BUtterfield 8 (24 page)

“I think so. I think something else, too. I think you two ought to get married, right away. Don’t lose any of the fun. Right away, Ann. He has his own money, and you have some I know. There’s no reason why you should miss anything. Get married.”

“I want to, and he’s crazy to, but I’m afraid of interfering with his studies.”

“It won’t interfere with his studies. He might have to neglect
you
a little, but he’ll be able to study much better with you than he would being in New York and wishing you were here or he was in Greenwich. No, by all means get married. Just look at all the young marriages there are today. People getting married as soon as the boy gets out of college. The hell with the depression. Not that that’s a factor in your getting married, but look at all the young couples, read the society pages and see, and there must be a lot of them that are really poor and without jobs. If you got married now and he goes back to P. and S. next year you’d have the fun of living together and all that, and then he’ll probably want to go abroad to Vienna or some place to continue his studies, and that will be like a honeymoon. Your family aren’t going to insist on a big wedding, are they?”

“Well, Father thinks it’s a good thing to keep up appearances. Mother doesn’t like the idea as much as she used to. She’d rather use the money for charity, but Father says he’s giving more to charity than ever before and with less money to do it on. He’s very serious about it. You see he knows Mr. Coolidge, and I think he thinks if we invited Mr. Coolidge to the wedding he’d come, and that would do a lot toward sort of taking people’s minds off the depression.”

“I don’t agree with your father.”

“Neither do I. Of course I wouldn’t dare say so, but I think Coolidge got us into this depression and he ought to keep out of the papers.”

“That’s what I think, too.”

“Well, you’ve given me something to think about. Not that I hadn’t thought of it myself, but whenever I broach the subject people say oh, there’s plenty of time. But you’re the only one that knows we’re practically married right now.”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” said Gloria. “Where do you go?”

“Usually to an apartment of a friend of Bill’s.”

“Well, then you’ve—have you ever spent the whole night?”

“Once.”

“That’s not enough.
You’re
not practically married.”

“How do
you
know so much? Gloria, don’t tell me you’re married?”

“No, but I know how it is to wake up with a man you love and have breakfast and all that. It takes time before you get accustomed to each other. Who’s going to use the bathroom first, and things like that. Intimacies. Ann, I can tell you a lot.”

“I wish you would.”

“I will. God! I know everything!”

“Why, Gloria.”

“Yes, everything. I know how good it can be and how awful, and you’re lucky. You marry Bill right away and hold on to him.”

“I’ve never seen you like this. Why does it mean so much to you? Is the man you love married?”

“You’ve guessed it.”

“And his wife won’t give him a divorce?”

“Yes,” said Gloria. “That’s it.”

“But couldn’t you both go to her and tell her you love each other? Is she a nice woman? How old is she?”

“Oh, we’ve had it out. Not she and I, but Jack and I.”

“Jack. Do I know him?”

“No.” She was on the verge of confessing that his name was not Jack, but she did not want to tell Ann too much. “Look, darling, I’ll call you tonight for sure and if you’re not there I’ll leave word that I’m coming or not.”

“All right, my pet,” said Ann, getting up. She kissed Gloria’s cheek. “Good luck, and I’ll see you, if not this week, perhaps a week from tomorrow.”

“Mm-hmm. And thanks loads.”

“Oh, I’m the one to thank you,” said Ann, and left.

Gloria thought a long time about how uncontagious love was. According to the book she ought to be wanting to telephone Liggett, and she did want to telephone Liggett in a way, but talking to Ann, virginal Ann with her one man and her happiness and innocence and her awkward love affair (she was sure Bill Henderson wore glasses and had to take them off and put them in a metal case before necking Ann)—it all made her angry with love, which struck in the strangest places. It didn’t seem to be any part of her own experience with love, and it depressed her. What possible problems could they have, Ann and Bill? A man from the Pacific Coast, comes all the way from the Pacific Coast and finds right here in the East the perfect girl for him. What possible problems could they have? What made them hesitate about getting married? She felt like pushing them, and pushing them roughly and impatiently. They would get married and after a couple of years Bill would have an affair with a nurse or somebody, and for him the excitement would die down. But by that time Ann would have had children, beautiful children with brown bodies in skimpy bathing suits. Ann would sit on the beach with them, looking up now and then from her magazine and calling them by name and answering their foolish questions and teaching them to swim. She would have enormous breasts but she would not get very fat. Her arms would fill out and look fine and brown in evening dress. And, Gloria knew, Ann would slowly get to disliking her. No; that wouldn’t be like Ann. But Gloria would be the only person like herself whom Ann could tolerate. Every Ann probably has one Gloria to whom she is loyal. And the girls they had gone to school with, who had made the cracks about Ann’s being Lesbian—they would turn out to be her friends, and she would ride with them and play bridge and go to the club dances. They would meet sometimes in the afternoons, parked in their station wagons, waiting for their husbands, and their husbands would get off the train, all wearing blue or gray flannel suits and club or fraternity hatbands on their stiff straw hats, with their newspapers folded the same way all of them. And she, Gloria, would visit Ann and Bill once each summer for the first few summers, and the men with the hatbands would make dates for New York. Oh, she knew it all.

She tried to laugh it off when she thought of the motion picture she had thought up for Ann’s future, but laughing it off was not easy. It was unsuccessful. Laughing it off was unsuccessful because the picture was accurate, and she knew it. Well, every Gloria, she reminded herself, also had an Ann whom she tolerated and to whom she was loyal. Ann’s was not her way of living, but it was all right for Ann. The only possible way for Ann, or rather the only good way. Hell, here she was in a bad humor, and for no apparent reason. You couldn’t call Ann’s happiness a reason.

 • • • 

In the rear of the second floor of the house in which Gloria lived there was a room which Mrs. Wandrous and the rest of the household called Mrs. Wandrous’ sewing-room. It was small and none of the furniture made you want to stay in it very long. Mrs. Wandrous kept needles and spools of thread and darning paraphernalia and sewing baskets in the room, but she did her sewing elsewhere. Occasionally Gloria went to that room to look out the window, and for no other reason.

The sewing-room looked out on the yard of Gloria’s house, and across the yard and across the contiguous yard was the rear of an old house which had been cut up into furnished apartments. It was nothing to look at. A woman in that house had a grand piano with a good tone, but her musical taste was precisely that of Roxy, the theater fellow. In fact Gloria had a theory that this woman closely followed the Roxy program, except when the program called for Ravel’s “Bolero” and the César Franck and one or two others that Gloria and Roxy liked. The woman also sang. She was terrible. And this woman was the only human being Gloria identified with the house. On warm days she had seen that much of the woman that was between the shoulders and the knees. The woman did not close the window all the way down on hot days. She never had seen the woman’s face, but only her torso. She had seen it in and out of clothes, and it was nothing to go out of your way to see. And that woman was the only human neighbor that Gloria knew anything about.

But a couple of yards away there was a garden; two yards with no fence between. Grass grew, there was a tree, there were some rose bushes, there were four iron chairs and a table to match with an umbrella standard in the center of the table. In that garden there was a police bitch and, just now, four puppies.

The last time Gloria had looked out the sewing-room windows the puppies were hardly more than little pieces of meat, not easy to count and completely helpless.

Now they must have been six weeks old, and as Gloria stood and watched them she forgot all about the woman who was playing the piano, for in a very few minutes she discovered something about the family of police dogs: the bitch had a favorite.

The bitch’s teats had lost their fullness and had gone back into her body, but that did not make the puppies forget that they had got milk there not so long ago. The mother would run away from their persistent attempts to gnaw at her, but one tan little fellow was more persistent than the others, and when the mother and the tan had got far enough away, the mother would stand and let him nibble at her. Then she would swat him good and hard, but, Gloria noticed, not hard enough for him to misunderstand and take offense and get angry with his mother. The mother would open her surprisingly big mouth and lift him up and swing him away from her, then she would take a mighty leap and fly about the garden, chasing sparrows. Meanwhile the other puppies would be waiting for her and when she met them they would try again to take milk from her. Or maybe they were like men, Gloria thought; maybe they knew there was no milk there. And Gloria had a strong suspicion that the mother really liked their making passes at her. She guessed Nature provided the mother with the instinct to swat the puppies away from her. They were old enough to eat solid food now and as a good mother it was her duty to make them look out for themselves.

The mother was a marvelous person. Gloria found herself thinking this and since she was alone and not thinking out loud she went on thinking it. The mother was a marvelous person. Such good qualities as there must be in her, the way she held up her head and her ears stood straight up, and the way she would play with her puppies but at the same time not let them get too fresh or have their own way. Then the way she would lie down with her face on her paws, her eyes looking deceptively sleepy as she watched the puppies trying to eat grass or find something edible in the grass. It was really marvelous. There was one black fellow who wanted to play with himself, and every time he did the mother would get up and let him have it with her paw or else pick him up in her mouth and pretend to chastise him. She would put him down after a few moments and by that time his mind would be off sex. But all this time the tan was her favorite, and then Gloria saw something she did not believe. She saw it with her own eyes. She did not know anything about dogs, and maybe this was common practice among dogs, but she made up her mind to ask the next vet if dogs did this all the time. What she saw that she did not believe was a matter between the mother and the tan.

The mother was lying on the grass watching her children (about the way Ann would on the beach when she had hers). The tan was getting ready to squat for Number One. Instantly the mother got up and grabbed him in her mouth and took him to a bush. She put him down and grabbed his hind leg and lifted it. It was all new to him and he struggled, trying to get into a squatting position again, and he leaked a little, but the mother held on and shook him until he stopped leaking. That was all. It must have been one of the first times the mother had done this, but it was wonderful to see. It made Gloria wonder where the father was.

The father. That son of a bitch probably was out on Long Island or Connecticut or Westchester, where it was fashionable and cool, and here was the mother teaching her pup to stand up like a man and not sit down like a pansy. But the mother didn’t seem to miss the father. She was self-sufficient, and that was a good thing about women. All that stuff about women must weep or wait or whichever it was. Give a woman her child or her children, and the hell with the men. It was incredible that before her very eyes Gloria had seen all the stuff about motherhood, which she thought was pretty much the bunk, being demonstrated by a police bitch and her litter. But it made her feel good again. It put Bill Henderson in his place as the mere father of Ann’s children, and let him put his nurse up on the operating table or do whatever he liked. He wasn’t important once he did his part toward making Ann’s babies. If you loved a man, so much the better, but you didn’t have to love him, you didn’t even have to know him. They brought the stuff all the way from France and England and made mares have colts in this country, and they had done it successfully with people in New York, where the father was sterile and both parents wanted a child. Liggett. He had children. Gloria wondered about herself. Three abortions and all the things she had done not to have children probably had a very bad effect. For the first time she wanted a child, and she—

“Gloria! Eddie Brunner wants to speak to you,” called her mother.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” she said.

Eddie might do it. But she didn’t want Eddie. She wanted Liggett. Still, Eddie
would
do it. Only too glad.

“Hello.”

“Hello, pal. This is Eddie.”

“I know.”

“I have good news for you, baby. I got a job.”

“A job! Eddie, that’s wonderful. Where? What doing?”

“Well, it isn’t much, only twenty-five bucks a week, but it’s something. Drawing for movie ads.”

“Oh, swell. When do you start?”

“Right away. I work at home. They’ll furnish the Bristol board and all that, but I can work at home. They called up this morning. Yesterday I was pretty sure I had it but I wasn’t sure. I did some sketches for them and they seemed pretty sure I could do the kind of stuff they wanted, but this morning they called up and said it was definite. In fact it’s going to be more than twenty-five bucks a week. That’s what it was going to be originally, on a basis of part-time work, but now they said they could use some of my drawings on every picture. What they’ll do is make mats and sell them. Do you know what mats are? Doesn’t make any difference. I’ll tell you at lunch. Will you have lunch with me?”