She dropped into a chair. Her profile was like a corpse’s profile. Her misery, her contempt for herself were like corpses in the room too. I hated watching her, hated submitting her to being watched. At random, grabbing any excuse, I asked if she was hungry and, before she could stop me, hurried out into the kitchen.
As I made a sandwich and poured a glass of milk, I was haunted by an image of her walking fifty blocks up Manhattan, exhausted, hungry, carrying the suitcase, hoarding her single dime. Plunging back into the past, I saw her lying at my side in the bedroom in Provence, with the mimosa tapping at the window, charging the air with its sweetness. I waited in the kitchen, dreading to go back to her.
Then I went back and it was all right. She was in control again. She even smiled a warm, relaxed smile when I gave her the tray.
I don’t know which of us started reminiscing about Claxton, but we slipped into it perfectly naturally. We remembered the most trivial incidents. She even laughed. I laughed too. When she had finished eating, she took a drink. Some color came back into her cheeks. I was more and more conscious of how beautiful she was, of how pleasantly intimate the room was and of the fact that we were alone. Part of me, I suppose, knew that this was the most dangerous thing that could happen. But it was a remote part, easy to ignore. We were back as if nothing had changed, back long before Portofino, back before the bad days had begun.
Angelica smoked continuously and, somehow, the cigarette box never got near her. Each time I took her a cigarette and each time, as I lit it for her and her hand, warm and alive again, brushed against mine, I felt a tingle of excitement. The last time I took her a cigarette, we were both laughing. My hand came into contact with hers. Suddenly she drew hers away.
“It’s charming here,” she said. “Betsy, I suppose?”
“I guess so.”
“She’s a wonderful wife for you, isn’t she?”
I knew she was signaling me to stop, but I also knew, by some telepathy of the nerves, that she was signaling against her will. I moved the fraction of an inch closer, feeling a little dizzy.
“Yes,” I said. “She’s a wonderful wife.”
“And Rickie?”
“He’s fine.”
“He…” She got up, twisting past me. “Could I see him?”
Her eyes were challenging me, ordering me back into my role as somebody else’s husband. That was why she had asked to see Rickie. I knew that. It was the only excuse for getting up that had occurred to her. If she had been thinking normally, seeing Rickie could only have meant another knife twist. If I had been thinking normally, I would have realized that taking her to him was the greatest betrayal I could make of Betsy. But I wasn’t-thinking normally. I was only playing the moment as it came.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s see him.”
We went down the corridor to Rickie’s room. A night light was burning. Rickie was lying on his back with his finger in his mouth and his black hair matted down over his eyes. We stood looking at him. Then his big black eyes opened. He gazed at me and with bland curiosity at Angelica.
At that moment the cuckoo in his corny Swiss cuckoo clock shot out, cuckooing two times. Rickie watched it.
“It’s two,” he said. “That’s very, very late, isn’t it, Pop?”
“Sure,” I said.
His eyes moved back to Angelica. “Who’s that?”
“It’s a friend,” I said.
“I had a tooth pulled today,” he said.
Suddenly Angelica said, “Let’s get out of here.”
She started for the door. I kissed Rickie, told him to go back to sleep and followed her. She was standing by the front door in the hall.
She said, “Give me the money, Bill. I’ve got to go.”
The thought of her leaving seemed unendurable. “Have one more drink.”
“No, Bill.”
“Just one more. After all, we’re saying good-by.”
I made drinks for us both in the living room and took them out to the hall. She accepted hers and I felt as if I had won a great victory.
I said, “It’s past two—a hell of a time to go searching for hotel rooms.”
“That doesn’t make any difference.”
“There’s a perfectly good guest room here.”
“No, Bill.”
“Why not? What difference can it possibly make?” The ice in her glass tinkled. I looked down. Her hand was trembling. I took the glass from her and put it down on a table.
When I took her in my arms, it seemed inevitable; I didn’t feel the slightest anxiety or the faintest pang of guilt. With my lips on hers, I drew her back to the hall couch. She had made no move to resist. As we sank down on it, she gave a little whimpering cry and clung to me as if I were the only safety in a world of terror. With her cry, my body recognized its final victory over my reason, and Betsy and the new life I had built without Angelica seemed nothing but a gimcrack cardboard structure which I had erected to fill the vacuum of my loneliness.
It was the cough I heard first. It was not loud, but its precise, chilly timbre seeped through to me vaguely as a sound that shouldn’t be there. Then it came again louder, unmistakable in its outraged decorum. I jumped away from Angelica.
Rickie’s nurse was standing immediately in front of us. She was wearing a white towel bathrobe. Her blonde hair, in a twisted pigtail, swung over one shoulder. Her face was a shade of purplish pink.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” she said. “I didn’t realize…”
Angelica sat up. I said stupidly, “Oh, Ellen…”
“Something woke Master Rickie. He called me. I was going to the kitchen to get him some hot milk. I didn’t realize…”
She turned from us and almost ran back down the passage.
For a long moment we sat in silence. Then Angelica got up, pulled her coat from under me and started to put it on.
In a dead little voice, she said, “Get me the money, Bill.”
I went to Betsy’s and my bedroom. My wallet was on the bureau. There was about thirty dollars in it. Now that the first anesthesia was wearing off, I felt foolish and frightened. I took all the money except a couple of dollars and gave it to Angelica. I knew it was grossly unfair to blame her. It had all been entirely my fault. I, who had so much to lose, had been the one so recklessly determined to lose it. But I rebelled against seeing it that way. Because I needed to, I could only think of myself as a victim. Angelica was the Enemy, the intruder who had inveigled her way into my life to destroy it a second time.
She put the money in her pocketbook. “Will she tell Betsy?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“I’m sorry.”
She picked up her suitcase and opened the front door. In my egoistic guilt and fear for my marriage, she looked small and colorless and enormously unmemorable. It seemed inconceivable that I could have imagined her into an object of desire. All I wanted was for her to go.
“Good-by, Angelica.”
At the door she lingered. “You can’t suggest a hotel, can you? I’m bad about New York.”
“Try the Wilton. It’s just over on Madison a couple of blocks down.”
“The Wilton. Thanks, Bill, and good-by.”
She slipped out of the door and closed it behind her. The two drinks were still on the hall table. I picked one up and gulped it. Angelica’s departure hadn’t helped. I was obsessed with shame and worry for Betsy whose whole life was based on her trust in me, who had grown from insecurity to security solely because she had come to believe that my love for her was as open and incorruptible as her love for me. Melodramatically, I saw a future where, my wife gone, my job gone, I faced a barren, empty existence again. I even contemplated hurrying into Ellen’s bedroom and pleading with her not to destroy Betsy’s happiness and mine.
But, all the time, I realized that I was only dramatizing the situation to try to salvage some shreds of pride. What I had done had merely been tawdry, almost farcical. Through absurdly romanticizing a s
exual itch which should have died but hadn’t quite, I had made an idiot of myself and had been caught. That was all. Betsy would understand. Surely she would understand.
Next morning I awoke steady again, knowing I had to face what I had done and that, first of all, I had to face Ellen. In the nursery Rickie was eating his cereal. Ellen in the pretentious, starched white uniform which she always insisted on wearing, was sitting next to him, knitting some shapeless garment for one of her interminable nieces in England. She looked up with icy respectfulness.
I said, “About last night, Ellen, I want to explain…”
“Really, sir. It’s not my place to ask for explanations, I’m sure.”
I floundered on. “She’s an old friend. She’d been in difficulty…”
“Please.” Ellen jumped up and put her starched arms theatrically around Rickie. “Not in front of the little boy.”
Rickie gave an Indian war-whoop and parroted, “Not in front of the little boy.” It was all going hopelessly wrong.
I began again, “I fully intend to tell Mrs. Harding all about it.”
The phone rang. Grateful for a letout, I hurried out and took the call in the bedroom. It was C. J. I knew he had been in Boston the night before for a press convention. He must just have got back.
“Bill? What were you doing last night?”
His voice sounded strangled by some indeterminate violent emotion.
Before I could speak, he barked, “Were you alone?”
I could only think for the moment and of the fatal consequences of C. J., of all people, finding out about Angelica.
“Yes,” I lied. “I was alone.”
“Then come around right away. I’m at the apartment. Grab a taxi. Come this instant.”
“All right, but…”
“You know what’s happened? You’ve read the papers?”
“No,” I said, my confusion merging into a sense of disaster.
“That friend of yours. Jaimie Lumb. That phony novelist you and Betsy so carefully cultivated. He was murdered last night. They found him in his apartment—shot dead.”
chapter 5
I dropped the receiver and stood staring at it, not seeing it. In that first instant of shock, it seemed to me that the bottom was falling out of my world, and panic invaded me like slugs crawling over my skin. Jaimie had been killed. Why or by whom seemed at the moment a matter of complete indifference to me. All I could think of was that Angelica would be one of the first people the police would question. She would have to account for her movements. I would be questioned. Ellen would be questioned. Inevitably Ellen would tell what she had seen. Last night’s episode was no longer just a humiliating incident to be ironed out somehow between Betsy and me. The press would get hold of it. It would be pruriently exaggerated and screamed from headlines. C. J., with his imperial pride of family, would discard me as a son-in-law and throw me out of my job five minutes after he had read the papers.
But, in spite of my panic for myself, it was Betsy who took first place in my thoughts. This would destroy Betsy. However hard I tried to explain, I could never shield her from what other people would be thinking. Once the news had become a common scandal, it would be worse for her than it had been before she met me. She would be back again in her own mind as the Ugly One, the one despised by her sister, rejected by her father, the Pathetic One who had taken to Good Works. But not only that. Now she would also see herself branded as a laughingstock, the wife who hadn’t been able to hold her husband, the rich old maid, married for her money by an adventurer who had used her to drag himself up from nowhere and had cynically returned at the first possible moment to an intrigue with his worthless first wife.
I could visualize her, after the news broke, reading the papers. Perhaps even today in Philadelphia. Perhaps Helen Reed would be with her. “Darling, how terrible.” I could see her cringe. For months now, whenever there was anyone, friend, acquaintance or stranger to be faced, she would cringe.
My love for her, which I had managed so conveniently to put to one side the night before, assailed me, stinging me with remorse. How could I have done it? How, possibly, could I have submitted her to this? I raged against myself and raged futilely against Angelica with her saved dime, her “courage,” her fatal appeal to nostalgia and pity. Why had she ever come back into my life?
I started to dress, trying not to lose my head. Ellen was the crux. If Ellen hadn’t caught us, Angelica and I could think up a fairly innocent explanation for why we had been together. Could I appeal to Ellen—if not for my sake, then for Betsy’s? She was impressed by Betsy. With a sinking heart I remembered her, hostile, stonily respectable, in the nursery a few minutes before. Then I remembered C. J.’s “Come at once.” I was torn between two equally urgent and formidable alternatives. I settled for C. J. He was the more formidable. “What were you doing last night?” It would be wiser to find out first how much he knew. When I’d dressed, I hurried out of the apartment and down to the street. I looked for a taxi; then I thought of a newspaper. I bought one on First Avenue and flagged a cab.
In the cab I leafed through the paper.
First I found a report of C. J.’s speech at the press banquet. Then I located the announcement in a small paragraph on a middle page. It merely gave the bald fact that a man identified as James Lumb, twenty-five, novelist, had been found shot in an apartment on East 20th Street. It gave no details; it didn’t even give the time of death. But, as I gazed at it, Jaimie became real to me as an actual corpse lying somewhere—in the morgue?—and a new thought burst in, sending my panic surging upward. What if Angelica had killed him? Wasn’t that as logical an end as any for their squalid relationship with its obbligato of violence? If she’d killed him! If then she’d come lying to me, impelled by her perverse instinct to destroy, to tangle me in with her, to drag me down too! Perhaps the police already knew. Perhaps C. J. knew too. With his connections in high places, he could find out anything he wanted to find out.
The taxi drew up in front of C. J.’s apartment on Park Avenue. With a sensation of absolute doom, I got out.
I went through the luxurious foyer and up in the purring elevator. Henry, the husband of the couple who were permanently installed in C. J.’s penthouse apartment, opened the door, hovering in elderly, arthritic anxiety.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Harding, sir.”
I heard C. J.’s voice from the library: “Bill? Is that you, Bill?”
I went down the passage, past all the Dufys flamboyantly hung in half-darkness to show how much C. J. could afford to throw away. The library door was open. I walked in.
At the best of times, C. J. intimidated me. Now, as I saw him, broad and squat, standing there, surrounded by all the red leather furniture and the walls of books, most of which, improbably, he had read, anxiety and guilt turned him into the very symbol of retribution. I have only the vaguest idea of what I’d expected from him, but it had certainly been something overwhelmingly bad. As he hurried toward me, I steeled myself to face the beginning of the end.
“Bill! Boy! Thank God you’ve come. We don’t have a moment to lose. The police have called. They’ll be here any minute.”
He put his hands on my arms. C. J. practically never touched anyone. He had a fetish about it. Dimly, from that unexpected physical contact and the propitiatory “Bill! Boy!” I realized that I was not the pariah after all. It made me steady enough actually to see him instead of just imagine him. He looked exhausted and threatened and older than I had ever seen him. But the frog eyes were diamond bright and inflexible of purpose. I knew him so well. I could tell that whatever had happened had been a mortal blow to him. He was being the Great General at Bay but Undaunted. At the moment, any personal feelings he might have about me were in suspension. I was merely something that he needed, something that fitted somehow into a counterattack.
“Just listen. Bill,” he said. “I’ll give you the facts. There’s no time for anything else. Yesterday I was in Boston. I got back at seven-t
hirty this morning. I’d read about Lumb in the paper. When I got here, Daphne wasn’t in the apartment. Her bed hadn’t been slept in. Half an hour later, she came in. I made her tell me everything. Part of last night she was with Lumb; the rest of it she was alone. She had nothing to do with this. You’ve got to take my word for it. She had nothing to do with it at all.”
I might have realized that nothing but trouble for Daphne could have affected him as strongly as this. But I hadn’t thought of Daphne. I’d thought of nothing but myself and Angelica.
“The poor child!” he said. “The poor deluded little idiot! My God, when she told me what’s been happening; when she let me know how criminally irresponsible you and Betsy have been…” He had suddenly whipped himself up into a fury and then just as suddenly he suppressed it. Later there would be hell to pay for all of us. I saw that. But that was to be later. C. J. could control his moods like a machine. This wasn’t the moment for moral indignation. This was the moment for action.
He was looking at me urgently again, almost pleadingly. “Bill, we can’t let the police know what she did last night. It’s impossible. Quite out of the question. That’s the point. That’s what we’re going to fix.”
He was even smiling at me now. It was a sketchy, artificial attempt to show “how close we were.” When he needed to charm his underlings, C. J. never bothered to make the charm convincing.
“It’s perfectly simple. We’ve just got to keep our heads. The police know that Daphne was friendly with Lumb. There was some earlier episode with the neighbors. The neighbors put them on to her. But they don’t know anything about last night. I’m certain of it. I sounded them out on the phone. This will just be a formal, fact-finding interview.”
Not taking his eyes from my face, he picked up a magazine from a table and rolled it into a truncheon. “I saw the solution immediately. The moment I’d checked with you and found out you were alone last night, I knew it couldn’t go wrong. I’ve already briefed Daphne. I’ve already released it to the press, too. The News called a couple of minutes after I’d talked to you, and I saw my chance. There’s nothing like getting your side in first.”
The Man with Two Wives Page 4
