Margaret Millar - Wives and Lovers

“Well, sit tight until I get there.”

“I hate to put you to this trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” George said dryly. “I haven’t anything else to do. It’ll keep me out of mischief.”

Hazel followed him to the front door. “I could go with you, George.”

“I’m in a hurry and you’re not dressed.”

“I could slip a coat on. It won’t take me a minute. I’d like to go.”

“Why?”

“Well, the excitement, I guess.”

“Is that all?”

She shook her head, rather shyly.

“What’s the real reason, Hazel?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do,” George said. “You don’t want to be left alone. You’d rather come with me, not because it’s me — I’m nothing special as far as you’re concerned — but just to get out of an empty house.”

“That’s not true, not all of it is, anyway.” She opened the door for him and the fog drifted into the room like ectoplasm. “You could come back and tell me all about it.”

“I could. Do you want me to?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be damned,” George said and went out to his car. He walked very quickly as if purposely gathering momentum to carry him along in case his decision to leave should begin to falter.

Ruth put down the phone, and tiptoed through the darkness to the front hall. Here, on the bottom step of the staircase, she sat with the brass poker across her lap and the little dog at her feet, a pair of strange sentinels guarding the sleeping children.

The whole house was quiet. All the noise and confusion, the screams for help, the wail of sirens, the shriek of brakes, she had heard merely in her own mind. The only real noises had been the barking of the little dog and the faint but unmistakable click of the back-door latch.

She was afraid, but pushing its way up through the cold layers of fear was a feeling of triumph. The prowler outside was her enemy, the synthesis of all her enemies; he was real and alive and identifiable, and she was armed against him, guarding the children, with help on the way.

Even on a sunny day it was a quiet neighborhood. Men went to their offices early in the morning and returned in the evening to eat dinner and read the newspaper and watch television behind closed blinds. Young children were kept off the street in nursery schools or walled patios, and dogs were fenced. It was a neighborhood built by and for retired people and members of the younger professional set who were on the way up.

Gordon didn’t belong there; he had never felt any sense of belonging. When he came home from his office after the day’s work he usually hesitated a moment outside the front door as if he was not sure whether it was his own door, or what lay behind it, his wife, Elaine, or some hostile stranger.

There was only one light on in the house, the night light in the upstairs bathroom. Elaine always left it on for the children so he knew they must be there, all four of them, sleeping quietly and not caring whether he came back or not. His absence seemed to have made only two differences: Elaine had been more careful about locking the doors, and she had bought a dog. He wondered whether the dog was intended as protection or as compensation for the children. A dog in exchange for a husband. Well, that’s fair enough , he thought wryly. Elaine doesn’t like either breed.

He leaned back against the slippery trunk of the loquat tree. Fog condensed on its leathery leaves and dripped on the ground with a monotonous little tune, plink, plunk, like a dozen leaking faucets. Plink, plunk, the tune was taken up by the bougainvillea over the garage and the hibiscus along the patio wall and the row of red-flowering eucalyptus that bordered the street. The sound reminded him of when he was a boy in Minnesota; in the spring the icicles that had hung stiff as quartz from the eaves throughout the winter started to melt until they fell loose and shattered, and the ice on the pond split open and water began to gurgle up through the cracks. Water sounds, dripping sounds everywhere. The first thaw in spring was almost as noisy as the first storm in autumn.

A cold trickle of moisture slid down the back of his neck. He pulled up his collar and walked silently through the fog to the front of the house. He had meant to arrive earlier, he had started out at dinner time from San Luis Obispo but as soon as the highway curved west to the coast the fog had struck like a crippling plague. Sleek young cars became gray and slow and anemic and moved like a procession of old men.

He went up the porch steps and sat down on the blue canvas glider, and from the inside of the house the dog began to bark again, in a higher pitch of hysteria and frustration. It wants to get out and bite me, chase me away, Gordon thought. I am an intruder. The house already belongs to him.

He was certain that the dog’s barking would wake Elaine, and now that the moment was at hand when he must face her he felt uneasy and afraid. He couldn’t remember all the compelling arguments he’d thought of during the day. He had planned each one carefully, using words and phrases that Elaine would understand and respond to emotionally. The arguments were still there inside his head but they had lost form, had thawed and dripped out of shape, like the icicles under the eaves, until they were blobs of slush.

He looked at the front door expecting it to open and not knowing what to say when it did. The door was solid mahogany because that’s what Elaine wanted. She said it gave people a good impression from the start if they were faced with a solid mahogany door. But, as it turned out, she was mistaken. Hardly anyone came to the house, and of those who did not one had recognized that the door was solid mahogany, and Elaine was forced to tell them: “How do you like our door?” or “I hardly heard, you know, the door is so thick. Solid mahogany, you know.”

Solid mahogany, closed and impenetrable. The key to it was on a key ring in his pocket. He could open the door if he wanted to, it was a simple matter, except for the dog. This was no ordinary dog. It sounded larger, stronger, fiercer. Its hoarse barking set up disturbing echoes in his mind, and each echo set up a new echo of its own until his eardrums reverberated with a cacophony of fears.

He sat motionless on the canvas glider with the fog dripping down his face.

A car came over the crest of the hill, languid and yellow-eyed. It crept past the house and paused with a sigh of brakes. The headlights went out, a door slammed, shoes scraped along the wet cement of the driveway.

A man walked out of the fog, like an actor making his entrance from behind a gray plush curtain. He crossed the lawn and came up the porch steps, a heavy-set man with a fedora pulled down low on his forehead. In the dark he could be anyone; but even in the light Gordon would not have recognized him. He knew George only as the half-hero, half-child of Hazel’s conversation.

Gordon leaned forward as if he was about to rise to welcome the stranger. The glider creaked.

The man turned with a little jump of surprise and said harshly, “What the hell.”

“I didn’t mean to startle—”

“What are you doing here?”

“I was about to ask you the same question.”

“Ruth called me, said there was a prowler hanging around the house.”

“Ruth? You must have the wrong address. This is my house.”

“So?”

“It’s not paid for, but I have the deed, so you might say it’s my house. Are you a policeman? It’s funny somebody should call a policeman because a man wants to get a little fresh air.”

“If it’s your house why don’t you go inside?”

“Well, I would, except for the dog. It isn’t any of your business but I don’t mind telling you. She bought a dog while I was away. It sounds like a fairly large dog. You heard it a moment ago?”