Fletcher Flora: Desperate Asylum

Emerson Page thought about the girl waiting upstairs, and wished very much that he was up there with her. The girl’s name was Edwina and Emerson’s thinking of her was always pleasant and frequently glandular.

Edwina, whose name was lovingly abbreviated to Ed, was Emerson’s wife, and at this moment he was wanting her very much, and he knew that she wanted him also. He regretted that this was not possible, or at least not practicable at the moment, but he consoled himself with the assurance that it would later be both.

The time was eight o’clock of a Saturday night in November. The place was the kitchen of a small restaurant and bar of distinction, of which Emerson was owner, in the town of Corinth, which was not in Greece. Emerson stepped out of the kitchen, where he had just eaten his own dinner, into the dining room, where he stopped and looked around and was conscious of a familiar warm diffusion of pride in his work and his accomplishment. It was not a large dining room, but it was relaxed and pleasant and good for the digestion. The napery was snowy. The silver and crystal caught and reflected the light from the ceiling. The woodwork was fine walnut, shining softly as satin. On the beige carpet from wall to wall, the footsteps of patrons and waitresses fell without sound. It was a nice room, and he had raised it like an only child from a short-order diner, and he was very proud.

Moving slowly, he skirted the room, nodding and smiling to guests at dinner, and turned under an arch into the bar. Here, light had been reduced even more than in the dining room, and he stood for a moment just inside the archway while the pupils of his eyes dilated in adjustment. A couple of men occupied stools. At a table in the rear, a man and a woman were drinking Manhattans. The woman reached over and lifted the cherry by its stem from the man’s glass. The man said something and the woman laughed, putting the cherry daintily between white teeth. Beyond the man and the woman, in an automatic coin machine with its volume carefully modulated, a platter was spinning out under a needle the reproduction of a throaty female voice: Let me go, let me go, let me go, lover .

He listened to the voice, still thinking of Ed, and he knew that he would never want her to let him go. Never in the world. Thinking of her, he could see her. Upstairs in the apartment, as he had recently left her, wearing the red velvet toreador pants that were enough to excite the bull in any normal male. Curled up in the biggest chair in the room under a reading lamp, concentrating with childish intensity on one of her interminable books. Books were an obsession with her. Books on history and art and literature and all such heavy stuff as that. Even books on psychology. Stuff about what made you do things. Her hunger to know things was created by an early and deeply instilled feeling of inadequacy that was a result of her never having finished high school.

“My God,” he’d said, “that was a long time ago. By now you probably know more than half the God-damn college professors in the country.”

“Well,” she’d answered, “after a while I may know more than the other half. Only I don’t. Know more than almost anyone, I mean. I have such a hell of a time remembering the stuff. It makes me simply furious.”

He stood very quietly, thinking and smiling, hoping that she would come down to have a drink with him before the night was gone. They would have a martini apiece, maybe two or three, and then they would go upstairs together, and it would be very wonderful, as it always was. It was a fine thing to have a wife you kept right on loving and wanting. It was a fine, lucky thing, and it didn’t happen to every man.

Walking across the room, he crawled onto a stool at the lower end of the bar where it curved around to the wall. Roscoe Dooley, the bartender, came down on the inside and said, “Good-evening, Em. Drink?”

Roscoe was more than an employee. He was an old friend. Even more than that. Emerson thought of him as an early benefactor, one of the people on Earth to whom he owed something. Time was, as a matter of fact, when their positions had been reversed. Roscoe had been the employer, Emerson the employee. But that was a long time ago, or seemed like a long time, before the second World War, in another world. Roscoe had then owned an owl diner across town near the high school. He had given Emerson a job and had sometimes read poetry to him.

In response to the question, Emerson shook his head. “No, thanks, Roscoe. It’s too early.”

Roscoe looked past him through the archway into the room of damask and silver and shining crystal where people talked softly and walked soundlessly and fed themselves well.

“It looks like a good night,” he said.

“Saturdays are always good.”

“It’s a long way from the old diner.”

“Quite a way.”

“I think a lot about then. How it was and everything.”

“So do I.”

“You were a smart kid. Quiet and smart. I always knew you were going someplace.”

“I haven’t gone much of anyplace, Roscoe. Just a restaurant and bar downtown.”

He didn’t really feel that way about it. It was a violation of his pride in what he had wanted to do and had done, and it pleased him to hear Roscoe deny it.

“It’s a fine place. It’s got character.”

“Say it again, Roscoe. You’re good for me. You’re good for my ego.”

“It’s true, anyhow. Almost anyone could operate a place to eat and drink. A lousy filling station. It takes someone like you to give a place the kind of character you’ve given this place. I couldn’t have done it. Not ever. I stayed out in the old diner for almost twenty years, and I’d still be there if you hadn’t come and got me out and given me this job.”

“It’s Ed’s character, not mine. I probably wouldn’t be here myself if it hadn’t been for her.”

Roscoe’s face got soft. He loved Ed in a way that went with his age. It made him happy to look at her and smell her and maybe touch her fingers when he handed her a drink.

“She’s a sweet girl,” he said. “I’m glad you married. Ed.”

“You should have married a girl like Ed yourself.”

“Me? Why the hell would a girl like Ed want to marry someone like me? I’m just a bum. Besides, there weren’t any girls like Ed when I was young enough to be interested, and I’ve never seen another one like her since then, either.”

Roscoe was in one of his gloomy periods. He was looking back and wishing things had been different for him. Emerson tried to think of something to say, but he couldn’t, and just then a patron got onto a stool down the line, so it wasn’t necessary to keep on trying. Roscoe went to get the order, and Emerson slipped off his stool and walked up to the big front window. He drew the drapes apart a little and stood looking out into the street.

It had begun to snow. Great flakes descended lazily from darkness into the light of the street lamps and shop windows to make a thin, white cover for this street of Corinth. Watching the slow and silent transformation of his town, Emerson felt his quiet happiness swell within him and become for a moment an enjoyable pain. He had lived all his life in Corinth and would not have considered living anyplace else. He liked the town, and the town liked him, and he had been successful in it. Not that everything had come easily. His father had died when he was very young, leaving enough insurance to pay for a funeral and retire a small mortgage on a house that was getting old and hadn’t been much when it was new, and Emerson started earlier than most boys to work at odd jobs. He delivered the local paper, The Corinth Reporter , and when he was finally able to buy a bicycle he began delivering parcels for various small merchants who didn’t have enough business to maintain a regular service.