He offered me a cigar, which I declined.
He cleared his throat.
He shifted his weight in the big easy chair.
Then he said, “Bert, no matter what you think, I never said anything to anybody about you being a radical.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Do you believe me?” he asked.
“I believe you,” I said. But I didn’t.
The job was a good one. Circle ran a huge operation, with two mills on the West Coast, another in New York State, and of course the one in Joliet. Since the company manufactured a wide variety of paper products — newsprint, industrial papers, bond and writing and ledger and manifold papers, bags and boxes, book and offset papers, butcher’s wrap, you name it — my selling job took me to a great many different kinds of retail outlets, and I was certainly never bored. Circle’s main paper product that year, though (as was the case with ail of the Joliet mills), was wallpaper, and I guess I earned most of my commissions selling to the housewares sections of the big department stores, or to the smaller paint and wallpaper retailers scattered all over Chicago. By the end of my third week at Circle, I began to think that Allen had done me a big favor. My earlier ideas on how to become a corporation executive now seemed terribly naive. The way to get into the board room was not by spiking and rolling logs off the conveyer belt. This was the way. I found myself outlining a plan for my rise through the Circle Mill ranks, allowing three to live years for each phase of the escalation, from salesman to District Manager, in which position I would begin supervising salesmen, and fighting with plant managers for deliveries, and influencing mill schedules, and meeting regularly with management, and then moving up to Sales Manager where my salary would take a sudden jump and company stock would be offered to me, and then on to Vice President-Sales where I would undoubtedly come into conflict with the Vice President-Manufacturing because the next job upward on the ladder was Executive Vice President, third highest position at Circle, with only the Chairman of the Board and the President of the company above. This was 1920. If everything went as I expected it to go, I could become President of Circle by as early as 1932, but certainly no later than 1940. None of it seemed beyond my grasp. I was, perhaps, just an uneducated lumberjack from the Wisconsin woods, but (as I had once told Mr. Moreland) this was America, and I knew that here a man could become whatever he chose to become.
The Garretts entered my life only peripherally in those early days at Circle. We saw them socially perhaps once a week, sometimes less, and I knew that our friendship was dying a normal death, and that it might have been dead already had his betrayal not, paradoxically, spurred a renewed interest in it. What I had earlier regarded as his inquiring mind, I came to realize was only a sponge invariably absorbing the wrong opinions of others. I can remember one night in the parlor of the Garrett flat when I mentioned that Circle had given me a brand-new Ford to drive, and Allen suddenly began endorsing all the horse manure being printed in the Dearborn Independent, rising to his full height and telling us that the claims about an international Jewish leadership were absolutely true, that the Jews were hellbent on confounding and confusing and finally overcoming the Gentile world by creating wars, revolutions, and civil disorders, that the Jews were getting all the profits from the sale of illegal whiskey, the Jewish landlords were charging exorbitant rents, (he Jewish manufacturers were making all the shorter skirts responsible for our decadence (while Rosie’s skirt inched higher and higher every week), the Jewish producers were making movies about orgies and putting on filthy Broadway plays, the Jews were doing this, the Jews were doing that, the Jews in short were responsible for everything that was wrong in the nation and the world because, just as the Independent had reported, everything was “under the mastery of the Jews.” I didn’t argue with him. Nancy and I left early instead. I knew the friendship was dying, and yet I clung to it, telling myself at first that Allen really wasn’t too bad a fellow, telling myself that Rosie was good company for my wife, but wondering even then, I suppose, if I wasn’t just waiting for exactly what was happening now.
Now, two months and a little bit later, in an alleyway outside a speakeasy, I knew the sweet revenge of kissing Allen’s wife, hot and trembling in the sweltering summer night as a gang of kids went by in one of Mr. Ford’s tin lizzies, and inside the vocalist sang, “And so I think I’ll travel on, to Avalon.” She put her tongue into my mouth, she pulled her face away from mine and laughed, she arched herself against me, and said, “Where’d he park the car? Let’s get in the car, Bert.”
“Rosie,” I said, “we’d best go back.”
“No,” she answered, and took my hand.
In the rear of the Jeffery Sedan, the windows open, passing automobile lights intermittently illuminating the interior roof, Rosie lay back against the cushioned seat and lifted her dress above her waist and said, “Do you like my stockings rolled?” and I touched her legs, touched silk the color of her flesh (a year ago, two years ago, a century ago, girls wore stockings that were either white or black), “All the girls are doing it,” Rosie said. (Doing what? Turkey trot? The world had changed, everything had been changed by the war.) Her mouth in the darkness was bright with paint, there was a vapid smile upon it, would she later claim that she’d been drunk? The smell of homemade gin climbed into the steamy interior of that silent automobile, our alcohol-scented breaths rushing to merge a moment before we locked lips again, my hands under her dress, clutching at her. She reached up with her thumbs to hook the elastic of her teddies, and then pulled them down over her belly and her thighs. I could dimly see the pale whiteness of her skin and against it a narrow black triangle, “Kiss me,” she said, my hands on her flesh so warm beneath the white tulle, her legs opening now, her slender fingers pressing the back of my neck, I thought again of a silent forest (there was, as always, that moment when she seemed to resist) and of a boy whose dreams in the violet dusk were proscribed by an insulated world, and I entered her, and she said, “What, Bert, what?” and I think I whispered, “I don’t know,” (and then she trembled, and I could hear her groan again, almost as if she were in pain) and I sought her mouth, sought that bright scarlet slash and drew from it whatever secrets Rosie knew, drew from it prognostications, scathing visions of what was yet to come, tasting of gin, long silken legs enveloping me, distant music swelling through the open car windows, “Here’s the Japanese sandman, trade him silver for gold,” (and there was a long heavy shudder and then a hundred echoing crackings, and then there was silence).
I drove them home in the Chicago midnight.
There was the smell of gin in the automobile, that and a stronger scent, but Allen Garrett was unconscious on the back seat and incapable of detecting Rosie’s lingering feral aroma, incapable of knowing what I had done to his wife not a half-hour before. She sat beside me now with her legs recklessly crossed, coat open, skirt high on her thighs, the rolled stockings lewdly suggestive (a Chicago streetwalker had been quoted in last week’s newspaper as saying, “You can’t tell the ladies from the trollops any more.”) I did not think Rosie Garrett was a trollop, but I’m not sure I thought she was a lady, either. I knew only that I had taken her with an explosive violence I had never before experienced, and felt now the same confusing aftermath of shame and guilt I had known in France, when i’d failed to stop what was happening to that little girl. I told myself as Rosie sat beside me with her head thrown back against the seat, humming “Avalon” as though I needed reminders of what we had together accomplished in the space of five minutes, told myself that this was the first time and the last time, and knew even then that I was lying to myself. But I tried nonetheless to understand what was happening, because it all seemed to be part of the bewildering labyrinth that had been constructed around me without my knowledge or consent. I felt as though I had, in the past few months, become a very minor if not totally insignificant figure in a changing landscape over which I had no personal control, as though the events of my own life were only secondary to the much larger events taking place. But more than that, it seemed to me that the nucleus of my intimate universe had somehow become dislocated, the nucleus was no longer me, Bertram A. Tyler. I was, instead, only an expendable moon that could be burned to cinders in the upper atmosphere without being missed or mourned, in danger of being replaced in an instant by some other revolving satellite created in outer space from the boiling matter of our time. I was certainly blameless for what had happened (Rosie’s hand on my thigh now, fingers widespread; strangers at eleven, lovers at midnight) if I could point to the speed of the modern-day world as the source of my confusion, the dial on the telephone, the closed automobile, the shorter skirts, the more liberal drinking habits (in themselves a confusing paradox), the whole surging momentum of a nation rushing back to a “normalcy” quite unlike anything it had known before. I blamed all these things, and hoped to become blameless in the process, but the guilt persisted.