John D. MacDonald
Linda
Looking back, I think it was right after the first of the year that Linda started hammering at me to take my vacation in the fall intsead of in the summer. Hammering isn’t exactly the word. That wasn’t Linda’s way. She started by talking about Stu and Betty Carbonelli and what a fine time they’d had when they went south for their vacation in November. And she talked about the terrible traffic in the summer and how dangerous it was. And about how not having kids made it easier too.
I kept my head down, thinking that this would blow over like most of her ideas. I wasn’t at all keen on this one. I knew it would mean more expense. Linda never thought or talked about money except when we didn’t have enough for something she wanted to do or wanted to buy, and then she had plenty to say. Actually, I never cared much for vacations. Sure, I like to get away from the plant for a while, but I’m content to stay around the house. I’ve got my woodworking tools in the cellar, and I like to fool around in the yard. There’s plenty to do.
Three years ago we did stay right at home. I thought it was the best vacation we ever had, but Linda kept saying it was the worst. This was the first year I was due to get three weeks with pay instead of just two, and she brought that up too, telling me how it would give us a real chance to get away.
I hoped it would blow over and I’d be able to talk her into taking the last three weeks in August. In fact, I put in for that early, in March. I thought we could rent a camp up at Lake Pleasant. That would mean only a seventy-mile trip and a chance for some fishing.
But Linda kept harping on it. Now, of course, I know why she kept after me the way she did. I know the horror that lived in the back of her mind all those months she was cooing and wheedling. Now that it’s too late, I can look back and see just how carefully it was all arranged.
Ever since Christmas we had been seeing quite a lot of the Jeffries. His first name was Brandon, but nobody would ever call him that. You instinctively called him Jeff. They were a little younger than Linda and me, and he was with the same company, but on the sales end, while I’ve been in the purchasing department for the past nine years — in fact ever since I got out of the army and married Linda. Jeff was one of the top salesmen on the road and last year they brought him in and made him sales manager of the northeastern division. He got an override on all the sales made in his division and had to make only about three trips a month. I guess he made out pretty well — probably a lot better than I do — and on top of that Stella, his wife, had some money of her own.
When they brought him in last year Jeff and Stella bought two adjoining lots about a block and a half from our place and put up quite a house. A little more modern than I go for, but Linda was just crazy about it. Linda always seemed to take a big shine to people who had more to do with than we did, and so it was always a strain trying to keep up. I tried to save a little, but it was a pretty slow process.
The four of us played bridge and canasta pretty often. Usually I don’t like to see too much of people who work at the same place because it’s like bringing your work home with you. But Jeff was in an entirely different division and we didn’t talk about the company at all.
Daytimes, Linda would go over and gab with Stella, or vice versa. They didn’t ever seem to become real good friends, if you know what I mean. We saw a lot of each other, but there was always a little reserve. Nobody ever seemed to let their hair down all the way. Maybe some of that was my fault. I have about two or three close friends, and a lot of people I just happen to know. I’ve always been quiet. Linda did the talking for both of us.
If you’ve ever been in purchasing, where you have to see the salesmen, you’ll know what I mean when I say that Jeff was a perfect salesman type. Not the cartoon type, slapping backs and breathing in your face, but the modern type of top sales hand — tall and good-looking in a sort of rugged way. When he told jokes, they were on himself. He’d listen when you talked. I mean really listen, drawing you out. He had that knack of making you feel important. I’m sure he wasn’t really interested in my woodworking shop, but he’d come down to the cellar and pretend to be. I probably bored him, showing him how the stuff worked, but you’d never guess it.
Jeff kept himself in shape too. He really worked at it — swimming and tennis and so on. And I guess he had a sun lamp home because he had a good tan the year round. All of which added to the kind of impression he made.
When you’re married to a woman like Linda, you develop a sort of sixth sense for those jokers who are on the make. We couldn’t ever go to a big party without somebody trying to hang all over her. I hate parties like that, but they made Linda sparkle. She was thirty-four when we met the Jeffries and looked about twenty-six or seven. People were all the time telling her that she looked like Paulette Goddard, but I never could see it.
One thing Linda really had, and that’s a beautiful figure. I have never seen a better figure anywhere, on anybody. She had to watch her weight pretty carefully. She liked to stay at a hundred and twenty-five. Personally, I liked her at about a hundred and thirty-two, because when she weighed less her face looked sort of gaunt.
But like I was saying, you develop a sixth sense when you have a wife like Linda. I watched Jeff pretty closely, worrying a little bit, because if anybody had a chance of making out, that Jeff Jeffries certainly would. But I could see that it was all right. They kidded around a lot, with him making a burlesque pass at her now and then, but I could see it was all in fun. And he was very loving with Stella, his wife, holding her hand whenever he could, and kissing her on the temple when they danced together at the club and that sort of thing. Which is funny when you think of it, because Stella Jeffries certainly was anything but a good-looking woman. She was just awfully nice. Really nice. I liked her a lot, more than I liked Jeff.
It certainly surprised me that I ever got to marry Linda Willestone. That was her name in high school, when I first knew her. We were in the same graduating class. She claimed that she remembered me, but I don’t think she really did. It was a big school, about seven thousand total enrollment, and I was even quieter then than I am now. I worked after school most of the time, so I didn’t have a chance to get in on those extra things a lot of the others did. Linda belonged to a different world. She was in just one of my classes. I was shy then. I thought about her a lot, at night, but it would have been just as easy for me to chop off my right hand as go up and say anything to her in the hall between classes. She ran around with a gang that included all the big shots in the student body. I didn’t see her again after I graduated, but I used to think about her from time to time and wonder what happened to her.
I got out of the army and got a job and a week later I saw her on the street and recognized her. I walked right up to her and said, “Hello, Linda.” She looked at me blankly. I told her who I was and how I’d been in high school with her. We went into a place and had coffee. Then I saw that she didn’t look good at all. She looked as if she’d been sick. Her clothing was shabby. All the life she had had in high school seemed to have faded.
She said frankly that she was broke and looking for a job. She’d come in on a bus from California. It was a pretty tragic story she told me. Her people were dead. She had married a marine and he’d been killed. He hadn’t transferred his insurance to her and his people, Kentucky people, wouldn’t have anything to do with her because the marine had married her instead of a girl in his home town.
She had worked for a while in California and then married an Air Force warrant officer. He got in some kind of a jam and had been given a dishonorable discharge and it was after that happened that she found out he’d already had a wife and two children back in Caribou, Maine. She’d worked some more and gotten sick and when sickness took her savings, she’d been a charity patient until she was well enough to leave. She’d worked just long enough to get together the bus fare to come home.