Cast a Cold Eye by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online

did. In fact, Hugh Caldwell, telling his own stories, interposed an obstacle, a distraction—himself, the living, asthmatic flesh—between the story and the audience. As the movies have supplanted the stage, and the radio the concert hall, so Francis Cleary in modern life tended to supplant his friend, Hugh Caldwell, and in supplanting him, he glorified him. He was the movie screen on which the aging actress, thanks to the magic of the camera and make-up man, appears young and radiant, purged of her wrinkles; he was the radio over which one hears a symphony without seeing the sweat of the first violinist.
    And yet, like all canned entertainment, Francis Cleary produced, in the end, a melancholy effect. To listen to him too long was like going to the movies in the morning; it engendered a sense of alienation and distance. Eventually, the host would move away, his desire to see Caldwell killed, not quickened, by this ghostly reunion, as the appetite is killed by a snack before dinner, as the taste for van Gogh’s paintings was killed by the reproductions of the “Sunflowers” and “L’Arlesienne” that used to symbolize cultural sympathies in the living rooms of Francis Cleary’s friends. But as the lesson of “L’Arlesienne” prevented hardly anyone from making the same mistake with Picasso’s “Lady in White,” so the lesson of Hugh Caldwell never prevented the host from allowing Francis Cleary to substitute on some other occasion for another old friend who was distasteful to the hostess, and many parties would be composed exclusively of Francis Clearys, male and female, stand-ins, reasonable facsimiles, who could fraternize with each other under the Redon or the Rouault or the Renoir reproductions—ready with anecdote, quotation, and paraphrase, amiable and immune as seconds at a duel. Afterwards, the host and hostess, reviewing the situation, would be unable to decide why it was that though everybody stayed late, got drunk, and ate all the sandwiches, nobody had had a particularly good time. And the failure of the party, far from causing bitterness or recrimination, would actually draw them together. Murmuring criticisms of their guests, they would pull up the blankets and embrace, convinced that they preferred each other, or rather that they preferred themselves as a couple to anybody else they knew.
    But what about Francis Cleary riding home in a taxi with his female equivalent? Sex was not for him; his given name disclosed this—it could be either masculine or feminine; nobody ever called him Frank. He might be a bachelor or a spinster; quite often, he was a couple, but a couple which functioned as an integer. If he had begun his Francis Cleary existence as a single man, it was unwise for him to marry, for a wife might define him too sharply, people might like her and then other people would dislike her; before he knew it, through her, he might become the issue rather than the solution of a dispute. To say that sex was not for him does not mean that he did not sometimes have girls, or, in his female aspect, men; he might even have been in love, but since nearly the whole area of his life was public and social, this one small reserved section which he kept for himself was private, intensely so. His romantic activities, if he had any, were extracurricular. They did not interfere with his social function, and it is impossible to tell which was cause and which effect: was it the fact that he had very early in life fallen in love with the married lady that placed his weekends and his evenings and his vacations at the disposal of his friends, or had he recognized from the very beginning that he was cast for the part of the professional friend and arranged his affairs accordingly, cultivating without real predilection sexual tastes so impossible that they must be forever gratified sub rosa, under assumed names, in Pullman cars, alleys, cheap hotel rooms, public parks? How was anybody to know? In some of his