Twelve
THE trade-paper photograph of Celia with her hair blowing bore fruit right after the Christmas weekend at the Vestrys’. Long hair was beginning to make inroads on the current chopped-off look, catching a good many models at an awkward stage, and a shampoo manufacturer was not illogically captivated by all that abundance. At a midtown studio, with a solemnity which would not have disgraced the unveiling of an entirely new concept from Detroit, Celia was posed at perhaps fifty angles, lit by and studied under varying colors and combinations of fights; had her pale hair brushed, combed, tousled, blown upon, dampened, draped through her fingers, arranged by someone else’s hands strand by strand.
What ultimately appeared in one of her revered magazines was a three-quarters back view of Celia against the misty mirrored image of a man’s face, showing only a curve of cheekbone, a fringe of artfully colored eyelashes attached for the occasion, and the silky torrent of hair. Although the photograph was cut off at the sweep of her bare shoulders, below which she was modestly clad in a pinned-together towel, it gave a surprising impression of total nudity.
Meanwhile, whenever he could manage it safely and secretly, Celia was seeing David Macintosh.
That he was essentially weak, and had the lost and embattled air of a man who has intended to order tomato juice and finds himself asking for a martini instead, did not bother her at all. Just as a mountain climber does not wish to rent or settle down on any of the peaks he adds to his credit, Celia had no permanent use for Mary Ellen’s unofficial fiance. He was an achievement—and an attractive one even, or especially, torn by guilt as he was. With a detachment made possible by the lack of any emotional involvement, Celia knew that he was enthralled for the moment only because she was something outside his experience.
Toward the end of January, when the hypothetical year to satisfy David’s parents was up, Mary Ellen asked Celia for a sleeping pill.
From her elaborate offhandedness, it was something she had been contemplating and fighting against for some time, even though the faint lilac under her eyes would have seemed to indicate a weariness that had no need of barbiturates for assuagement. It was a sleety Sunday night, and she had just come back from dinner with David before his plane for Providence.
“Certainly,” said Celia without comment, and got the little bottle from her bathroom and tipped out a capsule.
Mary Ellen studied the small yellow and white cylinder on her palm. “Thanks. Are these awfully hard to get? I mean,” she said rapidly, “is it a nuisance for you to part with this one?”
“Not at all. I don’t take them that often.” The sleeping pills had been part of Mr. Tomlinson’s supply, before he had stopped needing them, but there was no reason why Mary Ellen had to know that. “They’re prescription, of course.”
“Yes, I imagined they were.” Mary Ellen closed her fingers thoughtfully over the capsule. “Are you and—are you in love with David?” she inquired with sudden and terrible candor. “If you are, I ought to let you know that I don’t think I’m capable of bowing out gracefully. I do love him very much, and I’m pretty sure he loves me. Basically, I mean,” she added with no change of tone whatever.
So someone had seen them together, even in one of the carefully out-of-the-way places where David took her . . . If Celia had been a girl to use even mental profanity, she would have used it then. As it was, she controlled her sharp anger at David, who should have had the wit to reassure this diminutive big-eyed creature. She was not by any means ready to leave the comfortable apartment for another, or even—yet—to step out from under the equally comfortable cloak of Mary Ellen’s undeniably nice connections.
She said with coolness, “You’re not running a fever, by any chance?” while her mind sped, assembling dates and opportunities. “The funny thing is that David is worried about you. Your health, that is. He doesn’t want to alarm you, but he doesn’t think you’ve been looking well, and knowing how you feel about doctors he’s been sounding me out about getting you to go to one.”
It was not very good, but it was the best Celia could do with no warning at all, and it contained a tiny element of truth: after her ineradicable experience with morphine, Mary Ellen avoided doctors with the diligence other people used to dodge disease.
“How silly. I’m perfectly fine,” she said, and although from her tone she might have accepted this explanation of one or more unmentioned meetings between Celia and David her gray glance held, for a moment, not its usual vague luminosity but something of the cool clarity of Susan’s.
Susan, who had put David on the proscribed list after the country club dance, and who had had in her possession, however briefly, an envelope bearing the name and address of Celia’s family.
In the morning, in the thoughtful way of someone checking fire exits in a building although there has been no immediate smell of smoke, Celia took a train to Bridgeport.
Her deepening dread as she approached 1000 Grand Street—that ruinously memorable address, which had been the source of only half-friendly gibes in high school— seemed to underline the necessity for this mission. While Celia herself had contrived an entirely new shell, the street was as pitilessly unchanged as an ugly old photograph. There were the same patches of dirty ice on the cracked pavements, the same bleary shop windows sandwiched in occasionally among the flaking yellow brick buildings. Factory grit and scraps of litter still came blasting around corners, borne on a wind which carried hopelessness like an aroma.
An instinctive wariness rather than any kind of delicacy no had kept Celia from
