“So I want it all,” she said, musing. “If you’re bothering about yourself, then the best thing is go ahead and really bother. All the way. I walked past the big shoe-bazaar place on Fifty-third yesterday and I bought another pair of sandals. They were nice and they were inexpensive, but that’s not the point. The point is I have a perfectly good pair in the closet and bought these anyway.”
“That doesn’t seem too terribly indulgent.”
“Everything adds up. I’ve still got my debts to pay,” she said. “I am the girl who wants to be serviced. What are you?”
“He who wants to service — at least that’s what I’m left with.”
“Who wants to?”
I did not answer.
“Are you being duplicitous?” she asked. “Do you want to leave me?”
“I want the same things I’ve always wanted, Martha. They just get more and more illusive. I don’t feel myself quite able to pull anything off.”
“You got the Herzes their baby finally. Though that doesn’t satisfy you either, you told me.”
“I didn’t make my feelings clear. It satisfied me, it’s good news. Except,” I confessed, “it left me feeling a little envious.”
That was the truth, and it left me defenseless.
“You’re just a family man at heart,” she said.
“Please don’t be too smart.”
“How can I help it? I could have serviced you, you see, with a ready-made unit.”
“That isn’t quite what I meant, Martha. You didn’t even want that yourself.”
“Nor did you,” she said quickly.
“We influenced one another. Can we leave it at that?”
“Would you like to leave me, Gabe?”
“If I wanted to I would. At least I’d make a stab at it.”
“Would you? I’m a tough cookie, you know.”
“But so am I.”
“I suppose that’s what we’re up against. Two tough cookies like us, each getting his way. The end result will be that one of us will invite the other to take a look out the window, and then give a nice shove forward.”
“Or go nuts. Or hate one another’s guts. There are lots of possibilities.”
“Surely we can just work out some simple way of humiliating one another,” she said. “I’ll screw the janitor or something.”
“I’m not crazy about the turn the conversation is taking.”
“I’m not either.”
“It’s stopped raining.”
“You look very handsome,” she said to me, standing up. “Did I tell you that? Put on your jacket, let me see.”
“Maybe,” I said, while I smoothed out my trousers and buttoned my coat, “if I do get away for a week—”
“Yes.” She opened her purse and looked to see if she had the keys; she always did this, even though I had keys of my own. “Yes, and maybe you’ll come back and everybody will love everybody again.”
“You’re much more direct than I am, Martha. And maybe smarter—”
“You just don’t have to be so direct, that’s all.”
“No?”
“You’re stronger than I am, Gabe — and it’s clear what you hold against me anyway.”
“It’s not all that clear to me. But whatever you think it is, why don’t you save it?”
We walked down the stairs, and while I held the car door open, she said to me, “Is it clear, however, the few little things I have against you?”
“I think so.”
“Am I being reasonable?”
After a moment I said, “I don’t think so. No.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Then is it reasonable for you to detest me for letting them go?”
“I don’t detest you for letting them go.”
“For involving you in letting them go.”
“That’s not true either—”
“Well, you don’t feel the same, Gabe. I think you liked me noble better. But then,” she said, giving me no time to reply, “I would have preferred you that way too. We have to be satisfied with what we get.”
“True.”
I closed the door and came around to the street side of the car. “I won’t say anything,” Martha told me, as I got in, “and you don’t say anything, and when we get to the restaurant we’ll start in fresh. Let’s not ruin the night. Just look up there, how lovely it is.”
“Martha’s looking marvelous,” Sid Jaffe was saying to me five days later as we drove together to pick up the Herzes.
“Yes, she is.”
“She likes her job?”
“I think so. Delsey is very nice, a very amiable fellow.”
“How are the kids doing, do you know?” he asked.
“She called only a few nights ago. They’re out at the seashore.”
“So they’re all right?”
“It sounds as though they’re fine.”
At a red light Sid settled back into his seat, taking his hands from the wheel a moment. “Another beautiful day,” he said.
“It’s been a nice summer.”
“I haven’t been out of the office enough to find out.” His smile indicated that that was generally the way things went with him.
“You ought to take a vacation,” I suggested.
He sighed then, comically, but he clearly liked the picture of himself as a hard-working, industrious man. Though our meetings had been few and inconsequential, I rather admired Jaffe, admired, in fact, what he seemed to admire about himself. Generally I saw him down by the lake on Sundays; it was there that we had been introduced by Martha. He had a long striped towel that he stretched out on when sunning, and a portable radio in a little leather case on which he listened to the ball game; every hour or so, he would tuck his papers under the radio, walk down to the water, dive in, and swim long, even laps by himself, going clear out of sight for a time. Coming up from the water, his bald head dripping and shining, he would take a trip past our blanket at least once during the day to stop and say hello. He never allowed himself the pleasure of a visit, however, never once sat down — though there were occasions during the afternoon when I would happen to look up and see him, fifty yards off on his striped towel, glancing our way; that is, Martha’s way. Late in the afternoon, he would do a round of sit-ups, take a last swim, and then unobtrusively leave for home.
I came to respect Jaffe on those Sundays because he seemed to be a lonely man who had come to grips with his condition. Watching him, I wondered what my own particular style would be were I to wind up forty and single. There was something orderly and methodical about him that he managed to make attractive, though Martha had already indicated to me that it was that same orderliness that rendered him less than exciting, that finally — at least she had believed this in the past — made of Sid an uninspirited, unoriginal man.
“It’s amazing,” Sid was saying, as the car was moving again, “how much she looks like Cynthia.”
“Who?”
“Martha. Or Cynthia like her, I suppose I should say. Now that she’s rested and suntanned …”
I said, “They both have the same eyes.”
Sid looked sternly ahead now. “That’s right.”
After a long silence I asked, “You’ve seen Theresa?”
“I stopped by the other day.”
“Did you see the baby too?”
“I did.”
“And it’s all right …?” I asked.
“Oh sure,” he said. “Has Libby been calling you too?”
I shook my head.
“I thought you meant she’d been calling. She’s called my office three times in the last day or two. Making sure the baby’s got the proper number of appendages. Actually, the thing turns out to look a little like her. As much as it can look like anything yet.”
“Did you tell Libby? I’m sure it would excite her. At least I think it would,” I said.