The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (43 page)

“Amy,” Christine said from across the room. “Take your hands off Warren or I'll kill you.”

And everything went bad after that. Amy sprang to her feet in heated denial of any wrongdoing, Christine's rebuttal was loud and foul, Grace and Alfred stood with the weak smiles of spectators at a street accident, and Warren wanted to evaporate.

“You're
always
doing that,” Christine shouted. “Ever since I got you into this house you've been waving it around and rubbing it up against every man I bring home. You're cheap; you're a tart; you're a little slut.”

“And you're a
whore
,” Amy cried, just before bursting into tears. She lurched for the door then, but didn't make it: she was obliged to turn back with her fist in her mouth, her eyes bright with terror, in order to witness what Christine was saying to Grace Arnold.

“All right, Grace, listen.” Christine's voice was high and perilously steady. “You're my best friend and you always will be, but you've got to make a choice. It's her or me. I mean it. Because I swear on that baby's life”—and one arm made a theatrical sweep in the direction of her bedroom—“I swear on that baby's life I'm not staying in this house another day if she stays too.”

“Oh,” Amy said, advancing on her. “Oh, that was a rotten thing to do. Oh, you're a filthy—”

And the two girls were suddenly locked in combat, wrestling and punching, or trying to punch, tearing clothes and pulling hair. Grace tried to separate them, a shrill, quivering referee, but she only got pummeled and pushed around herself until she fell down, and that was when Alfred Arnold moved in.

“Shit,” he said. “Break it up. Break it
up.”
He managed to pull Christine away from Amy's throat and shove her roughly aside, then he prevented Amy from any further action by throwing her down full-length on the sofa, where she covered her face and wept.

“Cows,” Alfred said as he stumbled and righted himself. “Fucking cows.”

“Put some coffee on,” Grace suggested from the chair she had crawled to, and Alfred blundered to the stove and set a pan of water on the gas. He fumbled around for a bottle of instant-coffee syrup and put a spoonful of the stuff into each of five clean cups, breathing hard; then he began stalking the room with the wide and glittering eyes of a man who never thought his life would turn out like this.

“Fucking cows,” he said again. “Cows.” And with all his strength he smashed his right fist against the wall.

“Well, I knew Alfred was upset,” Christine said later, when she and Warren were in bed, “but I didn't think he'd go and hurt his hand that way. That was awful.”

“Can I come in?” Grace asked with a timid knock on the door, and she came in looking happy and disheveled. She was still wearing her dress but had evidently removed her garter belt, for her black nylon stockings had fallen into wrinkles around her ankles and her shoes. Her naked legs were pale and faintly hairy.

“How's Alfred's hand?” Christine inquired.

“Well, he's got it soaking in hot water,” Grace said, “but he keeps taking it out and trying to put it in his mouth. He'll be all right. Anyway, listen, though, Christine. You're right about Amy. She's no good. I've known that ever since you brought her here. I didn't want to say anything because she was your friend, but that's the God's truth. And I just want you to know you're my favorite, Christine. You'll always be my favorite.”

Lying and listening, with the bedclothes pulled up to his chin, Warren longed for the silence of home.

“. . . Remember the time she lost all the dry-cleaning tickets and lied about it?”

“Oh, and remember when you and me were getting ready to go to the pictures that day?” Grace said. “And there wasn't time to fix sandwiches so we had egg on toast instead because it was quicker? And she kept hanging around saying, ‘What're you making
eggs
for?' She was so mad and jealous because we hadn't asked her to come along to the pictures she was acting like a little kid.”

“Well, she
is
a little kid. She doesn't have any—doesn't have any maturity at all.”

“Right. You're absolutely right about that, Christine. And I'll tell you what I've decided to do: I'll tell her first thing in the morning. I'll simply say, ‘I'm sorry, Amy, but you're no longer welcome in my home. . . .'”

Warren got out of the house before dawn and tried to sleep in his own place, though he couldn't hope for more than an hour or two because he had to be up and dressed and smiling when Judith came down for her bath.

“I must say you're certainly
looking
well, Warren,” Judith told him. “You look as calm and fit as a man thoroughly in charge of his life. There isn't a
trace
of that haggard quality that used to worry me about you sometimes.”

“Oh?” he said. “Well, thanks, Judith. You're looking very well too, but then of course you always do.”

He knew the phone was going to ring, and he could only hope it would be silent until noon. That was when Judith went out to lunch—or, on days when she'd decided to economize, it was the time she went out to do her modest grocery shopping. She would carry a string bag around the neighborhood to be filled by deferential, admiring shopkeepers—Englishmen and women schooled for generations to know a lady when they saw one.

At noon, from the front windows, he watched her stately old figure descend the steps and move slowly down the street. And it seemed no more than a minute after that when the phone burst into ringing, his nerves making it sound much louder than it was.

“You sure took off in a hurry,” Christine said.

“Yeah. Well, I couldn't sleep. How'd it go with Amy this morning?”

“Oh, that's okay now. That's all over. The three of us had a long talk, and in the end I talked Grace into letting her stay.”

“Well, good. Still, I'm surprised she'd
want
to stay.”

“Are you kidding? Amy? You think she has anywhere else to go? Jesus, if you think
Amy
has anywhere else to go you're outa your mind. And I mean you know me, Warren: I get all upset sometimes, but I couldn't ever just turn somebody out on the street.” She paused, and he could hear the faint rhythmic click of her chewing gum. He hadn't known, until then, that she ever chewed gum.

For a moment it occurred to him that having her in this placid, rational, gum-chewing frame of mind might be his best opportunity yet for breaking off with her, over the telephone or not, but he hadn't quite organized his opening remarks before she was talking again.

“So listen, honey, I don't think I'll be able to see you for a while. Tonight's out, and tomorrow night too, and all through the weekend.” And she gave a quietly harsh little laugh. “I've got to make
some
money, don't I?”

“Well,
sure
,” he said. “
Sure
you do; I know that.” And not until those agreeable words were out of his mouth did he realize they were exactly the kind of thing a ponce might say.

“I might be able to come around to your place some afternoon, though,” Christine suggested.

“No, don't do that,” he said quickly. “I'm—I'm almost always out at the library in the afternoons.”

They settled on an evening in the following week, at her place, at five; but something in her voice made him suspect even then that she wouldn't be there—that intentionally failing to keep this appointment would be her inarticulate way of getting rid of him, or at least of making a start at it: nobody's ponce could expect to last forever. And so, when the day and the hour came, he wasn't surprised to find her gone.

“Christine's not here, Warren,” Grace Arnold explained, backing politely away from the door to let him come in. “She said to tell you she'd call. She had to go up to Scotland for a few days.”

“Oh? Is there—trouble at home, then?”

“How do you mean ‘trouble'?”

“Well, I just mean is there an—” And Warren found himself mouthing the same lame alibi that Carol and he had once agreed would be good enough for Judith, in what now seemed another life. “Is there an illness in her family, or something like that?”

“That's right, yes.” Grace was visibly grateful for his help. “There's an illness in her family.”

And he said he was sorry to hear it.

“Can I get you something, Warren?”

“No thanks. I'll see you, Grace.” Turning to leave, he found that the words for a cool, final exit line were already forming themselves in his mind. But he hadn't yet reached the door when Alfred came in from work, looking embarrassed, with his forearm encased in a heavy plaster cast from the elbow to the tips of the splinted fingers and hung in a muslin sling.

“Jesus,” Warren said, “that sure looks uncomfortable.”

“Ah, you get used to it,” Alfred said, “like everything else.”

“Know how many bones he broke, Warren?” Grace asked, almost as if she were boasting. “Three. Three bones.”

“Wow. Well, but how can you do any work, Alfred, with a hand like that?”

“Oh, well.” And Alfred managed a small, self-deprecating smile. “They give me all the cushy jobs.”

At the door, holding the knob in readiness, Warren turned back and said, “Tell Christine I stopped by, Grace, okay? And you might tell her too that I don't believe a word of anything you said about Scotland. Oh, and if she wants to call me, tell her I said not to bother. So long.”

Riding home, he kept assuring himself that he would probably never hear from Christine again. He might have wished for a more satisfactory conclusion; still, perhaps no satisfactory conclusion would ever have been possible. And he was increasingly pleased with the last thing he'd said: “If she wants to call me, tell her I said not to bother.” That, under the circumstances, had been just the right message, delivered in just the right way.

It was very late at night when the phone rang the next time; Judith was almost certainly asleep, and Warren sprang to pick it up before it could wake her.

“Listen,” Christine said, her voice empty of all affection and even of all civility, like that of an informer in a crime movie. “I'm just calling because this is something you ought to know. Alfred's mad at you. I mean really mad.”

“He is? Why?”

And he could almost see the narrowing of her eyes and lips. “Because you called his wife a liar.”

“Oh, come on. I don't believe—”

“You don't believe me? All right, wait and see. I'm just telling you for your own good. When a man like Alfred feels his wife has been insulted, that's trouble.”

The next day was Sunday—the man of the house would be home—and it took Warren most of the morning to decide that he'd better go there and talk to him. It seemed a silly thing to do, and he dreaded meeting Christine; still, once it was done he could put all of them out of his mind.

But he didn't have to go near the house. Turning the corner into the last block he met Alfred and the six children walking up the street, all dressed up for some Sunday outing, possibly to the zoo. Jane seemed glad to see him: she was holding Alfred's good left hand and wearing a bright pink ribbon in her African hair. “Hi, Warren,” she said as the younger ones came to a stop and clustered around.

“Hi, Jane. You look really nice.” And then he faced the man. “Alfred, I understand I owe you an apology.”

“Apology? What for?”

“Well, Christine said you were angry with me for what I said to Grace.”

Alfred looked puzzled, as if contemplating issues too complex and subtle ever to be sorted out. “No,” he said. “No, there was nothing like that.”

“Okay, then. Good. But I wanted to tell you I didn't mean any—you know.”

With a slight grimace, Alfred hitched his cast into a better position in the sling. “Piece of advice for you, Warren,” he said. “You don't ever want to listen to the women too much.” And he winked like an old comrade.

When Christine called him again it was in a rush of girlish ebullience, as if nothing had ever gone wrong between them—but Warren would never know what brought about the change, nor ever need to weigh its truth or falsehood.

“Honey, listen,” she said, “I think it's mostly all blown over at home now—I mean he's all calmed down and everything—so if you want to come over tomorrow night, or the next night or whenever you can, we can have a nice—”

“Now, wait a minute,” he told her. “You just listen to me a minute, sweetheart—oh, and by the way I think it's about time we cut out all the ‘honey' and the ‘sweetheart' stuff, don't you? Listen to me.”

He had gotten to his feet for emphasis, standing his ground, with the telephone cord snaked tight across his shirt and his free hand clenched into a fist that shook as rhythmically in the air as that of an impassioned public speaker as he made his final statement.

“Listen to me. Alfred didn't even know what the hell I meant when I tried to apologize. Didn't even know what the hell I was talking about, do you understand me? All right. That's one thing. Here's the other thing. I've had enough. Don't be calling me anymore, Christine, do you understand me? Don't be
calling
me anymore.”

“Okay, honey,” she said in a quick, meek voice that was almost lost in the sound of her hanging up.

And he was still gripping the phone at his cheek, breathing hard, when he heard the slow and careful deposit of Judith's receiver into its cradle upstairs.

Well, all right, and who cared? He walked over to a heavy cardboard box full of books and kicked it hard enough to send it skidding three or four feet away and release a shuddering cloud of dust; then he looked around for other things to kick, or to punch, or to smash and break, but instead he went back and sat bouncingly on the couch again and socked one fist into the palm of the other hand. Yeah, yeah, well, the hell with it. So what? Who cared?