by John O'Hara
“I was—to marry you,” she said. “Johnny could have been very unpleasant about you, don’t forget.”
“That lightweight,” said Wally, unmistakably implying that Johnny was incapable of sustained indignation. Two years later Wally married the present Mrs. Harris, the lady of the patroness list, and immediately started having lunch with Stanley again. By Wally’s lights it was all right to resume the friendship with Stanley Child as soon as he remarried, but not before. The friendship in its second phase was stronger than it had ever been, and it did not include the wives. “Wally and I are going over to play Pine Valley . . . Wally got me an invitation to Thomasville. Will you be all right?” At first she was not all right, at all; it was not her idea of fun to sit in a New York apartment while the two big boys, her husband and her ex, went off to play. She was not worried about what they would say about her; Stanley Child was simply not the kind of man who would discuss his wife with another man on any terms, and insensitive though he may have been about many things, Wally Harris would know better than to mention Agatha except when it was unavoidable. No, it was not the fear of their talking about her that annoyed her; it was her growing conviction that she could be the wife of two men and yet remain completely outside their lives, one after the other and the two together. In olden days they might well have fought a duel over her; in the fifth decade of the twentieth century they played golf together and tacitly denied her existence.
It was a dismal record for a girl who had only wanted to be liked, who had only tried to be pleasant to people. She loved Johnny Johns now, today, so many years later, but she had not even believed at the time that she was marrying Johnny for love. He was a screwy boy who would come charging into Canoe Place late Saturday nights, arriving alone and always leaving with some other boy’s girl. Nothing vicious about him; he made no phony promises, and he nursed no hard feelings against the girls who refused to ditch the boys they had come with. To such steadfast types he would say, “Okay, but you don’t know what you’re missing,” and it was as close as he ever came to the surliness of some of the other wolf types. At this point in her reminiscing she smiled.
Canoe Place, a Saturday night after a dance at the Meadow Club. He came and sat down beside her—actually in back of her—pulling up a chair from the next table. “Aggie Todd, I’ve a bone to pick with you. I hear you said I wasn’t a wolf.”
“You heard I said you weren’t a wolf? Were not? Why is that a bone to pick with me?”
“You trying to ruin my reputation?”
“You’re getting me all confused,” she said.
“Did you or did you not say I was not a wolf?”
“I said you were not,” she said.
“That’s what I heard. What right have you got to go around saying nice things about me?”
“Huh?”
“The first thing you know, all the mothers and fathers will start approving of me. Then where will I be?”
She was young, and not very quick. “Oh, now I get it,” she said. “You glory in a bad reputation, is that it?”
“I sure as hell don’t want to turn into a Henny Ramsdell.”
“You won’t, never fear.” This was fun because Henny Ramsdell at that very moment was seated on her left.
“Or a Bucky Clayton.” Bucky Clayton was sitting across the table, looking at them and straining an ear to hear what they were saying. “Take a gander at Bucky, trying to read our lips.”
“I know,” she said.
“Why did you rush to my defense, Aggie?”
“Because I think—well I don’t think you’re a wolf.”
“Well, one of these days maybe I’ll say something nice about you.” He was a little more serious, and started to rise.
“Why not now?”
“All right,” he said. Then, “No, I guess not. I don’t want to turn your head.”
“Ah, come on, turn my head, Johnny.”
“You really want me to?”
“Yes.”
“All right, but you asked for it, Aggie. I think you’re the only girl in this whole damn bunch that I give a hoot in hell about.”
“Is that true?” she said.
“It’s true.”
“Scout’s honor?”
“Now don’t push it. Yes, scout’s honor. Come on, let’s dance. Mr. Ramsdell, boy, I’m taking your girl away.”
“The hell you are,” said Henny Ramsdell.
“The hell I’m not,” said Johnny. “Come on, Aggie, while you have the chance.”
A week later they eloped, and during the next four years all the predictable mishaps of their kind of marriage came to pass. There was, in addition, a handicap that the pessimists had not counted on and the optimists had not foreseen: she was too young for companionship with most of the young wives in her set, and as a wife she was no longer compatible with the unmarried girls who were her contemporaries. It came down to a problem of often not knowing whom to have lunch with, and Johnny, working downtown, was impatiently lacking in an understanding of the problem. “You would never think,” she said to Wallace Harris, “that a thing like that would make so much difference, but it does.”
Wallace Harris was a bachelor, a few years older than Johnny. “Do you mean to say you’re lonely?”
“That’s just what I’m saying.”
“Why don’t you have a child?”
“We did. I never saw it.”
“Sorry.”
She had not been very bright about Wallace Harris. She had had no curiosity about him, and when she drifted into an affair with him she was all but shocked to discover that he had always been promiscuous, that women by the dozen had succumbed, if that was the word, to his availability. It was difficult to believe him as he told her the number and kinds of women who had slept with him, but she could not wholly doubt him since she was now one of that list herself. What made it difficult to believe him was her unthinking acceptance of the notion that roués had fun, and inevitably were gay; but for Wally there seemed to have been no fun, only a succession of women who used him as much as he used them. As for gaiety, one of his outstanding characteristics was a total lack of it. In this respect, however, she came to understand his success with women: he was so lacking in gaiety that a woman would automatically credit him with discretion and reliability. But poor Wally was essentially nothing more than a well-scrubbed male, who never needed a haircut or a manicure, and would have been far happier without women if the men he liked had been able to do without them too. He would never have been clinically curious about her life with Stanley Child as he had been about Johnny Johns; without asking, he would guess that Stanley’s demands on a woman were much like his own—and he would have been right. He understood Stanley, but Johnny Johns was a lightweight . . .
Agatha Child heard herself say, “What? What?”
Mary Moran was standing in the doorway, with the jacket of the black suit over her arm and holding up the skirt. “I didn’t mean to startle you, ma’am.”
“Oh—I was off somewhere,” said Agatha Child. “What is it, Mary?”
“Well, I was wondering if maybe there’s a little hole in the skirt we should have rewoven.”
“A hole in it? Let me see.”
“Right here, ma’am, just back of the knee. You musta caught it on something.”
“Yes. I wonder if it’d be worth it. Reweaving is awfully expensive.”
“Now if it was a country suit, you wouldn’t care so much. But you don’t want to go around with a hole in your skirt in the city.”
“I forget how much they charged the last time I had something rewoven. I paid four hundred dollars for that suit, when was it, three years ago?”
“You had this three years, that’s right. It’s a beautiful suit, no doubt about that. I think it’s worth getting it rewoven.”
“It’s too bad you ca
n’t wear my clothes. I’d give it to you, then I’d have an excuse to buy myself a new one.”
“No, I could never get into this. I was always too big an eater.”
“You could have a nice figure, if you’d take off about fifteen pounds. You really ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mary. That’s all since you’ve come to work for me.”
“Aach, and if they don’t like me this way it’s too late for me to change.”
“Too late? Nonsense. Forty-one. If I gave you a course at Elizabeth Arden, would you go through with it?”
“Me at Elizabeth Arden’s? Huh.”
“Well, any place.”
“Thanks just the same. I got the determination, if I want to starve off the fifteen pounds, but I’d only put it back on again.”
“Do as you please,” said Agatha Child.
“And what about the suit, ma’am?”
“Have it rewoven, of course. And tell them not to take so long. The last time I think they took over a month.”
“That was a big cigarette burn, in your gray.”
“You don’t have to make excuses for them, Mary. Just tell them what I said.”
Mary Moran left, saying no more. If she had stayed longer, said any more, Agatha Child would have fired her. The woman had snubbed her twice within the hour, less than an hour, actually. Agatha, at the thought of time, glanced at the little gold and enamel clock at her side. It was twelve-twenty-two, according to the clock—which obviously had stopped during the night. She reached for the clock to wind it, but it had not stopped; the winder took only one full turn. She held the clock to her ear, and it was steadily ticking away. Was it possible that she had been sitting here for an hour and ten minutes? Had she fallen asleep after her coffee and cigarette? She looked for her cigarette. It was not in the ash tray, and yet she remembered having a cigarette, blowing the smoke at the dogs.
Casually, so that Mary Moran would not come in and catch her in the act of looking for the cigarette butt, she bent over to the right and then to the left of her chair. The cigarette was on neither side. She leaned forward, and there it was, having burnt itself out and formed a small crater in the carpet. She had been asleep, and once again she had gone to sleep with a cigarette burning, just as she had done while wearing the gray suit, which Mary Moran knew about, and one other time that the maid did not know about, all within a space of six or eight weeks.
She picked up the cigarette butt and put it in the ash tray. Then she dipped a napkin in the glass of icewater and tried to rub the blackened crater in the carpet so that the burn would not show. This was only partially successful. The crater remained, and some of the piling was permanently blackened.
It was no time to panic; it was a time to face facts, to look at things calmly. She would begin by admitting that this was the fourth, not only the third, time that a cigarette had given her some kind of trouble recently. The third time, fortunately, was in a taxicab. The fourth time—a week ago—was here in the apartment, when she went to the bathroom and found a merry little fire in the tin wastebasket. She extinguished that fire easily by putting the basket under the bathtub tap and letting the water run. The contents of the basket she flushed down the toilet; the scorched basket itself presented a bit of a problem, which she solved by wrapping it in newspapers and taking it down to Madison Avenue and dropping it in the city basket. Mary Moran noticed that the bathroom basket was missing. She noticed everything. “I got tired of it,” Agatha Child told her. “I threw it out with the trash last night.”
“It was kind of pretty,” said Mary Moran.
“Cheap,” said Agatha Child. “I saw a nicer one at Hammacher’s.”
“Oh, one of them with the mirrors all around it?” said Mary. “Mrs. Brown has two of them.”
“Yes. The other basket was here when I took this apartment, and I don’t know why I kept it so long. But yesterday I decided I couldn’t look at it one more day.”
It was the kind of explanation that would satisfy Mary Moran, with her unspoken but unmistakable opinion of Agatha Child as a frivolous woman. The same opinion had made credible the explanation for the burn in the gray suit. “I’m almost sure that it was some awful woman at the cocktail party I went to yesterday. She carried a long cigarette holder, and I noticed her waving it around.”
Explanations were imperative. Agatha Child had heard of some woman who had been asked to leave some apartment-hotel because she was a fire hazard, falling asleep and setting fire to her bedclothes. It would not do, it would not do at all, to let Mary Moran know that Agatha Child had had any such experiences.
Agatha Child rose and sauntered to the livingroom door, listened, heard Mary Moran humming a tune, which she did when she was busy. Now quickly Agatha Child got a bottle of ink and a fountain pen and went back to her chair. She carefully poured ink on the crater in the carpet, watched it soak in, then sharp and loud she exclaimed, “God damn it! Oh, God damn it.”
Mary Moran appeared in the doorway. “Something the matter?”
“Look at the mess I’ve made. Trying to fill my pen.”
“They can get that out.”
“I wonder. I know they can get the stain out, but look how deep this is. One of those places where the dogs have chewed the carpet. Boys, you really do try my patience sometimes. Oh, well this was my fault, no use trying to blame the dogs.”
Brilliant. Inspired. At the moment of pouring the ink she had not even thought of the dogs and their, or Muggsy’s, habit of digging holes in the carpet. It was the kind of inspiration she would not have had if she had not refused to panic. Face facts, look at things calmly.
“Will I phone the rug man?” said Mary Moran.
“Yes, will you, before you leave? And I won’t be here this afternoon, Mary. I’ve just decided to blow myself to a new suit.”
“Another black, ma’am?”
“Anything but. This is something for spring,” said Agatha Child. “Do you think I’m mad, Mary? I am a little mad, aren’t I?”
(1963)
THE ASSISTANT
The alarm clock went off, and she did not remember setting it. It was a small clock, brass-plated, with a dial that was less than two inches in diameter, and the noise-making apparatus of it was annoying but not powerful enough to be commanding. Without stirring from her pillow she looked at it and said the first defiant thing that came into her head—and let it ring itself down. Then, before closing her eyes again, she looked to see what time it was. It was half past five.
She closed her eyes and dozed off into an enjoyable half-sleep, rather delicious it was because it was stolen sleep. Half past five itself meant nothing to her, but half past six might mean something. Half past six, or more likely, seven o’clock. Seven o’clock. What was there that she had to do, where was there that she had to be, at seven o’clock that would cause her to set her alarm clock for half past five? Seven o’clock was the time, all right. It would take her at least an hour to dress, and another half hour to get anywhere. She was to meet someone at seven o’clock, or at seven o’clock someone was coming here to her apartment. The big question was not so much where as who.
Now she reached out and with the skill of a blind person she took a cigarette out of a china box, and with somewhat less confidence she groped around the night table until her fingers found a lighter. With her eyes still closed, to protect her eyes from the glare—sometimes that first flame lighting that first cigarette could be as blinding as the bomb on Nagasaki—she brought the lighter to the end of the cigarette and took in that first shallow drag. Now, to all intents and purposes, she had come awake, or as a friend of hers was fond of saying, had rejoined the human race. George Waller. As he took his first drink of the day, he would nearly always say that he was rejoining the human race. He had got it out of a book somewhere. She wished it was as easy to remember whom she had a date with as it was to remember George Waller—or t
o forget George Waller, for that matter.