Desperate Characters
Paula Fox

Introduction by

Jonathan Franzen

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

No End to It: Rereading Desperate Characters

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

No End to It: Rereading Desperate Characters

On a first reading, Desperate Characters is a novel of suspense. Sophie Bentwood, a forty-year-old Brooklynite, is bitten by a stray cat to which she’s given milk, and for the next three days she wonders what the bite is going to bring her: death of rabies? shots in the belly? nothing at all? The engine of the book is Sophie’s cold-sweat dread. As in more conventional suspense novels, the stakes are life and death and, perhaps, the fate of the Free World. Sophie and her husband, Otto, are pioneering urban gentry in the late 1960s, when the civilization of the Free World’s leading city seems to be crumbling under a barrage of garbage, vomit, and excrement, vandalism, fraud, and class hatred. Otto’s longtime friend and law partner, Charlie Russel, quits the firm and attacks Otto savagely for his conservatism. Otto complains that a slovenly rural family’s kitchen says “one thing” to him—it says die—and, indeed, this seems to be the message he gets from almost everything in his changing world. Sophie, for her part, wavers between dread and a strange wish to be harmed. She’s terrified of a pain she’s not sure she doesn’t deserve. She clings to a world of privilege even as it suffocates her.

Along the way, page by page, are the pleasures of Paula Fox’s prose. Her sentences are small miracles of compression and specificity, tiny novels in themselves. This is the moment of the cat bite:

She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human touch, and she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as it struck at her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sank its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified, yet conscious enough of Otto’s presence to smother the cry that arose in her throat as she jerked her hand back from that circle of barbed wire.

By imagining a dramatic moment as a series of physical gestures—by paying close attention—Fox makes room here for each aspect of Sophie’s complexity: her liberality, her self-delusion, her vulnerability, and, above all, her married-person’s consciousness. Desperate Characters is the rare novel that does justice to both sides of marriage, both hate and love, both her and him. Otto is a man who loves his wife. Sophie is a woman who downs a shot of whiskey at six o’clock on a Monday morning and flushes out the kitchen sink “making loud childish sounds of disgust.” Otto is mean enough to say, “Lotsa luck, fella” when Charlie leaves the firm; Sophie is mean enough to ask him, later, why he said it; Otto is mortified when she does; Sophie is mortified for having mortified him.

The first time I read Desperate Characters, in 1991, I fell in love with it. It seemed to me obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow. It seemed inarguably great. And because I’d recognized my own troubled marriage in the Bentwoods’, and because the novel had appeared to suggest that the fear of pain is more destructive than pain itself, and because I wanted very much to believe this, I reread it almost immediately. I hoped that the book, on a second reading, might actually tell me how to live.

It did no such thing. It became, instead, more mysterious—became less of a lesson and more of an experience. Previously invisible metaphoric and thematic densities began to emerge. My eye fell, for example, on a sentence describing dawn’s arrival in a living room: “Objects, their outlines beginning to harden in the growing light, had a shadowy, totemic menace.” In the growing light of my second reading, I saw every object in the book begin to harden in this way. Chicken livers, for example, are introduced in the opening paragraph as a delicacy and as the centerpiece of a cultivated dinner—as the essence of old-world civilization. (“You take raw material and you transform it,” the leftist Leon remarks much later in the novel. “That is civilization.”) A day later, after the cat has bitten Sophie and she and Otto have started fighting back, the leftover livers become bait for the capture and killing of a wild animal. Cooked meat is still the essence of civilization; but what a much more violent thing civilization now appears to be! Or follow the food in another direction; see Sophie, shaken, on a Saturday morning, trying to shore up her spirits by spending money on a piece of cookware. She goes to the Bazaar Provençal to buy herself an omelet pan, a prop for a “hazy domestic dream” of French ease and cultivation. The scene ends with the saleswoman throwing up her hands “as though to ward off a hex” and Sophie fleeing with a purchase almost comically emblematic of her desperation: an hourglass egg timer.

Although Sophie’s hand is bleeding in this scene, her impulse is to deny it. The third time I read Desperate Characters—I’d assigned it in a fiction-writing class that I was teaching—I began to pay more attention to these denials. Sophie issues them more or less nonstop throughout the book: It’s all right. Oh, it’s nothing. Oh, well, it’s nothing. Don’t talk to me about it. THE CAT WASN’T SICK! It’s a bite, just a bite! I won’t go running off to the hospital for something as foolish as this. It’s nothing. It’s much better. It’s of no consequence. These repeated denials mirror the underlying structure of the novel: Sophie flees from one potential haven to another, and each in turn fails to protect her. She goes to a party with Otto, she sneaks out with Charlie, she buys herself a present, she seeks comfort in old friends, she reaches out to Charlie’s wife, she tries to phone her old lover, she agrees to go to the hospital, she catches the cat, she takes to bed, she tries to read a French novel, she flees to her beloved country house, she thinks about moving to another time zone, she thinks about adopting children, she destroys an old friendship: nothing brings relief. Her last hope is to write to her mother about the cat bite, to “strike the exact note calculated to arouse the old woman’s scorn and hilarity”—to make her plight into art, in other words. But Otto throws her ink bottle at the wall.

What is Sophie running from? The fourth time I read Desperate Characters, I hoped I’d get an answer. I wanted to figure out, finally, whether it’s a happy thing or a terrible thing that the Bentwoods’ life breaks open on the last page of the book. I wanted to “get” the final scene. But I still didn’t get it. I consoled myself with the idea that good fiction is defined, in large part, by its refusal to offer the easy answers of ideology, the cures of a therapeutic culture, or the pleasantly resolving dreams of mass entertainment. Maybe Desperate Characters wasn’t so much about answers as about the persistence of questions. I was struck by Sophie’s resemblance to Hamlet—another morbidly self-conscious character who receives a disturbing and ambiguous message, undergoes torments while trying to decide what the message means, and finally puts himself in the hands of a providential “divinity” and accepts his fate. For Sophie Bentwood, the ambiguous message comes not from a ghost but from a cat bite, and her agony is less about uncertainty than about an unwillingness to face the truth. Near the end, when she addresses a divinity and says, “God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside,” it’s not a moment of revelation. It’s a moment of relief.

A book that has fallen even briefly out of print can put a strain on the most devoted reader’s love. In the way that a man might regret certain shy mannerisms in his wife that cloud her beauty, or a woman might wish that her husband laughed less loudly at his own jokes, though the jokes are very funny, I’ve suffered for the tiny imperfections that might prejudice potential readers against Desperate Characters. I’m thinking of the stiffness and impersonality of the opening paragraph, the austerity of the opening sentence, the creaky word “repast.” As a lover of the book, I now appreciate how the formality and stasis of this paragraph set up the short, sharp line of dialogue that follows (“The cat is back”), but what if a reader never makes it past “repast”? I wonder, too, if the name “Otto Bentwood” might be difficult to take on first reading. Fox generally works her characters’ names very hard—the name “Russel,” for instance, nicely echoes Charlie’s restless, furtive energies (Otto suspects him of “rustling” clients), and just as something is surely missing in Charlie’s character, a second “1” is missing in his surname. I do admire how the old-fashioned and vaguely Teutonic name “Otto” saddles Otto, much as his own compulsive orderliness saddles him; but “Bentwood,” even after many readings, remains for me a little artificial in its bonsai imagery. And then there’s the title of the book. It’s apt, certainly, and yet it’s no The Day of the Locust, no The Great Gatsby, no Absalom, Absalom! It’s a title that people may forget or confuse with other titles. Sometimes, wishing it were stronger, I feel lonely in the peculiar way of someone deeply married.

As the years have gone by, I’ve continued to dip in and out of Desperate Characters, seeking comfort or reassurance from passages of familiar beauty. Now, though, as I reread the book in its entirety, I’m amazed by how much of it is still fresh and unfamiliar to me. I never paid attention, for example, to Otto’s anecdote, late in the book, about Cynthia Kornfeld and her husband the anarchist artist. I’d never noticed how Cynthia Kornfeld’s jello-and-nickels salad mocks the Bentwood equation of food and privilege and civilization, or how the notion of typewriters retrofitted to spew nonsense prefigures the novel’s closing image, or how the anecdote insists that Desperate Characters be read in the context of a contemporary art scene whose aim is the destruction of order and meaning. And Charlie Russel—have I ever really seen him until now? In my earlier readings he remained a kind of stock villain, a turncoat, an egregious man. Now he seems to me almost as important to the story as the cat. He’s Otto’s only friend; his phone call precipitates the final crisis; he produces the Thoreau quotation that gives the book its title; and he delivers a verdict on the Bentwoods—“drearily enslaved by introspection while the foundation of their privilege is being blasted out from under them”—that feels ominously dead-on.

At this late date, however, I’m not sure I even want fresh insights. As Sophie and Otto suffer from too-intimate knowledge of each other, I now suffer from too-intimate knowledge of Desperate Characters. My underlining and marginal annotations are getting out of hand. In my latest reading, I’m finding and flagging as vital and central an enormous number of previously unflagged images involving order and chaos and childhood and adulthood. Because the book is not long, and because I’ve now read it half a dozen times, I’m within sight of the point at which every sentence will be highlighted as vital and central. This extraordinary richness is, of course, a testament to Paula Fox’s genius. There’s hardly an extraneous or arbitrary word to be found in the book. Rigor and thematic density of such magnitude don’t happen by accident, and yet it’s almost impossible for a writer to achieve them while relaxing enough to allow the characters to come alive, and yet here the novel is, soaring above every other work of American realist fiction since the Second World War.

The irony of the novel’s richness, however, is that the better I grasp the import of each individual sentence, the less able I am to articulate what grand, global meaning all these local meanings might be serving. There’s finally a kind of horror to an overload of meaning. It’s closely akin, as Melville suggests in “The Whiteness of the Whale” in Moby-Dick, to a total whiteout absence of meaning. The tracking and deciphering and organizing of life’s significance can swamp the actual living of it, and in Desperate Characters the reader is not the only one who’s swamped. The Bentwoods themselves are highly literate, thoroughly modern creatures. Their curse is that they’re all too well equipped to read themselves as literary texts dense with overlapping meanings. In the course of one late-winter weekend, they become oppressed and finally overwhelmed by the way in which the most casual words and tiniest incidents feel like “portents.” The enormous suspense the book develops is not just a product of Sophie’s dread, then, or of Fox’s step-by-step closing of every possible avenue of escape, or of her equation of a crisis in a marital partnership with a crisis in a business partnership and a crisis in American urban life. More than anything else, it’s the slow cresting of a crushingly heavy wave of literary significance. Sophie consciously and explicitly invokes rabies as a metaphor for her emotional and political plight, and even as Otto breaks down and cries out about how desperate he is, he cannot avoid “quoting” (in the postmodern sense) his and Sophie’s earlier conversation about Thoreau, thereby invoking all the other themes and dialogues threading through the weekend, in particular Charlie’s vexing of the issue of “desperation.” As bad as it is to be desperate, it’s even worse to be desperate and also be aware of the vital questions of public law and order and privilege and Thoreauvian interpretation that are entailed in your private desperation, and to feel as if by breaking down you’re proving a whole nation of Charlie Russels right. When Sophie declares her wish to be rabid, as when Otto hurls the ink bottle, both seem to be revolting against an unbearable, almost murderous sense of the importance of their words and thoughts. Small wonder that the last actions of the book are wordless—that Sophie and Otto have “ceased to listen” to the words streaming from the telephone, and that the thing written in ink which they turn slowly to read is a violent, wordless blot. No sooner has Fox achieved the most dazzling success at finding order in the nonevents of one late-winter weekend than, with the perfect gesture, she repudiates that order.

Desperate Characters is a novel in revolt against its own perfection. The questions it raises are radical and unpleasant. What is the point of meaning—especially literary meaning—in a rabid modern world? Why bother creating and preserving order if civilization is every bit as killing as the anarchy to which it’s opposed? Why not be rabid? Why torment ourselves with books? Rereading the novel for the sixth or seventh time, I feel a cresting rage and frustration with its mysteries and with the paradoxes of civilization and with the insufficiency of my own brain and then, as if out of nowhere, I do get the ending—I feel what Otto Bentwood feels when he smashes the ink bottle against the wall—and suddenly I’m in love all over again.

Jonathan Franzen

January 1999

ONE

Mr. and Mrs. Otto Bentwood drew out their chairs simultaneously. As he sat down, Otto regarded the straw basket which held slices of French bread, an earthenware casserole filled with sautéed chicken livers, peeled and sliced tomatoes on an oval willowware platter Sophie had found in a Brooklyn Heights antique shop, and risotto Milanese in a green ceramic bowl. A strong light, somewhat softened by the stained glass of a Tiffany shade, fell upon this repast. A few feet away from the dining room table, an oblong of white, the reflection from a fluorescent tube over a stainless-steel sink, lay upon the floor in front of the entrance to the kitchen. The old sliding doors that had once separated the two first-floor rooms had long since been removed, so that by turning slightly the Bentwoods could glance down the length of their living room where, at this hour, a standing lamp with a shade like half a white sphere was always lit, and they could, if they chose, view the old cedar planks of the floor, a bookcase which held, among other volumes, the complete works of Goethe and two shelves of French poets, and the highly polished corner of a Victorian secretary.

Otto unfolded a large linen napkin with deliberation.

“The cat is back,” said Sophie.

“Are you surprised?” Otto asked. “What did you expect?”

Sophie looked beyond Otto’s shoulder at the glass door that opened onto a small wooden stoop, suspended above the back yard like a crow’s nest. The cat was rubbing its scruffy, half-starved body against the base of the door with soft insistence. Its gray fur, the gray of tree fungus, was faintly striped. Its head was massive, a pumpkin, jowled and unprincipled and grotesque.

“Stop watching it,” Otto said. “You shouldn’t have fed it in the first place.”

“I suppose.”

“We’ll have to call the A.S.P.C.A.”

“Poor thing.”

“It does very well for itself. All those cats do well.”

“Perhaps their survival depends on people like me.”

“These livers are good,” he said. “I don’t see that it matters whether they survive or not.”

The cat flung itself against the door.

“Ignore it,” Otto said. “Do you want all the wild cats in Brooklyn holding a food vigil on our porch? Think what they do to the garden! I saw one catch a bird the other day. They’re not pussycats, you know. They’re thugs.”

“Look how late the light stays now!”

“The days are getting longer. I hope the locals don’t start up with their goddamn bongos. Perhaps it will rain the way it did last spring.”

“Will you want coffee?”

“Tea. The rain locks them in.”

“The rain’s not on your side, Otto!”

He smiled. “Yes, it is.”

She did not smile at him. When she went to the kitchen, Otto quickly turned toward the door. The cat, at that instant, rammed its head against the glass. “Ugly bastard!” Otto muttered. The cat looked at him, then its eyes flicked away. The house felt powerfully solid to him; the sense of that solidity was like a hand placed firmly in the small of his back. Across the yard, past the cat’s agitated movements, he saw the rear windows of the houses on the slum street. Some windows had rags tacked across them, others, sheets of transparent plastic. From the sill of one, a blue blanket dangled. There was a long tear in the middle of it through which he could see the faded pink brick of the wall. The tattered end of the blanket just touched the top frame of a door which, as Otto was about to turn away, opened. A fat elderly woman in a bathrobe shouldered her way out into the yard and emptied a large paper sack over the ground. She stared down at the garbage for a moment, then shuffled back inside. Sophie returned with cups and saucers.

“I met Bullin on the street,” Otto said. “He told me two more houses have been sold over there.” He gestured toward the rear windows with his hand. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the cat leap as though he had offered it something.

“What happens to the people in them when the houses are bought? Where do they go? I always wonder about that.”

“I don’t know. Too many people everywhere.”

“Who bought the houses?”

“A brave pioneer from Wall Street. And the other, I think, a painter who got evicted from his loft on Lower Broadway.”

“It doesn’t take courage. It takes cash.”

“The rice is wonderful, Sophie.”

“Look! He’s curled up on that little ledge. How can he fit himself into such a small space?”

“They’re like snakes.”

“Otto, I’ll just give him a little milk. I know I shouldn’t have fed him in the first place. But he’s here now. We’ll be going out to Flynders in June. By the time we come home, he’ll have found someone else.”

“Why do you persist? It’s self-indulgence. Look! You don’t mind at all as long as you don’t have to see the cat looking starved. That goddamn woman just dumped her evening load of garbage over there. Why doesn’t the cat go there to eat?”

“I don’t care why I’m doing it,” Sophie said. “The point is that I can see it starving.”

“What time are we due at the Holsteins?”

“Nine-ish,” she said, on her way to the door with a saucer of milk. She reached up and inserted a small key in the lock, which had been placed on a crosspiece above the frame. Then she turned the brass handle.

At once the cat cried out, and began to lap up the milk. From other houses came the faint rattle of plates and pots, the mumble of television sets and radios—but the sheer multiplicity of noises made it difficult to identify individual ones.

The cat’s huge head hung over the little Meissen saucer. Sophie stooped and drew her hand along its back, which quivered beneath her fingers.

“Come back in and shut the door!” Otto complained. “It’s getting cold in here.”

A dog’s anguished yelp broke suddenly through the surface of the evening hum.

“My God!” exclaimed Otto. “What are they doing to that animal!”

“Catholics believe that animals have no souls,” Sophie said.

“Those people aren’t Catholics. What are you talking about! They all go to that Pentecostal iglesia up the street.”

The cat had begun to clean its whiskers. Sophie caressed its back again, drawing her fingers along until they met the sharp furry crook where the tail turned up. The cat’s back rose convulsively to press against her hand. She smiled, wondering how often, if ever before, the cat had felt a friendly human touch, and she was still smiling as the cat reared up on its hind legs, even as it struck at her with extended claws, smiling right up to that second when it sank its teeth into the back of her left hand and hung from her flesh so that she nearly fell forward, stunned and horrified, yet conscious enough of Otto’s presence to smother the cry that arose in her throat as she jerked her hand back from that circle of barbed wire. She pushed out with her other hand, and as the sweat broke out on her forehead, as her flesh crawled and tightened, she said, “No, no, stop that!” to the cat, as though it had done nothing more than beg for food, and in the midst of her pain and dismay she was astonished to hear how cool her voice was. Then, all at once, the claws released her and flew back as though to deliver another blow, but then the cat turned—it seemed in mid-air—and sprang from the porch, disappearing into the shadowed yard below.

“Sophie? What happened?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m going to get the tea now.” She pushed the door closed and walked quickly to the kitchen, keeping her back turned to Otto. Her heart pounded. She tried to breathe deeply to subdue that noisy thud and she wondered fleetingly at the shame she felt—as though she’d been caught in some despicable act.

Standing at the kitchen sink, clenching her hands, she told herself it was nothing. A long scratch at the base of her thumb bled slowly, but blood gushed from the bite. She turned on the water. Her hands looked drained; the small frecklelike blotches which had begun to appear during the winter were livid. She leaned forward against the sink, wondering if she were going to faint. Then she washed her hands with yellow kitchen soap. She licked her skin, tasting soap and blood, then covered the bite with a scrap of paper toweling.

When she returned with the tea, Otto was looking through some legal papers bound in blue covers. He glanced up at her, and she looked back at him with apparent calm, then placed his tea in front of him with her right hand, keeping the other out of sight at her side. Still, he seemed faintly puzzled, as though he’d heard a sound he couldn’t identify. She forestalled any questions by asking him at once if he’d like some fruit. He said no, and the moment passed.

“You left the door open. You have to lock it, Sophie, or it just swings back.”

She closed the door again, securing it with the key. Through the glass, she saw the saucer. Already there were a few spots of soot in it. She’d given up cigarettes in the fall, but it didn’t seem much use. I can’t unlock the door again, she said to herself.

“It’s done,” Otto said. He sighed. “Done, at last.”

“What’s done?”

“Deaf Sophie. You really don’t listen to me any more. Charlie moved out today, to his new office. He didn’t even tell me until this morning that he’d actually found a place. He said he wanted the whole thing to be a clean break. ‘If I need the files, can I get in touch with you?’ That’s what he asked me. Even in such a question, he implies that I’m likely to be unreasonable.”

She sat down, keeping her left hand on her lap.

“You’ve never said much about any of it to me,” she said.

“There wasn’t much to say. In this last year we haven’t agreed on anything, not anything. If I said it was going to rain, Charlie would pull at his lower lip and say, no, it wasn’t going to rain. After reading the weather reports carefully, he judged it was going to be a fine clear day. I should have learned a long time ago that character doesn’t change. I made all the superficial adjustments I could.”

“You’ve been together such a long time. Why have you come to this now?”

“I don’t care for the new people he’s taken up with, the clients. I know what’s always gone on in the office. I’ve done the tiresome work while Charlie’s put on his funny hats and knocked everybody dead with personal charm. His whole act has consisted in denying the law is anything but an ironic joke, and that goes far with a lot of people.”

“It will be hard to see them. Don’t you think it will? Ruth and I’ve never been close friends, but we managed. How do you just stop seeing people? What about the boat?”

“You just stop, that’s how. The winter has been so bad. You can’t imagine the people in the waiting room, a beggar’s army. He told me today that some of his clients were intimidated by the grandeur of our office, that they’ll be more comfortable in his new place. Then he said I’d dry up and disappear if I didn’t, in his words, tune in on the world. God! You should hear him talk, as though he’d been sanctified! One of his clients accused the receptionist of being racist because she asked him to use an ashtray instead of grinding his cigarette butt out in the rug. And today, two men like comic-strip spies helped him pack his goddamn cartons. No, we won’t be seeing them and he can have the boat. I’ve never cared that much about it. Really, it’s just been a burden.”

Sophie winced as she felt a thrust of sharp pain. He frowned at her and she saw that he thought she hadn’t liked what he had said. She’d tell him now, might as well. The incident with the cat was silly. At a distance of half an hour, she wondered at the terror she’d felt, and the shame.

“The cat scratched me,” she said. He got up at once and walked around the table to her.

“Let me see.”

She held up her hand. It was hurting. He touched it delicately, and his face showed solicitude. It flashed through her mind that he was sympathetic because the cat had justified his warning against it.

“Did you wash it? Did you put something on it?”

“Yes, yes,” she answered impatiently, watching the blood seep through the paper, thinking to herself that if the bleeding would stop, that would be an end to it.

“Well, I’m sorry, darling. But it wasn’t a good idea to feed it.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

“Does it hurt?”

“A little. Like an insect bite.”

“Just take it easy for a while. Read the paper.”

He cleared the table, put the dishes in the dishwasher, scraped the remaining livers into a bowl and set the casserole to soak. As he went about his work, he caught glimpses of Sophie, sitting up very straight, the newspaper on her lap. He was curiously touched by her uncharacteristic immobility. She appeared to be listening for something, waiting.

Sophie sat in the living room and stared at the front page of the newspaper. Her hand had begun to throb. It was only her hand, she told herself, yet the rest of her body seemed involved in a way she couldn’t understand. It was as though she’d been vitally wounded.

Otto walked into the living room. “What are you going to wear?” he asked her cheerfully.

“That Pucci dress,” she said, “although I think I’ve put on too much weight for it.” She got up. “Otto, why did it bite me? I was petting it.”

“I thought you said it just scratched you.”

“Whatever it did … but why did it attack me so?” They walked to the staircase. The mahogany banister glowed in the soft buttery light of a Victorian bubble-glass globe which hung from the ceiling. She and Otto had worked for a week taking off the old black paint from the banister. It was the first thing they had done together after they had bought the house.

“Because it’s savage,” he said. “Because all it wanted from you was food.” He put his foot on the first step and said, as if to himself, “I’ll be better off by myself.”

“You’ve always had your own clients,” she said irritably, clenching and unclenching her hurt hand. “I don’t see why you couldn’t keep on together.”

“All that melodrama … I can’t live with that. And he couldn’t leave it alone. If I wasn’t with him, I was against him. I don’t mean to say there isn’t cause. I don’t mean to say there’s any kind of justice in the world. But I know Charlie. He’s using those people and their causes. He just doesn’t want to be left out. And I want to be left out. Oh … it was time it all ended. We’ve used each other up. The truth is, I don’t like him any more.”

“I wonder how he feels?”

“Like Paul Muni, defending the unlovely and unloved. There never were such lawyers. Do you remember? All those movies in the thirties? The young doctors and lawyers going to the sticks and edifying all the rubes?”

“Paul Muni! Charlie’s right,” she said. “You’re barely in the right century.”

“That’s true.”

“But Charlie is not bad!” she exclaimed.

“I didn’t say he was bad. He’s irresponsible and vain and hysterical. Bad hasn’t anything to do with it.”

“Irresponsible! What do you mean, irresponsible!”

“Shut up!” said Otto. He put his arms around her.

“Look out!” she said. “I’ll get blood on you!”

TWO

A few feet from the bottom step, Otto paused and turned, as he habitually did, to look back at his home. He was drawn toward it. He yearned to throw open the door he had only just locked, to catch the house empty. It was, he thought, a little like the wish to be sentient at one’s own funeral.

With one or two exceptions, each of the houses on the Bentwoods’ block was occupied by one family. All of the houses had been built during the final third of the last century, and were of brick or brownstone. Where the brick had been cleaned, a chalky pink glow gave off an air of antique serenity. Most front parlor windows were covered with white shutters. Where owners had not yet been able to afford them, pieces of fabric concealed the life within behind the new panes of glass. These bits of cloth, even though they were temporary measures, had a certain style, a kind of forethought about taste, and were not at all like the rags that hung over the windows of the slum people. What the owners of the street lusted after was recognition of their superior comprehension of what counted in this world, and their strategy for getting it combined restraint and indirection.

One boardinghouse remained in business, but the nine tenants were very quiet, almost furtive, like the last remaining members of a foreign enclave who, daily, expect deportation.

The neighborhood eyesore was a house covered with yellow tile. An Italian family that had lived on the block during its worst days, finally moving out the day after all the street lamps had been smashed, was held responsible for this breach of taste.

The maple trees planted by the neighborhood association the year before were beginning to bud. But the street was not well lighted yet, and despite phone calls, letters, and petitions to City Hall and the local precinct, policemen were rarely glimpsed, except in patrol cars on their way to the slum people. At night, the street had a quiet earnest look, as though it were continuing to try to improve itself in the dark.

There was still refuse everywhere, a tide that rose but barely ebbed. Beer bottles and beer cans, liquor bottles, candy wrappers, crushed cigarette packs, caved-in boxes that had held detergents, rags, newspapers, curlers, string, plastic bottles, a shoe here and there, dog feces. Otto had once said, staring disgustedly at the curb in front of their house, that no dog had deposited that.

“Do you suppose they come here to shit at night?” he had asked Sophie.

She hadn’t replied, only giving him a sidelong glance that was touched with amusement. What would he have said, she wondered, if she had told him that his question had reminded her of a certain period in her childhood when moving the bowels, as her mother called it, was taken up by Sophie and her friends as an outdoor activity, until they were all caught in a community squat beneath a lilac bush? Sophie had been shut into the bathroom for an hour, in order, her mother had said, to study the proper receptacle for such functions.

The Holsteins lived in Brooklyn Heights on Henry Street, ten blocks from the Bentwoods. Otto didn’t want to take the car and lose his parking space, and although Sophie did not feel up to walking—she was vaguely nauseated—she didn’t want to insist on being driven. Otto would think the cat bite had affected her more than it really had. It was usually more costly to make a fool of oneself, she thought. Her fatuity had deserved at least a small puncture.

“Why do they drop everything on the pavement?” Otto asked angrily.

“It’s the packaging. Wrapping frenzy.”

“It’s simple provocation. I watched a colored man kick over a trash basket yesterday. When it rolled out into the street, he put his hands on his hips and roared with laughter. This morning I saw that man who hangs the blanket outside his window standing on his bed and pissing out into the yard.”

A car in low gear passed; a window slid down and a hand gently released a ball of Kleenex. Sophie began to laugh. “Americans …” muttered Otto, “softly dropping their turds wherever they go.”

They crossed Atlantic Avenue and started west, passing the Arab shops with their windows full of leather cushions and hookahs, the Arab bakeries which smelled of sesame paste. A thin Eastern wail slid out of a store no bigger than a closet. Inside, three men were staring down at a hand-operated record player. Sophie paused in front of a Jordanian restaurant, where the Bentwoods had dined with Charlie Russel and his wife only last week. Looking past the flaking gold letters on the glass, she saw the table they had sat at.

“How is it possible? It all seemed so friendly that night,” she said softly.

“It was. When we first decided to end the partnership, it was friendlier than it ever had been. But this week …”

“It’s not that you ever agreed on anything—but it all seemed so set.”

“No, we didn’t agree.”

She exclaimed suddenly and held up her hand.

“What is it?” he asked.

“You brushed against it.”

They stopped beneath a light while Otto inspected her hand.

“It’s swollen,” he said. “Looks awful.”

“It’s all right, just sensitive.”

The bleeding had stopped, but a small lump had formed, pushing up the lips of the wound.

“I think you ought to see a doctor. You ought, at least, to get a tetanus shot.”

“What do you mean, ‘at least’?” she cried irritably.

“Don’t be so bad-tempered.”

They turned up Henry Street. Otto noted with satisfaction that there was as much garbage here as in their own neighborhood. He wouldn’t consider buying a house on the Heights … horribly inflated prices, all that real-estate grinning in dusty crumbling rooms—think what you could do with that woodwork!—everyone knowing it was a put-up job, greed, low belly greed, get it while we can, house prices enunciated in refined accents, mortgages like progressive diseases, “I live on the Heights.” Of course, the Bentwoods’ neighborhood was on the same ladder, frantic lest the speculators now eying property were the “wrong” kind. Otto hated realtors, hated dealing with their nasty litigations. It was the only thing he and Charlie still agreed on. He sighed, thinking of the cop who had been checking on voter registration last week, who had said to Otto, “This area is really pulling itself together, doesn’t look like the same place it was two years ago. You people are doing a job!” And Otto had felt a murderous gratification.

“What are you sighing about?” Sophie asked.

“I don’t know.”

The Bentwoods had a high income. They had no children and, since they were both just over forty (Sophie was two months older than Otto), they didn’t anticipate any. They could purchase pretty much what they wanted. They had a Mercedes-Benz sedan and a house on Long Island with a long-term mortgage, which was hardly a burden any more. It sat in a meadow near the village of Flynders. Like their Brooklyn house, it was small, but it was a century older. Otto had paid for repairs out of cash reserves. In the seven years they had owned it, there had been only one disagreeable summer. That was when three homosexual men had rented a neighboring barn and played Judy Garland records all night long every night. They had set their portable record player on a cement birdbath in the old cow pasture. In moonlight or in fog, Judy Garland’s voice rang out across the meadow, driving into Otto’s head like a mailed fist. That September, he bought the barn. Someday he planned to convert it into a guest house. At present it housed the sailboat he shared with Russel.

“I think I’ll just give the boat to Charlie,” he said as they walked up the steps to the Holsteins’ door. “I don’t even remember how much money we each put in.”

“Where’s he going to sail it?” Sophie asked. “In the Bowery?”

The goddamn bite had made her nervous, he thought, and when she was nervous the quality he valued in her most—her equableness—disappeared. She seemed almost to narrow physically. He pressed the bell beneath the severe black plate on which was printed MYRON HOLSTEIN, M.D. Even if he was a psychoanalyst, he ought to know something about animal bites, Otto told her, but Sophie said she didn’t want to make an issue of it. It already felt better. “Please don’t bring it up. Just that I would like to leave early—” Then the door opened.

There were so many people wandering around beneath Flo Holstein’s brilliant wall lights that it looked as if a sale were in progress. Even at a glance, Sophie saw some among the multitude who were strangers to the house. These few were looking covertly at furniture and paintings. There wasn’t a copy of anything on the premises. It was real Miës van der Rohe, real Queen Anne, real Matisse and Gottlieb.

Flo had produced two successful musicals. Mike Holstein’s practice was largely made up of writers and painters. Sophie liked him. Otto said he suffered from culture desperation. “He can’t stand his own trade,” Otto had said. “He’s like one of those movie starlets who announces she’s studying philosophy at U.C.L.A.”

But at that moment Sophie—her face held in Dr. Holstein’s strong square hands—felt the nervous tension of the last two hours draining out of her as though she’d been given a mild soporific.

“Soph, darling! Hello, Otto. Sophie, you look marvelous! Is that dress a Pucci? What a relief that you don’t fiddle with your hair. That style makes you look like some sad lovely girl out of the thirties. Did you know that?” He kissed her in the manner of other people’s husbands, on the cheek, dry-lipped and ritualistic.

He didn’t know a thing about her, not even after ten years, but she loved the air of knowingness; the flattery that didn’t obligate her. And she liked his somewhat battered face, the close-fitting English suits he bought from a London salesman who stopped at a mid-town hotel each year to take orders, the Italian shoes he said were part of his seducer’s costume. He wasn’t a seducer. He was remote. He was like a man preceded into a room by acrobats.

Despite her resolve to say nothing, she found herself whispering into his neck. “Something awful happened … I’m making too much of it, I know, but it was awful …”

As he led her toward the kitchen, a man grabbed Otto’s arm, shouted something, and dragged him into a group near the fireplace. In the kitchen, Flo kissed her hurriedly and turned to look at a huge orange casserole squatting inside the face-level wall oven. Two men, one of them turning the water tap off and on and staring pensively in the sink, did not look up.

“What happened? Do you want your gin on the rocks?” Mike asked.

“A cat bit me.”

“Let’s see.”

She held up her hand. The slack fingers looked somewhat pitiful, she thought. Since she and Otto had looked at it under the street lamp, the bump appeared to have grown larger. It was tinged with yellow.

“Listen, that ought to be looked at!”

“Oh, it’s nothing. I’ve been bitten before by animals.” But she hadn’t. “It was a shock,” she said, stammering slightly as if she’d tripped over her lie, “because I’d been feeding the damned beast and it turned on me.”

“I don’t think there’s been any rabies around here in years, but—”

“No,” she said. “No, not a chance. That cat was perfectly healthy. You know me. I want to be the saint who tames wild creatures.”

“Mike!” Flo cried. “Get the door, will you? Here, what are you drinking, Sophie?”

“Nothing right now,” Sophie answered. Mike left her with a pat on the back, a nod that said he’d return. One of the young men began to comb his hair. Sophie went into the long living room. A television comedian she had met before at the Holsteins’ was holding forth among a group of seated people, none of whom was paying him much attention. In a voice of maniacal self-confidence, he reported that since he’d grown his beard, he couldn’t eat cooked cereal any more without making a swine of himself. When no one laughed, he caressed the growth at his chin and on his cheeks. “No kidding!” he cried. “These kids nowadays are wunnerful! Hair is for real! I wanna live and love and be myself. That’s the message! Seriously.” He was short and pudgy and his skin glistened like lard.

“A very Gentile party,” someone said over Sophie’s shoulder. She turned and saw a couple in their early twenties. The girl was in a white leather suit; the boy wore an army fatigue jacket, on which were pinned buttons shaped and painted like eyeballs, staring from nothing, at nothing. His frizzy hair shot off in all directions like a pubic St. Catherine’s wheel. The girl was beautiful—young and unmarked. Her amber hair fell to her waist. She wore a heavy bracelet around one of her ankles.

“I saw at least three Jews,” Sophie said.

They didn’t smile. “Your parties are educational,” the girl said.

“It isn’t my party,” Sophie replied.

“Yes, it’s yours,” the boy said judiciously. “Your generation’s thing.”

“Oh, for crissakes!” Sophie said, smiling.

They looked at each other. The boy touched the girl’s hair. “She’s a wicked one, isn’t she?” The girl nodded slowly.

“You must be young Mike’s friends?” asked Sophie. Young Mike was lurching through C.C.N.Y. but each semester’s end brought terror into the Holstein household. Would he go back once more?

“Let’s split,” said the boy. “We’ve got to go see Lonnie up in St. Luke’s.”

“The hospital?” asked Sophie. “It’s too late for visiting hours.”

They looked at her as though they’d never seen her before, then they both padded softly out of the living room, looking neither left nor right. “That’s a beautiful anklet!” Sophie called out. The girl looked back from the hall. For an instant, she seemed about to smile. “It hurts me to wear it,” she shouted. “Every time I move, it hurts.”

Otto was backed up against a wall, looking up at the chin of a powerfully built woman wearing pants and jacket. She was an English playwright, a friend of Flo’s, who wrote exclusively in verse. Otto, Sophie observed as she walked over to them, had one hand behind him pressed against the wooden paneling.

“We are all of us dying of boredom,” the woman was saying. “That is the why of the war, the why of the assassinations, the why of why. Boredom.”

“The younger ones are dying of freedom,” Otto said in a voice flattened by restraint. Sophie caught his eye. He shook his head very slightly.

“The young will save us,” the woman said. “It’s the young, thank the dead God, who will save us.”

“They are dying from what they are trying to cure themselves with,” Otto said.

“You are a square!” the woman said, stooping a little to look into his face.

“Hello, Suzanne,” Sophie said. “I just heard someone say, ‘I’m crashing.’ What does it mean?” She realized she had a fake ingenuous look on her face. It was obscurely insulting and she hoped Suzanne would feel the edge.

“In contemporary parlance,” Suzanne explained magnanimously, “it means either that you’ve come to spend the night in someone’s pad, or that you are coming down from a drug high.” She bowed to Otto and moved away. She rarely spoke to men when other women were around.

“Jesus!” Otto exclaimed. “Trying to stop her from talking is like trying to get a newspaper under a dog before it pukes!”

“I hate it when you talk like that! You’re getting worse as you get older. I can’t bear that mean reductive—”

“Where’s your drink?”

“I don’t want a drink,” she said irritably. He stood directly in front of her, blocking out the room. There was hesitancy in his look. He had heard her, hearing him, and he was sorry. She could see that, sorry herself now that she had spoken so meanly. For a second, they held each other’s gaze. “That button’s loose,” she said, touching his jacket. “I’ll get you something …” he said, but he didn’t move away. They had averted what was ordinary; they had felt briefly the force of something original, unknown, between them. Even as she tried to name it, it was dissolving, and he left her suddenly just as she had forgotten what she was trying to remember. She flattened her hand against the wall paneling. It looked like a tarantula. Her skin prickled. Rabies … no one ever got rabies, except some Southern country boy.

“Sophie, come here,” Mike said, and led her upstairs and into a large bedroom. A Greek rug covered the bed; a Mexican ceramic horse stood in front of the fireplace. On one of the bedside tables were piled paperback detective stories in their penny candy wrapper covers.

“Who reads those? You or Flo?”

“Me,” he replied, and he sighed and looked winsome. “They’re good for me. They ride roughshod over what I live with. Potent men. Palpitating women … a murderer’s mind laid out like the contents of a child’s pencil box.”

“You aren’t reading the right ones.”

“The new ones are the old ones. That false complexity is just another kind of pencil box.”

“What’s going to happen?” she burst out. “Everything is going to hell—”

“Sit down a minute and shut up! I want to call a doctor or two, see if I can rouse one. It’s a bad night for that.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and dialed, an address book held tightly in one hand, the phone cradled between his neck and shoulder. She heard him speak several times, but she didn’t listen to his words. She was wandering around the room. A green silk dressing gown was flung across a chaise lounge. On the mantelpiece stood a few small pre-Columbian statues, glaring with empty malevolence at the opposite wall, looking, oddly enough, as though they were outside the room but about to enter and sack it.

“There are only answering services,” Mike said, putting the phone down. “There’s not much point in leaving this number. Listen, I want you to go to the hospital. It’s six blocks from here and they have an emergency room that’s not bad. They’ll fix you up and you’ll have a peaceful night.”

“Did you know?” she began, “that Cervantes wanted to come to the New World, to New Spain, and the king wrote across his application, ‘No, tell him to get a job around here’? Isn’t that a funny story?”

He watched her, unmoving, his hands folded lightly, his shoulders hunched—it must be the way he listened to patients, she thought, as though he were about to receive a blow across the back.

“Just a story …”

“What’s the matter?”

“I wish I were Jewish,” she said. “Then when I died, I’d die as a Jew.”

“You’ll die as a Protestant.”

“There aren’t many left.”

“Then as a Gentile. I asked you, what’s the matter? Are you working on anything?”

“I haven’t wanted to work; it seems futile. There are so many who do it better than I do. I was sent a novel to translate but I couldn’t understand it, even in French. It simply irritated me. And I don’t have to work.”

“Tell me a little Baudelaire,” he said.

“Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux,

Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux—”

She broke off, laughing. “Why, you love it! You should see your face! Wait! Here!” and she snatched up a hand mirror from the top of a bureau and held it in front of him. He looked at her over the mirror. “I could smack you,” he said.

“No, no … you don’t understand. I liked the way you looked. That I could just recite a few lines and evoke that look!”

“Helpless bliss,” he said, getting to his feet.

“You know that Charlie and Otto are ending their partnership?”

“Otto doesn’t confide in me.”

“They can’t get along any more,” she said, replacing the mirror and turning back to him. “It’ll change our life, and yet it is as though nothing has happened.”

“It won’t change your life,” he said with a touch of impatience. “Maybe your plans, but not your life. Charlie, as I remember him, which is vaguely, is a bleeding heart, dying to be loved. He has the face of a handsome baby, doesn’t he? Or am I thinking of one of my patients? And Otto is all restraint. So the machine stopped functioning.” He shrugged.

“The truth is—” she began, then paused. He waited. “It wasn’t a machine,” she said quickly. “That’s an appalling view of what happens between people.”

“What did you start to say?”

“But are you saying what went on between them was only a mechanical arrangement of opposites, Mike?”

“All right, then, it wasn’t. The words don’t matter anyhow. Otto didn’t seem distressed.”

“We’d better go down,” she said.

But he had left her and was standing near the window, staring at the floor. As he lifted his head, she saw what he had been looking at. She walked over to him. They both looked at the stone on the floor. There were a few shards of broken glass around it. Mike picked it up. It filled the palm of his hand.

“The drapes must have muffled the sound,” he said. They both looked down at the street; the broken pane where the stone had entered was at the height of Mike’s brow. “It must have been in the last hour,” he said. “I was up an hour ago, getting aspirin for someone, and I stopped by here, I’ve forgotten why, and I know the stone wasn’t here then.”

Someone walked by on the street below, a St. Bernard puppy shambling along beside him. In all the windows of the opposite houses, lights shone. Car hoods glinted. Mike and Sophie silently watched a man investigating the contents of his glove compartment. A news truck rumbled by.

“Don’t mention it to Flo. I’ll clean it up. Who could have done it? What am I supposed to do?” Then he shook his head. “Oh, well, it’s nothing.” He smiled at her and patted her arm. “Sophie, would you like me to send you to a friend of mine? A friend I think highly of? A first-rate man? Member of the Institute?” He hefted the stone, looked back out the window.

“Thanks, Mike, but no.”

“But at least go to the hospital,” he said, without looking at her at all. She stared at him a moment, then left the room. Otto was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, a glass in his hand. He held it out as she neared the bottom.

“Ginger ale,” he said.

THREE

“I’m tired of parties,” Otto said in the taxi. “I get so bored. Movie talk bores me. I don’t care about Fred Astaire, and he doesn’t care about me. I care even less about Fellini. Flo is self-important simply because she knows actors.”

“Why did you say you hadn’t seen Death Takes a Holiday? I know you saw it because we saw it together. And you were crazy about Evelyn Venable. You talked about her for weeks … those bones, that fluty voice, you said she looked the way Emily Dickinson should have looked … don’t you remember?”

“My God!”

“And Fredric March, you said, was a perfect expression of an American idea of death, a dissipated toff in a black cape.”

“You stored all that away?” he asked wonderingly.

“You fell asleep and everyone knew you were asleep. Mike poked me and told me to take you home.”

“They were all trying to out-memory each other. It just proved how old we all are.”

“You have to make an effort.”

“What were you doing upstairs with Mike?”

“He called some doctors about the cat bite.”

“He thinks you ought to see someone?” he asked, alarmed.

She held up her hand. “Look how swollen it is!” she said. She flexed her fingers and groaned. “Perhaps if I soak it, the swelling will go down.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“Nobody was in. Don’t you know you can’t get a doctor any more? Don’t you know this country is falling apart?”

“Just because you can’t get a doctor on Friday evening does not mean the country is falling apart.”

“Oh, yes it does. There was a stone in their bedroom. Someone had thrown a stone through the window. It must have happened just before we arrived. Picked up a stone from somewhere and tossed it through the window!” As she was speaking, she took hold of his arm and now, as she became silent, her grip tightened as though only her hand could continue the burden of her thoughts.

“That’s awful,” he said. The taxi was idling. Otto saw they were home. He paid the driver. Sophie, suddenly animated by a murky but powerful conviction that she knew what was wrong with everything, ran up the steps. But she had to wait for Otto; she didn’t have her keys. He climbed the steps slowly, looking at the change in his hand. Sophie’s access of energy, so startling as to verge on pain, died at once. As they walked into the dark hall, the telephone rang.

“Who …?” he began. “At this time of night,” she said, as Otto went to the phone. But he didn’t touch it. It rang three more times, then Sophie pushed past him and grabbed the receiver. Otto went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “Yes?” he heard her say. “Hello, hello, hello?”

No one answered, but there was a faint throb as though darkness had a voice which thumped along the wire. Then she heard an exhalation of breath.

“It’s some degenerate,” she said loudly. Otto, a piece of cheese in one hand, gestured to her with the other. “Hang up! For God’s sake, hang up!”

“A degenerate,” she said into the mouthpiece. “An American cretin.” Otto stuffed the cheese in his mouth, then snatched the phone from her hand and replaced it with a bang in its cradle. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you!” he cried.

“You could ask,” she said, and began to cry. “I’ve been poisoned by that cat.” They turned to look at the back door.

“My God! It’s back!” she exclaimed.

A gray shape was huddled against the bottom of the door, toward which Otto ran, waving his hands and shouting, “Get out!” The cat slowly raised its head and blinked. Sophie shuddered. “I’ll call the A.S.P.C.A. tomorrow,” Otto said. The cat got up and stretched. They saw its mouth open as it looked up at them hopefully. “We can’t have this,” Otto muttered. He looked reproachfully at her.

“If I don’t feed it, it’ll give up,” she said mildly.

“If you allow it to …” He turned off the living room lamp.

“Why didn’t you answer the phone?” she flung back at him as they went up the stairs. “You’re becoming an eccentric, like Tanya.”

“Tanya! I thought Tanya lived her whole life on the phone.”

“She won’t answer it any more unless she’s just broken off a love affair.”

“Love affair,” he snorted, following Sophie down the hall to their bedroom. “Tanya and love!”

“She calls up people, though.”

“I hate Tanya.”

They stood facing each other beside the bed. “You’ve never told me that,” she said. “I’ve never heard you say that you hated anyone.”

“I only just realized it.”

“What about Claire?”

“Claire is all right. What do you care what I think about Tanya? You don’t like her yourself. You hardly ever see her.”

“I hardly ever see anyone.”

“Why do you make me feel it’s my fault?”

“You haven’t explained about not answering the phone,” she said accusingly.

“Because I never hear anything on it that I want to hear any more.”

They were both standing rigidly, each half-consciously amassing evidence against the other, charges that would counterbalance the exasperation that neither could fathom. Then he asked her directly why she was angry. She said she wasn’t angry at all; it was just so tiresome of him to indulge himself about the telephone, to stand there so stupidly while it rang, to force her to do it.

“Let’s go to bed,” he said wearily.

She gave him an ironic look, which he ignored. She was really wondering what would happen if she told him the telephone call, that sinister breathing, had frightened her. He would have said, “Don’t be foolish!” she concluded. “Stop telling me I’m foolish,” she wanted to shout.

He was hanging up his suit. She watched him straighten the pants. “You ought to throw out the underwear you’re wearing,” she said. “It’s about to fall apart.”

“I like it when they get so soft, after I’ve had them a long time.”

He sounded rather plaintive. She felt kinder toward him. There was something funny about people’s private little preferences and indulgences, something secretive and childlike and silly. She laughed at him and his soft old underwear. He looked down at himself, then at her, as he stripped off the shorts. His expression was complacent. Let him be complacent, she thought. At least, they’d avoided a pointless quarrel. She wondered if Tanya had ever tried to seduce Otto. Then she remembered Tanya’s only visit to Flynders. Otto had been shocked, morally outraged really, when he had accidentally discovered that Tanya had used every drawer in an immense bureau for the few articles she’d brought with her that weekend. “My God! She has a scarf in one drawer, a pair of stockings in another, one girdle in another. What kind of a woman is it who would use all the drawers in a chest just because they’re there?” he had cried to Sophie.

“Tanya is pretty awful,” Sophie said as Otto got into bed next to her. “I bet she’s awful to make love to. I bet she can hardly take her eyes off herself long enough to see who she’s in bed with.”

“Go to sleep,” he pleaded. “You’re going to wake me up.” She subsided without complaint. She wasn’t irritated with him now, and it didn’t seem to matter why she had been. She examined her hand and decided to give it a soaking. It certainly hurt.

When Sophie awoke, it was 3:00 A.M. Her hand, doubled up beneath her, was like an alien object which had somehow attached itself to her body, something that had clamped itself to her. She lay there for a moment, thinking of the cat, how surprised she’d been, seeing it again, when she and Otto had come home. It had looked so ordinary, just another city stray. What had she expected? That it would have been deranged by its attack on her? That it planned to smash and cuff its way into their house and eat them both up? She got up and went into the bathroom. The swelling, which she had managed to reduce earlier by the long soak in hot water, had returned. She filled the basin and immersed her hand. Then, looking at her face in the mirror over the sink—she didn’t want to see what she was doing—she began to press the fingers of her other hand against the swollen mass of skin. When she looked down, the water was clouded. She flexed her fingers, then made a fist.

When she got back into bed, she half threw herself against Otto’s back. He groaned.

“My hand is worse,” she whispered. He sat up at once.

“We’ll call Noel first thing in the morning,” he said. “If we have to, we’ll drive up to Pelham and drag him to his office. You’ve got to have that looked at.”

“If it isn’t any better.”

“Anyway.” Otto fell back against the pillows. “What time is it?” There were times when he felt he had not had a full night’s sleep since he had been married. Sophie seemed to take a special pleasure in night conversations.

“Three. Did you notice how young Mike behaved? How he looked? Did you see that Hungarian ribbon around his forehead, or folk art ribbon, or whatever it was?”

“Don’t talk about it,” he said sharply. “Just don’t bring it up. It only makes me angry. Wait till he tries to get a job.”

“He’ll never get a job. Mike will fund him. And the hair. He was playing with it all the time I was talking to him. Pleating it, braiding it, stroking it, pulling it.”

“What did you talk to him about?”

“Stupid things, stupidly.”

“They aren’t all that bad,” Otto said.

“Water babies. They come out of faucets, not out of people.”

“They want to be Negroes,” Otto said, yawning.

“I wish I knew what they’re up to,” she said, suddenly remembering she had told Mike’s father that she wanted to be a Jew.

“They’ve chosen to remain children,” he said sleepily, “not knowing that nobody has that option.”

What was a child? And how would she know? Where was the child she had been? Who could tell her what she had been like? She had one photograph of herself at four, sitting in a wicker rocker, a child’s chair, her legs straight out, in white cotton panties, wearing someone’s Panama hat that was too big for her. Who had assembled all those things? Panama hat, wicker chair, white cotton panties? Who had taken that picture? It was already turning yellow. What did young Mike, dirty, mysterious, seemingly indifferent, speaking that hieratic lingo that both insulted and exiled her, have to do with her childhood? With any childhood?

“Otto?” But he was asleep. A car went by. A slight breeze came through the open window, carrying with it the sound of a dog’s bark. Then she heard knocking, a fist on wood. She went to the window and looked down at the ledge which hid from view the stoop and anyone who might be standing there.

There was a kind of grunt, then several sharp raps, then a whisper. Had her scalp really moved? She looked back at the bed. Then she went to the hall and down the stairs, her hand held stiffly against the soft folds of her nightgown.

Stopping at the front door, hidden by the curtains which covered the glass insets, she listened and looked. On the other side of the door, a large body swayed, a large head veered toward the door, then away.

“Otto …” sighed a voice sadly.

Sophie unlocked the door. Charlie Russel was standing there, one lapel turned up.

“Charlie!”

“Ssh!”

He stepped into the entryway and she closed the door. Then they were close to each other like two people about to embrace. She felt his whole face watching her like an enormous eye. “I’ve got to talk to Otto,” he whispered intensely.

“He’s asleep.”

“I’m in a terrible state. I have to see him.”

“Now? You’re crazy.”

“Because I couldn’t see him a second before now. Because it’s taken me all this time, from this morning when I last set eyes on him, to get to the point where I am. I don’t care what time it is.” He reached out and gripped her arms.

“I won’t wake him,” she said angrily.

“I will.”

“You’re going to hurt my hand. A cat bit me.”

“I feel murdered,” Charlie said, letting go of her all at once and leaning against the wall. “Listen. Let’s go out and get a cup of coffee. Now that I think about it, I don’t want to see that bastard.”

“Does Ruth know where you are?”

“Ruth who?”

“That’s some joke,” she said. “I don’t like wife jokes. They drive me up the wall. Don’t make wife jokes to me.”

He stooped and peered into her face. “You sound mad.”

“I am mad,” she said.

“Will you? Have a cup of coffee?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s make a getaway,” he said, clapping his hands together.

“I’ve got to get dressed. Don’t make any noise. I’ll be right down. There’s a chair. Don’t move.”

She dressed silently; even the sleeves of her blouse, drawn up carefully over her arms, made no sound. It was as though she was only thinking about getting dressed.

Otto lay diagonally across the bed, one knee protruding from beneath the blanket. She brushed her hair quickly and pinned it, reached for a purse on the bureau, then left it there, putting her house keys in her pocket. As she picked up her shoes from the closet and tiptoed from the room, she felt, for a vertiginous moment, an unlawful excitement.

FOUR

They went down the street silently, quickly, like conspirators, speaking only when they had turned a corner and were headed for downtown Brooklyn.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “Is there anything open?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been around here at this hour. Did you come by subway?”

“No. I took a taxi. He dropped me at the wrong corner, but I was too tired to argue. I walked to your house.”

“Did you tell Ruth you were coming?”

“No. I had gone out to a movie. A man who was sitting beside me told me I was talking to myself. I told him not to interrupt, then, and he told me I was fucking up his one night out. So I left and got a taxi and went to a Bickford’s, which was full of people talking to themselves. Christ! Look at the paper all over the sidewalks.”

“Please. Don’t talk to me about garbage.”

They had come to an intersection. From the west, bearing down on them with an echoing bang and rattle of mechanical parts, came a bus. It went through the red light. The driver was hunched forward, his arms encircling the wheel, his hands hanging down like paper hands. There was only one passenger, an old woman with dazzling white hair. She looked at once majestic and mindless.

“What is she thinking about?” Sophie said.

“Nothing. She’s asleep.”

The light changed and changed again. Discarded wrappings and newspapers rustled all around them. A block away, a few figures stood torpidly outside the windows of a lunch counter. As they walked toward it, Sophie could see two men inside, moving briskly as they rinsed out thick white cups and scrubbed a grill. The people outside were simply standing there, watching. Across the street, near a subway exit, a short fat dark man wearing a tiny black hat was staring down at a sewer grating. He had the stunned immobility of a displaced person who had come as far as he could without further instructions.

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