The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy Page B

and offhand manner in which he pronounced the novelist’s name indicated no desire to shine, indicated in fact that he placed no value on that name, that it was to him a name like Hervey Allen or Arthur Brisbane or Westbrook Pegler or any other. Two alternatives presented themselves: either the man belonged to that extraordinary class of readers who have perfect literary digestions, who can devour anything printed, retaining what suits them, eliminating what does not, and liking all impartially, because, since they take what they want from each, they are always actually reading the same book (she had had a cousin who was like that about the theater, and she remembered how her aunt used to complain, saying, “It’s no use asking Cousin Florence whether the show at the stock company is any good this week; Cousin Florence has never seen a bad play”)—either that, or else the man had got the name confused and was really thinking of some popular writer all the time.
    Still, the assertion, shaky as it was, had given him status with her. It was as if he had spoken a password, and with a greater sense of assurance and propriety, she went on listening to his talk. His voice was rather rich and dark; the accent was Middle Western, but underneath the nasalities there was something soft and furry that came from the South. He lived in Cleveland, he told her, but his business kept him on the go a good deal; he spent nearly half his time in New York.
    “You do?” she exclaimed, her spirits rising. “What is your business?” Her original view of him had already begun to dissolve, and it now seemed to her that the instant he had entered the club car she had sensed that he was no ordinary provincial entrepreneur.
    “I’m a traveling salesman,” he replied genially.
    In a moment she recognized that this was a joke, but not before he had caught her look of absolute dismay and panic. He leaned toward her and laughed. “If it sounds any better to you,” he said, “I’m in the steel business.”
    “It doesn’t,” she replied, recovering herself, making her words prim with political disapproval. But he knew; she had given herself away; he had trapped her features in an expression of utter snobbery.
    “You’re a pink, I suppose,” he said, as if he had noticed nothing. “It’d sound better to you if I said I was a burglar.”
    “Yes,” she acknowledged, with a comic air of frankness, and they both laughed. Much later, he gave her a business card that said he was an executive in Little Steel, but he persisted in describing himself as a traveling salesman, and she saw at last that it was an accident that the joke had turned on her: the joke was a wry, humble, clownish one that he habitually turned on himself.
    When he asked if she would join him in a drink before lunch, she accepted readily. “Let’s go into the diner, though. It may be cooler.”
    “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in my compartment. I know it’s cool there.”
    Her face stiffened. A compartment was something she had not counted on. But she did not know (she never had known) how to refuse. She felt bitterly angry with the man for having exposed her—so early—to this supreme test of femininity, a test she was bound to fail, since she would either go into the compartment, not wanting to (and he would know this and feel contempt for her malleability), or she would stay out of the compartment, wanting to have gone in (and he would know this, too, and feel contempt for her timidity).
    The man looked at her face.
    “Don’t worry,” he said in a kind, almost fatherly voice. “It’ll be perfectly proper. I promise to leave the door open.” He took her arm and gave it a slight, reassuring squeeze, and she laughed out loud, delighted with him for having, as she thought, once again understood and spared her.
    In the compartment, which was off the club car, it was cooler. The highballs, gold in the glasses, tasted, as her own never did, the way they looked in