Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“You’ll get over it, nice old Philip”—she ruffled my hair—“You ought to know better. Why drag in feelings and things? I was in love once myself, or thought I was, but now I think it’s all the ‘bunk.’ You know what that means? Or are you too old-fashioned in New Haven.”

“You’re a demon, Coralyn.”

“I’m a changeling. I have no heart.”

“Some day you’ll find it—maybe too late.”

“Oh, don’t for God’s sake be sententious.… All the same I’m afraid! I’m afraid.…”

“What of?”

“Oh, ask me another. I don’t know. I wish I did. Where do we go from here?”

It was then that she told me about Michael, her sweetheart. She had been engaged to him for two years. He was an ensign in the Navy. Finally she had decided that she really wasn’t in love with him at all.

“But I thought I’d give the poor kid a square deal,” she said, looking at me soberly, “so I came to Newport to meet him and tell him about it. I spent a week with him—just, you know—to make it easier for him.”

“You mean you lived with him?”

“Sure. Why not?… Which is why you found me in New Haven.”

“What about Michael.”

She shrugged her young shoulders, arched her eyebrows, made a light gesture as of dusting some infinitesimal object off her fingers.

“He was nice.… But why should we get married and ruin each other?… Oh, no! Oh, no! I’d outgrown him. Outclimbed him. And that was that.”

“Well, well.”

“Well, well … let’s go for a ride.”

We rode, we walked, we dined, we danced, we dropped in at a show of paintings (where I kissed her in a deserted room before a brilliant water-color by Dodge MacKnight), and all the while we talked feverishly, jokingly, uneasily, in a kind of attempt to find just what our odd relationship was going to be. She was very detached, very cynical, very passionate, but also very remote. I was—I am ashamed to say—eager; it was my first transgression, and I hoped it would be prolonged.

Coralyn made fun of me.

“Don’t look at me like that when we’re dancing. The cops’ll pinch you.”

“They’ll think we’re engaged.”

“They’ll think you’re my sugar daddy!… I love this thing—what is this thing?”

And then there was Mabel. Would she mind, would she guess? Would she mind very much if she did guess?

“But there won’t,” said Coralyn, gently, murmuringly, “be very much to mind , will there?”

And as a matter of fact, there wasn’t; Coralyn saw to that. She farced the whole thing. Divinely passionate one moment, she was a clown the next. If I may put it in the vernacular, she deliberately set out to raise hell with anything that might threaten to become a “grand passion.” And she was singularly successful. In twenty-four hours she had, as she herself put it, spanked it out of me. I accused her of being heartless—I accused her of being everything. I was angry, I threatened her with a dire future, a future without home, without friends, without love—she laughed and threw a slipper at me. She told me that I ought to have been a Shakspearean actor. She suggested that my eyebrows ought to have been purple, that I needed a beard (at which point she imitated quite admirably the bleat of a goat), and then, abruptly kissing me, she said that she liked me best when I was slightly tight. (She had seen me tight just once.) I was not only defenseless—I actually found myself liking this new Coralyn, and this new friendship, better than the old.… By the time that Mabel came back, our new terms had been so well formulated that Mabel saw or suspected nothing. Our three lives went on just as before, until, some while later, Coralyn suddenly announced that she had a chance for a job in New York. She went, and for three months we heard not a word from her.

III.

What we then heard was the somewhat surprising news that Coralyn had gone into business for herself—she had opened a literary agency in partnership with a young Frenchman, a Greenwich Village Frenchman, named something-or-other Rivière. She solicited my wife’s business, and Mabel politely refused, but asked her down for a week-end. To this Coralyn replied that she was too busy, but suggested that if we should happen to be in New York we should look her up; she had an apartment (as I recall it) in East 35th Street. As it happened, I was planning at that very moment to go to New York on business; and when, two weeks later, I took the train, I wired Coralyn to meet me, if she could, for lunch. I don’t know quite what I expected would occur; but I do know that I thought our little affair would have a kind of recrudescence—as indeed, in a way, it did. When we met, amid the marble columns of the Hotel Belmont lobby, and sat down together on a gilt and red-plush sofa, I came under her spell as sharply and deliciously as before; and she too (as she told me later) felt not only a revival of her feeling for me, but a deepening also. As a matter of fact, it was at this moment that she began to make a sort of father of me, or father-confessor; though other feelings were mixed with this as well. As for me, I was again in love with her, but in a very curious and unanalyzable way. Did I feel sorry for her? Perhaps. At any rate, I noticed at the very outset a change in her, and one that disturbed me, made me a little unhappy. She was prettier, maturer, gentler, softer—but also—could I be mistaken?—in some indefinable way cheaper. Greenwich Village, or New York, had already left its mark on her.

“You’ve got on too much lipstick,” I said.

“And observe the eyebrows—I’ve plucked them out.”

“So I see. The exquisite eyebrows of the night-moth.”

“And admire the snakeskin shoes, for God’s sake! Aren’t they the bee’s moccasins?” She flourished a foot at me, a very smart foot, and prodded my ankle with her toe, laughing.

I admired her shoes, her frock, her hat, her gloves, taking the opportunity to pinch her little finger; and at once the same sort of delirium came over us that had so suddenly overwhelmed us at New Haven. But with a difference. For while we continued our light banter, at lunch, over a bad bottle of wine, I was continually aware, beneath it, of a deep melancholy, a note as of desperateness, even of tragedy. She was, I felt sure, unhappy, or bewildered—she made one think of a lost child. Even when she laughed—which as always she did a good deal—I seemed to detect an evasiveness in her, a fugitiveness, a flight from something; her eyes would explore mine and waver away; she would make a joke, only the next instant to catch her breath as if in tension. Her agency, she said, was flourishing. Her partner was a charmer—she had met him at a party.

“Are you in love with him?”

“Oh, no! You know my notions about love. It’s a fake.”

“But you are in love with somebody. I can see it.”

“Have I got red wings on? Are my eyes like stars? Philip, you’re a scream. Where’s your purple beard?”

“I shaved it off. But you’re unhappy.”

“No. But I’m afraid!… Let’s get a taxi.”

Her apartment, it turned out, was sublet from Rivière, who had “taken a room in the Village.” Some of his things were still about—a raincoat, a couple of hats, a pipe rack hung with dirty pipes, a violin case. She waved a hand at them.

“He’s coming to get them—some day. Would you like to meet him?”

“No. Why should I?”

“I’d like to know what you think of him. He wants to marry me.”

“The devil he does!”

“But I don’t think—oh, I don’t know.”

I put my arms around her—she rested her hands on my breast and kissed me, at first lightly, quickly, repeatedly, laughing a little, and then, all of a sudden, with an extraordinary ecstasy of surrender, murmuring softly into my mouth as she did so.