He noticed the way she tried to relax her body, to make herself like a child hearing a favourite story. But her hands tightened on the carved wooden arms and for a hundredth of a second she was suffering in an electric chair. Then she sank back again and tried to annihilate herself in the melody.
Some women possess their beauty as they do a custom sportscar or a thoroughbred horse. They drive it hard to every appointment and grant interviews from the saddle. The lucky ones have small accidents and learn to walk in the street, because nobody wants to listen to an arrogant old lady. Some women wear moss over their beauty and occasionally something rips it away – a lover, a pregnancy, maybe a death – and an incredible smile shows through, deep happy eyes, perfect skin, but this is temporary and soon the moss reforms. Some women study and counterfeit beauty. Industries have been established to serve these women, and men are conditioned to favour them. Some women inherit beauty as a family feature, and learn to value it slowly, as the scion of a great family becomes proud of an unusual chin because so many distinguished men bore it. And some women, Breavman thought, women like Shell, create it as they go along, changing not so much their faces as the air around them. They break down old rules of light and cannot be interpreted or compared. They make every room original.
He believed she was in some kind of pain, or rather, defeat. The loveliness she composed seemed to rebel and escape her, as sometimes a poem under the pen becomes wild and uncontrollable. This did not modify his wonder at her. What she created was still remarkable. Into that he wouldn’t dare intrude. But perhaps he could have some part in comforting her.
She recognized him and met his stare, having learned that this was the best method to greet the public seducer, and immediately perceived that there was in his eyes nothing that tried to make her an indifferent means, an object. She was simply being adored. For some curious reason she remembered a certain dress she had worn when she was at school and wished vaguely to be wearing it or know where it was. His head was inclined, he was smiling. He’s ready to watch me all night, she thought. Not speak, not ask anything. She wondered who he was. His face was young but there were unusually deep lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. It was as if all his experience were recorded there. The mouth would have been too full and sensual without the chastening lines, like those idiotic fat kissing lips of Hindu gods.
Well, what was she doing thinking about his lips? And what was she doing in this chair sitting so stilly for him? She should be back at her apartment, thinking, considering her future, learning a language, sorting things out, or whatever people who live alone are supposed to do when they come back at night.
She realized that years ago this was exactly how she would have liked to be observed, with music, before a window, with light made soft by old wood.
Soon she wouldn’t be able to see the separate stones in the wall, or the iron fence against the bushes. The sidewalks were mother-of-pearl, and although she could not see it, she knew the sun was dragging darkness as it cut behind the rose-edged New Jersey hills. Would he never turn away?
She closed her eyes and could still feel his stare. It had the power of defenceless praise. It did not call her beautiful, but called her to delight in her beauty, which is more understandable and human, and it pleased her to contemplate the pleasure she created. Who was the man who did this to her? She opened her eyes and smiled her curiosity at him. He stood up and walked to her.
“Will you come with me?”
“All right.”
“It’s almost dark.”
They left the room softly. Breavman closed the door carefully. They exchanged their names in whispers and laughed when they remembered that they could talk out loud.
They walked back and forth on the cement expanse that stretches in front of Grant’s Tomb. There is a certain formality about that area; at night it could be the private garden of an illustrious friend. They went in step over the large squares.
“The Grants are excellent hosts,” said Shell.
“They retire very early of an evening,” said Breavman.
“Wouldn’t you say their house is a wee bit pretentious?” said Shell.
“That’s generous. The entrance hall looks like a bloody mausoleum!” said Breavman. “And I hear he drinks.”
“So does she.”
They joined hands and ran down the hill. Crisp leaves splintered under their feet and they looked for drifts of them to trample down. Then they watched the traffic speed on the driveway below, the lights of countless cars. On the Hudson there were other lights, the necklace of the George Washington bridge, the slow-moving barges and the Alcoa sign across the water. The air was clear, the stars big. They stood close and inherited everything.
“I must go now.”
“Stay up the night with me! We’ll go to the fish market. There are great noble monsters packed in ice. There are turtles, live ones, for famous restaurants. We’ll rescue one and write messages on his shell and put him in the sea, Shell, sea-shell. Or we’ll go to the vegetable market. They’ve got red-net bags full of onions that look like huge pearls. Or we’ll go down to Forty-second Street and see ten movies and buy a mimeographed bulletin of jobs we can get in Pakistan –”
“I work tomorrow.”
“Which has nothing to do with it.”
“But I’d better go now.”
“I know this is unheard of in America, but I’ll walk you home.”
“I live on Twenty-third Street.”
“Exactly what I’d hoped. It’s over a hundred blocks.”
Shell took his
