I left that afternoon for New York, leaving Cave jubilantly making plans for the New Year: everything was again possible. Neither Iris nor I mentioned what we both knew ... each of us, in our different way, accommodating the first of many crimes, as we drove across the smoky hills to Spokane.
Six
1
“The tone, dear Gene, has all the unction, all the earnest turgidity of a theologian. You are perfect.” Clarissa beamed at me wickedly over lunch in the Plaza Hotel. We sat at a table beside a great plate-glass window through which we could see the frosted bleak expanse of Central Park, dingy in city snow, ringed by buildings like so many mountain peaks, monotonous in their sharp symmetry. The sky was sullen, gray with more snow to fall. The year was nearly over.
“I thought it really quite to the point,” I said loftily but with an anxious look at the thin black volume between us which was that day to be published. The hasty work of one hectic month released in record time by a connection of Paul Himmell’s.
“It’s pure nonsense, your historical part. I know, though I confess I was never one for the philosophers in those days ... dreary egotistical men, worse than the actors and not half so lovely. Waiter, I will have a melon: out of season I hope. I suggest you have it too. It’s light.”
I ordered pot-de-crême, the heaviest dessert on the menu.
“I’ve made you angry,” Clarissa pretended contrition. “I was only trying to compliment you. What I meant was that the sort of thing you’re doing I think is nonsense only because action is what counts, action on any level ... not theorizing.”
“There’s a certain action to thinking, you know, even to writing about the thoughts of others.”
“Oh, darling, don’t sound so stuffy. Your dessert, by the way, poisons the liver. Oh, isn’t that Bishop Winston over there by the door, in tweed? In mufti, eh, Bishop?”