It was about four-thirty on a fall afternoon when I decided to call it a day and go home. The office is in a remodeled loft on East 35th Street, with a two-story studio for drafting on the ground level, the offices off from that, and the third floor for storage. We own the whole building and owned it then. The house is on East 84th Street, and it’s a house, not an apartment. I got it on a deal that covered a couple of apartment houses and a store. It’s mine, and was mine then, with nothing owing on it. I decided to walk, and marched along, up Park and over, and it was around five-thirty when I got home. But I had forgotten it was Wednesday, Doris’s afternoon at home. I could hear them in there as soon as I opened the door, and I let out a damn under my breath, but there was nothing to do but brush my hair back and go in. It was the usual mob: a couple of Doris’s cousins, three women from the Social Center, a woman just back from Russia, a couple of women that have boxes at the Metropolitan Opera, and half a dozen husbands and sons. They were all Social Register, all so cultured that even their eyeballs were lavender, all rich, and all 100 % nitwits. They were the special kind of nitwits you meet in New York and nowhere else, and they might fool you if you didn’t know them, but they’re nitwits just the same. Me, I’m Social Register too, but I wasn’t until I married Doris, and I’m a traitor to the kind that took me in. Give me somebody like Craig, that’s a farmer from Reubenville, that never even heard of the Social Register, that wouldn’t know culture if he met it on the street, but is an A1 engineer just the same, and has designed a couple of bridges that have plenty of beauty, if that’s what they’re talking about. These friends of Doris’s, they’ve been everywhere, they’ve read everything, they know everybody, and I guess now and then they even do a little good, anyway when they shove money back of something that really needs help. But I don’t like them, and they don’t like me.
I went around, though, and shook hands, and didn’t tumble that anything unusual was going on until I saw Lorentz. Lorentz had been her singing teacher before she married me, and he had been in Europe since then, and this was the first I knew he was back. And his name, for some reason, didn’t seem to get mentioned much around our house. You see, Doris is opera-struck, and one of the things that began to make trouble between us within a month of the wedding was the great career she gave up to marry me. I kept telling her I didn’t want her to give up her career, and that she should go on studying. She was only nineteen then, and it certainly looked like she still had her future before her. But she would come back with a lot of stuff about a woman’s first duty being to her home, and when Randolph came, and after him Evelyn, I began to say she had probably been right at that. But that only made it worse. Then I was the one that was blocking her career, and had been all along, and every time we’d get going good, there’d be a lot of stuff about Lorentz, and the way he had raved about her voice, and if she had only listened to him instead of to me, until I got a little sick of it. Then after a while Lorentz wasn’t mentioned any more, and that suited me fine. I had nothing against him, but he always meant trouble, and the less I heard of him the better I liked it.
I went over and shook hands, and noticed he had got pretty gray since I saw him last. He was five or six years older than I was, about forty I would say, born in this country, but a mixture of Austrian and Italian. He was light, with a little clipped moustache, and about medium height, but his shoulders went back square, and there was something about him that said Europe, not America. I asked him how long he had been back, he said a couple of months, and I said swell. I asked him what he had been doing abroad, he said coaching in the Berlin opera, and I said swell. That seemed to be about all. Next thing I knew I was alone, watching Doris where she was at the table pouring drinks, with her eyes big and dark, and two bright red spots on her cheeks.
Of course the big excitement was that she was going to sing. So I just took a back seat and made sure I had a place for my glass, so I could put it down quick and clap when she got through. I don’t know what she sang. In those days I didn’t know one song from another. She stood facing us, with a little smile on her face and one elbow on the piano, and looked us over as though we were a whole concert hall full of people, and then she started to sing. But there was one thing that made me feel kind of funny. It was the whisper-whisper rehearsal she had with Lorentz just before she began. They were all sitting around, holding their breaths waiting for her, and there she was on the piano bench with Lorentz, listening to him whisper what she was to do. Once he struck two sharp chords, and she nodded her head. That doesn’t sound like much to be upset about, does it? She was in dead earnest, and no foolishness about it. The whole seven years I had been married to her, I don’t think I ever got one word out of her that wasn’t phoney, and yet with this guy she didn’t even try to put on an act.
They left about six-thirty, and I mixed another drink so we could have one while we were dressing for a dinner we had to go to. When I got upstairs she was stretched out on the chaise longue in brassiere, pants, stockings, and high-heeled slippers, looking out of the window. That meant trouble. Doris is a Chinese kimono girl, and she always seems to be gathering it around her so you can’t see what’s underneath, except that you can, just a little. But when she’s got the bit in her teeth, the first sign is that she begins to show everything she’s got. She’s got plenty, because a sculptor could cast her in bronze for a perfect thirty-four, and never have to do anything more about it at all. She’s small, but not too small, with dark red hair, green eyes, and a sad, soulful face, with a sad soulful shape to go with it. It’s the kind of shape that makes you want to put your arm around it, but if you do put your arm around it, anyway when she’s parading it around to get you excited, that’s when you made your big mistake. Then she shrinks and shudders, and gets so refined she can’t bear to be touched, and you feel like a heel, and she’s one up on you.
I didn’t touch her. I poured two drinks, and set one beside her, and said here’s how. She kept looking out the window, and in a minute or two saw the drink, and stared at it like she couldn’t imagine what it was. That was another little sign, because Doris likes a drink as well as you do or I do, and in fact she’s got quite a talent at it, in a quiet, refined way. “... Oh no. Thanks just the same.”
“You better have a couple, just for foundation. They’ll be plenty weak tonight, I can promise you that.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You feel bad?”
“Oh no, it’s not that.”
“No use wasting it then.”
I drained mine and started on hers. She watched me spear the olive, got a wan little smile on her face, and pointed at her throat. “Oh? Bad for the voice, hey?”
“Ruinous.”
“I guess it would be, at that.”
“You have to give up so many things.”
She kept looking at me with that sad, orphan look that she always gets on her face when she’s getting ready to be her bitchiest, as though I was far, far away, and she could hardly see me through the mist, and then she went back to looking out the window. “I’ve decided to resume my career, Leonard.”