Margaret Millar - Wives and Lovers

“I heard it.”

“Don’t you think it sounds like a fairly large dog?”

“It’s a little white mongrel,” George said, “about the size of a fox terrier.”

Inside the house there was silence, as if the dog was eavesdropping on the conversation.

Gordon rose, wiping the moisture from his forehead with the sleeve of his topcoat. “A little dog,” he said quietly. “How could you know that?”

“I know a lot of things about you, Foster.”

“You have the advantage of me. I don’t even know your name.”

“Anderson.”

“You’re Hazel’s—”

“That’s right.”

“Well.” Gordon looked down at the floor. Six inches from his left foot lay the doll he had given Judith the previous week. He had bought it, not for a special reason like a birthday, but in a moment of guilt and compunction, as if he could give to her in the form of this doll the happy babyhood she had missed. He had been able to buy off his conscience to some extent, but he hadn’t bought off Judith. Within two days the doll was naked and almost scalped, one arm was gone, its china eyes had been carefully pushed back into its empty head, and into its slightly open mouth between the rows of tiny perfect teeth, Judith had thrust Elaine’s ivory-handled nail file.

“Well,” he said again. “I suppose it’s time we met, even under circumstances like these. I’m not sure,” he added wryly, “what circumstances they are.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No. No, I confess I’m puz—”

“Where’s Ruby?”

“Ruby.” Gordon repeated the name in a flat voice as if it aroused no interest or memory in him. “She’s all right. Nothing happened to her.”

“Tell me where she is.”

“She’s — I left her in San Luis.”

“You left her.”

“She has a cousin there. I — she decided to stay with her until — while I came back and settled things with Elaine. So I came back.”

George stepped closer. He was laughing, soft derisive laughter that echoed back against the wall of fog.

“Lover boy,” he said, and the laughter bubbled up again, not from his throat but from a source deep inside him. “A real honest-to-God lover boy, eh, Foster?”

Gordon shook his head, mute, resigned.

“That’s your technique, is it, Foster? — Get them as far as San Luis, leave them with a cousin, and then come crawling back to your wife? That’s it? Eh, lover boy?”

“You can’t talk to me like that.” But the words were frail and wistful, like the clenched fist of a little boy, the sting of a butterfly, the bite of a glowworm.

He thought of Elaine the last time he’d seen her standing in the wind beneath the wild palm tree, her voice calm and quiet: you fool, you idiot, no character, no will power, not a man, no resemblance to a man...

“You can’t talk to me like that. I must—” I must defend my human dignity , he wanted to say. But there was no time, no place, for words. He drew back his arm and jerked it loosely like a piece of rope. His fist, an inert object at the end of it, incredibly, almost involuntarily, snapped up in front of him and struck George’s chin.

George stumbled sideways and stepped on the doll’s moist plastic head. The doll slipped out from under his foot with a squeaking noise and slid across the porch.

His arms flailed for a moment as he tried to recover his balance, then he fell heavily, his head striking the iron base of the glider.

From somewhere close by came the first soft muted wails of a police siren. Gordon turned and began to run. As he ran, his trembling muscles gained strength and a feeling of elation rose inside him like bubbles of adrenalin.

He climbed into his car and pressed the starter button. His right knuckles were painful and already swelling so that he couldn’t bend his hand around the steering wheel. But the pain was not unpleasant. He drove toward the business section of the city, steering with his left hand, his right hand resting on the seat beside him like a trophy.

He checked in at a hotel on lower State Street and from his room he called Ruby long distance. Although it was very late Ruby answered the phone on the second ring, as if she had been waiting beside it for hours expecting him to call.

“Ruby?”

“Gordon. Where are you?”

“I’m staying at a hotel for the night.”

“Did you talk to her? Did you ask her—?”

“I’m not going to ask her anything. I’m going to tell her.”

“You sound funny, Gordon. Have you been — do you feel all right?”

“I’m going to tell her,” he repeated and looked down at his bruised knuckles. You can’t talk to me like that. “I’ll see her tomorrow morning, first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Why didn’t you see her tonight?”

“It’s hard to explain.” Because it was foggy, because there was a dog barking, because Judith left her doll on the porch and a man stumbled over it. “I’ll see her tomorrow. I’ll make it perfectly clear that I’m not going to be run out of town like a criminal. I’m going to stay put and fight. I’m going to—”

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. Just yes.” And she made a little sighing sound that was almost inaudible. But he heard it. He had heard the same sound a thousand times from Elaine and he knew its meaning and its intent; it was a complete negation of everything he was trying to say.

“Ruby?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll see her first thing tomorrow and then we can make our plans definite.”

“Yes.”

“You can stay there for a few more days. Then I’ll find some place here for you to live, a little apartment, and then I’ll drive up and get you. How’s that?”

“Yes.”

Yes. Not a word of agreement, in fact not a word at all. A sigh. Elaine’s sound. A new sound for Ruby. He must destroy it before it grew as Elaine’s had grown.

“If you want me to,” he said, “I’ll drive up and get you tomorrow. We’ll face things together.”

He heard her gasp of surprise and pleasure. “Gordon, you’re not just saying that for my sake, because you know I’m seared?”

“No, I mean it. I’ll be there at noon.”

“Oh, Gordon.”

“Goodnight, darling. There’s nothing to be scared of.”

His hand had started to throb, heavily and irregularly, like a fluttering heart. He went into the bathroom and held it under the cold water tap.

“There’s nothing to be scared of,” he said and began to laugh.

The sun rose early and hung like an orange-red spotlight behind a gauze curtain. By seven-thirty most of the fog had burned away, and when Hazel went out into the back yard to empty the trash baskets the roofs of the houses were steaming as if the whole city was on fire. All the dust that the desert wind had laid over everything was washed away and the air was clean and sweet.

To hell with him, he didn’t even phone, Hazel thought, and banged the trash baskets upside down into the incinerator. Out came the remnants of the week: the letters and cigarette butts and apple cores, used pieces of Kleenex and empty food cartons and all the odds and ends from the drawers Harold and Josephine had cleaned out before they left, bits of ribbon, old grocery lists written on the corners of envelopes, some snapshot negatives, several newspaper clippings about pregnancy, a pamphlet on skin care, a sachet yellow and soured with age, and a woolen tie riddled with moth holes.

Hazel set a match to the rubbish and walked away because she did not want to see it burn. It seemed too final.

Slowly she crossed the yard. It had been only three days now since Escobar had cleaned it up, but already the grass had grown, more in some places than in others, so that the lawn looked uneven. The desert wind had deposited a fresh pile of dead leaves and acorns and eucalyptus pods beside the picket fence, and in the irrigation ditch Escobar had dug along the eugenia hedge there was a burst of new little weeds, tendrils of devil grass and sprigs of filaree and clusters of toadstools. Under the ground beside the garage an enterprising gopher had built himself some additional runways and storage rooms and his excavations had left little mounds of earth. During the night a dog or cat, bent on food or mischief, had upset the ant pot underneath the orange tree and the syrupy poison had seeped out and crystallized. The ants ignored the poison and marched as usual up and down the orange tree milking the aphids and, when it was necessary, carrying them to the more tender tips of the branches, like good farmers guiding their cattle to greener pastures.