Girl on the Best Seller List (3 page)

• • •

She had worked hard on that novel. No one knew that better than Milo. She had sat at that typewriter like someone driven, day after day, and sometimes far into the early morning.

“I’ll show them,” she would say.

“Show them what, Glo?”

He needn’t have asked. He had seen Fern Fulton’s condescending smiles directed at Glo at parties, seen them and resented them, and yet, how many times had he himself flinched inwardly when Glo said something like “Oh, sperry-grass, with that old Dutch sauce Holland days,” at a dinner when asparagus was served, or “Where’s the wash rag and soap,” when a finger bowl was placed before her. And could he ever forget that afternoon at the Cayuta Country Club when Min Stewart had bent over to retrieve a glove she had dropped and Gloria had goosed her? Min Stewart, Cayuta’s formidable septuagenarian social lioness…. It was no mystery to anyone why Min had kept Glo out of the Cayuta Ladies Birthday Club. There was not a soul in Cayuta who believed Min’s excuse that there were already too many members in the club whose birthdays were in January. Perhaps Glo’s major forte was her devastating ability to choose the most inappropriate, unpardonable thing to do or say at a social gathering. Milo still blushed to recall the chicken-in-the-pot supper at Second Presbyterian church, when Glo had excused herself during the soup course with the announcement: “When you gotta go, you gotta go.” She had followed that vulgarity by glancing across the table at Jay Mannerheim, Cayuta’s new psychoanalyst, and saying, “I suppose my toilet training was lousy!”

“I’ll show them I’m somebody,” Glo had vowed. “I’ll write a book that’ll make their ears burn!”

While Gloria pounded the typewriter, Milo did another sculpture. It was of Saint Agatha, patron saint of the arts, and Milo took exceptional care with this one. He hoped it would be placed at the other end of their bureau in the bedroom, opposite Saint Lucy. When he presented it to Glo, she said, “You’d like me to be a martyr, wouldn’t you, Milo? You’d like it if I was an old piece of soap that you could coat with plastic and put on the shelf beside the other ones? Saint Agatha, huh?” she had snickered, and then snapped the sculpture in half, leaving it there on the cardtable where she worked, beside the ashtray of cigarette butts and the wads and wads of wrinkled typing paper.

• • •

That was the night Milo got that splitting headache, the first one he had ever had in his life. It was the same night he had accidentally spilled the scalding tea on Glo, after he had prepared it to dissolve the aspirins faster and tripped carrying it across to his chair.

He supposed, too, it was the night he had first thought of his plot for revenge. Those headaches came more and more frequently after that, and each time the plot thickened. It was the only relief for the pain….

• • •

Glancing down at the dirty breakfast dishes stacked in the sink that morning, Milo Wealdon sighed. He raised his fingers to his lips, and sucked in smoke from his near-spent morning cigarette. Revenge was a strange word for a man like Milo to have in his vocabulary. It was as unlikely as “hate,” or “greed,” or “lust,” or “evil.” Words like that had always been meaningless to him, applicable only to situations he was unconnected with. Yet today, the word revenge loomed larger than any other. Today was the day, wasn’t it? Again, he sighed.

At thirty-six he was in excellent form. His long body was strong and hard and agile. He was proud of the fact that he looked the way an instructor in Physical Education ought to look and usually didn’t. It was perhaps the only conceit he had left, his physique, and it played no small part in his revenge. At one time he had entertained the thought that his curly brown hair, his pug nose, and his round brown eyes lent his countenance the same youthful handsomeness his body exhibited, but Gloria had called a halt on that fantasy. In her novel she had described him as
A Hercules from the neck down, and a runny-nosed bull dog from the neck up, with eyes as lusterless as the eyes of a fish on the end of a hook.

• • •

There was an expression of tired irritation on Milo’s face, suddenly aggravated by the fact that he realized he was running his tongue along the inside of his lower lip, the same way the stupid, weak-willed main character in Gloria’s novel always did whenever
he
was angry; the same way Milo always did too, though he had not been aware of it until
Population 12,360
was published. Now, he supposed, more than a million other people were aware of it as well. It had not helped matters any that Glo had named the numbskull hero Miles, or that she had dedicated her novel:

TO MY HUSBAND, MILO: A JUST REWARD

• • •

As the phone rang, and Milo went to answer it, he displaced his anger and indignation at what Gloria had done to him by deciding for the umpteenth time that whether or not
he
deserved to have
his
seams split open with a razor so that the sawdust all came spilling out, certainly the rest of the people in Cayuta, New York, did not deserve it! Glo had chosen a particularly vitriolic way of “showing” them; one that made her all the more a maverick in everyone’s eyes.

When he lifted the phone from its cradle, he spent the last of his rancor by barking his greeting.

There was a pause. Then Milo recognized Stanley Secora’s voice.

• • •

“Gee, Mr. Wealdon, I’m sorry to bother you. I — I just wondered if it would be okay for me to drop by this afternoon. I mean, if
Mrs.
Wealdon is going to be home.”

• • •

Immediately Milo felt obliged to sound enormously pleased that Stanley had called. It was partly because the timid and shy invariably reacted on him in such a way that he found himself duty-bound to make them feel wanted. But also, Milo felt this way toward Stanley because he knew the boy had developed an immense crush on Gloria, with the resulting error that Stanley believed he was destined to be a writer himself.

Vaguely, Glo was aware of him. Summers, Stanley cut the lawn sometimes, or helped put up the storm windows in the late fall. At odd intervals, he had helped Milo build compost piles for the lawn, plant Japanese Quince along the side yard, and paint the garage. Except for seeing him those times, and hearing from Milo of Stanley’s pathetic efforts in his Thursday evening tumbling class, Gloria had little reason at all to be aware of Stanley until her book was published.

Then, suddenly, Stanley began to talk of nothing else, of no one else. “Mrs. Wealdon” became his idol. He began to try to extract all sorts of miscellaneous information about her from Milo. He wondered about everything, from her preference in sweets to how many hours sleep a night she needed.

• • •

Once, during the tumbling class, Milo had snapped at him: “She likes coconut ice and she sleeps seven hours a night, Secora, but what the devil has any of that got to do with
you!”

After that, Stanley stopped coming to Milo’s class. He called once to announce that he was writing a novel, and would like “Mrs. Wealdon” to read it when she returned from New York. Milo felt so sorry he had lost his temper with the boy that he very graciously suggested Stanley write her, assuring him Glo would be tremendously interested in his work.

• • •

By telephone, Milo persuaded Gloria to drop Secora a post card, telling him to call her after the 20th of May, when she would be back in Cayuta.

It was now the 27th of May. Stanley had called eight times.

Milo said, “I’m delighted that you called. You know, we miss you at tumbling class.”

There had never been anyone more inept at the sport or more ill-suited to it than the dumpy, bespectacled stock clerk. Yet, in the beginning, Milo had never had a more eager pupil. He could not but admire Secora’s spirit. It wanted to soar, but it was weighed down; it was like a lily whose underground suckers imprisoned it.

• • •

Stanley said, “I’m working most of the time on my novel, Mr. Wealdon. Mrs. Wealdon sure inspired me. I mean, if
she
can write one of these best sellers, than I guess — ” He paused; then he began to stutter. “I — I d-d-didn’t mean it th-th-that way, Mr. Wealdon, I m-meant — ”

Milo said, “I know what you meant, fellow.”

“I meant she’s an inspiration.”

“Yes,” Milo said, “I know.”

He glanced down at the telephone pad on the table. The date was circled on Gloria’s engagement calendar. Written across the page in large, triumphant letters, were three words:

PITTS ARRIVES TONIGHT.

Milo had not yet met Gloria’s literary agent, but already he hated him. Hate, another once-remote word that was now close, suffocatingly close.

“I told Mrs. Wealdon Saturdays were my day off,” Stanley continued, “and she said I should drop by this afternoon. You have the track meet and all, so I wouldn’t be horning in on your time, would I, Mr. Wealdon?”

Horning in on
his
time. Milo wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t — not any more.

In smaller scribbling mid-way down the same page on the calendar Milo read:
Lunch with Min Stewart! Hotel. 12:30.

He ran his finger across the words, and put his thumb down hard on the exclamation point, as though squashing a bug.

He said, “If I were you, Stanley, I’d drop by a little earlier. Before noon. Mrs. Wealdon isn’t here now, but I know she’ll be back in time to change her clothes.”

If Secora were to show up before she could get downtown for her luncheon date with Min Stewart, Glo would have to give him a little time.

“You sure it’s all right, Mr. Wealdon? I don’t want to horn in on you, and I know she said her agent was coming from New York City later today.”

“You won’t be horning in, Stanley. And her agent won’t be here until tonight.”

Again, Milo felt the fury pulse through him. It was Pitts this and Pitts that and Pitts hung the moon, ever since Gloria had met her agent.

He said, “Come over about eleven-forty-five, Stanley.”

“Thanks, Mr. Wealdon,” Secora said; and then he said, “Oh, and Mr. Wealdon … you’re doing all right too, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?” Milo’s voice was taut, defensive. For the craziest moment he found himself thinking of the new dietician at the high school, Miss Shagland. His ears flushed scarlet, and he felt the same inner punch to his emotions he might have felt had he been caught with Roberta Shagland
in flagrante delicto.

“I mean about the team winning Wednesday,” Secora said uncertainly. “I mean, that was great coaching, Mr. Wealdon.
That’s
hard work too.”

After Milo hung up, he felt absurd. Roberta Shagland hardly knew he existed, he decided. But that wasn’t true either. For four days in a row he had carried her tray in the high school cafeteria, hadn’t he? She giggled a lot, too, at things he said. Still, that was no sign she even thought about him; not long thoughts. She was too shy. She had those enormous ankles. Rudy Unger, the science teacher, called her “piano legs.” The first time Milo heard him say it, he felt like knocking him down and kicking in his teeth. What control did a woman have over her ankles.

• • •

Milo was sick and tired of his own mind. It was as though he were caught up in Gloria’s winds, being propelled by them down some strange bright streets upon which he was destined to become the silly soul he had lately seemed more and more on the verge of being. Nights, he had those nightmares of being caught naked in the lobby of the Cayuta Hotel — nights when he could sleep at all, that is. And during the day? His headaches, and the plan — the plan for revenge.

Why couldn’t he just let it be, let Glo go on having her affair with this Pitts? What did it matter to him? What did Miss Shagland matter to him, for that matter? She wanted no part of him. Did anything matter to him ….

He thought of his geraniums, of the way the leaves were curling from the inside. That meant cyclamen mites. He would have to use a good nicotine spray on them, with some Blackleaf in it. Last year the cyclamen mites had eaten away at his chrysanthemums; he was not going to let them get the geraniums.

• • •

Milo sighed again, and it was as though anything and everything he did was a reminder of the book on the best-seller list. For “Miles” was always sighing too: “…
endlessly sighing away his existence, in hallways by coat racks, on gravel driveways near garages, in anterooms and elevators, down all the dreary gray-skyed streets, sighing, sighing, sighing.”

Glancing down again at the table where the telephone rested, Milo saw Gloria’s clipboard under her calendar. Attached to it were the yellow scratch sheets on which she wrote her notes. He took up the clipboard and began to read:

Under “four” there was a list:

Milo Wealdon tossed the clipboard back on the telephone table.

He ran his tongue along the inside of his lower lip. Then he felt the sudden slight beating near his temples, saw before him the bright, pulsating zigzag line. It was the fuzzy warning of another migraine on its way.