Ex-wifePart 19
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Part 19
He put his arm around me. I clung to him. It did not mean anything, but it was friendly. The taxi was cold. . . . Animals huddled together for warmth.
“It’s snowing, Pat.”
“That’s nice.”
“Listen, Peter. Do you want to marry Judith?”
“Hell, no. I don’t want to marry anybody. You cured me of that. How do you feel—very dizzy?”
“No, getting soberer now, the air’s grand.”
“You drink well, Pat, for a girl . . . I drink pretty well.” He laughed. “It’s a good thing that child of ours died, he’d have turned out just the prize drunk of his generation, probably.”
“Go to hell will you, Peter.”
“Sorry . . . I’ll talk about something else. Do you honestly still give a damn about that baby?”
“And I still give a damn about you. . . . I’m that kind of fool. Will you light me a cigarette?” His face, when the match flared up, looked hard. It was not much like the face of a boy I had known. . . .
“I suppose you consider me ‘the man who spoiled your life,’ Patricia.”
I thought about that. “Everyone spoils his own life, given time, probably.”
“Well, what you did to mine, little girl, was plenty. You taught me a lot though.”
“No doubt. Haven’t you heard any good stories lately, Peter? You aren’t being outstandingly entertaining.”
“You are a very beautiful young woman, Patricia. Is that better? Do I get a kiss for it?”
“Why not?” It means nothing; but, for its duration, I may pretend it means whatever I wish.
“Pat, Judith’s away. She has the apartment next to mine, you know. Would you like to come down and see my place?”
“Very much.”
He had written me a note, when he rented the apartment; and I had sent a letter to the storage people, to permit him to take out such furniture as he chose.
He kissed me again. Well, he was my husband, and it was very respectable to kiss one’s husband. I laughed and told him that. He thought it was amusing, too.
His apartment had etchings we had bought together in France, and curtains and a new rug that represented Judith’s taste, not mine.
We talked about the etchings. I took off my hat and coat, and he said my red dress was a gorgeous shade. He brought me a glass of cognac. It was good, much better than the Scotch had been.
He said, “You never were, Pat. I invented you.”
I said, “What does that mean?”
“That I shouldn’t damn you as much as I do.”
I said, “I suppose I am as responsible for the sort of person you are, nowadays, as you are responsible for the sort I am. I never thought of that before. There just are no villains in the piece.”
“Patty growing philosophical. Don’t. I’d rather you kissed me than talked.”
“As you wish.” He was right. It was better to kiss him than to try to talk to him. It might mean something to kiss him. How could I tell?
It was pleasant, too, to go to sleep with my arm slipped through his arm. It meant as much as anything else did, certainly.
His voice waked me. “Pat, do you plan to stay all night? It really isn’t very comfortable, for two.”
I wished that I had never married him, never kissed him, never met him, never heard of him. Also, that I had a revolver and could shoot him.
He said, “If you like, I’ll dress and take you home.”
I said, “Thank you, I should hate to put you to such great inconvenience.” I took my clothes, and went into his bath to dress, and stopped to take a shower.
Standing under it, it occurred to me that I should write ads for plumbers, because I seemed to take a shower at every crisis of my life. Or a bath.
Dressed, I went back to get my coat. He was sitting up in bed, smoking.
“Peter, tell me, just to placate my curiosity, why do you do things like this to me? I don’t believe you handle your other women by the same system . . . I hear too often that you are successful.”
“Oh hell, must we go into that, Pat?”
“I’ll simplify the question. Do you love me, or do you hate me?”
“That’s no simplification, and you know it.”
Both our voices were indifferent.
“Well, Patricia, if it will do you any good to know—before I kiss you I think of you as you used to be, and after I’ve kissed you I wonder how many men you’ve slept with by now.”
“The other women you know aren’t exactly without pasts.”
“It doesn’t matter about them. You are handicapped by dating back to the time when I was so full of ideals about the faith and constancy of women that I had no room for any sense about them.
“Yet, still, Patricia, you remain . . . a little different from the others. . . . You’d better get out. I must be tight, still, or I wouldn’t talk so much.”
I put on my coat and picked up my gloves. I felt that this really was the end for Peter and me. Yet I knew that I had felt that before, and it had not been so. I put on lipstick, carefully.
“Peter, will you kiss me ‘good-bye,’ as if it were the year 1922?” (Damn it, why did I ask that? He’ll present me a cheque for it as ghastly sentimentality. It was . . . but I am pretty sure that this is all, for me and Peter, and I wanted to end with a friendly gesture.)
He put out his cigarette, and lighted another. “You are a young woman whom it’s not easy to satisfy, Patricia.”
I detested him. Well, I could make him wince, too. “Why, Peter, my lovers are always complaining that I am frigid.”
“Get to hell out of here, will you,” he said.
I went out, without turning at the door to look at him. It was snowing hard. I said to myself, “Here am I flung out into the traditional snowstorm, isn’t that ridiculous?” And began to laugh. I came to Sixth Avenue, and must have turned south, instead of north, because I came to the door of “Dave’s Blue Room” which was a large all-night restaurant. I had been there often for sandwiches, and I knew that it was further south than the street where Peter lived. When I got to the door, I felt that I could not walk any farther. I thought some black coffee might be good for me. So I went in.
Bill was sitting with three other men of his own age, eating scrambled eggs and bacon. I supposed that they had been playing bridge somewhere.
He got up when I came in. “Come here and sit down, Patricia. What are you doing wandering about alone at three o’clock?”
He introduced the three men. They regarded me a little strangely, and I knew that I probably looked awful. I had not noticed, in Pete’s mirror.
Better make some explanation. In a minute, when I could manage my voice.
“I am so glad that you happened to be here, Bill. I felt unpleasantly conspicuous, coming in alone, but I did want some coffee. I’ve been having a rather distressing evening, as it happens.”
Bill ordered coffee, and recommended the scrambled eggs. I let him order them, too.
“You see, I’ve been arranging with my husband, the details of our divorce, and that sort of thing is always trying, I suppose.”
The four old men were immediately sympathetic, sufficiently so to change the subject. They said kind jovial things to the effect that it was delightful to have a young and pretty woman walk in upon their boredom.
I knew after a minute, and a sip of coffee, that I was not going to faint. But I could not do anything about the scrambled eggs. Bill took my hand, and held it hard, under the tablecloth. Well, he had known a great deal concerning women in his time.
Bill took me home, and left me at the door, after suggesting that we see three musical shows the next week.
I walked upstairs, thinking that Bill was a very nice man.
Outside her door, I decided to wake Lucia, and tell her that I was going to get a divorce. She would be sufficiently interested so that she would not mind being waked.
“Lucia, I’m going to get a divorce from Peter.”
“I’m glad, Pat. I’ll take you to my lawyer tomorrow at lunch time.” I sat on her little couch. I was too tired to go upstairs.
“Talk if you want to, Pat.”
“All right. I held on because I couldn’t let go. Now I’m letting go because I can’t hold on any more.”
“You’d better sleep down here, Pat. Sit in a chair, while I fix up the couch.”
“What is it like to get a divorce, Lucia?”
“Like having a tooth out. A wrench, and you feel better the day afterward.”
“My Great Romance threw me out into a snowstorm, Lucia, so I decided he’d had enough of me.”
“Patricia, darling, pull yourself together. Think about tomorrow being another day; or if that’s no good, remember that nothing ever in your whole life will hurt you very much, after this.”
“Is that true, Lucia, or are you being kind to me?”
She laughed, and put a cushion behind my head, and told me to take off my shoes, because they were soaked through from walking in the snow.
“This is true, Pat. It is unlikely that any other man will ‘desert’ you . . . any man you want to hold. Because, when first you suspect he’s ready to go, you’ll pack his baggage and buy him a one-way ticket anywhere he likes, so fast that he’ll leave reluctantly. You’ll never hold on again. It’s the holding on that hurts. Difference between sudden or long-prolonged dying. Do you think you could sleep now, if you went to bed? It’s four o’clock.”
“I think so.”
Next morning Lucia brought me my breakfast in bed, and was very entertaining about the virtues of Sam. That noon we went to see her lawyer.
XII
Sam gave Lucia an Orthophonic Phonograph for a birthday present. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was almost the only record we ever played on it. We turned that on, about once an hour when we were at home.
“The tune matches New York,” Lucia said. “The New York we know. It has gaiety and colour and irrelevancy and futility and glamour as beautifully blended as the ingredients in Crêpes Suzette.”
I said, “It makes me think of skyscrapers and Harlem and liners sailing and newsboys calling extras.”
“It makes me think I’m twenty years old and on the way to owning the city,” Lucia said. “Start it over again, will you?”
[Illustration]
Seven in the morning.
Lucia was calling from downstairs. “Pat, did you have a good time last night? I brought some food in; come down and have grapefruit and eggs with me; I have something exciting to tell you.”
“All right, but it’s so very early, Lucia.”
I got up. My mouth tasted of too many cigarettes the night before. But after a few minutes (and the calisthenics and a shower) I felt all silkily smooth and fresh. There was a gay February sunrise outside.
I put on a dull green jersey dress and beige stockings and brown alligator shoes; and put my money and make-up and a green handkerchief, in my alligator purse; and fitted a beige hat down over my right eye and up over my left. I tied a beige and green scarf around my throat, and got out fresh chamois gloves, and carried them downstairs with my green coat and my purse.
Lucia was looking very beautiful in the same sort of clothes. “Your grapefruit is over on the mantelpiece,” she said. “There wasn’t room for it on the coffee table. Eat it while I finish the eggs.”
“Why did you get me up an hour early, darling?” I said.
“I woke up early and felt conversational.”
“That isn’t why,” I yawned.
“All right, look at this,” she said. She had on a gorgeous new emerald ring.
“Oh, Lord,” I said. “You are going to marry Sam!”
We both laughed. “And I was expecting felicitations, Pat.”
I felt somewhat apologetic, and said that Sam was a grand person.
“You mean,” said Lucia, “that he is forty-five and not svelte by fifty pounds. I’m glad of both those facts. I’ll be the Last Woman in his life, with any luck at all. If I were a prize fighter, I’d want to have a chance at the main bout of the evening, sometime—not spend my whole career getting knocked around in the preliminaries. Besides, did you ever hear of the fifteen gold pieces? It’s a philosophy.”
“Tell me.”
“Every attractive woman has fifteen gold pieces to spend, one for each year between the time she is twenty and the time she is thirty-five. She may squander the first ten or twelve if she likes, but she damn well should invest the rest of them in something safe for her middle age.”
“Who told you about the gold pieces?”
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