Max Collins - Hard Cash

But the flow of liquor hadn’t.

That flow had increased.

His wife had always been a drinker, but never a drunk really, not till the death of her parents and sister. She was not a loud drunk. Never a conspicuous drunk at all. Socially, her drunkenness didn’t cause any harm; at a party she just flirted with the men and flattered the women, in a playful sort of way that just seemed to make everyone like her all the more — everyone except Rigley himself, of course. And her drunkenness at home just meant she was asleep most of the time. On the couch in the TV room, usually. Sometimes in bed. He had to have a woman in to do the cleaning for her, but they could afford it. And he’d often come home and find no dinner ready, but they (or he, if she was especially tight) would go out to eat; they could afford that too. And if friends called, Cora would come around, shake off her drowsy drunkenness, and be her charming, if a bit blurry, self. She wasn’t an annoying drunk to be around at all.

Unless you were married to her.

He was standing in his living room, Manhattan in hand, listening to his vice-president at the bank, Shep Jackson, rattle on about local politics. Jackson was a younger version of Rigley: smooth, dark-haired, tan, handsome, and handsomely dressed in a gray tailored suit. Rigley hated him for it. Jackson was the man the board had hand-picked to replace Rigley, and both men knew it and pretended they didn’t.

And Rigley wasn’t really listening to Jackson, either. He was pretending about that too.

What he redly was doing was watching his wife circulate through the small crowd (eight couples who all had season tickets for the Broadway Series at the University of Iowa’s Hancher Hall in Iowa City; it was their ritual to gather at the Rigleys’ for a cocktail party in the late afternoon and then drive, two couples to a car, to the play and have a late dinner out afterwards), and he marveled at how good she looked, for as much as she drank.

Her face, especially, looked good, but maybe that was just the face lift. The smooth skin enhanced the beauty of her large brown eyes and full mouth and small, sculpted nose. She looked something like Julie, as a matter of fact, except in Cora’s case the hair was honey yellow and thickly, if stylishly sprayed. Or he should say it the other way around, shouldn’t he — Julie looked like Cora. He’d picked Julie out because she looked like Cora had when he’d fallen in love with his wife-to-be over twenty-five years before.

They had gone to high school together. A small, small town in northeastern Iowa. Her father was in the banking business. He was principal stockholder of three banks in various small farming communities in that area, and was a landowner, too; he had three or four farms (he was always selling and buying farms like somebody adding hotels in Monopoly) and lived in the biggest house in the county. Rigley’s father was a schoolteacher. So was his mother. Between the two of them, his parents brought in a good living, and Rigley never wanted for anything; he was definitely a boy born on the “right side of the tracks,” a cliché that rang true in their small town. Anyone born on the wrong side would be considered a social climber if he tried to date Cora Pierce.

But that’s just what he’d been, secretly — a social climber. He knew no family fortune awaited him. He knew the limited benefits of schoolteaching were not for him. And he knew Cora Pierce had had her eye on him since the seventh grade, and so in high school he’d latched onto her and never let go.

They went to the same college (Iowa State) and were married after their sophomore year. Cora dropped out at that point and got a job in a bank there in Ames, with her father’s help. Rigley resisted any of his father-in-law’s efforts to pay his way through school, however, knowing that (a) his own parents had saved enough to put him, their only child, through four years of college, and (b) he would want to call on old man Pierce for bigger and better things in the future, after establishing himself in the family eyes as “his own man” and a pillar of integrity.

And old man Pierce had come through. He’d paid Rigley’s way through graduate school in the East (Wharton) and got him his first job, as installment loan officer in a big downtown Chicago bank. And then a vice-presidency at Port City, and finally the presidency, when he’d barely turned forty. Everything had turned out as he’d hoped.

Except maybe the marriage itself.

In the beginning, he had loved Cora. Or anyway he had convinced himself he did. It wasn’t hard to convince yourself you loved the wealthiest and most beautiful girl in the county. And Cora was all of that. She’d been homecoming queen and Representative Senior Girl back in high school. (He’d been Representative Senior Boy and most likely to succeed.) She was also valedictorian, whereas he was barely in the top ten percent of their small class. And to this day she was, in her way, the smarter of the two of them. The brains of the family, and the boss too, never letting him forget where the money came from. Never letting him forget that Daddy had pulled the strings to put George where he was today.

Still, Cora wasn’t the loud-mouth, obnoxious woman most bossy women are. She was dominant, yes, but quietly so. Not a bitch, not even a nag; just a decision-maker. And he didn’t mind being dominated at home; after all, he was dominant at work, wasn’t he? He didn’t mind being second in Cora’s heart to Daddy (no, make that third — her mother came second), and he didn’t mind the way she planned his life for him: parties, vacations, and all. He was too busy at work, making the bank go, to have to worry about anything else in his life; let Cora handle it.

Cora was easy to put up with, as long as the sex was good. And it was good for a long time.

Until they found out, definitely, that they could have no children.

Until she had her “female trouble” and the possibility of having a child (which had always been slim, because of his near-sterility, but still had been at least a possibility) became non-existent. After her “female trouble” (Cora never could bring herself to say “hysterectomy,” just as she always said “poop” instead of “shit,” never having outgrown her goddamned sheltered small-town conservative Iowa upbringing; thank God his parents had been liberals) sex gradually became something that happened only on special occasions, and then wasn’t particularly special for either one of them. Separate bedrooms came about for the stated reason that Rigley liked to read at night and Cora wanted the lights off, and the marriage became as sexually dead as their reproductive possibilities.

Even so, the marriage still seemed okay, superficially. Cora seemed comfortable with him. She liked the security of their life, and now that her parents were gone, she seemed desperately inclined to cling to what remained, which was Rigley and their stagnant marriage together. She surely must have realized just how desperate a deadend it was they were both heading down, and that probably helped explain the drunkenness.

But the possibility of divorce had never occurred to Cora, as far as Rigley knew. And he was glad. Divorce meant disaster to Rigley. He doggedly continued being nice to her. Complimenting the way she looked. Ignoring her drinking, as much as possible. Kissing her cheek goodbye in the moming and hello coming home at night And never, ever arguing with her.

Maybe theirs had always been a superficial marriage. Maybe even before these sexually barren last five years, they had had an empty marriage. Who could tell? Rigly figured he certainly wasn’t the only guy who, with a wife who shared his marital apathy, went through the paces of marriage, putting in time like somebody who keeps at a job he hates in hopes of eventual retirement. He wasn’t the only guy who enjoyed brief, relatively meaningless affairs with the wives of friends. Surely a marriage like this one wasn’t anything out of the ordinary these days.