Rich Man, Poor Man

Even though the cast changed the activity remained almost the same. Arguments about Russia and Alger Hiss and Senator Joe McCarthy, intellectual girls with bangs praising Trotsky … (“Drinks in the kitchen,” she said gaily to a new couple, sunburned, who had obviously been to the beach that day) … somebody who had just discovered Kierkegaard or who had met Sartre and had to tell about it, or who had just been to Israel or Tangier and had to tell about it. Once a month would have been fine. Or if they just didn’t drop their ashes all over the room, even twice a month. They were by and large handsome and educated young people, all somehow with enough money to dress well and buy each other drinks and take a place in the Hamptons for the best part of the summer. Just the sort of people she had dreamed would be her friends when she was a girl in Port Philip. But she had been surrounded by them for nearly five years now. Drinks in the kitchen. The endless party.

Looking purposeful, she made her way to the staircase and started up toward the room under the roof where Billy slept. After Billy was born, they had moved to the top floor of an old brownstone on West Twelfth Street and had converted the attic into a large room and put in a skylight. Aside from Billy’s bed and his toys, there was a big table on which Gretchen worked. There was a typewriter on it and it was piled with books and papers. She liked working in the same room with young Billy and the sound of her typing didn’t bother him, but seemed to serve as a kind of clicking lullaby for him. A child for the machine age, soothed by Remington.

When she turned on the table lamp, she saw that he wasn’t asleep now, though. He lay in the small bed in his pajamas, a cloth giraffe on the pillow beside him, his hands moving above his head slowly through the air, as though to make patterns in the cigarette smoke that drifted up from below. Gretchen felt guilty about the cigarette smoke but you couldn’t ask people not to smoke because a four-year-old boy on another floor might not like it. She went over to the bed and leaned down and kissed Billy’s forehead. There was the clean smell of soap from his bath and the sweet aroma of childish skin.

“When I grow up,” he said, “I am not going to invite anybody.”

Not your father’s child, Gretchen thought. Even though he looked exactly like him, blond, serenely dimpled. NoJordache there at all. Yet. Unless her brother Thomas had looked like that as a child. She kissed him again, leaning low over the bed. “Go to sleep, Billy,” she said.

She went over to the work table and sat down, grateful to be out of the chatter of the room below. She was sure nobody would miss her, even if she sat up there all night. She picked up a book that was lying on the table. Elementary psychology. She opened it idly. Two pages devoted to the blots of the Rorschach test. Know thyself. Know thine enemy. She was taking extension courses at NYU in the late afternoons and at night. If she stuck at it she would have her degree in two years. She had a nagging sense of inadequacy that made her shy with Willie’s educated friends and sometimes with Willie himself. Besides, she liked classrooms, the unhurried sense that she was among people who were not merely interested in money or position or being seen in public.

She had slipped away from the theater after Billy was born. Later, she had told herself, when he’s old enough not to need me all the time. By now she knew she would never try to act again. No loss. She had had to look for work that she could do at home and luckily she had found it, by the simplest of means. She had begun by helping Willie write his criticisms of radio and later television programs, whenever he was bored with them or busy doing something else or had a hangover. At first, he kept signing his name to her pieces, but then he was offered an executive job in the office of the magazine at a raise in pay and she had begun signing the pieces herself. The editor had told her privately that she wrote a lot better than Willie, but she had made her own judgment on Willie’s writing. She had come across the first act of his play one day, while cleaning out a trunk. It was dreadful. What was fu

She glanced at the sheet of yellow paper in the typewriter. She had penciled in a tentative title. “The Song of the Salesman.” She glanced at random down the page. “The i

She frowned. Not good enough. And useless, besides. Who would listen, who would act? The American people were getting what they thought they wanted. Her guests downstairs were most of them in one way or another living off the thing their hostess was denouncing above their heads. The liquor they were drinking was bought with money earned by a man singing the salesman’s song. She tore the sheet of paper from the machine and balled it up and threw it in the wastebasket. She would never get it printed, anyway. Willie would see to that.

She went over to the child’s bed. He had fallen asleep, grasping the giraffe. He slept, miraculously complete. What are you going to buy, what are you going to sell when you are my age? What errors are ahead of you? How much of love will be wasted?

There was a tread on the stairs and she hurriedly bent over, pretending to be tucking in the child. Willie, provider of ice, opened the door. “I wondered where you were,” he said.

“I was restoring my sanity,” she said.

“Gretchen,” he said reproachfully. He was a little flushed from drink and there were beads of perspiration on his upper lip. He had begun to bald, the forehead more Beethovenesque than ever, but somehow he still looked adolescent. “They’re your friends, as well as mine.”

“They’re nobody’s friends,” Gretchen said. “They’re drinkers, that’s all.” She was feeling bitchy. Rereading the lines from her article had crystallized the dissatisfaction that had sent her upstairs in the first place. And, suddenly, she was a

“What do you want me to do,” Willie said, “send them home?”

“Yes. Send them home.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Willie said. “Come on down, honey. People’ll begin to wonder what’s wrong with you.”

“Tell them I had a sudden wild urge to breast-feed,” Gretchen said. “In some tribes they breast-feed children until the age of seven. They know everything down there. See if they know that.”

“Honey …” He came over and put his arms around her. She could smell the gin. “Give a little. Please. You’re getting awfully nervy.”

“Oh. You noticed.”

“Of course I noticed.” He kissed her cheek. A nothing kiss, she thought. He hadn’t made love to her in two weeks. “I know what’s wrong,” he said. “You’re doing too much. Taking care of the kid, working, going to school, studying …” He was always trying to get her to drop her courses. “What’re you proving?” he had asked. “You’re the smartest girl in New York as it is.”

“I’m not doing half enough,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go down and pick a likely candidate and go off and have an affair. For my nerves.”

Willie dropped his arms from around her waist and stepped back, martinis receding. “Fu

“On to the cockpit,” she said, putting out the lamp on the table. “Drinks are in the kitchen.”