Girl on the Best Seller List (11 page)

Mickey grinned at Milo. “How’m I doing, Mr. Wealdon?”

“You’re doing okay, Mickey. Those were good hard hits from the base line.”

“There’s still something wrong though, huh?”

“You know it as well as I do. You have to charge that net and volley, Mickey.”

“I know.”

“You can do your racket-shifting just as well close. You try it. You’ll need it for your doubles game.”

“Yessir. I know that. I like my opponents to take over the net, but it’s a bad habit. Say, want to volley with me, Mr. Wealdon? You can use Dave’s racket?”

“Right!” Milo said.

• • •

After twenty minutes of play, Milo returned the racket to Dave Pompton. Pompton was a huge fellow, Mickey Lewis’s age, with muscles that were short and bunchy like a weightlifter’s or a furniture mover’s. He was a good baseball player, with ambitions to become a professional, but with all the quick stops and starts in the game, he was always pulling and tearing the muscles. Milo had gotten him to take up swimming for his arm and leg muscles, pushups for his back, and tennis to coordinate everything.

“How’s everything coming now?” said Milo.

“I think I’m getting there. I feel loose, no kidding.”

“You’ll be fine, Dave. You know Moose Skowron had your trouble.”

Dave Pompton laughed. “You mean
I
had his trouble, don’t you?”

“You’ll be better than Moose if you hit the way you did last Monday!”

“Thanks, Mr. Wealdon,” Mickey Lewis called as Milo walked away from the inside of the court. Dave’s thanks echoed Mickey’s. Then before the pair resumed their game, Milo heard Mickey say, “He ought to have kids.”

“With her?” was Dave’s answer.

• • •

Milo went back by the benches and continued to watch Mickey. He watched him charge the net a few times, and saw him handle the racket shift adequately. He watched Dave’s muscles flex as he reached for the high balls, and while he watched, he kept hearing the last words Dave had spoken: With
her?
Like a broken record: With
her?
With
her? Her?

He wished, in some ways, that Gloria had consented to have a child with him. He knew all the psychologists and moralists and arm-chair philosophers claimed a child needed the love of both parents, parents who were in love; but when he thought of Freddy Fulton and his daughter, he wished he had a son or a daughter himself. In many ways, Freddy’s kid was more similar to Edwina Dare in her personality than she was to Fern. Virginia was bright and shy and retiring, and probably never going to be very pretty — but she
was
real. Milo supposed it was particularly unkind of him even to have the thought that Freddy’s daughter was like Freddy’s ex-love. (Ex? No, that was just a convenient way of stating the fact she was no longer visible in Freddy’s life, but she would always be there, Milo guessed.) But Milo often wished he had even that much, some human reminder that his personality had been integrated into something more than soap sculptures, or shrubbery, or kids that came back after they’d been graduated from college and said, Do you remember me, Mr. Wealdon? and shook his hand and were glad to see him again.

Gloria had always said very bluntly, “I wouldn’t be afit mother, Milo. I hate children,” and he could hardly disagree with her about the impracticality of their having any. But he quite often mourned the missed opportunity, and though he was not one to really brood over past mistakes, occasionally, when he reflected on his own shortcomings, he was sorry that he had never discouraged that trait in him which was responsible for his having confused love and pity to such an extent.

He had read somewhere that love and hate had the same opposite — indifference. He had never been able to be indifferent to Gloria, not from the first moment he had seen her standing alone in that crowd at Cornell, looking sullen and sadly neglected. He supposed that what he felt even now, whenever someone laughed at her or showed her up, or even thought of him as a fool to stand by her — whatever made him still want to shield her, made him feel the inner twinge of anger at others’ abuse of her — must no longer have to do with his love for her; rather, now, it had to do with his hatred for her. Because the fact remained, he was not indifferent to Gloria.

He was standing there pondering this when Roberta Shagland drove up in her tiny Volkswagen. It was an old model, not a convertible, and Milo didn’t know why he felt sorry about
that,
but he did. She looked all the more large (though she was really not a big woman) as she got out of the car, and because she got out legs first, what Milo saw first were her gigantic ankles. He turned away, not to avoid her, but to make her think he did not see her in that situation. As he turned away he was aware that his gesture, intended as kindliness toward her, was horribly unkind, and he was glad that it was impossible for people to know others’ thoughts. Even Gloria had sensed something about him — a detestable something that had warranted her remark this morning: “You married me because
I
was a creep, or didn’t you think I’d figured that out?” It had stunned him slightly when she had said it. It had made him feel quite ill in his stomach. How had the act of love come to be interpreted in so many ways nowadays; how had its manifestations come to be all sorted out and classified in ugly vials and labeled so that now love was almost a danger, a trap, a way of exposing your most horribly personal inner self.

Milo remembered something that had happened once about a year ago. It was while he was reading in the Chronicle of the Abbey of Fontevrault, just after he had made his sculpture of St. Augustine. It was a story about the death of a nun who had after death appeared to one of her sisters in religion, saying, “Understand, my love, that I am already in great peace; but I do not know how to enter paradise without you. Therefore come quickly so that we may go in together.”

Milo had made the mistake of sharing with Gloria his pleasure in this passage. When he had finished reading it to her, she had let out a hoot of laughter. “You see?” she had said.

“What’s funny?”

“It’s all so much crap, Milo! They’re a couple of goddam lesbians.”

“Of course,” he had said sourly, closing the book. “Of course.”

“Those saints and all those holy characters were sick, sick, sick!” she laughed. “Jesus! What if I ever wrote a letter like that to Fern Fulton? Do you know what people would say?”

“No,” Milo said tiredly, on his way to his room now. “That I was queer,” said Gloria after him, “and you
know
it!”

There was no more, it seemed, the simple act of loving without caring why. There was all the fallout from Freud, filtering down on all peoples.

Behind him Roberta Shagland said, “What are you doing here on a Saturday, Coach?”

Everyone knew that Milo was at the school every Saturday. Milo knew, too, that she was here for the meeting with the school board, about the change in menu for the cafeteria.

He said, “I’m here every Saturday.”

“All work and no play,” she laughed.

He laughed too, but too generously. He said, “But what brings you here?”

“The school board,” she said.“We’re going to discuss a change in menu for the cafeteria.”

“Oh?” He acted surprised.

“Well, we could use a change.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Who’s the tennis champ, Coach?”

He didn’t like her to call him Coach. He would never tell her that, but it seemed too nicely to indicate an authority that was not valid. “The young Lewis boy is pretty good,” he said.

“Do you play, Coach?”

“Not tennis. I was never very good at it.”

That was an untruth. At Cornell he had been very good at every sport, but most successful at team sports, or solo sports like skiing. At competitive sports that involved two players, Milo had the unsportsman-like tendency to let the other fellow win, for no reason. He remembered that whenever, during a game of tennis, it was his part to call across the net, “Take two,” he felt like adding, “or three, or as many as you like.” He was good at it, but tennis was not his game.

Roberta Shagland said, “I love the game.”

He could not help it that it came to his mind: a picture of her in a white tennis skirt, then beneath the skirt the white sneakers, and above the sneakers — those ankles! He wanted to make it up to her that he had had that thought. He said, “You look very nice today.”

The change in subject seemed to fluster her. She blushed.

He said, “I don’t think it will rain, either.”

It was preposterous to have said that. It made her all the more confused.

He said, “I mean, for my track meet.”

“Oh, I know you meant that,” she hastened to say. “I know what you meant.”

He said, “Perhaps you’ll come to the meet.” There it was — the invitation.

Roberta Shagland hiccupped. “Excuse me.”

“That’s all right.”

“Yes, I’d like to see a meet.” A hiccup. “I never have.” Another.

“You ought to have a glass of water,” he said. “I’m going inside now.”

“Drink it very slowly,” he said. “That usually does the trick.”

It was such banal repartee. He felt so sorry for her, and somehow responsible for her hiccups. He was more embarrassed by them, he was certain, than she was.

But it was she who fled.

She said, “I’ll see you later.”

He looked after her and felt a little sad. He wished he had been somewhere where he could have gotten her the glass of water.

• • •

He watched the tennis players a little longer. He began to feel more relaxed, not as depressed as before. With the lessening of anxiety, came determination; tonight he would carry it out. He wouldn’t postpone it any longer, he was sure of that. Even though he was sorry for Gloria, even though he had an obligation, so long as she lived, to care for and about her, his plot would deliver him…. Revenge? That was a strange word in the light of what he was planning to do, but it was also strange, he decided, that love and hate should have the same opposite. A lot of things were strange in life, and, as he turned away from the tennis court and walked toward the school, Milo decided that not the least of these was the word “love” in a tennis game. It meant zero….

L
OUIE STEWART
liked it best back in the prescription department of the drug store his mother owned. There it was quiet and Louie could think constructively. But before he went there, it was necessary to sit at the soda fountain, order a lemon Coke, and decide which Thought he would choose. Louie had a “thought system,” to avoid random thinking, which was wasteful. And Louie detested waste. He worshipped order.

One of the things that drew him back to the prescription department even more than the quiet was the unique atmosphere of perfection. Louie loved the rows of bottles, the motley pills — each one counted, each one assigned, all in their places. He believed evil stemmed from disorder, and one of the reasons he
chose
his thoughts each day was so that he could organize his mind, and keep it from straying toward wickedness.

That noon as he poked the straw down between the ice cubes in the glass, he was experiencing the same confusion which had been plaguing him for weeks. His thinking ran ahead of him like a wild and unruly child, and he found himself dwelling on Gloria Wealdon’s novel. It was very nearly an obsession with him now. He kept it hidden behind the pill bottles, the way someone would hide contraband. Already the pages had the slackness of a well-perused reference book; the cover was torn from constant handling, and when Louie was searching for a certain part in the novel, he was able to find it in seconds.

Louie was long like a big skinny spider, with red hair and the inevitable freckles splashed across his countenance. He was thirty-five. When he was a child, arithmetic had been his hobby, and as he grew, he had expanded it to algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and ultimately, calculus. His ambition, at thirteen, had been to be an accountant, but when he had told his mother, she only nodded and went right on sipping her sweet vermouth aperitif and turned a page of her Henry James novel. He felt ashamed for having said it, and he took it back instantly: “I was kidding. Don’t you know when I’m kidding, Mums?” Then she smiled, put her book on her lap, and they talked about what his day had been like.

After that, he changed his ambition to a Thought; he listed it along with the others as: The Thought of Being an Accountant.

When he chose it, he imagined himself bent over the huge ledgers with their long-lined yellow paper, and the neat rows of figures under Losses, Gains, Leakages, and Economies. He enjoyed this Thought a great deal; he saved it for special days, believing that if he indulged himself too often it would be spoiled.

Still, he admitted that his mother had been right. He was much better off working in the drug store. One day he would be sole owner, and when he was, he would put into practice some of his own ideas. One he had devised was for doctors’ prescription pads. Their handwriting was so consistently wretched that Louie had worked out a system for pads with the prescriptions already printed upon them. The doctor need only sign his illegible name. It was a deliciously complicated system because of the variety in prescriptions and, in addition, Louie had devised a number system, along with a letter system, which encompassed the most common formulas, as well as directions for their use, such as
one a day, two before meals,
or
take when drowsy.