Ex-wifePart 2
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Part 2
“Dominic—to dine at the Cecelia” . . . such a solemn young Italian surgeon, he was; and danced like an Argentine professional.
“Gerard—the Brevoort—6:30 o’clock” . . . he was minor Wall Street.
“Ken-Ken-Ken” . . . at least three times a week through most of that year. When I see his name, I see lights of Harlem dance halls glittering across the most golden hair I ever saw. He might have been the greatest art director in the movies. He and I had the loveliest time imaginable. But he never once kissed me.
“John—Samarkand—9 o’clock” . . . painted murals for gas-houses, and Elks’ clubs and places like that.
“Ned—his house—6:30” . . . he did something in publishing; collected Napoleon—and served endless quantities of marvellous cognac.
The men were like that. I didn’t have many engagements with women.
III
That conversation with Lucia about ex-wives was a year and more past the night Peter left me sitting in his Aunt Janet’s armchair.
I sat there four and a half hours. I know exactly, because when I heard Pete’s taxi start, I looked at the banjo clock my grandfather gave us. It was ten minutes past six.
There was an unopened package of cigarettes beside me. I tore two or three of them in opening it; lighted one; and tried to realize that there was no more Peter. But instead, I began to remember things we had done. They slid through my head like moving pictures that were being run off much too fast—except that these were vividly coloured, not black and white and grey, and they had sounds of voices and fragrances of things in them.
Winter in London. (We spent every penny of our wedding-present checks on four months in England and a Springtime in Paris; because, after that, Peter would have to work hard a long time and get to be a star reporter. Or, I suggested, a dramatic critic, because I liked the theatre so much.) After luncheon we used to rush to Brown-Shipley’s on Pall Mall to get a check cashed; and then hurried down the Strand to Romano’s American bar, so that we would get there before it stopped serving at two-thirty. We usually reached the door, breathless, at two twenty-five.
Peter ordered enough double Scotch and soda all at once to last the afternoon. A little of the fog filtered in. I could remember the smell of the fog; the smoky fragrance of Scotch; the lights glancing off little bottles of Schweppes, spread all across the table; Peter’s deep voice saying gay things about how pretty I was, and what fun we would have, and the strange places to which we would travel someday soon when we had money—Moscow and Buenos Aires, and Budapest and China.
Or, over the third highball: “I’m teaching you how to drink properly, Patty darling. Most men’s wives drink so badly. Good Scotch . . . it’ll stand by you, Pat, in the days you have great sorrows. . . . But I’m not ever going to let you have any great sorrows.
“No great sorrows . . . and no baby, at least no baby for years and years. You are too young and nice-looking, and I don’t want you to be hurt.”
We did have a baby though after we got home, when Peter was earning forty-five dollars a week. He was so disturbed about it. When he was not worrying as to how we’d ever support it, he wondered if it was going to hurt me much, and whether I would ever be pretty again.
He was twenty-two years old, then. I was twenty-one.
Our families were letting us struggle, because that is supposed to give young people a sense of life’s realities. They did think they were letting us struggle on seventy-five dollars a week though: for we had told them that was Peter’s salary.
After I got used to the idea of having a baby, I thought it might be rather nice . . . a small son something like Pete.
He said: “Where in hell will we put it in a livingroom-bedroom-and-bath? We’ll never be alone again. It’ll take all your time. They have to be washed and rocked and fed incessantly.”
I said: “Maybe it can sleep in the kitchenette, and I’ll let it spend long visits with my family, so you won’t get tired of it.”
“Oh, God,” he said, “they cry all the time, don’t they?”
“I don’t know. Pete, do I look very awful?”
“Of course not, and anyway I expect you’ll get over it.”
I went home to Boston for the baby to be born. I felt that whatever happened to me would be more easily endured if I did not see Pete looking miserable and trying hard to be helpful.
The baby was a boy. He had enormous dark blue eyes and a fuzz of light hair like Peter’s, and weighed eight and a half pounds. I was crazy about him; in intervals between feeling that I had neither energy nor interest for anything, and never would any more.
Pete came up to look at him, of course; but was so delighted that I was thin again, that he did not talk about the baby at all, except to say, “Call him Patrick, because your name’s Patricia; and because, by the time he grows up, Patrick will be such a rare name that it will be in good standing again.” So I did. I thought it was entertaining to have a baby called Patrick.
After I had stayed at home with Patrick for three months, I went alone to visit Pete for a week, to find an apartment where we could have the baby. The kitchenette solution did not seem adequate, now that he was born.
The baby died, the second day I was in New York.
When I went back to Peter, we were frantically hard-up. He had borrowed money to pay my hospital bill, for we had not wanted our families to know we could not pay that. He expected to get ten dollars more a week, and got only five.
We were not very happy. Sometimes, when he was tired, he grew exasperated because I cried so much about the baby, and I was always vaguely resentful that he did not seem to be sorry about the baby at all.
Things grew better, after a time. Our families, who had begun to realize that we were very poor, sent us checks for our birthdays, and those paid our debts. We moved to an apartment toward the western border of Greenwich village. It had a roof, where we sat, hot August nights, and talked again about places we would go and things we would do, fairly soon (but not so soon as it had seemed the year before).
A man across the street played Chopin gloriously. I used to sit with my head against Pete’s shoulder, listening; feeling tranquil.
One day: “Patty, we have to adjust the budget to include one pair of shoes for me. These split at the side and wore through a sole simultaneously.”
“It’s a major tragedy, Pete. I haven’t had the iceman and the laundryman placated at the same time for a month. How much do men’s shoes cost?”
“Darling, what I used to pay for mine, and what I can get a pair for now, are things altogether different.”
Next day: “I saw a pair for six dollars that don’t look too hellish. Can we hold out three dollars this week and three next, my child?” He was cutting out cardboard to put in the sole of the one that was worn through, and being very cheerful about it.
I felt altogether sad. Poor Peter. He had always been so well-if-casually dressed.
The new shoes became the event of those two weeks.
The night before the second pay day, he came home gaily. “Uncle Harrison wired me at the office, he’ll be at the Brevoort at seven, to take us to an enormous dinner, Pat. Hurry and dress. I wish it were tomorrow and I had the handsome shoes.” They had grown from “not too hellish” to “handsome” in a fortnight of anticipation.
I dressed. I had one or two things left over from my trousseau that were quite possible. But, “Pete, which do you prefer, a stocking with a large run down the inside, or a medium-sized one down the back?”
“My God, dearest, are all your stockings worn out?”
“Seem to be.”
We chose the pair with the run on the inside, and had a most beautiful meal with his uncle.
Next day, he came in looking rather self-conscious. I looked for the lovely shoes, but he was not wearing them. He was carrying a small package. “I bought you a present, Patty,” he said. He had bought me three pairs of stockings.
The next week he got a ten dollar increase in salary; and the month after that I answered an ad in the Times for a copy-writer, and lied about previous experience, and got it for forty dollars a week. At first Pete wrote my next day’s ads for me the night before, until I learned to do it myself.
We had, suddenly, money for a maid; and for Pete to stop for drinks on his way home; and for us both to go out to dinner every night; and money for gin for parties.
We lasted just a year after that.
Peter and I both drank well; that is to say, he did not get raucous and I did not get giggly; and neither of us was to be found at an evening’s end, pale and dizzy on the nearest bed; but that is not to say he did not hold more closely any girl with whom he danced on eight drinks than on three, or that I did not take pretty speeches from almost anyone with increasing interest in the same ratio.
We were still in love, and acutely jealous of each other; but we never admitted the jealousy: it was too outrageously old-fashioned. He encouraged me to go about to dinners and places to dance, places he could not afford, with the occasional old-friends-from-out-of-town who turned up; because he wanted me to have a nice time. And he acquired two or three slightly misunderstood pretty wives, who called him to make a fourth at bridge, or a second at tea. I thought all of that was pleasant for him.
But we were jealous. When I came upon him, once, kissing a pair of charming shoulders at a party, I said nothing but resented it. And, on a night that I was in a trivial automobile accident in New Jersey, and turned up, very rumpled, at five in the morning, he was the calm and amused modern husband in manner, but his eyes were raging.
There is a progression in things of that sort.
While I was at the shore for a week-end, Peter spent a night with one of the not quite happy wives. He told me. He and I were very definitely committed to the honesty policy. I made no scene about it—and I never felt about Peter, after, quite as I had before.
It would have seemed to me incredible that I should ever be unfaithful to him. But I was, two or three months after that episode.
Pete had gone to Philadelphia over Sunday. Rickey telephoned, asking if he could join us for the usual Saturday night drinking, dinner somewhere. I told him that Pete was away, and he said he would take me places and amuse me. That sort of thing had happened dozens of times before—a good many of them with Rickey.
He happened to be Pete’s very oldest friend. The same class at prep school, and so on. Rickey was an altogether charming person. He liked me; we danced well together; he usually kissed me once or twice in the course of an evening, and Pete knew it. I do not believe that Rickey had any more definite ambitions about me on this occasion than on any other.
We felt like slumming, and went to Harlem; but it was a warm evening and Harlem was crowded and sticky. So Rickey said: “Come down to my place, and I’ll make something cool to drink, and we’ll do a symphony on the phonograph. It’ll be calmer.”
There seemed to be no reason against this. It was fairly early, and I was not sleepy, anyway.
Rickey mixed gin fizzes, and we sat on his window seat admiring Washington Square for a while, and put on some records, and had some more fizzes. We talked about Galsworthy and Wells and Bennett, as I remember. I wandered into his bedroom to put on fresh lipstick; and he came in, and felt impelled to kiss me. I kissed him, too. I liked Rickey very much.
And then—whether it is put down to a summer night or physical attraction or fizzes is not very important—Rickey went caveman. At first, I was just startled. Then I was angry, and said: “Rickey, stop this instant.” The instant, specifically, was when he had stopped kissing my mouth and begun to kiss my throat.
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