Not Now but Now. M.F.K. Fisher

old Harry, who still murmured lewd courtesies to Barbara.

      Jennie could feel their eyes turned toward her, waiting.

      She sighed, and then said like a hostess in a bad play, “Go on, go on. Forgive me. I’ll be back. But don’t say anything too wonderful. I’ll be furious if you do, really furious.”

      Paul laughed a little. “Will you miss our gossip most, Jennie, or do you still like to pretend that all your guests are, by the very fact that they are your guests, wits or at least wags?”

      Barbara stirred. “You’re bitchy, Paul, worse than a woman. Jennie doesn’t gossip,” she said intensely. “Jennie, you don’t gossip, ever! I never heard you gossip,” she said as if she were the only one who had ever really heard Jennie speak at all.

      Jennie laughed sparingly, tenderly. “Barbara is too young to be anything but merciful,” she said, and touched the girl with a light hand.

      “Or love is blind,” Paul said.

      Jennie felt angry, but only in part of herself. The rest was waiting, ready to escape from these well-bred people who talked so much. She would go to her room, read, lie in the dark, wait for capsules to put her to sleep.

      Sir Harry, with the mysterious suddenness of deaf people, picked up Paul’s sentence. “Love is never blind.” He cleared his throat to signal a possible bon mot. They all waited. “That, if Bobs will forgive any play on words which may offend her incredibly young ears, that is a fallacy.”

      Julia laughed at once, to show that she at least had caught the carefully enunciated pun, to show that she was quick and worldly, a perfect guest. Barbara laughed a little too, as if in respect, the dutiful convent graduate following her elders and betters, the near-nun, near-sophisticate.

      Jennie walked across to Harry’s chair and leaned over it so that she knew he could smell the perfume on her skin, under the white lace and the little crystals that shone in the starlight. “You are a disgusting old lecher.”

      That was what he wanted her to say, in just that soft, laughing, excited way. She could feel him open out with happiness: there he sat, old yes, impotent probably, but with a plump, charming dowager near him, a nubile girl close by, good brandy to hand and a respectful young man to pour it, and Jennie, Jennie herself, bending over him.

      Why should she not? Why should she be stingy, now at the last?

      It was indeed the last, she knew suddenly. She was going far away, not a few feet, but far. She could live no more in this womb of chitchat, of dark cozy death. She must burst from it or die of weariness of all these people. They were killing her, sucking her breath from between her lips without feeding her as they sucked, so that she hungered with an ugly, painful hunger. She wanted life from them, but they gave back nothing to sustain her.

      Old Harry—he took everything from her, good dinners and the glimmer of her crystals and the titillation of her half-offered body, genteel hostess-whore. And Julia filled up wealthy vacuum here, in Jennie’s house so waxed and lovely, away from the smooth succession of luxury hotels so waxed and lovely but empty of Jennie and the charming, witty, waggish friends. She sent daisies and orchids and chocolates wrapped in tufted satin; the old man wrote exquisite bread-and-butter notes on crested paper; Jennie smiled, starving, and asked them to come again, soon, soon.

      Barbara—how draining was her steady eagerness to be loved, and her arrogance, no matter how innocent, in thinking that she ever would be by proud, pure Jennie!

      And Paul the other innocent—Jennie hated him most, because he came the nearest, through accidents of chemistry and time, to her destruction.

      She sighed again, relieved to feel herself able to be so apart; it would be good to leave thus coolly.

      Sir Harry was already clearing his throat, prepared to splash off once more into his own little pond of vicarious venery.

      “I’ll be back soon, darlings,” Jennie said, smiling into the darkness at her lie, and as she walked lightly away she let herself brush against Paul’s arm, and knew that it rippled like a snake with shock at feeling her casual, remote flesh under her dress. It made her breath flow more easily, to have stopped his. Perhaps it would rouse him enough to exert himself a little toward Barbara, she thought with her own kind of primness. That would be good for them both, and more normal, two healthy young animals . . .

      But what could it matter to her? Why should she continue to arrange such meaningless liaisons? What good did they do her? Her creatures lay back in the soft dark, lifeless, letting her feed and perfume and stroke. What did she get for it besides the knowledge that they were hers? As she walked swiftly through the silky perfection of her house she felt more and more outraged. If she were the kind of woman who permitted herself to cry she would cry now, tears bitter as alum. People took from her, took bread and her beauty and her fine sense of balance, and they gave her nothing but the involuntary narcosis of their gossip. She was sick of it, sick to death.

      She stood in her room behind the thin, faintly moving silk of the curtains and let her tunic fall off and down and onto the floor. It was a sensation she loved, the slipping of the smooth fabric over her skin, the slow hissing of it as it went down, to lie there covering her feet, her legs rising like saplings from it, and then her small hips and the gentle roundness of her belly and her fine, pointed breasts. She attended to herself as if she were a trainer with a fine show-bitch: baths and feedings and exercise, all fit and proper. Then she enjoyed herself too, like the employer of the trainer of the show-bitch, and she felt proud ownership in all her own points, standing off to judge, coming close to caress.

      There were the fit clothes for such a rich possession as herself. There were tunics for night, all made alike and full of art, sewn with little shining stones. Winters she wore black velvet trousers, quirkishly. Daytime she covered herself carefully from strangers, in the best way to make them desire her without knowing it, and on her feet she wore little slippers of snakeskin. Everything was nice.

      Now she silently put things into a jewel case. She smiled to think of the trick she would play. She would go away. They would miss her, and suffer, but the house would run itself because of the momentum her mastery gave it, and Sir Harry would get his brandy as smoothly as if she were there, and Barbara would be desolate but soon consoled by ten minutes extra at her prie-dieu and an increasing tolerance for Paul’s adept, inevitable nuzzlings. Julia would putter gently in the herb garden, pretending that no palace-hotel held rooms ready for her death. And Jennie would be free, quit of them and their discreet chatter, their well-fed banalities, the meaningless fact that they existed at all. She would break through the safe darkness, and come alive, and find people who would give her of themselves, not suck at her until she was hollow and dying. She would find generous people, as rich and full as healthy wet-nurses, to feed her and satisfy her without hurt.

      She shivered, smoothed her hair for her little snakeskin skullcap, slipped her bare feet into the high-heeled shoes, and then stood silently behind the swaying curtains again, with no light to betray her, and listened to the four people out in the darkness.

      They were still talking, on and on, afraid to stop. She could see them in the starlight, and in a tender gleam that came out from the many-windowed house, her house, which she kept polished and murmurous with comfort for them. She hated them. They were dolts, content to exist unborn, floating softly in the starlight. And they thought she would always be there, to nourish them on the bread and the wine of her flattery.

      Old Harry sat back in the black shadow of the eucalyptus tree, and the signet ring on his hand, not liver-spotted in the nighttime, gleamed mischievously. “There’s no doubt about it,” he was saying, “our impenetrable Jennie—” He coughed, preparatory to heaven knows what genteel salacity.

      Paul said roughly, “Our impenetrable and lovely Jennie, my dear Harry, is undoubtedly standing behind the flattering champagne-silk curtains in her bedroom, looking out at us and despising us for a group of people too well fed to be anything but mildly malicious about her. She keeps us drugged with comfort, the swine on her island who might otherwise do harm to her.”

      Jennie shivered suddenly.