Richard’s novel was about to be published, and it promised to be very successful. Vivaldo, to his confusion and relief, had not found it very remarkable. But he had not had the courage to say this to Richard or to admit to himself that he would never have read the novel if Richard had not written it.
All the street sounds eventually ceased — motors, and the silky sound of tires, footfalls, curses, pieces of songs, and loud and prolonged good nights; the last door in his building slammed, the last murmurs, rustling, and creaking ended. The night grew still around him and his apartment grew cold. He lit the oven. They swarmed, then, in the bottom of his mind, his cloud of witnesses, in an air as heavy as the oven heat, clustering, really, around the desired and unknown Ida. Perhaps it was she who caused them to be so silent.
He stared into the streets and thought — bitterly, but also with a chilling, stunned sobriety — that, though he had been seeing them so long, perhaps he had never known them at all. The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived — nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died — through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present, then he was present still, and his world would open up before him.
Now the girl who lived across the street, whose name, he knew, was Nancy, but who reminded him of Jane — which was certainly why he never spoke to her — came in from her round of the bars and the coffee houses with yet another boneless young man. They were everywhere, which explained how she met them, but why she brought them home with her was a somewhat more sinister question. Those who wore their hair long wore beards; those who wore theirs short felt free to dispense with this useful but somewhat uneasy emphasis. They read poetry or they wrote it, furiously, as though to prove that they had been cut out for more masculine pursuits. This morning’s specimen wore white trousers and a yachting cap, and a paranoiac little beard jutted out from the bottom half of his face. This beard was his most aggressive feature, his only suggestion of hardness or tension. The girl, on the other hand, was all angles, bone, muscle, jaw; even her breasts seemed stony. They walked down the street, hand in hand, but not together. They paused before her stoop and the girl staggered. She leaned against him in an agony of loathing, belching alcohol; his rigidity suggested that her weight was onerous; and they climbed the short steps to the door. Here she paused and smiled at him, coquettishly raising those stony breasts as she pulled back her hair with her hands. The boy seemed to find this delay intolerable. He muttered something about the cold, pushing the girl in before him.
Well, now, they would make it — make what? not love, certainly — and should he be standing at this window twenty-four hours hence, he would see the same scene repeated with another boy.
How could they endure it? Well, he had been there. How had he endured it? Whiskey and marijuana had helped: he was a pretty good liar and that had helped; and most women inspired great contempt in him and that had helped. But there was more to it than that. After all, the country, the world — this city — was full of people who got up in the morning and went to bed at night and, mainly, throughout their lives, to the same bed. They did whatever it was they were supposed to do, and they raised their children. And perhaps he didn’t like these people very much, but, then, he didn’t, on the other hand, know them. He supposed that they existed because he had been told that they did; presumably, the faces he saw on subways and in the streets belonged to these people, who were admirable because they were numerous. His mother and father and his married sister and her husband and their friends were part of this multitude, and his younger brother would belong to them soon. And what did he know about them, really, except that they were ashamed of him? They didn’t know that he was real. It seemed that they didn’t, for that matter, know that they were real, but he was insufficiently simple to find this notion comforting.
He watched a lone man come up the street, his tight black overcoat buttoned to the neck, looking back from time to time as though he hoped he were being followed. Then the garbage truck came up the street, like a gray brainless insect. He watched the garbage being loaded. Then there was nothing, no one. The light was growing stronger. Soon, alarm clocks would begin to ring and the houses would expel the morning people. Then he thought of the scene which would now be occurring between the boy and the girl in the room.
The yellow electric light, self-consciously indirect, would by now have been discovered to be useless and would have been turned off. The girl would have taken off her shoes and turned on her radio or her hi-fi set and would be lying on the bed. The gray light, coming in through the monk’s-cloth blinds, would, with the malice of the noncommittal, be examining every surface, corner, angle, of the unloved room. The music would not be loud. They would have poured drinks by now and the girl’s drink would be on the table. The boy’s would be between his hands. He would be sitting on the bed, turned a little away from the girl, staring at the floor. His cap would have been pushed further back. And the silence, beneath the music, would be tremendous with their fear. Presently, one of them would make a move to conquer this. If it were the girl, the movement would be sighing and halting — sighing because of need, halting because of hostility. If it were the boy, the movement would be harshly or softly brutaclass="underline" he would lunge over the girl as though rape were in his mind, or he would try to arouse her lust by means of feathery kisses, meant to be burning, which he had seen in the movies. Friction and fantasy could not fail to produce a physiological heat and hardness; and this sheathed pressure between her thighs would be the girl’s signal to moan. She would toss her head a little and hold the boy more tightly and they would begin their descent into confusion. Off would come the cap — as the bed sighed and the gray light stared. Then his jacket would come off. His hands would push up the sweater and unlock the brassiere. Perhaps both might wish to pause here and begin a discovery of each other, but neither would dare. She moaned and clung to darkness, he removed the sweater. He struggled unlovingly with her breasts; the sound of her gasps foreshadowed his failure. Then the record on the hi-fi came to an end, or, on the radio, a commercial replaced the love song. He pulled up her skirt. Then the half-naked girl, with a small, apologetic murmur, rose from the bed, switched off the machine. Standing in the center of the room, she might mock her nakedness with a small, cruel joke. Then she would vanish into the john. The boy would finish his drink and take off everything except his undershorts. When the girl reappeared, both would be ready.