An Actor's Life for Me

Instantly, walter appel knew what the man across the way was up to. Walter had left his study and come into the living room out of pique with himself, really. He could not keep his mind off Tarsila Brown; he was supposed to be sitting there paying the bills, and all he could think about was whether he would call her. And whether he would did not seem to depend on whether he should. For he knew that he shouldn't. Only a fool had to learn the same lesson twice in six months, a fool or a child, and he made it a point in life to try not to act like either. Tarsila had arrived in New York from London; he had read the news in a gossip column. Would he call her? What good could possibly come of it?

He left his checkbook and came into the living room. Looking for nothing, except perhaps release from the unfamiliar discomfort of irresolution, Walter peered between the curtains. In the window facing onto the rear of the Appel apartment, he saw the naked man strolling back and forth.

His first impulse -- he had none. He did not throw open his own window and call, "Hey you -- will you please pull your shades!" He did not rush to telephone the police, or Bellevue. He did not go immediately around to Juliet's study to see if the curtains were drawn. Walter had no sharp impulse to act. The apartment across the courtyard had been empty for several weeks; the man must have recently moved in -- and without a doubt, he was trying to expose himself to Juliet. All Walter did, knowing this, was to drop the edge of the curtain and return to his desk where he tried once again to pay the previous month's bills.

Ridiculous! Pushing up from his chair, he raced out of the study, down the hall, and into the living room again. He took three lurching steps to the curtains, pitching forward like some monster -- and then got control of himself.

Walter switched on a lamp. He chose a record and placed it on the turntable. All the while he deliberately kept his back to the curtains. If you lived in a city like New York, you were bound to catch glimpses through the window... But the fellow had been exhibiting himself; his intent was made clear by the very way in which he moved his limbs, so slowly, so languorously ...

Walter adjusted the volume of the phonograph; he adjusted the tone. Then he walked around to Juliet's study. And there he had his second intuition. He realized what it was that Juliet was doing behind her door. For a week now she had been going off to her study after dinner to spend an hour or two writing, or so she had said. He had not bothered to question her; she was not very much of a writer, Walter believed, but he allowed her her enthusiasms; he had to. He knew now that she was not writing at all. One and one suddenly made two. He could hardly believe it. He only rapped on the door. "Brandy?"

There was no answer. If he tried the handle he would find it locked -- so he believed -- so he feared. "Juliet?"

The door swung open. Juliet was fully dressed. He looked immediately past her into the room. The curtains were closed. But just as she snapped out the lights, he saw that the soft folds of blue velvet --the drapes she herself had sewn -- were swinging to and fro, as though the wind were blowing them, or as though they had just been pulled shut.

• • •

Juliet and Walter were not a perfectly happy couple. There had been setbacks and there had been hard times, though discretion being a virtue of both, even when they had chosen for a while to separate, hardly anyone had known of their trouble. For reasons of their own, they had no children. Until only a short time ago, it had been to the expression of their talents that each had devoted himself. At an age when other young men and women were disappearing into small suburban houses, or sailing romantically off to Europe on five dollars a day, Juliet and Walter were living out of choice in one dark room over the truck traffic on Hudson Street. Once, to an impressionable girlfriend down from college, Juliet had offhandedly referred to their place as "a pad in the Village"; when they were alone again, Walter had bawled her out for it. He and Juliet lived where they did, as they did, because they wanted to be themselves -- which, at that time, meant that Juliet wanted to be an actress, and Walter a playwright.

But Juliet's career never really got off the ground. She had majored in drama and the dance at a series of permissive girls' schools, she had played most of the leads in college, but in New York the only parts she received were walk-ons in plays put on in vacant churches and downtown lofts, where sometimes to meet the fire regulations was as difficult as finding an audience. The one Broadway role she was ever in the running for -- a small one, at that -- she did not get because, said the director, she looked too much like Katharine Hepburn: at least that was how Juliet reported his remarks to Walter when she arrived home. Immediately she went out and cut her hair, bought a pair of pendulous copper earrings, and, in the next few days, tried on a crash diet of peanut butter and bananas to change her general appearance. But on the fifth morning, when she mounted the scale, she announced, "I've actually lost two pounds," and for a whole day, instead of going back to the director, as she had planned, or to her acting class, or even downstairs to get something for them to eat for dinner, she lay in bed and sobbed. Pathetically she thrashed about on the bed, waiting, Walter knew, for him to do something, or to say something, that would put things right for her. He was her rock. He had a stocky frame, and a strong chin, and in his early 20s his straight black hair had already begun to go gray at the sides. His neck was thick, his body hairy; he had always a tendency to look older and shorter than he was. To a girl like Juliet, so full of airy hopes and dreams, how like granite Walter must have seemed. But now all he could do for her, despite the graying sideburns and the forward thrust of his head, was feel sorry for her, and smooth her hair, and tell her that she ought to be flattered to be told that she looked like Katharine Hepburn, who was a beautiful woman.

The night of Juliet's collapse, Walter read over the five plays he had so industriously written during the three years of their marriage. How much longer could he keep it up? He too had been a hot-shot in the theater department, at a liberalarts college in Pennsylvania, a pretty little place up in the Allegheny Mountains that used the local high-school auditorium in which to put on plays. His drama professor had believed that Walter Appel had written the best one-act play by anyone who had ever attended the school. But Walter was in New York now; though it might be that the producers were commercial, and stupid, and Philistine (as Juliet assured him they were), it might also be that he was not a very gifted man. On the bed in the corner of the room, Juliet whimpered the night through in dreams of loss, while in his writing chair, Walter read his plays and admitted to himself that there was really no more chance of his becoming a playwright than of Juliet's becoming an actress. It was time to stop being an adolescent.

The next morning he put on a tie and jacket, and with the decision firmly made to change his life, he went off to look for work that he could do. Through Harvey Landau, who had met the young couple and taken to them in a fatherly way, Walter found a job in the business end of the theater. Perhaps it was not what he had hoped to do, but it was what he could do. In fact, it was only a short while before he found himself feeling much more like a man, doing a regular day's work, and doing it well.

The Appels were soon able to move from the squalid room on Hudson Street to a good-sized apartment in a brownstone on the Upper West Side. Juliet went around telling people about their high ceilings for a month, in an effort, Walter knew, to forget about her failure as an actress. As the months passed, he was surprised to find her clinging so to her illusions; but then he was surprised that for all his display of seriousness and purpose, he had actually been a victim of illusion himself.

At home Juliet began to practice her French with records. Did she believe they were going to move to France? He did not ask; he let her be. She went for a month to a German woman in the East 80s who taught her how to sew her own clothes. She enrolled in a writing course at the New School, and came home in tears one night, because the instructor had made fun of her story in class. Everything pointed in the same direction: it was time to have a baby. One night Walter had a dream of a little girl whose name was Allison. It was their daughter. But dreams are one thing, Walter well knew, and life another. Unfortunately it was not time to have a baby at all. For, some eight months after discovering their limitations as actress and playwright, the Appels discovered in themselves yet another limitation: it seemed as though they had fallen out of love.

Not that they appeared to care less for each other. What made the predicament so trying was that in all ways but one the marriage seemed to be what it was before: Juliet, between enthusiasms, leaning upon Walter, and Walter there to be leaned upon. During the day there were even moments when Walter thought that perhaps they should have a baby so as to prevent the marriage from falling apart, if that was what was beginning to happen. Yet at night he could not blind himself to the change that had taken place, though it was a change which at first he did not entirely understand. Why should they be indifferent to one another in their bed?

Though they had no baby, their life together went on. At parties Walter would even find himself rubbing his wife's back, as she sat beside him with a drink in her hand. He saw the other men admire her tall, good looks, her vivacity, the way she walked and laughed -- he admired these things himself, her spirit (continued on page 228) An Actor's Life (continued from page 86)edness had always seemed to him the feminine counterpart of his own diligence, but now it pained him to think that when she laughed she was not actually happy. Of course, they did not turn completely from one another; in the middle of the night, they would sometimes reach across the dark bed, and in a dreamy half-sleep, arouse each other's passions. But often it was not until he was on the subway the following morning that Walter remembered that during the previous eight hours he and Juliet had made love, and even then he was not always sure.

One evening at dinner Juliet dropped her fork and stared dully into the candles. "I don't know what the matter is," she said, and put her head in her hands.

Walter thought to move around to her chair and comfort her. But was she any more deprived than he was? "I don't either," he said.

She slammed the table. "What is it! Why do you find me so distasteful!"

"Why do you find me!" he shot back.

She began to cry. "Walter, I didn't mean that. I do know better than that. It's both of us, somehow. Yet we never really fight. You're so thoughtful and solid, you're so good to me -- and I'm so dependent on you, whether you know it or not. I think it has to do with our fittingtogether too well."

But that sounded ridiculous to both of them. Juliet blew her nose, Walter helped clear the table, and then each went off as though nothing had happened. At his desk Walter thought to himself, "We should have had a baby a long time ago. The actress business was silly from the start ... " But then how could he have known that at the start?

In five minutes each was back in the living room. "Walter," she said, "do you think we should be divorced?"

"Do you?" he demanded.

"Well -- no," she said, and hopelessly dropped into a chair.

He dropped into one opposite. "Neither do I," he said.

"Then," asked Juliet, tossing up her arms, "What should we do?"

Walter decided for them: they would separate for a little while. Maybe that would do something. Walter telephoned Harvey Landau and asked if he could get away for a few weeks: without even telling Harvey what the trouble was, Walter discovered that Harvey understood. Harvey said, "Do whatever you have to, boy. Just don't run off half-cocked."

"Juliet's going to be alone," said Walter, worried for her.

"We'll have her over for dinner. We'll take care of her." Softly Harvey added, "It happens to everybody."

"Thanks, Harvey." He hung up feeling so relieved that he did not even know why he was going away in the first place.

That night, in bed, his wife said, "Walter?"

"Yes?"

"I don't care who you sleep with. Just don't tell me about it when we meet again."

She was being so brave, so game. How she needed him! Why was he even leaving her? Was he a boy, expecting what a boy expects, or was he a man? Still, he answered with what seemed to him common sense. "The same for you."

There was a pause. "OK," she whispered, and they lay there back to back in an astonished silence.

Where should he go? South? Though it had been a wet and dreary winter, it didn't seem right for him to be lolling on a beach, spending their savings, while Juliet stayed behind in New York. This wasn't supposed to be a pleasure trip, anyway.

He took a train north, and got off in a small town upstate where he rented an inexpensive room; he had the idea that he would read, and walk, and mostly, think things through. But by the end of the first day he found he hadn't made much headway with his thinking. What was he supposed to think about? There was a broken-down ski lodge only a few miles away, and so after dinner, he hiked up the hill and sat at the bar, and watched the few guests sit around trying to think of folk songs to sing. Within the hour he met a young woman who was on vacation from her job as a secretary in Oneonta. They spent some time talking about where Oneonta was and drawing maps on napkins. He knew he could go to her room with her as soon as they began to talk. What he discovered was that he wanted to. His heart began to beat unnaturally. Never before had he committed adultery, yet he went off with the woman without much of an inner struggle. Juliet had said it was OK, and he had something to find out.

She had a room with a fireplace. Before he got into bed, she asked him to build a fire so that they would have it to look into afterward. The draft was bad, and Walter had to get up every few minutes to smash at the logs with the poker, whose handle kept coming off. But the young woman seemed unable to bear the idea of the fire going out, as she was taking half her summer vacation in the winter.

Walter slept in her bed every night for a week. Where Juliet was long in the thigh, the secretary from Oneonta was short; where Juliet was brunette, she was light. Did these few inconsequentialities make the difference? Were they what made him ravenous with her? No, she was just somebody different, a perfect stranger, though he attended to her breasts as though she were a dear friend. And the truth was he couldn't stand her.

On Friday he was ready to take the train down. It was not for this that he had come away. But the separation had been so short; he decided to stay on another night.

He awoke Saturday morning in disgust. After lunch, he went on a long walk with the secretary. The sun was shining on the snow, and they held hands. Absurd. He caught the train to New York just after dinner: he had to rush so to make it that he hadn't time to call the young woman, whose name was Sheila Kay, or Kaye, and tell her that he would not be seeing her that evening, as they had planned.

When he met Juliet at Grand Central, where she was waiting at the information booth, he felt himself go red; fortunately she did not see because she did not look directly at him. They walked across to the Commodore to have a drink, addressing each other like youngsters on a blind date. He handed Juliet a package and waited for her to open it. Inside was a lovely white ski sweater; he had written no note, for he did not know what she would want him to say. He did not know what had happened to her.

"I have a surprise for you, too," she said.

"My God," he thought, "she has found somebody!"

But all Juliet had to tell him was that in his absence she had gone off and gotten a job as Leo Kittering's girl Friday. Kittering was a young man of independent means who was forever trying to start a repertory company in New York; Walter remembered having met him once at a party. For his own reasons, he was so relieved to hear the news that for the first time he took her hands in his. Juliet beamed: she was hardly being paid a fortune, she said, but that wasn't the point. She told Walter she was a new person: she hoped she was through with self-pity.

That night they eventually grew tired of talking and had to go off to bed.

"I'm so tense," whishpered Juliet, when he moved in beside her. "It's ridiculous, but I am."

"It's not ridiculous," said Walter.

"Tomorrow ..." said Juliet.

"OK," he said, for he was not without tension himself, despite his success with the secretary from Oneonta, whom he tried with all his heart now not to think of.

When he opened his eyes, it was tomorrow. Walter knew what must be done. They were really as close as people could be -- a husband and a wife! So, amidst the white sheets, with the yellow curtains blowing in, and a garbage truck roaring away down on the street, Walter looked unflinchingly into Juliet's eyes, and she into his, and they performed the act of love. The noise of the truck grew so loud that at one point Walter wanted to get up and pull down the window. But he stayed where he was and did what had to be done -- which turned out to be more than having intercourse once again with his mate. They were telling each other that they wanted each other. When it was over and both lay panting in the strong light, Walter was willing to believe that their crisis was behind them, and that they were about to enter a new stage of marriage.

And so they did. That it could not be forever what it had been four years back on Hudson Street, and in Juliet's room before that, Walter had realized the night before the separation; now he accepted it. Nevertheless, he could not put his finger on why and how it had happened to them. Were they resentful of one another? disappointed in one another? too close to one another, whatever that meant? Or was it only time, the diminishing of passion that must one day come to every last husband and every last wife?

Whatever, Walter lowered the expectations of earlier days. He was not 17 years old, or even 21. He was almost 30. Not having to be divorced, he came to tell himself, was going to have to cost a little something. He hoped that was as clear to Juliet as it was to him; she too, he hoped, had lowered expectations that were perhaps unreal to begin with. Or were they? There was really no way to tell.

• • •

In June, Harvey Landau flew to London and took Walter with him. Harvey was going to look over some plays that were opening in the West End. Walter was thrilled -- surely he was on the rise -- and so too was Juliet thrilled for him; yet when her husband suggested that she come along, at his expense, she had to decline. Kittering had said to her that if she went away just now it would be for him like losing an arm, a statement that Juliet rushed home and repeated to Walter with a charming, open sense of her own importance. Walter understood, agreed, but was not happy. Alone in London it would be business followed by loneliness. But he did not know that he had a right to take her from what she clearly did not want to give up. The pleasures of the new job were filling a gap in her life that he was perhaps not responsible for, but with which he seemed to have something to do. Because, in this vague and ill-defined way, he suspected himself, he had not yet suggested that they fill the gap (if such there really was) with a baby, though of course the idea had occurred to him more than once.

He was on his own, then, when he met Tarsila Brown. She was an actress of Sardinian and American parentage, the wife of the playwright Foxie Brown, one of the noisier of the young Englishmen who had come to be called "angry." Foxie had recently been in two fistfights that had made the papers: the first was with an M.P., who happened to be passing Hyde Park Corner one morning, where Foxie -- still in dinner dress from the evening before -- had gathered about himself an audience and was imitating the Prime Minister. When the M.P., a man of temper, came charging at Foxie with his umbrella raised, Foxie knocked him cold. The second incident involved Tarsila, also knocked unconscious by Foxie -- who had boxed first for his college at Oxford -- outside their Hampstead home one afternoon. In the courtroom, Foxie had a gay time of it with the judge, to whom he insisted (or so the papers said) that his dispute with his wife had also been over "political matters" -- "whether the woman ought to nationalize herself or be content to stay at home by the fire with me." When Walter met Tarsila, Foxie Brown had just flown off to America.

At a party thrown for Harvey Landau by an English producer, Walter sipped a glass of whiskey and watched Tarsila do the twist. She had been pointed out to him as Foxie's newest estranged wife. When they were introduced she tried to stare him down. When it had obviously for some time been his turn to speak, all he could think to say was, "Your eyes are really black."

She said, "Don't put me on, all right?"

"All right," he said, though actually he admired her eyes, and her dancing had excited him.

But was it her eyes, he wondered, back in his hotel room; was it her dancing; was it that she was so much more voluptuous a woman than Juliet; or was it that she was Foxie Brown's wife?

Late the following afternoon, while deciding what to do with his evening, Walter took a stroll through Soho. Even though he kept his eyes open, and referred from time to time to his guidebook, he knew he was not seeing as much as he would if Juliet were with him. He missed her. He read the little cards posted to the bulletin boards outside the shops. They gave the names and addresses of women advertising themselves as "The Piquant Miss Terry," and "Jessica, a strict disciplinarian," and "Mademoiselle Madeline, authentic French lessons." He passed a simple wooden building with a laundry on the first floor; the Chinaman inside smiled out at him, and pointed upstairs. Walter shook his head, and went to meet Harvey at the hotel.

But after an hour of business, Walter excused himself for a moment. He did not telephone Tarsila because she was married to Foxie Brown; for all of Brown's success as a playwright, Walter would not have traded places with him for the world -- the fellow behaved like an ass. Walter was calling Tarsila because he was a man, and she was an exciting-looking woman. But even as he dialed her number, that seemed to him no less shabby a motive than the first.

"Next time," she said, "don't call at the last minute."

He said, "I didn't know I'd be free. Business ..."

"I just don't want you to think I like men who are offhand. As a matter of fact, I hate them."

Oh yes, thought Walter, and what is Foxie Brown? But he did not see the wisdom in saying anything of a skeptical nature and so, for whatever the reasons, he and Tarsila came together.

He had never before been with anyone like her. Such women he had only fanta- sied behind locked doors in the delirium of puberty. For the first time in his life, a woman dug her nails into his back. She moaned; she trembled; she cried out, "Oh don't, don't!" and this after they were already under way. "Walter," she whispered, "you're like I am. You're crazy for it, too." When he touched her hair, she said, "It's dark, coarse hair. It's Sardinian hair."

Consequently, he saw her the next night, too. And the night after; and the night after. How could he not? Coming out of restaurants they embraced in the street. What was the difference? Who did he know here? It did not seem as though it was he who was here anyway. He had a wife in America; he was in London on business; he knew about kidding yourself...

In the taxi rides to her flat she would sometimes jump the gun.

"The driver," moaned Walter, where upon Tarsila, mysteriously, excitingly, moaned back, "You." And Walter had to admit that it did not make a damn bit of difference about the taxi driver; he was only the back of a head, or eyes in the rearview mirror. It was just that when Walter and Juliet took a taxi, it was to get somewhere; that was what he had grown used to.

Then one night, when she put her arms around him, Walter said, "I'm just beginning to heal."

"Shh."

"No nails, Tarsila--"

She dropped away from him, and rolled onto her side.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"It's not passion with you," she said. "Your mind's working."

"It's not working."

"It is. You're not thinking about what we're doing. You're thinking about going home to your wife."

"Look," he said, a man laying his cards on the table. "I am going back. In two days."

To his surprise -- or was it chagrin? -- she did not jump up and say, "Then the hell with you!" She didn't dress in a huff and go storming off, leaving him as he had been before they had met. Rather, she pulled his mouth to hers, and said, "You have such sweet breath."

"You heard me?"

"You're so different, Walter. So solid. So steady. Why go home?"

Afterward, Tarsila said, "Do you know my old man?"

"Pardon?"

"Do you know Foxie?"

"Never met him," said Walter, lighting a cigarette.

"You know what he would say after a night like this? That it took the next day's writing out of him. But you -- you're so solid-looking, Walter. You're so there."

She said only these words, and in perfect seriousness, but Walter was overcome with humiliation and shame. What was Tarsila's life, or Foxie Brown's for that matter, but so much theatrics? An act. He had really understood what she was the very first night, when he had had a sensation, momentary (but to the point, he now saw), that beneath him Tarsila was floating in an inflated bag, a swollen invisible membrane, inside of which she carried on her contortions all alone. She told him he was so solid, so there, so this, so that, but how innocent of him to believe that it was he who prompted her passion, and not Tarsila, the fantasist, the pretender, the actress, who really prompted her own. "Oh, you are a king, Walter!" she cried, when they came together again that night, but he did not believe that she meant it.

The next night he saw her again. Why not, if he had seen her every night previously? But what of the night after? He would be home.

Even while he walked down Regent Street, shopping for a present for his wife, he asked himself the question Tarsila had asked, and which he believed he had found entirely sufficient reason to dismiss. Why go home?

At four or five the following morning, he was awakened from sleep with a searing pain down his right side. So intense was it that he believed he was having some kind of stroke. At thirty! Oh no! Is everything over? What has there been! In the midst of his terror, however, he was thankful that he had returned to his hotel instead of staying until morning at Tarsila's. He was thankful for what Juliet would be spared.

He flailed out for the phone. Within minutes he was in an ambulance bound for the hospital, where his appendix nearly burst in the surgein's hand. He could not help but believe that the attack had something to do with his activities of the past six days. Otherwise there was no explanation, though of course he did not doubt the physician when he assured him there did not have to be.

Tarsila came to see him only a few minutes after he had spoken long-distance to Juliet. When she slipped off the jacket to her yellow dress, he saw on her arm a mark that he must have made with his mouth.

She put her hand to the top of his hospital pajamas. "Chest hair drives me wild," she said. Did it really? How could it?

As Tarsila went out, Harvey Landau came in. They nodded, natural enemies. Though Harvey had seemingly paid no attention to what Walter did with his free hours, Walter had several times been on the edge of saying to him, "Look, you won't let on to Juliet?" However, he was a grown man and had a right to do what he wanted; consequently, he said nothing in defense of himself. He even began to think of the silent Harvey as Stuffy Harvey and Bourgeois Harvey: secretly Harvey wouldn't mind doing the very same thing -- Walter was sure -- but the man was 20 years too old and 40 pounds too fat and he hadn't the guts...

But the older man had only to open his mouth for Walter to see that his boss had nobody's interests at heart but Walter's own. "Do you mind if I give you some advice, big shot?" Harvey said at last.

Walter shook his head. "You don't have to."

"Oh, don't I?"

"No. She's a fake, Harv."

"And you're not a schoolkid," said Harvey, and the next day, with the doctor's permission, Walter left the hospital in a wheelchair and flew home. His wife was at the airport to meet him, and together they resumed their life.

• • •

Neither the evening that Walter had seen the man across the courtyard, nor the morning after, did he speak of it to Juliet. Nor did she say anything to him. In a way, that was why he said nothing to her...

But the question remained: had the man revealed himself intentionally? He might only have been walking back and forth before his window...But Walter would not talk himself out of what was apparent simply because it was not pleasant. He must only be careful not to assume what was not obvious: that Juliet had willingly been a witness. But the curtains had been swaying. And he simply knew it to be so. Of adultery he had never suspected her; yet of this ...

During the nights that followed, the lights were on across the way and the draperies pulled back, but when Walter stole through his own dark living room and peered between the drawn curtains, he saw nothing of the naked man. Juliet emerged from her study at nine on the second night; on the third, after a nonchalant trip to the kitchen, she returned to spend practically the entire evening behind the closed door. But before she disappeared into the study, she did something unusual: she looked to him as though she were going to explain herself -- rather, as though she were going to offer up some lie. And when had he ever demanded an explanation?

"Yes?" he said from the sofa, where he sat pretending to leaf through a magazine.

She shook her head -- flushing, he saw -- and went into the study. For a moment so astonished was he that he tried to tell himself he was only imagining things. He went quickly into the kitchen, from which Juliet had just emerged, and saw no evidence that she had even had a glass of water.

On Saturday evening, they went to a dinner party, and on Sunday out to visit friends in the country. There were two trains back to the city: one would get them in at seven, the other at midnight. It had been a dull day, full of peppy children and loving dogs, but when their hosts asked them to stay on for dinner and take the late train back, Walter immediately said yes. Juliet, however, grasped her forehead and said she wasn't feeling well, and the result was they took the early train.

"Do you really feel ill?" asked Walter, as soon as they boarded.

"Quiet. They're looking through the window. Wave."

The train began to move. "Juliet, do you feel ill or don't you?"

"Walter, I was so bored."

"Well, of all the damn things."

"Weren't you?"

"I said I wanted to stay for dinner. Didn't you hear me?"

"I thought you were being polite. You weren't bored?" she asked. "The big dog kept licking you more than anybody."

"I wasn't bored, Juliet."

"But you were."

"I was not!"

"Well--how am I supposed to know!" she replied, and though to a stranger it might have looked mundane enough, another marital spat, Walter knew, with a sinking of the stomach, that it was not. They did not speak the rest of the way back to the city.

At home, Juliet went into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her, and Walter rushed to the curtains, pushed them back an inch -- and across the way, no lights.

When Juliet came out of the bathroom, she said, "If you don't mind, I'm going to my study."

Walter was stretched out on the sofa. "Fine."

"I happen to be writing something," said Juliet, belligerently.

"Fine." But his smugness faded the instant she disappeared.

At the close of dinner the following night, Walter actually felt a burning sensation in his chest when he saw his wife take her coffee in two gulps. She mumbled something about what she was writing, and went off to her study. "OK," he said to himself. "So she is writing again." Where he was able to give up on some plan proven impossible with a clean and sharp break, Juliet's unrealistic and unrealizable aspirations had to move through a series of filters, until at last they disappeared. "OK, that is the woman. I should have known that when I married her." It was incredible even to him how strenuously he was trying to believe her.

He sat down at his desk to look through his mail. Then he got up, silently opened his door, and moved back down the hallway. Tonight the lights were back on, but there seemed to be nobody at home. Down below in the courtyard, he saw the reflection from Juliet's study window.

The Wednesday night previously he had not been hallucinating; the man had been there, he was sure. But was he hallucinating the rest? Had all this to do with learning that Tarsila was in town? Since Wednesday he had not thought about her at all. What with his new problem at home, the problem of whether he would call her had disappeared. Or had he invented the one so as to be relieved of the other?

Reason upon reason he continued to offer himself so as not to believe what he had known in an instant on that first night. Tarsila's arrival was nothing more than coincidental; he could not use her to explain away his suspicions of Juliet. In the seven months since his return from London, he had hardly even thought of her; and when he had, it was along with half the other people in New York: the occasion of her divorce from Brown had been treated in the tabloids with gusto. At the very end, there had been a slugfest at a house party in Lime-house, during which someone had pushed Foxie through an open window that let out onto the Thames. Tarsila had lost only a tooth, but the newspaper photograph of the poor woman, her hand over her mouth, had only further convinced Walter of his luck in having been stricken with appendicitis that last night in London. Had he been healthy and able, what foolish, impulsive decision might he have been tempted to make?

He was totally without regret then at having left Tarsila. Yet when the pathetic picture of her had appeared in one of the daily papers, with the caption "Tigress Loses Fang to Britain's Angry Man," Walter's first thought had been:With that tigress I spent a week. For about half a block, on the way to lunch, he had had an overpowering urge to mention his exploit to his companion, someone he hardly knew. But at the corner he shot the paper into a waste-basket and, himself again, walked on.

... He was standing at the curtains looking for a man who was not there. Why?

But then he saw what he was looking for. Or part of it. He saw an unshod foot. For nights Walter must have looked at the pale spot on the rug without realizing it was human flesh. But he needed only this, the ocular proof, for the last measure of doubt -- of hope -- to fade away. The man was there, sitting in a chair, in a corner of his living room, out of Walter's range, but directly in Juliet's. That first night he had been pacing up and down so as to get her attention, or recapture it, or God knows what. He sat now exposed to Juliet's eyes.

And in her study, what was Juliet doing? Pretending to write, and catching sidewise glances? Openly staring? Or was she unclothed too? To this had all her dreaming led her! To this! Looking from between the drapes at that bare foot, he cursed all those damn girls' schools his wife had been to, all the impossible aspirations they had spawned in her. But then, as was proper, he blamed himself. He should have forced her to have a child years ago.

• • •

His decision to call Tarsila he made so simply that he knew it must be connected with what was happening in his home each night. To revenge himself on Juliet? Why revenge, when what he felt for her, as the next night passed, and the next, was not anger or jealousy, but only a terrible pity. He felt pity, he did nothing. He could not at first figure out how to reveal what he knew, without precipitating a full-scale crisis. Might she not, after all, be on the edge of a breakdown? On the other hand, the whole affair might come to an end in another night or two. "Perhaps it is only some passing disturbance, some weird quirk," he told himself. "At any rate, don't lose your head."

But what might that man take it into his head to do next? In the early hours of the morning, fear of the consequences would so shake Walter, that he was ready to awaken Juliet then and there and get the thing out in the open. But when he looked at his sleeping wife, he was not able to disturb her, for he suddenly found himself thinking, "She could be married to anyone, for all that I have made her happy."

As though that were reason to let such insanity continue! As though it were even true! He must do something! Yet he did nothing, except to telephone Tarsila.

The instant Tarsila asked "Who is it?" he remembered that first conversation they had ever had, when she had cautioned him not to be offhand. But she was the offhand person, the one who did not know about deep attachments, about loyalty and sacrifice and dedication. Foxie was her second husband; he had been, he was sure, her umpteenth lover. He should hang up. She was an inferior person, an unreal person -- a fake.

"I want to see you," he said, as calmly as he could.

"Oh?"

"Yes."

"When you left London, you didn't make that too clear."

"No, I suppose I didn't. I would like to see you, however."

"As I remember, you didn't make anything clear. You just left is the way I remember it."

"Well, that's true."

She didn't answer.

"I was in the hospital, Tarsila. Then I was due back in New York."

"Well, I'm glad you arrived safely. Goodbye, squirt."

Walter did not immediately realize that there was no longer anyone at the other end of the line. He hung up and went back to his office.

At 8:30 that evening, Juliet went off to her study. Walter did not know what else to do but go off to his own. But for what? Once again, he came back into the living room, peered momentarily between the curtains, saw the foot, and then sat down in the dark.

Squirt. Or square? He could not remember now which she had said. The two words began to rise and drop inside him, one, then the other, as though they had in fact been addressed to him from one who really mattered.

As though they were words that mattered! What was going on? Juliet was his wife -- he was her husband! "Enough!" he thought, "I want Juliet back again," following which he thought, "Now there is no chance of having Tarsila on the side," and he was appalled at the kind of people he and his wife seemed to have become, almost overnight. No -- only himself overnight. Juliet had really never accepted what she was, what marriage was, what a husband was. At long last he had to admit that his wife was a problem larger than he could handle. It was hard to believe that all this had come to be.

• • •

The next evening he waited until dinner was over before he told her what, at last, he had decided.

"I want to ask you a question," he said, starting slowly.

"Yes?"

"To say something..."

"What?"

"This may seem out of the blue to you. However, it's something I've been thinking about for some time."

"Well, what is it?"

"I want us to go to talk to a psychiatrist about some things."

Juliet sat down. "What's the matter?" she asked.

He did not know whether to look directly at her, to catch her betraying herself, or look at the floor, so that she could save face until she was safely inside the doctor's office. "I thought you might think there were some things the matter."

"With you?" she asked.

Patience. She is caught, and she knows it. Poor Juliet, you are quite an actress after all. "With our marriage," said Walter kindly.

"-- I don't think anything's the matter." But she had hesitated.

"Perhaps if we talked it out," he said.

"What out?"

He gave no answer.

"Well, what out? You always say all those people in analysis are only kidding themselves. That it's a matter of will power."

"I never said all."

"Well, I don't understand what you're getting at. Well, don't look at me like that. I don't".

"Don't you?"

She threw down her napkin. "No!"

"I don't see why you won't come with me, Juliet."

"Because I don't know what you're getting at! You're trying to say there's something wrong with me."

"I'm not talking about you."

"You're talking about me, Walter, and I know it." There were tears in her eyes. "I know why you think I need a psychiatrist."

He dropped his gaze. "OK, Juliet. Why?"

No answer. When he looked back up, she was glaring at him. "You can't stand that I'm trying to write a play, that's why! You can't stand that I work for Leo -- you think that's a waste of time, too!"

"I didn't say anything about either. I thought you were writing a story."

"I told you a play."

"You didn't, Juliet."

"I did!"

He shook his head. But had she? A play?

"You can't stand it,!" she was grumbling. "You want me to see a psychiatrist about it."

He felt for a moment as though he had stepped off into nothing. Why was she writing a play? But she wasn't!

"You've never really had any respect for anything I've tried to do," said Juliet.

"That's not true. And it's not what I'm talking about."

"You always think I'm kidding myself."

Wearily, he shook his head.

"Anybody else would have continued acting, do you know that, Walter? How can you tell anything about yourself at twenty-five, if you don't give yourself a chance? But I only quit -- you know why? -- because I knew you thought I was making a fool of myself!"

"That's not so. You don't remember what happened."

"I remember what happened to me! I remember what I thought about. How do you know what I think!"

"Look" -- again, he had to shake off her words -- "maybe if you talk to someone about this--"

"Oh damn it! You never let me be what I am! You think I'm silly! You think I waste time!" And then, with a sob, she said, "And what if I do! Suppose I fritter away my whole life! What's the difference anyway? It's my life. If I don't do what you think, you think I'm kidding myself. Well, I'm not!" she shouted at him. "Or I am -- I don't care!" and she raced from the dining room to the study, where she slammed the door and locked it.

He had accomplished nothing. They were due at the psychiatrist's office the next afternoon; he had not told Juliet that he had already made an appointment for her, or, as he would have put it, for them. Now must he drag her? Was it time to pound on the study door and demand to be let in? Why hadn't he made her confess that very first night? She had been making a fool of herself, humiliating herself -- taking into her hands all that was her life! -- and he had been letting her.

He had let her! She was right now -- in spite, in anger, in bewilderment -- taking off her clothes, moving to the window. And he was letting her.

He stood up and charged into the darkened living room, toward the study, but wound up at the rear window, peeking between the curtains; and all his fury turned suddenly to suspicion of himself. These past nights, had he not been giving himself some secret pleasure by peeking, imagining...?

Then he saw what had happened across the way. The man had changed his seat. He had moved several feet into the room, in view not only of Juliet's window, but of the living-room window as well. He was settled back in a chair, his legs crossed at the ankles, and his head tipped back, showing the length of his pale throat. He was pretending to be watching TV. In the nude. Very slowly and deliberately, in a way that looked to Walter to be wholly salacious, he was smoking a cigarette.

"Oh God," said Walter, and he found he had tears in his eyes. Was he about to cry for Juliet? For the man across the way? He pulled upon the drawstrings of the curtains and stood in the dark, behind the big window, and looked down upon the strange man. Walter could not turn away from man. Walter could not turn away from what he saw. "Oh," thought Walter, "I am," and aloud and in exhaustion, like one capitulating, he said, "I am so ordinary."

He pulled off the sweater he was wearing and threw it to the floor. And what did that signify? He began to pull at his clothes. He seemed to himself to be angry. What was he doing? For the moment he did not care to know. His clothing, very shortly, was at his feet. Instantly, he moved back into the room; but once there he only turned on the lamps. Then, drawn by the sight of it, he returned to where the heap of clothing lay and slowly, before the window, he paced off the width of the room, from one side to the other, as though he were awaiting someone's arrival or trying out a pair of shoes. And he said words to himself. OK -- I am naked! In the light! In the window! I am doing this! In a dizzying moment -- as though all the uncertainties of the preceding weeks had come upon him in a single blow -- he spun toward the window and, leaning upon the sill, presented himself there, in his socks and his watch. Down in the courtyard below, as evidence that he actually was doing it, he confronted his own elongated shadow. Yes, I can do anything. Who are you to be so smug? You're not even a person! I am a person! I am at my window -- Juliet is at hers -- he is at his --

What am I doing?

He heard a noise, or thought he did, "Yee!" he cried, and in the next instant, pulled at the drawstrings of the curtains. He raced out from the room, yanking at the chains of the lamps as he flew past. In his study, he hurled himself upon the sofa and, trembling in every limb, he whined into his bundle of clothing, "You drove me to it -- you were never satisfied," and this time believed he was addressing his wife, as earlier, with his shadow, he must have been addressing Tarsila Brown.

• • •

Upon awakening the next morning, Walter found that his wife wasn't talking to him. Only silence through breakfast, then coldness on the bus, which they took down to the City Market on First Avenue. On Saturday mornings Juliet liked to shop at the big barn of a market and often Walter accompanied her; it had always been their pleasure to do little domestic things together. Once they had been such an amiable couple -- why had she always to dream of the impossible! This was all her fault!

But he tagged along, despite the bad feeling between them, despite the fact that he did not know what to do next with his wife, or for his wife -- or himself. Call the psychiatrist and tell him to forget it -- or go alone? And if the phone rang -- pick it up? Suppose it was the man across the way! If only he could obliterate last night!

It had taken two-and-a-half barbiturates, the largest potion Walter had ever swallowed, to obliterate enough of it for him even to fall asleep. He had taken the pills and, burrowing beneath the blankets of their bed -- to which his wife had not yet come -- he had waited for unconsciousness, praying all the while that the telephone would not ring. In the morning, he felt like a man who had been piling bricks all night; in sleep his body had been punished, though he could not remember how.

Marriage is strange. So strange, thought Walter, for when he and his wife moved into the crowded market, they took hold of one another's hands. It was what they always did, in order not to lose each other in the crowd. So they did it now. How close we are! Husband and wife -- isn't that enough?

"Hey --" said Juliet.

"I'm sorry ..."

"What's the matter with you?" He had squeezed her hand, but surely not too hard. Nevertheless, she shook loose of him.

"I'm sorry ..." he said.

They moved through the market now, past bulky bins of vegetables, wheels of cheese, vats of pickles, mounds of fish, past all the hubbub and color that had always appealed to the young couple and made them, usually, so tender with one another, as they shopped. Never had they thought of themselves as people insensitive to what was vivid in life, or to life's pleasures. No, they were not narrow ...

Oh, what next! Juliet, what is happening?

She turned from the cheese counter. "Walter, look, if you don't want to be with me this morning ..."

"Let's buy some fennel," he said. He did not know what else to say.

"I bought fennel."

"-- Seeded Italian bread," he said.

Petulantly, she started away. She had bought seeded Italian bread, too. So what? So what! He saw suddenly how much he hated her. Had there ever been a time in their marriage when she had not been a burden to him? Never! She started down the aisle, and he did not care if he never saw her again. What had she done to make him happy?

Then by the fish counter, toward which Juliet was moving, he caught sight of a familiar face. For the moment he was unable to place it. He imagined it might be some actor they had known years ago ... then he knew. Momentarily he had not recognized him, because, of course, in the market he was dressed. Walter looked back into the crowd -- and there he was, wearing a Tyrolean hat, a raincoat ... Heads moved; he was gone. When he came into view again, Walter turned quickly away, so as not to be seen looking. The fellow did not appear now so languid as he did reclining on a chair in his apartment; nor was his gaze focusless, statuelike, as it was from a distance; nor was his skin like enamel, as it looked in that soft light. His complexion was actually somewhat ruddy. In no obvious way did he appear a person less respectable than Walter himself -- but it was the man.

He's followed us!

Immediately, Walter began to push forward, to where he saw his wife moving directly up to the fish counter.

He made a grab for her arm.

"Excuse --" She turned, pulling herself free. "Walter!"

"Your fault!" he thought with murder in his heart. He caught hold of her a second time, and began to drag her with him to the exit.

"Look, I bought bread. Walter, you're pulling, Walter --" And indeed, with all his strength, he did pull her, while with his free hand he pushed to the side elbows, knees, shopping bags...

Toward the exit -- but toward the man! In the crowd of shoppers Walter had again lost sight of him -- but the crowd shifted, surged, and there was the hat, bobbing along, only yards from where they must pass to make it to the street, to home, and then -- God, to where? What had they done! Walter fastened his grip on Juliet and prepared for the push to the street.

"Walter!" Juliet demanded, "what --" And at the sound of her voice, questioning him, he seemed all at once -- on the very edge of escape -- to lose his purpose. Or it changed; or it burst forth. The impulse to drag her away with him became its opposite. It lasted but a second, a desire to cry out, "Oh, take her!" Then he heard her sobbing his name and, shoving and butting, dragging her with him, he made it through the exit and into the sunlit street.

She fell against him. "Walter --"

He wanted a cab -- but even more, he wanted to shake her and shake her, so that every stupid longing might come clattering out of her head.

"Darling Walter --"

He waved at taxis speeding by. "Home," he said. "We're going home! We're getting out of here --"

"Don't be angry with me --"

He turned on her. "Wait till we're home!"

She was sobbing, "I'm so sorry. It's you I'm married to. Not that play."

Oh! Enough! He grabbed her by both shoulders. The truth, at last! "What play?"

"It stinks, anyhow," she moaned. "Oh, you're hurting me."

A taxi pulled up. He pushed Juliet into the cab, jumped in himself and pulled the door shut behind them. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk -- Walter took a last look, and saw, with relief, no sign of the Tyrolean hat. And Juliet was sobbing, still.

"OK," he demanded. "What play?"

"It's only one act. I wasn't competing, really I wasn't. You think --"

"Damn you, Juliet. What play!"

"-- Wrong, Walter. I didn't mean to. It doesn't have to do with you, really." But she buried her head in his chest, as though she did not even believe herself. And she could not control the sobbing.

"Listen --" he said, lifting her face, "listen to me! What play!" But she only sobbed the same poor answers, over and over. He himself repeated his question two or three more times -- and then the truth, like a sharp edge, fell upon him at last. It fell like a guillotine, an unexpected horror of a whack, for all that it had been hanging overhead beforehand, gleaming away. "No!" he cried to himself. "No! It's her!" But the truth seemed to be that this time it was only himself.

• • •

She would never know; no one would.

He called Kittering and told him that Juliet was ill. It gave him pleasure -- if such was possible on so awful a day -- to say to Kittering, "She'll have to resign." He called Harvey next to say he must have two weeks' vacation: Juliet was not well, and they had to get away. If Harvey said no, then Walter would quit and take the two weeks on his own. He was not going to stop short now of obliterating the night before, and the nights prior to that as well. A moment before dialing, he thought he might be being too extreme -- until he reflected upon the extremity of what he had done. So he dialed: Harvey was a friend as well as a boss, and said yes. Then Walter telephoned a travel agency; after that, a real-estate agency uptown. He said he would need an apartment within a few weeks, and described what he was after. In the meantime he saw to it that all the drapes in the apartment were pulled shut; when the phone rang, he did not answer. He hovered over it, to be sure that Juliet did not answer either. But she wanted only to lie on their bed and tearfully confess to him, when he appeared in the doorway, that he had been right and she had been wrong and in her wretchedness, she said she was sorry; he was reminded of the day on Hudson Street, years ago, when she had given up acting ... and the next evening they were in the Bahamas.

Only when the plane touched down at the airport did Walter at last begin to feel safe. "My God, am I lucky." So he addressed himself as they took a taxi to the hotel; as they had dinner that evening; as they danced later to the music on the terrace; and later still when, at his suggestion, they went like lovers down by the bay, took off their shoes and walked along the water's edge, holding hands. It did not matter that whatever Juliet did she did obligingly; nor did it matter that she was unable to laugh, or even smile, with any conviction: at least it didn't matter to him yet. "I am lucky," he thought, "very lucky."

They walked along the beach. The air was soft and blue. The man across the courtyard was over a thousand miles away. Walter found he could be very clearheaded about him at last. The crisis had passed, and he could think. Who had the man been? What had he been up to? What had he wanted?

Did he just like to sit around naked watching television? Then why didn't he pull the drapes!

Walter managed to do nothing to reveal his astonishment. In fact, he spoke some words to Juliet about the stars overhead. But he began to feel so foolish ... Had they fled to the Bahamas for no good reason; were they moving for no good reason...?

Not so. He had to flee. He could not have remained in the apartment to be eaten up by worry, to die every time the phone rang or the downstairs buzzer went off. Innocent as the man across the way might actually have been -- and what proof was there of that, really? -- there was his own performance to keep in mind. He would have to remember it, even while forgetting it.

So then, what he had been chanting all day was true: he was a lucky man. "And I am going to stay lucky," he told himself, and they turned and headed back to their room where, upon the bed, he took what he believed to be the next necessary step in his marriage. To assert once again what he was, what his wife was -- at any rate, what they must be -- he mounted Juliet, who had appeared all day to be so chastened, and while she held her breath, he proceeded to reproduce himself.