“Well,” he said.
“Now you march upstairs and take a shower, and I’ll make myself a drink,” she said. “We’re going to have hot boiled lobster. Aunt Molly sent down a bushel this morning, and you’ll have to help us eat them. Eddie has to go to the doctor after dinner, and you can go home whenever you like.”
He went upstairs and did as he was told. When he had changed and come down, she was in the living room with a drink, and they drove over to her house in separate cars. They dined by candlelight off a table in the garden, and, washed and in a clean duck suit, he found himself contented with the role he had so recently and so passionately abdicated. It was not a romantic lead, but it had some subtle prominence. After dinner, Eddie excused himself and went off to see his psychiatrist, as he did three nights each week. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen anyone,” Doris said. “I don’t suppose you know the gossip.”
“I really haven’t seen anyone.”
“I know. I’ve heard you practicing the piano. Well, Lois Spinner is suing Frank, and suing the buttons off him.”
“Why?”
“Well, he’s been carrying on with this disgusting slut, a perfectly disgusting woman. His older son, Ralph?he’s a marvelous boy?saw them together in a restaurant. They were feeding each other. None of his children want to see him again.”
“Men have had mistresses before,” he said tentatively.
“Adultery is a mortal sin,” she said gaily, “and was punished in many societies with death.”
“Do you feel this strongly about divorce?”
“Oh, he had no intention of marrying the pig. He simply thought he could play his dirty games, humiliate, disgrace, and wound his family and return to their affections when he got bored. The divorce was not his idea. He’s begged Lois not to divorce him. I believe he’s threatened to kill himself.”
“I’ve known men,” he said, “to divide their attentions between a mistress and a wife.”
“I daresay you’ve never known it to be done successfully,” she said.
The fell truth in this had never quite appeared to him. “Adultery is a commonplace,” he said. “It is the subject of most of our literature, most of our plays, our movies. Popular songs are written about it.”
“You wouldn’t want to confuse your life with a French farce, would you?”
The authority with which she spoke astonished him. Here was the irresistibility of the lawful world, the varsity team, the best club. Suddenly, the image of Mrs. Zagreb’s bedroom, whose bleakness had seemed to him so poignant, returned to him in an unsavory light. He remembered that the window curtains were torn and that those hands that had so praised him were coarse and stubby. The promiscuity that he had thought to be the wellspring of her pureness now seemed to be an incurable illness. The kindnesses she had showed him seemed perverse and disgusting. She had groveled before his nakedness. Sitting in the summer night, in his clean clothes, he thought of Mrs. Estabrook, serene and refreshed, leading her four intelligent and handsome children across some gallery in his head. Adultery was the raw material of farce, popular music, madness, and self-destruction.
“It was terribly nice of you to have had me,” he said. “And now I think I’ll run along. I’ll practice the piano before I go to bed.”
“I’ll listen,” said Doris. “I can hear it quite clearly across the garden.”
The telephone was ringing when he came in. “I’m alone,” said Mrs. Zagreb, “and I thought you might like a drink.” He was there in a few minutes, went once more to the bottom of the sea, into that stupendous timelessness, secured against the pain of living. But, when it was time to go, he said that he could not see her again. “That’s perfectly all right,” she said. And then, “Did anyone ever fall in love with you?”
“Yes,” he said, “once. It was a couple of years ago. I had to go out to Indianapolis to set up a training schedule, and I had to stay with these people?it was part of the job?and there was this terribly nice woman, and every time she saw me she’d start crying. She cried at breakfast. She cried all through cocktails and dinner. It was awful. I had to move to a hotel, and naturally, I couldn’t ever tell anyone.”
“Good night,” she said, “good night and goodbye.”
“Good night, my love,” he said, “good night and goodbye.”
His wife called the next night while he was setting up the telescope. Oh, what excitement! They were driving down the next day. His daughter was going to announce her engagement to Frank Emmet. They wanted to be married before Christmas. Photographs had to be taken, announcements sent to the papers, a tent must be rented, wine ordered, et cetera. And his son had won the sailboat races on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. “Good night, my darling,” his wife said, and he fell into a chair, profoundly gratified at this requital of so many of his aspirations. He loved his daughter, he liked Frank Emmet, he even liked Frank Emmet’s parents, who
