Wives and Lovers

by Margaret Millar

  “It’s how I feel anyway.”

  “So you’re looking around for a nice sensible widow for me?”

  “Sure. Sure I am. Just today at lunch in the cafeteria I met a very—”

  “What a liar you are, Hazel. You almost make me laugh.”

  “Laugh yourself sick if you want to. I’m going back to bed. I have to get up early for work.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “Why should I? All you can do is swear at me and call me names.”

  “I can do more than that.”

  “I wish you’d—”

  “I can do a lot more than that, even without your co­operation.”

  “You’d better leave. I think you’re drunk.”

  She stepped back, pulling her bathrobe closer around her throat.

  “Afraid of me, Hazel?”

  “No.”

  “You are, though. You’re shaking like a leaf. What do you think I’m going to do to you?”

  She shook her head.

  “What would you like me to do?”

  “Take—take your hands off me.”

  “That’s what you really want?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”

  “When I touch you like this you feel no response?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “No! Yes! I’m sure.”

  “All right. I just thought I’d ask.”

  He took his hands away, looked at them for a moment as if they were strange new parts of his body, and put them in his pocket. The color had drained out of his face and his eyes bulged, dark and glassy like marbles.

  Walking over to the table he pulled out a chair and sat down and crossed his legs, moving stiffly as if he was in pain.

  He said in a low voice, “You’d better start looking a little harder for that widow. I don’t like living alone.”

  “George.”

  “I guess I owe you an apology. All right. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too.”

  “You? What for?”

  “The money.”

  “The money,” he repeated with a grim little smile. “That seems like a long time ago. It hardly matters any more.”

  “What does matter?”

  “Nothing that I can think of.”

  “Did you—” Hazel stopped and swallowed hard. “Did you love her very much?”

  “Christ. What a question.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “I thought about her a lot. When she was away I wanted to see her, but when I saw her she made me nervous, I couldn’t stand her sometimes. If that’s love, I loved her.”

  “That isn’t how you used to feel about me, is it, George?”

  “No.”

  “We had a lot of laughs together, didn’t we? Remember the time you brought home that wrestler from New Jersey and he damn near wrecked the place and finally you had to pin him down?”

  “I didn’t pin him down,” he said flatly. “He practically passed out. He could have broken my neck if he’d have been sober.”

  “That’s not true. You’re very strong.”

  “Oh stop it, Hazel.”

  “Well, you are.”

  “Stop it. I’m tired, I’m sick of myself. I’m a big fat nothing, let’s face it.”

  “You’re just feeling a little low tonight. Tomorrow morning you’ll—”

  “Tomorrow morning, next week, next month. It seems to me that all I’ve had for the past year is a future. The hell with it. I’d sell thirty years of future for ten minutes of present.”

  “You’re pretty hard up then.”

  “Sure I am. What do you expect? I haven’t had a wife for over a year.”

  The phone began to ring in the dining room and Hazel went to answer it. It was impossible to tell from her ex­pression whether she was relieved or disappointed by the interruption, but when she spoke into the telephone she sounded quite cross.

  “Hello? Yes, it’s me . . . Now wait a minute, take it easy. Are you sure? . . . Well, lock all the doors and call the police . . . Who cares what she’d think, she’s halfway to Chicago by this time . . . You’re sure you’re not imagining things? . . . Well, wait a minute. George is here. Talk to him.”

  She turned to call George but he was already there at her elbow.

  He said, “Who is it?”

  “Ruth. She’s staying with the Foster kids while Elaine’s away. She says there’s a burglar trying to get into the house.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I know, but suppose there really is?”

  “I’ll talk to her.” He took the phone from Hazel’s hand. “Ruth, it’s George. Now what’s this about a burglar?”

  Ruth’s voice came over the wire, dripping bitterness. “Oh, I heard what you said. I know what you’re thinking, that it’s all in my imagination. Well, I didn’t imagine the dog barking, I didn’t imagine someone trying the back door, I didn’t im—”

  “All right, Ruth, you didn’t.”

  “He’s out there now. I saw him with my own eyes, standing in the yard. And there’s a car parked out on the street. I can’t see if anyone’s in it but there might be, there might even be a whole gang of them. A man came around this afternoon trying to sell vacuum cleaners. I told him the Fosters were away, I was only the housekeeper. It could be the same man. I can’t tell, it’s too foggy.”

  “Well, sit tight until I get there.”

  “I hate to put you to this trouble.”

  “No trouble at all,” George said dryly. “I haven’t anything else to do. It’ll keep me out of mischief.”

  Hazel followed him to the front door. “I could go with you, George.”

  “I’m in a hurry and you’re not dressed.”

  “I could slip a coat on. It won’t take me a minute. I’d like to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, the excitement, I guess.”

  “Is that all?”

  She shook her head, rather shyly.

  “What’s the real reason, Hazel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do,” George said. “You don’t want to be left alone. You’d rather come with me, not because it’s me—I’m nothing special as far as you’re concerned—but just to get out of an empty house.”

  “That’s not true, not all of it is, anyway.” She opened the door for him and the fog drifted into the room like ectoplasm. “You could come back and tell me all about it.”

  “I could. Do you want me to?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be damned,” George said and went out to his car. He walked very quickly as if purposely gathering mo­mentum to carry him along in case his decision to leave should begin to falter.

  Ruth put down the phone, and tiptoed through the dark­ness to the front hall. Here, on the bottom step of the staircase, she sat with the brass poker across her lap and the little dog at her feet, a pair of strange sentinels guard­ing the sleeping children.

  The whole house was quiet. All the noise and confusion, the screams for help, the wail of sirens, the shriek of brakes, she had heard merely in her own mind. The only real noises had been the barking of the little dog and the faint but unmistakable click of the back-door latch.

  She was afraid, but pushing its way up through the cold layers of fear was a feeling of triumph. The prowler out­side was her enemy, the synthesis of all her enemies; he was real and alive and identifiable, and she was armed against him, guarding the children, with help on the way.

  16

  Even on a sunny day it was a quiet neighborhood. Men went to their offices early in the morning and returned in the evening to eat dinner and read the newspaper and watch
television behind closed blinds. Young children were kept off the street in nursery schools or walled patios, and dogs were fenced. It was a neighborhood built by and for retired people and members of the younger professional set who were on the way up.

  Gordon didn’t belong there; he had never felt any sense of belonging. When he came home from his office after the day’s work he usually hesitated a moment outside the front door as if he was not sure whether it was his own door, or what lay behind it, his wife, Elaine, or some hostile stranger.

  There was only one light on in the house, the night light in the upstairs bathroom. Elaine always left it on for the children so he knew they must be there, all four of them, sleeping quietly and not caring whether he came back or not. His absence seemed to have made only two differences: Elaine had been more careful about locking the doors, and she had bought a dog. He wondered whether the dog was intended as protection or as compensation for the children. A dog in exchange for a husband. Well, that’s fair enough, he thought wryly. Elaine doesn’t like either breed.

  He leaned back against the slippery trunk of the loquat tree. Fog condensed on its leathery leaves and dripped on the ground with a monotonous little tune, plink, plunk, like a dozen leaking faucets. Plink, plunk, the tune was taken up by the bougainvillea over the garage and the hibiscus along the patio wall and the row of red-flowering eucalyptus that bordered the street. The sound reminded him of when he was a boy in Minnesota; in the spring the icicles that had hung stiff as quartz from the eaves through­out the winter started to melt until they fell loose and shattered, and the ice on the pond split open and water began to gurgle up through the cracks. Water sounds, dripping sounds everywhere. The first thaw in spring was almost as noisy as the first storm in autumn.

  A cold trickle of moisture slid down the back of his neck. He pulled up his collar and walked silently through the fog to the front of the house. He had meant to arrive earlier, he had started out at dinner time from San Luis Obispo but as soon as the highway curved west to the coast the fog had struck like a crippling plague. Sleek young cars became gray and slow and anemic and moved like a procession of old men.

  He went up the porch steps and sat down on the blue canvas glider, and from the inside of the house the dog began to bark again, in a higher pitch of hysteria and frustration. It wants to get out and bite me, chase me away, Gordon thought. I am an intruder. The house already belongs to him.

  He was certain that the dog’s barking would wake Elaine, and now that the moment was at hand when he must face her he felt uneasy and afraid. He couldn’t re­member all the compelling arguments he’d thought of dur­ing the day. He had planned each one carefully, using words and phrases that Elaine would understand and respond to emotionally. The arguments were still there inside his head but they had lost form, had thawed and dripped out of shape, like the icicles under the eaves, until they were blobs of slush.

  He looked at the front door expecting it to open and not knowing what to say when it did. The door was solid mahogany because that’s what Elaine wanted. She said it gave people a good impression from the start if they were faced with a solid mahogany door. But, as it turned out, she was mistaken. Hardly anyone came to the house, and of those who did not one had recognized that the door was solid mahogany, and Elaine was forced to tell them: “How do you like our door?” or “I hardly heard, you know, the door is so thick. Solid mahogany, you know.”

  Solid mahogany, closed and impenetrable. The key to it was on a key ring in his pocket. He could open the door if he wanted to, it was a simple matter, except for the dog. This was no ordinary dog. It sounded larger, stronger, fiercer. Its hoarse barking set up disturbing echoes in his mind, and each echo set up a new echo of its own until his eardrums reverberated with a cacophony of fears.

  He sat motionless on the canvas glider with the fog dripping down his face.

  A car came over the crest of the hill, languid and yellow-eyed. It crept past the house and paused with a sigh of brakes. The headlights went out, a door slammed, shoes scraped along the wet cement of the driveway.

  A man walked out of the fog, like an actor making his entrance from behind a gray plush curtain. He crossed the lawn and came up the porch steps, a heavy-set man with a fedora pulled down low on his forehead. In the dark he could be anyone; but even in the light Gordon would not have recognized him. He knew George only as the half-hero, half-child of Hazel’s conversation.

  Gordon leaned forward as if he was about to rise to welcome the stranger. The glider creaked.

  The man turned with a little jump of surprise and said harshly, “What the hell.”

  “I didn’t mean to startle—”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question.”

  “Ruth called me, said there was a prowler hanging around the house.”

  “Ruth? You must have the wrong address. This is my house.”

  “So?”

  “It’s not paid for, but I have the deed, so you might say it’s my house. Are you a policeman? It’s funny somebody should call a policeman because a man wants to get a little fresh air.”

  “If it’s your house why don’t you go inside?”

  “Well, I would, except for the dog. It isn’t any of your business but I don’t mind telling you. She bought a dog while I was away. It sounds like a fairly large dog. You heard it a moment ago?”

  “I heard it.”

  “Don’t you think it sounds like a fairly large dog?”

  “It’s a little white mongrel,” George said, “about the size of a fox terrier.”

  Inside the house there was silence, as if the dog was eavesdropping on the conversation.

  Gordon rose, wiping the moisture from his forehead with the sleeve of his topcoat. “A little dog,” he said quietly. “How could you know that?”

  “I know a lot of things about you, Foster.”

  “You have the advantage of me. I don’t even know your name.”

  “Anderson.”

  “You’re Hazel’s—”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well.” Gordon looked down at the floor. Six inches from his left foot lay the doll he had given Judith the previous week. He had bought it, not for a special reason like a birthday, but in a moment of guilt and compunction, as if he could give to her in the form of this doll the happy babyhood she had missed. He had been able to buy off his conscience to some extent, but he hadn’t bought off Judith. Within two days the doll was naked and almost scalped, one arm was gone, its china eyes had been care­fully pushed back into its empty head, and into its slightly open mouth between the rows of tiny perfect teeth, Judith had thrust Elaine’s ivory-handled nail file.

  “Well,” he said again. “I suppose it’s time we met, even under circumstances like these. I’m not sure,” he added wryly, “what circumstances they are.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No. No, I confess I’m puz—”

  “Where’s Ruby?”

  “Ruby.” Gordon repeated the name in a flat voice as if it aroused no interest or memory in him. “She’s all right. Nothing happened to her.”

  “Tell me where she is.”

  “She’s—I left her in San Luis.”

  “You left her.”

  “She has a cousin there. I—she decided to stay with her until—while I came back and settled things with Elaine. So I came back.”

  George stepped closer. He was laughing, soft derisive laughter that echoed back against the wall of fog.

  “Lover boy,” he said, and the laughter bubbled up again, not from his throat but from a source deep inside him. “A real honest-to-God lover boy, eh, Foster?”

  Gordon shook his head, mute, resigned.

  “That’s your technique, is it, Foster?—Get them as far as San Luis, leave
them with a cousin, and then come crawling back to your wife? That’s it? Eh, lover boy?”

  “You can’t talk to me like that.” But the words were frail and wistful, like the clenched fist of a little boy, the sting of a butterfly, the bite of a glowworm.

  He thought of Elaine the last time he’d seen her standing in the wind beneath the wild palm tree, her voice calm and quiet: you fool, you idiot, no character, no will power, not a man, no resemblance to a man . . .

  “You can’t talk to me like that. I must—” I must defend my human dignity, he wanted to say. But there was no time, no place, for words. He drew back his arm and jerked it loosely like a piece of rope. His fist, an inert object at the end of it, incredibly, almost involuntarily, snapped up in front of him and struck George’s chin.

  George stumbled sideways and stepped on the doll’s moist plastic head. The doll slipped out from under his foot with a squeaking noise and slid across the porch.

  His arms flailed for a moment as he tried to recover his balance, then he fell heavily, his head striking the iron base of the glider.

  From somewhere close by came the first soft muted wails of a police siren. Gordon turned and began to run. As he ran, his trembling muscles gained strength and a feeling of elation rose inside him like bubbles of adrenalin.

  He climbed into his car and pressed the starter button. His right knuckles were painful and already swelling so that he couldn’t bend his hand around the steering wheel. But the pain was not unpleasant. He drove toward the business section of the city, steering with his left hand, his right hand resting on the seat beside him like a trophy.

  He checked in at a hotel on lower State Street and from his room he called Ruby long distance. Although it was very late Ruby answered the phone on the second ring, as if she had been waiting beside it for hours expecting him to call.

  “Ruby?”

  “Gordon. Where are you?”

  “I’m staying at a hotel for the night.”

  “Did you talk to her? Did you ask her—?”

  “I’m not going to ask her anything. I’m going to tell her.”

  “You sound funny, Gordon. Have you been—do you feel all right?”