Ex-wifePart 18
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Part 18
The telephone rang. The millinery buyer wanted to know definitely, how much extra space she was getting Friday. I sent the fashion copy-writer down to persuade her to run her ad on Sunday. The typographer telephoned to tell me he had not got the “Times” cuts yet. The printer telephoned to tell me the paper the ambitious copy-writer had sent him from our other printer’s was the wrong stock.
The telephone rang. The shoe buyer wanted to know about extra space on Friday. I called in the layout man and told him to combine the spaces planned for millinery and shoes and give it all to shoes. The advertising manager’s secretary came in to tell me the millinery buyer was outside in a rage, because she could not have more space on Friday. The advertising manager telephoned that he was going out to lunch, and would be back at four, and to settle everything myself until then. The telephone rang. The “Times” was irate with me. The millinery buyer came in, weeping.
The telephone rang.
“Hello, Pat?” I did not recognize the voice. Mine was cool. I did not like men to call me at the office. The telephone rang too much anyway.
“Yes, this is she.”
“Many happy returns.”
(For what? Oh yes, it was my wedding anniversary. But who knew that?)
The millinery buyer sniffed.
“Who is it, please?”
A chuckle at the other end of the telephone.
“It’s Peter.”
I said, “Good God, I mean how marvellous.”
The millinery buyer sighed impatiently.
“Are you busy being the important young executive, Pat?”
“Yes—you talk.”
The millinery buyer began to drum her fingers on the desk. Oh, to hell with her. I could feel myself getting ecstatically pink.
“Something reminded me of to you today, Pat. Will you go to dinner with me tonight?”
“Yes, what time?”
“Seven?”
“I’ll be working late, Peter darling—could you meet me here? They’ll let you in at the side door if you ask for me.”
The millinery buyer walked out. Something would have to be done about her, swiftly, but not instantly.
“All right, I’ll do that, Pat. Seven o’clock.”
The desk and the window and the rug and the typewriter spun around gaily. I assumed a formal expression, and called the ambitious copy-writer. “Take care of things here, for ten minutes, will you please? I’m going down to the millinery department. And telephone the shoe buyer. Be very sweet to him and ask him to please come see me as soon as possible. Tell him I want to consult with him about giving him adequate representation on Sunday, instead of inadequate representation Friday.” The child beamed. She would be an assistant advertising manager yet, God help her. At my office door I collided with the layout man coming in with the Friday layout.
“Listen, Milt,” I said, “take out shoes and give all that space to millinery.”
“God damn,” he said, “I’ve made over this page four times. Millinery has to go at the top.”
“There, there,” I said walking past him.
I heard my telephone ring. The young copy-writer called me back. “It’s the ‘Times,’ very mad about the rotogravure ad. What shall I tell them?”
“Give ’em my love and tell them all will be well ultimately.”
I went to placate the millinery buyer.
That afternoon I charged myself a Chanel red velvet dress and a hat shaped like a Dutch cap, that matched it. I sent the young copy-writer for suède shoes (her feet were the same size as mine) and gloves and stockings and a handbag. (She had excellent “style sense”; she would have my job some day no doubt.) The child was very pleased, because she had to go to another store for the shoes and would have a chance to buy herself tea and cake en route. I bribed two girls in the beauty shop to stay after the store closed, to give me a facial and manicure and shampoo.
At five-thirty, I had a shower in the employees “recreation room,” and the shampoo, manicure and so on. At ten to seven, I was back in my silly private office, revising the child’s copy on “perennial youth.” (It had turned out much better than I had feared. The FIRM was fairly well pleased with it. I had only to incorporate such of their suggestions as they would remember having made.)
I finished the ad, and telephoned the typographer to send a boy for it. Then I went outside, into the long empty advertising department, and put on my hat, in front of a small cracked mirror. It was seven o’clock. I remembered that Pete was usually late. I lighted a cigarette, and went back to my own office, smoking it.
I was not particularly excited. If Peter wanted me back, and said so, something in me that was quite comfortably dead would resurrect and start singing paeans. If Peter did not want me back, and had just telephoned on an impulse, I would dine with him; and get up next morning and go on to breakfast and to work, and to whatever developed for the evening, just as on any other day. . . . If Peter wanted a divorce, I would go see Lucia’s lawyer. . . . If he did not, I would let things drift, and go right on living in the hope of a miracle. Why not? There was nothing else I wanted as much as that miracle. Perhaps that proved I was a fool. I did not care if it did. I had been over all that ground with myself so many times before. . . . There was nothing to be excited about, now.
It was five minutes past seven. I went again into the department and brought back with me the last month’s files of Pete’s paper. I could talk to him at dinner about some of his recent stories. Up to this instant, I had not read one of Pete’s stories since he had left me. I knew that it would trouble me to find phrases in them that I had heard him use. I knew, though, that he had covered the Doane electrocution. (Mrs. Doane was that young women who killed her sleeping husband with such cool-blooded deliberateness that the jury convicted her notwithstanding her ingénue face.)
I turned over the files, looking for his signatures. There were a good many of them. Pete was turning out to be a good newspaperman. Once, I had clipped every story he wrote, in the days when his stories were three paragraphs buried on an inside page. Recollection of that fact distressed me; gave me the flat feeling of I-used-to-be-much-younger-than-I-am.
I began to read his account of the electrocution, and could not tell whether it were good or bad. Remembrances of Pete kept getting between me and the sense of it.
A phrase toward the end did catch at me, though. It made me laugh. He said, describing the entrance of Mrs. Doane into the electrocution chamber, “She looked so very small.” I laughed, because Pete always said that, or something like it, about every woman who ever stirred him for a moment.
I heard the door at the end of the department outside open and close, softly.
And suddenly, I had the sense of something dreadful about to happen. I heard steps, the familiar tread of someone drunk, walking steadily by an effort, coming closer across that long dark room outside. The sound of footsteps stopped.
I looked up and smiled.
Peter leaned against my office door, smiling with his eyes. He was very drunk.
“’Lo, Pat, still working? Looked at a paper this morning and saw by the date it was our wedding anniversary. Brought you a present. You ’n’ I haven’t been on a long, hard-drinking evening in years, and it’s damn well time we went on one. Brought you a quart of Scotch.”
(While I remember the last six months that we lived together, I shall be afraid of Peter drunk. . . . Think fast, think fast. . . . Hell! that is just a line from “What Price Glory?”)
“Thanks for the Scotch, Pete. Bet you had a pint yourself, where you bought it.” (Think . . . where is Judith? Oh, manage him yourself; you have, before.)
“Pat, you’re looking lovely. You look frightened though. Don’t be frightened. I’m drunk, but I’ll behave. I just thought it would be nice if we went on a party . . . sort of friendly.”
“Grand idea, darling. There are two glasses in that lowest drawer. Let’s have some Scotch, straight.” (And if the night watchman comes in, and finds me drinking here, I shall lose my job. I do not care. I can get another.)
“Kiss me, Pat . . . because you married me once . . . and because you’re lovely-looking . . . that doesn’t make sense, does it? Kiss me because I’d like you to.”
We kissed. I had kissed a good many people since Peter. And so, no doubt, had he, since me. That did not mean anything. Neither did this, perhaps. “Peter, pour me a drink while I put my coat on.”
We had three drinks fast. “Down the hatch, Pat. I taught you to drink. Be a credit to me. Drink even, kid.”
(This Scotch is raw. I shall get horribly drunk, if I do not eat soon. I must keep my head. Oh, what does it matter, whether I keep my head or not.)
He talked about Mrs. Doane, dying. “She looked so small, Pat, and so blonde. When they wheeled her past us, after, one of her little hands swung out from under the blanket that covered her, as if she wanted to clutch at one more man before they buried her. God, Patty, it was brutal.”
(His friends have kept asking and asking him about that electrocution, and no doubt he has been posing as being hard-as-hell about it, and getting more and more jumpy. Pete is not hard at all, really. Or, at least, he was not hard, when I knew him first.)
“I brought you up right, Pat. We’ve killed a pint, even. Let’s eat.”
Some vague restaurant in the Forties. Highballs. He talked about newspapers, Judith, Hilda, London, myself and himself, and how poor we had been.
I did not care what he talked about. He disturbed me. No other man disturbed me much, or long. Pete made me think of things it was no use thinking of. Still, it was nicer to be dining with him, than with anyone else.
I had three highballs. (Thank Heaven for Scotch. Everything swims gorgeously, not real any more. Vistas in hell, but a well-anaesthetized hell.)
“Remember, Pat, when you bought a jar of French mushrooms for my dinner on my birthday. They cost a dollar and a quarter, and you dropped the glass jar on the way home. . . .”
“And when you came in I was crying, Peter, and you insisted on knowing why. I was crying because I didn’t have another dollar and a quarter, and nothing else in the house to eat but canned beans and a birthday cake.”
“We always had canned beans for dinner the night before pay day, didn’t we, Pat? But, that night we washed the glass out of the mushrooms and ate them. They tasted good.”
(I suppose we make twelve thousand a year between us, nowadays, and we lived for two years on something like forty dollars a week.)
He talked about going to hell gaudily, in the tropical tradition, via some Central American Revolution. “When I have been drinking five or six more years, Patty, I’ll get out. Buy me a sombrero with silver coins jangling, and a sash and two pistols, and end up merrily on mezcal. You’re the only woman I’d ask to come, Patty. But you wouldn’t. You haven’t the courage to be really disreputable, even. You have a flower face though, damn you. Flower face and hands and a two-for-a-nickel soul.”
He talked on.
Once I said to him, melodramatically, “I’ll be sitting right beside you, in whatever gutter you choose to die. I plan so to live that we may be reunited in hell for ever.” (Applesauce! Live alone and die alone, like as not. And nonchalantly, too. He taught me to be nonchalant. I may be grateful someday.)
He is getting pretty profane—be obscene in a minute. Influence of Judith. Oh, that is damn unfair. He used to do it, in the Hilda era, to shock me. Try and shock me now. He is as unhappy as I am. Curious.
If I can start him off on poetry . . . try “Shropshire Lad” . . . that’s sure-fire.
“Pete, how do the verses go that begin, ‘When I was one-and-twenty—’”
“‘When I was one-and-twenty—I heard a wise man say—give crowns and pounds and guineas, but not your heart away.’” . . .
There, he will go right straight through. How I am drunk.
“Pete, let’s go taxi-riding.”
“All right. Where’s the check?”
“Taxi, go up the Drive to Grant’s Tomb and back.”
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