What he was saying finally reached Stella through her impatience with the sound of his voice. 'Do you mean to say, Harold, that you invited me to run away with you when you don't even have a job?'
'I want you with me.'
'Where did you plan to go?'
'I dunno. Maybe California.'
'Oh, Harold, you are being insufferably banal,' she exploded. 'Do you want to live in a trailer park? Eat tacoburgers? Instead of moaning to me you ought to be writing letters and trying to find a new job. And why should you think that I would enjoy sharing your poverty? I was your mistress, not your wife.' At the last second she restrained herself from adding, 'Thank God.'
In a muffled voice, Harold said, 'I need you.'
'This is ridiculous.'
'I do. I do need you.'
She saw that he was working himself up to the point of tears. 'Now you are being not only banal, but self- pitying. You really are a very self-pitying man, Harold. It took me a long time to see it, but lately when I have thought of you, I have seen you with a big placard around your neck which reads 'Deserving Case.' Admit it, Harold, things have not been very satisfactory between us lately.'
'Well, if I disgust you so much why do you go on seeing me?'
'You did not have much competition. And in fact, I do not intend to go on seeing you. In any case you will be far too busy applying for jobs to cater to my whims. And I will be too busy looking after my husband to listen to your complaints.'
'Your husband?' Sims said, now really stunned.
'Yes. He is far more important to me than you, and at this moment he needs me much more. So I am afraid this is it. I will not see you anymore.'
'That dried up little… that old clothes horse…? He can't be.'
'Watch out,' Stella warned.
'He's so insignificant,' Sims wailed. 'You've been making a fool of him for years!'
'All right. He is anything but dried up, and I will not listen to you insult him. If I have had an experimental approach to men during my life, Ricky has accommodated himself to it, which I dare say is more than you would be capable of doing, and if I have made a fool of anyone it is myself. I think it is time I retired into respectability. And-if you cannot see that Ricky has four or five times your own significance, then you are deluding yourself.'
'Jesus, you can really be a bitch,' Harold said, his little eyes as wide as they could get.
She smiled. ' 'You're the most terrifying, ruthless creature I've ever known,' as Melvyn Douglas said to Joan Crawford. I cannot remember the name of the movie, but Ricky is very fond of the line. Why don't you call him up and ask him the name of the picture?'
'God, when I think of the men you must have turned into dogshit.'
'Few of them made the transformation so successfully.'
'You bitch.' Harold's mouth was thinning dangerously.
'You know, like all intensely self-pitying men, you really are very crude, Harold. Would you please get out of my car?'
'You're angry,' he said in disbelief. 'I lose my job and you just dumped on me, and
'Yes, I am. Please get out, Harold. Go back to your little heaven of self-regard.'
'I could. I could get out right now.' He leaned forward. 'Or I could force you to see reason by making you do what you enjoy so much.'
'I see. You're threatening to rape me, are you, Harold?'
'It's more than a threat.'
'It's a promise, is it?' she asked, seeing real brutishness in him for the first time. 'Well, before you start slobbering over me, I'll make you a promise too.' Stella lifted a hand to the underside of her lapel and pulled out a long hatpin: she had carried it with her for years now, ever since a man in Schenectady had followed her all day through shops. She held the hatpin out before her. 'If you make one move toward me, I promise you I'll plant this thing in your neck.' Then she smiled: and it was the smile that did it.
He scrambled out of the seat as if given an electric shock and slammed the door behind him. Stella reversed the car to the restraining fence, changed gears and shot out across the oncoming traffic.
'GOD DAMN IT!' He pounded a fist into the palm of the other hand. 'I HOPE YOU HAVE AN ACCIDENT!'
Sims picked up a stone from the gravelly shoulder and threw it across the highway. Then he stood for a moment breathing heavily. 'Jesus, what a bitch.' He ran his fingers through his cropped hair; he was far too angry to drive all the way back to the university. Sims looked at the forest which began down the slope, saw the puddles of icy water between the trees, and then looked across the four lanes of road to the dry higher ground.
Story
6
'We'd just had a fight,' Lewis said. 'We didn't have many, and when we had one I was usually wrong. This time it was because I fired one of the maids. She was just a girl from the country around Malaga. I can't even remember her name anymore, but she was a crank, or so I thought.' He cleared his throat and leaned toward the fire. 'The reason was that she was all caught up in the occult. She believed in magic, evil spirits-Spanish peasant spiritualism. That didn't bother me enough to fire her, even though she spooked some of the help by seeing omens in everything. Birds on the lawn, unexpected rain, a broken glass-all omens. The reason I fired her was that she refused to clean one of the rooms.'
'It is a pretty damn good reason,' Otto said.
'I thought so too. But Linda thought I was being hard on the girl. She'd never refused to clean the room before. The girl was upset by the guests, said they were bad or something. It was crazy.'
Lewis took another slug of the brandy, and Otto added a branch to the fire. Flossie came nearer and lay with her hindquarters close to the flames.
'Were these guests Spanish, Lew-iss?'
'Americans. A woman from San Francisco named Florence de Peyser and a little girl, her niece. Alice Montgomery. A cute little girl about ten. And Mrs. de Peyser had a maid who traveled with her, a Mexican-American woman named Rosita. They stayed in a big suite at the top of the hotel. Really, Otto, you couldn't imagine people less spooky than those three. Of course, Rosita could have kept the suite clean and probably did, but it was our girl's job to go in there once a day and she refused, so I fired her. Linda wanted me to change the schedule around and let one of the other girls do it.'
Lewis stared into the fire. 'People heard us fighting about it and that was rare too. We were out in the rose garden, and I guess I yelled. I thought it was a matter of principle. So did Linda. Of course. I was stupid. I should have switched the schedule like Linda wanted. But I was too stubborn-in a day or two, she would have swung me around to her point of view, but she didn't live long enough.' Lewis bit off a piece of the sausage and for a time chewed silently without tasting. 'Mrs. de Peyser invited us to dinner in the suite that same night. Most nights we ate by ourselves and stayed out of people's way, but now and then a guest would invite us to join them for lunch or dinner. I thought Mrs. de Peyser was extending herself to be gracious, and I accepted for us.
'I should not have gone. I was very tired-exhausted. I'd been working hard all day. Besides arguing with Linda, I had helped load two hundred cases of wine into the storeroom in the morning, and then I played obligation games in a tennis tournament all afternoon. Two doubles matches. What I really needed was a quick snack and then bed, but we went up to the suite around nine. Mrs. de Peyser gave us drinks, and then we had arranged with the waiter that the meal was to be brought up around a quarter to ten. Rosita would serve it, and the waiter could go back to the dining room.
'Well, I had one drink and felt woozy. Florence de Peyser gave me another, and all I was fit for was trying to make conversation with Alice. She was a lovely little girl, but she never spoke unless you asked her a question. She was suffocated by good manners, and so passive that you thought she was simple-minded. I gathered that her parents had shunted her off onto her aunt for the summer.
'Later I wondered if my drink had been drugged. I began to feel odd, not sick or drunk exactly, but dissociated. Like I was floating above myself. But Florence de Peyser, who had given us a jaunt on her yacht-well, it
