“Nobody does, but they gave me ten last year.”
He was tired, he had his business worries, and the sight of his wife arranging pork chops in the broiler only seemed like an extension of a boring day. He was happy enough to take the convertible and race up the hill to the Blevins’, thinking that they might give him a drink. But the Blevins were away; their maid gave him an envelope with a check in it and shut the door. Turning in at the Flannagans’ driveway, he tried to remember if he had ever met them. The name encouraged him, because he always felt that he could handle the Irish. There was a glass pane in the front door, and through this he could see into a hallway where a plump woman with red hair was arranging flowers.
“Infectious hepatitis,” he shouted heartily.
She took a good look at herself in the mirror before she turned and, walking with very small steps, started toward the door. “Oh, please come in,” she said. The girlish voice was nearly a whisper. She was not a girl, he could see. Her hair was dyed, and her bloom was fading, and she must have been crowding forty, but she seemed to be one of those women who cling to the manners and graces of a pretty child of eight. “Your wife just called,” she said, separating one word from another, exactly like a child. “And I am not sure that I have any cash—any money, that is—but if you will wait just a minute I will write you out a check if I can find my checkbook. Won’t you step into the living room, where it’s cozier?”
A fire had just been lighted, he saw, and things had been set out for drinks, and, like any stray, his response to these comforts was instantaneous. Where was Mr. Flannagan? he wondered. Traveling home on a late train? Changing his clothes upstairs? Taking a shower? At the end of the room there was a desk heaped with papers, and she began to riffle these, making sighs and noises of girlish exasperation. “I am terribly sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, “but won’t you make yourself a little drink while you wait? Everything’s on the table.”
“What train does Mr. Flannagan come out on?”
“Mr. Flannagan is away,” she said. Her voice dropped. “Mr. Flannagan has been away for six weeks….”
“I’ll have a drink, then, if you’ll have one with me.”
“If you will promise to make it weak.”
“Sit down,” he said, “and enjoy your drink and look for your checkbook later. The only way to find things is to relax.”
All in all, they had six drinks. She described herself and her circumstances unhesitatingly. Mr. Flannagan manufactured plastic tongue depressors. He traveled all over the world. She didn’t like to travel. Planes made her feel faint, and in Tokyo, where she had gone that summer, she had been given raw fish for breakfast and so she had come straight home. She and her husband had formerly lived in New York, where she had many friends, but Mr. Flannagan thought the country would be safer in case of war. She would rather live in danger than die of loneliness and boredom. She had no children; she had made no friends. “I’ve seen you, though, before,” she said with enormous coyness, patting his knee. “I’ve seen you walking your dogs on Sunday and driving by in the convertible….”
The thought of this lonely woman sitting at her window touched him, although he was even more touched by her plumpness. Sheer plumpness, he knew, is not a vital part of the body and has no pro-creative functions. It serves merely as an excess cushion for the rest of the carcass. And knowing its humble place in the scale of things, why did he, at this time of life, seem almost ready to sell his soul for plumpness? The remarks she made about the sufferings of a lonely woman seemed so broad at first that he didn’t know what to make of them, but after the sixth drink he put his arm around her and suggested that they go upstairs and look for her checkbook there.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said later, when he was arranging himself to leave. Her voice shook with feeling, and he thought it lovely. He didn’t doubt her truthfulness, although he had heard the words a hundred times. “I’ve never done this before,” they always said, shaking their dresses down over their white shoulders. “I’ve never done this before,” they always said, waiting for the elevator in the hotel corridor. “I’ve never done this before,” they always said, pouring another whiskey. “I’ve never done this before,” they always said, putting on their stockings. On ships at sea, on railroad trains, in summer hotels with mountain views, they always said, “I’ve never done this before.”
“WHERE have you been?” Mrs. Pastern asked sadly, when he came in. “It’s after eleven.”
“I had a drink with the Flannagans.”
“She told me he was in Germany.”
“He came home unexpectedly.”
Charlie ate some supper in the kitchen and went into the TV room to hear the news. “Bomb them!” he shouted. “Throw a little nuclear hardware at them! Show them who’s boss!” But in bed he had trouble sleeping. He thought first of his son and daughter, away at college. He loved them. It was the only meaning of the word that he had ever known. Then he played nine imaginary holes of golf, choosing his handicap, his irons, his stance, his opponents, and his weather in detail, but the green of the links seemed faded in the light of his business worries. His money was tied up in a Nassau hotel, an Ohio pottery works, and a detergent for window washing, and luck had been running against him. His worries harried him up out of bed, and he lighted a cigarette and went to the window. In the starlight he could see the trees stripped of their leaves. During the summer he had tried to repair some of his losses at the track, and the bare trees reminded him that his pari-mutuel tickets would still be lying, like leaves, in the gutters near Belmont and Saratoga. Maple and ash, beech and elm, one hundred to win on Three in the fourth, fifty to win on Six in the third, one hundred to win on Two in the eighth. Children walking home from school would scuff through what seemed to be his foliage. Then, getting back into bed, he thought unashamedly of Mrs. Flannagan, planning where they would next meet and what they would do. There are, he thought, so few true means of forgetfulness in this life that why should he shun the medicine even when the medicine seemed, as it did, a little crude?
A NEW CONQUEST always had a wonderful effect on Charlie. He became overnight generous, understanding, inexhaustibly good-humored, relaxed, kind to cats, dogs, and strangers, expansive, and compassionate. There was, of course, the reproachful figure of Mrs. Pastern waiting for him in the evenings, but he had served her well, he thought, for twenty-five years, and if he were to touch her tenderly these days she would likely say, “Ouch. That’s where I bruised myself in the garden.” On the evenings that they spent together, she seemed to choose to display the roughest angles of her personality; to grind her ax. “You know,” she said, “Mary Quested cheats at cards.” Her remarks fell a good deal short of where he sat. If these were indirect expressions of disappointment, it was a disappointment that no longer touched him.
He met Mrs. Flannagan for lunch in the city, and they spent the afternoon together. Leaving the hotel, Mrs. Flannagan stopped at a display of perfume. She said that she liked perfume, worked her shoulders, and called him “Monkey.” Considering her girlishness and her claims to fidelity, there was, he thought, a distinct atmosphere of practice about her request, but he bought her a bottle of perfume. The second time they met, she admired a peignoir in a store window and he bought this. On their third meeting, she got a silk umbrella. Waiting for her in the restaurant for their fourth meeting, he hoped that she wasn’t going to ask for jewelry, because his reserves of cash were low. She had promised to meet him at one, and he basked in his circumstances and the smells of sauce, gin, and red floor carpets. She was always late, and at half past one he ordered a second drink. At a quarter to two, he saw his waiter whispering to another waiter—whispering, laughing, and nodding his head in Charlie’s direction. It was his first intimation of the chance that she might stand him up. But who was she—who did she think she was that she could do this to him? She was nothing but a lonely housewife; she was nothing but that. At two, he ordered his lunch. He was crushed. What had his emotional life been these last years but a series of sometimes shabby one-night stands, but without them his life would be unendurable.