Ex-wifePart 27
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Part 27
Once for three days in succession, I did not hear from him. So I wired, “How are you?” He explained later that there was no language to describe how damnably uncomfortable he was, so he did not answer the wire for a day.
By then, I had decided that he did not love me any more. By the day’s end—it had been a hot day, and I had to work very hard—I was contemplating suicide. I wrote him:
“This is a love letter for Noel and nothing else but . . . it will probably turn out full of profanity, but I can’t help that. I don’t know when the thought first came, to add to general hellishness of New York in the humidity, that you were annoyed with me. I suggested in my telegram that you wire me. What you should say, I don’t know. ‘It is cool here, I am working hard,’ maybe. Well, you would take it for granted that I knew that.
“However, the thought that you were annoyed, grew beautifully, grew through ‘He thinks I am just bingeing about with Nat and Bill and whoever turns up, very pleased with myself until I thought there must be a Wisconsin Wench. And I hope she drowns in Lake Superior and goes from there to hell, but I do hope she appreciates him, in the meantime.’ Is that my maternal instinct?
“Then I tried to be philosophical, and steady. The Philosophical Effort may entertain you. It amounted to this:
“In a friendship, affaire or whatever inadequate label one affixes to the things you and I share, a greater trust of the other person is implicit than in marriage, or any arrangement where one can lean on organized status.
“In the Love-Outside-Marriage that is so commonplace, now, what with new freedom and old divorce laws, there are no fences to enclose two people, and very few cushions against shocks. That’s all right. I don’t mind. We have discussed that.
“Candour has to do, instead of fences and cushions. If you were annoyed with me, if your feeling toward me changed, I believe that you would let me know, specifically and immediately.
“Generalities. . . . Adult women who try to ‘understand’ men, make no effort to enclose them. But women (in love) can put up with being enclosed, well enough. If you said to me, ‘Sorry but it makes me dismal to think of other people holding your hand, and what-not, and would you mind not going out with other men at all?’, I would stay at home.
“You won’t say that, though. You believe in this freedom more than I do. I just believe in it for men. Nevertheless, I do accept dinner dates, don’t I? . . . Not as I used . . . I don’t ever try to acquire any new men. . . . But I did go out with three people this week, and two of them made love to me. (The other was just a couple of lunch dates.)
“My grandmother would have mourned your absence—I mean your grandfather’s—in tears over her embroidery, perhaps. I bet I mourn yours more violently, in a cab with the wrong person, or in a speakeasy over a drink that I’m not having with you.
“I go to dinner, and I try to be amusing . . . sing for my supper, why not? And if there is a dreadful instant, when I think, ‘I wish I would find a telephone message from him on the switchboard when I get home,’ I am more likely to say, ‘yes, I’ll have another, thank you,’ than to look bored and sleepy. There is nothing to go home for—no message will be on the switchboard.
“As for the rest—on its merits. I don’t row if I get kissed once in the course of the evening, or so. I don’t invite it, and I make it obvious that I’m damn well not reciprocating.
“The only person I want to kiss is wandering around the Great Northwest—and I wish Coolidge would get nostalgia for the sight of the dome of the White House.
“Footnote to all this. . . . You said once that you thought incidental necking was awfully boring. So do I. But that is one of the things about which you are extraordinary. Most men do seem to feel they’ve achieved something, in a minor way, if they succeed in touching their lips to a woman’s chin or thereabouts, a couple of times in an evening. It makes me feel slightly like riding in a crowded Subway, but it’s nothing to make a scene about. Just part of all this damn freedom.
“Finally, about the possibility of your Wisconsin Wench. I hope not, but I don’t care except with those instincts that can’t be helped. Shan’t ask, want you always to do what you want. But, any Wisconsin Wench will have to be just miraculous, to be half as good, or nice-tempered or angelic to you as I plan to be when you come home at last.”
That night, an hour after I posted that letter, Noel telephoned from Wisconsin, and we spent ten extravagant minutes talking gay nonsense. I told him I had written an outstandingly dumb letter that he might as well tear up unread.
But he answered the letter, this way:
“Patricia—
“I miss you steadily. I have not taken to wenching. I have sat around talking politics with the old men or listening to young men (the photographers) talk of their probably fictitious dealings with the local virgins. I have a memory of you that seems undiminished in warmth, with which I go tranquilly to sleep, alone.
“This summer will end. And, darling, darling (as you say in your ’cello voice) I am closer to you at two thousand miles distance, than I could be to any other woman in my arms.”
I wrote him, later:
“When you come back, pack me in a suitcase, and haul me off to Vienna or Buenos Aires or Leningrad, and whenever you want conversation you can take me out of the suitcase and sit me on a chair and we’ll talk very merrily. When you want solitude I’ll fold myself in the suitcase uncomplainingly, for days at a time. And we’ll never be bored or hurried or under pressure to do anything ever, we’ll just be gaily disreputable until we die. Except that you will get famous, and women will make pilgrimages to see you, ’specially after they have learned you are handsome. I won’t let any of ’em in, except the very loveliest ones . . . I’ll let those in so that you will admire my taste.
“I send you a kiss-at-great-length.”
He wrote me apologetically, that if it weren’t too much trouble, he would like me to send a heavier overcoat, and some other things, to him. I wrote:
“You must know that I adore doing small things for you. It damn well isn’t modern, but I damn well can’t help it . . . so I shan’t pose about it . . . don’t have to pose with you about things.”
He sent me some Scotch from Canada, via a photographer who came back to New York.
“NOEL ANGEL,
“I shall save the Scotch to revive me, when I finally see a newspaper headline reading ‘President Returns to Washington.’ I expect to be found clutching the newspaper, muttering things about OUR CHIEF. You’ve led the paper with your Kellogg treaty stories, three days in succession. Did you know it? Such a bright young man.”
He was coming home in two weeks! I wrote:
“Noel: When you come back I shall telephone you . . . and suggest we go swimming; I shall telephone you, and ask to be taken to dinner . . . I shall telephone you, and demand to be taken for walks. I shall invent excuses to telephone you. I shall telephone you daily, hourly, incessantly. Will you mind?
“I feel that all sorts of lovely things will happen instantly, as soon as you’re home, and that you and I shall spend our old ages happily (over drinks) in front of the same fireplace, regarding a long row of books, written by you. And the old ages are so nice and far off.
“I’m looking handsome, what with sunburn turning brown, and I hope you’ll be pleased with the effect. I remember how you look in all sorts of moods. I have a whole collection of snapshots of you, inside my head. One of the nicest is Himself, asleep, with a pleased expression, looking ten years old or so.
“You wired—when a letter of mine missed a mail two or three days ago, asking if I had taken up with a blonde. Of course not—blondes are an adolescent taste.
“I had a ’orrible thought . . . you might have to stay in Washington, covering the President, until election. . . . Noel, a nice old-fashioned female (meaning myself) would then go modern. Nice old-fashioned what-nots don’t ever pursue a man, they guard their reputations . . . they are patient for ever. But if you get stuck in Washington, I go to Washington and get a job waiting on table in a restaurant, and the only thing that separates us, hereafter, is your wish to be by yourself.
“I want to know (if I met you in Washington as you suggest), if you’ll take me to see the Washington Monument, and give me highballs, and talk to me hours and hours and hours about politics and the Kellogg Treaty. I don’t care what you talk about. I just want to hear your voice. And will you pick me up and carry me about the room, but not muss my hair, and take me for a little walk about Washington. And if I’m very well-behaved will you kiss me once or twice?”
He answered that by wire.
“I shan’t mind being telephoned at twenty minute intervals stop will take you up Monument stop don’t guarantee about your hair stop yes yes yes.”
I wrote him once more, to Wisconsin.
“After my shameless correspondence, I shall probably be so shy that I’ll insist on sitting eight feet away from you, staring at you with an imbecilic look of content. . . . Let’s go for a week-end to the shore where I can fall asleep on the sand in the sun with my head on your shoulder. I shall feel that I’ve reached Ultimate Truth, like a Russian at the end of seventy-two hours conversation.”
He wired:
“Arranged going straight through to New York stop expect to enter city shouting love love nonstop reach Penn Station seven five P. M. Wednesday stop might I be met.”
He was met.
We had days and weeks of high felicity. Sometimes, as I walked along the street, remembrance of years when I had been unhappy, came to me; and they seemed an infinite distance away, and altogether unreal, like stories one hears about a friend of a friend of a friend.
He had a rather extraordinary offer made to him—to go to Yokohama as head of a Far East news bureau. He would have liked to go. He had been a foreign correspondent on the Continent, and he spoke Russian, which would be useful in the Far East post, but he had never been to Asia.
He broached the project to his wife. Part of the terms on which they had arranged their lives was that he was not to take a post outside New York, because it would be too embarrassing for her to travel. She refused to hear of the Asiatic scheme.
He spoke of it to me, and I was entirely willing to fling the advertising business overboard, and go. We had often talked about the places we’d see, and how I would occupy myself learning Japanese, while he covered Chinese wars and Indian border uprisings. But neither Noel nor I took the project very seriously. We did not expect that his wife would let him go.
During the conversation, when he told her that it was an extraordinary opportunity, and that he wanted very much to go, she told him that she knew all about me. He was startled—and even more surprised to discover that she had nothing more to say than that she knew about me.
He asked her to reconsider agreeing to let him go to Asia. (He had three months in which to make up his mind—someone was filling out a term of office in the meantime.) She said she would not agree to it, but that he could ask her again in a few weeks, if he chose.
Noel was growing a little restless on the “Times.” He felt that, on the New York staff, he’d gone about as far as he was likely to go, and he didn’t contemplate with much joy, the probability that he would spend the next twenty years, doing the same sort of stories, over and over.
Most of the time that we were together, though, we were too pleased with the world in general to worry about things like that. I did have one acute attack of wanting-to-be-made-an-honest-woman, and wrote him about it, when he was upstate covering the campaign tour of a governor.
“NOEL DEAREST—
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