The Perfect Host (32 page)

Jessie laughed her sudden, barking laugh. “You’re so right. I don’t know what makes you think he’d say a formal ‘I do’ after all these years.”

“He’d do it for you.”

“He would,” Jessie admitted, “and down inside he’d be thinking I’d reneged on something, and was taking advantage of my strategic position.” She waved a hand to include the room, the bed, and her current situation.

Agnes was visibly shocked. “Jessie, I do wish you wouldn’t!”

“I don’t have the proper respect for the dying, I guess. Oh, Agnes, I’m sorry, I’m very thoughtless.” A gleam came into her eyes. “But you see how it feels to have me take advantage of my circumstances … Why bother with this wedding thing now, of all times, Agnes? How could it possibly matter?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know, I just wish it could be,” Agnes all but sobbed. “I—do know, Jessie. M—maybe it’s because I’ve
never married. It’s just that—marriage is too big a thing to make a funny sophisticated game out of. I know I’m old-fashioned, Jess, but I’ve always seen this thing of yours as a sort of horrible mockery. You’ve been so—so—”

“Unrepentant?”

“Yes, and then there’s
that
horrible thing,” and she gestured over her shoulder with her now-moist handkerchief toward the statuette which pouted at her broad back. “ ‘There’s our marriage-license,’ Tommie used to say—that naked, pagan thing …”

“Shh. She’ll hear you.”

“I don’t—Oh, Jessie,
don’t
play! I never could understand your kind of joke—or your friends, or your ideas, or your way of life. And I’ve tried
so
hard not to interfere.”

Jessie caught her hand and squeezed it. “Agnes, don’t cry. You’re a dear. You always were. I wish I knew a million like you; they don’t make ’em straighter. Sometimes I think things are simpler and cleaner for you than they are for me, for all my bragging. You go by what’s laid down, and I go by what seems best for all concerned. Sometimes I wish I was like you.”

“If you were, you couldn’t make a charade out of a thing like marriage. It’s too
big
to be smeared by any one person, or by a couple, Jessie! Marriage is the founda—”

“You don’t have to sell me that package,” said Jessie, her husky voice crackling. Agnes stopped as if the other had thrown a switch.

“I bought it a long time back,” said Jessie, quietly. “I wrapped it up and kept it shiny and clean for twenty-two years. Shut up,” she said, without changing her inflection, as Agnes tried to speak. “Now I’m going to talk. You just sit quiet and listen to me.”

She turned over on her back and put her hands behind her head. As she spoke her eyes shifted from this point to that on the shadowed ceiling, finding memories, some dim, some bright and clear, each reflecting its corresponding amount of light into her face.

“Did you know I’d only known Tommie two weeks before we were—married? That’s all it was. It doesn’t seem so long ago, yet people have been born and grown up and married since then—people who are already older than we were when we met …

“You remember the late ’twenties. Those were wild days. It was the last gasp of Prohibition, and a lot of things went on that people tried not to notice at the time and have since tried to forget. Road-house parties were one of those things. The one we were on was big, and, like a lot of ’em, got smaller as we went along. We wanted to drink, that was all—not because we liked the stuff, but because we were told we couldn’t. There were plenty of places just north of New York, up through Connecticut and Rhode Island, where anyone in a car could reach all the liquor and jazz music he wanted, or thought he wanted. I suppose we knew it was stupid, childish, and vicious, but we did it anyway, partly to rebel, partly to be fashionable. Silly kids!

“I remember every detail of that evening. Tommie doesn’t. He’s like that. That’s why he doesn’t drink now, hasn’t for years. When Tommie drinks he doesn’t know what he’s doing at the time, doesn’t remember afterward what he’s done, and feels rotten the next morning.

“Tommie had just sold a magazine story and was full of money and high spirits. He wanted to buy me a present, but I didn’t feel that way about Tommie—I thought if he gave me anything, something important might be spoiled. He compromised on Miss O’Casey there—” she jabbed a finger toward the statuette—“and bought it at one of those funny little antique stores in Connecticut. We hauled her to one roadhouse after another, setting her up on the tables and buying her drinks—you know.”

“We woke up next morning at my place. You could hardly call it a rosy nuptial morning. Tommie felt terrible. The evening before was nothing to him but a large black cloud with streaks of lightning through it; I don’t think he wasted a minute trying to remember how he happened to be in my bed when he woke up, or what, if anything, had happened between us. He lay blinking dully at the dark goddess, which was sitting on my vanity table looking very bland and peaceful, and he groaned because his head hurt him. I fed him some breakfast and kissed him and sent him home. I wasn’t too happy about the whole thing. I was crazy about Tommie, and I didn’t want it spoiled, and I was afraid that now it was.

“He was back again in a couple of hours. Poor, mixed-up, mismanaged Tommie! He didn’t know what to do, or where to turn. He’d arrived home—he lived in a rooming-house uptown—to discover what little he had piled up on the sidewalk. He just hadn’t gotten around to paying his rent, and you know how it was with him in those days—forty dollars this week, fifty dollars next, nothing for three weeks, a hundred the week after. It was just after the stockmarket crash, and landladies were getting very particular about that week’s rent in advance, and Tommie simply didn’t have any money just then. That money he’d spent the night before was all he had. He didn’t even have a bank account!”

“He could have come to me,” said Agnes stiffly.

“He’d’ve starved first,” said Jessie. “Not because he disliked you, or even because of his pride, but just because he didn’t want to hear the truth about himself that you were so ready to tell him. Let’s face it, Agnes: Tommie didn’t become a big grown-up adult as fast as most of us. He got there—but it took time.

“Well, I won’t go into too many details. First I let Tommie bring his stuff over, because he had nowhere else to store it. I invited him to dinner. When he came, he had a tragic story of hunting for some place to hang his hat, and it just wasn’t possible without money. So—he stayed over that night. And the next one. Finally I told him to stop wasting so much time in house-hunting and make himself some money. The quickest way for him to do that was to write, so he set up his old typewriter in a corner of my living-room—I had a four-room place, and my roommate had just left to get married—and he got to work.

“The first story bounced, and the second, and the third. The days ran into weeks. I went to work every day, and Tommie would begin pounding on the typewriter as I left. I’ll admit it—I loved every minute of it. I guess I have a soft spot in me somewhere, and just don’t operate completely unless there’s something I can take care of. Tommie kept a little black book—I think he still has it somewhere—and carefully put down every little thing that he ate and smoked and drank, and added half the rent and gas and power, with a little over because he used the radio while he was working. It was cute.

“It was wonderful, but it couldn’t go on forever. I got so I almost dreaded the day he’d sell a story. I didn’t want him under my thumb, but—just to have him there was—Well, finally, when he’d been with me about six weeks, a check came in. When I got home he’d made dinner—oh, Aggie, you should have seen it! Candles on the table, and he’d roasted some squab. There was champagne! The idiot … the potatoes weren’t quite done, and we had to gulp the shrimp-cup so the squab wouldn’t burn; but it was the most wonderful dinner I ever had.” She flicked at her eyes and laughed.

“And then he solemnly presented me with an envelope containing slips of paper with columns of figures, and some money—down to the penny, his share of the expenses while he’d been there. He was so proud of it! It was the first time in his whole life he’d ever kept any kind of an account. He sat me down on the settee and showed me every item, and on some of them he quizzed me, with his face all puckered up with anxiety, as to the price of apples or how much gas I thought it took to roast a leg of lamb.

“I had to take the money. He’d’ve felt like a whipped pup if I hadn’t. Then I said I guessed he’d be leaving me now. He shuffled his feet and said, well, he guessed he should. I can’t tell you how I felt. Suddenly it occurred to me to ask him, ‘Tommie! How much money have you got left?’

“He admitted it, finally. He had three dollars and ninety cents. My darling budget-master—three dollars and ninety cents!

“I think I laughed for half an hour. He thought—and probably still thinks—that I was laughing because I thought he was funny. But I was laughing because I knew I could make him stay. Finally he began to laugh too, and he stayed.

“After that the question of his getting a place came up less and less often. He still took care of the budget, bless him … you know, I think that had a lot to do with his growing up in all the other ways? He began keeping his income-tax straight, and thinking ahead about getting his clothes pressed before he had to wear them, and keeping himself stocked up with typewriter ribbons and stamps. There are some old friends who say I made him over. Well, I didn’t. He did it all by himself.”

“But why didn’t you get married?”

Jessie smiled up into the place where the ceiling met the wall. “Tommie was terrified of the idea. At the end of seven months, when he was back on his feet and free to do what he wanted, we talked it out. He cared so terribly much about the thing we had together, Agnes. Tommie’s a strange man. Maybe that’s why his books are so popular.… I’d cut my tongue out before I’d advise anyone else to do what we did. I don’t think it would work for anyone else … anyway, Tommie was—and is—a sentimentalist of the first water. If we went to a restaurant and had a really perfect meal—I mean perfect in every last detail—Tommie wouldn’t go back. He’d made a memory, and anything placed on it would mar it for him. He wanted to keep that memory untarnished and unchanged in the little jewel-box he kept in the back of his dear fuzzy head.

“ ‘We’re together because we want to be together,’ he would say. ‘The very fact that we’re in this room together proves that there’s no place in all the world where either of us want to be but here, together. We don’t need a piece of paper to keep us together like two hot-dogs from the butcher-store. If we had that piece of paper, we could never know if we were together because we wanted to be, or if it was because society made it the easiest thing to do.’ Sometimes he’d mention the jail. He’d been walking along the street when a man right in front of him was killed by gangsters, and he was held for four days as a witness—mostly for his own protection; those were wild days. ‘That jail cell wasn’t bad, Jess,’ he told me. ‘It wasn’t very big, but it was clean. The fellow in there with me wasn’t bad company. They fed us regularly—not a lot, but quite enough—and they let us smoke all we wanted to, and there were magazines and candy-bars to be had at the commissary. The beds weren’t innerspring, but they were clean, and it was warm enough at night. I’ve been lots worse off than I was there. There was just one thing about it—a thing that drove me half out of my mind while I was there—a think that made that place a hell on earth. The door was locked.
The door was locked!
If they’d left it open—or even unlocked—I’d have been willing to stay in there indefinitely. Marriage is like that, Jess. We have ours, but the door is open. As long as we know it is,
we never have to go through it to see what’s on the other side. A marriage license would lock it.’ ”

Jessie shifted restlessly. “Children would have locked it, too … and if we could have had them, it would have been locked, and the whole story would be different. But we couldn’t, worse luck—worse, worse luck …

“Anyway, as far as the world was concerned, we were married. That began early, when I had to tell the landlady why I had a man in my place—I blurted it out, and that was the end of it. Tommie was very upset about that, but realized he could kick the whole story over with a word. So—hardly anyone ever got to know. You wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t been compelled to tell you.”

“I wish he hadn’t,” said Agnes. “I do. I’ve always liked you, Jessie. Really I have, though I’ve never been able to understand you. But when Tommie told me about your—your—about it, it blighted my whole attitude toward both of you.”

“I know it did. I was always sorry about that. It was one of the more infantile things that Tommie pulled, the darling. Anyway, we appointed Miss O’Casey there—” she thumbed at the statue—“Official Keeper of the Compact.” O.K.C., get it? Miss O’Casey. She was in on it from the beginning. I told you Tommie’s a sentimentalist. Well, maybe I am too, a little. He built a shelf in the little hallway between the living room and the bedroom and put her up there, where she could see and be seen, always. Tommie sometimes called her One-up, because of that raised finger—one up for the common people. Sometimes I called her Gigglepuss, just because her face is so placid and somber. But you say we made a joke of it—it wasn’t a joke, Agnes. Never that. Miss O’Casey and what she stood for was—is—a very serious thing indeed. Look at her, Aggie. Please do. Look at her carefully.”

With an expression of martyred patience, Agnes turned to look at the statue. She ran her eyes primly over the naked torso and bent to peer into the face. “She does look—strong,” she confessed at length, “strong and very peaceful.”

“She’s made that kind of marriage for us,” said Jessie quietly. “I can’t describe to you the look that passes between Tommie and me
when we hear of some old friends getting a divorce—and there have been so many of them, so terribly many! You know, they come to us, sometimes to one, sometimes to both of us, and ask us how we’ve made it all these years. They ask
us!
And what can we tell them?” She shrugged. “Only to have someone like Miss O’Casey here—and then keep faith with her. She does her part.”