by Irwin Shaw
“Only for men.” Peggy nodded, subtly accusing the people who ran the Oak Room of being in on the conspiracy to break up her marriage. “I understand. Have some of this honey. It’s delicious.”
“I don’t want any honey.”
“It’s delicious.”
“I know it’s delicious. I just don’t want any.” Benjamin felt his stomach clamping like a python around his apple pancake.
“How about after lunch?” Peggy asked, still calm and smiling a House and Garden smile.
“I have a date to play tennis at Rip’s.”
“I have a new racquet,” Peggy said, “and I’d love to try it…”
“Men’s doubles,” Benjamin said.
“Oh,” Peggy said, “Men’s doubles. That’s sacred.” She drawled out the “sacred.”
Why do I go on with this goddamn thing? Benjamin thought. What law says I have to go on with it? He drank his coffee. It was hot and scalded his tongue. He stood up, pretending to be a normal, happy, youngish husband home from the wars, pleased with the breakfast his beautiful wife, at great sacrifice, had prepared for him. “I have to go now,” he said.
“Will I ever see you again?” Peggy asked.
Some day, Benjamin thought, some scholar should really go profoundly into the manner in which the word “ever” is used by wives.
“We’re invited for drinks at the Roses’ this evening, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll meet you there.” He put on his jacket and picked up a leather envelope with papers in it that he had had to look over the evening before. Peggy sat there, peering down at her glass of milk. Benjamin knew what she was waiting for. He went over and kissed her. “Next Saturday,” he said.
“Sure,” she said. “Next Saturday.”
As Benjamin went out the door, he knew Peggy would start to cry. How many of the tears would be true tears and how many private histrionics, he would never know. She probably wouldn’t know, either.
At nine-thirty that morning Foynes’ office called. Foynes was not going to be able to come into town in time for lunch. He would telephone on Monday. Benjamin sat looking at the phone for several moments. Then he dialed his own number. Might as well make character while I can, he thought. He would take Peggy to lunch and the weekend would be the better for it. The line was busy. He hung up. He tried again a few minutes later. The line was still busy. He was exasperated with her this time. Is that all she does all morning? Talk?
He looked out the window. The fine spring morning had vanished. Dark rain clouds ambushed the sky. A piece of paper whirled outside his window, a message lost on invisible tides twenty-two stories high in the turbulent air. “Help!” “I love you!” “Sell everything.” The wind increased, the sky was well into Macbeth. No tennis, Benjamin thought, aside from everything else. He sat disconsolately at his desk, feeling deprived and unjustly harassed.
The phone rang a few seconds later and he answered brusquely. “Yes?”
“There’s no need to bite my head off. If you feel like that I’ll hang up.” It was Leah, her voice amused.
“Sorry,” he said. “I was wallowing in self-pity.”
“It’s going to rain this afternoon, you know,” Leah said. “It’s black as the pit from pole to pole outside my window.”
“Did you call me to give me the weather report?”
Leah laughed. He had once told Leah that her laugh was dangerous and he meant exactly that. “You know me better than that,” she said.
“Lunch,” he said.
“One-fifteen?”
“One,” he said.
He hung up, feeling better. He didn’t feel guilty, either—at least for the moment. If Peggy hadn’t been so busy gabbing all morning over the phone, he would have asked her to lunch before Leah called.
The rain started, the torrential, spring-summery black rain of New York that seems designed to wash the city clean of all its sins or sweep it into the sea before nightfall.
Benjamin regarded the rain outside his window with satisfaction. He always got an extra pleasure out of making love in New York on rainy afternoons.
It was not all pure pleasure, though. There had been the discussion with his father-in-law, for example, a few months before.
“Peggy says that you sleep with other women,” Woodham said.
“Does she?” Benjamin said, keeping his voice flat. He and his father-in-law were drinking old-fashioneds at the St. Regis bar. The Woodhams were in New York for a week, on their way to Europe for a holiday. Woodham, in his straight gray suit and his tight, fierce face, looked more like a colonel than ever.
“Yes,” Woodham said. “Quite a few of your friends say so, too. Ladies, mostly.”
“I was a fool,” Benjamin said, “to give you those two parties this week. Or I should have introduced you only to my enemies.”
Woodham laughed, a short, barking laugh. His laugh was military, formidable. “Ladies talk,” Woodham said. “She’s right, Peggy, isn’t she?”
“From time to time,” Benjamin said. He was not going to lie to the admirable, upright old man.
Woodham nodded. “Aside from that,” he said, “she says you’re an absolutely perfect husband.”
“How little she knows,” Benjamin said.
They drank their old-fashioneds in silence, watching the bartenders at their icy devotions.
“Does she want a divorce?” Benjamin asked.
“No.”
Benjamin wanted to run to the phone booth across the room and call Peggy and say, “I love you, I love you.” But he kept his face noncommittal and jangled the ice lightly in his glass. He knew that Woodham was waiting for him to say something more and would wait an hour, without a word if necessary, for him to say it. “I try to keep it as quiet as possible,” he said.
“It’s never really quiet,” Woodham said. “You know that.”
“I suppose so.”
They ordered two more old-fashioneds.
“She’s an only child,” Woodham said. “She’s used to being cherished.”
“I cherish her, Colonel. Inordinately.”
Woodham nodded again. “That’s what it looks like,” he said. “Outside looking in.” He watched the barman take away the empty glass and put the new glass down in front of him.
“Let me ask you a question, Colonel,” Benjamin said. “How long have you been married?”
Woodham looked wary. “Twenty-nine years. Why?”
“When was the first time you were unfaithful to your wife?”
Woodham sighed. “One for your side,” he said resignedly. He took a long swig of his drink.
“Let me ask you another question, Colonel,” Benjamin said.
“Goddamnit,” Woodham said, “I was sent down here to question you.”
“Peggy lived with you all the time I was overseas,” Benjamin said. “You saw her every day. Do you think she was faithful to me?”
Now Woodham didn’t look like a colonel. He looked like a divisional commander. “What’d she tell you?”
“Nothing,” Benjamin said. “I didn’t ask her.”
“What the hell are you driving at?”
“Just that it isn’t so damned important,” Benjamin said. “I’m not saying there aren’t marriages in which both people are faithful to each other from beginning to end. I read about them, I see them in the movies, I understand sermons every Sunday are full of them, but I don’t see a hell of a lot of them these days and neither do you.”
“I’m a doctor,” Woodham said, “I see a lot of things other people don’t see.”
Benjamin ignored this last weak defense.
“You asked me what I’m proving,” he said. “I’m not proving anything, except maybe that I’m alive. That I’m susceptible to beauty. That I’m not all one piece. That I’m hungry and I don’t know what I’m hungry for.”
“At your age,” Woodham said, meaning it as a reproach.
“At my age,” Benjamin said. “If Peggy is wait
ing for your report, you tell her I’ll love her all my life. But if she says she’ll divorce me because I occasionally have an affair, she can go to Reno tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Woodham said. “The report will go through channels.” He shook his head. “Damn,” he said, “at least you could try living in San Francisco.”
Replete with lunch and a bottle of wine, he climbed the steps of the converted brownstone house, behind Leah. He followed the womanly straight back, the glowing hair, the slightly swaying trim hips under the green linen dress, the long perfect legs. The hallway was dim; they mounted deliberately, decorously, savoring the knowledge, each of them, of how soon that decorum would be shattered.
They made love two or three times a week. The pleasure Leah gave him was as exquisite as in the beginning in Paris. But in his reveries, dozing before falling off to sleep or sitting in a subway car, closing his eyes to shut away the sad faces of the other travelers, the moment he relived with most intensity was the silent mounting of the steps behind the superb tall woman, looking at the elegantly tailored hips, anticipating, secretly possessing, as Leah took out her key and prepared to unlock the door to her apartment.
They lay side by side in the shadowed room. The curtains were drawn, the rain drummed outside the window, but the sun was out, too, wavering pale rays through the slit in the draperies. A bedside clock ticked softly. It was nearly five o’clock. His body felt weightless, aerated, anointed, victorious. He knew he should get up and get dressed and respectably descend the stairs, respectably appear at the Roses’ cocktail party, the private treasure of the afternoon’s sensuality hidden, the clue to its whereabouts a memorized telephone number. It was warm in the room and they lay naked, the sheet thrown back, Leah’s skin gleaming in the rainy, filtered light of late afternoon. Another five minutes.
“What did you say?” Leah asked.
He was surprised. He hadn’t realized that he had spoken. “I said, ‘Another five minutes,’” he said. “Only I thought I just thought it.”
“Love and run,” Leah said, but without complaint.
“We’ve been here for two and a half hours.”
“Gentlemen don’t count,” Leah said. “The truth is, I have to get up, too. There’s a cocktail party that I—”
“Where?”
“Some people called the Roses.”
“I’m going there, myself,” he said. “I didn’t know you knew them.”
“I don’t,” Leah said. “A gentleman is taking me there. He’s calling for me here in an hour.”
“Busy day in the East Sixties,” Benjamin said.
“Ugly man,” Leah said calmly. “Your wife going to be there, too?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Leah said. “Finally, I’ll get a chance to meet her.”
“I can’t wait,” Benjamin said. He remembered the scene at breakfast. It was the wrong day for this meeting. Though he couldn’t imagine a right day. He turned his head and kissed Leah. “See you at the next drink,” he said, and started to get out of bed.
Leah reached out and held him. “And now a message from our sponsor,” she said.
He lay back, pleased to have an excuse not to leave that rain-enclosed room, that joyous May-time bed, for another few seconds.
“The gentleman who’s coming to take me to the cocktail party,” Leah said, “is a man called Stafford. Do you know him?”
“No,” Benjamin said.
“He’s an extraordinary man,” Leah said.
Benjamin made a face.
“Don’t be childish,” Leah said. “Would you prefer it if I only saw ordinary men?”
“Of course,” Benjamin said. “The more ordinary the better.”
“I knew you were mean,” Leah said, “but I didn’t know you were that mean.”
Benjamin sighed.
“What’re you sighing about?” she said.
“You’re going to say something I’d rather not hear,” Benjamin said.
“I’ve been seeing him for three months,” Leah said. “He’s my evening feller.”
“You know what the Italians say,” Benjamin stroked the thick, straight hair that fell around her shoulders. “Only peasants make love at night.”
“Joke,” she said. She sounded suddenly bitter.
“Sorry,” he said.
“He’s one of the handsomest men alive,” Leah went on, her voice uninflected, “and one of the smartest. And most generous. And rich, rich, rich. And he’s asked me to marry him.”
Benjamin lay silent for a moment. “Question,” he said. “Why do you bother with a poor, domesticated, afternoon type like me at all?”
“I have my reasons, dear,” Leah said.
“Are you going to marry him?”
“Yes,” she said. “If.”
“If what?”
“If you won’t marry me.”
Benjamin didn’t say anything. Now that it had been said, he knew that he had been expecting it. For a long time.
“I think I’ve exhausted all the possibilities in being everybody’s popular unmarried friend in New York,” Leah said. “I want to have a home. I want to give up the damn store.” She ran an antique shop on Third Avenue that her father had owned for many years and that had become one of the smartest places in New York since she had taken it over on her return from the War. “I want children,” she said. “I want my own husband, not somebody else’s. Do I sound hideously bourgeois?”
“Leave out the ‘hideously,’” Benjamin said.
“Well, there it is.” She lay still, staring up at the ceiling, carefully speaking without emotion, making no claims, allowing the splendid nude body and the startling face make all her claims for her without words.
Benjamin sat up, swung around, sat on the edge of the bed, his back to her. He saw his reflection in a wavy, dark antique mirror on the opposite wall. His body looked drowned in the gold-veined dim glass. His reflection reminded him of all the prizefighters he had seen who were losing, who were battered and outgunned and exhausted and who sat on their stools wondering if they could get through the next three minutes.
“Do I have to put my vote in the box this minute?” Benjamin asked.
“No,” Leah said. “I told John I’d give him an answer in a week.”
“A week,” Benjamin said. He stood up and began to dress. It had stopped raining. The rays of sunlight coming in through the divided curtains were steady and bright yellow now. There were splinters of gold all over the room, on the perfume bottles, on the glass of a framed print on the wall, on Leah’s breasts. Benjamin dressed in silence. There was a knot in the lace of his left shoe and he said, “Damn,” as he struggled with it. Leah didn’t move. Golden flecks came and went in her eyes as the curtains sighed in a flicker of wind and the sun’s rays shifted with the rustling cloth. This room is going to be here, Benjamin thought, she will be lying on that bed on other afternoons with the rain outside, and I won’t be here. Oh, damn, damn, damn, he thought. Then he had to smile, even the way he felt at that moment. One “damn” for a shoelace and only two more for such a shipwreck of love.
He brushed his hair neatly, settled his tie into his collar. In the mirror he looked unmoved, everyday, undamaged, a young man in correct clothes, making his way up in New York, a man who knew the right places to go, the right answers to give, the right people to love. In the mirror, late on a sunny afternoon in the changeable weather of May.
“In a week,” he said, when he was dressed and ready to go. He leaned over the bed and kissed her forehead. She looked up at him, unsmiling, her eyes open. “See you in an hour or so,” he said, and went out of the room, out of the apartment, and decorously down the staircase and into the noise of the traffic of the city, into the washed, brilliant evening air.
As he entered the crowded room with its mingled odors of fresh flowers, perfume, and gin, he saw Peggy’s face, and he knew he was going to get drunk that night. She was standing near the windows, which looked out over the East Rive
r. She was making a cocktail-party pretense of being amused as she listened to two men and a pretty girl talking around her. But her eyes were on the door, like a radar fix, waiting for him. When she saw him, there was a peculiar effect, which Benjamin had never noticed in other women, of something closing down—a flower bunching its petals against a storm, a window being shut and a blind drawn, an animal disappearing into its den, a book being closed in such a way that you knew the reader hadn’t liked the last page she had read. He waved to her, smiled. She didn’t smile back. She turned and smiled to the man on her right and talked animatedly. Actress, he thought. Why the hell do I have to put up with it? He took a martini from a waiter, in no hurry to go over to his wife, and kissed the hostess and shook Larry Rose’s hand and complimented him on the beauty of the female guests.
He took a good slug of the martini and started across the room. His body no longer felt weightless or victorious. Automatically he scanned the room to see who was there who could most advantageously be asked to dinner to serve as a buffer between Peggy and himself, to make Peggy postpone the fulfillment of the dark promise of her face at least until they got home.
For the moment, there were no guaranteed buffers. He would have to wait until he saw what other guests arrived.
“Ben…” He felt his arm being held and transferred the martini to his other hand. It was Susan Noyes Federov, Louis’ ex-wife, the first of three ex-wives his brother was to accumulate in his sentimental career. He turned and kissed her, false and friendly, on her cheek. Susan was a pretty woman with cleverly dyed chestnut hair and the dark, forlorn eyes of an Italian orphan. She had a full, tremulous mouth that even in laughter brought the word “defeat” to mind. “Ben,” Susan said, “is Louis coming?”
“No,” Benjamin said. “I don’t think so.”
“Is he happy?” Susan asked.
Benjamin considered the question. He knew what Susan meant. The field of inquiry, he knew, was narrow. Susan was not asking if Louis was happy because he was doing well in his work or because he had reached the semi-finals of a squash tournament or because he had made some money in the market or because a candidate he had voted for had won an election. When Susan asked, “Is he happy?” what she wanted to know was whether Louis was happy with the woman who had taken her place. And that was all. She also knew what answer she wanted to hear and so did Benjamin. He was not heartless enough to tell her that Louis was very happy indeed with his bride of three months. The tremulous mouth would tremble, the orphan eyes would remember the losses of a calamitous life. Benjamin shrugged. “It’s hard to tell,” he said.