the instant of near-quiet after the last blast. He heard it; he glanced along the pier, and then he saw her. He shook his head as though in wonder, smiled, and rather sheepishly waved. He said something to the woman in the red suit, pointing at Marjorie; the woman looked at her and laughed, and said something that made Noel laugh. He raised his glass to Marjorie, shouted something she didn’t hear, and drank.
She yelled, “Write to me!”
He cupped his hand to his ear.
“Write to me! Write to me, I say!” The people on either side of her at the fence stared and smiled, but she was beyond self-consciousness. “WRITE TO ME!”
He shrugged to indicate that he couldn’t hear her. He spoke to the woman in the red suit, and she shrugged too, looking intently at Marjorie. She was too far away for Marjorie to see her features clearly; she appeared to be about forty, and not unattractive.
Marjorie held up the flat side of her purse, made a gesture of writing on it and sealing an envelope, then pointed to Noel and to herself. He grinned, and shook his head vehemently. She repeated the gesture with emphasis. He shook his head equally emphatically, and pantomimed putting a pistol to his temple. Before her eyes she saw the Mauretania’s rivets slide slowly to the left. A cheer went up from the people on the pier, and colored paper streamers rained from ship to shore. The band struck up Rule Britannia. Marjorie again made the writing gesture, and with a tearful smile shook her fist at Noel. He laughed, raised the glass to her again, drained it, and tossed it into the widening water between the pier and the ship. The woman in the red suit threw back her head, laughing, and patted him on the shoulder.
Marjorie took out her handkerchief and waved and waved, as long as she could distinguish Noel. She thought she saw his hand wave in answer once or twice. With the rest of the crowd she ran to the head of the pier, and watched the tugs pull the vast ship out into the muddy choppy Hudson and turn it around. It was a very clear sunny day; windows of houses along the New Jersey palisades glittered white. Far up the river the George Washington Bridge stood out sharp and gray against the blue Hudson and the green far Jersey hills. The freezing wind off the river smelled like the ocean at low tide; it cut at her legs, making her shiver inside her fur coat. She could see a dot of red at one point of the lower deck rail that might have been the plump woman, she could not make out Noel at all. But she stood and watched while the tugs pushed the bow southward to the ocean, and the water began to boil white around the towering stern. She watched the ship go down the river, getting smaller and smaller. She was almost the last of the visitors to leave the pier.
She took the letter from her purse in the taxicab and read it again on the way home. It was twenty pages long, typed in Noel’s neat clear double-spaced way on his customary thin yellow paper. The e was awry, bent to the left and pushed up above the typing line, as it had been ever since she had started getting letters from Noel, three years ago. She had not yet read the letter carefully. Finding it at the door, in the morning mail, she had surmised at once from its bulk what it was, and had skimmed it at top speed for the immediate facts. Though he said in it that he would be several days at sea when she received it, she had at once scanned the Times sailing list and then rushed down to the Cunard pier, where she had pestered the pursers until she found out that Noel was a third-class passenger on the Mauretania.
She started to read the letter once more; but she began to feel a little ill, possibly from reading in a bumpy cab, and she folded it away in the purse.
She was glad to find nobody in the apartment when she got home. She heated the coffee that was left on the kitchen stove, and the smell made her realize that she was very hungry. This surprised her. She would have guessed she would be unable to eat for a couple of days after a blow like this. Perhaps it was that the blow, however cruel and distressing, wasn’t entirely unexpected. Anyway, she was roaring hungry. She ate a roll with butter and thick chunks of cheese; then poured more coffee and ate another roll and more cheese. She ate whate
ver she pleased these days, and as much as she pleased. One of the rewards of having troubles like hers—a small reward, to be sure—was that she no longer had to worry about dieting. In the year of her affair with Noel she had grown very fashionably thin. Her waist was not much more than two spans around, and her hips had never been slimmer.
She went to her room, feeling remarkably good after the food; sat at her dressing table, and stared in the round mirror for a long time at her jilted friend, Marjorie Morgenstern. It was surprising how little upset she was. But this calm did not especially reassure her. Past twenty-two, she had learned something about the way she reacted to shocks. The bad time lay ahead. It might not even start for a couple of days, but she knew that when it came it was likely to be pretty frightful.
Well, she thought, contemplating her mirror image, Noel had thrown her over at last, and this time with a seeming massive finality. The twenty-page letter could hardly be more clear. And with characteristic perversity, he had discarded her when she was at her most attractive; when for the first time her career showed some promise; when she had given him all she had to give, and when he was in love with her as he had never been—though he obstinately refused to acknowledge it.
It was no vanity to believe she was looking better than ever. Though her mouth and eyes were somewhat lined with fatigue, the glass showed her a young woman who could be called nothing but beautiful. She had had a few modelling jobs recently. But for her medium stature she might have had more. She was not attractive in the stereotyped pattern of the fashion models; her cheeks weren’t sunken, her eyes didn’t glare or smolder, and there was nothing bony about her. But she had a well-cut face with firm flesh and good color, abundant dark brown hair, and a sweetly curved slender figure. Her best feature remained her large eyes, blue and very alive, with a touch of secrecy in them that was new, and all the old humor and sparkle. The main change in her appearance in the past year, she guessed, was that she looked like a woman, not a girl. A powerful femininity glowed from within her. She was aware of it from its effects. Men had never pursued her harder than in this year, when, possessed by Noel, she had been completely incapable of paying any attention to them. It was too bad the alteration in her had come not from a happy marriage, she reflected, but from an illicit affair, which had just exploded in her face. When marriage didn’t make a girl smug and sloppy like Rosalind Boehm, or tight-nerved and falsely gay like Marsha Michaelson, it could work just such a soft charming change; she had seen it make ugly girls into pleasant women, and pretty girls into stunning women. Here she was—pretty as any, over twenty-two, and in the ash can.