Wives and Lovers

by Margaret Millar

  “Personally, there’s nothing I’d like better than to see you married again, to some nice sensible woman, a widow, maybe, with a little something in the bank.”

  “All right, all right. You find her, I’ll marry her.”

  “I’ll look around. Meanwhile, don’t you forget what I told you about the mirror.”

  “No time like the present,” George said bleakly, and turned and stared into the mirror behind the bar. There, between a bottle of apple brandy and a bottle of vodka, was his face, and it seemed to him exactly the same face he’d always had, no better, no worse.

  “See what I mean, George? You’re no spring chicken. You’re still a nice-looking man, for my money, but you’re not going to set fire to any young girl . . . What’s her name?”

  “You wouldn’t know her. She’s one of the new girls I took on last week, a stranger in town.”

  “I thought you made it a rule not to mess around with the hired help.”

  “For Christ’s sake, who’s messing around? I drove her home a couple of times, is all. Now can we drop the subject?”

  “What’s your hurry? I’m just getting interested.”

  George leaned across the counter. His face was very red and the pulse in his temple throbbed with the rush of blood. “You won’t be satisfied until you know all about her, will you? You can’t leave me alone, can you?”

  “I just—well, I’d like to see you happy, is all.”

  “Don’t kid me. If you thought I showed the least sign of being happy you’d march down here and plug me full of holes.”

  “You don’t—”

  “Well, I’m happy now. Hear that?—I’m happy right now! So what are you going to do about it?”

  “Nothing,” Hazel said through stiff lips. “I’m glad to hear it. Very glad.”

  George turned away, exhaling a long noisy sigh like an engine standing in a station letting off excess steam be­cause it was not yet time to move. When he spoke again his voice was quiet and resigned. “Forget what I said. It’s not true, that business about plugging me full of holes. It’s just that I’m tired, I want to forget about things, in­cluding Ruby.”

  “Ruby.” She had known of course that it had to be Ruby but until the actual mention of her name she had kept hoping that it wasn’t. The girl, for all her youth, had a shifty way about her, and George, for all his ex­perience, was as artless and as easy to deceive as a baby. “All right,” Hazel said, “we’ll drop the subject. Forget about her.”

  “The point is, I can’t. She keeps cropping up in my head. I’ll be thinking of something else and then suddenly, wham, Ruby will pop up in the middle of it.”

  “And do you pop up in the middle of what she’s think­ing?”

  “Maybe, but I doubt it.” George smiled thinly. “As you pointed out, I’m not the type to set fire to any young girl.”

  “I didn’t mean that as a nasty crack. It was for—”

  “For my own good, yes, I know. Well, I haven’t set fire to her, and she hasn’t to me either. She’s just gotten under my skin, is all.”

  “Oh.”

  “I feel sorry for her, see. She’s a lousy waitress, moves around like I was running an old people’s home, and whenever she makes a mistake she stands around for ten minutes apologizing for it. She doesn’t realize that a customer would rather have a steak than an apology . . . And sloppy, God, is she sloppy. Half the coffee’s in the saucer and the other half’s on the floor, and she still manages to have enough left over to splash on the cus­tomer. She’s just not cut out for this kind of work.”

  “I guess not.”

  “But here she is, see?—and she’s not doing her job but she keeps trying so hard and the harder she tries the worse she gets. I ought to fire her before she wrecks the joint, but I can’t. She needs looking after. If I fired her, she’d be on my conscience.”

  “You’ve got a nice roomy conscience, George, there ought to be a place for one more.”

  Hazel climbed off the bar stool and smoothed her uni­form down over her hips. Her arms and legs felt a little heavy, partly from the beer and partly from the depres­sion that had come over her while George was talking. Though she was no longer married to George, or in love with him, she had a deep sense of responsibility for him as she had for all her friends and relatives, and it was a little disturbing to hear George talking about looking after somebody when he was the one who always had to be looked after. George was an impulsive man, and like most impulsive people he had friends who would have been willing to cut off a right arm for him, or at least a finger, and enemies who would have liked to shoot him on sight. It had been Hazel’s duty to protect him from both. Even now, when the marriage was ended and Hazel had been relieved of her duties, she still clung to some of them, like a retired general playing with tin soldiers and toy tanks long after the war was won or lost.

  She said, “Well, I’d better be getting on my horse.”

  “Hazel, if you were me, what would you do?”

  “About what?”

  “You know—Ruby.”

  “Pension her off. Put her in a good orphanage. Feed her to the sharks. How the heck should I know what to do? It’s your life.”

  “That’s the point, I don’t feel it is my life any more. I feel like I’m in a box and somebody’s sitting on the lid. Or—” George stroked his chin and scowled out the window. “Or like those lobsters way out there caught in the traps. At first they don’t realize they’re in a trap, they keep going through the same motions they always did, until zip, somebody pulls them up and there they are, lobsters Thermidor.”

  “George Anderson Thermidor,” Hazel said.

  Blinking, George drew his eyes away from the sea, and the invisible lobster traps. “I don’t know why I’m talking like this. It will give you the wrong idea of Ruby. Actually she’s a very shy, sweet kid.”

  “No traps?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you worrying about? No traps, no George Anderson Thermidor.” Hazel reached over the bar and patted him kindly on the shoulder. “You’ve got another one of your crushes, is all. Cheer up. You’ll get over it, same as always.”

  George stared at her gloomily. “You’re a pretty swell woman, Hazel.”

  “Baloney.”

  “No, I mean it. You know what we should do, Hazel? We should go out right now and tie one on, for old time’s sake.”

  “We should, eh?”

  “We’ll go the rounds, how about it? I’ll forget all about this joint, and Ruby.”

  “We’ll go the rounds, eh?”

  “Why not?”

  “You figure out why not.”

  She began walking toward the door, very slowly, as if she expected to be called back.

  George watched her, looking a little bewildered. “Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “But I thought you and I—”

  “My idea of how not to have a good time is to go the rounds with you and watch you get stinking drunk so you can forget another woman.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You give me a pain, George. You give me a big fat pain.”

  She went out and slammed the door, and a minute later he could hear her racing the engine of the old Chevy. The smell of its exhaust fumes floated in through the open windows along with the smell of kelp and dead fish and hot rolls baking in the kitchen and tar from the under­water oil wells.

  George watched the Chevy bounce along the wharf and then he turned and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was the same as it always was, except that it looked terribly surprised: What did I do or say? I just asked her to go out, to go the rounds.

  It seemed to George that people deliberately or ma­liciously misunderstood his intentions. He always had
the best intentions in the world, but lately every time he opened his mouth he got into trouble, the same as he did when he was a boy. When George was eight he had swollen adenoids and he kept his mouth open a great deal of the time to breathe through. One day when he was playing in the barranca behind his house, a bee flew into his mouth, and before he could spit it out the bee stung the roof of his mouth. For a long time after his adenoids had been removed, George kept his lips pressed together very tightly and he looked like a little old man with no teeth.

  George had told this story to nearly everyone he knew, to point a moral, but he never told the sequel: that he was still deathly afraid of bees and that whenever he was worried he kept his jaws clamped together and his lips compressed, and looked like a big middle-aged man with no teeth.

  Breathing through his nose George crossed the foyer and the dining room decorated with yacht pennants and abalone shells, and passed through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

  While the bar and the dining room were deserted, the kitchen was alive with a kind of hysterical activity. A boy in a brown apron was oiling the dish-washing ma­chine and whistling through his teeth. This boy had a gap between his two front teeth which was bad for talking but fine for whistling so he expressed himself not in words but with a variety of whistles, like a bird. All through the day and night his whistling served as an obbligato to the other kitchen sounds: the hissing of steam, the shrill squawking of the griddle, the banging of oven doors; bursts of Victor Herbert from the pastry chef and Romanelli’s eloquent cursing; the buzz of an electric timer measuring the minutes backwards, and the spasmodic peal of Mr. Romanelli’s own special alarm clock which he set to remind himself to do all kinds of things, to phone his wife, order turkeys, bawl out the linen-supply service and have the spark plugs checked in his car. At intervals throughout the day Romanelli’s alarm went off and the boy with the gap between his two front teeth whistled his allusive obbligatos.

  Romanelli put down the chicken he was singeing and came over to George. He was stripped to the waist, but he wore his white chef’s hat.

  “Lousy hot,” Romanelli said.

  George nodded, without unfolding his lips.

  “Some lady was here. Nice lady. She brought a present to you.” Romanelli’s eyes danced and his stomach heaved in silent laughter. “On the carving table I put it. Oh my, oh my.” Though Romanelli was inclined to be irritable, he dearly loved a joke, and when he laughed he laughed all over. His head bobbed, his chest shook, his feet stamped and his eyes laughed tears. “Oh my. Such a present. Such a nice lady.”

  On the carving table was a freshly caught stingray. It was not quite dead. Its barbed tail moved now and then, and on each side of its head its dull, vicious eyes stared at George.

  George’s mouth opened.

  “Take that goddamn thing out of here,” he shouted. “Do you hear me? Take it out, get rid of the goddamn thing!”

  He turned and saw Ruby standing in the doorway, look­ing pale and surprised. When she met his gaze she moved her arms convulsively and two cups rolled off the table beside her. They didn’t break, and Ruby bent over hur­riedly to pick them up. Her handbag fell on the floor.

  “And you,” George yelled. “You over there, you’re fired, see? Collect a week’s pay and get out! Hear me? You’re fired!”

  Ruby grabbed her handbag and ran.

  Romanelli impaled the stingray on a carving knife and carried it out to the garbage can.

  Even after the stingray was gone George could still smell it, its sharp fishy odor mingling with the odor of soap and baking pies and chicken livers and Ruby’s Cashmere Bouquet talcum powder.

  3

  Gordon Foster’s office was one of ten pink stucco bunga­lows built around a court on the upper end of Main Street. Nine of the bungalows were occupied by physicians specializing in various fields; Gordon was the only dentist.

  Whenever Elaine Foster came to call for her husband she took particular care with her grooming and her costume. As she walked through the court, past the gold­fish pond and the lantana hedges, she held her head high, not exactly pretending that she was one of the physicians’ wives, but half-consciously hoping that passers-by would mistake her for one. It was always a disappointment to her when she had to turn in at Number Seven, which was plainly marked, “Gordon W. Foster, D.D.S.”

  Elaine believed that Gordon could have been a real doctor if he had had more initiative, or if he’d met her earlier in life, so that she could have supplied the initia­tive. As it was, when they met, Gordon was already a dentist, and even Elaine’s considerable powers couldn’t make him into anything else. Their marriage had been colored by Elaine’s bile-green feeling that she had been cheated, that Gordon should have become a real doctor because she herself had all the attributes of a perfect doctor’s wife. She was energetic, competent, smartly groomed, and she had a low, cultured voice, excellent diction and a smattering of grammar: I’m very sorry the doctor is not in . . . You may reach him at his office . . . Yes, I shall see that he receives the message . . .

  Elaine was at her best on the telephone. She used it as an actress uses a role, to project her personality and at the same time to hide behind the projection. As a real doctor’s wife she could have spent a great deal of time on the tele­phone, leaving the details of the house and the three children to a maid. As a dentist’s wife, she couldn’t afford a maid. She couldn’t even afford a second car, so that when she needed the Oldsmobile for shopping or er­rands, she had to drive Gordon to work in the morning and call for him when he had finished for the day.

  She went around to the back door of Number Seven and let herself in. She could hear Gordon moving around in the lab, whistling. Elaine was, by nature, extremely suspicious of music or happy sounds in general, and she wondered what Gordon had to whistle about on such a hot day, with the house payment overdue and the tuition fee of Judith’s school raised again.

  The medicinal smell in the office made her cough. Gordon heard the cough and came out of the lab into the hall, carrying a full set of dentures in his hand.

  Elaine turned her eyes away. “Honestly, Gordon.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You know I can’t stand the sight of—those things.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” He put the dentures in his pocket. “I’m not quite ready to leave yet.”

  “I was hoping you would be. The children have been looking forward to this all day. You know how they adore the beach.”

  “Beach?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

  “No. I—”

  “But you have. I knew as soon as I walked in that you’d forgotten.”

  “I have other things on my mind, Elaine. I can’t re­member everything.”

  “We talked about it only this morning. You said at breakfast that it was going to be a hot day, and I said, let’s get Ruth to look after the baby and you and I and Judith and Paul will go down to the beach . . . You couldn’t possibly have forgotten.”

  “No.” He couldn’t possibly, but he had. He re­membered Elaine mentioning Ruth, but after that his mind had wandered because the name Ruth had reminded him of the name Ruby.

  Elaine was watching him, not reproachfully as she had at first, but with careful intensity like a cat about to pounce.

  “I hate to mention this, Gordon, but everyone has noticed how absent-minded you’ve become lately.”

  “I’ve been working pretty hard.”

  “Hard work or not, you still have ears. You heard me talking about going to the beach this afternoon.”

  “Yes, I suppose I did.”

  “But you didn’t care.”

  He put his hand in his pocket. The dentures felt cold and smooth to the touch, not like real teeth, which were warm and often a little rough. The owner of the dentures needed them by tomorrow
morning. Elaine needed to go to the beach. It was up to Gordon to decide whose need was the more urgent.

  He said, “I didn’t really promise that I’d have the afternoon free, Elaine.”

  “You implied a promise.”

  “I’d like to go to the beach as much as you, perhaps more.”

  “I’m not concerned with myself. It’s the children. You know how much they enjoy the water.”

  “I know how much they don’t.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing.”

  He was sorry he’d spoken, even though it was the truth. Like Elaine, both of the children were afraid of the water, and yet the beach seemed to hold an intense fascination for all three of them. Elaine would sit staring uneasily at the waves and wonder aloud about the tides and complain about the sand fleas. Paul would wander off by himself to pick up a group of strangers who would be very amused at first by his antics, then bored by his demands for at­tention, and finally exhausted and unkind. Judith, the seven-year-old, had a subtler approach to self-satisfaction. She would dig vast holes in the sand, large as graves, some of them, and here she would sit and eat her way through the contents of the picnic basket. A day at the beach, which always seemed so much fun for other families, was often a nightmare for the Fosters. Neither Gordon nor Elaine knew why this was so, but in self-defense each blamed the other.

  “I don’t care about myself,” Elaine said. “I’m used to disappointments, all kinds, all sizes.”

  “I guess you are.”

  “It’s the children I’m thinking of . . . Other families go places together, even the Harrisons, and he’s a real doctor. I saw them at the horse show, the night you worked late.”

  Gordon rubbed his eyes, knowing what was coming, yet feeling utterly powerless to stop it.

  “You work late so often recently.”

  “I have to.”

  “If your practice is really that good, perhaps it’s time to hire an assistant.”

  “I couldn’t make ends meet if I did.”