Wives and Lovers (2 page)

“You don't have to.”

“Wax is a preservative.”

“All right, then. All right.” There was no use in arguing with Ruth. Hazel knew that by evening the window sills would all be waxed and Ruth would be lying on the bed with a wet cloth across her eyes.

Gordon came in from the lab and began washing his hands at the basin.

Hazel climbed awkwardly out of the dental chair. “Have you finished?”

“With the bridge, yes. I still have that inlay to cast.”

“I can help you.”

“It's your afternoon off as well as mine.”

“In this weather there's nothing I want to do anyway.” There was something, but she would never have admitted it to anyone: she wanted to go down to the beach in a brand-new bathing suit and look the way she had twenty years ago when she and George were married. She had changed in those twenty years, and so had George, but it was characteristic of Hazel that she noticed more changes in herself than in him.

Gordon dried his hands on a linen towel. “Who was at the door?”

“That girl, the one who was here last week.”

“Girl?”

“Ruby MacCormick.”

“Well,” he said, carefully. “What did she want?”

“She's still here.”

“Oh.”

“She wants a room. She's moving. I was just trying to find a place for her to go.”

“And did you?”

“I think so. It's on the highway, 1906.”

“Not a very good location.”

“The best she can afford, that's my opinion. She talks big, but I can tell. Any woman could.”

He threw away the towel and stood for a moment with his clenched fist pressed against the left side of his chest. It was a way he had of standing lately, as if all his prob­lems had gathered together in a tight little bunch around his heart, and the pressure of his fist was meant to dispel them.

Hazel leaned over and picked up the towel and put it in the laundry container. She spoke quietly: “Maybe you'd better go out and say hello to her, just for politeness's sake.”

“I'd prefer not to.”

“All right then, I'll say it for you.”

“Do that.” He hesitated a moment. “Did you bring your car this morning?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps it wouldn't be too much out of your way to drive the girl as far as the highway. I feel a certain obliga­tion to her because she's a stranger in town.”

“Well, so do I, only I wanted to stay and help you cast the inlay. I'll pour it up for you.”

“I can do it alone. Or you can come back later, if you insist.”

“I'll come back.”

“Thank you, Hazel.”

He sounded so deeply grateful that she wasn't sure what he was thanking her for; it couldn't be for anything so trivial as offering to help him with the inlay, or driving Ruby over to the highway.

On the way to Mrs. Freeman's, the girl sat quiet and motionless except when Hazel's old Chevy hit a bump or turned a fast corner, or when Hazel asked a direct ques­tion: “What made you decide to come to Channel City?”

“I wanted to get away from home.”

“This is a tough place to make a living.”

“I have a job.”

“You'd do better down south. Some of the big airplane factories—”

“I like it here.”

“There's not much chance of promotion being a waitress at the Beachcomber.”

“Mr. Anderson says I can work up to cashier or hostess if I try.”

“And after that?”

Ruby frowned and then rubbed away the frown lines with the tip of her forefinger. “After that I might get married.”

“Have you a boyfriend back home?”

“Loads of them, but they're all silly and immature.”

“How old are you, Ruby?”

“Old enough.”

Hazel wanted to laugh—the things the girl said were funny, but the way she said them was not. There was an air of stubborn earnestness about her, as if she had in the back of her mind a single and solemn purpose that ob­literated all others.

Hazel stopped the car in front of 1906, a two-storied frame house with a sign nailed to one of the porch pillars: “Mrs. Freeman's Tourist Home, Ladies Only, Reason­able Rates, Ocean View.” The house, like the scrawny shrubs planted around it and the parched lawn in front of it, bore the marks of the drought years.

“It's not much to look at from the outside, but it's clean inside. Mrs. Freeman is a very clean woman,” Hazel added quite severely, as if Ruby had accused Mrs. Freeman of being a very dirty one.

Ruby opened the car door. “Thank you for the ride.”

“That's all right.”

“I didn't want to admit it but I was awful tired. You just about saved my life.”

“It was Dr. Foster's idea.”

“It was? Heavens, I didn't think he'd even remember me, honestly.”

But the word, honestly, was contradicted by the coy and artificial tone of her voice. She's lying, Hazel thought. She expected to be remembered, and wanted to be. I wonder what her game is.

Ruby put her suitcase on the ground and started to close the car door.

“Leave it open,” Hazel said. “It's cooler.”

“But you can't drive with it open.”

“I thought if you wouldn't be too long I'd wait here for you and drop you off at work on my way back to the office.”

The girl looked wary. “I couldn't ask you to do that.”

“You didn't ask me. I offered.”

“But why? Did Dr. Foster—?”

“No. This is my own idea.”

“Thank you.” She stood in the blazing sun, stroking the red fox. “You've changed my day, Miss Philip.”

“Have I?”

“It started out very bad, worse than I would ever tell anyone. But now it's changed. You've brought me luck. I feel, I honestly feel
lucky
.”

“I'm glad you do,” Hazel said. She wasn't certain what luck meant to Ruby or how the girl would use it now that it had come her way.

The front door opened and Mrs. Freeman came out on the porch, a tall, stout, middle-aged woman in a printed silk dress that blew around her like a tent. She peered down at the car with the look of chronic suspicion that landladies acquire after years of people. Then, very abruptly, she turned and went back into the house as if she had lost all interest in the car because she'd been ex­pecting someone else.

Inside the house again, Mrs. Freeman leaned against the banister and wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand.
I thought it was him, I thought for sure. He said, any day now, any day. One of these days . . .

Ruby picked up her suitcase. “I'm kind of scared. Would you come in with me?”

“I don't know her. She's a friend of my cousin's, not mine. Besides, you're lucky now, remember?”

“Yes, I'm lucky. This is my lucky day. People will like me and I will like them.”

So that's her idea of luck, Hazel thought. It had nothing to do with money or jobs. Luck was being liked and lik­ing; and the day which for Ruby had started out very bad, worse than she would ever tell anyone, must have started with hate. Someone had hated Ruby and she had hated in return, and Hazel had changed the day by being kind to her. Hazel wondered who would go to the trouble of hating a girl like Ruby.

Ruby went into the house, and the door closed on her like the page of a book.

Hazel lit a cigarette but the smoke was so hot and acrid that it parched her mouth and stung her eyes. She threw the cigarette out of the window, thinking of George, because it was one of the things she did which annoyed him, throwing lighted cigarettes out of the car. Whenever he read in the newspaper about a forest fire, he practically accused Hazel of being responsible for it even though she'd been several hundred miles away at the time it started and hadn't been smoking anyway. Many of the things for which George held Hazel responsible were justified, but starting forest fires was not one of them.

George was a most unreasonable man. Still, Hazel got out of the car and crushed out the cigarette under the rub­ber heel of her white nurse's oxfords, wishing that George would pass right that moment and see her. She frequently got a certain sly satisfaction out of correcting the minor faults he'd found in her. The major ones she retained; they were as much a part of her as her skin, but, like her skin, they had sagged a little with the years and no longer fitted so tight.

In five minutes Ruby came out again, without the suit­case and the fox fur. She was smiling and the smile sof­tened the angularity of her jaw and made her look quite pretty.

She got into the car, almost out of breath, as if she'd been running. “She
is
nice, really
nice,
I mean.”

“Good.”

“She liked me right away, too. I told you I felt lucky, didn't I?” She began to hum softly to herself, “I'm Look­ing Over a Four Leaf Clover.”

Hazel made a quick, illegal U-turn and headed south toward the harbor. Heat rose from the highway in waves, so that the white road markers looked uneven and the outlines of the passing cars were blurred. In the distance a strip of sea was visible, an ice-blue promise of relief from the heat.

“If I brought you luck,” Hazel said, “maybe you'll take my advice.”

“What advice?”

“Don't stick around this town.”

“I have to.”

“It's no place for a kid like you with no occupational training. It'd be different if you were going maybe to nurse's school or beauty college, something like that.”

“I hate sickness and I hate other people's dirty hair.” The girl paused. “Why are you so anxious for me to leave town?”

“I'm not anxious. There's nothing personal in it. I just think it'd be a good idea.”

“Well, it isn't.” Ruby turned and looked stubbornly out of the window. “I'm staying. I have a job, I'm self-supporting, and I can live where and how I want to.”

Hazel was silent, watching the strip of sea expand on the horizon. She said, finally, “That business about all the boyfriends back home—malarkey, wasn't it?”

The girl didn't answer.

“There's only one boyfriend and he's here, in this town. Is that your story, Ruby?”

“You're very nosy,” Ruby said
.

2

At twelve-thirty George Anderson walked along the wharf towards the Beachcomber, a tall, heavy-set man wearing slacks and a sport shirt and a navy blue yachting cap trimmed with gold braid.

Someone had told George once that he moved like an athlete, and ever since then he'd been extremely careful to move like an athlete at all times, eyes straight ahead, shoulders back, stomach in, chin up. This posture was no longer easy to maintain, partly because he was forty now and putting on weight, and partly because in such a position it was difficult to avoid stepping into the holes in the wharf or stumbling against the two-by-fours where it had been patched up.

The wharf was eighty years old. It had been built to last forever but even the proudest citizens of Channel City were forced to admit that it wasn't going to make it. Some of the holes in the planks were as large as fists and when cars drove along it or when a seiner accidentally struck it while docking, the whole structure swayed and tottered and the pilings squawked like gulls.

George took a personal interest in the wharf. He liked boats and he liked money, and the wharf meant both to him since the Beachcomber was built on the end of it. Sometimes, when a particular hole got so big that there was danger of one of the Beachcomber's customers break­ing a leg, George himself would come out and repair it, equipped with a bag of nails and a hammer and any piece of wood he could lay his hands on. One of the holes George had rather impulsively mended with the favorite chopping block of the Beachcomber's head chef, Romanelli. After an exchange of bitter words with George over the incident, Romanelli went home and sulked for two days, drinking red wine and planning hot revenge. Unable to think of anything drastic enough and rather pleasantly tired from trying, Romanelli returned to work on the third day, docile and resigned, and George bought him a new chopping block and personally burned Romanelli's initials on the side of it with a soldering iron.

On each side of the wharf “No Fishing” signs were posted but these signs were traditionally ignored and by noon the railings were lined with fishermen of all races and ages and sizes. George nodded pleasantly to each of them because they gave the wharf local color and pro­vided interesting characters for the patrons of the Beach­comber to watch as they dined.

He stopped behind an old woman wearing oil-stained jeans and a wide straw hat pushed back on her head. Her face was brown and lively and covered with wrinkles, like coffee being stirred.

“Hiya, Millie.”

Millie jumped, clutching at her hat. “Jees, you scared.

“I see you've changed places again. How's the luck over on this side?”

“The same,” Millie said. “The same, no matter where I go. I got a jinx, George.”

“Go on. You just have to keep trying.”

“I tell you, I got a jinx. It don't matter whether I use mussels or squid or sardines, or what I use. Listen, George, I got a proposition.”

“Nuts,” George said pleasantly.

Millie's propositions were always the same. They were a natural result of her jinx. Other fishermen might oc­casionally catch a stingray, but Millie hardly ever caught anything else. She usually pulled up at least one a day, and her problem was to get rid of it. If she threw it back into the sea it might be washed up on the beach and some curious child might pick it up and cut himself on the ray's barbed poisonous tail.

After considerable thought on the subject Millie had figured out a way to make a profit on her jinx.

“Listen, George, you cut off the tail, see, and the head, and clean out the guts and what you got left? Filet of stingray. Only you don't have to call it stingray on the menu. Maybe just filet of ray. Don't that sound good to eat?”

“No.”

“Hell, George, you're getting old, your mind's nar­rowing. You think maybe just because a stingray's a mean-looking bastard he won't taste so good. You serve swordfish steaks and swordfish are the meanest-looking bastards ever lived.”

Laughing, George put his hands in his pockets and jingled the loose change. He had every intention of some day buying one of Millie's stingrays and taking it over for Hazel to cook.

“I never see you eating any of the things,” he said.

“I had one last night for supper,” Millie lied solemnly. “No kidding, George, it was a real taste thrill. Maybe like tuna, maybe like abalone. High class stuff.”

“I bet.”

“Or chowder. How about making it into chowder, George? Chopped up like that, who'd know the difference from clams, I ask you. Be a sport and take a chance, George.”

“Ixnay.”

Millie sighed. “Oh well, no hard feelings anyway, eh? How's Hazel?”

“The last I heard, fine.”

“I saw her drive by a few minutes ago. She went into the Beachcomber. How about that?”

“What do you mean, how about it?”

“I figure you and Hazel—”

“You figure wrong.”

“Well, you don't have to bite my head off.”

With haughty dignity Millie returned to her fishing. She crossed herself and gave her pole three quick jerks to discourage her jinx.

Hazel's old blue Chevy was standing in the middle of the parking lot next to the Beachcomber. Hazel had never learned to park properly and whenever she came down to the wharf she just left her car with the key in the igni­tion so that anyone who wanted it moved could move it without bothering her.

George unlocked the front door of the Beachcomber and walked through the foyer into the bar. Hazel was standing at one of the open windows looking out at the sea and breathing very deeply like an underwater swim­mer storing up oxygen for the next dive.

He stared at her across the room, wondering why she had come, whether she had heard anything about him and the girl.

“How did you get in?”

“Through the kitchen. Romanelli told me you'd be along in a few minutes so I thought I'd stay and say hello. So, hello.”

“Hello.” He took off his yachting cap and began rolling up his sleeves. “Nice to see you, Hazel.”

“You act overjoyed.”

“It's too hot to turn cartwheels.”

“Think you still could?”

“Sure, I think so.” He put on his bartender's apron, tying it very tight to minimize his paunch. “I've been swimming from here to the breakwater and back every day for a week now.”

“Why?”

“Keeping in shape, that's all. How about a beer to cool off?”

“Sounds fine.” She crossed the room and perched on one of the red leather bar stools with her legs crossed. “I heard you were on another of your health binges.”

“Who told you?”

“Word gets around.”

“It seems to me a hell of a lot of words get around to you.” He drew two beers from the tap. “Here's to crime. Someday it may pay.”

“Right.” She sipped her beer. “Gee, this is like old times, eh, George?”

He looked at her uneasily over the rim of his glass. “I guess it is.”

“Maybe we ought to drink to old times.”

“That's for New Year's Eve.”

“What did you do last New Year's Eve, George?”

“I don't remember.” He remembered too well: he'd tended bar until two o'clock in the morning and then, in one of the vilest moods he'd ever experienced, he went home and began drinking. He woke up the next morning in a house on East Wilson Street with a plump black-haired girl lying beside him making little snorting noises in her sleep. His wallet was gone but he never reported it to the police.

“I kind of like New Year's Eve,” Hazel said. “Don't you?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Well, what else is new besides the health binge?”

“I wish you'd stop calling it that. I'm just trying to keep fit.”

“Romanelli says you've been eating seaweed.”

“I don't
eat
it. I sprinkle a little of it on my food.”

“Well, I'll be damned,” Hazel said earnestly. “How does it taste?”

“Pretty good.”

“What's this seaweed supposed to do for you?”

“A lot of things. It's full of vitamins and minerals and stuff like that. Matter of fact, a fellow I know has a kelp-cutting barge and I'm thinking of going into business with him.”

“The
seaweed
business?”

“That's right.”

“Well, I shall be very damned,” Hazel said.

“I might have known better than to mention it to you. It so happens that scientists have discovered many new uses for seaweed.”

“Name one.”

“There are hundreds. This fellow I know that owns the barge—”

“If I were you I'd stick to the restaurant business. The day may come when we'll all be sitting around munching seaweed but I don't think it's close. Remember the time you sank two thousand dollars in that vacuum cap for growing hair?”

“You've never let me forget it.”

“How could I? We nearly starved for a year.”

“Look, Hazel, let's not argue. If you're worried about whether I'm going to go broke and you won't get your alimony every month, forget it.”

“Maybe I'm a little worried,” she said dryly. “I can't keep the house running without it.”

“Ruth has no job yet?”

“No.”

“I thought by this time she'd be well enough to go back to teaching.”

“They'll never take her back, you know that. Maybe she knows it too. I can't tell.”

“Poor old Ruth.” George disliked Ruth intensely, hav­ing suffered too often from her acid disapproval, but now that he no longer had to see her, he could afford to express a little sympathy for her. “How are the others?”

“Fine.”

“Another beer?”

“No thanks. I have to get back to work pretty soon.” She added, casually, without looking at him, “Harold says he saw you downtown the other night.”

“I didn't see him.”

“You weren't doing much looking around, Harold said.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“You were too busy with the new girlfriend.”

George put the two empty glasses into the rinsing trough and wiped his hands carefully on his apron. “So that's why you came—”

“No, it's not. I gave someone a lift and—”

“—to check up on me again.”

“Apparently you need some checking up. Harold says the girl was young enough to be your daughter.”

“So?”

Hazel gazed at him in a kindly way. About some things, especially women, George was a babe in arms and Hazel sometimes had to be a little rough with him, for his own good. “Just remember what I told you, George, time and again. When some young chick pretends she's interested in you, you go and take a good look in the mirror.”

“Oh, for Pete's sake, I—”

“Then you ask yourself: is it
me
or is it the Beach­comber she's batting her eyelashes at? See what I mean, George? I don't want you to make a sap of yourself. It'd be kind of a reflection on me if you made a sap of your­self. Just don't get carried away.”

“Well, who's carried away?” George said irritably. “I hardly know the girl.”

“Personally, there's nothing I'd like better than to see you married again, to some nice sensible woman, a widow, maybe, with a little something in the bank.”

“All right, all right. You find her, I'll marry her.”

“I'll look around. Meanwhile, don't you forget what I told you about the mirror.”

“No time like the present,” George said bleakly, and turned and stared into the mirror behind the bar. There, between a bottle of apple brandy and a bottle of vodka,
was his face, and it seemed to him exactly the same face he'd always had, no better, no worse.

“See what I mean, George? You're no spring chicken. You're still a nice-looking man, for my money, but you're not going to set fire to any young girl . . . What's her name?”

“You wouldn't know her. She's one of the new girls I took on last week, a stranger in town.”

“I thought you made it a rule not to mess around with the hired help.”

“For Christ's sake, who's messing around? I drove her home a couple of times, is all. Now can we drop the subject?”

“What's your hurry? I'm just getting interested.”

George leaned across the counter. His face was very red and the pulse in his temple throbbed with the rush of blood. “You won't be satisfied until you know all about her, will you? You can't leave me alone, can you?”

“I just—well, I'd like to see you happy, is all.”