Margaret Millar - Wives and Lovers

With this new self-knowledge inflicted on him by Elaine came a gradual change in personality. He began to doubt himself and his motives. He was grateful to anyone, man or woman, who paid him any attention. He was awed by his three children, who seemed to despise him as much as Elaine did.

“Gordon,” Elaine told her friends with a tolerant little smile, “is not the fatherly type.” Above the smile her eyes added a personal little message to Gordon alone: You’re a very poor father, admit it, dear.

Gordon walked through the years in a kind of numb bewilderment.

In the early summer of his thirty-ninth year, in the lobby of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, a young woman asked him for a match.

She had dark hair and a thin, pointed face. The first thing Gordon noticed about her was her underdeveloped jaw. There wouldn’t be room for a normal set of teeth there, Gordon thought, and he wondered whether her teeth were exceptionally small or whether some of them had been removed to prevent overlapping.

“Sorry,” he said, patting his coat pockets automatically. “I don’t smoke.”

“Oh. Well. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She added, with a self-conscious little laugh, “Honestly, I don’t smoke either, only about once a year. But I was supposed to meet a certain party here and I’ve been waiting so long, I just thought a cigarette would help.”

They sat side by side under a potted palm tree, Gordon with his newspaper on his lap, and Ruby fingering the clasp of her purse.

“All I’m afraid of is that I missed my party,” Ruby said. “The lobby is so crowded, there must be a convention or something.”

“Dentists,” Gordon said.

“Oh, that’s it then. I wondered. Well—” She closed her purse with an air of finality and put on one of her gloves. “Well, I guess my party must be afraid of dentists or something—”

Gordon laughed. “Everybody is.”

“Well, I don’t blame them! I shiver every time I think of a dentist.”

“Are you shivering now?”

Her eyes grew wide. “Why?”

“I’m one.”

“No!”

“I am.”

“Gosh, and to think I’ve been sitting beside you all this time without a single shiver! But you don’t look a bit like a dentist. You look like, a lawyer or a doctor, maybe.”

Gordon was flattered. He had belonged for years to a club for professional men, but he had never got over the feeling that the doctors and lawyers among the members were superior to him, and that dentistry was the poor country cousin of medicine and law. Elaine lent her aid to this feeling. When the club held its monthly Ladies’ Night, Elaine was ostentatiously self-effacing, as if to remind everyone that she was, after all, only a dentist’s wife and had no right to open her mouth. She sometimes said as much to the other wives. “Of course it’s different with you, I’m only a poor dentist’s wife.” This remark caused acute embarrassment among the other women who found themselves forced to belittle their husbands and their husbands’ professions to make Elaine comfortable, or else to extol the art of dentistry: Where would we all be without dentists, I’d like to know. My goodness, dentists are terribly important.

The fact was that dentists were very important, and after two days of the convention Gordon was beginning to feel proud that he was a man who was doing hard and important work for the welfare of humanity. He was a little afraid for his new pride, though. It was too precious and fragile a thing to survive the journey home, and God knew, he’d never get it past the front door of his house.

He thought of Elaine, not bitterly, but with a kind of helpless pity. Whatever Elaine had wanted and expected from her marriage — great wealth? social position? an idyll of romance? — she hadn’t got it and he was unable to give it to her. She was, in the long run, worse off than he was. He had his job, he could become so absorbed in his work that he sometimes didn’t think of Elaine for two or three hours. He knew that Elaine had no such respite, that she was always conscious of him as she would have been conscious of a continuous nagging toothache.

He hadn’t, come to think of it, remembered Elaine once all day until the girl in the chair beside him asked him for a match. What had the girl said? — that he looked like a doctor or a lawyer. Some answer was expected of him, he must play the game, whatever it was.

“Appearances,” he said with ponderous humor, “are deceiving.”

“Aren’t they just!” She laughed, and he saw that her teeth were very small and even, like canine incisors. “Still, I always say I can tell a nice character by his face, I really can too. Look, isn’t that someone waving at you, over there by the cigar counter?”

Gordon turned, and recognizing a colleague of his, he waved back.

“He’s from my home town,” Gordon said. He mentioned the name of the town. Ruby said that she’d never been there but she knew lots of people who had, and they all agreed that it was the most beautiful place in the country.

“I certainly intend to go there,” she said. “I’ve just never found the time and my parents are terribly old school. They think girls should stay home all the time.”

“Do you work any place?”

“Just for the fun of it I’m working at the perfume counter in Magrim’s. Honestly, the people you meet! I never had any idea how the other half lives.”

“Didn’t you?” Gordon smiled at her innocence.

“Actually I’m not crazy about working, but it’s better than sitting at home watching Daddy fuss over his silly stamps and coins. A girl should get out on her own, don’t you agree?”

Gordon agreed.

Ruby’s “party” failed to appear. Gordon had intended to go to a movie by himself but he couldn’t think of any polite way to abandon the girl. She was too young to sit around a hotel lobby alone so Gordon offered to get her a taxi and send her home.

“That’s terribly kind of you,” Ruby said with a rueful little smile. “But I guess it wouldn’t do much good for me to go home this early. Mummy and Daddy are out tonight and I haven’t got a key.”

Gordon took her along to the movie. She was a trusting little thing. Even though he was a complete stranger she seemed to rely on him already and when they walked down the dark aisle she put her hand on his coat sleeve, tugging at it like a child who doesn’t want to be left behind.

Three days later she still didn’t want to be left behind.

“Don’t go, Gordon, please.”

“I have to. You don’t understand. I told you about Elaine and the children and my work.”

“Take me with you.”

“I can’t, Ruby.”

“Will you be back?”

“You know I will.”

“I’m afraid you’ll change your mind.”

“I would if I could,” Gordon said quietly. “It’s too late, I love you.”

“Say it again.”

“I love you.”

“What if I never see you again?” she sobbed. “What if you change your mind?”

“I won’t.” He held her in his arms while she wept. “I’ll be back, darling. Don’t worry, don’t cry.”

She sobbed over and over again, “What if I never see you again?”

He drove home alone, buoyant, frightened, intoxicated, ashamed of himself, confused, in love. Once or twice as he drove along the rocky coast he thought of sending himself and the car over the cliff, but he didn’t do it, and when he got home, Elaine seemed genuinely glad to see him.

Elaine fussed over him, unpacked his suitcase, and told him he was looking tired.

“Staying up late at all those burlesque shows, I bet!” she said with a gay laugh.

“I didn’t go to any burlesque shows.”