She smiled ruefully and said. “I wish I had worn that stocking that had the little hole in it, and left when you did this morning. I mightn’t have ever found out. But I guess it’s better that I know about it—” And looked at me almost as though expecting me to confirm her judgment in this. “That taxi driver came to the door a little while after you’d gone — you know, the one you promised to pay — and he said you knew where his stand was but you’d never come near him to pay him since that night, and he said he wasn’t going to wait any more, he’d come here to collect. I had quite an argument with him and told him he was drunk and — oh, what’s the use going into it? He didn’t purposely tell me anything, but the few things he let drop fitted in so well with what I knew already — about your staying away from me all the time and getting in wrong at the office and walking around so crazy all day yesterday and the day before — so I thought maybe it would do some good if I — had a talk with her, just had a talk with her — and at least find out what I was up against or what was going to happen to me. I found out from him where it was, and I tried to make myself look as pleasing as I could, and—” She gave a pathetic little shrug. “I drank a tablespoonful of your gin and went there—”
“Wasn’t I the one to talk to? What’s she got to do with it? What do you mean by dragging her in it for? All right! You’ll see how much you gained by it, you’ll see what good it does you!”
“It did this much good, anyway,” she said humbly, “whatever happens now, I know she won’t be to blame and I know I won’t — it’ll be all up to you, Wade.”
“You’re telling me,” I said ungraciously. And sneered. “Now just what was it you said to her makes you so sure of that? Let’s have it!”
“Oh, I didn’t walk in there like they do in the movies and say, ‘Give my back my husband!” Why, Wade, Bernice didn’t know you were married! I know she didn’t. Leaving me out of it altogether, I wouldn’t even call that fair to her herself—”
“What do you think you are, a court of justice?” I demanded resentfully. “Did she complain about it? Did she say she’s got a kick coming?”
“No, all she said was, ‘That may surprise you in a man, Maxine, but it doesn’t me any more.’ ”
“I notice you got pretty chummy, calling each other by your first names,” I said enviously. “What’d you do, sign a blood pact together? Too bad you didn’t both keep on bleeding a while longer!” It made me almost as furious at Bernice as at Maxine herself to think they had gotten on so well together — especially without my being there. I suppose, subconsciously, it would have suited the male in me much better to know that they had clawed and scratched each other’s eyes out over me.
“I almost like Bernice, in spite of everything,” Maxine mused. “I suppose a lot of women would call me crazy — because, after all, she’s stepped in where she has no right to — but I don’t blame her for that, not one bit. If I were single and had been through all she’s been through—”
“Single!” I thought to myself bitterly, “around the noon hour each day, and that’s about all!”
She looked at me a very long time, just sat there and looked at me like a calf looking at a man with a butcher knife in his hand. I didn’t speak either; what was there to say? Then she began to make her plea, the big plea that she must have been preparing all afternoon. It wasn’t very eloquent; but eloquent or otherwise, what chance did it have with me?
“What was in your mind all the time. Wade? You weren’t thinking of anything — anything permanent, were you? You mustn’t. It’ll blow over—”
“Will it?” I thought, and didn’t answer.
“We’ve had so much fun together. Wade. Even when we’ve fought it’s almost been like fun — compared to — compared to this. Fun to sulk, and fun to make up. Do you remember the time we got so sore at each other on the train, and we each swore we’d have separate rooms when we got there? And then, when we got to Atlantic City, there was only one double room left in the whole hotel? And we had that big screen brought in and put up between us? And it fell over in the middle of the night? And we were each of us sitting in exactly the same position, on the sides of our beds with our hands around our knees, listening? Wade, darling, we were like lovers in a musical show in those days. Boy-husband and child-wife. Let’s carry the thing through. Let’s sing our duet, kiss and make up. Let’s not throw it all away. It’s here with us now. Why should you, why should I, begin all over with somebody else?”
“All right, can all the chatter,” I said brutally. “I’d much rather hear what the upshot of it all was this afternoon. I suppose you drank tea and ate ladyfingers together! And then what? What was the final word when you left?”
“Why, nothing,” she said, “what could we say? I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself and ask her not to see you any more; what would be the sense of such a thing? You’re the only one can decide that, Wade. Which is exactly how she feels about it herself. ‘I’m the passive party in this,’ she told me, ‘it’s something that’ll have to be settled between you two. You go home and talk to him about it,’ she said when I left, ‘and more power to you—’ ”
“Traitor!” I thought poignantly.
“ ‘—and if you can get him to look at it your way,’ she said, ‘why, tell him to give me a ring and let me know, that’s all. I’ll understand.’ ”
“Hypocrite!” I fumed inwardly. “I’d like to kiss all the lies away from your lips, I’d like to kiss you and punch you for that until you squeal!”
“So there it is,” she concluded with a dismal sigh, “and here we are.”
“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” I answered crisply.
“Say what you mean,” she said. “Say just exactly what you feel like saying. God knows, no one’s trying to bully you!”
“Thanks!” I laughed coldly.
“You don’t need to hide anything from me, either, Wade. I know just how far this thing’s gone.”
“What kind of women are there in this world today, anyway!” I exclaimed disgustedly, throwing my cigarette deliberately on the floor and flattening it with my foot, then kicking it away.
“Oh, she didn’t have to tell me that,” Maxine answered with equal disgust. “Don’t, you suppose I can tell?”
“Good!” I said with feigned briskness. “Then you know the worst!”
“It isn’t that!” she tried to tell me. “Oh, Wade, Wade, don’t you understand it isn’t that! Weeks ago, already, when you stayed out like you did, I felt there was something doing — only I thought maybe it was some drifter you’d picked up in a speakeasy or on the street and then never seen again afterwards. Every married woman has that happen to her at some time or another. But this — this isn’t as disrespectful to me, maybe, but it’s a whole lot more dangerous. That’s what I’m driving at, that’s what I’m trying to get out of you — what do you intend doing? Is it going on like this, or what? You surely must have known I’d find out at one time or another; you didn’t expect to be able to lead a double life under my very nose indefinitely, did you?”
“Double life!” I mimicked. “Don’t be so dramatic, will you?”
“Dramatic is good!” she laughed bitterly. “I’m supposed to sit back and not say a word while everything I’ve got goes up the flue. Maybe you would if it happened to you!”
“Ah, baloney!” I said.
She stepped into the bedroom a minute to get a fresh handkerchief. “Better bring a few of ’em with you,” I called after her. “No telling how long this thing’s liable to keep up.”
She came back holding the new handkerchief over the lower part of her face. “Even ten-year-old schoolboys know enough not to hit a fellow when he’s down,” she said through it, her watery eyes peering at me above it.
“Cut out the martyr stuff,” I advised her. “That won’t help any.”
To my surprise, she did immediately, and became coldly disdainful.
“Nothing would with you,” she said. “Yo
u’re not worth my letting you see me cry over you. And if I feel like crying over you when you’re not around, I suppose that’s my tough luck.”
“Good!” I said to myself, “maybe she’s going to get sore; then I’ll have an excuse to walk out of here.”
She didn’t say anything for a while after that; just sat staring out of the window at nothing. Then, after fully ten minutes, she turned around and remarked, “You must be hungry, Wade. Why don’t you run down to the corner and get yourself something to eat? I haven’t got anything here for you.”
“What about you?” I said, standing up immediately. “Get your hat and come on.”
She looked at me pityingly. “I’m not a man,” she said. “I couldn’t eat right now — or any time tonight. You go ahead—”
At the door I said, “Want me to bring you back some sandwiches?”
“No, thanks, Wade,” she said, “but do you want to—”
“Do I want to — what?”
“Do you want to kiss me?”
I went over to her, bent over her, and felt her lips reach up to mine.
When I got to the door a second time, I remarked, “I’ll be right back.”
“That’s up to you, Wade,” she told me.
I didn’t pull the door smartly enough to after me, and it slipped back and stayed on a crack, so after I’d punched the button for the elevator, I stepped back to it to close it more firmly, and glancing through into our living room, saw her in there with her head buried in her arms on the sill before her, crying soundlessly to herself. I felt mean about it for a while afterward, but I couldn’t see what there was to do about it even if I had felt inclined to do something about it. “She ought to save her tears,” I told myself, “she’s going to need them a few months from now.”
I went into a lunchroom near where we lived, collected far more unsavory dishes than were necessary on a tin tray, and sat myself down at a table to eat and think it over, commingling the two processes without any difficulty on account of being, as Maxine had said, a man.
Bernice’s attitude occupied me principally. Had she really meant that when she said that if Maxine could persuade me into not seeing any more of her, it was all right with her? “She couldn’t have really meant it,” I assured myself. “She can’t possibly be that indifferent if she’s ready and willing to throw everything over and go away with me!” But the gruesome thought kept presenting itself: “Suppose she’s just been stringing you along, taking you for a sleigh ride, as they say; suppose she never intended to go away with you from the beginning, and that’s why she’s so complacent about Maxine putting the crusher on you if she can?” It was all I could do to keep away from the telephone and sound her out on it then and there. But something told me it would be wiser not to ring her up right on top of Maxine’s visit that afternoon. “She may be sore about it; it may have riled her a little, even if she didn’t let on to Maxine. And you never can tell about women — she may take it all out on me, if I ring her up right now. Better if we both sleep over it; better if I wait till tomorrow.” And I consoled myself in this wise: Bernice hadn’t let a word drop about our intentions to Maxine, she had confined the discussion (from what Maxine told me) to what had gone oh between us in the past few weeks; didn’t that argue that she had been acting a part to bluff Maxine, that she had no idea of relinquishing our scheme of going off together? I felt that it did, and felt a whole lot better about it than I had at any time since the bad news had broken two or three hours before.
“I’ll make it my business to see her tomorrow,” I said, slipping spoonfuls of rice pudding and raisins in and out of my mouth with relentless accuracy, “and I bet I’ll find out I’m right!”
Maxine was in bed when I went back, and though I felt sure she wasn’t asleep, her eyes were closed, so I didn’t speak to her. I noticed a little shiny thing, like a pearl, under one of her eyelids when I put the light on. A tear, I guess.
Chapter Five
I didn’t bother phoning Bernice the next day but went right up there to see her a little before two. I felt unusually cheerful, as though Maxine’s visit and the revelation of the day before had cleared the air for all parties concerned. It didn’t feel as though I were double-crossing her any more to come up here — although I hadn’t told her that I was going to, just the same.
“Hello, hand-shoes,” I greeted Tenacity, “is my lady in?”
Tenacity said she was eating her lunch, and when Bernice wanted to know who it was through the door, called back with unreproved familiarity, “Wade!”
She was sitting at her vanity table when I went in, or whatever you call those low things with triple mirrors and no drawers of any kind under them, and had all her beautification implements pushed aside to make room for a little tray containing a cucumber sandwich and a glass of frothy pink stuff that I took to be a strawberry soda. She pointed the second cucumber sandwich toward me, not offering it to me but indicating me by it, and waiting until she had finished chewing and had swallowed, remarked: “I thought you’d be around today!” At the same time, there was a mischievous, bantering light in her eyes that boded well.
“Sit down,” she said, pointing the sandwich at a chaise lounge. “Be through in a minute. I never do this, but I didn’t have any breakfast this morning.”
I had made up my mind before coming not to say anything to her until she had mentioned the subject first. About Maxine’s visit, I mean. Because, for all she knew, Maxine mightn’t have even told me and I might still be in the dark about it, so I wanted to hear what she had to say first. Therefore I made casual conversation while she bit her way busily through the second sandwich and sucked up the pink stuff through two straws.
“Gee, it’s a pipe of a day today, gold dust ’round your feet. You shoulda been out hours ago. What was the matter, hangover from last night?”
“No,” she said, “I simply overslept. Tenacity never wakes me, you know, and for the first time since I’ve been living in this place, the phone didn’t ring once all morning! Don’t know what to put it to. I even had her call the operator and have it tested, I was so sure it must be out of order. Nothing the matter with it, just an off-day for me, I guess.” This while she bent her head forward over the tray and the pinkish stuff drew together at the bottom of the glass and then was gone. “Not that it worries me; some relief, let me tell you. ’Jever try answering a phone with your eyes closed and a lot of cobwebs over your mouth?” She threw her arms back over her chair and stretched, turning her wrists out, then in again and beat them idly together. “And I never yet got in the tub but what I got a call and had to hop out again. Didn’t seem like a bath at all today. Light me one too.” She straightened up in her chair once more, tumbled her hair over her eyes, and blew smoke through it. She looked like a haystack beginning to catch fire. “By the way,” she said, turning half-around toward me, “I don’t know whether you know it or not, I had a visitor yesterday.” And her eyes crinkled mischievously at me.
Here it comes, I told myself; let’s have it! And let’s hear what really went on between the two of them.
“What’s the catch?” I said innocently. “That’s no event in your young life, is it?”
“Wade,” she smiled, shaking a finger at me, “you’ve been holding out on me.”
“I have? What do you mean?”
“You see, in Europe,” she laughed, “the married men wear rings just like the women do. It has its advantages.”
“What’s it all about, Bernice?” I said genially. “Let me in on it.”
She reached across, picked up my hand, and looked at it ostentatiously, turning it this way and that. “Tell the truth, Wade,” she said then, cocking her brows at me, “are you married?”
“Yes, sure I am,” I said readily. “Why?”
“You wouldn’t fool a girl, would you?”
“I wouldn’t fool a girl like you.”
“Well, do you think that’s nice?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell me that all al
ong?”
I knew all this was just byplay. “ ’Cause you didn’t ask me,” I said.
“We’ll let that go,” she laughed. “Anyway, your wife was here to see me yesterday.”
“All right, I’m listening.”
She glanced over my shoulder. “Close the door,” she murmured.
When I had returned to the chaise longue once more, she went on, “Say, Charlie, my boy, does it take a stick of dynamite to jar you, or didn’t you quite get what I just said to you?”
“You say Maxine was here to see you,” I said, enjoying myself hugely.
“Yes, Maxine,” she said. “And let me tell you she’s a darn nice kid, too.”
I made a face. “You can have her.”
“I don’t want her,” she said, but she was a little more serious now, “and how would you like it if I told you I don’t want you either?”
“Not very well,” I admitted, “so don’t.”
“She’s a damn nice kid, Wade,” and there was no mistaking the fact that she had stopped being playful. “I don’t see how you’ve got the heart to do anything like that to her; it would be an awfully low trick.”
I sat up tensely all at once. “What would?”
“Leave her in the soup like that.”
“You mean, what we’ve been thinking — what we’ve been figuring on? Bernice, you’re kidding me! you’re not going to leave me flat now, are you?”
She pointed her cigarette right at my heart, and it was as though she held a long spear in her hand instead of a Chesterfield when I heard what she was saying. “Get me, my used-to-be. I’m not bighearted. Maxine isn’t worrying me a bit; it’s myself that’s worrying me. Do you think I’d take a chance on you after the way I see you’re ready to sidetrack her? Not me! Why, it wouldn’t be eight months, instead of eight years, before you’d pull the same thing on me. She’s got the law on her side, and I wouldn’t even have that — nothing but my hips until the day you got tired of them—”
Manhattan Love Song Page 11
