“Changed your what?” said Mrs. Givings, frowning fearfully into the black perforations of her telephone. She was nearing the end of a bleak and very trying day, the whole afternoon of which had been spent at Greenacres—first sitting for unendurable lengths of time on various benches in the waxed and disinfected corridor, waiting for an appointment with John’s doctor, then sitting in wretched politeness beside the doctor’s desk while he told her that John’s behavior in the past several weeks had been “not very encouraging, I’m afraid,” and that “I think we’d better call a halt to these outings of his for a while, say five or six weeks.”
“But he’s been perfectly fine with us,” she had lied. “That’s what I was going to tell you. Oh, things did get a little out of hand this last time, as I said, but in general he’s seemed very relaxed. Very cheerful.”
“Yes. Unfortunately, we can only proceed on the basis of our own, ah, our own observations here in the ward. Tell me, what does his attitude seem to be at the conclusion of the visits? How does he seem to feel about coming back to the hospital each time?”
“He couldn’t be sweeter about it. Really, Doctor, he’s just as willing and cooperative as a lamb.”
“Yes.” And the doctor had fingered his loathsome tie clasp. “Well, actually, you see, it would probably be a healthier sign if he showed some reluctance. Let’s say”—he frowned at his calendar—“let’s say at least until the first Sunday in September. Then we might try again.”
He might as well have said never. By the first Sunday in September, in all probability, the Wheelers would be on their way to the other side of the world. Now, feeling enormously tired, she had called the Wheelers to cancel the next date they had made—she would have to find other excuses for the other Sundays from now on—and April Wheeler, whose voice sounded small and very far away, was trying to tell her that something was changed. Why did everything always change, when all you wanted, all you had ever humbly asked of whatever God there might be, was that certain things be allowed to remain the same?
“Changed your what?…” Then all at once Mrs. Givings was aware of the blood in her veins. “…Oh, changed your plans. Oh, then you’re not ready to sell…” and her pencil began to draw a row of black, five-pointed stars across the top of her scratch pad—to draw them with such furious pressure that their joyful shapes were embossed on all the pages underneath. “Oh, I am so glad to hear that, April. Really, this is the best news I’ve had in I don’t know how long. So you’ll be staying here with us, then…” She was afraid she might begin to cry; but luckily April was apologizing now for “all the trouble you’ve gone to about putting the house on the market,” which allowed her to retreat into the protection of a cool, tolerant businesswoman’s chuckle. “Oh, no, please don’t mention that. Really, it’s been no trouble at all…. All right, then…Fine, then, April…Good. We’ll be in touch.”
When she put the receiver back it was as if she were returning a rare and exquisite jewel to its velvet case.
A bad dream or a shrill bird, or both, woke him much too early in the morning and filled him with a sense of dread—a feeling that his next breath and blink of wakefulness would recall him to the knowledge of a grief, a burden of bad news from yesterday that sleep had only temporarily eased. It took him at least a minute to remember that it was good news, not bad: yesterday had been the last of the first week in August. The deadline had come and gone. The debate was over, and he had won.
He raised himself on one elbow to look at her in the blue light—she was turned away from him with her face hidden under a tangle of hair—and nestled close to her back with his arm around her. He arranged his face in a smile of contentment and his limbs in an attitude of total peace, but it didn’t work. Half an hour later he was still awake, wanting a cigarette and watching the sky turn to morning.
The peculiar thing was that in the past week or so they hadn’t mentioned it. Each afternoon he had come home ready to intercept whatever last-minute points of argument she might raise—he had even cut down on his drinking, so that his head would be clear for discussion—but each evening they had either talked of other things or hadn’t talked at all. Last night she had set up the ironing board in front of the television set and worked there, glancing up every few seconds from the steaming whisk and glide of the iron to peer, frowning, at whatever mottled image was cavorting on the screen.
What do you want to talk for? her profile seemed to be saying, in reply to his uneasy gaze from across the room. What is there to talk about? Haven’t we done enough talking?
When she turned off the television and folded up the ironing board at last, he went over and touched her arm.
“You know what this is?”
“What what is? What do you mean?”
“Today. It’s the last day of the—you know. If you’d gone ahead with that business, this would’ve been your last day for doing it.”
“Oh. Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
He patted her shoulder, feeling clumsy. “No regrets?”
“Well,” she said, “I guess I’d better not have any, had I? Be a little late for them now, wouldn’t it?” She carried the ironing board awkwardly away, one of its legs dangling, and she was all the way to the kitchen door before it occurred to him to help her. He sprang to her side.
“Here, let me take that.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
And in bed, without a word, they made a sensible, temperate, mature kind of love. The last thing he said before falling asleep was, “Listen. We’re going to be all right.”
“I hope so,” she whispered. “I hope so; very much.”
Then he had slept, and now he was awake.
He got up and went padding through the silent house. The kitchen was alight with all the colors of the sunrise—it was a beautiful morning—and the calendar had lost its power. There it hung, through the courtesy of A. J. Stolper and Sons, a document useful only in the paying of bills and the making of dental appointments. Days and weeks could pass now without anyone’s caring; a month might vanish before anyone thought to tear away the page for the month before.
Franklin H. Wheeler poured himself a glass of ice-cold orange juice, the color of the sun, and sipped it slowly at the kitchen table, afraid it would sicken him to take it all at once. He had won but he didn’t feel like a winner. He had successfully righted the course of his life but he felt himself more than ever a victim of the world’s indifference. It didn’t seem fair.
Only very gradually, there at the table, was he able to sort out and identify what it was that had haunted him on waking, that had threatened to make him gag on his orange juice and now prevented his enjoyment of the brilliant grass and trees and sky beyond the window.
It was that he was going to have another child, and he wasn’t at all sure that he wanted one.
“Knowing what you’ve got, comma,” said the living human voice in the playback of the Dictaphone, “knowing what you need, comma, knowing what you can do without, dash. That’s inventory control.
“Paragraph…”
It was suddenly past the middle of August, and two weeks had elapsed since his last talk with Pollock, or possibly three; time, now that he’d overcome the need to measure and apportion it, had again begun to slip away from him. “You mean to say it’s Friday already?” he was apt to demand on what he’d thought was Tuesday or Wednesday, and it wasn’t until lunchtime today, when he passed a store window featuring a display of autumn leaves and the words BACK TO SCHOOL, that he realized the summer was over. Very soon now it would be time for topcoats, and then it would be Christmas.
“The main thing I have to do now,” he had recently explained to April, “is to finish this Speaking-of series. I mean I can’t very well expect to talk money with him until I’ve done that, can I?”
“No; I suppose not. You know best.”
“Well, I can’t. I mean we can’t expect any miraculous changes overnight in a thing like this; it’s the kind of a thing th
at can’t be rushed.”
“Do I seem to be rushing you? Really, Frank; how many ways can I say it? It’s entirely up to you.”
“I know,” he said. “I know, of course I know that. Anyway, I do want to get the damn series done as soon as possible. I’ll probably stay in late a couple of nights this week to work on it.”
And he’d taken to staying in late nearly every night since then. He rather enjoyed having dinner alone in town and taking walks through the city at evening before catching the late train. It gave him a pleasant sense of independence, of freedom from the commuter’s round; and besides, it seemed a suitable practice for the new, mature, non-sentimental kind of marriage that was evidently going to be their way from now on.
The only trouble was that this second Speaking-of piece had turned out to be much harder than the first. He had finished it twice now, and each time had discovered gaping errors of logic or emphasis that seemed to demand a total revision.
The office clock read five-forty-five as he listened to the playback of his third and final revision, and the silence beyond his cubicle proved that even the last and most drearily conscientious people on the Fifteenth Floor had gone home; soon the platoons of scrubwomen would arrive with mops and buckets. When the recording had droned to its conclusion he felt nicely exhilarated. It wasn’t very good, but it would do. Now he could take off uptown and have a couple of drinks before dinner.
He was in the act of leaning over to shut off the machine when the click, click, click of a woman’s heels came delicately up the aisle outside. He knew at once that it was Maureen Grube, that she had purposely stayed late in order to be alone with him, and that he was going to take her out tonight. It seemed important not to look openly into the aisle as she passed; instead he remained hunched over the Dictaphone, peeking at the doorway from cover. It was Maureen, all right; the quick glimpse he caught of her was more than enough to confirm that. It was enough to show him that an inch of petticoat was switching nicely through a vent in the hem of her skirt with every step and that her face, as subtly averted as his own, had not quite dared to glance in at him.
Her footsteps receded, and as he waited confidently for their return he reset the machine to the “start” position and leaned back in his chair to listen. That way he could be staring frankly into the aisle, yet quite legitimately occupied with business, when she came by again.
“Copy for Veritype,” the Dictaphone said. “Title: Speaking of Inventory Control, parenthesis, revision three. Paragraph. Knowing what you’ve got, comma, knowing what you need, comma, knowing what you can do without, dash. That’s—”
“Oh.” She had stopped directly in his line of vision, and her careful expression of surprise was somewhat vitiated by the deep, permanent-looking blush that had suffused her face and neck. “Hello, Frank. Working late?”
He shut off the machine and got slowly to his feet, moving toward her with the loose, almost sleepy gait of a man who knows exactly what he’s doing.
“Hi,” he said.
THREE
EVERY FRIDAY and Saturday night, “For Your Dancing Pleasure,” the Steve Kovick Quartet played at Vito’s Log Cabin, on Route Twelve, and on those two nights (as Steve himself liked to say, winking over the rim of his rye-and-ginger) the joint really jumped.
Piano, bass, tenor sax and drums, they prided themselves on versatility. They could play anything, in any style you wanted to name, and to judge from the delight that swam in their eyes they had no idea of what inferior musicians they were. In the three supporting members of the Quartet this lack of discernment could be excused on the grounds of inexperience or amateurism or both, but it was harder to condone in their leader, who played the drums. A thick, blunt, blue-jawed man, getting on for forty now, he had been a professional for twenty years without ever quite learning his craft. Artistically awakened and nourished by the early recordings and movies of Gene Krupa, he had spent the only happy hours of his youth in a trance of hero-worshiping imitation—first intently slapping telephone books and overturned dishpans, later using a real set of drums in the sweat and liniment smells of the high-school gym—until one June night in his senior year when the rest of the band stopped playing, the hundreds of couples stood still, and Steve Kovick felt the weight of all their rapture on his wagging, chewing head while he beat it out for three solid minutes. But the splendid crash of cymbals with which he ended that performance marked the pinnacle and ruin of his talent. He would never drum that well again, he would never again kindle that much admiration, nor would he ever again lose his frantic grip on the conviction that he was great and getting better all the time. Even now, at a rundown beer-and-pizza joint like Vito’s Log Cabin, there was a negligent grandeur in the way he took the stand, the way he frowned over the arrangement of sticks and brushes and hi-hat cymbals and then peered out, beetle-browed, to ask if the spotlight could be adjusted a fraction of an inch before he settled down; and there was elaborate condescension in the way he whisked and thumped through preliminary fox trots or handled the gourds for Latin-American interludes; anyone could tell he was only marking time, waiting for the moment when he could tell the boys to cut loose on one of the old-time Benny Goodman jump numbers.
Only then, once or twice an hour, did he give himself wholly to his work. Socking the bass drum as if to box the ears of every customer in the house, doing his damnedest on snare and tom-tom, he would take off in a triumph of misplaced virtuosity that went relentlessly on and on until it drenched his hair with sweat and left him weak and happy as a child.
The patrons of the Log Cabin on dance nights were mostly high-school seniors (it was the corniest band in the world but the only live music for miles around; besides, there wasn’t any cover and they’d serve you without proof of age and the big parking lot was nice and dark) and a smattering of local storekeepers and contractors who sat in a state of constant laughter with their arms around their wives, remarking on how young it made them feel to watch these kids enjoying themselves. There was an occasional tough element, too, boys in black leather jackets and boots who slouched in the urine-smelling corner near the men’s room with their thumbs in their jeans, watching the girls with menacingly narrow eyes and taking repeated trips to the toilet to comb and recomb their hair; and there were the regulars, lonely and middle-aged and apparently homeless, the single or inadequately married people who came to the Log Cabin every night, music or not, to drink and sentimentalize under the fly-blown, joke-hung mirror of its rustic bar.
Not infrequently, over the past two years, the dance night crowd had included a party of four intensely humorous young adults who belonged to no discernible group at all: the Campbells and the Wheelers. Frank had discovered the place soon after moving to the country—had discovered it in search of drunkenness one night after a quarrel with his wife, and been quick to bring her back for dancing as soon as things were happier.
“You people ever been to the Log Cabin?” he had asked the Campbells early in their acquaintance, and April had said, “Oh no, darling; they’d hate it. It’s terrible.” The Campbells had looked from one to the other of their faces with uncertain smiles, ready to hate it or love it or espouse whatever other opinion of it might please the Wheelers most.
“No, I don’t think they’d hate it,” Frank had insisted. “I bet they’d like it. It takes a special kind of taste, is all. I mean the thing about the Log Cabin, you see,” he explained to them at last, “is that it’s so awful it’s kind of nice.”
At first, through the spring and summer of 1953, the four of them had come here only once in a while, as a kind of comic relief from more ambitious forms of entertainment; but by the following summer they had fallen into it like a cheap, bad habit, and it was their awareness of this particular degeneration, as much as any other, that had made the idea of the Laurel Players uncommonly attractive last winter. When The Petrified Forest went into rehearsal their attendance at the Log Cabin dwindled sharply (there were other, quieter places to stop for drink
s on the way home from the school), and in the long uneasy time since the failure of the play they had not come here at all—almost as if to do so would have constituted an admission of moral defeat.
But “What the hell,” Frank had said this evening, after every conversational attempt in the Campbells’ living room had petered out and died, “why don’t we all break down and go to the Log Cabin?”
And here they were, a quiet foursome ordering round after round of drinks, getting up and coupling off to dance, coming back and sitting silent under the blast of the jump numbers. But for all its awkwardness the evening was oddly free of tension, or so at least it seemed to Frank. April was as aloof and enigmatic, as far away from the party as she’d ever been in the worst of the old days, but the difference was that now he refused to worry about it. In the old days he might have talked and laughed himself sick trying to win an affectionate smile from her, or trying by sheer vivacity to make up for her rudeness to the Campbells (because that was what it did amount to, sitting there like some long-necked, heavy-lidded queen among commoners—plain damn rudeness); instead he was content to relax in his chair, one hand lightly tapping the table to Steve Kovick’s beat, and perform the minimal pleasantries while thinking his own thoughts.
Was his wife unhappy? That was unfortunate, but it was, after all, her problem. He had a few problems too. This crisp way of thinking, unencumbered by guilt or confusion, was as new and as comfortable as his lightweight autumn suit (a wool gabardine in a pleasingly dark shade of tan, a younger and more tasteful, junior-executive version of the suit Bart Pollock wore). The resumption of the business with Maureen had helped him toward a renewal of self-esteem, so that the face he saw in passing mirrors these days gave him back a level, unembarrassed glance. It was hardly a hero’s face but neither was it a self-pitying boy’s or a wretchedly anxious husband’s; it was the steady, controlled face of a man with a few things on his mind, and he rather liked it. The business with Maureen would have to be brought to a graceful conclusion soon—it had served its purpose—but in the meantime he felt he was entitled to savor it. That, in fact, was what he was doing now, allowing the erotic thump of Steve Kovick’s tom-tom to remind him of her hips, gazing wryly off into the swirl of dancers as he gave in to voluptuous memories.