Cold Spring Harbor

by Richard Yates

  She assured him there was nothing wrong with it at all, which seemed to lend a certain sanction to his escapade, and twenty minutes later, as he hummed along toward the lights of Route Twelve, he vowed that this time there would be no turning back.

  Each of the hurrying boys and girls who worked at the take-out section of Bill Bailey’s wore an overseas cap of starched white gauze, so flimsy a thing that the girls had to attach it to their hair with bobby pins, and they all looked much too busy to be approached with any questions other than those in the line of business. But then Evan saw a middle-aged woman hovering behind them in a way that suggested she was their supervisor, so he edged in, leaned a little over the counter, and called to her in a polite shout.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, do you know where I can find Miss Donovan? Mary Donovan?”

  “No, I don’t know of anyone by that name. Sorry.”

  “Or maybe,” he said, “maybe she’s called Mary Shepard here.”

  “Oh, Mary Shepard,” the woman said. “Well, certainly. Mary’s up on the second floor. Will you step around to the side door then? So I can let you in?”

  It felt funny to be welcomed into the management side of a customer-service counter, like being allowed behind the tellers’ windows of a bank, and funny to be shown up a lighted plank staircase that smelled of fresh lumber and looked as raw and finger-smudged as it must have been the day the carpenters hammered it together. Then he was at the partly open door of a little office with unpainted beaverboard walls, and he could see Mary alone in there, standing at a file cabinet. She was facing away from him, but he recognized her at once by the bright, loose hair and the legs; all he had to do was give the door a shove to open it all the way.

  “Well, Evan,” she said. “Well, I—What’re you—Well, what a surprise.”

  It was a surprise, all right. He was surprised at how steady and self-confident he felt when she sat down at a desk and offered him the chair beside it; he was surprised too at the ease and friendliness in the first few exchanges of their talk. As if to prove how much they still had in common, they had fallen at once into discussing Kathleen and agreeing on what a nice, smart little girl she was turning out to be.

  “And she really does enjoy the time she spends with you, Evan,” Mary told him. “She talks about you quite a lot.”

  “Well, good,” he said. “That’s really—that’s very good to hear.”

  When he asked her out for a drink she examined her wristwatch—he’d forgotten what shapely forearms she had—and said “Well, I won’t be through here for another hour, but sure. I mean I really would like to have a drink then, if you don’t mind waiting.”

  And he didn’t mind at all. Downstairs and outdoors and alone again, back in the trampled dust in front of the place, he pitied the drab supervisor and all her quick, harried, frowning children because none of them looked as though they had anything worth waiting for, tonight or ever.

  Smoking more cigarettes than he wanted, he killed most of the hour in his parked car with the engine running, trying to get a halfway decent sound or even a resonant buzz out of the dashboard radio. It had never worked for him, this cramped, crappy little radio set; it probably hadn’t worked for most of this car’s previous owners either, though it must once have been the pride of whoever first drove the damned car away from a dealer’s showroom, only a couple of years ago.

  By the end of the hour he was nervously alert, watching the door at this end of Bill Bailey’s, and when Mary finally did appear there he cut the engine and sprang from the car to greet her.

  “My God,” she said. “Is this really your car? Is it new?”

  “Oh, it’s a ’forty,” he said bashfully, “but it was practically a wreck when I picked it up; had to do an awful lot of work on it, front end and back. Got it running pretty good now, though.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised,” she said, and there was a subtle suggestion of teasing in her eyes. “You’ve always been something of a genius with cars, haven’t you.”

  She told him there was a fairly nice place called Oliver’s a mile or two up the road; the only problem was that she’d have to take her car there, too, so she could drive it home later and have it for work tomorrow. Could he sort of follow her, then, in this lovely great machine of his?

  “Be glad to, ma’am.” He whipped the fingers of his right hand up as if to touch the visor of an imaginary chauffeur’s cap and was briefly reminded of his shitty little brother-in-law, though Mary seemed to find it a charming gesture: she narrowed her eyes to give him a small, bright laugh and assured him it wouldn’t take long.

  “Well, but we were only kids then, Evan,” she explained half an hour later, over her second drink in one of the deep semicircular booths at Oliver’s. “We might as well’ve been twelve or thirteen years old when we—you know—when we got married. Doesn’t it seem that way to you?”

  He was looking around this voluptuous little place, or trying to, and wondering why they kept the lighting down to near-total darkness. (Were you expected to snuggle up and smooch in here? Was it the kind of place where you could finger-fuck your girl while the jukebox throbbed and moaned into some sappy little song about love in wartime?)

  “Well, okay, sure,” he said. “But then, why’d you take my name back, and give it to Kathy too?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t attach much significance to that if I were you,” she said in the same explanatory, advisory tone. “It was just something I did a few years ago when she started school. Seemed silly not to at the time, and besides I think I always have liked ‘Shepard’ better, as far as names go.”

  He wasn’t doing very well—that much was clear—but at least their talk hadn’t yet begun to weaken and falter; it was still alive. Anyone happening to glance over into their part of the darkness would have said they were having a good-enough time together.

  “So whatever happened to the dentist?” he asked her.

  “What dentist is that?”

  “You know. Your mother told me once you were engaged to a dental student.”

  “Oh, my God. That was years and years ago, back in I think my freshman year; and we certainly weren’t ‘engaged’—that could only have been something my mother misunderstood. She hardly ever gets things straight, as you may know.”

  This struck him as a good-enough chance for saying Well, so how many other guys have there been? Or, So who do you have for a man now? But he hadn’t managed to frame either question in his mind before she spoke first.

  “No, but how about you, Evan? What’s your wife like?”

  “Well, she’s—sweet,” he told her. “She’s very sweet, and I guess that’s part of the trouble. She’s like a little girl—is a little girl. And I mean we were okay when we had our own place down in Amityville; we were fine then, but now we’re living with her crazy old mother and her shitty little—Look, Mary, I’d really rather not go into all this right now, is that okay?”

  “Well, of course it is,” she said. “Anything you want to tell or not tell is perfectly okay with me.”

  But Evan hadn’t meant to reveal anywhere near that much about his personal life to this girl, and now he felt stupid for shooting his mouth off.

  One advantage of the very low lighting in this room, he’d decided, was that it could make almost any girl look like a million dollars. If he could only be quiet now and try to relax in the subtle company of the way this particular girl was made to look—the lovely, half-mocking eyes, the fine cheekbones and the rich cascading hair—it might still be possible to settle for a good-enough time. And what the hell other kind of time could he ever have been dumb enough to expect? “Care for another drink?” he asked her.

  “Well, no, it’s getting late,” she said, in what he had to admit was a nice-enough way. But then, as if for no other purpose than to let his heart and lungs begin working again, she said “I was wondering, though, if you might like to see my apartment—it’s just sort of around the corner—and we could have a nightcap th
ere.”

  As he followed her car down a long straight macadam road between potato fields (and for the second time tonight he was glad her car was nothing but a dusty little heap out of the early thirties because it seemed to suggest she hadn’t yet been taken up by some rich bastard), Evan Shepard knew he would have to consider himself the horse’s ass and clown of the century if he let this girl get away.

  Her apartment turned out to be the downstairs half of what had once been a potato farmer’s home, and she’d given it a dauntingly intellectual look with shelved books and phonograph albums on almost every wall. But Evan suspected these college-girl trappings wouldn’t matter at all if he could make his move soon—maybe even now, while she reached up to open her liquor cabinet—and he was right. All he had to do was get close enough to touch her waist, saying “Mary,” and she turned around and belonged to him again.

  “Oh, this is funny,” she said in his arms. For just a second he thought she meant to twist and pull free, but instead she said “Oh, this is really funny, isn’t it. Oh, Evan …”

  They tripped or stumbled and sank onto a college-graduate’s setup of mattress and box springs—a “studio couch”—and when they struggled up from it, as if fighting for air, it was only to rid themselves of summer clothes.

  And oh, it might be funny as hell but it was happening; it was true: he was in love with Mary all over again. Oh, here were the tits that had driven him wild in high school, and the marvelous legs, and here was the sweet dampening bush and the mound of her, alive in his hand. Oh, Jesus; oh, Mary …

  “Evan,” she kept saying. “Oh, Evan Shepard …”

  They took their time, making it last as long as they knew how, finding no need to be apart until long after it was over.

  Lying on his back and blinking as his breath came back to normal, Evan began to wish they hadn’t left the lights on in this roomful of learning and culture, and he hoped Mary would be the first to start talking again. But she only padded quickly into the bathroom and stayed there long enough to let him sort out his clothes in a befuddled way. When she came out, wearing a knee-length cotton robe, he was up and dressed and squinting at the titles of books along one wall.

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  And at least they could have coffee in her kitchen, where there weren’t any emblems of anybody’s higher-than-average intelligence. After a minute or two he was almost at ease with her again, and he could already sense how he’d feel on the road going home: he would feel like the very devil of a man.

  “… Well, I heard about your draft status, Evan,” Mary was saying across her kitchen table, “and of course I was glad for Kathy, but I was sorry, too, because I thought you’d probably want to be in the service.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re right, but what the hell; there’s nothing anybody can do about it. Besides, that’s ancient history now. I don’t even think about it much any more, from—you know—from day to day.”

  “Good,” she said. “It’s always important to keep the day-to-day stuff separate from the ancient history, isn’t it.”

  When he was ready to leave she got up and gave him a discreet, oddly restrained embrace at the kitchen door.

  “Oh, Jesus, Mary, this was nice,” he said against her hair. “Be okay if I come over again sometime? I mean if I call you first?”

  Her answer was a little too long in the making. “Well, I guess so, sure,” she said at last, “as long as you don’t make a habit of it.”

  And that was the only sour note, the only sharply disappointing part of the night that rode in his memory all the way home and all the next day at the plant.

  “Don’t make a habit of it” was something only a chilly girl, only a “tough” girl would think of saying, and Evan knew it would stay with him for days because never in any of their old times together—not even in the worst of their fights—had he really thought of Mary as being that kind of girl.

  Rachel came carefully downstairs one morning, in a dressing gown that wasn’t quite clean, and stood at the brink of the living room as though preparing to make an announcement. She looked around at each member of the double household—at Evan, who was soberly opening the morning paper, at Phil, who’d been home from Costello’s for hours but hadn’t felt like sleeping yet, and at her mother, who was setting the table for breakfast—and then she came out with it.

  “I love everybody,” she said, stepping into the room with an uncertain smile. And her declaration might have had the generally soothing effect she’d intended if her mother hadn’t picked it up and exploited it for all the sentimental weight it would bear.

  “Oh, Rachel,” she cried, “what a sweet, lovely thing to say!” and she turned to address Evan and Phil as if both of them might be too crass or numbskulled to appreciate it by themselves. “Isn’t that a wonderful thing for this girl to say, on a perfectly ordinary Friday morning? Rachel, I think you’ve put us all to shame for our petty bickering and our selfish little silences, and it’s something I’ll never forget. You really do have a marvelous wife, Evan, and I have a marvelous daughter. Oh, and Rachel, you can be sure that everybody in this house loves you, too, and we’re all tremendously glad to have you feeling so well.”

  Rachel’s embarrassment was now so intense that it seemed almost to prevent her from taking her place at the table; she tried two quick, apologetic looks at her husband and her brother, but they both missed the message in her eyes.

  And Gloria wasn’t yet quite finished. “I honestly believe that was a moment we’ll remember all our lives,” she said. “Little Rachel coming downstairs—or little big Rachel, rather—and saying ‘I love everybody.’ You know what I wish, though, Evan? I only wish your father could’ve been here this morning to share it with us.”

  But by then even Gloria seemed to sense that the thing had been carried far enough. As soon as she’d stopped talking the four of them took their breakfast in a hunched and businesslike silence, until Phil mumbled “Excuse me” and shoved back his chair.

  “Where do you think you’re going, young man?” Gloria inquired. “I don’t think you’d better go anywhere until you finish up all of that egg.”

  “Well, but frankly, dear,” Charles Shepard was saying at his own breakfast table, across the village, “I’ve about run out of excuses. And it might be so much easier than you think. We’d put in an appearance over there, is all—just once—and then it would be done with.”

  But Grace only said she still saw no reason why they couldn’t bring the woman over here instead. “Wouldn’t that take care of it? And wouldn’t it be more reasonable anyway, as long as she knows I’m housebound?”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Charles told her. He had tried to explain before that he didn’t want to invite Gloria Drake here because they’d have no control over how long she might stay—and, worse, because she might then feel free to come dropping in on other afternoons, again and again. Now he began explaining it once more, patiently, but Grace was in too peevish a mood to listen.

  “Oh, that’s silly,” she said. “That’s nonsense. And I really don’t think you’d be hectoring me this way, Charles, if you knew what it does to my blood pressure.”

  So he stopped hectoring her. When she was ready to retire to the sun porch for the day he helped her walk there very slowly, with one arm around her back for safety, as if she might fall.

  Except for Evan and a few very close neighbors, Charles had always felt alone in knowing that Grace wasn’t really “housebound” at all. Several times a year, if there was a movie she especially wanted to see, she would insist on his taking her to see it and would even hurry him up the dim movie-house stairway to the balcony, where smoking was permitted, and he would glance furtively around the audience up there in fear of being seen by people he knew from the village—people from the grocery store, say, or from the laundry.

  He felt sure he could eventually persuade her to agree with him in the matter of visiting Gloria Drake, but this wasn’t the day for it. All he c
ould do this morning, after getting her settled on the chaise longue with her light summer blanket and her magazine, was go into the kitchen and fix her morning drink.

  Phil Drake got very little sleep that day. He kept wrestling and punching his pillow into different shapes, as if that would help, but whenever a wave of sleep overcame him it brought ugly dreams of the kind that children have in fever, and they’d quickly wake him again. Then he’d be at the mercy of random, disorderly waking thoughts that made no sense. Nothing made sense, and he was reminded of times at school when he’d sit for an hour and a half in the near-perfect silence of study hall without turning a page of his textbook or even reading a line of it.

  On his first day in this house his mother had used her forefinger to part the dotted-swiss curtain on Evan and Rachel’s bedroom door (“Oh, good; she’s awake”) and ever since then, without wanting to think about it, he had known how easy it would be to have a look at them getting laid. The opportunity was there every night and almost every afternoon—and since he’d been working at Costello’s it was there in the early mornings too—but it had always seemed less a temptation than a mockery or parody of what all such temptations implied. He knew he would never be the kind of creep who did things like that, and so there had often been a slight, automatic lift of his self-esteem when he walked past the lightly curtained door.

  Then this morning, home from work and poking around the house because he didn’t yet feel like going to bed, watching the daylight break into every other room but theirs, he had found himself thinking seriously about that door and its curtain. He had even gone to stand there for a while, scarcely breathing, with one finger extended an inch or two from the fabric, just to find out how it would feel to come that close to doing an unforgivable thing; and in turning away he knew he could no longer consider this a mockery or parody: it was temptation itself.