They talked about the war being rough on men, but I guess you could say that Linda was just as much a war casualty as any man. What happened to her had just taken the heart out of her, and it made me feel bad to see the way she was. I guess what I did was pick her up and dust her off and put the heart back in her. You could call it a rebound on her part, I guess. Not a rebound from any specific man, but a rebound from life. For me it was fine, because I never thought I would get to marry Linda Willestone. I could still remember the times in high school when I would be leaving to walk to my after-school job, and I’d see Linda hurrying out to get into a car with a whole bunch of kids and go driving off somewhere, laughing and having a good time.
They always say that the first year of marriage is the hardest. With us I think it was the best. At first Linda seemed tired all the way through, but as the months went by she began to come alive more and more. She was fond of me and grateful to me. I did not demand that she love me. I hoped it would come later, but when it didn’t seem to, I didn’t mind too much. It was enough to have her around, and know that wherever we went, people looked at her.
It’s hard for a man to assess his own marriage. He cannot say if it is good or bad. Maybe no marriage is entirely good or bad. I know only that after that first year there was strain between us. Linda wanted a life that I didn’t want. I told her values were superficial; she told me life was more than waiting for death. There were no blazing quarrels. My temper is not of that breed. And in the last few years things became easier between us. We worked out a sort of compromise. She lived my way, and when we could afford it, she would take a trip, usually to Chicago. That seemed to ease her nervous tension.
I had hoped, of course, that we would have children. But that was denied us. The doctor she went to said that it had something to do with how sick she had been in California. It would have done much to end her restlessness, I thought, but since it could not be, we managed to work out a life with a minimum of strain. Sometimes, out of irritation, she would say cruel things to me, calling me a nonentity, a zero, a statistic. But I understood, or I thought I did. She was an earthy, hot-blooded woman, and our life was pretty quiet. I understand a great deal more about her now.
During the past year she began to take an almost frantic interest in her appearance, spending a lot of money on creams and lotions, taking strange diets, working hard on grotesque exercises that claimed to firm up this part or that, remove slack or wrinkles here and there. That too, in the light of what happened, becomes significant.
To round out this picture of Linda, I must add in all fairness that she was a superb housekeeper. I believe that was the result of her energy and restlessness. The house always gleamed. Though the food she cooked was plain and unimaginative, she always prepared it quickly, with a minimum of fuss and effort, and did her marketing with the relentless efficiency that made me jokingly offer to hire her in the purchasing department at the plant. She was good with her clothes too. Though she spent an uncomfortable amount, her wardrobe was much larger than even that amount would justify. The one project I completed in my cellar shop that pleased her the most was a special closet for her wardrobe. I walled off one end of her bedroom with mirrored doors in such a way that the doors could be completely folded out of the way, or so arranged that she could stand and get a multiple view of herself. I built in overhead cupboards for her hats, designed a long shoe rack, built in one set of wide shallow drawers that reached from the floor to shoulder height. It took me over two months of my spare time. Hanging the doors so they would roll easily was the trickiest part. Sometimes on rainy Sundays she would shut herself in her room and try on practically everything she owned, putting a lot of things aside for changes and alterations during the week.
As I said, I had already put in for a summer vacation and didn’t tell Linda, because I was waiting for this idea of a fall vacation to blow over. One night in late March or early April Jeff and Stella had come over. It was when we’d finished a rubber of bridge and were talking while I made fresh drinks that Linda told them about her idea, and how Stu and Betty Carbonelli had had such a good time.
“Betty said that you can get beach cottages for practically nothing on the west coast of Florida in October and November because their season doesn’t really start down there until around Christmas. They were on Verano Key, quite a way south of Sarasota. They said they had the whole beach to themselves.”
As I put the filled glasses down on the bridgetable, Jeff said, “You know, that sounds pretty good to me. What do you think, Stell?”
“I’ve never been on the west coast. When I was little we used to go down to Palm Beach a lot. Sis still has a big place there, but it’s rented every year through an agent. She never liked it.”
The bridge game was ignored while we all talked it over. I said it was too far to go for just three weeks, particularly if, as Stu Carbonelli said, you had to have a car. You could subtract six days for the trip, going and coming. A full week gone out of three.
Jeff thought that over for quite a while, frowning, and then he interrupted Stella and said, “Hey! Here’s a deal. We have to have a car, right? We could rent places close together. I could fix it, Paul, so that my three weeks would start four days after yours. You and Linda could drive down and Stell and I could fly down. Then when your time was up, you both could fly back and Stell and I could leave at the same time and drive back. If we were close together, we would only need one car, wouldn’t we? And then we’d both have two weeks and four days down there. Driving both ways is a chore. But just one way...”
“And we could put all the heavy luggage for both of us in the car, so it wouldn’t mean messing with a lot of baggage on the plane trip,” Linda said eagerly.
Actually, Jeff’s idea made it sound a lot better. I didn’t want to take our vacation along with the Jeffries if we were going to be in an expensive place, because I knew we couldn’t keep up with them. But Stu had talked a lot about the place they had gone, and it certainly wasn’t any Miami. He said that the nearest town, Hooker, was eight miles from the key, and to get off the key you drive over a rattly old one-lane wooden bridge. He had said there was quite a bit of commercial fishing in the area. He had said you could eat, sleep, fish and swim, and aside from that, if you wanted any night life of any special splendor, you had to go to Miami or Havana. If the Jeffries wanted to make a side trip, there was no reason why we had to go along with them. And Stu had raved about plug casting for snook by moonlight in Little Hurricane Pass at the south end of Verano Key.
Stella, who had been dubious at first, gradually became enthusiastic, and the three of them concentrated their forces on me. I brought up every objection I could think of, and every time one of them would answer it.
Like I said, I’m quiet. And I’m pretty stubborn too. I guess those things go together pretty often. There they were, the three of them all heckling me. Florida had begun to sound better to me, but it was the idea of the three of them leaning on me that put my back up. I finally said flatly that I’d decided to take my vacation in August and go up to Lake Pleasant. It certainly dampened that party right down. Maybe I sounded cross when I said it.
I was sorry to see Jeff and Stella leave so early, because I knew Linda would be gunning for me. This would be one of the big screaming brawls she could throw every so often, yapping at me in a shrill way that would make me dizzy.