The Game of Hide and Seek

New York is for lovers, it's on their side, he thought, stretched out cooling by her flank; but not for this parched lover. He suffered the thirst of the yearning man who had drunk from a cool, tempting, secretly corrupted spring. There was salt on his tongue. He thrust himself onto his back—thinking position—and thought himself into a mote of dust idly floating in the brilliant late-afternoon sunshine that suddenly poured into the room through the blinds. He left Helen, lovely Helen, fainting for only a moment into the damp trench made by her body in the bed; he became mere idle dust; he floated; he swirled. It was the best he could do. No use trying to sleep.

The mote decided that New York is for lovers who need the thrill of fleeing from public into private excitement, for those who flatter their pride in a daring, secret retreat amid the crowd, for the light and easy hand-holding very young. These lovers rise beautifully to the sea-swell challenge of the fantastic crested city.

Not Mike, wounded in his conjugal war. Not Helen, whose bitter and cautious delight in love had helped to make her an actress of rare quality. ("Ah'm the Queen of Off-Broadway," she sometimes explained. "Ah'm the Reignin' Queen of the most irrelevant plays you have ever seen. That don't scan, but it's true.")

They were drunkards of love. They had taken their fill, yet needed more. How (continued on page 118) Hide and Seek (continued from page 97) could this man and this woman do more for each other than pleasure?

If Mike Curtiss could have lacked for women, it would have been better. He might have dreamed of love, and then found a girl (almost every man does), and then put together fact of girl and dream of love.

Or is that the wrong way, too? The mote wriggled in mid-air like a pale spirochete. Mike felt himself growing heavy, becoming his body again after the flight of love.

Again Mike told himself that the trouble was his own fault—the sins of moony adolescence visited on his moony age. Dreaming too hard first was his flaw. As the drinker scratches a dry rage for oblivion into his heart, so he had raged through women for some ideal of perfect beauty, perfect sweetness, perfect perfection. "Why do you look at me like that, Mike?" one frightened girl had asked.

"I don't know, lady. You like to be looked at?"

Had he not earned his trouble? Yes. But now Helen, lovely Helen, who asked him: "Why do you look at me like that, Mike?"

"I don't know why, kid. I love you."

"Well. Well. Well, I like to be looked at like that, Mike. You're nice."

He did not need her to be perfect. He only needed her to be perfectly his.

Now she stirred in her sleep. She was waking. She did not know he had only recently been a mote of dust in the close air. She breathed quick hot kisses into his ear. She was saying something.

During the time of his marriage, he had gotten money and older and knowing, and many lovely women seemed to like men who are knowing and older and at least a little bit moneyed. So things were different after his divorce, different from college and different from marriage, and yet not entirely different. He had fled for his life from an unhappy, constricted woman who clutched because she could not dance. In New York he had found a life in which once again he was chosen by others and cunningly had to work out ways to resist, strategies for ease and freedom.

New York was full of quick, questing, constricted girls. Sex breathed humidly over the restaurants and the theaters and the expense accounts. Mingled in this breath, like the air of hallways, were hopes of love. The next hallway would be sweet, would be sweeter. The next girl would be less frightened. The everlasting cool music of nighttime Manhattan promised silence, was surrogate for silence; it coveted silence and space; the music grew louder and more tangled—variation on unstated melodies, elaborations on a too natural, distracted gift of song. The prey tracked down the hunter. Then it coupled; they coupled; he coupled, still alone, depleted, acquainted with grief and strange to the lady by his side.

Helen promised another joining and another privacy. She had needs, but was more than an empty space to fill. She gave herself value. Just as she chose the play she might do, the movie she might consent to take a part in, so she had chosen him, not because she needed a man but because she needed this man. She cared for him—or so he believed.

"You'll break my bones that way," Helen whispered in the heavy dark. "I love it. Break them. You care for real, don't you? Does your ear still hurt?" She had bit until a drop of the slow lymphy blood had stained their pillow.

The mote of dust swam away; he sucked it into his lungs. He took a deep breath of bodies and roses. The roses had seemed like a good extravagant winter idea. Now they sweated their heavy fragrance into the apartment.

He was hungry a little, but he was more tired. She turned eagerly, refreshed by her brief nap. He tried to hold her where she was, right there, stay there in his arms.

"Break them, Mike!"

"Let's just stay here."

"So many men," she said thoughtfully afterward, insisting on getting up to pop a cantaloupe for both of them, "so many men don't really care enough. We" (she meant women) "have to do all the caring." There was a responsible pout on her tired, satisfied face. Scent of roses and ripe cantaloupe. It was fresh and chilled. Good, good idea; they ate, dangling their naked legs from the bed, putting the rind in an ashtray. He kissed her on the shoulder—what a good friend she was, to find a cantaloupe during this season!

"It's been a nice seat belt, goodbye," she said, grinning her lopsided grin. This was one of their household jokes. Once they had pushed together the twin beds in a motel to make love, and he had fallen into the crack between the beds, and as the beds slid apart and he sank slowly to the carpet, he had called up like a drowning man, "Oh goodbye, it's been a great trip but I forgot to fasten my seat,belt——" And they had laughed like crazy children, tickled each other and roared with crazy delight, and stretched and made bridges and dipped each other like nutty acrobats into the widening gap between their beds.

"May I see you tomorrow?" he asked. "It's Sunday. May I see you all day? Let's get out of town for the day."

"Oh, I'm sorry, darling, I made a luncheon date. What a silly thing to do on a Sunday, and it's a silly person—you don't know him. But I'm having cocktails at Willy John's, I just have to put in an appearance—join me there. They'd love to meet you."

Silence.

"They know all about you. They know how special you are. Somehow I didn't even have to tell them, they just had to look at me. They say I even look different, Mike."

Silence. She straightened his rind in the ashtray—a bit of pedantic housekeeping to show him she really didn't think Sunday luncheon dates make any sense at all. And cocktails, too—no sense at all. She straightened his rind to tell him how special, how different, how she cared.

"I'd rather see you alone," he said at last, "I've seen you enough in crowds. I know how you are in a crowd. You handle them fine."

"Please."

"I'll wait till you're free. Tell me when. Right now."

"Don't you want to see me tomorrow, darling?" she asked.

"I already answered that question."

"Not at all?"

"You mean," he said heavily, "you have another party you must go to in the evening? And if I want to see you, there's another crowd for me to watch you in?"

More silence. Creakings through the walls; pipes, steps, all the business of the pueblo dwellers making their steady, irregularly clicking din. Radios. Elevators. The Lexington Avenue bus. Silence of fret between Helen and him.

"I go to parties," she said, patient and indulging him, "because I like them. It's fun. And because it's part of my career—my business—as you well know, and because——"

"As I well know."

"And because it's even more fun when you're there. I see you having a good time, you can't fool me, you enjoy it when people laugh at your jokes. They listen to you. I like watching—you're marvelous, Mike. Who likes to be alone all the time?"

"Not all the time," he said stubbornly, shutting his eyes because they were richly naked and this conversation seemed to strip them of their healthy, rich, desiring flesh; it made their arms and legs spindly in the late-afternoon light; he wanted to cough. "Not all the time, just sometimes. Just tomorrow."

"You have a way," she insisted, "you're awfully good at parties for a man who grouches so much. I've seen you just walk in and take over. Now just don't grouch me, Mike!" She shook her head flirtatiously; he had said how it tossed her thick hair, cropped thickly. She liked to win loving battles against him; she would not give up. "You're a natural with people, and against your own will. Do you think maybe that's why, Mike? People feel the weight, the friction of real character. Is that it? Tell me your secret, s'il te plait."

He would not be flirted by her when he was asking very much more. He did not smile.

"The way you laugh and look at people, Mike, they're putty in your hands. They just give up. You're the Pie-eyed Piper."

"I've had my hands in too much putty," he said. "I'd rather you looked at me, and I want to give up amusing people. Maybe you should stop being so amusing, too."

This time he caught her hard. Perhaps it was his hoarse, imperative voice, still with that special resonance after the afternoon's lovemaking. Perhaps it was this combined with his cold sarcasm. Her joke of flattery had fallen flat: bombed, as her friends put it. It was surely also that she was deeply susceptible to him, for her face turned waxy all at once, as if abruptly the sense of their profound trouble together had caught up with her body, and the pale and pink ease of satiety deserted her. He was aware of the bluish markings under her eyes: Great Lakes sinus, she had explained before he had seen anything but her flagrant beauty. She spoke almost in a whisper, averting her head, ashamed. "I don't care for anyone but you, love, but don't force me. I don't take forcing. That's why I run my life my own way. Ohio tried to force me—that's why I burned the bridges and put up my camp in Manhattan. I make my pretend. I do my special way of reading a line. I like a good night's work, fighting it out from eight-thirty till eleven, defending some imaginary soul, cleaning it bare—defending myself—and then taking it easy. My independence. It doesn't mean I don't love you."

Stubbornly he shook his head and pressed his lips; and he felt like a woman who says Be with me more to a man determined to build his life on achievement and motion, an enemy to love although requiring it—as the fire needs wood in order to be hot and active, but tells its need of wood by reducing it to gray ash. She had no right to do this! When women take up masculine vices, and men grow petulant and sulky, there is a violation of history. This thought, a sudden access of prissy conservatism, might have amused him in another mood. Now he still did not smile. He remembered that increasing numbers of young women are beginning to suffer the male diseases—ulcers, cardiac failures—nothing sacred. We don't demand the right to Fallopian tumors and hysterectomies, he thought. Why do they need our gastritis, too?

"Why are you grinning?" she asked.

"Joke. You'd be putty if I said. But it's really a complaint and pretty nasty."

"You don't want me to be an actress?"

"I want you to be good to yourself."

She shook her head slowly. Her yearning eyes overtook his vindictive imagination and he was sorry for his angry, whimsical generalizations. She was very dear to him, a worn, distracted beauty, and her anxious eyes were filled with moist effort. Even if distracted, she cared only for him among men. She liked other things and other people and other men, but as a man he pleased her most. Yes. That should be enough. And she was not always distracted.

"Mike," she said, "you've got both the flibbers and the nasties today. Let's have some soup. Keep up the old blood sugar."

She sprang to her feet; she ran. Her long legs like a new-found girl's, the coiled spring of her strength—good stock, tough good animal nature. She opened a can; she did kitchen work; she leaned and smiled while the pot came to a boil. She used a large spoon to guide the canned clam chowder into two plates. With her forearm she touched his robe, which she had appropriated to wear over nothing but her fine extravagant flesh, to protect it from any stain of soup. She looked worn, even more beautiful without make-up, the first lines of age gathered about the eyes and on her handsome full throat. Her eyes, gray and tender, locked themselves into his over the raised spoon before she would taste it. He blinked, grinned, and reached up her arm through the wide sleeve.

"Don't, I'll spill," she said, but made a quick grateful smile. "Let me come here someday and cook you a real meal. Remember the first time, the first time ..." She cut the sentence adrift while she did her own work of remembering, and then joined it again. "When we bought everything and had it all ready? Steaks and succotash and frozen strawberries?"

Yes. It was the week before she did the Lorca play for that educational network. She had come busily through his door in the afternoon, all prepared for cooking, with crisp celery stalks at the top of the sack, and had even put on an apron. She had spun around to show him how much like a little cook she could seem; the apron was silly and lovely, flying. He had taken her to his bedroom in the dying light of an October afternoon, and when they awoke during the night, it had seemed better just to nibble on crackers, ease their thirst with orange juice, drowsily talk, and then return to bed. The frozen strawberries lay melting in the sink.

"I remember," he said.

"But about tomorrow you don't remember? Bad sign, very bad. I'm slipping. In the evening you even promised to go to the party. The Trouts? Put on your thinking cap. You must remember, you complained so."

"Yes, sure, sure. But I'm not going. I think I said why already"—and with an impatience before her teasing effort that he could not conceal—"but I'll say it again if you ask me to."

"Are you angry with me? Do I—did I do something wrong?" She blushed. "Just now? Does your ear hurt?"

"No, no, no, don't connect with that—with the other room. I want to see you, I never tire of you—please, Helen!—but I don't see you anymore in the crowds. I don't see you at all."

Her eyes were darkening with shame and worry. She wanted him to be happy with her. This was making her a little angry and she did not like to be angry. Anger was one of the things she had left back in Ohio, except for the play anger of theater. That was different—a fine instructional reminder and use of it. "Maybe it's that you don't see yourself," she said.

She meant that he was too susceptible to crowds and that it was a weakness. He should be able to hold on to what he was, what he wanted, despite the crowds.

It was a weakness, then. All right.

But still unfair of her.

"Probably you're right," he said. "Probably it's just selfish, that's what you're thinking. I wouldn't deny it for an instant. There's nothing wrong with selfishness sometimes." He touched her bare, slender, helpless wrist in the flopping sleeve. "Selfishly I want to be alone with you, Helen."

He watched the naked struggle of worry and shame turning in her bruised eyes. Years ago he had learned that anger always wins this contest in the eyes, even if anger has been abolished. Once more he tried for love in the race with anxiety. "We're good alone. We're fine alone. We're not alone enough."

But what about tonight? she was thinking. She did not want to be angry with him. Nor did she want to turn it against herself. Fleet troubled pride, homeward yearning! She bent to breathe softly on her spoon and take the soup.

"I don't see why we can't risk it more often," he insisted stubbornly.

Just as stubbornly she made the decision not to understand him. Despite love, despite desire, despite hope, she could not turn from her way to his. It was a decision made for her by the deep, anxious accent at the left side of her mouth, even by the fine laughter lines in the delicate skin at the corners of her eyes. "About tomorrow," she said. "Look. I'll explain. I'm not justifying, Mike, you know we don't do that, but I'll explain. There's this man I have to meet, sort of by accident—you know. Hell, you could even be there. But they've cleared the rights to a new play by Sartre, Christopher Fry adaptation, and I'm perfect for it. I haven't read it yet, but everyone says I'm right. You know, the beautiful and smart intellectual type. Trained by Mike Curtiss—you know. Come on, kiss. Kiss-kiss."

He did.

"Ah that's better. I know it when you sulk, I feel it right here"—she felt her own stomach, she felt his and squeezed—"it feels like jealousy, you know? Awful, awful feeling. Especially when a person is trying to be so good, Mike—really trying."

She waited. She had challenged him to rise to her. Faith and toughness. They waited together.

A winter chill pierced the walls despite steam heat and drawn curtains and the scent of roses. Through the little kitchen in which they sat, he saw the ferocious white triangle of light from the gooseneck lamp pointed toward a pseudobrick linoleum wall pasted up by the last occupant. The light burned day and night. He liked to imagine it as sunlight, squinting his eyes; he liked to imagine love as love. The body's ache, glee and spasm was a seeming of love, and differed only from the steady true thing as the ceaseless light differed from sun. It had no shades and changes; it had no rhythm of fading and blazing; it did not provide the fixed, nourishing and consuming center of life.

Helen ate her soup in silence. The next gesture should be his. The steam of carrots and clams and spices warmed him. Surely it was foolish to talk longingly of being alone when they had this absolute privacy of nakedness and food together. She had the right to feel wronged—they had spent the whole day in music and silence and the thick struggle of flesh. But they were not alone, either, and she should know that he was right, too.

His apartment faced on a court. He could feel the weight of the flats overhead resting on his shoulders; he thrust his head out to bear the burden. Surrounded by schedules and plans, trodden under by obligations, he wanted to escape to eat grass, like a sick dog.

"Let's go to the country tomorrow," he said. "Sunday. I'll rent a car. Cancel all those things. There's no reason not to."

"Fine!" Her eyes brightened; she loved projects. "Let's make a real date for it, let's put it on the schedule for next week."

"Let's not. Let's just do it tomorrow."

"Darling, I can't."

He shrugged.

She came around the table to sit on his lap. He felt the marvelous warmth of her body through the robe she was wearing, through his pajamas. She put her head down on his shoulder so that her burning cheeks lay against his neck. She whispered that her skin was all rough from rubbing against his beard. He thought of his electric razor. No, he thought of the gleaming black cord hanging loose from the socket in the bathroom.

"I'm sorry about tomorrow, darling," she said. "I really wish, but——"

"Me, too."

"Please meet me tomorrow night. Write it down."

"I'll remember."

"Please. I suppose I should go home now, it's so late, but——"

She began to touch him with her hands.

Before going downstairs to get her a cab, he led her once more back into the bedroom. She would think that this meant they were together and alone. They hid from the city, from the world, from each other, in each other's arms.

Then she would go. She had a busy life. Tomorrow they would meet over cocktails and he would watch her in the crowd. Lightly she would squeeze his hand to let him know she thought only of him, and then she would pass on to greet another friend, a possible contact.

But right now her hands were imperative on him. They asked over his body, they demanded, they promised. His ear hurt. Greed. Pride. Hope. Hide! Hide, hide, hide.