I was getting alarmed at all this. I covered her mouth with my hand. I didn’t want to hear all about how much she loved me. If she couldn’t tell me she was starting to grow indifferent, like I was, at least she could keep still. “That isn’t love, Maxie, that’s... that’s almost hypnotism. You want to cut it out, I don’t like to hear you talk like that. You make too much of me” (“and make it tough for me,” I added to myself.)
We sat down to eat. Maxine had the table lowered from the wall and covered with orange and green dishes that came from Japan via the five-and-ten. We had canned tomato soup, canned spaghetti, canned pineapple, and evaporated milk. The bread was not canned, but it came wrapped by machinery in wax paper and already sliced. “Awfully thoughtless of them,” I remarked sociably, “to make us go to all the trouble of buttering it ourselves. Us pioneers certainly endure hardships.”
“Well,” she observed, passing between the gas range and the table a number of times, “the little there was to do, I did it. You’re idea of chipping in is to get yourself smelling like a barbershop.”
And over our heads, at the same time, we heard a chair indignantly clamped down, and the lady upstairs remarked in high dudgeon to her spouse: “Oh, yeah? Well, don’t eat it then, if you’re so particular! Too bad about you!”
“Find out what it is,” I suggested. “If he doesn’t want it, maybe we could use it down here.”
“What’s the matter with you, Wade?” Maxine remonstrated. “You’re crazy!”
“Do you dare me?” I insisted.
We listened a moment longer. “Believe me, I’ve got something better to do than slave over a hot stove all day for you. Shut up!” This last explosive admonition would have been audible even in a much better-built house than ours was. I thought: “It’ll be a feather in her cap; she won’t refuse,” and prided myself on my knowledge of feminine psychology.
“Do you know her?” I asked Maxine eagerly.
“No,” she said, “and this is no time to be interrupting them. You’ll get yourself disliked. Come back here.”
I went to the dumbwaiter shaft, opened the panel, and called up: “D-twelve! Oh, D-twelve!”
The panel above me opened and a man’s voice growled, “Who is it?”
“The floor below,” I answered cheerfully. “Couldn’t help overhearing your Mrs. just now. Listen, sport, how about sending down a little dish of that stuff, whatever it is? We don’t get much home cooking down here.”
I heard Maxine’s wail from the depths of the kitchenette. “Oh, Wade, you’re terrible! You don’t know how mortified I am.”
The gentleman I was conversing with replied truculently, “Think you’re wise, don’t you? Why don’t you learn to mind your own business!” And the panel slammed back. I waited. A second later it opened again and a persuasive feminine voice queried: “Hello? Hello below?”
I reached behind me, seized the eavesdropping Maxine by the elbow and dragged her forward, changing places with her.
“Yes,” she said embarrassedly, “my husband got a notion he would like to try somebody else’s cooking for a change. You know how men are. The grass is always greener in the other fellow’s yard.” She laughed apologetically. “Oh, that’s awfully nice of you. I’m Mrs. Wade. Thank you so much, Mrs. Greenbaum.” This went on for quite some time. They seemed to be exchanging recipes.
“Here,” she said, coming away from the dumbwaiter at last with a platter in her hand, “you nut! Here’s some lovely tapioca pudding for you.”
“Oh, God!” I said, sinking weakly back in my chair and covering my eyes with one hand, “and I thought it was a steak!”
“Now,” she said, “I hope you’re satisfied. As a result of this, I’ll probably have to say hello to her every time I meet her going up in the elevator. Or else sit here and entertain her all afternoon when you’re away. Phone the movie house and find out what’s going on.”
I felt like saying, “It’s polite to wait till you’re asked.”
I thought the picture would never be over. I squirmed and gritted my teeth in the baleful silverish glow that went on and on. I thought, “It’s not they who should be paid a couple of grand a week for making faces, it’s we who ought to be paid for sitting and watching.” Then we were back again, and Maxine snapped on the lights, while I put the milk bottle outside the door and locked the apartment for the night. Another day was over. But what good was that, when the one after would be just like it?
I delayed as long as I could, after she had gone to bed and even after she had turned out the bed light. I stalked around in the living room with my coat off and my tie loosened. There wasn’t going to be any making up of the row of the night before. I mean, we were made up already, but there weren’t going to be any tokens of it. But there wasn’t anything to read (and I hated reading, anyway) and there wasn’t anything to do. I went into the kitchenette, and there was that awful tapioca pudding of Mrs. Greenbaum’s staring me in the face. I emptied it into the sink and came out again. I pulled up the shades and looked out of the window. The sky was all brick dust, and there was no moon. Suddenly, standing there like that, I realized I had been praying, I had been saying, “Oh, Lord, give me a break. Let something romantic, something exciting, happen to me. Only once, if never again. Before I’m too old. Break up this life of mine. Never mind about mending it again, I can do that myself. Why did I ever marry her? Without her, every minute would have been an adventure! It isn’t fair—”
I went inside, jumped out of my things, and got into my own bed. She may have been awake or she may have been asleep, it didn’t matter to me.
Noise woke me up, great rolling drumbeats of it. I opened my dazed eyes, and outside the windows it would be all black one minute and all platinum the next, with a great big crash. And in that minute rain began to hiss down, and the curtains did a dance of the seven veils. “Quick, close the windows, Wade!” Maxine whimpered, and one of the tinsel flashes showed her to me in the next bed, with her arm flung before her face and the pillow over her head instead of under it.
“What’s the matter, scared?” I laughed, and got up and pulled down the sashes. That robbed the storm of all its dignity, made it just a stage effect in an old-fashioned melodrama, with the room very quiet all of a sudden and the flashes removed to a distance and not much better than an electric sign with the current flickering and dying down.
“I’m still scared,” she informed me in a certain tone.
“Have a cigarette,” I said. “I’m going back to sleep.”
Presently she said, “I have a cigarette, but I haven’t got a match.”
I took a folder of them from under my pillow and passed them to her across the aisle between the two beds. In grasping them, she reached too far up on my arm. I could feel her fingers slip almost up to my elbow. I left the matches and took the arm away.
In the morning I was dreaming of Bernice. I was saying. “There’s nothing worse than an earthquake; stand close to me in the doorway here until it passes,” when Maxine woke me by shaking my shoulder.
“My goodness,” she said. “I don’t know where you were the night before last, but you certainly act as though you’re making up for lost sleep. Come on, the coffee’ll get cold.”