by Packer, Vin
“Is this a bribe? Ido have a date for lunch.”
She felt sorry for him, and irritated that she did.
“Oh, it’s no bribe, Mrs. Wealdon. Oh no, m’am.” He shuffled his feet and held out the small box. “Coconut ice. Your favorite, I heard.”
He had the top of the box off, and when he unfolded the tissue paper there were two pieces of candy.
“Not now, Stanley. Put them by your manuscript.”
“You don’t want any, Mrs. Wealdon?”
“Not before lunch…. About the book, I’d be glad to read it. You’ll have to give me plenty of time.”
“I made that candy myself, Mrs. Wealdon,” said Stanley, backing into a chair.
“I appreciate it. Thank you. I’ll have it when I come home from lunch. For dessert. I reallydo have a lunch date, and I’m in a hurry.”
He looked blankly at her.
“I’ll read it within the next week,” she said.
He rubbed his hands together, and she noticed the bandages. “Did you have an accident?”
“I burned myself, making the candy.”
“Sorry.”
“I wish I knew if you liked it. I wish you’d have some.” “I have to dress now, Stanley.”
She ground out her cigarette emphatically. “I’m in a hurry.”
“I’ll take it back,” he said, “if you don’t want it, then I’ll — ”
She was suddenly exasperated. She whirled and, very nearly shouting, said, “Good heavens, Stanley, don’t behave so stupidly! I’ll eat your candy and I’ll read your book, but you must go right now!”
Perhaps she really had shouted, for, without saying another word, Stanley fled.
“When does he arrive, Gloria?” Milo’s voice said behind her.
“When does who arrive?” She pulled her shirttail out of her pants, began pulling the socks out of her hair, and started walking toward the bathroom. “I thought you’d gone.”
“You know who. Your literary agent.”
“Oh? So youare aware that he’s coming?” She bent and turned on the water in the tub. “He’ll be here tonight.”
“We ought to have a talk before then, Gloria.”
“We’re having one now, aren’t we. Just carry on,” she said, kicking off her space shoes.
“I think you could have given Stanley a little more time than you did.”
“I’m sure you think that, Milo. You feel obliged to be sweet and kind and tolerant of any creep who rides up on a bicycle. You married me becauseI was a creep. Was. Past tense. Or didn’t you think I’d figured that out, Milo?”
Milo’s head was throbbing again.
He said, “Why do we have to argue this way? There are certain things that need to be said between us. Can’t we say them in a quiet way?”
“Whisper, if you’d like,” she answered, grinning up at him. She flung her pants and bra into the tub. It had always annoyed him that Gloria did her laundry while she took her bath, soaping her stockings and her underwear right along with her arms and legs.
“Are you going to leave me?” he said. He looked at her, at all of her. It was pathetic the way her hips had spread, the way her figure had surrendered itself to middle age, though she was only thirty-three. She had stretch marks, and she was flabby-thighed and too soft.
“Do you want me to?” She tested the water with her toe, turning her back on him.
He thought how he would like to take his knee and ram her rear end with it, so that she’d go head-first into the tub.
“No,” he said sincerely, “I don’t want you to.” “And if I do?” she said. “Hand me the soap.”
“Maybe I’d kill myself.” He didn’t know why he said it, or why he laughed. He had intended not to answer that question at all, but there you were; the answer had just come out. He handed her the soap.
She eased herself into the hot water. Pretty soon her skin would get very red; her heart would race. She always took baths too hot for anyone. They made her weak after. In the beginning of their marriage, he had liked to make love to her when she was fresh from the bath. He had liked it if she was still a little moist, and smelling of the talcum she used. He used to sit on the top of the toilet seat watching her bathe, and it would excite him, and he would take her when she stepped from the tub into the towel he held waiting.
Now he stood there by the sink, and her breasts looked like great hams, not exciting.
“How would you kill yourself?” she said.
“I have a pill.”
“You’ll need more than one. Ouch! Hot!”
“No, I’ll only need the one. It’s very effective.” It was strychnine. He had used it to rout the large field rats from the city dump last year, when he had accepted the position of chairman of the dump clearing project. Strychnine was a product of the Quaker Button tree, native to the East Indies, a most violent poison, which Milo even hated to use on rats. How had he ever become involved in this conversation with Gloria?
She seemed unfazed. “I’d jump, if I were you.” She soaped herself vigorously. “Pills are not infallible in the age of the stomach pump and mobile oxygen tank. I’d jump. You just pick out a Jim-dandy hotel, ask for a room on the courtyard, on the nineteenth floor, have yourself a deliciously expensive dinner — on the house,” she chuckled, smoothing the washcloth along her arm, “have a couple of splits of champagne — and then whoosh!” She raised her hand and let the washcloth splash into the water. “Fini! Au reservoir, and all that!”
Milo decided that it was unbelievably pathetic that Gloria, in her conception of a suicide, should include the minor triumph of getting out of paying the dinner check. He sighed.
“ ‘ForMiles,’ “ she said, “ ‘was endlessly sighing away his existence, in hallways by coat racks, on gravel driveways on his way to — ’ “
“We’ll have the talk another time,” he said.
Gloria shrugged. “Close the door after you, there’s a draft!”
She spent the rest of the time in the tub, imagining how amused Pitts Ralei would be when she discussed Milo with him that evening. Pitts had a theory that the European male, like himself, was prone to falling in love with angelic-looking women who turned out in reality to be sluts; the American male, on the other hand, was susceptible to half-clad, very sexy, Martini-drinking females who were actually by nature quite virginal.
“You see it all the time in the movies,” he would say. “Our Frenchman with his Jeanne d’Arc who sells her flesh by night in Montmartre, and your American with his Marilyn Monroe who’s really only working in that road-house to support her three kids, and never allows a man so much as a passing pinch on the buttocks.”
Pitts was so darned clever, Gloria thought. Whenever he said,“Very good,” in response to an observation Gloria made, she felt manifestly erudite. Tonight, she planned to tell him about Milo. He never really seemed to understand the way Milo was. She thought about how she’d put it, perhaps:
“With most men, a woman has to struggle to be beautiful and desirable in order to hold him. Not Milo, P.” (She had taken to calling him simply P.) “With Milo, it’s quite the contrary. Ido believe that if I were to announce tomorrow that I was going on a ten-day salt-free reducing diet to improve my shape, he’d feel as miserable as another man would feel if his wife were to announce she was going to pick her teeth at a very social sit-down dinner party.”
Rubbing herself with a turkish towel as she climbed from the tub, Gloria Wealdon wondered if P. was in love with her. He had never said so right out like that, but neither had he ever said he was in love with anyone else. He laughed quite a lot when they were together, and one evening at the Oak Bar in the Plaza Hotel he had said quite spontaneously: “I care for you very much, Gloria. Youare important to me.”
When she put the talcum on her body, she remembered the way Milo always wanted to get her in on the bed after a bath. He always used to call her Glo at those times. There was something about Milo that made him drop the last half
of a person’s name if he was terribly passionate about them, or extremely sorry for them. The way he referred to his Rosary Peas as his Rosas that fall they died on him because their pot was not big enough for their roots. My poor Rosas, he had said, my little Rosas…. And Glo, when he wanted to get her in on the bed. Dacky Kent, his friend who had been studying to be a priest, was Dack after he died, and the good Lord only knows why Milo had one day called that mousey little salesclerk, Miss Dare, Edwin. Gloria remembered that she and Milo had come across Edwina Dare at the railroad station, where Milo had driven to pick up some punching bags he had had shipped from Cleveland which were to be installed in the high school gymnasium. They had stopped just for a second or so, both to say they were sorry Miss Dare was moving away from Cayuta, and hoping she would like it in Michigan (though heaven knew Gloria did not care a hoot). Out of a clear blue sky it had come — Milo’s voice saying, “Well, Edwin, goodbye now.”
She had even teased him about it on the way home. “Have you been fooling around with Edwina Dare or something? All of a sudden she’s Edwin.”
“I liked her,” he had said.
“That would figure,” Gloria had told him. “Just give you one unattractive, old maid spinster nobody gives a good goddamn about, and you’re all set to play Prince Charming.”
• • •
When she had finished dressing, Gloria stood before the full-length mirror in her navy blue suit with the saffron scarf tied at her neck. In her hand she carried the beige suede gloves and the navy bucket bag. She was no beauty, she realized that, but for once she felt that she had at last acquired good taste. Thanks to Pitts.
“Never be obvious,” he had instructed her. “If you’re wearing a navy blue suit, avoid white at the neck and white gloves to match. It’s too much like a Polish maid’s Easter Sunday in Ida Grove, Iowa. Whatever color you wear at your neck, never let it match exactly your glove color.”
After she had bought the full-length mink, Pitts had said, “Very well, I suppose youhad to buy mink. But remember, a lady never wears mink before five in the afternoon, or wool after five.”
She had returned the mink the following day.
• • •
Gloria thought of the way Fern Fulton flounced about Cayuta at high noon in her mink, and she decided that the next time she and Fern had a little talk, she would mention the matter. If Freddy was so concerned with the rules of decorum, he would do well to teach them to that cross-eyed hoyden of theirs. Just as Fern had been about to pour their second cups of coffee that morning, Virginia had appeared and undertaken the task. At least three times Gloria had saidone teaspoon of sugar. Yet when the monster handed her the cup, the coffee was saturated with it. Gloria had been barely able to finish it, and the only reason she had was to pacify Fern. More and more toward the end of their visit, Fern seemed on the brink of overt rage.
• • •
Walking through the living room, Gloria found Milo standing by the table, flipping through Stanley’s manuscript. He was just about to pop a coconut ice into his mouth.
“Sweets for the sweet, Milo?” she said. She knew how he disliked being caught eating candy. Milo was always off on tirades about the way sweets made cavities.
She said, “What on earth are you hanging around for? I thought you had to leave!”
Her husband shoved the candy and tissue into his pocket. “You could drop me off,” he said. “On the way I’ll stop in Stewart Drugs for you and get your anti-acid prescription filled.” He held out his hand, the red pill wiggling in the palm. “This is your last one. You’ll need some for tonight.”
After every meal she had to swallow one of the pills, to get through her next few hours comfortably. Milo liked to remind her of the fact, to point up his own iron constitution. She took the pill and slipped it into her change purse.
“I can get my own prescription filled.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d want to face Louie Stewart,” he said. “After all, you practically called him an out-and-out pansy in your book.”
“Did you forget that I’m having lunch with Louie’s mother, Milo?”
“I doubt that Louie’s forgiven you, even if Min has. And I doubt that Min has.”
“I don’t care … either way.”
“One day,” Milo said, “you’re not going to land on your feet.”
“Are you looking forward to picking up my broken bones from the ground, darling? The great big prince rescuing the little bitsy Cinderella?”
Milo turned his back to her and lit a cigarette. “I suppose your literary agent is the great lover?”
“Why don’t you ask him at dinner tonight? Oh, Lord! That reminds me. I’ve got to remember the name of that wine Pitts likes. It’s a rosy wine.”
“Rose-zay,” said Milo. “I won’t be at dinner.”
“Working late with the parallel bars and rope trapezes? Or is there an important conference at the ping-pong table?”
Milo told her to shut up. He whispered it.
“Why don’t you ask that new teacher with the piano legs to go on a hundred-yard dash with you under the stars, Milo? Or you could pole vault by the light of the moon.”
Milo took the car keys from his pocket. He turned back and faced his wife. “We better be going,” he said sourly, “or you’ll be late for your appointment…. Catch!” he called, tossing the keys with his infallible aim. They hit her across the bridge of the nose.
“Whoops! Sorry, Glor.” He picked them off the floor and handed them to her.
She looked at him, rubbing the tip of her suede glove along her nosebone, her eyes watery from the stinging blow.
“Now do you feel better, Milo?”
He did indeed. His headache was gone.
Eight
Dr. Hammerheim was the local Freud; and it was not always a case of mispronunciation when some citizens referred to him as the local fraud.
— FROM Population 12,360
THAT AFTERNOON while he was waiting for the light on Court Street, Jay Mannerheim noticed the car in front of him. Gloria Wealdon was driving, with Milo slumped beside her in the front seat. As the light went green and Jay turned at the corner, he began to think about the furor Gloria’s novel had created in Cayuta.
It had served to remind him of the fact that the human ego was pitifully fragile, grievously vulnerable; that human beings were far more complex and peculiar than they were already assumed to be.
For instance, there was Freddy Fulton’s family.
There was Fern, poor, lonely soul. At one time, probably back in the beginning of her analysis, she had told Gloria Wealdon the delicious falsehood that she and Jay were having an affair. It was innocent enough, as a fantasy(some of Jay’s patients murdered him intheirs) and it was common enough among his female patients. But when Gloria had written it into her novel, Fern felt ruined in Jay’s eyes.
When the book was first published, she spent most of her analytic hour talking about it.
“I suppose,” she would begin, “that you imagine I told Gloria a lie about us. It would be a ridiculous lie for me to tell,” she would continue, “because I don’t have to make up stories about my attractiveness. Why, I used to fight the boys off, down at Laura Bryan’s dancing school, when I was a girl. One boy — he’s a big man in stocks and bonds now and lives in Fairfield County — broke his collarbone racing across to dance with me. Jack Fowler was his name. Fowler and Nash, ever hear of them? Stocks and bonds.”
Then she would reach suddenly for the Kleenex box on Jay’s desk, and start to cry.
Sometimes she cried the whole fifty minutes, just sat and cried.
Once she said, “I think everyone in town is laughing at me because of that book. I think they all believe I told Gloria Wealdon we were having an affair! I never did, you know.You don’t think I did, do you?”
“What do you think I think?” Jay had answered.
“You laugh at me too,” she said.
• • •
That wa
s untrue. Jay Mannerheim realized an immense pity for Freddy Fulton’s wife. She had an almost sticky hunger for love, so that being in her presence was like walking through a too-humid hot August afternoon, when you felt as though you were powerless to accomplish anything at all. Sometimes Jay felt that all he could do for her was simply to listen, simply to take her money so she could buy those moments in his presence when there was no more façade, when there was just this miserable woman face-to-face with herself, looking into a mirror where there was reflected the shabby soap-opera of a lifetime; looking at truth instead of for it, the way someone will when dreams are over.
• • •
Now, with Gloria Wealdon’s book published, it was as though everyone else could look too; look and point and make fun. Fern Fulton might have been able to convince Gloria Wealdon that she and Jay were having an affair, but most everyone else suspected the truth. Even Freddy Fulton had laughed at the idea. Freddy had said he wished Jaywould have an affair with her.
Fulton puzzled Jay Mannerheim. From all he could gather, Freddy was never unfaithful to his wife, yet Fern confessed that up until about eight months ago their sexual activity had been only spasmodic for some six years. Now it was resuming with surprising frequency. Mannerheim supposed Fulton had either been neurotic in some unknown area, or guilty about whatever he imagined washis contribution to their child’s eye condition. The latter, most probably. Many times people displaced guilt and punished another by withholding love. Still, how had Fulton overcome it, and had the novel Gloria Wealdon wrote had something to do with it? It seemed unlikely. Fulton was too sharp a man for such a glib likelihood; at the same time, he always seemed so easy-going and content, not like someone wrestling with some inner conflict so sexual in its nature. Jay could always see him in his mind’s eye laughing with his head thrown back, standing that way he did with his legs apart, rocking on his heels, his slight paunch poking out in front of him, holding a drink with the ice melting in it (because he wasn’t a fast drinker). Freddy Fulton, philosophical in a sort of kind and cynical way (like a much older man who’d known great love, passion or some kind of adventure). A nice guy, laughing, grinning, winking, saying something too wise and quite clever. He was very much like Milo Wealdon, in a stronger way; Milo was a weak sister to a Freddy Fulton, yet in both there was some uncanny spark, a look in the eye, a spring in the walk, something different that made you like them for a reason you couldn’t honestly fathom. You just liked them, that was all.