by Hugh Hood
If only he had a little capital, say fifteen thousand! The store was due for a big increase in inventory and its owner would have welcomed a congenial partner. But what can you do, if you haven’t got it? Anyway Larry was looking around, planning to take some courses in merchandising and market analysis to complete his degree and escape from headaches and hemorrhoids forever. The local schools were no good: New York was the place. If he could only get down to New York, he would have his choice of a bewildering range of courses in any one of a dozen institutions.
He spent the hundred he made at the bookstore on Elizabeth’s Christmas present. She wouldn’t let him display his books on their shelves because they were mostly dog-eared paperbacks and textbooks. She said she wanted some fine bindings, not very many, to arrange artfully on the few shelves which intruded on her interior. He had checked the second-hand bookstores and had been able to pick up four sets: Newton on the Prophecies (1736), Reid’s Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1781), Ossian (1798), and The Junius Letters (1791). He had them cleaned and oiled, and the gold stampings renewed, and they looked like new.
They had been delivered to the bookstore for him. He sat around for a while, after nine o’clock, talking to the proprietor, thinking regretfully that he would have to hit the road again, Tuesday of next week. They totalled up the day’s sales, rearranged the stock for the next day, swept up, locked the safe, and then went around the corner with the mail in four bulky sacks. They had a couple of cups of coffee in a cafeteria next to the Post Office. It was past twelve when Larry got home, carrying his valuable books in a heavy parcel. He was sure that Elizabeth would love the books; they were exactly what she had in mind for the shelves and were obviously expensive. He suspected secretly that they looked like those books in liquor advertisements, all shining blue and red and gold, and forever unread. He didn’t want his wife to make a foolish mistake but he trusted her taste and judgment.
He swung his parcel onto the hall table and rubbed his fingers where the twine had galled them. It was very quiet, a single night light shining and no sound of life from their apartment which surprised him because Elizabeth’s car was in its proper place and there was a light on in the living room. He could hear an infant’s nighttime wailing, far away at the very top of the house. He listened for a minute to the frightened cries and felt sorry for the hungry baby. Then, as he didn’t have a key, he knocked quietly at the door.
“Elizabeth,” he said sharply, “let me in.” He thought that she’d locked the door because of burglars. “Sweetie,” he murmured cajolingly, “it’s me, Larry, let me in, will you?” But there wasn’t an answering sound.
She can’t be mad at me, he thought, I haven’t done anything. He looked around craftily, giving nothing away, and then called her by their most intimate pet-name, which a burglar wouldn’t know.
“Poopsie-pie,” he called softly, blushing a little. He hoped nobody else heard him. “Poopsie-pie, open up, it’s me, Larry.” He knocked harder at the door, beginning to feel tired and a little annoyed. He remembered that she’d gone out with Betsy Warren, and a couple of other girls only slightly less affected and fake.
“Poopsie-pie, let me in please, open up!” It occurred to him all at once that she was probably passed-out-drunk; he imagined Betsy Warren and her pals with genuine detestation.
The narrow hall echoed with his soft solicitations. In the opposite apartment Francis Rosebery and his wife heard the fatuous whispers and the knocking. They usually went to bed just after eleven but had been watching “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” on Channel 3, a special treat. By twelve-thirty, though, they decided that they couldn’t sit up any longer. Francis had an enormous pile of legislation on his desk; he had to go through it tomorrow and his eyes would be tired. He was standing in the foyer in his dressing gown when he heard Larry come in and begin to beg for admission. The walls were embarrassingly thin; he didn’t care to listen to these entreaties and endearments; he was past all that. That a man might call a woman “Poopsie-pie” and mean it, even a man ten years his junior, made him squirm. He called his wife “Paula” to her face, and referred to her to others as “my wife” or “Mrs. Rosebery.” Once in a very long while, when one of them was reminded of the child they’d lost, or of the plain fact that they weren’t able to have any more, he might address her as “dear.”
He yanked nervously at the tassels on his dressing-gown, not wanting to stay up any later, and hearing unwillingly the appeals in the hall. The knocking grew louder and, as it seemed to him, more desperate. He would never so lower himself, even with a girl like Mrs. Lovelace whom he sedulously ignored when they met in the hall, averting his eyes and darting into his apartment. The bitch, he thought, the bitch, she makes him pay for it twice over. He heard Paula calling from the bedroom.
“Who’s that,” she asked sleepily, “is it Larry?”
“Who else would it be?” snapped Francis. Then he lowered his voice and added, “She’s locked him out.”
“Maybe she’s asleep,” said Paula sensibly, “ask him if he’d like to call her on our phone.” It was her suggestion thought Francis, as he drew open the front door and called to Larry. He noticed the dejected slump of the shoulders and the desperation behind the boyish grin.
“Forgotten your key?” he asked kindly. “You can use our phone.” He hated to see Larry’s eyes but couldn’t take his own away. “I guess your wife’s dropped off.”
“That’s right,” said Larry, picking up a parcel from the hall table. “Wouldn’t want to lose these,” he mumbled, setting them down beside the telephone table. “Thanks, Francis, I hope I didn’t wake you up.”
Paula called from the bedroom. “We were just going, Larry, we hadn’t gone.”
“Hi, Paula,” he said lamely, “I’ll get her in a minute.” He dialled and they could hear the phone ring loudly in the other apartment. “It’s on the night table by the bed,” he said, “if she doesn’t hear that, she must be stinking.” He laughed shortly. “She went to a party with some kids from school. I’ll bet she drank gin, the idiot.” The phone went on ringing.
“Let it ring,” said Francis, deeply embarrassed, “and go and knock again.”
Larry went and beat on his front door and finally there were noises and the ringing stopped. Francis grabbed the phone.
“Mrs. Lovelace?” he said, rather curtly, “hold on a second, here’s your husband.” He handed Larry the receiver.
“Elizabeth? Elizabeth? It’s me, Larry. No, it’s me, your husband. Oh, damn it, Liz, wake up, it’s me.” His voice grew shrill. “Come on now, wake up.” He turned to Francis and said, “She hung up.”
“Call her again!”
“I hate to disturb her. Maybe I could break a window.”
“She’s awake now. Try again!”
So he did, and he did, and he did, and at the fourth try she revived enough to roll out of bed and come to the door. She wasn’t visible but nevertheless Francis felt his senses stir at the idea that she would be undressed.
“Good night, Larry,” he said decently, traitorously, and closed the door.
The nosy bugger, thought Larry as his own door swung wide, the nosy bugger with his helpful advice, I’ve forgotten the books, but they can hide them for me. She wavered in front of him and he put his hands on her small hips, feeling their warmth delightedly through the gauzy slip. He kissed her with rapture, tasting stale gin.
“Imagine that,” said Francis, lying chilly in his bed, “can you imagine his letting her push him around like that? I’d kick her bottom, that’s what I’d do.”
Paula breathed deeply and said nothing.
“I was so embarrassed for him, I couldn’t look at him,” said Francis reflectively, “why do you suppose he lets her get away with it?”
“He just adores her!” said Paula suddenly. “I think it’s lovely, the way he treats her.”
“Uxorious,” said Franci
s, peaceful at having given the symptom a name, “uxorious, that’s a word I’ve never used before, and it fits. I think she uses him, nobody has a right to use anybody else.” He thought of introducing a discussion of the forms of the categorical imperative but decided that it was too late. The bedroom was cold; his eyes were sore; he was overworked these days.
Francis and Paula were the same age, thirty-four, but had lost their illusions at different rates of speed. He had a good partnership in a distinguished Pearl Street law firm and his greatest responsibility was his position as Chief lobbyist for the building trade in the State Legislature. But he was more than a hireling; he prided himself on his sturdy independence of lifestyle. He was a great amateur of the pre-classical music of the eighteenth century, the compositions of Telemann, Vanhal, Hasse, “English” Bach, Abel, the Mannheim school, and the innumerable partners of Metastasio. He possessed the sole manuscript in this country of Salieri’s great work, Axur, re d’Ormus, a document which he had laboriously transcribed in a Viennese archive, while Paula roamed restlessly around the city.
That the Roseberys had no children was a circumstance in which they alternately rejoiced and felt dismal. Paula had no work of her own beyond taking care of Francis. She dusted and arranged his music manuscripts, and his thousands of discs, and polished their apartment until it glittered, and at that she had much leisure to observe everything that went on around her. It was she who first noticed in the three or four weeks immediately after Christmas that Elizabeth Lovelace had vanished. Normally the two young women met daily in the hall; they would exchange cautious critical glances and each would reaffirm to herself the superiority of her own notions of chic.
Elizabeth had done her kitchen in a contact paper which simulated bricks with ivy growing out of crannies. She had hung copper pots and pans in a row, in ascending order of size, and there was a clock shaped like an enormous pocket-watch hanging above the pots.
Paula knew that you would find that sort of thing in the decorators’ magazines every month, and she carefully avoided it. Instead she bought junk furniture from junk-shops and refinished it, spool cabinets, captain’s chairs, commodes. She painted pictures and framed them and now and then bought a drawing or a watercolour, and the Rosebery’s apartment resembled no one else’s.
When they visited one another, Elizabeth and Paula acted like wild but cautious animals investigating unfamiliar but potentially habitable lairs — the smell of the species reassuring but the burrowing inartistic and misguided.
In two or three weeks Paula grew uneasy at not finding her competitor in the halls and in time her uneasiness communicated itself to Francis. Can he have strangled her, wondered Paula, and in unspoken trailing of his wife’s meditations Francis thought to himself, I wouldn’t blame him a bit, I’d defend him. They were inclined to be very hard indeed on poor Elizabeth, who was in New York looking for her apprenticeship.
She had gone with Larry’s every blessing and encouragement, even his urging. They both felt (she more intensely than he) that if there was anything at all for her in the city, even if it only paid a little bit, that they might risk it without giving their relatives grounds for complaint. She departed for New York in a coarse olive-green wool, cowl-collared, sweater, black pants with a rather baggy seat, and one of those elaborately ragged and messy page boy haircuts, and could be found any day through January and February admiringly and beseechingly sitting in little display rooms, while poor Larry drove hotly up and down the hills of north-western Connecticut, swallowing anew every late afternoon his disappointment at the prospect of returning to their empty apartment.
She called him three or four nights weekly, which helped, usually calling just before he went to bed, sometimes when he was on the point of falling asleep. She would be bunking in with a girlfriend, or reluctantly passing three nights at her aunt’s. She said nothing about when she might come back to Hartford; they had agreed that there would have to be hardships endured on both sides.
“I miss you, lover,” she would whisper into the receiver. If she were at her aunt’s, she would whisper so low that he could scarcely hear her.
“Speak up!” he would say impatiently, and she would giggle.
“You can’t speak up when you’re saying ‘I miss you, lover.’”
Larry’s hands shook so, during these chats, that he often flipped his cigarette into the bedclothes and then wasted telephone time searching for the smouldering butt.
“When are you coming up? Does it look like you might find something?”
“Oh, Larry, it’s beginning to look promising. You know Ann and Michael Deshler, don’t you?”
“God, yes!”
“Sweetie, they’re going to open a shop themselves, and they want me to come in as an assistant.”
“Will they pay anything?”
“Perhaps not at first.”
“We couldn’t afford it.”
“Well, they might give me thirty-five dollars a week, for my time.”
He brightened up at this. “We could swing it on that, if I can get a transfer. That’s a hundred and forty a month. We could use it towards the rent.”
“If I could make enough to look after the rent, would you come?”
“Oh, sweetheart, I’d come anyway.” I shouldn’t have said that, he thought. “Come on up, this weekend?”
“I can’t possibly get away, honey. You come down!”
“Yes,” he said, “I believe I will. Good night,” he said, thinking happily about Saturday night.
She chuckled. “Dream about me,” she commanded.
Falling asleep, Larry couldn’t keep her image out of his mind. He remembered a cold night just after they were married, when he’d awakened to discover his arm hanging outside the covers, icy cold. Purely by reflex, he’d yanked the arm inside and slapped his frozen palm onto Elizabeth’s bare belly. Instead of squealing, as he’d expected, she’d stirred slowly, and waking gave the dearest of soft sighs. Ever afterwards, remembering, his nerves had rung with pleasure.
He went down to the city that weekend, and the next, and then for three weeks he was too busy with his territory, and too tired when he came home on Friday to make the trip; the weeks stretched insensibly into months and before he knew it February was almost over. One day late in the winter he woke at his accustomed time to find that there had been a fourteen inch snowfall overnight. It would take him hours to shovel the car out and the parking lot hadn’t been plowed. He decided to stay home and have a good rest, maybe stay in bed till noon and then do a little shovelling. But he was so used to getting up at half-past seven that he couldn’t go back to sleep. Except for the narrow strip on which he lay, the bed was frigid — when he extended an arm or a leg towards Elizabeth’s side he had to withdraw it instantly. Mumbling to himself, he rose and tottered around the apartment aimlessly. As the morning dragged by, the place grew to seem intolerably empty. He looked in the refrigerator for something to eat but found only an old dry piece of cheese, and a shrivelled lemon. He would have to struggle out to the corner for breakfast. At last he pulled on his clothes, washed his face, ran a comb carelessly through his sleep-tangled hair, he didn’t bother to shave, and went into the hall to look for his rubbers. Francis Rosebery was standing in the hall, staring out the front door. When he saw Larry he gave a guilty start.
“No mail delivery today,” said Francis morosely, “and it makes me laugh. ‘Neither wind nor rain nor sleet nor hail nor whatever it is shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.’ Hah! If one raindrop falls, the Post Office takes two days off.”
Larry put his head out the front door to check the mailbox. “You’re quite right,” he announced, “he hasn’t been around and I guess he won’t.” He sighed involuntarily. “I was expecting a letter.” He wished he hadn’t said it, for Francis’ eyes popped open and shut in a curious way. “Anyway,” he went on lamely, “I
guess I’ll go and get something to eat.”
“Come in and have something with us,” said Francis quickly.
“Thanks, Francis, but I don’t think I’d better. I’ve got to pick up some things from the drugstore, and I’d better shop for groceries in case Elizabeth is here for supper.” There was no prospect whatsoever of her being there but he didn’t see why Francis had to know everything.
“We haven’t seen much of her lately,” said Francis plaintively. “She isn’t sick, I hope.”
“No,” said Larry briefly, “she isn’t sick.” To himself he whispered other things. There was no need to tell the Roseberys anything. Let them think what they liked.
“Did your wife like the books?”
“What books?”
“Didn’t you give her some books for Christmas, the ones we hid for you?”
“Oh those, yes. She liked them fine.” In fact she had taken very little notice of them. Larry had put them out on the shelves after she’d gone. “She loved them,” he said mendaciously. “I’d better get on my horse.”
“Perhaps you could come in for dinner some night?” Francis almost said what he was thinking, that Larry must be desperately lonely, but stopped himself in time. He stood at the door, watching Larry stumble off through the drifts, and then he went dispiritedly inside. He hated winter weather; it made him feel prematurely old.
He sat in an easy chair in his living room, listening to his bones ache — he was certain that he could actually hear them clashing together. Presently Paula came out of the kitchen where she had been contemplating a gourmet cookbook. She threw him a look and decided to say nothing. Francis is in one of his moods, she thought with alarm, I wonder what’s wrong? When he had to stay around the apartment for a whole day, he grew bearish and sometimes really disagreeable. But as she knew the sequence of his moods better than he did himself, she found it relatively easy to avoid downright quarrelling. She fixed a gay, cheerful lunch, with a bowl of very hot split-pea and bacon soup as the pièce de résistance; she served it up and waited for Francis to tell her what was making him cross. He always brought it out if she kept silence long enough.
