XI

I was assistant advertising manager, within one step of having a secretary of my own. I had, already, a private office with a desk and a rug and a typewriter and a window and a telephone that rang twenty times an hour.

It was the fifth anniversary of my marriage. I was sad about that for ten minutes, in a cab on my way to work; and I might be sad about it again on my way home from work. In the interval I was very busy answering the telephone, and hoping I would be an advertising manager and have a secretary to answer it, soon.

It rang. The millinery buyer wanted extra space on the Friday page. I said I would let her know definitely later.

It rang. The typographer wanted to know where the cuts for the rotogravure page were, because the “Times” had called him to find out when it would be ready. I told him to telephone the engraver. I told someone in the department to telephone the engraver and rush him.

I began an ad on “We are seventy-four years young.” It was a “prestige” ad. A “prestige” ad is a thing on which store owners spend money, sorrowfully, because other store owners spend money on “prestige” ads, sorrowfully.

The telephone rang. The lingerie buyer wanted extra space on the Friday page. I was inconclusive about whether or not she would get it. The telephone rang. A printer wanted to tell me that he could not match paper on the folder of which we needed five hundred extra copies for mailing by noon. I encouraged a young copy-writer who was ambitious to be an assistant advertising manager, to run around in a few circles over that.

The telephone rang. The shoe buyer wanted larger space on the Friday page.

I wrote a little more copy on “We expect to be young for seventy-four years more.” (We were going to have an anniversary sale soon.)

The telephone rang. The “Times” announced irritably that our rotogravure copy was already three hours late, and they could not hold the space much longer. I was wistful with them. I sent someone to quarrel with the engraver about the missing cuts on that page. The engraver telephoned me, that there was so much etching on those cuts he could not deliver them to the typographer to “prove up” and send to the “Times,” for three hours more. I was wistful-with-an-undertone-of-rage, with him.

I wrote a little more copy. The ambitious young copy-writer came in to demand praise for having solved the printer’s difficulty. I praised her. The telephone rang. The glove buyer wanted more space on the Friday page. I was pessimistic with him. The telephone rang. The advertising manager (in conference with the FIRM) told me to cut the Friday page to six columns, and cut every department’s space proportionately. The telephone rang. Lucia wanted to know “how about lunch?” I said I was having a sandwich sent in.

The telephone rang. The jewelry buyer wanted more space on the Friday page. I sympathized with him. I told the layout man to cut everyone’s space on the Friday page. I wrote a little more copy. The “Times” telephoned. I said, “Just this once . . . give us a little more time . . . it will never happen again.” (I said that every other week.) The beauty shop telephoned to say I was ten minutes late for my shampoo appointment. I told them to cancel it.

The advertising manager telephoned to say they wanted the copy on “We have been young seventy-four years,” upstairs in an hour. I turned it over to the ambitious young copy-writer who was thrilled. I knew I should have to rewrite her version, but that would be faster than doing it myself.

The telephone rang. The millinery buyer wanted to know definitely, how much extra space she was getting Friday. I sent the fashion copy-writer down to persuade her to run her ad on Sunday. The typographer telephoned to tell me he had not got the “Times” cuts yet. The printer telephoned to tell me the paper the ambitious copy-writer had sent him from our other printer’s was the wrong stock.

The telephone rang. The shoe buyer wanted to know about extra space on Friday. I called in the layout man and told him to combine the spaces planned for millinery and shoes and give it all to shoes. The advertising manager’s secretary came in to tell me the millinery buyer was outside in a rage, because she could not have more space on Friday. The advertising manager telephoned that he was going out to lunch, and would be back at four, and to settle everything myself until then. The telephone rang. The “Times” was irate with me. The millinery buyer came in, weeping.

The telephone rang.

“Hello, Pat?” I did not recognize the voice. Mine was cool. I did not like men to call me at the office. The telephone rang too much anyway.

“Yes, this is she.”

“Many happy returns.”

(For what? Oh yes, it was my wedding anniversary. But who knew that?)

The millinery buyer sniffed.

“Who is it, please?”

A chuckle at the other end of the telephone.

“It’s Peter.”

I said, “Good God, I mean how marvellous.”

The millinery buyer sighed impatiently.

“Are you busy being the important young executive, Pat?”

“Yes—you talk.”

The millinery buyer began to drum her fingers on the desk. Oh, to hell with her. I could feel myself getting ecstatically pink.

“Something reminded me of to you today, Pat. Will you go to dinner with me tonight?”

“Yes, what time?”

“Seven?”

“I’ll be working late, Peter darling—could you meet me here? They’ll let you in at the side door if you ask for me.”

The millinery buyer walked out. Something would have to be done about her, swiftly, but not instantly.

“All right, I’ll do that, Pat. Seven o’clock.”

The desk and the window and the rug and the typewriter spun around gaily. I assumed a formal expression, and called the ambitious copy-writer. “Take care of things here, for ten minutes, will you please? I’m going down to the millinery department. And telephone the shoe buyer. Be very sweet to him and ask him to please come see me as soon as possible. Tell him I want to consult with him about giving him adequate representation on Sunday, instead of inadequate representation Friday.” The child beamed. She would be an assistant advertising manager yet, God help her. At my office door I collided with the layout man coming in with the Friday layout.

“Listen, Milt,” I said, “take out shoes and give all that space to millinery.”

“God damn,” he said, “I’ve made over this page four times. Millinery has to go at the top.”

“There, there,” I said walking past him.

I heard my telephone ring. The young copy-writer called me back. “It’s the ‘Times,’ very mad about the rotogravure ad. What shall I tell them?”

“Give ’em my love and tell them all will be well ultimately.”

I went to placate the millinery buyer.

That afternoon I charged myself a Chanel red velvet dress and a hat shaped like a Dutch cap, that matched it. I sent the young copy-writer for suède shoes (her feet were the same size as mine) and gloves and stockings and a handbag. (She had excellent “style sense”; she would have my job some day no doubt.) The child was very pleased, because she had to go to another store for the shoes and would have a chance to buy herself tea and cake en route. I bribed two girls in the beauty shop to stay after the store closed, to give me a facial and manicure and shampoo.

At five-thirty, I had a shower in the employees “recreation room,” and the shampoo, manicure and so on. At ten to seven, I was back in my silly private office, revising the child’s copy on “perennial youth.” (It had turned out much better than I had feared. The FIRM was fairly well pleased with it. I had only to incorporate such of their suggestions as they would remember having made.)

I finished the ad, and telephoned the typographer to send a boy for it. Then I went outside, into the long empty advertising department, and put on my hat, in front of a small cracked mirror. It was seven o’clock. I remembered that Pete was usually late. I lighted a cigarette, and went back to my own office, smoking it.

I was not particularly excited. If Peter wanted me back, and said so, something in me that was quite comfortably dead would resurrect and start singing paeans. If Peter did not want me back, and had just telephoned on an impulse, I would dine with him; and get up next morning and go on to breakfast and to work, and to whatever developed for the evening, just as on any other day. . . . If Peter wanted a divorce, I would go see Lucia’s lawyer. . . . If he did not, I would let things drift, and go right on living in the hope of a miracle. Why not? There was nothing else I wanted as much as that miracle. Perhaps that proved I was a fool. I did not care if it did. I had been over all that ground with myself so many times before. . . . There was nothing to be excited about, now.

It was five minutes past seven. I went again into the department and brought back with me the last month’s files of Pete’s paper. I could talk to him at dinner about some of his recent stories. Up to this instant, I had not read one of Pete’s stories since he had left me. I knew that it would trouble me to find phrases in them that I had heard him use. I knew, though, that he had covered the Doane electrocution. (Mrs. Doane was that young women who killed her sleeping husband with such cool-blooded deliberateness that the jury convicted her notwithstanding her ingénue face.)

I turned over the files, looking for his signatures. There were a good many of them. Pete was turning out to be a good newspaperman. Once, I had clipped every story he wrote, in the days when his stories were three paragraphs buried on an inside page. Recollection of that fact distressed me; gave me the flat feeling of I-used-to-be-much-younger-than-I-am.

I began to read his account of the electrocution, and could not tell whether it were good or bad. Remembrances of Pete kept getting between me and the sense of it.

A phrase toward the end did catch at me, though. It made me laugh. He said, describing the entrance of Mrs. Doane into the electrocution chamber, “She looked so very small.” I laughed, because Pete always said that, or something like it, about every woman who ever stirred him for a moment.

I heard the door at the end of the department outside open and close, softly.

And suddenly, I had the sense of something dreadful about to happen. I heard steps, the familiar tread of someone drunk, walking steadily by an effort, coming closer across that long dark room outside. The sound of footsteps stopped.

I looked up and smiled.

Peter leaned against my office door, smiling with his eyes. He was very drunk.

“ ’Lo, Pat, still working? Looked at a paper this morning and saw by the date it was our wedding anniversary. Brought you a present. You ’n’ I haven’t been on a long, hard-drinking evening in years, and it’s damn well time we went on one. Brought you a quart of Scotch.”

(While I remember the last six months that we lived together, I shall be afraid of Peter drunk. . . . Think fast, think fast. . . . Hell! that is just a line from “What Price Glory?”)

“Thanks for the Scotch, Pete. Bet you had a pint yourself, where you bought it.” (Think . . . where is Judith? Oh, manage him yourself; you have, before.)

“Pat, you’re looking lovely. You look frightened though. Don’t be frightened. I’m drunk, but I’ll behave. I just thought it would be nice if we went on a party . . . sort of friendly.”

“Grand idea, darling. There are two glasses in that lowest drawer. Let’s have some Scotch, straight.” (And if the night watchman comes in, and finds me drinking here, I shall lose my job. I do not care. I can get another.)

“Kiss me, Pat . . . because you married me once . . . and because you’re lovely-looking . . . that doesn’t make sense, does it? Kiss me because I’d like you to.”

We kissed. I had kissed a good many people since Peter. And so, no doubt, had he, since me. That did not mean anything. Neither did this, perhaps. “Peter, pour me a drink while I put my coat on.”

We had three drinks fast. “Down the hatch, Pat. I taught you to drink. Be a credit to me. Drink even, kid.”

(This Scotch is raw. I shall get horribly drunk, if I do not eat soon. I must keep my head. Oh, what does it matter, whether I keep my head or not.)

He talked about Mrs. Doane, dying. “She looked so small, Pat, and so blonde. When they wheeled her past us, after, one of her little hands swung out from under the blanket that covered her, as if she wanted to clutch at one more man before they buried her. God, Patty, it was brutal.”

(His friends have kept asking and asking him about that electrocution, and no doubt he has been posing as being hard-as-hell about it, and getting more and more jumpy. Pete is not hard at all, really. Or, at least, he was not hard, when I knew him first.)

“I brought you up right, Pat. We’ve killed a pint, even. Let’s eat.”

Some vague restaurant in the Forties. Highballs. He talked about newspapers, Judith, Hilda, London, myself and himself, and how poor we had been.

I did not care what he talked about. He disturbed me. No other man disturbed me much, or long. Pete made me think of things it was no use thinking of. Still, it was nicer to be dining with him, than with anyone else.

I had three highballs. (Thank Heaven for Scotch. Everything swims gorgeously, not real any more. Vistas in hell, but a well-anaesthetized hell.)

“Remember, Pat, when you bought a jar of French mushrooms for my dinner on my birthday. They cost a dollar and a quarter, and you dropped the glass jar on the way home. . . .”

“And when you came in I was crying, Peter, and you insisted on knowing why. I was crying because I didn’t have another dollar and a quarter, and nothing else in the house to eat but canned beans and a birthday cake.”

“We always had canned beans for dinner the night before pay day, didn’t we, Pat? But, that night we washed the glass out of the mushrooms and ate them. They tasted good.”

(I suppose we make twelve thousand a year between us, nowadays, and we lived for two years on something like forty dollars a week.)

He talked about going to hell gaudily, in the tropical tradition, via some Central American Revolution. “When I have been drinking five or six more years, Patty, I’ll get out. Buy me a sombrero with silver coins jangling, and a sash and two pistols, and end up merrily on mezcal. You’re the only woman I’d ask to come, Patty. But you wouldn’t. You haven’t the courage to be really disreputable, even. You have a flower face though, damn you. Flower face and hands and a two-for-a-nickel soul.”

He talked on.

Once I said to him, melodramatically, “I’ll be sitting right beside you, in whatever gutter you choose to die. I plan so to live that we may be reunited in hell for ever.” (Applesauce! Live alone and die alone, like as not. And nonchalantly, too. He taught me to be nonchalant. I may be grateful someday.)

He is getting pretty profane—be obscene in a minute. Influence of Judith. Oh, that is damn unfair. He used to do it, in the Hilda era, to shock me. Try and shock me now. He is as unhappy as I am. Curious.

If I can start him off on poetry . . . try “Shropshire Lad” . . . that’s sure-fire.

“Pete, how do the verses go that begin, ‘When I was one-and-twenty—’ ”

“ ‘When I was one-and-twenty—I heard a wise man say—give crowns and pounds and guineas, but not your heart away.’ ” . . .

There, he will go right straight through. How I am drunk.

“Pete, let’s go taxi-riding.”

“All right. Where’s the check?”

“Taxi, go up the Drive to Grant’s Tomb and back.”

He put his arm around me. I clung to him. It did not mean anything, but it was friendly. The taxi was cold. . . . Animals huddled together for warmth.

“It’s snowing, Pat.”

“That’s nice.”

“Listen, Peter. Do you want to marry Judith?”

“Hell, no. I don’t want to marry anybody. You cured me of that. How do you feel—very dizzy?”

“No, getting soberer now, the air’s grand.”

“You drink well, Pat, for a girl . . . I drink pretty well.” He laughed. “It’s a good thing that child of ours died, he’d have turned out just the prize drunk of his generation, probably.”

“Go to hell will you, Peter.”

“Sorry . . . I’ll talk about something else. Do you honestly still give a damn about that baby?”

“And I still give a damn about you. . . . I’m that kind of fool. Will you light me a cigarette?” His face, when the match flared up, looked hard. It was not much like the face of a boy I had known. . . .

“I suppose you consider me ‘the man who spoiled your life,’ Patricia.”

I thought about that. “Everyone spoils his own life, given time, probably.”

“Well, what you did to mine, little girl, was plenty. You taught me a lot though.”

“No doubt. Haven’t you heard any good stories lately, Peter? You aren’t being outstandingly entertaining.”

“You are a very beautiful young woman, Patricia. Is that better? Do I get a kiss for it?”

“Why not?” It means nothing; but, for its duration, I may pretend it means whatever I wish.

“Pat, Judith’s away. She has the apartment next to mine, you know. Would you like to come down and see my place?”

“Very much.”

He had written me a note, when he rented the apartment; and I had sent a letter to the storage people, to permit him to take out such furniture as he chose.

He kissed me again. Well, he was my husband, and it was very respectable to kiss one’s husband. I laughed and told him that. He thought it was amusing, too.

His apartment had etchings we had bought together in France, and curtains and a new rug that represented Judith’s taste, not mine.

We talked about the etchings. I took off my hat and coat, and he said my red dress was a gorgeous shade. He brought me a glass of cognac. It was good, much better than the Scotch had been.

He said, “You never were, Pat. I invented you.”

I said, “What does that mean?”

“That I shouldn’t damn you as much as I do.”

I said, “I suppose I am as responsible for the sort of person you are, nowadays, as you are responsible for the sort I am. I never thought of that before. There just are no villains in the piece.”

“Patty growing philosophical. Don’t. I’d rather you kissed me than talked.”

“As you wish.” He was right. It was better to kiss him than to try to talk to him. It might mean something to kiss him. How could I tell?

It was pleasant, too, to go to sleep with my arm slipped through his arm. It meant as much as anything else did, certainly.

His voice waked me. “Pat, do you plan to stay all night? It really isn’t very comfortable, for two.”

I wished that I had never married him, never kissed him, never met him, never heard of him. Also, that I had a revolver and could shoot him.

He said, “If you like, I’ll dress and take you home.”

I said, “Thank you, I should hate to put you to such great inconvenience.” I took my clothes, and went into his bath to dress, and stopped to take a shower.

Standing under it, it occurred to me that I should write ads for plumbers, because I seemed to take a shower at every crisis of my life. Or a bath.

Dressed, I went back to get my coat. He was sitting up in bed, smoking.

“Peter, tell me, just to placate my curiosity, why do you do things like this to me? I don’t believe you handle your other women by the same system . . . I hear too often that you are successful.”

“Oh hell, must we go into that, Pat?”

“I’ll simplify the question. Do you love me, or do you hate me?”

“That’s no simplification, and you know it.”

Both our voices were indifferent.

“Well, Patricia, if it will do you any good to know—before I kiss you I think of you as you used to be, and after I’ve kissed you I wonder how many men you’ve slept with by now.”

“The other women you know aren’t exactly without pasts.”

“It doesn’t matter about them. You are handicapped by dating back to the time when I was so full of ideals about the faith and constancy of women that I had no room for any sense about them.

“Yet, still, Patricia, you remain . . . a little different from the others. . . . You’d better get out. I must be tight, still, or I wouldn’t talk so much.”

I put on my coat and picked up my gloves. I felt that this really was the end for Peter and me. Yet I knew that I had felt that before, and it had not been so. I put on lipstick, carefully.

“Peter, will you kiss me ‘good-bye,’ as if it were the year 1922?” (Damn it, why did I ask that? He’ll present me a cheque for it as ghastly sentimentality. It was . . . but I am pretty sure that this is all, for me and Peter, and I wanted to end with a friendly gesture.)

He put out his cigarette, and lighted another. “You are a young woman whom it’s not easy to satisfy, Patricia.”

I detested him. Well, I could make him wince, too. “Why, Peter, my lovers are always complaining that I am frigid.”

“Get to hell out of here, will you,” he said.

I went out, without turning at the door to look at him. It was snowing hard. I said to myself, “Here am I flung out into the traditional snowstorm, isn’t that ridiculous?” And began to laugh. I came to Sixth Avenue, and must have turned south, instead of north, because I came to the door of “Dave’s Blue Room” which was a large all-night restaurant. I had been there often for sandwiches, and I knew that it was further south than the street where Peter lived. When I got to the door, I felt that I could not walk any farther. I thought some black coffee might be good for me. So I went in.

Bill was sitting with three other men of his own age, eating scrambled eggs and bacon. I supposed that they had been playing bridge somewhere.

He got up when I came in. “Come here and sit down, Patricia. What are you doing wandering about alone at three o’clock?”

He introduced the three men. They regarded me a little strangely, and I knew that I probably looked awful. I had not noticed, in Pete’s mirror.

Better make some explanation. In a minute, when I could manage my voice.

“I am so glad that you happened to be here, Bill. I felt unpleasantly conspicuous, coming in alone, but I did want some coffee. I’ve been having a rather distressing evening, as it happens.”

Bill ordered coffee, and recommended the scrambled eggs. I let him order them, too.

“You see, I’ve been arranging with my husband, the details of our divorce, and that sort of thing is always trying, I suppose.”

The four old men were immediately sympathetic, sufficiently so to change the subject. They said kind jovial things to the effect that it was delightful to have a young and pretty woman walk in upon their boredom.

I knew after a minute, and a sip of coffee, that I was not going to faint. But I could not do anything about the scrambled eggs. Bill took my hand, and held it hard, under the tablecloth. Well, he had known a great deal concerning women in his time.

Bill took me home, and left me at the door, after suggesting that we see three musical shows the next week.

I walked upstairs, thinking that Bill was a very nice man.

Outside her door, I decided to wake Lucia, and tell her that I was going to get a divorce. She would be sufficiently interested so that she would not mind being waked.

“Lucia, I’m going to get a divorce from Peter.”

“I’m glad, Pat. I’ll take you to my lawyer tomorrow at lunch time.” I sat on her little couch. I was too tired to go upstairs.

“Talk if you want to, Pat.”

“All right. I held on because I couldn’t let go. Now I’m letting go because I can’t hold on any more.”

“You’d better sleep down here, Pat. Sit in a chair, while I fix up the couch.”

“What is it like to get a divorce, Lucia?”

“Like having a tooth out. A wrench, and you feel better the day afterward.”

“My Great Romance threw me out into a snowstorm, Lucia, so I decided he’d had enough of me.”

“Patricia, darling, pull yourself together. Think about tomorrow being another day; or if that’s no good, remember that nothing ever in your whole life will hurt you very much, after this.”

“Is that true, Lucia, or are you being kind to me?”

She laughed, and put a cushion behind my head, and told me to take off my shoes, because they were soaked through from walking in the snow.

“This is true, Pat. It is unlikely that any other man will ‘desert’ you . . . any man you want to hold. Because, when first you suspect he’s ready to go, you’ll pack his baggage and buy him a one-way ticket anywhere he likes, so fast that he’ll leave reluctantly. You’ll never hold on again. It’s the holding on that hurts. Difference between sudden or long-prolonged dying. Do you think you could sleep now, if you went to bed? It’s four o’clock.”

“I think so.”

Next morning Lucia brought me my breakfast in bed, and was very entertaining about the virtues of Sam. That noon we went to see her lawyer.