I looked around, as though fearing that someone had read my thoughts. "Ross," said Betty, "I'm so glad you've come. It's wonderful to have so many friends."
"You're our mother, Betty. We refugees would be lost without you."
"How are you getting along in your job?"
"Fine, Betty. I'll be able to return some money to Vries-länder pretty soon."
She raised her head. 'Take your time about it," she said. "Vriesländer is a very wealthy man. He doesn't need the money. You can pay him back when the war is over." She laughed. "I'm glad you're doing well, Ross. So few of us are. I mustn't be sick long. The others need me. Don't you think so?"
"We wouldn't know what to do without you, Betty."
"I've got to get back home soon. I mustn't be sick now that things are going so well."
It was a moment before I understood that she meant the war.
"Of course not, Betty." I said. "Well keep our fingers crossed. Especially me. If it weren't for you, I'd probably be in an internment camp."
"Tomorrow you can all talk broken English again. Today I wanted to feel at home. With my own people. You understand, don't you? Kahn understood."
"We all understand, Betty."
"I've got to be brave."
"You're the bravest of the lot Good-by, Betty. We'll all come and see you."
She nodded. "Good-by, Ross."
I left the room with Ravic. Tannenbaum was standing by the door looking perplexedly from one twin to the other. I could see by his expression that he hated me again. "Have you quarreled with him?" Ravic asked.
"Just a bit of frivolous byplay to take my mind off the sick-room. I'm no good at visiting sick people. It makes me impatient and irritable. I hate myself for it, but I can't help it."
"Almost everybody is like that We feel guilty because of our good health."
I asked him about Betty's condition.
"We won't know until we've opened her up."
"Have you finished your examinations?"
"Yes."
"Are you performing the operation?"
"Yes. In collaboration with an American colleague."
"Well, good-by, Ravic."
"My name is Fresenberg now. My real name."
"Mine is still Ross. Not my real name."
He laughed and walked away quickly. I had wanted to ask him if we could see each other again; but then it occurred to me that he had no more desire to speak of the past than I did. We would have nothing to say to each other.
"You're looking around as if you'd hidden a corpse somewhere," said Natasha.
"It's an old habit," I said. "A hard one to get rid of."
"Did you often have to hide?"
I looked at her in surprise. It was a silly question, as silly as asking me if I had to breathe. Then it occurred to me that she knew next to nothing of the life I had led. That gave me a strange feeling of pleasant warmth. Thank God that she doesn't know, I thought.
She stood there, dark against the brightness of the window, and I had no need to give her any explanations or to feel like a refugee. I took her in my arms and kissed her.
"I've stocked the icebox," she informed me. "We can order anything else we need from the delicatessen and stay in all day. It's Sunday, in case you've forgotten."
"I haven't forgotten. Is there something to drink in the icebox?"
"Two bottles of vodka. Two bottles of milk and some beer."
"Can you cook?"
"Sort of. I can broil steaks and I'm pretty good with a can opener. We have plenty of fruit and salad and two radios. We're ready to set up housekeeping."
She laughed. I held her in my arms, and I didn't laugh. I felt as if I had been struck by a dozen rubber bolts, the kind that children shoot from air pistols. They don't hurt, but you feel them. "I guess it's too tame for you," said Natasha. "Too petit-bourgeois."
"It's the greatest adventure possible in these times," I said, breathing the fragrance of her hair.
I looked around. It was a small apartment on the fifteenth floor, consisting of living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bath. Maybe Fraser would have turned up his nose at it, but to me it was the height of luxury. The living room and bedroom had broad windows, from which one could see all the way to Wall Street.
"What do you think of it?" Natasha asked.
"This is the way to live in New York. You're right; we'd be crazy to set foot outside today."
"Just get us the Sunday papers. There's a newsstand right on the corner. Then we'll have everything we need. In the meantime I'll try to make some coffee."
I bought the Times and the Herald Tribune, about two hundred pages in all. I wondered whether people had been happier in the eighteenth century, when only the wealthy and educated read newspapers, and foreign correspondents were unknown, but came to no more significant conclusion than that what people don't know won't hurt them. A plane was circling in the fresh morning sky. I looked up and shook off my thoughts like fleas. I walked a little way on Second Avenue looking at the shops. The first two I saw were a German butcher shop and, right beside it, the Stern Brothers' delicatessen. It was comforting to know that the German butcher didn't spend his time massacring the Stern Brothers, but that all four of them, as Eddie, the news dealer, had informed me, had gone fishing together.
I retraced my steps and rode up to the fifteenth floor with a redheaded queer in a checked sports jacket who introduced himself as Jasper. He was accompanied by a white poodle named René. Jasper invited me to breakfast, but I managed to shake him off.
Natasha opened the door, her head done up in a turban and she had a towel around her waist; otherwise she was naked. "Marvelous!" I said, dropping the papers on a chair. "It fits in with what I've heard about this fifteenth floor." -
"What have you heard?"
"The news dealer at the corner tells me it used to be a whorehouse."
"I've been taking a bath," said Natasha. "You were gone so long. Did you go all the way to Times Square for the papers?"
"No, just roaming around. Did you know this place was alive with fags?"
She nodded and threw off her towel. "I know. To tell you the truth, this apartment belongs to one. But I have another confession to make."
"A confession? So soon?"
"Well . . ." she said. "Can you make coffee?"
"I'll make coffee later," I said.
I brought Natasha her coffee in bed. When we were hungry, an hour or two later, I called up Stern Brothers, which was
open despite the absence of the owners, and had them send up pastrami, salami, butter, cheese, and pumpernickel.
"I worship you, Natasha," I said. I had just refused to put on a pair of red pajamas belonging to the anonymous owner of the apartment "I worship you, but I will not put these things on, though the size seems to be right."
"Of course it is. You're built just like Jeremiah . . ."
"Who?"
"Jeremiah!"
"I don't care if it's the prophet in person; I won't wear them."
"Be reasonable, Robert They're washed and ironed, and Jerry is very clean."
"Who?"
"Jerry. Don't you sleep between sheets that have been used by other people?"
"At the hotel? Yes, but I don't know them."
"You don't know Jerry either."
"I know him through you. It's like a chicken. If a chicken's a total stranger to me, I'm willing to eat it but if I've raised it from the cradle and call it by name . . ."
"Too bad! I'd have loved to see you in red pajamas. But pajamas or no pajamas, I'm sleepy. Would you let me sleep for an hour? I'm so full of pastrami and beer and love. You can read the paper."
"I wouldn't dream of it. I'll lie down beside you."
"Do you think I'll be able to sleep? I don't. I'm not used to it"
"We can try. Maybe I'll drop off, too."
"All right"
A few minutes later she was sound asleep. The air conditioner hummed almost inaudibly. I could hear the muf
fled notes of a piano from somewhere down below. Someone who played very badly was practicing. I was carried back to my childhood and the hot summer days when just such slow, shaky piano playing was wafted down from a higher story and the chestnut trees outside the window rustled lazily in the breeze. I saw my father's tired, friendly face as he shuffled, slightly stooped, about the apartment—not his last, frightened, heartbreakingly brave face, but his peacetime face of years before.
I woke with a start. I had fallen asleep myself. Cautiously I rose and went into the other room to dress. I gathered my scattered clothes and stood by the window, looking out at the strange glistening city, which knew nothing of memories or traditions. The piano started up again, but this time it was a blues. I went to the middle of the room, from where I could see Natasha. She lay naked, with her head to one side and one hand in her hair. I loved her dearly. I loved her for her wholeheartedness. When she was with me, she was all there, but her presence never weighed on me, and then before I knew it she was gone. I went back to the window and looked again at the white, almost oriental landscape, a cross between Algiers and the moon. I listened to the steady hum of the traffic and watched the long row of traffic lights on Second Avenue as, section after section, they shifted from green to red and red to green. There was something comforting and at the same time inhuman about the regularity of it, as though this city were already controlled by robots, but not unfriendly ones. I went back to the middle of the room and discovered that when I turned around I could see Natasha in the mirror.
She sighed and turned over. I thought of taking the tray with the beer cans and leftovers to the kitchen, but decided against it, I had no desire to impress her with my domestic virtues. I didn't even put the vodka bottle back in the icebox, though I might have if I hadn't known there was another ice-cold bottle waiting. I thought of how strangely this rather normal situation had moved me—suddenly coming home and finding someone waiting for me, someone who had now dropped trustingly off to sleep.
I looked at Natasha. I loved her dearly, but without sentimentality. As long as this remained true, I knew I was relatively safe; I could break off without being hurt I gazed at her lovely shoulders and arms, and moved my arms in a gesture of silent prayer: Stay with mel Don't leave me before I leave you!
"What on earth are you doing?" said Natasha.
I dropped my hands. "How can you see me, lying on your belly like that?"
She pointed to a small mirror beside the radio on the bedside table. "Are you trying to hex me?" she asked. "Or have you had enough of domestic life?"
"Neither. I've never been so happy as here among the ghosts of old-time whores and new-time queers. And we're not going to budge. Maybe in the late afternoon we can take a little stroll on Fifth Avenue. But then well hurry back to grilled steak and love."
We didn't even go out in the afternoon. Instead, we opened the windows wide for an hour and let the hot air into the room. Then we set the air-conditioning at top speed so as not to sweat while making love. By the end of the day I felt as though we had spent almost a year of weightless peace in a vacuum.
XX
"I'm giving a little party," said Silvers. "You're invited."
"Thanks," I said without enthusiasm. "I'm afraid I can't make it. No dinner jacket."
"You don't need one. This is a summer party. You can wear what you like."
I saw no way out. "All right," I said.
"Could you bring Mrs. Whymper?"
"Have you invited her?"
"Not yet. But she's your friend."
The hypocrite! "I'm not so sure she'd come," I said. "And besides, she's been your friend much longer than mine. You told me so yourself."
"Oh well, it was just an idea. Some very interesting people will be coming."
I could imagine bis interesting people. The applied psychology of the merchant class is very simple. Anyone you can make money out of is interesting. Anyone who makes you lose money is a dog. All the rest are extras. Silvers observed this rule fanatically.
The Rockefellers, Fords, and Mêlions, whom Silvers had told me so much about that I couldn't help thinking they were his best friends, were absent. But there were other millionaires, mostly of the self-made variety. They were hearty, rather loud-mouthed, and lovable in a way, because it was plain that they felt as insecure in the world of art as they felt secure in the world of business. They all regarded themselves as collectors, not as purchasers of a few pictures. That was Silvers' big trick; he made them into collectors, seeing to it that a museum borrowed one of their paintings for an exhibition now and then. For these rich men, the little notice in the catalogue—"From the collection of Mr. and Mrs. X"—was a significant rung in the social ladder. It put them into the class of the great robber barons, the old-established plutocrats. Silvers took a very generous view: as far as he was concerned, anyone who had bought two small pictures was a collector; he advised him as though the outcome of the war depended on it and, perhaps even more important, affected to consult him: Here at last was a man on whose taste he could count.
Suddenly I found myself face to face with Mrs. Whymper. "What are you doing with these sharks?" she asked me. "Dreadful people! Shall we go?" "Where?"
"Anywhere. To El Morocco. Or come home with me." "I'd be glad to," I said. "But I can't leave. I'm sort of on duty."
"Sort of! What about me? Haven't you an obligation to me? You've got to get me out of here. It's your fault I was invited."
Her reasoning was pretty good, I thought "Are you Russian by any chance?" I asked.
"No. Why?"
"Your logic. An irresistible argument based on false premises and false deductions. Very charming, very feminine, and most irritating."
She laughed. "Have you known so many Russian women?"
"A few. They have a real genius for accusing men unjustly. They think it keeps us on our toes."
"You know such interesting things," said Mrs. Whymper, with a long sultry look. "When can we go? I'm sick of listening to those Little Red Riding Hood speeches."
"Little Red Riding Hood?"
"That's right. A wolf in sheep's clothing."
"That's not in Little Red Riding Hood. It's in the Bible."
"Thank you, professor, but there's a wolf in both. Don't these hyenas with their Renoirs and their big mouths make you sick?"
"Not really. I like to hear a man pontificating on a subject he knows nothing about. It's so refreshingly childlike. Experts are always a bore."
"And what about your high priest, who talks about bis pictures with tears in his eyes, as if they were his children, and then goes out and sens them at a good profit? What do you think of a man who sells his children?"
I couldn't help laughing. She seemed to know the score.
"Well then," she said. "Are you taking me home?"
"I can take you home, but I'll have to come back."
"Very well."
I ought to have known that her car would be waiting outside, but I was taken by surprise, and she saw it. "Never mind. Take me home. I won't eat you. My chauffeur will drive you back. You can't imagine how empty a house can be."
"I know all about it," I said.
"How's your beautiful girl friend?" she asked.
I gave her a disapproving look and said nothing.
She burst out laughing. "You don't have to tell me if it's a secret"
I saw she was trying to provoke me and controlled myself. "Have you been married very often?" I asked.
"Once. My husband died five years ago." Suddenly there were tears in her eyes.
I said nothing more. It seemed to me that we were quits.
The driver stopped and opened the door for us. She went straight to the house without waiting for me, and I followed with a feeling of annoyance. "I'm sorry," I said when I caught up with her. "I've got to go back. You understand that I have no choice."