I called Grace Parlapiano the next day, and went to their house after work. She was pale and seemed unhappy. I said that I had talked with Boobee. “Anthony has been very difficult,” she said, “and I am thinking seriously of getting a divorce or at least a legal separation. I happen to have rather a good voice, but he seems to feel that I’ve produced this fact out of spite and in order to humiliate him. He claims that I’m spoiled and greedy. This is, after all, the only house in the neighborhood that doesn’t have wall-to-wall carpeting, but when I had a man come to give me an estimate on carpeting, Anthony lost his temper. He completely lost his temper. I know that Latins are emotional?everyone told me this before I married?but when Boobee loses his temper it’s really frightening.”
“Boobee loves you,” I said.
“Anthony is very narrow-minded,” she said. “I sometimes think he married too late in life. For instance I suggested that we join the country club. He could learn to play golf, and you know how important golf is in business. He could make a great many advantageous business connections if we joined the club, but he thinks this is unreasonable of me. He doesn’t know how to dance, but when I suggested that he take dancing lessons he thought me unreasonable. I don’t complain, I really don’t. I don’t, for instance, have a fur coat and I’ve never asked for one, and you know perfectly well that I’m the only woman in the neighborhood who doesn’t have a fur coat.”
I ended the interview clumsily, and on that note of spiritual humbug we bring to the marital difficulties of our friends. My words were useless, of course, and things got no better. I happened to know, because Boobee kept me informed on the train every morning. He did not understand that men in America do not complain about their wives, and it was a vast and painful misunderstanding. He came up to me at the station one morning and said, “You are wrong. You are very wrong. That night when I told you she had a madness, you told me it was nothing. Now listen! She is buying a grand piano, and she is hiring a singing coach. She is doing this out of spitefulness. Now do you believe that she is mad?”
“Grace is not mad,” I said. “There is nothing wrong with the fact that she likes to sing. You’ve got to understand that her desire for a career is not spiteful. It is shared by almost every woman in the neighborhood. Margaret is working with a dramatic coach in New York three days a week and I don’t consider her spiteful or insane.”
“American men have no character,” he said. “They are commercial and banal.”
I would have hit him then, but he turned and walked away. This was evidently the end of our friendship, and I was tremendously relieved, because his accounts of Grace’s madness had come to be a harrowing bore and there seemed to be no hope of changing or illuminating his point of view. He left me alone for two weeks or longer, and then he approached me again one morning. His face was dark, his nose was enlarged, his manner was definitely unfriendly. He spoke in English. “Now you will be agreeing with me,” he said, “when I am telling you what she is doing. Now you will be seeing that there is no end to her spitefulness.” He sighed; he whistled through his teeth. “She is for having a concert!” he exclaimed and turned away.
A few days later, we received an invitation to hear Grace sing at the Aboleens’. Now, Mrs. Aboleen is the muse of our province. Through her brother, the novelist W. H. Towers, she has some literary connections, and through the bounty of her husband?a successful dental surgeon?she has a large collection of paintings. On her walls you read Dufy, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque, but the pictures on which these signatures appear are very bad, and Mrs. Aboleen is a surprisingly jealous muse. Any other woman in the neighborhood with similar inclinations is thought to be a vulgar usurper. The paintings, of course, are her paintings, but when a poet comes to spend a weekend at the Aboleens’ he becomes her poet. She may display him, urge him to perform, and let you shake his hand, but if you come too close to him or talk with him for more than a minute or two she will cut in with an avid possessiveness, a kind of anger, as if she had caught you pocketing the table silver. Grace had become, I suppose, her princess. The concert was on a Sunday afternoon, a lovely day, and I went bitterly. This may have colored my judgment of Grace’s performance, but everybody else said it was terrible. She sang a dozen songs, mostly in English, mostly arch and about love. Boobee’s despondent sighs could be heard between the songs, and I knew he was thinking that her abysmal spitefulness had invented the whole scene?the folding chairs, the vases of flowers, the maids waiting to pass tea. He was polite enough when the concert ended, but his nose seemed enormous.
I didn’t see him again for some time, and then I read one evening in the local paper that Marcantonio Parlapiano had been injured in an automobile accident on Route 67 and was recovering at the Platner Memorial Hospital. I went there at once. When I asked the nurse on his floor where I could find him, she said gaily, “Oh, you want to see Tony? Poor old Tony. Tony no speaka da English.”
He was in a room with two other patients. He had broken a leg, he looked dreadful, and there were tears in his eyes. I asked him when he would be allowed to go home. “To Grace?” he asked. “Never. I am never going back. Her father and mother are with her now. They are arranging a legal separation. I am going to Verona. I am taking the Colombo on the twenty-seventh.” He sobbed. “You know what she is asking me?” he said.
“No, Boobee. What did she ask you?”
“She is asking me to change my name.” He began to cry.
I saw him off on the Colombo, more because I like ships and sailings than because of the depth of our friendship, and I never saw him again. The last of my story has no more relevance than the wall in Verona, but when it happened I was reminded of Boobee, and so I’ll put it down. It was in a little town called Adrianapolis, about sixty miles from Yalta on the dry side of the Crimean Mountains. I had come over from the coast in a cab and was waiting for a plane to Moscow when I met another American. We were both, naturally, very happy to encounter someone who spoke English, and we went to the dining room and ordered a bottle of vodka. He was working as an engineer in a chemical-fertilizer plant in the mountains and was on his way back to the States for a six weeks’ vacation. We had a table by a window overlooking the airfield, where there was very little activity. At home it would have passed for one of those private airfields you find in the suburbs, mostly used by charter flights. There was a public address system, and a young woman with a very pure and musical voice was making announcements in Russian. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but I suppose she was asking Igor Vassilyevitch Kryukov to please report to the Aeroflot ticket counter.
“That reminds me of my wife,” my friend said. “The voice. I’m divorced now, but I was married five years to this girl. She was everything you could ask for. Beautiful, sexy, intelligent, loving, a great cook?she even had some money. She had planned to be an actress, but when this didn’t work out she wasn’t bitter or disappointed or
