“You will make this much a month,” she said. “And it costs this much for us to live a month. And we have this much to draw from to make up the difference.” The figures were cold, incontrovertible, the very pencil marks had a scornful and impregnable look; incidentally she now saw to it that he made not only the current weekly remittances to his sister but that he had also sent to her the equivalent sum of the lunches and the abortive hotel during the six weeks in New Orleans. Then she wrote down a date beside the last figure; it would be in early September. “On that day we wont have any money left.”
Then he repeated something he had thought while sitting on the park bench that day: “It will be all right. I’ve just got to get used to love. I never tried it before; you see, I’m at least ten years behind myself. I’m still free-wheeling. But I’ll get back into gear soon.”
“Yes,” she said. Then she crumpled the paper and flipped it aside, turning. “But that’s not important. That’s just whether it’s steak or hamburger. And hunger’s not here—” She struck his belly with the flat of her hand. “That’s just your old guts growling. Hunger’s here.” She touched his breast. “Dont you ever forget that.”
“I wont. Not now.”
“But you may. You’ve been hungry down here in your guts, so you are afraid of it. Because you are always a little afraid of what you have stood. If you had ever been in love before, you wouldn’t have been on that train that afternoon. Would you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Yes.”
“So it’s more than just training your brain to remember hunger’s not in the belly. Your belly, your guts themselves, have got to believe it. Can yours believe it?”
“Yes,” he said. Only she’s not so sure of that he told himself, because three days later when he returned from the hospital he found the work bench littered with twisted bits of wire and bottles of shellac and glue and wood fiber, a few tubes of paint and a pan in which a mass of tissue paper soaked in water, which two afternoons later had become a collection of little figures—deer and wolfhounds and horses and men and women, lean epicene sophisticated and bizarre, with a quality fantastic and perverse; the afternoon after that when he returned she and the figures were gone. She came in an hour later, her yellow eyes like a cat’s in the dark, not triumph or exultation but rather fierce affirmation, and with a new ten-dollar bill.
“He took them all,” she said, she named a leading department store. “Then he let me dress one of the windows. I have an order for a hundred dollars more—historical figures about Chicago, this part of the West. You know—Mrs. O’Leary with Nero’s face and the cow with a ukelele, Kit Carson with legs like Nijinsky and no face, just two eyes and a shelf of forehead to shade them with, buffalo cows with the heads and flanks of Arabian mares. And all the other stores on Michigan Avenue. Here. Take it.”
He refused. “It’s yours. You earned it.” She looked at him—the unwinking yellow stare in which he seemed to blunder and fumble like a moth, a rabbit caught in the glare of a torch; an envelopment almost like a liquid, a chemical precipitant, in which all the dross of small lying and sentimentality dissolved away. “I don’t—”
“You dont like the idea of your woman helping to support you, is that it? Listen. Dont you like what we’ve got?”
“You know I do.”
“Then what does it matter what it cost us, what we pay for it? or how? You stole the money we’ve got now; wouldn’t you do it again? Isn’t it worth it, even if it all busts tomorrow and we have to spend the rest of our lives paying interest?”
“Yes. Only it’s not going to bust tomorrow. Nor next month. Nor next year—”
“No. Not as long as we are worthy of keeping of it. Good enough. Strong enough. Worthy to be allowed to keep it. To get what you want as decently as you can, then keep it. Keep it.” She came and put her arms around him, hard, striking her body against him hard, not in caress but exactly as she would grasp him by the hair to wake him up from sleep. “That’s what I’m going to do. Try to do. I like bitching, and making things with my hands. I dont think that’s too much to be permitted to like, to want to have and keep.”
She earned that hundred dollars, working at night now, after he was in bed and sometimes asleep; during the next five weeks she earned twenty-eight dollars more, then she filled an order amounting to fifty. Then the orders stopped; she could get no more. Nevertheless she continued to work, at night altogether now, since she was out with her samples, her completed figures all day, and she worked usually with an audience now, for now their apartment had become a sort of evening club.
It began with a newspaper man named McCord who had worked on a New Orleans paper during the brief time when Charlotte’s youngest brother (in a dilettante and undergraduate heeler manner, Wilbourne gathered) had cubbed there. She met him on the street; he came to dinner one evening and took them out to dinner one evening; three nights later he appeared with three men and two women and four bottles of whiskey at their apartment, and after that Wilbourne never knew just whom he would find when he reached home, except that it would not be Charlotte alone and, regardless of who was there, idle, who even after the dearth season of sales had extended into weeks and then a month and summer was almost upon them, still worked in a cheap coverall already filthy as that of any house painter and a glass of whiskey-and-water among the twists of wire and pots of glue and paint and plaster which transformed steadily and endlessly beneath the deft untiring hands into the effigies elegant, bizarre, fantastic and perverse.
Then she made a final sale, a small one, and it was done, finished. It stopped as abruptly and inexplicably as it had begun. The summer season was on now, they told her at the stores, and the tourists and natives too were leaving town to escape the heat. “Except that that’s a lie,” she said. “It’s the saturation point,” she told him, told them all: it was at night, she had returned late with the cardboard box containing the figures which had been refused, so the evening’s collection of callers had already arrived. “But I expected it.
Because these are just fun.” She had taken the effigies from the box and set them up on the work bench again. “Like something created to live only in the pitch airless dark, like in a bank vault or maybe a poison swamp, not in the rich normal nourishing air breathed off of guts full of vegetables from Oak Park and Evanston. And so that’s it and that’s all. And now I’m not an artist any more and I’m tired and I’m hungry and I’m going to curl up with one of our good books and one of our crusts. So let each and all of you step up to the bench and choose himself or herself one souvenir and memento of this occasion, and beat it.”
“We can still eat a crust,” he told her. And besides, she’s not done yet, he thought. She hasn’t quit yet. She never will, thinking as he had thought before that there was a part of her which neither he nor Rittenmeyer had ever touched, which did not even love love. In less than a month he believed that he had proof of this; he returned and found her at the bench again, in a profound excitement which he had never seen before—an excitement without exultation but with a grim and deadly quality of irresistible driving as she told him about it. It was one of the men whom McCord had brought, a photographer. She was to make puppets, marionettes, and he to photograph them for magazine covers and advertisements; perhaps later they would use the actual puppets in charades, tableaux—a hired hall, a rented stable, something, anything. “It’s my money,” she told him. “The hundred and twenty-five dollars I never could get you to take.”
She worked with tense and concentrated fury. She would be at the bench when he went to sleep, he would wake at two and three oclock and find the fierce working light above it still burning. Now he would return (from
