With his mouth on hers, he moved his hand over her body heavily as if receiving long, difficult messages through his palm. “Well, what pretty things,” he said about her garments in the way. “What pretty little things,” and helped her remove them with care while she kissed his hands and his body. “Well, what pretty things. You know you had such pretty things?” holding up her opalescent slip to follow its satin glow moving up and down the folds. “Ah, the pretty things to cover up the pretty things. One pretty thing deserves another, right? Never saw such pretty things in all my life. Look at that.” Even if he had a wife in Boston, he might not be getting along with her, or before the war was over his wife might leave him, or the woman for whom he had bought the slip was not his wife. A man who could undress her with consoling words must be the man who would return to her.
But when he sat up on the side of the bed, rubbing his thighs, the bed moving up and down as he nervously rocked, the intent of the evening accomplished before the evening began and his gaze muddled, she knew that he was to be for that time only. She drew the blankets to her chin and lay grieving about his temporality as if it were a surprise, a revelation, and not a conviction that had accompanied her in the rising elevator. A sudden lowering of her spirits, an onslaught of reality, the elusiveness of the men she had loved, Paul elusive by running away and George by dying, all brought on a need for grieving under blankets. She watched this one as he walked around the room, pouring Scotch—his bare, very muscular legs, his short body and broad back, his bristle haircut and small, flat face, his eyes narrowing to appear wise when he came to the denouement of the story with which he was bombastically entertaining her.
Afraid of other temporal lovers, she fell in love with him to transform him into the lasting lover as he hopped around the room, pulling on his trousers.
She clung to him in the taxi. She ran her lips up and down his face and told him that there had never been anyone so good to her, even her husband. She would not release him when the taxi drew up at the curb before her house and made him sit with her for half an hour while she begged him to return to her. The taxi driver, a woman, got out and took a stroll down the middle of the street, her hands in her trouser pockets.
Alone in her room, she removed her clothes that seemed soiled as though from several days of wear because she had already removed them twice that night, once before supper and once again after, and felt a rage take her over, a rage against the man who had left her at her door. She knew he would never write to her and never return to her, that he had rubbed his mouth against her face and promised to write only because the promising and the rubbing were part of the joke that he always seemed to be laughing at to himself and that he could not tell her, and she felt rage against herself for clinging to him, for exaggerating her wish beyond the true degree of it, when the truth was she wanted nothing to last, when she wanted to be as he was, elusive as he was. Wrapped in her negligee, she smoked one after another of the canteen cigarettes the captain had given her because so few were available to civilians, smoking them as though they were a glut on the market.
6
Her father escorted her one evening to a small lounge in one of the large hotels on Nob Hill. The manager sat down with them; he was a patient of her father’s and deferential to him, ordering a cognac for them, chatting with them, and watching them put the glasses to their lips. Over in a corner a slight, blond man was pounding a baby grand piano, smiling over its dark, slanting wing at the men in uniform and their women, who crossed their knees when he sang at them, their short skirts slipping up their thighs. While she was glancing away at the couples in the dim light of the carriage lanterns, stirred by the crowding of bodies, the manager clasped her wrist and asked her to sing. He escorted her to the pianist, who seemed delighted, who said he remembered her, and she sang, picking up the tricks again, toying with her beads, coddling her voice in her throat, combining the skills of her voice and her body. She was hired to sing several nights a week, and she and her father drank together with the manager to celebrate. She knew that her father would be delighted by his daughter’s becoming a famous singer as much as—or more than—he would be by his son’s becoming a physician who was summoned to the bedsides of presidents. He was attracted to theatrical people, to artists, especially to bizarre artists of any field if they were elegantly bizarre, not imitative, not tawdry. He never missed a first night at the Opera House or a society ball, and even his everyday clothes had the touch of the actor—his dark gray form-fitted overcoat and his black homburg.
David liked to watch her prepare herself to go out and sing. He sat cross-legged on her bed with his head thrown back against the headboard, his mouth open because he was bemused by her and, since it was nine o’clock, half asleep. His eyes shifted from the glitter of the buckles on her shoes to the glow of the dress where it curved over the hips and the breasts to the fall and sway of the long string of beads. He did not often look at her face, he was used to her face and was, instead, intrigued by the animation of inanimate things. But sometimes she sang to him as she dressed, and he would watch her face then, as if it too were inanimate and the words and the tune made it flicker and change, as curious about the mechanism in her throat that made the low, strong whisper of a voice as he was about the central mystery of a performing toy; and while he gazed at the lively spirits in her garments and in her face, she was transfixed by him, in return—by the particulars of his beauty, the sturdy shape of his legs, his half-closed eyes and open lips, by the vitality evident even in repose. At this phase of his life, although all he could convey to her was what he perceived, as a five-year-old, of the workings of the world, she was more tolerant than she had ever been, more humoring, and more demonstrative of her love, because she was in touch with the world now, because she sang to those who were involved and who comprehended the world. All around the earth, armies battled and cities were bombed, and she sang to the salesmen and the manufacturers of everything necessary to the prosecution of the war; she sang to the generals and the admirals and all the uniforms of the services of the country in a hotel on a hill in a great port city.
She stood before the long, oval mirror, with imperious flicks of her fingers pressing the rubber ball in its golden net to spray cologne over her bare arms, watching her son, acting as an empress for him. Then she sprayed the air, high up toward the ceiling, pretending to wield an antiaircraft gun, and he laughed, still with his head back, his arched throat jumping. When she played with him during the day, he was often at odds with her, but in the evening, in this hour in which she felt no boredom because she was to leave him in a matter of minutes, she enjoyed the playing. During the day he was absorbed in his own self and she was his accomplice in that absorption, but now he became an accomplice in her self-absorption. When she pantomimed for him, acted silly for him, she felt that the audience later in the night was already gathered around her, enthralled by her entertaining her son.
“Olga!” she called, “did you make the bed?” And to him, “Never mind, we’ll dump you in anyway.” She held out her arms to him. “Come on, then. You want to fly into bed? You feel like a bird? If the war’s still going on when you’re eighteen, you can learn to fly. You can fly a plane.”
He leaped into her arms, causing her to stagger in her high heels. With his arms clasping her neck, a leg on each side of her waist, and his face looking back over her shoulder, he was carried into his room.
“Up, up you go,” she said, boosting him onto the dresser