The Man in the Net (2 page)

The very fact that he’d had to make that decision brought home to him once again the infinite complexity of the cat-and-mouse game which was doomed to go on between his wife and himself. As he carried the beer across to Steve, he wondered: What would he think if I told him what really went on in this house? He wouldn’t believe me, of course—none of them would. Not unless they saw Linda with their own eyes.

And it had been his job to make sure that they never did.

Steve Ritter took a deep pull at his glass. “Boy, that hits the spot. Does something to you, beer. After a couple of beers there isn’t nothing I couldn’t do. No, sir. Guess I could even paint pictures like you—all them straggly lines going one way and all them other straggly lines going the other …”

He stopped abruptly as Linda’s footsteps sounded tapping down the stairs and jumped up, watching the door. He was, thought John, almost a parody of the comic-strip muscle-boy hero strutting for the attractive female.

“Here she is. Here’s the beautiful, glamorous Mrs. Hamilton.”

And Linda came into the room, fresh and extraordinarily young-looking in a little off-the-rack dress with which she managed somehow to create an effect of style. As so often before, watching his wife, John Hamilton marveled at her camouflage. One of those dreadful village bores? Not a bit of it. Steve Ritter was her dearest friend. She moved toward him, smiling, both hands extended in the classic movie gesture of a gracious hostess. On her left wrist she was wearing a gold charm bracelet which John had never seen before. She must have bought it in Pittsfield.

“Steve, how sweet of you to drop by. Please forgive all that waiting. The drive to Pittsfield always exhausts me. If I don’t have a long hot shower the moment I get home, I’m dead. Oh, John.” As if she’d just seen he was there, Linda turned on her husband the smile particularly reserved for him in public, the affectionate, slightly pitying mother’s smile for the impractical artist who lives in the clouds. In the same instant she put her right hand over her left wrist and he noticed her slip the bracelet off her wrist and drop it into the pocket of her dress. So she had bought it in Pittsfield and, feeling guilty about the extravagance, was waiting for the “right moment” to break it to him. “So you’re back already, darling. I thought you’d still be out playing with the children.”

She turned back to Steve. “John’s too sweet. He just lives for those kids. Your Buck and all of them. Stoneville ought to give him some sort of official status—elect him scoutmaster or something. Sit down. Really, do sit down. Don’t keep standing for me.”

Steve dropped back into his chair and Linda perched herself on its arm, chattering intimately, laughing, gesturing with her cigarette. As he watched her, John thought suddenly: Isn’t it all a bit too much? Weren’t her eyes a little too bright? Hadn’t the crack about him and the children revealed its malice a shade too obviously? Had she had a drink in Pittsfield?

The moment the thought came, he hated himself. He knew it was as destructive for him as for her to have these constant suspicions. But once the worm of doubt had slid in, it couldn’t be dislodged. For almost a week now, ever since the failure of the show had been definitely established, she had been on the verge. He knew the symptoms so well.

Steve left surprisingly soon, refusing a second beer. Linda went with him to the kitchen door.

“How boring you have to rush off. You will come again soon, won’t you? Promise me, Steve.”

From the living-room John heard his wife’s caressing, almost flirtatious voice and then heard the slam of the screen door. Linda didn’t come back immediately. She must be standing at the door waving goodbye.

Holding his beer, John sat down on the arm of a chair. It had come to him, with a returning stir of panic, that this was probably the most important moment of his life. If he let himself down now, through cowardice or fake humility or diseased concern for Linda, he was through.

Pray God she hasn’t started to drink, he thought. And then, with savage self-contempt: What’s the matter with me? Do I just pretend I’m sorry for my wife? Am I really afraid of her? Have I come as close as this to the breaking point?

HE COULD hear Steve’s car moving away past the wall of the studio when Linda finally returned. The cigarette was dangling from her lower lip and her forehead was creased in a comedy scowl.

“Those poor dear boring clods! What have I done to deserve them?” The frown smoothed away and she smiled a quick, affectionate smile. “Darling, you’d better be thinking about changing. We’d got to be at Vickie’s party by six.”

He’d forgotten Vickie Carey’s birthday party. Why was there always some little extra thing to make it worse? Should he postpone it then? No. To hell with the party.

“Look, darling. Look, John. Look at me.” Linda touched his wrist and then, picking up folds of skirt in each hand, pirouetted in front of him. “Do you like me? Do you like my new hair?”

The very faintest hint of thickening in her voice told him the story. It had started. He was sure of it now. He felt a flattening exhaustion. She began to dance around the shabby wicker furniture.

“There’s a new girl at Madame Helene’s. She did my hair for the first time today. She said she found some grey hairs.” Linda let the folds of skirt drop and came back to him. “Darling, do you see them? Look, can you see the grey hairs? Here?” She raised a hand to her temple. “I can’t. I swear I can’t. It’s the sun, isn’t it? You know how the sun always bleaches it out in summer.”

He could see the grey hairs. There were only a few of them and they were hardly visible, but they were there. So that’s what had done it, he thought. Just a chance remark from a tactless girl had been enough. That was why she’d been making such charm to Steve, too. She’d been defying the girl, reassuring herself. Why did he always have to understand her so well? And why, understanding her, did he still find it so touching? Other women got grey hairs. They didn’t have to be lied to, propitiated, bolstered.

“That girl should be fired,” he said lightly, making a joke of it. “If you’ve got any grey hairs, I’ll eat them.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t notice. You’re far too sweet. But she said she found some. Not many, but some.” Linda shrugged. “Well—who cares? I’m twenty-nine. Lots of women get grey hair before they’re thirty.”

She was thirty-three. He’d seen her birth certificate once and she knew he’d seen it. But that hadn’t stopped her from keeping up the legend. Before she could drag him too far into the realms of unreality, he took the letter out of his pocket. It was going to be disaster anyway. It didn’t matter anymore about how he handled it.

He said, “Linda, I got a letter from Charlie Raines.” “From Charlie?” For a moment she wasn’t interested; then she was. Quickly, suspiciously, she said, “But you brought the mail before I went to Pittsfield. Why didn’t you tell me then?”

“I wanted some time to think about it.”

“Think about it? Think about what? What did he say?”

He held the letter out to her. “Want to read it?”

“Yes. Of course.” And then, “No. You read it to me.”

He’d forgotten how she hated putting on her reading glasses. His fingers unsteady, he took the letter out of the envelope and smoothed it.

“It’s long,” he said pointlessly. “Typical Charlie.”

He read;

Dear Johnny:

How is life in the great outdoors treating you? Don’t think we’ve forgotten you. You’ve been very much on our minds. To the extent, in fact, of a long, bang-up conference at the summit this afternoon. First, we all want you to know how badly we feel about the show at the Denham Galleries. We realize, of course, that half these art critic boys don’t know what they’re talking about and that they’re just gunning for you because your first show, when you were still with us, was such a success. But we also realize it must be a disappointment to you, financially, if for nothing else, since we understand, when you left us, that you would have to depend in the long run upon a steady sale of canvases if you were going to make this painting deal work out.

I hope you know us all well enough to be sure we aren’t a bunch of Philistines around here. Nor do I want you to think of me as a mean old Mephistopheles picking a “weak” moment in which to tempt you. But it so happens that H. C. has been forced by his doctors to retire as the head of the art department. For a couple of weeks we’ve been desperately looking for someone who could swing the job. The combination of first rate executive and first rate commercial artist doesn’t grow on trees, as you know, and, even though you felt at one time that the set-up here was too restricting for you, you are still considered by us as one of the most outstanding men in the field.

Yes, Johnny, let’s get down to brass tacks. This letter is frankly a plea for you to come back to us. The salary we are prepared to offer is the salary that H. C. has been getting plus the regular bonuses etc. It will, I would say, be about double what we were paying you when you left us. God knows, I don’t want to butt my nose into your private affairs, but we all feel that, just perhaps, after ten months of it, you might be getting a little bit tired of poverty in a garret (do they have garrets in the country?) and that, just perhaps, you might consider returning to the Raines and Raines family which has never stopped thinking of you as “one of us”.

Think it over, Johnny, and let us know as soon as possible. Speaking personally, I don’t see that it’s at all impractical for you to swing the job and have a considerable amount of time to continue your “serious” painting on the side. Maybe you’d drop down to the office one day this week and talk it over. We’d love seeing you anyway.

All the best and to Linda,

Sincerely …

While he was reading he had deliberately put the thought of his wife, standing by the mantel, out of his head. He had made himself concentrate on the things that really mattered—the fact that he knew, in spite of the critics, in spite of the burden of Linda, that he was gradually groping toward achievement in his painting; the fact that he was overwhelmingly sure a return to the sleek high-pressure commercialism of Raines and Raines would destroy in him the only thing he cared about any more; and the other fact—almost as important—the fact that Linda had been far worse in New York than she’d been in the country. She would have forgotten it, of course, because she was bored now and playing the role of the exiled martyr. But another desperate bid for competition with the Mrs. Raines, the Parkinsons, all those mercilessly chic and sophisticated women in Manhattan would break her.

Dr. MacAllister, the only person he’d confided in, had been emphatic about that.

“Since Linda won’t come to me as a patient, John, I can only give an opinion based on my observations. But I’d say if you don’t take her out of this rat-race she’ll be a hopeless alcoholic in a couple of years.”

As he put the letter down on a table, he looked at his wife for the first time. He had expected a virago explosion; he’d even expected her to break in before he’d finished reading the letter. But, as so often before, he’d been wrong about her. She’d lit another cigarette and was standing watching him, very quietly, with the forlorn dignity of someone who has abandoned hope because there was no point in hoping.

“You’re not going back,” she said.

He felt amazement and gratitude and a stab of guilt. Had he then underestimated her?

“So you do understand?”

“Of course I understand. You know you can paint. The critics haven’t changed that at all. And you want to paint. That’s all you want. That’s all you care about.”

“I couldn’t go back, Linda. Not unless we were starving, and we’re not starving. We’ve got enough to go along the way we’re going for five years, at least. You know that.” Because she wasn’t fighting him, all his old only partially destroyed affection for her was flooding in. He went to her, putting his hands on her arms. “Going back would be the end. You do understand, don’t you? You can see what a weasel letter that is. Charlie knows what that job would really be! Up to my eyes in it twenty-four hours a day. Doing my painting on the side! I couldn’t do anything on the side. Painting isn’t something you can do on the side anyway. I’ll go to New York tomorrow and explain. Charlie will understand.” It was heady, this realization that, against all expectations, he could still talk honestly with her. “After all, I made my decision when I made it. You remember, don’t you? We decided it together. You as much as I. You know it was the right thing. Not only for me but for you, too. You .. .”

“For me?” Suddenly her body stiffened. “What do you mean—for me?”

“You were just as fed up with New York as I was. You …”

“Me? Fed up with New York? Are you out of your mind? New York was my whole life.”

He felt the sense of well-being—that absurd, deluded sense of well-being—draining away.

“There hasn’t been an hour,” she said, “not an hour when I haven’t been dreaming that just possibly, one day, just possibly all this would be over and I would be back in my apartment, with my friends, with my kind of life. I haven’t said anything. I’ve tried so desperately not to say anything. And I’m not going to say anything now. But when you claim that it was for me, that it was only because of me that you dragged us here . .

“Linda, I didn’t say just for you. You know I didn’t. I said …”

“It doesn’t matter what you said. Nothing matters.” Her lower lip under the cigarette was trembling. “I’m not important anyway. I’ve always known that. I’m just the woman around the place—the woman to cook the meals, to clean the house. That’s a woman’s function, isn’t it? While you go off and lock yourself up all day in that dreary barn, painting your pictures. Off somewhere—God knows where—in a world of your own. And then, when you do have some free time, when we might be together doing things, getting closer—when you might be making it better for me, you just sit here blaring that phonograph or go off in those goddam woods with those goddam children like—like a-” She suddenly dropped into a chair, throwing her hands up to cover her face.

“Oh, hell. Oh, hell. Oh, hell … .”