Dancing in the Dark (19 page)

“That’s okay. I watch TV and read, or sometimes I bake if there hasn’t been time during the day. There are things to do. Of course I’d like it better if you came home, but I can find things to do.”

“And you don’t get mad?”

“Heavens, no. Why should I?”

Why indeed.

Anyway, we made a bargain: I would not make demands, and he would give. But what was he giving? Never mind. Twenty years down the road was no time to tell him I was waiting.

Oh, wasn’t I the perfect, understanding wife though?

Once, Harry brought home a man from work for a drink. They sat in the living room talking, while I tried to keep dinner from being ruined. I imagine the man’s wife was trying to do the same in their home. After a couple of hours the man stood and sighed and said, “Well, I better be getting home to the old ball and chain.”

What an ugly thing to say, a terrible way to feel. “It’s just an expression,” Harry told me later. But expressions don’t come from nowhere, and that man said that so easily, casually, about his wife. Not Harry. Not ever Harry.

“So what you’re saying is that you’re quite happy and contented and everything is tickety-boo, is that right?” A cynicism, bitterness, in the tone; so odd. And how do you answer?

“I suppose. If you want to put it that way. Harry, please let’s just drop it. I’m perfectly satisfied with my life.”

He flung up his hands. “Okay, okay. If you’re sure. I just wanted to be sure.”

I guess he really wasn’t asking about me at all that night. I guess he was really checking for permission to be free.

At home we just got in the door and he said, “I’m beat, I’m going to bed. Happy birthday, Edna.” I’d thought we might sit up for another glass of wine; and cool down from the evening and whatever was hot (and not warm) between us. But he did look weary.

I was restless still and stayed downstairs for a while, looking around. Just wandering through the rooms, staring at shining surfaces. Like my clothes: would my furniture suit my age? I approved the starkness of Rosenthal vases in the dining room and the cool beige woven couch in the living room, the simple silver frame on a mildly modern print of something not quite like what it was. I liked the smooth surfaces and the textured ones. So cool and light, my rooms.

But were they for a forty-year-old woman? Or did that matter, as long as they were tasteful? Magazines instructed in taste, and in changing tastes, changing just as the rules seemed to. I had no need for new rules, though, having embraced my own. And no need to alter simplicity for old flowery cake plates and painted vases, rough wooden tables instead of glass and chrome, heavy patterned furniture instead of light and plain. These new things were old, would have more nearly suited my parents’ home than mine. Things—tastes and rules—seemed to be going backward and forward simultaneously. Very confusing.

Probably having learned simplicity so well, I should stick to it. At forty, surely one has a right to say, “This is it.” Even if along with the satisfaction of saying that comes just a hint of death.

The daisy kitchen clock moved on past midnight, and I was into my forty-first year.

Harry was sound asleep when I went upstairs. I looked at him and wondered, “What were all those questions for? Why did he want to stir things up?” But what had he stirred up? I tossed for a while before I got to sleep.

But was up early the next morning, the morning of the first day of my forty-first year, and couldn’t quite recall the day before. It seemed an aberration. What had seemed so hard, or bad? Too many questions; and with too many questions a faltering of purpose, a betrayal. A relief to settle back on my own track.

It seemed important to demonstrate to Harry that I was fine. He needn’t worry, or even think about me. Things were as they should be, and he could go unburdened to his office. Certainly I did not want him to look at me again in quite the way he had the night before, or talk to me that way again.

Pancakes were usually for weekends when there was lots of time and lots to do; but I made pancakes that morning anyway, for proof.

“Very nice,” he said, and ate four. No questions this morning, no signs of the night before. “I’ve got to run if I want to beat the rush. See you later. I think I should be home for dinner, I’ll let you know.”

I waved good-bye and started my work. I would not think of twenty, forty years, enough to take each day.

I forgot how sad the closed-eyed music had seemed the day before, and put on an album in the afternoon, watched myself whirl on a stage, and smiled.

Later, he called to say he wouldn’t be able to make it for dinner after all, but should be home by nine. “Listen, Edna,” and he laughed, “don’t ever make pancakes again on a weekday.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve got a gut you wouldn’t believe. Weighs a ton. I can hardly move. All I want to do is sleep.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think of that.”

“Shit, I was kidding.” So easily he twisted on me in recent years; and again I didn’t really notice. “They were great, it’s just when you sit on your ass all day, it’s hard to work them off. If I was home mowing the lawn, they’d be gone by now. Listen, I’ve got to get to a meeting. See you later, okay?”

So. Dinner for one. An omelette and a small salad in front of the television set; another meal without Harry, another meal at which I could watch my weight. I watched Walter Cronkite while I ate. Who was Walter Cronkite anyway? Did he have secrets, tell lies? It didn’t seem so, but the faces, it seems, are just masks for other faces.

Was I like that as well? Or was my flaw maybe just transparency?

T
he phone call from that woman; Dottie Franklin. Why would she do such a thing? One assumes malice. Maybe I deserved malice.

I knew her, of course. We’d had dinners, the four of us, she and Jack, Harry and I, and we also met at parties. The first time, years ago, before I met them Harry told me a little about them. He always tried to do that, give me details about people we were seeing, so I’d feel more a part of it, I suppose, or not say something wrong, or so they wouldn’t seem quite like strangers.

“Don’t, for God’s sake, talk about marriage,” he told me. Why ever would I have raised such an intimate subject anyway? But he was warning, “It’s a bad topic, especially if they have a few drinks.” Everyone always had a few drinks.

“Why?”

“Because theirs is weird and if you get them started, it’ll all turn into a brawl.”

“But what’s the matter?”

“Who knows?” He raised his eyebrows, spread his palms towards me, shrugged. “Probably a lot of things. The obvious
one is that Jack’s a bit of a chaser, and every year or so he takes up with somebody for a while until he does something stupid, I don’t know, goes home with blonde hairs on his jacket maybe, and Dottie finds out. Then they have a hell of a row and heave things around and then they make up, sort of, until the next time.”

“But that’s terrible. Why do they stay together if it’s so awful?” Astonished that people might yell and throw dishes and live in the midst of betrayal.

“Probably because they like it that way. It’s never one person’s fault, you know.” No, I don’t suppose it is. “Jack’s not such a bad guy, it’s just the way he is. And in their way, they get along. Maybe they like fighting, maybe they get off on it.”

And when we met them, it did seem they got along. Jack wasn’t sharp and bright, not like Harry, but he did have an easy sort of charm, I could see his type. He might be attractive, if one were inclined to casualness.

And he and Dottie had little married jokes, small verbal nudges, and grinned at each other, and if there was a hard sort of undercurrent, maybe I only heard it because I knew to listen for it.

“We were lucky,” Harry said afterward. “They weren’t too bad tonight.”

I remember looking at her, though, and feeling sorry for her. And I must confess a straightening of my spine, a pride that Harry and I were different.

If she phoned out of malice, that’s understandable.

But unforgivable if it was done with pity. If it was true that she thought it only “fair” to tell me. If, as she lifted the receiver, dialled, she thought, “Poor Edna.”

“It was just by accident Jack saw them,” she told me. “He happened to glance out the car window as he was going past
her apartment building and there they were in the parking lot. Kissing.

“And after all, at eight o’clock in the morning, what other explanation could there be?

“I thought you ought to know. I thought it would be only fair.”

One thing I thought during my twelve long hours of thinking, fixed on that wall of gold-flecked white wallpaper: that the unique, flamboyant, clever, driving Harry, who hadn’t made it home last night, could have committed such an ordinary, clichéd, banal little sin. That he could have been trapped in one of my magazine articles, that is how ordinary he turned out to be, and that was a betrayal, too.

If he were going to do such a thing, which I wouldn’t have dreamed, but if I had dreamed, it would have been with someone more exotic, unreachable, someone more a challenge. Not just the person closest to hand.

Harry’s hands were on her. Every pore of my skin ached, seeing that.

When Harry hired her he said, “I can’t believe how she’s just moved in and taken over. She’s very young to be so confident.”

“She makes your work easier then?”

“You bet. It’s only been a week and she knows where everything is and who to put off and who to get back to right away and she’s not a pain in the ass about it, she doesn’t have to keep coming to me with questions.” He laughed. “In another couple of weeks I won’t have to go in at all, she’ll be taking care of everything. You have no idea how rare it is to find somebody you can depend on.”

Well, I thought I had some idea.

“Of course,” he said, “she’s been in the company for a year so she understands how the operation works. But still, it’s not often you find somebody who just does her job and does it right and isn’t bugging you all the time.”

When we were first introduced one day when I went to the office to meet Harry after work, there was nothing about her that made me notice her particularly. Nothing that said she was efficient or remarkable or anything at all. She was pretty enough, but not beautiful, but I hadn’t expected her to be beautiful. When Harry spoke of her skills, I assumed she did not have beauty. He would have mentioned that.

The day we met, her blonde hair was pulled back and not glamorous, although later I sometimes saw her with it down, curling around her shoulders. The only make-up she wore that I could see was a slash of lipstick. She was wearing a white blouse tucked not very carefully into a tailored grey skirt, a grey suit jacket slung over the back of her chair. Proper office wear, I suppose, although not something I would have chosen. Too stark. Blue eyes, but set a little too far apart, and a nose just a shade too flat. Wide mouth, and a plump chin that would likely double some day, if she weren’t careful.

If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can hear the sounds of my heartbeat and my pulse. I can almost hear the blood in the veins and arteries. There are shifting patterns of lights and shapes against my eyelids, and I can almost begin to feel how it all works, the internal intricacies. Could I trace the dangling, disconnected pieces?

Admirable, how the body goes on, performing its own routines, whatever is going on outside. It may speed or slow in a mild response, but basically it keeps functioning. Blood winds to the smallest places, food and drink are pulverized and acidized and moved, shifted, absorbed, the nerves send
impulses, knowledge and memory leap in the brain, it all goes on. Hair and toenails grow and are clipped and then grow again.

I wish I could live as blindly and dumbly as the hair and toenails, I wish I could restore my ignorance. I would like to be a drop of blood, or a heartbeat.

When I called him at the office, she always said, “Oh hello, Mrs. Cormick, I’ll just ring through and make sure he’s not in a meeting.” If he was on another line and I had to wait, she’d come back on and say, “He’ll just be a minute. How are you? We haven’t seen you for a while,” and I could say to her, “I’m just fine, how are things going there?”

It didn’t mean a thing, but that’s just it: she was cheerful, friendly, and ordinary, and didn’t mean a thing.

Really, I knew nothing about her except what Harry said: that she was quick and efficient and the best secretary he had ever had. Dear God, I expect that was true. I could even feel sorry for her. That she was in her middle twenties and worked at what must be really a dreary sort of job, you would think: typing, taking dictation and orders. “Does she have a boyfriend? Is she engaged?” I asked Harry. “No, she says she isn’t interested in settling down.” It was not a matter of settling down, as far as I could see. It was a matter of being safe and purposeful, not drifting.

Apparently she cared neither for her own safety nor for mine. Much less Harry’s. I cannot imagine such a woman. Even Dottie Franklin is more comprehensible, her cruelty more human.

How did she feel, talking to me on the phone, seeing me occasionally in the office, seeing Harry hold my elbows and kiss my cheek? How did that feel to her? Did she not care when we went out of the office together, going to dinner,
just the two of us? Did she know things, did he tell her things, that made it unimportant? How was she able to speak cheerfully and normally to me on the telephone? Was she feeling sorry for me? Laughing? I may, of course, be wrong, because I have been wrong about a number of things, but I didn’t feel or hear pity or laughter in her voice. She must have been cruel, though. Only a cruel person could play with other people’s lives, and if she was, as Harry said, not interested in permanence, she must have been just playing.

She may understand that even games have consequences. I wonder if she is a bit afraid to live now?

But if she was cruel, what was Harry? He came home every night (almost every night) to me. He touched my body and ate the meals I cooked and wore the shirts I washed and ironed and walked over the rugs I vacuumed and put on the suits I picked up from the cleaners, and all the time he knew.