The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (11 page)

The next part of the scene was at the water cooler, where Joe Collins's sober eyes became enriched with sympathy as Walter approached him.

“Joe,” Walter said. “I'm leaving. Got the ax.”

“No!” But Collins's look of shock was plainly an act of kindness; it couldn't have been much of a surprise. “Jesus, Walt, what the hell's the matter with these people?”

Then Fred Holmes chimed in, very grave and sorry, clearly pleased with the news: “Gee, boy, that's a damn shame.”

Walter led the two of them away to the elevators, where he pressed the “down” button; and suddenly other men were bearing down on him from all comers of the office, their faces stiff with sorrow, their hands held out.

“Awful sorry, Walt . . .”

“Good luck, boy . . .”

“Keep in touch, okay, Walt? . . .”

Nodding and smiling, shaking hands, Walter said, “Thanks,” and “So long,” and “I certainly will”; then the red light came on over one of the elevators with its little mechanical
ding!
and in another few seconds the doors slid open and the operator's voice said, “Down!” He backed into the car, still wearing his fixed smile and waving a jaunty salute to their earnest, talking faces, and the scene found its perfect conclusion as the doors slid shut, clamped, and the car dropped in silence through space.

All the way down he stood with the ruddy, bright-eyed look of a man fulfilled by pleasure; it wasn't until he was out on the street, walking rapidly, that he realized how completely he had enjoyed himself.

The heavy shock of this knowledge slowed him down, until he came to a stop and stood against a building front for the better part of a minute. His scalp prickled under his hat, and his fingers began to fumble with the knot of his tie and the button of his coat. He felt as if he had surprised himself in some obscene and shameful act, and he had never felt more helpless, or more frightened.

Then in a burst of action he set off again, squaring his hat and setting his jaw, bringing his heels down hard on the pavement, trying to look hurried and impatient and impelled by business. A man could drive himself crazy trying to psychoanalyze himself in the middle of Lexington Avenue, in the middle of the afternoon. The thing to do was get busy now, and start looking for a job.

The only trouble, he realized, coming to a stop again and looking around, was that he didn't know where he was going. He was somewhere in the upper Forties, on a corner that was bright with florist shops and taxicabs, alive with well-dressed men and women walking in the clear spring air. A telephone was what he needed first. He hurried across the street to a drugstore and made his way through smells of toilet soap and perfume and ketchup and bacon to the rank of phone booths along the rear wall; he got out his address book and found the page showing the several employment agencies where his applications were filed; then he got his dimes ready and shut himself into one of the booths.

But all the agencies told him the same thing: no openings in his field at the moment; no point in his coming in until they called him. When he was finished he dug for the address book again, to check the number of an acquaintance who had told him, a month before, that there might soon be an opening in his office. The book wasn't in his inside pocket; he plunged his hands into the other pockets of his coat and then his pants, cracking an elbow painfully against the wall of the booth, but all he could find were the old letters and the piece of chocolate from his desk. Cursing, he dropped the chocolate on the floor and, as if it were a lighted cigarette, stepped on it. These exertions in the heat of the booth made his breathing rapid and shallow. He was feeling faint by the time he saw the address book right in front of him, on top of the coin box, where he'd left it. His finger trembled in the dial, and when he started to speak, clawing the collar away from his sweating neck with his free hand, his voice was as weak and urgent as a beggar's.

“Jack,” he said. “I was just wondering—just wondering if you'd heard anything new on the opening you mentioned a while back.”

“On the which?”

“The opening. You know. You said there might be a job in your—”

“Oh, that. No, haven't heard a thing, Walt. I'll be in touch with you if anything breaks.”

“Okay, Jack.” He pulled open the folding door of the booth and leaned back against the stamped-tin wall, breathing deeply to welcome the rush of cool air. “I just thought it might've slipped your mind or something,” he said. His voice was almost normal again. “Sorry to bother you.”

“Hell, that's okay,” said the hearty voice in the receiver. “What's the matter, boy? Things getting a little sticky where you are?”

“
Oh
no,” Walter found himself saying, and he was immediately glad of the he. He almost never lied, and it always surprised him to discover how easy it could be. His voice gained confidence. “No. I'm all
right
here, Jack, it's just that I didn't want to—
you
know, I thought it might have slipped your mind, is all. How's the family?”

When the conversation was over, he guessed there was nothing more to do but go home. But he continued to sit in the open booth for a long time, with his feet stretched out on the drugstore floor, until a small, canny smile began to play on his face, slowly dissolving and changing into a look of normal strength. The ease of the lie had given him an idea that grew, the more he thought it over, into a profound and revolutionary decision.

He would not tell his wife. With luck he was sure to find some kind of work before the month was out, and in the meantime, for once in his life, he would keep his troubles to himself. Tonight, when she asked how the day had gone, he would say, “Oh, all right,” or even “Fine.” In the morning he would leave the house at the usual time and stay away all day, and he would go on doing the same thing every day until he had a job.

The phrase “Pull yourself together” occurred to him, and there was more than determination in the way he pulled himself together there in the phone booth, the way he gathered up his coins and straightened his tie and walked out to the street: there was a kind of nobility.

Several hours had to be killed before the normal time of his homecoming, and when he found himself walking west on Forty-second Street he decided to kill them in the Public Library. He mounted the wide stone steps importantly, and soon he was installed in the reading room, examining a bound copy of last year's
Life
magazines and going over and over his plan, enlarging and perfecting it.

He knew, sensibly, that there would be nothing easy about the day-to-day deception. It would call for the constant vigilance and cunning of an outlaw. But wasn't it the very difficulty of the plan that made it worthwhile? And in the end, when it was all over and he could tell her at last, it would be a reward worth every minute of the ordeal. He knew just how she would look at him when he told her—in blank disbelief at first and then, gradually, with the dawning of a kind of respect he hadn't seen in her eyes for years.

“You mean you kept it to yourself all this
time
? But
why,
Walt?”

“Oh well,” he would say casually, even shrugging, “I didn't see any point in upsetting you.”

When it was time to leave the library he lingered in the main entrance for a minute, taking deep pulls from a cigarette and looking down over the five o'clock traffic and crowds. The scene held a special nostalgia for him, because it was here, on a spring evening five years before, that he had come to meet her for the first time. “Can you meet me at the top of the library steps?” she had asked over the phone that morning, and it wasn't until many months later, after they were married, that this struck him as a peculiar meeting place. When he asked her about it then, she laughed at him. “Of
course
it was inconvenient—that was the whole point. I wanted to pose up there, like a princess in a castle or something, and make you climb up all those lovely steps to claim me.”

And that was exactly how it had seemed. He'd escaped from the office ten minutes early that day and hurried to Grand Central to wash and shave in a gleaming subterranean dressing room; he had waited in a fit of impatience while a very old, stout, slow attendant took his suit away to be pressed. Then, after tipping the attendant more than he could afford, he had raced outside and up Forty-second Street, tense and breathless as he strode past shoe stores and milk bars, as he winnowed his way through swarms of intolerably slow-moving pedestrians who had no idea of how urgent his mission was. He was afraid of being late, even half afraid that it was all some kind of a joke and she wouldn't be there at all. But as soon as he hit Fifth Avenue he saw her up there in the distance, alone, standing at the top of the library steps—a slender, radiant brunette in a fashionable black coat.

He slowed down, then. He crossed the avenue at a stroll, one hand in his pocket, and took the steps with such an easy, athletic nonchalance that nobody could have guessed at the hours of anxiety, the days of strategic and tactical planning this particular moment had cost him.

When he was fairly certain she could see him coming he looked up at her again, and she smiled. It wasn't the first time he had seen her smile that way, but it was the first time he could be sure it was intended wholly for him, and it caused warm tremors of pleasure in his chest. He couldn't remember the words of their greeting, but he remembered being quite sure that they were all right, that it was starting off well—that her wide shining eyes were seeing him exactly as he most wanted to be seen. The things he said, whatever they were, struck her as witty, and the things she said, or the sound of her voice when she said them, made him feel taller and stronger and broader of shoulder than ever before in his life. When they turned and started down the steps together he took hold of her upper arm, claiming her, and felt the light jounce of her breast on the backs of his fingers with each step. And the evening before them, spread out and waiting at their feet, seemed miraculously long and miraculously rich with promise.

Starting down alone, now, he found it strengthening to have one clear triumph to look back on—one time in his life, at least, when he had denied the possibility of failure, and won. Other memories came into focus when he crossed the avenue and started back down the gentle slope of Forty-second Street: they had come this way that evening too, and walked to the Biltmore for a drink, and he remembered how she had looked sitting beside him in the semidarkness of the cocktail lounge, squirming forward from the hips while he helped her out of the sleeves of her coat and then settling back, giving her long hair a toss and looking at him in a provocative sidelong way as she raised the glass to her lips. A little later she had said, “Oh, let's go down to the river—I love the river at this time of day,” and they had left the hotel and walked there. He walked there now, down through the clangor of Third Avenue and up toward Tudor City—it seemed a much longer walk alone—until he was standing at the little balustrade, looking down over the swarm of sleek cars on the East River Drive and at the slow, gray water moving beyond it. It was on this very spot, while a tugboat moaned somewhere under the darkening skyline of Queens, that he had drawn her close and kissed her for the first time. Now he turned away, a new man, and set out to walk all the way home.

The first thing that hit him, when he let himself in the apartment door, was the smell of Brussels sprouts. The children were still at their supper in the kitchen: he could hear their high mumbled voices over the clink of dishes, and then his wife's voice, tired and coaxing. When the door slammed he heard her say, “There's Daddy now,” and the children began to call, “Daddy! Daddy!”

He put his hat carefully in the hall closet and turned around just as she appeared in the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on her apron and smiling through her tiredness. “Home on time for once,” she said. “How lovely. I was afraid you'd be working late again.”

“No,” he said. “No, I didn't have to work late.” His voice had an oddly foreign, amplified sound in his own ears, as if he were speaking in an echo chamber.

“You do look tired, though, Walt. You look worn out.”

“Walked home, that's all. Guess I'm not used to it. How's everything?”

“Oh, fine.” But she looked worn out herself.

When they went together into the kitchen he felt encircled and entrapped by its humid brightness. His eyes roamed dolefully over the milk cartons, the mayonnaise jars and soup cans and cereal boxes, the peaches lined up to ripen on the windowsill, the remarkable frailty and tenderness of his two children, whose chattering faces were lightly streaked with mashed potato.

Things looked better in the bathroom, where he took longer than necessary over the job of washing up for dinner. At least he could be alone here, braced by splashings of cold water; the only intrusion was the sound of his wife's voice rising in impatience with the older child: “All right, Andrew Henderson. No story for
you
tonight unless you finish up all that custard
now.”
A little later came the scraping of chairs and stacking of dishes that meant their supper was over, and the light scuffle of shoes and the slamming door that meant they had been turned loose in their room for an hour to play before bath time.

Walter carefully dried his hands; then he went out to the living-room sofa and settled himself there with a magazine, taking very slow, deep breaths to show how self-controlled he was. In a minute she came in to join him, her apron removed and her lipstick replenished, bringing the cocktail pitcher full of ice. “Oh,” she said with a sigh. “Thank God that's over. Now for a little peace and quiet.”