Juice (23 page)

“Yes,” Helen said. “Joe's so pleased with them. All right, you two. Do what you want for a while. We're going downstairs. Eight-thirty's the limit.”

“Nine o'clock,” Dave said.

“Eight-thirty,” Helen said.

“Eight-thirty,” Dave said. “Is that clear, Sally?”

Mrs. Newbery scotched the impulse to laugh, but failed to kill it; Dave looked up at her with reproach.

“Come down at eight-thirty and say good night,” Helen told them. Sally smiled; Dave was already squatting before his bookcase.

“Connecting rooms are handy,” Helen said as they descended the stairs, “but they squabble about the door. If one wants it open, the other automatically wants it shut. You go in and take it easy. Take your shoes off and stretch out on the couch.”

“No. Let me help you in the kitchen.”

“There's not much to do.” A stranger in the house, Helen was thinking—unattached, and homeless, and a little envious, and really quite sweet. Really quite sweet! How condescending I am!

She turned to smile at Mrs. Newbery. “Sit there,” she said. “Use a saucer for an ash tray. Do you want a drink? Some beer?”

“Beer,” she said. “A lovely idea. I'll curl my hand around the glass and try to feel strong and tough and talkative. Does beer do that to you?”

“Sometimes,” Helen said. “I suppose because it's cheap, and you think of the stories about little girls sent out with a bucket to bring home a quart.”

“Yes. My parents never drank. They were old-fashioned Oregon drys. Great-granddaddy came west in a wagon, and so forth.”

“Are they still there?”

“No. They're dead. And I'm an only child. So now I can have a glass of beer when I want one. The march of history.”

Helen laughed. “You sound like your friend.” Swiftly, she cut the lid from a can of soup.

“My friend.” Mrs. Newbery laughed happily. “He's such an idiot, and so funny.”

“I like him,” Helen said, not sure for the moment that she was speaking the truth. She set the pan of soup on the stove, opened a quart bottle of beer and poured two glasses full. “The labyrinthine ways,” she murmured.

“Of what?”

“Of Davis and my husband. Everything. How complicated life is now.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Newbery watched Helen slice bread. Helen was in a dark-brown blouse, a khaki-colored linen skirt, and dark-brown pumps. The blouse flatters her face and hair, Mrs. Newbery thought; the skirt flatters her tanned legs; the pumps flatter her small feet. So it is called a casual ensemble.

“Chicken sandwiches all right?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Newbery said.

“How long have you known him?” Helen asked.

“Jay? Almost a year.”

“You call him Jay.”

“Jay,” she said, “or Jayjay, or John, or John James—what he said before about being so many people is partly true, you know.”

“Sometimes I wish Joe were like that,” Helen said. “I suppose that's a terrible thing to say.”

“It can be very tiring,” Mrs. Newbery said. “I keep wishing I could get hold of the real Davis and take a good look at it.”

Helen glanced up. “Funny. I had the same feeling this afternoon. What you see is fascinating, and it makes you wonder about what you don't see.” That glossy black hair, Helen thought; and she's slim, and she's just turned thirty.

“How can you say that to me?” Mrs. Newbery complained.

“Oh, well,” Helen said primly, “how could you stand a man if other women didn't think he was fascinating?”

“Very nicely, thank you.” Mrs. Newbery laughed. “There's a certain security in it.”

Helen's face was warm. “Yes,” she said, “but I wouldn't want it.”

“You don't need it,” Mrs. Newbery said immediately. “You have all the other kinds of security.”

“Not any more,” Helen said.

“Yes,” Mrs. Newbery said; Helen turned and saw the brightness of the blue eyes. “Yes, you do. Because you don't know Davis. Davis leches after people like your husband—thirsts for them! Do you know how the gypsies say a man can love three times in his life? Davis told me once that if he could see justice done—justice, justice, and not simply a balance, a legal equation—three times, it would be enough for him. That was a night I almost discovered him, almost burrowed through the Burbage and got to the Davis. He talked about Landauer. Do you remember Landauer? Yes. He talked about Landauer for three hours, and I think he was really happy that night, because he had me and Landauer; but that was only one night.” Her voice dropped. “He isn't always like that. Landauer was everything for a while, the whole universe of man, because everything man had ever tried to do, to be, was involved, and Jay could start with Landauer and go on to answer all questions: what to do about ex-Nazis who happen to be great artists, whether passive resistance was right or wrong, who was God. No,” she said, “your Joe is all right.”

“Is he?” Helen said. “Is he?”

“Yes,” she said. She looked away. “I don't know,” she said. “I'm only a foolish woman.”

Sally and Dave joined them, said good night, and left them for the evening. “They're too well behaved,” Helen said. “I suppose because you're a guest, or because there's been trouble.”

“Do they understand about Joe?”

“Do you?” Helen said sharply. “I'm not sure I do.”

“Are you worried for them?” Mrs. Newbery asked, thinking that food tasted different in a home, that the carpets, the curtains, the aroma of permanence altered shapes and colors and flavor.

“Yes. They could be terribly hurt.”

“I doubt it,” Mrs. Newbery said. “Their values are so different.”

“Oh, I know,” Helen said. “They don't care about death, for one thing; their closest friends move away and in a week they're all but forgotten. But I'm afraid people will say things.”

“How could they? Hurt children deliberately?”

“Not deliberately. It would be a word, or a gesture, or a friend their own age saying, ‘Gee, your daddy—'” Helen hesitated, and went on—“‘killed a man.'”

Mrs. Newbery frowned sadly.

Helen shrugged, and tried to smile. “Let's take the coffee into the other room.”

Then it was coffee, and talk, and more coffee, and a telephone call, and the nine-o'clock news, which was not different from the five-o'clock news. Time passed; Helen lay with her eyes closed, and Mrs. Newbery pitied her and felt uneasy disillusion, because Mrs. Newbery envied her too, and the pity was that a woman who could be so envied could also be so sad. They talked: “People disapproved,” Helen said, “because there were so many quick marriages during the war and a lot of them were spur of the moment. But we'd known each other for two years—he'd been away most of that time, but still I knew him—and I was pretty sure the whole time that I wanted to marry him. I wasn't sure he'd ask me, but he said later I was an imbecile; he hadn't asked me sooner only because he didn't trust himself to come back from the war. Then he got hepatitis. I was so happy. Sometimes I think about the kind of happiness you have for the first few years—I'm sorry. Did that hurt you?”

“No,” Mrs. Newbery said quickly. “It hasn't hurt for a long time. I was thinking of something else. Why just the first few years? Don't you still feel it?”

Helen grinned. “Yes. Other kinds too. But it changes a little, the children, you know, and I suppose your glands get old along with the rest of you. How did you meet Davis?”

“At a party. At Winkelmann's house. Yes, the judge.”

Helen opened her eyes. “Then Davis knows him?”

“Very well. Theoretically it doesn't make any difference.”

“No,” Helen said. “It shouldn't. How did you know the judge?”

“I didn't. I knew some friends of his. They were—keeping me busy. Is that the phrase? Taking me places, matchmaking oh so subtly. They took me to Winkelmann's party. They didn't know Jay. We were introduced and I don't think either of us spoke to anyone else all evening. We hardly even spoke to each other, for that matter. Later on he—he started talking. He hasn't stopped since.”

“He does rattle on,” Helen said. “You look so sad. Why?”

“I was remembering.” She shifted in the soft chair. “My husband.”

Helen waited.

“He was thirty-two,” Mrs. Newbery said, “and nice-looking and a bit of an athlete and an honorable and upright citizen, so I used to tease him, and he was just getting accustomed to me, just beginning to believe what he called his luck at having me, when he got sick. His nervous system short-circuited and began to curl up and disintegrate. What I was remembering was the last six months. He was in a sanitarium, and I visited every day, even when he didn't seem to know who I was, but the last six months he couldn't speak. He made unintelligible noises and then not even that. So we sat there, and I talked, and he stared. Silent. I offer in contrast John James Davis. I hated Davis. He talked and talked and talked, and I felt so terribly guilty, remembering. And then I felt guiltier because loving Davis it seemed as though I'd never really loved my husband—as though it had all been a childish friendship, and the marriage an accident, a hope, an ignorant rush toward the logical end—logical but not inevitable; and with Jay it
was
inevitable, and that felt like a betrayal of the dead.” Mrs. Newbery shook her head. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said all that. Will you make me a drink?”

“Of course,” Helen said. “Come with me. Will you marry Davis?”

“No,” she said. “He'll leave me.”

“He won't.”

“Yes, he will. He tries to talk about marriage, and I can feel the compulsion in it. An obscure instinct drives him to try to make an honest woman of me, but he doesn't really want to.”

“You sound very sure.”

“I am. You think I'm wrong because you see him as a man like your husband, or as part of a marriage like your own. You two have the capacity to love; therefore he and I must. He doesn't. Oh, yes, he does!” Anger crossed her face. “Of course he does. But he's afraid.”

Helen handed her the full glass; they walked back to the living room. “You don't have to talk about it,” Helen said. “I wasn't prying.”

“Yes, you were.” Mrs. Newbery laughed a tired laugh; it trailed off to a sigh. “I'd love to talk about it. I don't have anyone to talk to, you know. I have Jay to listen to, and now and then he lets me say something, like ‘I'll have the roast beef,' or ‘You have gravy on your tie,' but I'm a little afraid to talk about this with him. I'm afraid of forcing him. I stop him when he talks about it. I suppose I'm stupid, but I'd rather have what I can of him, even when it scares me, or hurts, than lose him.” She smiled weakly. “You're so kind to me; you feed me and make me drinks and listen to all this nonsense.”

“I shouldn't admit it,” Helen said, “but I'm fascinated. What's the matter with him?” She sat up on the couch and reached toward the coffee table. “I'm so curious I'm going to smoke. Want one?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

Helen held the lighter and said, “Go on, now.”

“You're terrible.” Mrs. Newbery laughed. “You've got a gleam in your eye. You want to be matron of honor.”

Helen grinned. “Maybe I'm just prurient. Never mind me. Go on.”

“Well, in a way he's the typical crotchety old man,” Mrs. Newbery said. “For twenty-five years he's been choosing his own menus and ties and hours and entertainments, and he doesn't like committing himself to change. And he knows that if he married without submerging his little eccentricities in the marriage, it would be cheating.”

“But you don't want him to,” Helen said reasonably.

“No; but sooner or later children would come, and I'd want him to buy a house, and get up for breakfast, and—you know better than I. But that isn't what he's afraid of. Privacy's only one of the reasons. He's afraid he'll come home in the evening and I'll ask him what he's been doing all day, and suppose he's been out drinking all day?”

“But he's a puritan!” Helen burst out. “Why should he think you'd mind?”

“Well, I might,” Mrs. Newbery said with good humor. “I'd probably take it personally. He thinks women take everything personally, even the weather. Atavism, he calls it. A hostile environment, the nest threatened. Of course he doesn't know a thing about women, but he's not the kind of man to whom you can say that. He said once that two intelligent men accept each other for what they are: part worker, part tyrant, part drunkard, part fornicator …” She smiled. “How well do you and I know each other? Anyway it was his word.”

Helen laughed. “Well enough for that, anyway. Do go on.”

“Good. Well, then he said that women see a man as part provider, part showpiece, and part foot-warmer, and those are functions he doesn't really care to fulfill. He didn't say that last, but I could sense it.”

“Does he have anything good to say for us?”

“Oh, yes.” Mrs. Newbery waved casually, quite pleased. “He loves us. All of us. But not enough to yield up his essence, as he would say: his inviolate dignity and independence.”

“Privacy,” Helen said, deprecating. “What does he do? Snore? Say horrible things in his sleep? Worship strange gods?”

“It's not that.”

“No,” Helen said, and added slowly, “How well
do
we know each other?”

A little jet of excited laughter escaped Mrs. Newbery. “You're marvelous. You've discovered something about him, haven't you? Go ahead. Say it.”

“All right,” Helen said. “I'll bet he's frigid.”

“Good heavens,” Mrs. Newbery said.

“I didn't mean—oh, damn you both,” Helen said, laughing. “I meant selfish, locked up, afraid to give, as though if he gave something away there'd be nothing left. A miser. It's a kind of frigidity.”