The Man Who Loved His Wife (4 page)

In the convertible silvercloud Lincoln Continental, Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher Strode made a picture as handsome as a color advertisement, the man big and rugged, deeply tanned, the young woman sleek and lovely, her dark hair careless in the wind. She chatted about the dinner menu, about the absurdity of her pleasure in a ripe honeydew, her indignation at the tastelessness of California tomatoes. Earlier these ardors would have been roused by the works of Chagall, Bernstein, and Balenciaga.

Fletcher sighed.

“You're bored,” Elaine sighed, immediately regretted the word, asked hastily, “Why don't we play golf this afternoon?” As though she liked the game! If she had been as companionable as she pretended, she would have learned to play; but no, she refused to yield body or mind to the tyranny of athletic form. “I'd rather watch you.” She rode around with him in the caddy cart, called out greetings and answered questions shouted by other players. Her show of interest was mere lip service. Privately, Fletcher thought, his wife believed it absurd for a man to care about knocking a ball around the links. Before he retired he had played weekday golf with the zest of a schoolboy enjoying hookey. Now that the game had become a time-killer, he found golf another form of impotence.

As they drove along Elaine studied young men in passing cars. “Darling! Did you notice just now? It was Manuel.” She waved wildly at the gardener. Manual was slender, dark, romantic in a sweaty Mexican way. Another disturbing vision clouded Fletcher's mind. “Manuel's a gentle person but he will keep that nasty stuff in the shed. He says it's necessary for bugs and slugs and stuff, but I wish he wouldn't. He says there are no children in the house and the boxes are plainly marked, but I told him,” she laughed slyly, “I'd hold him personally responsible for accidents. Fletch dear, why are you looking so somber?”

A grunt was his answer. He turned a corner swiftly. She slid along the leather seat. “Oh, Fletch, please! Don't drive so suicidally.”

When they were back at the house and Elaine busy with her groceries, Fletcher investigated the garden shed. Later that day he wrote in his diary:

Today she talked about the poisons in the garden shed. Has she honestly warned Manuel and has he told her that a package labeled
POISON
is not dangerous to adults who can read? Maybe it is just suspicion or one of those persecution complexes, but there are so many signs of danger in this house that I do not think I am just giving in to imagination. The thought of death is in her mind all the time. I wonder if she keeps talking about suicide to prepare the ground. I am sensitive to signs of danger. They say that the loss of one sense sharpens the others, that deaf men see more, the blind hear whispers in the distance. I used to shout, and now I listen. And learn.

Early in the marriage, when they were so crazily in love, Elaine would wait on edge for the sound of Fletcher's key in the lock, his “Hi, lovable!” in a shout that shook the walls. Now that he had retired from work and life, she had too much of his passionate possessing. Every hour of every day his vast, useless curiosity was spent upon her. No movement was too trivial for his attention, each chore was supervised. When she bathed he came into the room and perched his big body on her spindly dressing table stool. She had to curb temper and humor, give every moment to the protection of the man's poor pride. Restraint charged her nerves. Electric tensions quivered like wires in a high wind. She became overcheerful, considered every word, smiled too often. The mask stifled her. Once in a while in sheer rebellion she would prolong her conversation with a headwaiter or bestow charm outrageously upon a boy in a parking lot.

Once a week she had an afternoon to herself. Fletcher's Thursday appointment with the barber and manicurist, sacred to a man who had nothing else on his calendar, took him into Los Angeles. He could easily have found a more convenient shop, but he had started with this barber and manicurist when he and Elaine had first come to the city and stayed at the Ambassador
Hotel. He said the shop was the best in the city; his real reason was that they knew his disability and spared him the ordeal of speaking before strangers. He often lingered for a walk on streets where there were other pedestrians, tourists no doubt, whose presence gave the streets a slight sense of belonging to a city. Sometimes he drove down to the seedy center of the town to move with a crowd or listen to the street orators.

On one of these Thursdays Elaine's treasured loneliness was interrupted. Kneeling on the garden path, digging up and separating irises, she heard wheels on the driveway, thought that Fletcher had come home early. From the path came a voice, whole and masculine, “I hope I'm not disturbing you. I just want to look at your garden.”

She turned with loam in her hands. From where she squatted, the man seemed very high, a long stretch of gabardine and tweed. “You haven't changed much in the garden.”

“You know this garden?”

“I grew up in this house.”

“Oh.” She stood up to see him better. A narrow-brimmed hat shaded a narrow face, bony and sparsely covered with transparent skin, freckle-spattered. His eyes were shielded by close-fitting dark glasses.

“I haven't been on the hill for a long time. But today . . . I had to see a patient on Geranium Drive so”—a long, freckled hand covered the grounds in a wide arc—“I came to see whether the new owners had ruined Aunt Cora's garden.”

“New! We've been here more than a year, and why,” she challenged, “should we spoil your aunt's garden?”

“Everyone else does. How could I know you wouldn't pull out all the plants and put in those bestial-looking plants set in white pebbles? All around here,” the long, freckled hand moved in an arc of eloquent contempt, “they hire landscape
specialists
,” scorn underlined the word, “to make gardens ugly. I'm glad she isn't here to see it.”

“Who?”

“Aunt Cora. My foster-mother. She planned and planted this garden.”

“It's lovely.”

“You wouldn't know the neighborhood. When I was a kid there was a grove of eucalyptus where that horror stands.” He jerked a nod toward a Greco-Roman contemporary with Regency urns on the roof. “And over there were two enormous pepper trees, male and female. I used to wonder how trees made it.” He laughed; Elaine offered an echo. The man paid no attention. “Modern gardeners don't go for pepper and eucalyptus. They shed too much.” Uninvited he strode to the shade garden where azaleas and camellia shone pink and rose and white among polished foliage. “I used to resent it when she asked me to rake and carry, but in the blooming season . . . by God, it
is
the blooming season.” He took off his hat in obeisance.

Dusty red hair curled above a tall brow.

Elaine thought him too ardent but said gently, “I'm grateful to your foster-mother. Her garden's one of the reasons we bought the place. And the privacy, too. It must have been pleasant to grow up here.”

He was too thickly wrapped in memories to give attention to a stranger. Elaine followed while he strode along the path to the pool. Suddenly, “I laid these stones. The path was originally gravel. How well the dichondra's done. What a job to pull out all the crabgrass. I got twenty-five cents an hour. But why should you care?”

“I do. You made it lovely for me. At twenty-five cents an hour.”

“You haven't spoiled the house either.”

The stranger's compliment pleased her. Elaine valued mellowness and texture, thought the Mexican farmhouse architecture perfectly suited to the climate. The neighbors were always remodeling their houses, turning Tudor mansions into French chateaux, Cape Cod cottages into ranch houses with picture windows. Dazzling white stones and marble pillars transformed Mediterranean villas into buildings like funeral homes, and California bungalows were capped with mansard roofs. “Abortions,” said the visitor as they walked the paths he had laid.

“Why don't we sit down?”

“I don't want to keep you from anything.”

“I wasn't doing anything in particular, just transplanting irises.”

“It's the wrong season,” he said, and he held a chair for her. He asked her name, learned that she was married, that her husband was retired and generally at home, but always went out on Thursday afternoons. “That's my free day, too,” he said. “I do my hospital rounds in the morning but unless there's an emergency or necessary house calls, I try to keep Thursday afternoons for myself. Usually there are emergencies and necessary house calls. By the way, I'm Ralph Julian.”

They shook hands formally. Elaine listened edgily for the sound of her husband's car. Dr. Julian's visit would not be hard to explain, but there would inevitably be taut moments when the introduction would have to be acknowledged and Fletcher suffered the exposure of his infirmity. Just the same, Elaine was enjoying the unexpected visit and asked the guest if he would like to see how she had done the inside of the house.

He liked her furniture and hangings, noted the crammed bookshelves in the room which had been his foster-father's library and enjoyed, after proper protest about not wanting to bother her, a cup of tea. Elaine said she always made tea for herself in the afternoon, and he said it was like old times with Aunt Cora pouring Tibetan tea and serving cookies on a silver plate.

After he had gone and she had put the tea things in the dishwasher, she bathed and dressed in a bright hostess gown to greet her husband. She told him all about the visit of Dr. Ralph Julian who had grown up in this house as the son of Dr. Harry and Mrs. Cora Julian, who had adopted him after their son had drowned in the swimming pool. “When he came to live here he was eight and this seemed the most beautiful place in the world. He's sentimental about it.”

Sentiment brought Dr. Julian back after two weeks. He brought bulbs of a new tuberous begonia for the shade garden which he still considered his foster-mother's. Elaine happened to have baked chocolate brownies that morning. Once more the spirit of Aunt Cora joined them. Eulogies were devoted to her
cooking. Ralph had her recipe books somewhere in his apartment and promised to look for them. The next week he brought the books, which Elaine refused to keep since his future wife (on the second visit she had discovered that he was a bachelor) would surely want them. All week she copied out recipes and on the following Thursday tried her hand at macaroons. Fruitlessly. It was three weeks before he turned up to collect the cookbooks. There were no explanations as there were no formal dates. He came or did not. Elaine bought three new summer dresses and two pairs of bright slacks.

It was inevitable that her husband would meet the new friend. Ralph had been prepared for the maimed voice and showed neither the layman's offensive tact nor a doctor's clinical interest. When the subject was brought up . . . by Fletcher himself . . . Ralph praised the Los Angeles specialist recommended by Fletcher's doctor in New York.

A few weeks after this Elaine had become ill with the flu. Fletcher's specialist was certainly not the doctor to attend to her, and while he might have given her the name of a good internist, Fletcher suggested that she call Dr. Julian. Elaine was not so ill that she required that much attention, but Ralph came for daily visits, usually after all his other calls were finished so that he could linger with the patient and her husband. She was a healthy girl and recovered quickly. Nevertheless Ralph suggested a checkup. Fletcher drove her to his office and read magazines in the waiting room while she was with the doctor.

After her heartbeat and blood pressure had been recorded Ralph said, “I'm not coming to visit you anymore.”

Elaine hugged the coarse white examination gown tighter around her nakedness. “Oh dear, I'm sorry,” she said.

“So am I. I've enjoyed coming to the house again, but I don't think it's good for your husband. Lie down on the table, please.”

She had thought she would shrink at the exquisitely personal examination. Austere in his white coat, Ralph Julian studied her with the detachment of an engineer concerned with the working of a familiar machine. “Nothing wrong with you except tensions. You must try and relax.”

“Don't I need vitamins or a tonic or something?”

He suspected the cause of her nervousness, but was not licensed to ask about her relations with her husband. She would have liked to speak out, but could not say aloud that she lived in the constant dread of her husband's suicide. In Fletcher's every sigh and whim, his frequent rages, his sudden bursts of tenderness, she saw the compulsion. When they were alone and Fletcher croaked out his ideas and opinions, she listened for words that might reveal his intentions. It would have relieved her to relate these fears to Dr. Julian. She could not. They shook hands in parting and the doctor came out to the waiting room for a word with Fletcher.

Months passed before she saw Ralph again. She thought about him endlessly, held long conversations . . . in her bed, in the bathtub, swimming in the pool, digging in the garden, while she tended the kitchen machines . . . poured out a stream of fear and evidence of the increasing danger. In this harmless way a certain portion of her fear was absorbed. A shade, never clearly seen, Ralph became not a lover but a compassionate listener.

“How Fletch adores that diary of his. Isn't it awfully good for him to be so interested in
something?
” No response, but none was expected. “Don't you think that means that underneath everything, deeply, he wants to live?” In finding words for the question she had framed her own answer. “He hides the diary like a priceless treasure, a guilty secret. If I come in when he's writing, he sneaks it into a desk drawer. With a new Yale lock. And the look on his face! An anarchist hiding his bomb.” She laughed at the simile. “Fletch is such a child, really. Have you ever noticed that wide-eyed look? So unexpected in a big, tough, successful business man. I fell in love with that little-boy look.” Facing the absent confessor she dared hope. “I believe, I honestly do, that the fatal mood is dwindling. He can enjoy himself. Did I tell you we went to the movies? It was a good comedy for a change and then we went to a Chinese place to eat. He had such an appetite, like the old days. Almost the same, but . . .” Here she faltered for she could not, even in revery, permit herself to play out another one of those teeth-clenching climaxes,
the failure and remorse. She changed the subject. “That doctor! A good man, they say, in his field, but specialists can be too special, People aren't all bone and flesh. Doesn't he know what's
underneath?
Fifty sleeping pills! Can you believe it for a man in Fletch's state? I have the prescriptions filled myself and keep the pills hidden. He gets two a night, never more. I don't want him getting the habit, first two, then three, and so on. Fletch pretends to be amused, but I wonder. Perhaps it's all in my own mind; do you think I'm worrying uselessly?” As though the man were talking she answered herself hastily, “Of course it is. My own crazy imagination. There's really no danger.” And finally like a prayer repeated as self-hypnosis, “I worry because I love him so much. I do, you know.”