Wives and Lovers

16

Even on a sunny day it was a quiet neighborhood. Men went to their offices early in the morning and returned in the evening to eat dinner and read the newspaper and watch television behind closed blinds. Young children were kept off the street in nursery schools or walled patios, and dogs were fenced. It was a neighborhood built by and for retired people and members of the younger professional set who were on the way up.

Gordon didn’t belong there; he had never felt any sense of belonging. When he came home from his office after the day’s work he usually hesitated a moment outside the front door as if he was not sure whether it was his own door, or what lay behind it, his wife, Elaine, or some hostile stranger.

There was only one light on in the house, the night light in the upstairs bathroom. Elaine always left it on for the children so he knew they must be there, all four of them, sleeping quietly and not caring whether he came back or not. His absence seemed to have made only two differences: Elaine had been more careful about locking the doors, and she had bought a dog. He wondered whether the dog was intended as protection or as compensation for the children. A dog in exchange for a husband. Well, that’s fair enough, he thought wryly. Elaine doesn’t like either breed.

He leaned back against the slippery trunk of the loquat tree. Fog condensed on its leathery leaves and dripped on the ground with a monotonous little tune, plink, plunk, like a dozen leaking faucets. Plink, plunk, the tune was taken up by the bougainvillea over the garage and the hibiscus along the patio wall and the row of red-flowering eucalyptus that bordered the street. The sound reminded him of when he was a boy in Minnesota; in the spring the icicles that had hung stiff as quartz from the eaves throughout the winter started to melt until they fell loose and shattered, and the ice on the pond split open and water began to gurgle up through the cracks. Water sounds, dripping sounds everywhere. The first thaw in spring was almost as noisy as the first storm in autumn.

A cold trickle of moisture slid down the back of his neck. He pulled up his collar and walked silently through the fog to the front of the house. He had meant to arrive earlier, he had started out at dinner time from San Luis Obispo but as soon as the highway curved west to the coast the fog had struck like a crippling plague. Sleek young cars became gray and slow and anemic and moved like a procession of old men.

He went up the porch steps and sat down on the blue canvas glider, and from the inside of the house the dog began to bark again, in a higher pitch of hysteria and frustration. It wants to get out and bite me, chase me away, Gordon thought. I am an intruder. The house already belongs to him.

He was certain that the dog’s barking would wake Elaine, and now that the moment was at hand when he must face her he felt uneasy and afraid. He couldn’t remember all the compelling arguments he’d thought of during the day. He had planned each one carefully, using words and phrases that Elaine would understand and respond to emotionally. The arguments were still there inside his head but they had lost form, had thawed and dripped out of shape, like the icicles under the eaves, until they were blobs of slush.

He looked at the front door expecting it to open and not knowing what to say when it did. The door was solid mahogany because that’s what Elaine wanted. She said it gave people a good impression from the start if they were faced with a solid mahogany door. But, as it turned out, she was mistaken. Hardly anyone came to the house, and of those who did not one had recognized that the door was solid mahogany, and Elaine was forced to tell them: “How do you like our door?” or “I hardly heard, you know, the door is so thick. Solid mahogany, you know.”

Solid mahogany, closed and impenetrable. The key to it was on a key ring in his pocket. He could open the door if he wanted to, it was a simple matter, except for the dog. This was no ordinary dog. It sounded larger, stronger, fiercer. Its hoarse barking set up disturbing echoes in his mind, and each echo set up a new echo of its own until his eardrums reverberated with a cacophony of fears.

He sat motionless on the canvas glider with the fog dripping down his face.

A car came over the crest of the hill, languid and yellow-eyed. It crept past the house and paused with a sigh of brakes. The headlights went out, a door slammed, shoes scraped along the wet cement of the driveway.

A man walked out of the fog, like an actor making his entrance from behind a gray plush curtain. He crossed the lawn and came up the porch steps, a heavy-set man with a fedora pulled down low on his forehead. In the dark he could be anyone; but even in the light Gordon would not have recognized him. He knew George only as the half-hero, half-child of Hazel’s conversation.

Gordon leaned forward as if he was about to rise to welcome the stranger. The glider creaked.

The man turned with a little jump of surprise and said harshly, “What the hell.”

“I didn’t mean to startle—”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was about to ask you the same question.”

“Ruth called me, said there was a prowler hanging around the house.”

“Ruth? You must have the wrong address. This is my house.”

“So?”

“It’s not paid for, but I have the deed, so you might say it’s my house. Are you a policeman? It’s funny somebody should call a policeman because a man wants to get a little fresh air.”

“If it’s your house why don’t you go inside?”

“Well, I would, except for the dog. It isn’t any of your business but I don’t mind telling you. She bought a dog while I was away. It sounds like a fairly large dog. You heard it a moment ago?”

“I heard it.”

“Don’t you think it sounds like a fairly large dog?”

“It’s a little white mongrel,” George said, “about the size of a fox terrier.”

Inside the house there was silence, as if the dog was eavesdropping on the conversation.

Gordon rose, wiping the moisture from his forehead with the sleeve of his topcoat. “A little dog,” he said quietly. “How could you know that?”

“I know a lot of things about you, Foster.”

“You have the advantage of me. I don’t even know your name.”

“Anderson.”

“You’re Hazel’s—”

“That’s right.”

“Well.” Gordon looked down at the floor. Six inches from his left foot lay the doll he had given Judith the previous week. He had bought it, not for a special reason like a birthday, but in a moment of guilt and compunction, as if he could give to her in the form of this doll the happy babyhood she had missed. He had been able to buy off his conscience to some extent, but he hadn’t bought off Judith. Within two days the doll was naked and almost scalped, one arm was gone, its china eyes had been carefully pushed back into its empty head, and into its slightly open mouth between the rows of tiny perfect teeth, Judith had thrust Elaine’s ivory-handled nail file.

“Well,” he said again. “I suppose it’s time we met, even under circumstances like these. I’m not sure,” he added wryly, “what circumstances they are.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No. No, I confess I’m puz—”

“Where’s Ruby?”

“Ruby.” Gordon repeated the name in a flat voice as if it aroused no interest or memory in him. “She’s all right. Nothing happened to her.”

“Tell me where she is.”

“She’s — I left her in San Luis.”

“You left her.”

“She has a cousin there. I — she decided to stay with her until — while I came back and settled things with Elaine. So I came back.”

George stepped closer. He was laughing, soft derisive laughter that echoed back against the wall of fog.

“Lover boy,” he said, and the laughter bubbled up again, not from his throat but from a source deep inside him. “A real honest-to-God lover boy, eh, Foster?”

Gordon shook his head, mute, resigned.

“That’s your technique, is it, Foster? — Get them as far as San Luis, leave them with a cousin, and then come crawling back to your wife? That’s it? Eh, lover boy?”

“You can’t talk to me like that.” But the words were frail and wistful, like the clenched fist of a little boy, the sting of a butterfly, the bite of a glowworm.

He thought of Elaine the last time he’d seen her standing in the wind beneath the wild palm tree, her voice calm and quiet: you fool, you idiot, no character, no will power, not a man, no resemblance to a man...

“You can’t talk to me like that. I must—” I must defend my human dignity, he wanted to say. But there was no time, no place, for words. He drew back his arm and jerked it loosely like a piece of rope. His fist, an inert object at the end of it, incredibly, almost involuntarily, snapped up in front of him and struck George’s chin.

George stumbled sideways and stepped on the doll’s moist plastic head. The doll slipped out from under his foot with a squeaking noise and slid across the porch.

His arms flailed for a moment as he tried to recover his balance, then he fell heavily, his head striking the iron base of the glider.

From somewhere close by came the first soft muted wails of a police siren. Gordon turned and began to run. As he ran, his trembling muscles gained strength and a feeling of elation rose inside him like bubbles of adrenalin.

He climbed into his car and pressed the starter button. His right knuckles were painful and already swelling so that he couldn’t bend his hand around the steering wheel. But the pain was not unpleasant. He drove toward the business section of the city, steering with his left hand, his right hand resting on the seat beside him like a trophy.

He checked in at a hotel on lower State Street and from his room he called Ruby long distance. Although it was very late Ruby answered the phone on the second ring, as if she had been waiting beside it for hours expecting him to call.

“Ruby?”

“Gordon. Where are you?”

“I’m staying at a hotel for the night.”

“Did you talk to her? Did you ask her—?”

“I’m not going to ask her anything. I’m going to tell her.”

“You sound funny, Gordon. Have you been — do you feel all right?”

“I’m going to tell her,” he repeated and looked down at his bruised knuckles. You can’t talk to me like that. “I’ll see her tomorrow morning, first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Why didn’t you see her tonight?”

“It’s hard to explain.” Because it was foggy, because there was a dog barking, because Judith left her doll on the porch and a man stumbled over it. “I’ll see her tomorrow. I’ll make it perfectly clear that I’m not going to be run out of town like a criminal. I’m going to stay put and fight. I’m going to—”

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. Just yes.” And she made a little sighing sound that was almost inaudible. But he heard it. He had heard the same sound a thousand times from Elaine and he knew its meaning and its intent; it was a complete negation of everything he was trying to say.

“Ruby?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll see her first thing tomorrow and then we can make our plans definite.”

“Yes.”

“You can stay there for a few more days. Then I’ll find some place here for you to live, a little apartment, and then I’ll drive up and get you. How’s that?”

“Yes.”

Yes. Not a word of agreement, in fact not a word at all. A sigh. Elaine’s sound. A new sound for Ruby. He must destroy it before it grew as Elaine’s had grown.

“If you want me to,” he said, “I’ll drive up and get you tomorrow. We’ll face things together.”

He heard her gasp of surprise and pleasure. “Gordon, you’re not just saying that for my sake, because you know I’m seared?”

“No, I mean it. I’ll be there at noon.”

“Oh, Gordon.”

“Goodnight, darling. There’s nothing to be scared of.”

His hand had started to throb, heavily and irregularly, like a fluttering heart. He went into the bathroom and held it under the cold water tap.

“There’s nothing to be scared of,” he said and began to laugh.

The sun rose early and hung like an orange-red spotlight behind a gauze curtain. By seven-thirty most of the fog had burned away, and when Hazel went out into the back yard to empty the trash baskets the roofs of the houses were steaming as if the whole city was on fire. All the dust that the desert wind had laid over everything was washed away and the air was clean and sweet.

To hell with him, he didn’t even phone, Hazel thought, and banged the trash baskets upside down into the incinerator. Out came the remnants of the week: the letters and cigarette butts and apple cores, used pieces of Kleenex and empty food cartons and all the odds and ends from the drawers Harold and Josephine had cleaned out before they left, bits of ribbon, old grocery lists written on the corners of envelopes, some snapshot negatives, several newspaper clippings about pregnancy, a pamphlet on skin care, a sachet yellow and soured with age, and a woolen tie riddled with moth holes.

Hazel set a match to the rubbish and walked away because she did not want to see it burn. It seemed too final.

Slowly she crossed the yard. It had been only three days now since Escobar had cleaned it up, but already the grass had grown, more in some places than in others, so that the lawn looked uneven. The desert wind had deposited a fresh pile of dead leaves and acorns and eucalyptus pods beside the picket fence, and in the irrigation ditch Escobar had dug along the eugenia hedge there was a burst of new little weeds, tendrils of devil grass and sprigs of filaree and clusters of toadstools. Under the ground beside the garage an enterprising gopher had built himself some additional runways and storage rooms and his excavations had left little mounds of earth. During the night a dog or cat, bent on food or mischief, had upset the ant pot underneath the orange tree and the syrupy poison had seeped out and crystallized. The ants ignored the poison and marched as usual up and down the orange tree milking the aphids and, when it was necessary, carrying them to the more tender tips of the branches, like good farmers guiding their cattle to greener pastures.

It was as if, during a space of three days, a whole new cycle of life had begun. Under Hazel’s feet the ground seemed to move with bursting seeds and hatching eggs, with blind, brainless, soundless cells of things dividing and redividing; earthworms, sow bugs, nematodes, thrips, like rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief.

It’s no use, Hazel thought, a dozen Escobars wouldn’t change anything.

She heard the click of the gate, and turned and saw George. He looked tired and there was a bandage wrapped around his head so tightly that it crinkled his forehead and gave him a puzzled expression.

“Hello, Hazel.”

“Hello.”

“I thought you’d be up by this time. I’m on my way home and, well, I decided to drop in and see you first.”

“Oh.”

He touched the bandage lightly with his fingertips. “No questions?”

“You look like you had quite an evening.”

“I did.”

“In fact you look like you got into a fight.”

“In a way I did.”

“You’d think at your age you’d have learned to stay out of fights.”

“You’re sore, aren’t you, because I didn’t come back last night? Well, I couldn’t make it. Ruth phoned the police and they hauled me off to the hospital and wouldn’t let me go until a few minutes ago. The nurse hid my clothes so I couldn’t get away. And a couple of detectives kept asking me questions about who was my assailant, that’s what they called him, my assailant.”

“And who was he?”

“How should I know?” George said flatly. “It was foggy and dark. I didn’t get a good look at him. He jumped me, took me by surprise. I slipped on something and hit my head on the glider.”

“Is that what you told the police?”

“Yes.”

“Is it the truth?”

“Close enough.”

“What really happened?”

“What really happened,” he repeated thoughtfully, as if he had already spent a great deal of time trying to decide on an answer. “I don’t know. Maybe a lot happened, maybe I only got a cut on the head.”

“George, was it — is it a bad cut?”

He looked down at her irritably. “Don’t go into that Florence Nightingale routine. I’m a big boy, I can take care of myself.”

“Then why the hell don’t you?”

“Here we are quarreling again. Always quarreling.”

“Well, I can’t help it.” She turned and went up the porch steps. “There’s some coffee on the stove, let’s have a cup.”

He made no move to follow her. “No thanks.”

“Aren’t you even coming in?”

“No.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. I like it out here. Besides I can get a cup of coffee downtown. Any downtown. I can go anywhere in the world and get a cup of coffee.”

“Whatever that means.”

“It means a cup of coffee isn’t what I want.” He came up the porch steps, his head bent like a charging bull. “Listen to me. I did everything I could to get back here last night. I fought nurses and doctors and even policemen. I would have given my right arm to get back to you. It seemed the most important thing in the whole world to me, not because I’m hard up, as you put it, but because, well, I don’t know how to say it. I’m no good at saying things, you might laugh. And if you laughed, I might — I don’t trust myself — maybe I’d kill you.”

“I don’t feel like laughing.”

“Don’t I seem funny to you?”

“No.”

“I am, though. I’m pretty funny. What are you crying about?”

“I’m not crying. And if I am, I can if I want to.”

“What did I do to make you cry?”

She shook her head, holding her fists against her eyes. “Nothing.”

“I must have. Goddamn it, Hazel, don’t cry. I’m sorry. You hear that? I’m sorry. I don’t know what for, but I’m sorry. Now will you stop crying?”

“No.”

“Well, all right,” he said. “All right.”

He put his arms around her and she buried her face against his chest, and presently they went together into the house.