Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

The day after Isabel got the part in Hamlet we celebrated with steaks at a neighborhood restaurant. Isabel was radiant. Her complexion was luminous against her gray sweater and silver jewelry, her curly gray hair. I was pleasant on the outside but inside sullen. She had three glasses of wine; I had club soda. I had nearly given up drinking a few years before, after spotting some handwriting on the wall about what happened to people who drank gin with their scrambled eggs. In those days I was free of bad habits—especially of fucking. I smiled as Isabel drank her wine and talked about how much the part meant to her, but inside I sulked like a child.

That evening she sat by the fire with a cat in her lap and a beat-up paperback of Hamlet propped on the cat. She was underlining Gertrude’s speeches in red. I busied myself cleaning up the breakfast dishes, clanging pans from time to time to let my presence be felt. Fifty years old and often on the cover of Time or Peking , a “basic force” in world finance, as Forbes called me once, the terror of boardrooms and a mover and a shaker on Wall Street, and there I am in Isabel’s little New York kitchen clanging the frying pan against the steel sink because I’m pissed and jealous. Because she’s more interested in a play than in me. Because I can’t get it up with her and haven’t in the months we’ve lived together. Clang goes the pan as I set it back on the wood-burning stove, scrubbed. And from here in my self-imposed exile on Belson I can see I was angry with Isabel because she was a beautiful, smart, erotic woman who wanted me to fuck her. The very idea , I was saying in my heart, as I scrubbed bacon grease off that morning’s breakfast plates. Who in the hell does she think she is? said that scared child in my mossy old rib cage. I dried the silverware with a cloth and could hear the cat purring in Isabel’s lap. I wanted to wring its neck. Inside me an angry virginity smoldered, grimly loyal to a pair of miserable ghosts. I started throwing the silverware into its shallow drawer. Take that, you goddamn knives and forks! Son of a bitching, goddamned spoons! Isabel murmured pleasantly over her text, underlining speeches, occasionally stroking the big cat, Amagansett, in her lap. I slammed the silverware drawer shut and stated, with great control in my voice, “ Hamlet is an overrated play.” Ben Belson, literary critic.

“Huh?” Isabel said. There was an edge in her voice; she had picked up the sound of a gauntlet falling. “What’s that, sweetheart?”

“ Hamlet ,” I said, “is an overrated fucking play. It’s too long, too wordy, and it has too many corpses on the floor.” I dried my hands off on the towel, walked over and stood by the fire. The other cat, William, saw me coming and slinked away. Those fucking beasts pick up vibrations. “Nobody really knows what Hamlet’ s about, either. That’s a lousy recommendation for a play.”

Isabel marked her place with an ivory bookmark and then looked up at me coolly. “T.S. Eliot said it’s about a boy’s disgust with his mother.”

That one stopped me for a second, but I shook it off. I was in no mood to explore my own psyche. What I wanted was to work on Isabel’s. There she sat, content by the fire, happy in her career and her pussycats, warmhearted and serene. And here I stood with a rage in my otherwise empty heart and my big, calloused hands trembling. I got those callouses from chopping cords of wood, in fury, at my country home in Georgia, every time the Dow went the wrong way. Inside, there in New York, I am a complete mess, a bridge hand without a face card, a barren, angry hulk of impotence, a sick and furious motherfucker, and I say to Isabel, “Is something bothering you ?” She should have brained me with a lump of coal.

She looked up at me steadily before she spoke. “Ben,” she said. “You look ready for homicide, or worse. I don’t want to talk about Shakespeare with you right now.”

A part of me recognized that she was completely right. So I counterattacked. I tried to relax my features into something more amiable. Plausible anyway. I went back to the kitchen—actually just a space along one wall with a small stove and a dish cabinet in it—and started heating water for tea. I looked at my watch. A little after 11 P.M. “Isabel,” I said. “You can get awfully snotty when you talk about the theater. Do you feel Shakespeare’s something holy? Too holy for a businessman to discuss?”

The black cat leaped off her lap at that one. “Ben,” Isabel said, “for Christ’s sake come off it. I’m not a Shakespeare snob and you know it.”

Something glowed in me. I had her there. “What about that time we saw Henry the Fifth ? All that talk you gave me about the audience not being able to feel the cadences.” I was standing by the fireplace again, striking a pose of sweet reasonableness. “The fucking cadences .” I looked at her face. I could see I had hit home. Something inside me thrilled at it.

“Damn you, Ben,” she said. “If you didn’t have a bloody tin ear yourself you’d have known what I was talking about. Shakespeare was a poet.”

“Bullshit!” The fact was that I didn’t know beans about Shakespeare but I did sense that Isabel had mixed feelings about liking him and being in one of his plays. I felt I had something there. “Bullshit!” I said again, getting into it. “Shakespeare was a middle-class Englishman and he sucked up to aristocrats and the only people he endowed with classy feelings were princes and generals and emperors. The rest of his characters are drunks and clowns.”

Isabel didn’t even look up. “And women,” she said. Then, “Your tea water’s boiling.”

“Thanks,” I said, and walked back to the kitchen wall with what felt like controlled dignity. Actually, my mind and heart were a muddle. One thing about impotence: you miss the clarity that comes after an orgasm. Sometimes it felt as though my unspilled semen was backed up to my brain and had shortcircuited half the connections there. And what was there to do about such a muddle except to shout at Isabel? “I hate snobbery!” I shouted. “Goddamn it, I hate the way you want it both ways, Isabel: you want to be a Communist and bleed for the masses and you cultivate the tastes of an aristocrat. Antique English silverware”—I gestured toward the nail on which hung Isabel’s safety-deposit key; she kept her Georgian service for twelve in a vault—“and antique furniture. You wouldn’t let a veneer in the door. You wouldn’t so much as set your pinky down on a surface that wasn’t hand-rubbed by forelock-tuggers in a fucking English sweatshop. You’re proud as a pumpkin of being a daughter of the People’s Republic of Scotland, but the only barricade you’ve ever stood near had footlights on it.”

I felt a muted brotherhood with Shakespeare. Way to talk, Bill! I looked at Isabel and it seemed as if she were far away. Everything seemed far away. Isabel was staring into the fire, where my Mafia coal was burning. Her face was pale and drawn—impassive. Then she raised her eyes to my face silently and I saw something awfully, horribly hurt there, something that twisted me in the stomach and suddenly brought me back into the room with her. “Why are you talking like that, Ben?” she said.

I thought suddenly of Lulu and Philippe, the two California seals at the Central Park Zoo. I would walk up there sometimes around noon to buy one of the four-dollar hot dogs that the vendors sell. I needed to get out of the apartment from time to time and I’d walk up Fifth Avenue, by all those empty stores and then, near the park, by the run-down apartment buildings. The park itself was always a bit depressing, its trees long gone to wood thieves, and the zoo was full of empty cages that nobody wanted to have heated anymore. There hadn’t been an elephant in the place for forty years. But there were still some birds and an aquarium, and the big heated pool was still there with its two California sea lions. I’d buy my hot dog with sauerkraut and mustard and then go, huddled against that awful winter in my mackinaw and scarf and long underwear, and look at the seals while I ate. When they swam they rubbed their smooth bodies against one another in a kind of continuous “Hello.” The love in this was perfectly clear and as easy as sunshine, even in what must have been for those displaced Californians a frigid environment. To say the least. Yet they were full of life and of straightforward affection for one another. Why couldn’t Isabel and I, two grown homo sapiens , be like that? Why couldn’t I ? What the hell? What was wrong?