Heart Troubles (10 page)

Mrs. Foley shut her ears. She became conscious suddenly of a big bluebottle fly that buzzed noisily about the room. She noticed that there was a smell in the air, like bacon frying, from the clubhouse kitchen. In her nostrils that bacon smell seemed to grow until it was almost overpowering, and the sound of the buzzing fly seemed unbearable. She felt stifled, ill, suffocated by the smothering smell, the sound of the fly, the heat of the day, the closeness of the dressing room. Something was happening inside her. A hot arrow of pain was moving slowly through her, piercing one by one all the chambers of her heart. I can't get up, she thought. I'm rooted here.

After a while she heard the door of the other dressing room open again and close, and the sound of voices and footsteps recede along the corridor. She stood up and opened the door.

One end of the corridor opened upon a short flight of wooden steps that led down to the beach. From the top of the steps she saw her husband. He was in his bathing trunks, still wearing his visored cap, talking animatedly to the two couples on the beach. He looked up and saw her, excused himself, and started toward her.

At the foot of the steps she met him. She wanted suddenly to take him in her arms, to cradle him as she might a child, to say to him, “Oh, my dear, it doesn't matter. You're not that kind of man. Not to me.” He took her arm and whispered, “That tall fellow's Pitcairn. His wife's the woman in the blue suit. Be nice to them.”

She gave him her brightest smile. “I've been thinking,” she said. “Shall I ask them to join our table at the Sailors' Dinner?”

He pinched her elbow. “Atta girl!” he said. “I knew you'd come to your senses. Atta girl!”

WE LUCKY GENIUSES

“Do you know what day this is?” she asked him. They were driving down the Coast Highway, heading south from Carmel. The sun was indulging itself—really overdoing it a bit, he thought—setting flashily into the sea on their right, capping the waves with fiery points and turning the sky all the colors of a ribbon counter. But he had been intent not so much upon the sun's California behavior as upon the lanes of automobiles before and behind him. And in his mind he had been weaving lines to be carved on his headstone, in case there should be, as the radio had said, thirty-six more traffic deaths that weekend and his number should be included among them.

He asked her to repeat the question. And when she did he simply said no, annoyed at haying his happy, mortuary thoughts interrupted. He had been writing for his epitaph: “Devoted husband, good provider, loyal friend”—things like that—and “Had love the pow'r to stay the hand of death!” while ticking off in his head the names of all the people in the world who loved him.

“It's September twentieth,” she said.

“Oh?” Noncommittally.

“It's a year. A year is up tonight.”

“Well, well!” he said. And then, “I guess you're right. At midnight.” He glanced at her. She looked very tanned, very decorative in the open car with her wavy blonde hair blowing. She spread her slim fingers from the open window, moving them as if she were groping for a chord on a piano or trying to seize the sun's last rays. But her next words dispelled that illusion.

“Good-by!” she said, and he realized that she was doing nothing more poetic than waving a childish farewell to the sun. “I can't wait for it to be midnight,” she said, and he wondered if one of his mistakes hadn't been marrying a girl six years younger than he.

“Uh-huh,” he said. He drove faster. “I'm sure the Parkers' party won't last that long.”

“Rut if it does,” she asked, “shall we announce it to everyone?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not? What will you say?”

She turned to him. “I'll say,” she said pleasantly, “that a year ago today, September twenty-first, I promised my husband solemnly—after he'd begged me for days and weeks and months to promise him solemnly—I'd stick it out for another year.”

“I see,” he said. “And what if they ask you what you're going to do now?”

“I'll say that because absolutely nothing has changed and, having stuck out my year through thick and thin, mostly thin, I've decided to go free, as free as a bird. Off on my own, to find out what the good life really is like. And that tomorrow morning will see me packing my bags.”

“Very good,” he said. “Very well put.”

“Thank you,” she said.

They drove in silence. He had forgotten that promise, that bargain, or whatever it was they had made a year ago. Except that he had not really forgotten, only pushed it back into a little mental closet he kept specifically for old, unpleasant pacts, contracts he had been forced to sign, things he had had to compromise about or beg for. Of course he remembered it now though he had not remembered the exact date. It was like her to remember the date, and it was also like her not to have mentioned it to him since then or let him know she had been counting the days, as if the period were a prison sentence. It was funny, really, to realize that for the last three hundred and sixty-five days she had been quietly going about the ritual of living but biding her time.

“How cute of you to remember.”

She laughed softly. “I haven't had much else to think about.”

After a moment he said, “You know, I really thought things were going pretty well.”

“I'm sure you did,” she said. “Oh, look, Hugh! Look at the sun now.”

He looked. Only a bright tip showed, and the sky above it was Chinese red. “Pretty,” he said, looking back at the road.

“Don't drive so fast.”

“We're going to be late as it is.”

“I wish it weren't the Parkers. I hate the Parkers.”

“That's right. I'd forgotten you hate the Parkers. It's very helpful, darling, having you hate the Parkers, since you know he's considering a script of mine.”

“I know,” she said. “But that's been one of my troubles all along. I've never been able to like people I utterly despise. Pomposity and arrogance I think I could forgive him, even when he tries to kiss me, if he didn't try to do it in such a pompous, arrogant way.”

“Well, I'm sure Ed Parker will enjoy the little announcement you're planning to make at midnight.”

“Yes,” she said. “But if he should appear too interested, I shall have to add that Ed Parker, alas, is not for me.”

“You're doing very well,” he said. “You should have been the writer and not I.”

“A number of people have said that somebody else should be the writer and not you.”

“Why, thank you, Lucille! You're always so very, very sweet.”

“Don't mention it.”

“Tell me,” he said. “All those days and weeks and months when I supposedly begged you to stick it out another year—and frankly I don't remember begging you quite that long—what made you decide to stay?”

“Don't you remember?”

“I'm afraid I don't.”

“Well,” she said, “it was like all the other times I've agreed to stay.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was because I thought, Heel that he is most of the time, every now and then he does something wonderful.”

“Those lines,” he said, “sound just as fresh as when they were written by Oscar Hammerstein.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, “but that was what I thought.”

“And what was the wonderful thing I did a year ago?”

“It was something you said.”

“What did I say?”

“I've forgotten.”

“Lucille—”

“Please. I don't want to talk about it any more.”

He looked at her again. Her right arm trailed out the window, her left hand reposed in her lap, but there was something rigid about her whole pose, something hard and resolute in the set of her shoulders. Her face was turned away from him.

“Nine years is a long time,” he said finally.

“I know,” she said. “Very long.”

“You'd think that in such a long time we might have learned something.”

“Oh, I have,” she said. “I've learned a great deal.”

“What have you learned?”

“I've learned all about geniuses.” And she added, “Or should it be genii?”

“Genii are what you get when you rub magic lamps,” he said.

She laughed dryly. “That's hilarious, Hugh.”

“Give me a minute and I'll think of something better. Tell me more about geniuses. What have you learned about them?”

She leaned back against the leather seat. “Oh,” she said, “I've learned that gifted, talented—geniuses, really, like you, are erratic and unpredictable. They have temper tantrums and have to be comforted like babies. You have to pamper a genius or he sulks.”

“I see. And what else?”

“I've learned that gifted, talented geniuses like you are extremely selfish and demanding and expect the world to revolve around them.”

“Yes.”

“And I've learned that people like you, who write fantastically funny comedies, who were put in the world to make audiences hold their sides with laughter, who can come up with twenty-four brand-new gags a day, are really, deep inside—what is the cliché?—clowns with breaking hearts. And that people like you, who can put everybody at a cocktail party in stitches, actually have great big bleeding, babyish souls.”

“Very good! Excellent!” he said.

“And that people like you,” she went on, “feel cruelty and smallness can be forgiven because you're talented. The world has to overlook your fits of bad temper. And your sulks. Even your fibs. Just because you're sometimes very humorous. And I've learned that—”

“You're really wound up,” he said. “Go on.”

“And I've learned that when people like you promise that someday you're going to do something
great
and
important
and
honest
and—your own cliché—‘contribute to the great library of human culture,' that when people like you say things like that, it sounds very pretty but it never happens. Because people like you are really flops.”

“Flops? Do you really think so?”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn't say you'd done too badly, Lucille,” he said easily. “You've got a maid, a mink, a house in Pebble Beach.”

“Oh, lord!” she said. “Is that the way you measure success? A house in Pebble Beach, a maid, and a mink! Besides, I never asked for those things. You just presented them to me.”

“You mean you didn't want them?”

“Not really.”

“You've had good use out of some of those things.”

She didn't seem interested any more. “I know.” And then she said, “Hugh, let's not talk about it. I'm sorry I started it—truly I am.”

“You were brave,” he said, “to put up with it all for nine years.”

“Oh, look!” she said. “Look at the gulls, how low they're flying! Look at that one swoop!”

He looked at the birds against the fading sky. He reached down and turned on the low-beam headlights. “I wish you could remember,” he said.

“Remember what?”

“What it was I said a year ago.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, as a matter of fact, I do remember.”

“What was it?”

“I'm sorry. I don't want to spoil it by repeating it to you.”

“I see.”

“It was one of the few rather sweet things you've ever said. That's another thing about people like you, about geniuses. You're very lucky; the right thing pops into your head at just the right moment, and you say it. Your whole life can be about to collapse around you, and something steps in and saves the day. It's almost uncanny, the narrow escapes that geniuses have—by sheer fool's luck.”

“If I could remember the lucky thing I said, I'd say it again now,” he said softly.

“You'd put it into the script, you mean.”

“No, I—”

“Don't bother,” she said. “This script, this particular script, is over. We can't use another installment.”

“Well, you know me,” he said. “I always love a happy ending.”

“It's not in the cards for this one, I'm afraid.”

“Too bad,” he said. “I had such high hopes.”

He felt her look at him again, then look away. He thought, Perhaps she was right; perhaps he had been writing this script for too long. Possibly he had been writing too much of it by himself and had been resisting her collaboration. But surely it was too late now to go back over their marriage and make revisions.

The trouble was, he was not a genius. He knew that. Smart, yes. Clever, yes. Resourceful, good at keeping his eye on the main chance. He was all those things, but not a genius. Of course, he had been called a genius before. Genius is perhaps the cheapest word in show business. “Hugh Martin is a genius.” “Call in Hugh Martin; he'll save the script. The guy's a genius.” He'd heard it over and over again; but, he thought wryly, at least he was smart enough not to believe it. As for the other part—well, she was wrong there, too. He had it in him. Someday he
would
contribute to the great library of human culture. There was plenty of time. It was still early; he was only thirty-five. The big thing, the important thing, would come in due course. He'd planned his life pretty well so far; it had gone off without too many hitches. He'd plan the rest, too, and find a slot for everything.

He knew how things should be. Life is like a poker game; to get through it successfully requires certain dodges, a certain manner, a sense of situation, knowing when to bluff and when to play it straight. He had tried to teach her how things should be, which included how to dress, how to use makeup, how to talk, and how to mix a memorable cocktail. But on the whole she had been a reluctant student. That, essentially, always had been the difficulty between them. “You criticize me,” she said. But of course, he criticized her! He
had
to criticize her, didn't he, when she made mistakes?