The apartment would have to be redecorated, before anyone else took it.
I wondered if they would have it done in the same colours.
The moving men were through. I was taking the silver to storage myself,
in a cab. I left the key and ten dollars with the superintendent. He
thanked me, said, “I’m sorry for your troubles, ma’am,” and got me a
cab.
On the way to the warehouse, I thought I might as well slip my wedding
ring in with the coffee spoons. When I got there, I found that the
storage people counted over everything, before they made out their
receipts. I was embarrassed, when they came to the red flannel case with
the coffee-spoons and the wedding ring, and said, “I suppose you think a
wedding ring is an odd thing to store.”
The clerk who was checking looked up at me over rimless eyeglasses, with
old, incurious eyes. “Why, ma’am, we must have two’-three hundred of
them in the vaults right now,” he said.
* * * * *
I was used to green tiles in the bath instead of white, to going
downtown to work on a bus, instead of uptown on the subway, to Lucia,
unfailingly kind, unfailingly good-tempered, with her manner of treating
all things as equally unimportant and entertaining. I had been living
with Lucia three weeks.
“You must go places,” said Lucia the first day. “You just trotted about
with five or six friends of your husband, didn’t you; and when the
conversation grew dull they exchanged reminiscences about great crew
races of 1919 or some-such, didn’t they? Well, we’ll go places.”
In the three weeks we had been to six parties, three first nights, five
speakeasies, four night-clubs, two operas, and a concert where a negro
sang spirituals.
“You are amazingly popular, Lucia.” It was Sunday again, and we seemed
to have an hour with nothing to do.
“You mean, ex-wives are popular, Pat. Most popular class in New York.
Anyone can fling a life’s devotion at an ex-wife’s feet, and she can’t
do a thing in the world inconvenient about picking it up—at least an
ex-wife like you, can’t; because she has no divorce. Why don’t you
divorce Peter?”
“Nobody’s flinging any devotion at my feet. I can’t talk at parties. You
have to tell me what to say.”
“I know; do you mind, Pat? You’ll get over that, in a month or so when
you feel better. Seriously though, you should do something about seeing
to a divorce. The sooner the better, it makes a clean break. . . . Have
you heard from that Peter person? . . . I don’t want to seem intrusive.
. . .”