Mavis warmed her hands on her own heavy cup of coffee, and her spirits in its hot liquid comfort. Of course, Charles would feel so badly when he woke and remembered. How terribly alike men became when they drank too much—they seemed to find a level of fellowship never achieved when they were sober. She would comfort him in the remorse she knew he would feel, she would be careful not to say a word of recrimination. She knew he was not in the habit of drinking, thanks be to God; never at the Falls had he had more than wine or ale for dinner, he never asked for anything stronger. She must be patient.
Nevertheless, there was a bleak, obscure feeling that the change-over from her kind of life to his was too great. Something of the feeling that he would protect her from everything and everybody had gone. She could not put her finger on the source of her depression. Was she so weak, still a little girl at twenty, that she should have her love washed away by a breath of alcohol? Why, if she had real dignity, couldn’t she have simply insisted that he bid his drinking companion good night, insisted on the right to privacy? Because she was afraid of him? But how love someone and be afraid of him? She felt she must be very like one of the creatures of the woods that had to be carefully coaxed and gently wheedled to come out into the open, still ready to run at the slightest hint of an aggressive move. To run at the slightest smell of evil. Evil? Charles? Her own dear love? And suddenly a wave of tenderness swept over her, and her own stupidity seemed enormous. Of course, he would take her in his arms, blame himself for the idiotic night, feel ashamed that she had had to put up with such embarrassment, horrified at the remarks he and Art had made in her presence. And she would forgive him easily, comfort him and make light of it, and ask for his own patience with her ignorance. She walked up and down the main street of the town, and around several blocks, carefully staying oriented to the hotel building, until her feet began to hurt from the hard pavement and the unaccustomed heels. She must get back to him, whether he was awake or not. She would boot out the intruder, Mr. Haversmith, with a sharp tongue and a no-nonsense look.
The desk clerk gave her a preoccupied grouchy glance and her new strength wilted. The elevator boy was humming tunelessly, slyly appraising her, and she felt the agony of being without Charlie’s protecting arm. The ride to the sixth floor seemed endless.
She took a deep breath of relief at their door and, opening it quietly, she heard Charles whistling in the bathroom. Mr. Haversmith was nowhere to be seen.
“Charles?” She spoke softly as she went to the door of the bathroom.
Catching a glimpse of her over his shoulder, Charlie turned, soap still framing the margin of his shaven face. “Well, where the hell have you been!” he said, wheeling around.
“How do you feel?” she asked, startled. She had fully expected a groaning hangover, and was prepared for a job of fixing cold towels and coaxing broth. Except for his eyes, which looked bloodshot and oily, Charlie had an alert, fresh vigor. Above clean white shorts his body glowed from the shower which still steamed the room, bearing the odor of English cologne.
“I told you I wanted to get an early start this morning,” he said sharply, “If we get with it, we might reach Nelson by dinnertime. What in hell were you doing roaming around?”
Mavis was speechless.
“Well!” he shouted.
“Nothing. Nothing.” She stuttered.
“Nothing—nothing,” he mocked in falsetto. “Well, get packed up. You had breakfast, I suppose—couldn’t wait for me.” Striding around, he finished dressing, brushing his jacket, carefully tying his tie in the bathroom mirror, absorbed by his own reflection.
Mavis had sat down in the nearest chair, trying to assess the unfamiliar emotion that had taken hold of her. It was anger, yes. It was shock, yes. The tips of her fingers tingled, her chest felt tight, her heart thudded. She grasped feebly at one straw of explanation. “Charles, did the whisky keep you from remembering?”
“Ha!” He laughed shortly. “Really pinned on a beaut! That lousy joker, Art what’s-his-name, damn near drank up all my liquor. Left without so much as a ‘how’ve you been’ this morning. Come on, come on,” he said impatiently, “what are you just sitting there for?” Stopping in front of her, he put his hands on his hips and surveyed her. “You know, you look stupid—just stupid! I never realized how dumb you are. Look at you! Not even a sign of lipstick, your nose shiny, no stockings—God, you’ve got thick ankles, I never noticed.”
“Stop it! Charles!” It was an explosion, high and shrill. Then at the sound of her own voice she suddenly clasped her arms around herself, holding herself tightly.
“Why, what’s the matter with you? You feel sick or something?” Charlie’s widened eyes, his faint smile, were that of complete astonishment.
In that moment Mavis knew him. She could put off the pain for a while. It would sweep over her later back in Clarke Falls, much later when her son was born. But at the moment the clarity of her understanding was an absorbing wonderment. He was a paper doll, walking in the moonlight, blundering over shadows of objects that did not exist. Her own emotions, her sense of injustice, her acute disappointment in his lack of sensitivity, died down like a fire that has nothing to consume. Loving him was absurd, for there was nothing to love. Being afraid of him was as ridiculous as being afraid of the snakeskin lying in the path, beautiful, shaped in evil, without content of evil.
Charlie often puzzled, in the months that followed, over how strangely she had disappeared. One moment she was at his shoulder at the desk while he paid the bill, and then when he looked around she was gone. He had looked for her for a while back in the room; even at the garage, he asked the boy if she was in the car. Well, that was that. She was just gone, that’s all. And later he could truthfully answer—truthfully enough, that is—when people idly asked if he had ever been married, “Hardly!” with a shrug.
The idea of going through the formalities of a divorce seemed a waste of time to him. Why bother? Why bring something to light that would make him look silly; marrying a backwoods character like Mavis! He could just see himself walking into the house at Nelson and saying, “Mum, I got married while I was on a hunting trip—no, I don’t know where she is now!” Fat chance! Sometimes it was a good idea just to keep one’s mouth shut. It was a personal matter anyway.
And then there was a clamor of bells, the taste of Zoë’s lipstick on his lips; in the vestibule of the church flash bulbs were popping and he was being the proud “lucky man,” smiling down into Zoë’s face and wondering how she had actually achieved the effect of blushing! It was most becoming.
Charlie was an early enlistment in the Navy after Pearl Harbor. He gained the admiration of his office force and basked for a time in the pride of his wife, his parents, and the amazement in Virginia’s eyes at his zeal for his country. She told Jeff, “He could have got out of it so easily—got himself a cushy job in the Pentagon; it’s just not
like
him.”
Jeff was working at his drawing board, a stack of War Department assignments in front of him, preoccupied. “Be a good thing for him, probably. Now he’ll have to knuckle under. And I’m sure poor Zoë will be glad for a little peace in his absence. . . .”
Zoë was aware of the appellation her intimates gave her. But even so, “poor Zoë” had a feeling of accomplishment. She was the perfect hostess, with the most perfectly appointed apartment in New York; she laughed with her friends over the fact that Charlie simply had to flirt with anything in skirts from nine to ninety. Her whole life was spent in foreseeing and forestalling serious consequences to Charlie’s often unexplainable acts. She knew his partners ran his office but she ran the partners to protect him. With her poise and dignity, she was able to freeze out certain characters Charlie often brought home with him, and to discourage them from coming back. One night he hired a popular New Orleans combo to come in and play for him, bringing along some twenty strange guests. She gave the leader twice what Charlie had paid him, they decided it was too late anyway, and the party had died a natural death.
In her lonely times, and she had many of them, she would think to herself, “This is what I wanted. I
wanted
to take care of him,” and dropping a small tablet into a glass of cola, she would watch it dissolve and fuzz the dark liquid. Drinking it, waiting for the lift it would bring, she would sigh deeply and bitterly. “You got it, girl; you got it, make the best of it!” and with the dimple nicking her cheek, she would smilingly give orders for the packing of their bags for another unexpected weekend cruise to the Bahamas or a flying trip to Acapulco.
After a trip to Mexico Charlie had decided he wanted to see Elsie, who lived near Los Angeles—see how “his baby sister was making out.” Charlie had somehow never changed his contempt for Herb Jenner as a “soda jockey.” He had been righteously indignant when Elsie and Herb had married hastily, even though they had full parental approval. Elsie had simply said she knew her parents couldn’t stand another big wedding so soon after Jeff’s and Virginia’s, but that they just didn’t want to wait, that Herb would be embarrassed at all the fuss, so, “We’ll just elope, Dad—with you and Mum in on the secret!”
Charlie’s dire predictions that Herb was after Elsie’s money proved false. Herb had worked out the situation with Walter so that, as he said, “he could keep his pride intact” and still permit Elsie to enjoy some of the money from her inheritance. For a while he resisted Walter’s suggestion of a fifty-fifty proposition, but it was better than the ancient idea of a “dowry.” It was simply that Elsie would match him, dollar for dollar—minus one dollar, in whatever he earned. He grumbled awhile at the silly game, but when he realized that, even so, it would be tough on Elsie, he agreed. It was the source of a few quarrels in their early years, until Elsie put her foot down quite firmly. “We have one marriage, we have one bank account. It is an accident that I am able to contribute forty-nine per cent of it; I never had to work for it, take it and be happy about it like you are about what you call my ‘pretty face,’ and stop acting as though you would be happier if I were homely.”
Now he was head of the western regional branch of Mentone Research Laboratories, and their home at Playa del Rey bad a view of the sea, which often comforted Elsie in her occasional bouts of homesickness. It contained the wealth of their love, their twin boys, and a contentment that for some reason irritated Charlie when he and Zoë visited them.
In the patio Herb had a fire going in the barbecue, and the twins were playing, delighted with Uncle Charlie, who had thoroughly charmed them by a magic trick with a coin. “Do it again, Uncle Charlie, do it again!” and Charlie had obliged until Elsie gathered them up protesting, to be off to bed. As they disappeared into the house Charlie watched after them, smiling. Zoë put her hand gently on his shoulder and whispered, “Wouldn’t you like something like that of your own?”
“Don’t be an ass!” he laughed shortly. “The dogs are enough trouble in the apartment, as it is. Of course, it would be handy now, in case of war, to cop a deferment because of kids. Hey, Herb!” he called to where Herb was painting the broilers with an aromatic sauce. “I suppose you’d be called necessary to the war effort in your job, wouldn’t you?”
“Automatically,” said Herb, concentrating on his task.
Charlie pushed his bands into his pockets as he got up and went over to stare into the magenta coals. He said, “Of course, personally, I don’t think there’s going to be a war. The Japs just haven’t got the nerve to try anything against us.”
“You’re not alone in that thinking, Charlie. But if I could tell you about the kind of stuff we’re concentrating on at the lab, it’d make you wonder a bit.”
“What kind of stuff?” Charlie’s eyes widened, and Herb thought to himself, “He’s scared stiff!” and aloud, “Sorry, it’s top secret.”
“Nuts,” said Charlie, and kicked a pebble out of the way as he strolled off to look at the view. The rest of the evening was thoroughly unpleasant. Zoë and Elsie tried to keep apart and ignore the argument, and Herb kept attempting to change the subject. But Charlie persisted and finally grew louder and boasting. He knew a hell of a lot more than Herb with his stinking chemicals.
He
had talked with certain guys in Washington, and there just wasn’t going to be a war. When Herb finally refused to discuss the matter he switched. “But let me tell you one thing, if there is a fracas, I can tell you that
this
member of the family is going to be right there in front to slug it out with the yellow-bellies. No hiding behind kids or war-effort jobs for me!”
Zoë said quietly, “Stop talking like that, Charlie. You’re forgetting your manners!”
“Manners? Crap! What does a guy like this know about manners?”
Herb looked ready to punch him, but said instead, “It’s getting late—I’ll call you a cab.”
Driving back to the airport, Zoë was silent, as she had learned to be. Charlie was gazing out at the shimmer of the sea, humming a tune. “Cute couple, aren’t they?” he said cheerfully.
Back in New York, though Zoë had geared her life to surprises, she was totally unprepared for Charlie’s new, quiet, thoughtful attitude toward life. Everything about their relationship had had the “light touch,” as though there were something unchic about taking anything too seriously. There were occasional small fights about small matters, always prefaced by his tight smile and overelaborate objections, indicating that since they were both reasonable people the matter must be obvious to both as something to be corrected.
“Darling, I do wish you wouldn’t substitute a poor wine when you can’t buy the one I like from Gilman’s. I’m sure it wouldn’t be too much trouble to look someplace else?”
“Darling, could you ask Robert not to put a mirror shine on my shoes? It makes me feel as though I should also wear a diamond stickpin!”
“Darling, I loathe that color on you, please put on something else, just for your Charlie boy?”
“Darling, what in hell has happened to the thermostat? It’s like an oven in here!”