Voices of a Summer Day (11 page)

“Can’t you see him on Monday?” Peggy asked.

“He’s out of town on a job,” Benjamin said. “I can’t get hold of him.”

“All right,” Peggy said, delicately pouring honey over a small piece of toast. “I’ll have lunch with you both. If I’m invited.”

“But you can’t stand him,” Benjamin said. “You always say that…”

“I’ll stand him today,” Peggy said. She put the toast and honey neatly into her mouth.

Benjamin remembered the last few times, dating back more than a year now, that he had tried to go out with Foynes and Peggy together.

“We’ll all have indigestion,” he said.

“I just want to be with you today,” she said.

“Oh, God,” Benjamin said, bent under the crushing burden of a great love.

“You don’t have to say, ‘Oh, God,’” Peggy said. “I’m not
forcing
you. I just thought, a day like this…”

“We’re meeting at the Oak Room,” Benjamin said. “It’s only for men.”

“Only for men.” Peggy nodded, subtly accusing the people who ran the Oak Room of being in on the conspiracy to break up her marriage. “I understand. Have some of this honey. It’s delicious.”

“I don’t want any honey.”

“It’s delicious.”

“I know it’s delicious. I just don’t want any.” Benjamin felt his stomach clamping like a python around his apple pancake.

“How about after lunch?” Peggy asked, still calm and smiling a
House and Garden
smile.

“I have a date to play tennis at Rip’s.”

“I have a new racquet,” Peggy said, “and I’d love to try it…”

“Men’s doubles,” Benjamin said.

“Oh,” Peggy said, “Men’s doubles. That’s
sacred.”
She drawled out the “sacred.”

Why do I go on with this goddamn thing? Benjamin thought. What law says I have to go on with it? He drank his coffee. It was hot and scalded his tongue. He stood up, pretending to be a normal, happy, youngish husband home from the wars, pleased with the breakfast his beautiful wife, at great sacrifice, had prepared for him. “I have to go now,” he said.

“Will I ever see you again?” Peggy asked.

Some day, Benjamin thought, some scholar should really go profoundly into the manner in which the word “ever” is used by wives.

“We’re invited for drinks at the Roses’ this evening, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll meet you there.” He put on his jacket and picked up a leather envelope with papers in it that he had had to look over the evening before. Peggy sat there, peering down at her glass of milk. Benjamin knew what she was waiting for. He went over and kissed her. “Next Saturday,” he said.

“Sure,” she said. “Next Saturday.”

As Benjamin went out the door, he knew Peggy would start to cry. How many of the tears would be true tears and how many private histrionics, he would never know. She probably wouldn’t know, either.

At nine-thirty that morning Foynes’ office called. Foynes was not going to be able to come into town in time for lunch. He would telephone on Monday. Benjamin sat looking at the phone for several moments. Then he dialed his own number. Might as well make character while I can, he thought. He would take Peggy to lunch and the weekend would be the better for it. The line was busy. He hung up. He tried again a few minutes later. The line was still busy. He was exasperated with her this time. Is that all she does all morning?
Talk?

He looked out the window. The fine spring morning had vanished. Dark rain clouds ambushed the sky. A piece of paper whirled outside his window, a message lost on invisible tides twenty-two stories high in the turbulent air. “Help!” “I love you!” “Sell everything.” The wind increased, the sky was well into Macbeth. No tennis, Benjamin thought, aside from everything else. He sat disconsolately at his desk, feeling deprived and unjustly harassed.

The phone rang a few seconds later and he answered brusquely. “Yes?”

“There’s no need to bite my head off. If you feel like that I’ll hang up.” It was Leah, her voice amused.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was wallowing in self-pity.”

“It’s going to rain this afternoon, you know,” Leah said. “It’s black as the pit from pole to pole outside my window.”

“Did you call me to give me the weather report?”

Leah laughed. He had once told Leah that her laugh was dangerous and he meant exactly that. “You know me better than that,” she said.

“Lunch,” he said.

“One-fifteen?”

“One,” he said.

He hung up, feeling better. He didn’t feel guilty, either—at least for the moment. If Peggy hadn’t been so busy gabbing all morning over the phone, he would have asked
her
to lunch before Leah called.

The rain started, the torrential, spring-summery black rain of New York that seems designed to wash the city clean of all its sins or sweep it into the sea before nightfall.

Benjamin regarded the rain outside his window with satisfaction. He always got an extra pleasure out of making love in New York on rainy afternoons.

It was not all pure pleasure, though. There had been the discussion with his father-in-law, for example, a few months before.

“Peggy says that you sleep with other women,” Woodham said.

“Does she?” Benjamin said, keeping his voice flat. He and his father-in-law were drinking old-fashioneds at the St. Regis bar. The Woodhams were in New York for a week, on their way to Europe for a holiday. Woodham, in his straight gray suit and his tight, fierce face, looked more like a colonel than ever.

“Yes,” Woodham said. “Quite a few of your friends say so, too. Ladies, mostly.”

“I was a fool,” Benjamin said, “to give you those two parties this week. Or I should have introduced you only to my enemies.”

Woodham laughed, a short, barking laugh. His laugh was military, formidable. “Ladies talk,” Woodham said. “She’s right, Peggy, isn’t she?”

“From time to time,” Benjamin said. He was not going to lie to the admirable, upright old man.

Woodham nodded. “Aside from that,” he said, “she says you’re an absolutely perfect husband.”

“How little she knows,” Benjamin said.

They drank their old-fashioneds in silence, watching the bartenders at their icy devotions.

“Does she want a divorce?” Benjamin asked.

“No.”

Benjamin wanted to run to the phone booth across the room and call Peggy and say, “I love you, I love you.” But he kept his face noncommittal and jangled the ice lightly in his glass. He knew that Woodham was waiting for him to say something more and would wait an hour, without a word if necessary, for him to say it. “I try to keep it as quiet as possible,” he said.

“It’s never really quiet,” Woodham said. “You know that.”

“I suppose so.”

They ordered two more old-fashioneds.

“She’s an only child,” Woodham said. “She’s used to being cherished.”

“I cherish her, Colonel. Inordinately.”

Woodham nodded again. “That’s what it looks like,” he said. “Outside looking in.” He watched the barman take away the empty glass and put the new glass down in front of him.

“Let me ask you a question, Colonel,” Benjamin said. “How long have you been married?”

Woodham looked wary. “Twenty-nine years. Why?”

“When was the first time you were unfaithful to your wife?”

Woodham sighed. “One for your side,” he said resignedly. He took a long swig of his drink.

“Let me ask you another question, Colonel,” Benjamin said.

“Goddamnit,” Woodham said, “I was sent down here to question
you.”

“Peggy lived with you all the time I was overseas,” Benjamin said. “You saw her every day. Do you think she was faithful to me?”

Now Woodham didn’t look like a colonel. He looked like a divisional commander. “What’d she tell you?”

“Nothing,” Benjamin said. “I didn’t ask her.”

“What the hell are you driving at?”

“Just that it isn’t so damned important,” Benjamin said. “I’m not saying there aren’t marriages in which both people are faithful to each other from beginning to end. I read about them, I see them in the movies, I understand sermons every Sunday are full of them, but I don’t see a hell of a lot of them these days and neither do you.”

“I’m a doctor,” Woodham said, “I see a lot of things other people don’t see.”

Benjamin ignored this last weak defense.

“You asked me what I’m proving,” he said. “I’m not proving anything, except maybe that I’m alive. That I’m susceptible to beauty. That I’m not all one piece. That I’m hungry and I don’t know what I’m hungry for.”

“At your age,” Woodham said, meaning it as a reproach.

“At my age,” Benjamin said. “If Peggy is waiting for your report, you tell her I’ll love her all my life. But if she says she’ll divorce me because I occasionally have an affair, she can go to Reno tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Woodham said. “The report will go through channels.” He shook his head. “Damn,” he said, “at least you could
try
living in San Francisco.”

Replete with lunch and a bottle of wine, he climbed the steps of the converted brownstone house, behind Leah. He followed the womanly straight back, the glowing hair, the slightly swaying trim hips under the green linen dress, the long perfect legs. The hallway was dim; they mounted deliberately, decorously, savoring the knowledge, each of them, of how soon that decorum would be shattered.

They made love two or three times a week. The pleasure Leah gave him was as exquisite as in the beginning in Paris. But in his reveries, dozing before falling off to sleep or sitting in a subway car, closing his eyes to shut away the sad faces of the other travelers, the moment he relived with most intensity was the silent mounting of the steps behind the superb tall woman, looking at the elegantly tailored hips, anticipating, secretly possessing, as Leah took out her key and prepared to unlock the door to her apartment.

They lay side by side in the shadowed room. The curtains were drawn, the rain drummed outside the window, but the sun was out, too, wavering pale rays through the slit in the draperies. A bedside clock ticked softly. It was nearly five o’clock. His body felt weightless, aerated, anointed, victorious. He knew he should get up and get dressed and respectably descend the stairs, respectably appear at the Roses’ cocktail party, the private treasure of the afternoon’s sensuality hidden, the clue to its whereabouts a memorized telephone number. It was warm in the room and they lay naked, the sheet thrown back, Leah’s skin gleaming in the rainy, filtered light of late afternoon. Another five minutes.

“What did you say?” Leah asked.

He was surprised. He hadn’t realized that he had spoken. “I said, ‘Another five minutes,’” he said. “Only I thought I just
thought
it.”

“Love and run,” Leah said, but without complaint.

“We’ve been here for two and a half hours.”

“Gentlemen don’t count,” Leah said. “The truth is, I have to get up, too. There’s a cocktail party that I—”

“Where?”

“Some people called the Roses.”

“I’m going there, myself,” he said. “I didn’t know you knew them.”

“I don’t,” Leah said. “A gentleman is taking me there. He’s calling for me here in an hour.”

“Busy day in the East Sixties,” Benjamin said.

“Ugly man,” Leah said calmly. “Your wife going to be there, too?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Leah said. “Finally, I’ll get a chance to meet her.”

“I can’t wait,” Benjamin said. He remembered the scene at breakfast. It was the wrong day for this meeting. Though he couldn’t imagine a
right
day. He turned his head and kissed Leah. “See you at the next drink,” he said, and started to get out of bed.

Leah reached out and held him. “And now a message from our sponsor,” she said.

He lay back, pleased to have an excuse not to leave that rain-enclosed room, that joyous May-time bed, for another few seconds.

“The gentleman who’s coming to take me to the cocktail party,” Leah said, “is a man called Stafford. Do you know him?”

“No,” Benjamin said.

“He’s an extraordinary man,” Leah said.

Benjamin made a face.

“Don’t be childish,” Leah said. “Would you prefer it if I only saw ordinary men?”

“Of course,” Benjamin said. “The more ordinary the better.”

“I knew you were mean,” Leah said, “but I didn’t know you were
that
mean.”

Benjamin sighed.

“What’re you sighing about?” she said.

“You’re going to say something I’d rather not hear,” Benjamin said.

“I’ve been seeing him for three months,” Leah said. “He’s my
evening
feller.”

“You know what the Italians say,” Benjamin stroked the thick, straight hair that fell around her shoulders. “Only peasants make love at night.”

“Joke,” she said. She sounded suddenly bitter.

“Sorry,” he said.

“He’s one of the handsomest men alive,” Leah went on, her voice uninflected, “and one of the smartest. And most generous. And rich, rich, rich. And he’s asked me to marry him.”

Benjamin lay silent for a moment. “Question,” he said. “Why do you bother with a poor, domesticated, afternoon type like me at all?”

“I have my reasons, dear,” Leah said.

“Are you going to marry him?”

“Yes,” she said. “If.”

“If what?”

“If you won’t marry me.”

Benjamin didn’t say anything. Now that it had been said, he knew that he had been expecting it. For a long time.

“I think I’ve exhausted all the possibilities in being everybody’s popular unmarried friend in New York,” Leah said. “I want to have a home. I want to give up the damn store.” She ran an antique shop on Third Avenue that her father had owned for many years and that had become one of the smartest places in New York since she had taken it over on her return from the War. “I want children,” she said. “I want my own husband, not somebody else’s. Do I sound hideously bourgeois?”

“Leave out the ‘hideously,’” Benjamin said.

“Well, there it is.” She lay still, staring up at the ceiling, carefully speaking without emotion, making no claims, allowing the splendid nude body and the startling face make all her claims for her without words.