Louisa Balcolm, the postmistress, who lives two stops up the line. These, then, were the attendant players, the porters and gossips who would put down the groundwork for the spectacle. I kept an eye on my wristwatch. Then the train pulled in, and a moment later an eruption, a jackpot of humanity, burst through the station doors?so numerous and eager, so like sailors home from the sea, so hurried, so loving, that I laughed with pleasure. There they all were, the short and the tall, the rich and the poor, the sage and the foolish, my enemies and friends, and they all headed out the door with such a light step, so bright an eye, that I knew I must rejoin them. I would simply go back to work. This decision made me feel cheerful and magnanimous, and when I came home my cheer seemed for a moment to be infectious. Cora spoke for the first time in days in a voice that was full and warm, but when I replied, she said, musically, “I was speaking to the goldfish.” She was indeed. The beautiful smile that she had withheld from me was aimed at the goldfish bowl, and I wondered if she had not left the world, its lights, cities, and the clash of things, for this sphere of glass and its foolish castle. Watching her bend lovingly over the goldfish bowl, I got the distinct impression that she looked longingly into this other world.
I went to New York in the morning and called the friend who has always been most complimentary about my work with Dynaflex. He told me to come to his office at around noon?I guessed for lunch. “I want to go back to work,” I told him. “I want your help.”
“Well, it isn’t simple,” he said. “It isn’t as simple as it might seem. To begin with, you can’t expect much in the way of sympathy. Everybody in the business knows how generous Penumbra was to you. Most of us would be happy to change places. I mean, there’s a certain amount of natural envy. People don’t like to help a man who’s in a more comfortable position than they. And another thing is that Penumbra wants you to stay in retirement. I don’t know why this is, but I know it’s a fact, and anybody who took you on would be in trouble with Milltonium. And, to get on with the unpleasant facts, you’re just too damned old. Our president is twenty-seven. Our biggest competitor has a chief in his early thirties. So why don’t you enjoy yourself? Why don’t you take it easy? Why don’t you go around the world?” Then I asked, very humbly, if I made an investment in his firm?say fifty thousand dollars?could he find me a responsible post. He smiled broadly. It all seemed so easy. “I’ll be happy to take your fifty thousand,” he said lightly, “but as for finding you anything to do, I’m afraid…” Then his secretary came in to say that he was late for lunch.
I stood on a street corner, appearing to wait for the traffic light to change, but I was just waiting. I was staggered. What I wanted to do was to make a sandwich board on which I would list all my grievances. On it I would describe Penumbra’s dishonesty, Cora’s sorrow, the indignities I had suffered from the maid and gardener, and how cruelly I had been hurled out of the stream of things by a vogue for youth and inexperience. I would hang this sign from my shoulders and march up and down in front of the public library from nine until five, passing out more detailed literature to those who were interested. Throw in a snowstorm, gale winds, and the crash of thunder; I wanted it to be a spectacle.
I then stepped into a side-street restaurant to get a drink and some lunch. It was one of those places where lonely men eat seafood and read the afternoon newspapers and where, in spite of the bath of colored light and distant music, the atmosphere is distinctly contumacious. The headwaiter was a brisk character off the Corso di Roma. He duckfooted, banging down the heels of his Italian shoes, and hunched his shoulders as if his suit jacket bound. He spoke sharply to the bartender, who then whispered to a waiter, “I’ll kill him! Someday I’ll kill him!”
“You and me,” whispered the waiter, “we’ll kill him together.” The hat-check girl joined the whispering. She wanted to kill the manager. The conspirators scattered when the headwaiter returned, but the atmosphere remained mutinous. I drank a cocktail and ordered a salad, and then I overheard the impassioned voice of a man in the booth next to mine. I had nothing better to do than listen. “I go to Minneapolis,” he said. “I have to go to Minneapolis, and as soon as I check into the hotel the telephone’s ringing. She wants to tell me that the hot- water heater isn’t working. There I am in Minneapolis and she’s on Long Island and she calls me long-distance to say that the hot-water heater isn’t working. So then I ask her why doesn’t she call the plumber, and then she begins to cry. She cries over long-distance for about fifteen minutes, just because I suggest that she might call the plumber. Well, anyhow, in Minneapolis there’s this very good jewelry store, and so I bought her a pair of earrings. Sapphires. Eight hundred dollars. I can’t afford this kind of thing, but I can’t afford not to buy her presents. I mean, I can make eight hundred dollars in ten minutes, but as the tax lawyer says, I don’t take away more than a third of what I make, and so a pair of eight-hundred-dollar earrings cost me around two thousand. Anyway, I get the earrings, and I give them to her when I get home, and we go off to a party at the Barnstables. When we come home, she’s lost one of the earrings. She doesn’t know where she lost it. She doesn’t care. She won’t even call the Barnstables to see if it’s lying around on the floor. She doesn’t want to disturb them. So then I say it’s just like throwing money into the fire, and she begins to cry and says that sapphires are cold stones?that they express my inner coldness toward her. She says there wasn’t any love in the present?it wasn’t a loving present. All I had to do was to step into a jewelry store and buy them, she says. They didn’t cost me anything in thoughtfulness and affection. So then I ask her does she expect me to make her some earrings?does she want me to go to night school and learn how to make one of those crummy silver bracelets they make? Hammered. You know. Every little hammer blow a sign of love and affection. Is that what she wants, for Christ’s sake? That’s another night when I slept in the guest room…”
I went on eating and listening. I waited for the stranger’s companion to enter into the conversation, to make some sound of sympathy or assent, but there was none, and I wondered for a moment if he wasn’t talking to himself. I craned my neck around the edge of the booth, but he was too far into the corner for me to see. “She has this money of her own,” he went on. “I pay the tax on it, and she spends it all on clothes. She’s got hundreds and hundreds of dresses and shoes, and three fur coats, and four wigs. Four. But if I buy a suit she tells me I’m being wasteful. I have to buy clothes once in a while. I mean, I can’t go to the office looking like a bum. If I buy anything, it’s very wasteful. Last year, I bought an umbrella, just so I wouldn’t get wet. Wasteful. The year before, I bought a light coat. Wasteful. I can’t even buy a phonograph record, because I know I’ll catch hell for being so wasteful. On my salary?imagine, on my salary, we can’t afford to have bacon for breakfast excepting on Sundays. Bacon is wasteful. But you ought to see her telephone bills. She has this friend, this college roommate. I guess they were very close. She lives in Rome. I don’t like her. She was married to this very nice fellow, a good friend of mine, and she just ran him into the ground. She just disposed of him. He’s a wreck. Well, now she lives in Rome, and Vera keeps calling her on the telephone. Last month my telephone bills to Rome were over eight hundred dollars. So I said, ‘Vera,’ I said, ‘if you want to talk with your girl chum so much, why don’t you just get on a plane and fly to Rome? It would be a lot cheaper. ‘I don’t want to go to Rome,’ she said. ‘I hate Rome. It’s noisy and dirty.’
“But you know when I think back over my past, and her past, too, it seems to me that this is a situation with a very long taproot. My grandmother was a very emancipated woman, she was very strong on women’s rights. When my mother was thirty-two years old, she went to law school and got her degree. She never practiced. She said she went to law school so she’d have more things in common with Dad, but what she actually did was to destroy, really destroy the little tenderness that remained between them. She was almost never at home, and when she was she was always studying for her exams. It was always ‘Sh-h-h! Your mother’s studying law…’ My father was a lonely man, but there’s an awful lot of lonely men around. They won’t say so, of course. Who tells the truth? You meet an old friend on the street. He looks like hell. It’s frightening. His face is gray, and his
