Necessary to him.
Ten days’ reflection, he thought grimly, and it comes down to that. Necessary.
I accepted her too lightly, he thought, as one reflects upon a friend who has died and whose value, too late, is suddenly appreciated. I wasn’t careful enough.
He thought of what it would be like with just himself and Tony in the house. Tony, with his mother’s eyes, and the same delicate cheekbones, and so many of the same gestures, roughened a little by his maleness and made cruder and a little comic by his awkwardness and adolescence. Whatever else happens, Oliver thought, I couldn’t stand that.
He tried to think of what it must be like now up at the lake, Tony and Lucy together day and night, confronting each other, after the rainy evening ten days ago. Oliver supposed that he should have taken Tony home with him, for Tony’s sake. If he hadn’t rushed around like a stabbed bull, perhaps he would have done so. Only it would have made coming to a proper decision that much harder. Well, he comforted himself, let him have a rough week or so—in the long run, we’ll all profit by my being allowed to figure this out, undisturbed.
Oliver got up to go to bed. He put out the light and went upstairs to the bedroom that he shared with Lucy. It was a big room with a bay window, looking out through the foliage of an oak tree at the quiet street below. Oliver made the bed each morning, turning it down so that it would be ready to sleep in at night. The room was neater than it ever was when Lucy was there, and it suddenly seemed artificial and unfamiliar to Oliver because of that.
Lucy had left her silver-backed toilet articles on the dressing table and the first morning that Oliver had done the housework, he had arranged all the things, the brushes, the combs and nail-files, the carved hand-mirror, in a severe geometric pattern on the glass surface. Now they seemed like articles put out for sale in the shop of a man without much imagination. Oliver went over to the table and lifted the mirror. It was heavy and the silver handle was cool and he remembered the hundreds of times he had watched Lucy, getting dressed to go out, holding the mirror up, her head twisted, to see the back of her head and make sure her hair was all right, and the small, soft indefinite movements with which she pushed strands of hair in place. He remembered the mixture of tenderness and irritated amusement with which he had regarded her, pleased with her beauty, annoyed because she was taking so much time and making them late for wherever they were going, accomplishing nothing, as far as he could tell, with the hesitant, undecided movements of her hand.
He threw the mirror down carelessly, changing the pattern on the table. Then he put out the lamp and sat for a long time in the dark on the edge of the old bed.
Reserved, devoted, moderate, he remembered. That’s what I thought. Shakespeare, no doubt, would have a different opinion. And what about her own opinion of herself? Lying next to him for so many years, plotting, resentful, mocking his estimate of her, cherishing other qualities, closing her eyes, turning secretly away from him in the same bed, the twisting, stubborn inhabitant of the bawdy planet.
If I were another kind of man, he thought wearily, sitting fully dressed on the side of the bed in the dark room, I wouldn’t stay here alone, suffering, like this. I would drink or I would find another woman or I would do both. Then, satiated and loose, I’d arrive, sidewise, and with less pain, at a decision. For a moment, he thought of getting into the car and driving to New York and registering in a hotel there. Women wouldn’t be hard to find in the city, and, in fact, there were one or two whom he knew who had made it plain that all he had to do was ask. But even as he turned it over in his head, he knew he wouldn’t call anyone. He doubted, even, that he could manage to take another woman. He was a passionate man; he knew he was much more avid than other men his age—but it had all been channeled into the one direction. This is a hell of a predicament, he thought, grinning malevolently to himself, for a uxorious man.
Necessary.
What a goddamn summer, he thought, and stood up and undressed in the dark and got into bed.
The next morning, there was a letter in the mail from Lucy. Oliver was just leaving the house when the postman came, and he stood at the door, in the warm, early sunshine, turning the envelope over in his hand, conscious of his neighbors setting out to work, saying good-bye to children, hurrying to catch trains and buses, moving through the greenness of trees and lawns, against a background of flowers, moving through the bright summer morning, the men already grayed over a little, Oliver thought, by the shadows of the offices and factories that were waiting for them.
Oliver didn’t open the letter immediately. He looked at the familiar inscription on the envelope—backhand, childish, not quite controlled, always a little hard to read. Where had he heard that that kind of handwriting, backhand, was evidence of repression, hypocrisy, self-consciousness? He didn’t remember it accurately. Perhaps it was another kind of handwriting and he’d mixed it up. Some day, he’d get one of those books and look it up.
He opened the envelope and read the letter. It was short and without apologies. All she said was that she was going to leave him, because she couldn’t bear living any longer in the same house with Tony and him. And when she signed it, she didn’t say, Love, or anything like that. Just Lucy.
There was no information about how Tony was, no inquiries about him or what he had decided, no hesitation or offers. It was like no letter she had ever sent before, and if it hadn’t been for the handwriting, it would have been hard to believe that Lucy had written it.
That afternoon, he called Sam Patterson and asked him to come to dinner that night. The good thing about Sam was that there never was any problem about seeing him alone. All Sam ever did was tell his wife he wasn’t going to be home to dinner, and that was the end of it. Maybe Sam had the secret, Oliver thought, maybe he was the man to ask about marriage.
They had dinner at a hotel, with a bottle of wine, and Oliver found himself enjoying it and eating a great deal, after the ten days of cooking for himself. They talked lightly all through dinner, in the kind of conversational shorthand that develops between friends who have known each other many years, and it was only when the dishes had been cleared away and the coffee set down before them that Oliver said, “Sam, the reason I asked you to have dinner with me is that I need advice. I’m in trouble and I have to make a decision and maybe you can help me …”
Then, sipping his coffee, not looking at Patterson, Oliver told him the whole story, the call from Tony, the arrival at the lake, Tony’s outburst, Lucy’s denial and accusation of Tony, Bunner’s confession, everything.
He spoke slowly and evenly, without emotion or shading, methodically presenting all the facts to Patterson, like a responsible witness making a deposition after an accident, like a doctor giving the symptoms of a puzzling case to a specialist who has been called in for consultation.
Patterson listened silently, showing nothing on his face, thinking, I don’t know another man who would make such a dry, accurate, well-organized report out of his life’s convulsion like this. He is making love, desire and betrayal sound like a paper to be read before an historical society on a minor treaty of the eighteenth century. At the same time, listening impassively, Patterson could not help feeling an unworthy twinge of jealousy. If she finally was going to choose somebody, he thought, why couldn’t she have chosen me?