Wives and Lovers

by Margaret Millar

  Mrs. Freeman was, on the whole, rather glad to see Ruby.

  “You gave me a start,” she said, drawing a deep breath. “I confess, I’ve never gotten used to staying alone in the house. You never can tell. Look at all those sex murders down in L.A. Even a town like this, I bet you’d be surprised at the things that are going on. My advice to young girls, and I see a lot of them, running a place like this, my advice is to stay out of bars. Bars are the breeding place of crime, also they don’t wash the glasses properly, I’ve heard, just rinse them in cold water. By the way, that Mr. Anderson phoned for you. Wait a minute, he left a number for you to call. Here it is, 23664.”

  Without answering, Ruby started up the stairs.

  “Aren’t you going to call him?”

  “No—no, I’m too tired.”

  “Maybe it’s about the job he promised you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake,” Mrs. Freeman said. “Yon ought to care. Jobs don’t grow on trees. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know.” She paused, leaning against the ban­ister. “I don’t want to talk to him. He makes me feel crawly.”

  “Crawly, for goodness sake. I thought he was such a nice man, clean-cut looking. Crawly. The way you girls talk, I don’t understand you.”

  Ruby merely stared at her woodenly.

  Mrs. Freeman said, offended, “It’s none of my business, but I can’t help taking an interest and when I see a nice-looking man obviously all gone on a girl—and what with the war and so many young men being killed, girls can’t afford to be too choosy.”

  “I’m not looking for a young man.”

  “Even so, you should be sensible. You can’t have too many irons in the fire.” Mrs. Freeman shook her head in sincere bewilderment. “Here is this man, putting himself out to get you a job and you won’t even call him, no, he makes you feel crawly, you put on an emotional display.”

  Some of the bitter resentment Ruby felt against Gordon spilled over on Mrs. Freeman and George. “I know it’s none of your business, but I don’t like him and I don’t like the way he looks at me. Also he’s too fat and his face is too pink and shaved-looking. And I don’t like the way he talks to me as if I was a worm.”

  “Even so,” Mrs. Freeman said helplessly. “Even so.”

  She had no daughters of her own and so she had devel­oped a proprietary interest in the young unmarried women who came to her house. Her chief concern was to get them married. In spite of her own experience, she still believed that marriage had curative qualities and that a bad husband was better than no husband at all. She was worried by the fact that most of the girls she knew were like Ruby. They had left their homes in search of romance, and overweight pink-faced men didn’t belong in their dreams.

  Mrs. Freeman read the Vital Statistics in the paper every night and she was shocked by the number of di­vorces in the town. She blamed it partly on the town itself. People who saw it for the first time believed that they had reached the end of the rainbow, here between the violet mountains and the jeweled sea. And it was the end of the rainbow, Mrs. Freeman knew that; but she knew, too, how difficult it was to live there. The romantic postcard perfection of nature contrasted too sharply with the ordinary human existence. The stretches of beach, the parks, the bridle paths, the mountain trails—they were there, free for everybody, except the girls like Ruby who worked all week and washed and ironed their clothes on Sunday. Living beside a subway in Flatbush or in a small flat town in Kansas, they could have held on to their dreams of traveling some day to a tropical Eden. Now that they had reached Eden they were all the more discontented to find themselves leading the same old lives. The end of the rainbow was no longer around the corner; it was six miles north to the mountains and nineteen blocks south to the sea. Yet these blocks were more difficult to travel than three thousand miles across the country.

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Freeman said, still with her air of helplessness. “Maybe it’s true about every place, but here it’s very true, people expect too much.”

  “I expect nothing,” Ruby said.

  “I remember once when I first came here years ago. It was in the spring and I was standing out in the yard at night. The acacia tree was in bloom and the moon was so bright that the shadows were as sharp as sun shadows and I could see the little yellow acacia blossoms like chenille. I picked a sprig and held it against my face, so soft, like a baby’s fingers. The sky was full of stars, and the air wasn’t just air, it was rich and thick and cold, I can’t describe it. There was a bird at the top of the tree making a funny little noise, a mockingbird perhaps. I had such an odd feeling, standing there, as if anything might happen in the midst of all this beauty, something wonderful. I saw Robert’s shadow against the kitchen blind, this very kitchen, and he looked as handsome as a god. Oh, the feeling I had.”

  She paused, twisting the wedding ring round and round her finger.

  “Well?” Ruby said.

  “Well, then Robert flung open the kitchen window, and told me to come in, he was hungry and wanted a grilled-cheese sandwich.” She added, very earnestly, “I’m glad he did. It was a good lesson for me. Acacia doesn’t last long after it’s picked. I put it in water but the blossoms got smaller and smaller and finally they fell off.”

  The doorbell pealed. Smoothing down her dress and adjusting her face into an expression of amiability, just in case, Mrs. Freeman answered the door.

  She was agreeably surprised to see George, who was not too pink-faced or fat, merely a sturdy, healthy-looking man.

  “She just came in,” Mrs. Freeman said. “Ruby, here’s Mr. Anderson.”

  Ruby came down the stairs slowly.

  “I left my number for you to call,” George said.

  “I just got home.”

  “I thought you might like to go for a drive or some­thing.”

  “It’s a nice evening,” Mrs. Freeman said. “And too late in the year for acacia.”

  She returned to her letters.

  “What’d she mean by that?” George said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You look tired, Ruby.”

  “You’re always telling me that.”

  “Am I? I’m sorry. I can’t help paying attention to how you look. It’s getting to be a habit, I guess. Will you be warm enough in that suit?”

  “It’s getting late—”

  “You can’t turn me down all the time. Anyway, it’s Saturday night, and everybody celebrates on Saturday night.”

  “What do they celebrate?” Ruby said dully.

  “Anything.” He held the screen door open and she went out on the porch. “Are you going to be warm enough? Maybe you’d better get a coat.”

  “No, I’ll be all right.”

  He put his hand on her elbow, and guided her down the porch steps and across the clay path that substituted for a sidewalk. She didn’t shrink away from him as she usually did. She felt too remote to bother about it, as if she had had a great deal to drink and while she was still conscious of what was happening to her she had no interest in it.

  George started the car. “Is there any special place you’d like to go?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll just drive around then,”

  “Where’s Garcia Road?”

  “What number?”

  “Twenty-three hundred.”

  “That’d be up in the hills. Why?”

  “Nothing. I just overheard a—a customer say he lived there, that’s all. I wondered what it was like.”

  “We’ll go and find out,” George said cheerfully. “Got to check up on our customers, see that they come from the right kind of houses.”

  “No—no, I’d just as soon not. I’d just as soon drive along the beach.”

 
; “All right.” He sent her a quick, puzzled glance. Her evasions irritated him. She had no reason to treat him as if he were a district attorney and she was accused of a crime. Yet this was actually how he felt about her. He wanted to put her on a spot and question her about her­self, find out a few things about her. Her face rarely re­vealed anything but a kind of resigned unhappiness, and it was this expression of hers that agitated him. If she had cause for her unhappiness—money troubles? sickness in the family? loneliness?—he wanted her to break down and tell him, to bawl on his shoulder the way Hazel used to do.

  They drove along toward the Mesa and George thought about Hazel and the night she had said out of a blue sky, “Jesus, I feel just like bawling the house down.” And bawl the house down she did, for a solid hour, until the police drove up to the front of the house, summoned by a neighbor to stop George from beating his wife. Hazel was delighted and she brought out two quarts of beer to celebrate the unexpected company. Neither of the two policemen could drink anything, since they were on duty, but Hazel invited them to come back during their off hours. They came back every now and then, bringing a friend or two, until eventually Hazel knew the whole police department.

  “It must be lonely for you,” George said, “not knowing anyone in town.”

  “I get along,” Ruby said. “I—read a lot. And write letters home.”

  “How are your mother and father?”

  “Fine.”

  “Don’t you miss the big city?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And your friends?”

  “I’m not much for parties or things like that.”

  “Maybe you should get out more, have a little fun and excitement.”

  “I’d just be bored.”

  “You should try it anyway.”

  “I used to go to parties at school. I never had a good time. I was scared to death of the boys. I couldn’t even open my mouth.”

  “You still are,” George said. “Scared, I mean.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Of me, anyway.”

  “No.”

  “Then I wish you were. I’d like to think I rang some kind of a bell with you somehow.” He kept his attention for a minute on the narrow winding road that crept up the Mesa. Then he said, “I need a drink. How about you?”

  “If you want one, all right.”

  “You certainly are an enthusiastic gal tonight. Is there anything worrying you?”

  “No.”

  “And you wouldn’t tell me anyway, I get it.” He made a right turn at the next crossing. “Here’s your Garcia Road.”

  “I didn’t want to— Say, what’s the big idea anyway?”

  “I didn’t believe that about ‘one of the customers.’”

  “I don’t care what you believe, Mr. Anderson.”

  “Here’s your twenty-three hundred.” George put the car in low and they went very slowly past a white frame ranch house. “Satisfied?”

  She didn’t even look at the house. “Yes, thank you.”

  “Who lives there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can easily look it up in the City Directory.”

  “Why bother?”

  “Because it worries me. I think you told me a lie. Who lives there?”

  “One of the customers, I don’t know his name. And you can let me out of this car right now. I’ll walk home. I never wanted to come anyway. You’re always accusing me of things.”

  Instead of stopping the car he raced the engine and they shot ahead, up the hill.

  “Why should I lie?” Ruby said. “If it was anyone I knew lived in that house why should I have mentioned it?”

  “Maybe you thought I was too dumb to catch on, eh?”

  “You can’t catch on when there’s nothing to catch on to, no matter how smart you are.”

  “I didn’t say I was smart. I only want to be sure. I suppose I’m jealous of you, but if I tell you that you’ll only say I have no right to be jealous of you. Which is perfectly true.”

  “Well, it is.”

  “I said it first,” George said flatly. “Where do you want to go for a drink?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “You know what? I’d like to see you drunk sometime, Ruby. I bet you can be pretty vicious.”

  “You’ll never find out,” she said with a sharp laugh.

  “I wouldn’t want to. I like you better the way you are, so full of secrets you’re bursting at the seams.”

  “You certainly have some funny ideas about me, Mr. Anderson. I can’t understand why you want to take me out all the time, when all you do is quarrel with me. Maybe you’re just a bully.”

  “I’d hate to think that.”

  “And whenever we’re out together all you want to talk about is me and what’s the matter with me and what a funny girl I am. I don’t talk about you like that.”

  “That’s because you’re not interested.”

  “Why can’t we ever talk about something else for a change? I’m—I’m so sick of myself I never even want to hear my own name again.” She covered her face with her hands, and with her closed eyes she saw Gordon looking at her with such quiet loathing that she wanted to tear at her own face for inspiring such a look. “I’m so sick of myself I could die. I hate—”

  “Be quiet,” George said harshly. “That’s a hell of a way to talk.”

  “I hate my own face, I hate it so much I’d like to slash it with a razor, I’d like to slash everything, everything I see!”

  He pulled the car over to the curb and turned off the ignition. He said, with pain in his voice, “That’s kid stuff, Ruby, stop it.”

  “A lot you know about it!”

  “I do. You’re just depressed. You’ll snap out of it.”

  She shook her head over and over again, refusing to be comforted. Powerless, he listened to her flow of words: it was a bad world, with bad people in it, she was as bad as the rest, worse, hateful.

  Finally he started the car again. He didn’t know what to do about Ruby. He couldn’t force himself to try and stop her hysteria with a slap, and he couldn’t take her back to Mrs. Freeman’s until she calmed down.

  He thought suddenly of Hazel. Her house was less than half a mile away; he could stop there and leave Ruby in the car while he got some whisky from Hazel. Hazel wouldn’t mind, as long as she didn’t know it was for Ruby.

  “I’ll stop off and get you something to drink,” George said. “It will make you feel better.”

  “A drink—you think a drink will cure anything, any­thing in the world—”

  “It helps, sometimes.”

  “It can’t help me, nothing can.”

  “Let’s try it.”

  “You don’t know, you don’t know—”

  “I don’t want to know. Just take it easy.”

  She kept silent until he parked the car in front of Hazel’s white stucco house. Then she said, in a low voice, “You’re being very kind to me. It’s no use, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, it’s just no use.”

  “We’ll see.”

  He got out and walked around the lane to the back of the house. Parked beside the fence there was a car he didn’t recognize, a black Cadillac with a monogram on the driver’s door which was too elaborate to be deciphered at one glance.

  George passed the car and went through the gate toward the back door. The moon had come up and it hung like a fruit among the top branches of the oak tree behind the garage. From the garage itself there came the scurrying and bustling noises of the wood rats as they raced along the ceiling and up and down the walls. Sometimes when George used to get his car out of the garage in the mornings he found their tiny paw marks i
n the dust on the engine hood. Aside from the paw marks and the dust they shook down from the ceiling, the wood rats did no harm. Their noise disturbed Hazel, though, and she used to go out now and then and bang on the garage roof with a broom. The wood rats froze in their tracks while Hazel banged away, breaking one or two of the tiles in her fury; but as soon as she returned to the house they started again, louder than ever, until the garage seemed to be cracking open. George had never been able to trap a wood rat, in fact he had never even seen one. The evidence that they existed at all was purely circumstantial, the noise and the paw marks on the roof tiles or on the engine hood of the car, like the tracks of the invisible man.

  The sounds from the garage suddenly ceased, as though the rats had sensed the presence of an intruder. They seemed to be watching from under the tiles, listening, waiting for the stranger to leave the yard. George was struck by a feeling of loss and resentment. He thought, by God, I used to live here, this was my yard. I planted those two orange trees myself, with my own hands. And the hedge too . . . the hedge has been clipped, it looks too neat, like Willie’s mustache . . . I ought to get back to work, what in hell am I doing here anyway?

  The hedge had grown, as thick as a wall and as high as Ruby. He looked at it as he crossed the yard, feeling almost betrayed, as if he’d half-expected it to stop growing during his absence.

  He went up the steps of the back porch and rapped, hes­itantly, on the screen door.

  Harold and Josephine were at the kitchen table, making sandwiches. Harold was buttering bread and Josephine was slicing some meat loaf. Whenever a crumb of meat fell on the table Josephine picked it up and popped it in her mouth in a natural, unself-conscious way. They were both sunburned from their afternoon in the sailboat, and a row of freckles had sprung up out of nowhere along the bridge of Josephine’s nose.