Wives and Lovers

by Margaret Millar

  “They’re not meeting too well right now.”

  “Well, I’m doing my best.”

  “Yes. Yes, I really believe you are, Gordon.”

  She sounded so sincere and kindly that he turned to look at her in surprise. She was a tall woman, nearly as tall as he. Her self-assured manner, her air of owning the world, had been one of the first things about her that he had noticed and admired. As the years passed Gordon had come to realize that it was not an air or a manner; Elaine really did own her world, and she allowed him to live in a little corner of it at a rent that he found it nearly impossible to pay.

  “The trouble with some people’s best,” Elaine said, “is that it isn’t good enough.”

  “Nothing will ever be good enough for you, Elaine.”

  “Other women are more easily satisfied, are they?”

  “I don’t know . . . I don’t even know what we’re talking about, money or sex.”

  “You know I never discuss sex,” she said stiffly.

  “Then it must be money. Is that what you want, Elaine? Money?”

  “All I want is for our family to be together, to have a decent home life, with warmth and affection.”

  “I’d like that, too.” But he knew that what Elaine meant by warmth and affection was not what he meant. To Elaine, warmth was gay conversation in front of the fireplace after dinner, and affection was a quick hug or a peck on the cheek, and, “Not now, Gordon, the children might still be awake—” or it was getting late, or she was tired, or she thought she heard the baby stirring upstairs or a prowler out in the yard.

  She stood twisting her wedding ring, pulling it up over the second joint of her finger and pushing it back again. Up and over, over and down, with the diamonds glittering like tears. “What a lovely scene this has been, eh, Gordon? And what a charming couple we make. Somebody called us that once—remember?—a complete stranger said it when we were walking down Main Street on a Saturday night.”

  “I think that’s what you really want out of life—to be one half of a charming couple walking down Main Street on a Saturday night.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. All I know is that this whole argument started because I made a simple little request. I wanted you to take the children to the beach like any normal father.”

  “Sorry,” he said with a wry smile. “I’m feeling a little abnormal today.”

  “Is that meant to be a joke?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, it’s not funny. You have been acting abnormal recently—losing all that money on a horse race last week, going for those long walks alone every night, drinking down in that awful café and staying so late I have to phone you to come home.”

  “I like to walk. And I drink coffee, almost exclu­sively.”

  “There’s coffee at home.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you prefer to go down there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  He had a sudden impulse to tell her the real reason but the impulse went lame before it could move. He knew he would never have the nerve to tell her even half of the truth. “Gomez is an old patient of mine. I feel obliged to patronize him.”

  “Very considerate of you.”

  “Besides, when I go for a walk I like to have some kind of destination. Gomez’s place is just the right distance.”

  “Does anyone ever see you in there?”

  “If they look around, I imagine they see me. Why?”

  “The place seems awfully low class. I wouldn’t want any of our friends to see you there.”

  “Any real doctors, you mean?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, I’ll make you a promise, Elaine. If I ever see any real doctor coming in the front door I’ll sneak out through the kitchen.”

  He expected her to get angry or at least to accuse him of sarcasm. She did neither. “Thank you, Gordon,” she said calmly. “That will be very kind of you.”

  “Elaine, before you go, I’d like to ask you one ques­tion.”

  “Ask it.”

  “How did you first find out I went down to Gomez’s place?”

  “You can’t keep a secret in this town. Only a fool would try.”

  “You’re sure I have secrets?”

  “Your face is crawling with them.”

  Hazel had come in the back door but they were too en­grossed in the quarrel to notice her. They stood in the hot, dark little hall, eyeing each other like fighters planning the next, the most devastating blow.

  “Pardon me,” Hazel said.

  They both turned and looked at her as if she had dropped from another planet to invade their private world. Neither of them spoke.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Hazel said, addressing Elaine. “I just came back to help Dr. Foster pour up an inlay . . . My, it’s certainly hot, isn’t it?”

  Elaine blinked. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  “A perfect day for the beach.”

  “Yes, I thought so too. Apparently I was wrong.” She buttoned the little bolero she wore over her yellow linen sundress, and slung the rope straps of her beach purse over her left shoulder. “Well, I’ll be going now, Gordon. I don’t want to interfere with anything you and Hazel had planned.”

  “I’ll take you out to the car.”

  “Don’t bother. I’m quite accustomed to finding my way around alone.” She walked down the hall to the back door, passing Hazel without a glance. “When you’re ready to come home, Gordon, give me a call.”

  “All right.”

  “Unless you’d prefer a nice long walk.”

  Gordon colored. “I’ll walk.”

  “Good. And I’ll have a pot of coffee waiting for you. You like coffee so much.”

  She closed the door behind her very softly to indicate to Gordon that she was not in the least angry.

  She went out into the court, past the goldfish pond and the lantana hedges, holding her head high, looking like a real doctor’s wife. But when she reached the sidewalk she began to tremble so violently that she could hardly walk. She stood for a moment and pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes. Behind her closed lids there were no pictures, only a moving mass of colors, the reds of rage, the grays of terror.

  Gordon turned to Hazel. “Don’t say anything.”

  “I had no inten—”

  “In fact, it might be a good idea if you went home.”

  “But—”

  “Now.”

  “All right.”

  When both the women were gone, he began to whistle again.

  4

  From a distance Hazel’s house looked like a small white box set right against the foot of the mountains in a grove of live-oak trees. But as Hazel drove up Castillo Street the box enlarged into a house, the live-oak trees stepped back a hundred yards into their proper place, and the mountains were six or seven miles away, the color of violets seen through frosted glass.

  Hazel had lived in the town all her life. When she was a child she liked to believe that these mountains were the highest in the world, roadless, inaccessible, to be climbed only by daring men with ropes and pickaxes and spiked boots. It was quite a disappointment to her when her brother Harold, at the age of ten, accompanied his Boy Scout troop on a weekend trip to the Lookout Tower and returned unharmed. Harold reported great dangers, some real, like poison oak and rattlesnakes, some imagined, like tigers and man-eating plants; but he had worn ordinary gym shoes and no one in the party had carried a pickaxe.

  Hazel stepped out of the car and the roadless, inaccessible mountains were blue dwarfs of hills. She opened the gate of the picket fence and crossed the back yard, stepping carefully around the gopher holes and the clusters of nettles that stung like wasps, du
cking to avoid the spider webs spun from the tangle of geraniums to the clothesline, and waiting while a lizard shimmied across her path into the safety of the anise weeds which had grown large as shrubs beside the wall of the garage. Cross­ing the back yard was as hazardous as Harold’s trip up the mountain. When Hazel was feeling a little depressed, and consequently vulnerable to superstition and guilt, she believed that her back yard, with all its sprawling re­production and confusion of nature, was getting back at her for certain lapses in her own life.

  She had tried once to explain it to George: “It’s like the minute my back is turned, things happen—you know?—they all get together and whoop it up.”

  Hazel never caught them whooping it up, but the evi­dence was there: an extra million ants hustling up and down the orange tree, more nests of snails at the roots of the geraniums, new little mounds of earth made by new little gophers, and fresh spider webs strung across the windows and under the eaves. She hosed the ants off the orange tree, she swept away the spider webs and crushed the snails with a spade. She put poisoned grain into the gopher holes. The gophers smelled her scent and avoided the grain, and eventually it sprouted up all over the yard into bright green tufts of wild rice. She set metal traps baited with raw apple and raisins. In order to evade the traps, the gophers dug more and deeper tunnels.

  After that she tried an entirely new system, suggested by Josephine’s cousin who owned a ranch and presumably knew gophers like the back of his hand. In every open hole, Hazel stuck the top half of a broken beer bottle. Josephine’s ranching cousin claimed that gophers were unable to turn around in their holes and that they would commit involuntary suicide on the jagged ends of glass. The beer bottles sticking out all over the yard puzzled everyone, including the gophers. They nibbled a little of the glass, found it too hard to chew, and returned to their normal diet. One of the gophers died of old age and over­eating.

  Just as the weeds and animals had got out of control in Hazel’s back yard, so had the people in her life, her cousin, Ruth, her younger brother, Harold, who drove a truck for a furniture store, Harold’s wife, Josephine, and, in a few more months, Josephine’s child. There was no longer any minute of the day or any square foot of the house that Hazel could call her own.

  Even before she opened the kitchen door, she could hear them talking, Ruth’s high, taut, suffering voice, and Harold’s quiet worried one.

  “—but strawberries and artichokes, that’s going too far, Harold.”

  “The doctor said—”

  “The strawberry season is over. You don’t seem to realize how much food costs these days.”

  “Hazel said I was to satisfy Josephine’s cravings.”

  “We all go through life with unsatisfied cravings, Harold. And not just for artichokes and strawberries, either.”

  “Even so.”

  “Cabbage is excellent nutrition for expectant mothers. It contains calcium.”

  “Josephine hates the smell.”

  “We could use a little Air-Wick.”

  Hazel came into the kitchen but they didn’t interrupt their conversation; it was the kind of household where no fuss was made over arrivals and departures, since there were so many of them. Only the little mongrel, Wendy, paid much attention to these matters. She sprang from her place at Ruth’s feet and made a great fuss over Hazel. From somewhere in her obscure ancestry, Wendy had acquired a fine sense of self-preservation, and she seemed to know that Hazel was the head of the house and must be given special notice.

  They were seated across from each other at the round, oilcloth-covered table, Harold drinking a cup of coffee, Ruth cutting up a large head of cabbage into a wooden bowl.

  Hazel leaned down to pat the dog’s firm little rump. “Any more coffee?”

  “On the stove,” Ruth said. “I was just telling Harold—”

  “I heard you from outside.”

  “Well, don’t you agree?”

  “If she wants artichokes, let her have artichokes.”

  “Very well,” Ruth said stiffly. “Very well. I shall eat the cabbage myself.”

  “The calcium will do you good.”

  “There is no growing child inside of me whose little bones need strengthening.”

  “Inside of me either, but I’ll help you eat the cabbage.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table beside Harold. They smiled at each other, very faintly, so that Ruth wouldn’t notice.

  She noticed anyway. “I don’t see what’s so humorous about the high cost of food. I realize that I don’t contribute any actual money to the household, but it’s my job to keep expenses as low as possible, even at the risk of incurring unpopularity.”

  “You’re not unpopular,” Hazel said. “Now forget it.”

  Ever since Ruth began having trouble with her nerves, she had to be treated, on occasion, like a child, to be given firm yes and no answers, and sometimes strict orders or very abrupt changes of subject.

  It was Hazel who usually provided the change of sub­ject.

  “I thought you were going to babysit for the Fosters this afternoon.”

  “I was, yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. Mrs. Foster came home unexpectedly and paid me for a full hour, seventy-five cents, though I was only there half that time. I’ve saved fourteen dollars now . . . Do you think that’s enough?”

  “Enough for what?”

  “The suit,” Harold said and kicked Hazel under the table as a reminder. “The suit she’s going to buy to wear in front of the School Board. Herringbone tweed.”

  “No, not tweed.” Ruth paused, looking reflectively up at the plaster ceiling. “I’ve changed my mind about the tweed. Silk shantung, I think, very simply cut. Don’t you think silk shantung would be better, Hazel? It will still be very warm in September . . . And perhaps if I’m lucky enough to get a real bargain on the suit, I’ll be able to afford a hat as well. I’d like to cover up my hair.”

  “There’s nothing the matter with your hair.”

  “I don’t want them to see what a change there has been in it. They might think something drastic has happened to me the past year, the way I’ve suddenly become gray like this . . . A turban would cover it up nicely. Are they wearing turbans any more, Hazel?”

  “Some people are.”

  “Then I shall aim for a turban.”

  “Ruth—”

  “Then, when I have my outfit all ready, I’ll phone the superintendent and ask for an interview. They say the teacher shortage in town is very acute. Of course they say that every year. I mustn’t build my hopes too high.”

  “No, you mustn’t.”

  “By September, I should have at least twenty dollars.”

  She picked up the wooden bowl of cabbage and carried it over to the sink.

  Hazel looked at her brother. “Where’s Josephine?”

  “Sleeping. I told her to lie down, she looked bad.”

  “You didn’t tell her she looked bad?”

  “No.”

  “I hope to God not.”

  Harold’s responsibilities as a future father weighed heavily on him. He had always been a sweet-natured, dreamy man who could spot a silver lining a mile away, but as soon as Josephine missed her first period, Harold became a worrier. He worried nearly all the time because Josephine looked very frail and had a chronically delicate constitution. Harold had never been ill a day in his life and delicate constitutions fascinated and alarmed him.

  “She’s so little, Hazel.”

  “You talk like she was a midget or something.”

  “It’s not only her size. It’s—well, she’s no spring chicken.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t tell her that. I got enough trouble on my hands.”

  “Sure, I know that,
Haze.”

  “For instance, that yard. You’d think a bunch of for­eigners lived here the way that yard looks. We might as well go live in a jungle.”

  Ruth turned sharply. “Are you implying, Hazel, that I should attend to the outside of the house as well as the in­side?”

  “Speaking of the jungle,” Harold said. “You know what a guy down at the plant told me the other day? He said, in the jungle the natives—well, say for instance the natives are going from one village to another, walking, and the native women are pregnant. They just stop walk­ing, have their babies, and catch up with the rest of the tribe again. Can you beat that?”

  “I keep this house clean,” Ruth said. “There isn’t a cleaner house in town. I can’t be expected to get out and dig in the yard.”

  “We ought to plant something,” Hazel said. “We ought to have a few flowers around the place, like next door.”

  “The people next door have a gardener once a week. It’s easy enough to have flowers if you can afford some­body to look after them. It’s a question of money, the same as practically everything else in this world.”

  Frowning, Hazel picked up her empty cup and began rinsing it under the tap. “I wish I’d meet a millionaire.”

  Hazel often thought quite seriously about her million­aire. His face and age varied in her mind but always he had in his background a frigid wife. Hazel saw herself opening up vistas for this man and having a few vistas opened up in return.

  In a town that was reputedly teeming with million­aires, Hazel had never met one. The closest approximation was her former employer, Arthur W. Cooke, who had a real estate business, a wife, and a black Cadillac big as a hearse. Now and then Mr. Cooke would drop in to in­quire after Hazel’s health. He never stayed more than half an hour and he never indicated any interest in Hazel other than the state of her health. Though Hazel called these occasions “dates,” they were more like visits from the family physician.

  “Suppose I did meet a wealthy man,” Hazel said, “someone with class like Mr. Cooke, for instance, I’d be ashamed to bring him here with all those weeds around the place and the gopher holes . . . It’s a funny thing to me that with all those nice flowers and plants next door that the gophers don’t move over there.”