The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels

by De Vries, Peter

  When it dawned on her that he was simply going to fantastic lengths to avoid or postpone that critical moment when he would be absolutely forced to a direct vocative, she decided to have some sport with him. She chose her moment carefully. She was in the bathtub and he was pulling his shaving gear from the medicine chest.

  “Oh, look, would you do me a favor?” she said. “Ask Mother whether Gertrude telephoned today while I was at the hairdresser’s.”

  “I’m in my shorts.”

  “You don’t have to go to her. Just call down.”

  “Call down? Where is she?”

  “In the back yard. Just slip on your robe and yell off the porch.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “I’m in the tub.”

  “Can’t it wait till you get out? I’ve got lather all over me,” Pete said, briskly plying his shaving brush to make this true.

  “No, it’s important, and I may forget it.” Closing her eyes and trying to keep a straight face, she said, “My God, all you have to do is holler down over the banister. She’s right there in her usual chair.”

  Pete set his brush down, clearing his throat nervously. He was evidently under great strain. He got his bathrobe from the hook behind the door, put it on, and started slowly off in his slippers. It was clear that he was suffering. This was It—the moment preordained and not to be evaded.

  Tillie lay very still in the tub, listening. Pete could be heard miserably clearing his throat again as he scuffed through the nearby kitchen and out onto the porch. The door was open, it being summertime, and she could hear him through the screen door. That twanged shut behind him. Now he was crossing the porch, now standing at the rail, looking down at where Mrs. Shilepsky sat sunning herself, three floors below. There was a long pause. Then Tillie heard, shrill and piercing, the whistle Pete could so adroitly produce by putting two fingers into his mouth. It stood them in such good stead when summoning taxis in the rain. It must have served him well now. She could imagine her mother twisting about in her Adirondack chair to squint inquiringly upward, as well as hear Pete calling down, perhaps between cupped hands, “Did Gertrude Wilson telephone today? No? Thanks. That’s all.”

  He had outwitted her. But she would trap him yet, Tillie thought, lathering a leg.

  She never did. The problem was solved for poor Pete as it has been for so many countless husbands before him, simply by their becoming fathers. By mid-autumn he was off the hook. He could call Mrs. Shilepsky “Grandma.”

  Four

  Tillie made sure Gertrude Wilson was one of the first to know she was expecting, and when the child was born, a boy, Gertrude sent along a handsome silver runcible spoon with his name, Charles, engraved on it in a flowing script. Their relationship entered on a period of relative felicity. Gertrude assured her that no one could raise a child in the city, and that she would keep an eye peeled for a house for the Seltzers in her neck of New Jersey. Perhaps in part because she had no children of her own, she displayed here the same proprietorial force with which she did her matchmaking, and with every remembrance that the Seltzers couldn’t afford to buy, yet at least, but would have to rent.

  When Charlie was turning two she stumbled on just the thing. A five-room Colonial which could only be rented because it belonged to an estate over which the heirs were wrangling at a rate that guaranteed its unsalability for years. The Seltzers drove out to look at it one Sunday afternoon, paid the agent two months’ rent on the spot, and moved in six weeks later, after subletting their apartment.

  Their first visitor was Jimmy Twitchell, or Tillie’s was, as Jimmy called one weekday morning when Pete was in the city. He brought a cut-leaf philodendron for a house present. He assured her, as he strolled among disemboweled packing crates on meowing feet, that this suburb was becoming terribly chic. “The plumbers won’t make house calls any longer,” he jabbered, darting her the expectant glance. Tillie laughed all right, being too exhausted not to, though the jest had a familiar ring. Had she heard it on some television variety hour? No matter. Jimmy openly declared himself to be a cultural Robin Hood, stealing from the witty to give to the dull. Pete, who returned the Twitchell distaste with interest “up to as high as ten percent,” had a rather blunter way of putting it. “He steals jokes and then files the serial numbers off them and gives them a fresh paint job, so nobody will recognize them,” he said. So it might have been electricians who no longer made house calls, out Connecticut way, in the routine Tillie could therefore now not place. Why couldn’t Jimmy stand Pete? Gertrude had an explanation. Jimmy was one of the farthest-out of human specialties—fags who can’t stand men. What’s left after that? Jimmy, little dreaming how he was getting his own back, said Gertrude “looked like a Lesbian with doubts about her masculinity.” Thus Tillie found herself in a crossfire in which she could hardly hope to engage, but no matter: it was a chic address, in a set by which she could hope to remain forever dazzled. Pete didn’t bat in that league either, but as if she cared! He was the salt of the earth. Let the Jimmy Twitchells be its pepper, mustard and vinegar.

  Mrs. Shilepsky would come out from her new city apartment for stays of two or three days, sometimes a week, liberating the Seltzers for the interval by acting as sitter. Once when she was on deck, Tillie spent the day in town shopping, and after a late lunch thought she’d surprise Pete by dropping in on him at his office.

  Though it was a quarter to three, he still hadn’t returned from lunch himself. She waited in the outer office till three, when a certain self-consciousness between her and the typing receptionist near whom she sat drove her into the ladies’ room to primp for a hasty departure. She wanted to catch a train leaving in twenty minutes anyway.

  As she emerged, she caught sight of Pete at the far end of the corridor, saying goodbye to a girl in a red checked coat. Tillie stopped short, half in and half out of the washroom, her hand holding the door open. There was an exchange of murmurs and low laughter between them, and a sense of dallying, reluctant leave-taking. Then the girl, a tall blonde, put a hand to Pete’s brow to see whether he had any fever. A sudden pause in the surrounding office clatter made their words momentarily distinguishable. He felt warm, the girl laughingly said, but whether he had any temperature was hard to tell because her own hand was cold. “I’ll be all right,” he said. Their actual departure for respective offices was lost on Tillie, who, with the odd but instinctive guilt sense of the sexual witness, turned and fled back into the washroom. There she stayed for a few more minutes before making her furtive escape from the building, running with her head down into the welcome street.

  Her guilt had quite worn off by evening. She was waiting for Pete when he arrived home at the usual time, holding a drink in her hand and a cigarette in the other with an air of ominous composure. Mrs. Shilepsky was in the nursery with Charlie. Pete seemed in good spirits.

  “Sorry I missed you today,” he said. “You should call beforehand so I’ll know. Miss Templeton said you were in town shopping, which I hope means you haven’t fixed anything. Because I thought we might take your mother out to dinner. If we can get a sitter. She deserves it after this hitch.”

  He wore the disarming smile that from now on would automatically arouse her defenses.

  “She’d like to go to the church bingo,” Tillie said, wondering just how far you had to, or could, graduate satire for anyone as unscrupulously wholesome as this. She now remembered his saying, of a male miscreant they had been discussing—it might have been Burt Wilson—that he would not cast the first stone. “I don’t sit in judgment,” he said. This was Pete Seltzer being charitable. He was an early Christian.

  “Well, all right,” he said. “Let’s do that then.”

  “Go to the church bingo?”

  “Yes.”

  “It may snow.”

  “Lies, all lies!”

  Having divested himself of hat, coat and briefcase, he kissed her, large-minded about the cheek only presented to him. He walked to the liquor cabinet, after a
knightly check of her own glass that was really something to behold.

  “I left around three. I saw you come in,” she said, nudging them an inch closer to the abyss. Her own war of nerves was too much for her, and she quickly added, “Or I think I did. I wasn’t sure.”

  That put the burden of honesty squarely up to him, by offering him also the opportunity for deception. She wasn’t at all sure she didn’t want that.

  “Then why the hell didn’t you speak up?” he said, turning his head but leaving his back to her.

  She decided she preferred doubt, and to recover it, said, “I was down in the street by that time, half a block away at the corner, looking for a cab. I couldn’t be certain it was you.”

  “Who could mistake a gimpy?” He laughed, again asking for no sympathy.

  She rejected that game now, but did safeguard the chance, for him, at the hankypanky that would obscure from her too harsh a truth, a smoke screen that for some wild reason they might both need. It was not so much a matter of letting sleeping dogs lie as keeping a mad one out. There was after all a child in a nearby room.

  He turned around and came back, a drink in his hand and a smile on his face.

  “How did you like the package?”

  “The what?”

  “The girl I was with. Didn’t you get a look at her? That’s the one I was telling you about the other night. Or did I?”

  “Oh, the new girl. I believe you said something about her. You’re breaking her in as a canvasser or something.”

  “Yes. We’re buttonholing men in the street these days to see whether they like their shaving lather warm or not. Did you know they’ve developed one that turns warm on your fingertips? Skoal.”

  “Skoal. Do you still have to go out? I thought you were definitely in the office.”

  “Oh, you have to keep your hand in at the field level if you want to supervise right. Besides, you get saddle sores in that damn swivel chair all day. And you don’t get them like Miss Lund all the time.”

  “Did you take her to lunch, Pete?”

  “You bet your sweet bundle I did. And don’t think your correspondent wouldn’t like to parlay that into a little hard breathing. But you know me. The old louse manqué. Not to first base. Aren’t you ashamed, such a schlep for a husband. I suppose it reflects on you, but… Well, so. What else was by you? Were the walls perpendicular today?”

  “Oh, I’m fine—except for this premonition of disaster.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s extrasensory perception time in Dixie again. Every twenty-eight days like clockwork. Let me take you out of all this. Look, let’s get out the Belly Baedekers and see if they write up that French restaurant over on Route 22.”

  It was a term he used for eating guides, of which they had several, since they both liked good food. When she had the blight, Pete would lead her about the bedroom in imitations of those classical paintings depicting Adam and Eve being banished from Paradise. It was how he literally took the Curse, as something laid on them. His arm around her waist, he would roll his stricken eyes as he led her through the imaginary gate, smiting his breast and uttering wails of despair at heaven, or throwing backward glances of hopeless regret at the Garden from which they were exiled by the angel with the flaming sword. She laughed at his horseplay again tonight, after they returned from dinner and a movie, just the two of them, but said that she could nevertheless still not shed the sense of uneasiness that had come over her. She had vague fears about the future, or a fear, which she could not define.

  “Nonsense,” he said, “everything’s going to be ragasocky.” His personal variant of such predecessors as scrumptious and kopacetik.

  Well, it was nothing of the kind. Miss Lund telephoned one day to introduce herself as “someone you don’t know, but know of,” and to ask whether Mrs. Seltzer cared to sit down like two civilized people and talk the whole thing over.

  “I can’t,” Tillie said.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t sit down like two civilized people, since I’m only one, but I often sit down with another, if I can find one.”

  “Well, swell. It’s about Peter of course.”

  “Who?”

  “Peter. Your husband.”

  She was so used to thinking of him as Pete that for a second she honestly hadn’t realized whom the girl was talking about. There is something of a gulf between Peter and Pete, so wide they could hardly be interchangeable names for any man consummately either the one or the other, and Pete was so hopelessly, so unvarnishedly Pete that hearing him called Peter for the first time in her life almost made her laugh in the girl’s face. She had asked Pete whether the Lund wasn’t kind of dumb, and he had answered, “Not from the neck down.” That wasn’t a very Peterish thing to say.

  “I know he’s told you about me—I insisted that he do or break it off, as I don’t like deception and won’t have any part of it—and so I thought the only intelligent thing would be to have a drink together and lay our cards on the table.”

  They made a date to meet for drinks the following Saturday, in a bar a few miles from where Tillie lived. The girl would be only too happy to make the half-hour’s trip out from the city. Tillie’s one proviso was that Pete be told absolutely nothing about this.

  Miss Lund was waiting for her in a booth. She bore out Tillie’s original fleeting impression in the office passage, that she was in her mid-twenties. She had the demolishing combination of blonde hair and brown eyes. She looked at once fragile and indestructible because, though she talked glibly about her innermost thoughts, or pretended to, not even her surface could be touched. She seemed to have been sprayed with some invisible protective film, like silicone.

  “My husband,” Tillie said when they had sized one another up. “What on earth do you see in him?”

  Miss Lund began a willing enough enumeration of Pete’s credits: that he was amusing, good-natured, generous, kind, a blast in his way, and—hinting at how far the affair had progressed—a pistol.

  “A what?” Tillie said. She had heard perfectly well, but the word made the girl momentarily absurd, and she wanted it repeated.

  “A pistol.”

  “Do you have an apartment in New York, Miss Lund?”

  “Yes. Not far from the office, marfact.”

  Through Tillie’s dismay ran a counter-thrill of hope that this was the adversity about which the premonitions had persisted; that this was all the blow to be dealt her, and not such a fatal one at that; one, indeed, curiously softened by a mitigation she could not deny her vanity had secretly seized on the instant she saw Miss Lund plain. She, Tillie, had not had to settle for somebody for whom she was, in turn, the last streetcar. Far from it! Here before her was living proof—far more living than the feminine touches noted in Pete’s apartment on her first visits there—of what he could attract. She was almost proud of him. Bastard manqué indeed! Mentally she told Gertrude Wilson to put this in her pipe and smoke it.

  Under the elation of a few more drinks, she extrapolated this triumph of Pete’s into a future of now thoroughly conceivable successors who would confirm the evidence that she had hooked a ladies’ man. Not all as young and pretty as Miss Lund, perhaps, but toothsome conquests nonetheless, trophies who would not disgrace her. Holding her chin up and straight out, so as to minify the throat wrinkles (which she knew to be the correct word, and not minimize, which meant the reverse, to underestimate), sitting erect in this fashion, she told this girl exactly what she was up against: to wit, her probable failure to domesticate our nonesuch any more than Tillie had. “Pete simply can’t be housebroken,” she said, with a touch of loftiness. The first qualification to be looked for in any second Mrs. Seltzer would be her capacity for putting up with precisely such threats as this encounter of a third. She was certainly bragging about her prize now. “Are you and he engaged?” she asked, carelessly. Her performance was beautiful. The girl gaped.

  “How could we be engaged? He’s married, isn’t he?”


  “I suppose.”

  Tillie shrugged like a woman of the world, from whom pointers might well be taken by anyone seriously interested in essaying the role she was wearily enough ready to abdicate.

  “I don’t want to be cruel, my dear, but if all of us got together to talk things over who’ve something to talk over, we’d have to rent a hall. You’re only one of half a dozen or more—to my knowledge, of course,” she added with a tight smile not intended to be needlessly caustic.

  Miss Lund let herself slump to the table in a semicomic pantomime of flabbergastation. “Blumph!” she said. A sense of sorority had developed between them, far above the mere mutual tolerance to which she had looked forward as the best possible fruit of this meeting. When she learned that they shared a grievance rather than an issue, nothing would do but that Mrs. Seltzer join her in some hard analysis of the cause.

  “What do you suppose is Peter’s trouble?”

  “Well, he’s not attractive to the other sex, you see, and so he must make up for it by having so many of them,” Tillie said. “Or feels he has to.”

  Burlesque was not in the least detected. The girl nodded as she studied the dregs of her whiskey sour astutely. She was evidently somewhat educated at least. “Men who are pistols,” she said, frowning, as though picking her way carefully through an extremely labyrinthine thought, “are that because they feel a need to be. They’re afraid that at bottom they aren’t, and so have to prove to themselves over and over again that they are.”