So Little Time (65 page)

It was like a stage set again. There he was in his slacks and his Normandy shirt, a temperamental playwright racking his brains, lighting a straight-stemmed pipe. No doubt he was looking quizzical and interesting as he lighted his pipe. Marianna, with her head upon the pillows of the wicker chaise longue, looked exactly as she should have looked, affectionate and anxious and amused.

“Darling,” Marianna said.

“What?” he answered.

“What's it about?”

“It's about a boy and a girl in a brownstone house in New York,” he said.

“When are you going to read it to me?” she asked.

Marianna and the room were all in perfect focus. He was familiar with every intonation of her voice, and yet it was not as definite, for instance, as Madge's voice. He had to give it more attention and to consider more carefully what she said. She was there, and he was there, but she was not as actual as Madge who was not there. It had something to do with time.

“I've told you, dear,” he said: “when I've finished with it. When it's all here.”

“Won't you read some now?” she asked. “Darling, it might help you. You're not working now.”

“No,” he said, “not now.”

“Why not?” she asked.

And then the artificiality was gone and he was surprised that he told her the truth.

“Dear, because I'm afraid,” he said. “I don't like to be a coward, but I'm afraid.”

“Why darling,” she said, “what are you afraid of?”

The best thing about it all was that she was like his conscience in a way. He could tell her anything, and she always listened.

“You see,” he said, “it's all I've got. It's all the justification—all that I can give you. If it isn't good—and I'll know and you'll know when I read it—there won't be any reason for you or me, or any of this at all. It will mean I haven't anything to offer you. It will all be over, dear. That's what I mean by time.”

He had not put it clearly, but he knew she understood him. He had made himself entirely defenseless, but he did not mind.

“Darling,” she answered, “you don't have to give me anything.”

“Oh, yes I do,” he said, “if I haven't anything to give—”

“Darling,” she said, “I wish you'd read it now.”

“No,” he said, “not now.”

“Darling,” she said, “what did you mean, having a piece of time, and doing something which you should have done a while before?”

“I don't know exactly,” he said, “that's the trouble, dear. You can see yourself in the mirror but your face is flat. You can hear your voice in your ears, but it's not the way it sounds to anybody else. I can see you and hear you. You can see me and hear me; but we can't see ourselves.”

“That's why I love you,” she said, “because you say things like that. Are you going to work any more?”

“No,” he said, “not now,” and he began pacing from the fireplace to the table and back again.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“I was thinking about my brother Alf,” he said. “He called on me, and I ought to look him up. He's at San Bernardino.”

“What's he doing there?” Marianna asked.

He was glad to be talking about Alf and not about himself.

“Alf?” he said. “Why, Alf's married someone with an orange grove out at San Bernardino. You ought to see Alf.”

“I'd like to,” she said. “Let's go out and see him.”

“You may not like him,” he answered, “but I'd like to take you there.”

“What are you laughing at?” she asked.

“It's funny,” he told her, “thinking of you and Alf.”

They rode to San Bernardino with the top down in the runabout he had rented. He wanted to drive his car and not her Packard. Marianna had a blue silk handkerchief knotted beneath her chin to keep her hair from blowing. She sat close to him, leaning lightly against his shoulder just as Madge did sometimes, and that proximity, nothing else, made him think of the ride he had taken with Madge down the Post Road, and then over the Merritt Parkway and out into Connecticut, less than a year before.

The houses by the Post Road had been old and tired, the sad remnants of another day, but here, until they reached the flat valley where San Bernardino lay, everything was new. They had passed through miles of small houses all set close together, built for the employees of one of the aircraft companies working on lend-lease aircraft, and on those thousands of planes which the President had ordered. He could see and hear the planes circling overhead. They were drab and camouflaged, but the sound of the motors was familiar and he wished he could try one out—but they would be too hot for him, those planes. He would have lost that co-ordination of hand and eye. You had to be young, very young, to handle them. The air was so clear that he could see the cloud-covered peaks to the east; those “stuffed clouds,” as pilots called them. He could see the blue fields of lupine on the foothills, but already in early May the grass was growing brown, as it always did out there in summer. That atmosphere of drought on the Pacific Coast had always disturbed him. It was not his country and it never would be, no matter how long he remained there.

Its people had come from everywhere—from the Middle West, from New England, from upstate New York, from everywhere. They had come there with their savings to die in the sun, or else they had come to live again and to grow oranges. Most of the valley floor was very green from the square miles of orange groves. Everyone was growing oranges or lemons or grapefruit or tangerines or those new monstrosities called “tangelos,” the juice of which was being dispensed from little booths all along the road, five cents a drink or all you could drink for ten cents. The air was redolent of orange blossoms, but Jeffrey had nothing whatsoever to do with it. It was not his country.

“Darling,” Marianna said, “tell me some more about Alf. Tell me some more about Lime Street.”

He had told her a great deal about Lime Street already, and she was not like Madge who only pretended to like to hear.

“Alf's always stayed just the way he always was,” Jeffrey said. “When you've grown up with someone—did you ever think you can't change that proportion? It's always constant. He always calls me ‘kid.' He'll show off when he sees you. It's like a Sennett Comedy a little—custard pies, a hearty laugh when there isn't anything to laugh about. It makes it a little sad. And then there's another thing about Alf.”

“What?” she asked.

“Money,” he said. “Alf never could learn about money. ‘I'll just telegraph my baby, she'll send ten or twenty, maybe, and I won't have to walk back home.'”

Marianna was too young, and he himself was almost too young to have heard that song, but she was able to catch the mood of it. It went with the sound of the motor and with the sound of the tires on the road.

“Darling,” Marianna said, “I'm your baby.”

“Perhaps,” he answered, “but I've never telegraphed to any baby, dear.”

“Jeffrey,” she said, “you love him, don't you?”

“I wouldn't say so, exactly,” he answered. “He's really a big bastard, dear.”

“Darling,” she asked, “who's his baby, now?”

Marianna had never seemed so near to him. He dropped one hand from the wheel and raised her hand and kissed it. Somehow she belonged to him more than she ever had.

“I haven't seen this new baby,” he said, and he was laughing. “I've had to cope with the other ones, but not this baby. This one—she's a widow. Alf met her playing numbers. Do you remember that song? How did it go? ‘Give me a kiss by the numbers, one, two, three.'”

“That was in the last war, wasn't it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, “the last war.”

“I was ten in the last war,” she said, “that was when we lived in Portland.”

“Did you wear pigtails?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, “two pigtails.”

Then he was telling her about Alf. This new wife, this time, Alf had told him, was the jack pot. You couldn't be wrong always. They had met right at one of those tables in the center of a drugstore at Las Vegas where you could play the number game or buy a thermos jug for the desert, or get a Coca-Cola. It was just the time of the Helldorado at Las Vegas, when they had the beard-growing contest and Gila Monsters in cages on street corners. It was all wide open at Las Vegas, not that everything wasn't always wide open there. Alf said that you ought to be there in Helldorado Week. The only thing that he had seen that gave him more of a laugh was the Poets' Round-up at Sante Fe. The poets' round-up, Alf said, was a sort of rodeo. The master of ceremonies was dressed like a cowboy and he would call out a poet's name and they would open the trap of the pen and out would come a poet and read a poem. They had poets, too, in Las Vegas—poets and pansies, everything, in Las Vegas, and they had the beard-growing contest during Helldorado Week. Alf had been growing one for the occasion and he was going to lead a burro in the parade and be dressed like a desert rat.

He was growing a beard right there in the drugstore when he met Agnes next to him at the number game, and he'd hit the jack pot this time. She wasn't so much to look at. She was a little on the fat side. She was a numerologist—that is, as Alf said, she could do anything with numbers, and when she asked him the date and year of his birth, she got out a piece of paper and worked out those numbers with the date and year of her own birth, and there you had it. She wasn't so much to look at, but she could do anything with numbers. She was lonely and you know why Alf was living in Nevada, and he was lonesome, too. He wanted to pick up the pieces and start all over again; and she was a real widow, not grass, and her husband had left her an orange grove at San Bedoo—that was what you called San Bernardino out there, in case you didn't know it—and the numbers showed that they had the same vibrations, right there in the drugstore at Las Vegas. And as Alf said, what did you know about that? There wasn't much else to know about it. They were married that night at Las Vegas, because it was down in the numbers. She wasn't much to look at, but he was tired of looks. Her name was Agnes, just plain Agnes, five letters and when you added them to Alf, it made eight, and Alf was settling down. It was a little cuckoo sometimes, having Agnes fry the eggs and do the coffee all by numbers, but she could do it if she liked. No one had understood Alf for a long while. He was getting fat himself and he was settling down.

Jeffrey could ad lib like that with Marianna. Nothing mattered that afternoon. He was thinking it was the way his life always should have been. They were passing through San Bernardino by then and Alf had told Jeffrey how to get to their place. You went to the end of the Main Street and to the left, then past a Giant Orange Drink Stand and then past Hawkins' Lemon Grove, and then past a roadside stand run by a man called a “rockologist,” who sold mineral specimens he had brought from the hills—R
OCKOLOGIST
was written with rocks in front of the stand—and then the next gate on the left was Alf's. The name was “Rednow”—Wonder spelled backwards.

“Show me something that it hasn't got,” Jeffrey said.

“What?” Marianna asked him.

“Nothing,” Jeffrey answered, “nothing, dear.”

40

Wonder Spelled Backwards

They were approaching the Giant Orange Drink Stand before Marianna spoke again. It was one of those huge plaster and composition spheres, painted like an orange, with a hole cut in it, from which projected a counter that was heaped with oranges and glasses, and bearing that familiar sign: “All you can drink—ten cents.” The thought of stopping there and testing one's capacity with successive glasses of orange juice brought up an unpleasing gastronomic picture.

“Jeff,” Marianna said, and her voice broke abruptly into his mood. There was a hesitation in it, and a studied carelessness that was reminiscent of Madge's voice. “You're not worried, are you?”

“Worried?” he answered. “About what, sweet?”

He supposed she meant that he was worried about explaining her to Alf, and that was nothing to bother about, but her voice went on, still carefully and hesitantly.

“About you and me and Madge.”

Jeffrey felt his hands grip the steering wheel tighter. This was an impasse which he had tried to keep out of his mind and it had not been there much, but now it drained the joy out of him like liquid from a bottle. It was not the time or the place to bring it up, and he wondered whether all women were alike and whether they all chose instinctively to embark on difficult subjects at just the wrong time. It reminded him of the way Madge would bring up some problem in a taxicab just before they reached a friend's house for dinner. It was not the time and place. He did not want to think of it as a problem, and certainly not now.

“Why?” he said. “What makes you think I am?”

“I thought you were,” Marianna said. “You must be. Darling, I keep wondering. Have you ever done anything like this before?”

His hands still gripped the steering wheel. He could not imagine why she had brought it up now, when he had to watch the side of the road for the shop of the rockologist. They were passing other roadside stands—“Orange Water Ice For Sale”… “Persian Kitties For Sale”… “Canary Birds For Sale”… just tell him something that wasn't here.

“No,” he said, and it was true, but she must have known that he would say no. “Do you mean I've been too casual? I'm awfully sorry, dear. I'm—well, maybe I'm not the type. But you knew that, didn't you? You've known me long enough.”

“No,” she answered quickly, “of course—of course it isn't that—but you must be worried, dear, and I wish you'd tell me about it. You're—so enigmatic sometimes, and so reticent about some things.”