She sat down on the edge of the bed again, and looked at the mass of black hair that hid his expressions by cast of unneeded shadow. “When I learned from Meg who she had been seeing, when I learned that she had slept with you, I knew I had to do something.” She twisted the air in nervous hands.
Then she went on. “When I saw you — I managed to get your address, this party tonight, from Meg — I couldn’t see what she saw in you. You have many women here, don’t you?”
He did not answer. He stared at the wall as if unable to tear his eyes away.
“Yes, of course you do. They must bother you terribly. It’s the distance you put between yourself and everyone. It’s the farawayness of you. That’s very appealing. I can see why Meg — you’re right, I know she’s wild, I didn’t want anyone capitalizing on that, she’s all I’ve got since Bert died — I can see why she came here. Your painting … why do you do it? You really aren’t very good, but the way you do it, the way … I watched. It was frightening. I had to watch.”
Ivor Balmi turned to her, lipped hesitatingly at his words, then said desperately, “Please. Go away. Go now. I don’t want you here. I want …”
Then he reached for her, she came to him, and from that moment their affair began its downhill slide.
At first, she came irregularly, once, perhaps twice a week. But as her intensity of feeling mounted for him, she found it more and more difficult to stay away. Then came the difficulties, the subterfuges, the guilt — for Meg knew something was afoot. Just what, she was unable to tell, but to Meg’s mother — whose name, Ivor Balmi learned almost a week later, was Christina — it was apparent that her daughter might soon begin to suspect the truth.
She mentioned it to Ivor one night, as they sat at his chipped, wobble-legged kitchen table.
“So what if she finds out?” he said, taking a bite from the fried chicken leg. She pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulders; there was a great deal of Ivor Balmi in the expression, the movement.
“Meg would be very hurt. I really think she loves you, Ivor.” She arched her eyebrows at him. He continued eating. “You’re so alone, Ivor. You’re always alone … and you don’t have to be that way. There are people who care about you, who love you, who just wait for a little return of that love …”
He had been listening imperiously, still eating. Now he threw down the chicken leg and glared at her. Once more she had spoken an unpleasant, piercing truth.
“Love;that’s just fine, just fine; love, is it?” Ivor Balmi chuckled. “You use that word like it was a dust mop — it’ll clean everything up. Love! You’ve got the wrong guy for that. Hate is more in my line. I know all about hate. Really I do. But I don’t know a damn thing about love.”
“Love is some kind of pigeonhole label; you feel need, you feel lust, you feel the boost to your ego, you feel lonely — call it love. Lump it all together; none of it makes the word. The word’s a label, a phoney, like ‘middle class’ or ‘beatnik’ or ‘the right way to do things.’ It doesn’t exist, except for people with clichés for synapses.”
“But if you want to know about hate,that I can tell you. I can expound for hours. I had a father who was simple; no, I mean really simple. He got into the Communist Party after the Depression, so you can’t even rationalize him on grounds of pie in the sky. He was pure and simple a humanitarian; he gave a damn about his fellow man. There’s room enough in the world for everyone, good or bad, he used to tell me, and he thought the Commies could do it. Maybe that’s one reason why I don’t want to get involved with people: you care too much, you’ll always get your throat stepped on. Yeah, he cared. What an ass. So when McCarthy cut loose, there was my old man, sitting in a chair in front of the committee, playing God. ‘What is your occupation?’ McCarthy asked him, and you know what he answered? ‘I’m a pedagogue.’ That was brilliant. It made all the eggheads watching the witch hunts on TV very happy. It also lost my old man his job. Hate? I know it inside and out. Hate was what I breathed on my block. No one talked to us. The grocer stopped giving credit, and that was that. Every night the ice cream man came by with his bells ringing, and I stood watching the other kids getting theirs; we couldn’t afford a five-cent ice cream sucker. Have you any idea what it is to be shunned? We were those Red Balmis. I used to have to fight my way home for lunch every day. It was lovely. ”
“Hate? You bet your ass I know it. So don’t talk to me about love. I hated my old man — you had to hate anyone that stupid — and I hated the world and I hated myself most of all. So don’t come sucking around me looking for little bird-leavings of love. They’ve all been gobbled by the vultures.”
“And that’s what I’ll do to you if you hang around. Fair warning. Hate is a kind of dry-rot; it’s catching.” He had been talking so fast, so intensely, his face had grown red, and around the jawbones quite white. His eyes were heavy and frosted over. He looked inward, seeing things.
After that discussion, she avoided making mental demands on him, in ways he might construe to mean attachments. She was in love with him — she needed no more involved diagnosis than that — and though she knew he was an incomplete man, in many ways a hollow man, she felt the need to be near him, even when he reverted to his former manner and excluded her completely from his world.
But there was change in Ivor Balmi. It showed in unsuspected ways, but most obviously in his painting:
A scene of intense light. Distantly the golden-belled trumpets blare heralding the appearance of the Straight Man, his hair almost paper-white. Columns of marauding starshine pour down, lighting the plain across which he walks. Gates within gates within gates open to him and the look on his face as he advances (four behind him, watching to see if he gets through, joyful to see he will) transfigures his basic homeliness. The apotheosis of simple man. The deification of groundlings.
Ivor Balmi sold the painting for two hundred and fifty dollars to the third person who viewed it at the Kulten Galleries, where Christina had taken it. It had taken her three days to convince Ivor that she should take it for display. He acquiesced to her wishes with a shy smile, finally.
The night they celebrated receipt of the check for the sale of the painting, Meg came to call.
It was a bad scene, filled with the sort of true-confession bathos that Ivor Balmi reviled with all his heart, yet was drawn into like a maelstrom. When it was over, and Meg had called her mother a whore and had steamed out of the loft (“Never to be seen again, good God! ” said Christina), they sat staring at one another emptily.