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Part 1

[Cover Illustration]

JONATHAN CAPE AND HARRISON SMITH, 139 E. 46TH STREET, NEW YORK, N. Y. AND 77 WELLINGTON STREET, WEST, TORONTO. JONATHAN CAPE, LTD., 30 BEDFORD SQ., W.C.1, LONDON, ENGLAND

EX-WIFE

Ursula Parrott

New York Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith

(Before Publication)

THIRD PRINTING JULY, 1929 FOURTH PRINTING AUGUST, 1929 FIFTH PRINTING SEPTEMBER, 1929

SET UP AND PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, BINGHAMTON, N. Y. BOUND BY THE J. F. TAPLEY COMPANY

To HUGH O’CONNOR

Ex-Wife

My husband left me four years ago. Why—I don’t precisely understand, and never did. Nor, I suspect, does he. Nowadays, when the catastrophe that it seemed to be and its causes are matters equally inconsequential, I am increasingly disposed to the belief that he brought himself to the point of deserting me because I made such outrageous scenes at first mention of the possibility.

Of course, during the frantic six months that preceded his actual departure, he presented reasons for it, by dozens. I remember some of them. At times he said I had lost my looks. At other times he said I had nothing but looks to recommend me. He said I took no interest in his interests. He said also that I insisted on thrusting myself into all of them. He said I was spiritless, or temperamental; had no moral sense, or was a prude. He said he wanted to marry the woman he really loved; and, that once rid of me, he would not marry anyone else on a bet.

In the four years since, I have listened to the causes given for the dismal ends of many marriages, and have come to believe my husband’s list as sensible as most.

He grew tired of me; hunted about for reasons to justify his weariness; and found them. They seemed valid to him. I suppose if I had tired of him, I should have done the same thing.

But I was not tired of him; so I fought his going ruthlessly and very stupidly. I was sure that if I fought I would win. I have never been as sure of myself since, as I was then, when I was twenty-four. No stirring of any ethical scruples about possessiveness, or idea of the futility of coercing emotion, complicated my efforts to keep what I wanted.

At first, I think, I pretended to high motives—“stay for the sake of our families,” and so on. Later, as I grew panicky, I experimented with argument, rage, anguish, hysteria and threats of suicide; and refused to admit to myself, until five minutes before he left, that he really might go, in spite of everything. . . .

While he finished packing, I sat, beginning to believe it. I tried to think of some last-minute miracle to manage: considered slashing my wrists so that he would have to go get a doctor, and then to stay until I recovered. But I recognized, in a world that had suddenly become an altogether incredible place, that he might just walk out and leave me to die of the slashes.

I hoped I looked devastated; I hoped I looked lovely. Then I remembered that the armchair in which I sat was a wedding present from his Aunt Janet, and wondered what one did with a husband’s relatives’ wedding presents when a husband left. (In New York, one sells them to impecunious young-married friends, ultimately.) The lamp beside me was among the first of the modernistic ones. I remembered that Wanamaker’s had not been paid for it.

The sound of trunk lids closing, stopped. He came in.

He stood there, looking handsome and stubborn and unhappy. I was assailed by recollections of how good-looking I had thought him—first time we met, a house-party at New Haven, four, no five Springtimes. . . .

“I’m going to get a cab for my things,” he said.

“Peter, don’t go,” I said.

“What’s the use of that?” he said.

We regarded each other. And suddenly, after six months in which I had always managed to find one more protest, relevant or otherwise, there were no more.

I ached. We had loved each other for three years, and hated each other half the fourth. It seemed such a long way to have journeyed from a gay and confident beginning.

Apparently, he had a few last words to offer, if I could manage none. He suppressed two or three beginnings.

“When will you divorce me, Patricia?”

I said, “On the far side of hell.”

He shrugged. He was not even angry. He just looked tired.

“Have it your own way, Patty.” (He had not called me “Patty” for months. “Pat,” casually; “Patricia,” furiously.)

Then he said, “Well, don’t mourn me long, old de-ah.” He came and patted my hair, and went out.

My last and silliest inspiration arrived. I thought, “If he doesn’t get his trunks, he can’t go,” and I bolted the apartment door. He came back with the cab driver, and knocked. I sat very still. He shouted, “If you don’t open that door, I’ll break it in.” He would have done it. So I opened the door. He threw his keys on a table. “I shan’t ever need these,” he said.

I went back to sitting in the armchair. Trunks and bags and taxi-man and husband departed, noisily. I thought, “This is the end. Why don’t I cry or something?”

In that lazy space on Sunday, between late breakfast and time to dress for a cocktail party, Lucia, with whom I was sharing an apartment, tried to define “ex-wife.”

“Not every woman who used to be married is one. There are women about whom it is more significant to know that they work at this or that, or like to travel, or go to symphony concerts, than to know that they were once married to someone or other.”

She looked at me, reflectively. “You’re an ex-wife, Pat, because it is the most important thing to know about you . . . explains everything else, that you once were married to a man who left you.”

“You’re one, too, by that definition. That you once were married to Arch explains most things about you,” I said.

“Yes, but I convalesce somewhat. One isn’t an ex-wife if one’s in love again, or even if one never thinks about one’s husband any more.”

“How many years does it take to get to that stage?” I asked. I had been to dinner with Pete the evening before, and knew that I would be miserable for a week.

“There, there, child,” she said, “you’ll feel better tomorrow.” She began again. “An ex-wife is a woman with a crick in the neck from looking back over her shoulder at her matrimony.”

I contributed. “An ex-wife’s a woman who’s always prattling at parties about the joys of being independent, while she’s sober . . . and beginning on either the virtues or the villainies of her departed husband on one drink too many.”

“An ex-wife,” Lucia said, “is just a surplus woman, like those the sociologists used to worry about, during the war.”

“Nobody worries about an ex-wife though, except her family—or her husband if she is one of those who took alimony,” I said.

“We don’t need to be worried about, yet, darling. We’re too much in demand. Wait ’til we’re forty . . . if we’re not dead of insufficient sleep, before then.”

“I’ll be dead of drinking bad absinthe,” I announced, resignedly.

Lucia protested. “I really wish you would stop drinking that stuff. It will hurt your looks.”

But her voice was languid. We were just talking. Pretty soon it would be time to make up one’s face, and put on a velvet frock, and things would start happening fast again. It was not a bad life, while things happened fast. And they usually did.

I tried one more definition. “Ex-wives . . . young and handsome ex-wives like us, illustrate how this freedom for women turned out to be God’s greatest gift to men.”

We laughed. The winter sun came warmly in over our shoulders. It was pleasant, sitting there. Peter and I had fought like hell the night before.

“Don’t think about him,” said Lucia. “I can always tell when you are; it does horrid things to your mouth.” She talked about ex-wives again, abruptly.

I felt bitter. After awhile I said, “An ex-wife is a young woman for whom the eternity promised in the marriage ceremony is reduced to three years or five or eight.”

Lucia: “Brought up under the tattered banners of ‘Love Everlasting’ and ‘All for Purity’ we have to adapt ourself to life in the era of the one-night-stand.”

Then she remembered that she was trying to make me feel gayer.

“Darling, what’s the difference. . . . We are awfully popular, and we know endless men, and we go everywhere.”

“They all want to sleep with us,” I said. “So soon as they get here for dinner they begin arranging to stay for breakfast.”

“And that isn’t very important, either, Pat. You know it isn’t. You are just feeling flat today. . . . What are you going to wear?”

I told her, and went to dress. When I came downstairs again she had mixed two Martinis. I felt better, when I had mine.

After that Max came. We gave him a Martini and he said, “Here’s to crime and other pleasures.” He always said that for a toast. Then he inquired about our health and our jobs. I suppose because jobs seemed important to him.

They were not to us. We both did advertising. Lucia was in an agency. I was fashion copy-writer in a department store. We averaged about a hundred dollars a week apiece, with odds and ends of free-lance writing. We had what we called a garret, on Park Avenue. The rent was a hundred and seventy-five dollars a month, and we spent most of the rest of our money on clothes. We never saved anything.

Lucia said she used to save money when she was married. So did I. Once I saved five dollars a week for a year, for a rug that would be “nice enough to keep when we had a house.” After Peter left, I sold the rug for forty dollars, and bought a pair of shoes and a hat with it.

While I was married, I saved money and made plans for the next fifty years and so on. Afterward, I did not make plans for the month after next. It seemed such a waste of time.

When there didn’t seem to be much else to say to Max about our jobs, we took him along to the cocktail party. He loved observing the younger generation. So he said.

We did not know many Jews. He was one of the nicest. He was old; looked like a Rembrandt portrait; had made about a million dollars in the junk business; and been taken up by people who wanted him to give money to their philanthropies. He had a huge wife whom he adored. One day he told us proudly that she was learning to write. We thought for an instant it was to write books; but he meant a-b-c’s.

He was not one of our set. But it was not a set; just unmatched pieces. The names in my engagement book for the first year post-Peter show well enough the sort of people we knew. (I can’t remember for whom some of the initials did stand.)

“Dinner—Richard” . . . he used to be Sunday feature editor of a newspaper. He went to Hollywood on one of those three month opportunity contracts. I’ve heard he’s writing sports in San Francisco now.

“H. R. G.—8 o’clock” . . . author of one play that was a hit, and two that flopped. I went with him to the opening of one of the flops. It was not a gala evening.

“David—Sunday breakfast” . . . who was David? Some vaguely unpleasant association. Oh yes, that was the night I actually did get out of a cab on Eighty-Sixth street in a rage and a snowstorm. David imported sausage casings from Russia. Odd occupation, that.

“Hal—to go beer-gardening in Hoboken” . . . he was just an ex-ambassador who thought he was very, very young at heart.

“Leonard—at the Russian Bear—8 o’clock” . . . he was rather sweet. A former Rhodes scholar working for thirty a week on a tabloid.

“C. L. C.—the Ritz—7:15 o’clock” . . . the younger generation novelist. He always admitted it without being asked.

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