Tale for the Mirror (12 page)

T
HAT SATRUDAY AFTERNOON, AFTER
he had left the analyst’s office for what might be the last time, he stopped in at the elegant little Viennese bakery in the same block, and bought a mocha cake for his wife. Although, even five years ago, Dorothy had been one of those out-of-towners who slipped into the ways of the city with only a little more emphasis than was natural, she had never lost her glee over the complicated, alien tidbits which were such a contrast to the pies and hefty layer cakes of her native Utica. The huge new “housing development” in which they had been lucky enough to get an apartment quartered only several glittering chain shops, which she had long since learned to snub.

Waiting absently at the counter for his change, he found that actually he could not fully realign Dorothy’s face in his memory. Although he could summon a hundred images of their life together, before and now—the curve of her back as she offered the spoon to the child, the tilt of her head as she slumped, reading, in a chair—in full focus her face evaded him, remaining always in the rear, or to one side. A common enough occurrence, he knew. Nevertheless it left a curious hollow in his new-found assurance.

As he left the store, he turned a last look on the block to which he had been coming for almost three years now. Although, when away from it, he could not have told between which two of the line of houses the one he visited was precisely located, the whole of the block reared itself in his mind like a composition, an entity whose significance had become the foreground of his life. Up three steps, in at the gray entrance, into one of those self-service elevators within whose clicking, measured suspension one rode always with a sense of doom, no matter to what event. Then the anonymous room, whose stepped-down colors and noncommittal furniture offered only the neuter comfort of no stimulus to either approval or dislike. Then, finally, another installment in the long, delicate auscultation of himself, during which, sometimes clamped in resistance, sometimes irrigated with relief, he had been free to pursue the quality of his fear.

Turning away, he walked down to the corner and joined the vague group waiting for a bus. Wherever you went, at almost any time, on almost every corner, there would be such a group assembled. It was a deceptively impressive fact which, when elaborated on, he had long since learned, led nowhere. It was part of the provocative pulse of a city, of a world in which, if you did not learn to deflect the thousand casual contacts strewn at you, without attempting to seize upon them, to weld them into some philosophy of destination, you were lost indeed.

He wedged himself onto the bus, carefully protecting the cake. Looking down at the white box, he thought tiredly of what a funny symbol it was of that daily switch-off in which, laying aside the engrossing thread of himself, he bought a cake, he took a bus, and—rapped smartly back into the secondary—he deserted for another day the re-creation of himself as a working being. As a working being, he cautioned himself, he heard himself being cautioned by the dry voice from behind him in the anonymous room. For if the whole process had not helped him to hold himself untremulously at last in a world where others managed, what had it been but an infinitely seductive excursion into ego, after which, as cut off from others as he had been in the beginning, he would find himself twice alone, holding together the explored corners of himself?

Clutching the box in his cramped hand, he got off the bus at his stop. Less than a year ago, down here, there had been nothing but the great cylindrical gas tanks, nuzzled by tenements, slotted shops, and the exhausted outbuildings natural to the wharflike streets near an old river. Now the “housing development” loomed upward before him, an incredible collage pasted against the sky. Even remembering the excavations and the swarmed signs of contractors, even forcibly recalling the scores of families who were inside it going through their daily paces like tidy, trotting simulacra of each other, it was hard to believe that the whole organism had not been stroked from a lamp. Looking at it, the eye seemed always to be trying to wipe it away.

He and Dorothy had already been drawn into the imitatively suburban life of the young couples who lived there. Dorothy, of course, he thought, much more than he—since whatever time he had away from his university job was already so prescribed. Again he strove for a better picture of her, brushing aside the recurrent blankness. In the mornings, waving to her as he passed the playground on the way to his classes, he had seen her sitting talking or reading or sewing with the other mothers, watching Libby as she played with the other beplaided and corduroyed toddlers in the austerely planned sandpit, already cluttered with buried rakes and spoons and lost tin fish. All of the mothers, still slender and attractive, looked like thirty-year-old versions of the college girls they once had been. Many of them had had careers or talents that marriage and children had interrupted or aborted, and to the memory of these they paid insistent and bitter homage, constantly totting up the frustrations of housewifery in remarks which were like a kind of bleak, allusive shorthand understood by them all. For now that they were women of the home, they felt an inferiority to their former selves, and so, too, they had constructed a technical patter full of words like “preschool” and “security” and references to “Gesell-and-Ilg,” as if by this subaqueous jargon they would return motherhood, with all its inconvenient secretions and scullion duties, to the status of a profession.

With Dorothy, however, he thought thankfully, this defeated prattling never had been more than part of her half naïve acceptance of the New York “line.” She had been reared in a town where people, particularly the women, expected that life would deal with them according to those archaic truisms which, if no longer so hallowed as once, came to them, at least, without the friction of disappointment. It had been this certainty in her which had drawn him as much as her mild blond good looks, whose exact lineaments so curiously evaded him now; it had been to this sureness that he, already deeply flawed with irresolution, had clung and married himself, in the sick hope of transference.

How was he to have foreseen, he thought now, that this very ability of hers to cope, this health, would become formidable between them, sending him further into his cowl of preoccupation, leaving her beached on normality, so that, strangers now, too far apart even for conflict, they had gone on sharing the terrible binding familiarities of the joint board, the joint child, and, less and less often, the graceless despair of the common bed?

For in the world of the normal, he knew now—he heard the dry voice say—to those whose qualms were always based on the tangible, the active, the real, how could he have seemed otherwise than intransigent, when he had insisted that in his world there was a basic, roiling chaos, over which the footage was never more than a series of staircases that dissolved as one trod them, in the midst of which alternatives faced one like knives—and people were only alternatives?

He walked on through the circuitous approaches to his own building. Light skittered, noise faceted from the hived buildings about him, lazily compounding a day, redolent of livelier Saturdays and more expectant springs, which was like a percussive recall to health. Fear was all right, it said to him, as long as one could bring it out into the light and give it a name. He was almost up out of the ditch now, almost up on the other, the safe side, with Dorothy and all the people who knew where they were going, and could manage.

He turned in at Number 6 Village Drive, noting, as always, the cozy term applied to the massive clinical building whose entrance halls, all of nude beige marble enlivened only by buttons, held the etherized silence of a museum. It was difficult to believe that on its upper floors hundreds of doors opened on interiors rumpled with living and the intimate sediment of people, on kitchens checkered with the aftermath of meals, bathrooms, clotted with diapers and cream pots, at whose windows stockings hung swinging in the dust motes and the sun.

The door opened to his key and he stepped into the apartment, receiving the familiar impingement of the pictures, the chairs, the books serried just as he had left them. Everything waited for him like a box full of stale attitudes, old grooves in which he both fitted and chafed. As always on Saturdays, the room had a cleanliness almost pitiable in view of the way Sunday’s lax living jarred and crumbled it—almost as if Dorothy expected someone—or something. He hoped she was not going to expect too much of him at first. He hadn’t really thought, he hadn’t had time to think of it during these years, visualizing her, when at all, as a man in a ward visualizes the ordinary ones, cumbered with health, who wait patiently in the anterooms of hospitals.

In the bedroom, Libby lay on his bed, her face locked fast in the upturned purity of sleep. Dorothy, face down on her own bed, turned her head toward him as he came in. Her mouth, drawn down at the corners at first, in the half-drugged enmity of the dreamer coarsely awakened, quivered faintly in greeting.

Of course, he thought, feeling foolishly relieved. This is she. This is the way she is.

“Hi,” he said softly, because of Libby.

“Hi.”

He looked down at Libby, who was in pajamas. “She in for the night?”

She nodded. “I gave her an early supper. You know how it is otherwise.” She raised herself up on her elbow and pushed back her hair.

“Mmm,” he said. He knew how it was. In her voice, her attitude, he heard the echoing plaint of the other women: “If you don’t let them nap then they’re cranky, and if you do then they never want to go to bed later on—and you have them on your hands till nine!” Nobody seems to enjoy or glory in his children any more, he thought. We’re always plotting, calculating how to have a personal life in spite of them.

“Thought you might want to go shopping or something,” he said, trying on a smile. In his mood, composed half of his release, half of the infectious rhythm of Saturday expectancy, he found himself thinking of the Saturday afternoons she used to love—in the early days of their marriage, or when Libby had been a woollen-wrapped bundle carried jauntily on his shoulder—when they had been part of all the other families idling through the stores, trekking through Sears, perhaps—and coming out of that array of rose trellises and tires with a pair of curtains or a kitchen tool, they had returned home heartened and gay and somehow conquerors, through that device so feminine, so American—the purchase.

“I’ve done the shopping,” she said, with a faint look of surprise. “The Ewarts asked us upstairs for the usual. I thought we could come down once in a while to check. It’s too late for a sitter.”

“Mmm.” He put the cake-box down on the night table, stretching his cramped hand. “Mocha,” he said.

“Thanks.” She awarded it a brief, listless smile.

He sat down carefully on the side of her bed. His hand, braced on the bed, was near her waist. She edged away politely, careful not to interpret affection into the casual gesture. For both of them it had become a matter of pride not to admit, to solicit for the shaming need that was no longer closeness. Nightly, the tense waiting for the hand which did not come had sagged more and more often into sleep; in the infinitesimal edgings away they had built the routine of remoteness.

He put his hand in his lap, inspected it. “I’m through,” he said. “At the doctor’s.” He gave her a quick, guilty look, and concentrated again on the hand. Except for the first of the month, when the bills came in, it had been a matter of rigid convention never to mention the doctor.

“For good?” she said.

“He thinks. I hope.”

She swung her legs down to the floor on the other side of the bed. After a minute, she padded around in front of him and sat down at the dressing table with her back to him, opened a drawer, took out a hairbrush, ran a finger over the bristles. He waited for her to speak, turn at least, but she began brushing her hair, slapping the brush against her head with a tired halfhearted stroke.

He gave a self-conscious laugh, and again, the surreptitious look. “Ring out, wild bells,” he said.

“I’m sorry—” She turned. He waited, he told himself, for her to drop the damn brush.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, “sorry I can’t be more…oh well—” She looked down at the brush. “I know you expected me to be…well…waiting.” Then she put down the brush and the words came with a rush, a bitterness. “At the door. Or a street corner, maybe. With a lei, or something.”

The quick acid of the words surprised him. She was slow and honest in all she did, with no deft talent either with the paring knife or the tongue.

“Forget it,” he said, the dread of a scene opening like a funnel before him.

“No,” she said, laboring now. “I suppose…in a way I
was
waiting.” She raised her head. “Did you ever ask your doctor that…ask him what happens to people waiting on the sidelines for people like you to—?” She stopped.

“To what?”

“To get over their love affair—with themselves.”

“Love affair!”

“Ah, you know you loved it,” she said. “Spinning out yourself. Because meanwhile you didn’t have to
do
anything—about anything or anybody.”

“Would it have been better if I’d had T.B.? Something that showed?”

She put a hand out toward him, almost touching his knee, then drew it back. “I kept thinking of them all the time—all the wives, and husbands, and parents of the people going to your doctor. On the outside all the time, smoothing things over, picking up the pieces—holding their breath. What are we supposed to do? Stop living?”

“If you felt like that, why didn’t you say some—”

“Oh no,” she said quickly. “I wasn’t supposed to interrupt—or intrude!”

It was true, he thought. What she had represented these three years had been the damaging real—which he had avoided even as he fought his way toward it.

“I know it hasn’t been easy for you,” he said humbly. “Perhaps that was part of my trouble…that I didn’t think enough about that. But now—”