Wives and Lovers

by Margaret Millar

  “It’s not fair,” she screamed mentally at Mr. Gomez, who was frying a hamburger. “It’s not fair! She’s got everything—Gordon and the house and the kids, and all I’ve got is the back booth in this lousy little joint!”

  The smell of grease rose from the griddle, clung to the walls and seeped into the very pores of Ruby’s skin, blending with the cologne she had splashed on her wrists for Gordon. She felt a little nauseated and dizzy from all the coffee she had drunk, but she sat with her eyes fixed glassily on the front door. Whenever the door opened her mouth got set, ready to smile; when it closed again, and Gordon was still missing, her heart shrank and oozed its juices like the hamburger Mr. Gomez was frying on the griddle.

  She never gave up hope until Gomez changed the sign on the front door from “Open” to “Closed.” Then she rose, picked up her handbag and the fox fur, and said goodnight to Gomez, very gaily, letting him know that she wasn’t at all disappointed, and that, Gordon Foster or no Gordon Foster, this was how she liked to spend her evenings, sipping coffee in Mr. Gomez’s delightful back booth.

  “How the time flies,” she said brightly. “I was so interested sitting here watching the people I didn’t realize how late it was getting. You certainly have an interesting place here!”

  She didn’t fool Gomez, who hated the place more than she did, and she didn’t fool herself either. As soon as she stepped outside, the cold sea wind slapped the smile off her face. I hate him, she thought, running down the street. I hate him. I’ll get back at him. I’ll get even. I’ll go and see his wife. He’ll be sorry.

  But Gordon’s sorrow had already begun, and it was deeper than Ruby realized. It was the sorrow of failure. He had failed Elaine and the children, he had failed Ruby, and he had failed himself. A more self-assured man might have taken a firm stand one way or the other. The only solution Gordon could think of was to go away for a while and leave the burden of decision up to Elaine and Ruby. A vacation, he called it, when he mentioned it to Elaine. He said he thought he’d take a little trip.

  “To San Francisco again?” Elaine said with sweet irony.

  “What do you mean, again?”

  “I only meant that you seem to have had such a gay time there a couple of months ago.”

  “You’ve got a funny idea of a gay time,” Gordon said. “I was at lectures damn near all day, every day.” After one lecture he had picked Ruby up in a hotel lobby but he still couldn’t understand why Elaine should suspect this. “That was a business trip. A dentist has to keep up with the latest developments and equipment. This time I want a holiday. I thought of Mexico, Ensenada perhaps.”

  “Mexico?”

  “What’s the matter with Mexico?”

  “Did I say there was anything the matter with Mexico, dear?”

  “You said it as if you suddenly smelled a bad smell.”

  Elaine smiled gently. “There you go imagining things again, dear. You’re getting so sensitive. I wonder if it could be glandular.”

  “Listen, I know how you said ‘Mexico.’ Don’t try and kid me.”

  “Really, Gordon, you’re becoming impossible. I’ve thought time and again that perhaps you should go and see a doctor. Glandular disturbances are common at your age.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Gordon said, sweating.

  “All this fuss simply because I said ‘Mexico’ in a perfectly ordinary tone of voice. I’m sure I’ve got nothing against Mexico. Of course I’ve heard it’s terribly dirty. You can’t drink the water at all without boiling it, and you have to be awfully careful about the food, cholera and things like that.”

  Elaine could, with a few well-chosen words, reduce anything to its lowest common multiple. Having deflated Gordon and crushed Mexico, she went to work with undiminished fervor on vacations in general and Gordon’s in particular. It was a funny thing, Elaine said, that men took vacations every now and then while women went right on year after year without any kind of rest or holiday at all. Anyway, did Gordon really think it was wise to leave right now?

  “After all, dear, you’ve got your family to think about. It isn’t as if you were in some business that could carry on without you. I mean, every day that you’re not at the office and don’t keep your appointments, you’re losing money. You have your overhead, and Hazel’s salary, and you know how many new dentists, all of them veterans too, are opening up offices here. After all, you’re in a competitive profession. If you’re going to be away from the office half the time your patients are going to feel that they can’t depend on you.”

  In one short speech she had managed to convey to Gordon that he was a shirker who hadn’t helped win the war, as well as lazy, impractical, thoughtless, incompetent and irresponsible.

  Elaine considered herself a true gentlewoman. She never raised her voice or swore, and even when driven into a corner by fate she used only legitimate womanly weapons like her children, her bed and soft words strung on steel. She had betrayed Gordon on the day she married him by telling her mother that she knew Gordon had a weak character and that she would have to be strong for both of them. Elaine often recalled this speech, which she termed “realistic,” and which she considered remarkably shrewd for a girl so “young”—she was twenty-seven on the day she was married. Not six months later, she told Gordon of her speech to her mother. Gordon was shocked, not by her malice, which she had already revealed in many small ways, but by the fact that she despised him. She made it clear that it was only her own iron will and determination which kept Gordon on the straight and narrow and confined him to his office twelve hours a day. Gordon was thirty then, and working very hard to build up a practice so that he could buy Elaine a new house. He was quite surprised to find out that he was a weak character, and inexperienced enough to take the criticism se­riously. In the end, after Elaine had given him a gentle heart-to-heart talk, Gordon was convinced that he was indeed weak and that it was Elaine’s personal power that turned the drill and kept him confined in the magnetic circle of office-and-home.

  With this new self-knowledge inflicted on him by Elaine came a gradual change in personality. He began to doubt himself and his motives. He was grateful to anyone, man or woman, who paid him any attention. He was awed by his three children, who seemed to despise him as much as Elaine did.

  “Gordon,” Elaine told her friends with a tolerant little smile, “is not the fatherly type.” Above the smile her eyes added a personal little message to Gordon alone: You’re a very poor father, admit it, dear.

  Gordon walked through the years in a kind of numb bewilderment.

  In the early summer of his thirty-ninth year, in the lobby of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, a young woman asked him for a match.

  She had dark hair and a thin, pointed face. The first thing Gordon noticed about her was her underdeveloped jaw. There wouldn’t be room for a normal set of teeth there, Gordon thought, and he wondered whether her teeth were exceptionally small or whether some of them had been removed to prevent overlapping.

  “Sorry,” he said, patting his coat pockets automatically. “I don’t smoke.”

  “Oh. Well. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She added, with a self-conscious little laugh, “Honestly, I don’t smoke either, only about once a year. But I was supposed to meet a certain party here and I’ve been waiting so long, I just thought a cigarette would help.”

  They sat side by side under a potted palm tree, Gordon with his newspaper on his lap, and Ruby fingering the clasp of her purse.

  “All I’m afraid of is that I missed my party,” Ruby said. “The lobby is so crowded, there must be a conven­tion or something.”

  “Dentists,” Gordon said.

  “Oh, that’s it then. I wondered. Well—” She closed her purse with an air of finality and put on one of her gloves. “Well, I guess my party must be afraid of dentists or something—”

  G
ordon laughed. “Everybody is.”

  “Well, I don’t blame them! I shiver every time I think of a dentist.”

  “Are you shivering now?”

  Her eyes grew wide. “Why?”

  “I’m one.”

  “No!”

  “I am.”

  “Gosh, and to think I’ve been sitting beside you all this time without a single shiver! But you don’t look a bit like a dentist. You look like, a lawyer or a doctor, maybe.”

  Gordon was flattered. He had belonged for years to a club for professional men, but he had never got over the feeling that the doctors and lawyers among the members were superior to him, and that dentistry was the poor country cousin of medicine and law. Elaine lent her aid to this feeling. When the club held its monthly Ladies’ Night, Elaine was ostentatiously self-effacing, as if to remind everyone that she was, after all, only a dentist’s wife and had no right to open her mouth. She sometimes said as much to the other wives. “Of course it’s different with you, I’m only a poor dentist’s wife.” This remark caused acute embarrassment among the other women who found themselves forced to belittle their husbands and their husbands’ professions to make Elaine comfortable, or else to extol the art of dentistry: Where would we all be without dentists, I’d like to know. My goodness, dentists are terribly important.

  The fact was that dentists were very important, and after two days of the convention Gordon was beginning to feel proud that he was a man who was doing hard and important work for the welfare of humanity. He was a little afraid for his new pride, though. It was too precious and fragile a thing to survive the journey home, and God knew, he’d never get it past the front door of his house.

  He thought of Elaine, not bitterly, but with a kind of helpless pity. Whatever Elaine had wanted and expected from her marriage—great wealth? social position? an idyll of romance?—she hadn’t got it and he was unable to give it to her. She was, in the long run, worse off than he was. He had his job, he could become so absorbed in his work that he sometimes didn’t think of Elaine for two or three hours. He knew that Elaine had no such respite, that she was always conscious of him as she would have been conscious of a continuous nagging toothache.

  He hadn’t, come to think of it, remembered Elaine once all day until the girl in the chair beside him asked him for a match. What had the girl said?—that he looked like a doctor or a lawyer. Some answer was expected of him, he must play the game, whatever it was.

  “Appearances,” he said with ponderous humor, “are deceiving.”

  “Aren’t they just!” She laughed, and he saw that her teeth were very small and even, like canine incisors. “Still, I always say I can tell a nice character by his face, I really can too. Look, isn’t that someone waving at you, over there by the cigar counter?”

  Gordon turned, and recognizing a colleague of his, he waved back.

  “He’s from my home town,” Gordon said. He men­tioned the name of the town. Ruby said that she’d never been there but she knew lots of people who had, and they all agreed that it was the most beautiful place in the country.

  “I certainly intend to go there,” she said. “I’ve just never found the time and my parents are terribly old school. They think girls should stay home all the time.”

  “Do you work any place?”

  “Just for the fun of it I’m working at the perfume counter in Magrim’s. Honestly, the people you meet! I never had any idea how the other half lives.”

  “Didn’t you?” Gordon smiled at her innocence.

  “Actually I’m not crazy about working, but it’s better than sitting at home watching Daddy fuss over his silly stamps and coins. A girl should get out on her own, don’t you agree?”

  Gordon agreed.

  Ruby’s “party” failed to appear. Gordon had intended to go to a movie by himself but he couldn’t think of any polite way to abandon the girl. She was too young to sit around a hotel lobby alone so Gordon offered to get her a taxi and send her home.

  “That’s terribly kind of you,” Ruby said with a rueful little smile. “But I guess it wouldn’t do much good for me to go home this early. Mummy and Daddy are out tonight and I haven’t got a key.”

  Gordon took her along to the movie. She was a trusting little thing. Even though he was a complete stranger she seemed to rely on him already and when they walked down the dark aisle she put her hand on his coat sleeve, tugging at it like a child who doesn’t want to be left behind.

  Three days later she still didn’t want to be left behind.

  “Don’t go, Gordon, please.”

  “I have to. You don’t understand. I told you about Elaine and the children and my work.”

  “Take me with you.”

  “I can’t, Ruby.”

  “Will you be back?”

  “You know I will.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll change your mind.”

  “I would if I could,” Gordon said quietly. “It’s too late, I love you.”

  “Say it again.”

  “I love you.”

  “What if I never see you again?” she sobbed. “What if you change your mind?”

  “I won’t.” He held her in his arms while she wept. “I’ll be back, darling. Don’t worry, don’t cry,”

  She sobbed over and over again, “What if I never see you again?”

  He drove home alone, buoyant, frightened, intoxicated, ashamed of himself, confused, in love. Once or twice as he drove along the rocky coast he thought of sending himself and the car over the cliff, but he didn’t do it, and when he got home, Elaine seemed genuinely glad to see him.

  Elaine fussed over him, unpacked his suitcase, and told him he was looking tired.

  “Staying up late at all those burlesque shows, I bet!” she said with a gay laugh.

  “I didn’t go to any burlesque shows.”

  “My goodness, I thought that’s what conventions were for!”

  He looked at her steadily. “Did you?”

  “What’s the matter with you, Gordon? Can’t you take a joke any more?”

  “It depends on the joke.”

  “As if I didn’t know you have too much self-respect to go to a burlesque show,” Elaine said reproachfully. “What did you do with your evenings?”

  “I went to the movies,” Gordon said. I fell in love with a girl named Ruby. At first I thought she was just an innocent, wide-eyed kid, and then afterwards at the movie I thought she was an ordinary pick-up. When it was too late I found out something else—she was a virgin.

  Four days later he had a letter from her. During office hours he kept the letter in his pocket and at night he left it in the office safe.

  Dear Gordon:

  I guess by this time you’ve forgotten all about me and I wouldn’t blame you, really I wouldn’t Gordon, I’m not worthy to shine your shoes. In fact I’ve got some things on my conscience and I thought I’d tell you, then if you’ve forgotten me you can just read this and forget it too, but if you haven’t and if you still feel about me the way I do about you, you will know anyway that I’m trying to play fair and square with you. Well, here goes, Gordon.

  I wasn’t waiting for anybody that night in the lobby, I was just sitting there. I was walking home and I got tired so I went and sat there pretending I was waiting for someone because otherwise it wouldn’t be good taste. Isn’t it funny Gordon that if my feet hadn’t been hurting I wouldn’t ever have met you. I’m glad I did, no matter what happens to us I’ll never be sorry. I swear on my honor I never did that before, talking to a strange man like that and I will never do it again. I haven’t even looked at another man since you left, what’s the use they look silly beside you.

  Point two: I told you I lived with my parents, this isn’t true either because my parents are divorced and have married other peo
ple and I live with my aunt and cousin, my cousin is older than I and she has a good job. I guess you will think I am a terrible liar. I don’t know why I said that about my parents I haven’t seen them for years, but I want you to know the truth now anyway because I love you Gordon. I’ve never been in love before only crushes.

  I guess that’s all Gordon. I hope you won’t hate me the way I hate myself for telling you those lies, but I wouldn’t blame you if you turned against me. I am not good enough for you maybe I never will be but I’m going to try hard. I think of you all the time, please write to me Gordon. I love you. Ruby.

  Every evening, while Hazel was cleaning up the front office, Gordon went into the lab and sat down on the high stool. He read the letter over and over and then he put his head down on the lab table and wept without tears.

  Ruby arrived in town three weeks later. She came by bus carrying a suitcase containing two letters from Gordon, a few clothes and her aunt’s red fox neckpiece (borrowed for a limited time only). She had nearly two hundred dollars, scraped together from various sources. Seventy dollars was her own, her cousin lent her twenty-five, and a hundred came from her father in Seattle. She had written to him for the first time in two years telling him she was going to be married and needed money for a trousseau. Her father sent her a check and a note wishing her happiness and telling her not to mention the check to her mother under any circumstances.

  She took a room in a boarding house a couple of blocks from the bus terminal. Here she unpacked her suitcase, shook out the red fox neckpiece and washed her face. Then she went to the nearest café to phone Gordon and have something to eat.

  She sat down in a booth, trembling with weariness and excitement. She was here at last, in the same city as Gordon, perhaps even just a few blocks from him right this minute. From now on all her days would be colored by the possibility of seeing Gordon. He might be walking past the café right now (she looked and could see nothing beyond the closed Venetian blind) and every time she stepped out of the door she might catch a glimpse of his car. She had memorized the license number on that first night, standing on the curb outside Gordon’s hotel. She had repeated it aloud over and over, without realizing why. Everything that concerned Gordon had become absorbingly important to her, with the exception of Elaine. She thought of Elaine vaguely as a shadow-figure crossing Gordon’s path now and then without touching him or interfering with him. Ruby’s one-sided imagination flung a veil over Elaine and her children, her own future, her financial difficulties, Gordon’s reputation, and any preconceived notions she had of right and wrong. Right was something you were going to do anyway, and if it didn’t justify itself afterwards it became wrong. Ruby’s mind worked with disastrous simplicity. It was “wrong” to lie to Gordon about her parents, but it was “right” to follow him here without telling him about it in advance or asking his opinion.