Once we were home, it was very wonderful to me to have my old boldness back. I wisecracked with our busboys, I was charming to tittering dowagers, I drank till very late and made Melanie get up and look at the moon. “There’s no better view in the world,” I said. “Name one.” I had us go out for drinks in other hotels, to feel myself recognized, to draw the greetings of management. When Melanie didn’t come with me, women sought me out; they came up to my table to ask when we were getting a bigger pool or whether I liked the whiskey sours here.
That was how I took up with Debbie. She was only nineteen and first sat at my table with her mother, who wanted to know the best place to buy a panama hat for her husband. Debbie was a perky little blonde with a big bust, and I didn’t know why she decided to fix on me, but she found me in the parking lot an hour later and made up pointless things to ask me. I was drunk but not dumb and knew not to risk making a pass, though she kept me there awhile. Of course, the whole encounter stayed in my brain and when she came to visit me at the hotel the next day, I snuck her into an unused room. What did I think I was doing? Taking more than I needed, piling on extra. People did. She was not even as pretty as Melanie, and nowhere near as smart. I lived in a sea of extra helpings, on an island of the overfed.
Debbie would lie on my chest and call me pet names. “Baby boy.” “Mon amour.” “Mi corazón.” A year of junior college was enough for her, but she liked languages. Her family was booked for the season, so our affair had a whole winter to bloom. And she decided to be afraid she was breaking my heart. “Don’t look so sad,” she said. “I mean it. Give me a smile.”
I liked my wife as much as ever. I never didn’t like Melanie. The sight of her stepping out of her shoes at night excited me; I was even more attentive, more stirred up. “Wild man,” Melanie said.
Did I feel guilty? I was too fascinated by what I was doing. I think I felt heroic, a man equal to a double task. I had passed beyond what was usual. Would I ever go back? I wasn’t sure.
Debbie and I had a room in the hotel that was sort of our room, and I had the maids put flowers in it, hot pink gladioli, anthurium with curved red spikes, orchids with spread sepals and speckled labella. How sexy those flowers were, in an abstract way. Our affair had that kind of abstraction, it was intense and simple. We didn’t need to know much.
The front desk had been told not to rent that room because the plumbing had an unfixable leak (much tee-heeing from Debbie about this excuse). “The number 716 is going to make you so lonesome after I leave,” she said. She was going back to Wilmington, where she lived.
“We could meet in your town,” I said. “I’ll go.”
“No promises,” she said.
All the workers in the hotel knew about us, but no one was carrying tales. The night before Debbie left, I went back after supper to the chambers I shared with Melanie, and my wife was lying on the bed in her clothes. “Do I look green?” she said. “I feel green.”
“What did you eat?”
“It’s not the food,” she said. She turned her face to the wall.
I had a very disturbing thought, but I let it go. I didn’t say, Are you pregnant? I said, “Sleep, my lover.” And I went off to see Debbie. She would be gone so soon, what did any of it matter? I had the rest of my life to minister tenderly to Melanie.
Debbie was giddy with triumph on her last night. “I’m going to make you remember me!” she said. This meant added flourishes in foreplay, which I certainly appreciated — much slyness and laughing, and then the more serious drama, the wild unstoppable resolve, the whimpering and calling out in voices not our own.
When we were done, Debbie whispered into my shoulder, “How will you ever get along without me?”
“Very badly,” I said. It did occur to me that I had a lover to go home to and she didn’t.
“It was not very bright of you to get married so young,” she said. “Really very stupid.”
“Stop it,” I said. “Okay?”
“Why were you so stupid?”
“Debbie,” I said. “I think it’s time to shut up.”
“You shut up,” she said.
“I will, then,” I said. “If you want.”
I turned away, but not for long. There she was, when I turned back. Her tanned face was radiantly pink and misty with sweat.
“You just look so sad,” she said. “I hate to see you look so sad.”
I made a dopey sad-clown face. I was a little appalled at myself.
“Poor baby,” she said.
I crumpled my brow, I turned down my lips in a pout. How greedy I had gotten.
“Cheer me up,” I said.
Before dawn, I went back to Melanie, who slept in our bed, breathing evenly into her own dreams. Some hours later I came out of a deep slumber to hear her throwing up in the bathroom. “Honey, are you okay?” I said.
“Look at your back,” she called out. “Just look.”
I started to joke about how I didn’t have eyes in the back of my head, did I, but by then I was swerving in the mirror and saw the row of scratches on my skin. Freshly rusty. I was sure there was a lie that would help me, but I couldn’t think of it.
“You’re the one I love,” I said.
This only made her shriek and yowl — Melanie, the sanest of women.
She was still shouting, and her eyes were wet and furious when she came out of the bathroom. “How did I end up with you?” she said. “What’s wrong with me that I picked you?”
“This was nothing,” I said. “Really nothing.”
“That’s so reassuring,” she said. “You betrayed me for nothing.”
Melanie stood in her little flowery cotton nightgown, with her slender legs looking spindly, and I was more convinced by the minute that she was pregnant. I kept thinking, as she raged and twisted her face in disgust and I argued and cowered, that she would never leave me if she were having my baby. She was too solid a girl to maroon herself like that. I would do whatever penance I had to to keep her and she would never make it easy, but I would win her over in the end.
“Don’t be upset, don’t be. Tell me what you want me to do,” I said. “I’ll do anything.”
“Give me all your money,” she said. “Give me your salary for the rest of your life.”
“Very funny,” I said. “I guess we’ll talk later.”
“Talk is cheap,” she said.
For most of the next week, Melanie had a stomach virus. She burned a low fever and threw up many times a day, and I came back to the room as often as I could to set down cups of tea, plates of dry toast, bowls of clear broth. Did she want ginger ale? A cold compress? If she was pregnant, she didn’t say so. What she said was, “I’ll be so glad to get out of this phony hotel and away from phony you and your phony family.”
She got me to confess Debbie’s name, and she didn’t know who Debbie was. That seemed to especially enrage her. Her mouth was a bitter line when we talked. I held fast to the notion that she would come back to herself if enough time passed. My father paid a visit and brought her some favorite records to get well by. Tommy Dorsey, Miriam Makeba. She gave my father an earful about me. My father told my mother.
“Oh, Anthony,” my mother said. “You were so nice when you were a little boy.” I began taking most of my meals in our room. I ate what I could and I said anything I could think of to coax Melanie out of hating me. She lay slumped against the pillow, pale and fixed. I listed what was beautiful about her, I went into tales of great times in college, I gave her a soft, fuzzy bathrobe from the hotel gift shop. I bought her a very good pair of pearl earrings from the hotel jeweler. Even with my name and discount, I had to pay in installments, but the pearls were perfect and pure, her kind of thing.