“Well,” Charlie said, “let me think about this for a while.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line. Then, almost querulously, Edgar Willey’s voice said, “What is there to think about?”
“Listen,” Charlie said, “fifteen hundred dollars is a substantial sum of money. Let me think about it, please. Besides—”
“Yeah? Besides what?”
“Besides, I was talking to Stan Peterson when I bought this house, and he said—”
“What did Peterson say?”
“He said that it was a good thing the Lane was in rough condition. He said it kept people from barreling down here at eighty miles an hour and running over children, and it also kept people who had no business driving down here from driving down here at all,” Charlie said.
There was another pause. Then Edgar Willey said, “Well, that Stan Peterson was a stupid son-of-a-bitch. We all hated him on the Lane.”
“Oh,” Charlie said. “I thought one of the unique things about the Lane was that you were all pals.”
“Now, look here, Lord,” Edgar Willey said, “if you can honestly and truthfully tell me you can’t afford it, just say so.”
“Do you mean that if I did say I couldn’t afford it, you might think I was not being honest and truthful, Edgar?” Charlie asked.
“Now, don’t get testy! All I’m saying is—”
“And all I’m asking, Edgar, is that you give me a little time to think it over.”
This time the pause was longer and more serious, and Charlie began to wonder whether Edgar Willey’s next words might be, “I’ll give you exactly two minutes to think it over, Lord!” Then he heard Edgar clear his throat several times and say, “Well, of course if you hold out on us, it’s just going to make the job that much more expensive for the rest of us. I shouldn’t think you’d like to be the only hold-out, buddy.”
“I realize that,” Charlie said. “And I see what you mean.”
“And I’d also suggest you talk this thing over with your wife, Lord,” Edgar said. “Because when I mentioned it to her this afternoon she agreed that it should be done.”
“I see,” Charlie said. “Well, I certainly plan to talk it over with my wife, Edgar. I plan to talk it over, and I plan to think it over. So, as I said before, I’ll let you know. Good-bye.” He hung up the phone.
Nancy, during the conversation—and perhaps because she had been aware of the tenor of it—had left the room. He found her in the living room smoking a cigarette, holding up fabric samples against the walls. “I wish I could settle on something for the curtains,” she said. “What do you think of this one?”
“I guess you know what that call was about,” he said.
“Oh, about the road, I suppose. Yes, he mentioned it to me.”
“You might have warned me, sweetheart.”
“Charlie, honestly, I’ve had so many other things on my mind …” Her voice trailed off.
“I also gather you agreed to spend the money.”
“How can we help it? We can’t be the only ones who hold out. The others have all agreed—”
“Then you did agree.”
“Charlie, I only said that I thought it sounded like a good idea. Truly that’s all I said!”
“Well, in that case,” he said, “I’m going to tell him that we do not agree.”
“Oh, Charlie! We’ve got to go along with the others! We can’t just—just make enemies of all our neighbors right away. We can’t!”
“I take it Mr. Peterson wouldn’t go along with the others.”
“Yes! And look where the Petersons are now! Gone!”
“And a damn sight better off, wherever they are,” he said.
“Oh, Charlie, don’t! Don’t be like that! Don’t get into one of these fights again.”
“Darling,” he said, “I don’t want to get into a fight any more than you do. But we simply have got to stop spending money like this—until I begin bringing some money in. We’re dipping into the money deeper and deeper, don’t you see? Painters, carpenters, sump pumps, new upholstery—”
“But we need these things!”
“But we don’t need twenty-five cases of liquor, and we don’t need a new surface on the street. Hell, I’ll bet you even agreed to join his god-damned liquor pool!”
“Oh, stop shouting!” she said. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about—this liquor pool!”
“And meanwhile we have taxes, your doctor—”
“Do you want me to give up my doctor, is that it?”
“I’m just saying that the way we’re going we’re going to run out of money,” he said.
“Oh, why are we fighting?” she said. “I was so happy—I was so happy just an hour ago! Over a few truckloads of tar? Anyway, we can afford it.”
“How?” he said gently. “Just tell me how we can afford it. You keep the checkbook. How do we stand with our budget?”
“What budget?” She shook her head impatiently. “Oh, we’re perfectly fine.”
“Not running behind at all?”
“What do you mean—running behind? Behind what?”
“Look,” he said. “We sold the house in Encino for sixty-five thousand, right? And we paid fifty-three-five for this place—right? By my calculation, that gave us exactly twelve thousand, five hundred dollars to live on—which we agreed was going to last us for two years.”
“Of course if you’d taken out a mortgage, the way I suggested,” she said, “we’d have a lot more. But no. Big-time Charlie—you had to pay cash.”
“We happened to have had the cash,” he said evenly. “And twelve thousand, five hundred dollars left over to live on for two years.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” she said, turning away. “How could a family of five live for two years on twelve thousand dollars—here, of all places, in one of the most expensive sections on the entire East Coast? That’s only six thousand dollars a year. I never said we could live on that—not here in Westmount, anyway.”
“But Westmount was where you wanted to live.”
“So what!” she said angrily. “It can’t be done. It’ll last us a year, perhaps—which is all we’ll need it to last us.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Your show is in the fall!”
“I just want to know how much we’ve got left,” he said.
She shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. Seven thousand—something like that. Am I supposed to be Price-Waterhouse?”
“Seven thousand? We’ve been here a week, and—”
“Two weeks!”
“We’ve been here two weeks and we’ve spent half the money that you think is going to last us a full year?”
“I said it will last us till the fall. Moving is expensive, you know. About the most expensive thing you can do is move! Do you realize how much it cost us just to move—shipping the car, the plane tickets—”
“If we’d done as I suggested, sold the car in California, and—”
“But you were the one who wanted to move, don’t forget! You were the one who wanted to move east!”
“Oh, Nancy—”
“What do you mean, ‘Oh, Nancy’?”
He shook his head slowly back and forth.
“Anyway,” she said, “I can always sell some of my stocks.”
After a moment he said, “Yes, you could always do that.”
“In fact I have—sold a few.”
“You have! You mean, we’ve spent even more?”
“Just some odds and ends. How do you think we can buy the things we need? Don’t look at me like that! You just this minute said I could sell some of my stocks! So! I sold a few—last week. Now are you going to tell me I shouldn’t have?”
“Oh, Jesus!”
“They’re my stocks, aren’t they? I can sell them if I want to, can’t I?”
“How much did you sell?”
“I knew it! I shouldn’t have even told you!”
“Nancy,
this is just the sort of argument we promised each other we’d never have.”
“Who started it? Who started talking as though we were headed for the poorhouse? Who?”
“I only said—”
“How can you say I’m extravagant with money? Just look at the things I do without! I do all my own housework, do you realize that? Everyone else on this Lane has a cleaning woman—not me! Look at the things Jane Willey has. Look at—”
Wearily he said, “I only said I didn’t think we could afford to have the Lane resurfaced.”
“Oh!” She seized the swatch of fabric and tossed it into the air. “Oh, I don’t understand you at all! Half an hour ago you said, ‘Damn the expense for upholstery, full speed ahead!’ Now you’ve got us practically in the poorhouse. Oh, I know what it was! It was Harold, wasn’t it! Harold wanting to go to his high-school dance! You resent that, don’t you? You resent poor Harold having a little bit of money to take a girl to his very first dance in a new school. You resent him having any sort of social life of his own—just because it’s a little bit better social life than you had when you were his age. Oh, that’s it, that’s it!”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Nancy,” he said.
She threw her cigarette into the open fireplace. “Well, if we’re short of money, you can always ask Myra Mirisch for an advance, can’t you?”
“An advance on what?”
“On the twenty thousand.”
He studied her face, then shook his head again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Twenty thousand what?”
“It will be at least that, won’t it? From your sale? I happen to know these dealers give advances to painters all the time. All you’d have to do is ask.”
“Now wait a minute,” he said. “Where did this mysterious figure of twenty thousand come from? What makes you think a sale of mine would bring that?”
“Don’t you ever read the papers? You ought to know that art prices in New York are at least ten times what they are on the Coast. If one of your pictures won a three-hundred-dollar prize in a little show nobody ever heard of in Pacific Palisades, then certainly someone like Myra Mirisch—”
“Oh, I get it now,” he said. “We multiply three hundred dollars times ten—that’s three thousand. Multiply that by my seven pictures and you’ve got just about twenty thousand. But you forgot to deduct the thirty-percent commission. Nancy, you’re talking like a damned fool.”
“Don’t you read how inflated the art market is in New York? Stuart Preston, in last Sunday’s Times? Why did we move here, anyway?”
“That’s the second time I’ve wondered about that today,” he said.
“Andrew Wyeth—fifty, sixty thousand dollars for a picture! Certainly you—”
“I am not Andrew Wyeth,” he said. “If you think so, you’re losing your mind.”
“Mrs. Jackson Pollock buys her dresses at Dior!”
“Jackson Pollock is dead,” he said. “You are losing your mind.”
“When the Museum of Modern Art buys a picture—”
“What makes you think the Museum of Modern Art is going to buy one of my pictures?”
“You’re the one who’s always telling me to be nice to René d’Harnoncourt when I meet him!” she said. “You’re the one who’s always talking about the Modern Museum. All I want is a happy home—a little peace!”
“Then get this idea of twenty thousand dollars out of your head.”
“I merely said you could get an advance from Myra Mirisch just like that,” she said and snapped her fingers. “Everybody else does. But no—not you! Because you’re too proud, aren’t you? Too proud to ask for a simple, routine advance on your show so we could live like normal people.”
“For Christ’s sake, Nancy,” he said. “What if I told you there isn’t going to be any show? Or if there is, that it isn’t going to be for at least another year. Or two years—or four. God knows, maybe never. What if I told you that?”
She stood very still. Then she said, “That isn’t true. You’re lying to me.” And she turned and ran up the stairs.
He waited in the empty room, not knowing what he was waiting for, not knowing what to do next or where to go. All he knew was that everything he had planned to do that day had gone wrong and that there was nothing that could be done about it now, nothing more to say. He crossed the room to the freshly painted window seat, where Carla’s books still lay, and picked them up. He would carry them upstairs to her and remind her to get busy with her homework.
As he picked up the composition book, a loose page fell from between the blue-canvas covers and floated to the floor. He knelt and lifted it and was suddenly touched by the sight of her round, careful, penciled handwriting, which covered the page in tightly packed lines. It was some sort of letter, and remembering with a smile that spelling was not one of Carla’s strong points now that she had taken up journalism, he began to read it.
Editor
THE CHATTERBOX
Dear Sirs:
I believe that my Father, Charles Lord, would be an excellent candidate for the next of our “Let’s Know Our Parents” series for the following reasons:
My Father, Charles Lord, is a very good artist who is now on the vurge of reaching the acne of his sucess. One of his paintings has already won a prise in an Art Show in Calif. (Pac. Palisades) of 300 dols. In the Fall we will see him have a big show of his paintings at a famous galery in N.Y.C. Some people might say that it has taken my Father a long time to reach this acne. But to me it is a case of perserverence and dilligents, and of long hard work in his Creative Field. Now what he has dreamed of all his life is at last coming true.
Personally my Father is a handsome man with a good-natured and and winning personality. He has reared three children and stresses self-reliants. He is physically of mediam height, a good athleet, dark but with a twinge of gray in his hair.
My Father is an interesting conversationalist with many interesting ideas on Modern Art to expound which our readers I am sure would find intersting and enlightning. I also think that my Father would be willing to be intervued by our Editers. The circumstances of our leaving our home in Calif, were not happy ones, and recognition of my Father’s talents by our Chatterbox Editers would be good for his moral.
Respectfully Submited,
Carla R. Lord
He held it in his hand and read it again. She had written “moral” the first time, then crossed it out. She had then tried “moreale,” then “morall,” had crossed them both out, and had finally settled on “moral” again. He replaced the paper carefully between the blue-cloth covers. Then he put the binder and books back on the window seat where he had found them. He ran his hand through his hair and, yes, he could feel that twinge of gray. There are days, he thought, when my life seems to be just one gray twinge after another. He walked up the echoing stairs.
Nancy lay on her back, still dressed, on top of the coverlet, looking up at the white ceiling. He closed the door. “You were lying, weren’t you?” she said in a quiet voice to the ceiling.
He sat down beside her on the bed. “Of course I was,” he said wearily, and bending over, began unlacing his shoes.
4
It was the day after the painters had finally packed up their brushes and cans and ladders and tarps and left. But that was practically the only comfortable thing about it. It was one of those days, this particular Thursday, when, for Nancy Lord, nothing at all seemed to be going right. The day had been one disaster after another. Charlie had left early in the morning for another conference with Myra Mirisch. Though he couldn’t be blamed for everything (nobody could be blamed for everything that had happened that day except herself), his early appointment had made one more breakfast for her to fix, and this—plus the toaster, which had suddenly decided to act up and kept burning up the bread—had made everybody’s breakfast late.
Though the kids usually walked to school, she could see by eight-fifteen that they were never going to
make it by the first bell. So she had thrown a coat over her dressing gown and got the car out of the garage to drive them. Then, halfway to the high school, Carla realized she had forgotten her Latin book, and so they had had to stop, turn around, and drive back home for that, with Nancy scolding Carla all the way. And the weather had been nasty. The morning had been covered with a dark, soupy fog—she had had to drive slowly and turned her headlights on—and she got them to school just as the last kids were going in the door.
As she was driving home, the fog suddenly lifted, and the day became sparklingly clear, every new leaf and bud of spring shining with moisture, gently dripping. The world looked like a Flemish painting, Nancy thought, and took this for a good omen, but it was not. The change in the weather was so swift and so intense and glittering that it exhilarated her; perhaps that was why, when she parked her car in front of her house, she forgot to turn the headlights off, and when she came out again at noon to go on an errand in the village—hurrying, clutching her shopping list in one hand and her ear keys and bag in the other—she found she had a dead battery.
She swore softly under her breath when there was no response at all from the ignition, and she hurried back into the house to call the garage. She was standing at the phone, actually dialing, when she saw, through the living-room window, her automobile begin to roll. She screamed once into the telephone receiver and dropped it. She stood there, watching her car moving slowly at first, then picking up speed. As in any moment of panic, her thoughts gathered slowly. Run out after it, try to catch it, get the door open and get aboard it, she told herself, and then, no, don’t do that, because people can be dragged that way, and killed. She simply stood there as the car went on its mad, random, driverless course, and she watched its progress with a kind of helpless, abstract horror.
Strange shapeless prayers arose to heaven as she saw, at the foot of the Lane, the large grassy stretch that lay just ahead of where the land fell away again, into the brook and swamp and trees. Dear little car, she prayed, come to a nice gentle stop on that stretch of grass. The car rolled gracefully down the incline of her driveway and passed neatly between two maple trees—she was proud of it for doing that, for missing those trees so expertly—and then it rolled, a little faster, out into the Lane. It crossed the Lane onto the McCarthys’ lawn, and it seemed, headed straight for the McCarthys’ house. But then, halfway across the lawn, it rather kindly changed its mind, and she congratulated it again.
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