I won't trouble the initial sentences of this account with a description of the wife — for she will make her appearance later, when that critical moment of ours arrives, and this will do nicely enough for her, given all that she really matters to what is herein unfolding. Nor is it profitable that you know much about the second woman — and indeed I do not have that much to tell you, considering that I have laid eyes on the creature only once — just as I only once saw the woman that is the wife. It was at what I keep calling the critical moment that both women were first revealed to me, a coincidence you must have guessed was coming.
As for the children, they are positively of no particular consequence at all.
What I did know, and knew well before the worst happened, was this: The man who is the subject of this little history had elected to end his relation with the second woman and had gone ahead and done something toward this end. At least this is what he said he had done when he later sought my attention over drinks.
"To which she said what?" I said, trying to concentrate on particularities that interested me no more than the larger chronicle did.
But the fellow was waiting for this. He played with his glass and let a histrionic silence draw the curtains aside. Then, suffering the phrases of his speech as if to place before me a parallel of the desolation he chose to believe the second woman had struggled to surmount, our man said:
" ‘If that is what you want. If that is what you must have. All right, then have it you shall.' "
"Splendid!" I said, and then I said, "You're well out of it, lad!" adding this latter more for reasons of ceremony and rhythm than in response to anything known. Surely, I had nothing substantive to go on, no basis to judge the health of the fellow's spirit one way or the other, with or without his having the second woman to visit from time to time.
But it proved he was waiting for this also.
"I don't know," he said, pretending, it seemed to me, thought.
"Of course you do!" I said. "Well out of it, I say!"
"I'd like to think so," he said, fingering his glass again, not swallowing much except in showily halting motions to his mouth. "But I don't know."
"Ah, well," I said, already fashioning up the sentence that would sponsor my exit.
You see, like the fellow whose dishevelment I record, I too reside in urban circumstance. I had planned to do the household grocery shopping after hours that Friday night — to do as I have always done in order that I not have to do the household grocery shopping the Saturday morning following, the number of shoppers being half as many Friday nights.
It was, and is, my custom — and I have come to be convinced that it is only the unbending observance of custom that sustains life in an urban circumstance. Those city persons strict and exact in their habits, and in possession of a hearty dispensation of them, make it through to their Mondays. I believe I have seen examples persuasive enough on either side of the question to propose the postulate.
Such a postulate guides my conduct, in any case — whatever the validity of its content — and I had been too long drinking with this man and had good reason to be on my way.
Moreover, there was nothing I wanted to hear from him. There would be no surprises in anything he would disclose to me — he, as I, knew exactly what to say.
It is why I am not very interested in people — nor all that much in myself. We all of us know exactly what to say, and say it — the man who sat with me making an opera out of his glass; I, speaking to him then and speaking to you now; you, reading and making your mind up about this page.
There is no escape from this.
Nor is it any longer necessary to act as if there might be.
It was only necessary to say: "Look, my friend, there will be another one after this one. Better to have made an end to the thing and to get a new thing on the march."
He raised his eyes from his fraudulent musing, noticing me for the first time, I could tell.
"That's a shockingly childish suggestion," he said.
"You think so?" I said. "Perhaps my mind was elsewhere. What did I say?" I said.
He studied my expression for a time. I could see what he was after. But I would not let him have it.
"I'll get the check," he said, glancing at his wristwatch, and then, in a stylishly sweeping motion, lifting the same hand to signal for the waiter. "Got to run," he said, polishing off his drink and finishing with me as well. Then he said, "Dinner's early and I have to get the groceries done."
DURING THE COURSE of the events I describe, my son's sled was stolen. Actually, it was removed from the premises by the custodian who services the little apartment building we live in. It was our custom to keep the sled right outside the door, propped against the hallway wall and ready for action — whereas it was the custodian's custom to complain that such storage of the sled interfered with his access to the carpet when he came once a week to clean it.
He comes Saturdays.
I could hear him out there with his industrial-caliber vacuum cleaner some Saturdays ago. The rumpus the thing creates is unmistakable, and I remember having to raise my voice to repeat "Your move." It was midday, a perfectly lovely piece of weather, but we were home playing checkers, my boy and I, while his chicken pox healed and while his mother was out running errands. It was only when she returned that the theft was discovered, the place where the Flexible Flyer had stood leaning now an insultingly vacant patch of clean carpet.
She called the landlord and she called the police.
The sled is, after all, irreplaceable, one of the last Flexible Flyers made of wood, a practice some while ago discontinued. We had to search the city to find it and buy it — and it was very satisfying to display it when the snow came and all those less demanding parents showed up with their deprived children and plastic.
I know he took it. I did not see him do it — but I know, I know.
It was a test of something, a clash of habits, custom pitted against custom — our resolve to show off our quality, his resolve to perform unstipulated work.
On the other hand, it is our carpet that is now uniformly clean those last few inches all the way to the wall, not his!
I am not unwilling to be pleased by this.
AT ANY RATE, the man I am made to call my friend — because it is clumsy to keep referring to him otherwise, and I suppose I must say I know him as well as I know anybody — telephoned me at my office the Monday following. Have I told you that we are in the same line of work?
The fellow often calls me at my office, to speak of business. It is the basis of our knowing each other — business.
"Why did you say that?" my friend said.
"Say what?" I said.
"You know," he said. "Suggesting that I get another setup."
"Haven't you always? I thought this was your practice," I said.
"That's not the point," my friend said.
"Then what is the point?" I said.
"Skip it," my friend said, and hung up.
I was not the least bothered by any of this. To begin with, the man tired me — and conducted a private life no more notable than my own. It is not that I am too fine to hear a man's secrets; it is only that no one has any new ones. Besides, insofar as our joint concerns of a business nature go, the man's need of me was greater than mine of him. At all events, there is no question of it now. You must remember, the fellow has since been reduced, brought down. When it comes to need now, he is the one who has it more.