Ex-wifePart 11
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Part 11
“There is progress, though, Lucia. Myself, I’ve progressed, in taste, from Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway.”
“How much progress is that?”
“A damn long distance on the road to bigger and broader vocabularies.”
Lucia laughed. “You see, you’re feeling better already, Pat. Did you know I was five years older than you?”
“I didn’t think it was as much as that.”
“Yes, I’m twenty-nine. Arch walked out on me when I was twenty-five. I tried to manage him too much; wanted to make a success of him, you know. And made scenes about other women. Usual story. As soon as he was successful enough to get a chance to manage his Chicago office, he went; and told me to comfort myself with my love for music, or something to that effect. I forget.
“I used to jump through hoops for him. Used to ache for his visits to New York. I haven’t seen him for a couple of years, and I’m glad. He still—there’s just a breath’s space of disturbance—about the first man you loved—”
She looked very placid, notwithstanding. I ached, but it helped to sit and listen to Lucia.
“By the time you’re twenty-nine,” she said, “you’re likely to have reached—the age of generalizing. I no longer think of myself as me, a terrifically important person. I think I’m an interesting example of the unattached woman-about-town. Victim of the new freedom—had it thrust on me willy-nilly. You belong to the same type. But you’re younger, and you mind more.”
“What’s going to become of us, Lucia?”
“Nothing. Whatever ‘becomes’ of anyone else? Get old, and grey haired, and fat or scrawny.”
She could not be as indifferent as all that. “What do you really think about ex-wives, Lucia?”
She grew animated.
“We are free. Applesauce! Free to pay our own rent, and buy our own clothes, and put up with the eccentricities of three to eight men who have authority over us in business, instead of having to please just one husband.
“We don’t have to be dominated any more. Twaddle! Grant that a woman married to a brute or a degenerate under the old system, was out of luck. How many of those were there, compared to the women married to average decent men with a sense of responsibility?
“If you and your Peter had been young fifty years ago, you wouldn’t have been unfaithful to him once; because you wouldn’t have had twenty opportunities for infidelity flung at you in a year; and, if he were unfaithful to you, he’d manage it discreetly, because he’d be socially ostracized if he didn’t. And he wouldn’t have told you to go your way, blithely; because there wouldn’t have been any way for you to go. The principal thing that relieving women from the dullness of domesticity did, was to relieve men from any necessity of offering stability in return for love, fidelity and so on.
“Women used to have status, a relative security. Now they have the status of any prostitute, success while their looks hold out. If the next generation of women have any sense, they’ll dynamite the statue of Susan B. Anthony, and start a crusade for the revival of chivalry.
“Freedom from men? Which of us is free who is emotionally absorbed in any man? The choices for women used to be: marriage, the convent, or the street. They’re just the same now. Marriage has the same name. Or you can have a career, letting it absorb all emotional energy (just like the convent). Or you can have an imitation masculine attitude toward sex, and a succession of meaningless affairs, promiscuity, (the street, that is) taking your pay in orchids and dinner dates instead of money left on the dresser.
“Women used to be happy if their men were good to them; and, when they grew old, if their children got along all right. They’re happy on the same basis now. They always followed their lovers with their dreams, to war or work, but were content enough at home if they were occupied and had a modicum of kisses. The abnormal ones, I suppose, had a rotten time of it, and so they yelled and pushed and tipped over the apple-cart for the rest of us in the end.” She stopped and lighted a cigarette.
“However, Lucia, here we are, with the sun of the new age shining on us; what are we going to do about it?”
“Pat, let’s have more coffee and some marmalade. Are you feeling calmer, child? Does the thought of women-in-general make you see Pete and yourself in proportion? I expect not. Give it a couple of years though.
“Ex-wives seem to be doing three things. Some go in for celibacy and business success—one necessitates the other almost always, you know, simply because there is a limit to the amount of vitality a woman has to expend, altogether. Most women can’t stand the pace of a career and a great love affair (or several in succession) managed simultaneously. The careerists will be all right, though, in a sense; they’ll save money for their old age and so on. But they won’t have children, so the problem ends with them. That is class one.”
“I don’t belong to that class, Lucia. I’m glad—I feel lucky—that I can sling words together, and hold a well-paid job, and get others on the side. But I don’t give a damn about it, except that it permits a more luxurious life than if I were a twenty-a-week clerk, somewhere.”
“At present, Pat, you’re in class two and, I think, on your way to class three, where I am. Class two says ‘Love is over, there remains . . . adventuring about.’ I’m judging from your before-breakfast-mood of planning to kiss so many people you forget what your husband was like. It will probably give you distance on him; and do you more good than harm, if you go through with that idea.”
“Of course, Lucia, there are the scruples that are left over from the way one was brought up.”
“Yes. But I think chastity, really, went out when birth control came in. If there is no ‘consequence’—it just isn’t important. People’s ideas—the things they say about affaires—begin to shift enormously, and their ideas are half a generation behind their conduct—their experiments.”
“The thought of going out and getting me fifty lovers doesn’t stir me much, though, Lucia. What’ll I have in the end? My memories, I suppose. Hell! Memory may have been some comfort to the Victorians, judging from their poetry; but I don’t seem to be able to work the miracle on it. To remember that Peter adored me in 1923, just leaves me absolutely cold in 1926. I’ll have to eat dinner with someone other than Pete tonight, no matter what he once said about for ever-and-ever.”
“I know. You’ll come to class three in the end. You’ll marry again.”
“Are you going to marry again, Lucia?”
“You bet, darling, in about another year. The imminence of my thirties makes me believe in the probability of my forties, and do I plan to be a worn-out, irritable female sitting around an advertising office shivering every time they hire a bright kid copy-writer just out of college, and being distressingly polite to an advertising manager ten years younger than myself? I do not.”
“Are you in love?”
The serene face looked suddenly wistful. “No. After Arch, no one was ever quite what I wanted. Oh, I experimented, had lovers, not many. Casual lovers, so much more interested in themselves than me, always. Casual lovers are like that. And they felt injured when I’d not live up to the promise of the colour of my hair (with you Pat, it would be the shape of your mouth) and it’s difficult to know what to say to them between kisses. I might have cared for someone, again, I suppose, if I had not been always waiting for Arch to come to town. That’s the sort of thing you shouldn’t do, but no doubt will.”
“Whom are you going to marry?”
“You can make raids on any of my men except Sam.”
“But he’s not good-looking . . . and isn’t he dull?”
“I thought that would surprise you. He has more substance (and I mean in character, as well as in banks) than anyone else we know. He’s stopped asking what it’s all about. He knows a few things that he wants out of the show. I’m one of them.”
“I don’t believe you’ll marry him.”
“Wait a year and see. Let’s go get manicures.”
After we had manicures, I went to my office, and did a full day’s work in an afternoon. I knew if I had a minute to think about Peter I would have hysterics over my typewriter; and hysterics, in department store advertising offices, are permitted only to a few, very successful women buyers. I was through at five, and wanted to telephone him. But what was there to say? “You might have taken me to breakfast, Peter?” There was not much sense to that. So I went upstairs to the beauty shop, and managed a facial before the store closed, instead.
Lucia was taking me along to a party given for a woman who had come back from Arabia, the world’s greatest authority on Arab love songs.
Lucia and I usually dressed together, downstairs in her room, so that we could talk. “Had a facial didn’t you, Pat? Looks grand. I did some wangling for you this afternoon; telephoned Ned to bring Charlie along for you. You can start your career of crime with the younger generation novelist, if you’re still going in for it. Are you?”
“I don’t know. I still feel outstandingly broken hearted, and I want to make Pete seem a long way off since I can’t have him close as I want.”
“The middle distance is neither this nor that. Like pink roses, isn’t it? Well, try Charlie. You’ll have a chance. He’s like that. . . . I’ll be interested in watching the fireworks, if you’ve really made up your mind to snatch a few opportunities. To date, you’ve just been sufficiently good-looking so that the men I’ve introduced to you haven’t minded—much—the fact that you’ve been inert as a sofa-cushion. I see you’ve brought down your bright red dress.”
I had not worn it yet—had bought it because the colour was heavenly. But it was, a bit obviously, a dress one wore to be stared at. Tight across the hips, and no back.
Lucia wore a bouffant gold thing that made her look like an angel, only more sophisticated.
Ned and Charlie turned up with a flask of cocktails already mixed. Ned was a publisher. He had never paid any attention to me before, but the red dress changed that. However, Lucia soon absorbed him. Charlie turned out to be a commonplace, medium-sized young blond, who would have looked better if he took up squash rackets. But he wore his consciousness of success like his very perfect dinner coat, a trifle flamboyantly.
“Another woman with exquisite hands,” he said, second or third sentence.
“Your shoulders—would make a man forget every disillusionment he’d ever had,” he said, fifth or sixth sentence.
Then we went to dinner at the Ritz. Lucia was taking care of Ned, in undertones, so I talked about Charlie’s books. Fortunately I had read them, but I read a great deal anyway. I said they were poignant, which seemed to please him. I had not tried to please anyone in a long time. This man was quite easy.
When we got to the party, we found the woman who knew all about Arab love lyrics, ten years too old to be decorative while she sang them, yet she would sing them.
I let Charlie take me upstairs to find drinks. He talked about women, and love, and snatching the unrepeatable golden moments as they came, else the champagne grew flat. That was the general tenor of it, anyway. I let him kiss me.
He was technically expert. One knows about things like that, from sophomore year at college on. He said he had not been so stirred in years. I knew that was probably what he always said next. But I was entertained.
In the dressing-room (Charlie and I were going taxi-riding in the Park, of course—“away from all these stupid people,” he said) I met Lucia, putting fresh lipstick on.
“Look here,” she said. “Do you want to do this? Charlie admits himself he’s one of the town’s great lovers, and he’s gone head over for the moment, but what is all that to you?”
“I don’t know that I want to. I don’t want not to.” I tried to think what I did want.
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