by Belva Plain
One of the secretaries knocked and entered with a message. “Mr. Jenks wants to see you in his office.”
Arrogant bastard! Before his promotion Jenks would have come to Adam’s room to say whatever he wanted to say. Now because of it he had suddenly become superior to Adam.
Two men were apparently waiting for Jenks in his outer office. Jenks had a larger office now, one for himself, and the outer one for his secretary. The two rooms were separated by a glass partition.
Jenks began. “I hear you’re not so happy at ADS.”
In utter astonishment Adam stammered, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You complain of overwork.”
“I never—why, that’s absurd. Who told you such a thing?”
Jenks looked him in the eye. “All those late-night meetings. After one o’clock in the morning in the storm, your wife said.”
“My wife?” repeated Adam.
He cursed his blasted tendency to break out into a sweat. And just as he had that time on the street with Fred Davis, he went wet. And he stared back at Jenks.
“Don’t be angry with your wife. She meant no harm, Crane. It was just idle talk. I understand that. Or should I say ‘innocent’ talk?”
“I don’t know what Margaret could have meant. I never discuss the company or my work here, even at home.” The words emerged in a mumble. “I like my work here, you should know that. I’m loyal.”
“Be that as it may, any talk of long hours and late meetings makes us look inefficient or on the rocks, which we definitely are not. As you know, as you should well know, Crane.” Jenks’s voice rang loud enough to be heard beyond the office. “So I would advise you to see to it that neither you nor anyone in your household does it again.”
“Of course not, of course not. It was an error, not seriously meant. A complete misunderstanding.”
“As to your private life, that’s your concern. As long as it doesn’t interfere with your work here. Is that clear, Crane?”
He despises me, Adam thought. A C student, I’ll wager, from a tenth-rate college in Squeedunk.
“It’s clear,” he said, still mumbling.
“Good,” said Jenks.
The two men in the outer office looked at Adam and quickly looked away. They had heard the whole thing. He had been humiliated, like a schoolboy who has been sent to the principal’s office. And as if naked he walked down the corridor to his room, where he sat with both hands pressed over his burning face.
He seethed with the outrage of it. What I should do, he thought, is march right back there and say, “You could have talked to me in private like a gentleman, or better still, you could have ignored the whole business instead of repeating all that silly women’s gabble. And as to your allusions to my private life—” But of course, he could not march back there and say anything at all.
If he could only escape from his whole complicated life! Life pulling at him from every direction! Just go someplace with Randi, some quiet, simple place, sit in the sun and walk through pine woods in the shade without having to think. He was always thinking!
And he experienced now a bad sensation, a loss of equilibrium, as if he were falling, tumbling, with nothing to grab on to. If their mutual dislike had turned Jenks into an enemy, there was no telling what might happen. Among all the rumors that buzzed like bees around a hive was one about some young genius of twenty-four who had been researching software at the state university and was being wooed by a few companies, including ADS. A fellow like him could move in here with his team and turn the place inside out.…
The dinner was about to be served when he got home. He had driven three times around the block trying to slow his heartbeat and still his fury.
“I thought you were going to be late again,” Margaret said. “We were just going to start without you. They all have so much homework tonight.”
“Let them eat without me. I’ve no appetite. I want to see you upstairs now, anyway.”
She followed him into their bedroom. Filled with alarm, she sank down on the dressing-table bench and waited.
Still wearing his outer coat, Adam stood frowning with his hands in his pockets, jingling coins and keys. He was obviously so disturbed about something that he was unable to begin.
“Listen,” he said roughly. “Listen to me. Jenks called me in today. He treated me like dirt. You told his wife I wasn’t happy in the company.”
“What? Are you crazy? I never said that. Do you think I’m a lunatic that I would say such a thing?”
“You said something. They didn’t make it up out of whole cloth.”
What could she have said? Whatever it was, it must have been trivial indeed, for she had to strain to recall it. Adam was glaring at her, making it harder to pull her thoughts together.
“Well, I’m waiting, Margaret.”
“All I remember is saying something about how hard the people work at ADS. It was really a compliment. Oh, yes, I mentioned all the meetings and how you got caught in the storm the other night. That was all.”
“That’s all? All?” Adam’s cheeks and eyebrows, his whole face, seemed to rise toward his hairline. “You damn fool. You utter damn fool. You may do fine in the chem lab teaching a bunch of teenagers, but you haven’t got the faintest notion of the real world, have you? Shooting your mouth off in front of those women—”
“I did not shoot my mouth off, Adam. I never do. I can’t help it if they chose to exaggerate a passing, innocuous remark.”
“You were talking to Jenks’s wife, of all people! If I’m transferred out of here to some backwater or even fired, God forbid, I’ll have you to thank for it. Do you realize that? Do you?”
She stood up. He had never in all their years spoken to her with such fury, such venom. He was breathing heavily and still glaring. She thought she saw hatred in his eyes. At that her adrenaline began to pour, and rising to her full height, she brought herself up almost to the level of that hatred.
“Now you listen to me,” she cried, seizing hold of his coat lapels. “I’ve had just about enough from you. If you’re sick, and I do believe you are, go get some help, as I’ve asked you twenty times to do. But sick or not, I won’t take this from you anymore. I can’t stand the way you treat me! What is this about? Who are you? You’re not here, you’re someplace else where I can’t find you. Where are you hiding? I’ve been fighting clouds and shadows, and I’m tired of it. I’ve tried to be patient, to understand that there’s something wrong with you, yet there’s a limit—”
“Oh, you’ve got a lot to complain about, you have. Go ask other women, women whose husbands come home and raise hell over every little thing, while I go out quietly to work in the yard or stay in and teach the children at the computer. Do I fight? Do I ever raise my voice?”
“It would be better if you did once in a while. At least it would be more human. We would know you were here. What is the mystery about you? Why won’t you talk about yourself, anyway? How long can I go on feeling as alone as I have been feeling? I try, I try.…” She began to cry. “Why do you treat me like this, blaming me for something I didn’t do and would never do? Why do you hate me, Adam?—because I know you do. I see it in your cold eyes.”
“I don’t hate you. You’re being ridiculous. It’s laughable.”
“I don’t think so. Laughable? There’s been mighty little laughter in this house for a long, long time. When I think of the way it used to be …” She stopped and wiped her cheeks.
A momentous change was taking shape, as something previously unthinkable, and therefore denied, insisted upon returning. And she looked around the room as if there, in the familiarity of the wallpaper with its yellow butterflies or the pictures of her parents in their double frame or the books on the night table, she might find either agreement with or final denial of this unthinkable thing.
There was no denial. And she said, speaking shrilly and loud, “There’s somebody else.”
Adam threw up his hands, addressing
an invisible audience. “I come home to tell her that I may be in hot water at the office on account of her stupid remarks, and all she can do is accuse me of having ‘another woman.’ Does that make any sense? Does it?”
There was indeed no logic to it; the facts had no connection with each other, and yet the idea had taken hold, and she could only repeat it.
“It’s true! Yes, it is. It happens to women every day, so why not to me?”
“Not true, Margaret,” Adam said calmly. “Not.”
“It’s been eighteen years. Time for a change, a new woman, right? Who is she, Adam? Who? Who is the woman who’s going to take my place?”
“You’re hysterical. You’re making a fool of yourself.”
When she saw him looking beyond her, she turned and saw the group in the hall outside the door: the girls and Danny were standing there in numb astonishment. Now she was struck with horror: her children had caught their parents in a forbidden intimacy, almost as if they had come upon them in bed making love.
“Oh,” she cried, “oh, what are you doing here? We—it’s only a foolish argument, it’s nothing. Go have your dinner.”
And Adam echoed, “Yes. Go downstairs. Who told you to come up here? There’s nothing to worry about. Go.”
Obediently, they started to the stairs, but not before Margaret had seen Megan’s stricken face.
“Well, now you’ve done it,” Adam said. “Did you see Megan? You’ve given your young daughter something nice to remember, haven’t you?”
Margaret sobbed. Her nerves were going. She who had never had “nerves,” who was known for being “steady,” had just disgraced herself. She dropped her face into her hands and sat there shaking.
How long she sat, she did not know. When she looked up, Adam had removed his coat and was sitting on the bench watching her. He spoke to her quietly.
“We’re making too much of all this. I’m sorry if I began it, coming home frazzled and taking it out on you. I’m sure Jenks exaggerated that business. It’s like him to do. I’m sorry.”
She wiped her cheeks and nodded.
“But as to that other, the thing you said—it’s not true.”
“I don’t know why I thought—for a moment there, I was so sure,” she murmured. “And then I saw the children, and I knew it couldn’t possibly be true. You wouldn’t do that to them. I know you wouldn’t.”
“If I could help it,” Adam said gravely, “I would never hurt them.”
Whenever he spoke like that, with his dignity, his gravity, and the wise touch of his consoling smile, he touched her heart, touched it as he had done when she was seventeen.
“I’ll go down and straighten them out. They must be terrified. But they have to learn that sometimes people’s emotions make them say outlandish things. They haven’t heard much of that in this house.”
“No,” she said, “no, they haven’t.”
“Perhaps that wasn’t all to the good. Perhaps they would be better off with a little toughening.”
This talk is becoming ambiguous, she thought, and my head aches. Probably I’ve been holding too much in for too long. And so I went a bit crazy just now. That’s all that happened.
“I’ll bring up something for you to eat.”
“Why? Do I look too frightful to go downstairs?”
“Not frightful. You just look as if you’ve been crying, that’s all. Stay here and let me wait on you for a change.”
“All right. And explain to them, will you?”
“Of course.”
He left her sitting quietly, under control, thoughts streaming through her tired head. He had spoken so gently just now, so kindly, like the Adam she knew. And yet she was quite aware that he had still not touched her flesh. Even a cheek or a hand laid upon either of hers would have meant so much. It was strange, all so strange.
What was happening to them?
“So she really knows, you see. She doesn’t want to know, but she does,” Adam said wearily as he concluded the story.
Randi sighed. “I suppose this is your way of saying that we can’t have that little trip you promised for January.”
“How can I do it now? Besides all this business at home, things are uncertain at the office, as I’ve been telling you.”
He had not, however, told Randi about Jenks’s tongue-lashing. There was no reason to do so. A man had his pride too. And in addition he had lately been feeling compunction over the burdens he was laying upon Randi.
The effects were evident in more ways than one, in her sometimes plaintive voice, in her sighs which revealed perhaps more than she intended, and in her very posture. At the moment she made a drooping silhouette at the window, where the strong light washed against blue-gray shadow and made dark blurs of her downcast eyes. An Impressionist would emphasize her pallor, he thought irrelevantly, by dressing her in some sort of long, graceful robe: plum-purple, maybe, or wine-red? His mind was wandering.
When the clock struck the half hour, she looked up, exclaiming, “I’d like to throw that damn thing out! It’s like a prison guard when you’re here. ‘Time,’ it calls. ‘You’ve ten minutes left. Five, four, countdown’! I hate the thing.”
“It’s only two-thirty. I can stay till four.”
“Oh, Saturday night, of course. An invitation to a diplomatic dinner at the White House.”
“Randi darling, try not to be bitter. Do you think I really want to have dinner at Gil’s house along with his country-club show-offs? And best of all, oh, best of all, with Fred Davis?”
“The snoop. Your wife’s lover.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t talk about her.”
“Why? Do you still love her enough to be jealous?”
“Randi, please. She has no lover. But I wouldn’t mind if Fred were her lover.”
He sat down on the floor beside Randi’s chair and looked up at her face, pleading, “I wish I could do something to keep you from being so sad.”
A vast sadness permeated everything. A blight lay over home, office, and suddenly now over this place, too, this source of joy. Mankind wants certainty, and there is none, he thought. Even the weather mocks you; outdoors now in the January thaw you can hear the drip of melting snow, but tomorrow the wind may howl again.
“I feel,” he said, “as if I’m in a toboggan racing downhill toward a stone wall, and I must get off before it crashes.”
“It won’t crash if you steer it right. You have to go around the end of the wall.” She stroked his head. “You’re all knotted up again. You can’t keep on like this.” When he did not answer, she kept stroking and talking, gently stroking and gently talking. “You said you wished you could do something to relieve my sadness. Well, you can, and relieve your own at the same time.” She paused. “It’s not as hard as you probably think it is to get a divorce. That’s your real answer, Adam. Bite the bullet.”
Divorce. The word shocked him. “I haven’t been thinking of divorce,” he said.
“Why not? Don’t you owe anything to yourself? Don’t you have a right to be happy?”
Alarmed, he cried out, “Randi! You’re not thinking of leaving me, are you?” And he sat up straight to seek her eyes.
She leaned forward, kissed his forehead, and whispered, “God knows, God knows I don’t want to, but—”
“I’ve been saying stupid things,” he said desperately. “It’s a mood, that’s all, and it will pass as it came. Believe me, we’ll be ourselves again. In an hour from now we’ll—”
“No. No, Adam. We can’t stay the way we are. You can’t go on dividing yourself.”
“Why not? In Europe they used to accept—maybe they do yet—the fact that a man can maintain a family and still have a lover. Sometimes the wife even knows about it. And life goes on without wreckage, the children don’t suffer, they have their father and no harm is done. I don’t say it’s the best way, but it’s better than tearing everything apart.”
“That was all right once, Adam. When there was no other w
ay for a woman in my position, she had to accept back-door love. But I want to walk in at the front door. Women have rights today.”
He saw that underneath this indignation lay a powerful anger that she was trying to curb.
“I love you. I want to have a home with you. I want to have a baby. Don’t look surprised. Why shouldn’t I want one? You talk about your children.… When am I going to have mine? When I’m fifty? I’m already thirty-eight years old.”
With a small sob Randi paused, while Adam, dismayed by this outburst, waited for it to resume. He had naturally guessed what she wanted, for it was no more than what most women wanted. But he had also believed that she had accepted the impossibility of getting it.
“I’m sick of hiding, of all these narrow escapes, like yours in that snowstorm. Or being scared that some busybody will catch us out together in your car. Or needing eyes in the back of my head. Sick of it all. I feel as if I’ve been caught shoplifting or something.”
He saw before him a great divide. It was as if he were standing on a hill observing below him the place in the road where it formed a junction, and he would have to choose which way to take.
There was, however, a fair distance still to go before he would reach that place, and he need make no choice yet. So he spoke very carefully, with his hand on hers, saying almost timidly, “Darling Randi, you knew how it was with me. You said you understood.”
“That was more than two years ago. How could I have known how I would feel living this way? I feel married to you now, and you feel the same toward me. You’ve said it many, many times.”
That was true.
“Must she be a drag on you for the rest of your life?”
Now Randi placed her hand on his so that his one hand was held between two of hers; it seemed to him that the currents of their blood were flowing into each other.
“I’m telling you now, Adam, go home and talk to her. Tell her things have changed between you, as she well knows, and that it makes no sense to stick out the rest of your lives together annoying each other. Tell her she’ll be better off herself. She can make a new start. She’s young enough—how old is she?”
