Wives and Lovers

11

Gordon swung the car off the highway and switched off the ignition. He had turned the radio on very loud, to keep him awake. As long as this fast, jerky music continued, he didn’t feel like sleeping and he didn’t feel like thinking. He didn’t know the tune the orchestra was playing but he sang anyway, “chewy, chewy, chewy,” and honked the horn to emphasize the rhythm.

By squinting up his eyes and concentrating, he could make out the row of houses along the highway, dark, locked for the night. In one of these houses Ruby was sleeping. He couldn’t see very well but he was pretty sure which house it was, so he honked the horn insistently. As if in answer, a train came wailing around the bend, and all other sounds were lost in its dismal echo, Yoo hoo, yoo hoo hoo! The road shuddered, the houses trembled, their windows vibrating like chattering teeth. Long after the light on the caboose had disappeared, Gordon could hear the train mourning its farewell, adieu, adieu! He would have liked to follow the train, driving along the tracks, until he caught up with it. But this was impracticable, he realized. The wheels of the car wouldn’t fit the tracks, and even if they did it would be hard to keep on them. And suppose another train came along from behind? It would smash the car to pieces, and Elaine would be mad.

He honked the horn again, to drown out the echo of the train whistle.

In one of the houses a light appeared in an upstairs window. A shadow moved behind the blind, and a minute later a light went on in the downstairs hall. A woman in a bathrobe came out on the porch, carrying a flashlight. She shone the flashlight at the car, then directly into Gordon’s face. Gordon blinked. The woman came down the porch steps, cautiously, as if she didn’t quite trust them. She was middle-aged, heavily built. Her gray hair swung in pigtails against her shoulders. She had some kind of grease plastered on her neck and around her eyes.

“What do you want?” Mrs. Freeman said. “Waking decent people in the middle of the night, you ought to be ashamed. Turn that radio down, my land, do you want to attract the cops?” She sounded very cross, but it was a surface crossness. Mrs. Freeman was, in fact, rather relieved at seeing a total stranger. When she had wakened to the sound of the horn and the blare of the radio, she’d been half-afraid that it was Robert coming home all of a sudden, as he usually did, with one of his noisy friends.

“What do you want?” she repeated, when Gordon had turned down the radio.

“I want Ruby,” Gordon said. “Tell Ruby — you tell Ruby—”

“Ruby’s asleep like everyone else with a grain of sense to them. The trouble with you is, you’re drunk.”

“I know. I know I am. I’m very sorry.”

“You better be more careful. There are cops going up and down here all night. The highway patrol is just a couple of blocks up.”

“It is?” Gordon said, blinking. “I never knew that.”

“Well, you know now. You just skiddoo on home and go to bed like everyone else.”

Gordon shook his head, apologetic but obstinate. “I prefer to sleep here. I won’t disturb anyone. I’ll go to sleep in the car and when Ruby wakes up, you tell her I’m here.”

“You can’t sleep here. They’ll pick you up and put you in jail.”

“They can’t put me in jail just because I’m very tired.”

“You and who else,” Mrs. Freeman said in disgust.

“It wouldn’t be cricket.”

“Go on, skiddoo home now.” She fluttered her hand at him as if she were shooing away a chicken. “I got enough trouble without a drunk man being picked up in front of my house.” She broke off suddenly and exclaimed, “My land, you aren’t even dressed proper!”

“It’s because I lost my hat,” Gordon said. “I put it down some place and lost it. It belongs to the costume. You see, the costume isn’t complete without the hat.” He knew that the hat wasn’t important to him, yet he was filled with an overwhelming sense of loss. I’ve lost my hat. I’ve lost something. I’m no longer a man, Elaine said so. I bear no resemblance to a man.

Mrs. Freeman was staring at him in disapproval. “You people that get drunk at Fiesta time, it’s you people that give Fiesta a bad name.”

“I’m very sorry.” He leaned his head against the back of the seat, closing his eyes. He was sorry. He didn’t want to give Fiesta a bad name or to cause Mrs. Freeman any trouble. All his desires of the evening — to sing with Judge Bowridge, to hit Elaine, to cry, to follow the train up the tracks, to go back and find his hat — they had all congealed into one great desire, to go to sleep. But Mrs. Freeman turned the flashlight full on his face again and he had to open his eyes.

“All right,” she said in a resigned voice. “I’ll go and wake her up. Now don’t go off to sleep while I’m gone, will you?” She reached in and shook his arm. “Don’t go to sleep now, you promise.”

“I promise,” Gordon said earnestly. “Tell Ruby — tell Ruby—”

“You tell her yourself,” Mrs. Freeman said, and went up the porch steps, muttering under her breath.

He had promised not to go to sleep, and he didn’t. He merely closed his eyes and floated, until he heard Ruby opening the door of the car. She was breathing hard, as if she was angry or had hurried to get out of the house.

“Ruby?” He moved his hand towards her in a helpless gesture of appeal.

She took his hand and held it, stroking it very gently, as if she was soothing a hurt. He still wasn’t sure whether she was angry or not, until she spoke: “Where ever did you get so dirty?”

He opened his eyes. She was smiling at him, amused. She had her beige coat on over her pajamas, and a scarf around her head to hide the pin curls.

“I was sitting on the ground under a tree,” Gordon said.

“I’ve never seen you dirty before.”

“Am I dirty?”

“There’s mud on your coat, and see, here’s a grass stain on your hand. And your fingernails — you are a disgrace. Mrs. Freeman thinks so anyway.”

“I’m very, very sorry,” Gordon said. “Would you like some music?”

“All right.”

He turned the radio up a little. “There. How do you like that?”

“What did you get drunk for?”

“Oh, now. Oh, now, now, now.”

“I just wondered. I’ve never seen you drunk before either.”

“I am full of surprises.”

“Well, yes,” Ruby said slowly. “I guess you are.”

“I’m not going home.”

“Nobody said you had to.”

“That woman said I did. I said, no — I was very polite, though.”

Ruby laughed. “I’m sure you were.”

“You’re a funny girl. You sound so happy. Let me look at you.”

“No,” she said, quite sharply, turning her face away. “I haven’t any make-up on and my hair’s done up.”

“Well, I’m dirty. That makes us a pair. We’re a pair, aren’t we, Ruby?”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Well, but we are. We’re a pair. Both victims. Can’t fight back. Soft.” He felt something closing in his head, like a sliding door. He saw it closing, slowly and inexorably, and he reached out to stop it. “No character, will power.”

He put his head on Ruby’s shoulder and watched the door close.

“Chewy, chewy, chewy,” Gordon said, and went to sleep.

With her free hand Ruby switched off the headlights of the car and turned off the radio. She saw that Mrs. Freeman was still up, moving around the house, and she thought, with detachment, She will probably ask me to move. I’ll have to move again. Well, that’s all right.

She sat listening to the beat of Gordon’s heart and the ticking of the dashboard clock, until Mrs. Freeman came outside again. She was carrying a cup of coffee, and the flashlight. The steam rose from the coffee like mist.

“Well,” she said. “Well. I guess you know him, eh?”

Ruby nodded.

“I made some coffee. Here.”

“Thanks, thanks ever so much.”

“It will sober him up.” She stared at Ruby. There was hostility in her face, but a certain stoical tolerance too. Facts were facts, and she might disapprove of the fact of a drunken man outside her house, but there he was. “What will the neighbors think?”

“There’s no one up, no lights.”

“They’re probably all peeking out the windows. I have a hard enough time holding my head up.”

“I’ll move,” Ruby said. “I’ll move out tomorrow if you want me to.”

“It’s not your fault,” Mrs. Freeman said soberly. “My land, the things that happen. The things that happen that aren’t really anybody’s fault.” She sighed. “What’s his name?”

“Gordon.”

She went over to the other side of the car and, grasping Gordon’s left arm, she pulled him to a sitting position, saying his name over and over in a stern whisper: “Gordon. Wake up, Gordon. Gordon! Now you just sit up, Gordon.”

She shook him until his eyes opened. Then she held him upright while Ruby fed him the coffee. Whenever she saw a car approaching Mrs. Freeman switched off the flashlight and the three of them were left in the darkness.

They put him to bed on the studio couch in Mrs. Freeman’s dining room. He lay on his side, with his legs drawn up. His shirt stuck out from the ripped seam of his coat, and he slept with his cheek resting on his grass-stained, muddy hands. Ruby covered him with two blankets.

“Look like kids when they’re sleeping,” Mrs. Freeman said with a kind of bitter melancholy. “I guess he’ll be warm enough with two blankets. Anyway, it’s all I have.”

“He’ll be fine. I— it’s— it’s very nice of you — letting him stay.”

“I couldn’t do anything else.”

“It’s very nice of you not to be mad.”

“I am mad,” Mrs. Freeman said decisively. “I am mad. But I don’t know who at.”

She flung a look of disapproval at the sleeping Gordon, but Ruby stepped between her and the couch, as if to shield Gordon. “He wouldn’t put anyone out like this intentionally,” she said. “He never would. Something must have happened.”

“Something always does.” Mrs. Freeman pulled the chain hanging from the beaded chandelier. “Always. Well, no matter. There’s some coffee left, if you want some.”

“Yes, I would. Thanks very much.”

“We’ll have to drink it in the kitchen. We don’t want to wake him up. Who knows, he might come to life and want to dance and make whoopee. You can’t tell with drunks.”

“He’s not a drunk,” Ruby said stubbornly. “He hardly ever drinks. Something must have happened.”

The kitchen was cold and damp. Mrs. Freeman lit the gas oven and left the oven door open. Then she poured the coffee, and the two of them sat facing each other across the linoleum-covered table. The table had already been set for Mrs. Freeman’s solitary breakfast. None of the dishes matched — they were the surviving odds and ends of old sets, the remnants of the years. The salt shaker was shaped like an orange, the pepper shaker was silver plate, with some of the silver still clinging to its surface. Her cup was a shaving mug left behind by one of her tourists. Repeated washings in hot water had peeled away some of the lettering on it but it was still partly legible, Gr in s f El so, Texas. Her knife and fork belonged to her wedding present from her father, a set of silver, but the spoon didn’t match. It had been a gift from Robert several years ago. He had arrived home unexpectedly one morning, broke, without a suitcase, without anything: Carrie, it’s me. Now don’t be sore, Carrie, don’t be like that. Look, I brought you something, it’s a present, Carrie. He had wrapped the spoon up carefully in tissue paper and tied it with a broken shoelace. He watched her eagerly while she unwrapped it. I hope you like it, Carrie. You’re always saying we need some decent silver. The spoon bore the imprint “Hilton Hotels.” I knew you’d be pleased.

She picked up the spoon now and stirred some sugar in her coffee. She felt a savage anger welling in her stomach. It spread down her arm into her hand, making her stir the coffee violently.

“I don’t know who at,” she said, as if to herself. “In the daytime it’s all right. I write my letters and make the beds and do my work. I’m not bothered. It’s when the night comes on that I begin to worry. It’s funny out here — as soon as the sun goes down it gets cold. Not like back home where you could sit on the porch in the twilight and rock a bit. No, out here it gets cold right away, a kind of bleakness sets in. Such a change, all of a sudden, it makes you kind of scared that the sun’s not going to come out again the next day. I’m getting like all the other old fogies around here, I depend on the weather too much, like it’s a religion. It creeps up on you, gradual, and you get superstitious — like, if the sun shines, well, that’s good, there’s still plenty of life left in the old girl, that’s how you feel. Dying seems awfully far away when I go out into the back yard in the morning and the sun warms my head. I feel quite youthful and confident, like God was smiling at me.” She added curtly, “Downright heathenish. A graven image.”

She sipped her coffee, a cool and bitter syrup that soured at the base of her throat.

“So something must have happened,” she said. “Yes. It always does. Excuses, I know all the excuses there are in this world. He’s married, I suppose.”

Ruby said, “Yes.”

“And what’s to happen now?”

“I don’t know. It’s up to Gordon.” She traced the pattern of the linoleum with her forefinger. “He’s the one that has to figure things out. He’s got ties, other people to think about, and I haven’t.”

With an air of impatience Mrs. Freeman got up and rinsed out the coffee cups at the sink.

“Not anyone I care about,” Ruby said.

“And that nice Mr. Anderson—” She turned off the oven and banged the door shut. “Well, that’s the way it goes. You better set your alarm early. Miss Hodgins gets up at seven and I don’t want her to find him sleeping on the couch like that. It wouldn’t look right, him in costume and everything.”

“I’ll get up at six.”

“Well, good night then.”

“Mrs. Freeman — thanks for all your kindness.”

“Kindness,” Mrs. Freeman said. “You’re going to need more than kindness before you’re through. Well. I told you I get feeling blue at night like this, don’t pay any attention to me. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

Ruby set her alarm for six. Then she took off her coat and hung it in the closet, moving slowly because she dreaded to go to bed and lie in the darkness, thinking. I get feeling blue at night like this. She would have liked to read for a while but there was no reading light in the room. The crudely painted Mexican pottery lamp on the bureau didn’t work, and the only other light in the room was the ceiling light with a chain suspended from it. The chain was too short to reach, so someone had tied a strip of pink cloth to the end of it. Ruby pulled the strip of cloth, then lay on the bed with her eyes open, wondering why Gordon had come and what he was going to do.

We’re a pair, both victims, can’t fight back. In the darkness she shook her head violently as if Gordon was there to witness her denial. In the same motion she denied Mrs. Freeman too: You’re going to need more than kindness.

No, no, her head rocked back and forth on the pillow. They don’t understand about me, I’m tough. I’m tough.

When she came downstairs in the morning Gordon was already awake. He was sitting on the couch holding his head in his hands. She came toward him, very shyly, as if she were half-afraid he wouldn’t remember who she was.

“Are you all right, Gordon?”

“I’m fine.”

She sat down beside him. He was pale and his eyes were bloodshot. The pulse in his temple was beating hard and fast.

“Thanks for letting me sleep here,” he said. “What time is it?”

“A little after six.”

“The beginning of a new day.” He turned to look at her, smiling. “You brushed your hair out. Last night you had a scarf around it, you looked very pretty.”

“I didn’t think you’d remember.”

“I remember everything, I think. I’ve got to go out and buy some clothes.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“I forgot. Well, I’ve got an old outfit at the office, I can wear that.”

“You have clothes at home.”

“I’m not going home. It’s too bad it’s Sunday. That’s going to make things harder, getting some money, etcetera.”

“Why do you need money today?”

“I told you, I’m not going home. I’m running away, I suppose you’d call it. I haven’t run away since I was seven and I’ve forgotten how you go about it, but I think money is pretty essential. I hope you’ll come with me, will you, Ruby?”

“Gordon — listen Gordon, you’re not still sort of half-drunk?”

“I’m sober.”

“What about Elaine? Did you talk to her?”

“Yes, we had quite a talk,” Gordon said dryly. “Last night.”

“Did you tell her you were going away? With me?”

“No, I’m going to let her be surprised.”

She looked at him anxiously for a moment. “Gordon, what is this? Are we just going on a little holiday, or are we going to stay together for good? I know, maybe I shouldn’t ask that—”

“We’re staying together. God knows what she’ll do. I’m hoping she’ll get a divorce. I’m hoping she’ll realize when I’m gone that that’s what she’s wanted all along.” He got to his feet. His head felt heavy and brittle, and for a minute he could see nothing but blackness shot with flashes of light. But his physical discomfort merely accentuated the peace in his mind. Elaine had freed him. She didn’t intend to, but she had, and now he was free. He said, “We’ll drive over to my office for some clothes and then we’ll have breakfast, I’ll bring you back here and you can pack your things while I’m trying to gather together some money.”

“I haven’t much to pack.”

“More than I have.” He glanced down at her, smiling at her earnestness. He would have liked to bend over and kiss her but he was afraid his head might split in two. He put his hands on her shoulders. “We’ll never come back to this town, Ruby.”

“We’ll have to. This is where your work is.”

“I’ll sell my practice and start another one, wherever you want to go.”

“I’ll help you,” she said. “I’ll work hard.”

“We’ll start all over. I hate this town, I never want to see it again.”

She stared up at him, thinking, he will never love me the way I do him, I am looking forward just to being with him, and he’s looking forward to getting away from Elaine — not the town, he doesn’t hate the town, it’s just that she’s in it. But it doesn’t matter. I’m lucky and I’m tough.

She turned away and began to fold the blankets on the couch. A desert wind had began to blow over the mountains in the middle of the night and the blankets felt dry and dusty. Everything in the house was covered with a film of powdered sand, and there was a rawness in Ruby’s throat and nasal passages.

When they went outside the wind was still blowing, warm and furious. Gordon’s car was gray with dust, and still the dirt came spinning along the road. The houses trembled, as if a procession of freight cars was lunging up the tracks.

The keys were in the car.

“It’s a nice day to get out of town,” Gordon said.

They drove to his office and Ruby waited in the car while he went inside. It was quite a while before he returned, wearing the gabardine slacks and shirt that he kept for golfing. He looked very stern when he got back into the car.

“Gordon, you’re sorry to be leaving?”

“No,” he said quietly. “I was just looking around for the last time. Sentimental, isn’t it? I’m not sorry I’m leaving. I would just like to take some things with me. It’s funny how you can get attached to an electric machine. Habit, ownership.”

“You don’t have to sell your practice, Gordon. Couldn’t we just go away for a while and then we could come back and you could start to work just where you left off?”

“That’s the hard way.”

“Why? You haven’t tried it. People in this day and age don’t look down on a man for living with a woman.”

“An insurance man, maybe not, or a truck driver. But a schoolteacher, a doctor, a dentist — it’s not enough to be able to teach or perform an operation or fill a tooth. We have to set an example. This isn’t L.A. or Hollywood, Ruby. They’re a hundred miles and fifty million light years away. My ability to fill teeth isn’t half as important as my morals.” He shook his head. “No, I couldn’t swing it, I’m too soft. It would hurt me if they said, ‘I certainly will not pay him any five dollars for cleaning my teeth just so he can spend it on that woman he’s living with.’ Don’t look surprised. People are funny, they’re pretty hard on people who do some of the things they themselves would like to do. So what I’d get if I stayed here is just that — unpaid bills, patients who want a bargain because they figure I couldn’t afford not to cut my prices, and maybe a few new patients who believe that any dentist who lives in sin should be willing to sell drugs on the side. No, I couldn’t face it.”

He added, after a time, “I don’t dare hope she’ll divorce me. She doesn’t believe in divorce, but there’s a chance, maybe, if she can come to believe that it would be better for her, too. It would be, of course. She’ll never be happy living only to spite me. It’s funny about Elaine. I think that if she’d never married me she’d have been all right. She wouldn’t be so filled with vengeance and petty spite. Maybe even yet she will have some kind of decent life with a little softness in it.” A gust of wind blew a piece of newspaper against the windshield. It shivered there for a minute and then lurched wildly off down the street. “Where would you like to have breakfast?”

“Any place that’s open,” Ruby said.

They drove down Main Street. The sun had already risen and in the distance they saw the sheen of the ocean. But the town looked dead, parched by the hot wind. Along the curb were abandoned cars under a pall of dust. Two women were hurrying across the street heading into the wind, shielding their eyes with their hands. An old man sat on a bench at a bus stop, like a victim resigned to the sacrifice, his legs apart, his lunch pail resting on his stomach, his head thrown back with his neck ready for the knife. The old man moved, coughed, spat into the gutter. A cardboard box rolled down the sidewalk and a piece of ripped awning flapped against a store window. A painted sign swung in the wind, squeaking on its hinges. The supple palm trees leaned to the ocean, their fronds streaming out like seaweed, and the air was filled with a continuous rustling noise.

It wasn’t a very high wind, like the wind that came in from the ocean and blew the fog off the top of the mountains and cluttered the beaches with kelp and stranded starfish and pieces of tar from the underwater oil wells. Gordon liked the sea winds, they were natural, they suited the town. But the desert wind was an intruder, an alien from the other side of the mountain. Sometimes it hung around for days, like an unwelcome guest in the house who produced tension but must be tolerated. Gordon felt the tension in his hands as they gripped the steering wheel, and in his throat which seemed swollen and grimy.

Yet he was grateful to the wind, too. It was a good day to be leaving, a day when the town looked unnatural, squalid, hidden under scurf. He let his mind dwell, deliberately, on the things he didn’t like in the town. Over on Gioconda Street, where the highway bisected the town, lay the nucleus of the slum section. Here lived the Negroes, the Mexicans, and the remnants of what had once been a large Chinese community, in sagging shacks and chicken houses and barns. These slums were worse than anything he had ever seen even in the large cities. If they had existed in Chicago or New York, at least some attention might have been drawn to them, but here they were ignored. The rickety children played in the dirt on Gioconda Street and went to school when they had clothes and shoes to wear, or to the General Hospital if they got sick enough. The town bulged with doctors and elaborate clinics, but many of the residents of the slums felt that it was easier to die than to make the long trek out to the General Hospital and wait all day for a turn, only to be told to eat more eggs and T-bone steaks, take a long rest free from worry, go to Arizona, wear a custom-made truss, buy contraceptives, take vitamin pills. Every Saturday morning they came to Gordon’s office for free dental treatment and Gordon had come to dread this day in the week because he, too, had to give them impossible advice: If you could try to keep Susie off carbohydrates, Mrs. Haley. Sure, sure, Doc. Say, I still got this awful pain in my side and I been told I oughta have an operation on my insides but I got my cleaning jobs to do, I can’t take no time off with all those mouths to feed.

He forced himself to think of Mrs. Haley. When she first came to the office she had the holes in her teeth plugged with candle wax. She had all her children with her, for moral support, and Gordon had given them each a ride in the dental chair, two at a time.

Thinking of Mrs. Haley, he was sure that he hated this pretentious little town. It wore culture on its head like an ageing, kittenish dowager, wearing a picture hat with artificial roses, and needing a good hot bath.

He was glad to be leaving.

The only place they could find open was the lunch room across from the S. P. station. The counter was already half-filled with railroad men. They talked back and forth to each other and to the two waitresses. One of the men took a snapshot out of his wallet and passed it to the stout waitress.

“Gee whiz,” she exclaimed. “They’re cute! They’re as cute as bugs! You musta had a good-looking iceman.” She handed the picture to Ruby. “Pass it along, will you? It’s Joe’s twins.”

Joe’s twins were standing in a playpen wearing identical expressions of surprise.

“They are cute,” Ruby said. “Aren’t they, Gordon?”

Gordon glanced briefly at the picture and passed it on.

“They don’t like to have their pictures took,” Joe explained. “Maybe scared of the camera.”

“G’wan,” said the waitress. “You probably beat them. G’wan, admit it.”

“You’re a great kidder,” Joe said.

The waitress brought Ruby and Gordon some scrambled eggs. She had a good-natured, careless attitude that reminded Gordon of Hazel. He hadn’t, until that moment, thought of trying to get some money through Hazel. Hazel wouldn’t have any herself, not enough anyway, but if he gave her a check she might be able to cash it through George Anderson.

Without tasting his eggs, he went to the phone booth and dialed Hazel’s number.