The light in our room shone beneath the door like a bright brass threshold. Margaret was in bed, reading.
“Margaret,” I said, “why did you marry me?”
She pretended not to look startled. It was a princessly gesture but it did not come off. “I had my reasons,” she said at last.
“I’ll bet you did,” I said. It had actually crossed my mind that I might have been a front man in some international plot. “What were they?”
“Why?”
“Because I must understand how I’m being used.”
“You’ll never understand that”
“Ah,” I said.
“Did you enjoy your walk with Mrs. Taylor?”
“I didn’t touch Mrs. Taylor.”
“I know that,” she said.
“You don’t seem very grateful for my fidelity.”
“You have no fidelity,” she said.
I was enjoying the conversation. People with unnamable sorrows touch and awe me. Margaret now struck me as one of these. It was very adult talk, I thought. I had the impression that our voices had actually changed— that my flat, midwestern vowels had rounded and that Margaret’s faint, Italianate English had become somehow Middle-European, the sound of a queen rather than a princess.
“Why did you marry me?” I repeated.
“Oh,” she said, “love.”
Outside the voices swelled. “‘Oh, bury me not,’” they sang, “‘on the lone prair-ee.’”
I waited for her to go on. She sat up in bed, and the sheet fell away from the royal breasts.
“‘Where the coyotes howl,’” they sang, “‘and the wind is free.’”
“A famous American folk song,” I said. “Jesus, these people feel sorry for themselves.”
Margaret was staring at me.
“Let me understand you,” I said. “Did you love me?”
“I’ve just told you.”
“But what was the mystery?”
“That’s the mystery.”
“Just that?”
“Yes.”
“Only that?”
“Yes.” She turned away.
“Well, that ties it,” I said, suddenly exploding. “That really does. That ties it. You’re the one who should have gone walking with Mrs. Taylor.”
“You’re insane.”
“I’m harmless.” I giggled. “Like everyone else.”
“What is it you want?” she shouted suddenly.
“What everybody wants,” I said calmly. “What you want, what Mrs. Marvin Taylor wants.”
“Happiness,” Margaret said contemptuously.
“Screw happiness. Immorality.”
It was odd, finally, to be in a position to say no, to deny others with a clear, free conscience. It came with age, I supposed. But really there was nothing to it. It was just an illusion of power. No one had any real power. No one did except maybe suicides in the brief moment between their self-violence and their deaths.
“Well,” I said, “cheer up, Principessa. And move over.”
“I don’t want to make love,” she said.
I shrugged.
“There are other people alive,” Margaret said after a while.
“Millions,” I said. “Zillions. That’s my point. It would be pretty silly to try to care for all of them.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that you care for all of them.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see. One for one. Double up. Like the buddy system.” I sat down on the edge of the bed.
“I don’t want to make love, I tell you,” Margaret said.
“In that case, pass the brochure. I want to read the literature.”
IV
Finally I understood what the trouble was. I had been confused by alternatives, overwhelmed by the extraordinary complications of ordinary life. Some men — and I was one — could function only under a pressure, a deadline, a doom. One hones himself against his needs, so he had better understand what those are.
But maybe, too, there had been a certain good husbandry in my bad marriage. There were, after all, natural laws — who knew it better? — and perhaps men, like farms, like phoenixes, had to lie low once in a while. Like Lome’s scrap iron and lint, nothing was ever a total loss; everything went on working for one, counting for something better than it seemed to. There was just so much faith that one could put in serendipity, however, and I decided that it was time to make a change in my life.
Compromises and disguises were out. The King of England walking Harlem in a zoot suit is only a white man in funny clothes. His Highness knows where his Highness’ bread is buttered. The secret agents, with guns, with transistor equipment, are right behind him. There has to be a deep amnesia of the soul. Indigence is the one thing you can’t fake. Low birth is all some of us have.
Still, the solution wasn’t to leave Margaret, only to get away from her. Divorce or separation would just have been a further complication. I had to get outside again, to enter the world like a nun in reverse. I recognized the difficulties. They talk about the nouveaux riches, and one knows what to expect, what to avoid, but who ever heard of the nouveaux poor, the nouveaux stricken?
One afternoon I told Margaret I felt guilty about my life.
“You’re just bored,” she said.
“No,” I said, “it would be wrong for me to be bored. I don’t do anything. I make no contribution. For the first time in my life I’m uneasy about people less fortunate than myself.” It was true in a way; at least it would have been if such people existed. I told her I had volunteered my services in the Police Athletic League and that I would be teaching Puerto Ricans body-building in a gym on the East Side. I don’t think she believed me. It was not a very inspired lie, but even its baldness served because it announced to Margaret that I was up to something, that I did not want to be disturbed.
The next day I took a room in a boarding house off Fifty-eighth Street and went to a pawnshop on Eight Avenue to lay in a wardrobe. I told the pawnbroker that I was an actor, that I needed a certain kind of clothes for the part I was playing, not seedy so much as shabby, and not shabby so much as tasteless, and not tasteless so much as anonymous.
“I see him as a guy in the bleachers,” I said. “He drinks beer. You know? Probably he’s not really from New York at all. Probably he’s originally from Gary, Indiana. He wears black shoes and powder-blue socks.”
“A hayseed,” the pawnbroker said.
“Well, yes and no,” I said. “My conception is more of a guy used to hard work in a factory, or somebody who wraps packages in a stockroom. He likes to watch people bowl. He likes to be comfortable. He wears wind- breakers. His pants turn over his belt.”
“Yeah,” the pawnbroker said, interested. “I think I see what you’re getting at. He could probably afford better but he’s ignorant.”
“That’s it.”
“He’s got underwear with big red ants painted on it,” the pawnbroker said.
“He wears wide ties.”
“There’s a loud pattern on his socks,” the pawnbroker said.
“Oh, an awful one,” I said.
“Yeah,” the pawnbroker said. “Yeah.”
“His wife is a waitress,” I said.
“Sure,” the pawnbroker said, “and now he drives a bus because he strained his back in the factory.”