“Do you mind if I smoke, old girl?” I said in my best imitation of wealthy speech. “No? Why, thank you, I think I’ll light up one of these monogrammed cigs with my initials on them.”
She was animated with pleasure, how easily she could be made to live! I kissed her to show her how the wealthy kissed, their noses so high in the air that their lips never met, only their chins. Then of course I kissed her properly. She was confused, she drew back blushing, she had thought it her secret that she was sweet on me.
Whatever I wanted from poor Libby I couldn’t explain what I was doing solely to gain it. We had the run of the house and pretended to be masters. For those few minutes the upstairs maid and the hobo boy were the Bennetts of Loon Lake.
Libby took my hand and showed me a storage room where F. W. Bennett kept his stock of outfits that he provided his guests as gifts: riding habits and boots, tennis flannels, bathing suits, a goddamn haberdashery.
I stood in front of a full-length mirror and took off my greens and put on a pair of tan tweed knickers with pleats, ribbed socks, brown-and-white saddle shoes, my size, a soft white shirt, and a white sweater with an argyle design of large gold and brown diamonds across my chest.
I was stunned by the magnificent youth that looked back at me from the mirror. All the scars and deeper marks of hard life were covered in fine fashion. The face, a bit gaunt but unlined, the hair I combed back hastily with my fingers. He made a passing aristocrat! Well, I thought, so a lot of the effect comes from the outside, doesn’t it? I might be a Bennett son!
And then I felt again my child’s pretense that those two gray sticks in Paterson were not really my parents but my kidnappers! Who knew whose child I was!
I dreamed of recognition from her from Clara. It was her nearness that made me so crazy, and bold with Libby. So feverish so happy.
And as for Bennett I thought, He is no more aware of me than of some unfortunate prowler mauled by the wild dogs. But here I am, wearing his clothes, wandering freely through his house. Here I am, Mr. Muck-amuck, and you don’t even know it!
Then Libby came back from the female supply store and she was wearing jodhpurs and a silk blouse and a riding helmet perched none too securely on her thick hair and she wobbled in a pair of shiny boots too wide in the shank for her thin legs.
“You look swell, Libby,” I said. She turned around with little shaky steps and gave me all the dimensions. Her gray eyes shone, her mouth stretched in her tremulous overbitten smile. I danced her out of there down the corridor doing a fast fox trot full of swirls while I hummed the tune I had heard the night I came, “Exactly Like You,” Libby laughing and worrying at the same time, telling me to hush, looking back over her shoulder, giggling, falling against me every other step, brushing my cheek with her lips. And the light lay like a track along the carpet and shone in golden stations of the open doors.
15
There being no sign of her in the main house I knew she was staying in the smaller lodge perhaps a hundred yards west, into the woods and halfway down the hill to the lake.
I think I must have spent some while calculating how to get there, figuring out a pretext and then a script for the conversation we would have. But one evening, during the staff meal, one of the woodfolk, a grandmotherly one, said to me, “That Penfield called. You’re to go over to the cottage.”
“Who, me? What for?”
“How should I know?” she said. “I’ll be glad when you’re gone and them with you.”
I finished my meal as slowly as I could, feigning the attitude of the workingmen of dark green. I washed my tray and lit a cigarette and sauntered back to my room.
I latched the door and changed from my work clothes to the knickers and shirt and sweater and ribbed socks and saddle shoes. Poor Libby, all happiness drained like the color in her face when I told her I was keeping these things. Shouldn’t she have known that the fellow who’d write in the guest book would do that? Anyway, she understood the firm basis of our relationship, that whatever trust she placed in me I would betray.
And as for Mr. Penfield I knew in my bones I didn’t have anything to fear from him. He had a way of canceling himself out if you let him talk long enough.
I washed my face and combed my hair and got out of the staff house without being seen.
Already dark on the path, the first stars coming out. Joe drew a sharp breath and tried to calm himself. He was trembling. He had followed her, navigating by her star, and by that means had been sleeping in a bed and eating well and indulging his self-regard for several weeks. An edited view but fervently held.
In his mind, his feelings were enough. He didn’t need intentions, plans, the specificity of hope. Presenting his heart was enough.
“Here he is — and look at him!” Penfield said at the door. He held a bottle of red wine in one hand and a glass in the other. “Come in, come in!”
It was a low-ceilinged cottage with a living room and kitchen and stone hearth all in one. I tried not to look at her she was sitting on the sofa Indian style wearing a robe of white satiny material and it had fallen open across her thighs. I tried not to look she was not looking at me but taking a mighty pull from her wineglass head up neck beautiful pulsing neck.
“Here he is, Clara — Joe of Paterson, the man I wanted you to meet.” A glass was put in my hand.
“Miss Clara Lukaćs,” he said.
Pointing me at a chair, he crossed his ankles and sank his bulk down on the floor at her feet.
They were both facing me and to my right and their left a fire was going in the fireplace. The light flared and dimmed on their faces as some kind of wavering attention, I thought, especially from her she had not asked to meet me how absurd to have thought that. I sensed some purpose not entirely complimentary in the summons. Yet Penfield was smiling amiably indicating to me to drink and so I did, with the odd conviction that I had never tasted wine before. I had ridden the cars with the bums of three states worked with freaks and was wicked and shameless but in this moment it was my inexperience that shone.
What was the conversation? Mostly his, of course, the brilliant singsong of the failed poet, but how could I have been listening with the attention such beautiful words demanded, people from my world didn’t talk with such embellishment such scrollwork. I had never before met someone who admitted to the profession of poet but believed it by the way he spoke. I kept my eyes on his face but it was her I looked at, this restless cat of inattention sitting quite still and staring into her wine careless of exposed limbs the inner thigh the rounded knee small cream cracked hummock of the underknees she sat quite still but her mind pacing from one wall to another, an expression on her small fair face of grief or petulance I couldn’t tell. But how she felt was of overriding importance to me, how she felt! — then and every moment after — was my foremost concern, what I lived by. This was her quality and I think she was unconscious of it, that her presence occupied great moral space around her though she was surprisingly small, a small-boned slight thing with narrow shoulders. There was nothing stately about her except the alarming size of her moods. I studied her face with a fervent rush of recognition, a fair skin with a rouge of chapped cheeks, quick green eyes prominent upper lip everything framed in marcelled bleached blond hair I had friends playing as a child with such faces in Paterson I heard the fluent yowl of injustice from this face.
Mr. Penfield speaking of injustice explained how much more modest were his own rooms over the stables than this full cottage in the rustic log style. On the other hand he wrote well there he said in his way of negating his every point of view by obliging himself to express its opposite.