Margaret Millar - Wives and Lovers

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Hazel said earnestly. “How does it taste?”

“Pretty good.”

“What’s this seaweed supposed to do for you?”

“A lot of things. It’s full of vitamins and minerals and stuff like that. Matter of fact, a fellow I know has a kelp-cutting barge and I’m thinking of going into business with him.”

“The seaweed business?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I shall be very damned,” Hazel said.

“I might have known better than to mention it to you. It so happens that scientists have discovered many new uses for seaweed.”

“Name one.”

“There are hundreds. This fellow I know that owns the barge—”

“If I were you I’d stick to the restaurant business. The day may come when we’ll all be sitting around munching seaweed but I don’t think it’s close. Remember the time you sank two thousand dollars in that vacuum cap for growing hair?”

“You’ve never let me forget it.”

“How could I? We nearly starved for a year.”

“Look, Hazel, let’s not argue. If you’re worried about whether I’m going to go broke and you won’t get your alimony every month, forget it.”

“Maybe I’m a little worried,” she said dryly. “I can’t keep the house running without it.”

“Ruth has no job yet?”

“No.”

“I thought by this time she’d be well enough to go back to teaching.”

“They’ll never take her back, you know that. Maybe she knows it too. I can’t tell.”

“Poor old Ruth.” George disliked Ruth intensely, having suffered too often from her acid disapproval, but now that he no longer had to see her, he could afford to express a little sympathy for her. “How are the others?”

“Fine.”

“Another beer?”

“No thanks. I have to get back to work pretty soon.” She added, casually, without looking at him, “Harold says he saw you downtown the other night.”

“I didn’t see him.”

“You weren’t doing much looking around, Harold said.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“You were too busy with the new girlfriend.”

George put the two empty glasses into the rinsing trough and wiped his hands carefully on his apron. “So that’s why you came—”

“No, it’s not. I gave someone a lift and—”

“—to check up on me again.”

“Apparently you need some checking up. Harold says the girl was young enough to be your daughter.”

“So?”

Hazel gazed at him in a kindly way. About some things, especially women, George was a babe in arms and Hazel sometimes had to be a little rough with him, for his own good. “Just remember what I told you, George, time and again. When some young chick pretends she’s interested in you, you go and take a good look in the mirror.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, I—”

“Then you ask yourself: is it me or is it the Beachcomber she’s batting her eyelashes at? See what I mean, George? I don’t want you to make a sap of yourself. It’d be kind of a reflection on me if you made a sap of yourself. Just don’t get carried away.”

“Well, who’s carried away?” George said irritably. “I hardly know the girl.”

“Personally, there’s nothing I’d like better than to see you married again, to some nice sensible woman, a widow, maybe, with a little something in the bank.”

“All right, all right. You find her, I’ll marry her.”

“I’ll look around. Meanwhile, don’t you forget what I told you about the mirror.”

“No time like the present,” George said bleakly, and turned and stared into the mirror behind the bar. There, between a bottle of apple brandy and a bottle of vodka, was his face, and it seemed to him exactly the same face he’d always had, no better, no worse.

“See what I mean, George? You’re no spring chicken. You’re still a nice-looking man, for my money, but you’re not going to set fire to any young girl... What’s her name?”

“You wouldn’t know her. She’s one of the new girls I took on last week, a stranger in town.”

“I thought you made it a rule not to mess around with the hired help.”

“For Christ’s sake, who’s messing around? I drove her home a couple of times, is all. Now can we drop the subject?”

“What’s your hurry? I’m just getting interested.”

George leaned across the counter. His face was very red and the pulse in his temple throbbed with the rush of blood. “You won’t be satisfied until you know all about her, will you? You can’t leave me alone, can you?”

“I just — well, I’d like to see you happy, is all.”

“Don’t kid me. If you thought I showed the least sign of being happy you’d march down here and plug me full of holes.”

“You don’t—”

“Well, I’m happy now. Hear that? — I’m happy right now! So what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” Hazel said through stiff lips. “I’m glad to hear it. Very glad.”

George turned away, exhaling a long noisy sigh like an engine standing in a station letting off excess steam because it was not yet time to move. When he spoke again his voice was quiet and resigned. “Forget what I said. It’s not true, that business about plugging me full of holes. It’s just that I’m tired, I want to forget about things, including Ruby.”

“Ruby.” She had known of course that it had to be Ruby but until the actual mention of her name she had kept hoping that it wasn’t. The girl, for all her youth, had a shifty way about her, and George, for all his experience, was as artless and as easy to deceive as a baby. “All right,” Hazel said, “we’ll drop the subject. Forget about her.”

“The point is, I can’t. She keeps cropping up in my head. I’ll be thinking of something else and then suddenly, wham, Ruby will pop up in the middle of it.”

“And do you pop up in the middle of what she’s thinking?”

“Maybe, but I doubt it.” George smiled thinly. “As you pointed out, I’m not the type to set fire to any young girl.”

“I didn’t mean that as a nasty crack. It was for—”

“For my own good, yes, I know. Well, I haven’t set fire to her, and she hasn’t to me either. She’s just gotten under my skin, is all.”

“Oh.”

“I feel sorry for her, see. She’s a lousy waitress, moves around like I was running an old people’s home, and whenever she makes a mistake she stands around for ten minutes apologizing for it. She doesn’t realize that a customer would rather have a steak than an apology... And sloppy, God, is she sloppy. Half the coffee’s in the saucer and the other half’s on the floor, and she still manages to have enough left over to splash on the customer. She’s just not cut out for this kind of work.”

“I guess not.”

“But here she is, see? — and she’s not doing her job but she keeps trying so hard and the harder she tries the worse she gets. I ought to fire her before she wrecks the joint, but I can’t. She needs looking after. If I fired her, she’d be on my conscience.”

“You’ve got a nice roomy conscience, George, there ought to be a place for one more.”

Hazel climbed off the bar stool and smoothed her uniform down over her hips. Her arms and legs felt a little heavy, partly from the beer and partly from the depression that had come over her while George was talking. Though she was no longer married to George, or in love with him, she had a deep sense of responsibility for him as she had for all her friends and relatives, and it was a little disturbing to hear George talking about looking after somebody when he was the one who always had to be looked after. George was an impulsive man, and like most impulsive people he had friends who would have been willing to cut off a right arm for him, or at least a finger, and enemies who would have liked to shoot him on sight. It had been Hazel’s duty to protect him from both. Even now, when the marriage was ended and Hazel had been relieved of her duties, she still clung to some of them, like a retired general playing with tin soldiers and toy tanks long after the war was won or lost.