Ex-wifePart 21
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Part 21
He told me a story about a woman who had sent for him (from St. Louis to Honolulu) to be the father of her son. The child turned out to be a daughter, though—and besides the date of its birth was only six months after Horace reached Honolulu. The rest of the story was romantic though.
When he went from that to a monologue about the amount of savoir faire young women could gain from association with older men-of-the-world, I sighed and recognized that he thought of me as a bedroom, not gallery, adornment. Pete would have to get along with a photograph, if he had kept one.
My retreat, for the moment, was easy. It always is, with men who are really beauty-mad; if a woman will be humble enough to realize that they rate her as somewhat less exciting than a sunset, and nothing really to be compared with a good piece of pottery.
Horace had, in his studio, the most exquisite maple lowboy I had ever seen. Its proportions were heavenly, and its patina was that cross between velvet softness and satin sheen that is never actually achieved in fabric.
I began to admire the lowboy. I was as intelligent about it as possible. Soon, Horace was regarding it with love and absorption, and patting its surface with the regard he had bestowed ten minutes earlier upon my shoulders.
When his concentration upon the lowboy was complete, I said that I was painfully hungry. The man had good manners. He took me to eat, stopping to swear at the unfinished portrait of his Spanish girl as we went out.
[Illustration]
One in the morning.
I had had a lovely time so far. Horace was a genius, and I had met so few of them among the semi-celebrities. He had talked five hours straight, with time out for consuming a Gargantuan dinner, and endless drinks—about painting and women, and art and women, and life and women designed for the solace of men.
I was trying to remember everything he had said about painting, for Nat, but I could scarcely keep my head up. He was thirty years older than I, but had four times as much energy.
Nevertheless, I felt that just a little more to eat should certainly put him to sleep for the night, so I dragged him to Childs, on the way home, saying that I ached for some of Childs’ coffee. If Horace reached my apartment still able to manage himself, I could not depend on Lucia for assistance. She might not turn up until dawn. So I tried ordering an omelet and buttercakes and pumpkin pie for him. He enclosed them all, with no apparent difficulty.
Ten people bowed to me, but not one came over to join us. And Horace had discovered that I was utterly voluptuous. (No one else had ever said that, and I doubted his judgment. I weighed only a hundred and five pounds now, and that is not voluptuous by most standards.)
I looked about, but there was no maple lowboy in Childs for Horace to examine instead of examining me. So I let him call a cab, suggested a taxi-ride, discovered within five minutes that I might as well let him take me home, and said, “Let’s go home.”
[Illustration]
Two in the morning.
As I waited, while Horace paid the cab, the night air blew clean and cold and fresh against my face, and a winter moon that looked very remote and detached, shone down on the tall dark buildings, and the quiet grey street, and on Horace and the taxi-man and me. And I had, for an instant, that feeling that New York was an altogether beautiful place to live, no matter what happened to me living in it—a comforting feeling that had come to me sometimes, of late, when I stopped looking to people for comfort.
Horace trotted energetically up the stairs behind me. I felt worse, every step I climbed. I did not want him to stay, could not think of any good reason I should ask him to go, and unlocked my door.
I sat in a small chair, so that Horace would have to sit on the couch, opposite; lighted a cigarette, and wished I could go somewhere to sleep for a month.
Horace sat down heavily.
I waited for him to begin whatever he planned to begin.
“Young woman,” he said. (Probably he was near enough drunk now so that he did not remember my name.) “When I met you, I thought you were intelligent, because your head is the right shape.”
I grinned. He was going to be original—well I might have trusted him for that.
“You are not intelligent, though, else you would set higher value than you seem to set on the admiration of a man like myself, who is a connoisseur of women. Perhaps you prefer callow and pretty boys—”
(Oh, he minded being old, did he? Now I could not send him home. He would feel so—done. It was not fair for an assistant advertising manager to make a great painter feel—finished.)
“I’m extremely flattered that you should have devoted an evening to me, Horace.”
“Don’t say words that mean nothing, young woman. Listen to me, please. I have something to say that may interest you.”
He was a bit arbitrary, but if he felt like it, I did not mind. I was too tired. His huge head was framed against the whiteness of the panelled door behind the couch. I wondered if he had ever done a portrait of himself—that grizzled head was marvellous. I wished that door led somewhere I could go, instead of leading just to the bath. I could not spend the night in the tub.
“Young woman,” (I thought that if he called me that again I would fling a cushion at him. There was no reason why I should let people sit in my own apartment and say “young woman” to me, whether they could paint beautiful portraits or not.)
He went on. “You have a body that is delightful, whatever you may lack in intelligence. And since you seem to set no value on me, personally, I will give you the maple lowboy you had taste enough to admire, if you will let me stay here tonight.”
That means the Spanish girl is not coming back to have her picture finished, and the man is offering me the successorship. He can stay, unless I think of a method of getting him out that is more subtle than saying, “You are rather a disgusting old man; please go.” Because he is not disgusting, he is just candid. Wants what he wants and will pay a price for it.
Oh, I suppose I shall have to let him stay, but he can keep his maple lowboy. The only thing I have left to cherish is my amateur standing. (Did that door behind him move? I’m so tired I am seeing things. Of course it did not.)
Horace had not finished talking, quite. “Permit me to light another cigarette for you, and take five minutes to consider the lowboy. There is not another like it in America.”
He lighted my cigarette. Then he took out his watch.
“It is twenty minutes past two. I shall ask for your answer at twenty-five past.” He stood staring at the watch.
I laughed. He ignored me. I looked at my own watch. I knew I should say something to stop this absurdity, but I could not talk, I could only laugh.
“It is two twenty-five,” he said. “Do you want five minutes more to make up your mind?”
There was a sound of glass smashing, in the bathroom. Horace turned. The bathroom door opened a little. A voice said, “For God’s sake, Pat, take him or leave him, now, I can’t live five more minutes without a drink.”
“Kenneth!” I said. The bathroom door opened wide. Kenneth staggered out and leant against it. His opera hat was on one side of his head—his tail coat was crumpled. He stood, tall and golden-haired and dreadfully thin, grinning down at us both, looking like a cartoon of a Young-Man-About-Town.
Behind him, I could see a bottle smashed in pieces on the floor.
Horace had got his breath back. He roared—at me. “Who the hell is this?” He lost his breath again, after the roar.
Kenneth answered.
“Sir,” he said in the more severe of his Harvard voices, “If you are inquiring about me—I am the young woman’s—manager. I agree with you that she is charming, but she has the annoying habit of going out to get business for herself occasionally, in spite of our arrangements. Now—if you will discuss things with me. . . . You were saying something about a lowboy. We don’t usually take furniture—but if it is accessible for evaluation—”
Horace got his breath back, permanently, as far as I was ever to know. He got his breath and his hat and coat and gloves and stick. He began roaring.
He roared all the short Anglo-Saxon words I had ever heard, and a few others whose meaning I gathered by his tone. He walked out. His roars could be heard receding, as he stamped downstairs.
I wiggled about in my chair. “Kenneth, you idiot,” I said. “Did you ever hear so many synonyms for slut as that man used?”
But Kenneth did not think it was funny.
“Damn you, Patricia,” he said, “You would have let him stay—that horrible old man. ‘Let me stay and I’ll give you a lowboy.’ Christ—let me stay and I’ll give you—”
“Kenneth, stop please—I’ve had a damnable hour and I can’t stand any more. You had better go away.”
And then that tragic young man, whose gaiety was perennial as the blueness of his eyes, began to sob, and sob, and sob. He sat on the floor, and took a ruffle of my blue frock in his hands, and shook with sobs.
I patted his hair a little. I could not think of anything else to do for him. I said, “Please stop, Kenneth, dear. I am not important enough for anyone to cry about.”
He grew steady, after a little while, but he still kept twisting the blue ruffle in his hands.
“Patricia,” he said very softly, “so little and so nice—too nice to get mauled by all the fools in New York.”
“Please don’t, Kenneth,” I said.
“You stir me too,” he said, “didn’t you know? I am no different than the others.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Damn them,” he said, “and I can’t ever touch you.”
“Kenneth, my dear, my dear.”
“Patricia, if I never touched you, would you marry me and go away somewhere? I have enough money left so that you could live a year. I shan’t live a year. We could go to California, and you could swim in the Pacific.”
It sounded pleasant.
“But what’s the use Kenneth? Isn’t your favourite aphorism that there’s no sense in going other places if you have to take yourself along? Thank you, though.”
We sat quiet for a little while.
He looked up and smiled, and I knew he was all right again.
“Car’s around the corner, Pat,” he said. “Want to put on something warm and go for a drive in the fresh air?”
“Let’s,” I said.
“Bring a volume of Swinburne along, like a nice girl,” he said. “I’ll make you read aloud to me at breakfast, if we stay out that long.”
Kenneth liked me to read poetry to him—quite old-fashioned, romantic things. Perhaps they were things that had pleased him when he was in school, or perhaps his Hungarian dancer had liked them. I never asked.
[Illustration]
Seven in the morning.
The sun was rising over the East river. We sat, Kenneth in his crumpled evening clothes, and I in my blue frock that just would not ever look fresh again, under an old fur coat, in his car at the foot of Beekman Place, by the river. We were quite warm and happy and sleepy. I was reading aloud to him from “The Garden of Proserpine.”
From too much love of living— From hope and fear set free We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever Gods there be That no life lives for ever—
[Illustration]
XIII
“Taxi!”
“Go to the courthouse on Center Street, one block above City Hall.”
“There are lots of courthouses there, ma’am, which one?”
“I don’t know—never was there—drive down and we’ll see.”
“This might be it, driver; stop and I’ll ask that policeman.
“Officer, is this the courthouse where they hear divorces?”
“No, lady, this is worse; this is the Tombs prison. Go on another block.”
The taxi-driver went on another block. When I got out, he said, “I wish you good luck, ma’am,” so I gave him fifty cents for himself instead of twenty-five.
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