Seed on the Wind

She smiled at herself. Here she was, finding out all over again that nothing ever turns out the way you expect it to. At least not the way you picture it. That spring and summer three years ago she used to think, walking home alone from the office or sitting at the switchboard waiting for the buzzer, just wait till she had a baby! She could feel the muscles in her arms fierce around it; she never tired, after a thousand repetitions, of the imagined warmth of its confident sweet-smelling little body. As a matter of fact, she might as well admit it... but no, it wasn’t exactly a bore. But the fierceness soon disappeared or else it just simply wasn’t there. It wasn’t that she minded washing out diapers or getting up in the night or sitting on the floor rolling a ball back and forth instead of reading or mending her clothes; certainly it wasn’t that she had any regrets...

It did seem though that it was a bit dull. Nothing desperate of course, she could go along all right, and god knows it was better than if, for instance, she had married Daintico and he were always hanging around. Married, no getting away from it. As a husband perhaps, but that was the joke of it, you could get rid of him as a husband if you wanted to, but as a father he was permanent. How could you make that seem sensible? When she had asked the lawyer he had talked a lot of nonsense. It wasn’t just because a man helped make the baby, for unless he was a husband he had no rights at all, which was as it should be. No wonder men wanted to get married...

She didn’t know a single man, she decided, not one, who was at all fit to be a father. A permanent father. Try to think of one of them that way and you could see how silly it was. Palichak. Mr. Pitkin. Daintico. Albert. Doctor Berry. Any one of them might in a pinch serve for any other imaginable purpose, but as fathers they were all equally unthinkable. Lovers? At that word something stirred within her, unbearable; a deep and bitter pain that exploded into a cloud of vapor which smothered her brain and concealed the source of thought, so that all that was left of everything was a numb resentment, a vast and intolerable discomfort. She forced her way through it with all the scorn of her will. Lovers hell, she thought, what of it, don’t be an ass, anyone would do for that.

The word attacked her again, one evening not long after, under somewhat different circumstances. Up to a certain point it was much like a hundred other evenings that had preceded it. Albert had come in an hour or so after dinner and found her sitting with her legs curled under her in a big chair, her only big chair, brushing her hair preparatory to putting it up for the night, eating peanut brittle and reading a magazine. As dressing-gown she wore a white robe which had originally served as her drapery in a frontispiece for a new edition of Baudelaire. A screen papered in black and silver, with a hole in one corner, bought at an auction on University Place, sheltered Roy’s crib in the corner, and a little heap of coals glowed in the grate, for though it was nearly May the night was quite cool and there was no heat.

She finished her hair, then made some coffee and brought out crackers and cheese. Albert was all in, he said; he had spent the afternoon at the Independents’ and had only one thing left to decide, whether to sit in the bathtub and slash his wrists or get a job in the subway. He lay on his back on the floor in front of Lora’s chair with a cracker in one hand and a piece of cheese in the other, now and then rising on his elbow to take a sip of coffee, demanding of her for god’s sake never to pose again; join him instead, he begged, in a campaign to blow up all paint and canvas factories.

“They’d still have paper and charcoal,” Lora said.

“And ink and tempera and chalk and graphite and bug juice and the blood of plants,” he groaned. “It’s impossible to believe that two things, one as lovely as you and the other as ugly as art, can exist in the same world.”

“You’ll be sorry for that in the morning.”

He grinned. “Half of it maybe. Only half. The other half stays good sober or drunk, morning or night. Even El Greco never made you up.”

“That’s nice.” She smiled back at him. “I never saw an El Greco, but that doesn’t matter, I know you’re crazy about him.” She drained her coffee cup, then, reaching for a cigarette and a match, said suddenly, “You’d better take a good look, for this is your last chance.”

He sat up. “What do you mean? You’re not going away?”

She shook her head no, smiling.

“Getting married!”

Another shake.

He lay down again. “I know what it is, you’re going to paint. I knew you would, everybody does sooner or later. What the hell, I don’t have to look at your pictures, you can turn them to the wall when I come around and I’ll never know. If you have a show you can write my piece about it.”

“Really, I’m serious. I can’t see you anymore. I’m afraid to.”

“Afraid of me? Come now, you’ve withstood my charms nearly two years.”