It hung above his mantel, the painting, and on those nights when he could not sleep he would pour a glass of whiskey and talk to the headless hawk, tell it the stuff of his life: he was, he said, a poet who had never written poetry, a painter who had never painted, a lover who had never loved (absolutely)—someone, in short, without direction, and quite headless. Oh, it wasn’t that he hadn’t tried—good beginnings, always, bad endings, always. Vincent, white, male, age thirty-six, college graduate: a man in the sea, fifty miles from shore; a victim, born to be murdered, either by himself or another; an actor unemployed. It was there, all of it, in the painting, everything disconnected and cockeyed, and who was she that she should know so much? Inquiries, those he’d made had led nowhere; not another dealer knew of her, and to search for a D.J. living in, presumably, a Y.W.C.A. seemed absurd. Then, too, he’d quite expected she would reappear, but February passed, and March. One evening, crossing the square which fronts the Plaza, he had a queer thing happen. The archaic hansom drivers who line that location were lighting their carriage lamps, for it was dusk, and lamplight traced through moving leaves. A hansom pulled from the curb and rolled past in the twilight. There was a single occupant, and this passenger, whose face he could not see, was a girl with chopped fawn-colored hair. So he settled on a bench, and whiled away time talking with a soldier, and a fairy colored boy who quoted poetry, and a man out airing a dachshund: night characters with whom he waited—but the carriage, with the one for whom he waited, never came back. Again he saw her (or supposed he did) descending subway stairs, and this time lost her in the tiled tunnels of painted arrows and Spearmint machines. It was as if her face were imposed upon his mind; he could no more dispossess it than could, for example, a dead man rid his legendary eyes of the last image seen. Around the middle of April he went up to Connecticut to spend a weekend with his married sister; keyed-up, caustic, he wasn’t, as she complained, at all like himself. “What is it, Vinny darling—if you need money …” “Oh, shut up!” he said. “Must be love,” teased his brother-in-law. “Come on, Vinny, ’fess up; what’s she like?” And all this so annoyed him he caught the next train home. From a booth in Grand Central he called to apologize, but a sick nervousness hummed inside him, and he hung up while the operator was still trying to make a connection. He wanted a drink. At the Commodore Bar he spent an hour or so downing four daiquiris—it was Saturday, it was nine, there was nothing to do unless he did it alone, he was feeling sad for himself. Now in the park behind the Public Library sweethearts moved whisperingly under trees, and drinking-fountain water bubbled softly, like their voices, but for all the white April evening meant to him, Vincent, drunk a little and wandering, might as well have been old, like the old bench-sitters rasping phlegm.
In the country, spring is a time of small happenings happening quietly, hyacinth shoots thrusting in a garden, willows burning with a sudden frosty fire of green, lengthening afternoons of long flowing dusk, and midnight rain opening lilac; but in the city there is the fanfare of organ-grinders, and odors, undiluted by winter wind, clog the air; windows long closed go up, and conversation, drifting beyond a room, collides with the jangle of a peddler’s bell. It is the crazy season of toy balloons and roller skates, of courtyard baritones and men of freakish enterprise, like the one who jumped up now like a jack-in-the-box. He was old, he had a telescope and a sign: 25¢ See the Moon! See the Stars! 25¢. No stars could penetrate a city’s glare, but Vincent saw the moon, a round, shadowed whiteness, and then a blaze of electric bulbs: Four Roses, Bing Cro——. He was moving through caramel-scented staleness, swimming through oceans of cheese-pale faces, neon and darkness. Above the blasting of a jukebox, bullet-fire boomed, a cardboard duck fell plop, and somebody screeched: “Yay Iggy!” It was a Broadway funhouse, a penny arcade, and jammed from wall to wall with Saturday splurgers. He watched a penny movie (What the Bootblack Saw), and had his fortune told by a wax witch leering behind glass: “Yours is an affectionate nature” … but he read no further, for up near the jukebox there was an attractive commotion. A crowd of kids, clapping in time to jazz music, had formed a circle around two dancers. These dancers were both colored, both girls. They swayed together slow and easy, like lovers, rocked and stamped and rolled serious savage eyes, their muscles rhythmically attuned to the ripple of a clarinet, the rising harangue of a drum. Vincent’s gaze traveled round the audience, and when he saw her a bright shiver went through him, for something of the dance’s violence was reflected in her face. Standing there beside a tall ugly boy, it was as if she were the sleeper and the Negroes a dream. Trumpet-drum-piano, bawling on behind a black girl’s froggy voice, wailed toward a rocking finale. The clapping ended, the dancers parted. She was alone now; though Vincent’s instinct was to leave before she noticed, he advanced, and, as one would gently waken a sleeper, lightly touched her shoulder. “Hello,” he said, his voice too loud. Turning, she stared at him, and her eyes were clear-blank. First terror, then puzzlement replaced the dead lost look. She took a step backward, and, just as the jukebox commenced hollering again, he seized her wrist: “You remember me,” he prompted, “the gallery? Your painting?” She blinked, let the lids sink sleepily over those eyes, and he could feel the slow relaxing of tension in her arm. She was thinner than he recalled, prettier, too, and her hair, grown out somewhat, hung in casual disorder. A little Christmas ribbon dangled sadly from a stray lock. He started to say, “Can I buy you a drink?” but she leaned against him, her head resting on his chest like a child’s, and he said: “Will you come home with me?” She lifted her face; the answer, when it came, was a breath, a whisper: “Please,” she said.
Vincent stripped off his clothes, arranged them neatly in the closet, and admired his nakedness before a mirrored door. He was not so handsome as he supposed, but handsome all the same. For his moderate height he was excellently proportioned; his hair was dark yellow, and his delicate, rather snub-nosed face had a fine, ruddy coloring. The rumble of running water broke the quiet; she was in the bathroom preparing to bathe. He dressed in loose-fitting flannel pajamas, lit a cigarette, said, “Everything all right?” The water went off, a long silence, then: “Yes, thank you.” On the way home in a cab he’d made an attempt at conversation, but she had said nothing, not even when they entered the apartment—and this last offended him, for, taking rather female pride in his quarters, he’d expected a complimentary remark. It was one enormously high-ceilinged room, a bath and kitchenette, a backyard garden. In the furnishings he’d combined modern with antique and produced a distinguished result. Decorating the walls were a trio of Toulouse-Lautrec prints, a framed circus poster, D.J.’s painting, photographs of Rilke, Nijinsky and Duse. A candelabra of lean blue candles burned on a desk; the room, washed in their delirious light, wavered. French doors led into the yard. He never used it much, for it was a place impossible to keep clean. There were a few dead tulip stalks dark in the moonshine, a puny heaven tree, and an old weather-worn chair left by the last tenant. He paced back and forth over the cold flagstones, hoping that in the cool air the drugged drunk sensation he felt would wear off. Nearby a piano was being badly mauled, and in a window above there was a child’s face. He was thumbing a blade of grass when her shadow fell long across the yard. She was in the doorway. “You mustn’t come out,” he said, moving toward her. “It’s turned a little cold.”
There was about her now an appealing softness; she seemed somehow less angular, less out of tune with the average, and Vincent, offering a glass of sherry, was delighted at the delicacy with which she touched it to her lips. She was wearing his terry-cloth robe; it was by yards too large. Her feet were bare, and she tucked them up beside her on the couch. “It’s like Glass Hill, the candlelight,” she said, and smiled. “My Granny lived at Glass Hill. We had lovely times, sometimes; do you know what she used to say? She used to say, ‘Candles are magic wands; light one and the world is a story book.’ ”
“What a dreary old lady she must’ve been,” said Vincent, quite drunk
. “We should probably have hated each other.”
“Granny would’ve loved you,” she said. “She loved any kind of man, every man she ever met, even Mr. Destronelli.”
“Destronelli?” It was a name he’d heard before.
Her eyes slid slyly sideways, and this look seemed to say: There must be no subterfuge between us, we who understand each other have no need of it. “Oh, you know,” she said with a conviction that, under more commonplace circumstances, would have been surprising. It was, however, as if he’d abandoned temporarily the faculty of surprise. “Everybody knows him.”
He curved an arm around her, and brought her nearer. “Not me, I don’t,” he said, kissing her mouth, neck; she was not responsive especially, but he said—and his voice had gone adolescently shaky—“Never met Mr. Whoozits.” He slipped a hand inside her robe, loosening it away from her shoulders. Above one breast she had a birthmark, small and star-shaped. He glanced at the mirrored door, where uncertain light rippled their reflections, made them pale and incomplete. She was smiling. “Mr. Whoozits,” he said, “what does he look like?” The suggestion of a smile faded, a small monkeylike frown flickered on her face. She looked above the mantel at her painting, and he realized that this was the first notice she’d shown it; she appeared to study in the picture a particular object, but whether hawk or head he could not say. “Well,” she said quietly, pressing closer to him, “he looks like you, like me, like most anybody.”
It was raining; in the wet noon light two nubs of candle still burned, and at an open window gray curtains tossed forlornly. Vincent extricated his arm; it was numb from the weight of her body. Careful not to make a noise, he eased out of bed, blew out the candles, tiptoed into the bathroom, and doused his face with cold water. On the way to the kitchenette he flexed his arms, feeling, as he hadn’t for a long time, an intensely male pleasure in his strength, a healthy wholeness of person. He made and put on a tray orange juice, raisin-bread toast, a pot of tea; then, so inexpertly that everything on the tray rattled, he brought the breakfast in and placed it on a table beside the bed.
She had not moved; her ruffled hair spread fanwise across the pillow, and one hand rested in the hollow where his head had lain. He leaned over and kissed her lips, and her eyelids, blue with sleep, trembled. “Yes, yes, I’m awake,” she murmured, and rain, lifting in the wind, sprayed against the window like surf. He somehow knew that with her, there would be none of the usual artifice: no avoidance of eyes, no shame-faced, accusing pause. She raised herself on her elbow; she looked at him, Vincent thought, as if he were her husband, and, handing her the orange juice, he smiled his gratitude.
“What is today?”
“Sunday,” he told her, bundling under the quilt, and settling the tray across his legs.
“But there are no church bells,” she said. “And it’s raining.”
Vincent divided a piece of toast. “You don’t mind that, do you? Rain—such a peaceful sound.” He poured tea. “Sugar? Cream?”
She disregarded this, and said, “Today is Sunday what? What month, I mean?”
“Where have you been living, in the subway?” he said, grinning. And it puzzled him to think she was serious. “Oh, April … April something-or-other.”
“April,” she repeated. “Have I been here long?”
“Only since last night.”
“Oh.”
Vincent stirred his tea, the spoon tinkling in the cup like a bell. Toast crumbs spilled among the sheets, and he thought of the Tribune and the Times waiting outside the door, but they, this morning, held no charms; it was best lying here beside her in the warm bed, sipping tea, listening to the rain. Odd, when you stopped to consider, certainly very odd. She did not know his name, nor he hers. And so he said, “I still owe you thirty dollars, do you realize that? Your own fault, of course—leaving such a damn-fool address. And D.J., what is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t think I’d better tell you my name,” she said. “I could make up one easy enough: Dorothy Jordan, Delilah Johnson; see? There are all kinds of names I could make up, and if it wasn’t for him, I’d tell you right.”
Vincent lowered the tray to the floor. He rolled over on his side, and, facing her, his heartbeat quickened. “Who’s him?” Though her expression was calm, anger muddied her voice when she said, “If you don’t know him, then tell me, why am I here?”
Silence, and outside the rain seemed suddenly suspended. A ship’s horn moaned in the river. Holding her close, he combed his fingers through her hair, and, wanting so much to be believed, said, “Because I love you.”
She closed her eyes. “What became of them?”
“Who?”
“The others you’ve said that to.”
It commenced again, the rain spattering grayly at the window, falling on hushed Sunday streets; listening, Vincent remembered. He remembered his cousin, Lucille, poor, beautiful, stupid Lucille, who sat all day embroidering silk flowers on scraps of linen. And Allen T. Baker—there was the winter they’d spent in Havana, the house they’d lived in, crumbling rooms of rose-colored rock; poor Allen, he’d thought it was to be forever. Gordon too. Gordon, with the kinky yellow hair, and a head full of old Elizabethan ballads. Was it true he’d shot himself? And Connie Silver, the deaf girl, the one who had wanted to be an actress—what had become of her? Or Helen, Louise, Laura? “There was just one,” he said, and to his own ears this had a truthful ring. “Only one, and she’s dead.”
Tenderly, as if in sympathy, she touched his cheek. “I suppose he killed her,” she said, her eyes so close he could see the outline of his face imprisoned in their greenness. “He killed Miss Hall, you know. The dearest woman in the world, Miss Hall, and so pretty your breath went away. I had piano lessons with her, and when she played the piano, when she said hello and when she said good-bye—it was like my heart would stop.” Her voice had taken on an impersonal tone, as though she were talking of matters belonging to another age, and in which she was not concerned directly. “It was the end of summer when she married him—September, I think. She went to Atlanta, and they were married there, and she never came back. It was just that sudden.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that. I saw a picture of him in the paper. Sometimes I think if she’d known how much I loved her—why are there some you can’t ever tell?—I think maybe she wouldn’t have married; maybe it would’ve all been different, like I wanted it.” She turned her face into the pillow, and if she cried, there was no sound.
On May twentieth she was eighteen; it seemed incredible—Vincent had thought her many years older. He wanted to introduce her at a surprise party, but had finally to admit that this was an unsuitable plan. First off, though the subject was always there on the tip of his tongue, not once had he ever mentioned D.J. to any of his friends; secondly, he could visualize discouragingly well the entertainment provided them at meeting a girl about whom, while they openly shared an apartment, he knew nothing, not even her name. Still the birthday called for some kind of treat. Dinner and the theater were hopeless. She hadn’t, through no fault of his, a dress of any sort. He’d given her forty-odd dollars to buy clothes, and here is what she spent it on: a leather windbreaker, a set of military brushes, a raincoat, a cigarette lighter. Also, her suitcase, which she’d brought to the apartment, had contained nothing but hotel soap, a pair of scissors she used for pruning her hair, two Bibles and an appalling color-tinted photograph. The photograph showed a simpering middle-aged woman with dumpy features. There was an inscription: Best Wishes and Good Luck from Martha Lovejoy Hall.
Because she could not cook they had their meals out; his salary and the limitations of her wardrobe confined them mostly to the Automat—her favorite: the macaroni was so delicious!—or one of the bar-grills along Third. And so the birthday dinner was eaten in an Automat. She’d scrubbed her face until the skin shone red, trimmed and shampooed her hair, and with the messy skill of a six-year-old playing grown-up, varnished her nails. She wore the leather windbreaker,
and on it pinned a sheaf of violets he’d given her; it must have looked amusing, for two rowdy girls sharing their table giggled frantically. Vincent said if they didn’t shut up …
“Oh, yeah, who you think you are?”
“Superman. Jerk thinks he’s superman.”
It was too much, and Vincent lost his temper. He shoved back from the table, upsetting a ketchup jar. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, but D.J., who had paid the fracas no attention whatever, went right on spooning blackberry cobbler; furious as he was, he waited quietly until she finished, for he respected her remoteness, and yet wondered in what period of time she lived. It was futile, he’d discovered, to question her past; still, she seemed only now and then aware of the present, and it was likely the future didn’t mean much to her. Her mind was like a mirror reflecting blue space in a barren room.
“What would you like now?” he said, as they came into the street. “We could ride in a cab through the park.”
She wiped off with her jacket-cuff flecks of blackberry staining the corners of her mouth, and said, “I want to go to a picture show.”
The movies. Again. In the last month he’d seen so many films, snatches of Hollywood dialogue rumbled in his dreams. One Saturday at her insistence they’d bought tickets to three different theaters, cheap places where smells of latrine disinfectant poisoned the air. And each morning before leaving for work he left on the mantel fifty cents—rain or shine, she went to a picture show. But Vincent was sensitive enough to see why; there had been in his own life a certain time of limbo when he’d gone to movies every day, often sitting through several repeats of the same film; it was in its way like religion, for there, watching the shifting patterns of black and white, he knew a release of conscience similar to the kind a man must find confessing to his father.
“Handcuffs,” she said, referring to an incident in The Thirty-Nine Steps, which they’d seen at the Beverly in a program of Hitchcock revivals. “That blond woman and the man handcuffed together—well, it made me think of something else.” She stepped into a pair of his pajamas, pinned the corsage of violets to the edge of her pillow, and folded up on the bed. “People getting caught like that, locked together.”