The day began consciously for Mrs. Dearly at exactly nine o’clock, when she wakened. She had left her windows open and the drapes drawn back before going to bed, and her room was now, at nine o’clock in the morning, full of warm and golden light. It was clearly going to be one of those andante days expiring through minutes and hours to slumberous summer sounds.
Mrs. Dearly loved that kind of day, so softly sensuous and replete with drowsy dreams, and she was aware of this one instantly in her flesh and bones. She yawned and stretched, lifting golden arms into the golden light. Looking down the length of her body, its senses astir in a sheer mist of blue nylon, she felt a kind of innocent narcissistic delight. Holding herself in child-like affection, quite uncorrupted by vanity, she was truly grateful for being what she was — so perfectly made for love and lovely things; but her gratitude was unformed and undirected, and she hadn’t the faintest notion to whom it was owed, or how it might be acknowledged.
She lay in bed for perhaps another half hour, absorbing and transforming all the subtle manifestations of the day, and then she stretched again and got up and shed the blue mist on the way to the bathroom. It lay on the floor like something conjured out of her dreams, a giant handful of the bubble bath foam in which she soaked until ten. Returning then to the bedroom, she began to remove the bright enamel from her fingernails, and when this was accomplished she began, with equally meticulous attention, to put on another coat of enamel.
Inasmuch as the new coat was the same color and shade as the old, the effect, when she was finished, was identical with the one it replaced; but in the meanwhile she had measured the heightening of her anticipation and excitement by the precise performance of a small task that occupied her pleasantly and brought her so much closer to where the day was taking her.
It was almost noon when she was finally dressed in a tan sleeveless dress, tan stockings and shoes, and a tiny hat of deeper shade. She inspected herself in her full-length mirror with the same child-like innocence and delight with which she had looked at herself earlier in the blue mist, turning slowly now for the effect from all sides; and then, carrying her purse and a pair of white gloves, she went downstairs prepared to leave the house, going out the back way to a terrace where she expected her husband to be — and there he was, sure enough, reclining in a blue and yellow sling chair.
Mrs. Dearly crossed the terrace and kissed him lightly over one eye, patting his head at the same time with a display of that kind of affection one generally bestows on small boys and dogs.
“Good morning, dear,” she said.
“Morning? In case you don’t realize it, it’s noon.”
The words alone, unqualified by inflection, had a carping connotation; but his voice was, in fact, amused and indulgent — as if it were understood and agreed that she should be immune to the imposition and demands of time, and that it would, really, be rather absurd if she were otherwise.
“Oh, I’ve been up for hours,” she said. “Honestly I have.”
“You’re dressed for the street,” he said. “Where are you going?”
“I have some shopping to do downtown. Do you mind?”
“Not in the least. But don’t you want some lunch before you go? I suppose it’s too late for breakfast.”
“I hardly ever eat breakfast, as you know, and I’ll have lunch downtown. What will you do?”
“There’s plenty to do in the flower beds, and I’m going to mow the grass.”
“I knew it. I was looking out at the lawn last evening, and I said to myself that the grass was getting high. Cal will mow the grass tomorrow, I said.”
“You were right. That’s exactly what Cal is going to do.”
“You shouldn’t work so hard at it, dear. Why don’t you hire a gardener to do such things?”
“Because I wouldn’t get any pleasure out of having a gardener do it. I enjoy doing the yard work — you know that perfectly well. All week I look forward to the weekend when I can get my green thumb into the ground. Things grow for me, and the grass somehow looks better when I mow it. I’m a frustrated horticulturist, I guess.”
This was true. He had made several millions in real estate speculations, but he took more pride in his grass, his roses, his flowering and evergreen shrubs. He even had the rough look of a man who lived close to the earth. Now, on the wide terrace behind his costly house, he was wearing a coarse blue shirt tucked into worn jeans, and his shoes were the shoes of a working man, not of a dilettante gardener — thick-soled, hard-toed shoes laced up around his ankles.
Mrs. Dearly, although willing to concede something to his more numerous years — which were twenty more than her own — still felt that the addiction of a rich man to rough pursuits, like digging in the ground and mowing grass, should adhere to more fashionable lines. There was no reason, for example, why Cal couldn’t work just as well in a colorful sports shirt and in presentable trousers and shoes as in the crude outfit he was now wearing. Moreover, to put it candidly, he stank. When she had bent over to kiss him and pat his head, the odor of perspiration had been strong. She could not see that it was made less offensive by being the result of earthly labor.
“Well, you must be careful of the heat,” she said. “You may have a stroke or something if you’re not careful.”
“I’ll be careful, thank you. An old fellow like me has to be, you know.”
“Nonsense. You’re a perennial boy. Will you look after yourself properly while I’m gone? Have a good lunch, I mean, and don’t stay too long in the sun without resting.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said. “I’m strong as a bull.”
Bending to kiss him again, she thought that he not only was as strong as one, he also smelled like one.
“Goodbye, dear,” she said. “I may be just a little late.”
“Shall I back your car out for you?”
“Don’t bother, thanks. I don’t in the least mind doing it myself.”
As a matter of fact, she preferred it. His handling of her beautiful little Jaguar was, she felt, a kind of physical violation only a little less disturbing than that imposed infrequently on herself. Having now evaded the former — as she did, whenever possible, the latter — she drove the ten or twelve miles downtown in a considerably shorter time than obedience to the speed limits would have permitted.
She loved driving fast, could not resist the sense and excitement of high speeds, and it was fortunate that she also drove expertly, with a casual mastery to which the Jaguar submitted as if it were somehow an extension of its driver. Sometimes she really felt this, especially on the highway, that she and the powerful little car were organically joined, and that it experienced in its tempered-steel body the same thrill she experienced in her soft and yielding body. This was nonsense, of course, a private fantasy, but it amused her...
Downtown, she parked in the Municipal Garage two levels underground and walked through a brightly lighted tunnel to an elevator that carried her up into the lobby of a hotel across the street. She was hungry by then, so she had lunch by herself in the hotel, and after eating like a bird she went to several department stores in the area where she bought a great many things, mostly personal and wearable, all of which she left in the stores for delivery. This took quite a while, lunch and shopping requiring about three hours; but the time passed agreeably and almost before she knew it, it was 3:30 — which was the time she was supposed to meet Douglas.
She returned to the hotel where she had lunched, going this time to the cocktail lounge instead of the restaurant, and it was cool and seductive there, in an artificial dusk suspended mistily between light and darkness. She paused just inside the door while her eyes adjusted to the shadows, listening to the soft serenade of recorded strings and feeling her happiness and quiet excitement stir and swell inside her with an effect of almost painful pleasure; and all the while she was looking around for Douglas, and there he was, as she had hoped and expected, at a small table in a corner.