She crossed the room with eager steps and pulled open the drapes, as if she could hardly wait to see this new day. The sun was shining like a congratulation. A swarm of bees did a noisy, dizzy dance for her alone, and the dream drowned of its own weight. The people dug themselves out of the sand, shook themselves and stretched and began to make human sounds.
Her mother coughed, Laura was taking a shower. Brown whistled his way down the stairs, Mrs. Putnam brought the milk in.
She phoned the doctor before she went down for breakfast. When she told him she wanted Charles’s address, he gave it to her without asking any questions or showing any surprise. He seemed to have been waiting, in fact, for her to call and to be acting under Charles’s instructions.
Perhaps Charles has found out already, she thought, and he’s waiting for me. Brown might have written to him or told Forbes. She knew Forbes phoned the house now and then and talked to Brown — there were some collect calls from Green Village on the phone bill. Brown didn’t mention them and she didn’t ask. It was somehow annoying to ask Brown anything. He always answered truthfully and the truth was always blameless. Only his face lied. It invited you to believe in intrigue. His eyes had plots in them, spies and secret formulae lurked in their corners. Behind his smile grew vast scandals and his eyebrows twitched with revolutions. Untraceable poisons rolled on his tongue and his hands fondled a homemade bomb. You felt cheated when he opened his heart to you, and you saw it was as fat, pink and innocent as a baby.
No, Brown hadn’t told, and he wouldn’t.
“Have you got that?” Dr. MacNeil asked.
“Yes, thanks.” She read it off to him as she’d written it. “Turn left at the main intersection of the village, drive two miles, turn right, the third cottage.”
“That’s fine. I think you’ll find him in good spirits.”
“I hope so,” she said, wondering why he should suddenly be so friendly, so anxious for her to see Charles.
“Oh, you will. He’s taking a more reasonable attitude now. He’s had an opportunity to think matters over.”
“What matters?”
“The general situation,” MacNeil said blandly.
She thanked him for the address and hung up.
Neither Laura nor her mother had come down for breakfast yet. Brown was in the dining room setting out halves of grapefruit at each place.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning, Mrs. Pearson.” His little eyes slid from her face to the grapefruit and back again, as if they were saying, “Guess what’s in the grapefruit this morning. Give up? Curare! I just had a shipment from the chief of an Amazon tribe.”
She smiled involuntarily, and he smiled in return. They seemed to be sharing some huge, inscrutable joke not meant for other people.
“I’m going out to see Mr. Pearson this morning,” she said. “You can call me a cab right after breakfast.”
“Mr. Ferris would be glad to drive you.”
“I don’t want to impose on him.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t look at it like that.”
“I prefer a cab.”
“Certainly, ma’am.” He rubbed the side of his jaw pensively. “Any particular color?”
“Pink,” she said, and bit decisively into a piece of grapefruit.
The cab arrived at nine and Brown escorted her out. She was very surprised when she saw that the cab was pink. Brown waited, with childish glee, for her to remark on it.
“It’s pretty,” she said.
“The only pink cab in town.” He nodded his head mysteriously, implying the rest: a couple of friends of mine who happen to be gnomes painted it up for me in a jiffy.
She was almost ready to believe that he’d said it and that it was true. The driver looked like a gnome. He wore an oversize pink and grey checked cap under which his sad, delicate little face crouched in hiding from a world which did not understand him. His voice was high and sweet as a choir boy’s, and his hands touched the gears, thin and elegant as spiders.
“A beautiful day,” he said. “A really beautiful day.”
“Yes, isn’t it?”
“This is my very own cab.”
My very own. I painted it with my own tiny hands with a watercolor brush and I drive it up and down the treble clef.
She leaned back and closed her eyes, forcing silence on the gnome and blotting out the beautiful day. Each turn of the wheels brought her closer to Charles, but she could not even conjure up a picture of him or plan a single sentence to say to him. The most she could do was censure herself, and that only in a trite and rather absent way: This is a bad situation and you are a bad woman. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. There will be a terrible scandal, innocent people will suffer, not just you...
But I won’t suffer, she thought with amazement, and I don’t think I’m a bad woman. I’m not ashamed of anything except marrying Charles and making a mess of it.
She could view their marriage with detachment now that it would soon be ended. The fault had been mainly hers. She had had something to conceal from Charles, and the very act of concealment had aggravated her sin, the way layers of face powder cover up acne but make it spread and itch. She had married Charles at a time when she was filled with resentment against all men because one man had seduced her (rather easily, she admitted), and then left her.
It was not the loss of her virginity that bothered her so much as the fact that she had lost it for nothing, and in such a sordid, ordinary way. She remembered the squeaking couch in the parlor at home, the careful shifting to avoid the broken spring, and the darkness torn now and then by her father’s gargantuan snores, or her mother calling, “Martha, you better come to bed now. It’s late.”
Her mother always called in the same kind of voice, kindly, but a bit absent-minded. Almost as if she knew what was going on downstairs, Martha thought, but felt she had neither the right nor the strength to interfere. Her parents were similar in their attitudes. They were not morally loose, their lives were blameless and dull; but they had a certain laxity of purpose. There was nothing clean-cut or definite about their thoughts or their plans. They never wanted one thing consistently or badly enough to go after it. Their weak acceptance of whatever came along had puzzled Martha when she was a child and enraged her when she became older. By the time she was fifteen, her life was already in sharp contrast to theirs. She was relentlessly ambitious and puritanical. She moved like a steamroller, in a straight line, crushing everything that was in her way. She harried her mother about her housekeeping and her father about his occasional and harmless drinking bouts. She looked after Laura, she washed and ironed her dresses, and brushed her hair and sent her off to school starched, prim and respectable.
She worked hard and late, without amusement and almost without reward. Though she was branded a bluestocking at school, her marks were invariably mediocre. She was not popular. Some of the boys admired her from a distance and sent her mash notes, but she rejected them with scorn. She had some of the usual, wild schoolgirl crushes on her male teachers and assorted movie actors and orchestra leaders, dark and romantic men that passed her on the street and dark and romantic men who stared at her from the windows of cars or buses. Just one long deep look and the crush was born and was lifted tenderly from her heart into her diary: “I feel so wonderful today, diary, because I finally saw Him. I don’t even know his name, but in my secret heart I call him Mr. X. Names are not important anyway. When two people just look at each other, they should both know.”
The parade of Mr. X.s marched briskly into oblivion, their scent lost in the musty odor of ink, while the silverfish slithered across their tracks.