Free Collected Novels and Plays by James Merrill

what you will of me. Shall we even be able to talk about books, I wonder? You look like the sort of person who prefers Eliot to Christopher Fry.”
    “I do,” said Francis. “So that I imagine,” he nodded towards his father, “we’ll have to talk about
him.
That ought to please everybody concerned.”
    This was the happiest stroke. It set Benjamin to beaming. Lady Good got up and kissed them both, awkwardly, tenderly. All three appeared to feel a bit flattered and safe.
    5. “What am I supposed to do with this?” inquired Mr. Tanning. A silver pillbox had been set beside his coffee-cup.
    Louis Leroy broke into a little shuffling dance. “Miss McBride, she gave them to me. May be she wants you to swallow them?” He showed surprise when this answer proved acceptable, and reluctantly left them alone in the dim curtained dining room, with sea sounds in their ears.
    “I wonder what Louis thinks of us,” said Francis.
    Mr. Tanning swallowed two red pills before telling an illustrative story. His answers to many questions took the form of parables. The young man saw himself as a neophyte listening to some expert ancient.
    Two winters before, Mr. Tanning and his valet had arrived in Jamaica to find no room for Louis in the Cheeks’ bungalow. Irene’s butler recommended a small hotel in Kingston, from which to commute by bus. Later, a rooming-house down the road from the Cheeks advertised a vacancy, but Louis had by then learned to enjoy town living. Mr. Tanning laughed and shook his head. “The hotel wasn’t a hotel at all. At least Mr. Leroy had been such a
     distinguished guest that the proprietress hadn’t even been charging him for his room.”
    “So he didn’t move?”
    “Oh yes, he moved.”
    Francis lit a cigarette from the candle in front of him. Was there a point to the story?
    Finally Mr. Tanning went on. “A month passed and I moved, too. I moved because the Cheeks’ house wasn’t big enough. But I told Irene that Louis Leroy had set me an example I was ashamed not to follow. By God, I didn’t think she’d ever forgive me!”
    Francis thought it was very funny, and said so.
    “I thought it was funny, too,” Mr. Tanning said, “but the Buchanans didn’t. They’re highly sensitive. They don’t want their daughters to grow up believing Grandpa was a Casanova.”
    It seemed to Francis, who had been thinking how nice that the old man could talk as if still capable of amorous exploits, nicer yet of Enid and Larry to take them seriously. Not for a moment did he suppose they were really to be taken so; Francis’s idea of physical love was a violent one, a matter of anguish, lies, recriminations.
    The idea needed to be distinguished from that of mere sex, which was after all what Mr. Tanning talked about, at merry length. He seldom talked about his wives. These, presumably, he
had
loved, deeply but cheerlessly, while turning, banal as it sounded, to other women for companionsipand fun. To Natalie Bigelow, for instance, whose presence before dinner, curled on the sofa between Francis and Lady Good, spoke louder than any word of her
     host’s. Longer than anybody she had been younger than anybody. Even now just the faintest puckering of her wonderful unimpaired face, the contours stippled rather than etched, her over-intricate hair and its unlikely tint, the small searching movements of her head and hands, hinted that of her threescore years and ten, sixty would not come again. She lived like a churchmouse in a closet on Lexington Avenue. It was too divine, she whispered, to be back at the Cottage; she
     wouldn’t leave till Ben threw her out. She asked so little and it meant so much—breakfast on a tray, a cocktail before dinner, the blessed certainty of dinner itself. What Ben asked, it appeared, was simply that she be there, lovely and going blind, to acknowledge his own long easy loyalty to the good times they’d had. Natalie had outlasted Vinnie and Fern. Had she known Benjamin that early in