The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

by Richard Yates

  “Wow,” he said, sinking into one of the chairs across the room from her. “Jesus. Talk about a hard day at the office. I want to tell you, baby, this one was a bitch. . . .”

  As she listened, or rather as she tried to listen while watching him talk, it occurred to Susan that he looked older than his age. He had taken to wearing a short beard, at her suggestion—it was she who trimmed it for him every three weeks or so—but she wasn’t sure she would have suggested it if she’d known it would be white. And she didn’t know if she would ever get used to his new hair, which had been entirely his own idea. As long as she’d known him his straight brown hair had been heavily streaked with gray, and she’d always found that attractive, but some months ago he had decided to let it grow because he didn’t want to be the only man in the State House with a nineteen-fifties haircut, and now in luxuriance it was far more gray than brown. It was long enough in back to hide the collars of his shirt and his coat, long and heavy enough on the sides to cover his ears and to swing against his cheeks when he leaned forward, and it hung cropped in carefully irregular bangs across his forehead in the manner of the actress Jane Fonda.

  That wasn’t all: his legs, which she would have described as “lean” only a few years ago, looked so thin now in their neat gray flannel trousers as to suggest that he wouldn’t be able to ride a bicycle without wobbling and veering slowly all over the street.

  “. . . And there are times,” he was saying, delicately rubbing his closed eyelids with thumb and forefinger, “there are times when I wish Frank Brady would just go away and get lost. You can’t imagine what the pressure’s like in that sweatshop. Well. Get you a drink?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Thanks.” And she watched him walk out of the room to the kitchen. She heard the soft slam of the big refrigerator door and the breaking open of an ice tray, and then came something unexpected and frightening: a burst of high, wild laughter that didn’t sound like David at all. It went on and on, rising into falsetto and falling only part of the way down as he gasped for breath, and he was still in the grip of its convulsions when he came weakly back into the room with a very dark bourbon and water rocking and clinking in his hand.

  “Baby, listen,” he said as soon as he was able to speak. “I’ve just thought of the perfect revenge to take on Frank Brady. Listen. Staple—” But he got no further than that before the laughter hit him again. When he’d recovered he took a deep breath, made a sober face, and said, “Staple his lower lip to his desk.”

  She achieved a smile, but it wasn’t enough to please him.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, looking hurt. “You don’t think that’s funny.”

  “Sure I do. It’s pretty funny, when you picture it.”

  Then they were sitting close together on the sofa, and he was taking greedy swigs of his drink as if this rich, good whiskey was the main thing he had waited for all day.

  “Could I have one too?” she asked.

  “Have one what?”

  “You know; a drink.”

  “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry,” he said as he got up to lunge for the kitchen again. “I’m sorry, dear. I meant to fix you one and I just forgot, that’s all. I’m getting absentminded in my old age, that’s all.”

  And she waited, still smiling, hoping he wouldn’t want to talk about his old age anymore. He wasn’t yet forty-seven.

  Another time, late one night when they were alone and cleaning up after having several people in for dinner, David remarked sourly of one guest that he was a pompous, humorless young twerp.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Susan said. “I think he’s nice.”

  “Oh, yeah, ‘nice.’ That word covers just about everything for you, doesn’t it. Well, fuck it. Fuck ‘nice.’” And he slammed out of the room and down the hall as if he meant to go straight to bed. There was a good deal of thumping and banging in the bedroom for a minute or two; then he came back and faced her again, trembling. “‘Nice,’” he said. “‘Nice.’ Is that what you want? You want the world to be ‘nice’? Because listen, baby. Listen, sweetheart. The world is about as nice as shit. The world is struggle and rape and humiliation and death. The world is no fucking place for dreamy little rich girls from St. Louis, do you understand me? Go home, for Christ’s sake. Get outa here and go home to your fucking father if you want to find ‘nice.’”

  While he stood shouting at her, with all that gray and white hair shaking around his almost eclipsed, almost forgotten face, it was like watching a child’s tantrum enacted in the person of a crazy old man.

  But it didn’t last long. It was over quickly when he sat down in shame and silence to hold his elaborate head in his hands. Then, soon enough, came his choked-out, abject apology. “Oh, Jesus, Susan, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what gets into me when I’m like that.”

  “It’s all right,” she told him. “Let’s just—let’s just sort of go easy on each other for a while.”

  And going easy on each other turned out to be almost a pleasure. The gentleness and quiet of it, the temperance of it, permitted them both to shy away from the heat of each other’s concerns without ever seeming to flinch, yet it permitted them the old intimacy too, when they both felt like it, and so they got along.

  Through the difficulties of two more years there were times of peace, times of exultant companionship and other times of exasperation and bickering, or of silence; it all seemed to settle out into what David called a good marriage.

  “Hey, Susan?” he would ask now and then, affecting a boyish bashfulness. “Think we’ll make it?”

  “Sure,” she would say.

  Not long after his nation’s withdrawal from the war that had impelled him to change his life, David Clark made arrangements to go back to his teaching job. He then wrote a letter of resignation to Governor Brady, an act that made him feel “wonderful,” and he urged his wife not to worry about the future. These years away from the classroom, he explained, had simply been a mistake—not a bad or a costly mistake, perhaps even one he could ultimately find profit in—but a mistake nonetheless. He was a school man. He had always been a school man, and would probably always be.

  “Unless,” he said, looking suddenly shy, “unless you think of all this as kind of—going backwards or something.”

  “Why would I think that?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what you’re thinking. It always has been.”

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose that’s something I can’t help, isn’t it.”

  And they both fell silent. It was a warm afternoon at the end of summer. They were sitting with iced-tea glasses in which the ice had melted and the watery tea was almost gone.

  “Oh, baby, listen—” he began, and he reached over to clasp her thigh for emphasis but hesitated and drew his hand back. “Listen,” he said again. “Let me tell you something: we’ll be all right.”

  After a long pause, examining her warm glass, she said, “No we won’t.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said no we won’t. We haven’t been all right for a long time and we aren’t all right now and it isn’t going to get any better. I’m sorry if this comes as a surprise but it really shouldn’t, and it wouldn’t if you’d ever known me as well as you think you do. It’s over, that’s all. I’m leaving. I’ll be taking Candace to California as soon as I can get our stuff packed, probably in a day or two. I’ll call my parents tonight and tell them, and then my whole family will know. Once everybody knows, I imagine it’ll be easier for you to accept.”

  All the blood seemed to have gone out of David’s face, and all the moisture out of his mouth. “I don’t believe this,” he said. “I don’t believe I’m sitting in this chair.”

  “Well, you’ll believe it soon enough. And nothing you can say is going to stop me.”

  He set his empty glass on the floor and got quickly to his feet, as he always did for shouting, but he didn’t shout. Instead he peered very closely at her face, as if trying to penetrate
the surface of it, and said, “My God, you really mean this, don’t you. I’ve really lost you, haven’t I. You don’t—love me anymore.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Exactly. I don’t love you anymore.”

  “Well, but for Christ’s sake, Susan, why? Can you tell me why?”

  “There is no why,” she said. “There’s no more why to not loving than there is to loving. Isn’t that something most intelligent people understand?”

  In an excellent residential suburb of St. Louis, a place of broad lawns and of deep, cool houses set back among shade trees, Edward Andrews sat alone in his study, trying to finish an article he’d been asked to write for a medical journal. He thought he had most of it right, but he couldn’t find a way to work up the final paragraphs into a real conclusion, and every time he tried something different it seemed to get worse. The thing kept coming to a stop, rather than to an end.

  “Ed?” his wife called from the hallway. “That was Susan on the phone. She’s on the Interstate, and she’ll be here with Candace in half an hour. You want to get dressed or anything?”

  He certainly did. He wanted to take a quick hot shower too, and to stand at the mirror solemnly combing and recombing his hair until he got it parted just the right way. A clean shirt then, with the cuffs folded back two turns, and a fresh pair of lightweight flannels—all this to prove that at sixty-three he could still be spruce and vigorous for Susan.

  When she arrived there were huggings and kissings in the front hall—Dr. Andrews’s lips brushed the cool lobe of an ear—and there were happy exclamations at how much Candace had grown, how different she looked, since the last time her grandparents had seen her.

  Alone in the kitchen, preparing drinks and coming to an abrupt, nervous decision that he’d better have a quick one now, here, before taking the tray into the living room, Dr. Andrews wondered once again what it was that could make him tremble in the presence of this dearest child, this particular girl. She was always so calm and so competent, for one thing. She had probably never done an incompetent or irresponsible thing in her life, except for wasting her Turnbull College tuition that time—and that, now that he thought of it, was nothing at all compared to the way millions of other children had behaved in those years, with their flowers and their love beads, their fuzzy-headed Eastern religions and their mindless pursuit of drug-induced derangement. Maybe David Clark could be thanked, after all, for having steered her away from all that; but no, that wasn’t right. The credit couldn’t go to Clark because it belonged to Susan herself. She was too intelligent ever to have been a vagabond, just as she was too honest to go on living with a man she no longer loved.

  “So what are your plans, Susan?” he asked as he brought the bright tinkling tray of drinks into the room. “California’s kind of a big place. Kind of a scary place too.”

  “Scary? How do you mean?”

  “Oh, well, I don’t know,” he said, and he was ready to back down on anything now if it meant avoiding an argument. “All I meant was—you know—judging from some of the stuff you read in magazines, and so forth. I don’t really have any firsthand information at all.”

  Susan explained, then, that she had a few friends in Marin County—“that’s up north of San Francisco”—so she wouldn’t be starting out among strangers. She would find a place to live, and then she’d look for some kind of work.

  “What kind?” he asked. “I mean, is there anything in particular you’d like to do?”

  “I don’t really know yet,” she said. “I’m pretty good with children; I might work in a nursery school or a day-care center; otherwise I’ll look for something else.” She crossed her narrow, pretty knees under the hem of an attractive tweed skirt, and he wondered if she had changed into fresh clothes in some motel room on the road in order to look nice for this homecoming.

  “Well, dear,” he said. “I hope you know I’ll be happy to help out in any way I can if you’re—”

  “No, no, Daddy, that’s okay. We can get along easily on what David sends us. We’ll be all right.”

  And it was such a fine thing to hear her say “Daddy” that he allowed himself to sit back, silent and almost relaxed. He didn’t even ask the one question foremost in his mind: How is David, Susan? How’s he taking all this?

  He had met and talked with David Clark only a few times—first at the wedding, and on four or five occasions since then—and he’d been surprised each time to discover that he liked the man. Once, tentatively, they had begun to discuss politics, until David said, “Well, Doctor, I guess I’ve always been a bleeding-heart liberal,” and Edward Andrews found that appealing—the humor and the self-deprecation of it, if not the way it might apply to current issues. He had even decided not to mind David’s being twenty years older than Susan, or his having another, earlier family far away, because all that seemed to suggest he wasn’t likely to make any more mistakes; he would devote the prime of his middle age to his second marriage. And the best part, the thing that seemed to make nothing else matter, was that this shy, courteous, sometimes bewildered-looking stranger could never take his eyes away from Susan in any gathering. Couldn’t everybody see he was in love with her? And wasn’t that the first thing to look for in a son-in-law? Well, sure it was. Of course it was. And so, therefore, what now? What was the poor son of a bitch going to do with the rest of his life?

  Susan and her mother were talking of family matters. All three of the younger girls were living away from home now, two of them married, and there were other bits of news to be exchanged about the older girls. Then after awhile—inevitably, it seemed—they took up the subject of childbearing.

  Agnes Andrews would be sixty before very long, and for many years she had been obliged to wear spectacles with lenses so thick that it wasn’t easy to see the expression in her eyes: you had to rely on the smile or the frown or the patient, neutral look of her mouth. And her husband had to acknowledge that the rest of her was rapidly aging too. There wasn’t much left of her once-lustrous hair except what the hairdresser could salvage and primp; her body sagged in some places and was bloated in others. She looked like what she was: a woman who’d been called Mother in shrill, hungering voices for most of her life.

  Long ago, almost beyond memory, she had been a neat, crisp, surprisingly passionate young nurse whose flesh he had been wholly unable to resist. The only minor deterrent, easily ignored from their first night right on up through the night he’d proposed to her (“I love you, Agnes; oh, I love you, and I need you. I need you . . .”), the only qualifying aspect of his love had been his knowledge that some people—his mother, for one—might think it strange of him to marry a girl of the working class.

  “. . . Well, Judy was my easiest,” she was saying. “I never knew a thing. I went into the hospital and they put me under, and when I woke up it was all over. She was born, I was full of painkillers so I felt all right, and somebody gave me a bowl of Rice Krispies. No, but some of the others were a lot harder—you, for instance. Yours was a difficult birth. Still, I think my worst times were with the younger girls, probably because I was getting older. . . .”

  Agnes rarely talked at such length—whole days could pass without her saying a word—but this had come to be her favorite topic. She sat leaning forward, her forearms on her knees and her clasped hands rolling this way and that to emphasize the points she was making.

  “. . . And you see Dr. Palmer thought I was unconscious—they all did—but the anesthetic wasn’t working. I could feel everything, and I could hear every word they said. I heard Dr. Palmer say, ‘Watch out for that uterus: it’s thin as paper.’”

  “God,” Susan said. “Weren’t you frightened?”

  And Agnes gave a tired little laugh that made her glasses gleam in the fading afternoon light. “Well,” she said, “when you’ve been through it as many times as I have, I guess you don’t really think much about being frightened anymore.”

  Candace, who had been given a glass of ginger ale with a ch
erry in it, went over to stand and stare out of the big windows that faced west, almost as if she were trying to gauge the distance to California. “Mommy?” she called, turning back. “Are we staying here tonight, or what?”

  “Oh no, honey,” Susan told her. “We can only stay a little while. We’ve got a long drive ahead.”

  Out in the kitchen again, Edward Andrews broke open a tray of ice cubes with more force and noise than necessary, hoping it might stifle his mounting rage, but it didn’t. He had to turn away and press his forehead hard against the heel of one trembling hand, like a goddamned actor in a tragedy.

  Girls. Would they always drive you crazy? Would their smiles of rejection always drop you into despair and their smiles of welcome lead only into new, worse, more terrible ways of breaking your heart? Were you expected to listen forever to one of them bragging about how paper-thin her womb was, or to another saying, ‘We can only stay a little while”? Oh, dear Christ, how in the whole of a lifetime can anybody understand girls?

  After a minute or two he achieved a semblance of composure. He carried the fresh drinks back into the living room with an almost stately bearing, determined that for this next, last little while he would keep everything down and quiet inside him so that neither of these girls, these women, would sense his anguish.

  Half an hour later, in the early dusk, they were all out in the driveway. Candace was seated and belted in on the passenger side of the car, and Susan, with the car keys out and ready in her hand, was embracing her mother. Then she stepped over to give her father a hug, but it wasn’t really much of a hug at all; it was more like an agreeable gesture of dismissal.

  “Drive carefully, dear,” he said into the softness of her dark, fragrant hair. “And listen—”

  She drew away from him with a pleasant, attentive look, but he had swallowed whatever it was or might have been that he wanted her to know, and all he said instead was “Listen: keep in touch, okay?”