The Hours (10 page)

She will give Clarissa Dalloway great skill with servants, a manner that is intricately kind and commanding. Her servants will love her. They will do more than she asks.

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7

Mrs
. Dalloway

E
nterin
g the hallway with her flowers, Clarissa meets Sally on her way out. For a moment—less than a moment—she sees Sally as she would if they were strangers. Sally is a pale, gray-haired woman, harsh-faced, impatient, ten pounds lighter than she ought to be. For a moment, seeing this stranger in the hall, Clarissa is filled with tenderness and a vague, clinical disapproval. Clarissa thinks, She is so agitated and lovely. Clarissa thinks, She should never wear yellow, not even this deep mustard tone.

‘‘Hey,’’ Sally says. ‘‘Great flowers.’’

They kiss quickly, on the lips. They are always generous with kisses.

‘‘Where are you going?’’ Clarissa asks.

‘‘Uptown. Lunch with Oliver St. Ives. Did I tell you? I can’t remember if I told you.’’

‘‘You didn’t.’’

‘‘Sorry. Do you mind?’’

‘‘Not at all. Nice to be having lunch with a movie star.’’

‘‘I cleaned like a demon in there.’’

‘‘Toilet paper?’’

‘‘There’s plenty. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’’

‘‘Bye.’’

‘‘The flowers are great,’’ Sally says. ‘‘Why do I feel nervous?’’

‘‘Having lunch with a movie star, I suppose.’’

‘‘It’s just Oliver. I feel like I’m abandoning you.’’

‘‘You’re not. Everything’s fine.’’

‘‘You’re sure?’’

‘‘Go. Have a good time.’’

‘‘Bye.’’

They kiss again. Clarissa will speak to Sally, when the time seems right, about retiring the mustard-colored jacket.

As she continues down the hall, she wonders over the pleasure she felt—what had it been?—just a little more than an hour earlier. At this moment, at eleven-thirty on a warm June day, the hallway of her building feels like an entrance to the realm of the dead. The urn sits in its niche and the brown-glazed floor tiles silently return, in muddied form, the elderly ocher light of the sconces. No, not the realm of the dead, exactly; there is something worse than death, with its promise of release and slumber. There is dust rising, endless days, and a hallway that sits and sits, always full of the same brown light and the dank, slightly chemical smell that will do, until something more precise comes along, as the actual odor of age and

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loss
, the end of hope. Richard, her lost lover, her truest friend, is disappearing into his illness, his insanity. Richard will not accompany her, as planned, into old age.

Clarissa lets herself into the apartment and immediately, oddly, feels better. A little better. There’s the party to think about. At least there’s that. Here is her home; hers and Sally’s; and although they’ve lived here together almost fifteen years she is still struck by its beauty and by their impossible good fortune. Two floors and a garden in the West Village! They are rich, of course; obscenely rich by the world’s standards; but not rich rich, not New York City rich. They had a certain amount to spend and they lucked into these pine-planked floors, this bank of casement windows that open onto the bricked patio where emerald moss grows in shallow stone troughs and a small circular fountain, a platter of clear water, burbles at the touch of a switch. Clarissa takes the flowers into the kitchen, where Sally has left a note (‘‘Lunch w. Oliver— did I forget to tell U?—back by 3 latest, XXXXX’’). Clarissa is filled, suddenly, with a sense of dislocation. This is not her kitchen at all. This is the kitchen of an acquaintance, pretty enough but not her taste, full of foreign smells. She lives elsewhere. She lives in a room where a tree gently taps against the glass as someone touches a needle to a phonograph record. Here in this kitchen white dishes are stacked pristinely, like holy implements, behind glassed cupboard doors. A row of old terra-cotta pots, glazed in various shades of crackled yellow, stand on the granite countertop. Clarissa recognizes these things but stands apart from them. She feels the presence of her own

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ghost
; the part of her at once most indestructibly alive and least distinct; the part that owns nothing; that observes with wonder and detachment, like a tourist in a museum, a row of glazed yellow pots and a countertop with a single crumb on it, a chrome spigot from which a single droplet trembles, gathers weight, and falls. She and Sally bought all these things, she can remember every transaction, but she feels now that they are arbitrary, the spigot and the counter and the pots, the white dishes. They are only choices, one thing and then another, yes or no, and she sees how easily she could slip out of this life— these empty and arbitrary comforts. She could simply leave it and return to her other home, where neither Sally nor Richard exists; where there is only the essence of Clarissa, a girl grown into a woman, still full of hope, still capable of anything. It is revealed to her that all her sorrow and loneliness, the whole creaking scaffold of it, stems simply from pretending to live in this apartment among these objects, with kind, nervous Sally, and that if she leaves she’ll be happy, or better than happy. She’ll be herself. She feels briefly, wonderfully alone, with everything ahead of her.

Then the feeling moves on. It does not collapse; it is not whisked away. It simply moves on, like a train that stops at a small country station, stands for a while, and then continues out of sight. Clarissa pulls the flowers from their paper, puts them in the sink. She is disappointed and more than a little relieved. This is, in fact, her apartment, her collection of clay pots, her mate, her life. She wants no other. Feeling regular, neither elated nor depressed, simply present as Clarissa

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Vaughan
, a fortunate woman, professionally well regarded, giving a party for a celebrated and mortally ill artist, she goes back to the living room to check the messages on the answering machine. The party will go well or badly. Either way, she and Sally will have dinner afterward. They will go to bed.

On the tape is the new caterer (he has an untraceable accent; what if he’s incompetent?) confirming his three o’clock delivery. There is a guest asking for permission to bring along a guest of her own, and another announcing that he has to leave town that morning to see a childhood friend whose AIDS has developed, unexpectedly, into leukemia.

The machine clicks off. Clarissa pushes the rewind button. If Sally forgot to mention her lunch with Oliver St. Ives it’s probably because the invitation was made to Sally alone. Oliver St. Ives, the scandal, the hero, has not asked Clarissa to lunch. Oliver St. Ives, who came out spectacularly in Vanity Fair and was subsequently dropped from his leading role in an expensive thriller, has gained more notoriety as a gay activist than he could ever have hoped for had he continued posing as a heterosexual and cranking out pricey B-movies. Sally met Oliver St. Ives when he appeared on the very serious, very highbrow interview show she co-produces (which would never, of course, have considered him when he was just an action hero, and not one of the first rank). Sally has become someone he invites to lunch, though he and Clarissa have met several times by now and had what Clarissa recalls as a long and surprisingly intimate conversation at a fund-raiser. Doesn’t it matter that she’s the woman in the book? (Though the book, of course,

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failed
, and though Oliver, of course, probably reads very little.) Oliver did not say to Sally, ‘‘Be sure to bring that interesting woman you live with.’’ He probably thought Clarissa was a wife; only a wife. Clarissa returns to the kitchen. She isn’t jealous of Sally, it isn’t anything as cheap as that, but she cannot help feeling, in being passed over by Oliver St. Ives, the waning of the world’s interest in her and, more powerfully, the embarrassing fact that it matters to her even now, as she prepares a party for a man who may be a great artist and may not survive the year. I am trivial, endlessly trivial, she thinks. And yet. Going uninvited feels in some way like a minor demonstration of the world’s ability to get along without her. Being passed over by Oliver St. Ives (who probably did not consciously exclude her but simply did not think of her at all) resembles death the way a child’s shoebox diorama of a historic event resembles the event itself. It’s a tiny thing, bright, shabby, all felt and glue. But nevertheless. It isn’t failure, she tells herself. It isn’t failure to be in these rooms, in your skin, cutting the stems of flowers. It isn’t failure but it requires more of you, the whole effort does; just being present and grateful; being happy (terrible word). People don’t look at you on the street anymore, or if they do it is not with sexual notions of any sort. You are not invited to lunch by Oliver St. Ives. Outside the narrow kitchen window the city sails and rumbles. Lovers argue; cashiers ring up; young men and women shop for new clothes as the woman standing under the Washington Square Arch sings iiiii and you snip the end off a rose and put it in a vase full of hot water. You try to hold the moment, just here, in the kitchen with

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th
e flowers. You try to inhabit it, to love it, because it’s yours and because what waits immediately outside these rooms is the hallway, with its brown tiles and its dim brown lamps that are always lit. Because even if the door to the trailer had opened, the woman inside, be she Meryl Streep or Vanessa Redgrave or even Susan Sarandon, would have been simply that, a woman in a trailer, and you could not possibly have done what you wanted to do. You could not have received her, there on the street; taken her in your arms; and wept with her. It would be so wonderful to cry like that, in the arms of a woman who was at once immortal and a tired, frightened person just emerged from a trailer. What you are, more than anything, is alive, right here in your kitchen, just as Meryl Streep and Vanessa Redgrave are alive somewhere, as traffic grumbles in from Sixth Avenue and the silver blades of the scissors cut juicily through a dark green stalk.

That summer when she was eighteen, it seemed anything could happen, anything at all. It seemed that she could kiss her grave, formidable best friend down by the pond, it seemed that they could sleep together in a strange combination of lust and innocence, and not worry about what, if anything, it meant. It was the house, really, she thinks. Without the house they would simply have remained three undergraduates who smoked joints and argued in the dormitories at Columbia. It was the house. It was the chain of events initiated by the old aunt and uncle’s fatal congress with a produce truck on the outskirts of Plymouth, and Louis’s parents offering him and his friends the use, for the whole summer, of the suddenly vacated house,

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wher
e lettuce was still fresh in the refrigerator and a feral cat kept checking, with growing impatience, for the scraps it had always found outside the kitchen door. It was the house and the weather—the ecstatic unreality of it all—that helped turn Richard’s friendship into a more devouring kind of love, and it was those same elements, really, that brought Clarissa here, to this kitchen in New York City, where she stands on Italian slate (a mistake, it’s cold and subject to stains), cutting flowers and struggling, with only moderate success, to stop caring that Oliver St. Ives, the activist and ruined movie star, has not asked her to lunch.

It was not betrayal, she had insisted; it was simply an expansion of the possible. She did not require fidelity of Richard— god forbid!—and she was not in any way extorting property that belonged to Louis. Louis didn’t think so, either (or at least wouldn’t admit to thinking so, but really, could it have been mere chance that he cut himself so often that summer, with various tools and kitchen knives, and that he required two separate trips to the local doctor for stitches?). It was 1965; love spent might simply engender more of the same. It seemed possible, at least. Why not have sex with everybody, as long as you wanted them and they wanted you? So Richard continued with Louis and started up with her as well, and it felt right; simply right. Not that sex and love were uncomplicated. Clarissa’s attempts with Louis, for instance, failed utterly. He was not interested in her nor she in him, for all his celebrated beauty. They both loved Richard, they both wanted Richard, and that would have to do as a bond between them. Not all

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peopl
e were meant to be lovers, and they were not naı¨ve enough to try and force it beyond one stoned failure in the bed Louis would share, for the rest of the summer, only with Richard, on the nights Richard was not with Clarissa.

How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she’d tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard’s kiss on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with the rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something . . . larger and stranger than what they’ve got? It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That’s who I was. That’s who I am—a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you’ve made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.