The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (55 page)

It didn't take him long to make up his mind. He argued with her a little and feigned exasperation, for the sake of his rapidly diminishing pride, but in less than half an hour he was riding tense at the wheel of his car and following the taillights of hers at a respectful distance. He had even brought along the stacked pages of his screenplay and a supply of fresh paper and pencils, because she'd assured him there were any number of big, clean, well-appointed rooms in Jill's house where he could work all day in total privacy, if that was what he might decide he wanted to do. “And I mean really, wouldn't it be better to spend the rest of our time together at my place?” she'd said. “Come on. You know it would. And how much time do we have left anyway? Seven weeks or something? Six?”

So it happened that Jack Fields became, briefly, a resident of that Greek Revival mansion in Beverly Hills. Giving more thanks than he felt, he accepted the use of an upstairs room to work in—it even had a bathroom that was nearly as opulent as Sally's—and their nights together were spent in her “apartment,” where neither of them ever mentioned the Japanese dinner table again.

During the cocktail hour each day it was necessary to associate with Jill Jarvis and to be drawn, however reluctantly, into her world, but at first, after a drink or two and an exchange of winks, they would manage to escape to a restaurant and an evening of their own. Later, though, more and more often and to Jack's increasing annoyance, Sally would go on drinking and talking with whatever guests of Jill's were there until they'd find themselves caught up in the ritual of the late, late dinner at home—until the plump uniformed Negro maid named Nippy appeared in the doorway saying, “Miz Jarvis? There isn't gonna be nothing left of this meat at all unless you folks come and eat it pretty soon.”

Stiff and swaying, their eyes barely able to focus on their plates, the party would pick at blackened steak and shrunken, wrinkled vegetables until, as if in acknowledgment of a common revulsion, they would leave most of their dinner untouched and go back to the den to drink again. And the worst part was that Jack too, by this time, would find he wanted nothing more than more to drink. He and Sally, on some of those nights, were too drunk for anything but sleep as they climbed the reeling stairs; he would crawl alone into her bed and pass out, waking many hours later to lie listening to the slow rasp of her breath, discovering more than once that it came from the other double bed.

He had learned that he didn't much like Sally when she drank. Her eyes would grow startlingly bright, her upper lip would loosen and bloat, and she'd laugh as stridently as an unpopular schoolgirl over things he didn't think were funny at all.

Late one afternoon the young Hawaiian, Ralph, dropped in again, but this time, despite happy cries of greeting and welcome from the girls, he was a solemn bearer of terrible news as he eased himself into a leather chair.

“You know the head of my firm I was telling you about?” he said. “Cliff Myers? His wife died this morning. Heart attack. Collapsed in the bathroom. Thirty-five years old.” And lowering his eyes he took a hesitant sip of scotch as if it were a funereal sacrament.

Jill and Sally came urgently forward in their cushions to stare at him, their eyes round and their mouths instantly shaped for the syllable “Oh!” that burst from them in unison. Then Sally said, “My God!” and Jill, slumping weakly with one wrist against her lovely forehead, said, “Thirty-five years old. Oh, the poor man. The poor man.”

Neither Jack nor Woody Starr had yet joined in the grief, but after quick self-conscious glances at each other they were able to murmur appropriate things.

“Was there any history of heart trouble at
all
?” Sally demanded.

“None at all,” Ralph assured her. “None at all.”

And for once, in these endless cocktail times, they had something substantial to talk about. Cliff Myers was a man of iron, Ralph told them. If he hadn't proved that in his professional career—and God knew he certainly had—then he'd proved it this morning. First he had tried and failed to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the bathroom floor; then he'd wrapped his wife in a blanket, carried her out to the car and driven her to the hospital, knowing she was probably dead all the way. The doctors there wanted to give him a sedative after they'd broken the news, but you didn't just go around giving sedatives to a man like Cliff Myers. He had driven home alone, and by nine-fifteen—nine-fifteen!—he had called the office to explain why he wouldn't be in for work today.

“Oh!” Sally cried. “Oh, God, I can't bear this. I can't bear this”—and she got up and ran from the room in tears.

Jack followed her quickly into the living room but she wouldn't let him put his arms around her, and he realized at once that he didn't really mind the refusal.

“Hey, come on, Sally,” he said, standing several feet apart from her with his hands in his pockets while she wept, or seemed to weep. “Come on. Take it easy.”

“Well, but things like this up
set
me, that's all; I can't help it. I'm sensitive, that's all.”

“Yeah, well, okay; okay.”

“A girl with everything to live for,” she said in a quavering voice, “and her whole life going out like that—click—and then
whump
on the bathroom floor; oh, God. Oh, God.”

“Well, but look,” he said. “Don't you think you're overdoing this a little? I mean you didn't even know the girl and you don't know the man either, so it's really like something you've read in the paper, right? And the point is you can read stuff like this in the paper every day, over your chicken-salad sandwich, and it doesn't necessarily make you—”

“Oh, Jesus, chicken-salad sandwich,” she said with loathing, looking him harshly up and down as she backed away. “You really are a cold bastard, aren't you. You know something? You know what I've just begun to figure out about you? You're a cold, unfeeling son of a bitch and you don't care about anything in the world but yourself and your rotten self-indulgent scribbling and no
wonder
your wife couldn't stand the sight of you.”

And she was halfway up the stairs before he decided that his best reply was to make no reply at all. He went back into the den to finish his drink and try to figure things out, and he was doing that when Kicker came in with a lumpy, badly rolled sleeping bag on his shoulder.

“Hey, Woody?” the boy said. “You ready?”

“Sure, Kick.” Woody got quickly to his feet and knocked back his whiskey, and they left the house together. Jill, huddled with Ralph in an intense discussion of Cliff Myers's tragedy, barely glanced up to wish them good night.

After awhile Jack went upstairs, walked on mincing tiptoe past Sally's closed door and struck off down an adjoining hall to gather up the screenplay and the other personal stuff that had accumulated in “his” room; then he went back downstairs and made a nervous departure past Jill and Ralph, who paid him no attention.

He would wait a few days before calling Sally at the office. If they could make it up, that would be fine, though probably never as fine as before. And if not, well, hell, weren't there plenty of other girls in Los Angeles? Weren't there girls much younger than Sally who cavorted in marvelously scanty bathing suits on the sand beyond his window every day? Or couldn't he ask Carl Oppenheimer to introduce him to one of the many, many girls Carl Oppenheimer seemed to know? Besides, there were only a few weeks left before he'd be done with the script and back in New York, so who the hell cared?

But as his car hummed through the darkness toward Malibu he knew that line of reasoning was nonsense. Drunken and foolish or not, gray-haired or not, Sally Baldwin was the only woman in the world.

Until an hour before dawn that night he sat drinking in his chill, damp bedroom, hearing the surf and breathing the mildew from his hundred-year-old mattress, allowing himself to entertain the thought that he might be a self-destructive personality after all. What saved him, enabling him to lie down and cover himself with sleep at last, was his knowledge that any number of sanctimonious people had agreed to hang that bleak and terrible label on F. Scott Fitzgerald too.

Sally called up two days later and said, in a shy and guarded voice, “You still mad at me?”

And he assured her that he wasn't, while his right hand gripped the phone as if for life and his left made wide, mindless gestures in the air to prove his sincerity.

“Well, okay, I'm glad,” she said. “And I'm sorry, Jack. Really. I know I drink too much and everything. And I've felt awful since you left, and I miss you an awful lot. So look: You think you might come in this afternoon and meet me at the Beverly Wilshire? You know? Where we had our first drink together, way back whenever it was?”

And all the way to that well-remembered bar he made heartfelt plans for the kind of reconciliation that might make them both feel young and strong again. If she could get a little time off from work they could take a trip together—up to San Francisco or down to Mexico—or else he could move out of the damned beach house and find a better place to stay with her in town.

But almost from the moment Sally sat down with him, when they were holding hands as tightly on the table as they'd done that other time, it was clear that Sally had other ideas.

“Well, I'm furious with Jill,” she began. “Absolutely furious. It's been one ridiculous thing after another. First of all we went to the hairdresser yesterday—we always do that together—and on the way home she said she thought we ought to stop going places together. I said, ‘What do you mean? What're you talking about, Jill?' And she said, ‘I think people think we're lesbians.' Well, it made me sick, that's all. Made me sick.

“And then last night she called Ralph and asked him—oh, and in this very low, suggestive voice too—asked him to invite Cliff Myers over for dinner tonight. Can you believe that? I said, ‘Jill, that's tasteless.' I said, ‘Look: a month or two from now it might be a thoughtful gesture, but the man's wife's only been dead two
days.
Can't you see how—how tasteless that is?' And she said, ‘I don't care if it is.' She said, ‘I've got to meet that man. I'm helplessly attracted to everything that man stands for.'

“Oh, and it's even worse than that, Jack. Because you see Woody Starr has this lousy little apartment in the back of his studio? Where he used to live before he moved in with Jill? And I think it's against the law—I mean I think there's a city ordinance that merchants aren't supposed to sleep in their shops—but anyway, sometimes he takes Kicker down there to bunk in for a night or two with him, and they cook breakfast for themselves and stuff; I guess it's sort of like camping out. So they've spent the past couple of nights there, and today Jill called me at the office in this terrible fit of giggles—she sounded about sixteen—and said, ‘Guess what. I've just conned Woody into keeping Kicker in the studio another night. Isn't that neat?' I said, ‘What do you mean?' And she said, ‘Oh, don't be dense, Sally. Now they won't be here to spoil everything when Cliff
Myers
comes over.' I said, ‘Well, in the first place, Jill, what makes you think he'll come over at all?' And she said, ‘Didn't I tell you? Ralph called this morning and confirmed it. He's bringing Cliff Myers to the house at six o'clock.'”

“Oh,” Jack said.

“And so listen, Jack. It'll probably be awful, watching her try to seduce that poor guy, but will you—will you come home with me? Because the point is I don't want to go through it alone.”

“Why go through it at all? We can get a room somewhere—hell, we can get a room right here, if you like.”

“And not even have clean clothes in the morning?” she said. “Go to work in this same terrible dress? No thanks.”

“That's dumb, Sally. Make a quick run up to the house, get your clothes and come back, and then we'll—”

“Look, Jack. If you don't want to come along with me you certainly don't have to, but I'm going anyway. I mean everything may be sick and degenerate or whatever you want to call it in that house, but it's my home.”

“Oh, shit, you know better than that. Whaddya mean ‘home,' for Christ's sake? That fucking menagerie couldn't be
any
body's home.”

She looked at him in an offended, willfully humorless way, like someone whose religion has been held up to ridicule. “It's the only home I have, Jack,” she said quietly.

“
Balls!
” And several people at neighboring tables looked quickly up and around at him, with startled faces. “I mean goddamnit, Sally,” he said, trying and failing to lower his voice, “if it gives you some kind of perverse pleasure to lie back and let Jill fucking Jarvis parade her depravity through your life, that's something you really ought to take up with some fucking psy
chi
atrist instead of me.”

“Sir,” a waiter said at his elbow, “I'll have to ask you to keep your voice down and watch your language. You can be heard all over this room.”

“It's all right,” Sally told the waiter. “We're leaving.”

On the way out of the place, torn between more reckless shouting and abject apologies for having shouted at all, Jack hung his head and walked stiffly, in silence.

“Well,” she said when they reached her parked car in the dazzling afternoon sun, “you were really attractive in there, weren't you? You really gave a memorable performance, didn't you? How can I ever go
in
there again without getting funny looks from the waiters and everyone else?”

“Yeah, well, you can write it all down in your memory book.”