Ex-wifePart 12
Página 1 de 9
Part 12
“Lucia, I’d like to be harder, inside. To try to take all this sort of thing as men are supposed to take it, for the adventure, for the moment’s gaiety—perhaps for warmth and friendliness and anaesthesia against—against feeling so alone. I know I shan’t be sobbing about Charlie tomorrow morning. He won’t matter enough. Damn it if I cry over this fresh make-up—
“Lucia, it might be fun . . .”
“All right. Don’t cry. Sit still a minute; you may as well make him wait a bit. Better take my wrap, it’s warmer than yours, and the gold’s good with your dress. And this is my last protest; I act like a maiden aunt about you anyway . . . Pat, can you dash off with this spoiled young novelist, remembering that you spent last night with Peter?”
“Yes, because if this Charlie person can make me feel last night was a month ago, or even a week, I’ll—I’ll send him gardenias.”
“Finish your cigarette and run along. And if you can really adopt the alleged masculine attitude toward sex, you’ve got all of New York to console you for Peter. New York on a short term lease, while you have the looks and the clothes for it. I’m betting you can’t though. Not many women can.”
Charlie was pacing up and down drinking a highball in enormous gulps. We went riding in the Park. I recognized a couple of things he had used in his books, among what he said, but he was pleasantly flattering, and not so conceited but that he implied gratitude, even surprise, for my manner of acquiescence.
We went to my apartment. He was unhurried. He said, “Strange little flower-face with a Mona Lisa mouth.” I wanted him to kiss me, and stop talking. He did not know it, but he might be going to do me some good. I kept remembering Peter walking up and down, the night before, and I wanted that ghost exorcised fast.
Finally Charlie did kiss me.
He left when it was growing light. I slept.
In the morning Lucia and I breakfasted together hurriedly. She asked no questions at all, but talked about going to the circus that night, with two men from the “Tribune,” “unless your new boyfriend is taking you places, Patricia.”
“He’s going out of town this afternoon, Lucia. I wouldn’t have been so reckless yesterday, if I hadn’t known that.”
“How my protegée grows up,” Lucia said.
We walked down the Avenue a little way together, laughing at things, in the Spring sunshine. Then I went on alone. I was neither happy nor unhappy. Peter seemed a fairly comfortably long time ago. I thought how to write the After-Easter-Sale-of-Millinery ad.
VII
When Charlie came back to New York, I said that I was extremely busy, the three times he telephoned.
After that, when we met occasionally at parties, we smiled at each other in passing on to territory not already explored. Several successors to Charlie went the same way, during weeks that slipped past as swiftly paced as moods.
Moods—of anguish about Peter, that lessened, and was bitterest in its lessening, for hope about Peter lessened with it—of fatigue, when the effort to work, to dress, to think of things to say to people was just less than the effort necessary to face an evening or a day alone. Gay moods, when New York was glamorous from the jungle sweat of Harlem dance halls to the cool lights on boats beyond the Battery, glimpsed as one drove through empty echoing downtown streets at dawn. Moods of tranquillity, when a sense of unreality slipped between myself and any aching, and the people and happenings of crowded days were people and happenings of an unimportant dream, and my whole life with Peter was a dream fading, growing remote as the remembrance of sunsets over snowy marshes, watched through a window, when I was a child.
There were men. When, as occasionally, their desire was sufficient to break through the defence of my indifference, I was neither glad, nor very sorry. Hoping sometime to wake and find I had slept beside a lover and a friend, I slept to wake beside a stranger exigent, triumphant, or exasperated, or perhaps as bored and as polite as I.
Spring passed, and I wrote ads about clothes to take vacationing; and bought a few of them; and went for a fortnight with Lucia to Maine—two weeks spent swimming and sleeping, and feeling healthy, comfortable enough lying on sand in the sun, without thinking.
Midsummer heat enclosed New York like a fog. In printed silk frocks that, damp and mussed and dusty, I flung into a hamper to go to the cleaner’s at each day’s end, I wrote ads about Apparel for the Beaches, and the August Sale of Furs. In flowered chiffons and pastel-coloured slippers, Lucia and I danced on hotel roofs, or drove out to dine at Long Island roadhouses.
One day, when a sketch of a diving figure, drawn for me by an artist to illustrate an ad of men’s bathing suits, made me remember, suddenly, vividly, a day two summers past, when I sat on the edge of a raft swinging my legs and watching Pete do swan dives, I telephoned him.
“Oh, hello, Pat. Anything special on your mind?”
“I thought you might think of somewhere cool, and take me there to dinner.”
“There isn’t anywhere cool. I’m pretty busy this week. Suppose I call you Monday or Tuesday?”
“All right. That will be nice.”
He did not call.
One night at the Bossert roof overlooking the harbour, Lucia and I saw Pete and Judith dancing. We were not dancing, we were with Sam and another somewhat fat banker, a friend of his. We were both very tired, and not in form, and just said bright things to entertain the bankers, intermittently, sipping cool drinks and letting them talk about who would float loans to meet German reparation payments, most of the time.
Lucia noticed Judith first, and asked me if that was Peter, with her. I said “yes” and felt, for an instant, sick with jealousy of Judith looking gay, dancing gracefully if amorously; and then that passed and I did not look at them any more, just bowed as we walked by their table when we were leaving, and thought that Peter was looking rather white and tired.
The next week I met Judith in front of the Library at noontime. It was a fairly cool day, and I was celebrating by wearing a silver fox that was my most recent and best-beloved extravagance. Of course I had bought it wholesale, but I would be paying for it for three months more, at that. My first feeling, on seeing Judith, was just relief that I had worn the gorgeous scarf, because I could not bear to meet her in anything but the best-looking clothes I owned. Judith did wear clothes well. And I considered what else I had on, and compared it as to chic with Judith’s clothes (it was all right, both had dresses of imported prints, but mine was a copy of a recent Vionnet, and hers of an early Spring Chanel—my wide black Milan hat was as fine a straw as hers, and we came out even on slippers—they were the same model as a matter of fact) before I realized that it was all quite funny.
“Hello,” she said, “where are you going?”
“Luncheon,” I said, “are you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Will you lunch with me?”
“Love to,” I said.
We went to the Vanity Fair tea-room on Fortieth Street.
She took off her hat, as soon as she sat down, saying she was hot. I noticed there was a light over her head, and remembered what Lucia said about Judith never losing an opportunity to let light shine across her auburn hair.
Then I knew that I was being stupid. She was smartly dressed, just as smartly as I. She was not as pretty as I, but for all I knew she might be cleverer, and have a better disposition, and so on. Yet because she stood in my way with Peter, I could not think about her, estimate her, calmly—judge her fairly.
I gave up struggling to be civilized about her, and ordered some fruit salad, and wondered whether she felt about me as I did about her, or whether, because I was Peter’s past and she was Peter’s present, she could be detached and contemplate me as just a sort of relic.
We talked about how hot it had been and what clothes for Autumn would be like, and where we had spent our vacations. She mentioned Peter first, when we had reached the iced coffee and sherbet stage.
To be precise, she did not mention him. She implied him.
“I suppose you’ll be getting your divorce this Fall, Patricia?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m in no hurry.”
She hesitated. I did not help her out. So she generalized. “Not much sense hanging on when a man’s through.”
I thought for a second. She did not know me well enough to be personal. I could shift the subject and she could not go back to it. But, if I let her go on, I might find out how things were going with Peter and her. I did not know what good that would do me, if any, to be sure. Still— I sipped my iced coffee. Then I said:
“How do you know Pete’s through, Judith?”
“You’ve been separated nearly six months, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know Pete’s taking an apartment, September first?”
“All by himself, Judith?”
“He and I are taking adjoining apartments in a house on East Tenth Street.”
She had courage, or she was desperate, which?
“How very nice for you both.”
She tried again. “Patricia, I’m not trying to be catty. I mean, I thought you and I might both be better off if we talked this out.”
“What? Where you live? That’s your affair, Judith.”
“You know perfectly well that Pete and I are in love with each other.”
“I know nothing of the sort, Judith.”
But why should I be unduly disagreeable? She was making something in me hurt, about Peter, as it had not hurt in months. But she might not know that. And she was being candid, to a degree. Candid about herself, and optimistic about Peter, probably. Well—I was optimistic about Peter myself, with less reason, nowadays, than she had.
“Are you asking me to get out of your way, Judith?”
“Yes.”
“Why should I?”
“Why not? Pete will never go back to you, anyway.”
“I’m not so sure of that.”
Her expression was suddenly anxious.
And I was sorry for her, and myself, simultaneously. She was playing her hand, I was playing mine; what was the difference?
“Listen, Judith, I’m still crazy about Pete, myself.”
“Oh. I thought you were getting over it. You go about a lot.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.
“Judith, Pete hasn’t asked you to marry him, you just think he might, if he had a divorce.”
“All right. Put it that way.”
We were talking round and round the thing, and I was feeling worse every minute. Better finish it.
“I don’t know any more, why I want Pete back. But I do. I’ll divorce him, if and when he asks me to—we’ve had that arrangement for months. Until then, I’ll play for time.”
“That’s that, then.”
She picked up her gloves. I felt a little apologetic, somewhat as if I had bumped into someone going through a door.
“Sorry, Judith. But after all I didn’t cut in on you, you cut in on me.”
“Not on you, on Hilda.”
That was casuistry, but maybe she believed it, so I let it go.
We walked down the Avenue together, talking about clothes again, and I left her at the door of Franklin Simon’s. It occurred to me afterward that it was a curious conversation.
It seemed matter-of-fact enough at the time.
VIII
It was Saturday and September and half-past seven at night, and my birthday. I remembered all that. It was easier to remember that, than to think which way the stairs curved.
Kenneth had given a cocktail party for me. I had come home on a bus to get some air. Now I had to dress for late dinner with Bill. It was just a pause in the day’s hard drinking. Before I dressed, I was going in to tell Lucia what it felt like to be me. Lucia could not go to the cocktail party. She had to see Sam off somewhere. Sam was getting pretty incessant. Too bad. Lucia should marry someone who looked more like Apollo than Sam. But she had once. Arch looked something like Apollo. Lots of other women besides Lucia had thought so too, from all accounts.
Comentários (0)