Allantry

A Story by RALPH MALONEY

IT GAVE Earl Parrish great pleasure to take attractive girls to lunch. Not just downstairs for a martini and a sandwich, but to lunch. To Colony or Nino’s or 21, where he could confer with an ornamented sommelier and where he could score thick napery with the heel of a heavy spoon in offhand diagrams as he talked. Parrish asked nothing more of the young ladies than that they be agreeable luncheon companions. When one of the more susceptible, flattered by Parrish’s elaborate and costly attentions, indicated her availability for the remainder of the afternoon, not to say the evening, Parrish turned the offer aside with a joke. When no joke would do, he said, sadly, no.

For the Earl of Parrish, as he had been known since his school days, was something of a gallant, which means he overvalued women. He was, consequently, shy of them, too shy to recognize that women are content to be their half of an anxious and lustful species. He had had no sisters; he had never attended a coeducational school; when he came to the age when a well-brought-up English boy sees much of girls, he had been commissioned in the Fifty-first Highland and shipped to Libya. When at last he was introduced to the society of women, in Washington in 1943, he was more shy than ever, for by that time he had one arm, his right.

Conversation during Parrish’s luncheons was never general. The point of departure might range from the morning’s headlines to a remark overheard from an adjoining table. What ensued was a pat speech, unvarying as a child’s elocution lesson: the American male was abdicating; the female everywhere ascendant, if not dominant. Since the introduction of indoor plumbing, the American male had been altogether emasculated by guilt. In fifty years, Feminism had become Momism had become Togetherness, wherein the wife was Mom, controlling the money, the social life, and rationing out affection and sex. For the future, Parrish saw America carpeted by housing developments, cleansed of all perils, challenges, rich smells, harsh tastes, and peopled by fairies and their mothers. When the wine was in him, the prospect brought him close to tears, for he liked his adopted country very much.

Parrish was, of course, a bachelor, but by no means a celibate. Persistent rejection of a woman is a rudeness, unthinkable in a gallant, and the Earl entered into infrequent liaisons with girls he took to lunch. These were all brief, ending, without exception, when the girl involved realized that Parrish was not a shy man who needed her help in acquiring a wife, but a man who had no real need of women, having been obliged to do without them until his twenty-second year. All the alliances terminated as they had begun, at the insistence of the young lady and with the gallant complaisance of Parrish.

Pamela Laraja was the exception. Parrish met her at an angels’ party given to raise money for a musical in which she was to dance. His business was good, and at the end of the evening, Parrish purchased a couple of shares. Then, summoning for the hundredth time some canvasser’s callosity to mantle his vanity, he asked Pamela to lunch. She accepted at once, and calmly, and gave Parrish her address and telephone number.

HE TOOK her to Rodolpho’s, a Mafia-American restaurant on the East Side too dark and sexy for midday and therefore never crowded at lunch. They talked very little in the cab crosstown, Pamela having nothing that needed saying and Parrish shy, in awe of the soft downing of her cheek. He had not seen the down the night before. The sunlight brought it out, and it excited him curiously. When the waiter arrived, Parrish, relieved to have company, ordered martinis, although he made it a rule never to drink gin during the day and rarely at night. Midway in the second martini, the ordinaries of introduction behind them, Parrish, searching for a point of departure for his speech, said, “You seem different to me somehow. More European or more continental than most American girls I meet.”

“My parents are Spanish,” Pamela said.

“Oh, yes. Spain,” Parrish said witlessly. He was busy with his speech. (He had, however, a moment’s image of her father, a spidery Catalan don reading Cervantes in bad light.) “Certainly the Spanish have never had the problem America is faced with today.” He drew from his breast pocket a bail-point pen and striped the deep tablecloth with the button end. “Look at the American male. The symbol of mother dominates his early life. The female schoolteacher dominates his daytime life as he grows up. By the time he’s seventeen, the American boy is afraid to take any aggressive action toward women, and since sex is a form of aggression, we find a situation wherein a kind of male frigidity — Why are you smiling?” he asked gently.

Pamela Laraja was not smiling; she was grinning. The martinis had taken her completely into camp, and she had just barely averted asking Parrish to play Simon Says with her. She smiled broadly, barely abridging laughter. “I’ve seen so much of it,” she said.

“I don’t doubt you have,” Parrish went on. “You’re an American girl — woman, I should say,” he added gallantly, smiling. “You’ve seen it all around you, growing up. Your mother fighting her battle for dominance in the home and winning — the law makes sure of that — then being bloody unhappy about her victory —”

Another big grin from Pamela stopped Parrish. She knew the martinis were really too much this time because she had almost asked him what he did when his elbow itched. Aloud, for something to say, she said, “My mother is dead.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” said Parrish, genuinely contrite. “I should have had more sense.”

“No, no,” she cut in. “Go on with what you were saying.” She drained her glass and planted it carefully on the table, thinking: That was two. Number three is on the way. If Wingy doesn’t feed me pretty soon, I’m going to slip down where it’s cool and take a nap.

“I’m sorry I used your mother as an example,” Parrish continued. “I just wanted to bring what I have to say closer to home. Perhaps you can see the situation in the homes of your friends. Women fighting for dominance, then getting it and being bloody miserable. Then they turn to acquisition. They want washer-dryers, automobiles, a house with a picture window, so they can have stature in the eyes of other women. They don’t care about masculine opinion anymore because they’ve discredited the male. They just keep the men around so they can drive them to acquire all this property. Do you realize that some seventy percent of America’s wealth is controlled by women?”

Just sober enough to realize some comment was expected of her, Pamela said, “I wish I had some of it,” and followed with a saving smile over the rim of her glass.

Only the momentum of habit carried Parrish past this response. “Philip Wylie, in his Generation of Vipers —" The shrimp arrived. Parrish lost his audience utterly. Pamela swabbed a shrimp in sauce and mouthed it with intent delicacy, savoring. Her eyes seemed literally to smoke. Parrish noticed for the first time tender gatherings of bleached fuzz at the corners of her upper lip. As she chewed, her lips drooped in minor ecstasy; light lines pulsed evenly in her throat as she swallowed. After the second shrimp her eyes widened briefly, perhaps in surprise that Parrish was there. To cover, she asked solicitously, “Aren’t you going to eat?”

Parrish nodded and faced his food bravely. He shelved his speech for the day and perhaps for many days to come. No woman could take so much joy out of a plate of shrimp and whine for a washerdryer or strike for a second car. His speech (for all it might have been addressed to a hydrant) was shelved also because he seriously suspected it was inappropriate here, misdirected. Without conscious connection, perhaps only uncomfortable in the silence, he said, “Do you like wine with lunch?”

“I’ve had wine with meals all my life.”

“Oh, yes,” Parrish said, “I suppose being Spanish —”

“No. My father was a bartender.”

Parrish, in a rush to forestall an embarrassment which simply wasn’t there, said, “A noble calling. A profession, even. I’ve always thought that if my luck ran out on potatoes, I’d like to become a bartender.” It was true. He saw the bartender as a kind of mythic older brother in American society, a figure he could identify with easily.

Pamela looked once, inadvertently, at his slack left sleeve and lowered her gaze swiftly to the table.

“Yes, of course,” Parrish said.

She leaned forward earnestly, the jersey of her upper dress catching on the tablecloth, her bosom profoundly separated and quite forgotten. “Please don’t get mad. I mean, a bartender has all he can do with two hands, for heaven’s sake.” She went back to her food, embarrassed in her turn, and her upper dress unhanded her. Parrish wasn’t in the least angry, or even upset. He knew that when she accepted the fact he had one arm she accepted him. He was also and uncharacteristically triplets with lust for her parted, pouting, unaware upper body.

They had wine and Spanish brandy (in honor of Pamela’s heritage), while Parrish smiled bravely through the pain she had done him (he was smiling at the Perfidious Albion in himself). In the street, in the cruel midafternoon sunlight, he asked her to his place for a drink, and Pamela, after only the smallest (You hurt him. And whatthehell, Archie, whatthehell) hesitation, said she’d love a drink.

MONTHS later, rooting around in what had happened, Parrish knew he had never loved Pamela. He had so thoroughly approved of everything she was and did that he had been blinded, as one traditionally is in love. Pamela was the affirmation and epitome of everything he sought in women: tender, considerate, as feminine as her cleavage, and funny in her horrid way. More important, she was undemanding — he had to press money on her — and obedient. No, obedient was the wrong word. She wanted to do what he wanted to do or what he wanted her to do. It was her business more to please him than obey him, and there is no name for that. She quit her show to take proper care of him, and spent her time away from him at the zoo or shopping on Third Avenue for nut presents for him.

Her sense of humor was appalling, but he had long ago given up on what Americans called wit, and you can’t really expect everything in a woman. For example, her mother was not, as Pamela had said, dead. She had said that during their first lunch together simply to compound Parrish’s evident uneasiness. Once, when he had explained to her what “superfluous” meant, she indicated her grasp by saying, “Like a No Smoking sign in a cancer clinic,” and fell down laughing. On one of her Third Avenue shopping trips she bought him a giant gilt candelabra, for which she promised him a piano one day; on another she came home with a guaranteed-human shrunken head for his bar. Like many Americans her age, she worshiped the non sequitur: “I know all about contraception. My mother was a waitress.” Parrish laughed with her for a while because she laughed so hard, but after a few weeks he could manage, barely, to smile.

She watched him dress every morning, sitting on the couch wrapped in a spinnaker-sized bathing sheet. Parrish was uncompromising to the point of elegance in the matter of dress, for he knew his impairment was one of the marks of war a man can wear with grace — even a hint of glamour — if the rest of him is properly turned out. One careless touch kills the military air and with it the dash. His stance, once he was dressed, was so unremittingly erect that a drunken friend once remarked that Parrish’s arm wasn’t missing, it was holding on to the ceiling. At first Parrish thought it was curiosity that kept Pamela so engrossed in his dressing; then for some weeks he thought it might be love. Later he understood her fascination. For the first time in her life she was witnessing the phenomenon of meticulousness.

Evenings and weekends, Parrish watched Pamela. She moved continually without conveying nervousness. It wasn’t restlessness. She simply couldn’t tell a story without hurling herself into it. At first Parrish thought his interest was connoisseurship, appreciating the tight grace of her body. For a little while he thought it was lust, or even love. Later he knew that his interest was in observing the phenomenon of abandon, as alien to him as meticulousness was to Pamela.

When he got home at night, usually later and stiffer than was absolutely required, Parrish was given a greeting, always, that he thought American women reserved for husbands home early and sober on payday. Still he stopped, as he had for years, at a favorite bar halfway between his office and his apartment. Home was pleasant, but he liked a few drinks at the end of the day in the company of men. His visits to the bar grew longer and longer, until he came to know the bartender well — which meant he was staying well after the commuters had gone, staying too late. When he came home late and with perhaps too much in him, his heart gave a small anticipatory flutter as he rode the elevator, or as he worked his key in the door. There were remnants in that flutter of the awful and delicious weakness that overcame him when he was a schoolboy and about to be reprimanded. Yet whenever and in whatever shape he chose to show up, Parrish was greeted loudly and fondly by a half-dressed or half-undressed Pamela, apparently overjoyed that he came home at all.

When at last it occurred to Parrish to ask Pamela to marry him, he had difficulty thinking of anything else. He considered his proposal as he considered everything else: in terms of his absent arm. He was afraid of the manner of her acceptance and in terror of rejection. Parrish knew exactly how he would ask her to become his wife. He’d kiss her hello, pat her on the behind, make himself a Scotch, and drop the proposition into her lap. “Look here, Beastie,” he’d say, “we’ve been together a couple of months now. I don’t see any reason we shouldn’t honor this agreement with a simple civil ceremony.” Then he would sip his Scotch, waiting. “Do you mean get married, Earl?” she would say, and there it all broke off.

He told himself he’d be a lucky man to have her. She was everything he approved of in a woman. But he could not ask. Because in the moment that would follow she would glance or not glance (that was his dilemma: it didn’t matter which) at his left shoulder, and he could not abide that moment. This scene — his offhand proposal and the manner of her acceptance — possessed him. He thought of virtually nothing else during the day; every conversation he started with Pamela fell flat because the opening words were almost — just almost — his proposal. He was a bore about it and knew it, but couldn’t shake the spell.

HIS broker shook the spell. He called Parrish to say that Florida potatoes had gone all to hell and that Parrish now held options on forty carloads of unmarketable spuds.

Even as he hung up the phone Parrish wondered at himself. He had taken the options in the spring knowing Florida potatoes would be valueless in the fall, intending to sell the options at a profit in August, before the Maine and Idaho crops were in. Rudimentary. The basic gamble in his business, what his business was all about. How had he permitted himself to take such a beating? Or rather, why had he defeated himself?

Parrish decided that in his agony of stupid shyness over the proposal and his goddamn arm he had neglected his business dangerously. He determined then, in the afternoon dark of the cubicle he used for an office, to ask the girl to marry him and to hell with what she thought of one-armed husbands.

He went directly home, without a stop for courage or comfort. Pamela was, as usual, soaking in the bathtub with the door wide open and the hi-fi booming from the far room. Absorbed in himself and what he was about to ask — at any rate, not thinking — Parrish pushed the bathroom door shut. “Honey?” she called. “Don’t shut the door. I can’t hear the music.”

“A door is to shut,” Parrish muttered to himself. “That’s what they’re there for.”

He heard splashing and the light pad of bare feet on tile. The door swung wide. He saw only her slender arm beaded with water. “You’re home early, darling,” she called.

He did not answer. He went to the bar and took a Scotch neat, poured a second Scotch over ice, and walked to a cold hardwood chair, which seemed appropriate to his mood, where he sat erect, legs primly crossed. The apartment, he noted, was clean in a thoroughly disorganized way, as though carefully dusted by an energetic utter stranger. Records and books were stacked in neat, unrelated piles: Walter Scott on top of Kerouac, Berlioz next to Sinatra. A flurry of annoyance seized him, then gave way to the warmth of the Scotch, and any protest he might have made was forgotten.

Pamela padded out of the bathroom wrapped in the same towel she had worn nine hours earlier when the Earl had kissed her good-bye. Her brown hair was piled in a thick, impromptu twist on top of her head. “You had a lousy day, didn’t you,” she stated, genuinely concerned. “Why don’t you take off your coat?”

Parrish opened his mouth then to ask Pamela to marry him, to get it over with, but something annoyed him anew. “I’ve had a lousy day is right. I hope to hell you like eating potatoes, because I forgot to drop the options on forty carloads.” He quieted. He might just as well discuss business with a doorknob, he thought. She had flopped on the couch, all skin and towel, and was silently calling his attention to her latest gift. It covered twelve square feet of Parrish’s wall, an oil portrait of a bespectacled nineteenth-century industrialist in a thick and gaudy rococo frame. Beneath the painting a bold plaque read: “OUR FOUNDER,” and below that, in more modest lettering, “H. A. Calkins.”

“Isn’t he something else?” Pamela cried, laughing. “That cheer you up?”

Parrish knew he should be amused, but the immense blight on his wall bothered him instead. He remained silent, knowing that edgy as he was, he’d say something wrong and start a fight. “Oh, well.”Pamela said, resigned. “I thought it was funny. Don’t be too glum about it. It only cost fifteen bucks.” She did not pout. She knew the painting was funny and that Parrish was off his feed. Appreciating all this and helpless in his annoyance, Parrish said he was sorry but he was too tired to enjoy anything. He downed his Scotch and poured another, thinner drink for himself, and prepared again to ask her to marry him.

“If you’re tired, let me get your drink,” Pamela said, rising. “Take off your coat and I’ll —”

“My coat, my coat,” Parrish said, turning on her. “What is there about my coat that fascinates you so? I don’t like to take my coat off and you know it.”

“All right, darling. Don’t take my head off.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, I have a right to some —” He walked back to the hard chair and sat.

There was a long silence. “I’m sorry,” Pamela said at length. “I don’t know why you should be shy about the arm with me. After all —”

Parrish shot up from the chair. “There are some areas I don’t think require discussion. If I happen to be normally sensitive about a minor deformity — ”

“Oh, deformity, nonsense,” she cut in sternly. “Don’t tell me about deformity. I used to work in a laundry.” And she started to laugh, rolling on her back and kicking her legs wildly in the air, and kept laughing until Parrish, enraged at the blind alleys she found so funny, strode into the bathroom and locked the door behind him. He breathed deeply, regularly, before the mirror, trying to regain command of himself. He splashed cold water on his face and scrubbed at his eyes. He was at length sufficiently in command to apologize, or at least to start a more sensible quarrel, when there was a knock on the bathroom door. “Can you hurry a little, Earl? I was in the tub such a long time —”

Parrish heard no more. He slammed out of the bathroom, his face contorted, deranged in pain, to confront a recoiling girl. “Will you put some clothes on! Will you get dressed and stop running around like some bloody Polynesian nymph! Will you in the name of God observe the simplest formalities, the rudiments of decency! Some shred of modesty . . .”

She watched him with unafraid curiosity akin to amusement. “Oh, Earl,” she said sensibly, “settle down. I only want to use the john.” She reached under the towel and scratched her belly vigorously.

“Stop scratching yourself! There is a time and place for everything!” he cried helplessly. “I don’t by God care what you want to do in the bathroom. Must one’s life be one unending round of intimacies!” He paused for breath and found the word; “You slob!”

Pamela watched his rage clinically, not afraid but not amused now either. “I don’t understand you, Earl.”She shook her head. “All your talk about women . . .”

“I don’t care what I say. I want the minimum of privacy one accords an animal if I have to go to a hotel to get it. I want my bathroom back!”

She nodded. “You don’t have to go to a hotel. I’ll get out.”

“Do that,” he snapped crisply, very British now, and pushed past her, through the front door to the corridor, where he walked down to the lobby rather than wait for the elevator. In the wait he might defeat himself and go back.

Several times before midnight, Parrish came close to calling Pamela, and was once in a phone booth with a dime in hand when he changed his mind. After midnight, when he was sure she was gone, Parrish felt bitter loss, but was somehow not saddened by it. The loss of Pamela was a fact he was by nature unable to alter, like the loss of an arm, perhaps, and there seemed no point in weeping over what one couldn’t restore. At two in the morning, in his regular saloon, the bartender offered Parrish a “nightcap on the house" to get rid of him. Parrish declined with thanks, drew himself erect in a manful attempt to master his unsteadiness, and said, “I am drinking for a reason, John. I had very bad news today. I discovered that I can never be a bartender.”

John mopped the bar and looked directly into Parrish’s eyes, carefully away from the sleeve that flapped loose now at his side. “What do you want to be a bartender for, Mr. Parrish?” He gestured vaguely with the rag. “You got your potatoes.”

“A bartender has all he can do with two hands.”

“I’ll say,” John said.

“When I was very young and went to war, I prayed that I would be wounded and decorated and that it would all not take very long. My prayers were answered abundantly, and I have been quite miserable since.”

John turned off the bar lights, politely ignoring Parrish’s soliloquy.

“I sometimes think . . .” Here Parrish paused, using all his will to remain in control. “Think that the crudest joke the gods can play on a man is to give him precisely what he thinks he wants, and more. It can be very destructive.”

“If you say so, Mr. Parrish,” John said in the darkness.

“I’m sorry. I seem to be keeping you.” Parrish stepped back from the bar, restored the loose left sleeve to its pocket. “Fortunes of war, John.”

“Way the ball bounces, Mr. Parrish.”

“Good-night.” Parrish pinched his tie tight at the collar, patted the left sleeve smooth, and made his way with sturdy dignity to the street.