We got to facts. By the time we had burrowed through the roses to the bench, we had exchanged those basic bits of information which usually make the rest fall (often incorrectly) into some pattern, a foundation for those various architectures people together are pleased to build to celebrate friendship or enmity or love or, on very special occasions, in the case of a grand affair, one of those fine palaces with rooms for all three, and much else besides.
Iris was from the Middle West, from a rich suburb of Detroit. This interested me in many ways, for there still existed in those days a real disaffection between East and Midwest and Far West which is hard to conceive nowadays in that gray homogeneity which currently passes for a civilized nation. I was an Easterner, a New Yorker from the valley with Southern roots, and I felt instinctively that the outlanders were perhaps not entirely civilized. Needless to say, at the time, I would indignantly have denied this prejudice had someone attributed it to me, for those were the days of tolerance in which all prejudice had been banished, from conversation at least ... though of course to banish prejudice is a contradiction in terms since, by definition, prejudice means prejudgment, and though time and experience usually explode for us all the prejudgments of our first years, they exist, nevertheless, as part of our subconscious, a sabotaging, irrational force, causing us to commit strange crimes indeed, made so much worse because they are often secret even to ourselves. I was, then, prejudiced against the Midwesterner ... against the Californians too. I felt that the former especially was curiously hostile to freedom, to the interplay of that rational Western culture which I had so lovingly embraced in my boyhood and grown up with, always conscious of my citizenship in the world, of my role as a humble but appreciative voice in the long conversation. I resented the automobile manufacturers who thought only of manufacturing objects, who distrusted ideas, who feared the fine with the primitive intensity of implacable ignorance. Could this cool girl be from Detroit? From that same rich suburb which had provided me with a number of handsome vital classmates at school? Boys who had combined physical vigor with a resistance to all ideas but those of their suburb which could only be described as heroic considering the power of New England schools to crack even the toughest prejudices, at least on the rational level. That these boys did not possess a rational level had often occurred to me, though I did, grudgingly, admire, even in my scorn, their grace and strength as well as their confidence in that assembly line which had provided their parents with large suburban homes and themselves with a classical New England education which, unlike the rest of us, they’d managed to resist ... the whole main current of Western civilization eddying helplessly about these youths who stood, pleasantly firm, like so many rocks in a desperate channel.
Iris Mortimer was one of them. Having learned this there was nothing to do but find sufficient names between us to establish the beginnings of the rapport of class which, even in that late year of the mid-century, still existed: the dowdy aristocracy to which we belonged by virtue of financial security, at least in childhood, of education, of self-esteem and of houses where servants had been in some quantity before the second of the wars; all this we shared and of course those names in common of schoolmates, some from her region, others from mine, names which established us as being of an age. We avoided for some time any comment upon the names, withholding our true selves during the period of identification. I discovered too that she, like me, had remained unmarried, an exceptional state of affairs, for all the names we had mentioned represented two people now instead of one. Ours had been a reactionary generation which had attempted to combat the time of wars and disasters by a scrupulous observance of its grandparents’ customs, a direct reaction to the linking generation whose lives had been so entertainingly ornamented with self-conscious, untidy alliances, well-fortified by suspect gin. The result was no doubt classic but, at the same time; it was a little shocking: their children were decorous, subdued; they married early, conceived glumly, surrendered to the will of their own children in the interests of enlightened psychology; their lives enriched by the best gin in the better suburbs, safe among their own kind. Yet, miraculously, I had escaped and so apparently had Iris. Both, simultaneously, were aware of this: that sort of swift, unstated communication which briefly makes human relationships seem more potential, more meaningful than actually they are: it is the promise perhaps of a perfect harmony never to be achieved in life’s estate.
“You live here alone?” She indicated the wrong direction though taking in, correctly, the river on whose east bank I did live, a few miles to the north of Clarissa.
I nodded. “Entirely alone ... in an old house.”
She sighed. “No family?”
“None here. Not much anywhere else. A few in New Orleans, my family’s original base.” I waited for her to ask if I never got lonely living in a house on the river, remote from others; but she saw nothing extraordinary in this.
“It must be fine,” she said slowly. She broke a leaf off a flowering bush whose branch, heavy with blooming, quivered above our heads as we sat on the garden bench and watched the dim flash of goldfish in the muddy waters of the pond.
“I like it,” I said, a little disappointed that there was now no opportunity for me to construct one of my familiar defenses of a life alone: I had, in the five years since my days of travel had temporarily ended, many occasions on which to defend and glorify the solitary life I had chosen for myself beside this river. I had an ever-changing repertoire of feints and thrusts: for instance, with the hearty, I invariably questioned, gently of course, the virtue of a life in the city, confined to a small apartment with uninhibited babies and breathing daily large quantities of soot; or then I sometimes enjoyed assuming the prince of darkness pose, alone with his crimes in an ancient house, a figure which could, if necessary, be quickly altered to the more engaging one of remote observer of the ways of men, a stoic among his books, sustained by the recorded fragments of forgotten bloody days, evoking solemnly the pure essences of nobler times a chaste intelligence beyond the combat, a priest celebrating the cool memory of his race. My theater was extensive and I almost regretted that with Iris there was no need for even a brief curtain raiser, much less one of my exuberant galas.
Not accustomed to the neutral response, I stammered something about the pleasures of gardens; Iris’s calm indifference saved me from what might have been a truly mawkish outburst calculated to interest her at any cost (mawkish because, I am confident, that none of our deepest wishes or deeds is, finally, when honestly declared, very wonderful or mysterious: simplicity not complexity is at the center of our being; fortunately the trembling “I” is seldom revealed, even to paid listeners, for, conscious of the appalling directness of our needs, we wisely disguise their nature with a legerdemain of peculiar cunning). Much of Iris’s attraction for me ... and at the beginning that attraction did exist ... was that one did not need to discuss so many things: of course the better charades were not called into being which, creatively speaking, was a pity; but then it was a relief not to pretend and, better still, a relief not to begin the business of plumbing shallows under the illusion that a treasure chest of truth might be found on the mind’s sea floor ... a grim ritual which was popular in those years, especially in the suburbs and housing projects where the mental therapists were ubiquitous and busy.