"I meet a few."
"Famous ones, I mean. What's your wife like? Blonde? Brunette?"
"You know a movie actress named Maureen O'Sullivan?"
She nodded.
"Ricky--my wife--gets mistaken for her. We go into night clubs and
sometimes they give us a swell table and people begin asking each other
who the hell I am--thinking they've identified Ricky."
"She's sweet--Miss O'Sullivan."
"Ricky is, too."
"Who's the most beautiful one you ever met?"
"The most beautiful one--I never met. Hedy Lamarr."
"You could, though. Celebrities can meet each other."
"I'm only about a Class D celebrity."
"Suppose--?" She eyed me speculatively. "Suppose some glamorous dame
and you met. Suppose you got a yen for her? What would you do?"
"God knows."
"I'm serious. After all, you've written enough articles and books and
stories about it. Do you mean what you say? Or are you just trying to
be sensational?"
"Would I, in other words, after meeting the gorgeous Miss or Mrs.
So-and-so, invite her to take a long drive in the country--or to picnic
on a beach--to look at etchings? Would I, personally? I might. Sure."
"What would Mrs. Wylie say?" The gray eyes were troubled--perhaps
afraid.
"Maybe nothing. She would never hear of it. Does marriage have to end
privacy entirely--every hour of it in a life? If she did hear--she
might still say nothing. She might laugh at me. She might be hurt. She
might be angry. It would depend on her mood at the moment."
"Her mood just at the moment!"
"Sure."
"Isn't that--pretty"--she sought a term--"unstable?"
"Extremely stable. It would show that she regarded what we have been
led to call infidelity a matter of so superficial a nature as to be
colored by a superficial mood. This, in turn, would indicate that
her more profound attitude toward me--and my feelings for her--was
unshaken. Stable, as you would say. If, on the other hand, I knew she
would have only one, single conceivable reaction--whether noncommittal
or aggrieved--I could be certain that her feelings for me, and her
deepest sense of my feelings, had become absolutist, rigid, probably
dominating and demanding, certainly doctrinaire. I could deduce that
she was in a most unstable situation--since people resort to the
projection of absolutes on other people only when they are torn by
uncertainty of themselves. Notice this in religions. The absolutes are
defined to a hair--with different sorts of steeples, doorways, fonts
and crucifixes marking infinitesimal splits over dogma--but with no
commensurate variation in the effect on human conduct whatever. Is a
Baptist nobler than a Methodist? Kinder? Wiser? No. So the different
absolutes of both, seen detachedly, represent nothing more than the
uncertainty, instability, self-doubt, inconfidence, distrust, and lack
of magnanimity of both. Their passion to lay down the law, taken with
the minuscule variants that ensue, is proof that Christians have no
stability whatever. Sex follows the same rule--and so does everything
else."
"I would have been furious, though."
She referred, still, to my hypothetical infidelity. And her reference
was interesting. Without thinking, she had used the past perfect
subjunctive. If, that is to say, her husband--the apparent supplier
of the opulent rings--had trifled with a strange brunette at some
lodge convention, this young lady's reaction _would have been_
fury. It apparently would not be, now. The assured presumption was,
therefore, a rift between herself and her spouse. Coupled with her
way of drinking cocktails while eating a sandwich, the brandy in her
coffee, her reading matter, and, particularly, the blur of suffering I
had seen in her eyes, this presumption led to further inference: the
rift was recent and she was in flight from it, while yet attempting to
understand its causes.
She was, that is to say, no habitual Martini drinker; these do not mix
their cocktails with their viands. She was reading Kinsey not from the
starved cupidity of hundreds of thousands of other women (for if she
had been even that uninhibited she would have read it sooner) but in
the effort to discover something. She was drinking not to drown her
sorrow but to take away its edge: she had mixed her latest drink with
the antidote of coffee. And, inasmuch as I had never seen her with
her husband at the Astolat, it was a good guess, at least, that she
was here as part of an act of abandonment rather than as a result of
being abandoned by him. Her accent was vaguely eastern--but eastern
rubbed against, and somewhat eradicated by, the flatter tones of the
West. Like numberless other such women, she had fled to New York for
refuge--and from a considerable distance. Texas, perhaps, or Arizona.
And probably she had lived in Manhattan before now: the Knight's Bar
was unknown to tourists--with the exception of Europeans visiting
America.
"You would have been furious," I finally said. "Think that over. Here
we are, engaged in a favorite national pastime--imagining flirtations
with handsome persons in the public eye. I often reflect that picture
stars--male and female--are lucky to have so little imagination,
on the average. If you can kill a person by sticking pins into a
statue of him--which you cannot, unless he believes it--think of the
possible result on a star of the lurid, lewd fantasies poured upon his
photographs, or hers, by millions and millions of people. Grant any
validity in the pin-sticking process and you have, in the photo-doting
parallel, a curious possible explanation of what the press knows as
Hollywood high jinks. Psychogenic. The effect, on the poor individual,
of mass assault, mob lechery. But skip all that. The point I want to
make is this: some ladies we have hypothesized are married. You can see
yourself as enraged, if any husband of yours had his head turned--to
continue the euphemisms--by one such. But it does not seem to occur to
you that any possible husbands of the ladies also might feel themselves
involved in the matter--and even experience traces of pain?"
"Men!" she said. "Why should anyone care what they feel?"
"O-h-h-h, because they're so plentiful."
She smiled a little--and poured plain coffee. "You haven't asked me my
name."
"Naturally."
"Naturally?"
"You've been wondering when I would. In such a case, the obvious thing
to do is to let a girl go on wondering. Besides--my inquisitiveness is
never casual. It might be a convenience to know your name. But very
little else. A clue, maybe, to the good taste of your parents--or lack
of it--and to the national strain of your husband's paternal line."
"It's Yvonne Prentiss."
"See what I mean? A handy--but otherwise irrelevant fact."