by Irwin Shaw
That it was as much his fault as his wife’s and that he recognized this did not make the check-signing sessions any the easier for him.
He added up the amounts of the checks he had signed, entered them neatly in the checkbook. The total came to nine thousand, three hundred and twenty-six dollars and forty-seven cents. Not bad, he thought, for a man with two flops behind him.
When he had been working with Brenner on his first play, Brenner had once said to him, “I cannot take the problems of a man who makes more than fifty dollars a week seriously.” Brenner had been youthfully extreme then, but he wondered what his old friend would think about him if somehow he had wandered into the office that afternoon and happened to glance down at the repeated signatures on the scraps of paper scattered across the littered desk.
On an impulse he made out one last check, in his own hand, for nine thousand, three hundred and twenty-six dollars and forty-seven cents. He left the space for the payee blank for a moment. Then he filled in the name of a hospital. It was the hospital in which his two daughters had been born.
He wrote a short note to the fund-raising committee of the hospital to go along with the contribution, put the note and the check into an envelope, and addressed it and sealed it.
He had balanced his accounts for the day.
He called through the door to Belinda. He had tried, briefly, installing a buzzer, but its implications had made him uneasy.
When Belinda came in, he gave her the checks and the one sealed envelope and said, “That’ll do it for this afternoon, thank you.”
Then he went downstairs to the bar next door and had enough to drink so that the evening ahead of him would be a blur.
When he got home, Penelope said, “Do you think I’ll ever live to see the day that you’ll show up for dinner sober?”
The last guests had just gone. There were empty glasses all around the living room. Penelope was in the kitchen emptying ashtrays. He looked at his watch. One-thirty. Everybody had stayed too long. He sank into an easy chair, kicked off his shoes. There had been fourteen at dinner. The dinner had been very good. The company dull. He had drunk too much wine.
Theoretically, his twelve guests were his friends. Of them all, there were only two, Robert and Alice Paine, whom he considered true friends. Robert Paine was a vice-president of a publishing house, on the business side, a portly, solid, highly educated man who spoke slowly, weighing his words, ignoring small talk. Craig had met him when he had been asked to select an anthology of plays for Paine’s publishing house, and he had taken an immediate liking to the man. His wife Alice was a child psychiatrist, a large, squarish, handsome woman with mannishly clipped graying hair framing a quiet oval face. Penelope thought they were heavy going, and Craig knew that they had been invited for his sake, so that he wouldn’t complain too bitterly about the rest of the list.
There had been nobody at the table who worked in either the theatre or the movies, although two of the men had from time to time invested in plays of his. Bertie Folsom had been there as usual. Since his wife died, Bertie Folsom was at every dinner party. Talking about the stock market. At length. Folsom was a few years older than Craig, a short, sharp-faced, balding, insignificant-looking, meticulously tailored man with a neat, round paunch who headed a big brokerage concern on Wall Street. The farther he went downtown, Craig thought, the more Bertie Folsom must gain in significance. He occasionally gave advice to Craig on stocks. Occasionally, Craig took it. Sometimes the advice was valuable. Since being widowed, he was invited to all dinners at the Craig house. Often he called at six in the evening and asked what they were doing that night. When they weren’t doing anything in particular, the Craigs asked him to join them for quiet family dinners. Folsom remembered everybody’s birthday, brought gifts for Anne and Marcia. Penelope felt sorry for him, she said. Craig figured that Folsom could not be worth less than two million dollars. Perhaps it was evidence of Penelope’s warmth of character that she could find time to be sorry for a man who was worth two million dollars. When they had a party like the one tonight, Penelope invited various ladies for Folsom. They were the sort of ladies, usually divorced, who were always free to come to anybody’s house for dinner. When Craig was out of town or working, Folsom escorted Penelope to the theatre and to parties. Somebody had once said Folsom was a useful man, one should always have a widower among one’s circle of friends.
The conversation during the evening had been, aside from Bertie Folsom’s dissertations on the stock market, about servants, the disastrous quality of the plays on Broadway that season, sports cars, Ferraris, Porsches, and Maseratis, the shortcomings of the young, speculation about the amours, legitimate and covert, of friends who were not present that night, the impossibility of finding a decent place anymore in the Caribbean to spend a holiday, and the comparative virtues of various ski resorts. Somehow, everybody there skied each winter. Except Craig. Penelope spent a month a year in Sun Valley and Aspen. Alone. Sitting at the head of his table in the house on the East Side of New York City, Craig felt that he had become an expert on snow. He had nothing against skiing—he wished he had had the time to take it up when he was a young man—but he believed people should ski, not talk about it. No one that evening had mentioned his last picture, or any of his pictures, except the Paines, who had come early so as to have a chance to talk to him alone for a few minutes over drinks before the rest of the guests had arrived. The Paines had liked his last picture, although Alice Paine had been bothered by the violence of a scene in a Parisian nightclub in which the hero got involved in a brawl. “Alice,” Robert Paine had said affectionately about his wife, “hasn’t learned yet how to stop being a psychiatrist when she enters a movie house.”
There had been one interlude in the evening during which Craig had listened with some interest. The subject of Women’s Liberation had come up, and Penelope, who ordinarily spoke little in company, had been eloquently vehement on the subject. She was for Women’s Liberation. Craig had agreed with her. So had the other women at the table. If they had not all been so busy with fittings and arranging dinner parties and observing the schedules of hairdressers and traveling to the Caribbean and Sun Valley, they undoubtedly would have made a considerable impression on the movement.
Craig did not bother with the guest lists for parties. For one thing, he was too occupied with other matters to take the time. Occasionally, he met someone who interested him enough to suggest his or her name to Penelope, but more often than not Penelope would find some reason, usually perfectly valid, why the man or woman or couple would not fit in with the particular evening she was planning.
He sighed, not actually knowing why he did so. He heaved himself out of the chair and walked in his stockinged feet across the thick pale carpet to the sideboard where the bottles were ranged and poured himself a whisky. Penelope came in from the kitchen, glanced at the glass in his hand. When she did that, he always felt guilty. He picked up the bottle and added another ounce to his drink, splashed some soda into it, and went back to the easy chair. He watched Penelope move about the big, comfortable room in the subdued lamplight that shone in soft creamy pools on the polished wood of end tablès, the brocade of chairs, the brass pots full of flowers. Penelope could not stand strong light. It was always difficult in any house she inhabited, even houses they rented for a summer, to find a place where it was possible to read.
She was dressed in a long, loose red velvet robe that swung gracefully around her slender, still youthful figure as she touched a bunch of flowers, put a magazine back in the rack, closed the cover of a silver cigarette box. Her taste was sure. Things looked better after she had touched them. There was nothing ornate or showy about her house, but, Craig thought, it was a wonderful place to live in, and he loved it. With the glass of whisky in his hand, he watched his wife move around the warm, welcoming room, and he forgot the dull departed guests. At that moment, admiring her in the midnight silence, he knew he loved her and felt completely married. He knew her
faults. She was a liar, extravagant, cunning, often pretentious; she filled his house with second-rate people because she feared the competition of wit, beauty, intelligence; she had been unfaithful to him and at the same time made him suffer from the blackmail of her jealousy; when things went wrong, she invariably found a way to pass the blame onto other shoulders, usually his; often she bored him. Still, he loved her. No marriage was all of one piece. Each partner paid some price. He had no illusions about his own perfection. He was sure that in her secret heart Penelope’s list of his failings was much longer than the account of his own judgments on her.
He put his glass down, stood up, went over to her, kissed the back of her neck. She stiffened as though the gesture had caught her by surprise.
“Let’s go to bed,” he said.
She pulled away. “You go to bed,” she said. “I still have things to do down here.”
“I want to go to bed with you,” he said.
She walked quickly across the room, put a chair between them as though for defense. “I thought that was just about over,” she said.
“Well, it isn’t.”
“It is for me,” she said.
“What did you say?”
“I said it’s over for me. Permanently. I don’t want to go to bed with you or with anybody.” Her voice was low, even, without emotion.
“What brought that on?” He tried to keep his anger from showing.
“You,” she said. “Everything. Leave me alone.”
He went over and got his glass and took a long drink.
“When you sober up in the morning,” she said, “you’ll find your passion has been neatly filed away in the back of the vault. Along with a lot of other things.”
“I’m not drunk,” he said.
“Every night,” she said.
“Do you mean what you just said?”
“Yes.”
“All of a sudden like that?”
“It isn’t so sudden,” she said, still behind the barrier of the chair. “You’ve been bored with me for years. And you’ve shown it. Tonight you did everything but yawn in the face of all my friends.”
“You must admit, Penny,” he said, “that it was a drab collection tonight.”
“I don’t admit anything.”
“That Bertie Folsom, for God’s sake …”
“A lot of people think he’s a most intelligent, attractive man.”
“A lot of people thought Hitler was an intelligent, attractive man.” He took a step toward her. He could see her knuckles whiten as she gripped the back of the chair, and he stopped.
“Come on, Penny,” he said gently. “Don’t let a passing mood make you say things you’ll be sorry for later.”
“It isn’t any passing mood.” Her mouth pulled down severely. Even in the soft light she now looked her full age. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.”
He finished his drink, sat down, looked searchingly at her. She returned his glance unflinchingly, the enmity plain in her eyes.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose this calls for a divorce. And a drink.” He stood up and carried his glass to the sideboard.
“There’s no need for a divorce,” she said. “You don’t want to get married again, do you?”
He laughed shortly and poured himself a stiff drink.
“I don’t want to get married, either,” she went on.
“What do we do—live together just as though nothing had happened?” he demanded.
“Yes. If only for Marcia and Anne. Anyway, it shouldn’t be any great hardship. Nothing very much has happened between us for years now. Every once in a while, when you’re not bombed to extinction, or you’ve got a case of insomnia or one of your other girls isn’t available, you remember you have a wife, and you come crawling around.”
“That’s a word I’m going to remember, Penny,” he said. “Crawling.”
She ignored his warning. “Four or five nights a year,” she said, “there won’t be any games at home. That’s all. I think we both can stand it.”
“I’m forty-four years old, Penny,” he said. “I don’t see myself remaining celibate for the rest of my life.”
“Celibate!” She laughed harshly. “There’s another word for you. You can do whatever you want. Just the way you always have.”
“I think,” he said quietly, “tomorrow will be just the day for me to go on a nice long trip. Europe might be just the thing.”
“The girls’re coming home for Christmas,” she said. “The least you owe them is to be here when they come. Don’t take it out on them.”
“All right,” he said. “Europe can wait until after Christmas.”
He heard a telephone ringing. Still dislocated in time, he almost called out, “Penny, will you take that, please?” Then he shook himself, looked around, realized where he was, at an ornate, fake antique desk in a hotel room facing the sea, and reached over and picked up the phone. “Craig speaking,” he said.
There was a faraway howling over the wires, American voices jumbled and speaking too low to be understood, then, weirdly, a few notes of a piano, then a click and silence. He frowned, put the phone down, looked at his watch. It was past midnight, between three and six in the afternoon on the continent of America. He waited, but the phone did not ring again.
He stood up and poured himself a drink. He felt a wetness on his cheek. He looked disbelievingly at himself in the mirror. He had been weeping. He brushed the tears roughly away with the back of his hand, drank half the whisky, glared at the telephone. Who had tried to reach him, what message had been baffled in its course to him in midocean?
Perhaps it had been the one voice that could have made everything clear—tell him where he stood, what were his assets, what his debts, what he owed, what was owed him. On what side of the ledger he might enter his marriage, his daughters, his career. Let him know once and for all if he was morally bankrupt or ethically solvent, announce whether his loving had been a defensible expense, answer the question of whether or not, in an age of wars and endless horror, his preoccupation with fictions and shadows had been a callous waste of honor.
The telephone did not ring. There was no message from America. He finished his drink.
When he had been away from her, Penelope had had the habit of calling him almost every night just before she went to bed. “I don’t sleep happily,” she had said, “unless I hear your voice and know that you’re all right.”
The telephone bills had been enormous.
Sometimes he had been irritated by her calls, at other times moved by husbandly tenderness at the sound of the low, familiar, musical voice from a distant city, the other shore of a continent. He had been irritated when he thought that she had been checking on him, testing his fidelity, even though after what had happened between them he felt that he owed her no fidelity, or at least not that form of fidelity. He had been unfaithful to her occasionally. Without a sense of guilt, he told himself. Nor did he underestimate the continuing pleasure his indulgence made possible. But he had never allowed himself to become seriously involved with another woman. To that extent, he had felt he had protected his marriage. For the same reason he had refrained from inquiring into his wife’s relations with other men. He had never checked on her. She had secretly rifled through all his papers, he knew, hunting for women’s names, but he had never picked up a letter addressed to her or questioned her about whom she had seen or where she had gone. Again, without examining this facet of his behavior closely, he had felt that it would have been demeaning to him, a belittling blow to his pride. He had recognized the female cunning in Penelope’s late-night telephone calls but for the most part had tolerated them, even been fondly amused by them, flattered by them. Now he knew he had been wrong. He and his wife had avoided candor, and they had drained their marriage.
He had been angry that morning when he had received her letter and had made out the monthly check, and he had reflected on her rapacity and meanness of spirit. But now,
after midnight, alone, the memories that had been aroused by passing the house on the Cap d’Antibes that afternoon working within him and the frustrating sounds of the indecipherable voices on the wires still echoing in his ears, he couldn’t help but remember better times, gentler encounters.
For Craig, at least, the marriage worked best at times of stress—when late at night, after long hours in the theatre, he would return from the chaos of rehearsals, the savage clash of wills and temperaments whose tensions it was his job as producer to absorb and accommodate, and find Penelope waiting up for him, ready to make a drink for him in the beautifully ordered living room of their house and listen to him pour out his recapitulation of the day’s work, the day’s problems, the small tragedies, the day’s insane comedies, the fears for the morrow, the disputes that remainded to be solved. She was sympathetic, cool, understanding. Her intuition and intelligence could be relied on. Invariably, she was helpful, the most reliable of partners, the most useful of advisers, steadfastly faithful to his interests. Out of all the memories of his marriage, all the good times, the summer in Antibes, the deeply satisfying moments with his daughters, even the long-shared pleasure of their love-making, it was those countless quiet midnight conversations in which they shared the best of themselves with each other that in retrospect were the real texture of their marriage, the most painful to have to forget.
Well, he had plenty of problems tonight, he could use advice. Despite everything, he knew he longed for the sound of her voice. When he had written her to tell her he was taking steps for a divorce, she had written him a long letter pleading with him not to break up their marriage, with all the reasons, passionate and sensible and homely, for keeping it alive. He had barely glanced at it, afraid, perhaps, that it would sway him, and coldly sent her a note telling her to find a lawyer.
