Ex-wifePart 3
Página 1 de 9
Part 3
He stopped, and stood for a minute with his arm around my shoulders. I looked up at him—he was about a foot taller than I—a pleasant brown-haired young man.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t have such a tragic face, Rickey de-ah. I don’t feel complimented by making anyone look like that.” He laughed then, and kissed me again; and in a moment, it was all to do over.
But in that moment I had lost the wish to do much about it. Curiosity? Desire? The feeling that Pete experimented and why should not I? The thought that it would be an adventure? I cannot remember now. So many things have intervened.
I woke at six. Rickey, sleeping, looked very peaceful. From whatever angle I regarded that personable head, I could not make it look much like a villain’s.
I thought about Peter, and I thought I was going to be sick. So I got up very quietly, and took a shower, and dressed. Rickey was still asleep. I left him a note. I remember it.
It read: “Rickey: I’m not having hysterics, but I know I could not think of anything to say at breakfast. Call us up soon.”
As soon as I got home I did have hysterics. All the ghosts of my ancestors who had been good women sat about and damned me. Then I considered the Peter problem. I had more hysterics. I was very hungry, so I went to Alice McCollister’s Coffee Shop and had a large breakfast.
Peter was to get home at six in the evening. It was about four when I discovered that I was afraid to tell him—that to confront a theoretically modern young husband with the actual fact of his wife’s infidelity was just beyond me.
So, what I did about Peter was to bathe again. Then I made up my face carefully, and greeted him with tea and muffins instead of a confession. We dined out, and met Rickey by accident; and he and Pete had one of their when-we-played-on-the-same-team reminiscent evenings. I listened and thought that life was not very simple. It was probably the first time that had ever occurred to me.
Also, I realized, that if I did tell Peter, I could not tell him that it was Rickey. The wife-and-the-best-friend pattern was so particularly dreadful. Besides, Peter might feel that the man who had led his wife astray should be beaten, in the conventional manner; and he probably could not beat Rickey, who was so much bigger. That would just add to Pete’s humiliation.
I know it all sounds absurd—as if I thought then the thing should be played as a farce. I did not. There was anguish and regret and bewilderment. But they have faded. I only remember my surprise that all the theories about the right to experiment and the desirability of varied experience—theories that had seemed so entirely adequate in discussing the sexual adventures of acquaintances—were no help at all when the decision concerned Peter and me.
Also surprise that, though I had been married to Pete for more than two years, I did not have the faintest idea how he would take this. I thought it conceivable he would shoot me—more likely that he would not, but would leave me for ever—and just possible that he would understand how fortuitous the whole thing was.
A week went by. I bought a hat Pete admired; wrote copy in the daytime; danced about evenings; tried being “good” to him, having things he liked for breakfast, and suggesting the restaurants he preferred for dinner.
And I thought, every time that he kissed me, that I should cry.
That was why, at the end of the week, I told him. I did not wait for a suitable moment. It never would have arrived, of course. I told him while we were finishing an amiable leisurely Sunday breakfast. At the point where anything that might happen seemed no worse than to go on as if nothing had, I was even relatively cheerful.
I finished my waffle. (I’d made waffles because Pete loved them.) I thought, “I bet I never eat another waffle in my life.” (I never have, either.)
Pouring Pete a second cup of coffee, I thought, “My hands are cold, but they don’t shake.” Lighting a cigarette, I thought, “It is nice to have a breakfast room.”
And, looking at Pete and myself in the wall mirror—Pete, blond and lean and fit and comfortable in an aged purple silk dressing gown, myself small and dark-haired and white skinned, relatively decorative in a turquoise satin negligee—I thought that we both were definitely charming looking.
I can see us sitting there now, but not as if it were Peter and myself. As if, through a dusty windowpane, I regarded two strangers in a doorway across a wide street.
I managed flippancy. “Peter, I want to put on a wife-confesses-all show.”
He looked unworried. “My God, darling, have you bought a fur coat and charged it?”
“Worse than that.”
“You’ve lost your job, and we’ll have to go back to honest poverty?”
“Don’t be funny, Pete.”
His voice changed. “Sorry, Patty, what is it? . . . Don’t look so worried. I won’t beat you, you know.”
I drew a long breath. “I’ve been unfaithful to you.” (“Unfaithful” . . . what an odd word it was.)
I could not look at him, and then I had to look at him. I always had admired Pete’s poise. Now he was sitting absolutely expressionless . . . but how dreadfully still.
“Patty . . . is this a joke by any chance?”
“No.” What had I loosed . . . what was he thinking?
“How did it happen?” His voice was very quiet.
I could not tell him about Rickey. I had not planned what to tell or not to tell; had not thought what he would ask. Well . . .
“I was drunk, Peter.” That was thin; he knew I did not get as drunk as that.
He let it go. “Who was the man, Patty?”
(Play for time. Maybe someone will telephone or something and I’ll get time to think.)
“I didn’t ask you the name of the woman you stayed with.” I had known anyway, of course.
“That has nothing to do with it.”
And it did not, if he did not feel that it did.
(Must not say “Rickey.” . . . Is there anyone who has just gone away? . . . No, must not name anybody.)
“Tell me who it was Patty.” He had known Rickey fifteen years . . . he cared more about Rickey than anyone, except me. I did not care about Rickey. I did not care if he went and died somewhere really, but I could not humiliate Pete so dreadfully.
He took my hand: “Don’t look so frightened. I’m going to try to understand about it, darling.” What an old voice.
“But you must tell me who it was. I shall have something to say to him.”
(Get time . . . get time to think.)
“You’ve gone conventional, Pete.”
No good, that.
“I expect I have. Will you please not be evasive?”
I lost my head. Like the traditional tabloid murderess, I then heard a shot fired, it seemed.
I heard myself saying, “There’s no use in that. You see . . . it was more than one man.”
He knocked his coffee cup off the table.
“Sorry,” he said. “That was awkward of me. Go on. . . . What were you saying?”
“Peter, you don’t know, but sometimes on parties when I’ve had too much to drink I just get pretty vague . . . and I don’t seem to have much control, and this has been going on for some time” . . . (I can’t have him checking up dates) “and I’ve wanted to tell you but I haven’t dared . . . and of course I’ll go home or give you a divorce or anything you like.” (Oh, let him believe me, no, let him not believe me.)
He moved his mouth as if it hurt him. “Don’t talk so fast, Patty.”
I stopped talking altogether. He was going to believe me, all right. He always had. I had never lied to him before.
He stood up. He said, in a completely impersonal voice, “And I always thought you were the cleanest person in the world.”
I began to cry, not because it would do any good—because I could not help it.
“Don’t do that, Patty,” he said, again very gently. “Listen, will you do something to please me?”
I said “Yes.”
“Will you sit down and read a book for a while, like a nice child. . . . It’s all right . . . I just want to be by myself.”
I sat down. He went into the bedroom and closed the door. I shed tears over all the rotogravure pictures; and knew that was a silly thing to do.
Suddenly I thought, “Maybe he’ll kill himself. I must tell him not to.” I opened the bedroom door softly. He did not hear me. He was lying face down across his bed, sobbing.
That was the only time I ever saw Peter cry.
I did not dare go in. I went back and stared at the livingroom wall. It was cream-colour. It needed redecorating, but not badly.
After awhile, I heard Peter taking a shower. He came in, looking all right, or pretty nearly.
“Listen, Pat, I have a short speech to make, and don’t interrupt, darling. You’re an enormously desirable young woman, and I’ve never taken the least care of you. I have encouraged you to drink and that sort of thing. This show is my fault. We won’t talk about it any more. Only . . . you won’t do it again, will you?”
“No, no, no,” I said. “Never. But it wasn’t your fault, you trusted me.”
“More to the point if I’d looked after you a bit. . . . Well, my dear, go take a shower, and dress, and I’ll mix cocktails, and we’ll have a couple and then go calling. Might find out what Rickey’s doing.”
I dressed, we had two Manhattans apiece, and went to see Rickey. He mixed highballs. After my first, Peter took my glass away. “The child’s cutting down on liquor, Rick. It’s bad for her nerves,” he said. Rickey looked surprised, but said nothing.
He and Peter got pretty drunk, and talked about football.
After two weeks I said to Peter, “Look here, if on second thought you want me to go home or anything, because of that show, tell me.”
He said: “Forget about it, angel. I have.” He had not, but I did not speak of it again.
Then we had three very serene months. Small things were different. Peter censored what I drank; and when Bill Martin, whom I had known in Boston, came to town and asked me to go roof dancing, Pete said he did not want me to go.
I did not mind at all. I had loved Peter before all this and I loved him twice as much after. I thought he was so marvellous about it. I still do.
I thought: “I will try to make it up to Pete by being good-tempered always, and looking as pretty as possible, and following all his stories, and not being extravagant any more.” I felt very grown-up.
One day Peter said, “You know, you are turning out the loveliest person to whom to be married. Just a perfect wife.”
Then I was really happy again.
It was the week after that that Hilda Jarvis came to New York.
Any estimate I give of that woman’s character will necessarily be inaccurate, I suppose. She told me once, when she was being kind and explaining why I was so bad for Peter, that I had no moral sense, and so could not understand people who did.
And I told her that might be so, but that I had more sense about men in my left thumb than she did in her whole hundred forty-five pound body.
All our conversations became as irrelevant and vicious as that. We never had talked the same language. That had not mattered, all the years we lived around the corner from each other in Boston, because we only talked about books, clothes and her struggles with her Aunt Genevieve. She was wonderful to her Aunt Genevieve.
Let me try again. . . . Hilda was a little rigid in her joints, likewise in her soul. She was well built and had capable hands and feet. She had smooth long brown hair, blue eyes that would have looked deeper if she had rouged her cheeks under them, but she would not. She was a very pure girl. She should have married some simple soul, and made him an amiable wife. Of course, she would have got very fat, after a couple of placid children.
Yes, I do dislike her. She convinced me of the relativity of virtue: i.e. if a woman has been asked into twenty beds, and managed to stay out of nineteen of them, on a purely percentage basis she is a good deal more virtuous than a woman who has only been asked into one, and went.
Comentários (0)