by Oakley Hall
It was more than a month before she saw Jack Ward again. Then late one Saturday afternoon she looked up from her typewriter to see him leaning over the counter, grinning at her. He wore a plaid sport jacket and a sport shirt, open at the neck. He waved the check in his hand at her.
“Hello,” she called, and she got up and went over to him. “What’s the trouble?”
“You gave me too much money.”
“Oh, really?” She got the timekeeper’s pink sheets from the file, found his name on them and held her finger on the line. “How much did you get?”
“$63.38, with all the graft off.”
She added his time and did the multiplication on a scratch pad. “Thirty-four hours straight time and four hours overtime,” she said. “No, that’s right.”
“It rained Monday. We didn’t work.”
She smiled at him. “You get two hours pay for going out, whether you work or not. Didn’t you know that?”
He stared at her boldly, and then he looked down and folded the check and put it in his coat pocket. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I guess that’s it.”
“How’s the job?” Gene asked, clasping her hands on the counter.
“Rough. They got me dozing up gravel for the hot plant. Takes me the whole weekend to get the asphalt out of my ears.”
Gene laughed, and he said suddenly, “What’s your name?”
“Gene Geary.”
“Listen, there’s a good band at Pacific Square tonight. What do you say?”
“What do I say to what?”
“How about our going?”
Gene smiled and shook her head. “Sorry.”
“Got a date?”
“Yes. I’m sorry though, Jack.”
He stared at her coolly and impudently for a moment, then just as she began to grow angry, shook his head sadly and moved away. “So long,” he said. Again she watched him, smiling, as he went out and past the front window. This time he didn’t look back.
A few days later she noticed on the work slips from Kearny that he was operating a grader instead of a bulldozer. “Making grade,” his slips said, in his heavy scrawling handwriting, instead of, “Pushing gravel.” It was not long before he came to see her again, and one Saturday night they went to a dance at the Pacific Square.
Gene wore her brown tweed suit with the white jabot, and on an impulse she had bought herself the pair of alligator shoes she had always wanted. At first she smiled to herself because Jack’s coat was tight and too short, but for some reason she didn’t really mind. And she had never liked the Pacific Square, but this night she didn’t mind that the band played too fast, that the floor was crowded, and that they did not dance well together. But she was glad when Jack took her arm and guided her into the bar. They found a table and a sweating waiter brought them two Old Fashioneds.
“Hot,” Jack said, unbuttoning his coat and flexing his shoulders. It was close and smoky in the bar, and the pulse of music from the dance floor was loud. Jack’s leg touched hers under the table and he drew it quickly away.
“Where are you from, Jack?” Gene asked.
“Bakersfield. Before that Lodi. I keep dropping down the state. You always lived here?”
“I was born here. We lived in Norfolk for a while.”
“This town’s all right,” he said, nodding. “I think I’ll stick around.”
“It was nicer before the war,” Gene said. Jack looked at her silently, boldly, and his eyes made her nervous. She looked down at her drink and said, “Were you overseas long?”
“Long enough.”
There was a silence and Gene felt she had to say something. Finally she said, “I’ve been thinking about you. Remember that first time you came in? You said you were ambitious. I was wondering…”
“You said I was ambitious,” he interrupted.
She flushed. “Well, I’ve been wondering about cat skinners. What…”
“Not much,” he interrupted again. “See, we can do something pretty good, but what else? I don’t want to be a skinner all my life, and maybe I can get to be a grade foreman. But that’s nowhere. Or superintendent…”
“That’s somewhere, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but you got to know a lot more than just about making grade. You got to know some engineering and I’m not kidding myself I’m anything but a stupid skinner. That’s okay; I know it.”
She looked at him, thinking about Charley Long. Jack was bent over his drink with his shoulders hunched forward. His lower lip stuck out and his forehead was wrinkled.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s why I got a little sore when you said you’d bet I was broke. Hell, I’m fairly well loaded for a guy just out of the Navy. When I got in I got to thinking about this. I began saving my dough, and I’m making a good lot right now and I’m saving it, too. You know what I’m going to do?”
He looked up at her with his eyes squeezed almost shut and she saw he was embarrassed again. She smiled at him.
“I’m going to buy a couple of cats. I think I can save about four or five thousand bucks in about three years and then I’ll get a loan and buy me a couple of cats and let them work for me. If I’m smart and can keep them up and keep them working, I’ll buy some more equipment. Then I’ll have something, maybe.”
“I think you’ll do it,” Gene said.
He grinned self-consciously and finished his drink. “Well, let’s have another,” he said, and turned to call the waiter.
Gene decided she liked Jack. She liked talking to him and she liked him because she had been sure he was going to try something with her on the way home that night, and he hadn’t. She had been so sure she was almost disappointed. As the weeks went by and she saw him often, she began to think he was just putting it off so she wouldn’t be on her guard, that he would ask her to go to Los Angeles for a weekend with him, or ask her down to his room, and she made up a little speech of reproof to deliver when he did. But still he didn’t, and somehow it put her on the defensive.
Then when she had come to the conclusion that she had misjudged him, she determined to tell him she was more or less engaged to Charley Long. But she didn’t, and as time went on, a little guiltily, she began to worry less about Charley finding out she was seeing someone else. And one night she broke a date with Charley to see Jack.
They hadn’t been together many times when Jack asked her to marry him. She could count the times on her fingers: twice to the Pacific Square, once on a picnic to the mountains, one Sunday in Tijuana, dinner at her house and dinner at La Jolla. He had asked her to marry him that night in La Jolla. She had had a premonition about it, considering the possibility a little humorously, but feeling sorry for him, and she had tried to push the thought from her mind. Yet it had shocked her when it came. She had not known what to say, and then she had surprised herself by saying she would tell him what she decided the next time she saw him.
The next time she saw him was on a Sunday night in the Sky Room at the El Cortez Hotel. She told him she would marry him, trembling with excitement, thinking to herself that she must be crazy, that she should marry Charley Long, that she couldn’t hurt Charley this way, that this was a terrible mistake. She didn’t quite believe herself when she said the words, but she was trembling with excitement.
She couldn’t meet his eyes. She was embarrassed and afraid of them, and she felt cold and shivery and completely alert, as though she had just come out of an icy shower. She sat looking out over the black shape of the high school and the lights climbing the hill, a little disappointed at the lack of romance, but savoring the sharp, cold, new feeling of excitement that made her tingle all over. Then as she looked back at Jack, she was in love with him; she had been in love with him all along, she had not realized it, and it was why she felt the way she did. She felt it was a tremendous discovery and she wanted to tell him.
She laughed shakily and said, “I guess I’ve been in love with you all along, but I didn’t know it.”
“I knew we ought to
get married that first time I saw you in the office.”
“Did you?” she said, and she laughed nervously again. “Did you, Jack?” she said.
His face became serious and he looked down and rattled the ice in his glass. “Do you want a regular wedding or shall we just take off for Yuma?”
“I think we’d better have it at my house,” Gene said, and she thought for the first time about her mother. She felt herself grimace. “Do you mind?” she asked.
“No. However you want it.”
“It’s just—my mother,” she said. “I don’t really care.”
“I can get Arch for best man,” Jack said.
“Arch?”
“Arch Huber.”
“Oh, yes,” Gene said. “I think I remember him.”
They were silent for a long time. Jack was not looking at her and she studied the shadows on his broad face. His hand was a thick brown shape on the edge of the table, holding a cigarette. She realized with a shock that he was a complete stranger to her, but she didn’t care. She searched his face, trying to read him, trying to find there what she wanted, what was hers now by right.
“Jack,” she said.
The carved brown hand clenched, then relaxed and he grinned at her, his yellow eyes looking straight into hers. He put the cigarette between his lips and reached across the table and took her hand in his.
“Did you really know?” she said. “Did you really know that first time in the office?”
4
For Gene, the wedding had an unreal quality, as though she had not really lived it, but had dreamed it, or read it in a book: her mother disapproving of Jack; Charley Long being a good sport and wishing her happiness; walking down the aisle of blue ribbon on her Uncle Alvin’s arm, with Mary Ellen playing the wedding march on the piano; so many people watching whom she knew only slightly or not at all. Seeing Jack and Arch Huber waiting before the minister, she had a moment of cold, knotted terror, and she had thought she could not go through with it.
And Jack had been strange that day. He had seemed shaken and unsure of himself. His face was pale under his tan as they drove up the coast to Del Mar.
He drove silently and she watched his hands, which were clenched tightly on the wheel. He still did not speak when he had parked the Mercury in the lot in front of the hotel and carried their bags in under the porte cochere. Gene waited at the elevator while he signed the register and received a key with a red, numbered tag on it, and they rode up in the elevator with the bellhop. In their room Jack tipped the boy and stood facing the door after he had gone.
Gene went over and put her arms around him. “What’s the matter, darling?”
“Nothing,” he said seriously, running his hand over her hair. “I guess I was just thinking I was pretty lucky.” He put his arm around her waist and they walked slowly across to the window.
The room was large and square, with ugly wallpaper and a huge bed that jutted without subtlety from the inside wall. There was a bureau, a closet with a mirror in the door and another door that led into the bathroom, and the window looked out over the lawn and the gardens and the tennis courts to the ocean that was darkening in the early evening, with a lace of surf flickering along the white beach. A long, stilt-legged pier ran out into the water. The piles made flecks of white against the heavy blue of the ocean, and the sun, like half an orange, was crouched on the horizon. Gene felt Jack’s hand move up and press her shoulder against his arm.
“Hungry?” he asked.
She smiled and shook her head. “I’ve got to unpack.”
“I guess I’ll take a walk. Do you mind, Gene?”
She shook her head. “Don’t be long.” She stayed at the window as he turned and left the room.
After a moment she saw him come out on the terrace below her and stride down the path across the lawn and past the tennis courts. He took long steps, his arms and shoulders swinging. She lost him where the hotel gardens fell away to the road, but leaning forward with her hands on the windowsill, she finally caught sight of him again, standing on the boardwalk by the fence that bordered the beach.
He was standing with his elbows resting on the top of the fence, staring out at the ocean. The sun had sunk to a reflected gold line on the water that pointed toward him, and Gene watched until the color was gone. Then she turned and began to unpack the bags, fingering Jack’s unfamiliar belongings as she laid them in the drawers or hung them in the closet.
After she had combed her hair and retouched her mouth she went to the window again. A breath of cold air came in on her face and the beach was dim in the twilight, but she could still see the dark shape that was Jack. She saw him strike a match and light a cigarette, and then he slowly walked toward the hotel. She waved as he came up the path to the terrace, but he didn’t see her.
5
When she looked back on it she could remember that they had been happy, wonderfully happy, for a while. But that happiness had become so tortured and racked that now it seemed it could not have been happiness at all. She couldn’t remember when the shadow of V appeared, although it was before Marian Huber had come to tell her about Jack and his Mrs. Denton, but she couldn’t detach any of it in her mind from all of it, so suffused with it had her mind become.
She had been unable to know Jack completely. From the beginning there had been something standing between them, although it had been vague and phantomlike. But then, the night Arch and Marian had been invited over to dinner, Jack hadn’t come home. He had not even phoned, and Gene had cried herself to sleep, worrying about him.
Gray light was streaming in the window and across the tangled bedclothes when she heard someone moving around in the apartment and she jerked awake. She blinked the sleep from her sodden eyes and raised herself on her elbows, calling Jack’s name. The morning was cold and there were goose pimples on her arm as she reached for the clock. It had stopped. She had forgotten to wind it. She called again, and then Jack was standing in the doorway, his face haggard, his features wooden and indistinguishable.
“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he said.
“Oh, Jack!” she cried. “Where were you?” She knew her face must be ugly from crying and heavy sleep, and she dug her knuckles into her eyes. The tears started again.
“I had to work till just now,” Jack said. “I’m sorry if I worried you.”
“Oh, Jack, I nearly died!”
“They trucked the hot plant down from Kearny. I had to stay down till we got it unloaded. We had a lot of trouble.”
“But couldn’t you phone? Couldn’t you even have phoned to let me know?”
“I didn’t have a chance.” He said it brusquely, but he came over and kissed her on the cheek. She put her arms around his neck and pulled him down to her, but he was stiff and resisting. She had never felt so separated from him.
“I’m sorry I jumped on you like that,” she whispered. “But I was so scared. I know you must have been working hard.”
He pulled away and stood erect, looking down at her. His bare chest was enormously wide, hairy, wrapped in hard, flat muscles. “I’m sorry you got worried,” he said, running the palm of his hand up and down over the hair. He had his shaving brush in the other hand and behind him in the gray hall was the thin, yellow outline of the bathroom door. As he retreated toward it, he said, “Go on back to sleep, Gene. I’ll see you tonight.”
“Don’t you want any breakfast?” she called after him. “Let me get you something to eat, Jack!”
There was a sound of rushing water from the bathroom and his voice was muffled: “I’ll get something in town. Go on back to sleep, honey.”
But she didn’t go back to sleep, and as the gray turned lighter in the bedroom and the hall she lay awake and looked at the ceiling with wet, frightened eyes. She heard Jack finish shaving, heard him tiptoeing down the hall, heard the front door close, and then the apartment was deathly quiet. When it had been too quiet too long she got up and made herself some coffee.
&nb
sp; 6
She thought at first Jack was just tired of her, that something had happened to their marriage that happened to all marriages, and that it would soon pass, change, like a car shifting into another gear. Then, fighting with herself, she tried to believe that he really had to work late many nights because of his new job. And after all, he had been a bachelor for so long, it was only natural he would want to see his old friends sometimes without her. But she couldn’t explain away the fact that he lied to her. He lied to her with words, with looks, with silence, and he lied to her the rare times he made love to her.
It was Marian Huber who caused her to make the decision to confront Jack. She could go on swallowing her hurt and waiting for Jack’s conscience to win out as long as it was only between the two of them. But her pride would not permit her to play the wronged, forgiving wife in the eyes of anyone else.
She spent the afternoon at her mother’s, ashamed that she would have to seek support there, and she left without asking her mother for advice, as she had meant to do. In the apartment again, she waited for Jack to come home from work, steeling herself with self-pity and righteousness, but dreading his arrival, dreading what she would have to say, and fighting the tears back. She was afraid their marriage was lost and she still loved Jack, and she was afraid that what was happening was somehow her fault.
He came home at six, unshaven and tired, and his eyes turned toward her dully as she faced him from the kitchen door. She did not speak, holding herself tightly and watching him as he dropped into the easy chair and put his feet up on the ottoman. Then she went to the refrigerator for ice cubes and mixed two highballs. She took one to Jack and sat down on the couch, and carefully placed the other on the end table.
“Thanks,” Jack said. He raised the glass and drank deeply. Then he looked around at her. “What’s the matter with you?”
Still she did not speak. She took a drink and then lit herself a cigarette. Her hand was trembling and she waved the match until it went out, and dropped it into the silver ashtray.
