“I couldn’t possibly. The children have been saving for months to buy you that damned-fool contraption.”
“You don’t know what I’ve been through,” I said.
“If you’d been through hell, I wouldn’t forgive you,” she said. “You haven’t been through anything that would justify your behavior. They’ve had it hidden in the garage for a week. They’re so sweet.”
“I haven’t felt like myself,” I said.
“Don’t tell me that you haven’t felt like yourself,” she said. “I’ve looked forward to having you leave in the morning, and I’ve dreaded having you come home at night.”
“I can’t have been all that bad,” I said.
“It’s been hell,” she said. “You’ve been sharp with the children, nasty to me, rude to your friends, and malicious behind their backs. It’s been hideous.”
“Would you like me to go?”
“Oh, Lord, would I like you to go! Then I could breathe.”
“What about the children?”
I went down the hall to the closet where we keep the bags. When I took out my suitcase, I found that the children’s puppy had chewed the leather binding loose all along one side. Trying to find another suitcase, I brought the whole pile down on top of me, boxing my ears. I carried my bag with this long strip of leather trailing behind me back into our bedroom. “Look,” I said. “Look at this, Christina. The dog has chewed the binding off my suitcase.” She didn’t even raise her head. “I’ve poured twenty thousand dollars a year into this establishment for ten years,” I shouted, “and when the time comes for me to go, I don’t even have a decent suitcase! Everybody else has a suitcase. Even the cat has a nice traveling bag.” I threw open my shirt drawer, and there were only four clean shirts. “I don’t have enough clean shirts to last a week!” I shouted. Then I got a few things together, clapped my hat on my head, and marched out. I even thought, for a minute, of taking the car, and I went into the garage and looked it over. Then I saw the FOR SALE sign that had been hanging on the house when we bought it long, long ago. I wiped the dirt off the sign and got a nail and a rock and went around to the front of the house and nailed the FOR SALE sign onto a maple tree. Then I walked to the station. It’s about a mile. The long strip of leather was trailing along behind me, and I stopped and tried to rip it off the suitcase, but it wouldn’t come. When I got down to the station, I found there wasn’t another train until four in the morning. I decided I would wait. I sat down on my suitcase and waited five minutes. Then I marched home again. Halfway there I saw Christina coming down the street, in a sweater and a skirt and sneakers?the quickest things to put on, but summery things?and we walked home together and went to bed.
On Saturday, I played golf, and although the game finished late, I wanted to take a swim in the club pool before I went home. There was no one at the pool but Tom Maitland. He is a dark-skinned and nice- looking man, very rich, but quiet. He seems withdrawn. His wife is the fattest woman in Shady Hill, and nobody much likes his children, and I think he is the kind of man whose parties and friendship and affairs in love and business all rest like an intricate superstructure?a tower of matchsticks?on the melancholy of his early youth. A breath could bring the whole thing down. It was nearly dark when I had finished swimming; the clubhouse was lighted and you could hear the sounds of dinner on the porch. Maitland was sitting at the edge of the pool dabbling his feet in the bright-blue water, with its Dead Sea smell of chlorine. I was drying myself off, and as I passed him, I asked if he wasn’t going in. “I don’t know how to swim,” he said. He smiled and looked away from me then to the still, polished water of the pool, in the dark landscape. “We used to have a pool at home,” he said, “but I never got a chance to swim in it. I was always studying the violin.” There he was, forty-five years old and at least a millionaire, and he couldn’t even float, and I don’t suppose he had many occasions to speak as honestly as he had just spoken. While I was getting dressed, the idea settled in my head?with no help from me?that the Maitlands would be my next victims.
A few nights later, I woke up at three. I thought over the loose ends in my life?Mother in Cleveland, and parablendeum?and then I went into the bathroom to light a cigarette before I remembered that I was dying of bronchial cancer and leaving my widow and orphans penniless. I put on my blue sneakers and the rest of the outfit, looked in at the open doors of the children’s rooms, and then went out. It was cloudy. I walked through back gardens to the corner. Then I crossed the street and turned up the Maitlands’ driveway, walking on the grass at the edge of the gravel. The door was open, and I went in, just as excited and frightened as I had been at the Warburtons’ and feeling insubstantial in the dim light?a ghost. I followed my nose up the stairs to where I knew their bedroom was, and, hearing heavy breathing and seeing a jacket and some pants on a chair, I reached for the pocket of the jacket, but there wasn’t one. It wasn’t a suit coat at all; it was one of those bright satin jackets that kids wear. There was no sense in looking for a wallet in his trousers. He couldn’t make that much cutting the Maitlands’ grass. I got out of there in a hurry.
I did not sleep any more that night but sat in the dark thinking about Tom Maitland, and Gracie Maitland, and the Warburtons, and Christina, and my own sordid destiny, and how different Shady Hill looked at night than in the light of day.
But I went out the next night?this time to the Pewters’, who were not only rich but booze fighters, and who drank so much that I didn’t see how they could hear thunder after the lights were turned out. I left, as usual, a little after three.
I was thinking sadly about my beginnings?about how I was made by a priggish couple in a midtown hotel after a six-course dinner with wines, and my mother had told me so many times that if she hadn’t drunk so many Old-Fashioneds before that famous dinner I would still be unborn on a star. And I thought about my old man and that night at the Plaza and the bruised thighs of the peasant women of Picardy and all the brown-gold angels that held the theatre together and my terrible destiny. While I was walking toward the Pewters’, there was a harsh stirring in all the trees and gardens, like a draft on a bed of fire, and I wondered what it was until I felt the rain on my hands and face, and then I began to laugh.
