"A sergeant'll say something you don't like and you'll hit him. I know you."
"Listen," Michael said patiently. "Nobody hits sergeants. Not me or anybody else."
"You haven't taken an order from anybody in your whole life, Michael. I know you. That was one of the reasons it was impossible to live with you. After all, I lived with you for three years and I know you better than any…"
"Yes, Laura, darling," Michael said patiently.
"We may be divorced and all that," Laura went on rapidly, "but there's no one in the whole world I'm fonder of. You know that."
"I know that," Michael said, believing her.
"And I don't want to see you killed." She began to cry.
"I won't be killed," Michael said gently.
"And I hate to think of you being ordered about. It's wrong…"
Michael shook his head, wondering once again at the gap between the real world and a woman's version of the world.
"Don't you worry about me, Laura, darling," he said. "And it was very sweet of you to call me."
"I've decided something," Laura said firmly. "I'm not going to take any more of your money."
Michael sighed. "Have you got a job?"
"No. But I'm seeing MacDonald at MGM this afternoon, and…"
"O.K. When you work, you don't take any money. That's fine." Michael rushed past the point, not letting Laura speak. "I read in the paper you're going to get married. That true?"
"No. Maybe after the war. He's going into the Navy. He's going to work in Washington."
"Good luck," Michael murmured.
"There was an assistant director from Republic they took right into the Air Corps. First Lieutenant. He won't leave Santa Anita for the duration. Public relations. And you're going to be a private…"
"Please, Laura darling," Michael said. "This call will cost you five hundred dollars."
"You're a queer, stupid man and you always were."
"Yes, darling."
"Will you write me where they station you?"
"Yes."
"I'll come and visit you."
"That will be wonderful." Michael had a vision of his beautiful ex-wife in her mink coat and her almost famous face and figure, waiting outside Fort Sill, Oklahoma, with the soldiers whistling at her as they went past.
"I feel all mixed up about you." Laura was crying softly and honestly. "I always did and I always will."
"I know what you mean." Michael remembered the way Laura looked fixing her hair in front of a mirror and how she looked when dancing and during the holidays they'd had. For a moment he was moved by the distant tears, and regretted the lost years behind him, the years without war, the years without separations…
"What the hell," he said softly. "They'll probably put me in an office somewhere."
"You won't let them," she sobbed. "I know you. You won't let them."
"You don't let the Army do anything. It does what it wants and you do what it wants. The Army isn't Warner Brothers, darling."
"Promise me… promise me…" The voice rose and fell and then there was a click and the connection was cut off. Michael looked at the phone and put it down.
Finally he got up and went into the kitchen and finished cooking his breakfast. He carried the bacon and eggs and toast and coffee, black and thick, into the living-room and put it down on the wide table set in front of the great sunny window.
He turned the radio on. Brahms was being played, a piano concerto. The music poured out of the machine, round, disputatious and melancholy. He ate slowly, smearing marmalade thickly on the toast, enjoying the buttery taste of the eggs and the strong taste of the coffee, proud of his cooking, listening with pleasure to the mournful, sweet thunder of the radio.
He opened the Times at the theatrical page. It was full of rumours of endless plays and endless actors. Each morning he read the theatrical page of the Times with growing depression. Each morning the recital of baffled hope and money lost and sorrowful critical reproach of his profession made him feel a little silly and restless.
He pushed the paper aside and lit the day's first cigarette and took the last sip of coffee. He turned the radio off. It was playing Respighi by now, anyway, and Respighi left the morning air with a dying fall and left the sunlit house in fragrant silence as Michael sat at the breakfast table, smoking, staring dreamily out at the gardens and the diagonal glimpse of street and working people below. After a while, he got up and shaved and bathed.
Then he put on a pair of old flannel trousers and a soft old blue shirt, gently and beautifully faded from many launderings. Most of his clothes were already packed away, but there were still two jackets hanging in the closet. He stood there thoughtfully, trying to make up his mind for a moment, then picked the grey jacket, and put it on. It was a worn old jacket, soft and light on his shoulders.
Downstairs his car was waiting at the kerb, its paint and chromium glistening from the garage's industry. He started the motor and pushed the button for the top. The top came down slowly and majestically. Michael felt the usual touch of amusement at the grave collapsing movement.
He drove up Fifth Avenue slowly. Every time he rode up through the city on a working day, he felt once again some of the same slightly malicious pleasure he had experienced the first day he had driven in his first, brand-new car, top down, up the Avenue, at midday, looking at the working men and women thronging to their lunches, and feeling wealthy and noble and free.
Michael drove up the broad street, between the rich windows, frivolous and wealthy and elegantly suggestive in the sun.
Michael left his car at the door of Cahoon's apartment house, giving the keys to the doorman. Cahoon was going to use the car and take care of it until Michael returned. It would have been more sensible to sell the car, but Michael had a superstitious feeling that the bright little machine was a token of his gayest civilian days, long rides in the country in the springtime and careless holidays, and that he must somehow preserve it as a charm against his return.
On foot, feeling a little bereft, he walked slowly across town. The day stretched ahead of him with sudden emptiness. He went into a drug-store and called Peggy.
"After all," he said, when he heard her voice, "there's no law that says I can't see you twice in the same day."
Peggy chuckled. "I get hungry about one o'clock," she said.
"I'll buy you lunch, if that's what you want"
"That's what I want." Then, more slowly, "I'm glad you called. I have something very serious to say to you."
"All right," Michael said. "I feel pretty serious today. One o'clock."
He hung up, smiling. He walked out into the sunlight and headed downtown, towards his lawyer's office, thinking about Peggy. He knew what the serious talk she wanted to have at lunch would be about. They had known each other for about two years, rich, warm years, a little desperate because day by day the war came closer and closer. Marriage in this bloody year was a cloudy and heartbreaking business. Marry and die, graves and widows; the husband-soldier carrying his wife's photograph in his pack like an extra hundred pounds of lead; the single man mourning furiously in the screaming jungle night for the forsworn moment, the honourable ceremony; the blinded veteran listening for his wife's chained footstep…
He felt silly sitting in the panelled room across the desk from his lawyer, reading through his will. Outside the window, high up in the tall building, the city shone in the everyday sunlight, the brick towers rearing into the soft blue haze, the streams of smoke from the boats on the river, the same city, looking exactly as it had always looked, and here he was, with his glasses on, reading, "… one-third of the aforementioned estate to my former wife, Miss Laura Roberts. In the event of her marriage, this bequest is voided and the amount reserved in her interest will be joined to the residual amount left in the name of the executor and divided in this manner…"