Short Stories: Five Decades (78 page)

“Damn these pants,” Stewart was muttering after hitting a ball into the net. “I keep tripping over them all the time.”

“You ought to wear shorts, like everyone else,” Jane said.

“I will. Buy me some this week,” Stewart said, taking time out and rolling his cuffs up slowly and obviously. Jane had bought him three pairs of shorts a month before, but he always pretended he couldn’t find them, and wore the long trousers. His legs are surprisingly skinny, Jane thought, hating herself for thinking it, and they’re hairy, and his vanity won’t let him.… She started to go for a ball, then stopped when she saw Stewart going for it.

He hit it out to the backstop. “Janie, darling,” he said, “at least stay out of my way.”

“Sorry,” she said. Stewie, darling, she thought, Stewie, be careful. Don’t lay it on. You’re not really like this. I know you’re not. Even for a moment, don’t make it look as though you are.

Stewart ended the next rally by hitting the ball into the net. He stared unhappily at the ground. “The least they might do,” he said in a low voice to Jane, “is roll the court if they invite people to play on it.”

Please, Stewie, Jane begged within herself, don’t do it. The alibis. The time he forgot to sign the lease for the apartment and they were put out and he blamed it on the lawyer, and the time he lost the job in Chicago and it was because he had gone to the wrong college, and the time … By a rigorous act of will, Jane froze her eyes on the ball, kept her mind blank as she hit it back methodically again and again.

Eleanor and Croker kept winning points. Croker had begun to chop every ball, spinning soft, deceptive shots that landed in midcourt and hardly bounced before they fell a second time. The only way that Jane could return them was to hit them carefully, softly, just getting them back. But Stewart kept going in on them furiously, taking his full, beautiful swing, sending the ball whistling into the net or over the court into the backstop. He looked as pretty and expert as ever as he played, but he lost point after point.

“What a way to play tennis,” he grumbled, with his back to his opponents. “Why doesn’t he play ping-pong or jacks?”

“You can’t slam those dinky little shots like that,” Janie said. “You have to get them back soft.”

“You play your game,” Stewart said, “and I’ll play mine.”

“Sorry,” Jane said. Oh, Stewart, she mourned within her.

Stewart went after two more of Croker’s soft chops, each time whipping his backhand around in his usual, slightly exaggerated, beautiful stroke, and each time knocking the ball into the net.

I can’t help it, Jane thought. That
is
the way he is. Form above everything. If he were hanging over a cliff, he’d let himself fall to the rocks below rather than risk being ungraceful climbing to safety to save his life. He always has to pick up the check in bars and restaurants, no matter whom he is with or how many guests there are at the table, always with the same lordly, laughing, slightly derisive manner, even if we are down to our last fifty dollars. And when they had people in to dinner, there had to be two maids to wait on table, and French wines, and there always had to be those special bottles of brandy that cost as much as a vacation in the country. And he became so cold and remote when Jane argued with him about it, reminding him they were not rich and there was no sense in pretending they were. And his shoes. She blinked her eyes painfully, getting a sudden vision, there in the sun and shadow, of the long row of exquisite shoes, at seventy dollars a pair, that he insisted upon having made to his order. How ridiculous, she thought, to allow yourself to be unnerved at your husband’s taste in shoes, and she loyally reminded herself how much a part of his attraction it had been in the beginning that he was always so beautifully dressed and so easy and graceful and careless of money.

The score was 4–3 in favor of Eleanor and Croker. Stewart’s shots suddenly began to work again, and he and Jane took the next game with ease. Stewart’s grin came back then, and he cheerfully reassured Jane, “Now we’re going to take them.” But after winning the first two points of the next game he had a wild streak and missed the base line by a few inches three times in a row, and they eventually lost the game.

I will make no deductions from this, Jane told herself stonily as she went up to the net for Stewart’s serve. Anybody is liable to miss a few shots like that—anybody. And yet, how like Stewart! Just when it was most important to be steady and dependable.… The time she’d been so sick and the maid had quit, and Jane lay, broken and miserable, in bed for three weeks, with no one to take care of her except Stewart … He had been charming and thoughtful for the first week, fixing her meals, reading to her, sitting at her side for hours on end, cheerful and obliging, making her illness gently tolerable. And then he had suddenly grown nervous and abrupt, made vague excuses to leave her alone, and vanished for hours at a time, only to come back and hastily attend her for a few moments and vanish again, leaving her there in the rumpled bed, staring, lonely and shaken, at the ceiling as dusk faded into night and night into morning. She had been sure there was another girl then and she had resolved that when she was well and able to move around again, she would come to some decision with him, but as unpredictably as his absences had begun, they stopped. Once more he was tender and helpful, once more he sat at her side and nursed her and cheered her, and out of gratitude and love she had remained quiet and pushed her doubts deep to the back of her mind. And here they were again, in the middle of a holiday afternoon, foolishly, in this most unlikely place, during this mild, pointless game, with half a dozen people lazily watching, laughing and friendly, over their drinks.

She looked at him a few moments later, handsome and dear and familiar at her side, and he grinned back at her, and she was ashamed of herself for the thoughts that had been flooding through her brain. It was that silly girl on the other side of the net who had started it all, she thought. That practiced, obvious, almost automatic technique of flattering the male sex. That meaningless, rather pitiful flirtatiousness. It was foolish to allow it to throw her into the bitter waters of reflection. Marriage, after all, was an up-and-down affair and in many ways a fragile and devious thing, and was not to be examined too closely. Marriage was not a bank statement or a foreign policy or an X-ray photograph in a doctor’s hand. You took it and lived through it, and maybe, a long time later—perhaps the day before you died—you totalled up the accounts, if you were of that turn of mind, but not before. And if you were a reasonable, sensible, mature woman, you certainly didn’t do your additions and subtractions on a tennis court every time your husband hit a ball into the net. Jane smiled at herself and shook her head.

“Nice shot,” she said warmly to Stewart as he swept a forehand across court, past Croker, for a point.

But it was still set point. Croker placed himself to receive Stewart’s service, tense and determined and a little funny-looking, with his purple face and his serious round body a little too tight under his clothes. The spectators had fallen silent, and the wind had died, and there was a sense of stillness and expectancy as Stewart reared up and served.

Jane was at the net and she heard the sharp twang of Stewart’s racket hitting the ball behind her and the riflelike report as it hit the tape and fell away. He had just missed his first service.

Jane didn’t dare look around. She could feel Stewart walking into place, in that stiff-backed, pleasant way of his, and feel him shuffling around nervously, and she couldn’t look back. Please, she thought, please get this one in. Helplessly, she thought of all the times when, just at the crucial moment, he had failed. Oh, God, this is silly, she thought. I mustn’t do this. The time he had old man Sawyer’s account practically in his hands and he got drunk. On the sporting pages, they called it coming through in the clutch. There were some players who did and some players who didn’t, and after a while you got to know which was which. If you looked at it coldly, you had to admit that until now Stewart had been one of those who didn’t. The time her father died, just after her sister had run off with the vocalist in that band, and if there had been a man around, taking hold of things, her father’s partner wouldn’t’ve been able to get away with most of the estate the way he did, and the vocalist could have been frightened off. One day’s strength and determination, one day of making the right move at the right time … But after the funeral, Stewart had pulled out and gone to Seattle on what he had said was absolutely imperative business, but that had never amounted to anything anyway, and Jane’s mother and sister, and Jane, too, were still paying for that day of failure.

She could sense Stewart winding up for his service behind her back. Somewhere in her spine she felt a sense of disaster. It was going to be a double fault. She knew it. No, she thought, I mustn’t. He isn’t really like that. He’s so intelligent and talented and good, he can go so far. She must not make this terrible judgment on her husband just because of the way he played tennis. And yet, his tennis was so much like his life. Gifted, graceful, powerful, showy, flawed, erratic …

Please, she thought, make this one good. Childishly, she felt, If this one is good it will be a turning point, a symbol, his whole life will be different. She hated herself for her thoughts and stared blankly at Eleanor, self-consciously alert and desirable in her pretty dress.

Why the hell did she have to come here this Sunday? Jane thought despairingly.

She heard the crack of the racket behind her. The ball whistled past her, hit the tape, rolled undecidedly on top of the net for a moment, then fell back at her feet for a double fault and the set.

“Too bad.” She turned and smiled at Stewart, helplessly feeling herself beginning to wonder how she would manage to find the six weeks it would take in Reno. She shook her head, knowing that she wasn’t going to Reno, but knowing, too, that the word would pass through her thoughts again and again, more and more frequently, with growing insistence, as the days went by.

She walked off the court with Stewart, holding his hand.

“The shadows,” Stewart was saying. “Late in the afternoon, like this. It’s impossible to see the service line.”

“Yes, dear,” Jane said.

A Wicked Story

T
he curtain came down and the applause began. The theatre was warm now, after the three long acts, and Robert Harvey applauded lightly, only from the wrists, because he didn’t want to sweat. He was a big, heavy man, and he had found that when he permitted himself enthusiasm in the overheated midtown auditoriums, he came away soaking wet. He had once caught a bad cold that way, going out into a rainstorm after
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and he had learned to temper his gratitude, moving his hands politely but making very little noise. The curtain went up again and the cast took their bows, smiling widely because the play had been running three months and was going to run at least a year and they were all eating. Robert regarded them coolly, thinking, Well, they certainly aren’t worth four-eighty a seat. What has happened, he thought, to the plays I used to see when I was a younger man?

Virginia, in the next seat, was applauding briskly. Her eyes were shining, as they did when she was enjoying herself. Robert decided not to say anything about the four-eighty a seat when he talked to her later about the play. The actors were taking individual curtain calls now, and when the girl who played the cynical friend of the heroine came on, Robert clapped his hands quite powerfully, risking perspiration, because he had met her once at a party. Besides, she was not a bad-looking girl, with longish black hair, cut in an unusual way, and large blue eyes. She was a bit too big and eventually she was going to be fat and you had the feeling she never was going to get very far as an actress, but none of these things would be crucial for several more years. Robert felt the beads of perspiration coming out on his forehead, and he was glad when the girl, after a bosomy curtsy, went off into the wings.

The lights came on and the Harveys moved slowly up the aisle in the newly disturbed waves of perfume and fur. Virginia said, “That was a very nice little play, wasn’t it?” and Robert nodded, hoping that there were no relatives of the playwright within earshot. In the lobby, as he put on his coat, he saw a young man with a yellow muffler who was leaning against the box-office window staring at Virginia. In a more realistic society, he thought, taking Virginia’s arm and moving her toward the street, you would be permitted to walk over and punch the nose of any man who looked at your wife that way.

They spurted across the street among the taxis, Virginia fleet on her high heels, and went through the alley, between the stage doors and the gay posters for musical comedies. There were three hits playing on the next street, and the people flowing from the theatres sounded good-natured and jubilant, and you knew that they would remain that way for at least another half hour, and it was pleasant to be among them in the windless, cold night air. The lights of the restaurant across the street were warm among the dark buildings, and the doorman, while not effusive, was agreeably polite as he swung the door open for them. The headwaiter was a little chillier than the doorman and seated them at the rear of the restaurant, although there were several empty tables closer to the entrance. Robert humbly accepted the table, thinking philosophically, Well, this is a theatrical restaurant; there are dozens of places where they’d put me near the front of the room and actors’d be lucky to get through the door.