Ex-wifePart 20
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Part 20
“The woman who washes my hair. She used to be a model for magazine covers.”
“You could marry plenty of younger and gayer people than Sam,” I said.
“I don’t want to. I tell you I want to be the Last Woman in someone’s life.”
“Do you like listening to discourses on the new trade markets of the world, and how much oil they expect to find in China in the next ten years?”
Lucia beamed. “I love it. I am thirty years old, and I have spent five years listening to discourses on new books and new plays and new clothes . . . and wisecracks . . . I never want to hear another wisecrack until I die. I adore hearing about the glamorous future of South America, and how the rate of foreign exchange affects . . . I am not sure what it affects, yet, but I shall find out. . . .”
“Good Lord, Lucia, you expect to be happy.”
“Of course, happy and settled and as protected as my grandmother. I plan to make Sam happy, too. I would marry him if he were relatively poor.”
“How do you feel about sleeping with him?”
“I’d rather sleep with him the rest of my life, for the sake of having his kindness and good humour and honesty around; than put up with the selfishness and vanity and casual, heartbreaking infidelities of any ‘attractive’ man I know, for the sake of occasional golden moments in bed.”
“Do you want to have children, Lucia?”
“I’ll have them if he wants them. Some women who’ve been self-supporting do seem to acquire a permanent feeling that we should earn our way. Have some more coffee, Pat.”
“Oh, dear,” I said, “I shall miss you like hell, and I do feel you should marry someone you are crazy about.”
“You can come visit me on Long Island every week-end, darling . . . and I did marry someone I was crazy about, once. . . . I’ll find you a nice banker, younger and thinner than Sam, if you like.”
“I don’t like . . . I don’t want to marry again.”
“You’ll feel differently, after your divorce goes through next month,” said Lucia. “Run along to work. I have an appointment outside the office and I don’t have to start yet.”
I put on my coat. “Lucia, is Sam really what you want?”
“Not much like what I used to want. And much more than I ever expected to have, now.”
[Illustration]
Half-past eight.
My cab was held up in traffic. I lighted a cigarette. Everyone kept saying to me, nowadays, “You’ll feel differently after your divorce,” or “You’ll feel better after your divorce.” Just as they say, “You’ll feel better after you have your tonsils out,” or “after the baby is born,” or “after you eat.”
I wondered if doctors said to the very old, “You’ll feel better after you’re dead.”
Committed to divorcing Peter, with the suit filed, and the lawyer’s retaining fee paid, I knew no more whether I wanted to divorce Peter, than I know what sort of coat I should want for the Springtime of 1940.
If I had held on, for six months more, or six years, would Peter have come back, ultimately? And would I have wanted him, or not?
The traffic signals changed. I told the driver to hurry.
[Illustration]
Eleven o’clock.
The ambitious young copy-writer, who would probably have my job some day, knocked on my office door.
“Things are quiet today, aren’t they,” she said.
“Yes, thank God.”
“I wanted to ask you to luncheon,” she said shyly. “You see—you are older than I, and married, and a successful business woman; and I wanted some advice.”
Well, I was twenty-five, she was probably twenty-one. I myself had thought twenty-five a fairly advanced age, four years before I reached it.
“I am sorry I can’t lunch with you. I have an appointment with the misses’ dress buyer. But why don’t you sit down now and tell me about it.”
She stumbled about for a beginning.
“Your work is going very well these days. I have been meaning to tell you so,” I said.
“It isn’t that. Thanks awfully, though . . . I want to get married.”
“How very nice. I can arrange for you to get a leave of absence whenever you want it,” I said.
“No. The thing is—the man I’m thinking of marrying insists that I give up my job. He doesn’t want his wife to work. He hasn’t very much money, but he will make more all the time . . .” She stopped.
“Same old marriage versus career problem?”
“Yes.”
“How old is this man?”
“Six months older than I. He’s twenty-two.”
“Do you care very much about him?”
Tears filled her large innocent blue eyes. “I love him terribly,” she said.
I was surprised by my own enthusiasm. “My dear child, marry him—and if you have to get a job some day you’ll get one. If there’s anything I can do to help—I mean I can give you notes to people who will sell you your furniture wholesale—do tell me about it. . . . Tell me some more about your fiancé.”
She talked and talked. She said she would be leaving in two weeks.
She had not needed my advice—she would have married him anyway, probably. She would have done well, in advertising.
Instead, she would eat canned beans the night before her husband’s pay day, or something of the sort, I supposed. And I would have to teach someone her job.
I wondered if I meant the rhapsodies in which I finally told her that she must not let love go by, or words to that effect . . . and decided that I meant them, in some moods.
[Illustration]
Five o’clock—telephone ringing.
“Pat, it’s Nathaniel—I’m celebrating—have you a dinner date?”
“Yes, I have a dinner date, but I should like to celebrate, briefly.”
“I’ll meet you at the side door at five-thirty.”
End of the day. Hands-and-neck bathed. Face cold creamed, lipsticked, rouged, powdered.
Nat waiting at the side door.
“Hello, small girl. You’re looking lovely. My aged father up and gave me a raise. He made two hundred thousand in the market last week, so he raised my salary from fifty to sixty dollars. Let’s have cocktails.”
Giacomo’s bar. Clover Clubs cold as ice cream, and pink as fingernail salve.
“Nat, where have you been all these two days?”
“I forgot to tell you—so excited about my raise—I’ve been on a trip—longest trip I’ve taken since my brother died sudden—I’ve been to Philadelphia—papa’s building a bank there.”
He looked worn, and dismal.
“It’s grand about the raise, Nat. . . . And some day, some day you’ll go places . . . and see all the lovely pictures in the world.”
“Yeah—some day when I’m fifty and my eyesight is so bad I can’t see anything smaller than a twelve by twenty foot mural.”
I felt sorry for him. He had spent seven years paying the cheque for the brother who had died gaily via the alcohol-chorine route. But everyone paid the cheque for everyone else, after all. And some day his father would leave him money to go places and see things.
“Darling . . . if you want me to cut my dinner date, I’ll try to, and we can go riding about until you feel better.”
“No, Pat. You are a dear, though. You’re always cheerful. Did you have a hard day?”
“No. Advised a young woman to choose love before the advertising business—and marry a man who makes fifty dollars a week.”
“You are a reckless girl. You should be married yourself, but not to anyone making less than fifty an hour. Your taste in clothes is too subtle.”
“How percipient you grow, Nathaniel.”
“Well, I like to look at pictures, and so I notice you.”
Nathaniel’s efforts at compliments always embarrassed me. They were so solemn.
I told him the story about the farmer’s daughter who had a grandmother, and I told him that Lucia was really going to marry Sam, and I told him that he (Nathaniel) was an ever-so-bright hour in any young woman’s day—and then I said I must go home to dress carefully, because I was dining with Horace.
Nathaniel was impressed. “America’s greatest portrait painter.—Pat, will he do a picture of you? I’ll borrow money from the doctor to pay for an option on it.”
“I doubt if he paints me—he’s not definitely through with his Spanish girl.” And then I wished I had not had four Clover Clubs so fast, because Nathaniel hated to hear things like that about people whose work he admired.
“His sense of colour is marvellous, Patricia.”
I talked to him about colour—of paintings, of skies, of buildings—and had him happily stirred about the possibility of making New York the most colourful city in the world by the time I left him to go home to a sombre silent dinner with his father.
[Illustration]
I met Lucia coming downstairs as I was going up. She was wearing a white and gold dress, and a wrap with a white fox scarf. “Lucia you look heavenly. Is all this in honour of your affianced?”
“Yes, darling, in honour of him and his brother from Chicago, and dinner at the Ritz.”
“I never knew Sam had a brother from Chicago.”
“The brother has four children dear, and a healthy wife. No good to you, in the soon-approaching days of your freedom.”
“Not having any, I told you.”
“We’ll see about that, Pat. Speaking of men you are not going to marry, has Kenneth got keys to your apartment?”
“Yes, I forgot to tell you. I gave him keys some time ago; so that he could sit about and wait to take me to Harlem, if he turned up late.”
“Well, he’s been poking his once beautiful head in and out of my door for an hour, demanding you. He is very drunk. Poor Ken, he looks like the wandering Jew gone Nordic. He left some time ago, though. I heard him falling downstairs. Were you dining with him?”
“No, dining with Horace.”
“What are you doing, trying out all the self-advertised Great Lovers in New York, one after the other . . . or do you want a sketch of yourself? He never makes them until afterward. Says it’s not anatomically possible . . . I suppose it’s all right for you to amuse yourself though—and you have been cutting down on adventures recently, haven’t you?”
She sat herself in the niche by the landing, where once, I suppose, before the house got remodelled, a saint or a bust of a statesman or perhaps even a virgin had sat.
“Pat I have a minute to talk. Are you very unhappy about divorcing Peter?”
“I don’t think about it. I have cut down on what you call adventures—they are no good to me. At first, I thought I could take them as easiest way to forgetting Peter, but that doesn’t happen. I’m not designed for a just-for-the-fun-of-it woman, perhaps.”
“Never mind—I couldn’t make that grade, either. I’ll find you a husband. I’ll have lots of spare time after I’m married. Meanwhile have fun with the Great Lovers.”
“Horace is no Great Lover so far as I know—and he’s ages old, Lucia.”
But Lucia stood up, and started downstairs. Her voice floated back with her perfume. “Great Lovers—men who’ve ‘known a hundred women,’ and boast of it—they remind me of the man who wanted to be a musician and so took one lesson on each instrument in the orchestra.”
I called downstairs.
“What happened to him, Lucia?”
She put her face against the balustrade below. “He couldn’t play a tune on any of them in the end, Pat.”
[Illustration]
Eight in the evening.
Horace was almost as broad as he was long, physically. I met him at his studio, as he had asked. I had wanted to see the things he was working on; because they would be worth seeing, and because Nathaniel would love hearing about them.
Horace had half a shaker full of Martinis before I turned up. He kissed my hand, poured me a Martini in a tumbler, and began to talk. He admired my frock—I had worn my sapphire-blue taffeta, because it was a “picture” dress, and, while I did not plan to go to any great lengths to get Horace to paint me, still one never knew.
If he wanted to, the picture would hang in some gallery where Pete could go to see it, when he was old, and it would help him to remember how I had looked. (I could not “sell” myself that pretty idea, with any conviction. I was sure that Pete would remember me, if at all, as just one among the errors of his youth.)
Horace was entertaining. He had kissed and painted his way from Soho to Manila, and his reminiscences of the pictures and ladies he had made in his day were almost as good as the pictures, and probably much better than the ladies.
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