In the Absence of Angels Read online

  “No,” Robert said, clicking on the record arm. “I’m afraid Africa’s démodé.” A harpsichord began to play, its dwarf notes hollow and perfect. Robert raised his voice a shade above the music. “Full of fashion photographers. And little come-lately writers.” He sucked in his cheeks and made a face. “Trying out their passions under the beeg, bad sun.”

  “Eheu, poor Africa?” said Peter.

  Robert laughed. Vince stared at him out of wizened eyes. Not drink, so much, after all, Peter decided, looking professionally at the mottled cherub face before he realized that he was comparing it with another face, but lately left. He looked away.

  “Weren’t you going over, Peter?” Robert leaned against the machine.

  “Not this year.” Carefully Peter kept out of his voice the knell the words made in his mind. In Greenwich, there were many graveled walks, unshrubbed except for the nurses who dotted them, silent and attitudinized as trees. “Isn’t that Landowska playing?”

  “Hmm. Nice and cooling on a hot day. Or a fevered brow.” Robert fiddled with the volume control. The music became louder, then lowered. “Vince wrote a poem about that once. About the Mozart, really, wasn’t it, Vince? ‘A lovely clock between ourselves and time.’ ” He enunciated daintily, pushing the words away from him with his tongue.

  “Turn it off!” Vince stood up, his small fists clenched, hanging at his sides.

  “No, let her finish.” Robert turned deliberately and closed the lid of the machine, so that the faint hiss of the needle vanished from the frail, metronomic notes. He smiled. “What a time-obsessed crowd writers are. Now Mario doesn’t have to bother with that dimension.”

  “Not unless I paint portraits,” Mario said. His parted lips exposed his teeth, like some white, unexpected flint of intelligence.

  “Dolce far niente,” Robert said softly. He repeated the phrase dreamily, so that half-known Italian words — “loggia,” the “Ponte Vecchio,” the “Lungarno” — imprinted themselves one by one on Peter’s mind, and he saw the two of them, Mario and Roberto now, already in the frayed-gold light of Florence, in the umber dusk of half-imagined towns.

  A word, muffled, came out of Vince’s throat. He lunged for the record-player. Robert seized his wrist and held it down on the lid. They were locked that way, staring at each other, when the doorbell rang.

  “That must be Susan,” Robert said. He released Vince and looked down, watching the blood return to his fingers, flexing his palm.

  With a second choked sound, Vince flung out his fist in an awkward attempt at a punch. It grazed Robert’s cheek, clawing downward. A thin line of red appeared on Robert’s cheek. Fist to mouth, Vince stood a moment; then he rushed from the room. They heard the nearer bedroom door slam and the lock click. The bell rang again, a short, hesitant burr.

  Robert clapped his hand to his cheek, shrugged, and left the room.

  Mario got up out of his chair for the first time. “Aren’t you going to ask who Susan is?”

  “Should I?” Peter leaned away from the face bent confidentially near, curly with glee.

  “His daughter,” Mario whispered. “He said he was expecting his daughter. Can you imagine? Robert!”

  Peter moved farther away from the mobile, pressing face and, standing at the window, studied the gritty details of the courtyard. A vertical line of lighted windows, each with a glimpse of stair, marked the hallways on each of the five floors. Most of the other windows were dim and closed, or opened just a few inches above their white ledges, and the yard was quiet. People would be away or out in the sun, or in their brighter front rooms dressing for dinner, all of them avoiding this dark shaft that connected the backs of their lives. Or, here and there, was there someone sitting in the fading light, someone lying on a bed with his face pressed to a pillow? The window a few feet to the right, around the corner of the court, must be the window of the room into which Vince had gone. There was no light in it.

  Robert returned, a Kleenex held against his cheek. With him was a pretty, ruffle-headed girl in a navy-blue dress with a red arrow at each shoulder. He switched on another lamp. For the next arrival, Peter thought, surely he will tug back a velvet curtain or break out with a heraldic flourish of drums, recorded by Red Seal. Or perhaps the musty wardrobe was opening at last and was this the skeleton — this girl who had just shaken hands with Mario, and now extended her hand toward Peter, tentatively, timidly, as if she did not habitually shake hands but today would observe every custom she could.

  “How do you do?”

  “How do you do?” Peter said. The hand he held for a moment was small and childish, the nails unpainted, but the rest of her was very correct for the eye of the beholder, like the young models one sees in magazines, sitting or standing against a column, always in three-quarter view, so that the picture, the ensemble, will not be marred by the human glance. Mario took from her a red dressing case that she held in her free hand, bent to pick up a pair of white gloves that she had dropped, and returned them with an avid interest which overbalanced, like a waiter’s gallantry. She sat down, brushing at the gloves.

  “The train was awfully dusty — and crowded.” She smiled tightly at Robert, looked hastily and obliquely at each of the other two, and bent over the gloves, brushing earnestly, stopping as if someone had said something, and, when no one did, brushing again.

  “Well, well, well,” Robert said. His manners, always good, were never so to the point of clichés, which would be for him what nervous gaffes were for other people. He coughed, rubbed his cheek with the back of his hand, looked at the hand, and stuffed the Kleenex into the pocket of his shorts. “How was camp?”

  Mario’s eyebrows went up. The girl was twenty, surely, Peter thought.

  “All right,” she said. She gave Robert the stiff smile again and looked down into her lap. “I like helping children. They can use it.” Her hands folded on top of the gloves, then inched under and hid beneath them.

  “Susan’s been counseling at a camp which broke up early because of a polio scare,” Robert said as he sat down. “She’s going to use Vince’s room while I’m away, until college opens.”

  “Oh — ” She looked up at Peter. “Then you aren’t Vince?”

  “No. I just dropped in. I’m Peter Birge.”

  She gave him a neat nod of acknowledgment. “I’m glad, because I certainly wouldn’t want to inconvenience — ”

  “Did you get hold of your mother in Reno?” Robert asked quickly.

  “Not yet. But she couldn’t break up her residence term anyway. And Arthur must have closed up the house here. The phone was disconnected.”

  “Arthur’s Susan’s stepfather,” Robert explained with a little laugh. “Number three, I think. Or is it four, Sue?”

  Without moving, she seemed to retreat, so that again there was nothing left for the observer except the girl against the column, any one of a dozen with the short, anonymous nose, the capped hair, the foot arched in the trim shoe, and half an iris glossed with an expertly aimed photoflood. “Three,” she said. Then one of the hidden hands stole out from under the gloves, and she began to munch evenly on a fingernail.

  “Heavens, you haven’t still got that habit!” Robert said.

  “What a heavy papa you make, Roberto,” Mario said.

  She flushed, and put the hand back in her lap, tucking the fingers under. She looked from Peter to Mario and back again. “Then you’re not Vince,” she said. “I didn’t think you were.”

  The darkness increased around the lamps. Behind Peter, the court had become brisk with lights, windows sliding up, and the sound of taps running.

  “Guess Vince fell asleep. I’d better get him up and send him on his way.” Robert shrugged, and rose.

  “Oh, don’t! I wouldn’t want to be an inconvenience,” the girl said, with a polite terror which suggested she might often have been one.

  “On the contrary.” Robert spread his palms, with a smile, and walked down the hall. They heard him knocking on a do
or, then his indistinct voice.

  In the triangular silence, Mario stepped past Peter and slid the window up softly. He leaned out to listen, peering sidewise at the window to the right. As he was pulling himself back in, he looked down. His hands stiffened on the ledge. Very slowly he pulled himself all the way in and stood up. Behind him a tin ventilator clattered inward and fell to the floor. In the shadowy lamplight his too classic face was like marble which moved numbly. He swayed a little, as if with vertigo.

  “I’d better get out of here!”

  They heard his heavy breath as he dashed from the room. The slam of the outer door blended with Robert’s battering, louder now, on the door down the hall.

  “What’s down there?” She was beside Peter, otherwise he could not have heard her. They took hands, like strangers met on a narrow footbridge or on one of those steep places where people cling together more for anchorage against their own impulse than for balance. Carefully they leaned out over the sill. Yes — it was down there, the shirt, zebra-striped, just decipherable on the merged shadow of the courtyard below.

  Carefully, as if they were made of eggshell, as if by some guarded movement they could still rescue themselves from disaster, they drew back and straightened up. Robert, his face askew with the impossible question, was behind them.

  After this, there was the hubbub — the ambulance from St. Luke’s, the prowl car, the two detectives from the precinct station house, and finally the “super,” a vague man with the grub pallor and shamble of those who live in basements. He pawed over the keys on the thong around his wrist and, after several tries, opened the bedroom door. It was a quiet, unviolent room with a tossed bed and an open window, with a stagy significance acquired only momentarily in the minds of those who gathered in a group at its door.

  Much later, after midnight, Peter and Susan sat in the bald glare of an all-night restaurant. With hysterical eagerness, Robert had gone on to the station house with the two detectives to register the salient facts, to help ferret out the relatives in Ohio, to arrange, in fact, anything that might still be arrangeable about Vince. Almost without noticing, he had acquiesced in Peter’s proposal to look after Susan. Susan herself, after silently watching the gratuitous burbling of her father, as if it were a phenomenon she could neither believe nor leave, had followed Peter without comment. At his suggestion, they had stopped off at the restaurant on their way to her stepfather’s house, for which she had a key.

  “Thanks. I was starved.” She leaned back and pushed at the short bang of hair on her forehead.

  “Hadn’t you eaten at all?”

  “Just those pasty sandwiches they sell on the train. There wasn’t any diner.”

  “Smoke?”

  “I do, but I’m just too tired. I can get into a hotel all right, don’t you think? If I can’t get in at Arthur’s?”

  “I know the manager of a small one near us,” Peter said. “But if you don’t mind coming to my place, you can use my mother’s room for tonight. Or for as long as you need, probably.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She’s away. She’ll be away for quite a while.”

  “Not in Reno, by any chance?” There was a roughness, almost a coarseness, in her tone, like that in the overdone camaraderie of the shy.

  “No. My father died when I was eight. Why?”

  “Oh, something in the way you spoke. And then you’re so competent. Does she work?”

  “No. My father left something. Does yours?”

  She stood up and picked up her bedraggled gloves. “No,” she said, and her voice was suddenly distant and delicate again. “She marries.” She turned and walked out ahead of him.

  He paid, rushed out of the restaurant, and caught up with her.

  “Thought maybe you’d run out on me,” he said.

  She got in the car without answering.

  They drove through the Park, toward the address in the East Seventies that she had given him. A weak smell of grass underlay the gas-blended air, but the Park seemed limp and worn, as if the strain of the day’s effluvia had been too much for it. At the Seventy-second Street stop signal, the blank light of a street lamp invaded the car.

  “Thought you might be feeling Mrs. Grundyish at my suggesting the apartment,” Peter said.

  “Mrs. Grundy wasn’t around much when I grew up.” The signal changed and they moved ahead.

  They stopped in a street which had almost no lights along its smartly converted house fronts. This was one of the streets, still sequestered by money, whose houses came alive only under the accelerated, febrile glitter of winter and would dream through the gross summer days, their interiors deadened with muslin or stirred faintly with the subterranean clinkings of caretakers. No. 4 was dark.

  “I would rather stay over at your place, if I have to,” the girl said. Her voice was offhand and prim. “I hate hotels. We always stopped at them in between.”

  “Let’s get out and see.”

  They stepped down into the areaway in front of the entrance, the car door banging hollowly behind them. She fumbled in her purse and took out a key, although it was already obvious that it would not be usable. In his childhood, he had often hung around in the areaways of old brownstones such as this had been. In the corners there had always been a soft, decaying smell, and the ironwork, bent and smeared, always hung loose and broken-toothed. The areaway of this house had been repaved with slippery flag; even in the humid night there was no smell. Black-tongued grillwork, with an oily shine and padlocked, secured the windows and the smooth door. Fastened on the grillwork in front of the door was the neat, square proclamation of a protection agency.

  “You don’t have a key for the padlocks, do you?”

  “No.” She stood on the curb, looking up at the house. “It was a nice room I had there. Nicest one I ever did have, really.” She crossed to the car and got in.

  He followed her over to the car and got in beside her. She had her head in her hands.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll get in touch with somebody in the morning.”

  “I don’t. I don’t care about any of it, really.” She sat up, her face averted. “My parents, or any of the people they tangle with.” She wound the lever on the door slowly, then reversed it. “Robert, or my mother, or Arthur,” she said, “although he was always pleasant enough. Even Vince — even if I’d known him.”

  “He was just a screwed-up kid. It could have been anybody’s window.”

  “No.” Suddenly she turned and faced him. “I should think it would be the best privilege there is, though. To care, I mean.”

  When he did not immediately reply, she gave him a little pat on the arm and sat back. “Excuse it, please. I guess I’m groggy.” She turned around and put her head on the crook of her arm. Her words came faintly through it. “Wake me when we get there.”

  She was asleep by the time they reached his street. He parked the car as quietly as possible beneath his own windows. He himself had never felt more awake in his life. He could have sat there until morning with her sleep-secured beside him. He sat thinking of how different it would be at Rye, or anywhere, with her along, with someone along who was the same age. For they were the same age, whatever that was, whatever the age was of people like them. There was nothing he would be unable to tell her.

  To the north, above the rooftops, the electric mauve of midtown blanked out any auguries in the sky, but he wasn’t looking for anything like that. Tomorrow he would take her for a drive — whatever the weather. There were a lot of good roads around Greenwich.

  Point of Departure

  AFTERWARD, LEANING THEIR ELBOWS on the mantel, they lit cigarettes and stared at each other warily. The late afternoon, seeping into the small apartment, pushed back its boundaries, melted them into shadow, intruding into the comfortably trivial box the long finger of space.

  They were, she thought, like two people holding on to the opposite ends of a string, each anxious to let go first, or at least soon, without
offending the other, yet each reluctant to drop the curling, lapsing bond between them. Always, afterward, there was the sense of a dialectic, a question not concluded; after the blind engulfment the two separate egos collected themselves painfully, slowly donned their bits of protective armor, and maneuvered once more for place.

  It would be easy, good, she thought, to talk long and intimately afterward, to meet on close ground, divested of all pretense. But they never want this; they never do. The long, probing conversations that women tried to force upon them, getting closer to the nerve of personality — how they hated them, retreating from them brusquely into silence, sheepishly into the commonplace of the consolatory pat! Or, after the aura of wanting had ebbed, did they too feel a little bereft, bare, in front of the speculative, now disenchanted eyes opposite them; did they too conceal a fumbling need to linger a little longer in the dark recesses of emotion, to examine, to assess what had been separate, had blended, and now was separate again?

  Doubting this, she could see him, so quickly, so expertly casual, leaving in a few minutes, gathering up his hat and his brief case with a delicate assumption of reluctance, exhaling a last relieved whiff of tenderness into her ear. Out of some obscure pride she never went to the door with him; he never remarked on this but always closed the door very gently, like someone leaving a sickroom. She could imagine him standing on the doorstep downstairs, squaring his shoulders and making straight for a bar, eager to immerse himself quickly in the swapping masculine talk of baseball scores and prize fights, blow by blow — all the vicarious jaunty brag that sat upon him as inappropriately as a cockaded paper party hat, but that was indulged in alike, she knew, by the simple male and the clever.

  Opposite, already a little absent, he stared at her a trifle wryly, pulling gratefully at his cigarette. Now, he knew, would begin the gentle process of disengagement that he had learned long ago, defensively, to perform so well. Now it would be like a game of gesture in which he excelled, in which it would be as if, smiling the tolerant smile of experience, he divested himself one by one of a series of clinging hands, until he stood again remote, inaccessible, free. Only later, when the warmth and almost all the conquest had worn away, would the slow rise of irritation with self and women begin, then the slight guilt of satiety that would enable the resolve to be made, and finally the shrug and the forgetfulness.