The Hothouse by the East River Read online

  MURIEL SPARK

  The Hothouse by the East River

  I

  If it were only true that all’s well that ends well, if only it were true.

  She stamps her right foot.

  She says, ‘I’ll try the other one,’ sitting down to let the salesman lift her left foot and nicely interlock it with the other shoe.

  He says, ‘They fit like a glove.’ The voice is foreignly correct and dutiful.

  She stands, now, and walks a little space to the mirror, watching first the shoes as she walks, and then, half-turning, her leg’s reflection. It is a hot, hot day of July in hot New York. She looks next at the heel.

  She looks over at the other shoes on the floor beside the chair, three of them beside their three open boxes and two worn shoes lying on their sides. Finally, she glances at the salesman.

  He focuses his eyes on the shoes.

  Now, once more, it is evening and her husband has come in.

  She sits by the window, speaking to him against the purr of the air-conditioner, but looking away — out across the East River as if he were standing in the air beyond the window pane. He stands in the middle of the room behind her and listens.

  She says, ‘I went shopping. I went to a shoe store for some shoes. You won’t believe me, what happened.’

  He says, ‘Well, what was it?’

  She says, ‘You won’t believe me, that’s the trouble. You aren’t sure that you’ll believe me.’

  ‘How do I know if you don’t tell me what it is?’

  ‘You’ll believe me, yes, but you won’t believe that it really happened. What’s the use of telling you? You don’t feel sure of my facts.’

  ‘Oh tell me anyway,’ he says, as if he is not really interested.

  ‘Paul,’ she says, ‘I recognised a salesman in a shoe store today. He used to be a prisoner of war in England.’

  ‘Which P.O.W.?’

  ‘Kiel.’

  ‘Which Kiel?’

  ‘Helmut Kiel. Which one do you think?’

  ‘There was Claus, also Kiel.’

  ‘Oh, that little mess, that lop-sided one who read the books on ballet?’

  ‘Yes, Claus Kiel.’

  ‘Well, I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about Helmut Kiel. You know who I mean by “Kiel”. Why have you brought up Claus Kiel?’

  Paul thinks: She doesn’t turn her head, she watches the East River.

  One day he thought he had caught her, in profile, as he moved closer to her, smiling at Welfare Island as if it were someone she recognised. The little island was only a mass of leafage, seen from the window. She could not possibly have seen a person so far away down there.

  Is it possible that she is smiling again, he thinks; could she be smiling to herself, retaining humorous reflections to herself? Is she sly and sophisticated, not mad after all? But it isn’t possible, he thinks; she is like a child, the way she comes out with everything at this hour of the evening.

  She tells him everything that comes into her head at this hour of the evening and it is for him to discover whether what she says is true or whether she has imagined it. But has she decided on this course, or can’t she help it? How false, how true?

  It is true that in the past winter he has seemed to catch her concealing a smile at the red Pepsi-Cola sign on the far bank of the river. Now he thinks of the phrase, ‘tongue in cheek’, and is confused between what it means and how it would work if Elsa, with her head averted towards the river, actually put her tongue in her cheek, which she does not.

  And Paul, still standing in the middle of the carpet, then looks at her shadow. He sees her shadow cast on the curtain, not on the floor where it should be according to the position of the setting sun from the window bay behind her, cross-town to the West Side. He sees her shadow, as he has seen it many times before, cast once more unnaturally.

  Although he has expected it, he turns away his head at the sight.

  ‘Paul,’ she says, still gazing at the river, ‘go and get us a drink.’

  Their son, Pierre, came to see them last night. He said, while they were discussing, by habit, in the hail, the problem of Mother: ‘She is not such a fool.’

  ‘Then I am the fool, to spend my money on Garven.’

  ‘She’s got to have Garven.’ He uttered this like a threat, intensifying his voice to scare away the opposition that he knew to be prowling.

  Garven Bey is her analyst. Pierre is anxious that his mother should not go back into the clinic and so upset his peace of mind. Moreover, Pierre knows it was not his father’s money that went so vastly on Garven, but the surface-dust, the top silt, merely, of his mother’s fortune.

  Last night, Paul said, as his son was leaving, ‘What did you think she looked like tonight?’

  ‘All right. There’s definitely something strange, of course…’

  Paul said goodnight abruptly, almost satisfied that his son had still not noticed the precise cause of the strangeness.

  Paul cannot acknowledge it. A mirage, that shadow of hers. Not a fact.

  She gazes out of the window. ‘Paul, go and get a drink.’

  But Paul stands on. He says to her as she sits by the window, ‘Are you serious about this man in the shoe shop?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then, Elsa, I should say you have imagined Helmut Kiel. This is in the imaginative category, almost definitely. You couldn’t have come across him in a shoe store. He died in prison with only himself to thank for it. You should tell Garven of this experience.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘What shoe shop was it?’

  ‘Melinda’s at Madison Avenue. At least I think so.’

  ‘Are you smiling, there?’

  ‘No. Why don’t you make a drink?’

  ‘He died in prison six, seven years after the war.’

  She laughs. Then she says, ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Plainly you are not speaking literally.’

  ‘I think I’ll have a drink.’ But he does not go. He thinks, she has become a mocker, she wasn’t always like this. It’s I who have made her so.

  She sits immobile; and now, to his mind, she is real estate like the source of her money. She sits, well-dressed with her pretty hair-do and careful make-up, but sits solidly, as on valuable land-property painted up like a deteriorating building that has not yet been pulled down to make way for those high steel structures, her daughter and her son. So Paul’s mind ripples over the surface.

  And he thinks to himself, deliberately, word by word: I must pull myself together. She is mad.

  The Pan Am sign on the far bank of the river flicks on and off. She seems to be catching a sudden unexpected glimpse of the United Nations building, which has been standing there all the time, and she shudders.

  ‘Are you cold?’ he says. ‘These air-conditioners are too old. They aren’t right.’

  ‘They can be treacherous,’ she says.

  ‘Elsa,’ he says, ‘do you feel chilly? Why don’t we get a modern system?’

  She laughs out of the window.

  He speaks again, meaning to win her round, meaning to insinuate an idea into her head that might fetch her back to reason, presuming she is departing from reason once more.

  ‘The temperature touched a hundred and one at noon. The highways have buckled, many places.’

  She has turned her head towards the dark mass of Welfare Island.

  He feels he has probably failed in his attempt to say, ‘You are suffering from the heat, your imagination…‘ He feels he might be wrong, he is not sure, as yet, if she is going to have a relapse. This has happened before, he thinks, here in this room I have stood, she ha
s sat, how many times?

  He says, ‘What’s the name of the shoe store?’

  ‘Melinda’s, Madison Avenue somewhere near Fifty-fifth, Fifty-sixth — might be Fifty-seventh.’

  He says, ‘Upper Fifties and Madison. It still can’t be less than ninety-eight.’

  She says to the East River: ‘He means ninety-eight degrees — the temperature.’ Then, still looking out of the window she says, ‘Paul, get me a drink. I’ll have vodka on the rocks, please.’

  She is looking for something out there. The sun has gone down. Yes, she is looking out for it again. Silently Paul says to himself: ‘It’s not there.’ And again, ‘There’s nothing there.’

  ‘The heat out there has affected you,’ she says, her face still turned to the dark blue river where it quivers with the ink-red reflection of the Pepsi-Cola sign on the opposite bank. ‘It’s affected you, Paul,’ she says in her tranquillity. ‘You’ve been standing there in that spot since you came in.’ She has moved her head very little to the right and now she is looking at the United Nations building with its patches of lighted windows. ‘Since you came in,’ she says, ‘you’ve been standing there watching me, Paul. It’s the heat making you suspicious. Today’s been the hottest on record for twelve years. Tomorrow is to be worse. People are going mad in the streets. People coming home, men coming home, will have riots in their hearts and heads, never mind riots in the streets.’

  He wants to go and prepare their drinks, and has been thinking, ‘This has happened before,’ but he will not move lest she should think she has taunted him into it. He says, ‘Why did you go shopping for shoes in the heat?’

  ‘I had swollen feet. I needed a bigger size.’

  The cunning answers of the crazy… He turns, now, and goes into the kitchen for the ice. Will she incline her face towards him when he comes back?

  He breaks up the ice in the kitchen, he lingers. Eventually he returns, with face and eyes strained in the effort.

  New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection: New York heaves outside the consultant’s office, agitating all around her about her ears.

  He looks across from his armchair to hers (for he does not believe in the couch; to relinquish it had been his first speciality) and says, ‘And then?’

  ‘I came to Carthage.’

  ‘Carthage?’

  She says, ‘I could write a book.’

  ‘What do you mean by Carthage?’ he says. ‘You say you came. You came, you say. Do you mean here is Carthage?’

  ‘Here?’

  He says, ‘Well, sort of.’

  ‘No, it was only a manner of speaking.’ She smiles to herself, as if to irritate him. He is thrown, knowing vaguely that Carthage was an ancient city of ancient times but unable to gather together all at once the many things he has probably heard about Carthage.

  She says, in the absence of his reply, ‘I think I’m really all right, Garven.’ Garven is his first name. His claim is, ‘I get my patients right away on to a first-name basis’; it is the second on the list of his specialities.

  ‘I’m all right, Garven,’ she says again while he is still wending his way towards Carthage.

  ‘Yes, I hope so. But we’ve got a good bit of ground to cover yet, Elsa, you know.’

  She says, as if to irritate him, ‘Why do you say “cover”? Isn’t that a peculiar word for you to use? I thought psychiatry was meant to uncover something. But you say “cover”. You said “We’ve got a good bit of ground to cover yet”—.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ He places his hands out before him, palms downward, to hush her up. He then explains the meaning of ‘cover up’ in its current social usage; he explains bitterly with extreme care.

  She says, ‘You aren’t getting annoyed, are you?’

  ‘Me? No.’

  She says, ‘I came to Carthage where there bubbled around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves.’

  ‘Elsa,’ he says, ‘just take it easy. Relax, you have to relax.’

  Arriving home she says, ‘I managed to rattle Garven again today.’ She curves herself into the most comfortable chair, with her back to the window, and smiling into the reflection of sky in the glass of a picture, as if congratulating it. — ‘I rattled him. He said he wanted to establish a person-to-person relationship with me.’

  Paul says, ‘Have you nothing better to do with your money than waste your doctor’s time with it?’

  ‘Not much.’ Then she adds, ‘Tra-la-la’ to the simple notes of doh-ray-mee.

  ‘I wouldn’t be in his shoes. I wouldn’t like to have to read a woman,’ Paul says.

  She laughs half-privately; at least she does not go near the window and share the joke with whatever it is out there on the East River, invisible to everyone but herself, that she takes such notice of through the windowpane, day after day.

  He says, ‘I went along to the shoe store.’

  ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘Yes, it was Kiel, all right.’

  ‘Helmut Kiel,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, Helmut Kiel.’

  She says, ‘Not Claus, you see.’

  ‘No, Helmut Kiel.’

  ‘So you see, it wasn’t my imagination,’ she says.

  ‘Elsa, I never said it was your imagination, Elsa. Sometimes you imagine things. I just had to be sure, that’s all, Elsa. It was certainly put out that he died in prison. There’s some mystery about him. Always was.’

  She laughs and is over by the window again, as he had feared, in the attitude of communing with a sort of friend about the high humour of what he has just said. He stands in the middle of the room.

  ‘Did Kiel recognise you, Elsa?’

  ‘I think so. Did he recognise you?’

  ‘No, I saw him through the window from the street. He didn’t see me.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she says.

  It is better when she says something than nothing when she sits by the window, although when she speaks it’s likely to be bad. Because she usually says something ordinary, as if everything were all right.

  Everything is not all right.

  ‘Sit by one of the other windows, Elsa, for a change.’

  ‘There’s nothing to see from the other windows.’

  ‘Well, there’s the street, isn’t there? And the people, the traffic.’

  He knows, now, that she has been smiling.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Elsa, why sit by the bloody window at all?’

  He pronounces bloody as ‘blawdy’, this being a word he has not learned as a child in Montenegro from his English governess. ‘Bloody’ he had learned from the English during the war when his ear was no longer receptive. Apart from such late encounters with the vernacular his English is good. He is sure she is smiling out to the river. ‘The bloody window all day.’

  And he says, ‘You’re still a young woman, Elsa. Sitting by windows all day …‘ He has said this before. Sometimes it seems certain that she knows he is not being honest. But there is something else he is concealing as he speaks. Perhaps she knows it.

  ‘Not all day,’ she says. ‘I sit here mostly late afternoon, mostly in the evening.’ This happens to be true.

  The window-bay of the room, jutting out fourteen stories above everything, is considered to be a feature of luxury. These great windows cover a third of the east wall which overlooks the river, the whole of the north wall towards the street, and the adjoining corner of the west wall from where can be seen the length of the street with the intersection of avenues diminishing in the distance as far as the Pan Am building. Within the rectangular space are the plants and ferns which any normal person would put there.

  Sometimes there is a marvellous sunset pouring in the west window, but Elsa prefers to watch the river. The sunset from the west spills the shadows of Elsa’s palms and f
erns all over the floor, all over Elsa and the curtains by the east window. Out of the west window, on good days at sunset the Manhattan rooflines are black against the brilliance while the sky over the East River darkens slowly.

  He cannot remember exactly what day it was that, on returning to the flat at seven in the evening — or six… if he could remember the season of the year…

  In the evening — he cannot exactly remember the day, the time of day, perhaps it was spring, or winter, perhaps it was five, six o’clock…

  He is standing in the middle of the room. She is sitting by the window, staring out over the East River. The late sunlight from the opposite window touches her shoulders and hair, it casts the shadow of palm leaves across the carpet, over her arm. The chair she sits in casts a shadow before her.

  There is another shadow, hers. It falls behind her. Behind her, and cast by what light? She is casting a shadow in the wrong direction. There’s no light shining upon her from the east window, it comes from the west window. What is she looking at?

  He looks. Welfare Island. The borough of Queens across the river. The river moving past a moored barge.

  She says, without turning her head, ‘Why are you standing there? Why don’t you get a drink?’

  Or she says, ‘Pierre just left.’

  Or, ‘I bought a pair of shoes today.’

  The day is getting darker. He switches on the floor lamp, although the room is still light enough.

  Her shadow does not move. He comes and stands beside her, looking out. There is no beam of light coming in from the East River or the sky. But she goes on looking and receiving; perhaps she’s begun to smile. She casts a shadow behind her as she moves her chair to make room for him. Today she began a new course of analysis, or perhaps she began last week.

  She is saying, ‘I bought a pair of shoes.’

  Or, ‘Pierre doesn’t know what to do.’

  Or, ‘Katerina ran out of deodorant in Castellam-mare.’

  Paul turns to go to the kitchen for ice. At the door he turns again.

  His heart thumps for help. ‘Help me! Help me!’ cries his heart, battering the sides of the coffin. ‘The schizophrenic has imposed her will. Her delusion, her figment, her nothing-there, has come to pass.’