Margaret Millar - Wives and Lovers

“You won’t be. Come on.”

He opened the car door and Ruby got out. She brushed off her skirt and the shoulders of her suit, and smoothed down her hair. “Do I look all right?”

“You look fine.” He wanted to say, beautiful, but he was afraid that the word would only increase her self-consciousness and that she wouldn’t believe him anyway. “Let’s go around to the back. Hazel’s in the kitchen.”

“Is it your house?”

“Not any more. We had a property settlement and Hazel got the house.”

“It’s funny you’re still friends like this.”

“Like what?”

“Well, calling on her like this, and bringing me here.”

“It doesn’t strike me as funny. Why should it?”

“I thought when two people break up, they wouldn’t ever want to see each other again.”

“It’d be pretty hard not to see Hazel again,” George said dryly. “She’s all over the place. I don’t mean she checks up on me or anything. But it’s a small town and we have mutual friends, and so we bump into each other.”

“I’d hate that. If I ever got a divorce I’d run away, far away. I’d never want to see him again, never, I’d run away.”

“Well, don’t get excited. You’re not even married yet.” He paused. “Not even considering it, I guess.”

“No.”

“You’ll change your mind someday when you meet the right man.”

She didn’t bother to answer. In silence they went across the yard and up the steps of Hazel’s back porch.

Hazel opened the screen door, wearing a fixed smile on her face that looked as if it had been attached with glue. During the time it had taken George to go out to the car and get Ruby, Hazel had freshened her make-up and combed her hair, but already along her upper lip and the hairline of her forehead little pinpoints of sweat were oozing up through the new layer of powder.

When she spoke she used her office-voice which had a professional lilt to it intended to make Dr. Foster’s patients feel at ease. “Come on in and make yourself at home — Ruby, is it?”

“Yes.”

She looked at Hazel, dully, with no sign of recognition. It was as if the two days since they had met had lengthened into years for Ruby and these years had numbed her memory.

“George tells me you’re not feeling very well,” Hazel said.

Ruby shook her head. “I feel fine, just fine.”

“That’s good.”

“I get nervous sometimes, that’s all. Everybody does. It’s nothing. I wouldn’t dream of imposing—”

“You’re not imposing.” Hazel turned to George. “Harold’s in the front room. He wants to talk to you about the boat.”

“My boat?”

“Yes. He says it’s sprung a leak.”

“A leak? He must be imagining things. Sure, on a day like this, she ships a little water, naturally.”

“All right, so it doesn’t leak. Talk to Harold about it. I never said it leaked.”

“He didn’t either.”

“Go and ask him.”

“I will. If that suits Ruby.”

Ruby glanced at him listlessly, as if the conversation and the moods and tensions beneath it had been too difficult to follow. “What did you say?”

“Is it O.K. with you if I leave you here with Hazel for a while?”

“I don’t care.”

“I won’t be long.”

“I don’t care.”

He paused in the doorway and looked back, but she was no longer watching him. Letting the door swing shut behind him he was conscious of a feeling of relief, and of gratitude to Hazel for insisting that he go and talk to Harold. Sometimes he wanted to leave Ruby and couldn’t; he deluded himself into thinking that if he stayed another minute, or five, or ten, his words, his presence and the very passage of time would change her in his favor.

The door swung into place with a squeak of hinges. The noise seemed to focus Ruby’s attention more sharply than any human voice. She looked at the door thoughtfully, as if it had said something to her, without words to distort its meaning.

“It needs oiling,” Hazel said. “Everything does around here. Including me. Want some beer?”

“No. No, thanks. You go right ahead, though.”

“I don’t mind if I do.” She took a quart of beer out of the refrigerator and poured out a glassful. The beer was warm and foamed out over the sides of the glass like soapsuds. “Sit down, why don’t you, before you drop.”

“I won’t drop.” But she pulled out one of the straight-backed wooden chairs and sat down at the kitchen table. “I feel fine.”

“Ruby—”

“Just fine.”

“Ruby, snap out of it.”

“What?”

“Listen, you haven’t been taking drugs or anything, have you?”

“Drugs? No, I never take drugs.”

“You don’t remember me, Ruby?”

“Remember?”

“We’ve met before.”

Ruby shook her head, slowly, unable for the moment to make any connection between the plump and perspiring woman holding the glass of beer, and the composed efficient nurse in the white uniform who ran Gordon’s office and answered the telephone. Even the voices were different.

“What you need,” Hazel said, “is some food and rest.”

“No, thank you.” She stared at the table in front of her, at the half-prepared sandwiches, the buttered bread and the thick slices of meat loaf containing bright blobs of green which might have been peas or green pepper but which looked to Ruby like some phosphorescent decay. She had missed dinner — she hadn’t, in fact, had a square meal for a week now — and the sight of the meat and its strong oniony smell nauseated her. She never wanted to see food again. There was no fight, no resolution, left in her, only the numbness of despair that made her want to lie down in a quiet place and go to sleep for a long time until many things were forgotten. She hadn’t even the energy to get up and leave. She was bound by sheer inertia to a chair at Hazel’s kitchen table, shrouded by the smell of meat loaf and the sweet, fermented memories of the summer with Gordon.

“You’re Gordon’s Hazel,” she said, and a nerve began to twitch in her left cheek, contracting the muscle and pulling up the corner of her mouth. It was as if, minutes before Ruby herself could see any humor in the situation, her face was preparing to smile. But instead of smiling, she threw back her head and laughed, and kept on laughing while Hazel watched her uneasily over the moist, foamy rim of her glass.

“You’re George’s Hazel and you’re Gordon’s Hazel and they both begin with a G!” It was so excruciatingly funny that tears oozed out from between her eyelids and fell down her cheeks almost to the point of her chin. She did not weep like Josephine who had a wealth of tears, fat and silver and smooth like ball bearings. Ruby’s tears came out pinched and meager, little coins squeezed out of shape between a miser’s fingers. Josephine wept from a great reservoir of self-regard and self-pity; Ruby wept from the dry ducts of self-hate.

“You’re punchy.” Hazel took a piece of Kleenex from the window ledge over the sink. “Here. Use this.”

“I don’t want anything from you, I don’t want anything from anybody.”

“All right, but not so loud. George might hear you.”

“I don’t care.” She took the piece of Kleenex and rubbed her face, savagely, as if she had a grudge against her own skin. “He brought me here on purpose. It was a trap. He wants to find out things about me.”

“He wants to help you.”

“I hate him. I hate him and his help.”

“Now listen—”

“He’s a fat creepy old man and when he looks at me I feel like screaming, my skin crawls. I know what he’s thinking. I know what he wants. And it’s not to help me. He wants to help me, what a laugh.”