Ex-wifePart 13
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Part 13
Well this was the last flight of stairs. I stepped through the hem of my dress, and got my foot out again, somehow, and stumbled against Lucia’s door. It opened, so I went in. Lucia was lying down reading. She sat up and began to laugh.
“Patricia, my darling, what an edge!”
“Celebrating . . . celebrating being twenty-five years old. Sit down and tell you about it.”
“Do you want some hangover medicine?”
“No. Want to talk.”
“All right. How does it feel to be twenty-five? I forget.”
“You got over it, I expect I’ll get over it, give me time. Got over being twenty. Lucia, I’ll be thirty-five, like as not, some day.”
“Then you can settle down in life and let your hips grow.”
“I can’t eat as much now I’m twenty-five as I did when I was twenty. I used to call chicken patties, and chocolate layer cake lunch. Now I have an endive salad; I guess that’s the biggest difference.”
“What else is there, Pat?”
“I’m just as good-looking and I’m thinner and I certainly wear my clothes better. Used to wear floppy hats with flowers on them and Pete’d tell me I was dewy. Used to be a dewy girl but now, by gosh, I don’t. Is that funny, Lucia, or am I drunk?”
“Both,” said Lucia, politely. “Go on.”
“Oh yes, when I was twenty I planned to have a Great Romance. Well, did I not? And marry it?”
“Talk about something else, Pat. What presents did you get?”
“Men used to bring me violets and now they bring me Scotch. Liquor isn’t a gift to a woman, it’s just an investment in her. One’s Great Romance—”
“Oh dear,” said Lucia. “Well if you must, you must. What about it?”
“One’s Great Romance . . . Passion, Memory, Dust . . . Lucia, I have a literary edge. . . . That’s Galsworthy. Isn’t it funny how tired my Great Romance got of me? If I’d known as much at twenty as I do at twenty-five, maybe I could have kept it, do you think? . . . Never have another Romance like it, him, Peter . . .”
“That’s the everlasting mercy of the Lord, I expect,” said Lucia.
“Yes, another Great Romance would be the death of me. One gets the same feeling, or near enough, on four Manhattans if they’re good; and that failing, one can see what five will do. The hangover from Manhattan’s shorter’n that from Romances . . .”
“Tell me more about the Manhattans,” said Lucia.
“Manhattans, they’re good. They’ll never turn you into lady-entering-room-preceded-by-diaphram, either, if you don’t mix ’em with bread and pastries. The way to look at one’s Great Romance is . . .”
“Oh Lord,” said Lucia.
“It’s very grand to get it over young. And no one’s got tired of me since. I get tired first. Once or twice it’s been just about one date first, but that’s adequate isn’t it, Lucia?”
“Entirely adequate, dear.”
“The air is one of those things that it’s more blessed to give than to receive. Also the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away—smaller and less troubling Romances. Lucia, it’s a Biblical edge I’ve got.”
“Fine. What do you want, now you’re twenty-five?”
“I don’t know. But then I never did know what I wanted, except Peter, and that was very little help to me wasn’t it? I guess I want to make eight thousand dollars next year and buy a couple of bonds for my old age.”
“You’ll buy three fur coats, a darn sight more likely, Pat.”
“Maybe. Anyway I shan’t make eight thousand—too lazy to get that much freelancing. Make about six and spend about seven. Oh I forgot. When I was twenty I wanted to write, and now I do fashion copy.”
“Did you accomplish everything else you set out to do in life just like that, Pat?”
“Hell, no, but I’m a Futilitarian, so it doesn’t matter. I am futile, you are futile, we are futile, they are more futile. But we two have a nice time at it. We don’t get so bored that we have to talk about sex.”
“Don’t you start talking about sex now.”
“Of course not, why talk about it, better put up with it in a cheerful way.”
“Like a brave little woman,” said Lucia.
“I feel horribly dizzy, Lucia. Listen, do you suppose I’m going on all my life, waiting for Peter, when I’m twenty-five and thirty-five and forty—Lucia. It’s so long—”
“There, darling. Think of something else quick. Look at the newspaper. Here’s a Graphic. See the pretty picture of the oldest divorcée in New York State. (I bet it’s a composite photograph. They probably used her grand-daughter’s legs in it). There. See, you have lots of time. You may summon enthusiasm about being a divorcée yet.”
“Isn’t she old, Lucia. Poor thing, do you suppose she was ever bunned in her life? Lucia, think of the old women who were never bunned, poor dears. . . .”
“Think of all the middle-aged females who never were—all the feminists, Pat.”
“How few, Lucia, how melancholily few, ever knew that beautiful swinging-of-the-spheres sensation, toward the end of a hard-drinking evening . . . when one could pass out, or laugh rather noisily about divers absurdities that occur to one . . . but does neither, just breathes very evenly, and goes on talking in a low voice about the sources of anti-Klu-KIux feeling in the South, or some-such subject . . . and feels on the edge of knowing what one really thinks about everything. How few, how sadly few. . . . Oh, Lucia, the new freedom for women came just too late to save the old saloon.”
IX
October’s the pleasantest month of the year, in New York. Cool days succeed one another crescendo, like states of mind in convalescence after fever. The air is so clear that edges of tall buildings are etched against the sky, sharp and clean as lines in Chinese paintings.
On sunny days the warmth of furs and Winter tweeds is just outrageous luxury, and Fifth Avenue’s a fragrance blended of furs and tweeds and boutonnières and new leather gloves and French perfume—and the underlying scent of gasoline belongs there definitely as the smokiness in Scotch.
Evenings sparkle with a feeling of things-about-to-happen-fast-again, many theatres opening, everyone giving parties to people back from Paris with gay or ridiculous stories about everyone else who was there.
One may live October through, and never see scarlet-stained Autumn leaves, except as centrepieces on tea-room tables. Yet the fires small boys build in obscure streets at dusk—fires of three barrel staves and a soap-box—have somehow a pungency that’s reminiscent of heaped Autumn leaves burning on well-kept suburban lawns.
I went to a gymnasium most afternoons between half-past five and dinner time, because exercise kept me clear-headed writing copy in the daytime, and fresher-looking through the evening. The gymnasium had a running track on the roof. Going ’round and ’round it, regarding the view of upper Broadway electric light signs, or thinking that the person who invented the sweat shirt had no sense of design, or just counting off twenty laps to the mile, and debating detachedly whether to be energetic and run three miles, or lazy and stop at two, I felt very contented. Thump, thump, thump, around a board track. It was a simple occupation, but an absorbing one.
That feeling of running, of having been running endlessly, so that I was breathless, yet must go on running for ever, seemed to sum up my life. Running, through days of posing as an efficient young business woman, through nights of posing as a sophisticated young woman about town. Running from the memory of Peter, toward something or nothing, it did not matter which.
“You’re a success,” said Lucia, one day. “Three times out of five, when the telephone rings now, it’s for you. Ex-wife Grade A, you turned out to be.”
Ex-wife Grade A, I was. Sex-appeal, dresses well, looks young, dances lightly, can make wisecracks, and is self-supporting. Lets a man talk. Does not gold-dig, except for another round of liqueurs after dinner. Never passes out or gets raucous, or gets sick. Not susceptible to the “I want you, I want you, I want you” attitude, but likely to succumb to “pity me, my life is lonely”—once with any man.
Three men came to be fixtures among the transients.
The first was Nathaniel.
At a large and stupid tea, given by a woman in the agency for which Lucia wrote copy, I noticed a tall young man wandering about looking as if he wished himself elsewhere. I wished I were elsewhere too. The room was crowded and hot, and everyone was talking advertising shop-talk. Eventually someone presented the tall young man, and I recognized his last name as one seen frequently on signs on skyscrapers in process of construction.
“You don’t have to talk,” he said. “You look like a Drian drawing.”
That was so nice of him that I tried to talk as amusingly as possible. But he continued to look as if he wished he were somewhere else, so eventually I asked him what he was doing at the tea.
He explained that his father was a client of the agency, asked me how I got there, and I explained that I was a friend of Lucia’s, who was a friend of the hostess’s.
“Lucia,” he said, “is gorgeous but decadent looking. She hasn’t your obvious wholesomeness.”
“Wholesomeness” was a term that had not been used frequently in connexion with me, of late. It left me somewhat startled actually, but pleased.
“Let’s go take a cab,” he said, “and drive right around the city. I hate hot smoky rooms.”
Because he was such a nice scrubbed-looking young man, and also because I had nothing to do until eight o’clock anyway, I went.
By “around” the city, he had meant literally that.—West Street by the docks to the Battery, and up the far East Side, where bits of the river showed at the street ends.
I thought he himself was about the most “wholesome” looking person I had seen in months. He had brown hair that would have curled untidily, if it were not so close-clipped, wide-set gay grey eyes, a curious sensitive mouth, a good chin, a beautiful vaguely striped suit, and a necktie I did not like. It looked a little consciously vagabondish. To offset that, he had enormous, well-shaped muscular hands.
He was fun. He talked about the shapes and colours and flavours of things. I knew in half an hour that he had a passion for beauty beyond anyone I had ever met—an impersonal sort of passion for line and form and tone. He talked about the curved hulls of ships, I remember, with a warmth I had heard in other men’s voices when, over wine, they remembered some woman whom they had loved very much.
I had decided that this Nathaniel person was altogether engaging, when suddenly he took off his hat, bent down, kissed the corner of my mouth, let me go instantly, and without drawing breath, announced, “You kiss very badly. I shan’t kiss you again.”
I laughed and laughed and laughed. He grew embarrassed; he blushed beautifully; I kept on laughing. When I could breathe I said, “Do you always make that speech?”
“Tell you sometime,” he said. “There’s a marvellous show of modern French painters at the Dudensing gallery. Could you leave your office a bit early tomorrow and see it?”
“Love to,” I said.
Months later he told me about the speech in the cab.
The day before he met me, his roommate at college had been jeering him about his lack of “line” with women, and had recommended kissing them within the first hour of meeting, telling them they kissed atrociously, and watching them prove how wrong that statement was. Nat said he had felt the speech might also serve to indicate that he was enormously sophisticated, and then he could go on taking women to art-galleries and Russian restaurants, without bothering further about personalities.
However, since I did not react as he had expected, he dropped the line from his repertoire.
By the time he finally explained “how badly you kiss,” I knew a great many other things about him. He was the only surviving son of a man who had gone from small-job contracting to skyscraper building, and from an Allen Street tenement to a residence in the East ’Sixties, in the course of twenty-five years or so.
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