Presence: Stories Read online

  “Oh, that’s nice.”

  She laughed again.

  “Well, I meant it!” he protested.

  Her face turned instantly grave. “I know you did.”

  To Madame Lhevine and Lucretia he said, “Between us it’s always a battle of half-wits.”

  The women’s laughter relieved him; he was some ten years younger than Cleota and Lucretia, a rolling-gaited, hands-in-pockets novelist whose vast inexperience with women had given him a curiosity about them so intense as to approach understanding. With women, he usually found himself behind any one of various masks, depending on the situation; at the moment it was that of the raffish youth, the younger poet, perhaps, for it was never possible to arrive—especially before Cleota—as himself. She was, he always sensed, an unhappy woman who perhaps did not even know her unhappiness; she therefore sought something, some sensuous reassurance, which he could distract her from by simulating this carefree artist’s bantering. Not that Cleota herself attracted him; that she was a wife was enough to place her in a vaguely sacred area. Unless he should strike out toward another sort of life and character for himself, a life, as he visualized it, of truthful relations—which is to say, personal relations of a confessional sort. But somewhere in his mind he knew that real truths only came out of disaster, and he would do his best to avoid disaster in all the departments of his life. He had to, he felt, out of decency. For the true terror of living in a false position was that the love of others became attached to it and so would be betrayed if one were to strike for the truth. And treason to others—to Joseph Kersh—was the ultimate destruction, worse even than treason to himself, living with a wife he could not love.

  By the time he was seated at the table he was already chafing at the boyish role Cleota had thrust upon him these six or seven years of their acquaintance. He made his manner grave and seemingly even troubled, and since, as the only man present, attention was centered on him for the moment and he had to speak, he looked directly into Lucretia’s eyes and asked, “How’s your husband?”

  Lucretia lowered her gaze to her cigarette and, tapping it impatiently, she said, “He’s all right.”

  He heard her door clap shut. Women discovered alone, he believed, must have been talking about sex. He had believed this since his childhood, when his mother’s bridge parties had always gone from screaming hilarity to matronly silence as soon as he appeared. He knew then, as he knew now, that there was something illicit here, something prohibited in the air. Knowing was no problem to him; it was admitting that he knew. For it tore at his sense of good, of right, and of the proper nature of things that wives should betray the smallest contempt for their husbands. And yet, he felt, contempt was around this table now. And he was dismayed that this flattered him and gave him a joyous feeling of fitness. “Just a half,” he said to Cleota, who was pouring more whisky into his glass. “I’ve got to get to sleep soon.”

  “Oh, don’t go!” she said strongly, and he saw that she was flushed with whisky. “Are you writing up here?”

  “No.” Gratified, he saw how she was waiting for serious news of him. Lucretia too was curious. “I’m just worrying.”

  “You?”

  “Why not?” he asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Just that you seem to do everything you want to do.”

  Her admiration, he believed, was for some strength she seemed to think he had, and he accepted with pleasure. But a distant alarm was ringing for him tonight; something intimate was happening here, and he should not have come.

  “I don’t know,” he answered Cleota. “Maybe I do do what I want to. The trouble is I don’t know I’m doing it.” And he resolved, in the name of some distant truthfulness, to reveal a little of his own bewilderment. “I really go from moment to moment, despite appearances. I don’t know what I’m doing any more than anybody else.”

  “Ah, but you do know,” said Madame Lhevine, narrowing her eyes. He looked at her with surprise. “I have read your books. You do know. Within yourself you know.”

  He found himself liking this ugly woman. Her tone reminded him of his mother’s when she would look at him after he had knocked over a vase and say, “You will be a great man.”

  “You follow your spirit, Mr. Kersh,” she went on, “so it is not necessary to know anything more.”

  “I suppose I do,” he said, “but it would save a lot of trouble if I could believe it.”

  “But I’m sure you understand,” Madame pressed on, “that the sense you have of not knowing is what makes your art. When an artist knows what he is doing he can no longer do it, don’t you think?”

  This so matched the license Joseph secretly claimed for himself, and the blessed freedom from responsibility he longed for, that he could not in good conscience accept it. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “It’s romantic to think an artist is unconscious.” And now he broadened his shoulders and his right hand closed in a fist. “A work of art must work, like a good machine—”

  “But a machine made by a blind man,” Madame said in an experienced tone.

  “I deny that,” he said, shaking his head, helpless to dam up this flood of certainty. “I have to think through a form before I can write. I have to engineer a structure. I have to know what I am doing.”

  “Of course,” Madame cut in, “but at a certain point you must know nothing and allow yourself only your feelings. In fact, that is my only—my only reservation about your work.”

  “What?” he asked. He did not like her. Women ought not to criticize. She was repulsively ugly, like a dwarf.

  “They are a bit overconstructed,” she said. “I hope you will not think me presumptuous, but I do not have that feeling even though I admire enormously what you say.”

  He hoped that the heat he felt rising in his face would be attributed to the whisky. Crossing his knees suddenly, he knocked the table against Madame and quickly set it back in place, laughing. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cripple you.”

  He saw, with near shock, that Cleota was openly staring at him—with admiration. It was most noticeable. Why was Stowe gone, alone?

  Lucretia was deep in thought, looking at the ashtray and tapping her cigarette on it. “But really, Joe”—she faced him with her over-puzzled look—“don’t you think that people are really much more disoriented than you portray them? I mean—”

  “My characters are pretty disoriented, Lucretia,” he said and made Cleota laugh.

  “No, seriously; your people always seem to learn something,” she complained.

  “Don’t you think people learn?” he asked and wondered what they were secretly arguing about. There was, in fact, something dense about Lucretia, he had always thought. The first time he had met her she had just come from mating two horses and was feverish with her success, and it had seemed so clear that she had had a sexual interest in the procedure herself, yet was unaware of it, and this had given her a dull quality in his eyes—a musky one too, however.

  “Of course they learn,” she said—and it was clear she was matching intellects with him, which a woman ought not do, he felt—“but they learn geometry and the necessary dates. Not . . .” She sought the word, and Madame supplied it.

  “Not spirit.”

  “Yes!” Lucretia agreed but deferred to Madame to continue.

  “I’m sure you agree,” said Madame, “that essentially the spirit is formed quite early. Actually it knows all it will ever know from the beginning.”

  “Then what’s the point in living?”

  “Because we must live. That is all.”

  “I wouldn’t call that much of a point,” Joseph said.

  “Maybe there isn’t much of a point,” Cleota suddenly put in.

  Joseph turned to her, struck by her sad gravity. He wondered whether Stowe had any idea she was so hopeless. But he checked himself—she was only talking and bein
g her usual tolerant self. That was what he could never understand—she and Stowe could feel deeply about some issue and yet be perfectly friendly with people who stood for everything they opposed. Life to them was some kind of game, whereas one ought to believe something to the point of suffering for it. He wished he could find a way of leaving now instead of sitting here with these three crocked lunks arguing about spirits!

  “Although I do think we learn,” Cleota went on, with an open glance of support for Joseph. “I don’t know if we learn only what we unconsciously knew before, or whether it’s all continuously new, but I think we learn.”

  How admirably direct she was! Joseph caught this flower she had surprisingly tossed him and with it charged against the other two women. “What always gets me is how people will scoff at science and conscious wisdom and the whole rational approach to life, but when they go to the more “profound” places, like Mexico or Sicily or some other spiritual-type country, they never forget to take their typhoid shots!”

  The mocking voices of Madame Lhevine and Lucretia were in the air, and he reddened with anger. Lucretia yelled, “That’s got nothing to do with—”

  “It’s only the exact point! If you believe something you have to live by it or it’s just talk! You can’t say we don’t learn and then blithely accept the fruits of what we’ve learned. That’s—it’s—” He wanted to say, “Lying.”

  “Oh, now, Joe,” Lucretia drawled, looking at him with toleration—he sounded like her husband proving to her on engineering principles that she was not unhappy—“what we’re talking about is simply not on that plane. You’re ten years behind the times. Nobody’s underrating science and conscious wisdom; it’s simply that it doesn’t provide an inner aim, a point to live for. It still leaves man essentially alone.”

  “Except that the only people I ever met who feel part of an international, a world community are scientists. They’re the only ones who aren’t alone.”

  “Now, Joe, really—what does a sentence like that mean?”

  He was furious. “It means that they don’t live for themselves only, they live in the service of a greater thing.”

  “What, for heaven’s sake?”

  “What? The alleviation of human pain and the wiping out of human poverty.”

  “We can’t all be wiping out poverty, Joseph. What do we do? We’re simply not talking about the same things.” She turned to Cleota. “Do you sense the difference, Clee?”

  “Of course there’s a difference,” Cleota said, her eyes avoiding Lucretia’s, “but why can’t you both be right?” And she glanced at Joseph for confirmation of this, to him, total absurdity.

  “I don’t care about being right,” he said quietly now. But his hopes for Cleota had again subsided; she was a total mystery to him. Nothing ever came to an issue for her. The idea came sharply to his mind that every time he came here it was an anticlimax. This was why he always left feeling he had wasted his time—they were people who simply lived in an oblong hum and did not strive for some apotheosis, some climax in life, either a great accomplishment or a discovery or any blast of light and sound that would fling them into a new speed, a further orbit.

  Yet, inexplicably, when he had been fired from the university for his refusal to disavow the Left-wing youth, she had gone on for months indignantly talking about it, phoning to see how he was, and for a while even spoke of living abroad to protest the oppressive American atmosphere.

  Madame and Lucretia evidently felt he had been put down successfully, and the ugly woman allowed him a kind look and said, “It doesn’t matter anyway—you are a very good writer.”

  This outstretching of a finger instead of a whole hand made Joseph and Cleota laugh, and he said, “I’m not knocking intuition.” Cleota laughed louder, but he had meant this as a compromise with Madame and said to Cleota, “Wait a minute, I’m making up to her,” and Cleota laughed louder still. His abruptness always entertained her, but it was something more now; in his passion for his ideas, ideas she understood but did not find irreplaceable, she sensed a fleshed connection with an outside force, an unseen imperative directing his life. He had to say what he said, believe what he believed, was helpless to compromise, and this spoke a dedication not different from love in him.

  She drank three inches of whisky straight, observing a bright stain of green moonlight through the wet windows over her guests’ heads. A planetary silence seemed to surround the continuing argument; she felt herself floating away. Her only alarm was that the talk was dying and they would all soon leave. She poured whisky for Joseph, who was pounding the table with his open hand. “I am not knocking intuition,” he was saying again, “I work with it, I make my living by it.” Out of nowhere an idea hit him. “I’ll tell you something, Madame Lhevine. I come from a long line of superstitious idiots. I once had an aunt, see, and she told fortunes—”

  Cleota exploded, throwing her hands up in the air and turning from the table doubled over by laughter. Lucretia first smiled, trying to resist for Madame’s sake, but she caught the infection, and then Madame herself unwillingly joined, and Joseph, smiling stupidly, looked at the three women laughing hysterically around him, asking, “What? What!” but no one was able to answer, until he too was carried into the waves; and, as always happens in such cases, one of them had only to look at the other to begin insanely laughing all over again. And when they had quieted enough for him to be heard he explained to Cleota, “But she did. In fact, she was part gypsy!”

  At this Cleota screamed, and she and Lucretia bent across the table, grasping each other’s arms, gasping and laughing with their faces hidden by their shoulders, and Madame kept slapping the table and shaking her head and going, “Ho, ho, ho.”

  Joseph, without understanding what it was all about, could not help feeling their hysteria was at his expense. His soberness returned before theirs, and he sat patiently smiling, on the verge of feeling the fool, and lit his cigar and took a drink, waiting for them to come to.

  At last Cleota explained with kindness that Saint had said precisely the same things, and that . . . But now it was hard to reconstruct the earlier situation, especially Madame’s resentment at the girl’s presumptuous claim of an aunt who could do what Madame did—at least it could not be explained, Cleota realized, without characterizing Madame Lhevine as being extremely jealous and even petty about her talent for fortune-telling; and, besides, Cleota was aware that Madame was not happy with the title of fortune-teller and yet she did not know what else to call her without invoking words like spiritualist or seer or whatever—words that embarrassed Cleota and might in the bargain again offend the lady. The net of the explanation was a muddle, a confusion which confirmed in Joseph his recurring notion that the Rummels were in fact trivial and their minds disoriented, while for Cleota her inability to conclusively describe Madame left her—however hilariously amused she still appeared—with the feeling that Madame was perhaps a fraud. This was not at all a distasteful idea to Cleota; it was simply Madame’s character. What did disturb her under her flushed smile, and prevented her from detaining Madame, who now said it was getting late, was the thought of being left alone. The image surged up of Stowe lying dead in his casket, and it stiffened her a little toward Lucretia as she helped her into her coat, quite as though Lucretia had borne her this prophecy in part, carrying it from her own blasted home where nothing ever went right.

  Cleota returned from the driveway and removed her Romanian shawl and poured herself a new drink, still enjoying the exhilaration that follows helpless laughter, the physical cleanliness and strength that it leaves behind in healthy people, and at the same time her eyes had the indrawn look that the discomposing news had left there, and Joseph watched her, bewildered by her double mood.

  Without asking him she handed him a drink, and they faced each other at the fire, which she had just fanned to life. “I’ll go soon,” he said. “I have to work tomorrow.”


  He saw that she was drunk, much drunker than she had seemed with the other two women present. In one continuous motion she sat down and let her knees spread apart, staring over his head. Then she leaned over heavily and set her drink on the floor between her feet and fell back into the chair again, blowing out air and turning her face toward the fire. Her breathing was still deep, and her hands hung limply from the arms of the wicker chair. Her seeming abandon was not a sign of sensuousness to him at first. He thought she was even indicating such trust in him that she need not look composed.

  Drunken women made Joseph nervous. He spoke, trying for their customary bantering tone. “Now what was that all about?” he asked, grinning.

  She did not answer, seemed hardly to have heard. Her staring eyes suggested some vast preoccupation and finally a despair that he had never before seen in her. An engagement, a moment of personal confrontation, seemed to be approaching, and to ward it off Joseph said, “I did have an aunt like that. She read my palm the night before I left home for college and predicted I’d flunk out after one semester.”

  He had hardly started his remark when it sounded to him like chatter unworthy of the moment. And now Cleota turned her head, still resting on the rim of the chair’s back, and looked at him. With a shock he felt the challenge in her eyes. She was looking at him as a man, and for the first time. Her challenge kept growing in him, and to throw her off he lazily put his arm over the back of his chair and turned to the fire as though he too were preoccupied with other thoughts. Was it possible? Cleota Rummel?

  “Do you remember John Trudeau?” she asked.

  He turned to her, relieved; it would be gossip after all. “I think so. That tall guy used to teach up at—”

  “Why—do you know why—?” She broke off, her face drawn together in mystification. She was seeing past him and around him, staring. “Why do they all end in sex?”

  He was relieved at the genuinely questioning note; she was not being coy. He damned his evil mind of a moment before. “What do you mean?” he asked.