On Keeping Women by Hortense Calisher Page B

only so long as he keeps thinking she must have some talent he is looking for; when she incautiously finds the strength to deny this, his calls begin to fail. Hers to him become unevently successful. One Thursday, the wrong part of the week for their assignations, she forces it, walking into the restaurant where he lunches with his partner. He doesn’t recognize her right off; in a grim rush of bourgeois pride she hasn’t dressed for it. He takes her home with him; he’s kind. But the minute they enter his apartment she smells another girl, through his awkwardness. That he can after all be gauche in this way wrings her—a little. She wishes for the rose petticoat, but she too has her sentiment; it’s the one new garment she’d taken back to her village, as the smallest of links between her two lives.
    As they undress, she sees he’s uneasy but, as always, able, not a man who needs champagne or carnal chitchat either; indeed, no sooner had she learned to coarsen her tongue with Kevin, than she’s had to clip it back for this Southerner.
    Just as they rise, facing each other knee to knee on his many experienced pillows— his luxury—the phone rings. With a polite murmur, and yes, lowered lids, he goes into the pantry to answer it. From the bedroom extension-phone, so close under her eye, she turns consciously to the photographs. She likes the bullfighter—who’d gouged him in the pocket and left him—much the best. In this moment, she understands that she too should be gouging him in some way. If, when he comes back, she can say “Yes, you were right: I have a secret volume of poetry here” —pointing meanwhile to her throat or her stomach—he’ll rise to it at once. Setting out on the double for printer, afterward. Or perhaps: “Carnegie Recital Hall, my concert two weeks from now; remember the date. Well of course I haven’t told you, Day. I don’t wear my harp on my sleeve.”
    Instead, when he comes back to the bedroom and begins again, too polite not to, she feels even desire fade before her utter urge to have him know she understands his mechanism—to reveal it to him.
    As he eases her off the bed to her feet, and standing too, places her arms around his hips, she fixed her eye on the organ of his confidence, as it rose under her. “Producer!” she spat forth, saw him stammer in the flesh, and it was over.
    She’s proud of having left behind the clothes.
    This time, in the aftermath, she’s not dulled, but inordinately restless, and ashamed of not having been in love with him. “I am at home, home, home” she says to herself each dusk—“and I need two lives.” Spasmodically she still attends the class, which is now in spring-term. One day, outside the college, she meets Plaut, the instructor, walking with his wife. She sees that his wife’s baby is well on. He waggles a finger at her. “Going to have to give you an Incomplete.”
    Her laugh startles him. “But I’m continuing.”
    All home duties she now performs only adequately, and restraining the cookies; she has heart now neither for excess or neglect—and has the third telephone taken out. But something from those city afternoons-in-bed has been held over. She knows for sure now that sexually she won’t go back again to Ray. Yet she sees to it that her second day in New York now comes only on weekends, when the whole family gets itself together for the Boat Show, or she shops with the two girls. One Saturday, on the way to Olafsdotter’s in the Village to buy them clogs, they pass the door of Kevin’s old flat on Bleecker. Her haunches shift for a moment, and she says to the girls “Hold my hands.” On another, walking toward the Frick, she says suddenly to Ray “Let’s walk up a few more, why don’t we?” and to the two boys “We’ll meet you there”—and so doing, she and Ray walk down Folger’s block. Not on the chance of meeting him; he’s never in town on weekends. “Why’d you do that?” Ray says. “Oh I