They are no good, those books. But they sell. They have the disproportionate quantities of seaminess that gain authors reputations as realists, and their style is no tax on the brain. They abound in lines like "Behind him he could hear Dumbrowski's heavy breathing" and "With a bellow of mingled rage and pain he came at him." There are more descriptive stencils like "a thickset man with beetling brows" and "a small birdlike woman' than you can shake a stick at, and the frequency of "You mean—?" in his dialogue indicates that he is no pathfinder there, either. Triter still is the lyric strain with which the brutal realism is relieved, being marked by an almost unlimited use of the atmospheric "somewhere": "Somewhere a bird sang," "Somewhere a woman's laughter broke the stillness of the night," and so on. Complexity of characterization is achieved by the sedulous repetition of "part of him." "Part of him wanted to so-and-so, while another part of him wanted to such-and-such." It goes without saying that the "as if in a dream" locution appears on every fourth page. As befits the work of a fearless realist, the aspect of life most abundantly dealt with is sex.
It was this particular exaggeration I was reflecting on as my wife and I drove over to the party at the home of the man in question, whom I will call Dumbrowski because it's so typical of the names he gives his characters. I groped for some thought on which to impale this latter-day obsession with the frequent and physical depiction of passion an ironic phrase for it, which I felt to be teasing the edge of my mind if not the very tip of my tongue. "Why does he lay sex on so thick?" I finally asked my wife, who was driving the car. I thought a little conversation on the subject might help me snare that elusive conceit. "He and realists of that ilk? They have people in and out of bed like seals in and out of water—affairs right and left, sex day and night. Why is that?"
"Maybe they just don't know the facts of life," she said.
I lapsed into silence, staring ahead through the windshield. We must have gone a mile or more before I turned irritably to her and said, "What the hell are we going there for? You don't like him any better than I do."
She shrugged. "They owed us an invitation."
We slowed and entered the front gate of the house in which we were to spend the evening. I climbed out of the car and made my way unwillingly up the gravel drive to the door.
The house was jammed with guests. Dumbrowski, however, stood out in his pink shirt and black tie, which, in turn, stood out under his light-gray cashmere jacket. He was too tall and too broad-shouldered, I noted, and his hair needed some heavy pruning, like his books. I managed to steer clear of him during the cocktail period and even through dinner, for which the more than thirty guests were distributed among several small tables. After dinner, though, the whole party formed a unified group to which mine host held forth in typical fashion—by which I mean his way of aiming the stem of his pipe at you when making a point, or (another favorite piece of business) swirling his brandy around in a snifter. A man has a perfect right to gaze into a brandy inhaler and swirl the contents around when making an observation, but in that case he ought to get off something better than "I'm sure our ways must seem as odd to them as theirs do to us," and "The burdens of the Presidency are enormous."
I had eaten and drunk heavily, as an alternative to hanging myself from the nearest chandelier, and as a result had the hiccups so badly that for a while I sounded like an outboard motor. Luckily, I found a chair in a remote corner of the living room, and went for the most part unnoticed. At about half past ten, some cretin, a woman who had just moved to Westport and was socially on the make, asked Dumbrowski to read us a chapter of his work in progress. He modestly refused, and, what with one thing and another, was soon installed with a sheaf of manuscript in his hand and a circle of prisoners around him.
This was a story, he told us as he stoked his pipe preparatory to the reading, about a burnt-out prizefighter who signs for one last fight in an attempt to get enough money to marry a woman he is in love with. He is not only badly beaten but gravely injured, and is taken to the hospital immediately following the "bout":
" 'Stramaglia knew that he lay dying,' " Dumbrowski read, in a voice that was low and modulated, yet vibrant with respect for the material. " 'Part of him wanted to die.' " See? " Part of him wanted desperately to live. A great weariness assailed him. Somewhere a cart rattled in the corridor. Then he was dimly aware that the door of his room had opened and someone was sitting in the chair beside his bed. He knew without opening his eyes that it was Constanza.' "
A hush fell across the room as, in a pregnant pause of more than usual duration, Dumbrowski took a last suck on his pipe before setting it down in an ashtray at his elbow. There was no denying the emotion generated among his listeners a tension that made even me momentarily leave off tallying the cliches as they fell from his lips. He continued reading: " ' "Constanza, I have a request to make that may seem strange to you," Stramaglia whispered thickly, "but would you get me my gloves? I'd like to go out with them on." ' "
A snicker escaped me at the same time that a sob caught in my throat. In addition, I wasn't quite over the hiccups, so the resulting moment was one of great confusion indeed. Everyone turned to look at me. Dumbrowski himself raised his head and glanced in my direction, but he resumed reading almost immediately, in an effort to recover what he could of the spell he had been weaving. Fortunately, he was near the end of the chapter, or of the section he had chosen to read, and presently he was putting his manuscript aside, to a ripple of compliments and hand clapping. He acknowledged the applause smilingly, then rose with a brisk "Well so!" and set to work freshening up people's drinks.
I knew that I had got his goat. And I knew, as I'm sure he did, too, that the undercurrent of animosity between us, so long concealed, must break through into open hostility very soon. Dumbrowski, at any rate, took his revenge in short order. A girl of about twenty-five launched a long and detailed account of the trouble she was having finding a job in New York. In the course of it, she asked three or four of the men present, including me, if they couldn't help. I promised to see if there were any openings in my office. "Oh, openings!" she exclaimed, throwing up her hands. "I'm talking about somebody just plain getting me in."
Here Dumbrowski slipped in his stiletto. "You mustn't give the poor chap such a time, Nancy," he said. "He doesn't have any of the kind of influence you're talking about—the kind that cuts corners for people. He only just works there himself."
I spent the remainder of the evening spoiling for a fight. I prowled the living room with highball after highball, glaring either at Dumbrowski, who went from strength to strength with one group after another, or at my wife, whom I saw in gay communion with a succession of attentive males. "It's no wonder," I snapped elliptically from behind her as she sat on a sofa waiting for an admirer to trot back with a drink for her. "Next time you go out with me, you'll wear a dress with a top. I mean that." Before she could turn and ask for an exegesis, I was making for a piano, at which I sat for some time picking out chords of an angry and atonal nature. I eased my feelings by reviewing some of my adversary's more blatant shortcomings as an artist, mentally repeating a few of his characteristic effects. "Behind him he could hear Dumbrowski's heavy breathing," I reiterated amusedly to myself, and "You mean—?"
It was toward midnight, when the party was boiling noisily through its climax, that he gave me what I took to be a casus belli. He was standing nearby with a dapper but gloomy-looking man of about forty, whose name I hadn't caught. As I watched them, it was borne in on me that they were discussing my wife, who was chattering away to several people in the vicinity. The two men nodded and smiled appreciatively. Then Dumbrowski said something that I got only imperfectly but that under the din, at least seemed to have something to do with someone's being "picked up without any trouble."
I took a long pull on my drink, rose from the piano bench, and strode over, just as the other man made off. "All right, Dumbrowski," I said. "I heard that."
"Heard what?" he asked.
"Whatever you said. Shall we step outside?"
He glanced into my glass. "Don't you think you've had enough, old boy?" he asked.
"More than enough. Just slip out through the terrace, shall we?" I suggested, nodding toward a pair of French doors, closed against the autumn night.
"I'm sure I don't know what the devil you're talking about."
"I think you know what I'm talking about, Dumbrowski," I said, fixing him with narrowed eyes.
He paused and took me in speculatively. "You hate my guts, don't you?" he said at last, in low tones.
"I would if you had any. You get 'em, I'll hate 'em."
"Why, you—!" His fists opened and shut at his sides. "I've got guests to think about, but you come back here any time you wish, and by God—"
"How's tomorrow morning?"
"That's fine with me."
"I'll be here with bells on," I said. "That's a promise."
I awoke the next morning, Sunday, at eleven o'clock. My head felt swollen to twice its size, and as though it had been filled with concrete. When I tried to move it, the room swam in a steady circle from floor to ceiling, like the picture on a television set when it is in need of vertical tuning. The condition cleared up after a bit, and I got up and doused myself with cold water, dressed, and went down to the kitchen, where my wife was sitting over a cup of coffee and the Times.
"Good morning," I said, drawing on a tweed jacket, for the day was quite nippy.
"What's morning about it?"
I helped myself to a glass of cold orange juice from a pitcher. I drank it standing up, aware of her watching me. "What in heaven's name happened last night?" she asked. (I had stalked out of the party after my skirmish, pausing only long enough to make sure she had transportation home, and gone straight to bed on getting there myself, so these were our first words since then.) "What was that all about between you and Frank?"
"You'd be surprised," I answered acidly, and marched out of the house, making directly for the car, which I had left parked in the driveway, the keys in it.
I sat inside the car reviewing the hazards of living in a society as complex as ours. The memory of my grievances sent my temper flaring again. Should I keep my date with Dumbrowski? Honor or at least self-respect demanded that I do. There seemed no alternative. It was as though we had parted with the understanding "Fists, at dawn."
It was closer to noon when I reached the Dumbrowskis'. Nobody was stirring except the maid, who frowned uncertainly when, standing on the porch with my hands in my coat pockets, I asked for the master. She glanced over her shoulder up the vestibule stairway. "Are you expected?" she asked.
I told her that I was. As we talked, I debated with myself whether to leave a message that I had called, and go. Then a second-story window slid open and Dumbrowski's head appeared between the curtains, his face mangled with sleep, and an ice bag on his tousled hair. "Oh that," he said, remembering. He squinted down through the bright fall sunshine and, with the hand not concerned with steadying the ice bag, gathered the lapels of a bathrobe over his chest.
"I can come back later," I said, squinting back up at him, "if now isn't convenient."
"I'll be down." His head withdrew, and the window slid shut.
I sat on the porch steps to wait, declining the maid's invitation to wait inside. I picked up a handful of gravel from the drive and flicked the stones away one by one with my thumb. After about five minutes, the door behind me opened and Durnbrowski emerged, clad in a black turtleneck sweater and denim slacks. He must have had quite a night (my wife hadn't got home till two o'clock, I learned later), because he looked like something the cat dragged in. I sympathetically murmured something to that effect as I rose to greet him, and repeated my offer to let this go till some other time. "No, let's get it over with," he said doggedly.
"Right," I said, removing my coat as I followed him down the steps to the yard.
We squared away on a width of lawn that was concealed from the house by a group of birches, from which the ground we stood on fell away to a small pond in which the Dumbrowskis had once kept goldfish. We circled one another for a minute or two, our guards up, edging about for the advantage. There was no doubt what that consisted in here; it consisted in remaining above one's opponent.
"This has been brewing for a long time," I observed as we sparred.
"It was bound to come to a head," Dumbrowski agreed. He cocked his forward arm to the right a bit, and I stiffened my own guard, at the same time thrusting out my chest to give that impression of pectoral strength that is always suggested in photographs of prizefighters.
"We don't cotton to one another, you and I," I went on. "And there you have it."
"You don't like my stuff. I know that."
"It's not my dish of tea."
"I hate that expression," Dumbrowski replied with unexpected violence. "Why don't you come right out and say what you think? Not that I don't know what your dish of tea is. That English lot! Twitches and nuances!" Here he reeled off a string of contemporary British novelists who did, with uncanny accuracy, reflect my private reading tastes. "Lint pickers!" he exclaimed in a burst of spirit. "All that eyebrow combing! "
I recognized well enough the animus of the popular artist whom critical approval has bypassed. He was one of those authors read by hundreds of thousands but of whom no one has ever heard. They have no reputation; they are merely household words. Oh, I knew what was in Dumbrowski's craw all right. But that did not spare me the comparable sting of having my gout as a reader under attack. Now I felt the urgent need to strike a blow.
"It's better than that burly realism," I retorted hotly. "And all that sex. Want to know why you chaps slather it on? You don't know the facts of life."
He paused long enough for the exquisite irony of this to sink in I could sense the shaft going home then he lowered his head and came at me with a bellow of mingled rage and pain.
I met his charge by adroitly stepping aside, more or less executing what is known in bullfighting as, I believe, a veronica. He stumbled in his plunge and lost his balance, sprawling headlong among the birches. He got to his feet and came for me again. I lunged forward to meet him, and we came together, our arms going like flails. It was amazing how few blows found their mark—practically none at all. This time, I tripped on a rock and stumbled against him, and, interlocked, we danced down the incline toward the goldfish pond. We fetched up short of it only because, at the conclusion of our career down the grass, we clumsily pulled each other down in a jumble of arms and legs. This had the effect of converting the encounter into a wrestling match, and by an accident of the terrain in my favor I landed on top, but so near the water that any attempt to alter our positions might have meant disaster for both of us. So I sat there on Dumbrowski's chest for a bit.
"This will teach you to speak lightly of a lady's name," I panted.
"Ridiculous." He brought the word out between gasps of his own. "Never understood this fussing over a compliment paid a woman."
"Compliment?"
He nodded. "Only told Feversham be sure go talk to her if he wanted picking up."
"You mean—" I said.
He nodded again. "Feversham was depressed. So I told him go talk to her. She picks you right up. Always thought so. Great fun. At least appreciate your taste in that."
I climbed off of him. I turned away and dropped leadenly to the grass in a sitting position. I knew well enough now what was happening, and I offered no resistance. Behind me I could hear Dumbrowski's heavy breathing. Somewhere a car backfired, shattering the morning stillness. As if in a dream, I gave my head a shake and said, "It was all a ghastly mistake."
"I'll accept that."
I could hear him getting to his feet now. When he spanked the dirt from his clothes, it was as if the blows stung my cheeks. But when I turned to look up at him over my shoulder, his face was twisted in a grin of forgiving triumph. Dumbrowski knew that he had won; in his eyes there was that quiet knowledge. There is no need to relate the rest in detail: how part of me hated him while more of me hated myself; how I rose, as if in a trance, to dust off my own clothes; and how, at last, Dumbrowski steered me up the lawn to the house and even into it, my arm in his vise-like grip. "Wash up in there," he said, not unkindly. When I emerged from the bathroom he had indicated, he said, "Now come into the kitchen for some coffee."
We sat hunched over our cups of strong black coffee, our arms along the table, facing each other in a new understanding that needed no words. Each treasured within him the satisfaction of having stood up to the other, yet respected the other for having done the same. Somewhere a clock struck one and I told Dumbrowski that I had to go. I rose and, shaking his hand, took my leave.
As I strode up the walk to my car, I knew a strange peace the peace of a man who has faced up to what courage and chivalry demanded, and not flinched. I knew it was the same with Dumbrowski. We would never speak of this again, yet we were strangely cleansed. Part of me regretted the incident and always would but another, deeper part of me would always prize it for the challenge that had come out of it ... a challenge met. Somewhere a duck quacked. The air was like wine. It was with a high heart that I sprang into my car and drove home to the woman I loved.