Wives and Lovers

6

Ruby had never lived in a small town before, and she was unaware of the speed and intricacy of its grapevine. She assumed that she had in Channel City the same anonymity she had in San Francisco, and that no one knew about the relationship between Gordon Foster and herself, not even the owner of the café which was their meeting place.

She was not interested in or curious about the other people and she rarely paid any attention to them even when she was sitting waiting for Gordon and had nothing to do but drink coffee. She would have been surprised to learn that at least a dozen habitués of the café knew her and Gordon by sight and guessed the relationship, and several more knew them by name and were sure of the relationship. In the latter group was Al Gomez, who owned the café, and Gordon Foster’s wife, Elaine. Neither nature nor experience had equipped Gordon for a life of intrigue, and Elaine had found out about Ruby a week after Ruby arrived in town.

Elaine, as a churchwoman and the mother of three children, believed in divorce even less than she believed in marriage and Gordon, so she didn’t discuss the subject of Ruby at all. She merely telephoned the café two or three times in an evening, and asked Mr. Gomez politely to send Gordon home, one of the children had a sore throat, or a wrenched knee, or a headache, or a spot that might be measles. She never asked to speak to Gordon personally; she used Mr. Gomez as the messenger. This proved, at first, to be an effective device, for the messages, delivered in Gomez’s harsh, low voice sounded quite alarming. Mr. Gomez would shuffle over to the back booth where Ruby and Gordon were sitting, fix Gordon with his hot little eyes, and croak, “Wife says one of the kids fell out of bed, broke his arm.”

These messages, however startling they were in the beginning, had gradually lost their power, and the only people who were affected by them any longer were Gomez, who was tired of answering the phone, Ruby, who was infuriated by Elaine’s wily deceptions, and the two older Foster children. They had learned for the first time, listening to their mother on the telephone, that they were frail and mortal, surrounded by their enemy, death. They developed hourly symptoms, and screamed in real terror over a scratch or a bruise. Elaine, who believed she loved her children, was very much concerned because her five-year-old boy suffered from nightmares, and the girl, seven, was disgustingly fat from overeating. The girl found solace in food; even during school hours, or in bed at night, she chewed surreptitiously. As a result she frequently suffered abdominal pains which were relayed to Gordon, via Mr. Gomez: “The wife phoned, says one of the kids got a bust appendix.”

“Thank you, Gomez.”

“Or maybe polio.”

“If she phones again, tell her I’ve left.”

“Check.”

“Polio,” Ruby said, clenching her fists until the knuckles showed white. “Polio.”

“I’d better be leaving, Ruby.”

“But you just got here.”

“I know.”

“I hardly ever see you.”

“I know that too.”

When no one was looking, he kissed her goodbye.

He was often late for their meetings in the back booth, and sometimes he didn’t show up at all. Ruby would sit there the entire evening, sipping coffee, which was all she could afford, and watching the front door until her eyes went out of focus and her face looked drunken in its owlish intensity.

Once in a while Mr. Gomez would pause on his way to or from the kitchen.

“Late, eh?”

“Oh, he’ll be along. He should be here any minute.”

“Maybe the wife says no.”

“She’s always saying no. That wouldn’t make any difference. He’ll be here, I’m not worried.”

“Married man.”

Mr. Gomez’s abbreviated speeches, delivered in a cracked monotone, were difficult to understand. Ruby was not certain whether he was telling her that he too was a married man and knew how it was with wives, or whether he was reproving her for having a date with a married man. It worried her. She fancied reproach in his eyes and she wanted to slap his face, the dirty little Mex, but also to explain to him that she loved Gordon, she’d given up everything just to live in the same town he did.

“It’s not fair,” she screamed mentally at Mr. Gomez, who was frying a hamburger. “It’s not fair! She’s got everything — Gordon and the house and the kids, and all I’ve got is the back booth in this lousy little joint!”

The smell of grease rose from the griddle, clung to the walls and seeped into the very pores of Ruby’s skin, blending with the cologne she had splashed on her wrists for Gordon. She felt a little nauseated and dizzy from all the coffee she had drunk, but she sat with her eyes fixed glassily on the front door. Whenever the door opened her mouth got set, ready to smile; when it closed again, and Gordon was still missing, her heart shrank and oozed its juices like the hamburger Mr. Gomez was frying on the griddle.

She never gave up hope until Gomez changed the sign on the front door from “Open” to “Closed.” Then she rose, picked up her handbag and the fox fur, and said goodnight to Gomez, very gaily, letting him know that she wasn’t at all disappointed, and that, Gordon Foster or no Gordon Foster, this was how she liked to spend her evenings, sipping coffee in Mr. Gomez’s delightful back booth.

“How the time flies,” she said brightly. “I was so interested sitting here watching the people I didn’t realize how late it was getting. You certainly have an interesting place here!”

She didn’t fool Gomez, who hated the place more than she did, and she didn’t fool herself either. As soon as she stepped outside, the cold sea wind slapped the smile off her face. I hate him, she thought, running down the street. I hate him. I’ll get back at him. I’ll get even. I’ll go and see his wife. He’ll be sorry.

But Gordon’s sorrow had already begun, and it was deeper than Ruby realized. It was the sorrow of failure. He had failed Elaine and the children, he had failed Ruby, and he had failed himself. A more self-assured man might have taken a firm stand one way or the other. The only solution Gordon could think of was to go away for a while and leave the burden of decision up to Elaine and Ruby. A vacation, he called it, when he mentioned it to Elaine. He said he thought he’d take a little trip.

“To San Francisco again?” Elaine said with sweet irony.

“What do you mean, again?”

“I only meant that you seem to have had such a gay time there a couple of months ago.”

“You’ve got a funny idea of a gay time,” Gordon said. “I was at lectures damn near all day, every day.” After one lecture he had picked Ruby up in a hotel lobby but he still couldn’t understand why Elaine should suspect this. “That was a business trip. A dentist has to keep up with the latest developments and equipment. This time I want a holiday. I thought of Mexico, Ensenada perhaps.”

“Mexico?”

“What’s the matter with Mexico?”

“Did I say there was anything the matter with Mexico, dear?”

“You said it as if you suddenly smelled a bad smell.”

Elaine smiled gently. “There you go imagining things again, dear. You’re getting so sensitive. I wonder if it could be glandular.”

“Listen, I know how you said ‘Mexico.’ Don’t try and kid me.”

“Really, Gordon, you’re becoming impossible. I’ve thought time and again that perhaps you should go and see a doctor. Glandular disturbances are common at your age.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gordon said, sweating.

“All this fuss simply because I said ‘Mexico’ in a perfectly ordinary tone of voice. I’m sure I’ve got nothing against Mexico. Of course I’ve heard it’s terribly dirty. You can’t drink the water at all without boiling it, and you have to be awfully careful about the food, cholera and things like that.”

Elaine could, with a few well-chosen words, reduce anything to its lowest common multiple. Having deflated Gordon and crushed Mexico, she went to work with undiminished fervor on vacations in general and Gordon’s in particular. It was a funny thing, Elaine said, that men took vacations every now and then while women went right on year after year without any kind of rest or holiday at all. Anyway, did Gordon really think it was wise to leave right now?

“After all, dear, you’ve got your family to think about. It isn’t as if you were in some business that could carry on without you. I mean, every day that you’re not at the office and don’t keep your appointments, you’re losing money. You have your overhead, and Hazel’s salary, and you know how many new dentists, all of them veterans too, are opening up offices here. After all, you’re in a competitive profession. If you’re going to be away from the office half the time your patients are going to feel that they can’t depend on you.”

In one short speech she had managed to convey to Gordon that he was a shirker who hadn’t helped win the war, as well as lazy, impractical, thoughtless, incompetent and irresponsible.

Elaine considered herself a true gentlewoman. She never raised her voice or swore, and even when driven into a corner by fate she used only legitimate womanly weapons like her children, her bed and soft words strung on steel. She had betrayed Gordon on the day she married him by telling her mother that she knew Gordon had a weak character and that she would have to be strong for both of them. Elaine often recalled this speech, which she termed “realistic,” and which she considered remarkably shrewd for a girl so “young” — she was twenty-seven on the day she was married. Not six months later, she told Gordon of her speech to her mother. Gordon was shocked, not by her malice, which she had already revealed in many small ways, but by the fact that she despised him. She made it clear that it was only her own iron will and determination which kept Gordon on the straight and narrow and confined him to his office twelve hours a day. Gordon was thirty then, and working very hard to build up a practice so that he could buy Elaine a new house. He was quite surprised to find out that he was a weak character, and inexperienced enough to take the criticism seriously. In the end, after Elaine had given him a gentle heart-to-heart talk, Gordon was convinced that he was indeed weak and that it was Elaine’s personal power that turned the drill and kept him confined in the magnetic circle of office-and-home.

With this new self-knowledge inflicted on him by Elaine came a gradual change in personality. He began to doubt himself and his motives. He was grateful to anyone, man or woman, who paid him any attention. He was awed by his three children, who seemed to despise him as much as Elaine did.

“Gordon,” Elaine told her friends with a tolerant little smile, “is not the fatherly type.” Above the smile her eyes added a personal little message to Gordon alone: You’re a very poor father, admit it, dear.

Gordon walked through the years in a kind of numb bewilderment.

In the early summer of his thirty-ninth year, in the lobby of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, a young woman asked him for a match.

She had dark hair and a thin, pointed face. The first thing Gordon noticed about her was her underdeveloped jaw. There wouldn’t be room for a normal set of teeth there, Gordon thought, and he wondered whether her teeth were exceptionally small or whether some of them had been removed to prevent overlapping.

“Sorry,” he said, patting his coat pockets automatically. “I don’t smoke.”

“Oh. Well. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She added, with a self-conscious little laugh, “Honestly, I don’t smoke either, only about once a year. But I was supposed to meet a certain party here and I’ve been waiting so long, I just thought a cigarette would help.”

They sat side by side under a potted palm tree, Gordon with his newspaper on his lap, and Ruby fingering the clasp of her purse.

“All I’m afraid of is that I missed my party,” Ruby said. “The lobby is so crowded, there must be a convention or something.”

“Dentists,” Gordon said.

“Oh, that’s it then. I wondered. Well—” She closed her purse with an air of finality and put on one of her gloves. “Well, I guess my party must be afraid of dentists or something—”

Gordon laughed. “Everybody is.”

“Well, I don’t blame them! I shiver every time I think of a dentist.”

“Are you shivering now?”

Her eyes grew wide. “Why?”

“I’m one.”

“No!”

“I am.”

“Gosh, and to think I’ve been sitting beside you all this time without a single shiver! But you don’t look a bit like a dentist. You look like, a lawyer or a doctor, maybe.”

Gordon was flattered. He had belonged for years to a club for professional men, but he had never got over the feeling that the doctors and lawyers among the members were superior to him, and that dentistry was the poor country cousin of medicine and law. Elaine lent her aid to this feeling. When the club held its monthly Ladies’ Night, Elaine was ostentatiously self-effacing, as if to remind everyone that she was, after all, only a dentist’s wife and had no right to open her mouth. She sometimes said as much to the other wives. “Of course it’s different with you, I’m only a poor dentist’s wife.” This remark caused acute embarrassment among the other women who found themselves forced to belittle their husbands and their husbands’ professions to make Elaine comfortable, or else to extol the art of dentistry: Where would we all be without dentists, I’d like to know. My goodness, dentists are terribly important.

The fact was that dentists were very important, and after two days of the convention Gordon was beginning to feel proud that he was a man who was doing hard and important work for the welfare of humanity. He was a little afraid for his new pride, though. It was too precious and fragile a thing to survive the journey home, and God knew, he’d never get it past the front door of his house.

He thought of Elaine, not bitterly, but with a kind of helpless pity. Whatever Elaine had wanted and expected from her marriage — great wealth? social position? an idyll of romance? — she hadn’t got it and he was unable to give it to her. She was, in the long run, worse off than he was. He had his job, he could become so absorbed in his work that he sometimes didn’t think of Elaine for two or three hours. He knew that Elaine had no such respite, that she was always conscious of him as she would have been conscious of a continuous nagging toothache.

He hadn’t, come to think of it, remembered Elaine once all day until the girl in the chair beside him asked him for a match. What had the girl said? — that he looked like a doctor or a lawyer. Some answer was expected of him, he must play the game, whatever it was.

“Appearances,” he said with ponderous humor, “are deceiving.”

“Aren’t they just!” She laughed, and he saw that her teeth were very small and even, like canine incisors. “Still, I always say I can tell a nice character by his face, I really can too. Look, isn’t that someone waving at you, over there by the cigar counter?”

Gordon turned, and recognizing a colleague of his, he waved back.

“He’s from my home town,” Gordon said. He mentioned the name of the town. Ruby said that she’d never been there but she knew lots of people who had, and they all agreed that it was the most beautiful place in the country.

“I certainly intend to go there,” she said. “I’ve just never found the time and my parents are terribly old school. They think girls should stay home all the time.”

“Do you work any place?”

“Just for the fun of it I’m working at the perfume counter in Magrim’s. Honestly, the people you meet! I never had any idea how the other half lives.”

“Didn’t you?” Gordon smiled at her innocence.

“Actually I’m not crazy about working, but it’s better than sitting at home watching Daddy fuss over his silly stamps and coins. A girl should get out on her own, don’t you agree?”

Gordon agreed.

Ruby’s “party” failed to appear. Gordon had intended to go to a movie by himself but he couldn’t think of any polite way to abandon the girl. She was too young to sit around a hotel lobby alone so Gordon offered to get her a taxi and send her home.

“That’s terribly kind of you,” Ruby said with a rueful little smile. “But I guess it wouldn’t do much good for me to go home this early. Mummy and Daddy are out tonight and I haven’t got a key.”

Gordon took her along to the movie. She was a trusting little thing. Even though he was a complete stranger she seemed to rely on him already and when they walked down the dark aisle she put her hand on his coat sleeve, tugging at it like a child who doesn’t want to be left behind.

Three days later she still didn’t want to be left behind.

“Don’t go, Gordon, please.”

“I have to. You don’t understand. I told you about Elaine and the children and my work.”

“Take me with you.”

“I can’t, Ruby.”

“Will you be back?”

“You know I will.”

“I’m afraid you’ll change your mind.”

“I would if I could,” Gordon said quietly. “It’s too late, I love you.”

“Say it again.”

“I love you.”

“What if I never see you again?” she sobbed. “What if you change your mind?”

“I won’t.” He held her in his arms while she wept. “I’ll be back, darling. Don’t worry, don’t cry.”

She sobbed over and over again, “What if I never see you again?”

He drove home alone, buoyant, frightened, intoxicated, ashamed of himself, confused, in love. Once or twice as he drove along the rocky coast he thought of sending himself and the car over the cliff, but he didn’t do it, and when he got home, Elaine seemed genuinely glad to see him.

Elaine fussed over him, unpacked his suitcase, and told him he was looking tired.

“Staying up late at all those burlesque shows, I bet!” she said with a gay laugh.

“I didn’t go to any burlesque shows.”

“My goodness, I thought that’s what conventions were for!”

He looked at her steadily. “Did you?”

“What’s the matter with you, Gordon? Can’t you take a joke any more?”

“It depends on the joke.”

“As if I didn’t know you have too much self-respect to go to a burlesque show,” Elaine said reproachfully. “What did you do with your evenings?”

“I went to the movies,” Gordon said. I fell in love with a girl named Ruby. At first I thought she was just an innocent, wide-eyed kid, and then afterwards at the movie I thought she was an ordinary pick-up. When it was too late I found out something else — she was a virgin.

Four days later he had a letter from her. During office hours he kept the letter in his pocket and at night he left it in the office safe.

Every evening, while Hazel was cleaning up the front office, Gordon went into the lab and sat down on the high stool. He read the letter over and over and then he put his head down on the lab table and wept without tears.

Ruby arrived in town three weeks later. She came by bus carrying a suitcase containing two letters from Gordon, a few clothes and her aunt’s red fox neckpiece (borrowed for a limited time only). She had nearly two hundred dollars, scraped together from various sources. Seventy dollars was her own, her cousin lent her twenty-five, and a hundred came from her father in Seattle. She had written to him for the first time in two years telling him she was going to be married and needed money for a trousseau. Her father sent her a check and a note wishing her happiness and telling her not to mention the check to her mother under any circumstances.

She took a room in a boarding house a couple of blocks from the bus terminal. Here she unpacked her suitcase, shook out the red fox neckpiece and washed her face. Then she went to the nearest café to phone Gordon and have something to eat.

She sat down in a booth, trembling with weariness and excitement. She was here at last, in the same city as Gordon, perhaps even just a few blocks from him right this minute. From now on all her days would be colored by the possibility of seeing Gordon. He might be walking past the café right now (she looked and could see nothing beyond the closed Venetian blind) and every time she stepped out of the door she might catch a glimpse of his car. She had memorized the license number on that first night, standing on the curb outside Gordon’s hotel. She had repeated it aloud over and over, without realizing why. Everything that concerned Gordon had become absorbingly important to her, with the exception of Elaine. She thought of Elaine vaguely as a shadow-figure crossing Gordon’s path now and then without touching him or interfering with him. Ruby’s one-sided imagination flung a veil over Elaine and her children, her own future, her financial difficulties, Gordon’s reputation, and any preconceived notions she had of right and wrong. Right was something you were going to do anyway, and if it didn’t justify itself afterwards it became wrong. Ruby’s mind worked with disastrous simplicity. It was “wrong” to lie to Gordon about her parents, but it was “right” to follow him here without telling him about it in advance or asking his opinion.

She wanted to surprise Gordon, and she did.

She dialed the number of his office while Mr. Gomez reheated a batch of French-fried potatoes and the juke box moaned a soft, disturbing song. The music brushed her ears and her lips like a kiss.

Watching her from behind the counter Mr. Gomez made one of his quick, wrong analyses of character: kid from a small town, on her way to Hollywood, due for a shock, no jobs around, lousy with pretty girls already, the kid’s asking for it.

“I’m not hungry,” Gordon told Elaine at dinner. “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”

Elaine glanced at him across the table. She believed nothing and so she could always spot a lie, an ability which was her pride and joy.

“A walk? I should think after standing on your feet all day a walk would be about the last thing you’d want.”

“I don’t get enough exercise.”

“You have your golf on Sunday afternoons.”

“If you’ve any objections to me going for a walk, say so. Don’t beat around the bush. Is there something you want me to do around the house, is that it?”

“You don’t have to get irritable, Gordon. I didn’t object to your going for a walk, it just seemed peculiar, that’s all.”

“Well, perhaps I am peculiar,” Gordon said.

Elaine sighed and thought, how true. Gordon was peculiar, and little did these people who were always telling her how lucky she was to have a good husband, little did they know what she had to put up with. It was quite possible that Gordon’s trouble was glandular. If this was the case, Elaine would stand by, she would even nurse him herself, if necessary, until Gordon’s glands readjusted and he had completely recovered. Complete recovery, in Elaine’s terms, meant that Gordon would be constantly sweet, affectionate, devoted to herself and the children. He would stay home at night and they would all play games together, a gay, happy, united little family. This was Elaine’s dream, this picture of Gordon and herself and the children sitting at a table reading aloud or playing Parcheesi and Casino and Snakes and Ladders... She and Gordon would touch hands and smile with pride and love at the children’s excitement... This was what she wanted but she had never told Gordon, and her own attempts in the direction of the dream were hopelessly inadequate. The boys were too young for such games and the girl Judith got overexcited and tried to cheat. Elaine was horrified by this cheating, she could not believe it was natural for a seven-year-old to try to cheat, and in the end she blamed Gordon for passing on his hereditary weakness to his daughter. The gay evenings with the children were nightmares for Gordon and agonizing frustration for Elaine.

Elaine confided in no one. To her friends she appeared invulnerable, and it was only when she said her prayers in the evening that she admitted, even to herself, that she was not.

When Gordon had left she put the children to bed. Then she went into the bedroom she shared with Gordon. Kneeling beside the bed Elaine confided in her doctor-psychoanalyst-father-mother-confessor-God. She talked to Him quite naturally, as to an old friend.

“Dear Father, I need your help, we all do. We turn to you in our unhappiness. I don’t ask you to make me happy, only to show me what is wrong and what I should do. Whatever it is I have enough strength and faith to do it. Something terrible is wrong in this house, it is crushing us all, and I know it must be my fault as well as Gordon’s. Gordon is out for a walk — it’s funny how I keep telling You things You must know — and I miss him the way I did when he was in San Francisco. I think I love him, I don’t know. When he’s away I love him, but when he comes back everything starts over, all the small irritations and differences. I do my best to lead a virtuous life but some times I have wicked thoughts and when I look at Gordon I resent him. Where does this terrible resentment come from? Sometimes I want to hit out at him, and just tonight when he swallowed some soup and it went down the wrong way, I felt glad, really glad! I thought, that will teach him — those were the very words that came into my mind. But why? What would it teach him? How could I have been glad? Dear Lord, show me the way, I am lost and wicked — I don’t know — what a mess, Oh God, what a mess—”

She remained on her knees for a long time, staring up at the ceiling, a blank relentless heaven.

In terror and exultation Gordon opened the door of Mr. Gomez’s café and found Ruby in the back booth.

“Gordon — Gordon, are you glad I’m here?”

“Yes, yes, you know I am—”

“I’m glad too.”

He took her hand and held it against his mouth.

“Gordon, I didn’t come here to ask you for anything.”

“I know. Don’t talk.”

“I have to say this,” she said earnestly. “I mean, I don’t want you to give up your family or anything, I wouldn’t ask you to. I just came to be near you.”

“You shouldn’t have come.”

“Here I am, though.”

“Here you are.”

“Are you happy?”

“Very.” He smiled at her but his eyes were worried. “I’m very happy.”

She noticed his worry and said quickly, “Now don’t start thinking, Gordon. For one night we won’t think or plan or anything, eh?”

“All right.”

“If it’s me you’re worrying about, you can stop right now. I can take care of myself and I know exactly what I’m doing.”

“What did you tell your aunt?”

“That I was going to get a job here, and I am, too. She didn’t mind. She even let me borrow her red fox fur so I could look more presentable. Naturally I didn’t tell her about you, she’s death on men anyway.”

“Have you any money?”

“Lots. My father sent me some. I had to tell a lie to get it. Does that shock you, Gordon?”

He shook his head. He was beyond the stage of shock, no matter what happened. His life, which for eight years had run like an engine on schedule, had without warning jumped its tracks and roared off into the woods.

It couldn’t have happened, Gordon thought in sudden panic, it isn’t true. Yet here was Ruby sitting by his side, accepting with mature complacence her new role as mistress to a married man. She seemed to have tossed away her girlhood and walked on without looking back and without looking ahead. She had no goal, no ambition, and no purpose beyond the immediate satisfaction of being near Gordon.

“You’ll have to go back home before your aunt finds out the truth,” Gordon said wearily.

“I have no home. My aunt’s house is no more home to me than the room up the street that I just rented. Why should I go back? Gordon—” She put her hand on his wrist. “Listen, Gordon, after you left, the whole city seemed dead to me. The people were there just the same and they did the same things they always did, walked and laughed and drove cars, but they looked dead to me, like they had motors in them like that dummy that rides the exercycle on Powell Street. Remember when we passed it on the cable car and you said it was wonderful, a typically American invention to get nowhere fast?”

Gordon nodded, marveling at the way she remembered, with absolute accuracy, all the words he had spoken in her presence, as if she had deliberately, right from the first, set out to memorize them. Why? Gordon thought. Why me? He saw himself as an ordinary man crowding forty, getting a little bald, a little stooped, a little tired. There was nothing about him to appeal to a young girl, yet for Ruby his departure had murdered a city. She loves me, Gordon thought, and he felt a nameless fear draining the blood out of his head.

Love, I’m not sure what it is, what does it mean? Elaine loves to love things. She loves tweed suits, mushrooms, bleached mahogany furniture, bridge, even me. “I love you, Gordon, naturally I do, for heaven’s sake you’re my husband, aren’t you?” She loves the children too. Eat your custard because Mummy loves you and wants you to be big and strong. Elaine wants to be loved in return, she’s always asking me if I love her and I always say I do. “Certainly, of course, absolutely, sure, naturally, why shouldn’t I love you, you’re my wife, aren’t you?” What have we been talking about all these years, Elaine and I? I never killed a city for Elaine.

“I remember,” Gordon said.

“I felt dead too, Gordon. I knew I was moving around, sometimes I could feel my legs walking up the streets but they didn’t have any connection with me, they just walked by themselves automatically.”

“I didn’t — I didn’t mean to make you feel this way about me.”

“I know, but I do. It’s happened. You don’t really want me to go home, do you, Gordon?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s settled then. And you mustn’t worry, promise?”

“I promise, Ruby.”

She pressed her head against his shoulder. Her mouth trembled and her eyes were blurred with tears. “I’ve never loved anyone before and nobody’s ever loved me either, not my father or mother or my aunt or another man, no one.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Gordon said. He felt a new and grave responsibility for her. She had such stubborn naiveté, she was so ignorant of the world and of the difficulties ahead of them both.

In fear and love and desperation he put his arm around her and held her close.

For Gordon, who was by nature a blunt and honest man, life became a series of sly, awkward deceptions.

He lied to Hazel: “You’d better phone Mrs. Hathaway and cancel her five o’clock appointment. I have a bit of a headache.” He lied to Elaine: “That walk last night set me up. I think I ought to get more exercise—” and to the children: “Daddy can’t read to you tonight, he’s going down to the Y to have a swim.”

Later, he and Ruby parted at the front door of Ruby’s boarding house. The proprietress, who didn’t allow visitors of the opposite sex in any of the rooms, had lately become suspicious of one or two of her tenants, and she sat all evening in the parlor with the blinds up, looking alert.

“The old biddy’s watching,” Ruby said. “Don’t kiss me.”

“All right.”

“Will I see you tomorrow, Gordon?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did you tell Elaine tonight?”

“That I was going for a swim at the Y.”

“You better wet your hair some place.”

On his way home he went into the public lavatory and dampened his hair under the tap. He splashed some water in his eyes to make them a little red, and dried his face with his handkerchief. He walked home along the dark quiet streets with the smell of the lavatory in his nostrils and despair and degradation in his heart.

On his arrival Elaine noticed his damp hair and reddish eyes, but she also noticed that he didn’t smell of chlorine as he always did after a swim in the pool. She didn’t make any comment to Gordon, she merely noted the discrepancy in the little account book she had kept inside her head for years.

The next night Elaine left the children alone, with a bag of chocolates as solace, and followed Gordon down to Mr. Gomez’s café. Through the window slot in the front door she saw Gordon enter one of the back booths and greet someone who was already there. After the first vicious thrill of triumph — “I was right! I’ve been right all along, absolutely right!” — she felt a dazed incredulity. She had followed the wrong man, it was not Gordon (good old comfortable, steady, hard-working Gordon); and the woman who had followed him, dodging behind bushes and trees pretending to be mailing a letter and looking for a certain house number, was not herself, Elaine, the sincere, virtuous, respectable Elaine she knew and loved so well.

Elaine was, during the first few hours, more appalled at herself than at Gordon. How could I, she thought. How could I, following him like that, peering in that window — what would Mama say if she found out?

Neither Mama, nor Gordon, nor anyone else, found out about Elaine’s trip in the dark. Elaine managed to forget it herself except when Judith referred to it as “the night Mummy left us alone with the chocolates.”

The night of the chocolates, which was for Judith one of her most delightful experiences, was the beginning of what Elaine called her fight for her home and her happiness and the children. She fought indirectly, via the telephone and Mr. Gomez.

The calls infuriated Ruby. “Why can’t she leave us alone? She’s got everything she wants, what’s she griping about? I’m the one should be griping.”

“What’s the matter now, Ruby?”

“I’ve got to move.”

“Why?”

“The old biddy’s found out about us. She told me very politely this morning that she didn’t keep a house and she wasn’t a madam and if I wasn’t out by Thursday morning she’d report me to the police and they’d run me out of town. Nice, eh?”

“She must be crazy to talk like that,” Gordon said, pale with anger. “My God, Ruby, didn’t you defend yourself? Didn’t you talk back?”

“Sure I talked back,” Ruby said dully. “I said I’d move out Thursday morning and that’s all I said because it’s all I could say.”

“But you must have—”

“Well, I didn’t. I want to get out of there, anyway. I don’t even want to go back there tonight. She scares me, Gordon.” She leaned her head on her hands in a picture of weary resignation. “What’s the matter with me tonight? I guess I’m tired. Don’t pay any attention to me. Things are getting so much more mixed up than I thought. I just seem to be making a sort of general mess of everything. Even my new job. You know what Mr. Anderson said to me tonight? He said I was the worst waitress he’d ever seen and I guess he’s right. In the same breath he asked me to go out with him. I said no. Would you be jealous if I did go out with him, Gordon?”

“I suppose I would,” Gordon said soberly. “I don’t know. I’ve never been jealous of anyone before.”

“You wouldn’t. I mean, that’s sort of typical of you. You’re just sort of generally nice, aren’t you?”

Gordon smiled. “Elaine would like to hear that.”

“Don’t talk about her tonight. I’m too tired, I’m so tired I could die. What a job, hauling food around all day. You should see some of them eat. God, people are pigs. It makes me so sick watching them that I never want to eat again.”

“You’ve got to quit that job. I’ll get some money for you. I’ll tell Elaine that—”

He stopped, unable to think of anything to tell Elaine that she would even pretend to believe. Out of the budget Elaine allowed him twenty dollars a week for lunch and incidentals. The budget had always been Elaine’s job — an office budget that covered salaries, rent and new equipment, and one for the household. These budgets invariably balanced, and Gordon was grateful to Elaine for taking over the job and making his money stretch further than he would have been able to do. He had never needed more than twenty dollars a week for himself. Now that he did, the only way he could get it was by more lying. If he cashed a check on their joint account Elaine would find out about it and he would still have to lie.

In the end he wrote out a check for fifty dollars and told Elaine he had lost it on a horse race.

“How could you, Gordon,” Elaine said, with soft reproach, “when you know how we could have used that money! The children are old enough now to perceive things. They see that the Brittons next door have a slide and swing, but they haven’t. And poor Paul has had his heart set on a model airplane with a real motor in it. Or a wading pool. I did so hope we’d be able to manage a wading pool this summer. Well — I won’t nag, Gordon, I hate nagging wives. But I must ask you for the sake of the children to keep within your allowance.”

A little later, while reading the paper, Elaine pointed out to Gordon the picture of an Indian potentate, reputed to be one of the richest men in the world.

“Of course he’d have to be rich,” Elaine said sharply, “in order to be able to afford a harem.”

Gordon did not defend himself any more than Ruby had when her landlady asked her to leave.

Monday noon, before she left for work, the landlady knocked on her door and when Ruby failed to answer she let herself in with a passkey.

Ruby was sitting on the edge of the bed in her slip, doubled over as if she had a cramp.

“What’s the matter, girl? You sick or something?”

“No.”

“You found a place yet?”

“No. I haven’t had much chance to look.”

“Just so’s you’re out by Thursday. This is the best room in the house and I want—”

“It’s ugly,” Ruby said, without raising her head. “It’s the ugliest room in the world.”

“Mind your tongue or I’ll kick you out right now.”

“My rent’s paid.”

“Girls like you, there’s a place for them and it’s not in any respectable home like this one.”

When the landlady had gone, Ruby got up and opened the closet door. The red fox fur was lying on the shelf, its glass eyes bright as jewels. Her aunt wanted the fur back; she’d written two letters about it, stating that she wanted it to wear at the wedding of a relative of hers. Though Ruby didn’t actually need the fur, she was reluctant to send it back because it reminded her of Gordon and the first night she had arrived in town — it was a symbol of the happy future she had imagined then. To relinquish the fox fur now would be an admission of failure and an acknowledgment that the happy future had already come and gone. She still loved Gordon but not in the pure distilled sense she had at first. Some of the pollutions of circumstance had seeped in, the squalor of her life, the room she’d lived in, the eternal smell of grease in Mr. Gomez’s café, the endless cups of bitter coffee, the endless waiting, the hope that had sickened but refused to die. If she sent the fox fur back she might as well go with it, go home, and never see Gordon again. But at the thought of a world without Gordon her heart contracted in a spasm of fear. She stood for a long time in the dark little clothes closet pressing her face against the red fox and wondering what she could do or say or become to make Gordon love her again.

On Wednesday when she went to work she called Gordon from the pay phone behind the wharf warehouse. He answered the phone himself.

“Dr. Foster’s office.”

“Hello, Gordon?”

“Hello.”

“Is there anybody there? Can you talk?”

“There’s no one here.”

“Why haven’t I seen you? Is there anything the matter, Gordon?”

“I couldn’t get away,” Gordon said wearily. “Ever since the business about the fifty-dollar check, the assumption is that I’m an insane gambler and not to be trusted even to go for a walk alone.”

“You sound so bitter.”

“I don’t mean to. Are you all right, Ruby?”

“Naturally.”

“Did you find a place to move to?”

“Not yet. When will I see you, Gordon?”

“God knows. When I can think up a new lie, I guess.”

“I’ll be waiting tonight after I get through work.”

“No, don’t. I can’t — I can’t stand the thought of you just sitting there in that place waiting for me. You don’t understand — I feel as if I’ve got to be there and yet I can’t get there. It tears me apart, I can’t tell you — I—”

“I won’t wait if you don’t want me to,” Ruby said quickly.

“Do you understand? Just for one night I want to feel that I don’t have to be two places at once, that no one’s expecting anything of me. I know, I guess this sounds childish, but just for this one night I’ve got to be a free agent. Don’t you ever feel like that, Ruby?”

“No. I don’t want to be a free agent. I like to wait for you, even if you don’t come. What else would I do if I didn’t wait for you?”

She hung up, and for a minute she sat staring listlessly into the round black mouth of the telephone. What else would. I do if I didn’t wait for Gordon?

That night after work she walked to the edge of the wharf and stood with her forearms resting on the rail, watching the lights of the town. The lights flickered halfway up the mountain so that the town seemed to be pinned to the side of the mountain with stars. On the wharf the lights were going out one by one. Everyone was leaving, except the customers in the bar. The kitchen was closed, and the waitresses and the kitchen help were departing, in twos and threes. They walked quickly, on the balls of their feet so their heels wouldn’t catch in the gaps between the planks. They were all anxious to get back on the dry land since it was common talk that the wharf was heading for disintegration and no one was doing anything to stop it. Occasionally some haphazard repair work was done and a few of the rotting piles were replaced, but this did not mitigate the sense of imminent doom among the people who worked at the Beachcomber. This feeling was nurtured by the cashier, a woman called Virginia, who had escaped certain death for five years now, six nights a week. To newcomers like Ruby, Virginia was careful to point out that the wharf was nearly eighty years old, and aside from the natural deterioration of the years there was also the strong possibility of a bad storm or a tidal wave.

“Mark my words,” Virginia said. “One of these days we’ll all find ourselves in the ocean hanging onto anything that floats. And you know what I’m going to do then? I’m going to sue them! I’m going to sue the whole damn bunch of them, the owners of the wharf and the city that grants the franchise and Anderson and his outfit, and when I collect I’m going to retire, build a house in the middle of the desert and live the life of Riley. Maybe we could all sue them and all of us retire.”

The hired help of the Beachcomber were drawn together, by Virginia’s enthusiasm, into a common dread and a common dream. The life of Riley appealed to them, and those among them who couldn’t swim found themselves eyeing the furnishings of the Beachcomber with the quality of buoyancy in mind.

When Virginia saw Ruby leaning against the railing she paused a moment to proffer advice. She reminded Ruby that the railing was nearly eighty years old, that it was quite a drop into the sea, and the water was cold and deep. Moreover if Ruby drowned she couldn’t even sue anybody, being dead.

Having survived one more day, Virginia sped back to land.

Ruby leaned her full weight on the railing. I wouldn’t care, she thought. I wouldn’t care about drowning except I wouldn’t like the water to be very cold. Gordon might be sorry for a while but he’d be glad too. He wouldn’t have to think or worry about me any more, he wouldn’t have to feel obliged to me all the time. It would be a relief to him if I died.

She began walking slowly toward shore. She wondered which of the lights of the town belonged to Gordon and what he was doing. Reading? Or perhaps he was already asleep? Poor Gordon. She hadn’t meant to cause him so much trouble. Everything had seemed very harmless and right to her in the beginning. All she wanted was to be in the same town as Gordon and to see him now and then. It wasn’t a great deal to ask for, but she hadn’t foreseen how even this much might affect Gordon’s life. Instead of making him happy she had only made him despise himself, and her too. There was no way that she could give back to Gordon his dignity and self-respect. Nothing could dissolve the feeling of degradation that Gordon had had the night he dampened his hair under the tap in the public lavatory. He had told her about it, and Ruby understood his rage and humiliation and guilt. He had said, “I can’t stand it,” and she believed now that this was true. Gordon was destroying himself and she was the instrument of destruction.

She groped blindly toward the lights of the town, wishing the wharf would rot away under her feet. She seemed to feel it actually moving, not rolling gently with the swell of the water, but throbbing with quick shivers like an old man with palsy. The headlights of a car beamed suddenly behind her. She stepped aside, and as the car passed her, the planks of the wharf rattled and shuddered. She began to run, as fast as she could, toward the shore.

When she reached the boulevard the car was parked along the curb waiting for her. She recognized Mr. Anderson at the wheel but she pretended she didn’t see him.

He called after her, “Hop in and I’ll give you a lift home.”

She stopped, shaking her head. “No, no thanks.”

“Might as well.”

“It’s such a nice night, I don’t mind walking.”

“You look tired.” He opened the front door of the car. “Come on, get in.”

She got in, holding the fox fur tight around her throat.

“You don’t have to act so scared,” George said. “I assure you I’m pretty tired myself.” He was smiling, but there was a note of irritation in his voice. “I’m going to have a beer and a steak sandwich. If you want to come with me, fine. If you don’t, I’ll take you home first.”

“I’ll — just get out any place and walk home.”

“That suits me.” He started the car and headed up Main Street. “You’re a funny girl. I can’t make you out.”

She said nothing. She was not interested in Mr. Anderson’s opinion of her. She hardly considered him a human being, he was so remote from her thoughts.

“I’m sorry I had to speak a little rough to you about that bar check,” George said. “But I’m in business, and if I want to stay in business I have to shoot off my mouth once in a while.”

“I didn’t mind.”

“Good.”

“I’ll get off at the next corner, if that’s all right with you.”

“Well, it isn’t, but there’s not much I can do about it, is there?”

At the next corner he stopped the car. He leaned across her to open the door. She shrank back against the seat to avoid his touch.

George said dryly, “Is there something the matter with me or is there something the matter with you? You’re not married or anything, are you?”

“No.”

“I’m not, either. I was, but I’m not any more. Won’t you let me take you out sometime?”

“I really don’t care much about going out.”

“That’s that, then.”

“Thanks for the ride.”

“You’re welcome.”

As soon as he drove off, she went straight to Mr. Gomez’s café. She sat there until closing time, drinking coffee. She kept her eye on the door, out of habit. Gordon didn’t even know she’d be waiting, so there wasn’t the slightest hope that he would come. But she got a certain bitter satisfaction in watching the door anyway, facing the hopelessness.

She sat there for an hour and a half, seeing quite clearly that there was no future for her and Gordon, and there was no easy way out. The wharf would not rot under her feet, no tidal wave would engulf her, no storm would carry her out to sea.

During the week she sent the fox fur back to her aunt, parcel post, and she let George drive her home two nights in a row. He assumed that she was becoming more friendly toward him and Ruby didn’t bother to correct him. She was slipping back into her old habits of evasiveness. It was hardly worthwhile to tell the truth to anyone or explain anything. Let Mr. Anderson assume whatever he wanted to assume, it didn’t matter.

On Thursday night she met Gordon at the café for the last time. She arrived full of enthusiasm about the new job Mr. Anderson had promised her. A new job meant a new life, new hope, new chances.

Gordon was waiting for her when she got there. He looked out of place in the regular Thursday-night crowd. He was not watching the door for her arrival. He was watching the people at the bar in sober bewilderment, as if he too was aware of the difference between them and himself, but could not figure out what this difference was. These people were not drunk, yet the possibility of becoming drunk was already coloring their evening. They could cut loose if they liked, and they relaxed into quick friendships, easy laughter, loose wallets. The regulars at the café formed a kind of club for the kind of people for whom ordinary clubs were impossible. They were Mr. Gomez’s Rotarian Kiwanis of the Masonic Order of the Elks and Lions. They convened to exchange slaps on the back, stories, political arguments, gossip and news of absentee members, and to mitigate their loneliness.

Gordon, watching them, wished that he could walk over and join the club, or that he could look forward to one night every week when he could relax and forget his responsibilities. One night, not to get drunk, but to sit up at the bar with the regulars and roll thirteenth-ace for the next quarter for the juke box. He felt like a wistful child, on the outside looking in, yet he knew quite well that what he was looking into was nothing that he could accept or enjoy. Gordon could never unlock his chains; they had been forged long before he met Elaine.

“Hello, Gordon.” Ruby sat down beside him. She had meant to blurt out her good news right away, but her throat felt clogged and furry and she spoke so softly he had to bend his head to hear her. “I haven’t seen you for a long time.”

“I know.”

“I’ve missed you terribly. Have you missed me?”

“Yes.” He took her hand and held it. There was a desperate strength in his grip as if he knew that something valuable was slipping away from him and he was unable to stop it, unable even to assess its value.

“I missed you,” he said, “but I didn’t want to see you. I had to reason things out and give you a chance to do the same.”

“I didn’t want a chance to reason things out. Everything I’ve done is unreasonable if you look at it that way.”

“No, wait, Ruby. I tried — I tried to figure out a way where we’d all come out all right, you and Elaine and I and the kids.” He drew in his breath painfully. “And there isn’t any way. We all have to suffer for my selfishness.”

“We haven’t done anything so terrible. Why should you let your conscience bother you like this? Elaine isn’t hurt.”

“She is, and so are my children, and me, and you most of all, Ruby. What have you gotten out of all this except grief?”

“I don’t think of that, Gordon. I love you. I’ve told you that so often and you never understand it, do you?”

“Understand it? No, I don’t. I’ve tried to figure that out, too. I can’t understand why you should love me, I don’t know what love is. I only know it needs certain things in order to survive. It can’t grow like a mushroom in a pile of dirt in the cellar.”

She got up. Her head felt light and empty. “You shouldn’t have said that, Gordon. You’re right but you shouldn’t have said it. It wasn’t a very nice thing to say. You hurt me. You hurt me, Gordon.”

She walked toward the front door. Her eyes were dazed and her mouth still hung open a little in terrible surprise.