Ex-wifePart 8
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Part 8
In the three weeks we had been to six parties, three first nights, five speakeasies, four night-clubs, two operas, and a concert where a negro sang spirituals.
“You are amazingly popular, Lucia.” It was Sunday again, and we seemed to have an hour with nothing to do.
“You mean, ex-wives are popular, Pat. Most popular class in New York. Anyone can fling a life’s devotion at an ex-wife’s feet, and she can’t do a thing in the world inconvenient about picking it up—at least an ex-wife like you, can’t; because she has no divorce. Why don’t you divorce Peter?”
“Nobody’s flinging any devotion at my feet. I can’t talk at parties. You have to tell me what to say.”
“I know; do you mind, Pat? You’ll get over that, in a month or so when you feel better. Seriously though, you should do something about seeing to a divorce. The sooner the better, it makes a clean break. . . . Have you heard from that Peter person? . . . I don’t want to seem intrusive. . . .”
I had heard from him. I had a note. I got it and showed it to Lucia.
It read, “Here is a cheque for the last month’s rent downtown. I don’t plan to make further contribution to your support. Of course, if you are starving or anything, call me up and I’ll send you a few meals. But I imagine you’ll get on all right. Your sort does. I am living for the moment at the Wilton Arms Hotel. Better address me at the office, though. How about letting me have some furniture when I take an apartment? Have a nice time. Peter.”
“Succinct young man,” said Lucia, and hesitated a minute. Then, “I’ve been hearing this and that about him, Pat.”
“All right, tell me,” I said. I had wondered about that. During the week or two when we had been moving, Lucia had experimented a bit with a tentative “he might come back, Patricia, you don’t want to feel hopeless,” attitude; and had then shifted definitely to the “it’s all over, but someday you may be glad it is,” point of view.
Lucia said: “I made inquiries. That’s a long story. Everyone’s always advising a woman separated from her husband. Dozens of people advise me. Some were helpful, some anything but. I didn’t want to press you into talk about him—it might distress you too much—but I thought since I’d taken you on more or less, I’d better find out what the situation was, if I could, so that I shouldn’t advise you badly.”
“You are an angel, Lucia. Tell me, really, though, why you bother.”
“Several reasons. Wanted to live with someone, knew you’d be fun when you convalesce somewhat, and you are a type that contrasts with mine beautifully. I mean you’re black haired and vivacious (normally) and petite, and I’m long and languorous and red-blonde. Beside, someone did as much by me, while I was in the state you’re in, and that’s sort of a bill I wanted to pay somewhere. . . . All that’s irrelevant. You told me all about that Hilda business . . . but where does this Judith woman come in? I found out through a girl who knows a man on Pete’s paper, that he’s seen about with her every night in the week.”
“Something must have happened about Hilda,” I contributed. I felt miserable again. I was having a very bad time, trying not to speculate where Peter was, and with whom, and what he was doing, in every quiet half hour I had, anyway.
“You are bright, Pat. Sorry; I don’t want to tease you. . . . Anyway, before I heard that, I thought your beloved was likely to get enough of his Hilda in a few weeks, and turn up wiser . . . and content for a while. You do seem to be crazy about him, and in spite of the awful time you’ve both been having, a great reconciliation scene might well have been managed.”
She stretched out an amazingly white arm for a piece of Turkish paste, nibbled it with a few words about thanking God she was thin enough to eat as much candy as she liked, and looked at me to see if I were on the verge of tears or anything.
“That’s a nice Chinese kimona you’ve got, Pat,” she went on. I laughed. I was getting used to Lucia’s irrelevancies. They meant “If this conversation is bothering you, we’ll talk about something else, instantly.”
“That’s a grand green negligee you’ve got, darling,” I said. “Go on. I don’t mind talking to you about Pete. In fact, it helps, rather. I told him I’d never divorce him, but I begin to feel that I’m a rather low person to stick to that, if he really wants a divorce.”
“Yes,” said Lucia, “we all grow sensible, but it takes time. . . . What I meant about Judith was, that if ‘something has happened about Hilda’ as you put it, and he’s gone on to Jude, instead of coming back to you . . . my child, you may as well go see a lawyer now as next year.”
(I thought, “Not yet; I won’t let go yet; I can fill in time, while I have hope it’s just an entr’acte to be spent, but not otherwise.”)
Lucia went on: “Men . . . men are always coming back from little excursion trips—but once they start on world cruises. . . .”
“Judith’s no world cruise. She isn’t as nice, really, as Hilda, or as good-looking.”
“I’ll talk about her in a minute. About the excursions and cruises—I mean that a man, really in love with one woman, often can go tripping off blithely but briefly with another, simply because she has a stirring voice or wide innocent eyes. He comes back, then, to the woman, no worse off, sometimes improved, even. But once he embarks on a tour, child, he’s going to stop at so many ports he will forget perhaps, what city he started from, and certainly what that city had that was unique, among all the scenery he’s seen since. Your Peter seems to be sailing on and on, Pat.”
“I can’t believe it yet, Lucia.”
She was, immediately, sympathetic. “Of course not. Don’t try, either. I might be wrong, and anyway, the only use for advice is to put it in your pocket and save until, if ever, you feel like taking it. . . . You’ve met Judith?”
“At the office, several times—she’s gone in for being a stylist since she got her divorce, you know. And once on a party.”
“Do you like her?”
“No. . . . But I wouldn’t anyway, now. I’m afraid I’m a very jealous person, Lucia.”
“Everybody is, and everybody poses as not being. . . . I don’t like Judith either, but she has her points. Do you mind if I go into that, because I’d like to explain why I think she’ll finish you off, to put it very brutally, if Peter has taken up with her?”
“Go ahead,” (Peter “taken up” by that hardfaced, young woman. It was just ridiculous. And yet I knew that I was being 1880 about her. She had style, she was amusing.)
“Patricia, be a nice girl and take away this candy. I shall make myself sick. And bring me my cigarette holder, the amber one.”
Then Lucia began: “I dislike Judith principally for a triviality, her language, that is. Of course, the use of the vernacular, obscenity, in common speech is just another one-time strictly masculine ceremonial vice, like drinking and smoking, that has, recently, gone bi-sexual. I think, though, there is a difference. Women, attractive women, in spite of the opinion of the Bible belt, actually do not look a bit less feminine, or desirable, with a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail glass in the other, than their grandmothers did, with a fan, held right, and a bouquet, left. The cocktail glass and cigarette are provocative, gayer, that’s all. I’m not talking, naturally, about women one sees draped, in alcoholic semi-stupor, about tables in cheap night-clubs. Men of their type are as distressing.
“But about language. Perhaps the vernacular is picturesque, has a flavour, in men’s clubs and bars, like the very physiological smutty jokes they now begin to tell us. It remains, though, to me, incongruous in the speech of a woman supposedly well bred. It affects me, when Judith adorns her comments on bad weather, or something as casual, with phrases one sees occasionally scrawled on walls of empty buildings, just as if she appeared in her very good copies of French clothes chewing tobacco and spitting at intervals.”
“I know, Lucia. That’s why I don’t think Peter can take her seriously.”
“That doesn’t follow, at all, Pat. You see, you gave that young man of yours a horrible shock, if you’ll forgive me for mentioning it.” I winced, she noticed it, but decided to go on.
“Oh, it was a very grand gesture, to tell him of your infidelity, and you’ll never be so young, again, as to make another like it. . . . You should have decided never to repeat the incident, and never to mention it. Grand gestures are expensive. How expensive yours was, whether it’s to cost you Peter for ever, you can’t tell yet. But it probably will. You must have knocked all that half-baked young collegiate’s conceptions about women, into a cocked hat.”
(Peter, a “half-baked young collegiate?” I’d never thought of that. Perhaps he was.)
“Never mind, Pat. I did something as young as that once, with Arch. Tell you sometime. To go on with Judith though. A woman of her sort, with the just-one-of-the-boys attitude, may be precisely what Pete wants at the moment, especially if something has gone wrong with the machinery in the other pure love of his life. Judith has sex-appeal, a deliberate sex-appeal. Of course, not like yours, Pat.”
“I haven’t any, couldn’t keep my own husband.”
“Don’t generalize from one example and an irrelevant one. You have a practically universal sex-appeal. As soon as you begin to be even a little interested in people, again, instead of just decorative but altogether unresponsive, you’ll have dozens of men asking to ‘love’ (her accent was derisive) you for a night or a month or two or even longer. I worry about that.
“I have very little sex-appeal myself, Pat. Nothing passionate about me except the colour of my hair. My spiritual expression puts men off me, except as a daytime companion. I’m glad too. The other, the evading of incessant pursuit, is so tiring. . . . That’ll do for another Sunday sermon though.
“Judith, and women of her type, cultivate sex-appeal because they need to. Women of her type—not really feminine, not pretty, even, actually, succeed by being clever enough to accent what they have. Take her. She has handsome auburn hair, not bad eyes (hazel aren’t they?) and a good slim round figure. That’s all. Her features are just scattered about her face. Can you remember her nose or hands or mouth or chin? Her knees are much more vivid in my recollection. She always crosses them high. They are quite nice, too. I remember them best, really, and her hair, for she takes off her hat on every possible and impossible occasion, to let the light shine on it. Why do I remember her eyes, I wonder? Oh yes, she narrows them to look at people sleepily.”
I giggled. “Wonderful, Lucia . . . Did she ever cut in on you?”
“No, really. Someone like her did, though. . . . The type says, in its startling language, the extremity of its make-up, oh, the way it waves its legs about, ‘I am accessible, I am accessible, and I’m very good fun, indeed.’ They are good fun, too. They give a man the comfortable feeling of sitting about with no collar on. I’m sure Judith will be easier for your Peter, than either you or Hilda were. He’s good-looking isn’t he? And the newspaper crowd will amuse her. . . . Patricia my child, she can probably keep him ages, until he gets another attack of grail-seeking, idealism. She may cure him of any further recurrence of that, even. Women of her sort do.”
“Lucia, you are the complete Cassandra, this afternoon.”
“Let’s have a drink—there won’t be any at the Stevens’—they have the most amazing Russians who suddenly burst into song, though. Worthwhile, usually. Will you mix it?”
“It will have to be a Bronx. There’s nothing but gin and oranges. . . .
“It tastes good. Lucia, do you think I should write Pete and ask him if he still wants a divorce?”
“Why write him? That’s just obvious indiscretion. . . . Why not telephone him?”
“He’d be at the club, now, probably.”
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