“No,” she said, sniffling, burying her face against the front of his shirt. “Telling me isn’t enough, darling.”
He stepped back, dropping his hands, turning cool. “Then what do I have to do? You want to tie a bell on me? You want to keep me in reach twenty-four hours a day?”
She wiped her eyes with her hands and looked up, straightening, defiance seeping into her fibers; she said, “I’m sorry I went all to pieces. I guess I’m tired. But I’ve never seen you snappish like this-do you get like this whenever you go to see your mother? Is this the effect she has on you?”
He stared at her in slack-jawed amazement. “What the devil does my mother have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know. But every time I mention her, you bristle.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Then why haven’t you taken me to meet her?”
The thought of such a meeting made him smile. “My dear, she’d chew you to ribbons, believe me. I’m doing you a favor by keeping you apart.”
“Why do you assume she’d hate me? Because she hates all your women? Is she jealous of them? Do you think it’s an accident that by adding just one letter you can change ‘mother’ to ‘smother’? I’m beginning to get very strange feelings about your-”
“That’s enough,” he snapped. “That’s God damned well enough. You’re one hundred percent off base-let’s just keep my mother out of it from now on, all right? There are things beyond your understanding, Anne dear. I have a strong feeling of loyality to my family-we Wyatts are tribal creatures in a way you could never comprehend. It has nothing to do with the cheap Freudian cliches you seem to have bouncing around in your head. My mother doesn’t dominate me. I am not a concealed, mother-tyrannized homosexual. I’m not a hagridden victim of momism. Can’t you trust me when I tell you it’s better that you don’t meet my mother for a while? She’s a sixty-seven-year-old sachem, she’s vicious and bawdy and hard to take, and if I’m to avoid having the two of you start scratching each other’s eyes out, I’ll have to pave the way with her gradually, get her used to the idea-after all, it’s been at least thirty years since she last spoke to a single person, outside of shopkeepers and servants, who didn’t belong to a family that was descended from Newport society or an ambassador to the Court of St. James. She’s old and she’s stubborn, and it’s going to take me time to bring her around. Darling, I’ve told you all this before-you just don’t seem to-”
“I’m sorry, Steve,” she said. “I don’t believe you.”
He blurted, “Why not?” and immediately realized that what he should have said was, I don’t give a damn whether you believe me or not. He tried to cover the lapse by sweeping her into the circle of his arms and murmuring, “Oh, look here, darling, let’s not quarrel. I love you, you know-with all my heart.” He caressed her slowly, gently, beginning to smile at her.
She said faintly, “I wish I could understand all this. I’m afraid.”
“Of what?”
“I just don’t want to be hurt.”
“I could never hurt you,” he breathed, and tipped her face up with his finger to kiss her mouth. Within his palm, through the fabric of the nightie, her nipple hardened.
“Oh, Steve darling,” she said, with a long breath escaping; she began to smile with childlike eagerness. “I’m so sorry-forgive me?”
He laughed in his throat and carried her to the bed. Happy with the cruelty of planting doubts in her mind, he made love to her languorously and quietly.
Afterward he lay back, drowsy, caressing her absently.
She said, “Talk to me, darling.”
After a pause he said, “About what?”
21. Russell Hastings
By the time Russ Hastings arrived at the airport Saturday morning, he was in a state of depressed anxiety that bordered on paranoid rage. In the past twelve hours the world had smitten him from every direction with petty, maddening annoyances. His shoelace had broken; he had tripped on it and practically brained himself tumbling into the elevator, the floor of which was four inches below where it should have been. After he had plunged to the back and narrowly regained his balance, the bored elevator operator had said, “Watch ya step, buddy,” and Hastings had wanted to strangle him. Later, thinking about it, he had burst out laughing on a crowded street corner, where passing pedestrians gave him startled glances and edged away from him.
Too restless to go straight home from Carol McCloud’s last night, he had gone walking; somehow he had found himself, near midnight, on upper Broadway on the fringes of Harlem, buying an early edition of the Times and watching a workman on a ladder fix new letters on a movie marquee. On the dark side streets around him took place the transactions of night commerce: burglaries, furtive exchanges of money and narcotics. The lonely outcries in the hot night might have been those of people being bitten by rats in the sullen wretched tenements. He walked slowly down the gray sidewalks, avoiding refuse and shuffling bums; he passed a clutch of fags on parade, cruising for a mark, and a Spanish streetwalker wearing a loose, flowing cotton dress-he tried to ascertain her figure, but the dress made it hard to tell; she gave him a smile, and he went on, an innocent victim among innocent victims. A police van crossed Broadway, moving slowly, collecting the corpses of the ones who died in the tropical night. He felt foolish, disturbed, cowardly-like a pale dude among cowboys. If only he had seen action in the Army, he thought-it had been peacetime during his two years’ service. If only he had seen the worst. I am still naive. He knew these hard black faces under the Harlem street lights-violent ones, dope peddlers, muggers, thieves-but in his guts they were only dull black faces, Yassuh boss Nigras-shif’less and got rhythm, but violent? Impossible: he had never himself seen that kind of violence, and therefore he did not believe in it.
That had been last night. This morning he had gone into a coffee shop for breakfast, and a waiter had spilled coffee on his cuff. There was hardly time to rush back and change into an old tweed suit which he hadn’t packed because it was too warm. Then, breakfastless, he had stood on a corner in ten minutes’ growing panic before a taxi appeared.
Now there was the long hassle at the check-in counter-it seemed the airline had sold the same seat to another passenger as well, as airlines were wont to do. He had to pull rank by showing his government I.D. before they would let him on the plane. He knew full well the airlines had as much feeling toward their passengers as an armed robber had toward his victims, but it still enraged him. The eternal innocent. He made the half-mile walk down the echoing corridor, changing his carry-on suitcase from hand to hand every few hundred yards, going past the sign No Smoking Beyond This Point thinking of Jennys with struts and doped fabric-nostalgic for an era he hadn’t even known. He reached the gate in time to hear the obligatory public-address announcement that the flight would be delayed twenty minutes “due to frammissoshemlorbesan,” and he glared at the check-in man while someone stepped on his foot and left a scuffed dent on his shoe. The high, shrill whine of a plane moved past outside, and the peculiar stench of jet-engine exhaust stung his nostrils.
In time the plane boarded and taxied four miles to a runway where eighteen jets stood in line waiting to take off. He tried to adjust himself in the seat, which, neither sitting nor reclining, had clearly been designed with something other than a human body in mind.
Seventy minutes after its scheduled departure time the plane got off, launched by fifty thousands pound of pollutant thrust. He closed his eyes and drowsed. But of course every six minutes a stewardess woke him up to inquire if he wanted a magazine or a drink, or insist that he uncross his legs so she could tip down the folding table, which sat empty above his cramped knees for twenty minutes before she set before him a meal reminiscent of fried concrete garnished with fossil ferns, served on a wood-grained plastic tray. “I don’t mind plastic,” he said unreasonably, “but why does it always have to look like something else? Why can’t they just let it look like plastic?”