Desperate Characters. Paula Fox

to make an issue of it. It already felt better. “Please don’t bring it up. Just that I would like to leave early—” Then the door opened.

      There were so many people wandering around beneath Flo Holstein’s brilliant wall lights that it looked as if a sale were in progress. Even at a glance, Sophie saw some among the multitude who were strangers to the house. These few were looking covertly at furniture and paintings. There wasn’t a copy of anything on the premises. It was real Miës van der Rohe, real Queen Anne, real Matisse and Gottlieb.

      Flo had produced two successful musicals. Mike Holstein’s practice was largely made up of writers and painters. Sophie liked him. Otto said he suffered from culture desperation. “He can’t stand his own trade,” Otto had said. “He’s like one of those movie starlets who announces she’s studying philosophy at U.C.L.A.”

      But at that moment Sophie—her face held in Dr. Holstein’s strong square hands—felt the nervous tension of the last two hours draining out of her as though she’d been given a mild soporific.

      “Soph, darling! Hello, Otto. Sophie, you look marvelous! Is that dress a Pucci? What a relief that you don’t fiddle with your hair. That style makes you look like some sad lovely girl out of the thirties. Did you know that?” He kissed her in the manner of other people’s husbands, on the cheek, dry-lipped and ritualistic.

      He didn’t know a thing about her, not even after ten years, but she loved the air of knowingness; the flattery that didn’t obligate her. And she liked his somewhat battered face, the close-fitting English suits he bought from a London salesman who stopped at a mid-town hotel each year to take orders, the Italian shoes he said were part of his seducer’s costume. He wasn’t a seducer. He was remote. He was like a man preceded into a room by acrobats.

      Despite her resolve to say nothing, she found herself whispering into his neck. “Something awful happened … I’m making too much of it, I know, but it was awful …”

      As he led her toward the kitchen, a man grabbed Otto’s arm, shouted something, and dragged him into a group near the fireplace. In the kitchen, Flo kissed her hurriedly and turned to look at a huge orange casserole squatting inside the face-level wall oven. Two men, one of them turning the water tap off and on and staring pensively in the sink, did not look up.

      “What happened? Do you want your gin on the rocks?” Mike asked.

      “A cat bit me.”

      “Let’s see.”

      She held up her hand. The slack fingers looked somewhat pitiful, she thought. Since she and Otto had looked at it under the street lamp, the bump appeared to have grown larger. It was tinged with yellow.

      “Listen, that ought to be looked at!”

      “Oh, it’s nothing. I’ve been bitten before by animals.” But she hadn’t. “It was a shock,” she said, stammering slightly as if she’d tripped over her lie, “because I’d been feeding the damned beast and it turned on me.”

      “I don’t think there’s been any rabies around here in years, but—”

      “No,” she said. “No, not a chance. That cat was perfectly healthy. You know me. I want to be the saint who tames wild creatures.”

      “Mike!” Flo cried. “Get the door, will you? Here, what are you drinking, Sophie?”

      “Nothing right now,” Sophie answered. Mike left her with a pat on the back, a nod that said he’d return. One of the young men began to comb his hair. Sophie went into the long living room. A television comedian she had met before at the Holsteins’ was holding forth among a group of seated people, none of whom was paying him much attention. In a voice of maniacal self-confidence, he reported that since he’d grown his beard, he couldn’t eat cooked cereal any more without making a swine of himself. When no one laughed, he caressed the growth at his chin and on his cheeks. “No kidding!” he cried. “These kids nowadays are wunnerful! Hair is for real! I wanna live and love and be myself. That’s the message! Seriously.” He was short and pudgy and his skin glistened like lard.

      “A very Gentile party,” someone said over Sophie’s shoulder. She turned and saw a couple in their early twenties. The girl was in a white leather suit; the boy wore an army fatigue jacket, on which were pinned buttons shaped and painted like eyeballs, staring from nothing, at nothing. His frizzy hair shot off in all directions like a pubic St. Catherine’s wheel. The girl was beautiful—young and unmarked. Her amber hair fell to her waist. She wore a heavy bracelet around one of her ankles.

      “I saw at least three Jews,” Sophie said.

      They didn’t smile. “Your parties are educational,” the girl said.

      “It isn’t my party,” Sophie replied.

      “Yes, it’s yours,” the boy said judiciously. “Your generation’s thing.”

      “Oh, for crissakes!” Sophie said, smiling.

      They looked at each other. The boy touched the girl’s hair. “She’s a wicked one, isn’t she?” The girl nodded slowly.

      “You must be young Mike’s friends?” asked Sophie. Young Mike was lurching through C.C.N.Y. but each semester’s end brought terror into the Holstein household. Would he go back once more?

      “Let’s split,” said the boy. “We’ve got to go see Lonnie up in St. Luke’s.”

      “The hospital?” asked Sophie. “It’s too late for visiting hours.”

      They looked at her as though they’d never seen her before, then they both padded softly out of the living room, looking neither left nor right. “That’s a beautiful anklet!” Sophie called out. The girl looked back from the hall. For an instant, she seemed about to smile. “It hurts me to wear it,” she shouted. “Every time I move, it hurts.”

      Otto was backed up against a wall, looking up at the chin of a powerfully built woman wearing pants and jacket. She was an English playwright, a friend of Flo’s, who wrote exclusively in verse. Otto, Sophie observed as she walked over to them, had one hand behind him pressed against the wooden paneling.

      “We are all of us dying of boredom,” the woman was saying. “That is the why of the war, the why of the assassinations, the why of why. Boredom.”

      “The younger ones are dying of freedom,” Otto said in a voice flattened by restraint. Sophie caught his eye. He shook his head very slightly.

      “The young will save us,” the woman said. “It’s the young, thank the dead God, who will save us.”

      “They are dying from what they are trying to cure themselves with,” Otto said.

      “You are a square!” the woman said, stooping a little to look into his face.

      “Hello, Suzanne,” Sophie said. “I just heard someone say, ‘I’m crashing.’ What does it mean?” She realized she had a fake ingenuous look on her face. It was obscurely insulting and she hoped Suzanne would feel the edge.

      “In contemporary parlance,” Suzanne explained magnanimously, “it means either that you’ve come to spend the night in someone’s pad, or that you are coming down from a drug high.” She bowed to Otto and moved away. She rarely spoke to men when other women were around.

      “Jesus!” Otto exclaimed. “Trying to stop her from talking is like trying to get a newspaper under a dog before it pukes!”

      “I hate it when you talk like that! You’re getting worse as you get older. I can’t bear that mean reductive—”

      “Where’s your drink?”

      “I don’t want a drink,” she said irritably. He stood directly in front of her, blocking out the room. There was hesitancy in his look. He had heard her, hearing him, and he was sorry. She could see that, sorry herself now that she had spoken so meanly. For a second, they held each other’s gaze. “That button’s loose,”