Gump knew some characters all right, this one lived in a coldwater flat in Paradise Alley, and he lived alone except for six Siamese and a stuffed python called Mabel: oh my dear boys, you should’ve known your old mother in those days, when Mabel was alive! What mad camps we were, so jolly, such fun, everyone adored us, several kings and all the queens ha ha, yes, we played the world together, dancing, dancing, twelve weeks in London alone, Waldo and Sinistra, Sinistra, that was Mabel’s stage name, poor darling, she’d be alive this very minute if it wasn’t for those filthy airlines, it really is too sick-making; you see, they wouldn’t allow Mabel on the plane, this was in Tangier and we’d had an imperative call to Madrid, so I simply wrapped her around me and put on an overcoat; everything was fine until somewhere over Spain she began to squeeze, I know how she felt, poor smothering baby, but it was absolute agony, Mabel getting tighter and tighter until finally I simply fainted, whereupon they hacked her in half with a knife, said it was the only way they could get me loose, those butchers! Ah, well—a flag, a flower, your sweetheart’s name? This isn’t going to hurt a bit.
But it had hurt; G-R-A-D-Y, the letters of her name, blue and red and linked with a line, were still afire, so he bought a bottle of baby oil, and sat on an open-top Fifth Avenue bus massaging it into his wrist. He got off the bus near the Frick museum; walking park-side and under the trees, he started downtown, his eyes darting over the diamond-squared stones, an old habit that meant he was searching for lost valuables, money: twice he’d found rings, once a twenty-dollar bill, and today he stooped to pick up a nickel; straightening, he looked across the street, and he was where he wanted to be, opposite the McNeils’ apartment house.
Look at Mr. Fat Ass: the doorman, swallow-coated, cotton-gloved, who does the bastard think he is, puffing like a pigeon? Ah, no sir, Miss McNeil is not at home, ah, no sir, I’m afraid she left no message. But he could not face the doorman down; he could only spit behind the bastard’s back. He crossed the street again, and paced up and down under the trees, hitching his shoulders.
Then he saw little Leslie, the elevator boy, a cherub with pink cheeks and a sugary mouth; he came darting under the trees: hey there, he said, love furtively filling his eyes, look, I know where she is, only don’t tell him I told you, and he said the doorman had been forwarding mail to Miss McNeil at her sister’s house in East Hampton. He seemed hurt when Clyde offered him a half-dollar. So what d’ya want me to do, kiss you? said Clyde, and little Leslie, retreating, said fiercely: who d’ya think you’re kidding?
He’d thought he would go crazy, there alone on the glaring acre of scorched gravel, and the afternoon like a greasy bubble that would never burst; but Gump showed up with a handful of real Havana cigars and a bottle of gin. Gump was on vacation, and they sat in the parking-lot shack enjoying the treats he’d brought and playing two-handed stud. Clyde couldn’t keep his mind on the game, he lost twenty-two consecutive deals, so he threw down his cards and leaned in the doorway, sulking; late-day shadows surged, swayed, he saw night coming toward him, and he said, listen, you want to make a little trip with me? Because he was afraid to go alone.
All this would go on, these waves, these sea roses shedding sun-dried petals on the sand; if I die, all this will go on: and she resented that it should. She raised up among the dunes and drew a scarf across her thighs, then let it slide down again, for there was no one to see that she was naked. It was a coarse, unprofessional beach, crudely vast and scattered with old bones of driftwood. Grand people, preferring the club’s beach, never used it, though some, like Apple and her husband, had built houses along the line. Every morning after breakfast Grady packed a box lunch and stayed hiding among the dunes until the sun kneeled sea-level and the sand grew cold.
Sometimes she stood by the water, letting foam rinse around her ankles. She’d not ever distrusted water, but now each time she wanted to plunge out between the waves, she imagined them concealing teeth, tentacles. Just as she could not advance into the water, so she could not cross the threshold of a crowded room: Apple had given up asking her to meet anyone; twice they’d quarreled over this, once especially when Grady got all dressed for a dance at the Maidstone Club, then changed her mind and refused to go: and Apple said, I just think you’d better see a doctor, don’t you?
Grady could have answered that she had: Dr. Angus Bell, a cousin of Peter’s who practiced in Southampton. Afterwards, she felt she’d known the truth longer than was possible—considering that she was not quite six weeks pregnant. In the house she’d found a medical book, and at night, locking the guest room door, she studied the portraits of lurid, fist-tight embryos, the lace-like veins, veil-like skin and coagulating eyes, which, curled as in sleep, hung to the roots of her heart.
When? at what moment? the afternoon it rained? she was sure it had happened then, it had been so much the best: lying there, safe from the cool shadowy rain, and Clyde kicking back the covers to join her with a gentleness more gentle than the closing of an eyelid. If I died (in Greenwich she’d heard so often about Liza Ash, the much loved Liza who knew the words of every song: and Liza Ash had bled to death in a subway toilet) all this will go on. Shells in the tide, ships far off and going farther.
Or drawing nearer. According to a letter just received by Apple, her mother and your poor father were sailing from Cherbourg the sixteenth of September, which meant they would be home in less than a month: Tell Grady please to have Mrs. Ferry come in from the country as she is sure to have made a mess—God knows I should have left Mrs. Ferry in charge—as we are not up to another mess having just seen what those Germans left of the house in Cannes simply unbelievable and another thing tell Grady her dress has turned out more marvelous than a dream simply unbelievable.
At last there arrives a time when one asks, what have I done? and for her it had come that morning at breakfast when Apple, reading the letter aloud, reached this mention of the dress; forgetting she’d not wanted it, and knowing only that now she never would wear it, she fled down the stairs of a new and mysterious grief: what have I done? The sea asked the same, keen gulls repeated the sea.
Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living. Unfortunately, one mirror is as treacherous as another, reflecting at some point in every adventure the same vain unsatisfied face, and so when she asks what have I done? she means really what am I doing? as one usually does.
The sun was weakening, and she remembered that Apple’s little boy was having a birthday party for which oh god she’d promised to organize games. She slipped on her bathing suit and was about to step onto the open beach when she saw two horses cantering through the shallow surf.
Astride the horses were a young man and a handsome girl with black streaming hair; Grady knew them, she’d played tennis with them the summer before, but now she couldn’t recall their name, P-something and part of the younger manic set: rather charming, especially the wife. Up the beach they rode, their voices uniting in thrilled hoopla, and back they stormed, the drenched horses glistening like glass.
Dismounting not far from where she lay hidden, and leaving their horses to cavort, they clambered over the dunes and fell with lovely laughter into a cove of high grass; it was quiet then, gulls glided soundless, sea breeze shivered the grass, and Grady thought of them curled there together, protected by a world that wished them well. Malice prompted her to show herself.
Rising, she walked directly past them, and her shadow, skimming over them like a wing, was meant to shatter their pleasure. In this it failed, for the P-somethings, made innocent by
