Ex-wifePart 25
Página 1 de 9
Part 25
He laughed. “Darling, I know exactly how you feel. If you stamped your feet at this moment, and cursed me in Bowery accents, I could watch you walk out of my life and be glad to see you vanish. But you sit there looking lovely. . . . Curious, how distressing it is to be anything but flippant. If I said, brokenly, ‘Good-bye for ever, my dear young love,’ I should feel like an imbecile. Yet I want to say something nice to you.”
We both laughed—and Peter came across the garden, and put his head against my knees, and his arms around them.
“Patricia, I am glad I married you when I was young. I wouldn’t have missed it.”
I said, “Peter, my darling, damn you for making me cry. I am glad I married you when I was young, too. And I’m sorry for every stupid thing I ever did that hurt you.” Tears spilt down my face, and dripped on the back of his neck, absurdly. He gave me a handkerchief, and a cigarette, and asked if I wanted another drink.
“No, I think I want to go home, Peter; and by myself.”
“All right. Would you believe that I’m not trying to be disagreeable, if I tell you that I hope I never see you again?”
I could understand about that. I said, “You will like me pretty well, if you never see me for five minutes.”
“That’s it. . . . Will you kiss me, nonchalantly, Patricia, before you go?”
I kissed him nonchalantly. He bent his head, and put his cheek against mine, gently. It was a gesture of his that once was familiar to me. It hurt. I wanted, more than I had wanted anything in years, to find words to tell Peter how much I had loved him once, and how sorry I was that I did not love him now.
He kissed my eyelids and my mouth and my throat. He lighted a cigarette, and walked once up and down the garden. Then he said, “Patricia, will you stay here with me tonight?”
I wanted so much—to want to stay. I wanted to feel for an hour, that I loved Peter. I could not feel anything at all.
I said, “It just would be pretending; and I should cry, probably, because it was not real any more; and that would make you cross.”
“Yes, and I’d treat you as outrageously as possible in the morning, I suppose. I couldn’t help it.”
“I know. Better find me a taxi, Peter. I am going home.”
He went to find a taxi. When he came back, he said, “For God’s sake, think of something flippant for your parting speech, darling. I have thought of mine.”
I powdered my face, by moonlight. “All right. Tell me yours first, Peter.”
“I left you. Now you’re leaving me. So you win the last battle.”
“That’s not very amusing, Peter.”
“Probably not.”
We walked from the garden through his darkened apartment to the street door. Before he opened it, he said, “What is your exit line?”
I said, “And now Lord Thou lettest Thy servant depart in peace.”
“That’s no better than mine,” he said.
“I know. It’s the best I can manage, though, Pete.”
The taxi was waiting outside. He gave my address to the driver.
He said, “Well, Patricia, thank you for dining with me.”
“I enjoyed it,” I said.
Next day Helena came back from Canada, and she and I shopped for Fall clothes together. The advertising manager returned from his breakdown and I had a vacation.
On the first evening after I came back to New York, I was sitting alone, reading an accumulation of letters from Lucia, when the telephone rang.
A voice said, “After I left the Black Hills I had to fill in at our Washington Bureau. I got back to New York twenty minutes ago. Is it too late in the evening to ask you to go somewhere to dance? I’ve spent the entire trip from Washington discussing the Republicans who want to run against Smith next year, and I want to hear music.”
I said, “Hello, Noel. Of course I’ll go dancing. How soon will you call for me?”
“Half an hour,” he said.
XVI
That telephone conversation with Noel was in September, 1927.
On a November afternoon in 1928, I was having tea and muffins with him, in front of his fireplace.
The Republicans had run Hoover against Al Smith, and the old-fashioned Americans who had been troubled by the possibility that Al might invite the Pope to Sunday morning breakfast in the White House, were sleeping again at night.
When we finished tea, Noel put on his overcoat. He said: “I shall be back in two hours or so. I have two or three rapid ‘good-byes’ to say to people. Then we’ll go to dinner wherever you like.”
“You have finished packing, haven’t you?” I asked.
“Yes. When you take the papers in the desk to my safe deposit vault, be sure to take that tin box on the bookcase with them. It has all your letters in it. When I come back, I shall need them to comfort my declining years.”
We smiled at each other. “Do you mind if I put your letters to me in the same vault, darling darling,” I said. “It is as near as we are likely to come to sharing the same grave.”
“Don’t, Patricia,” he said. He was not talking about the letters.
“I’m sorry, Noel. It’s all right. After all, we have had so much more than most people ever dream of having.”
“Sit by the fire, until I come back, Pat—and look over your letters. They won’t distress you.”
(Dear Noel—he knew the letters would remind me of gay evenings we had shared, and that was the best he could do for me, at the moment.)
He reconsidered, just before he went out. “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps you had better read the ‘Mercury.’”
“No,” I said. “I want to find out if I ever managed to write you that you were the nicest person in the world.”
He went to say “good-bye” to people, and I made myself fresh tea. Before I looked at my letters to Noel I went upstairs and got his from a drawer in my dressing table. Noel and I had had apartments in the same house for nearly a year.
My suggestion that I store his letters with mine had been made on impulse, but I felt that it was sensible enough. I did not want to destroy his letters—neither did I want to keep them about to read and re-read when I was lonely—to find, possibly, in each re-reading, a little warmth gone from them.
I was twenty-seven. More than a thousand crowded days intervened between myself and that younger woman who believed she could not live without Peter. When, rarely, now, I was reminded of the Peter I had known, I thought of him kindly, as someone with whom I had shared a painful post-adolescence, someone who no doubt had been as bewildered as I about most things. He and I were married and had a child and separated, before either of us grew up.
I had lived to discover that after First Love one can love again—as much—more, for one knows more. I believed that I would love Noel for ever, perhaps. But I knew also that I could live without Noel; and that, as Time changed me, I should not even miss him, often, or very badly.
I opened the box that held my letters to him. There were a good many, for I had written him daily, whenever he was on out-of-town stories.
He had all the letters packed neatly, in the order in which I had written them—and I found that infinitely touching, because Noel was the sort of man who had to search through four drawers to discover shirt studs or handkerchiefs or a fountain pen or collar buttons.
The first letter was to his New York address.
“NOEL DEAR,
“I remember telling you, some weeks ago, that I never stayed with the same man twice, in the years since Peter, because I never liked any of them after I had stayed with them. Therefore this—to state specifically that I liked you twenty times as much this morning at breakfast, as last night at dinner-time.”
I wrote that letter two months after the late September evening when Noel telephoned. In those two months I decided that his hair was the shade of burnished bronze (and complained to him that he kept it clipped too closely—but never, to the last day that I knew him, did he wear it any longer.) I decided that I loved his voice and his smile, and the shape of his eyebrows (they exactly matched his hair) and the things he said, and the way he laughed, and the fact that he believed in taking exercise.
I knew that he was supposed to be brilliant. I heard a story about him: that several city editors, dining together, made separate lists of the five best newspapermen in New York and that his was the only name that appeared on all the lists. But I had known so many people who were supposed to be brilliant. I liked Noel better because he was so obviously sane, and stable, and well-balanced. It gave me a feeling of great steadiness to be with him.
And I had found someone to whom I could talk, after years when I had just made conversation.
I saw him nearly every evening, and saw no one else—except Nathaniel and Bill. I knew them well enough to say, “I shall be able to have dinner, but I must get home by quarter to ten. Is that all right?”
Noel worked on a morning newspaper, and got through at ten or eleven at night. We walked, danced, went to supper. We talked about politics, disarmament, the War (he had a combat decoration, but he did not tell me that, someone else did), newspapers, advertising, books, operas. We talked about his childhood, my childhood, people he had known, people I had known. We flung the patterns of our lives at each other.
I was worried, at the beginning, lest someone tell him I was supposed to be promiscuous. I thought he would not like me any more. I was sure that I loved him, when I had seen him three times, but I saw no reason that he should ever love me. I was just a woman whose own husband had found her impossible. With other men, I had not felt as humble, but that was because I did not care whether they ever loved me or not.
I decided to tell Noel, myself. If the knowledge that I had been promiscuous was to make him stop seeing me, that would hurt less, immediately, than later. So, one October evening, when we were walking along lower Fifth Avenue, I said abruptly:
“Look here. Don’t have any illusions about me. I have slept with more men than I can remember.” That was exaggeration, but I had to exaggerate, lest I should understate.
He did not look disgusted or shocked or even surprised. He said, “That’s interesting. What were you doing—trying to use sex as an anaesthetic for something-or-other? That can’t be managed, usually.”
I said, “You needn’t be polite about it. If you think I am an awful person, say so.”
He said, “You darling imbecile—I think you are the nicest person I have ever known. Whatever happened to you has made you poised and tolerant, and comprehending, and anyone who knows you should be grateful for whatever produced the result.”
I said, “Oh.” I said, “Do you mean it—you aren’t just being sorry for me?”
He said, “God, no. I mean it.”
Something in me that had hurt horribly at odd moments, for a long, long time, stopped hurting for ever.
I slipped my arm through his. “I am glad you don’t mind, but anyway I stopped.”
He laughed at me. He was so friendly that I laughed, too. “There must be thousands of bitterly disappointed men in New York, Pat. You don’t mind being ragged about it, do you? . . . I promise never to ask you to stay with me, if I can help it.” The tone of his voice changed. “For various reasons, I don’t stay with women for whom I would be likely to care. It seems somewhat unfair.”
He had never referred to his marriage before.
“I know about your marriage, Noel,” I said. “Kenneth told me.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Noel, let’s stop at Childs and have coffee and buttercakes. I am hungry.”
Afterwards, we talked about our marriages too, as just among the things that had happened to us.
Noel did not kiss me for another month. Once, in the interval, he did put his arms ’round me—as we were crossing Madison Square Park—because I said that, given the choice of staying with Gene Tunney or Jack Dempsey, I would choose Dempsey, joyously.
Comentários (0)