Besides Nathaniel and Kenneth, there was Bill. On a night soon after I
went to live with Lucia, a night when nothing was happening, Lucia said,
“Let’s summon Bill.”
“What is it,” I said, “a bootlegger?”
“It’s a gentleman of the old school, darling, and a great help in small
doses.” She telephoned the Racquet club.
In ten minutes Bill appeared, with Scotch and soda and Racquet club
cigarettes, and three medium grade club stories he told before he had
his coat off.
When he looked at me, he said, “Lord, you remind me of a woman I knew in
Honolulu in 1906. Damn nice woman too, she was.” He sighed, gustily, sat
down, and talked to us about how he made gin, where he bought Scotch,
how far and how fast he had driven through Rhode Island the Sunday
before, the condition of the stock market, and how pretty we both were.
He was bald and pink-cheeked as a baby, had a smile that must have been
irresistible in 1906 and thereabouts, and manners as nice as his
manicured hands.
After an hour, Lucia stifled a yawn. He got up, kissed us both
matter-of-factly, thanked us for letting him call, and trotted off.
“It’s all right, but I don’t see exactly why—” I began.
“Oh, he’s as comfortable occasionally, as an old rocking chair,” said
Lucia. “There’s a man who never got lost among the nuances, for he
wouldn’t know a nuance if he saw it. His life’s been good wine and good
food and a good-sized quota of pretty women, and the code of a gentleman
of his time, defined as paying his card debts, carrying his drinks well,
and never letting his wife and his current mistress meet.”
“What would he do if you began to talk to him about the single
standard—or the single tax for that matter?”
“Pat me on the head, and say a girl as pretty as I shouldn’t bother her
head with nonsense. If I kept on, he’d go to sleep. Bill’s grand and
healthy and simple.”
“What does he think about modern women?”
“Never heard of ’em. Thinks women are three sorts, the women one marries
and keeps, the women who should have got married and kept, but gummed
their chances somehow, and the women one takes to bed for a night and
pays well.”
“Is he ever interesting?”
“Yes, he was being up to date tonight to impress you, that’s why he was
so awful. Take him back thirty years, and get him to tell you how the
young bloods rode to the Brevoort Sunday mornings, and tied their horses
outside while they breakfasted on a magnum of champagne and a beefsteak
apiece. On things like that he’s good.”
In time Bill told me that story. He told me also the story of the woman
in Honolulu in 1906; also of a Chinese girl he bought in Shanghai, in
the course of that trip to the Orient that summed up far horizons for
him. “You know,” he said of her, “she couldn’t speak a word of English,
yet I felt always she was the best-bred woman I’d ever met in my life.”
Some men at sixty are the total of experiences had and philosophies
considered. Bill was the total of recollected meals and wine, and of
women kissed. Now, contentedly, he surveyed other people’s youth.
Among complex and tiring and tired men, he was solace to the heart,
asking no more of me or Lucia or any woman, than that she be pretty, and
speak in a “lady’s” voice.
* * * * *
Nathaniel, Kenneth and Bill were my three friends. Stepan was a man who
hated me.
He was handsome, if you like the heavy-jowled, close-clipped
black-moustached type, that is so stockily built it looks lumbering, but
walks, disconcertingly, like a cat. He was a Russian, obviously—Russian
Jew, perhaps. His last name was not revelatory, neither was he. I heard
that he had a good deal of money—he was seen about at theatres and good
restaurants and the more conglomerate parties.
I met him at one of those. He was quite drunk, but that was not apparent
as he circulated about a room full of guests. He was introduced, danced
with me in a manner too intimate, but difficult to protest against, and
took me into an empty room adjoining, on the pretense of finding
cigarettes.
There, with no preliminaries, he enclosed me in arms that felt strong as
an ape’s, kissed my shoulders, and said, “You were made to my measure.
You’re going home with me tonight.”
I said, “How do you get asked to places anyway? I suppose you bribe the
butler to let you in, and trust that the hostess will remember your
face, without remembering that she saw it in some inferior speakeasy.”
“Don’t underrate me, stupidly,” he said. “I am cosmopolitan. I have no
illusions about you American women with your pretense of superiority.
Like any women, you have one function. What do you make a month . . . in
your silly job? Two hundred dollars? Three hundred dollars? I will pay
you that. I can pay for my satisfactions. Get your wraps.”
“I know now,” I said, “what they mean by ‘scratch a Slav and find a
Tartar.’” And then I wished I had not said that, for it flicked
something in him, and he regarded me with such hate in his eyes I was
frightened.
A man and a girl came in looking for privacy. I walked past Stepan and
said, softly, “If we meet in some theatre lobby, please don’t bother to
bow,” and found Lucia.
Later that night he came to me for an instant, while I was waiting for
the men who were taking us home. “You will come with me, I am very
sure,” he said, “but, perhaps not this week.”
Thereafter, he watched me, on the occasional evenings when we met.
I thought him absurdly melodramatic; forgot him when he was not present;
and tried to ignore him, when he was. Yet, he affected me for months
with a sense of uneasiness.
Then, one night, a man named Henry decided to devote himself to me. I
had met Henry a dozen times. People told unpleasant stories about him,
to the effect that he had been kept by a succession of women approaching
dowagerdom, while he was in process of writing a novel still unfinished.
He was a pretty-faced, curly haired blond boy, with something rather
tragic underlying the obvious weakness of his mouth and hands.
On the evening when I noticed him following me about like a helpless
sort of pup in search of ownership, I was feeling very tired. I had an
especially trying week at the office. Nat was on Long Island, and
Kenneth had vanished on one of his occasional three-day absinthe binges.
Henry progressed to: “You are so warm and clean-looking, and young. You
can’t imagine how it helps me to talk to you.”
That was average inanity, yet he was the sort of young man most women
would pity. That trait must have been very useful to him, on many
occasions beside this.
“I’m staying alone in a friend’s apartment for the week-end,” he said.
“If you would come there, for an hour—just let me talk to you, it would
be kindness more than you could guess.”
I was appallingly tired and thought he was innocuous, and went. At the
door of a rather magnificent apartment on Madison Avenue, it occurred to
me that Henry was curiously nervous. I wondered if he expected either a
telephone call or a personal descent by some woman or other; decided
that if it happened, at the worst it could only result in an amusing
tale to tell Lucia, and took off my coat and hat.
I laid my gloves and purse on a desk, glanced down, and was confronted
by a snapshot of this man Henry, and Stepan. I felt as if a little cold
wind had blown, suddenly, across the back of my neck.
“Is this Stepan’s apartment by any chance?”
“Yes, he’s gone to Chicago for two or three days.”
I wanted to go home, instantly. I thought then, that I was being silly.
Ultimately I stayed with this man Henry. Because he had said: “If I
could hold someone clean and strong and young in my arms, I believe it
would make me feel clean and strong and young, again.”
No one was any good for me. There arose, occasionally, the desire to be
good for someone.
I woke, to find the bed empty beside me; thought Henry had gone to get
himself a drink; and slept again. I woke to strong arms around me, a
mouth kissing mine, a horrible hard voice saying, “It’s just Stepan,
don’t be frightened, lie still.” He put a heavy hand across my mouth.
I thought I should die of terror in the dark. I bit his hand, I
struggled. In the end I lay still.
He brought me some brandy. I blinked at him in the light. He was wearing
a red velvet robe with ermine on it, and I thought that he had bought it
among the bloody loot of some old-regime Russian palace, and it made him
more dreadful than he was.
“Now we can talk,” he said. He talked. “You young women think you can
be, in the American phrase ‘hard-boiled.’ You don’t know what
‘hard-boiled’ means. I do.”