Margaret Millar - Wives and Lovers

Elaine confided in no one. To her friends she appeared invulnerable, and it was only when she said her prayers in the evening that she admitted, even to herself, that she was not.

When Gordon had left she put the children to bed. Then she went into the bedroom she shared with Gordon. Kneeling beside the bed Elaine confided in her doctor-psychoanalyst-father-mother-confessor-God. She talked to Him quite naturally, as to an old friend.

“Dear Father, I need your help, we all do. We turn to you in our unhappiness. I don’t ask you to make me happy, only to show me what is wrong and what I should do. Whatever it is I have enough strength and faith to do it. Something terrible is wrong in this house, it is crushing us all, and I know it must be my fault as well as Gordon’s. Gordon is out for a walk — it’s funny how I keep telling You things You must know — and I miss him the way I did when he was in San Francisco. I think I love him, I don’t know. When he’s away I love him, but when he comes back everything starts over, all the small irritations and differences. I do my best to lead a virtuous life but some times I have wicked thoughts and when I look at Gordon I resent him. Where does this terrible resentment come from? Sometimes I want to hit out at him, and just tonight when he swallowed some soup and it went down the wrong way, I felt glad, really glad! I thought, that will teach him — those were the very words that came into my mind. But why? What would it teach him? How could I have been glad? Dear Lord, show me the way, I am lost and wicked — I don’t know — what a mess, Oh God, what a mess—”

She remained on her knees for a long time, staring up at the ceiling, a blank relentless heaven.

In terror and exultation Gordon opened the door of Mr. Gomez’s café and found Ruby in the back booth.

“Gordon — Gordon, are you glad I’m here?”

“Yes, yes, you know I am—”

“I’m glad too.”

He took her hand and held it against his mouth.

“Gordon, I didn’t come here to ask you for anything.”

“I know. Don’t talk.”

“I have to say this,” she said earnestly. “I mean, I don’t want you to give up your family or anything, I wouldn’t ask you to. I just came to be near you.”

“You shouldn’t have come.”

“Here I am, though.”

“Here you are.”

“Are you happy?”

“Very.” He smiled at her but his eyes were worried. “I’m very happy.”

She noticed his worry and said quickly, “Now don’t start thinking, Gordon. For one night we won’t think or plan or anything, eh?”

“All right.”

“If it’s me you’re worrying about, you can stop right now. I can take care of myself and I know exactly what I’m doing.”

“What did you tell your aunt?”

“That I was going to get a job here, and I am, too. She didn’t mind. She even let me borrow her red fox fur so I could look more presentable. Naturally I didn’t tell her about you, she’s death on men anyway.”

“Have you any money?”

“Lots. My father sent me some. I had to tell a lie to get it. Does that shock you, Gordon?”

He shook his head. He was beyond the stage of shock, no matter what happened. His life, which for eight years had run like an engine on schedule, had without warning jumped its tracks and roared off into the woods.

It couldn’t have happened, Gordon thought in sudden panic, it isn’t true. Yet here was Ruby sitting by his side, accepting with mature complacence her new role as mistress to a married man. She seemed to have tossed away her girlhood and walked on without looking back and without looking ahead. She had no goal, no ambition, and no purpose beyond the immediate satisfaction of being near Gordon.

“You’ll have to go back home before your aunt finds out the truth,” Gordon said wearily.

“I have no home. My aunt’s house is no more home to me than the room up the street that I just rented. Why should I go back? Gordon—” She put her hand on his wrist. “Listen, Gordon, after you left, the whole city seemed dead to me. The people were there just the same and they did the same things they always did, walked and laughed and drove cars, but they looked dead to me, like they had motors in them like that dummy that rides the exercycle on Powell Street. Remember when we passed it on the cable car and you said it was wonderful, a typically American invention to get nowhere fast?”

Gordon nodded, marveling at the way she remembered, with absolute accuracy, all the words he had spoken in her presence, as if she had deliberately, right from the first, set out to memorize them. Why? Gordon thought. Why me? He saw himself as an ordinary man crowding forty, getting a little bald, a little stooped, a little tired. There was nothing about him to appeal to a young girl, yet for Ruby his departure had murdered a city. She loves me, Gordon thought, and he felt a nameless fear draining the blood out of his head.

Love, I’m not sure what it is, what does it mean? Elaine loves to love things. She loves tweed suits, mushrooms, bleached mahogany furniture, bridge, even me. “I love you, Gordon, naturally I do, for heaven’s sake you’re my husband, aren’t you?” She loves the children too. Eat your custard because Mummy loves you and wants you to be big and strong. Elaine wants to be loved in return, she’s always asking me if I love her and I always say I do. “Certainly, of course, absolutely, sure, naturally, why shouldn’t I love you, you’re my wife, aren’t you?” What have we been talking about all these years, Elaine and I? I never killed a city for Elaine.

“I remember,” Gordon said.

“I felt dead too, Gordon. I knew I was moving around, sometimes I could feel my legs walking up the streets but they didn’t have any connection with me, they just walked by themselves automatically.”

“I didn’t — I didn’t mean to make you feel this way about me.”

“I know, but I do. It’s happened. You don’t really want me to go home, do you, Gordon?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s settled then. And you mustn’t worry, promise?”

“I promise, Ruby.”

She pressed her head against his shoulder. Her mouth trembled and her eyes were blurred with tears. “I’ve never loved anyone before and nobody’s ever loved me either, not my father or mother or my aunt or another man, no one.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Gordon said. He felt a new and grave responsibility for her. She had such stubborn naiveté, she was so ignorant of the world and of the difficulties ahead of them both.

In fear and love and desperation he put his arm around her and held her close.

For Gordon, who was by nature a blunt and honest man, life became a series of sly, awkward deceptions.

He lied to Hazel: “You’d better phone Mrs. Hathaway and cancel her five o’clock appointment. I have a bit of a headache.” He lied to Elaine: “That walk last night set me up. I think I ought to get more exercise—” and to the children: “Daddy can’t read to you tonight, he’s going down to the Y to have a swim.”

Later, he and Ruby parted at the front door of Ruby’s boarding house. The proprietress, who didn’t allow visitors of the opposite sex in any of the rooms, had lately become suspicious of one or two of her tenants, and she sat all evening in the parlor with the blinds up, looking alert.

“The old biddy’s watching,” Ruby said. “Don’t kiss me.”

“All right.”

“Will I see you tomorrow, Gordon?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did you tell Elaine tonight?”

“That I was going for a swim at the Y.”

“You better wet your hair some place.”

On his way home he went into the public lavatory and dampened his hair under the tap. He splashed some water in his eyes to make them a little red, and dried his face with his handkerchief. He walked home along the dark quiet streets with the smell of the lavatory in his nostrils and despair and degradation in his heart.