It said: “If you continue discouraging Pat’s advances, she’ll soon take
another lover, and then you and I are rid of her, Peter my dearest.”
I put it back in the envelope carefully. That girl—that girl did not
know what she was doing. She would not last a month, with a Peter who
had recovered sanity. But—at that, she might last long enough to finish
Peter and me.
When he came home that night, “Peter, I suggest you take those letters
of your dear love and lock ’em up. If I read any more of her advice on
how to handle me, I might take ’em to a lawyer. Also—I don’t care what
I said before—I’m not going to give you a divorce to marry that woman,
ever, ever, ever.”
I thought he would strike me. I did not care now. The first time I had
wandered about with a bruise on my mouth, it did something rather
permanent to my soul, or whatever I had like a soul. After that, I just
jested about falling against a table in the dark. No one believed me. It
did not matter, whether they did or not.
But he did not strike me. He took the letters and put them in his pocket
and said, “I’m leaving a week from Saturday, Pat.”
* * * * *
It was a week from Saturday now, and I had been sitting a long time in
the wing chair, remembering irrelevancies. I hunted about for a
cigarette. There were no more. I had smoked the whole package.
The apartment seemed almost unbearably still. I thought that it probably
always would be, now. No more Peter, to come in gaily, flinging coat on
one chair, and hat on another, and gloves on a third, calling eagerly,
“Patty, Patty, dearest. Oh, most delicious young woman, a husband is
home for the night, thank God.”
Yes, it probably always would be desperately still, without Peter. It
occurred to me, as a very surprising fact, that, since I was only
twenty-four, I might well live forty or fifty years, with no Peter. How
many nights was that? An appalling number of thousands.
I stood up. I wanted a cigarette. There was a package Peter had left, on
the mantel, with just two or three in it. That fool woman upstairs was
playing sentimental ballads. This was “What’ll I do?” God-awful idiotic
song. “You-r lips an’ my lips were joi-uned in a ki-i-sss, a ki-is with
an _un_happy en-nnding . . . Whaddl’ I dooo with jest a mum-o-ry.” Would
she stop her phonograph if I telephoned her? What’s the use.
I will telephone the doctor. That will be entertaining. Won’t he be
startled? And why not? The number is in the book.