wider than the one before. His part of the marriage was like being strapped in a roller coaster, and if it hadn’t been for other factors, namely money, he would have looked forward to the moment when the ride was over.
He and Paul Brady had been roommates at Harvard. De Rham squeaked through the four years, but Paul had pulled one D plus too many and didn’t get the diploma. Everybody they knew had a definite idea what they wanted to do after graduation. He and Paul wouldn’t have been accepted at a graduate school even if they had had the desire. They were discouraged by the thought of joining some corporation as executive trainees. They liked to write light verse, they took good photographs and liked music and theater, but they had no particular talent or overriding interest. So one night, in the course of a drunken conversation which neither took very seriously, they decided that the only sensible thing was to marry a woman with money.
And that was the way it turned out. Paul’s wife had only one drawback. She believed her husband should go to an office, any office, every morning at nine. She didn’t care what he did, so long as he did it in an office, with a phone and a secretary. Paul couldn’t go along with that, and the marriage was now on the rocks.
Dotty didn’t have that particular hang-up, but she had others. Among other things, she demanded more sympathy and support than Henry was prepared to give anybody.
The professional dropouts had the idea. You didn’t argue. You simply refused to suit-up for the rat race. You let your hair and nails grow and wore the same underwear until it fell apart. You lived in a cold-water flat until they evicted you, and then you went somewhere else. The only trouble about this from Henry’s point of view was that he was old-fashioned, he liked booze and was frightened by drugs.
He was a divided man, he supposed. Everybody was hooked on something, and he was hooked on regular meals. He saw no reason to settle for that cold-water pad unless he had to. He liked to hang over the side of an expensive boat and watch the ocean cream past. He could see nothing wrong with material possessions so long as they cost him no effort and not too much in the way of compromise. In the Catholic countries, where divorce was difficult, once you married the woman you were set for life. But not here. Here you had to exert yourself to keep her contented, or you had to have an angle. He had thought he had Dotty sewed up, thanks to a piece of carelessness on her part and some quick thinking on his. But apparently not.
He accepted the fact that he was the passive type. He had faced that about himself a long time ago, but she couldn’t accept people as they were. She was always on, she always had to be organizing, manipulating. This byplay tonight with the will-she was challenging him to be assertive and masculine and turn her over to the police, if he had the guts. She was telling him that he was a lousy blackmailer, among other things. She was calling the pot, and what was he going to do about it?
God, he was tired. Nothing was in focus. Each eye saw its own image, and he couldn’t get them to mesh. Dotty’s face, as she came back from that irritating performance in the doorway with poor Captain Petrocelli, who must have been badly confused by the time he left the room, overlapped so much with the identical face beside it that De Rham couldn’t decide what expression was on it.
“Would you like to know why I really made a new will?” she demanded.
Paul complained, “Dotty, it’s your dough and you’ve decided not to leave it to Henry. Now give it a rest.”
“No, I want to explain. He thinks it’s because I hate him. Not at all. I love him, and I wouldn’t have missed being married to him for the world. He’s not unduly masculine, but he’s a pretty good lover in an effete way, once I can get him started.”
“All you ever had to do was snap your fingers,” De Rham said.
“I can forgive him most things, using me, ignoring me, but what I can’t forgive-”
There were tears in her eyes. If those tears could be analyzed, De Rham thought, they would probably assay at ninety percent gin.
Her voice broke. “Nobody likes to be made fun of.”
“I know it was a joke, a cruel one. If you try very very hard, do you think you can imagine how I felt, coming into my own house, to find my husband mimicking me to his old college chum?”
“Why do I need to imagine it, honey? You’ve told me often enough.”
Paul, on the other side of the room, was trying to keep from laughing. He was about to erupt. Bad tactics, De Rham knew, because the only way to get any peace was to let Dotty unload her grievances and apologize. If you could convince her you were sincere, you had won another day.
Paul gurgled and blew. She went over to him and poured her drink deliberately on his head.
“It was a funny imitation, wasn’t it, Paul?”
“Funny as all hell,” Paul said through his laughter. “Dotty, you’re wasting good gin.”
“I didn’t think it was so funny,” she said. “I thought it was the meanest thing he’s ever done, and he can be mean without really trying. Those were private matters he was sneering at, things I told him in confidence, after sex. How do you think it made me feel, being played back in that sarcastic, distorted way? I made up my mind then-”
It was against De Rham’s best interests, but he couldn’t help himself. He was beginning to break up. That cold-water flat in Haight-Ashbury was looking more desirable all the time. Talk about tactical errors! — his imitation of Dotty in a self-examining mood had been the tactical error of the decade. It took place on a Wednesday afternoon. She was supposedly at a matinee. She had changed her mind at the last minute, missing him, and had decided to come home and make love. Paul had dropped in for lunch. He had been talking amusingly about his own deteriorating marriage, with the scotch flowing freely, and suddenly De Rham heard himself talking in his wife’s voice. Paul had shrieked with laughter, stimulating De Rham to come up with more and more outrageous effects.
They hadn’t heard the door open. She listened to quite a bit of it before interrupting. She really made De Rham labor that time. He thought he had finally persuaded her to forget about it. This cruise and the Brazil excursion were supposed to seal the reconciliation. But he had overlooked the fact that he was dealing with a wack, and as any psychiatrist could tell you, wacks never forget an injury to their ego.
“I really don’t think I want to be married to you, darling,” she said to De Rham, pouring herself more gin. “You’ll let me divorce you, won’t you?”
“Yes, that would be the gentlemanly thing to do.”
Paul said, “Except that he isn’t a gentleman. Don’t be fooled, Dotty. He has a Harvard A.B., but none of those Ivy League values really rubbed off.”
“True,” De Rham murmured. “I don’t want to compete. I’m essentially a non-competitor.”
“I’ll make you a small cash settlement-” she said.
“No-o, Dotty, put it out of your mind. The trouble with me is I’m misplaced in the twentieth century. I’m so easily satisfied. I like things as they are.”
“But they can’t stay that way!” she cried. “I can’t bear to have you around. I won’t pay any more of your bills.”
“I don’t require much.”
“Just a fifth of scotch a day.” She took his face in one hand, squeezing with her full strength. “What do I have to do to make you understand?”
He couldn’t have spoken even if there had been anything to say. She let him go in a moment. He went back to his contemplation of the designs in the ceiling. He was a bit miffed, of course, but he couldn’t allow her to upset him.
When he noticed what she was doing, he saw that she had torn a half dozen pages out of the latest
“Hmm?” she said idly, and set the pile on fire.
“Hey!” Paul said.
De Rham stayed where he was, holding his wife’s eyes, while Paul scrambled off the bunk, bringing a pillow, and smothered the flames. It wasn’t much of a bonfire, just enough to fill the room with smoke and ruin the coffee table.
“That was really intelligent,” Paul said. “Do you know we happen to be in a boat? That there’s nothing between us and the Atlantic Ocean but one layer of wood, and wood burns?”
De Rham told his wife softly, “Baby, you don’t fool me a bit.”
“I thought I might.”
