convertible.”
The thought of this lonely woman sitting at her window touched him, although he was even more touched by her plumpness. Sheer plumpness, he knew, is not a vital part of the body and has no procreative functions. It serves merely as an excess cushion for the rest of the carcass. And knowing its humble place in the scale of things, why did he, at this time of life, seem almost ready to sell his soul for plumpness? The remarks she made about the sufferings of a lonely woman seemed so broad at first that he didn’t know what to make of them, but after the sixth drink he put his arm around her and suggested that they go upstairs and look for her checkbook there.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said later, when he was arranging himself to leave. Her voice shook with feeling, and he thought it lovely. He didn’t doubt her truthfulness, although he had heard the words a hundred times. “I’ve never done this before,” they always said, shaking their dresses down over their white shoulders. “I’ve never done this before,” they always said, waiting for the elevator in the hotel corridor. “I’ve never done this before,” they always said, pouring another whiskey. “I’ve never done this before,” they always said, putting on their stockings. On ships at sea, on railroad trains, in summer hotels with mountain views, they always said, “I’ve never done this before.”
“Where have you been?” Mrs. Pastern asked sadly, when he came in. “It’s after eleven.”
“I had a drink with the Flannagans.”
“She told me he was in Germany.”
“He came home unexpectedly.”
Charlie ate some supper in the kitchen and went into the TV room to hear the news. “Bomb them!” he shouted. “Throw a little nuclear hardware at them! Show them who’s boss!” But in bed he had trouble sleeping. He thought first of his son and daughter, away at college. He loved them. It was the only meaning of the word that he had ever known. Then he played nine imaginary holes of golf, choosing his handicap, his irons, his stance, his opponents, and his weather in detail, but the green of the links seemed faded in the light of his business worries. His money was tied up in a Nassau hotel, an Ohio pottery works, and a detergent for window washing, and luck had been running against him. His worries harried him up out of bed, and he lighted a cigarette and went to the window. In the starlight he could see the trees stripped of their leaves. During the summer he had tried to repair some of his losses at the track, and the bare trees reminded him that his pari-mutuel tickets would still be lying, like leaves, in the gutters near Belmont and Saratoga. Maple and ash, beech and elm, one hundred to win on Three in the fourth, fifty to win on Six in the third, one hundred to win on Two in the eighth. Children walking home from school would scuff through what seemed to be his foliage. Then, getting back into bed, he thought unashamedly of Mrs. Flannagan, planning where they would next meet and what they would do. There are, he thought, so few true means of forgetfulness in this life that why should he shun the medicine even when the medicine seemed, as it did, a little crude?
A new conquest always had a wonderful effect on Charlie. He became overnight generous, understanding, inexhaustibly good-humored, relaxed, kind to cats, dogs, and strangers, expansive, and compassionate. There was, of course, the reproachful figure of Mrs. Pastern waiting for him in the evenings, but he had served her well, he thought, for twenty-five years, and if he were to touch her tenderly these days she would likely say, “Ouch. That’s where I bruised myself in the garden.” On the evenings that they spent together, she seemed to choose to display the roughest angles of her personality; to grind her ax. “You know,” she said, “Mary Quested cheats at cards.” Her remarks fell a good deal short of where he sat. If these were indirect expressions of disappointment, it was a disappointment that no longer touched him.
He met Mrs. Flannagan for lunch in the city, and they spent the afternoon together. Leaving the hotel, Mrs. Flannagan stopped at a display of perfume. She said that she liked perfume, worked her shoulders, and called him “Monkey.” Considering her girlishness and her claims to fidelity, there was, he thought, a distinct atmosphere of practice about her request, but he bought her a bottle of perfume. The second time they met, she admired a peignoir in a store window and he bought this. On their third meeting, she got a silk umbrella. Waiting for her in the restaurant for their fourth meeting, he hoped that she wasn’t going to ask for jewelry, because his reserves of cash were low. She had promised to meet him at one, and he basked in his circumstances and the smells of sauce, gin, and red floor carpets. She was always late, and at half past one he ordered a second drink. At a quarter to two, he saw his waiter whispering to another waiter?whispering, laughing, and nodding his head in Charlie’s direction. It was his first intimation of the chance that she might stand him up. But who was she?who did she think she was that she could do this to him? She was nothing but a lonely housewife; she was nothing but that. At two, he ordered his lunch. He was crushed. What had his emotional life been these last years but a series of sometimes shabby one-night stands, but without them his life would be unendurable.
There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between one and two?a spiritual no-man’s-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments, and rat-holes we all share, disarmed by the gullibility of our hearts. The waiter knew, and the laughter and lighthearted conversations at the tables around Charlie honed his feelings. He seemed to be helplessly elevated on his disappointment like a flagpole sitter, his aloneness looming larger and larger in the crowded room. Then he saw his own swollen image in a mirror, his gray hair clinging to his pate like the remains of a romantic landscape, his heavy body shaped a little like a firehouse Santa Claus, the paunch enlarged by one or two of Mrs. Kelly’s second-best sofa cushions. He pushed his table away and started for a telephone booth in the hall.
“Is there anything wrong with your lunch, monsieur?” the waiter asked.
She answered the phone, and in her most girlish voice said, “We cannot go on like this. I have thought it over, and we cannot go on. It is not because I do not want to, because you are a very virile man, but my conscience will not let me.”
“Can I stop by tonight and talk it over?”
“Well…” she said.
