Margaret Millar - Wives and Lovers

“It must be lonely for you,” George said, “not knowing anyone in town.”

“I get along,” Ruby said. “I — read a lot. And write letters home.”

“How are your mother and father?”

“Fine.”

“Don’t you miss the big city?”

“Sometimes.”

“And your friends?”

“I’m not much for parties or things like that.”

“Maybe you should get out more, have a little fun and excitement.”

“I’d just be bored.”

“You should try it anyway.”

“I used to go to parties at school. I never had a good time. I was scared to death of the boys. I couldn’t even open my mouth.”

“You still are,” George said. “Scared, I mean.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Of me, anyway.”

“No.”

“Then I wish you were. I’d like to think I rang some kind of a bell with you somehow.” He kept his attention for a minute on the narrow winding road that crept up the Mesa. Then he said, “I need a drink. How about you?”

“If you want one, all right.”

“You certainly are an enthusiastic gal tonight. Is there anything worrying you?”

“No.”

“And you wouldn’t tell me anyway, I get it.” He made a right turn at the next crossing. “Here’s your Garcia Road.”

“I didn’t want to— Say, what’s the big idea anyway?”

“I didn’t believe that about ‘one of the customers.’”

“I don’t care what you believe, Mr. Anderson.”

“Here’s your twenty-three hundred.” George put the car in low and they went very slowly past a white frame ranch house. “Satisfied?”

She didn’t even look at the house. “Yes, thank you.”

“Who lives there?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can easily look it up in the City Directory.”

“Why bother?”

“Because it worries me. I think you told me a lie. Who lives there?”

“One of the customers, I don’t know his name. And you can let me out of this car right now. I’ll walk home. I never wanted to come anyway. You’re always accusing me of things.”

Instead of stopping the car he raced the engine and they shot ahead, up the hill.

“Why should I lie?” Ruby said. “If it was anyone I knew lived in that house why should I have mentioned it?”

“Maybe you thought I was too dumb to catch on, eh?”

“You can’t catch on when there’s nothing to catch on to, no matter how smart you are.”

“I didn’t say I was smart. I only want to be sure. I suppose I’m jealous of you, but if I tell you that you’ll only say I have no right to be jealous of you. Which is perfectly true.”

“Well, it is.”

“I said it first,” George said flatly. “Where do you want to go for a drink?”

“Anywhere.”

“You know what? I’d like to see you drunk sometime, Ruby. I bet you can be pretty vicious.”

“ You’ll never find out,” she said with a sharp laugh.

“I wouldn’t want to. I like you better the way you are, so full of secrets you’re bursting at the seams.”

“You certainly have some funny ideas about me, Mr. Anderson. I can’t understand why you want to take me out all the time, when all you do is quarrel with me. Maybe you’re just a bully.”

“I’d hate to think that.”

“And whenever we’re out together all you want to talk about is me and what’s the matter with me and what a funny girl I am. I don’t talk about you like that.”

“That’s because you’re not interested.”

“Why can’t we ever talk about something else for a change? I’m — I’m so sick of myself I never even want to hear my own name again.” She covered her face with her hands, and with her closed eyes she saw Gordon looking at her with such quiet loathing that she wanted to tear at her own face for inspiring such a look. “I’m so sick of myself I could die. I hate—”

“Be quiet,” George said harshly. “That’s a hell of a way to talk.”

“I hate my own face, I hate it so much I’d like to slash it with a razor, I’d like to slash everything, everything I see!”

He pulled the car over to the curb and turned off the ignition. He said, with pain in his voice, “That’s kid stuff, Ruby, stop it.”

“A lot you know about it!”

“I do. You’re just depressed. You’ll snap out of it.”

She shook her head over and over again, refusing to be comforted. Powerless, he listened to her flow of words: it was a bad world, with bad people in it, she was as bad as the rest, worse, hateful.

Finally he started the car again. He didn’t know what to do about Ruby. He couldn’t force himself to try and stop her hysteria with a slap, and he couldn’t take her back to Mrs. Freeman’s until she calmed down.

He thought suddenly of Hazel. Her house was less than half a mile away; he could stop there and leave Ruby in the car while he got some whisky from Hazel. Hazel wouldn’t mind, as long as she didn’t know it was for Ruby.

“I’ll stop off and get you something to drink,” George said. “It will make you feel better.”

“A drink — you think a drink will cure anything, anything in the world—”

“It helps, sometimes.”

“It can’t help me, nothing can.”

“Let’s try it.”

“You don’t know, you don’t know—”

“I don’t want to know. Just take it easy.”

She kept silent until he parked the car in front of Hazel’s white stucco house. Then she said, in a low voice, “You’re being very kind to me. It’s no use, though.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, it’s just no use.”

“We’ll see.”

He got out and walked around the lane to the back of the house. Parked beside the fence there was a car he didn’t recognize, a black Cadillac with a monogram on the driver’s door which was too elaborate to be deciphered at one glance.

George passed the car and went through the gate toward the back door. The moon had come up and it hung like a fruit among the top branches of the oak tree behind the garage. From the garage itself there came the scurrying and bustling noises of the wood rats as they raced along the ceiling and up and down the walls. Sometimes when George used to get his car out of the garage in the mornings he found their tiny paw marks in the dust on the engine hood. Aside from the paw marks and the dust they shook down from the ceiling, the wood rats did no harm. Their noise disturbed Hazel, though, and she used to go out now and then and bang on the garage roof with a broom. The wood rats froze in their tracks while Hazel banged away, breaking one or two of the tiles in her fury; but as soon as she returned to the house they started again, louder than ever, until the garage seemed to be cracking open. George had never been able to trap a wood rat, in fact he had never even seen one. The evidence that they existed at all was purely circumstantial, the noise and the paw marks on the roof tiles or on the engine hood of the car, like the tracks of the invisible man.

The sounds from the garage suddenly ceased, as though the rats had sensed the presence of an intruder. They seemed to be watching from under the tiles, listening, waiting for the stranger to leave the yard. George was struck by a feeling of loss and resentment. He thought, by God, I used to live here, this was my yard. I planted those two orange trees myself, with my own hands. And the hedge too... the hedge has been clipped, it looks too neat, like Willie’s mustache... I ought to get back to work, what in hell am I doing here anyway?

The hedge had grown, as thick as a wall and as high as Ruby. He looked at it as he crossed the yard, feeling almost betrayed, as if he’d half-expected it to stop growing during his absence.