I don’t know what’s got into her. Well, I guess I do, but it doesn’t justify—
On the other hand, it was presumptuous of Ellen Balfour to think that every woman in the world wants to hold a three-month-old baby just as soon as she catches sight of one. Daphne’s right, it was presumptuous. Daphne held the kid, her arms really stiff, as if he could roll out of her arms and bounce off the grass and she wouldn’t care. I chucked the boy under the chin a couple of times, and said he was a little prince, and he cried his head off. Then Daphne gave him back to his mother. Mrs. Balfour seemed to think Daphne was just overcome with delight and kept saying, “Oh, bless you, bless you. You’ll get one of your own soon, Daphne — may I call you Daphne?” English manners.
Daphne whispered to me, “That’s the ugliest child I ever saw.”
“Bad stock,” I whispered back, less because I actually thought so and more because I’ve been thinking that Daphne and I should be allies; I want us to be allies even when she’s misbehaving. I got a laugh out of her, anyway. Nothing’s even happened to us yet — we haven’t had a broke spell yet, or watched each other lose people, lose our looks, face down sickness. But D. seems to be holding out on me, refusing to go all the way into this thing unless there’s a child, too. Once I think my way past a lot of stuff that hasn’t got anything to do with anything, the thought of being called “Dad” doesn’t give me the jumps — well, not as severely as it used to. I didn’t used to think about these things. I must be getting older. Daphne could be onto something, but I won’t be hustled into it.
The other day I went on an urgent mission to retrieve my wallet from a jacket pocket before D. sent our stuff out to be cleaned. D. had left a book on top of the laundry basket: Happy Husband, that was the title. And underneath, in smaller letters: Make him happy, keep him happy! An advice manual. I took it away, read a few pages, chased them down with a couple of despairing drinks. There are real books all around the house, everywhere. She could pick one up and in mere seconds she could be involved in something that makes her laugh and feel nervous and hot and cold and forgive the world its absurdity — Pushkin, maybe, or Céline. Instead she’s spending her time reading up on what to do about me. It got me down. The book itself was useless, too. All the advice it offered about the timing of meals and affecting a cheerful disposition and trying to take an interest in the husband’s doings even when they’re fearfully boring and never saying “I told you so”—these aren’t the reasons a person looks with favour upon another person, these aren’t the reasons someone stays in love. I put the book back before she knew I’d seen it. If I said anything about it she’d tell me I was taking it too seriously, that she was just looking at it for amusement.
As for Mary, I’d been trying to get her to show up, but she wouldn’t. I don’t know what that means. Am I drying up? My book about the killer accountant is going as well as it can be, considering that I hardly know what I’m writing; I’m just jogging along behind the plot like a carthorse, ready to drop it as soon as Mary shows up and it’s time to get out of here. But no sign of Mary. She could be staying away deliberately (if so, I didn’t know she could do that), or my brainpower’s getting weak. Maybe once I’m alone in my beard things will be the way they used to be with her — friendly, I mean. I wrote her name in the steam on my bathroom mirror, as a kind of invocation, and after a couple of slow minutes I added a middle name for her. A kind of incentive, a step towards reality, bait. I wrote Jane. A good, plain, sensible name. Mary Jane Foxe, I wrote. Before my eyes the letters changed; the name grew longer. “Aurelia.” Mary Aurelia Foxe. This is what it’s come to.
I pulled up outside a bar I’d been to a couple of times. I knew I could be kind of alone there, especially during the day, when the social drinkers are waiting for the clock to strike a respectable hour before they start. There were a few guys inside, spaced well apart, one of them sitting at a corner table. He was groaning into his hat, but no one else in there even looked at him. I took another corner table, set down my scotch, lit my pipe, opened my copy of Metamorphoses, and pretended to read. The other guys started giving me the eye then, including the one who was wailing into his hat. “Gentlemen,” I said, from behind the cover of my book, “it’s a free country.” That had no effect, so I told the bartender to get them drinks, on me — there were only five of them in total. They left me in peace once they got their drinks.
It was quiet until a bunch of youngsters swept in and started yelling their orders all over the place. I raised my eyes from the line I’d been staring at for the past fifteen minutes or so and watched them. They used long words and called each other by nicknames that alluded to the classical world. Castor was present, and Pollux, and Patroclus and Achilles. College men, in town for the weekend. Three of them had a muttered dispute amongst themselves before heading over to where I sat. They drew out chairs, turned them around, and sat on them. Usually it annoys me when people do that, but I wanted to know what they had to say. They asked me if I was S. J. Fox, and I said, Yup. They named a few of my books and said they liked them. I said, Thanks. They called their friends over and announced my name. Looking round at the faces, I could tell that some of them had no idea who I was, but they did an impressive job of pretending that wasn’t the case. There’s something to be said for good breeding. You get hypocrites out of it, but you get the odd respectful youngster, too. They called me sir, and boss, and wouldn’t hear of me buying my own drinks. I put my book aside and answered their questions as well as I could. These boys all had names like Toby and Jed — their real names, that is. They didn’t try to get me to call them by their Greek names. They reminded me of Daphne’s set, kids who had never been poor and never would be, spouting cheerfully lopsided theories. Men of the world who didn’t live in the world — not properly. Me, I’m a farmer’s son. These boys reckoned the Europeans were about to get into a scrap over Czechoslovakia, and that there’d be war again, and we’d be in it again. They wanted to know what I thought about that. I reminded them that Germany had had its balls cut off — land taken, no army to speak of, no money — there wasn’t going to be any war. I told them they weren’t going to have to do what I did, that if they were looking for glory they’d better find another way. “I hope you’re right, Mr. Fox,” Jed said earnestly — or was it Toby? Blue sweatshirts and ears that stuck out. “I hope you’re right, but I don’t think you are. Things are really boiling over — the Germans are saying all kinds of things, and France and England are running around trying to get promises—”
“Didn’t you hear? We aren’t promising anything. Roosevelt said we’re staying neutral. What’s Czechoslovakia got to do with us?”
Toby — or Jed — stared at me. “What’s Czechoslovakia got to do with us? Well, what’s independence got to do with us? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness?”
All I could think of were a couple of lines someone else had recited to me a long time ago, in France: To goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey. That’s Proust, y’know, the guy had told me. (Daphne should have said to me, “You know what Proust says. . ” If she had, that little exchange of ours wouldn’t have happened, or would have happened differently, maybe, would have ended without me having to shut the window in her face.) The boys went quiet, which means I’d said the lines aloud. They were all squinting at me, as if I was some figure in a fading photograph and each of them was vying to be the first to identify me. A pox on the young. I left without saying good-bye, just walked out.