“I’ll telephone your office, Pat, and say you had to go to the dentist
and will be in at noon. I’ll stay out myself, too. It’s a nice day, and
I haven’t taken a morning off since the one after the Bordens’ sailed.”
“I’d like to take a car and drive too fast; race railroad trains to
grade crossings, Lucia.”
“Yes. Dress, Pat, and we’ll go somewhere leisurely to eat.”
I dressed, in the new blue ensemble. We went to Mary Elizabeth’s
restaurant. It was quiet, for late breakfast; and we could look out over
the Avenue.
“Lucia, I let him stay, because I thought it was the way to get him
back.”
“What do you want him back for?”
“Because we used to love each other so.”
“Do you love him now, really?”
“At this moment I wish he were dead. But generally I love him.”
“As he is or as he was?”
“As he was.”
“How are you going to manage to get him back as he was?”
She poured herself a second cup of coffee.
“In a minute Pat, I’ll be quoting the well-known source of copy for
cigarette ads to you.”
“The Rubaiyat?”
“Exactly. ‘The moving figure writes and having writ’—what of it? Be
like me. Watch people perform and don’t get involved yourself.”
“The Rubaiyat’s just an adolescent’s ideal of philosophy, except the
parts about drinking.”
“Tell me some philosophy that’s not adolescent. Self-expression—the new
freedom for women—Freud, that Great Excuse?”
“There _is_ progress, though, Lucia. Myself, I’ve progressed, in taste,
from Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway.”
“How much progress is that?”
“A damn long distance on the road to bigger and broader vocabularies.”
Lucia laughed. “You see, you’re feeling better already, Pat. Did you
know I was five years older than you?”
“I didn’t think it was as much as that.”
“Yes, I’m twenty-nine. Arch walked out on me when I was twenty-five. I
tried to manage him too much; wanted to make a success of him, you know.
And made scenes about other women. Usual story. As soon as he was
successful enough to get a chance to manage his Chicago office, he went;
and told me to comfort myself with my love for music, or something to
that effect. I forget.
“I used to jump through hoops for him. Used to ache for his visits to
New York. I haven’t seen him for a couple of years, and I’m glad. He
still—there’s just a breath’s space of disturbance—about the first man
you loved—”
She looked very placid, notwithstanding. I ached, but it helped to sit
and listen to Lucia.
“By the time you’re twenty-nine,” she said, “you’re likely to have
reached—the age of generalizing. I no longer think of myself as _me_, a
terrifically important person. I think I’m an interesting example of the
unattached woman-about-town. Victim of the new freedom—had it thrust on
me willy-nilly. You belong to the same type. But you’re younger, and you
mind more.”
“What’s going to become of us, Lucia?”
“Nothing. Whatever ‘becomes’ of anyone else? Get old, and grey haired,
and fat or scrawny.”
She could not be as indifferent as all that. “What do you really think
about ex-wives, Lucia?”
She grew animated.
“We are _free_. Applesauce! Free to pay our own rent, and buy our own
clothes, and put up with the eccentricities of three to eight men who
have authority over us in business, instead of having to please just one
husband.
“We don’t have to be dominated any more. Twaddle! Grant that a woman
married to a brute or a degenerate under the old system, was out of
luck. How many of those were there, compared to the women married to
average decent men with a sense of responsibility?
“If you and your Peter had been young fifty years ago, you wouldn’t have
been unfaithful to him once; because you wouldn’t have had twenty
opportunities for infidelity flung at you in a year; and, if he were
unfaithful to you, he’d manage it discreetly, because he’d be socially
ostracized if he didn’t. And he wouldn’t have told you to go your way,
blithely; because there wouldn’t have been any way for you to go. The
principal thing that relieving women from the dullness of domesticity
did, was to relieve men from any necessity of offering stability in
return for love, fidelity and so on.
“Women used to have status, a relative security. Now they have the
status of any prostitute, success while their looks hold out. If the
next generation of women have any sense, they’ll dynamite the statue of
Susan B. Anthony, and start a crusade for the revival of chivalry.
“Freedom from men? Which of us is free who is emotionally absorbed in
any man? The choices for women used to be: marriage, the convent, or the
street. They’re just the same now. Marriage has the same name. Or you
can have a _career_, letting it absorb all emotional energy (just like
the convent). Or you can have an imitation masculine attitude toward
sex, and a succession of meaningless affairs, promiscuity, (the street,
that is) taking your pay in orchids and dinner dates instead of money
left on the dresser.
“Women used to be happy if their men were good to them; and, when they
grew old, if their children got along all right. They’re happy on the
same basis now. They always followed their lovers with their dreams, to
war or work, but were content enough at home if they were occupied and
had a modicum of kisses. The abnormal ones, I suppose, had a rotten time
of it, and so they yelled and pushed and tipped over the apple-cart for
the rest of us in the end.” She stopped and lighted a cigarette.
“However, Lucia, here we are, with the sun of the new age shining on us;
what are we going to do about it?”
“Pat, let’s have more coffee and some marmalade. Are you feeling calmer,
child? Does the thought of women-in-general make you see Pete and
yourself in proportion? I expect not. Give it a couple of years though.
“Ex-wives seem to be doing three things. Some go in for celibacy and
business success—one necessitates the other almost always, you know,
simply because there is a limit to the amount of vitality a woman has to
expend, altogether. Most women can’t stand the pace of a career and a
great love affair (or several in succession) managed simultaneously. The
careerists will be all right, though, in a sense; they’ll save money for
their old age and so on. But they won’t have children, so the problem
ends with them. That is class one.”
“I don’t belong to that class, Lucia. I’m glad—I feel lucky—that I can
sling words together, and hold a well-paid job, and get others on the
side. But I don’t give a damn about it, except that it permits a more
luxurious life than if I were a twenty-a-week clerk, somewhere.”
“At present, Pat, you’re in class two and, I think, on your way to class
three, where I am. Class two says ‘Love is over, there remains . . .
adventuring about.’ I’m judging from your before-breakfast-mood of
planning to kiss so many people you forget what your husband was like.
It will probably give you distance on him; and do you more good than
harm, if you go through with that idea.”
“Of course, Lucia, there are the scruples that are left over from the
way one was brought up.”
“Yes. But I think chastity, really, went out when birth control came in.
If there is no ‘consequence’—it just isn’t important. People’s
ideas—the things they say about _affaires_—begin to shift enormously,
and their ideas are half a generation behind their conduct—their
experiments.”
“The thought of going out and getting me fifty lovers doesn’t stir me
much, though, Lucia. What’ll I have in the end? My memories, I suppose.
Hell! Memory may have been some comfort to the Victorians, judging from
their poetry; but I don’t seem to be able to work the miracle on it. To
remember that Peter adored me in 1923, just leaves me absolutely cold in
1926. I’ll have to eat dinner with someone other than Pete tonight, no
matter what he once said about for ever-and-ever.”
“I know. You’ll come to class three in the end. You’ll marry again.”
“Are you going to marry again, Lucia?”
“You bet, darling, in about another year. The imminence of my thirties
makes me believe in the probability of my forties, and do I plan to be a
worn-out, irritable female sitting around an advertising office
shivering every time they hire a bright kid copy-writer just out of
college, and being distressingly polite to an advertising manager ten
years younger than myself? I do not.”
“Are you in love?”
The serene face looked suddenly wistful. “No. After Arch, no one was
ever quite what I wanted. Oh, I experimented, had lovers, not many.
Casual lovers, so much more interested in themselves than me, always.
Casual lovers are like that. And they felt injured when I’d not live up
to the promise of the colour of my hair (with you Pat, it would be the
shape of your mouth) and it’s difficult to know what to say to them
between kisses. I might have cared for someone, again, I suppose, if I
had not been always waiting for Arch to come to town. That’s the sort of
thing you shouldn’t do, but no doubt will.”
“Whom are you going to marry?”
“You can make raids on any of my men except Sam.”
“But he’s not good-looking . . . and isn’t he dull?”
“I thought that would surprise you. He has more substance (and I mean in
character, as well as in banks) than anyone else we know. He’s stopped
asking what it’s all about. He knows a few things that he wants out of
the show. I’m one of them.”
“I don’t believe you’ll marry him.”
“Wait a year and see. Let’s go get manicures.”
* * * * *
After we had manicures, I went to my office, and did a full day’s work
in an afternoon. I knew if I had a minute to think about Peter I would
have hysterics over my typewriter; and hysterics, in department store
advertising offices, are permitted only to a few, very successful women
buyers. I was through at five, and wanted to telephone him. But what was
there to say? “You might have taken me to breakfast, Peter?” There was
not much sense to that. So I went upstairs to the beauty shop, and
managed a facial before the store closed, instead.
Lucia was taking me along to a party given for a woman who had come back
from Arabia, the world’s greatest authority on Arab love songs.
Lucia and I usually dressed together, downstairs in her room, so that we
could talk. “Had a facial didn’t you, Pat? Looks grand. I did some
wangling for you this afternoon; telephoned Ned to bring Charlie along
for you. You can start your career of crime with _the_ younger
generation novelist, if you’re still going in for it. Are you?”
“I don’t know. I still feel outstandingly broken hearted, and I want to
make Pete seem a long way off since I can’t have him close as I want.”
“The middle distance _is_ neither this nor that. Like pink roses, isn’t
it? Well, try Charlie. You’ll have a chance. He’s like that. . . . I’ll
be interested in watching the fireworks, if you’ve really made up your
mind to snatch a few opportunities. To date, you’ve just been
sufficiently good-looking so that the men I’ve introduced to you haven’t
minded—much—the fact that you’ve been inert as a sofa-cushion. I see
you’ve brought down your bright red dress.”
I had not worn it yet—had bought it because the colour was heavenly.
But it was, a bit obviously, a dress one wore to be stared at. Tight
across the hips, and no back.
Lucia wore a bouffant gold thing that made her look like an angel, only
more sophisticated.
Ned and Charlie turned up with a flask of cocktails already mixed. Ned
was a publisher. He had never paid any attention to me before, but the
red dress changed that. However, Lucia soon absorbed him. Charlie turned
out to be a commonplace, medium-sized young blond, who would have looked
better if he took up squash rackets. But he wore his consciousness of
success like his very perfect dinner coat, a trifle flamboyantly.
“Another woman with exquisite hands,” he said, second or third sentence.
“Your shoulders—would make a man forget every disillusionment he’d ever
had,” he said, fifth or sixth sentence.
Then we went to dinner at the Ritz. Lucia was taking care of Ned, in
undertones, so I talked about Charlie’s books. Fortunately I had read
them, but I read a great deal anyway. I said they were poignant, which
seemed to please him. I had not tried to please anyone in a long time.
This man was quite easy.
When we got to the party, we found the woman who knew all about Arab
love lyrics, ten years too old to be decorative while she sang them, yet
she _would_ sing them.
I let Charlie take me upstairs to find drinks. He talked about women,
and love, and snatching the unrepeatable golden moments as they came,
else the champagne grew flat. That was the general tenor of it, anyway.
I let him kiss me.
He was technically expert. One knows about things like that, from
sophomore year at college on. He said he had not been so stirred in
years. I knew that was probably what he always said next. But I was
entertained.
In the dressing-room (Charlie and I were going taxi-riding in the Park,
of course—“away from all these stupid people,” he said) I met Lucia,
putting fresh lipstick on.
“Look here,” she said. “Do you want to do this? Charlie admits himself
he’s one of the town’s great lovers, and he’s gone head over for the
moment, but what is all that to you?”
“I don’t know that I want to. I don’t want not to.” I tried to think
what I did want.
“Lucia, I’d like to be harder, inside. To try to take all this sort of
thing as men are supposed to take it, for the adventure, for the
moment’s gaiety—perhaps for warmth and friendliness and anaesthesia
against—against feeling so alone. I know I shan’t be sobbing about
Charlie tomorrow morning. He won’t matter enough. Damn it if I cry over
this fresh make-up—
“Lucia, it might be fun . . .”
“All right. Don’t cry. Sit still a minute; you may as well make him wait
a bit. Better take my wrap, it’s warmer than yours, and the gold’s good
with your dress. And this is my last protest; I act like a maiden aunt
about you anyway . . . Pat, can you dash off with this spoiled young
novelist, remembering that you spent last night with Peter?”
“Yes, because if this Charlie person can make me feel last night was a
month ago, or even a week, I’ll—I’ll send him gardenias.”
“Finish your cigarette and run along. And if you can really adopt the
alleged masculine attitude toward sex, you’ve got all of New York to
console you for Peter. New York on a short term lease, while you have
the looks and the clothes for it. I’m betting you can’t though. Not many
women can.”
Charlie was pacing up and down drinking a highball in enormous gulps. We
went riding in the Park. I recognized a couple of things he had used in
his books, among what he said, but he was pleasantly flattering, and not
so conceited but that he implied gratitude, even surprise, for my manner
of acquiescence.
We went to my apartment. He was unhurried. He said, “Strange little
flower-face with a Mona Lisa mouth.” I wanted him to kiss me, and stop
talking. He did not know it, but he might be going to do me some good. I
kept remembering Peter walking up and down, the night before, and I
wanted that ghost exorcised fast.
Finally Charlie did kiss me.
He left when it was growing light. I slept.
In the morning Lucia and I breakfasted together hurriedly. She asked no
questions at all, but talked about going to the circus that night, with
two men from the “Tribune,” “unless your new boyfriend is taking you
places, Patricia.”
“He’s going out of town this afternoon, Lucia. I wouldn’t have been so
reckless yesterday, if I hadn’t known that.”
“How my protegée grows up,” Lucia said.
We walked down the Avenue a little way together, laughing at things, in
the Spring sunshine. Then I went on alone. I was neither happy nor
unhappy. Peter seemed a fairly comfortably long time ago. I thought how
to write the After-Easter-Sale-of-Millinery ad.