Free Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick Page A

3. Regretfulness, kindness, charitable good humor, apologies for the lateness of the hour. Where is your little red coat? Can I take you to a cab? Or: You’ll never want to see me again...too late...too early... no cigarettes left.
    I was honored when he allowed me to go to bed with him and dishonored when I felt my imaginative, anxious, exhausting efforts were not what he wanted. His handsomeness created anxiety in me; his snobbery was detailed and full of quirks, like that of people living in provincial capitals, or foreigners living in Florence or Cairo. Worst of all was my ambivalence over what I took to be the inauthenticity of his Marxism. In my heart I was weasel-like, hungry, hunting with blazing eyes for innocent contradictions, given to predatory chewings on the difference between theory and practice. That is what I had brought from home in Kentucky to New York, this large bounty of polemicism, stored away behind light, limp Southern hair and not-quite-blue eyes.
    In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me—a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discolored blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicion and stinginess. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet.
    Casanova: The great exhilaration to my spirits, greater than all my own pleasure, was the joy of giving pleasure to a woman.
    Some reason to doubt the truth of that. Still, reversals and peculiarities fall down upon those too proud of their erotic life. Even sacrifice may be a novelty. Alex’s vanity was, like that of the dubious Casanova at the falsifying moment of composition, trapped in the belief that he had a special power, or perhaps a special duty, to please women. Having more charm than money played its part. So love was a treadmill, like churchgoing, kept alive by respect for the community. Many have this evangelical view of lovemaking: There! I’ve done it once today and twice the day before yesterday.
    Orgasms of twenty years ago leave no memory. Better to be handsome and leave, like Alex, the image of lean Egyptian features, a sloping skull, and conversations about the inability of the ruling class to imagine , to experience .
    I am waiting; he is late. Changes, gaps—the embarrassments of the lifeline. The important women in Alex’s life have not been good-looking. He liked Yankee types, aggressively plain, prudent, mulish, in love with their fathers—the kind who do not spend too much of their principal and who, of course, have principles. Few women have their own money; thus his real loves were rare.
    For this last woman, Sarah, Alex and his book on architecture were a sacred trust. And how he must have winced under the watchful care, the dowdy concern for this capital, the holding on to his literary investment as if it were a small tract of undeveloped land, in the family so to speak.
    Something terrible had happened to him. I felt it as he came into the room. Yes, it was as if he had come down from a bitter defeat in the North. The snow had fallen on him; the ice had moved too close. No matter, romantic style, a sort of athleticism, does not slump and sag overnight, and so he brought a careful gift, chosen for himself and for me. Simple, inexpensive, flattering. A paperback: Chapters of Erie by Charles Francis and Henry Adams.
    A slip of paper marked a page by Henry Adams on the New York gold conspiracy and he read out: “One of the earliest acts of the new rulers was precisely such as Balzac and Dumas might have predicted and delighted in. They established themselves in a palace...a huge building of white marble, not unlike a