BUtterfield 8 (17 page)

Emily came in while he was eating his soup. “Did anything happen about the coat?”

“I couldn’t find Casey. I’ll get in touch with him today.”

“There’s some on your vest. Here, I’ll get it.”

“No, it’s all right. I’ll do it.”

“I’ll do it. You’ll stain it. Let me.” She scraped off the splash of soup with a knife. “There.”

“Thanks.”

“Let’s go to the theater tonight. I want to see Bart Marshall. And you like Zita Johann.”

“Bart Marshall? Who is he?”

“Herbert Marshall. I was being funny.”

“What are they playing in?”

“‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow.’ By Philip Barry.”

“Oh, yes. Well, all right if you get the tickets. Who shall we ask?”

“I thought we could ask the Farleys. We’ll be going to the country soon and I dislike not having seen her since last summer. What made me think of them was they were at the club Sunday, and Mrs. Farley’s a nice woman. I like her.”

“Yes, I saw him. He was with a fellow that said he knew me at New Haven. A Jew.”

“Oh, ho. You?” Emily laughed.

“What are you laughing at? I have nothing against Jews. I have some good friends Jews. Paul and Jimmy. You know I like them.”

“Oh, I know, but not while you were in college.”

“Listen, don’t you go around saying things like that. This is no time for that kind of snobbishness. Have the Farleys by all means. Her brother is a great friend of Al Smith’s. You get the tickets, and what about dressing?”

“I think a black tie.”

“Yes. Farley’s always very well dressed, and if you don’t specify black tie he’s liable to come in tails, and I’ll be damned if I want to put on tails this late in the season. Is this play any good?”

“Josie liked it.”

“What the hell does she know about anything?”

“You
like
Josie. I’ve heard you
say
you liked her.”

“Oh, you mean Josie Wells. I thought you meant Josie Demuth.” He wiped his mouth with the napkin lengthwise. He looked at his watch, and then had to look again to see what time it was. “I’ll be home as early as I can. I’m going to Philadelphia on the ten o’clock, but I’ll be back in plenty of time for dinner, I hope. I’m not going to the office at all, unless I stop in after I get back from Philadelphia. Good-by.” He kissed her.

 • • • 

“This is Emily Liggett, Mrs. Farley. I tried to wave to you at the club Sunday.”

“I saw you, and the
girls.
Was that really Ruth?”

“It was. Isn’t she—”

“Oh, she must be such fun. I knew Barbara, but I had to look twice to be sure that was Ruth. She used to be
pretty,
but now she’s
handsome.”

“Oh, thank you. I wish I could tell her that, but I think I’ll save it for her. When she needs cheering up. I wondered if you and Mr. Farley could come to dinner tonight on such short notice. I wanted to ask you on Sunday, but it would only be the four of us, you and Mr. Farley and my husband and I. I thought we might go to the theater.”

“Tonight? Why, yes, I think so. I’m almost positive.”

“Oh, fine. Have you seen ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow’?”

“No, we haven’t. Paul said this morning that that was one of the things he wanted to see. I thought it would get the Pulitzer Prize, or at least a lot of people seemed to.”

“Oh, have they given the Pulitzer Prize again?”

“Yes, it’s in this morning’s paper. ‘Alison’s House,’ by Susan Glaspell, won it.”

“‘Alison’s House.’ Oh, yes. That was about Emily Dickinson, but I never did see it. They do so many good things at the Civic Repertory but it’s such a nuisance to go all the way down there. Well, I’m so glad you can come. At seven-thirty, and black tie for our husbands.”

“Grand, and thank you so much,” said Nancy.

She liked Emily Liggett, and she was pleased because she knew Mrs. Liggett had not tried to wave to her on Sunday. That lie was one of the amenities. Nancy Farley knew that what had happened was that Mrs. Liggett had seen her at the club, had thought of her some time, perhaps several times, on Monday, and had decided probably last night to invite her to dinner. Nancy had no hope of being or desire to be an intimate friend of Emily Liggett’s. Emily Liggett was one of a few women whom Nancy always spoke to, addressing them as Mrs., seeing them a lot around the club in the summer and over the heads of people at the theater. She knew Emily liked her—which meant little more than liking her looks, but that was quite all right—and that the liking had in it such qualities as mutual respect and approval. They never would be close friends, because they never would have to be. Nancy knew that if she ever happened to be taking a boat trip or a long train ride with Emily Liggett they would find they had friends in common other than the same general group they knew in New York; but Nancy was satisfied to take that for granted, along with probable tastes in common. There was warmth now in her admiration for Mrs. Liggett; it took a kind of courage for Mrs. Liggett to invite the Farleys to dinner, and it was that which Nancy admired. She called Paul’s office and left word with his secretary that they were going to the Liggetts’ for dinner. Then she went to Paul’s room to see that one of his two dinner jackets was pressed and ready to wear, and she made a routine inspection of his shirts and collars and ties.

The Farley boys were long since at school and Nancy had nothing to do until five o’clock. Every day at five, unless Paul had other plans, Nancy would drive down Lexington Avenue to the neighborhood of the Graybar Building, where Paul had his offices. She had been doing this for four years. It began accidentally. She happened one afternoon to be in the neighborhood of his offices, which were then at 247 Park Avenue, and she waited for him and caught him coming out. It was such a good idea, they agreed, that it would be fun to do it every day she could. It did have its points; there were many afternoon parties in those days, and she would stop and pick him up and they would go to the parties together. Although they never happened to say so to each other or to anyone else, both Nancy and Paul hated to enter a room alone. But together they put up a good united front, and they were two people who in the minds of their friends were thought of always as husband and wife. Only to his draftsmen and to the employees of his clubs and a few business acquaintances did Paul have an identity of his own. After working hours everyone thought of him as the one in masculine attire of the inseparable Mr. and Mrs. Paul Farley. It was almost true of Nancy, too; as true as it could be of a woman, who, if she has anything at all—beauty, ugliness, charm, bad taste, good taste, sex appeal—begins with a quicker identity and holds it longer than a man does. And so they would go to parties together, or simply go home together. Every day she would meet him.

After a while it began to be a habit that to Nancy was not an unmixed blessing. At first occasionally, and then every day, Paul would come up in back of the car and gently pinch the back of Nancy’s neck. In the beginning it was cute, she thought. Then she found that she was expecting it. Then she found she was setting herself against it, tightening her nerves and sitting in the very middle of the front seat, hoping he would not be able to take her by surprise. But he always did. It became a game with him, and she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times when luck was with her and she was quicker than he. They had a phaeton then, a Packard. When they were buying a convertible one thing she had in mind was that she would be able to raise the window on her side and he would not be able to touch her neck. This was no good, though; he would get the same surprise effect by rapping hard with his ring on the raised window. Little by little the custom of meeting Paul every day became a nuisance, then almost a horror. It made her jittery, and all because he was doing something she at first thought was cute, sweet. After they would get in the car it would take her a few minutes to get her mind on what he was saying. A few times, on days when the weather was fine and he had reason to expect her to meet him, she just could not bring herself to face it—although face it was precisely not the word—and she would find excuses not to turn up. At such times he would be so hurt that she would tell herself she was a little beast; Paul was so kind and considerate and sweet in everything else, what on earth was the matter with her that she couldn’t pass over such a slight fault? But this self-reproach did not have any lasting effect. It was a form of self-indulgence that certainly did not solve the problem.

As for coming right out and telling Paul she objected to his pinching the back of her neck—that was out of the question. From conversations with her friends, and from her own observations, Nancy knew that in every marriage (which after all boils down to two human beings living together) the wife has to keep her mouth shut about at least one small thing her husband does that disgusts her. She knew of a case where the marriage was ruined because of the husband’s habit of allowing just a little of the white of egg to hang from the spoon when he ate soft-boiled eggs. In that case the disgusting thing occurred every morning. She knew of another case where the husband walked out on his wife because he said she was unclean; it took one of those psychoanalytical quacks a month to get the man to reveal that the woman never went to the bathroom without leaving toilet paper floating in the bowl of the toilet. Things like these that you kept quiet about, they were worse than the things you could quarrel about; your husband’s behavior in bed, or your wife’s; his taste in clothes, or hers; cheating at games, flirtatiousness, bad manners, differences of opinion, repetitiousness, bragging and humility and punctuality and the lack of it and all the other things that people can quarrel openly about. Then there was always the hope that please God he might stop. But, no; he probably did it because he thought it was expected of him.

Now this Tuesday Nancy Farley, with nothing to do all day, began thinking of Paul’s little trick early in the day. It was going to be a fine day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and no chance of any legitimate excuse not to meet Paul. This same day, this idleness gave her plenty of chance to think from time to time of John Watterson, the homely actor who everyone said had more charm than—well, everyone said he had more charm than anyone they ever knew. Watterson came of an awfully good Boston family and he had gone to Harvard, and he usually played hardboiled parts, although he looked well in tails. He reminded some people of Lincoln; he was tall and homely like Lincoln, and Lincoln must have had a marvelous voice too. Watterson had. What with one play and another, Watterson had reached that point where he could be identified by his first name: “Are you going to John’s opening?” meant Watterson as surely as Kit and Alfred and Lynn and Helen and Oggie and Jane and Zita and Bart and Blanche and Eva and Hopie and Leslie meant the people that those names meant. Watterson certainly had arrived, and having arrived he had quietly settled down to the practice of his profession, on and off the stage.

The first thing Nancy said about him when she first laid eyes on him was that there was an honest man, which she amended to there is a man with honesty. He had hair like an Indian’s, straight and black and it fell over his forehead—never with any attempt on his part to keep it from falling. He had big thick lips and out of them came the sounds of this hard strong voice of his in a Chicago accent which he never tried to change, except when he played the captain of an English minesweeper and in his one try at the films, when he played an Indian. He was used to being told he had beautiful hands. They were big, and on the little finger of each hand he wore a signet ring which had had to have more gold put in to fit his fingers. He liked women whose buttocks just fit his spread hands, and although Nancy did not quite qualify, she was still on the small side. He wanted Nancy.

She had seen him probably a dozen times offstage. This was extremely painful to him, as he was every bit as aware of the number of times he had seen her as Nancy was of the number of times she had seen him. But it had always been Mr. Watterson and Mrs. Farley. The last three times she had seen him he had asked her to come in some afternoon, any afternoon, when she was in the neighborhood and had a minute. That was as far as he would go. If she came it would be with the understanding, et cetera. She knew that. And he knew as well as the next one what his reputation was, and all the women he knew also knew his reputation. “I have no etchings,” he would say, “but I’ll bet I can get you tight.” Yes, he had honesty, and he was in the phone book.

It was Spring and Nancy had nothing to do all day until the daily ordeal with Paul, and last week she had seen Watterson and that time he had said: “You haven’t come in for a drink, Mrs. Farley. What about that?”

“I haven’t been thirsty.”

“Thirsty? What has thirsty got to do with it? I’m going away for the week-end, but I’ll be back Tuesday and I’m in the phone book, so I think you’ll need a drink Tuesday. Or Thursday. Thirsty on Thursday. Or Wednesday. Or any other day. But beginning Tuesday.” Then he had laughed to take the curse off it a little and also to let her know that of course he didn’t think for one minute she’d come.

Once in her life with Paul, Nancy had let herself go in a kiss with another man, a hard kiss, standing up, with her mouth open and her legs apart. Now that she thought of it, that had been an actor too. A young actor, a practically unknown juvenile. This day, thinking about Watterson, and then about the juvenile, she went back to a truth which she had discovered for herself. It was something she discovered watching the progress of the extra-marital love life of her friends—while pretending not to watch at all. The truth was that there is a certain kind of man, attractive and famous in his way and sought after by women, whom sound women, women like Nancy herself, can conceivably have an affair with, but would not marry if he were the last man on earth. Once Nancy had heard the French wisecrack: that you can walk in the Bois without buying it. (It sounded better than the American: why keep a cow when milk is so cheap?) She would use the Bois remark to justify the behavior of some men whom she liked without liking their behavior. Only in the past three or four years had she even attempted to apply it woman to man. Well, she would not marry a man like Watterson, but since there were men like Watterson, why not find out about them? Why not find out about at least one other man? She knew every hair on Paul’s body; they knew everything about each other that they might be likely to learn. A new man would be all strange, and Nancy wondered about herself, too. Maybe she was all strange, to herself as much as to any new man. And this was a good time to find out. As coolly as that she made up her mind to have an affair with John Watterson the actor.