He calls the next week and she says “Howard Tetch?” “Yes, I called you last week. Freddy Gum’s friend. You said—” “Oh, right, Howard. It’s awful of me — please, I apologize. I don’t know how I could have forgotten your name a second time. Believe me, it’s the work. Sixty hours, seventy. How are you?” “Fine,” he says, “and I was wondering if there was some time this week, or even on the weekend, we could—” “I really couldn’t this week or the weekend. What I was doing last week extended into this one, and maybe even worse. Not the socializing, but those sixty-seventy-hours-a-week work. I’m not stringing you along, honestly. But I do have this profession that’s very demanding sometimes—” “What is it you do?” “Whatever I do — and I wish I had the time to tell you, but I haven’t. We’ll talk it over when we meet. So you’ll call me? I can easily understand why you wouldn’t.” “No, sure, next week then. I’ll call.”
He doesn’t call back. A week later another friend calls and says he’s giving a dinner party Saturday and “two very lovely and intelligent young women, both single, will be coming and I want you to meet them. Who can say? You might get interested in them both. Then you’ll have a problem you wish never started by phoning around for possible brides and mothers for your future kids, right?” “Oh, I don’t know,” Howard says, “but sounds pretty good so far.”
He goes to the party. One of these two women is physically beautiful, all right, but unattractive. Something about the way she’s dressed — she’s overdressed — and her perfume, makeup, self-important air or something, and she talks too much and too loudly. She also smokes — a lot — and every so often blows smoke on the person she’s talking to, and both times she left her extinguished cigarette smoldering. He just knows — so he doesn’t even approach her — he could never start seeing or not for too long a woman who smokes so much and so carelessly. The other woman — seems to be her friend — is pretty, has a nice figure, more simply dressed, no makeup or none he can make out, doesn’t smoke or isn’t smoking here, talks intelligently and has a pleasant voice. He introduces himself, they talk about different things, she tells him she recently got divorced and he says “I’m sorry, that can be very rough.” “Just the opposite. We settled it quickly and friendly and since the day I left him I’ve never felt so free in my life. I love going out, or staying in when I want to, and partying late, meeting lots or people, but being unattached.” She has a six-year-old son who lives with his father. “One child, that’s all I ever wanted, and now I think even one was too many for me, much as I love him. Since his father wanted to take him, I thought why not? I see him every other weekend, or every weekend if that’s what he wants, but he so far hasn’t, and get him for a month in the summer. Lots of people disapprove, but they’re not me. Many of them are hypocrites, for they’re the same ones who feel so strongly that the husband — so why not the ex-husband who’s the father of your child? — should take a much larger if not an equal role in the partnership. Well, it’s still a partnership where our son’s concerned, or at least till he’s eighteen or twenty-one, isn’t it? Do you disapprove too?” He says “No, if it works for you all and it’s what you want and no one’s hurt. Sure. Of course, there’s got to be some sadness or remorse in a divorce where there’s a child involved,” and she says “Wrong again, with us. Having two parents was just too confusing for Riner. He thinks it’s great having only one at a time to answer to, and another to fall back on just in case.”
He takes her phone number, calls, they have dinner, he sees her to her apartment house after, shakes her hand in the lobby and says he’ll call again if she doesn’t mind, “for it was a nice evening: lively conversation, some laughs, many of them, if fact, and we seem to have several similar interests,” and she says “So come on up. Even stay if you want; you don’t seem like a masher.” They go to bed and in the morning over coffee she says “I want to tell you something. I like you but don’t want you getting any ideas about my being your one-and-only from now on. You should know from the start that I’m seeing several men, sleeping with three of them — they’re all clean and straight, so don’t worry. And you can be number four if you want, but I’m not for a long time getting seriously connected to anyone. You don’t like the arrangement — no problem: here’s my cheek to kiss and there’s the door.” He says he doesn’t mind the arrangement for now, kisses her lips just before he leaves, but doesn’t call again.
He sees a woman on a movie line waiting to go in. He’s alone and she seems to be too. She’s reading quite quickly a novel he liked a lot and never looks up from it at the people in front and behind her, at least while he’s looking at her. Attractive, intelligent looking, he likes the casual way she’s dressed, way her hair is, everything. He intentionally finds a seat two rows behind hers, watches her a lot and she never speaks to the person on either side of her. On the way out he does something he hasn’t done in about twenty years. He gets alongside her and says “Pardon me, miss, but did you like the movie?” She smiles and says “It was a big disappointment, and you?” “Didn’t care for it much either. Listen, this is difficult to do-introducing myself to a woman I’ve never met — like this, I mean, and something I haven’t done in God knows how many years. But would you — my name is Howard Tetch — like to have a cup of coffee someplace or a beer and talk about the movie? That book too — I read it and saw you reading. If you don’t, then please, I’m sorry for stopping you — I already think you’re going to say no, and why shouldn’t you?” “No, let’s have coffee, but for me, tea.” “Tea, yes, much healthier for you — that’s what I’ll have too.”
They have tea, talk — the book, movie, difficulties of introducing yourself to strangers you want to meet, something she’s wanted to do with a number of men—“I can admit it,”—but never had the courage for it. He sees her to a taxi, next day calls her at work, they meet for tea, meet again for lunch, another time for a movie, go to bed, soon he’s at her place more than his own. She’s thirty-three and also wants to get married and have a child, probably two. “With the right person, of course. That’ll take, once I meet him, about six months to find out. Then once it’s decided, I’d like to get married no more than a month after that, or at least begin trying to conceive.” The more time he spends at her place, the bossier and pettier she gets with him. She doesn’t like him hanging the underpants he washes on the shower curtain rod. He says “What about if I hang them on a hanger over the tub?” but she doesn’t like that either. “It looks shabby, like something in a squalid boardinghouse. Put them in the dryer with the rest of our clothes.” “The elastic waistband stretches. So does the crotch part to where after a few dryer dryings you can see my balls. That’s why I hand-wash them and hang them up like that.” Problem’s never resolved. He wrings his underpants out and hangs them on a hanger, with a few newspaper sheets underneath, in the foot of closet space she’s set aside for his clothes. A couple of times when he does this she says the drops from the hanging underpants might go through the paper and ruin the closet floor. He puts more newspapers down and that seems to assuage her. She thinks he should shave before he gets into bed, not when he rises. He says “But I’ve always shaved, maybe since I started shaving my entire face, in the morning. That’s what I do.” “Well try changing your habits a little. You’re scratchy. It hurts our lovemaking. My skin’s fair, much smoother than yours, and your face against it at night is an irritant.” “An irritant?” “It irritates my face, all right?” “Then we’ll make love in the morning after I shave.” “We can do that too,” she says, “but like most couples, most of our lovemaking is at night. Also, while I’m on the subject, I wish you wouldn’t get back into bed after you exercise in the morning. Your armpits smell. You sweat up the bed. If you don’t want to shower after, wash your arms down with a wet washrag. Your back and chest too.” “I only exercise those early times in the morning when I can’t sleep anymore, or am having trouble sleeping. So I feel, long as I’m up, I should either read or do something I’m going to do later in the day anyway, like exercising. But from now on I’ll do as you say with the washrag whenever I do exercise very early and then, maybe because the exercising’s relaxed or tired me, get back into bed.” She also thinks he hogs too much of the covers; he should try keeping his legs straight in front of him in bed rather than lying them diagonally cross her side; he could perhaps shampoo more often—“Your hair gets to the sticky level sometimes.” And is that old thin belt really right for when he dresses up? “If anything, maybe you can redye it.” And does he have to wear jeans with a hole in the knee, even if it is only to go to the corner store? “What about you?” he finally says. “You read the Times in bed before we make love at night or just go to sleep, and then don’t wash the newsprint off your hands. That gets on me. Probably also gets on the sheets and pillowcases, but of course only on your side of the bed, and your sheets and pillowcases, so why should I be griping, right? And your blouses. I’m not the only one who sweats. And after you have into one of yours — OK, you had a tough day at work and probably on the crowded subway to and from work and your body’s reacted to it — that’s natural. But you hang these blouses back up in the closet. On your side, that’s fine with me, and I’m not saying the smell gets on my clothes. But it isn’t exactly a great experience to get hit with it when I go into the closet for something. Anyway, I’m just saying.” They complain like this some more, begin to quarrel, have a couple of fights where they don’t speak to each other for an hour, a day, and soon agree they’re not right for each other anymore and should break up. When he’s packing his things to take back to his apartment, she says “I’m obviously not ready to be with only one man as much as I thought. I’m certainly not ready for marriage yet. As to having a child — to perhaps have two? I should really get my head looked over to have thought of that.” “Well, I’m still ready,” he says, “though maybe all this time I’ve been mistaken there too.”