from me, and then when she’s done she sighs a deep sigh and says, “Well, you certainly stuffed yourself.” On Wednesdays I always eat a big lunch in town, so I won’t be hungry. I always have the calves’ liver and bacon or something like that, to fill me up.
As soon as I stepped into the restaurant that night, I thought I would see Olga. I hadn’t known that she would return?I hadn’t thought about it?but since I’ve seen the summit of the Matterhorn in my dreams much more than once, mightn’t she reappear? I felt happy and expectant. I was glad that I had on my new suit and had remembered to get a haircut. I wanted her to see me at my best, and I wanted to see her in a brighter light than she had appeared in that rainy night. Then I noticed that the Muzak was playing the same somber and graceful waltz that I had heard coming from the Livermores’ television, and I thought that perhaps this was no more than a deception of the music?some simple turn of memory that had fooled me as I had been fooled by the smell of the rain into thinking that I was young.
There was no Olga. I had no consolation. Then I felt desperate, desolate, crushed. I noticed how Zena smacked her lips and gave me a challenging glare, as if she was daring me to touch the shrimp foo-yong. But I wanted Olga, and the force of my need seemed to reestablish her reality. How could anything I desired so ardently be unreal? The music was only a coincidence. I straightened up again and looked around the place cheerfully, expecting her to come in at any minute, but she never did.
I didn’t think she would be at the movies?I knew she didn’t like movies?but I still had the feeling that I would see her that night. I didn’t deceive myself?I want to make this clear; I knew she was unreal, and yet she seemed to have some punctuality, some order, some schedule of engagements, and above all I needed her. After my wife went to bed I sat on the edge of the bathtub reading the newspaper. My wife doesn’t like me to sit in the kitchen or the living room, so I read in the bathroom, where the light is bright. I was reading when Olga came in. There was no waltz music, no rain, nothing that could account for her presence, excepting my loneliness. “Oh, my darling,” I said, “I thought you were going to meet me at the restaurant.” She said something about not wanting to be seen by my wife. Then she sat down beside me on the bathtub, I put my arms around her, and we talked about her plans. She was looking for an apartment. She was then living in a cheap hotel, and she was having trouble finding a job. “It’s too bad you can’t type and take shorthand,” I remember telling her. “It might almost be worthwhile going to school… I’ll look around and see if I can find anything. Sometimes there’s an opening for a receptionist… You could do that, couldn’t you? I won’t let you be a hat-check girl or a restaurant hostess. No, I won’t let you. I’d rather pay your salary until something better comes along…”
My wife threw open the bathroom door. Women’s hair curlers, like grass dye and funny signs, only seem to me reminders of the fact that we must find more serious and finer things upon which to comment, and I will only say that my wife wears so many and such bellicose hair curlers that anybody trying to romance her would lose an eye. “You’re talking to yourself,” she thundered. “You can be heard all over the neighborhood. They’ll think you’re nuts. And you woke me up. You woke me out of a sound sleep, and you know that if my first sleep is interrupted I can’t ever get to sleep again.” She went to the medicine cabinet and took a sleeping pill. “If you want to talk to yourself,” she said, “go on up to the attic.” She went into her bedroom and locked the door.
A few nights later, when I was cooking some hamburgers in the back yard, I saw what looked to be some rain clouds rising in the south. I thought this was a good sign. I wanted some news of Olga. After I had washed the dishes I went out onto the back porch and waited. It isn’t really a porch?just a little wooden platform with four steps above the garbage pail. Mr. Livermore was on his porch, and Mr. Kovacs was on his, and I wondered were they waiting as I was for a chimera. If I went over, for instance, and asked Mr. Livermore if his was blond or dark-haired, would he understand? For a minute I wanted terribly to confide in someone. Then the waltz began to play, and just as the music faded she ran up the steps.
Oh, she was very happy that night! She had a job. I knew all about this, because I’d found the job for her. She was working as a receptionist in the same building where I worked. What I didn’t know was that she had found an apartment?not a real apartment but a furnished room with a kitchen and bath of her own. This was just as well, because all her furniture was in California. Would I come and see the apartment? Would I come now? We could take a late train in and spend the night there. I said that I would, but first I had to go into the house and see that the children were all right. I went upstairs to the children’s room. They were asleep. Zena had already locked herself in. I went into the bathroom to wash my hands and found on the basin a note, written by Betty-Ann, my oldest daughter. “Dere Daddy,” she had written, “do not leave us.”
This convergence of reality and unreality was meaningless. The children wouldn’t know anything about my delusion. The back porch, to their clear eyes, would seem empty. The note would only reflect their inescapable knowledge of my unhappiness. But Olga was waiting on the back porch. I seemed to feel her impatience, to see the way she swung her long legs, glanced at her wristwatch (a graduation present), and smoked a cigarette, and yet I also seemed nailed to the house by the children’s plea. I could not move. I remembered a parade in the village I had taken my youngest son to not long ago. It was the annual march of some provincial and fraternal order. There were two costumed bands and half a dozen platoons of the fraternity. The marchers, the brotherhood, seemed mostly to be marginal workmen?post-office clerks and barbers, I guess. The weather couldn’t have accounted for my attitude, because I remembered clearly that it was fair and cool, but the effect of the parade upon me was as somber as if I had stood on some gallows hill. In the ranks I saw faces lined by drink, harried by hard work, wasted by worry, and stamped invariably with disappointment, as if the gala procession was meant to prove that life is a force of crushing compromise. The music was boisterous, but the faces and the bodies were the faces and bodies of compromised men, and I remembered getting to my feet and staring into the last of the ranks, looking for someone with clear features that would dispel my sober feelings. There was no one. Sitting in the bathroom, I seemed to join the marchers. I seemed to experience for the first time in my life what they must all have known?racked and torn with the desire to escape and nailed through the heart by a plea. I ran downstairs, but she had gone. No pretty woman waits very long for anyone. She was a fiction, and yet I couldn’t bring her back, any more than I could change the fact that her wristwatch was a graduation present and that her name was Olga.
She didn’t come back for a week, although Zena was in terrible shape and there seemed to be some ratio, some connection, between her obstreperousness and my ability to produce a phantom. Every night at eight, the Livermores’ television played the somber and graceful waltz, and I was out there every night. Ten days passed before she returned. Mr. Kovacs was cooking. Mr. Livermore was dyeing his grass.
The music had just begun to fade when she appeared. Something had changed. She held her head down. What was wrong? As she came up the steps, I saw that she had been drinking. She was drunk. She began to cry as soon as I took her in my arms. I stroked her soft, dark hair, perfectly happy to support and hold her, whatever had happened. She told me everything. She had gone out with a man from the office. He had got her drunk and seduced her. She had felt too ashamed of herself to go to work in the morning, and had spent some time in a bar. Then, half drunk, she had gone to the office to confront her seducer, and there had been a disorderly scene, during which she was fired. It was I she had betrayed, she told me. She didn’t care about herself. I had given her a chance to lead a new life and she had failed me. I caught myself smiling fatuously at the depth of her
