Ex-wifePart 28
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Part 28
“The preface to this letter is—I am as binged as I ever was. First time in a year. Nat and I fell off the wagon with the loudest splash imaginable—that acquaintance of yours, Tony, who has had the unreciprocated ‘glad’ on me for so long, caused it.
“Nat telephoned me to ask me to dine at seven, (You know he’s been having an attack of wanting-to-get-away-from-it-all for months. Poor child.) At ten to seven the bell rang. It was that fool Tony. His yellow hair was combed four ways at once, as usual; and he was drunk as usual, too. He had a flask, and I had a drink. Then Nat came. He was tight, too, which is extraordinary. It seems he’d just seen his father through one of his attacks. So we all had more drinks.
“We went to Delano’s bar, and began drinking Manhattans. A wild rainstorm developed outside, and no cabs were to be had, so we had more drinks, and the bartenders cooked us eggs and things.
“I was feeling low, because I was tired—and Tony and Nat are a God-awful combination, although they seem to go out together frequently. I mean, Nat’s likely to get dismal, and Tony amorous, simultaneously.
“They both got tighter and tighter on their drinks.
“Then Tony said to Nat: ‘You’re the boy Pat’ll marry in the end, of course. One day she’ll look at herself in a mirror and know she’s not going to be an apparently-sophisticated-twenty-two eternally. Then she’ll marry you, and make you a swell wife, that’s the funny part of it. I’ll send you a wedding present.’
“I said, ‘I don’t want to marry anybody.’
“Tony said: ‘You’ll get sense some day.’
“We had two more rounds of drinks, and I talked about the Paramount Building.
“Then Tony said: ‘I shall “make” Pat, one day . . . not for a couple of years, one day when she’s tired.’
“Nat said: ‘The hell you will. I’ll marry her some day when she’s tired. You’re right . . . she ought to be married . . . women need stability . . . I don’t care how she occupies herself in the meantime.’
“I said, ‘Stop talking about me as if I were a car that must be parked somewhere ultimately. If you want to know, I’m perfectly happy at the moment.’
“They said, jointly: ‘Sure, but he can never marry you.’
“I said, ‘Talk about something else, please.’
“It’s all right, Noel, I probably wouldn’t write you about it, if I weren’t tight myself. It was a pretty disgusting evening—but not extraordinary. We are an unmannerly generation. The best-brought up man you know is likely at any moment to start shouting his sexual ambitions in a speakeasy. It doesn’t mean anything.
“This means something, though. It’s damnably true that I shall some day look at myself in a mirror, and know that—not in the scarlet frock I wore tonight, or any other, shall I look like twenty-two, any more. And wish that I had stability, meaning a husband to pay for facial massages through all my middle-age. But I shan’t take such a husband. It would be too great a waste of you and me and dreams and love.
“I’m asking something of you, though. I probably wouldn’t ask it if sober. Because the thought of growing old, alone, frightens me, would you write me a letter and say, ‘I would marry you if I could.’ I know you never can . . . but to have a two-line note that said you would have married me, had things been otherwise, would comfort me.
“Your affection for me is the loveliest thing I ever found, you know, in a world-full of second rate solutions for everything, and I should rather have the off-chance of permanence with you, than nineteen gold-framed marriage certificates with anyone else. Can you understand though, that a two-line note would be comforting, because it was a dismal evening?”
He wrote me a long letter. I looked for it among the other letters he had written me. I read it, and put it aside. That would be the only letter I would keep, because I didn’t believe the warmth could ever go from it. It ended: “The thing that all men look for, I have found, with you.”
I recovered from that mood of aching-to-be-a-wife.
Noel and I went about through October evenings, and were as happy as we had ever been—happier, for we grew more and more at ease with each other, and closer to each other in understanding. He said that we were getting like the two ancient philosophers who sat, contentedly, and listened to each other think.
One day, I was getting ready to leave the office, and thinking that I would have time to go to gymnasium for an hour before I went home to dress for dinner with Noel, when my little assistant-secretary came in and said that a lady wanted to see me.
“Who is it, Doris?”
“She wouldn’t give her name. She said it was personal. I thought you might know her. She has a black patch covering the whole left side of her face.”
“Oh,” I said, “Send her in Doris. . . . And you may go home. I shan’t need you again tonight.”
There was an instant in which I thought, “I should have refused to see her—she wasn’t ever real to me, while I did not see her.” But I knew that I could not have sent her away, really. I could not have done that, to Noel.
I said: “How do you do. Won’t you sit down?”
She said: “I am Noel’s wife. I have been wanting to talk to you for some time.” She sat in the armchair beside my desk.
Light from the wall lamp opposite, fell across her. She was a rather tall woman—with a figure that might have been good, had she chosen her clothes carefully. She wore the sort of good, country tweeds that women select for practicality, for durability, without reference to the nuances of style.
Under her tan felt sports’ hat, golden hair outcropped, with an effect of untidiness, that might, once, have been an effect of splendour. Over the left side of her face—a black patch concealed what lay beneath, from hat-brim to chin. The right side of her face was composed of a large eye, of violet-blue, a graceful brown eyebrow, clear white skin and half a mouth that once, obviously, the men who knew her said was “rosebud.”
Well, I should have known that Noel’s taste was all right. War bride married-in-haste, she might have been—she must have been composite of cream and roses then.
She said: “I feel this is an intrusion and that I should apologize. Something has happened that makes it necessary.”
Yes, it was a well-bred voice. Curiously unformed, though, like the voice of a very young girl.
“That’s quite all right. I have so much admiration for Noel that I’m delighted to meet his wife.”
(Being civilized means that one keeps one’s words unrelated to one’s thoughts, when necessary.)
She said: “It will be easier for me—I am not used to talking to people—if you will let me say what I have to say—first.”
I said, “As you wish.”
“I don’t like Noel, usually. If you had driven, when you were twenty, with a man who got drunk, and wrecked his car, and your face, so that you went about like a cripple, all the rest of your life, you would not like him.”
I said, “Perhaps not.”
She said: “I have had weeks and months and years to think. I have had nothing else to do, since the summer of 1919. Sometimes I think I have spoiled Noel’s life. But he finished mine.”
I said, “No doubt that’s true. I met him years after all that. Can you tell me what it has to do with me?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’m getting to all that. Granted that I loved someone else, when Noel came back from the war. He ended that for me, too.”
I said, “Yes, quite.”
“He is the only person I still know,” she said, “who is going on in the world where things happen. . . . My sister is a tired old maid.”
“I have understood that, a little,” I said. “You may have heard a good deal about Noel and me. I have never tried to take what you have kept.”
“I know,” she said, “I have nothing against you. I used to quarrel with Noel, because he met younger, beautiful women, while not a man this side of hell will look at me, again. But I’ve got reconciled to that. Only—now it’s different.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because Noel and I are going to have a baby, in seven months or so.”
I held on to the edge of my desk. The sharp corners cut into my hands. Noel’s wife became part of a picture—the office walls and ceiling—and the view of Manhattan lights outside. The picture swung, and swung, crazily.
I said to myself: “You have been rarely privileged, Patricia. You have been The Wife, and The Other Woman. You have played ball on both sides of that net, and been privileged to lose on both. That’s a rare experience.”
I said to myself: “This finishes you, Patricia . . . that wife that was a vague fantastic figure on the outskirts of his life—owns him now for all time. Poor Noel, poor Noel—he’ll never go to Yokohama, he can never leave New York. He’ll live and die where he is, tied to that half-masked figure, and the red-haired baby I wanted, that woman will have.”
I said to myself: “No, one doesn’t go insane, one doesn’t scream—one remembers that the years taught one something. But what, after all, did they teach? Oh, yes, I remember—that all things pass—that all things pass.”
I said, “Are you glad that you and Noel are having a baby?”
Noel’s wife said: “Yes. He used to talk about having one—ten or eleven years ago, when he loved me. After my accident I never wanted one, for years, because I thought a child would be frightened by a face like mine—and I didn’t want a baby that would be afraid of me. But—this last year or so” (this last year or so—all the time I’d known Noel), “I’ve thought that a baby wouldn’t mind, if I was good to it. I have wanted one for a year—it didn’t happen before.”
I said: “I think it’s very nice for you.”
She said: “I came to see you, because I know you are Noel’s mistress. I haven’t needed him, or wanted him, often, all these years. I did not have anything to talk to him about. But now, I want him as the father of my child.”
(God—that was a phrase they used in movie captions.)
“I have not told Noel,” that unformed, girlish voice went on. “I wanted to see you first. I wanted to ask you to stop seeing him. I plan to live in a suburb close to New York now, and have him live with me, or at least come to see me every other day or so—so he will grow fond of his child. . . . Noel used to want a child once, when we were young . . . I hope this child is a son. . . . And I’m asking you to do this, because you are a young and handsome woman. . . . There will be other men for you. I have only Noel . . . and this child, who will give me something to live for.”
I managed to say: “I understand how you must feel about it.”
(She had called me Noel’s “mistress.” Ugly word, “mistress.” He and I had loved each other so . . . Noel would want a son . . . he had wanted one of mine . . . Noel to grow old, to be bound forever . . . to end up on a newspaper copy desk, when he was tired—and through. Noel was honourable. I had so loved that in him. Noel would stick to his disfigured wife . . . who was with child.)
I said: “I had a child once, I remember. It died.”
Something of animation, of sympathy, even, stirred in that half-face. She said: “I am sorry. Was it a boy or a girl? How old would it be?”
I said: “It was a son. I forget how old he would have been. Almost four, I think.”
She said: “Well, will you give Noel up, so that I can have him to be a father for my child? . . . Some weeks ago he wanted to go to Asia . . . I wasn’t sure about this then. . . . He won’t mind not going to Asia, now.”
I thought: “How little she knows Noel, nowadays.”
I looked out, at the dark New York skyline, with the lights of other offices, shining. I wondered what the people, sitting in those offices, after hours, were discussing. I thought: “This finishes me . . . but it finishes Noel, for ever, and he is a more valuable person than I.”
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