“None of your business.”
“You’re crazy if you’re playing close to home. Nobody with any sense plays close to home.”
“Then I’m safe,” Larry said, annoyed. “If nobody does it, it’s not expected and not looked for.”
“It’s always looked for,” Felix replied. “Every woman in the world is just itching to sink her teeth into some other woman’s juicy bit of homegrown gossip. It makes her own running around seem more pure. Look, count up the shopping trips, and the visits to the doctor, and the bridge-club meetings, and the sewing-club meetings, and the out-of-town girl-friends who have to be met in New York, and the dental appointments, and the dancing classes, and the adult-education routine — do you know where half of these women really are?”
“Where?”
“In bed. Any hour of the day. Morning, noon or night. With the husband, it has to be at night, it has to be dark on clean sheets, with candlesticks on the dresser and a bucket of iced champagne near the bed. With the man next door, it can be in broad daylight in a smelly barn on dirty straw, and it’s romantic.”
Larry smiled.
“Romance,” Felix said. “They’re all looking for romance because they’ve learned it from books and movies. And what can be more romantic than a man who’s willing to risk your husband’s shotgun to have you? Jesus, you must be the sexiest thing on wheels! This is romance. This is what Mrs. America wants. Do you know what she’s got?”
“What?”
“She’s got a stranger on top of her. And the only exciting thing about this guy is that he is a stranger. She’ll do anything for this stranger. Things she wouldn’t dream of doing with her husband, she’ll do with this stranger. Why? Because she doesn’t own him and he makes her twitch. She’s got to have him. Every other woman in the world is her enemy. She tells herself she’s in love, and she’s willing to risk her home, her happiness, her pride, everything, just to be with this stranger who fills her once a week. The romance seekers. They’re everywhere, ready to fall in love at the drop of a hat. Anyplace you’ve got a housewife, you’ve also got a potential mistress for a stranger.”
“Your wife, too?” Larry asked.
“Betty’d like nothing better than to roll in the hay with a stranger. She’d be good for him, too. And he’d be great for her. I wish she’d get herself somebody.”
“Why?” Larry asked. “To ease your own conscience?”
“Who me? My conscience is clear. I’m a respectable butcher.”
“But the rest of us are all animals, huh, Felix?”
“Aren’t we all?” Felix asked, smiling.
The walls were down, and now Felix would talk.
And now, beginning to know the man at last Larry suspected he’d wanted to unload his mind from the very beginning. They sat side by side in the bar at the shopping center. Darkness pressed at the plate-glass window, and they spoke in whispers, like two old friends discussing family trouble.
“Larry,” Felix said, “there’s nothing like it. I know just how you feel. You’re in love, and there’s nothing like it.”
“Have you ever been in love?”
“I’m always in love,” Felix said. “If I wasn’t in love, I’d be dead. Jesus, Larry, I’m a butcher!”
He looked at Felix, and he thought Felix is a butcher and he doesn’t like being a butcher or living in Pinecrest Manor with a wife who’s too loud no matter how cute she is. And so he plays around. This is the only excitement in the life of Felix Anders: the meeting, the discovery, the conquest, the retreat, the further conquests. There are no real worlds left for Felix Anders to conquer, no worlds left for the butchers of America; there are only women.
So this is the real profession of Felix Anders.
He is poised, charming, bored, aloof, secretive, superior and intelligently cunning. He is a discoverer and an explorer and a conqueror. There are worlds of lonely housewives, and Felix is a master at his profession, which is the conquest of these women.
Am I like Felix Anders?
“Love, Larry,” he said. “That look in their eyes, the look that’s for you alone. Sweet, sweet. Ahhhh, you become alive again, do you know? Women are so goddamn sweet. There’s this model I’m dropping now. Not cheesecake, fashion. Pretty as a picture. Long black hair, brown eyes, a high-class model’s walk. Do you know how models walk?”
“Yes.”
“She came into the shop one day with this sweet sweet smile on her face, and she asked for fourteen pounds of eye round. I explained to her that a rib roast would be better if she was planning on so big a party. We got to talking. I’m just a butcher. I start with meat, and from meat I go to other things. We got to talking about parties. She said she liked small parties better than big parties. I said I liked small parties, too. That was the beginning. And now, after three months, it’s almost the end.”
“Is she married?” Larry asked.
“Oh, certainly. Her husband is a salesman. He sells steel. He’s away two weeks out of every three. I was seeing more of her than I saw of Betty. She’s the sweetest thing alive, and she loves me, and I used to love her. But that’s all over now. I only want to get her off my back now.”
He talks differently, Larry thought, when he is Felix Anders, Conqueror.
He warned me not to confide, but he’s confiding in me, telling me everything, explaining Felix Anders, Conqueror. The other Felix is only the mask. The Felix Anders who stands coolly distant on a station platform is not this man in armor. He is only the mask donned for society. Betty and the children are part of that mask. But this Felix Anders is a hero. This Felix Anders was born two thousand years too late. He should be wearing a beard, and a plumed hat, and a sword. He should be laying his way across France, barmaid by barmaid.
“I never kid myself, Larry,” Felix said. “I always recognize that moment when it’s over. I always know when I’m falling out of love.”
“It seems to me you’re never really in love,” Larry said.
“What’s love?” Felix asked. “Do you know?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Then how can you say I’m never in love?”
“Love is mutual and equal pleasure, I suppose,” Larry said.
“But whose pleasure comes first?”
“It has to be equal,” Larry said. “In fact, the other person’s pleasure might even be more important to you than your own.”
“There’s the mistake,” Felix said. “My pleasure comes first. A woman is a woman, and I never forget that. When I start forgetting it, I always ask myself, ‘How would you like to be married to this girl? Do you think it’d be any different from being married to Betty?’ And I always get the same answer.”
“And what’s that?”
“No.”
“Well... I sometimes wonder what it would be like. Being married to her.”
“Get it out of your mind. You’re crazy.”
“Maybe I am, Felix. All I know is that this isn’t the kind of stuff you’ve been talking about. This isn’t just another streetcar. This is it.”
“It?” Felix laughed. “What’s it?”
“This. What I have. What she has. What we’ve got together. This is it.”
“It’ll pass,” Felix said. “This, too, shall pass.”
“I hope not.”
“You’re stupid. If you were smart, you’d pull out right this minute. You’d go to that phone and call her and say, ‘Goodbye, Blondie, it’s been swell.’ That’s what you’d do.”
“I can’t. I love her.”
“Everything about her?”