Jane Bowles - My Sister's Hand in Mine - The Collected Works of Jane Bowles

“The whole civilization is going to pieces,” he said.

Her voice was sorrowful. “I know it.” Her answers to his ceaseless complaining about the West’s contamination of Moslem culture had become increasingly unpredictable. Today, because she felt that he was in a very irritable mood and in need of an argument, she automatically agreed with him. “It’s going to pieces so quickly, too,” she said, and her tone was sepulchral.

He looked at her without any light in his blue eyes. “There are places where the culture has remained untouched,” he announced as if for the first time. “If we went into the desert you wouldn’t have to face all this. Wouldn’t you love that?” He was punishing her for her swift agreement with him a moment earlier. He knew she had no desire to go to the desert, and that she believed it was not possible to continue trying to escape from the Industrial Revolution. Without realizing he was doing it he had provoked the argument he wanted.

“Why do you ask me if I wouldn’t love to go into the desert, when you know as well as I do I wouldn’t. We’ve talked about it over and over. Every few days we talk about it.” Although the sun was beating down on her chest, making it feel on fire, deep inside she could still feel the cold current that seemed to run near her heart.

“Well,” he said. “You change. Sometimes you say you would like to go.”

It was true. She did change. Sometimes she would run to him with bright eyes. “Let’s go,” she would say. “Let’s go into the desert.” But she never did this if she was sober.

There was something wistful in his voice, and she had to remind herself that she wanted to feel cranky rather than heartbroken. In order to go on talking she said: “Sometimes I feel like going, but it’s always when I’ve had something to drink. When I’ve had nothing to drink I’m afraid.” She turned to face him, and he saw that she was beginning to have her hunted expression.

“Do you think I ought to go?” she asked him.

“Go where?”

“To the desert. To live in an oasis.” She was pronouncing her words slowly. “Maybe that’s what I should do, since I’m your wife.”

“You must do what you really want to do,” he said. He had been trying to teach her this for twelve years.

“What I really want.… Well, if you’d be happy in an oasis, maybe I’d really want to do that.” She spoke hesitantly, and there was a note of doubt in her voice.

“What?” He shook his head as if he had run into a spiderweb. “What is it?”

“I meant that maybe if you were happy in an oasis I would be, too. Wives get pleasure out of making their husbands happy. They really do, quite aside from its being moral.”

He did not smile. He was in too bad a humor. “You’d go to an oasis because you wanted to escape from Western civilization.”

“My friends and I don’t feel there’s any way of escaping it. It’s not interesting to sit around talking about industrialization.”

“What friends?” He liked her to feel isolated.

“Our friends.” Most of them she had not seen in many years. She turned to him with a certain violence. “I think you come to these countries so you can complain. I’m tired of hearing the word civilization. It has no meaning. Or I’ve forgotten what it meant, anyway.”

The moment when they might have felt tenderness had passed, and secretly they both rejoiced. Since he did not answer her, she went on. “I think it’s uninteresting. To sit and watch costumes disappear, one by one. It’s uninteresting even to mention it.”

“They are not costumes,” he said distinctly. “They’re simply the clothes people wear.”

She was as bitter as he about the changes, but she felt it would be indelicate for them both to reflect the same sorrow. It would happen some day, surely. A serious grief would silence their argument. They would share it and not be able to look into each other’s eyes. But as long as she could she would hold off that moment.

Frank pulled hard on the front door and opened it with a jerk, so that the pane of glass shook in its frame. It was his sister’s custom never to go to the door and open it for him. She had an instinctive respect for his secretive nature.

He hung his coat on a hook in the hall and walked into the parlor, where he was certain he would find his sister. She was seated as usual in her armchair. Next to her was a heavy round table of an awkward height which made it useful for neither eating nor writing, although it was large enough for either purpose. Even in the morning Lila always wore a silk dress, stockings, and well-shined shoes. In fact, at all times of the day she was fully dressed to go into the town, although she seldom ventured from the house. Her hair was not very neat, but she took the trouble to rouge her lips.

“How were the men at the Coffee Pot tonight?” she asked when her brother entered the room. There was no variety in the inflection of her voice. It was apparent that, like him, she had never tried, either by emphasis or coloring of tone, to influence or charm a listener.

Frank sat down and rested for a while without speaking.

“How were the men at the Coffee Pot?” she said again with no change of expression.

“The same as they always are.”

“You mean by that, hungry and noisy.” For an outsider it would have been hard to say whether she was being critical of the men at the Coffee Pot or sincerely asking for information. This was a question she had asked him many times, and he had various ways of answering, depending upon his mood. On this particular night he was uncommunicative. “They go to the Coffee Pot for a bite to eat,” he said.

She looked at him. The depths of her dark eyes held neither warmth nor comfort. “Was it crowded?” she asked.

He considered this for a moment while she watched him attentively. He was near the lamp and his face was raspberry-colored, an even deeper red than it would have been otherwise.

“It was.”

“Then it must have been noisy.” The dropping of her voice at the end of a sentence gave her listener, if he was a stranger, the impression that she did not intend to continue with the conversation. Her brother of course knew this was not the case, and he was not surprised at all when a minute later she went on. “Did you speak with anyone?”

“No, I didn’t.” He jumped up from his chair and went over to a glass bookcase in the corner. “I don’t usually, do I?”

“That doesn’t mean that you won’t, does it?” she said calmly.

“I wouldn’t change my habits from one night to the next,” he said. “Not sitting at the Coffee Pot.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not human nature to do that, is it?”

“I know nothing about human nature at all,” she said. “Nor do you, for that matter. I don’t know why you’d refer to it. I do suspect, though, that I at least might change very suddenly.” Her voice remained indifferent, as though the subject were not one which was close to her. “It’s a feeling that’s always present with me … here.” She touched her breast.

Although he wandered around the room for a moment feigning to have lost interest in the conversation, she knew this was not so. Since they lied to each other in different ways, the excitement they felt in conversing together was very great.

“Tell me,” she said. “If you don’t expect to experience anything new at the Coffee Pot, why do you continue to go there?” This too she had often asked him in the past weeks, but the repetition of things added to rather than detracting from the excitement.

“I don’t like to talk to anybody. But I like to go out,” he said. “I may not like other men, but I like the world.”