Wives and Lovers (6 page)

The apology had a curious effect on Ruby. She lost her air of frightened timidity. She looked composed, even a little ironic.

“She doesn't like men callers to stay too long,” Ruby said.

“Do you have other men callers?”

“I can't see that it's any of your business.”

“It isn't. I just want to know.”

“Well then, sure. Sure I have.”

“I don't believe it,” George said.

Ruby put her hands on her hips in an exasperated man­ner. “Well, I like that! I certainly like
that,
Mr. Anderson! You, you just get out of here and don't come back!”

George smiled painfully. “You're not such a bunny after all.”

“I certainly don't have to stand here and be insulted.”

Thump, thump, thump, Mrs. Freeman's implying feet went down the hall again.

“Why did you leave the other place and move over here all of a sudden?” George said.

“That's my affair.”

“Was it the rent? Do you need money?”

“Now I suppose you're thinking that I skipped out without paying my rent! Well, let me tell you one thing, Mr. Anderson. If I were broke I could always go home. You seem to have gotten the wrong idea about me. I'm no orphan. I'm not alone in the world. I can go back to San Francisco any time. My mother and father have a beauti­ful home there and they're always begging me to come back. But I told my dad, I'm tired of this sheltered life, I want to earn my own way.”

“Why?”

“Because. Because I do, that's all. In the modern world a girl has to be able to look out for herself.”

“You're not thinking of going home, then?”

“I haven't made up my mind. It all depends.”

“I wouldn't like you to leave town.”

“That's funny. Someone else told me today that I'd be better off if I did. There are more jobs down south.”

“There are jobs here, too. If you don't want to come back to the Beachcomber, maybe I can find something else for you. I've got some connections around town.”

Ruby's face lit up. “That would be wonderful. Do you really think you could?”

“I don't see why not.”

“A receptionist, maybe. I've always thought I'd like to be a receptionist.”

“I don't know about that,” George said cautiously. “There's not much call for receptionists in a town this size.”

“Still, it's possible, isn't it?—with your connections?”

“Yes.”

“Gosh, it'd be nice, sitting instead of standing all the time, and wearing pretty clothes and keeping my nails decent.” Her eyes were soft and her cheeks seemed to
have already fattened on this dream of pretty clothes and half-inch nails. “I'd have to get a new permanent, though. My hair is a mess.”

“It looks fine to me.”

“No, it's a mess.” She twisted a strand of it between her fingers. “Why should you do me a favor, Mr. Ander­son?”

“Because I want to. There's nothing, well, personal in it. I know you need a job, and you're just a kid. In fact—well, to tell you the truth, I'm old enough to be your father.”

“You are?” Ruby giggled nervously. “My goodness, you certainly don't look it. You don't look a day over forty.”

George, who was forty, thanked her and pulled in his stomach. He knew by her expression that she had meant the remark as a compliment and that she probably thought he was at least fifty.

He felt a little sick, but he smiled and said, “I'll do the best I can for you.”

“Oh, I know you will.”

“I don't suppose you'd like to come out and have some dinner with me.”

“I'd love to, but I can't.”

“Oh.”

“I really can't. I'm so tired. All this excitement, getting fired first and then having you appear out of the blue with a wonderful new job—”

“I haven't found you one yet.”

“But you will, with all your connections and every­thing.”

“I hope so . . . Meanwhile, you'd better come back to the Beachcomber. At least it's a living.”

“All right, if you say so, Mr. Anderson.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“All right.”

They shook hands, in a friendly way, and George opened the parlor door. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mrs. Freeman descending on him from the dining room. He walked rapidly in the opposite direction to avoid a meeting.

“In a hurry, isn't he?” Mrs. Freeman commented.

“He's a very important businessman,” Ruby said. “He's got things to do.”

“I knew it the minute I looked at him. A businessman, I said to myself. What business?”

“He owns the Beachcomber.”

“All by himself?”

Ruby nodded. Though she knew that George had only a quarter interest in the Beachcomber she didn't think it worthwhile to mention this to Mrs. Freeman. It was a small point, and Ruby believed that it was ridiculous to keep to the strict facts when a few variations served a better purpose. In this respect she was a true spiritual daughter of the house.

“He's got an eye for you,” Mrs. Freeman said, with a satisfied nod. “I could tell it the minute I saw him.”

“Oh, that's silly, I never heard anything so silly.”

“Mark my words, he's a goner.”

Ruby colored. “Well, I certainly didn't encourage him.”

“Why, I bet you could have him in a minute if you just snapped your fingers. Mark my words, I know men and he's got that look.” It occurred to Mrs. Freeman at this point that possibly George was a married man and that she had gone too far in encouraging Ruby. She added, “If he's married, well, that's a horse of another color. I believe in the sanctity of the home and I think that any woman who comes between a man and his wife ought to be horsewhipped.”

Mrs. Freeman's eyes hardened, applying the horsewhip to the guilty Ruby. But instead of cringing, Ruby said coldly, “He's divorced, you don't have to worry.”

“Not that I was actually worried. I knew as soon as I laid eyes on you that you were a girl that came from a respectable family. There's a lady, I said to myself.”

Ruby was unable to resist this blandishment. Over a cup of Mrs. Freeman's hot, bitter coffee she described her parents and their beautiful home atop Nob Hill whence they could see San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate. Her father, a retired gentleman of the old school, spent all his time now on his collection of rare stamps and coins. Her mother, who had been a beauty in her youth, was now silver-haired but she still rode every day. She was a brilliant horsewoman.

“I know that horsy set,” Mrs. Freeman contributed.

“I was terribly spoiled. Then one day I guess I just suddenly grew up. I wanted to live my own life and earn my own way. Daddy nearly had a fit and Mummy cried and cried, but it was no use, they couldn't keep me home. When I make up my mind to do a thing, it's as good as done. Naturally I'll go back someday, but not until I've proved I can stand on my own feet. And now that Mr. Anderson's getting me a job as a receptionist, I feel I'm finally getting some place. I suppose I should really sit down right now and write and tell Mummy and Daddy the good news, but I've got to dress and meet someone.”

When Ruby had gone back to her room, Mrs. Freeman poured herself another cup of coffee and sat down at the dining-room table to finish the newspaper.

“What a liar,” she said aloud, yet she felt genuinely sorry for Ruby, who was a victim of circumstance like herself. To a lesser degree she felt sorry for George too, because he had what Mrs. Freeman called a “nice open face” and a shrewd eye. From this shrewd eye Mrs. Freeman deduced that George knew quite a lot about women, and it was her opinion that men who understood women could be more easily duped by any individual woman than one who didn't. Take her husband, Robert, for instance. Robert had never understood women, never wanted to, never pretended to, yet he'd had a wife as faithful as the day was long.

As faithful as the day is long, Mrs. Freeman thought, sighing. She turned for comfort to the City News Briefs. Here, in blunt paragraphs, were recorded the mistakes and sorrows, and the petty complaints and transgressions of that large but neglected and anonymous section of the community to which Mrs. Freeman unwittingly belonged. Names were seldom mentioned in the News Briefs. More tactful devices were used for identification: “A woman in the 500 block of W. Los Olivos complained to police of a dog barking in the neighborhood.” “An intoxicated middle-aged man was found sleeping in an alley and was given lodging by the police overnight.” “A rancher from the Arroyo Burro district reports that two sorrel mares have strayed or been stolen from his premises.” “Several juveniles were warned by police when they were found aiming rocks at a boulevard sign near the swimming pool.” “Two Mexican nationals were arrested in a local café after becoming involved in an argument with the proprietor.”

These items were cunningly spaced between advertise­ments, so that to make sure of not missing anything Mrs. Freeman read all the advertisements too: slenderizing salons, used cars, potato chips, lost dogs, apartments, lending libraries, Swedish Massage and Hawaiian choco­lates.

While she read Mrs. Freeman talked half-aloud to her­self. “Seems a lot of money for a 1939 Ford . . . I wonder what café they were arrested in, seems silly not to mention the name . . . that friend of Mrs. Lam­bert's lives on Los Olivos, but that's east not west, but it could easily be her anyway, newspapers are always making mistakes like that . . . trying to stop a dog barking. Might as well stop the wind blowing, what are dogs for, I'd like to know . . . sorrel mares, never heard of sorrel, but mark my words they were stolen, human nature can get very low.”

She heard one of the girls coming downstairs and she stopped talking abruptly. She didn't want any of them to think she was balmy, talking to herself like that, and she was certain that none of them had enough sense to realize that if you have no one else to talk to, you talk to yourself.

It was Ruby.

“Dressed already?” Mrs. Freeman said cheerfully. “That's a pretty suit. It goes with your eyes.”

Ruby blushed with pleasure and averted her eyes, afraid, breathlessly afraid that if she let Mrs. Freeman look at her eyes again Mrs. Freeman might change her mind and say, no, the suit didn't go with her eyes.

She went down the hall, hugging the thin compliment to her heart, letting it nestle there, warm and protected, until it grew fat: she said I have nice eyes. She said, what a pretty suit, it goes with your beautiful eyes. Like stars, she said.

She pictured herself telling Gordon about it tonight, if he could get away from the house to meet her. She would say to him, “Oh, she's a funny old bird, Gordon. You know what she said to me as I was leaving tonight? She said I was beautiful.
Me,
beautiful! Gosh, you could have knocked me over with a feather! She said, with eyes like that, you ought to be in the movies, Ruby.”

6

Ruby had never lived in a small town before, and she was unaware of the speed and intricacy of its grapevine. She assumed that she had in Channel City the same anonymity she had in San Francisco, and that no one knew about the relationship between Gordon Foster and herself, not even the owner of the café which was their meeting place.

She was not interested in or curious about the other people and she rarely paid any attention to them even when she was sitting waiting for Gordon and had nothing to do but drink coffee. She would have been surprised to learn that at least a dozen habitués of the café knew her and Gordon by sight and guessed the relationship, and several more knew them by name and were sure of the relation­ship. In the latter group was Al Gomez, who owned the café, and Gordon Foster's wife, Elaine. Neither nature nor experience had equipped Gordon for a life of intrigue, and Elaine had found out about Ruby a week after Ruby arrived in town.

Elaine, as a churchwoman and the mother of three children, believed in divorce even less than she believed in marriage and Gordon, so she didn't discuss the subject of Ruby at all. She merely telephoned the café two or three times in an evening, and asked Mr. Gomez politely to send Gordon home, one of the children had a sore throat, or a wrenched knee, or a headache, or a spot that might be measles. She never asked to speak to Gordon personally; she used Mr. Gomez as the messenger. This proved, at first, to be an effective device, for the messages, delivered in Gomez's harsh, low voice sounded quite alarming. Mr. Gomez would shuffle over to the back booth where Ruby and Gordon were sitting, fix Gordon with his hot little eyes, and croak, “Wife says one of the kids fell out of bed, broke his arm.”

These messages, however startling they were in the beginning, had gradually lost their power, and the only people who were affected by them any longer were Gomez, who was tired of answering the phone, Ruby, who was infuriated by Elaine's wily deceptions, and the two older Foster children. They had learned for the first time, listening to their mother on the telephone, that they were frail and mortal, surrounded by their enemy, death. They developed hourly symptoms, and screamed in real terror over a scratch or a bruise. Elaine, who believed she loved her children, was very much concerned because her five-year-old boy suffered from nightmares, and the girl, seven, was disgustingly fat from overeating. The girl found solace in food; even during school hours, or in bed at night, she chewed surreptitiously. As a result she frequently suffered abdominal pains which were relayed to Gordon, via Mr. Gomez: “The wife phoned, says one of the kids got a bust appendix.”

“Thank you, Gomez.”

“Or maybe polio.”

“If she phones again, tell her I've left.”

“Check.”

“Polio,” Ruby said, clenching her fists until the knuckles showed white. “
Polio
.”

“I'd better be leaving, Ruby.”

“But you just got here.”

“I know.”

“I hardly ever
see
you.”

“I know that too.”

When no one was looking, he kissed her goodbye.

He was often late for their meetings in the back booth, and sometimes he didn't show up at all. Ruby would sit there the entire evening, sipping coffee, which was all she could afford, and watching the front door until her eyes went out of focus and her face looked drunken in its owlish intensity.

Once in a while Mr. Gomez would pause on his way to or from the kitchen.

“Late, eh?”

“Oh, he'll be along. He should be here any minute.”

“Maybe the wife says no.”

“She's always saying no. That wouldn't make any difference. He'll be here, I'm not worried.”

“Married man.”

Mr. Gomez's abbreviated speeches, delivered in a cracked monotone, were difficult to understand. Ruby was not certain whether he was telling her that he too was a married man and knew how it was with wives, or whether he was reproving her for having a date with a married man. It worried her. She fancied reproach in his eyes and she wanted to slap his face, the dirty little Mex, but also to explain to him that she loved Gordon, she'd given up everything just to live in the same town he did.

“It's not fair,” she screamed mentally at Mr. Gomez, who was frying a hamburger. “It's not fair! She's got everything—Gordon and the house and the kids, and all I've got is the back booth in this lousy little joint!”

The smell of grease rose from the griddle, clung to the walls and seeped into the very pores of Ruby's skin, blending with the cologne she had splashed on her wrists for Gordon. She felt a little nauseated and dizzy from all the coffee she had drunk, but she sat with her eyes fixed glassily on the front door. Whenever the door opened her mouth got set, ready to smile; when it closed again, and Gordon was still missing, her heart shrank and oozed its juices like the hamburger Mr. Gomez was frying on the griddle.

She never gave up hope until Gomez changed the sign on the front door from “Open” to “Closed.” Then she rose, picked up her handbag and the fox fur, and said goodnight to Gomez, very gaily, letting him know that she wasn't at all disappointed, and that, Gordon Foster or no Gordon Foster, this was how she liked to spend her evenings, sipping coffee in Mr. Gomez's delightful back booth.

“How the time flies,” she said brightly. “I was so interested sitting here watching the people I didn't realize how late it was getting. You certainly have an interesting place here!”

She didn't fool Gomez, who hated the place more than she did, and she didn't fool herself either. As soon as she stepped outside, the cold sea wind slapped the smile off her face. I hate him, she thought, running down the street. I hate him. I'll get back at him. I'll get even. I'll go and see his wife. He'll be sorry.

But Gordon's sorrow had already begun, and it was deeper than Ruby realized. It was the sorrow of failure. He had failed Elaine and the children, he had failed Ruby, and he had failed himself. A more self-assured man might have taken a firm stand one way or the other. The only solution Gordon could think of was to go away for a while and leave the burden of decision up to Elaine and Ruby. A vacation, he called it, when he mentioned it to Elaine. He said he thought he'd take a little trip.

“To San Francisco
again?
” Elaine said with sweet irony.

“What do you mean,
again?
”

“I only meant that you seem to have had such a gay time there a couple of months ago.”

“You've got a funny idea of a gay time,” Gordon said. “I was at lectures damn near all day, every day.” After one lecture he had picked Ruby up in a hotel lobby but he still couldn't understand why Elaine should suspect this. “That was a business trip. A dentist has to keep up with the latest developments and equipment. This time I want a holiday. I thought of Mexico, Ensenada perhaps.”

“Mexico?”

“What's the matter with Mexico?”

“Did I say there was anything the matter with Mexico, dear?”

“You said it as if you suddenly smelled a bad smell.”

Elaine smiled gently. “There you go imagining things again, dear. You're getting so sensitive. I wonder if it could be glandular.”

“Listen, I know how you said ‘Mexico.' Don't try and kid me.”

“Really, Gordon, you're becoming impossible. I've thought time and again that perhaps you should go and see a doctor. Glandular disturbances are common at your age.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gordon said, sweating.

“All this fuss simply because I said ‘Mexico' in a perfectly ordinary tone of voice. I'm sure I've got nothing against Mexico. Of course I've heard it's terribly dirty. You can't drink the water at all without boiling it, and you have to be awfully careful about the food, cholera and things like that.”

Elaine could, with a few well-chosen words, reduce anything to its lowest common multiple. Having deflated Gordon and crushed Mexico, she went to work with undiminished fervor on vacations in general and Gordon's in particular. It was a funny thing, Elaine said, that men took vacations every now and then while women went right on year after year without any kind of rest or holiday at all. Anyway, did Gordon really think it was wise to leave right now?

“After all, dear, you've got your family to think about. It isn't as if you were in some business that could carry on without you. I mean, every day that you're not at the office and don't keep your appointments, you're losing money. You have your overhead, and Hazel's salary, and you know how many new dentists, all of them veterans too, are opening up offices here. After all, you're in a competitive profession. If you're going to be away from the office half the time your patients are going to feel that they can't depend on you.”

In one short speech she had managed to convey to Gordon that he was a shirker who hadn't helped win the war, as well as lazy, impractical, thoughtless, incompetent and irresponsible.

Elaine considered herself a true gentlewoman. She never raised her voice or swore, and even when driven into a corner by fate she used only legitimate womanly weapons like her children, her bed and soft words strung on steel. She had betrayed Gordon on the day she married him by telling her mother that she knew Gordon had a weak character and that she would have to be strong for both of them. Elaine often recalled this speech, which she termed “realistic,” and which she considered remarkably shrewd for a girl so “young”—she was twenty-seven on the day she was married. Not six months later, she told Gordon of her speech to her mother. Gordon was shocked, not by her malice, which she had already revealed in many small ways, but by the fact that she despised him. She made it clear that it was only her own iron will and determination which kept Gordon on the straight and narrow and confined him to his office twelve hours a day. Gordon was thirty then, and working very hard to build up a practice so that he could buy Elaine a new house. He was quite surprised to find out that he was a weak character, and inexperienced enough to take the criticism se­riously. In the end, after Elaine had given him a gentle heart-to-heart talk, Gordon was convinced that he was indeed weak and that it was Elaine's personal power that turned the drill and kept him confined in the magnetic circle of office-and-home.

With this new self-knowledge inflicted on him by Elaine came a gradual change in personality. He began to doubt himself and his motives. He was grateful to anyone, man or woman, who paid him any attention. He was awed by his three children, who seemed to despise him as much as Elaine did.

“Gordon,” Elaine told her friends with a tolerant little smile, “is not the fatherly type.” Above the smile her eyes added a personal little message to Gordon alone:
You're a very poor father, admit it, dear.

Gordon walked through the years in a kind of numb bewilderment.

In the early summer of his thirty-ninth year, in the lobby of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, a young woman asked him for a match.

She had dark hair and a thin, pointed face. The first thing Gordon noticed about her was her underdeveloped jaw. There wouldn't be room for a normal set of teeth there, Gordon thought, and he wondered whether her teeth were exceptionally small or whether some of them had been removed to prevent overlapping.

“Sorry,” he said, patting his coat pockets automatically. “I don't smoke.”

“Oh. Well. I'm sorry to have bothered you.” She added, with a self-conscious little laugh, “Honestly, I don't smoke either, only about once a year. But I was supposed to meet a certain party here and I've been waiting so long, I just thought a cigarette would help.”

They sat side by side under a potted palm tree, Gordon with his newspaper on his lap, and Ruby fingering the clasp of her purse.

“All I'm afraid of is that I missed my party,” Ruby said. “The lobby is so crowded, there must be a conven­tion or something.”

“Dentists,” Gordon said.

“Oh, that's it then. I wondered. Well—” She closed her purse with an air of finality and put on one of her gloves. “Well, I guess my party must be afraid of dentists or something—”

Gordon laughed. “Everybody is.”

“Well, I don't blame them! I shiver every time I think of a dentist.”

“Are you shivering now?”

Her eyes grew wide. “Why?”

“I'm one.”

“No!”

“I am.”

“Gosh, and to think I've been sitting beside you all this time without a single shiver! But you don't look a bit like a dentist. You look like, a lawyer or a doctor, maybe.”

Gordon was flattered. He had belonged for years to a club for professional men, but he had never got over the feeling that the doctors and lawyers among the members were superior to him, and that dentistry was the poor country cousin of medicine and law. Elaine lent her aid to this feeling. When the club held its monthly Ladies' Night, Elaine was ostentatiously self-effacing, as if to remind everyone that she was, after all, only a dentist's wife and had no right to open her mouth. She sometimes said as much to the other wives. “Of course it's different with you,
I'm
only a poor dentist's wife.” This remark caused acute embarrassment among the other women who found themselves forced to belittle their husbands and their husbands' professions to make Elaine comfortable, or else to extol the art of dentistry:
Where would we all be without dentists, I'd like to know. My goodness, dentists are terribly important.