Mojave, Truman Capote

Mojave

AT 5 P.M. THAT WINTER afternoon she had an appointment with Dr. Bentsen, formerly her psychoanalyst and currently her lover. When their relationship had changed from the analytical to the emotional, he insisted, on ethical grounds, that she cease to be his patient. Not that it mattered. He had not been of much help as an analyst, and as a lover—well, once she had watched him running to catch a bus, two hundred and twenty pounds of shortish, fiftyish, frizzly-haired, hip-heavy, myopic Manhattan Intellectual, and she had laughed: how was it possible that she could love a man so ill-humored, so ill-favored as Ezra Bentsen? The answer was she didn’t; in fact, she disliked him. But at least she didn’t associate him with resignation and despair. She feared her husband; she was not afraid of Dr. Bentsen. Still, it was her husband she loved.

She was rich; at any rate, had a substantial allowance from her husband, who was rich, and so could afford the studio-apartment hideaway where she met her lover perhaps once a week, sometimes twice, never more. She could also afford gifts he seemed to expect on these occasions. Not that he appreciated their quality: Verdura cuff links, classic Paul Flato cigarette cases, the obligatory Cartier watch, and (more to the point) occasional specific amounts of cash he asked to “borrow.”

He had never given her a single present. Well, one: a mother-of-pearl Spanish dress comb that he claimed was an heirloom, a mother-treasure. Of course, it was nothing she could wear, for she wore her own hair, fluffy and tobacco-colored, like a childish aureole around her deceptively naïve and youthful face. Thanks to dieting, private exercises with Joseph Pilatos, and the dermatological attentions of Dr. Orentreich, she looked in her early twenties; she was thirty-six.

The Spanish comb. Her hair. That reminded her of Jaime Sanchez and something that had happened yesterday. Jaime Sanchez was her hairdresser, and though they had known each other scarcely a year, they were, in their own way, good friends. She confided in him somewhat; he confided in her considerably more. Until recently she had judged Jaime to be a happy, almost overly blessed young man. 

He shared an apartment with an attractive lover, a young dentist named Carlos. Jaime and Carlos had been schoolmates in San Juan; they had left Puerto Rico together, settling first in New Orleans, then New York, and it was Jaime, working as a beautician, a talented one, who had put Carlos through dental school. Now Carlos had his own office and a clientele of prosperous Puerto Ricans and blacks.

However, during her last several visits she had noticed that Jaime Sanchez’s usually unclouded eyes were somber, yellowed, as though he had a hangover, and his expertly articulate hands, ordinarily so calm and capable, trembled a little.

Yesterday, while scissor-trimming her hair, he had stopped and stood gasping, gasping—not as though fighting for air, but as if struggling against a scream.
She had said: “What is it? Are you all right?”
“No.”

He had stepped to a washbasin and splashed his face with cold water. While drying himself, he said: “I’m going to kill Carlos.” He waited, as if expecting her to ask him why; when she merely stared, he continued: “There’s no use talking any more. He understands nothing. My words mean nothing. The only way I can communicate with him is to kill him. Then he will understand.”
“I’m not sure that I do, Jaime.”

“Have I ever mentioned to you Angelita? My cousin Angelita? She came here six months ago. She has always been in love with Carlos. Since she was, oh, twelve years old. And now Carlos is in love with her. He wants to marry her and have a household of children.”
She felt so awkward that all she could think to ask was: “Is she a nice girl?”

“Too nice.” He had seized the scissors and resumed clipping. “No, I mean that. She is an excellent girl, very petite, like a pretty parrot, and much too nice; her kindness becomes cruel. Though she doesn’t understand that she is being cruel. For example …” She glanced at Jaime’s face moving in the mirror above the washbasin; it was not the merry face that had often beguiled her, but pain and perplexity exactly reflected. “Angelita and Carlos want me to live with them after they are married, all of us together in one apartment. 

It was her idea, but Carlos says yes! yes! we must all stay together and from now on he and I will live like brothers. That is the reason I have to kill him. He could never have loved me, not if he could ignore my enduring such hell. He says, ‘Yes, I love you, Jaime; but Angelita—this is different.’ There is no difference. You love or you do not. You destroy or you do not. But Carlos will never understand that. Nothing reaches him, nothing can—only a bullet or a razor.”

She wanted to laugh; at the same time she couldn’t because she realized he was serious and also because she well knew how true it was that certain persons could only be made to recognize the truth, be made to understand, by subjecting them to extreme punishment.

Nevertheless, she did laugh, but in a manner that Jaime would not interpret as genuine laughter. It was something comparable to a sympathetic shrug. “You could never kill anyone, Jaime.”
He began to comb her hair; the tugs were not gentle, but she knew the anger implied was against himself, not her. “Shit!” Then: “No. And that’s the reason for most suicides. Someone is torturing you. You want to kill them, but you can’t. All that pain is because you love them, and you can’t kill them because you love them. So you kill yourself instead.”

Leaving, she considered kissing him on the cheek, but settled for shaking his hand. “I know how trite this is, Jaime. And for the moment certainly no help at all. But remember—there’s always somebody else. Just don’t look for the same person, that’s all.”

THE RENDEZVOUS APARTMENT WAS ON East Sixty-fifth Street; today she walked to it from her home, a small town house on Beekman Place. It was windy, there was leftover snow on the sidewalk and a promise of more in the air, but she was snug enough in the coat her husband had given her for Christmas—a sable-colored suede coat that was lined with sable.

A cousin had rented the apartment for her in his own name. The cousin, who was married to a harridan and lived in Greenwich, sometimes visited the apartment with his secretary, a fat Japanese woman who drenched herself in nose-boggling amounts of Mitsouko. This afternoon the apartment reeked of the lady’s perfume, from which she deduced that her cousin had lately been dallying here. That meant she would have to change the sheets.

She did so, then prepared herself. On a table beside the bed she placed a small box wrapped in shiny cerulean paper; it contained a gold toothpick she had bought at Tiffany, a gift for Dr. Bentsen, for one of his unpleasing habits was constantly picking his teeth, and, moreover, picking them with an endless series of paper matches. She had thought the gold pick might make the whole process a little less disagreeable. She put a stack of Lee Wiley and Fred Astaire records on a phonograph, poured herself a glass of cold white wine, undressed entirely, lubricated herself, and stretched out on the bed, humming, singing along with the divine Fred and listening for the scratch of her lover’s key at the door.

To judge from appearances, orgasms were agonizing events in the life of Ezra Bentsen: he grimaced, he ground his dentures, he whimpered like a frightened mutt. Of course, she was always relieved when she heard the whimper; it meant that soon his lathered carcass would roll off her, for he was not one to linger, whispering tender compliments: he just rolled right off. And today, having done so, he greedily reached for the blue box, knowing it was a present for him. After opening it, he grunted.

She explained: “It’s a gold toothpick.”
He chuckled, an unusual sound coming from him, for his sense of humor was meager. “That’s kind of cute,” he said, and began picking his teeth. “You know what happened last night? I slapped Thelma. But good. And I punched her in the stomach, too.”
Thelma was his wife; she was a child psychiatrist, and by reputation a fine one.

“The trouble with Thelma is you can’t talk to her. She doesn’t understand. Sometimes that’s the only way you can get the message across. Give her a fat lip.”
She thought of Jaime Sanchez.
“Do you know a Mrs. Roger Rhinelander?” Dr. Bentsen said.
“Mary Rhinelander? Her father was my father’s best friend. They owned a racing stable together. One of her horses won the Kentucky Derby. Poor Mary, though. She married a real bastard.”
“So she tells me.”
“Oh? Is Mrs. Rhinelander a new patient?”

“Brand-new. Funny thing. She came to me for more or less the particular reason that brought you; her situation is almost identical.”
The particular reason? Actually, she had a number of problems that had contributed to her eventual seduction on Dr. Bentsen’s couch, the principal one being that she had not been capable of having a sexual relationship with her husband since the birth of their second child. She had married when she was twenty-four; her husband was fifteen years her senior. Though they had fought a lot, and were jealous of each other, the first five years of their marriage remained in her memory as an unblemished vista. The difficulty started when he asked her to have a child; if she hadn’t been so much in love with him, she would never have consented—she had been afraid of children when she herself was a child, and the company of a child still made her uneasy. 

But she had given him a son, and the experience of pregnancy had traumatized her: when she wasn’t actually suffering, she imagined she was, and after the birth she descended into a depression that continued more than a year. Every day she slept fourteen hours of Seconal sleep; as for the other ten, she kept awake by fueling herself with amphetamines. The second child, another boy, had been a drunken accident—though she suspected that really her husband had tricked her. The instant she knew she was pregnant again she had insisted on having an abortion; he had told her that if she went ahead with it, he would divorce her. 

Well, he had lived to regret that. The child had been born two months prematurely, had nearly died, and because of massive internal hemorrhaging, so had she; they had both hovered above an abyss through months of intensive care. Since then, she had never shared a bed with her husband; she wanted to, but she couldn’t, for the naked presence of him, the thought of his body inside hers, summoned intolerable terrors.

Dr. Bentsen wore thick black socks with garters, which he never removed while “making love”; now, as he was sliding his gartered legs into a pair of shiny-seated blue serge trousers, he said: “Let’s see. Tomorrow is Tuesday. Wednesday is our anniversary …”

“Our anniversary?”
“Thelma’s! Our twentieth. I want to take her to … Tell me the best restaurant around now?”
“What does it matter? It’s very small and very smart and the owner would never give you a table.”
His lack of humor asserted itself: “That’s a damn strange thing to say. What do you mean, he wouldn’t give me a table?”
“Just what I said. One look at you and he’d know you had hairy heels. There are some people who won’t serve people with hairy heels. He’s one of them.”

Dr. Bentsen was familiar with her habit of introducing unfamiliar lingo, and he had learned to pretend he knew what it signified; he was as ignorant of her ambience as she was of his, but the shifting instability of his character would not allow him to admit it.
“Well, then,” he said, “is Friday all right? Around five?”
She said: “No, thank you.” He was tying his tie and stopped; she was still lying on the bed, uncovered, naked; Fred was singing “By Myself.” “No, thank you, darling Dr. B. I don’t think we’ll be meeting here any more.”

She could see he was startled. Of course he would miss her—she was beautiful, she was considerate, it never bothered her when he asked her for money. He knelt beside the bed and fondled her breast. She noticed an icy mustache of sweat on his upper lip. “What is this? Drugs? Drink?”
She laughed and said: “All I drink is white wine, and not much of that. No, my friend. It’s simply that you have hairy heels.”

Like many analysts, Dr. Bentsen was quite literal-minded; just for a second she thought he was going to strip off his socks and examine his feet. Churlishly, like a child, he said: “I don’t have hairy heels.”
“Oh, yes you do. Just like a horse. All ordinary horses have hairy heels. Thoroughbreds don’t. The heels of a well-bred horse are flat and glistening. Give my love to Thelma.”
“Smart-ass. Friday?”
The Astaire record ended. She swallowed the last of the wine.
“Maybe. I’ll call you,” she said.

As it happened, she never called, and she never saw him again—except once, a year later, when she sat on a banquette next to him at La Grenouille; he was lunching with Mary Rhinelander, and she was amused to see that Mrs. Rhinelander signed the check.

THE PROMISED SNOW HAD ARRIVED by the time she returned, again on foot, to the house on Beekman Place. The front door was painted pale yellow and had a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s claw. Anna, one of four Irishwomen who staffed the house, answered the door and reported that the children, exhausted from an afternoon of ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, had already had their supper and been put to bed.

Thank God. Now she wouldn’t have to undergo the half-hour of playtime and tale-telling and kiss-goodnight that customarily concluded her children’s day; she may not have been an affectionate mother, but she was a dutiful one—just as her own mother had been. It was seven o’clock, and her husband had phoned to say he would be home at seven-thirty; at eight they were supposed to go to a dinner party with the Sylvester Hales, friends from San Francisco. She bathed, scented herself to remove memories of Dr. Bentsen, remodeled her makeup, of which she wore the most modest quantity, and changed into a grey silk caftan and grey silk slippers with pearl buckles.

She was posing by the fireplace in the library on the second floor when she heard her husband’s footsteps on the stairs. It was a graceful pose, inviting as the room itself, an unusual octagonal room with cinnamon lacquered walls, a yellow lacquered floor, brass bookshelves (a notion borrowed from Billy Baldwin), two huge bushes of brown orchids ensconced in yellow Chinese vases, a Marino Marini horse standing in a corner, a South Seas Gauguin over the mantel, and a delicate fire fluttering in the fireplace. French windows offered a view of a darkened garden, drifting snow, and lighted tugboats floating like lanterns on the East River. A voluptuous couch, upholstered in mocha velvet, faced the fireplace, and in front of it, on a table lacquered the yellow of the floor, rested an ice-filled silver bucket; embedded in the bucket was a carafe brimming with pepper-flavored red Russian vodka.

Her husband hesitated in the doorway, and nodded at her approvingly: he was one of those men who truly noticed a woman’s appearance, gathered at a glance the total atmosphere. He was worth dressing for, and it was one of her lesser reasons for loving him. A more important reason was that he resembled her father, a man who had been, and forever would be, the man in her life; her father had shot himself, though no one ever knew why, for he was a gentleman of almost abnormal discretion. Before this happened, she had terminated three engagements, but two months after her father’s death she met George, and married him because in both looks and manners he approximated her great lost love.

She moved across the room to meet her husband halfway. She kissed his cheek, and the flesh against her lips felt as cold as the snowflakes at the window. He was a large man, Irish, black-haired and green-eyed, handsome even though he had lately accumulated considerable poundage and had gotten a bit jowly, too. He projected a superficial vitality; both men and women were drawn to him by that alone. Closely observed, however, one sensed a secret fatigue, a lack of any real optimism. His wife was severely aware of it, and why not? She was its principal cause.

She said: “It’s such a rotten night out, and you look so tired. Let’s stay home and have supper by the fire.”
“Really, darling—you wouldn’t mind? It seems a mean thing to do to the Haleses. Even if she is a cunt.”
“George! Don’t use that word. You know I hate it.”

“Sorry,” he said; he was, too. He was always careful not to offend her, just as she took the same care with him: a consequence of the quiet that simultaneously kept them together and apart.
“I’ll call and say you’re coming down with a cold.”
“Well, it won’t be a lie. I think I am.”

WHILE SHE CALLED THE HALESES, and arranged with Anna for a soup and soufflé supper to be served in an hour’s time, he chugalugged a dazzling dose of the scarlet vodka and felt it light a fire in his stomach; before his wife returned, he poured himself a respectable shot and stretched full length on the couch. She knelt on the floor and removed his shoes and began to massage his feet: God knows, he didn’t have hairy heels. He groaned.

“Hmm. That feels good.”
“I love you, George.”
“I love you, too.”
She thought of putting on a record, but no, the sound of the fire was all the room needed.

“George?”
“Yes, darling.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“A woman named Ivory Hunter.”
“You really know somebody named Ivory Hunter?”

“Well. That was her stage name. She’d been a burlesque dancer.”
She laughed. “What is this, some part of your college adventures?”
“I never knew her. I only heard about her once. It was the summer after I left Yale.”

He closed his eyes and drained his vodka. “The summer I hitchhiked out to New Mexico and California. Remember? That’s how I got my nose broke. In a bar fight in Needles, California.” She liked his broken nose, it offset the extreme gentleness of his face; he had once spoken of having it re-broken and reset, but she had talked him out of it. “It was early September, and that’s always the hottest time of the year in Southern California; over a hundred almost every day. I ought to have treated myself to a bus ride, at least across the desert. But there I was like a fool, deep in the Mojave, hauling a fifty-pound knapsack and sweating until there was no sweat in me. 

I swear it was a hundred and fifty in the shade. Except there wasn’t any shade. Nothing but sand and mesquite and this boiling blue sky. Once a big truck drove by, but it wouldn’t stop for me. All it did was kill a rattlesnake that was crawling across the road.

“I kept thinking something was bound to turn up somewhere. A garage. Now and then cars passed, but I might as well have been invisible. I began to feel sorry for myself, to understand what it means to be helpless, and to understand why it’s a good thing that Buddhists send out their young monks to beg. It’s chastening. It rips off that last layer of baby fat.

“And then I met Mr. Schmidt. I thought maybe it was a mirage. An old white-haired man about a quarter mile up the highway. He was standing by the road with heat waves rippling around him. As I got closer I saw that he carried a cane and wore pitch-black glasses, and he was dressed as if headed for church—white suit, white shirt, black tie, black shoes.

“Without looking at me, and while some distance away, he called out: ‘My name is George Schmidt.’
“I said: ‘Yes. Good afternoon, sir.’
“He said: ‘Is it afternoon?’
“ ‘After three.’
“ ‘Then I must have been standing here two hours or more. Would you mind telling me where I am?’
“ ‘In the Mojave Desert. About eighteen miles west of Needles.’

“ ‘Imagine that,’ he said. ‘Leaving a seventy-year-old blind man stranded alone in the desert. Ten dollars in my pocket, and not another rag to my name. Women are like flies: they settle on sugar or shit. I’m not saying I’m sugar, but she’s sure settled for shit now. My name is George Schmidt.’

“I said: ‘Yes, sir, you told me. I’m George Whitelaw.’ He wanted to know where I was going, what I was up to, and when I said I was hitchhiking, heading for New York, he asked if I would take his hand and help him along a bit, maybe until we could catch a ride. I forgot to mention that he had a German accent and was extremely stout, almost fat; he looked as if he’d been lying in a hammock all his life. But when I held his hand I felt the roughness, the immense strength of it. You wouldn’t have wanted a pair of hands like that around your throat. He said: ‘Yes, I have strong hands. I’ve worked as a masseur for fifty years, the last twelve in Palm Springs. You got any water?’ 

I gave him my canteen, which was still half full. And he said: ‘She left me here without even a drop of water. The whole thing took me by surprise. Though I can’t say it should have, knowing Ivory good as I did. That’s my wife. Ivory Hunter, she was. A stripper; she played the Chicago World’s Fair, 1932, and she would have been a star if it hadn’t been for that Sally Rand. Ivory invented this fan-dance thing and that Rand woman stole it off her. So Ivory said. Probably just more of her bullshit. Uh-oh, watch out for that rattler, he’s over there someplace, I can hear him really singing. There’s two things I’m scared of. Snakes and women. They have a lot in common. One thing they have in common is: the last thing that dies is their tail.’

“A couple of cars passed and I stuck out my thumb and the old man tried to flag them down with his stick, but we must have looked too peculiar—a dirty kid in dungarees and a blind fat man dressed in his city best. I guess we’d still be out there if it hadn’t been for this truckdriver. A Mexican. He was parked by the road fixing a flat. He could speak about five words of Tex-Mex, all of them four-letter, but I still remembered a lot of Spanish from the summer with Uncle Alvin in Cuba. So the Mexican told me he was on his way to El Paso, and if that was our direction, we were welcome aboard.

“But Mr. Schmidt wasn’t too keen. I had practically to drag him into the caboose. ‘I hate Mexicans. Never met a Mexican I liked. If it wasn’t for a Mexican … Him only nineteen and her I’d say from the touch of her skin, I’d say Ivory was a woman way past sixty. When I married her a couple of years ago, she said she was fifty-two. See, I was living in this trailer camp out on Route 111. One of those trailer camps halfway between Palm Springs and Cathedral City. 

Cathedral City! Some name for a dump that’s nothing but honky-tonks and pool halls and fag bars. The only thing you can say about it is Bing Crosby lives there. If that’s saying something. Anyway, living next to me in this other trailer is my friend Hulga. Ever since my wife died—she died the same day Hitler died—Hulga had been driving me to work; she works as a waitress at this Jew club where I’m the masseur. 

All the waiters and waitresses at the club are big blond Germans. The Jews like that; they really keep them stepping. So one day Hulga tells me she has a cousin coming to visit. Ivory Hunter. I forget her legal name, it was on the marriage certificate, but I forget. She had about three husbands before; she probably didn’t remember the name she was born with. Anyway, Hulga tells me that this cousin of hers, Ivory, used to be a famous dancer, but now she’s just come out of the hospital and she’s lost her last husband on account of she’s spent a year in the hospital with TB. That’s why Hulga asked her out to Palm Springs. 

Because of the air. Also, she didn’t have any place else to go. The first night she was there, Hulga invited me over, and I liked her cousin right away; we didn’t talk much, we listened to the radio mostly, but I liked Ivory. She had a real nice voice, real slow and gentle, she sounded like nurses ought to sound; she said she didn’t smoke or drink and she was a member of the Church of God, same as me. After that, I was over at Hulga’s almost every night.’ ”

GEORGE LIT A CIGARETTE, AND his wife tilted out a jigger more of the pepper vodka for him. To her surprise, she poured one for herself. A number of things about her husband’s narrative had accelerated her ever-present but usually Librium-subdued anxiety; she couldn’t imagine where his memoir was leading, but she knew there was some destination, for George seldom rambled. He had graduated third in his class at Yale Law School, never practiced law but had gone on to top his class at Harvard Business School; within the past decade he had been offered a presidential Cabinet post, and an ambassadorship to England or France or wherever he wanted. However, what had made her feel the need for red vodka, a ruby bauble burning in the firelight, was the disquieting manner in which George Whitelaw had become Mr. Schmidt; her husband was an exceptional mimic. He could imitate certain of their friends with infuriating accuracy. But this was not casual mimicry; he seemed entranced, a man fixed in another man’s mind.

“ ‘I had an old Chevy nobody had driven since my wife died. But Ivory got it tuned up, and pretty soon it wasn’t Hulga driving me to work and bringing me home, but Ivory. Looking back, I can see it was all a plot between Hulga and Ivory, but I didn’t put it together then. Everybody around the trailer park, and everybody that met her, all they said was what a lovely woman she was, big blue eyes and pretty legs. I figured it was just good-heartedness, the Church of God—I figured that was why she was spending her evenings cooking dinner and keeping house for an old blind man. One night we were listening to the Hit Parade on the radio, and she kissed me and rubbed her hand along my leg. Pretty soon we were doing it twice a day—once before breakfast and once after dinner, and me a man of sixty-nine. But it seemed like she was as crazy about my cock as I was about her cunt—’ ”

She tossed her vodka into the fireplace, a splash that made the flames hiss and flourish; but it was an idle protest: Mr. Schmidt would not be reproached.
“ ‘YES, SIR, IVORY WAS ALL cunt. Whatever way you want to use the word. It was exactly one month from the day I met her to the day I married her. She didn’t change much, she fed me good, she was always interested to hear about the Jews at the club, and it was me that cut down on the sex—way down, what with my blood pressure and all. 

But she never complained. We read the Bible together, and night after night she would read aloud from magazines, good magazines like Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post, until I fell asleep. She was always saying she hoped she died before I did because she would be heartbroken and destitute. It was true I didn’t have much to leave. No insurance, just some bank-savings that I turned into a joint account, and I had the trailer put in her name. No, I can’t say there was a harsh word between us until she had the big fight with Hulga.

“ ‘For a long time I didn’t know what the fight was about. All I knew was that they didn’t speak to each other any more, and when I asked Ivory what was going on, she said: “Nothing.” As far as she was concerned, she hadn’t had any falling-out with Hulga: “But you know how much she drinks.” That was true. Well, like I told you, Hulga was a waitress at the club, and one day she comes barging into the massage room. 

I had a customer on the table, had him there spread out buck-naked, but a lot she cared—she smelled like a Four Roses factory. She could hardly stand up. She told me she had just got fired, and suddenly she started swearing and pissing. She was hollering at me and pissing all over the floor. She said everybody at the trailer park was laughing at me. She said Ivory was an old whore who had latched onto me because she was down and out and couldn’t do any better. And she said what kind of a chowderhead was I? Didn’t I know my wife was fucking the balls off Freddy Feo since God knows when?

“ ‘Now, see, Freddy Feo was an itinerant Tex-Mex kid—he was just out of jail somewhere, and the manager of the trailer park had picked him up in one of those fag bars in Cat City and put him to work as a handyman. I don’t guess he could have been one-hundred-percent fag because he was giving plenty of the old girls around there a tickle for their money. One of them was Hulga. She was loop-de-do over him. 

On hot nights him and Hulga used to sit outside her trailer on her swing-seat drinking straight tequila, forget the lime, and he’d play the guitar and sing spic songs. Ivory described it to me as a green guitar with his name spelled out in rhinestone letters. I’ll say this, the spic could sing. But Ivory always claimed she couldn’t stand him; she said he was a cheap little greaser out to take Hulga for every nickel she had. Myself, I don’t remember exchanging ten words with him, but I didn’t like him because of the way he smelled. I have a nose like a bloodhound and I could smell him a hundred yards off, he wore so much brilliantine in his hair, and something else that Ivory said was called Evening in Paris.

“ ‘Ivory swore up and down it wasn’t so. Her? Her let a Tex-Mex monkey like Freddy Feo put a finger on her? She said it was because Hulga had been dumped by this kid that she was crazy and jealous and thought he was humping everything from Cat City to Indio. She said she was insulted that I’d listen to such lies, even though Hulga was more to be pitied than reviled. And she took off the wedding ring I’d given her—it had belonged to my first wife, but she said that didn’t make any difference because she knew I’d loved Hedda and that made it all the better—and she handed it to me and she said if I didn’t believe her, then here was the ring and she’d take the next bus going anywhere. So I put it back on her finger and we knelt on the floor and prayed together.

“ ‘I did believe her; at least I thought I did; but in some way it was like a seesaw in my head—yes, no, yes, no. And Ivory had lost her looseness; before she had an easiness in her body that was like the easiness in her voice. But now it was all wire—tense, like those Jews at the club that keep whining and scolding because you can’t rub away all their worries. Hulga got a job at the Miramar, but out at the trailer park I always turned away when I smelled her coming. Once she sort of whispered up beside me: “Did you know that sweet wife of yours gave the greaser a pair of gold earrings! But his boyfriend won’t let him wear them.” I don’t know. 

Ivory prayed every night with me that the Lord would keep us together, healthy in spirit and body. But I noticed … Well, on those warm summer nights when Freddy Feo would be out there somewhere in the dark, singing and playing his guitar, she’d turn off the radio right in the middle of Bob Hope or Edgar Bergen or whatever, and go sit outside and listen. She said she was looking at the stars: “I bet there’s no place in the world you can see the stars like here.” But suddenly it turned out she hated Cat City and the Springs. 

The whole desert, the sandstorms, summers with temperatures up to a hundred thirty degrees, and nothing to do if you wasn’t rich and belonged to the Racquet Club. She just announced this one morning. She said we should pick up the trailer and plant it down anywhere where the air was cool. Wisconsin. Michigan. I felt good about the idea; it set my mind to rest as to what might be going on between her and Freddy Feo.

“ ‘Well, I had a client there at the club, a fellow from Detroit, and he said he might be able to get me on as a masseur at the Detroit Athletic Club; nothing definite, only one of them maybe deals. But that was enough for Ivory. Twenty-three skidoo, and she’s got the trailer uprooted, fifteen years of planting strewn all over the ground, the Chevy ready to roll, and all our savings turned into traveler’s checks. Last night she scrubbed me top to bottom and shampooed my hair, and this morning we set off a little after daylight.

“ ‘I realized something was wrong, and I’d have known what it was if I hadn’t dozed off soon as we hit the highway. She must have dumped sleeping pills in my coffee.
“ ‘But when I woke up I smelled him. The brilliantine and the dime-store perfume. He was hiding in the trailer. Coiled back there somewhere like a snake. What I thought was: Ivory and the kid are going to kill me and leave me for the buzzards. 

She said, “You’re awake, George.” The way she said it, the slight fear, I could tell she knew what was going on in my head. That I’d guessed it all. I told her, Stop the car. She wanted to know what for? Because I had to take a leak. She stopped the car, and I could hear she was crying. As I got out, she said: “You been good to me, George, but I didn’t know nothing else to do. And you got a profession. There’ll always be a place for you somewhere.”

“ ‘I got out of the car, and I really did take a leak, and while I was standing there the motor started up and she drove away. I didn’t know where I was until you came along, Mr.…?’
“ ‘George Whitelaw.’ And I told him: ‘Jesus, that’s just like murder. Leaving a blind man helpless in the middle of nowhere. When we get to El Paso we’ll go to the police station.’
“He said: ‘Hell, no. She’s got enough trouble without the cops. She settled on shit—leave her to it. Ivory’s the one out in nowhere. Besides, I love her. A woman can do you like that, and still you love her.’ ”

GEORGE REFILLED HIS VODKA; she placed a small log on the fire, and the new rush of flame was only a little brighter than the furious red suddenly flushing her cheeks.
“That women do,” she said, her tone aggressive, challenging. “Only a crazy person … Do you think I could do something like that?”
The expression in his eyes, a certain visual silence, shocked her and made her avert her eyes, withdrawing the question. “Well, what happened to him?”
“Mr. Schmidt?”
“Mr. Schmidt.”

He shrugged. “The last I saw of him he was drinking a glass of milk in a diner, a truck stop outside El Paso. I was lucky; I got a ride with a trucker all the way to Newark. I sort of forgot about it. But for the last few months I find myself wondering about Ivory Hunter and George Schmidt. It must be age; I’m beginning to feel old myself.”
She knelt beside him again; she held his hand, interweaving her fingers with his. “Fifty-two? And you feel old?”

He had retreated; when he spoke, it was the wondering murmur of a man addressing himself. “I always had such confidence. Just walking the street, I felt such a swing. I could feel people looking at me—on the street, in a restaurant, at a party—envying me, wondering who is that guy. Whenever I walked into a party, I knew I could have half the women in the room if I wanted them. But that’s all over. Seems as though old George Whitelaw has become the invisible man. Not a head turns. I called Mimi Stewart twice last week, and she never returned the calls. I didn’t tell you, but I stopped at Buddy Wilson’s yesterday, he was having a little cocktail thing. There must have been twenty fairly attractive girls, and they all looked right through me; to them I was a tired old guy who smiled too much.”

She said: “But I thought you were still seeing Christine.”
“I’ll tell you a secret. Christine is engaged to that Rutherford boy from Philadelphia. I haven’t seen her since November. He’s okay for her; she’s happy and I’m happy for her.”
“Christine! Which Rutherford boy? Kenyon or Paul?”
“The older one.”
“That’s Kenyon. You knew that and didn’t tell me?”
“There’s so much I haven’t told you, my dear.”

Yet that was not entirely true. For when they had stopped sleeping together, they had begun discussing together—indeed, collaborating on—each of his affairs. Alice Kent: five months; ended because she’d demanded he divorce and marry her. Sister Jones: terminated after one year when her husband found out about it. Pat Simpson: a Vogue model who’d gone to Hollywood, promised to return and never had. Adele O’Hara: beautiful, an alcoholic, a rambunctious scene-maker; he’d broken that one off himself. Mary Campbell, Mary Chester, Jane Vere-Jones. Others. And now Christine.

A few he had discovered himself; the majority were “romances” she herself had stage-managed, friends she’d introduced him to, confidantes she had trusted to provide him with an outlet but not to exceed the mark.

“Well,” she sighed. “I suppose we can’t blame Christine. Kenyon Rutherford’s rather a catch.” Still, her mind was running, searching like the flames shivering through the logs: a name to fill the void. Alice Combs: available, but too dull. Charlotte Finch: too rich, and George felt emasculated by women—or men, for that matter—richer than himself. Perhaps the Ellison woman? The soigné Mrs. Harold Ellison who was in Haiti getting a swift divorce …

He said: “Stop frowning.”
“I’m not frowning.”
“It just means more silicone, more bills from Orentreich. I’d rather see the human wrinkles. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. We all, sometimes, leave each other out there under the skies, and we never understand why.”

AN ECHO, CAVERNS RESOUNDING: Jaime Sanchez and Carlos and Angelita; Hulga and Freddy Feo and Ivory Hunter and Mr. Schmidt; Dr. Bentsen and George, George and herself, Dr. Bentsen and Mary Rhinelander …

He gave a slight pressure to their interwoven fingers, and with his other hand, raised her chin and insisted on their eyes meeting. He moved her hand up to his lips and kissed its palm.
“I love you, Sarah.”
“I love you, too.”

But the touch of his lips, the insinuated threat, tautened her. Below stairs, she heard the rattle of silver on trays: Anna and Margaret were ascending with the fireside supper.
“I love you, too,” she repeated with pretended sleepiness, and with a feigned languor moved to draw the window draperies. Drawn, the heavy silk concealed the night river and the lighted riverboats, so snow-misted that they were as muted as the design in a Japanese scroll of winter night.

“George?” An urgent plea before the supper-laden Irishwomen arrived, expertly balancing their offerings: “Please, darling. We’ll think of somebody.”



The End