Peter leaned against my office door, smiling with his eyes. He was very
drunk.
“’Lo, Pat, still working? Looked at a paper this morning and saw by the
date it was our wedding anniversary. Brought you a present. You ’n’ I
haven’t been on a long, hard-drinking evening in years, and it’s damn
well time we went on one. Brought you a quart of Scotch.”
(While I remember the last six months that we lived together, I shall be
afraid of Peter drunk. . . . Think fast, think fast. . . . Hell! that is
just a line from “What Price Glory?”)
“Thanks for the Scotch, Pete. Bet you had a pint yourself, where you
bought it.” (Think . . . where is Judith? Oh, manage him yourself; you
have, before.)
“Pat, you’re looking lovely. You look frightened though. Don’t be
frightened. I’m drunk, but I’ll behave. I just thought it would be nice
if we went on a party . . . sort of friendly.”
“Grand idea, darling. There are two glasses in that lowest drawer. Let’s
have some Scotch, straight.” (And if the night watchman comes in, and
finds me drinking here, I shall lose my job. I do not care. I can get
another.)
“Kiss me, Pat . . . because you married me once . . . and because you’re
lovely-looking . . . that doesn’t make sense, does it? Kiss me because
I’d like you to.”
We kissed. I had kissed a good many people since Peter. And so, no
doubt, had he, since me. That did not mean anything. Neither did this,
perhaps. “Peter, pour me a drink while I put my coat on.”
We had three drinks fast. “Down the hatch, Pat. I taught you to drink.
Be a credit to me. Drink even, kid.”
(This Scotch is raw. I shall get horribly drunk, if I do not eat soon. I
must keep my head. Oh, what does it matter, whether I keep my head or
not.)
He talked about Mrs. Doane, dying. “She looked so small, Pat, and so
blonde. When they wheeled her past us, after, one of her little hands
swung out from under the blanket that covered her, as if she wanted to
clutch at one more man before they buried her. God, Patty, it was
brutal.”
(His friends have kept asking and asking him about that electrocution,
and no doubt he has been posing as being hard-as-hell about it, and
getting more and more jumpy. Pete is not hard at all, really. Or, at
least, he was not hard, when I knew him first.)
“I brought you up right, Pat. We’ve killed a pint, even. Let’s eat.”
Some vague restaurant in the Forties. Highballs. He talked about
newspapers, Judith, Hilda, London, myself and himself, and how poor we
had been.
I did not care what he talked about. He disturbed me. No other man
disturbed me much, or long. Pete made me think of things it was no use
thinking of. Still, it was nicer to be dining with him, than with anyone
else.
I had three highballs. (Thank Heaven for Scotch. Everything swims
gorgeously, not real any more. Vistas in hell, but a well-anaesthetized
hell.)
“Remember, Pat, when you bought a jar of French mushrooms for my dinner
on my birthday. They cost a dollar and a quarter, and you dropped the
glass jar on the way home. . . .”
“And when you came in I was crying, Peter, and you insisted on knowing
why. I was crying because I didn’t have another dollar and a quarter,
and nothing else in the house to eat but canned beans and a birthday
cake.”
“We always had canned beans for dinner the night before pay day, didn’t
we, Pat? But, that night we washed the glass out of the mushrooms and
ate them. They tasted good.”
(I suppose we make twelve thousand a year between us, nowadays, and we
lived for two years on something like forty dollars a week.)
He talked about going to hell gaudily, in the tropical tradition, via
some Central American Revolution. “When I have been drinking five or six
more years, Patty, I’ll get out. Buy me a sombrero with silver coins
jangling, and a sash and two pistols, and end up merrily on mezcal.
You’re the only woman I’d ask to come, Patty. But you wouldn’t. You
haven’t the courage to be really disreputable, even. You have a flower
face though, damn you. Flower face and hands and a two-for-a-nickel
soul.”
He talked on.
Once I said to him, melodramatically, “I’ll be sitting right beside you,
in whatever gutter you choose to die. I plan so to live that we may be
reunited in hell for ever.” (Applesauce! Live alone and die alone, like
as not. And nonchalantly, too. He taught me to be nonchalant. I may be
grateful someday.)
He is getting pretty profane—be obscene in a minute. Influence of
Judith. Oh, that is damn unfair. He used to do it, in the Hilda era, to
shock me. Try and shock me now. He is as unhappy as I am. Curious.
If I can start him off on poetry . . . try “Shropshire Lad” . . . that’s
sure-fire.
“Pete, how do the verses go that begin, ‘When I was one-and-twenty—’”
“‘When I was one-and-twenty—I heard a wise man say—give crowns and
pounds and guineas, but not your heart away.’” . . .
There, he will go right straight through. How I am drunk.
“Pete, let’s go taxi-riding.”
“All right. Where’s the check?”
“Taxi, go up the Drive to Grant’s Tomb and back.”
* * * * *
He put his arm around me. I clung to him. It did not mean anything, but
it was friendly. The taxi was cold. . . . Animals huddled together for
warmth.
“It’s snowing, Pat.”
“That’s nice.”
“Listen, Peter. Do you want to marry Judith?”
“Hell, no. I don’t want to marry anybody. You cured me of that. How do
you feel—very dizzy?”
“No, getting soberer now, the air’s grand.”
“You drink well, Pat, for a girl . . . I drink pretty well.” He laughed.
“It’s a good thing that child of ours died, he’d have turned out just
the prize drunk of his generation, probably.”
“Go to hell will you, Peter.”
“Sorry . . . I’ll talk about something else. Do you honestly still give
a damn about that baby?”
“And I still give a damn about you. . . . I’m that kind of fool. Will
you light me a cigarette?” His face, when the match flared up, looked
hard. It was not much like the face of a boy I had known. . . .
“I suppose you consider me ‘the man who spoiled your life,’ Patricia.”
I thought about that. “Everyone spoils his own life, given time,
probably.”
“Well, what you did to mine, little girl, was plenty. You taught me a
lot though.”
“No doubt. Haven’t you heard any good stories lately, Peter? You aren’t
being outstandingly entertaining.”
“You are a very beautiful young woman, Patricia. Is that better? Do I
get a kiss for it?”
“Why not?” It means nothing; but, for its duration, I may pretend it
means whatever I wish.
“Pat, Judith’s away. She has the apartment next to mine, you know. Would
you like to come down and see my place?”
“Very much.”
He had written me a note, when he rented the apartment; and I had sent a
letter to the storage people, to permit him to take out such furniture
as he chose.
He kissed me again. Well, he was my husband, and it was very respectable
to kiss one’s husband. I laughed and told him that. He thought it was
amusing, too.
His apartment had etchings we had bought together in France, and
curtains and a new rug that represented Judith’s taste, not mine.
We talked about the etchings. I took off my hat and coat, and he said my
red dress was a gorgeous shade. He brought me a glass of cognac. It was
good, much better than the Scotch had been.
He said, “You never were, Pat. I invented you.”