“I’m sorry in a way I didn’t transfer, because I’d like to have spent a year or two in New York. Soon as I get enough money I’m going to try to get a job on a New York paper. The World is the paper I’d like to work on, but it’s awfully hard to get a job there. It’s awfully hard to get a job anywhere nowadays, at least on a paper. I have this friend of mine on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the best men they have, getting an awfully good salary. He went to New York on his vacation and he dropped in just to look around at one of the papers, and do you know what they offered him?”
“What?”
“Forty dollars a week! Good Lord, I’m getting twenty, and I don’t know a thing compared to him, but forty dollars a week. That was as high as they’d go. You can imagine what he told them.” She shook her head and reminisced with her eyes, not looking at Julian. So she felt more at ease with married men.
“How on earth does a man support a family on forty dollars a week? Oh, I know it’s done, but on a paper I should think you’d have to dress pretty well?” Julian asked.
“That’s exactly what this friend of mine said. He has a wife and child. He couldn’t begin to afford to live in New York. His friends are always saying, Why doesn’t he go to New York. Well, that’s the answer.”
It certainly was, Julian reflected. It certainly was the answer. So a man with a wife and child had done it? That meant, most likely, that it had been done with more skill—and regularity—than if it had been done by a college boy. “Drink?” he said.
“Oh, all right,” she said.
He made the drinks and went back to her with a drink in each hand. But instead of handing her hers he put both drinks down together on the small table and sat down beside her. He put his hand under her chin and she turned her face and smiled and then she closed her eyes and her mouth was open before it touched his. She brought up her knee and pushed herself full-length out on the couch, and held his head with her hands over his ears. “Just kiss me,” she said, but she put her hand under his coat and opened his vest and shirt. “No,” she said. “Just kiss me.” She was terribly strong. Suddenly she jerked away from him. “Whew! Come up for air,” she said. He hated her more than anyone ever had hated anyone.
“Drink?” he said.
“No, I don’t think so. I must go.”
“Don’t go,” he said. He wanted to call her all kinds of bitches.
“Now is the best time,” she said, but she did not get up.
“Well, it’s up to you,” he said.
“Listen, Joo-lian,” she apologized by exaggerating the u in his name, “if I stay here you know what’ll happen.”
“All right,” he said.
“Not all right at all. You’re married to a swell girl. I don’t know her at all, but I know she’s swell, and you don’t give a damn about me. Oh, I don’t want to talk about it. I admit, I have a yen for you, but—but all the same I’m going. Good-by,” she said, and she would not let him help her with her coat. He heard the wurra-wurra of the starter in her car, but he was not thinking of her. He was thinking of the time after time he was going to hear those words in the future. “You’re married to a swell girl. I don’t know her at all (or, “Caroline’s one of my best friends”)…. I have a yen for you, but all the same I’m going.” Miss Cartwright was already deep in the past, the musty part of the past, but now her words came out of the mouths of all the girls he wanted to see. Telephone operators, department store clerks, secretaries, wives of friends, girls in the school crowd, nurses—all the pretty girls in Gibbsville, trying to make him believe they all loved Caroline. In that moment the break with Caroline ceased to look like the beginning of a vacation. Now it looked worse than anything, for he knew that plenty of girls would do anything with a married man so long as he was married, but in Gibbsville for the rest of his life he was Caroline’s husband. There could be a divorce, Caroline could marry again for that matter, but no girl in Gibbsville—worth having—would risk the loss of reputation which would be her punishment for getting herself identified with him. He recalled a slang axiom that never had any meaning in college days: “Don’t buck the system; you’re liable to gum the works.”
He didn’t want to go back and make a more definite break with Caroline. He didn’t want to go back to anything, and he went from that to wondering what he wanted to go to. Thirty years old. “She’s only twenty, and he’s thirty. She’s only twenty-two, and he’s thirty. She’s only eighteen, and he’s thirty and been married once, you know. You wouldn’t call him young. He’s at least thirty. No, let’s not have him. He’s one of the older guys. Wish Julian English would act his age. He’s always cutting in. His own crowd won’t have him. I should think he’d resign from the club. Listen, if you don’t tell him you want him to stop dancing with you, then I will. No thanks, Julian, I’d rather walk. No thanks, Mr. English, I haven’t much farther to go. Listen, English, I want you to get this straight. Julian, I’ve been a friend of your family’s for a good many years. Julian, I wish you wouldn’t call me so much. My father gets furious. You better leave me out at the corner, becuss if my old man. Listen, you, leave my sister alone. Oh, hello, sweetie, you want to wait for Ann she’s busy now be down a little while. No liquor, no meat, no coffee, drink plenty of water, stay off your feet as much as possible, and we’ll have you in good shape in a year’s time, maybe less.” He had a drink. He had another and he got up and took off his coat and vest and tie. He had another and he brought the Scotch over and stood the bottle on the floor, and he got out his favorite records, which were in three albums. He put the albums on the floor. When he got drunk enough he would want to play them, but he wanted to have them near now. He lay down and then got up and brought the seltzer and the ice bucket and stood them beside the Scotch. He examined the Scotch bottle and saw there was not much more than a pint left, so he went to the dining-room and got another and opened it, then put the cork back. He drank while walking and this demonstrated the inadequacy of the glass. He had a smart idea. He took the flowers out of a vase and poured the water out, and made himself the biggest highball he ever had seen. It did not last very long. He got up again and got a plate of hors d’œuvres from the kitchen. They made him thirsty. He lowered his suspenders and felt much better.
“I think, if you don’t mind, I think we shall play a little tune,” he said aloud. He played Paul Whiteman’s record of Stairway to Paradise, and when the record came to the “patter” he was screaming with jazz. The phonograph stopped itself but he was up and changing it to a much later record, Jean Goldkette’s band playing Sunny Disposish. He laid a lot of records out on the floor without looking at their titles. He spun a spoon around, and when it stopped he would play the record to which it pointed. He played only three records in this way, because he was pounding his feet, keeping time, and he broke one of his most favorite, Whiteman’s Lady of the Evening, valuable because it has the fanciest trick ending ever put on a record. He wanted to cry but he could not. He wanted to pick up the pieces. He reached over to pick them up, and lost his balance and sat down on another record, crushing it unmusically. He did not want to see what it was. All he knew was that it was a Brunswick, which meant it was one of the oldest and best. He had a drink out of the glass. He used the vase for resting-drinking, and the glass for moving-drinking. That way he did not disturb the main drink while moving around, and could fill the glass while getting up and sitting down. Unintentionally he lay back. “I am now,” he said, “drunk. Drunk. Dronk. Drongk.” He reached like a blind man for the fresh bottle and with eyes that he knew were sober he watched himself pour himself a drink. “No ice I get drunk kicker. Quicker,” he said that aloud. To himself he said: “I bet I look like something nice now.” He found he had two cigarettes burning, one in the ash tray on the floor, and the other getting stuck in the varnish on the edge of the phonograph. He half planned a lie to explain how the burn got there and then, for the first time, he knew it would not make any difference.