The Wild Palms: [If I Forget Thee Jerusalem] Read online

  They crossed the court and entered the french windows and the noise—the piano, the voices—a longish room, uneven of floor, the walls completely covered with unframed paintings which at the moment impacted upon Wilbourne with that inextricable and detailless effect of an enormous circus poster seen suddenly at close range, from which vision, the very eyeballs, seem to start violently back in consternation. It contained no furniture except a piano at which a man sat in a basque cap and a bathrobe. Perhaps a dozen other people sat or stood about on the floor with glasses; a woman in a sleeveless linen frock shrieked, “My God, where was the funeral?” and came and kissed Flint, still carrying her glass.

  “This is Doctor Wilbourne, boys and girls,” Flint said. “Watch him. He’s got a pad of blank checks in his pocket and a scalpel in his sleeve.” His host did not even turn his head, though a woman brought him a drink presently. It was his hostess, though no one had told him that; she stood and talked to him for a moment, or at him because he was not listening, he was looking at the pictures on the wall; presently he stood alone, still holding his glass, before the wall itself. He had seen photographs and reproductions of such in magazines before, at which he had looked completely without curiosity because it was completely without belief, as a yokel might look at a drawing of a dinosaur. But now the yokel was looking at the monster itself and Wilbourne stood before the paintings in complete absorption. It was not at what they portrayed, the method or the coloring; they meant nothing to him. It was in a bemusement without heat or envy at a condition which could supply a man with the obvious leisure and means to spend his days painting such as this and his evenings playing the piano and feeding liquor to people whom he ignored and (in one case, at least) whose names he did not even bother to catch. He was still standing there when someone behind said, “Here’s Rat and Charley”; he was still standing there when Charlotte spoke at his shoulder:

  “What do you think about it, mister?” He turned and saw a young woman a good deal shorter than he and for a moment he thought she was fat until he saw it was not fat at all but merely that broad, simple, profoundly delicate and feminine articulation of Arabian mares—a woman of under twenty-five, in a print cotton dress, a face which laid no claim even to prettiness and wore no makeup save the painted broad mouth, with a faint inch-long scar on one cheek which he recognised as an old burn, doubtless from childhood. “You haven’t decided yet, have you?”

  “No,” he said. “I dont know.”

  “Dont know what you think, or whether you are trying to decide or not?”

  “Yes. Probably that. What do you think about it?”

  “Marshmallows with horseradish,” she said, too promptly. “I paint too,” she added. “I can afford to say. I can afford to say I can beat that, too. What’s your name? and what have you got all this on for, just to come slumming? So we can all know you are slumming?”

  He told her and now she looked at him and he saw that her eyes were not hazel but yellow, like a cat’s, staring at him with a speculative sobriety like a man might, intent beyond mere boldness, speculative beyond any staring. “I borrowed this suit. It’s the first time in my life I ever had one on.” Then he said, he did not intend to, he didn’t even know he was going to say it, he seemed to be drowning, volition and will, in the yellow stare: “This is my birthday. I’m twenty-seven years old.”

  “Oh,” she said. She turned, she took him by the wrist, a grasp simple, ruthless and firm, drawing him after her. “Come on.” He followed, awkwardly, not to trod on her heels, then she released him and went on before him, across the room to where three men and two women stood about the table on which the bottles and glasses sat. She stopped, she grasped his wrist again and drew him toward a man of his own age about, in a dark double-breasted suit, with blond wavy hair going a little thin, a face not quite handsome and reasonably insensitive and shrewder than intelligent yet on the whole gentler than not, assured courteous and successful. “This is Rat,” she said. “He is the senior living ex-freshman of the University of Alabama. That’s why we still call him Rat. You can call him Rat too. Sometimes he is.”

  Later—it was after midnight and Flint and the woman who had kissed him were gone—they stood in the court beside the jasmine bush. “I’ve got two children, both girls,” she said. “That’s funny, because all my family were brothers except me. I liked my oldest brother the best but you cant sleep with your brother and he and Rat roomed together in school so I married Rat and now I’ve got two girls, and when I was seven years old I fell in the fireplace, my brother and I were fighting, and that’s the scar. It’s on my shoulder and side and hip too and I got in the habit of telling people about it before they would have time not to ask and I still do it even when it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Do you tell everybody like this? At first?”

  “About the brothers or about the scar?”

  “Both. Maybe the scar.”

  “No. That’s funny too. I had forgotten. I haven’t told anybody in years. Five years.”

  “But you told me.”

  “Yes. And that’s funny twice. No, three times now. Listen. I lied to you. I dont paint. I work with clay, and some in brass, and once with a piece of stone, with a chisel and maul. Feel.” She took his hand and drew his finger-tips along the base of her other palm—the broad, blunt, strong, supple-fingered hand with nails as closely trimmed as if she had bitten them down, the skin at the base and lower joints of the fingers not calloused exactly but smoothly hardened and toughened like the heel of a foot. “That’s what I make: something you can touch, pick up, something with weight in your hand that you can look at the behind side of, that displaces air and displaces water and when you drop it, it’s your foot that breaks and not the shape. Not poking at a piece of cloth with a knife or a brush like you were trying to put together a jig saw puzzle with a rotten switch through the bars of a cage. That’s why I said I could beat that,” she said. She didn’t move, she didn’t even indicate by a motion of her head the room behind them. “Not just something to tickle your taste buds for a second and then swallowed and maybe not even sticking to your entrails but just evacuated whole and flushed away into the damned old sewer, the Might-just-as-well-not-have-been. Will you come to supper tomorrow night?”

  “I cant. I’m on duty tomorrow night.”

  “The next night then? Or when?”

  “Dont you have engagements yourself?”

  “There are some people coming the night after tomorrow. But they wont bother you.” She looked at him. “All right, if you dont want a lot of people, I’ll put them off. The night after tomorrow? At seven? Do you want me to come to the hospital for you in the car?”

  “No. Dont do that.”

  “I can, you know.”

  “I know it,” he said. “I know it. Listen—”

  “Let’s go in,” she said. “I’m going home. And dont wear that. Wear your own clothes. I want to see.”

  Two evenings later he went to dinner. He found a modest though comfortable apartment in an irreproachable neighborhood near Audubon Park, a negro maid, two not particularly remarkable children of two and four, with her hair but otherwise looking like the father (who in another dark obviously expensive double-breasted suit made a cocktail not particularly remarkable either and insisted that Wilbourne call him Rat) and she in something he knew had been purchased as a semi-formal garment and which she wore with the same ruthless indifference as she had the garment in which he had first seen her, as if both of them were overalls. After the meal, which was considerably better than the cocktails, she went out with the older child, who had dined with them, but she returned presently to lie on the sofa smoking while Rittenmeyer continued to ask Wilbourne questions about his profession such as the president of a college fraternity might ask of a pledge from the medical school. At ten oclock Wilbourne said he must go. “No,” she said, “not yet.” So he remained; at half past ten Rittenmeyer said he must work tomorrow and was going to bed and left them. Then
she crushed out the cigarette and rose and came to where he stood before the cold hearth and stopped, facing him. “What to—Do they call you Harry? What to do about it, Harry?”

  “I dont know. I never was in love before.”

  “I have been. But I dont know either.—Do you want me to call a cab for you?”

  “No.” He turned, she moved beside him across the room. “I’ll walk.”

  “Are you that poor? Let me pay for the cab. You cant walk to the hospital. It’s three miles.”

  “That’s not far.”

  “It wont be his money, if that’s what you mean. I have some of my own. I have been saving it for something, I dont know what.” She handed him his hat and stood with her hand on the door knob.

  “Three miles is not far. I would walk—”

  “Yes,” she said. She opened the door, they looked at one another. Then the door closed between them. It was painted white. They did not shake hands.

  During the next six weeks they met five times more. This would be down town for lunch, because he would not again enter her husband’s house and his destiny or luck (or ill-luck, since otherwise he might have discovered that love no more exists just at one spot and in one moment and in one body out of all the earth and all time and all the teeming breathed than sunlight does) brought him no more second hand invitations to parties. It would be in Vieux Carre places where they could lunch on the weekly two dollars which he had been sending to his sister to apply on the note. At the third of these she said abruptly, out of nothing: “I have told Rat.”

  “Told him?”

  “About lunches. That I have been meeting you.” After that she never mentioned her husband again. The fifth time they did not lunch. They went to a hotel, they planned it the day before. He discovered that he knew next to nothing about the proper procedure other than supposition and imagination; because of his ignorance he believed that there was a secret to the successful performance of the business, not a secret formula to be followed but rather a kind of white magic: a word or some infinitesimal and trivial movement of the hand such as that which opens a hidden drawer or panel. He thought once of asking her how to go about it because he was certain that she would know, just as he was certain that she would never be at a loss about anything she wished to do, not only because of her absolute co-ordination but because even in this short time he had come to realise that intuitive and infallible skill of all women in the practical affairs of love. But he did not ask her because he told himself that, when she told him how to do, which she would, and it would be correct, he might at some later time believe that she had done this before and that even if she had, he did not want to know it. So he asked Flint.

  “Jesus,” Flint said. “You have come out, haven’t you? I didn’t even know you knew a girl.” Wilbourne could almost watch Flint thinking swiftly, casting backward. “Was it that brawl at Crowe’s that night? But hell, that’s your business, aint it? It’s easy. Just take a bag with a couple of bricks wrapped up in a towel so they wont rattle, and walk in. I wouldn’t pick the Saint Charles or the Roosevelt, of course. Take one of the smaller ones, not too small of course. Maybe that one down toward the station. Wrap the bricks separately, see, then roll them up together. And be sure to carry a coat with you. Raincoat.”

  “Yes. Do you reckon I’d better tell her to bring a coat too?”

  Flint laughed, one short syllable, not loud. “I guess not. I dont guess she’ll need any coaching from you or me either.—Here,” he said quickly, “hold your horses. I dont know her. I aint talking about her. I’m talking about women. She could turn up with a bag of her own and a coat and a veil and the stub of a Pullman ticket sticking out of her handbag and that wouldn’t mean she had done this before. That’s just women. There aint any advice that Don Juan or Solomon either could give the youngest fourteen-year-old gal ever foaled about this kind of phenagling.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She probably wont come anyway.” He found that he really believed that. He still believed it even when the cab drew up to the curb where he waited with the bag. She had a coat, but no bag nor veil. She came swiftly out of the cab when he opened the door, her face was hard, sober, her eyes extraordinarily yellow, her voice harsh:

  “Well? Where?”

  He told her. “It’s not far. We can—” She turned, already getting back into the cab. “We can walk—”

  “You damned pauper,” she said. “Get in. Hurry.” He got in. The cab moved on. The hotel was not far. A negro porter took the bag. Then it seemed to Wilbourne that he had never been in his life, and would never be again, so aware of her as he was while she stood in the center of the dingy lobby raddled with the Saturday nights of drummers and of minor race-track hangers-on while he signed the two fictitious names on the pad and gave to the clerk the sixth two dollars which were to have gone to his sister but did not, waiting for him, making no effort for effacement, quiet, contained, and with a quality profoundly tragic which he knew (he was learning fast) was not peculiar to her but was an attribute of all women at this instant in their lives, which would invest them with a dignity, almost a modesty, to be carried over and clothe even the last prone and slightly comic attitude of ultimate surrender. He followed her down the corridor and into the door which the porter opened, he dismissed the porter and closed the rented door behind him and watched her cross the room to the single dingy window and, still in the hat and coat, turn without pausing and exactly like a child playing prisoner’s base and return to him, the yellow eyes, the whole face which he had already come to call beautiful, hard and fixed. “Oh God, Harry,” she said. She beat her clenched fists on his chest. “Not like this. Jesus, not like this.”

  “All right,” he said. “Steady, now.” He caught her wrists and held them, still doubled into fists against his chest while she still wrenched at them to free them to strike his chest again. Yes he thought. Not like this and never. “Steady now.”

  “Not like this, Harry. Not back alleys. I’ve always said that: that no matter what happened to me, whatever I did, anything anything but not back alleys. If it had just been hot pants, somebody with a physique I just leched for all of a sudden so that I never looked nor thought higher than his collar. But not us, Harry. Not you. Not you.”

  “Steady now,” he said. “It’s all right.” He led her to the edge of the bed and stood over her, still holding her wrists.

  “I told you how I wanted to make things, take the fine hard clean brass or stone and cut it, no matter how hard, how long it took, cut it into something fine, that you could be proud to show, that you could touch, hold, see the behind side of it and feel the fine solid weight so when you dropped it it wouldn’t be the thing that broke it would be the foot it dropped on except it’s the heart that breaks and not foot, if I have a heart. But Jesus, Harry, how I have bitched it for you.” She extended her hand, then he realised what she was about and twisted his hips away before she touched him.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “You mustn’t worry about me. Do you want a cigarette?”

  “Please.” He gave her a cigarette and a light, looking down at the foreshortened slant of her nose and jaw as she drew at it. He threw the match away. “Well,” she said. “So that’s that. And no divorce.”

  “No divorce?”

  “Rat’s a Catholic. He wont give me one.”

  “You mean that he—”

  “I told him. Not that I was to meet you at a hotel. I just said, suppose I did. And he still said no soap.”

  “Cant you get the divorce?”

  “On what grounds? He would fight it. And it would have to be here—a Catholic judge. So there’s just one other thing. And it seems I cant do that.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Your children.”

  For a moment she looked at him, smoking. “I wasn’t thinking of them. I mean, I have already thought of them. So now I dont need to think of them anymore because I know the answer to that and I know I cant change that answer and I dont think I ca
n change me because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself. So I dont need to think about the children. I settled that a long time ago. I was thinking about money. My brother sends me twenty-five dollars every Christmas and for the last five years I have saved it. I told you the other night I dont know why I have saved it. Maybe it was for this and maybe this is the best joke of all: that I have saved for five years and it’s only a hundred and twenty-five dollars, hardly enough to get two people to Chicago. And you have nothing.” She leaned toward the table at the head of the bed and crushed the cigarette out with slow and infinite care, and rose. “So that’s that. That’s all of it.”

  “No,” he said. “No! I’ll be damned if it is.”

  “Do you want to go on like this? hanging around and staying green for me like an apple on a limb?” She took his raincoat from the chair and slung it across her arm and stood waiting.

  “Dont you want to go first?” he said. “I’ll wait about thirty minutes, then I——”

  “And let you walk alone through that lobby carrying the bag for that clerk and that nigger to snigger at because they saw me leave before I would have even had time to take my clothes off, let alone put them back on?” She went to the door and put her hand on the key. He picked up the bag and followed. But she did not unlock the door at once. “Listen. Tell me again you haven’t got any money. Say it. So I can have something my ears can listen to as making sense even if I cant understand it. Some reason why I—that I can accept as the strong reason we cant beat even if I cant believe or understand that it could be just that, just money, not anything but just money. Come on. Say it.”