He stared at her and then laughed, bellowing, plumping back on the floor and up again. He didn’t stop laughing.
“Well, I didn’t,” she declared stoutly. “Be quiet, you’ll wake the baby.” She got up and went to the screen and disappeared behind it. Her voice could be heard, low and soothing. Soon she came out again. “You did wake him,” she said. “You’d better go if you’re going to roar like a bull.”
“I’ll be good,” Albert promised. “But my god that was funny. You’re as literal as an academician. The only thing wrong with me, Lora mia, is that there’s nothing wrong with me. In a world of sick men the healthy are perverse. But Anita. Don’t worry about Anita; I’ll fix her. Don’t for god’s sake cast me off; you, the sacred grove where I rest my feet. The true madonna, the hope of the world. I’m going to learn to paint, and do you and Roy, naked in the sun, and call it triumphantly Virgin and Bastard. I hope they’ll let me take it to prison with me, and you must come now and then and let me talk to you.”
“You’re an awful fool,” said Lora. “So is Miss Chavez maybe; all the more reason why you’ll have to find another sacred grove to rest your feet in. I don’t intend to be made uncomfortable for a sin I’ve not committed.”
“And one you’re not interested in.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Right. Carefully you didn’t say it. You did also, however, mention a picture you hadn’t painted. And that I’ve been careful not to make it difficult. Are you doing this deliberately?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Ha, you’re not so dumb.” He sat, still on the floor, with his knees crossed and his arms folded, directly in front of her chair, looking up at her; and she felt a quickening in her heart, a faint pleasant alarm through her body and limbs, as she saw his eyes fastened on her with no admiration, no fondness even.
“You’re not so dumb,” he repeated. “But for the sake of clearness let’s put it this way. What would be your reaction if I were to announce that I intend to sleep here tonight, in that rather narrow bed, with you?”
“Announce? To Mrs. Pegg? To Miss Chavez? To the newspapers?”
“Don’t quibble. What about it? You don’t need to look triumphant, I know my voice is trembling. What about it?”
“I’m not triumphant.”
“What about it?”
“Well... it would have one advantage, it would save Miss Chavez from being a liar, wouldn’t it?”
“Many advantages. It would extinguish the flame that surrounds you.”
Lora smiled at him. She had an impulse to touch him too, but kept her hands in her lap. His arms were still folded.
“You’re pretty funny,” she said. “You propose — this, like — this — without ever having wanted to kiss me—”
“I haven’t wanted to kiss you.” His voice trembled in earnest now; he got to his knees, close to her, and put his hands on the arms of her chair; she no longer enjoyed his eyes, but was held by them. “For god’s sake, Lora mia, pay no attention to what I say. From this moment. Until peace comes again. But understand distinctly that I know it is you who did it, though god knows I don’t know why. Ah, I have never touched you before — there... there — good god to be drowned with you — I never expected this...”
IX
Helen was six months old before she was named. She was born in the flat on Eleventh Street, to which Albert had taken his pregnant Brünnhilde in the fall following what he had one day labelled the immaculate seduction scene. The first week or so after she came he called his daughter nothing at all; of a morning, sometimes early, usually late, he would leap out of bed, get dressed in five minutes and leave for the little restaurant down the street to get his rolls and coffee. He would find a moment though to stop at the crib, pull down the blanket and take a look. “At last I know what obscenity is,” he would say; or perhaps, “No wonder they invented maternal love, it would be either that or manslaughter.”
This baby had been easy, almost too easy, Lora thought; the third day she had got her own breakfast and lunch, and now from the little kitchen she would call indifferently:
“Don’t pretend, Albert dear; if she’s as bad as that why do you take the trouble to look at her? Remember what you told me, one should have the courage of one’s emotions.”
And he would call back:
“Don’t get analytical, Lora mia, it’s not your line. Where the hell is my necktie? As a physical fact I’m a father; as a further physical fact this thing in here is a complicated worm. You might at least buy it a wig. So long — I’m off.”
A month later he was calling it Paula; after Saint Paul, he explained, a tribute from fornication to its first great antagonist. Others would make rival claims, he said, Buddha for instance; but Buddha was no antagonist of anything, merely he was lazy, he wanted a good excuse to go off and sit down somewhere.
But Lora objected. She didn’t like Paula; it sounded too much like a boy with curls. Almost anything else.
“All right,” Albert grinned, “then Fornica. Not so bad. Fornica Winter Scher. Fornica darling. Fornica Scher.”
“Winter.”
“Why not keep the Scher? It’s usual. You’ll get along lots better in this world if you respect the conventions.”
“You’re an awful fool. I’ll name her myself.”
Anne Seaver, over from Brooklyn one day, called her Baba, and that stuck for several months, until Albert finally declared he could no longer bear it because it made him think of Sir Joshua Reynolds; this went unexplained. Besides, Baba was extraordinary.
“The trick in naming children,” he said, “is to avoid all distinctive flavor. Sink them at once into the universal mire and they’re much less apt to get disturbing ideas. The ideal way would be to call all boys Tom and all girls Helen; indeed, when certain present tendencies reach their destined goal even that distinction will disappear and everybody can be called Sam. We shall discount the inevitable and call her Sam.”
“We shall not. I hate girls having boys’ names.”
“At least halfway then; Helen.”
Lora sighed; at last that was over. She might have known better in the first place than to let him get started on it.
She had admitted to herself long since that Albert was rather beyond her. That first night he had slept in her room she had decided that he was like all other men, calculable to the extent of his desires, but then another complication arose: what was that extent? He really did seem to have some sort of desire beyond the food he ate and the love he took and the fun of making himself felt on other people. He put up that claim; she got those phrases from him. What was that desire, she asked him once, during those first two months when they spent every night together in the narrow bed that made them sleep stretched out close, their bodies touching at each slight movement. The desire to die intact, he replied; and then said he was too sleepy to talk about it and it didn’t matter anyway.
When he learned she was pregnant — she waited three months to tell him — he insisted that she stop work at once. She might as well, he declared, for pretty soon she would have to, no one would want her. She protested that she had got her first job, with Palichak, less than two months before Roy was born, but he dismissed that as a special case. What the deuce, he said, he might or might not be able to support the child of his loins after it was born, but he certainly would manage to get it that far.
“You didn’t want it,” said Lora.
“Perfectly indifferent,” he declared. “I did think I was taking precautions, but only because it is old-fashioned not to. I don’t mind a bit, so long as you understand my attitude.”