I took a chance on a milk punch in spite of the way my dinner was behaving itself, and soon learned I should have left the punch part out of the order. I danced once with Alice and once with Janey, and then it was time to split the winnings and go home.
I stood looking out the bedroom windows, smoking a final cigarette before undressing for the night, half aware of Alice puttering through her bedtime routines. She is, I suppose, a sweet and undemanding woman. In seven years of marriage, her features and figure have become heavier and her blonde hair has turned several shades darker, and she has begun to foreshadow just what she will look like at fifty. All her life, people have said, “Alice has such a sunny disposition!” It bothers both of us that we have been unable to have children, but for different reasons. Kids would have diluted some of the attention she focuses on me.
Don’t ask me what love is. She was a sweet, impenetrable mystery and I wanted her very badly. After we’d been married a year, I realized two things. There was no mystery left; she had become totally predictable in all things. And I realized that I had given up the opportunity to use marriage at some future time for business advantage. In that sense, I had deprived myself of the use of a weapon many men have utilized with great shrewdness, and I could not see that I had gotten very much in return. She could neither help nor hinder my career in any measurable degree.
I knew what I had to do and how I would do it, and it was only fair to let her know. She was sitting at her dressing table. I stubbed my cigarette out and said, “I’m letting Lew go, honey.”
She turned around to stare at me, with that smile people wear when they do not quite catch the point of a joke.
“Go where?” she asked.
Her denseness irritated me, and absolved me from any obligation to tell her what else I might have in mind for Lew. “I’m tying the can to him. I can get him two months’ pay.”
She stood up quickly and came over to stand in front of me. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“What’s so complicated about it? He’s made me look bad. I can’t afford him.”
“But you can’t do this to him! I can’t let this happen to Lew and Janey. You can’t he serious, Bill! No... no job can be so important.”
“You’d better understand that nothing you or anybody else can say is going to change my mind. When anything turns into a question of survival, honey. I come first. Do you think it’s going to be easy for me to tell him? Do you think that I’m going to enjoy it?”
She stared up at me for a long time, her head slightly tilted. “Yes.” she whispered. “I think you will.”
I walked away. “That’s a vicious thing to say, Alice.”
She backed away, and she looked puzzled. “I’ve never known you at all, Bill. I’ve been explaining you to myself in all the wrong ways. I haven’t wanted to believe you’re so... little.”
“There’s no reason for you to get all worked up about this.”
“No? I just... accept all this and go on as before, all humble and grateful about being married to such a promising young man.” She was crying softly now.
“Why should it change anything?”
“Because it is, as you say, a question of survival, Bill. And wouldn’t I be a dreadful fool to hang around here until the time when you decide you can’t afford me either?”
It all happened a long time ago. So much has happened, it seems impossible it was only two years ago. I fired Lew. I spent ten minutes firing him before he realized what was happening, and then, unbelievably, he wept. A big guy like that! Snuffling and trying to grin, then leaving my office almost at a run. Morella at Otis Wire owed me a fat favor, so I used it getting Lew a job over there, one he could handle.
When Flannigan left, he took me with him, and my picture appeared for the first time in many trade journals. I was the newest recruit on what was called Flannigan’s First Team.
Right now, I am reorganizing the whole Venezuelan setup. When I got hack to my hotel in Caracas last night, after three days in the field, I found a letter from Lew Wales, forwarded from the New York offices. It was friendly. Lew has never held a grudge against anybody in his life. He enclosed a picture of the four of them, taken in the hack yard of the house where I had once lived, the house I had turned over to Alice along with our savings. She refused alimony.
I had known his name was Rainey. I took the picture over under the light. He was a big man, as big as Lew Wales. The four of them stood in sunlight, grinning and squinting into the lens. The stranger had his arm around Alice’s waist, and she was swollen with child.
Suddenly, last night, a curious thing happened to me. It has never happened before and I hope it will never happen again. I looked at the picture and I suddenly had a sensation of great loss, of a twisting, bitter regret that rasped my heart and blurred my eyes. I felt as if I had walked out of a good and warm place and closed a door and learned, too late, it had locked when it closed.
But this morning I looked at the picture again. And I smiled because it had a look of quaintness, of unassuming middle-class charm. The four of them were trapped back there in a tiny world, squinting in the sunlight, content to breed and work and die, yearning for no more than they were receiving.
As I looked at the picture, I felt a nostalgic sentimentality. I imagine that a great man would look in that same way at a photograph of the humble circumstances of his birth, and marvel at his own escape.
