III.
What we then heard was the somewhat surprising news that Coralyn had gone into business for herself—she had opened a literary agency in partnership with a young Frenchman, a Greenwich Village Frenchman, named something-or-other Rivière. She solicited my wife’s business, and Mabel politely refused, but asked her down for a week-end. To this Coralyn replied that she was too busy, but suggested that if we should happen to be in New York we should look her up; she had an apartment (as I recall it) in East 35th Street. As it happened, I was planning at that very moment to go to New York on business; and when, two weeks later, I took the train, I wired Coralyn to meet me, if she could, for lunch. I don’t know quite what I expected would occur; but I do know that I thought our little affair would have a kind of recrudescence—as indeed, in a way, it did. When we met, amid the marble columns of the Hotel Belmont lobby, and sat down together on a gilt and red-plush sofa, I came under her spell as sharply and deliciously as before; and she too (as she told me later) felt not only a revival of her feeling for me, but a deepening also. As a matter of fact, it was at this moment that she began to make a sort of father of me, or father-confessor; though other feelings were mixed with this as well. As for me, I was again in love with her, but in a very curious and unanalyzable way. Did I feel sorry for her? Perhaps. At any rate, I noticed at the very outset a change in her, and one that disturbed me, made me a little unhappy. She was prettier, maturer, gentler, softer—but also—could I be mistaken?—in some indefinable way cheaper. Greenwich Village, or New York, had already left its mark on her.
“You’ve got on too much lipstick,” I said.
“And observe the eyebrows—I’ve plucked them out.”
“So I see. The exquisite eyebrows of the night-moth.”
“And admire the snakeskin shoes, for God’s sake! Aren’t they the bee’s moccasins?” She flourished a foot at me, a very smart foot, and prodded my ankle with her toe, laughing.
I admired her shoes, her frock, her hat, her gloves, taking the opportunity to pinch her little finger; and at once the same sort of delirium came over us that had so suddenly overwhelmed us at New Haven. But with a difference. For while we continued our light banter, at lunch, over a bad bottle of wine, I was continually aware, beneath it, of a deep melancholy, a note as of desperateness, even of tragedy. She was, I felt sure, unhappy, or bewildered—she made one think of a lost child. Even when she laughed—which as always she did a good deal—I seemed to detect an evasiveness in her, a fugitiveness, a flight from something; her eyes would explore mine and waver away; she would make a joke, only the next instant to catch her breath as if in tension. Her agency, she said, was flourishing. Her partner was a charmer—she had met him at a party.
“Are you in love with him?”
“Oh, no! You know my notions about love. It’s a fake.”
“But you are in love with somebody. I can see it.”
“Have I got red wings on? Are my eyes like stars? Philip, you’re a scream. Where’s your purple beard?”
“I shaved it off. But you’re unhappy.”
“No. But I’m afraid!… Let’s get a taxi.”
Her apartment, it turned out, was sublet from Rivière, who had “taken a room in the Village.” Some of his things were still about—a raincoat, a couple of hats, a pipe rack hung with dirty pipes, a violin case. She waved a hand at them.
“He’s coming to get them—some day. Would you like to meet him?”
“No. Why should I?”
“I’d like to know what you think of him. He wants to marry me.”
“The devil he does!”
“But I don’t think—oh, I don’t know.”
I put my arms around her—she rested her hands on my breast and kissed me, at first lightly, quickly, repeatedly, laughing a little, and then, all of a sudden, with an extraordinary ecstasy of surrender, murmuring softly into my mouth as she did so.
“You’re nice, Philip.”
“So are you, Coralyn. But you’re unhappy.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me why.”
“I will—but not now.”
“Tell me.”
“Don’t be a nuisance.”
She drew back from me, laughing, her hands still on my breast, and I saw that tears were in her eyes.
“I’ll tell you at breakfast,” she said, “and in the meantime, for God’s sake, let’s be happy!”
And we were, with such happiness, such ecstasy—perhaps the sharper for that—as can come to two people who know, every moment, beneath, around, above their happiness, the shadow of tragedy. Perhaps the sense of time, the sense of doom, played into our hands. At all events, everything conspired to make that twenty-four hours the happiest we ever knew together. It rained, and we walked in the rain all the way to the museum, where we scandalized the other visitors (who were very few) by making an absurdity of everything. Coralyn was at her best; at her best and most tomboyish and most ridiculous. The Turners reminded her of dishes on which poached eggs and strawberry jam had been successively eaten; she whinnied before the El Grecos; and the Rodin sculptures, she pretended, made her sick, reminding her of the “sort of pale underdeveloped over-involved things you see in bottles in a medical school.” She kissed me behind the model of the Parthenon, before Manet’s parrot portrait, in the presence of a mummy, and—what was worse—in the presence also of a very solemn museum attendant, who had come unexpectedly from behind the plaster horse. She declared that I had gray hair, and that she was a disgrace to me; taking my handkerchief out of my pocket, as she said so, to blow her nose.
“You’re an old fogey, Philip.”
“I know it.”
“You’re a darling, Philip.”
“Of course.”
“I think you ought to wear sideburns and a stock, and carry a gray umbrella.”
“Why not a bird-cage?”
“Or an organ and a monkey. Let me be your monkey, Philip.”
And at once she imitated, startlingly, a monkey, grinning rabidly and searching for fleas under her armpits. She was perfectly hideous; dowagers and art students stared; and I adored her, at the same time leading her quickly into another gallery.
After that we walked in the Park in the rain, admired the wet riders on their wet horses, admired the reservoir, the camels, the ducks and swans (I told her about the Italian immigrant, newly arrived, who though they were wild, and shot a brace for his supper), and proceeded down Sixth Avenue (my favorite street) to a French table d’hôte dinner. Everything was as delightful as could be. We dawdled over the bad cocktails, we dawdled again over the cognac and coffee, amused ourselves with the conversations at the adjacent tables, all the while with a feeling that we were avoiding the issue. Coralyn was gay; she told me about the wild parties she had been to, in the Village, and of the freaks she had met. Epicenes of both sexes. Professional Bohemians, careful cultivators of the attic and the coal-hole. She assured me that I wouldn’t at all like the sort of thing; I agreed with her. Once at a dance a well-known novelist had bitten her on the shoulder, just before he passed out in the middle of the floor. So-and-so, the publisher, had insisted on seeing her home—very affectionately—and had been sick in the cab. She had made a friend of a policeman, who had introduced her to a new speakeasy—a very nice one. She had gone with him there several times. And so on and so on.…