"Schwartz," I said, "that cat, that mouser you gave me, he goes off every other week and comes home smelling like a whorehouse on Sunday morning."
"No whorehouses around here," said the druggist.
"I know," I said, "but where do you suppose he gets the perfume?"
"Cats roam," said the druggist.
"I suppose so," I said, "but do you sell French perfume? I mean if I can find who buys the stuff
"I don't remember selling a bottle since last Christmas," the druggist said. "The Avery boy bought a bottle for his girl friend."
"Thank you," I said.
That night after dinner Schwartz went to the door and signaled to be let out. I put on a coat and went out with him. He went directly through the garden and into the woods at the right of the house with me following. I was as excited as any lover on his way. The smell of the woods, heightened by the dampness of the brook, the stars overhead, especially Venus, seemed to be extensions of my love affair. I thought she would be raven-haired with a marbly pallor and a single blue vein at the side of her brow. I thought she would be about thirty. (I was twenty-three.) Now and then Schwartz let out a meow so that it wasn't too difficult to follow him. I went happily through the woods, across Marshman's pasture and into Marsh-man's woods. These had not been cleared for some years and the saplings lashed at my trousers and my face. Then I lost Schwartz. I called and called. Schwartz, Schwartz, here Schwartz. Would anyone, hearing my voice in the dark woods, recognize it as the voice of a lover? I wandered through the woods calling my cat until a tall sapling dealt me a blinding blow across the eyes and I gave up. I made my way home feeling frustrated and lonely.
Schwartz returned at the end of the week and I seized him and smelled his coat to make sure that she was still setting out her lures. She was. He stayed with me that time ten days. A snow had fallen on the night he vanished and in the morning I saw that his tracks were clear enough to follow. I got through Marshman's woods and came, at the edge of them, on a small frame house, painted gray. It was utilitarian and graceless and might have been built by some hard-working amateur carpenter on Saturdays and Sundays and those summer nights when the dark comes late. I had seriously begun to doubt that it was the lair of a raven-haired beauty. The cat's tracks went around the house to a back door. When I knocked an old man opened the door.
He was small, smaller than I, anyhow, with thin gray hair, pomaded and combed. There was a white button in his right ear, connected to a cord. From the lines and the colorlessness of his face I would guess that he was close to seventy. Some clash between the immutable facts of vanity and time seemed to animate him. He was old but he wore a flashy diamond ring, his shoes were polished and there was all that pomade. He looked a little like one of those dapper men who manage movie theaters in the badlands.
"Good morning," I said. "I'm looking for my cat."
"Ah," he said, "then you must be the master of dear Henry. I've often wondered where Henry was domiciled when he was not with me. Henry, Henry, your second master has come to pay us a call." Schwartz was asleep on a chair. He did not stir. The room was a combination kitchen and chemistry laboratory. There was the usual kitchen furniture and on a long bench an assortment of test tubes and retorts. The air was heavy with scent. "I don't know anything about the olfactory capacities of cats but Henry does seem to enjoy perfumes, don't you Henry. May I introduce myself. I'm Gilbert Hansen, formerly head chemist for Beaure-garde et Cie."
"Hammer," I said, "Paul Hammer." "
How do you do. Won't you sit down."
"Thank you," I said. "You manufacture perfume here?"
"I experiment with scents," he said. "I'm no longer in the manufacturing end of things but if I hit on something I like I'll sell the patent, of course. Not to Beauregarde et Cie, however. After forty-two years with them I was dismissed without cause or warning. However this seems to be a common practice in industry these days. I do have an income from my patents. I am the inventor of Étoile de Neige, Chous-Chous, Muguet de Nuit and Naissance de Jour."
"Really," I said. "How did you happen to pick a place like this-way off in the woods-for your experiments?'
"Well it isn't as out of the way as it seems. I have a garden and I grow my own thyme, lavender, iris, roses, mint, wintergreen, celery and parsley. I buy my lemons and oranges in Blenville and Charlie Hubber, who lives at the four corners, traps beaver and muskrat for me. I find their castors as lasting as civet and I get them for a fraction of the market price. I buy gum resin, methyl salicylate and benz-aldehyde. Flower perfumes are not my forte since they have very limited aphrodisiac powers. The principal ingredient of Chous-Chous is cedar bark, and parsley and celery go into Naissance de Jour."
"Did you study chemistry?"
"No. I learned my profession as an apprentice. I think of it more as alchemy than chemistry. Alchemy is, of course, the transmutation of base metals into noble ones and when an extract of beaver musk, cedar bark, heliotrope, celery and gum resin can arouse immortal longings in a male we are close to alchemy, wouldn't you say?"
"I know what you mean," I said.
"The concept of man as a microcosm, containing within himself all the parts of the universe, is Babylonian. The elements are constant. The distillations and transmutations release their innate power. This not only works in the manufacture of perfume; I think these transmutations can work in the development of character."
I heard a woman's heels in the next room-light, swift, the step of someone young. Marietta came into the kitchen. "This is my granddaughter," he said, "Marietta Drum."
"Paul Hammer," I said.
"Oh, hello," she said. She lighted a cigarette. "Eight," she said.
"How many yesterday," he asked.
"Sixteen," she said, "but it was only twelve the day before."
She wore a cloth coat with a white thread on one shoulder. Her hair was dark blond. She was not beautiful-not yet. Something, some form of loneliness or unhappiness, seemed to mask or darken her looks. It would be a lie to say that there was always a white thread on her clothing-that even if I bought her a mink coat there would be a white thread on it-but the white thread had some mysterious power as if it were a catalyst that clarified my susceptibilities. It seemed like magic and when she picked the thread off her coat and dropped it onto the floor, the magic remained.
"Where are you going now," he asked.
"Oh, I thought I'd drive into New York," she said.
"Why? What do you want to go to New York for? You don't have anything to do in New York."
"I'll find something to do," she said. "I'll go to the Museum of Natural History."
"What about the groceries."
"I'll buy them later. I'll be back before the stores close." She was gone.
"Well, goodbye Schwartz," I said. "Come home whenever you feel like it. I always have plenty of mice. It was nice to have met you," I said to the old man. "You and your granddaughter must come over for a drink someday. I have the Emmison place."
I walked and ran through the snowy woods back to my house, changed my clothes and headed for the city. I was in love with Marietta and I recognized all the symptoms. My life was boundless- my knees were weak. This had nothing to do with the fact that I had been inhaling the aphrodisiac fumes of Étoile de Neige, Chous-Chous, Muguet de Nuit and Naissance de Jour. My sudden infatuation could be put down as immature, but the truth of the matter is that I frequently fall suddenly in love with men, women, children and dogs. These attachments are unpredictable, ardent and numerous.
For example, when I was still in the publishing business I had an appointment to meet a printer in New York. I telephoned from the hotel lobby and he asked me to come up to his room. When he opened the door and introduced himself I saw past him to where his wife stood in the middle of the room. She was not a beauty but she had a prettiness, a brightness, that was stunning. I talked with her only long enough for him to get his hat and coat, but during this time I seemed to fall in love. I urged her to join us for lunch but she said she had to go to Bloomingdale's and look for furniture. We said goodbye and the printer and I went out to lunch. The business conversation bored me and I had trouble keeping my mind on the contracts we were meant to discuss. All I could think of was her blondness, her trimness, the radiance with which, it seemed, she had been standing in the middle of that hotel room when he opened the door. I hurried through lunch, said that I had another appointment, and looped over to the furniture department at Bloomingdale's, where I found her reading a price tag on a chest of drawers.
"Hello," I said.
"Hello," she said, "I somehow thought you might come…" Then she took my arm and we left Bloomingdale's, walking on air, and went to some restaurant where she had tea and I had a drink. We seemed immersed in one another-she seemed to generate a heat and light that I needed. I don't remember much of what we said but I do remember being terribly happy and that everyone around us-the waiters and the barmen-seemed to share our happiness. They lived in Connecticut and she asked me to come out for the weekend. I walked her back to the hotel, kissed her goodbye in the lobby, and walked around the streets for an hour, so high that my ears were ringing. On Friday I went out to Connecticut and she met me at the station. There was a lot of kissing in the car. I said that I loved her. She said she loved me. That night after dinner when her husband went upstairs to the toilet we had a serious discussion about her children-they had three children-and she said that her husband had been in analysis for seven years. At this point any disruption in his affairs would be catastrophic. The pleasure his wife and I took in one another's company must have been apparent because on Saturday he began to sulk. On Sunday he was downright mean and glum. He said that he detested above all things maladjusted men who preyed on the happiness of others. He used the word parasite five times. I said I was leaving for Cleveland in the morning and she said she would drive me to the airport. He said she would not. They had a quarrel and she cried. When I left in the morning they were still sleeping and there was no one to say goodbye to but the cat.
It took me a month or so to forget her but in the meantime I had to go to London. The man with whom I shared a seat on the plane was pleasant and we began to talk. Nothing important was said but we were very sympathetic and at one point he asked if I would like to go to sleep or should we go on talking. I said that I would like to go on talking and we talked all the way across the Atlantic. We shared a cab into London. I was going to the Connaught and he was staying at the Army-Navy. When we said goodbye he suggested that we have lunch together. I had no other engagement and he met me at the Connaught for lunch. After lunch we started walking and we walked all over London-walked to Westminster and the Embankment -and when the bars reopened we went to a pub and had some drinks. He said that he knew of a good restaurant near Grosvenor Square and we went there for dinner and stayed there until about midnight when we said goodbye. We exchanged cards and promised to call one another in New. York but we never did and I've never seen him
again.
There was, so far as I could discern, nothing unnatural in this encounter but things are not always this simple. In the late winter I went south to Wentworth to play some golf. An amiable man in the bar the night I arrived suggested that we pair off since our scores seemed to be about the same. In the morning, at about the third or fourth hole, I noticed that he was praising my form and praising it extravagantly. There is nothing about my form that deserves praise and I began to feel that his flattery-which is what it amounted to-had in it a hint of amorousness. I then began to feel that he was losing the game to me-that his golf was better than mine but that he was chipping his shots to give me a slight advantage. We played nineteen holes and his manner grew-or so I thought- increasingly sentimental and protective. I kept my distance in the shower and when we went to the bar I definitely got the feeling that something was going on. He kept bumping into me and touching me. I was not repelled but I did not want to invest my sexuality in a one-night stand with a stranger at Wentworth and I left in the morning.
As for children I will give only one example. I went out to Maggie Fowler's for a weekend in the Hamptons. Her son-a boy of about eight or nine-was with her. He was the child of her first marriage and evidently spent most of his time with his father or away at school. He seemed a little strange with Maggie. He had that extraordinary air of privacy that some children enjoy. This may have been produced by the rigors of a divorce but I've seen it in all sorts of children. I got up early on Saturday morning and, finding him downstairs, walked with him to the beach for a swim.