A New Life (43 page)
Authors: Bernard Malamud
“Trick?”
“Pauline has always had odd tastes.”
“I tricked her and she tricked you?”
“She’ll do the same to you. She’s a discontented woman and I could tell you more. If you were to marry her you’d find that out soon enough, and I’d pity you when you did.”
“If that’s the case why do you want to keep her?”
“I love her,” he said miserably.
Levin socked himself hard on the chest.
Gilley then came up with a proposition: “We’ve both made mistakes, though I wouldn’t have done to you half of what you did to me. What I have to say is that I’m willing to forgive and forget if you will resign and leave. I promise you good references.”
But Levin sadly shook his head.
“She’s all I’ve got,” Gerald said brokenly.
The instructor lay back with both eyes shut.
On Monday the acting head let it be known through Avis Fliss and George Bullock that he and his wife were separating, with an assist by Mr. S. Levin. The halls were thick with talk as department members came in to hand in their grades and get on their gowns for the Commencement ceremony. People
avoided Levin and he avoided them .The next day the election was held in Dean Seagram’s office. Levin did not attend. Neither did Bucket. The first and final vote for head of department was Gilley 17, Fabrikant 2, Levin o. Though he had expected nothing less, Levin, poor man’s Parnell, somewhere in his buried self felt shame and loss. He might have led.
avoided Levin and he avoided them .The next day the election was held in Dean Seagram’s office. Levin did not attend. Neither did Bucket. The first and final vote for head of department was Gilley 17, Fabrikant 2, Levin o. Though he had expected nothing less, Levin, poor man’s Parnell, somewhere in his buried self felt shame and loss. He might have led.
In his mailbox was a note from Gilley. “I am willing to let you stay on for one last year, provided you promise not to see my wife again, or otherwise interfere in our lives. G. Gilley, Head of Dept. P.S. In thinking it over we will use the books your committee recommended. G.G.”
Levin did not reply. Later in the day he received by messenger an official communication from President Marion Labhart, terminating his services “as of today, in the public interest, for good and sufficient cause of a moral nature.” He referred to the ex-instructor, among other things, as a “frustrated Union Square radical.”
Levin put his fist through Duffy’s bloody window.
He awoke with Pauline in his arms. She had kissed him awake. “Mrs. Beaty let me come up when I told her I was upset and bad to see you.”
Levin, realizing it was no dream, sat up slowly. She moved back on the bed, looking worn, tired, lonely. She was hastily dressed and in doubt.
“How’s your hand?”
“Better.”
He lit a cigarette with his bandaged hand.
“I never saw you smoke before.”
“I go back to it sometimes.”
“What else do you go back to?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Nothing really. I’m sorry I’m nervous.” She asked, “How do you feel?”
“I slept badly, thinking of the job.”
“But you knew you would lose it. Even if you had won the election you would have lost your job once people knew why I was leaving Gerald.”
“For a short time in my life I felt I was able to say what would happen to me next.”
“There are other jobs,” Pauline said. “But if you think you’re sacrificing the right thing for the wrong woman, you can call it off. Don’t be too proud to admit defeat.”
He said he wasn’t.
Pauline said, “Gerald left last night and went to the hotel until I leave the house. We had a nasty argument about the children. He said he’d contest my divorce and not let me have them. He accused me of deserting them in spirit long ago. I said the truth was I had long ago deserted him but hadn’t the courage to say so. Our marriage was in shreds after Leo left, but the children kept it together until I fell in love with you.”
She got her handkerchief out of her bag. “I’ve never seen him so hurt and unyielding. He asked me not to leave him, and when I said it was for the good of us all he got very bitter and said if it was a question of whose good it was, he would keep Erik and Mary.”
She blew her nose. “I’m blowing my nose,” she said. “He has been an affectionate father but I’ve always thought of them as more mine than his. I was the one who really wanted them. He made me wait almost six years before we put in adoption papers. After he left I kept waking up every hour and wanting to look at the kids. I went upstairs several times. I’ve been so positive he would let me have them and I almost died when he said no. Please help me get them, Lev.”
He had always known she would want them. I’m in so far already, he thought.
He said he would help her.
“I hate to burden you further,” she said. “But you really don’t have to marry me.”
“We’ve gone through all that,” he said.
“Why are you then?”
“I’ve told you.”
“Tell me again.”
“I love you.”
“Without feeling?”
“As I am.”
“You love me on principle?”
“Yes.”
“Is that all?”
“No.”
“How else?”
He was silent.
“I get afraid,” Pauline said. “It’s so easy to make a serious mistake.” She said, after a minute, “Will you talk to him? He wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Would it be so bad to leave them with him?”
“What would he do with them? Either he’d have to bring someone in to take care of them or send them to his parents. I don’t want strangers bringing up my children.”
“Couldn’t he take one and we’d have the other?”
“I couldn’t do that, they both need me. They’re still babies.”
“Suppose I said I didn’t want them?”
“I don’t think you would.”
Levin asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“Talk to Gerald and persuade him to let us keep them.”
“What makes him think he could take them from you?”
“He said he would tell the court I wasn’t a fit mother.”
“Don’t cry.”
“I wouldn’t if you put your arms around me.”
He did that, thinking he hadn’t planned to see Gilley again, either.
Pauline waited downstairs while he shaved and dressed. It took him longer than usual, partly because of his bandaged hand. When Levin came down, they were all in the kitchen,
the kids playing with Mrs. Beaty’s pots. Pauline was having a cup of coffee with the landlady.
the kids playing with Mrs. Beaty’s pots. Pauline was having a cup of coffee with the landlady.
“Good wishes if I may, Mr. Levin,” Mrs. Beaty said.
“Lev want to marry Mama,” said Erik.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Pauline asked, reddening. “Mrs. Beaty very kindly made a fresh potful.”
“I’ll eat later.”
“You can now, there’s no rush.”
“I’d rather go now.”
Levin called the office but Milly said Dr. Gilley was staying at the Covered Wagon Hotel. They drove downtown in Levin’s car. Summer had come, the day was warm. They said little.
In the hotel lobby Levin asked, “Are we all going up?”
Pauline, tense, shook her head. “I’d rather not. I will though if you want me to.”
“Wait here,” said Levin.
“Tell him I want Erik and Mary and mean to have them. If he wants to go to court that’s all right with me.”
Then she said, “Maybe you’d better not say it that way. Speak to him nicely. Maybe he’ll relent. Do you think he will?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try not to make him angry—any more than he is.”
He said he would try.
She pressed his hand.
In the elevator he thought: I’ve slept with his wife and here I come asking for his kids. He felt he wanted to give Gilley back everything he had taken from him and more.
Levin stood in front of the door five minutes before he knocked.
Gerald, in a seersucker robe, unshaven, dark half-moons under his eyes, opened the door.
“Oh, it’s you.”
“Sorry to bother you again,” Levin said, “but there’s one last thing I have to see you about.” He was ready to step back if Gilley slammed the door in his face.
“Come in,” Gerald said. The magazines and newspapers he
had been reading were strewn around the armchair and base of the lit pink lamp in the darkish hotel room.
had been reading were strewn around the armchair and base of the lit pink lamp in the darkish hotel room.
He looks like a misplaced bachelor, Levin thought, and I feel long since married.
“Pardon the small room,” Gilley said. He sat in the armchair, crossing his long red-haired legs. “I was hoping you’d show up.”
Levin sat on the edge of a hard chair. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a thorn in your side, Gerald.”
“More a pain in the ass,” Gilley said. “And if you’re so goddamn sorry, why don’t you close up shop and go haunt some other neighborhood? Why did you have to pick on me? I’ve worked doggone hard in my life and don’t know why I shouldn’t be allowed to live in peace with my wife and kids and enjoy the fruits of my labor.”
“The reason I’ve come,” Levin said, “is to ask for the children. They’ll miss their mother. She says they’d only be in your way.”
“If their mother wants them so much why didn’t she act like one? Why didn’t she consider their welfare before breaking up their home?”
He was haughty, embittered, so unhappy Levin found it hard to look at him.
Neither of them spoke until Gerald, uncrossing his legs, said, “I thought you’d be more than glad for me to take them off your hands, but if you’re asking to have them for her, that shows you don’t really have any true idea what you’re in for. Up to now you’ve had a free ride on my back, although I can’t blame you entirely, I suppose. I know darn well it wasn’t all your fault, and that’s why I opened the door to you just now instead of punching your eye. But the way you’re acting convinces me, if I haven’t already been convinced along other lines of the same thing, that you are a very inexperienced person. I mean with women as they really are and not as they pretend to be, or as they are when it’s a question of going to bed with them. I don’t doubt you’re in love with my wife.
Duffy was too, but that’s not the whole of it. A lot you don’t know will pop up the minute you begin to live as man and wife under the same roof. Up to then the picture might as well be something you think you’re seeing whereas the real thing is something else again after it’s been developed. That’s why I thought I ought to talk to you before you go on with this.
Duffy was too, but that’s not the whole of it. A lot you don’t know will pop up the minute you begin to live as man and wife under the same roof. Up to then the picture might as well be something you think you’re seeing whereas the real thing is something else again after it’s been developed. That’s why I thought I ought to talk to you before you go on with this.
“I appreciate it,” Levin said, “but I know what you mean.”
“You can’t,” said Gilley, “unless you’ve been married to her for years. First off, she has some qualities that would drive even the most patient man, and I am one of them—crazy. If you want to know why I want her back if that’s the case, and after she has twice deceived and humiliated me, the reason is understandable. I’m used to her and know what to expect. She can’t surprise me any more, good or bad, though this would be her last chance with the bad. I’ve had it. Yet I’d be a liar not to admit there are some wonderful things about Pauline or why am I bothering to talk to you now? But as somebody thinking of marrying a woman who has been married a dozen years, the best and freshest of her youth, you are due for some unpleasant surprises, and I wouldn’t be surprised myself in the least to hear that you and she break up within six months if you are so foolish as to marry her. In order to save you unforseen trouble I’ll give you some idea what she’s like.”
“I know what she’s like—”
“You think you do. I’ve already told you she is never contented, but I don’t think you understand what that means. She was born dissatisfied, as some people are—Fabrikant comes to mind, and I could mention others—or maybe she was brought up that way. Whatever it is, even when as a student she turned in some very good term papers to me, which I gave high A’s to, she never was satisfied. She always said she felt she should have done better. Not that she
could,
mind you, but that she
should
have, as though all you have to do to execute a better performance is to wish for it. I blame her old man for this, to some extent. I understand he was a fine physician
and a nice thoughtful person—I’ve suffered myself from his virtues—but it’s plain to me that he gave her a blown-up idea of herself. She was an only child, too, be that as it may. If you make the mistake of tying yourself to her, more than once—I guarantee—you’ll wake up at six A.M. to hear her already going on about her life and how it didn’t pan out as she wanted it to. When you ask her what she had expected, all she can tell you is that she wanted to be a better peson than she is. And this, as is obvious, from a woman who admits to two extra-marital lovers in the last three years. Then you will hear in long detail everything she thinks she has done wrong, or those things she tried to do and had to give up, or everything she now does and does badly. She will never once tell you what she does well, which can get pretty monotonous. After that she’ll blame you for as much as she blames herself, because you married her—in my case when she was twenty—and didn’t do what she calls ‘bring me out,’ meaning make out of her something she couldn’t make out of herself though you may have broken your back trying to think up new ways to do it. I’ve suggested courses, taken her on trips, kept her on a decent budget even when I couldn’t so well afford it, given her a position in the community, a car, fine home, children just as real and lovable as anyone else’s, although adopted, and in general tried everything I know to make her happy. And when she’s through with that complaint she will have worked herself up into a nervous jag, so that unless you get out of the house early you’ll be having an argument with her that may run through the day and into the night, just to the time, let’s say, when you might be thinking of a little natural satisfaction. The next day it’ll take her half the morning to wake up because she hasn’t slept well, which happens more often than you would think. I’m not saying I hold these things against her, and I’m willing to bet that if you asked her right now she’ll admit I’ve always been considerate. Maybe it’s just the way her nervous system is built. It might be what used
to be called ‘delicate.’ Almost anything can throw off her balance and start you both being miserable.”
could,
mind you, but that she
should
have, as though all you have to do to execute a better performance is to wish for it. I blame her old man for this, to some extent. I understand he was a fine physician
and a nice thoughtful person—I’ve suffered myself from his virtues—but it’s plain to me that he gave her a blown-up idea of herself. She was an only child, too, be that as it may. If you make the mistake of tying yourself to her, more than once—I guarantee—you’ll wake up at six A.M. to hear her already going on about her life and how it didn’t pan out as she wanted it to. When you ask her what she had expected, all she can tell you is that she wanted to be a better peson than she is. And this, as is obvious, from a woman who admits to two extra-marital lovers in the last three years. Then you will hear in long detail everything she thinks she has done wrong, or those things she tried to do and had to give up, or everything she now does and does badly. She will never once tell you what she does well, which can get pretty monotonous. After that she’ll blame you for as much as she blames herself, because you married her—in my case when she was twenty—and didn’t do what she calls ‘bring me out,’ meaning make out of her something she couldn’t make out of herself though you may have broken your back trying to think up new ways to do it. I’ve suggested courses, taken her on trips, kept her on a decent budget even when I couldn’t so well afford it, given her a position in the community, a car, fine home, children just as real and lovable as anyone else’s, although adopted, and in general tried everything I know to make her happy. And when she’s through with that complaint she will have worked herself up into a nervous jag, so that unless you get out of the house early you’ll be having an argument with her that may run through the day and into the night, just to the time, let’s say, when you might be thinking of a little natural satisfaction. The next day it’ll take her half the morning to wake up because she hasn’t slept well, which happens more often than you would think. I’m not saying I hold these things against her, and I’m willing to bet that if you asked her right now she’ll admit I’ve always been considerate. Maybe it’s just the way her nervous system is built. It might be what used
to be called ‘delicate.’ Almost anything can throw off her balance and start you both being miserable.”
Levin shifted in his chair.
Gilley went on: “If you happen to want someone who is a good housekeeper and will keep the house as neat and orderly as I’ve seen your office—I’m not talking about those fireballs who do canning, baking, gardening, civic activities, refinishing furniture, bean picking in summer, and play tennis besides keeping up the usual household chores—I am talking about a reduced scale of domestic efficiency—well, you’d better forget it. She has her periods of efficiency, I admit, usually in the spring and early fall, but there are times when for one reason or another she can’t get organized enough to clean the toilet and I have to do it after a full day’s work, especially on a day she has spent most of the time with a pile of cookbooks around her, cooking a dinner that should take two hours to prepare instead of seven, and is not anything super-special anyway. That’s why we don’t entertain as much as I would like. She doesn’t care for housework—it bores her, and even on days she is concentrating on getting it done, her resistance to it cuts down on her accomplishment. That’s why I frankly thought we were better off not adopting for a while because I knew she’d be more swamped than ever. As soon as I could afford a cleaning woman for her twice a week I agreed to having the kids. I know how finicky you are to order and punctuality, but if you marry her you can bury your clock for all the good it will do you. Not only does she resist time, she makes it her enemy.”
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