There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between one and two—a spiritual no-man’s-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments, and ratholes we all share, disarmed by the gullibility of our hearts. The waiter knew, and the laughter and lighthearted conversations at the tables around Charlie honed his feelings. He seemed to be helplessly elevated on his disappointment like a flagpole sitter, his aloneness looming larger and larger in the crowded room. Then he saw his own swollen image in a mirror, his gray hair clinging to his pate like the remains of a romantic landscape, his heavy body shaped a little like a firehouse Santa Claus, the paunch enlarged by one or two of Mrs. Kelly’s second-best sofa cushions. He pushed his table away and started for a telephone booth in the hall.
“Is there anything wrong with your lunch, monsieur?” the waiter asked.
She answered the phone, and in her most girlish voice said, “We cannot go on like this. I have thought it over, and we cannot go on. It is not because I do not want to, because you are a very virile man, but my conscience will not let me.”
“Can I stop by tonight and talk it over?”
“Well …” she said.
“I’ll come straight up from the station.”
“If you’ll do me a favor.”
“What?”
“I will tell you when I see you tonight. But please park your car behind the house and come in the back door. I do not want to give these old gossips here anything to talk about. You must remember that I have never done this before.”
Of course she was right, he thought. She had her self-esteem to maintain. Her pride, he thought, was so childish, so sterling! Sometimes, driving through a New Hampshire mill town late in the day, he thought, you will see in some alley or driveway, down by the river, a child dressed in a tablecloth, sitting on a broken stool, waving her scepter over a kingdom of weeds and cinders and a few skinny chickens. It is the purity and the irony of their pride that touches one; and he felt that way about Mrs. Flannagan.
SHE LET HIM IN at the back door that night, but in the living room the scene was the same. The fire was burning, she made him a drink, and in her company he felt as if he had just worked his shoulders free of a heavy pack. But she was coy, in and out of his arms, tickling him and then tripping across the room to look at herself in the mirror. “I want my favor first,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Guess.”
“I can’t give you money. I’m not rich, you know.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think of taking money.” She was indignant.
“Then what is it?”
“Something you wear.”
“But my watch is worthless, my cuff links are brass.”
“Something else.”
“But what?”
“I won’t tell you unless you promise to give it to me.”
He pushed her away from him then, knowing that he could easily be made a fool of. “I can’t make a promise unless I know what it is you want.”
“It’s something very small.”
“How small?”
“Tiny. Weeny.”
“Please tell me what it is.” Then he seized her in his arms, and this was the moment he felt most like himself: solemn, virile, wise, and imperturbable.
“I won’t tell you unless you promise.”
“But I can’t promise.”
“Then go away,” she said. “Go away and never, never, come back.”
She was too childish to give the command much force, and yet it was not wasted on him. Could he go back to his own house, empty but for his wife, who would be grinding her ax? Go there and wait until time and chance turned up another friend?
“Please tell me.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“I want,” she said, “a key to your bomb shelter.”
The demand struck at him like a sledge-hammer blow, and suddenly he felt in all his parts the enormous weight of chagrin. All his gentle speculations on her person—the mill-town girl ruling her chickens—backfired bitterly. This must have been on her mind from the beginning, when she first lit the fire, lost her checkbook, and gave him a drink. The demand abraded his lust, but only for a moment, for now she was back in his arms, marching her fingers up and down his rib cage, saying, “Creepy, creepy, creepy mouse, come to live in Charlie’s house.” His need for her was crippling; it seemed like a cruel blow at the back of his knees. And yet in some chamber of his thick head he could see the foolishness and the obsolescence of his hankering skin. But how could he reform his bone and muscle to suit this new world; instruct his meandering and greedy flesh in politics, geography, holocausts, and cataclysms? Her front was round, fragrant, and soft, and he took the key off its ring—a piece of metal one and one-half inches long, warmed by the warmth of his hands, a genuine talisman of salvation, a defense against the end of the world—and dropped it into the neck of her dress.
THE PASTERNS’ BOMB SHELTER had been completed that spring. They would have liked to keep it a secret; would have liked at least to soft-pedal its existence; but the trucks and bulldozers going in and out of their driveway had informed everyone. It had cost thirty-two thousand dollars, and it had two chemical toilets, an oxygen supply, and a library, compiled by a Columbia professor, consisting of books meant to inspire hopefulness, humor, and tranquillity. There were stores of survival food to last three months, and several cases of hard liquor. Mrs. Pastern had bought the plaster-of-Paris ducks, the birdbath, and the gnomes in an attempt to give the lump in her garden a look of innocence; to make it acceptable—at least to herself. For, bulking as it did in so pretty and domestic a scene and signifying as it must the death of at least half the world’s population, she had found it, with its grassy cover, impossible to reconcile with the blue sky and the white clouds. She liked to keep the curtains drawn at that side of the house, and they were drawn the next afternoon, when she served gin to the bishop.
The bishop had come unexpectedly. Her minister had telephoned and said that the bishop was in the neighborhood and would like to thank her for her services to the church, and could he bring the bishop over now? She threw together some things for tea, changed her dress, and came down into the hall just as they rang the bell.
“How do you do, Your Grace,” she said. “Won’t you come in, Your Grace? Would you like some tea, Your Grace—or would you sooner have a drink, Your Grace?”
“I would like a Martini,” said the bishop.
He had the gift of a clear and carrying voice. He was a well-built man, with hair as black as dye, firm and sallow skin deeply creased around a wide mouth, and eyes as glittering and haggard, she thought, as someone drugged. “If you’ll excuse me, Your Grace …”
This request for a cocktail confused her; Charlie always mixed the drinks. She dropped ice on the pantry floor, poured a pint or so of gin into the shaker, and tried to correct what appeared to her to be a lethal drink with more vermouth.
“Mr. Ludgate here has been telling me how indispensable you are to the life of the parish,” the bishop said, taking his drink.
“I do try,” said Mrs. Pastern.