The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (24 page)

It was growing dusky outside and Alice had turned on no lights but allowed the room to steep in soft grayness. But now it was time for the two groups, the women around one fireplace and the men around the other, to come together for a last exchange before breaking up to go home. To signal the arrival of that moment Alice switched on a lamp.

A change of mood had been coming over me which this sudden light and rustle of activity quickened. The amused, half-contemptuous detachment with which I had been listening to the men now struck me as false and I felt myself filled with a vague dissatisfaction. Suddenly I felt the emptiness of their lives and knew that my own life was no better, no more vigorous. I turned from them.

When I turned I saw Gavin standing in the farthest door, smilingly surveying the room. He had never looked so young, so gay and reckless. From the door he held open came a draft of cool air and to me at that moment he looked like a bringer of fresh air.

Some kind of look was passing between him and the ladies' end of the room. I turned and saw responding to him, unnoticed by all but me, a woman whom I had often seen at Alice's teas. Gavin caught sight of his brother-in-law and pursed his lips with disdain. Then he cast upon the men's corner where I stood a look of utter contempt but reserved a smile for me, and for that I forgave him his insanity. I was glad to be his friend and I recalled with shame the times earlier that I had avoided him.

He strolled over and joined the women. He greeted each one smoothly, concentrating on each that smile of his and all his attention. But when he came to Leila Herschell he blushed, stammered, looked caught, and did a job which a ten-year-old could have bettered in covering up his slip. Now I knew where I had seen the woman before, in Gavin's station wagon the night I got off the train at Webster's Bridge. I looked at Alice. She was talking with somewhat hysterical unconcern to her brother-in-law. How
she
, Leila, was taking it, I couldn't tell—I never got to know her very well—but it is possible that she was enjoying it.

The thing I couldn't understand was why he had seemed so terribly put out at finding her there, when he had recognized and winked at her from all the way across the room.

By now the men had all gathered round and Gavin went to the portable bar and offered to mix drinks. I think they all sensed the possibility of a scene, for everyone accepted eagerly. He asked each of us—except his brother-in-law, and he pointedly asked Victoria how he wanted his—how each of us took it. But he did not ask Leila Herschell. Hers he mixed automatically. And it was a very personal kind of a drink with a rare combination of ingredients, which Gavin measured and mixed with an all-too-practiced hand. I was spellbound. It took him a long time and in the process he seemed to forget the existence of everyone in the room except her. By this time I was not the only one spellbound. In fact, the only one who was not was Alice, who was trying with desperate chit-chat—the only sound in the room now—to divert the bewitched attention of her neighbors. The last touch was Gavin's tasting the drink himself very deliberately and smacking his lips judiciously, and, satisfied, handing it to Leila with a flourish, all of which seemed to declare an absolute identity of taste between them, developed over a long and intimate period. All this, plus the husky tone in which he spoke to her, was quite enough, but to add one final touch he straightened himself from bending close over her, and, as though sensing the quiet, the stares, suddenly coming to and discovering the enormity of his indiscretion, he hardened his neck and looked around at Alice in wide-eyed alarm. It was the best job of bad acting I ever hope to see, and I understood then that was what it was meant to be.

I realized that Gavin had never been trying to conceal his philanderings from Alice, but to make her take notice of them. How I must have wounded him that night when I said she was too wrapped up in her career to care what he did with himself!

I saw him suddenly as a kind of inverted sentimentalist, a believer in marriage—the old-fashioned kind—a man with pride enough left to care if his wife ignored him. He was out of place and out of time, with a pride not to be bent and pacified by the memory of one glamorous, martial, male moment of escape from his routine of meaningless work which any other man could do as well as he and any woman as well as any man, nor in finding something—like gardening—which he could do and his wife couldn't. He took entirely too much pleasure in the mere fact of being unfaithful to his wife, though, who knows, I asked myself, but what in perverse times like ours, perhaps the only way left to honor a thing is in the breach rather than in the observance.

I went home and made my wife promise to give up her job.

V

The next day on the train Gavin and I began playing our game. I was his spy and on mornings after seeing Alice I reported her latest wiles to catch him. He knew it was pure invention and that his “slip” about his mistress had made Alice not a whit more interested, but this called forth our creative abilities and made the game all the more exciting. I quite outdid myself to help him feel hounded and harassed and to feel he was causing her acute distress. Times, I was in some peril of believing it myself.

I pointed out that she was beginning to show wear. She had grown dark circles under her eyes and become careless of her hair and there were days when she looked quite distraught. But the reason, I knew, was the continued failure of her work. She had brought herself at last to come to me for help and this necessity made her almost insulting before she was done. But it was not that which made me so halfhearted in pushing her work. The spectacle of middle-aged love had always appealed to my sentimentality, and though I don't think I quite hoped to bring the Gavins to a state of belated bliss, still I certainly was not going to do anything to help things stay as they were between them, and if Alice were finally discouraged about that career of hers, why, who knew, perhaps she might return to him, become a wife. Stranger things had happened. The Gavins as they were now had happened.

He kept me posted daily, too, on his running skirmish with her, appearing on the train some mornings looking harried and hollow-eyed and hinting darkly how close upon him she was, then the next morning smiling and crafty and pleased with himself at the way he had outfoxed her this time.

He would get off the 6:36 at Webster's Bridge and have dinner with his mistress. Then maybe he would stay, maybe he would go home to Cressett. When he went home he took one of about seven different roads, never allowing himself to decide which until the last moment. He changed cars often, buying each time a different make and color so that none should become familiar to the workers whose houses lay along the back edges of the towns, nor to their children who played in the streets until late at night. After leaving Webster's Bridge all roads climbed above the long valley where in the distance the lights of Cressett lay like scattered coals, and Gavin tried to describe the pleasure it gave him in coming home from his rendezvous to look down on those lights, to glide powerfully through the night past darkened, unsuspecting farmhouses. He felt himself freed from all likeness to the people in those houses, and at the sight of a fox stealing across the road one night with a chicken in its mouth he had felt a thrill of fellowship.

It was clear to me that love was dead between him and Alice. I doubted that there had ever been any. It was not his heart that was wounded by unrequited love, but his pride that was wounded by her ignoring him. I knew it was pride with him, and, if you take my meaning,
male
pride, when he told me that he made a point, even if “Webster's Bridge” (the only name I ever heard him use for his mistress) bored him, of not getting home until after midnight, and that when he came in he made as much noise as possible, for unlike most men, who try to keep their wives from learning how late they've been, Gavin wanted to be sure Alice knew how late he was. There had been times, he told me somewhat shamefacedly, when he had sneaked in so she would not know how early he was.

He was proud of his record of never offering her any excuse for his nights away from home. She was too proud to ask, he said, so she just had to stew in silent fury. He had a variation on this of sometimes offering her an excuse so transparent it would have insulted the intelligence of a ten-year-old. Now
that
, I could imagine,
would
irritate Alice.

He told me of evenings he had spent away from home and not in Webster's Bridge either, but wandering all night in New York. Once, around five in the morning, he had found himself near the Battery and he never forgot the sun coming up over the East River and the gulls rising out of the mist. He had stayed away from his mistress deliberately, so that his torture of Alice would be abstract, pure. I wondered whether, sitting there on the pier that dawn, he had been able to convince himself that Alice was lying awake in an agony of jealous suspicion. Or had he lost by that time all sense of the reason for his act?

He had his own doubts now, and wondered sometimes if all was right with him in the head. His memory was going bad, for example. Or rather, the worse it got for recent things, the more vividly he recalled things that had happened to him fifteen and twenty years ago. Things returned to him in dreams, painful scenes for the most part, in which he had played a foolish role or done something despicable. He was depressed often and he assured me solemnly that he was a much less happy man than I no doubt imagined. He was always restless and dissatisfied lately and had even caught himself asking himself such silly questions as whether he was a success in life. More and more he found himself, he said with self-contemptuous amazement,
thinking
all the time. He was dissatisfied with his mistress, for one thing, tired of her; she no longer excited him. Or rather, he added hastily and with a leer, other women excited him more. He told me one morning of having had a woman up at the Cressett house the night before, having got Alice away on an elaborate pretext (a simple one would not have satisfied that strong sense of drama which I was beginning to recognize as perhaps his main characteristic) and the delightful thing was that the woman was not his mistress. Oh, she had once been his mistress, but that was long ago, and, as he said, what woman hadn't been his mistress one time or another? He laughed to fill the coach when he thought of not only Alice away on a wild-goose chase, but his regular mistress sitting at home in Webster's Bridge, both being deceived at once. There he had had, I said to myself, two wives to be unfaithful to at the same time; was there ever such respect for marriage?

His escapade excited him tremendously, and all the more because he did not understand why. There was something about his enjoyment of such things that mystified him, and more than once he asked me to explain it to him. “Now what makes me do things like that?” he would sober suddenly and say. Yet when I tried to tell him he shut me off at once, just as he always shut off his own self-questionings. He preferred to act on impulse, to be wrong if necessary in what he did, but not to be deliberative. And yet, he said, he had not always been the kind of fellow who, for example, could decide without investigation that I was a detective hired by his wife, and he confessed to just a shade of doubt that the little man in the city that night had been one. But what if he wasn't? What the hell! Deliberation robbed things of excitement. He was too old now, he said, to start looking back over everything he had ever done to find out whether he had been right or wrong.

But, like everyone, he had an urge to understand himself which even he could not always deny. He liked me to ask him questions about himself. So I said, “Whatever made you marry her?”

“Money,” he said. But he said it too quickly. There was something in his tone which assured me that this disarming, frank admission was a lie. It was not that he seemed to expect me to doubt it, but that it seemed not to satisfy him entirely. His true reason must be something pretty shameful, I thought, if to claim this one was less painful to him. And then I knew what it was—to him far more shameful—he had married her because he loved her.

“She had a lot?” I asked.

“It seemed a lot to me at the time. It was during the crash, you see. I'd always made good money and when the crash came I laughed. We all did. Things would pick up in no time, so why worry. But things didn't and so—”

“So she came along with her gilt-edged securities and you saw your chance and took it.”

“I married her,” he said, and with those words the false tone was gone. “I think she had pretty well accustomed herself to the idea of staying single, being a career woman—or trying to become one. Only one man before me had ever had the nerve or the ignorance to buck her sister and propose to her. And you should have seen him. He was a florist. She showed me his picture once after we'd been married a while. In this picture he's on the boardwalk at Coney Island in an old-fashioned bathing suit down to his knees. He was about five feet tall and already bald all the way back to his ears. His name was Adelbert something. I think she meant to make me jealous by showing me his picture. Well, she didn't marry him because her sister objected, and she
did
marry me for the same reason. It was the first time in her life she ever crossed Victoria and for a while it made her feel she had done something heroic, defied everything for a great love.”

He took a breath, then went on. “I spent the night before our wedding with this girl I was keeping. I guess you might say I'd decided to convince myself with one last fling that I had no regrets at leaving the single life behind. Anyhow, this girl had sort of dared me to do it and I did. Her name was Dolores. Dolores Davis. I still remember her quite well.” (Evidently he thought this quite a feat of memory, considering, I supposed, how many had come since her.) “Alice believed I was out at a stag party too drunk to get to her place. To punish me she announced on our wedding night that she'd determined not to let me ‘share her bed' for three months. She even marked down the exact date when I could begin to on a calendar—to torment me. That's the thing that's always got me. Alice never liked the business in bed, but she thought she ought to. It was the modern thing.