Conrad Aiken: Great Circle

He walked over to Bertha, lifted her chin with his hand so that her eyes were raised toward his own, looked idly into them for an instant, saw that they were now hard and tearless, and turned toward Tom with a conscious brightening of expression.

— Besides, you’ve got on one of your most beautiful waistcoats, and the handsomest tweed suit in Cambridge, and I couldn’t bear to spoil them. And if I missed — good God. You’d kill me with one hand. In self-defense. And I’d rather go mad than die. Oh, much.… Jesus.

— Thank you, said Tom — I appreciate your esthetic tact.

— Don’t mention, old fellow — there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Step right up and help yourself.… But as I was saying. What was I saying?

He frowned into his glass, then covered it with his hand. Tired. His wits were gone. He was saying things badly, saying the wrong things, off the track somehow. Something else must be found, some other direction, something deeper, more to the point, more plangent and poignant. Profound abstractions, self-sacrifice, nobility, a great constellation of bright and beautiful stars. A vast bouquet of planets in a purple sky.

— Why don’t you say something, Berty? God knows you usually have enough—

— What is there to say. It’s done.

— I suppose you didn’t think of consulting me about it.

— Yes, I did. But it came too vaguely, and then too suddenly—

— He swept you off your feet.

— Oh, for the love of mud, Andy!

Tom stood up, very straight and angry.

— I wonder if you quite realize your own part in this situation, Andy. For six months you’ve left me practically alone. You’ve been drunk night after night. If Tom behaved decently to me, did a little something to make things happier for me — if I could get a little enjoyment out of life—

— I see. Yes, indeed. Tom as the good Samaritan. The neglected wife. But I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you that it was partly just because I saw this business beginning that I withdrew myself?

— Oh, no! You can’t get away with that. Oh, no. It had begun before that, and you know it.

Silence. This wasn’t right at all. He stared at the carpet. He felt their eyes fixed upon him, and for the moment wasn’t quite sure that he could look at them. A deep pain opened somewhere within him, a deep sadness, an enormous sense of lostness and futility. It was all no use. Impossible to explain. What on earth could one do with words? Memories? Ideas? A trifling little barter of facts? He walked to the table, refilled his glass, went to the window beside the couch and looked out, looked down into the rain-dark street, where the twin lights of Shepard Hall entrance illuminated the boardwalk, sodden with water. Perhaps it was himself, after all, who was wrong. Was it wholly impossible? Ten years. The dance of places, the dance of rooms, the dance of houses. Bertha plus one, Bertha plus two, Bertha plus three, Bertha plus four. Bertha at the Coffee Party, at the skating rink, on the toboggan at Oakley, on the river at Concord, the Sudbury, the Assabet, walking in spring along the granite lip of the Frog Pond — and now Bertha here, Bertha belonging no longer only to himself, if indeed she belonged at all. Where was it all gone? Where was it now? It was nowhere. It was gone forever. Nothing could now ever be the same in the world, never again. This was no longer his Berty, that was not Tom — two new persons sat in the room with him, two strangers who looked at him with hostility and misunderstanding, whose minds and memories were now allied against his own. He was outnumbered, outmaneuvred, outwitted. What was the use. Better get completely drunk, and let it all go to hell. Speak out his bitterness and be damned to them. Yes. Be damned to them. Let them go to hell and stay there.

— All right, Tom, I suppose you’re right — you’d better go home and leave this to Berty and me. Go on, get out. Put on your damned little galoshes and gloves and carry your pretty little malacca. But first I’d just like to call you, to your white face, a worm: a curious and very handsome worm. Don’t you think so?

He lifted his glass in a toast and drank it off. He had come quite close to Tom, and they were looking with an extraordinary amiability into each other’s eyes. Protractedly. Exchanging what? He felt his gaze move subtly from one to the other of Tom’s two eyes, was for a moment conscious of Tom’s ancient embarrassment at having to look at a glass eye, and felt it now as a peculiar but too fortuitous advantage. He was pleased at the thought.

— Good night, Bertha, Tom said.

— Wait a minute. There’s one more thing. I suppose you’ll want to marry her, and make an honest women of her? It’ll be a divorce, of course?

— Andy! Is that quite necessary?

Bertha flung the words at him crookedly as she flung off the black velvet band from her hair, which she tossed angrily to the right.

— Perhaps not — perhaps not.… Go on, Tom — get out.

From the doorway, he watched Tom pulling on the galoshes, straining and flushing. This was fun. Awkward moment for Tom.

— Sorry your hat and stick are on the floor.

— It doesn’t matter, old man.

— I suppose you’ll be going to Sanders on Thursday?

— Probably.

— Well, sleep well!

— Good night, Andy. Come in and see me when you feel like talking about it.

— Yes, indeed!

He patted Tom delightfully on the shoulder of his raincoat, smiled, and softly shut the door. A beautifully managed exit. Couldn’t have been better. And the idea of Tom’s sleeping. Good God. Who would sleep after this? Who? Himself only, for only himself would have the sense to get thoroughly and completely and obliviously drunk. Yes. Drunk. He was drunk already. He was beginning to feel gay. Rubbed his hands on his forehead and then together and stepped quite nimbly into the sitting room, where Bertha, her back turned, was looking at the books on the mantelpiece.

— Well, darling, now we can discuss this quite amicably and privately. Isn’t it nice? Now we can really go into it, without self-consciousness.

— I think you’re behaving revoltingly.

— Revoltingly! What the hell do you mean. I’m behaving like a perfect gentleman.

— You know what I mean.

— I’m damned if I do. But I’ll be delighted to hear. Have a drink?

— I think you might at least have kept sober, and not introduced, or tried to introduce, this element of disgusting farce.

— God, you make me laugh. Your usual total lack of perception. Blind as a bat. I suppose I ought to have sent some flowers first, in a taxi, with a little message? Congratulations and facilitations. The bridal chamber was decorated with roses and syringes. Typical of you not to see that the only way, the only way, of handling such a scene is humorously! Good jumping Jesus. It’s that, among other things, that’s always been wrong with us. Your heavy-handedness: this fatuous Brattle Street dignity: all these Goddamned poetic hypocrisies. I suppose we ought to be tragic about it, and behave like people in a novel, or an Ibsen play. Ought I to have apologized for having come into my own flat and then cried about it? Tragic! Who’s it tragic for, if not for me, supposing I wanted to give in to it? What the hell have I come back to? To a stinking void. To a part of myself that’s dead. Well, all right. That’s my funeral. Not yours, and not Tom’s. If I want to make a joke of it, for the moment, so as to avoid cheap sentimental dramatics, the sort you act in at Brattle Hall, you might at least have the intelligence to see why I do it, and that it’s my own business. I get drunk because I don’t want to be wholly conscious. Because, I admit it, I’m partly a coward, and don’t want to know, or to have you and Tom know, exactly how many volts of pain I’m carrying. Do you want me to cry? Do you want me to comfort you? Or do you expect just a calm rational discussion of the ethics and esthetics of sexual fidelity?