26 The New York Review
Sweet made audiences shiver over lives
dominated by hungers (transgressive
and otherwise) destined to lead either
to a bullet in the back or the electric
chair. These movies—filmed mostly
in haunting shadow or on streets made
sinister by darkness and rain, and
with sex continually smoldering in the
background—excited a romantic mel-
ancholy in viewers that elevated their
status from B to A.
It wasn’t the words put in the mouths
of the characters that made these mov-
ies thrilling; it was rather a tone that the
films achieved, some ineffable sense of
things that spoke, guardedly but un-
deniably, to antisocial desires, unat-
tainable intimacy, psychological drift.
Today, much of the dialogue in these
movies can sound laughable. Take In a
Lonely Place, for instance, in which the
protagonist confides, “I was born when
she kissed me. I died when she left me.
I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”
But watch the movie to the end and,
never mind the sex and danger, I guar-
antee a strong sense of emotional exile
will wash over you.
In the late 1940s French film critics
began to call this kind of work noir,
and in the 1950s and 1960s there were
writers everywhere who found in noir
metaphors they thought they could
make use of. Among these was Alfred
Hayes, for whom “Joe Hill” had long
been superseded by Double Indemnity,
and who now responded to the influ-
ence of noir as the New York novelist
he had it in him to be rather than the
California screenwriter he had be-
come. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreci-
ate what a good screen noir could do,
especially if it featured love gone rotten
in compromising circumstances. It was
that he knew it would take an extended
fiction to illuminate what for him was
noir’s central issue: the inability to feel
the reality of your own or anyone else’s
life, even if it belonged to someone you
were sleeping with. If ever Hayes had
been uncertain about how to sink this
insight into a story touched by noir,
that uncertainty evaporated in 1953
when he published In Love, the novel
that became the template for all that
was to follow.
A man of almost forty, a failing
screenwriter who shall remain name-
less, meets a woman of twenty- two
(also nameless), slightly shopworn, at
a bar in Manhattan. He, married but
separated from his wife, lives alone
in a midtown hotel; she, divorced and
with a child she has stashed with her
parents, in a tiny apartment in a bad
neighborhood. Each of them is waiting
for someone or something to rescue
them from their stalled lives. They fall
into bed, then into an erotic connec-
tion that resembles love. What follows
is a hundred- odd- page account, related
in the first person by the man, detail-
ing the unholy course of an affair that
comes to seem emblematic of the times,
yet psychologically timeless.
From the start, the story is drenched
in mutual distrust, a distrust that is fin-
gered thoughtfully by both the narrator
and the woman as though it were an in-
fection that might heal rather than flare
if properly attended to. But such atten-
tion would require the open expression
of wholehearted tenderness, the kind
that leaves one vulnerable, a condition
neither the man nor the woman is up
for.
She is fragile, painfully naive:Life was so unfair! All she’d ever
wanted was a reasonable amount
of happiness.... Why, being beau-
tiful, and why, being young, and
why, being reasonably faithful and
reasonably good and reasonably
passionate, was it so hard to gouge
out of the reluctant mountain her
own small private ingot of happi-
ness?... Everyone seemed more
fortunate than she.The narrator, smarter and far more ex-
perienced, isn’t much better. When he
is being honest with himself he knows
that adopting the demeanor of one
who, hurt by life, remains wary is for
the most part an affectation:Because I, too, was difficult, eas-
ily depressed, changeable, evasive,
and perhaps not entirely honest....
The portrait I drew of myself was
always unflattering (but was it
really unflattering? Wasn’t it, ac-
tually, by insisting so on my inac-
cessibility making myself more
attractive?) but always, of course,
with just a touch of sadness to ev-
erything I said.Neither of these damaged souls can
abandon the guardedness with which
they have long lived. From start to fin-
ish their situation is precarious; when
its stability is only slightly threatened,
each begins calculating their odds. It’s
on the ground of this loaded combina-
tion of pathos and cunning that Hayes’s
talent hits pay dirt.
Within a matter of months the
woman (always the one more on edge)commits an act of sexual duplicity that
takes the narrator by surprise. Her
infidelity turns on the proposition of
Howard, a besotted businessman who
offers her $1,000 to sleep with him for
just one night. She is shocked, by both
the figure and the temptation, but re-
lates the offer to the narrator as though
it’s a big joke. Nonetheless, she muses
out loud, she’s certain that if she did
do something like that, “you’d take
me back, wouldn’t you, darling? You’d
forgive me. After all, I’ve been nice,
haven’t I, and I haven’t caused you too
much trouble, and it’s really such a lot
of money.” Then she looks directly into
his face: “Silly, she said. Stop looking
like that. You know I wouldn’t.”
But of course she does.
If this were a genuine noir, at this
point the woman would be seen as the
femme fatale doing in the unsuspecting
protagonist—and the reader’s spine
would tingle with fear and excitement.
But as it’s a work of emotional imagina-
tion, what’s memorable is the aloneness
that these two inflict on each other.
The narrator realizes that the ball
had been in his court. “I had simply to
say that I did not want her to see him,
or to accept his invitations,” he tells us,
“and that I loved her, and that I was
jealous.” But this he could not do: “I
smiled; I pretended to approve, and
pretended not to be alarmed... and
inside me, a slow petrification spread.”
After she leaves him for Howard, who,
of course, never wanted just one night,
he is surprised to find himself really suf-
fering over his own part in this startling
turn of events, concluding (rightly) that
it was “my cowardice, my reluctance
to declare myself, my habitual irony,
myself in short as the years had mademe,” that had been responsible for her
flight.
One night at three in the morning his
phone rings. It’s her. She tells him she’s
left Howard because it is only with him
that she feels real to herself. She’s lying.
She called because Howard has refused
to marry her, and she needs to reassure
herself that she is, after all, still desir-
able. The confusion of rage, angst, and
hunger with which they fall into bed is
stunning. But for these two, stunning
goes only so far.
In a final twist she goes back to How-
ard, and the narrator blackmails her
into sleeping with him once more. This
time she feels violated, and she lashes
out at him:Nobody was necessary to me, she
said. Not really necessary. I was
fond enough of people and some I
loved but none of them were nec-
essary to me. She had never been
necessary to me.... I existed for
myself.With all the shabbiness surround-
ing her affair with Howard, “he still
needed her in a way I never would and
what he felt for her was something I
would never feel for a woman.... I
did not need women for what I really
needed.”
And what of her? What does she feel
like when she lies down with Howard,
and then goes out to buy a dress or a
car on his dime? What of the child we
are not at all certain she will reclaim?
What of the men of the future whom
she will certainly be meeting between
two and four on rainy afternoons? No
matter. We have arrived at the heart of
the novel. She doesn’t need men anyDon’t think
you have to speak
of the snow, branches
bent, weak
limbs broken
or of what you hear.
Everything is real
in the mind, the radio
waves on frequencies
that leave the leaves
undisturbed, and the snow,
general in the north
and now across the continent.
The storm has erased
every mark yesterday
you made on the road,
the path, the plow
opening a way
by burying everything else.
It was easiest
to be on foot,
to choose Velcro
over lace-up and avoid
the struggle of the snowshoe strap.
How else go
but with sharp
metal teeth,a soft step.
The super blood
wolf moon is there
we heard on the news
yet there’s nothing
we can see
but cloud and mist.
Yet the moon.
Deer on the unplowed path
fat tires of trucks
and on the shore
looking west, then north
the snowed plain
you know to be
a lake became the moon
soft whipped into white hillocks
by the night’s long windDon’t think
you have to speak
about the country
that wind
this storm
everything real
and white in the blanking eye—Maureen N. McLaneWINTER