Wednesday: It’s only midmorning and I’ve just hung up from the third anonymous phone call in an hour. It does no good to hang up and then not answer the inevitable ringing that follows — he would let it ring forever. These calls are the same as the others, only worse. His insinuating voice, the same recital of facts reminding me I’m not just a name in the phone book. Describing my addiction to objets d’art, expensive clothes, perfume, and gin. Repeating the details of my parents’ suicide, of my estrangement with my brother, Judge Peter W. Daniels of Denver, Colorado. He knows Jerry is a lawyer and that we have an eight-year-old son named Alex and no pets. That I was pregnant before Jerry and I were married.
Who could possibly know all these things — and who has nothing better to do than remind me of them? Who could be so cruel? Or so sick?
Linda Hatfield? But it’s a man. Maybe she has a sick boy friend and this is how they get their jollies.
Who else has a grudge against me? The TV repairman? Forget it, he couldn’t possibly know these things — unless he got a look at you, and that’s unlikely. It couldn’t be that insipid neighbor with the Tyrolean hat who has been flinging epithets at me ever since I sent him the cleaner’s bill for the dress his Weimaraner soiled on the elevator. Myra? Jean? No, if I read them correctly they’re too cool, too busy with their own lives. No, these people are too irrelevant. It’s somebody else. It’s somebody I know. Somebody I’m overlooking…
Thursday: Rafael Plum called me into his office this afternoon and asked for my resignation. After ten years! When I asked him why, he shrugged. The economy, he said with no particular effort to sound convincing. The bad times.
Let Myra go, I told him. Or Jean. They were both hired years after I was.
They’re indispensable, he said, and working full-time. Besides, he added, he has been receiving complaints from important clients about my rudeness and off-handedness. That’s a lie, of course. I bend over backwards to be charming and helpful to every one of our customers, whether they are important or not.
All right, I told him, for some reason you want me out. I don’t care about the job. I grew tired of it long ago and won’t have a moment’s trouble getting a better one within five blocks of here. But I’m amazed you think you can fire me. Some well chosen words from me and you will be out of business, in jail, explaining yourself to a long line of husbands, or all three! How can you possibly think you can fire me?
He looked at me for a long time through those blue-tinted glasses of his. All right, he said finally, we’ll talk about it again on Monday. Meantime he’d like to know — how much would I consider fair severance pay?
I told him to guess — to make it a careful guess, and to make it in cash.
Saturday: Alex just phoned from camp. He was crying and said he was going to run away. Jerry went to the office this morning on some important business, but I told Alex to sit tight and his father and I would be up to get him, by tomorrow noon at the very latest.
I phoned Jerry at the office and he’s not there. I tried to reach Mr. Crosscup, the director of the camp, and he and his assistant are out with the 8-10 year olds on an overnight hike. The secretary said that Alex is with them and they are beyond reach of a phone. I told her that couldn’t be strictly true because I had received a phone call from my son within the past five minutes. She said she would send one of the counselors after the group and will call me back when she has some word.
I’m not going to wait around forever to hear from her or from Jerry. If Jerry isn’t home in an hour, I’m going up there without him.
Monday: I drove up to Echo Lake without Jerry on Saturday. The counselor had caught up with the overnight group and Alex and the director came back with him to the camp. Alex looked at me as if he had never seen me before in his life. He insisted he had made no call and Mr. Crosscup assured me with infuriating courtesy that there was no possible way Alex could have got to a telephone from where they had been in the mountains. I told him I had never agreed that my child should be so far out of reach of civilization, whereupon he produced a paper Jerry had signed allowing Alex to go on overnight hikes and canoe trips no farther than twenty-four hours’ distance from modern communications.
Alex and I took a walk and I pleaded with him to return to New York with me, but he refused flat out. He doesn’t like Jerry and me, he said — he hates us. At first he wouldn’t tell me why. Then he did.
Did you call me all the way up here to say these terrible things, I asked him. I didn’t call you up here, he screamed, and ran away from me into the woods. I let him go. I’ve got to think before I try talking to him again. I hated my parents, but they gave me nothing. Jerry and I give Alex everything.
Could my son be insane, as my parents were? They say mental illness skips a generation. It certainly skipped ours. Peter has behaved hatefully toward me since we settled the estate but he’s a judge, after all, and what could be more stable?
I forgot to tell you on Saturday that Stephen called, right on the heels of the call from Alex, wanting to see me and explain his absence. I told him I was on my way upstate to see Alex and had no time to talk to him.
I didn’t go to the gallery today. Rafael will have to wait until tomorrow for our talk. But it won’t be pleasant, and I’m aching for a pleasant conversation with somebody.
Tuesday: Rafael and I have had our talk and I walked out with $5000. It’s a ridiculously small amount, but he knows very well that I will call on him when I am in need of more.
I took a long walk in the heat, away from the apartment — it is so morbidly silent these days except for that bitchy phone. I walked all the way from the gallery down to lower Broadway. It’s a long way but I’ve always been a great walker. By the time I realized where I was, I was thirsty and stopped at a bar. I forget its name, but I remember that it had a friendly old mirror over the bar and that I stayed for quite a while. It was dark when I returned to the apartment — dark and empty.
What is keeping Jerry so busy these days? He is never here for meals anymore and often he doesn’t even come home to sleep. I’d suspect an affair, but that would be impossible with Jerry. He’s too much of a family man at heart. Besides, he adores me. It’s a very cold proposition, adoration, but I will live with it until it suits me to move on.
Wednesday: The phone woke me before 5:00 this morning. Jerry wasn’t home yet and I thought it would be he, but it was Mr. Anonymous. When he started in about me I hung up and went to the kitchen to make some coffee. When the phone rang again, I let it ring until I couldn’t stand it anymore and had to pick up the receiver.
Your husband wants a divorce, he said.
I’ll kill him first, I thought. How would you know? I asked him.
I know everything about you, he sneered. I know about your husband, who wants a divorce at any cost, and about Stephen, who means you no more good than you mean him, and about your brother who hates you and your son who hates you. I know that you have no friends, nor really any friendly acquaintances. I know that you’ve lost your job and have $5000 that you stupidly haven’t deposited in the bank.
That’s not true, I said.
It’s true, he assured me. I saw you at the bar yesterday. And you saw me. I learned several new things about you. I had known that you drink too much but I hadn’t yet realized that you talk too much to strangers and you wear too much perfume. Funny how when you get better acquainted with some women they lose their appeal.