And mixed with all this was a helpless flavor of satisfaction. Oliver, who before this had never asked help or advice from anyone. Oliver, the most self-sufficient and reticent of men, was coming to him for aid in his moment of pain and doubt. It made Patterson feel more important in Oliver’s company than he had ever felt before, and at the same time seemed to open some new gate of affection and compassion for his friend. Finally, he thought, no friendship is complete until your friend turns to you in despair.
Seated in the corner of the restaurant, their table removed from the other diners, Patterson listened carefully to the measured, fastidious voice of his friend. I must get all the facts straight, he thought, almost as if he were going into an operating room where the slightest haziness or misunderstanding might mean the difference between life and death; this is one time I must not say or do the wrong thing.
“… It never occurred to me,” Oliver was saying, “that anything like this could ever happen to us. It’s just unbelievable.”
Patterson smiled inwardly to himself, although no sign of it showed on his face. Friend, he thought, out of his different experience, it is never unbelievable.
“And the way it happened,” Oliver went on. “The damned commonplace way it happened. With the twenty-year-old tutor! It’s like a joke you hear at a smoker!”
I will warn Lucy, Patterson thought sardonically, to make it more original the next time. Pick a hunchback, or the governor of a Southern state, or a Negro drummer. Her husband has an aversion to the obvious.
“When women are ready to pick someone,” Patterson said, “they choose from the available material. Literary precedents have very little to do with it. At a moment like that, nobody thinks of herself as a character in an off-color joke.”
“What do you mean, ready to pick someone?” Oliver said harshly. “Did you ever think that Lucy was ready to pick someone?”
“No,” Patterson said honestly. “Not until now.”
“And now …”
Patterson shrugged. “Now, after it’s happened,” he said, “it’s not altogether surprising.”
“What do you mean by that?” There was hostility in Oliver’s voice.
“Adultery,” Patterson said mildly, “is the upper-middle-class American woman’s form of self-expression.”
For a moment, Oliver seemed angry. Then he laughed. “I see I came to the right man,” he said. “Okay, Philosopher. Continue.”
“All right,” Patterson said. “Try to look at it from her point of view for a few minutes. What have you done with her since your wedding day …?”
“I’ve done a hell of a lot,” Oliver broke in. “I’ve taken care of her every minute for fifteen years. Maybe it might sound crass, and I don’t suppose I’d ever say it to her, but she’s lived damned well and she’s never had to worry about anything and no matter how tough it was for me from time to time, I never said a word to her. Christ, she’s pretty nearly the only woman in the country who hardly even knew there was a Depression. To this day she can’t keep a checkbook straight or remember to pay the electric company on time. I’ll tell you what I did for her—I took full responsibility for her,” he said angrily, as though Patterson were Lucy’s representative and was arguing her case. “She’s thirty-five years old and she hasn’t the faintest notion of how tough it is to be alive in the twentieth century. For fifteen years she’s been living like a schoolgirl on a holiday. Don’t ask me what I’ve done for her. What’re you nodding about like that … ?”
“Exactly,” Patterson said. “Just what I said.”
“What do you mean, just what you said?” Oliver’s voice was beginning to rise.
“Now don’t get angry with me,” Patterson said good-humoredly. “I haven’t slept with any college boys.”
“That’s a damned poor joke,” said Oliver.
“Look,” said Patterson, “you’ve come to me for help, haven’t you?”
“I suppose so,” Oliver said. “Yes, of course.”
“Well, the only way I know how to help,” Patterson said, “is to try to figure out why she finally did something like this.”
“I know why,” Oliver said angrily. “She’s a …” He stopped and shook his head. Then he sighed. “No, she’s not at all. Go on. I’ll keep quiet.”
“You made all the decisions,” Patterson said. “You took her away from her work …”
“Her work.” Oliver made a contemptuous sound. “Messing around in a smelly laboratory for an old idiot by the name of Stubbs. You ever hear of him?”
“No.”
“Neither has anyone else. If she worked with him for twenty years, maybe they’d have produced one paper, proving that algae were green.”
Patterson chuckled.
“You laugh,” Oliver said. “But it’s true. What the hell, it wasn’t like tearing Galileo away from his telescope. The human race was going to survive just the same, whether or not she went into that laboratory five mornings a week. She wasn’t so different from all the other girls. She fiddled around, pretending to have a career, waiting to get married. The cities’re full of them.”
“That’s another thing,” Patterson said. “I talked to her. She hated leaving New York.”
“If every woman who couldn’t live in New York felt she had to betray her husband in consequence …” Oliver began. He shook his head angrily and drained the last of the wine from his glass. “And what about me?” he asked. “Do you think I wanted to come here to live?” he asked. “Do you think I wanted to be saddled with the printing business? That was the meanest day of my life, when I came up here after my father died and looked at the books and saw that the whole thing was going to collapse if I didn’t take hold. For ten years,” he said, “every time I’ve gone through the gate of the plant, I’ve felt myself growing rigid with boredom. But I haven’t taken it out on my wife …”
“The difference is,” Patterson said gently, “that you made the decision. And she had to follow.”
“God, it was over ten years ago!”
“You can build up a good case of regret in ten years,” Patterson said. “You can get to feel real useless in ten years.”
“Useless!” Oliver was making little balls of bread crumbs and flicking them brusquely against the wine bottle. “She had the boy to take care of, the house …”
“Would you be satisfied just taking care of a little boy and a house all your life?” Patterson asked.
“I’m not a woman.”
Patterson grinned.
“What is a man supposed to do?” Oliver asked. “Set up a Female WPA? Interesting projects,” he said sardonically, “for women who have nothing to do between three and five in the afternoon.” He looked at Patterson suspiciously. “How do you know so much?” he asked. “Has she been filling your ear?”
“No,” Patterson said. “She didn’t have to.”
“What about your own wife?” Oliver said, attacking. “What about Catherine?”
Patterson hesitated. “Catherine is a lost, placid soul,” he said. “She gave up hope when she was nineteen.” He shrugged. “Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe I don’t know her at all. Maybe she’s writing pornographic novels in the attic. Maybe she has a string of lovers from here to Long Island Sound. We don’t communicate enough for me to find out. It’s a different kind of marriage,” he explained regretfully, concealing his envy of his friend. “There’s nothing she or I could do that could possibly make either of us angry.” He smiled crookedly. “Or even mildly disturbed.”
“Why’ve you kept it up so long, then?” Oliver demanded. “Why didn’t you quit?”