David whimpered against the fervency of her kisses, and she released him and lay back, turning her face to the window. The night was faintly illumined by the moon that was rising in that part of the sky not visible to her. She felt an exhaustion as after love and the dissatisfaction that at times combined with it, that desire for something more, as if something more had been promised her that was not yet given.
4
A friend of her mother’s owned a dress shop off the lobby of one of the larger hotels, and she accepted a job there as a salesgirl. She wanted to sing again in a lounge, but that would be like an act of infidelity. Even her job at the hotel might seem like that to her husband, and when he returned for a few days before he was sent to England, she did not tell him that she was working.
The shop’s windows faced the lobby and the street, both, and so the shop, with its gilded, high-domed ceiling, was like a display case for her. The hotel guests glanced in at her and she glanced out at them. She saw them as also on display, a passing display of generals and officers, industrialists, and diplomats. The hotel was like a hub for the entire war-frantic city. She saw them arriving and departing in immaculate uniforms and perfect suits, their faces not so preoccupied with their great tasks that she went unnoticed.
She sold dresses to wealthy women, some of them her friends and her mother’s friends, to discontented young women and young women delighted with their lives, and to elderly women whose sagging flesh was held up by elaborate corsets. Since her own mother was slender, Vivian had never seen women’s bodies compressed and thrust up, and when these women took a long time to feel cloth between their fingers, or to decide for or against a ruffle or pleat, or to turn around and around again, in gowns and negligees, before the triple mirrors, their contemplation and deliberation seemed to her so futile. The war was not their concern; their anxiety was for their reflection in the long mirrors in the dressing room, whether they grew old like queens, as if age were an accretion of power, or sweetly, to placate the inevitable, or grew old retaliatively, as if everyone were cheating them of life. Among these elderly ones she felt a species apart, herself the only one of her kind, never to grow old and never to die.
In this gilded room with claret carpet and chairs of ocher velvet and rows of gowns on black velvet hangers, in this room fragrant with cologne sprayed into the air, where she was visible from the street and the lobby, she underwent a constant shifting of emotions. Her curiosity about the men who passed through the lobby or who came into the shop to buy gifts for women was chastened by her own need for fidelity, a yearning for her husband, and this shifting itself was exciting, a constant tremor of the heart.
She felt, at this time, estranged from her son. She had hired a woman to take care of him, and the woman, Olga, lived with them—a spindly, aging woman with gray and orange hair and dark grape lipstick, who, because of an intolerance for racket, could not work in the shipyards, one among a few women, as she said of herself, not making a fortune sorting rivets and counting bolts. With no husband around who was generous with the child, as George had been, Vivian lacked the example. With no husband around to devote herself to, she had no desire to devote herself to anyone. She was with David only an hour or so in the morning and in the evening, and the impatience with him that had always been present now declared itself only as an uneasy deafness to his small, complaining voice and his screams of joy; since she was not so bound to him, she no longer felt so impatient with him.
She began to stay away evenings, serving as hostess at a U.S.O. center for soldiers and sailors. She enjoyed dancing with them, the change of bodies against hers, the many strange bodies responding to the strangeness of hers. Some of the men were appealing to her, the appeal of the few made stronger by the presence of the many. Teresa, her cousin, whose husband was also in England, took men home with her, but, for Vivian, taking a strange man to bed for one night was like taking a first step into that freedom which she preferred to titillate herself with rather than experience. Every day she wrote her letter or added to an unfinished letter. She wrote that she loved him, and she was sure that she did, but as she wrote her words of love, she imagined all the things he would condemn her for if she did them.
She was asked to supper one evening by her father’s mistress, Adele, who had telephoned her at work, and, on entering the apartment, saw a young sailor stand up from the couch. The lamps, as usual, were dim, and in a moment’s time she took a dislike to the laxness of his body, to the lazing pleasure the body took in its attractiveness. When he shifted weight, at her approach, from one foot to the other, an ungainliness in his legs, an overgrownness of his body, revealed him as Paul. Adele, sitting on the floor, her legs crossed, hugging an ankle with one hand and holding a wine glass with the other, jokingly introduced them as if they had never met, and they laughed with embarrassment, their laughter and voices sounding to Vivian like that of a couple who have always wanted to meet. Although, after he had left her, she had not known anyone who had meant as much to her, there was now no desire for him, only a superficial excitement. Adele served a feast despite the rationing, telling them it was done with mirrors and spices, and presided with a wide-gesturing charm that declared this young man her favorite brother and that denied she had ever ranted against him for his abandonment of his wife and child. He dawdled his fingers over the linen cloth, the arm of his chair, the silverware, as if his sense of touch had become more acute now that he was in the perceptive presence of two women who called for sensitivity; it was flattery done with gestures. He told them of his tribulations in New York; he had got a small part in a musical and found his legs rather heavy to dance around on; and with the closing of that show he had spent a year in Nassau as a companion for a very old and very wealthy man, but he had tired, he said, of reading his employer Alice in Wonderland every night, and then he laughed, apparently realizing Vivian was no longer naïve, that she might even have become more worldly than he and that his leaving her had contributed to her awakening.
David always came to her bed in the morning, while she reclined against the pillows and read the newspaper, and, with his legs under the covers, he ate his toast and sipped coffee and cream from her saucer and played with odd bits of broken jewelry and with a few small toys he carried in with him. Scrutinizing his features, the morning after her supper with Paul and Adele, she was pleased to find only a minimal resemblance to his father. She had known all along that the resemblance was only an undertone, but felt a desire to reassure herself about it. At four, his beauty combined the best features of her family. His hair, although resembling his father’s in its thickness and its arcs of curls like the hair of Renaissance angels, was a darker brown, with a cast of amber red, like her mother’s hair, a color she had always envied, for her own was the common light brown of her father’s family and had always to be bleached. David’s eyes were blue, but darker than his father’s, and there was a broadness across his eyes that Paul lacked, and a narrowing toward the chin. Under her scrutiny, he appeared to be more perfect than ever and more her own than ever, wholly her own and not the father’s, who had inquired about him with his glance slipping away as if to inquire was to confess a crime. But, though he seemed more than ever her own, the elusiveness of his father, which had contrived to make the son her own, became the son’s possession also. Although she nurtured him now and sustained him, his life was to be his own, even as his father and his stepfather appeared to belong to nobody but themselves, their lives their own though they were herded into regiments and battalions, into staffs and corps, onto transports, onto tremendous gray ships, and into battles.
When George was killed at St. Vith, she forgot his faults and remembered only his virtues. It seemed to her that his jealousy had indicated not a lack of understanding of her but a greater understanding than her own. He had prized her—that was the reason for his jealousy—and, prizing her, he must have known her essential self, the innocent self, and had struggled with her other self, the heedless, all-desirous self, as if it were his deadly enemy as well as hers. Nobody else would ever love her as much and understand her as well and join with her against the enemy within herself.
5
A few months after the news reached her of her husband’s death, she went up, one evening, to the
