A Charmed Life (25 page)

Just as he was at his wits’ end, she came back, wearing a pink dressing gown and a pair of slippers, with her hair, combed, down her back. This domestic image made him feel awkward and remorseful, like the sight of his mother in curlers and wrapper, waiting for him on the stairway of their Yonkers house when he had been out roistering with the gang. “Are you all right?” he said, finally, staring into her pale face. Her eyes had turned black, like two big raw prunes, and she looked a little the worse for liquor, though she had put fresh lipstick on. She nodded, smiling faintly. He wanted to assure her, from the bottom of his heart, that what had just occurred would never happen again, but he felt it would sound impolite to say so. “Good-bye, Miles,” said Martha gently. He could not make out whether that was meant to be symbolic or whether she was impatient to get him out of here. He took her hand and kissed her hastily on the forehead. “You’d better clean this up,” he jerked out, with a blunt gesture around the room. Then he turned and beat it. But as he started down the hill to where his car was parked, he stole a look back at the house, and to his relief he could see her through the thin curtains moving about the parlor, busily straightening up.

Miles had not enjoyed it much either, Martha said pensively to herself, as she picked up the beads from the parlor floor. It had been like an exercise in gluttony; they had both grasped for a morsel they did not really want. But she did not feel especially bad for what they had done. Now that it was over, it appeared to have been inevitable. She had thought it all out while she had been lingering in the bathroom, dousing her face in cold water to sober herself up and hoping that he would leave, so that she would not have to talk to him again. She had brought it on herself, she supposed. She ought not to have asked him in, knowing that it was a risk, even as they stood in her doorway. But it had been one of those challenges that she always rose to, like a fish to the bait—the fear of being afraid. And she still did not think that Miles had brought her home with the set purpose of seducing her. It had happened all by itself,
invitus, invitant.
In the end, he had done it, she reckoned, just because it was obvious; it was a kind of strength in him not to fear banality but to step right up to it like a man at a free-lunch counter.

She could not deny that she had asked for it, if only by her imprudence. Yet when he had first landed on her, she had felt like laughing. She could not take it seriously. All the while she was struggling, she had been suppressing a smile, at his ridiculous searching for her zipper (he had never been able to find anything), at the blunt simplicity of his onset that took her consent for granted. Her chief worry, at first, had been that he would break the sofa. She had not been alarmed for her virtue, feeling certain that she could free herself once he grasped the sincerity of her objections. She was disgusted with him for slavering over her hair, but since she could not stop him, she resigned herself—that was the way he was, and his enjoyment could not harm her. This inability to feel outrage was of course her undoing. Even when her dress was open, she could not summon wrath sufficient to warrant scratching him or kicking him to keep him from exploring her back. Then, once he had touched her breast, she no longer, so it had seemed to her, had the
right
to refuse him. It was like that thing in law, where if you let somebody cross your property without hindrance, they finally secure a right of way. A drunken notion of equity had been beating at her mind, even as she pushed and parried—the idea that one more time could not possibly count and that she was being preposterous.

And she still felt the force of this reasoning, even now, as she methodically filled the ice tray and carried it, spilling, across the kitchen to the icebox. The only thing that shamed her, looking back on the encounter, was the fact that her senses had awakened under Miles’s touch. She would have liked to blot out that part, which was only a minute or two, from her memory. But honesty compelled her to remember, with a half-desirous shudder, that moment when his hand had first squeezed her expectant breast and languorous delight had possessed her, like a voluptuary.

She made a face and proceeded unsteadily to the bathroom. But as she stood there, brushing her teeth, her sensuality relived those few moments, and she longed for John to come home. Disgusted with herself, she rinsed out her mouth and spat into the basin. Nothing, she thought angrily, could be more immoral than utilizing your husband, whom you loved, to slake the desires kindled by another man, whom you detested. Moreover, her practical side added, she would be very unattractive to him in her present condition, still half-tight, swaying a little, and smelling of stale alcohol. He would be cross with her, anyway, for going to the Coes’ and getting drunk and seeing Miles again. And he would be right; it could not have come out worse if he had predicted it himself.

Misgivings overtook her. He would be bound to find out that Miles had driven her home. Should she admit that she had asked him in or not? Tomorrow he might notice that there was an inch or so missing from the bottle of Scotch. She took three aspirins and drank two glasses of water, revolving the problem in her mind. She could say Miles had come in for a drink and made a pass at her, which was true enough but hard on Miles; or she could say he had come in for a drink and not made a pass at her, which was kind but hard on John’s credulity. Or she could say that he had left her at the door and blame the missing whiskey, if John noticed it, on the handyman, who was notorious for taking liquor whenever he came into a house. Martha steadied herself on the wash basin and stared at her flushed face in the mirror. She would never have thought that she could entertain such wicked ideas even for a second.

A shiver ran through her. She had not realized how cold the house was. Poor Miles, she thought, picturing his big white perspiring body, clad only in socks and garters, exposed to the drafts of the parlor. And it would be a miracle if she herself did not get sick from lying naked on the sofa in late October, with only a coal fire going. John would never forgive her if he knew of this piece of heedlessness. If she died, he would be furious and blame it all on the Coes. She smiled fondly, thinking of John’s oddities, and hurried into bed. He liked to assign blame, arbitrarily, in military style. And he would be more annoyed if she caught cold than at any other feature of the seduction.
Dear
John, she said to herself. He would doubtless find a way of making New Leeds the villain of the whole episode, assuming she were to tell him. But she could not risk telling him, and precisely for that reason. Being intelligent and perceptive, he might forgive her and Miles and even see the absurd logic of it. But he would have to find some target for his stores of blame.

She sighed, hugging the blankets to her. The best thing would be to say that she had had Miles in for a drink and then gloss over the next part. If he asked whether Miles had made a pass, it would be wisest to say yes, just a little one; if she denied it, he might doubt the whole story. The one thing to fear, aside from her getting a cold (for which he would certainly hold the Coes’ play-reading responsible), was that he would discover that her jet-and-crystal necklace had been broken. He had given it to her, two years ago, for her birthday, and though it could be restrung, he would never feel quite the same about it, like the watch, which was a gift too. John had a peculiar attitude toward fragile, delicate things—among which he included herself. He loved them angrily, foreseeing their destruction, and did not want them to be used, except on the highest occasions. This attitude always vexed Martha. It seemed to her somehow undemocratic. She believed firmly in use. That, in a sense, was what had got her into trouble tonight—with Miles, she could not treat herself as a precious vase to be kept on a top shelf, like their Bohemian glass, which she insisted on using too. And yet look what had happened. Her dress was a wreck—she would have to mend it and iron it the next time John went away; her necklace was broken; she had started lying and deceiving and thinking of implicating the poor handyman. And she would probably have an awful hangover.

She buried her head in the pillow and resolutely went to sleep. When she woke, it was daylight and the place beside her was empty. She came into full consciousness instantly and sprang up in bed, her heart pounding with terror. Her watch said eight o’clock. He should have been home five hours ago. She listened; the house was silent. Not even the pump was running. Flinging off the covers, she vaulted out of bed and sped in her bare feet across the cold floors up to the guest bedroom. There was no one there. A ringing scream came out of her. It smote her with utter certainty that he had somehow come home and seen them there through the window and quietly gone away forever. She tried to reason with herself. After all, she had looked at her watch before Miles turned out the lights, and it had been only a quarter of two. Nobody could have made it from Boston in that time. And she had looked again, at two-twenty, after Miles had left. John must have been killed in an accident.

But her common sense refused to credit this. The police would have called her. A hideous thought came to her. Perhaps her watch had been wrong. Suppose it had started losing more than its allotted twenty minutes a day? And now that she thought about it, she could not remember setting it ahead yesterday morning, as she usually did, right after breakfast—the day had been upset with John’s leaving early. Another memory jogged her. When Warren came to fetch her last night, she had been surprised: she had not expected him so early. “Oh, my God!” she heard herself cry. Her watch said eight-five now, but it might be much later. The clock in the parlor had stopped last week, when John tried to fix it himself; he could not get the pendulum back right. She stumbled to the telephone. But the operator said: “I am sorree; we are not allowed to give out the time.” She tried the Coes’ number; it was busy. Dolly had no telephone, and she and John had no radio. Outside, it had stopped raining, but the gray sky did not reveal whether it was morning or afternoon. A peculiar inhibition checked her when she thought of calling the Hubers; she did not know them well enough, she considered, to call them and ask them the time. She could call the vicomte and ask the time casually while ordering some liquor. She picked up the phone and set it down again irresolutely, stricken with shyness, like stage fright. She perhaps did not want to hear what time it was, for then she would know the worst for certain.

The only thing that mattered was to find John and try to explain it all to him. But she did not know how to set about this. Her hand went out again to the telephone, but she shrank from calling the police. If he had been killed in an automobile accident, she did not want to know. The only course that seemed really feasible was to go back to sleep. Numbly, she started to the bedroom. Someone, eventually, would come and find her there, hiding under the covers. She got into bed and closed her eyes but opened them almost at once as another cry escaped her. “I can’t
stand
it,” she moaned. And indeed it seemed to her that she could not endure another moment of existence. She began to sob aloud, as if from a physical pain.

Unable to stay in bed, she wandered into the parlor and wanly commenced to rebuild the fire, and as she knelt crouched by the hearth, weeping, she noticed that black and crystal beads were lying in the cracks between the floorboards and that two bone hairpins were in plain sight on the sofa. A strange relief swept through her. What if John had come home and seen this, she said to herself, forgetting that he had already, so she believed, seen everything. She poked out the beads and swept them into the dustpan, marveling at how tight she must have been last night to have presumed that she had cleaned them all up. And yet—as she now noticed for the first time—she did not have a hangover. She remembered reading somewhere that fear did something to your adrenalins and that pilots, during the war, never got hangovers on a flight, no matter how much they had drunk the night before. A wild laugh broke from her. What a price to pay for not having a hangover!

Just then, down the hill, she thought she heard a car’s motor. But she went back to building the fire, reluctant to look out the window, lest it not be he. In a moment, there was a knocking on the kitchen door. Nearly fainting, Martha went and pulled it open. It was only Jane Coe.

“Where’s John?” she demanded at once. Martha could not speak. She threw herself, sobbing, onto Jane’s bosom. “Gone,” she finally said. “Gone!” Jane hurried into the bathroom and got a wet washcloth to wash the tears and coal dust off Martha’s face, which gave Martha time to recover herself. In the first instant, she had wanted to confess everything and be comforted, but now caution intervened. “What time is it?” she asked huskily. It was quarter of nine, Jane said. Martha’s heart leapt with incredulous joy. Her own watch said eight-thirty. Therefore,
therefore,
she said to herself, her fears were groundless: he could not have seen anything. But then it came to her that he must be dead or injured, and though, two minutes before, she would have felt this was the lesser evil, now this new horror struck her with redoubled force. She moaned. “What happened? Did you have a fight? Why aren’t you dressed?” said Jane. “Or didn’t he come home last night?” Martha nodded, speechlessly, and burst into fresh sobs. “What did I tell you?” said Jane. “He probably spent the night in some tourist place, just the way I said.” “No,” retorted Martha. “He would have called me.” Jane looked grave. “Have you called the police?” Martha smiled sadly. “I was afraid to.”

Jane herself called the police and the hospital in Trowbridge. There was nothing. But they were sending out an alarm, though Martha was not much use there: she could not remember the car’s registration number or the year of the make. All she could say was that it had a New York license plate and was an old black Ford convertible.

Jane put a pot of coffee on and made Martha dress. Then she told the news she had brought with her: Warren’s mother had died. He was off to New York this morning on the little plane from Digby, and then on to Savannah, taking the afternoon plane. There was only one difficulty: he had no suit. “No suit?” exclaimed Martha, from the bedroom, trying to take an interest. Only his corduroy, it seemed, and that, agreed Martha, fighting down her tears, would not do for a funeral, not in the South, anyway.
You must think of others,
she said to herself.
Jane is thinking of you.
And she put her mind on the problem. “Well,” she suggested, coming back into the kitchen, “when he gets to New York, he can take a taxi in from the airfield and pick up something off the rack at Brooks Brothers. The fitter can probably baste the pants up while he waits.” But Jane did not take to this notion. She had had a better idea, it seemed. “What was that?” said Martha, absently. Jane lowered her eyes. “That blue suit of John’s,” she acknowledged. Martha buried her head in her arms on the kitchen table and began to laugh hysterically. “It’s gone,” she gasped. “Isn’t that ironical?” Jane gave her coffee, and she grew a little calmer. “Is that why you came?” she asked at length. Jane nodded. “Oh, dear,” said Martha. “Oh, dear. I’m sorry.”