Wives and Lovers (23 page)

“No. No, really—”

“Count it, go on.”

She counted the money quickly and put it in the back pocket of her jeans as if she was trying to get it out of sight as fast as possible.

“I don't want to pry,” George said, “but I'd kind of like to know who the guy is. I deserve that much for my trouble, don't I?”

“You're going to get paid back. What difference does it make who the guy is?”

“Just say I'm nosy.”

“Sorry, I can't tell you.”

“All right, it's your business.”

Hazel turned away, avoiding his eyes. She was tempted to give him back the money right away and make a con­fession:
I was going to play what you'd think was a dirty trick, George, only I've changed my mind.

But her mind refused to change. She thought, it isn't actually a dirty trick, it's for his own good. He said him­self he wished he'd never met her. It's my fault that he did and now it's my fault that she's going away. Everyone will be better off.

She said, looking a little guilty: “Maybe I could use a drink at that. I'm not dressed, though. I didn't figure on coming in.”

“That's all right. There's nobody around except Judge Bowridge.”

“Is he—?”

“He is.”

“That's too bad.”

They went inside. The judge was still sitting at the bar, his arms forming a circle around the half-finished martini. He was talking quietly but distinctly to himself in a language which neither George nor Hazel recognized but which George from past experience assumed was Latin.

“Carpe diem,”
said the judge,
“quam minimum credula postero.
What happened to you, Anderson?”

“I went out to meet Hazel.”

“Hazel. My dear lady, I did not recognize you without your hair. Here, sit down, take off your glasses, let me ad­mire you.
O mater pulchra filia pulchrior.
”

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Hazel said, laugh­ing.

“No, indeed. I speak from the heart. Sit down, sit down, the night is young.”

“It's morning.”

“I was merely using a figure of speech. I am quite aware that it's morning. Sunday morning, as a matter of fact. I am always perfectly oriented, even when I've been drinking. And I might as well confess that I've had one or two drinks throughout the night.”

“Maybe it's time you thought about going home.”

“I have thought about it,” Bowridge said solemnly. “It seems like an excellent idea.”

“Then—”

“But not one which appeals to me.
Carpe diem,
I say. Seize the day. Swing it by the tail. Let it know who's boss.”

Hazel's smile was a little forced. For one thing she wasn't sure what he was talking about, and for another she had never before seen Judge Bowridge when he'd been drinking. She had heard about his periodic bats, from George and a dozen other people, but she hadn't witnessed one, and it embarrassed her.

“I sense opprobrium in the air,” Bowridge said. “Chide me no chides, Hazel.”

“It sounds like you're talking in riddles.”

“Like the Sphinx. Yes. But that is not my sole re­semblance to the Sphinx. We are both old, desiccated, frangible. I know many fine riddles. For example, what is it that can go up the chimney down, but not down the chimney up?”

Hazel took a careful sip of the beer George had drawn for her, and tried to look thoughtful.

“It's very simple,” the judge said. “Go on, guess.”

“I can't.”

“Give up?”

“Yes.”

“It's an umbrella.”

“Oh.”

“A very fine riddle, that. You don't happen to know any, do you?”

“I don't think so.”

“Well, no matter, no matter. We will play Twenty Questions instead. Would you like that?”

“I really don't know,” Hazel said earnestly. “I've never played them. Besides, I've got to go, I have an im­portant engagement.”

Bowridge frowned. “It's very peculiar, every time I suggest a game of Twenty Questions, people suddenly discover that they have an engagement somewhere. Is there something intrinsically repulsive about the game itself, or am
I
the repelling factor?”

“I really have a date. I've got to deliver some money.”

“Money. How very interesting. To whom?”

They were both watching her, the judge owlishly, over the top of his spectacles, and George with obvious eager­ness, as if he believed that Hazel, now that she was in the presence of a Judge of the Superior Court, must tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. To some extent Hazel shared this feeling but it did not alter her decision to lie, it only made it more difficult to carry out.

George said, earnestly, “Listen, Hazel, has it entered your brain that if you give this guy money to run out on his wife, you're kind of responsible for what happens?”

“I am not.”

“Just think about it.”

“I already have. He could get the money from someone else. The only reason he asked me is because, well, he just thought of me first, is all. He has lots of friends he could have asked.” She knew that this was a lie. Gordon had no close friends. “He would go away anyway, even without any money. I'm not responsible one bit. And I don't see why you're acting so petty about it.”

“It isn't the money, it's the way you let yourself get dragged into everybody's business. You can't walk up the street without getting involved with somebody.”

“You don't have to worry about me.”

“I am not worried about you,” George said stiffly. “I'm pointing out to you a simple fact.”

“I already know some simple facts.”

“For instance, just for instance, remember the day you got the bright idea of driving over to Ojai to look up your mother's long-lost cousin Gladys. That was all right, if it would have stopped there. But no. It turns out Gladys has a sister and the sister is living right here in town, teaching school. So naturally you look up the sister too, and by a strange coincidence she happens to be having a nervous breakdown and has to give up her job and has nothing to live on. The rest is history.”

“You're getting awfully stuffy in your old age, George. I remember the bums you were always bringing home with you.”

“They didn't stay for a couple of years.”

“I used to dread getting up in the mornings, never knowing how many bodies I'd have to step over to get to the kitchen.”

“That was different. We were married then, you had me to protect you.”

“The only thing you ever protected me from was having a good time.”

“That's a lie, by Jesus!”

“And it's none of your damned business who lives in my house because it's
my house.
”

“I gave it to you.”

“The judge gave it to me.”

“I signed the prop—”

“Now, now,” the judge said, looking sad. “Now, now, now.”

“I signed the property settle—”

“Order in the court.”

“—meat.”

“You're in contempt, Anderson. I fine you one martini.”

George looked down at the floor, mute and stubborn.

“You refuse to pay, Anderson?”

“That's right. I called you a cab.”

“You realize what this means, of course. If you should ever be forced to appear in my court, I shall take a very dim view of your innocence, a very dim view indeed.”

“I'll ask for a jury trial.”

“Naturally. But in my instructions to the jury I al­ways have the last word.” Bowridge rose unsteadily, hang­ing on to the ledge of the counter, and addressed the rows of glasses behind George's head. “Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard the evidence. This niggardly fellow, Anderson, is—”

“You'd better sit down before you fall down.”

“Very well. I always address the jury in that position anyway.” He sat down with cautious dignity, but he looked suddenly very tired, as if the act of rising, or the change of emotional atmosphere in the room, had ex­hausted him. He tried to revitalize himself by humming, “Chewy Chewy,” but he couldn't remember the tune, and the sound that came from his throat was a sad sighing which had no connection with music.

“A fine melody, that,” he said, pretending that he could sing it perfectly if he chose to. “Foster sang high and I sang low, but Foster couldn't hold his liquor and finally I had to go it alone. That's life for you—one ends up going it alone.
Lacrimae rerum.
You know what that means, Anderson?”

“I guess it's Latin.”

“It means the tears of things, the sorrows of the world.”

“Sure, sure. Just don't start on a crying jag in here.”

“Preposterous remark,” Bowridge said. The truth was, he did want to cry a little and then go to sleep. Simple, human desires; there was no real reason why he shouldn't gratify them. A few tears, a little sleep, and one would wake up, refreshed, forgetting the long night.

Though his eyes felt moist he could not cry and when he folded his arms on the counter and buried his head be­tween them like a scrawny sparrow hiding from the cold and desolate winter, he could not sleep. The spinning of his heart and the ticking of his mind kept him awake. It seemed to him that he was a freak, that the simple and commonplace gratifications were always just beyond his grasp, or around the corner, or in the middle of next week.

“Your cab's here,” George said.

13

Ruth came home at noon, her cheeks pink from the walk and from excitement. Dr. Foster had stayed out all night, and never in all her born days had such a thing happened to someone who was as close to her as Elaine was. It was dreadful, it was scandalous, but the excitement kept flood­ing through her in waves. She greeted Wendy with al­most hysterical fondness and the dog responded, leaping up at her, turning in circles, barking in ferocious delight.

“Quiet,” she said. “Be quiet. Down, down, Wendy. Quiet.” But the dog was positive she didn't mean it and kept leaping up at her and nibbling affectionately at her clothes with its tiny front teeth. “Ah there, there. Yes, I'm home. Now that's enough. Yes, yes, of course you're glad to see me, oh my, yes, you are!”
Dr. Foster didn't come home!
“She's always glad to see her mother, yes, she is. Now get down, Wendy.”
Dr. Foster ran away!
“That's a good girl, you get down. You get down like your mother's good girl.”
And I am the king of the castle.

She was not consciously aware of the children's chant running through her head, but the derisive notes picked their way out of her memory and she thought of Manuel who climbed the pepper tree, and Margaret and the pen­nies she hoarded in her desk. Where were they now, all the children? Carrying the dog she went to the window and looked out at the playground across the street. The dust was rolling across it like a wall of yellow fog pushed by the wind.

She thought, some day soon I will go back. I feel much better. I feel very strong, actually.

The dog squirmed out of her arms and headed for the kitchen. She turned from the window, laughing, filled with a sense of power because Dr. Foster had run away from his wife. In contrast to Elaine, she had very little, only a dog instead of children and a husband, but the dog was all hers. It would never run off and stay out all night and get drunk.

“There,” she said, “did someone forget to give my girl her breakfast? We'll fix that.”

Josephine was in the kitchen, sipping a glass of milk and gazing placidly into space. Sometimes she could sit for hours without thinking of anything, only seeing a lot of warm rich color in her mind.

“Nobody had any breakfast,” she said in a vaguely surprised voice, “except me and Harold. I was wondering if I should do the dishes but there's hardly enough to bother about.”

“I had breakfast at Mrs. Foster's house. She asked me to stay there all night.”

With her mind swathed in the warm rich colors, Jose­phine was incurious. “Harold went out to look at an apartment. The ad was in the paper this morning, three rooms, it said, and no pets and no children allowed. Harold said I'd better stay home on account of someone might suspect my condition.”

“Mrs. Foster,” Ruth said, rather annoyed at Josephine's obtuseness, “didn't want to stay alone with the children.”

“Is she scared of the dark? I am, once in a while. I know very well it's the same room in the dark as it is in the light, but I can't be positively
sure
unless I turn the light on again for a minute.”

“Of course she's not afraid of the dark. She was upset because
he
didn't come home. He took the car and ran off last night, and this morning he phoned. She told me every word he said. He's not coming back, he said, he doesn't want to live with her any more and she's to get a divorce.”

“My goodness.” Josephine was shocked. “I thought they were a very happy couple.”

“So did I. You can't tell from appearances. He said no matter what grounds she gets a divorce on, he promises to give her reasonable alimony and not to ask custody of any of the children. That's not all, either. There's a girl mixed up in it. Mrs. Foster thinks they've been living in sin together. She's not sure, but that's what she thinks. Quite a young girl too. It doesn't put him in a very good light, I must say.”

“I don't believe it. No man would leave his kids like that.” The warm colors were gone, the scene was gray. She was having her baby and Harold was leaving her. The baby cried pitifully, and she herself held out her arms, pleading, but Harold turned away. A very slim, pretty girl was smiling at him. “Not a decent man like—like Harold.”

“Who can tell who's decent nowadays? Look at Dr. Foster. There wasn't a person in town who didn't think he was the soul of honor. He fooled everybody, even Hazel.”

“What if he never comes back? Hazel won't have a job.”

“I never thought of that.”

“It seems a shame,” Josephine said. “Just when she was all settled and getting the yard fixed up and every­thing.”

Ruth flung back her head as if she'd been challenged. “Well, at least that's the end of the Mexican anyway. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.”

She walked decisively to the sink and began to rinse off the dishes under the tap, but she felt such a sudden sharp pain in her chest that she had to stop. She leaned over the sink, pressing her dripping hands against her bosom. It's nothing, she thought. I feel very strong, actually. It's one of those silly meaningless pains that everybody gets now and then. I'm really quite strong.

“Do you feel all right?” Josephine asked.

“Yes—dizzy spell—it's over now.”

“It's from that walking. If you walked all the way from Fosters' house at your age—not that you're old, my good­ness, but it's the way you walk, so fast no one can keep up with you. You'd think someone was chasing you.”

The pain was gone. She wiped her hands and dabbed at the water on the front of her dress, the damp imprint of two hands, one over each breast.

“I like to walk fast,” she said.

Josephine giggled. “I can't say the same for myself, right now. I've gotten so I just hate to move, unless Harold's around to help me up out of chairs and things like that.”

“I should change my dress.”

“It'll dry in a minute on a day like this.”

“I'll go and change it. I shouldn't be working around in the kitchen in a good dress like this. It's wasteful.”

She went into her bedroom, shutting the door against Josephine. Quite frequently lately, the sound of Jose­phine's gentle voice talking about Harold, and the sight of her distended abdomen and swollen breasts, set Ruth's nerves on edge. She wasn't sure why she had these violent reactions to Josephine. They came at her suddenly, in the midst of quite ordinary conversations about the baby's name, or the number of diapers that would be necessary, or the house Josephine meant to have someday down by the sea.

“Not a big house. Two bedrooms, that will be enough.”

“You'll get the fog down there.”

“I don't care, I never get tired looking at the sea.”

“If you build above the fog line it would be better for the baby.”

“And wistaria vines over the front veranda. I'm crazy about wistaria.”

“It's all right when it's in bloom, but think of when it isn't. It looks like old dead twigs.”

“And maybe a very small orchard, a couple of orange trees and an avocado. And a jacaranda, just to look at.”

“They say you've got to plant two avocados side by side, a single one won't bear fruit.”

“I never heard of that.”

“You've got to be careful about jacarandas too. Some of them never bloom and some bloom in fits, maybe every few years. They're very temperamental, someone told me.”

“My goodness, Ruth, you've said something kind of unpleasant about every single one of my ideas.”

“No, I haven't.”

“You have so. About the fog line and the wistarias and the jacaranda—”

“I was just urging you to be careful.”

“Well, it didn't sound like it. It sounded like—”

Josephine couldn't explain what it sounded like, and Ruth, who might have explained, didn't try. It sounded as if she was jealous of Josephine with her baby who hadn't arrived yet, the two-bedroom house that hadn't been built, and the jacaranda that wasn't planted. But she knew she wasn't jealous of the baby, the tree, the house, only of Josephine's capacity for dreaming of such things.

She took off the crepe dress she always wore to the Fosters' on Saturday nights. Where the water had touched it, the crepe had puckered and the imprint of her hands was now indistinct and no larger than a child's. She hung the dress on her side of the closet she shared with Hazel.

Standing in her white cotton slip, Ruth heard her heart knocking against the bones of her chest, extraordinarily loud and distinct in the stifling closet. It was the heart­beat of fear. She felt that her life was changing, but she didn't know in which way and she was afraid to have it change at all. The indications of change were there. They were very small things that someone else mightn't notice, little wings beating against the thin brittle walls of her world like moths at a window.

Dr. Foster had left, and though he scarcely knew she was alive, his leaving affected her. There would be no more Saturday nights for her, telling stories to Paul and Judith and giving the baby his bottle, and probably even no more job for Hazel. The four of them, and the fifth to come, would be forced to live on Hazel's alimony and Harold's wages, while the cost of living kept going up and up and up.

The excitement she felt when she entered the house had been only carbonated fear and now that the bubbles had disappeared she recognized it for what it was. She was terrified by the intricate complexities of even one small human act. A man who was almost a stranger to her had decided to leave his wife, and by this decision he had in­volved not only himself and his family and the girl, but herself and Hazel and Josephine and Harold and the baby, even the dog. Perhaps in the end, she thought desperately, everyone in the world was affected by the actions of every other person, a chain reaction was set up that never ceased. It went on and on, an interminable string tying them all together in an inextricably knotted mass. There was no escape, it was a universal law: one drop of water couldn't be displaced without affecting all the other drops.

She stood in the narrow closet listening to her fearful heart and the pressing of the wind against the windows. She couldn't move, she couldn't take one step forward or backward for fear that step would be heard around the world.

At that moment she came, as close as she'd ever come, to some kind of revelation, but the moment passed and her mind had to withdraw to protect itself. She began to grope for some simple easy explanation that would shift the weight of responsibility. It's this wind, she thought. I always get nervy like this when the wind blows in from the desert. It used to affect my classes too. The children were all cross and I had quite a time controlling them. They used to sag over their desks, their eyes reddened with dust—

She put on a wrap-around cotton dress that Josephine had given to her when Josephine had become too big to wear it any longer. She felt quite ashamed of herself for becoming irritated with Josephine. It was the wind, of course. Now that she realized that fact, she could discipline herself better. For the rest of the day she would force herself to be pleasant and to smile when she didn't feel like it. She had the will power, she could do it. Ignore the desert wind.

She heard the front door slam and she knew it must be Hazel coming home because Harold always closed doors very softly to avoid startling Josephine. Bracing herself (against the wind, the drop of water, the knot of string) she went out to the living room.

She told Hazel the news while Hazel sat on the daven­port rubbing her eyes.

“You don't seem very surprised,” Ruth said.

“Not so very. My God, it's hot. Is there some cold juice or something in the refrigerator?”

“Grapefruit juice. Don't rub your eyes like that. You're only rubbing the dust in, not getting it out.”

“It feels good anyway.”

“If you're not surprised it means you must have had your suspicions all along. Mrs. Foster asked me that last night, and I said, of course not. Hazel's never said a word except what a wonderful man Dr. Foster is. I said, I'm sure Hazel would never condone anything like that.”

“Like what?”

“His running around with other women.”

“He didn't,” Hazel said deliberately. “There was just one woman.”

“How do you know?”

“Someone told me.”

“That's even worse. It—it practically proves that they were—cohabiting.''

“If they weren't, they soon will be.”

“I'm shocked to the core by your attitude, Hazel. You don't seem to realize—”

“How's Elaine taking it?”

“How would anyone take it? She's beside herself, the poor woman. This morning he had the nerve to phone her and tell her, bold as brass, to go out and get a divorce. Naturally she refused. She said never, no matter what happens, will she disgrace her church and her parents and her children by becoming a divorced woman. And I agree with her. She's convinced that divorce is wrong and I ad­mire her for standing by her convictions.”