Ex-wifePart 30
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Part 30
After dinner, we went to his apartment. I said to him: “Go mix yourself a highball. . . . There is something that I want to tell you, and I want you to look out the windows, and think of time and space and relativity, while I tell it, and not interrupt until I finish.”
I began: “You can go to Asia, after all.”
When I was done, he came and put his arms around me; and I ran my fingers through his hair, and we did not talk, for a long long time. Thereafter, we had some debate as to details . . . but no man of his type is very eager to yield adventure even for a woman.
Noel was to have Asia. He suffered a good deal, I believe, at the thought of losing me. He might suffer more, as Asia grew commonplace; but, meanwhile, Asia was his other Great Desire.
We lived through a week in which we lived as if all things between us had lasted since the beginning of Time, and were to last for ever. Then I had a wire from Beatrice, who wanted to know what time on Thursday she should arrive, to go clothes-buying among the fashionable wholesalers.
I arranged to take Thursday afternoon off . . . and since her sentence to wearing a black patch was so nearly ended, we went without embarrassment to various wholesale clothing places and bought tweeds, and evening frocks, and sweaters-and-skirts, and jersey ensembles, and hats to wear with them all. (Even a silver turban for dancing.)
We ended the afternoon at a shoe-shop, and I discovered with some amusement that, though she was a taller woman, her shoes were a smaller size than mine.
There was more enthusiasm in her voice than there had been the week before. She told the shoe-clerk gaily that she was travelling to Chicago, to see her mother whom she hadn’t visited in ten years.
(Noel was to join her in Chicago. He was leaving New York, a day or two later than she.)
Helena could not see us before six-thirty. Beatrice asked me to go to tea with her, to fill in the interval. I said: “Well, I was thinking of going to a speakeasy. I know a nice one, on Fifty-Second Street, where women without escorts are not conspicuous.”
Her voice was like the voice of a sub-debutante invited to an important college prom. “Oh, could we go to a speakeasy?” she said. “You know, my accident was in 1919, before Prohibition, and I have never seen a speakeasy.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “I have wasted my youth in so many of them.” We went to Fifty-Second Street. Beatrice was stirred by the fact that she could put her foot on a brass rail at the bar. She had read about brass rails but never seen one. We had two Alexanders, and they did not seem to disturb her, unduly.
I thought, simultaneously, that this girl was only a year or two older than myself and that, except for one thing and another, she would have been much prettier than I.
(And would have held Noel for ever, perhaps? . . . The chances that determine people’s lives. Well, no sense considering them at any length. One accepted them. It was easier.)
Helena had made six masks for Beatrice. They were lovely things—she must have worked until dawn, several nights in succession, to finish them. Across the width of her apartment they were amazingly life-like. Even viewed closely there was nothing in the least grotesque about them, because they were so decorative.
There were full-face masks for evening wear, and a full-face mask for wear with sports’ clothes. There were half-masks, too. “And how do I eat, wearing them?” Beatrice asked.
Helena explained that the half-masks were designed for that. . . . “They are cut out, a little, around the mouth. The explanation of it is intricate, but you eat a cookie, and see how simple it is.”
If a woman with half a face could glow, Beatrice glowed when she tried them on. Her hands (which were well-shaped, graceful hands) looked excited.
“They are wonderful,” she said. “So light, and so comfortable, and pretty. How much should I pay you for them?”
Helena said: “Nothing. Patricia is an old friend of mine.”
Something—something vaguely familiar in the expression of the mouth and chin on the full-face masks, disturbed me. I could not think why.
Lucia drifted in, to admire—and Beatrice tried each mask on, again, for her. Then Beatrice showed all her new clothes (she had insisted on bringing them along, in a cab) to Helena; and Lucia and I went into the bathroom for a drink of Scotch.
Lucia said: “Do you feel all right?”
I said, “Yes. She is leaving in the middle of next week, you know, and Noel is going at the end of it.”
I said, “Those masks are extraordinary, aren’t they. They are not only decorative—they have a definite individuality, even a definite charm.”
Lucia said: “Helena always liked you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Honestly, don’t you know, Pat? Was there nothing about the lower part of the face, in the full masks, that you recognized?”
“Something, vaguely, but I don’t know what.”
Lucia smiled—her all-comprehending smile.
“Ever see your face, Pat, when you were looking tranquil, and well pleased with life? . . . Helena has a sardonic humour. . . . She’s copied that grave smile of yours, to follow Noel, all over Asia.”
On the way to Beatrice’s suburban train, she and I had a short conversation. “Maybe you dislike me,” she said, “but I hope not . . . I feel that I owe you a good deal, and I thought . . . if my child were a girl I might name her for you.”
I lighted a cigarette. “God is an ironist,” I said, but that seemed beyond Beatrice’s comprehension.
She said: “Anyway. I wanted to tell you . . . that I mean to be good to Noel. I know that he will have to leave me by myself, much of the time, in the Far East” (—the words conjured up pictures of the places Noel and I might have seen, together . . . the sounds and colours of bazaars, I would never know them, now. I drew a long breath) “but I shan’t object” she said . . . “Now that he is going to be my husband, really officially, I mean to give him as much liberty as can be managed. After all, I shall have the baby.”
“That’s sensible, Beatrice,” I said. “And, if he should have a brief romance with a Geisha girl, don’t curse him out for it. He’ll come back, to see the baby, and to get himself a clean shirt. That’s marriage.”
“I’ll behave, Patricia,” she said. . . . Her train was leaving in three minutes. She stopped by the train-gate. “Tell me you don’t hate me,” she said.
“I don’t hate you. I hope you work it out, Beatrice.” After two minutes, now, I would never see her again. For that at least, I could be grateful.
“Beatrice—they say there are splendid British surgeons in the East, and facial surgery has been elaborated, since the War. . . . Perhaps, something may be managed for you, there.”
She smiled half a smile, and she found a good exit line. (Peter, who was almost forgotten now, had asked me to find one, once.) Beatrice said: “Meanwhile there are the masks . . . you wear them, too, don’t you?” She ran, not ungracefully, to catch her train.
I hurried home, to dine with Noel.
And the infinite time that he and I had felt destined for us, together, was determined now as ten days. They were not unhappy days. We talked to each other as if all the years we had lived were stable behind our comprehension of each other—and as if all the years ahead were ours to share.
Only once, I spoke to him, of the little time remaining. I said: “I understand better now, about the French aristos, who died serenely on the guillotine. I don’t believe they suffered at the last. . . . Relieved from all concern with the day after tomorrow—they were serene. Kenneth felt like that, do you remember?”
He said, “Yes. . . . The only problem is whether one adds life to one’s years or years to one’s life. . . . Or did you tell me that, concerning something else, Pat?”
I said, “Concerning an Ex-wife, perhaps. . . . Noel, your hair is a colour destined to shine in my soul.”
But he was thinking of Asiatic cities, where he would live his life—and I let him talk, about the possibility of learning Chinese, in five years.
“It is a five-year contract, Pat—with option of renewal for the same length of time. When I come back—I may be forty-five years old.”
(In ten years, I shall be thirty-seven—and whatever I am spared—I begged to be spared, meeting Noel next, when I am thirty-seven.)
Noel was still working on the “Times.” On one of his last days, there, he went to Lakehurst, to do an aviation story. I wrote him a letter—because I had written him always, when he was on an out-of-town assignment. (We had agreed, that I was not to write him to Yokohama. There would be no return-from-Yokohama, in which I would be concerned. He was to write me only in the stories . . . that the “Times” would run, about how the years went, in Asia.)
I wrote him, to Lakehurst:
“Please don’t decide that I care very little—because I am taking this so calmly. I have wrung my hands over it, a good bit, first and last.
“You-and-I apparently come to an end. The commonplace and possessive and exacting and stupid relationships, into which people drift, come to bad ends soon or late. But what has that to do with you and me? We may yet be sitting before a fireplace, when you are eighty-seven and I am seventy-nine, discussing flavours of wines, and of adventures. Why not?”
I believed that, too, for five or ten minutes.
That was my last letter to Noel.
I put it back in the tin box, with the others, and put the rest of his letters to me, unread, in the box, too.
I went upstairs to change my dress.
And thought, not for the first time, that vanity is so great a blessing to women that it should be listed among the major virtues. Recollection that the last time Noel ever saw me, I was wearing a bright red dress from Paris, with a hat that matched it precisely, and a brand-new grey Krimmer coat, would be some comfort to me, always. That might be absurd. It was none the less profoundly true.
I went back to his apartment, and put fresh logs on the fire. He came in.
“You’re looking very lovely, Pat,” he said. “Have you decided where you’d like to dine?”
“Dante’s, I think.”
“Grand idea . . . and we’ll have crabmeat ravigotte and filet mignon and Chianti and crêpes Suzette. . . .”
We had an evening, and a night, and a morning, left to spend. We spent them as gaily as we had spent a hundred others. We pretended to each other that this evening and night and morning, were just like all the others.
We pretended so successfully, that, on the way to his train I felt that I was just seeing Noel off on another out-of-town assignment.
As always, he took me through the train-gates, at the Grand Central (although non-passengers are supposed to make their parting speeches outside the gates) so that we could talk a little longer. As always, I watched the porter arrange his baggage. As always, we walked out onto the platform, and Noel gave me a cigarette.
But I found that I couldn’t hold my cigarette, steadily, beside this train. So I threw it away, and Noel threw his away.
I said: “How much time is there?”
He said: “Two or three minutes.”
I said: “I don’t want to be casual. I want to tell you that I shall love you for ever and ever, whatever that means . . .”
“Whatever it means, Pat, I shall, too.”
He took off his hat. He was a young man with red hair that was the shade of bright-burnished bronze, and a nice chin, that almost had a dimple in it, and a grey tweed overcoat, and a grey muffler I had given him. I wanted to remember exactly how he looked . . . I wanted to think of some words that would be significant—that would make him happy to remember.
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