Дональд Уэстлейк - A Likely Story

“You mean winter?”

“I mean that week.”

“That was when Ginger could get off from work,” I said. I hadn’t the slightest idea where the conversation was going.

“No other reason?”

“What other reason is there?”

“February third?”

I looked at her, shaking my head, waiting for her to go on, while she leaned forward slightly, gazing at me in an expectant testing kind of way. Then she leaned back, relaxing, shaking her head, saying, “You don’t remember.”

“February third.” I frowned, casting my mind back. “Good God, is that when— Let’s see, the third was a Thursday this year, so it would have been Wednesday last—”

Then it came to me. That was the date all right, that was the moment when seven months of distress and trouble and finagling and sneaking around had finally come to a head and I had at last broken out of this cocoon, or egg, or whatever it was.

It all began the summer before last, part of which we spent in a rented house on Fire Island, where I was one of the few males who didn’t commute daily or weekly to a job in the city. Mary and I had been drifting apart — at any rate, I had been drifting apart — and either there were more targets of opportunity among the solitary daytime wives that summer or I was in a mood to be more aware of them; whatever the reason, I took my opportunities where I found them, feeling both pleased with myself and guilty, until I realized Mary knew what was going on and did not ever plan to say a word about it.

That was the finish. Of everything, ultimately, but initially it was the finish of both the pleasure and the guilt. I think I could have stood anything else from Mary: raging arguments, brokenhearted pleas, stern admonitions, her own revenge infidelities, you name it. But to be humored , to matter that little, took the starch out of more than my sails. There was no more catting around that summer, but one evening when we were alone for dinner — both kids “eating over” with friends, as the local argot had it — I broke a buzzing long silence by saying, “Mary, this marriage is over.”

She looked at me calmly. “No, it isn’t, Tom,” she said.

“Oh, yes, it is.”

“You’re just resisting being a grown-up,” she said. “You want one more round before the bars close.”

One last fling. The seven year itch. The last hurrah. All that easy dismissal. “Mary,” I said, “you are reducing me to Dagwood Bumstead, and that’s why this marriage is over.”

But it wasn’t over that moment, or that easily. We continued to live together, and in the fall I started up with Ginger, who over the summer had broken up with Lance. (We’d met the Patchetts several years before, and had become friends.) Maybe in my summertime flings I’d been trying to attract Mary’s attention, I’m not sure about that, but when I took up with Ginger I made damn sure there’d be no chance for Mary to do her shrinking head act again. I was sly, I was slippery, I was plausible, and I was not found out. Ginger and I originally got together in October, and by late November we both knew we could have a long-term thing together if we wanted. But families don’t break up before Christmas, so we waited.

Pre-Christmas shopping is, of course, the perfect cover for the adulterer. We’re all off on mysterious errands all the time anyway. But then Christmas itself is a downer, if you know you’re about to pack up and leave this crowd gathered happily around this tree, which may be why I stalled and dawdled all the way through January, until Ginger asked me straight out whether I was going to leave my wife, “because if you aren’t, you’re going to leave me. I won’t play Back Street , Tom.”

So that’s when I did it. February third, the anniversary of which I had been so unfeeling as to forget. Nodding at Mary, in her kitchen, I said, “That’s when I left.”

She offered a sad smile and said, “I had been hoping it was when you would come back.”

“Mary,” I said.

She raised her hand to stop me. “I know, we just keep saying the same things over and over again. I hope you’ll come back, you hope you won’t.”

“I know I won’t.”

“I’ll wait,” she said.

“I wish you wouldn’t. And there’s no point remembering that date any more, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“I’ll remember it anyway,” she said, and smiled.

Why do I let Mary sucker me this way? I just get hell afterwards from Ginger.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. My attitude toward holidays generally is that they are a terrible interruption in the life of a freelancer — nobody’s around in any of the offices to answer my calls — and my attitude toward Valentine’s Day in particular is that it’s on a par with having a feast day for coronary thrombosis. Don’t people realize the awful harm done by romance? All those cutesy red valentine hearts should be edged in black. “Be my valentine,” is an insidious sentence to teach a child. (As with most general festive occasions, we busy adults have also left this one to be observed by our children.)

The whole thing is a ghastly mistake anyway. St. Valentine, if there ever was a St. Valentine, had nothing to do with hearts or romance or Hallmark Cards. Way back when, there may actually have been two priests named Valentine, both martyred during the reign of the emperor Claudius — and he seemed such a nice fellow on television, too — or the two stories may refer to the same ill-treated priest, or he may just be a legend after all, like St. Christopher. The point is, his feast day on February fourteenth has to do with martyrdom , not love and sex; or am I missing something here?

Anyway, apparently St. Valentines remembrance day got mixed up somewhere along the line with a Roman festival called Lupercalia on February fifteenth, one day later, which was itself pretty weird. The Luperci were a group of priests who, every February fifteenth, would start the day by sacrificing some goats and a dog. (There was no particular god or goddess they were sacrificing to, this was just something they did.) Then they cut lengths of thong from the skins of the sacrificed goats and ran naked around the walls of the Palatine the rest of the day, hitting people with the thongs.

All of this was more necromancy than religion, an occult act that was supposed to make a magic ring around the city, keeping good luck inside and bad luck out. And (this may at last be where the modern Valentines Day idea got started) being hit by one of those thongs on that particular day was supposed to cure sterility.

(A kind of fresh pork sausage with ground pignoli nuts, cumin seed, bay leaves and black pepper was eaten that day, as part of the ritual, and became so identified with Lupercalia that when the emperor Constantine turned Christian he banned the eating of sausage, which of course immediately created a whole army of sausage bootleggers, and may explain why Al Capone always looked like a sausage.)

In any event, Mary phoned yesterday afternoon to say I should come to dinner because Jennifer had returned from school distraught that she hadn’t received enough Valentine cards and was therefore humiliated with her peer group.

“Enough? What do you mean enough? How many sexual propositions is a decent eleven-year-old girl supposed to receive in one day?”

“Sex has nothing to do with it, Tom,” Mary said, “as you very well know. Valentines have to do with popularity and friendship.”

“It’s a holiday in honor of lust, that’s what it is,” I insisted. “One of the seven deadly sins, commemorated. And named after a saint.”

“Stop being silly, Tom. Jennifer needs you.”