by Alfred Hayes
She examined me.
How nice and fat I looked. What had happened to the rumored torch? She’d heard it was blazing. I didn’t look at all, not to her aged eyes, as though I were carrying anything so combustible as a torch. I looked rather disgustingly benign. Was I sure I didn’t want a hot toddy, now that I looked so disgustingly benign?
No.
She drank the smoking toddy.
So the torch was out. How nice. She wished hers would blow out too, thoroughly. But it was nice somebody’s had. I ought to go skating, now that I seemed about to resume the dimensions of an ordinary and torchless human being; skating was wonderful, too, in a way, the exercise, so much nicer than all that sticky business of suffering, she recommended it, skating, and a steak, and dinner together, since here she was and here I was, a pair of survivors. And yes, she’d almost forgotten, she’d seen my ex-girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. Last night, at the club.
Howard?
Yes, Howard. Looking perfectly miserable, too. She’d left him, I knew that, didn’t I?
Yes, I knew that.
She’d probably call me any day now, and I could, benign though I was, pick right up where I’d left off. Of course, she was rather marvelous, when you thought about it, asking him pointblank like that if he was going to marry her. What could the poor son of a bitch say but no?
Did I say something? Vivian said. My God, she called you. You didn’t know.
God, women, Vivian said. I wondered why you seemed so well. And with that angelic look, too. What in hell does that mother of hers feed her to give her such an angelic look?
Now, lover, Vivian said. If I knew you were going to look like that, I’d have kept my big mouth shut.
She really didn’t tell you? she said. She’s wonderful. You’d think she couldn’t stick a pin in a pincushion. She just called you in the middle of the night. She discovered she didn’t love him. I’d never have thought of a simple explanation like that. Which is my trouble: I’m always thinking of the complicated ones, and they never work. Will you do me a favor and stop looking so devastated? Any minute I’ll start feeling I just strangled a baby in the crib.
Where are you going? she said.
I left her at the bar.
Was she home? Vivian said. Well it’s only five-thirty. Relax. She really didn’t two-time you: she just got her signals crossed a little. Why don’t you drink that Scotch before it dies in the glass?
And the way he cried on my shoulder, Vivian said. I’d have felt sorry for him if there hadn’t been such a cover charge. She’s gotten under that skin of his, too, and I suppose, with all his money, he never thought she would just stand up and walk. Now he thinks because she went he’s lost a fine girl. Does it sound familiar? Darling, everything’s familiar. He was certainly groaning. I must say there’s nothing duller than listening for two hours on end to somebody else’s love troubles. And he was so stiff about it. He’s probably been out all afternoon trying to get rid of it on the handball court. I got the impression though that his resistance wasn’t going to last very long: he looked about ripe for the telephone routine.
And meanwhile she called you.
Marvelous, Vivian said. Some women are, you know: they don’t walk erect yet, but in a way they’re marvelous.
What do you want his address for? she said. In the first place I don’t know it, and in the second place you’re not going to do something immensely heroic, are you, like breaking in on them if she’s with him? You don’t know if she’s with him: she may just be out, somewhere, looking at trousseaus.
Can’t you see her though, Vivian said, the night she asked him? She probably sat perfectly upright, the little soldier, and looked him straight in his dividends. I suppose she decided she had given him long enough. I wonder what she wore for the occasion? Something black? I imagine she felt as though her virginity was being miraculously restored. I suppose if he could have gotten away with anything but a direct no, which she forced from him, he would have. Then she went home, and took an aspirin, and cold-creamed her face, and since she wasn’t going to lose everything she called you. I am being bitchy, aren’t I? Well, like my doctor says, rich or poor, money makes a difference.
Do you know she fainted once in an unemployment insurance office? Vivian said. Keeled right over.
And then there’s the kid, she said. Lovely little girl. What is she now, five? She played some records once she had made: mama whispering the lyrics, and baby singing, in a sweet falsetto, something out of Annie Get Your Gun. Darling little girl; and smart. She’d marry Dracula, I suppose, to protect the kid. So don’t be stupid: she can’t help herself. Of course, she could be honest about it, but it’s late in the day, and I wouldn’t say this is exactly the century to start being honest in. She has to persuade herself that he has other virtues besides that monstrous bank account. Besides, a cold bitch couldn’t have gotten him, if she gets him. It needed that small childish affrighted smile of hers. That tremulousness. That little delicate chin quivering when she’s on the point of tears. That look, when she’s hurt, as though someone just swatted her with a heavy rose.
Sit still, Vivian said. Drink your Scotch. Being nervous isn’t going to change anything.
Yes, I’ve seen them together, she said: he pilots her a little, by the elbow, as though she’ll run aground somewhere if he isn’t careful. That wife of his, the first cutie, she must have really gone over him with a rough brush. Afterward, what he couldn’t get was: who’d love him? Really him. Which one meant it, the babe with the trusting eyes, the demure sweetie who cooed at him and wouldn’t let him touch even the edges of a half-exposed breast in an evening gown, and which one was taking him for a well-known sleighride? He couldn’t ever be sure. Because there was nothing in the world to separate for him in advance the good ones from the bad ones: they all looked alike in clothes from Saks. So he’s gun-shy, and the one, strangely enough, he trusts least is himself. He knows the error is always finally his. Now, I suppose, he’s in love with her, and convinced, too, because she’s gone, that she’s what she pretends she is: the piano student, the nice little girl who commutes home. But it’s all tentative with him: he’ll have detectives out watching her get out of her bubble bath if he ever gets the slightest suspicion she’s not quite made of snow apples and pure-brand foods.
God knows what they talk to each other about, Vivian said. She’s not the most brilliant conversationalist in town, and while he doesn’t grunt, I wouldn’t like an extended tête-à-tête for the next twenty years with him. It’s that damned idea of his that what he’s saying is automatically interesting because he’s saying it. And he’s never anything but earnest. Do you suppose having more than sixty-five dollars in the bank all at one time would make that kind of a square out of me? Because, brother, if there’s a dull opinion left in the world, he has it. I mean he’d drive me out of what mind I have. He’ll tell you, for example, about some mine he’s just, more or less as a joke, put a few thousand in, fifty or sixty he means, expecting the people out there at the mine, he’s never even seen the goddamn thing, to bring in only a little lead or a little silver, and somebody took a wrong turn, amnesia no doubt, and opened up an accidental vein of solid gold. They’re bringing the stuff in in carloads. And of course he says it all modestly, with a cute little deprecatory smile, amused by it all: the son of a bitch, amused by a vein of solid gold. That’s what I mean. That would drive me out of my head. And then the friendships he boasts about, and drops neatly into the conversation: Sam, because of his horses, Sam being some San Francisco millionaire, and the horses being a racing stable; or Jack, who’s taking him big game hunting one of these days in Kenya, a two-gun safari, and you’re supposed to know what a two-gun safari is; or Ed, the newspaperman, the news-paper being, it turns out, a chain of them, who’s a real good egg but lacks perspective; then it turns out what he means by perspective is that Ed, the thoughtless fellow, gets into political quarrels, antagonizing all sorts of people he might need later, like Senators.
I’d go crazy trying to talk to a man who does that with the English language. And then that laugh of his: I mean at what he thinks are jokes, little cracks about sex: they really kill him. And then, the rich conservative businessman’s horror of publicity. Mustn’t get his name in the papers, the gossip columns particularly; but he loves it. The poor bastard is really dying to be glamorous, after all. They’re all dying to be glamorous. That’s what they’re doing in those clubs. Now where are you going? Vivian said.
The phone rang emptily in the room she wasn’t in.
Darling, relax, Vivian said. She’ll be home. She has to come home sometime just like I have to go home sometime. We all have to go home sometime. Where else is there?
Now let’s get on the sex thing, Vivian said. That would really knock me out. And let me explain why. Well in the first place he would be just the kind of a gent who would figure it all out in that solid little skull of his that it was all right with a tootsie he picked up in the lobby of a hotel in Miami Beach or on a trip to Nassau but not with his little wife. There are certain well-known practices that one doesn’t ever practice with one’s little wife in the sanctity of one’s little home. Of course the little wife, meek and mild and heaven’s child, might have more or less of a yen for a practice like that or any other kind of infield practice but something, what the hell would you call it, honorableness I guess he thinks it is, says to him it ain’t the sort of scrimmage one indulges in with the lady of the house. Because if you do and she likes it then how the hell, once more, do you tell the difference between her and the twenty-dollar thing you picked up in the lobby in Miami Beach? And brother, like I said, he wants to be able to tell the difference. But she’s going to marry him. He could have two heads and she’d marry him, but I suppose my telling you all this won’t make the slightest bit of difference to you. No matter how much information of the most revealing kind you stick in a man’s head what he’s going to do he’ll do anyway, like leave a perfectly nice bar with a perfectly nice glass of Scotch and canned music and all, and go out and try to kick in somebody’s perfectly inoffensive door. Why? That’s a good question, isn’t it, lover, and I’ll bet you haven’t the slightest inclination to answer it. Well, goodnight. Save a stained-glass window for me.
Outside, I caught a taxi.
She came out of the house, pulling on long black gloves, wearing over her hair a light gray filmy scarf, and as she turned toward the corner a drunk came lurching out of the bar and grill, and I watched her swerve slightly to avoid him. She was all dressed up. She gave the drunk a look that was meant to wither him but which, unfortunately, the drunk did not notice, and from the other side of the street I watched her turn down the avenue. She was apparently walking to wherever she was going. I was sure I knew where she was going. It was about seven o’clock, the hour when they let the beasts into the adjoining cages. At the corner a red light delayed her. She adjusted something on her wrist: a bracelet, or her watch. Somebody in a homburg standing outside a drugstore looked at her as she went by: the filmy scarf first, and then her legs. A taxi slowed thinking she was a fare.
O you bitch, I thought.
She hesitated briefly outside a dress shop on Park: a dummy in the window wore a dress that was brighter than the lipstick on her mouth. She looked critically at the gown, sparing it, I thought, a precious moment or two, but evidently something about it displeased her. Was it cut too low? Or perhaps not low enough. I was sure the gown wasn’t cut low enough. She liked a good subterranean cut in her evening gowns, they went so nicely with her demure expression. She walked on, looking like any girl would look around dinnertime hurrying to a date, with a touch of perfume behind each ear, a touch of perfume between her upstanding little breasts, and, providing the date was special enough and consequential enough, just the merest touch between her legs.
Bitch, bitch, I thought.
Hurry, hurry, she had said, and I had hurried, in the dead of night, to her palpitating side. Now, mounted on her little motorcycle, all dressed up, she was hurrying to what she must have known would inevitably happen all the time we were driving down to the little place on the shore, and have known all the time we were at the hotel, and she had only been making sure that I did not slip entirely away while she waited. She turned once, and I started guiltily, thinking she had seen me, moving back into the doorway of a camera store.
Bitch, bitch, bitch, I thought.
And now you’re Hawkshaw, the cockeyed detective, I said to myself. Now you’re the trained gumshoe, hot on her trail. Why don’t you open a goddamn agency?
Subject (aged twenty-four, wearing a gray scarf, high-heeled shoes, a fur coat somewhat gone to hell, and a bitch if there ever was one) disappears momentarily between two parked cars, emerges again, a radiant babe, on her way to a roll in the hay. Or didn’t they put that in the neat, typed-up, circumspect, but precise reports filed at the bureau, and mailed, with the customary discretion, to Mr. X, the gentleman dying to know the truth? And what exactly was the truth I was dying to know? I knew it already, with a dead certainty, didn’t I? I knew it, I knew everything now, I knew the customary everything. Then why was I following her, boy Pinkerton with my nickel badge, to a destination I was so absolutely sure I knew? Did old indomitable me still somewhere incredibly believe that she might not even now be going to where beyond the shadow of any doubt I knew she was going? There she was, the little intent wayfarer on life’s difficult highway, with the slight dabs of perfume in their discreet places, while I, patsy on a monumental scale, followed half a block behind her. She’d smell real sweet tonight. She’d be a goddamn bouquet. She’d be lilies of the valley, with the dew still on them.