Ex-wifePart 7
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Part 7
Peter was too young, too. He would have looked marvellous in a uniform . . . naval aviation green. But most of those did not get across. Peter marching with sun shining on his blond hair.
Oh God, if I begin to cry I shall not be able to stop. Better get up, and see what there is for that doctor’s breakfast. I want to be all dressed when he wakes.
Left leg out of bed, right leg out of bed, negligee, slippers. I feel very clear-headed. We did not drink much. The doctor probably believes in keeping fit. (I must ask him, I bet he will mention “mens sana in corpore sano.”) They had that on the wall of the gymnasium in school.
I believe in keeping fit myself. I shall go do calisthenics in the livingroom, I do not want him waking and watching me. Calisthenics every morning—and nights when there is nothing exigent to prevent, are ten minutes sacred to the memory of an athletic adolescence.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. They help. I like touching my toes to the floor over my head. Calisthenics make me feel like a warm, live animal rolling about in a pasture. Liquor makes everything go far off, too, but it makes me feel like a mind wandering freely through space, not like a warm body in a pasture.
Better go look at the doctor. He sleeps on. “After life’s fitful fever,” no, that is something else. I will have a shower, now. Someone should invent a method for using bath salts in a shower, then it would be perfect.
I am actually hungry. People are not supposed to be able to eat with broken hearts. I feel like an alarm clock wound up too tight. I must not think . . . count sheep jumping a fence . . . no that is for going to sleep.
I will wear my blue jersey dress with white collars and cuffs . . . it looks so chaste. Lord, I have been more chased than chaste. Oh damn, I must get myself together, that man will be waking up. I wonder what his first name is. I forgot to ask. Should I look it up in the telephone book?
I wonder what Nora ordered for breakfast. She is a very good maid. It is a good thing she does not come on Sundays. I shall have to get her another job; Gretchen will snap her up. I cannot keep this apartment. What will become of me? A bad end no doubt—walking Sixth Avenue, and touching Peter on the arm begging for fifty cents—like hell.
This kitchen is nice and sunny. Give the doctor orange juice, of course, it is full of vitamins.
There are duck eggs. . . . Nora went to Jefferson Market and bought duck eggs, for Pete’s Sunday breakfast because she knows he is absurdly fond of them. I am going to cry, now, only for a minute though. . . . The duck eggs will do for the doctor. There are no others. They are nicest shirred.
“Good morning, Patricia . . . you look very fresh.”
“I’ve been doing calisthenics.”
“The mens sana idea?”
(Hold everything while he kisses you. Count sheep fence jumping. A kiss does not take long.)
He is a more percipient young man than I thought. “Are you having morning-after reactions? I’m sorry, my dear.”
“It’s all right. I’m just a bit—what my husband used to call jittery.”
“That’s understandable. Have you such a masculine accessory as a razor, Patricia?”
“Silly little gold one . . . in my dressing table. I’ll get it—can you manage with that?” (Pete used a big straight one . . . that was what I was going to slash my wrists with . . . he packed it . . . the bathroom has gone feminine over night.)
The doctor talked about medicine, vitamins, ductless glands and things, at breakfast. He was extremely percipient. And he liked duck eggs.
He called the Brevoort for a cab. Then, “I’m going to be tactful, and wait for you to telephone me, Patricia, because I don’t want you to feel that I’m thrusting myself on you.”
I smiled, looking friendly, I hope.
“I’m somewhat older than you . . . and should like to give you a small piece of advice—or warning, if I may?”
“Of course, and I’m sorry if I’m being childish this morning, Doctor.”
“Not at all . . . Perhaps you don’t realize that as a young woman—and an extremely attractive one—separated from her husband—men are going to consider you the fairest game in the world. You’ll get used to it, and adjust yourself. At first it may be difficult.” . . . (Well, why doesn’t he get to his advice? Is he going to suggest a course in the Psychology of Sex? I should not be so impatient, he has been very kind to me. That must be his taxi-man ringing the doorbell.)
“Try to remember that the banality about time healing everything is quite true.”
(Is that all the medical profession has to offer me? How much time does it take is what I want to know.)
“Yes, taxi, wait outside a minute.”
“Meanwhile, Patricia, don’t take things too hard.”
He smiled. “It was one of the pleasantest nights of my life,” he said quite gravely.
He picked up his hat, refrained from kissing me, and held out his hand. For that last I was suddenly so warmly grateful that I could smile, really gaily, and say what was truth at the moment. “I am glad you stayed.”
“I shall hope that you telephone, Patricia.” The door closed behind him—a completely comprehending and nice man.
I knew that I would never telephone—that I would never see him again. He understood that, too.
The telephone rang. It was Lucia. Very beautiful Lucia was—ex-wife of a man named Archibald. I met Arch once; had known Lucia casually some time, at the Advertising Club. She seemed to be taking more interest in me of late, since she knew I had been having what department store help call “family troubles.”
“I hear from a friend of a friend of Rickey’s, that your husband and Rick celebrated your husband’s return to bachelor life, at the Yale Club last night?”
“I shouldn’t wonder, Lucia. He left before dinner yesterday.”
A little silence.
“How are you feeling?”
“All right, I guess.” (It is going to be awful to have people asking how I feel all the time, as if I were convalescing from typhoid.)
“Come up and have tea with me?”
“Love to.”
“And Pat, it’s not bad being an ex-wife when you get used to it. I quite like the life.”
“Tell me about it at tea.”
“’Right.”
Ex-wife—ex-wife of Peter puts on a beaver coat and fresh white gloves. I cannot bear being ex-wife of Peter.
The late sun of Sunday afternoon shone on ex-wife of Peter walking fast uptown, through the crowds of funny people recovering from too-huge dinners by waddling a few blocks along Fifth Avenue. (I can tell by the expression of men’s faces that I am looking well. I look just the same as I did last week, probably, and shall not look much different next week, or for five years, or even ten, if I take exercise. In five years or ten, shall I walk, still wanting to meet Peter in the middle of the next block?)
Park Avenue.
Lucia is a red-haired oval-faced madonna in a black velvet dress. She is much slimmer than a Titian madonna though—a sort of a cross between Titian’s and Burne-Jones’ women.
“Pat, I’m giving you a highball instead of tea.”
“Lucia, don’t break the news gently, but does one ever get over it?”
She sipped a highball. She held a cigarette in long thin fingers. She regarded me sympathetically, then appraisingly. She grinned a gaminesque grin, that set oddly on her lovely face. She looked as if I were being very funny indeed. She did not answer.
“One doesn’t ever get over it, does one?”
She threw her cigarette into the fireplace, impatiently. “I’ll make a prophecy, Pat. In three years you won’t remember the colour of his eyes.”
“That’s a comfort.”
“Do you think so?” said Lucia.
V
It was time I went home. Lucia, no doubt, had a dinner engagement. But I did not want to leave. I suddenly did not want, ever, to spend another night, another hour, even, in that apartment that had been Pete’s and mine.
Lucia said: “Come upstairs, there’s something I want to show you.” She wanted to show me a small duplex apartment, on the upper two floors. There was a huge room and bath on each level, with an amusing interior staircase connecting them. There was the usual Manhattan view of building operations in progress.
“If you would come live with me,” said Lucia, “we could afford this place. I’d like to live with another woman anyway—it would have its advantages, provided there was a relative amount of privacy.”
Indifference, that was rather comfortable, descended on me. I would have to live somewhere; Lucia was lovely. Why not?
“But do you make a habit of being kind to dumb animals, Lucia?”
She laughed. “You will be dumb for a while, you know, Pat. I was . . . I’m going to put on my hat, because Checko will be turning up. You’d better stay here tonight. There’s a fruit-cake for you to eat, or you can go out and get something nourishing. Why go home and wait for your husband to telephone? He won’t—yet. I’ll be late. . . . The daybed unfolds, or you can sleep on the little couch.
“Have you a daybed by the way, Patricia? No ex-wife’s home complete without. A single bed, as decorative as possible, capable of adjustment to meet crises as they occur.”
I was not interested in daybeds. “Who is Checko?” I said.
“No one. Just a help on an off-Sunday. He is going to write an epic poem, year after next, meanwhile he’s a ghost-writer for a couple of movie stars and a prizefighter. I’ll meet him downstairs if you don’t mind, because you’re his type and he would spend an hour talking to you, and I’m awfully hungry.”
“Do you really want me to live with you, Lucia?”
“Yes. We’ll have fun. You’ll see.”
Ringing of the doorbell sent Lucia downstairs. I lighted a cigarette, and began to read, “The Silver Spoon.”
Lucia arranged everything. She saw my landlord and got permission for me to break my lease—chose what furniture I would take uptown, saw Nora, and decided we could manage to support her as well as the rent, if she would keep our clothes pressed and lingerie straps sewn on; bought me a daybed.
The day the storage people came to pack was the only time, after that Sunday, when I spent more than ten minutes in my old apartment.
Maple beds with pineapple posts, gold-framed mirror with the eagle on it, that had been my great-grandmother’s, Peter’s cherished ship bookends, the hangings we had bought at Liberty’s in London—all were swiftly mummified in brown paper, and departed.
I found a bottle of port Pete had left and gave it to the moving men.
The apartment would have to be redecorated, before anyone else took it. I wondered if they would have it done in the same colours.
The moving men were through. I was taking the silver to storage myself, in a cab. I left the key and ten dollars with the superintendent. He thanked me, said, “I’m sorry for your troubles, ma’am,” and got me a cab.
On the way to the warehouse, I thought I might as well slip my wedding ring in with the coffee spoons. When I got there, I found that the storage people counted over everything, before they made out their receipts. I was embarrassed, when they came to the red flannel case with the coffee-spoons and the wedding ring, and said, “I suppose you think a wedding ring is an odd thing to store.”
The clerk who was checking looked up at me over rimless eyeglasses, with old, incurious eyes. “Why, ma’am, we must have two’-three hundred of them in the vaults right now,” he said.
I was used to green tiles in the bath instead of white, to going downtown to work on a bus, instead of uptown on the subway, to Lucia, unfailingly kind, unfailingly good-tempered, with her manner of treating all things as equally unimportant and entertaining. I had been living with Lucia three weeks.
“You must go places,” said Lucia the first day. “You just trotted about with five or six friends of your husband, didn’t you; and when the conversation grew dull they exchanged reminiscences about great crew races of 1919 or some-such, didn’t they? Well, we’ll go places.”
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