by Sol Stein
“Were you afraid,” he said, “I might find you weren’t sleeping alone?”
“If I showed up at your house, would I find you sleeping alone?”
A thought he would rather not pursue. One of the constants of infidelity.
“You started telling me about today.”
“Well, this morning I dressed, bathed, went—”
“In that order?”
“Inclusively but not serially. Went for milk and bread and things, looked at last night’s painting, decided that I’d have been better off sneaking into a movie with you, then decided the painting was coming along okay after all, so I patted it, washed the breakfast dishes, left some food to thaw for supper tonight and went to work. Are you going to sit there naked?”
“Go on,” said Peter, starting to dress.
“Well, I punched the time clock, and I started to—”
“What time clock?”
“Well, I punched something or somebody on my way in. Maybe it was the fifteenth-floor receptionist. You know how irritable I can be in the morning. I hung my coat up, went into my office, discovered it wasn’t my office, went next door to my very own office and looked out the window.”
“Nice view?”
“Couldn’t see. Window washers were washing the windows from outside, and all I could see was the window washers.”
“So far I have a feeling you’re overpaid.”
“In twelve minutes flat I whipped off a first-rate sketch of a Coke Christmas display to go with that mean-looking Santa Claus, and the rest of the day was spent showing off my twelve minutes’ work to Members of the Hierarchy.”
“They liked it?”
She dismissed his question with a wave of her cigarette. He knew how good her work was.
“Any propositions today?”
“Are you being jealous or proprietary?”
“I know the environment.”
“I also did a cover idea for the Helena Rubinstein brochure, and I found out, in midafternoon, that you’re not a father.”
“I am a father,” he said.
“Well, then, I’m not a mother.”
He said nothing.
“If I were pregnant, you’d send me to the butcher.”
“No.”
“You’d marry me?”
“Why ever for?”
“Honor. Anyhow, the matter is academic. Your honor is safe for now.”
His nerves were spindling off somewhere, and he was trying frantically to get them back in place. He took a long swig of the drink.
“Hey!” she said.
He knew she knew that any time he took a long swig like that, it was a squashing down of something. Thank heaven the radio was a transistor, he thought, as the sound came on at once, and with a turn he found music he could dance to, took her in his arms and danced. Would their dancing silence him inside?
Over her shoulder, he tried to concentrate on the physical objects of the room. The walls always seemed to recede into darkness, probably because Elizabeth kept paintings, hers and others, lighted by spots inobtrusively placed against the ceiling, and the paintings therefore seemed to mark the outer limits of the room; out beyond them, darkened space.
The couch was convertible; it had to be in an apartment this small. The coffee table was very low, as if it had no legs at all. Handsome actually when seen from above, which is how it had to be seen, but no place to park a coffee cup gracefully. Beauty first. Only bathrooms and kitchens were for utility, Elizabeth had said.
At that precise moment Peter became aware of the loud thumps from the floor below. They hadn’t been making that much noise.
“Oh, hell!” he said.
“Ignore her,” said Elizabeth.
They continued dancing until the thumps repeated themselves.
There was no point trying to continue. Elizabeth’s dismay showed on her face. The last time they had heard the noises from the floor below, they had been on the convertible, the distraction had wilted him.
“Do you think she objects to the dancing or that I entertain a man on the premises?”
“You do both brilliantly.”
“She gets paid.”
“That’s catty.”
“Perhaps. But true. There’s been a petition to get her out of the building.”
“Then to her you’re a scab. She’d outlaw free fornication.”
“I could tell her you buy me a lunch and dinner sometimes, and these earrings, and this watch, and you’ve given me cash I’ve never returned.”
“What are you working up to?”
“Nothing. Depressed by my state of sin.”
“Think how stately the sin of the married woman who knocks down a split-level house, a maid, an extra car, and for less comfort than you give me.”
“That’s an awfully economic view.”
“When there’s no love, there’s barter.”
“Why are you so sure Rose is wrong for you?”
This line of questioning, Your Honor, he thought, is irrelevant and immaterial.
“It’s the shape of her behind,” he said.
“What shape is that?”
“It has no shape. It’s the whole of her physically,” Peter went on. “She looks right in clothes, but when she’s naked it’s as if a skeleton were carrying her flesh as a burden.”
“You, sir, are that way, too, sometimes.”
He couldn’t disagree.
“If Rose were an old friend,” he said. “I wouldn’t see much of her. Our tacks are different. We’d probably have managed to break off. If Rose were a relative, I mean a male-female-neuter relative other than a wife, I’d see her at family reunions and we’d bring ourselves up to date on the number of children we’d had. But I’m married to her, and the children are ours. We have a family reunion every day without the rest of the relatives present for diversion.”
Peter took Elizabeth’s hand, and gently she took his hand off hers. “When did you know,” she said, “about you and Rose?”
“One day long before I met you, I succumbed to television. I mean I sat down to watch some program I thought I wanted to see because the paper said everybody ought to see it, and then I watched the following program, and the program after, and my inertia frightened me. I sat watching, and Rose sat alongside watching, and we died.”
“That makes me a necrophiliac,” said Elizabeth.
“A restorer of life,” said Peter. “The first time we had a drink after work, it was to talk out some business odds and ends, and when we looked up, five hours had passed. Nobody can discuss business for five hours, and we certainly hadn’t been.”
She knew what he would say. She was watching to see how he would tell it.
“And there was that complicated time we went to bed together, finally, and lying here, my arm under your head, afterward felt as good as during. That never happened to me before. When did you know, elf?”
“Sometimes I’m not sure I know now.”
A real question sometimes begged an unexpected answer.
“I’ve lived alone so long and gotten so used to it.”
Elizabeth could see the hurt in his face. “Yes, there was one time,” she said. “I was walking by myself downtown on a Saturday morning when you were home with the kids, and suddenly the air raid sirens went off. I didn’t know a drill was scheduled, and for five or ten frantic seconds I believed it was an air raid, and I didn’t feel frightened of dying.” She paused, then said, “Because I was living.”
Peter watched her face. “How come you never married, elf?”
“Never been asked,” she replied.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Never been asked by the right man. Not even now.”
She saw instantly how much she had hurt him and said, “I’m sorry.”
Peter sat her down. “You’ve never met Harry, have you? America’s most ardent advocate of the ménage à trois, not in one house but the European system, a wife and kids at home, an apartment
for the permanent lady of his life?”
She waited.
“Harry’s marvelous,” Peter went on. “It’s been going on for years. The women sort of know about each other. The wife likes Harry and what Harry calls ‘the integrity of the family.’ No broken home, no problem with the kids.”
“And the other woman?”
“Oh, Harry’s mad about her.”
“And she’s just wild about Harry.”
“It’s lasted eleven years. I’ve seen them together many times. They don’t sneak around corners the way we do. Most of Harry’s good friends see them together, though not at Harry’s home, but he’s got home friends, too. It works.”
The way Elizabeth was looking at him made him want to take back the whole conversation.
“Which of the women,” Elizabeth asked, “has the life insurance?”
“I, uh, would be surprised if both women aren’t well taken care of.”
“I’d like to ask a real question,” said Elizabeth.
“Sure,” he said.
“Is this a trial balloon?”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I appeal to everyone in this courtroom to believe me sincerely. I love this woman. Is it a sin to like to get laid by the woman you love?
The courtroom shook with laughter.
“A trial balloon?” he echoed, bargaining poorly for time to think. “I don’t understand Harry’s type of life,” he said. He took her hand. It felt limp. “I want to live with you.”
She said, “Part time.” There was no animosity in her face.
Was she looking for a commitment? He was committed, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he?
If at this moment he had to decide between not seeing her again and living with her—but did he have to make that choice?
He held his left hand before her as if he were showing it to her for the first time.
“Nice hand,” she said.
With that hand he gripped her arm and sat her down on the sofa.
Elizabeth watched him pace.
“Did you know I played a beautiful piano when I was six?” he asked. “Good enough to astound some people?”
Elizabeth seemed genuinely surprised.
“When I was seven, a nickel ball we were playing with rolled down the sewer, and two kids helped me lift the sewer cover and another kid went down after the ball. When he came up I reached for the ball, and the other kids couldn’t hold the weight alone. The sewer cover dropped on my left hand. Oh, it’s all right!” he said to Elizabeth’s sudden concern. “I can pick up a telephone.”
He stood over her. She wanted to get up, to end the unequal balance of Peter standing and her sitting, but there wasn’t room enough to stand up—he was that close—and she wouldn’t push him away.
“I could use the telephone, but I couldn’t play. I made jokes about being a right-handed piano player. Tennis was the therapy recommended for a kid with fast feet and a good right hand who couldn’t play the piano, so I played tennis till it took everybody’s mind off my left hand—except mine. How much tennis can a kid play?” he shouted at Elizabeth.
“I decided to be rich instead of a piano player. Did it ever occur to you that wanting to be rich is the perfect substitute? Oh, I wanted to be good rich. My scheme was to be so goddamn rich I could give every kid in the world an extra nickel ball. I wouldn’t give to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army or the goddamn Museum of Modern Art. I’d set up a ball foundation!”
“You seem not to have succeeded,” she said.
“Getting rich takes too much time. Besides, I saw the others trying, and how they act about money kind of puts you off the game.
“Well, I decided to become a patriarch instead and have a lot of kids and turn them all into great piano players. Isn’t that how we use our children?
“Jonathan hated playing the piano. Was I supposed to force him? Well, we had the damn piano paid for and in the house, so Margaret took lessons because she’s an angel and wanted to please me. When I finally had the sense to tell her she didn’t have to play, she said no, no, it was all right. When I insisted, was she relieved!
“I stopped having piano players. I stopped having kids. For a couple of weeks I thought about politics, but I didn’t have the guts to do a Coolidge in a war bonnet. Besides, I couldn’t get elected to anything. I’m the kind that gets an appointive office or none at all. And I couldn’t buy a South American republic and become a dictator because I couldn’t afford it, and besides, I like it here. And they don’t have kings anymore, not here, not even in plays. You know what’s here? You know what’s possible and here and American? Advertising.”
Elizabeth laughed.
“Now don’t laugh at advertising,” Peter said. “What other profession has all the frustrations built right in? A shoemaker makes a pair of shoes, or used to. At least he can fix a pair of shoes, and when he fixes them he knows they’re fixed. But what do you make in advertising?”
“You’re good at it,” she said.
“I was a good piano player.”
Peter sat down on the sofa alongside of Elizabeth, resting his head in his hands, in the audience with her, avoiding looking at the empty stage of her living room.
He tried to keep all trace of scorn out of his voice. “Advertising moves people. Closer to a store. That’s not the way I want to move people.”
She was passing him a cigarette she had lit. He held it without smoking.
“My first three years in advertising,” he said, “I worked like a fury by day, and by night I wrote something to move people. I wrote thirteen good chapters of a fifteen-chapter book, but I didn’t have the guts to take the silence, and I showed the thirteen chapters to Rose.”
“Did she like it?”
“She never said. She fell asleep over the first chapter, and I put it and the other twelve away in a drawer.”
With unaccustomed intensity Elizabeth said, “You’re out of your mind. Why?”
“Because I wanted to kill Rose. I should have! People are more tolerant of murder than divorce.”
She said nothing.
“The big myth used to be that you ruin the kids if you get divorced. Now they say you can divorce your wife but you don’t have to divorce your children. Is that true? It takes two heroes to make a decent relationship with children possible after divorce, and how many couples are made up of two heroes? Is Rose? Am I? I saw what happened with Charlie Baron and his kids. Charlie’s wife remarried fast and she saw to it that the kids’ ties with their stepfather, one by one, replaced their ties with Charlie, until Charlie had the role of visiting stranger, and the visits became intolerable because the loyalty of kids is conditioned by toys and holidays and day-to-day things, and most of all by exposure and habitat. Charlie wouldn’t have divorced his wife—he swore to that—if he had known he would be divorcing the kids also. It’s okay for the guy who isn’t much involved with the kids, or never was, or who identifies the kids with his ex and would just as soon not see them, but for a guy like Charlie Baron it was pure hell.”
She knew he wasn’t talking about Charlie Baron.
The cigarette in Peter’s hand had burned itself down to a butt without his having taken a puff. Carefully he cupped his other hand under the ash and brought it over to the ashtray.
“You know,” he said, “Rose never asked to see the novel again. Not out of meanness; Rose isn’t mean. She forgot about it.”
“You love the kids very, very much,” said Elizabeth, speaking against the one possibility she longed for.
“I love the kids and I love you, only you’re not their mother.”
She didn’t seem to understand.
“The kids are my kids, me as nearly as I can make me. I’d give my life for them if ever put to the test. I couldn’t bear not seeing them every night.”
“You don’t see them every night now,” said Elizabeth.
“I know,” he said.
“If you came to live with me, it’d be worse.”
“I
know.”
“The kids are kids. They need you. And you’re not ready to live without them. You should stop coming here.”
“I live here,” said Peter.
He hadn’t understood what he was saying until he said it, and when he did, it seemed irreversible.
“You,” he said, taking her hand, “are my next of kin.” He kissed her. It was somehow awkward sitting side by side, and so he pulled her to her feet, and their faces and bodies came together and stayed together.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said and headed for the bathroom.
Necessary interruption. Physiology. Nuisance. No use complaining.
The ringing caught him a step and a reach from the telephone. He had picked it up before thinking. Hang up? Childish. Try a neutral male voice. Say the least. “Hello?” he said.
“May I speak to Miss Kilter, please?” said the strained voice.
Peter put the receiver down next to the phone. He hadn’t wanted it to clatter but it did. He should have said, “One moment, please,” He had said “hello”; that was bad enough. His knuckles knocked on the door of the bathroom.
“Hurry up and get the phone.”
“Minute,” Elizabeth said through the door.
“Hurry,” he said, “it’s Rose.”
Elizabeth opened the door a crack. “It’s who?”
“Rose,” he whispered, his face white.
“My God,” said Elizabeth. She came out. She went over to the phone and then retreated one step.
He motioned for her to pick it up.
She shook her head.
“I can’t,” he said. “Hurry.”
I’ve got to get the hell out of here.
There was absolute fear in Elizabeth’s face as she picked up the telephone, visibly mustering her courage. He heard her striving to sound normal, to sound calm, as she said, “Hello? Yes, this is. No, no bother at all, Mrs. Carmody. I’m quite certain. I don’t know where he is. No, he’s not here. Yes, of course, if he calls I’ll tell him to call you, but I don’t expect him to call. No, not at all. Good-bye.”
Elizabeth hung up. Coward Carmody wanted to avoid her eyes.