I waited until she was good and through, then I said: “Are you all through now? Good! Well, since your heart’s so set on checking-up on me, I’ll tell you exactly how I spent yesterday and the day before—”
She turned and gave me a look as though she was afraid of what I was going to say next, almost would rather not hear it. But I noticed that she didn’t stop me from going ahead, just the same.
So then I gave her an elaborate, ironically elaborate résumé covering the eight working hours of those two days, sixteen hours in all. Not a detail was overlooked; I took her with me step by step on those long, aimless, tortured walks I had taken, back and forth across the town, that resembled so closely a distracted man pacing to and fro in a room. And when I interrupted myself to recall that I had had an orange juice at Fifty-Fourth Street and Broadway, or that I had bought The Sun at the downstairs stand in the Pennsylvania subway station, she didn’t dare resent the irony implied in my giving her such details. The account was exhaustive; exhaustive and exhausting. I almost mentioned each time I had sought a washroom. Three incidents, and only three, were not exposed to her: my one interrogation of Bernice’s doorman on Monday and my two repetitions of it on Tuesday.
But, womanlike, she still seemed dissatisfied when I was through, seemed to be looking for a motive in all this. As though I had overreached myself in giving her more details than were necessary and yet at the same time withholding the key to the situation. “But why couldn’t you stand the thought of sticking in the office all day? Why were you so distracted? What was the matter with you? You haven’t told me that yet. What was on your mind? What made you chase all over town like a chicken with its head cut off, without knowing where you were going at all?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “couldn’t tell you if I tried. And that’s that. Take it or leave it. I’m no psychologist.”
“And was it the same thing with you today?”
“Identically,” I said shortly.
Then she began to lean toward credulity. “Wade, maybe you’ve been working too hard. I’m worried about you. Maybe you should see a doctor—”
“And maybe I should see the Golden Gate with my Bernice,” I thought feelingly.
“Mrs. Greenbaum told me that after they have the fur sales in August her husband always gets in such a state he has to go to Bear Mountain for a week—”
“With some blonde, I bet,” I said aloud.
“He’s not that kind of a man,” she pouted. “They’re a very devoted couple—”
At which precise moment, as though they had only been waiting for a signal from us to begin, a sound of angered footsteps crossed our ceiling, and words of dispute came crackling through sections of the fragile plaster, now here, now there. “You should be such a man like he is!” And then over in the other corner, “You should live so long — I’m too good for you!” It was timed too perfectly; it was unreal. It was not life, it was the movies. And yet it happened.
Maxine made no attempt to save her face in the matter; her laughter mingled unabashedly with mine. We rocked uncontrollably on our chairs and looked into each other’s eyes to add fuel to our enjoyment of the situation.
“They live like doves!” came from over the chandelier. I could see the chandelier throbbing from the force of this statement.
For a moment I even harbored the delightful suspicion that we were the couple in question, but it seemed not. “Believe me, Sadie don’t know how lucky she is! I’ll tell her the next time I see her—!”
“Tell her a thing or two about yourself, why don’t you, ha?”
I noticed, however, in spite of this last, that the repartee or whatever you might call it was predominantly feminine. Perhaps Mr. Greenbaum was a devoted man after all. Or else his wife’s voice carried much better through laths and plaster.
When we were both completely laughed out, and the situation had begun not only to abate but to pall as well, Maxine leaned confidentially forward in her chair and said to me, “Wade, darling, I was so upset about what happened this afternoon, I didn’t get a thing in for tonight. If I get my hat and coat, will you take me out to a restaurant? We haven’t done that in such a long time,” she added coaxingly. “Will you, Wade?”
“Sure,” I said generously, touching her cheek with one finger, “why not?”
When she had come running back with her things on and preceded me out the door, I remarked, “But no postmortems, do you hear?”
She looked around at me tenderly over her shoulder. “I’m sorry I was mean to you, Wade,” she said. “It’ll all come out all right, won’t it?”
I was too busy locking the door to answer.
By the very next morning, which was Thursday, I had already begun to get up later, now that I didn’t have to be in on time any more. We had breakfast at ten, and Maxine rather seemed to enjoy the idea than otherwise. The peace, well-being, and even amiability that had descended upon us following the Greenbaum explosion the evening before persisted in the sunlight of the breakfast nook. Maxine’s green curtains looked cozy, and I had a paper there I had stepped out to buy while she was getting the coffee ready. It was all okay; I mean as a temporary vacuum to tide me over until Paradise began with Bernice, it would do very nicely.
I finished the paper and she the dishes at about the same time. The check from my late concern had come, and I had it in my pocket; I had told her a little earlier that I didn’t think I would go back and cringe to Stewart just for the sake of getting the job back, that this had pulled me out of the rut I’d been in all along, if nothing else, and I preferred to go out and get a newer, more lucrative job, even if it took me a week or two to find what I wanted. Which is not altogether the empty boast it may sound; jobs were plentiful and times were good.
I got up from the table, stretched, yawned, and said, “I think I’ll blow now.”
“I wanted to go downtown too today,” she told me. “They’re selling out those little collar-and-cuff sets at Gimbel’s; I need one for my dark blue.” Which didn’t interest me at all. I didn’t even know what she meant by her dark blue — probably one of her dresses.
“If you’ll wait till I put something on.” she went on. “we could ride in together.” She was still in her pajamas.
“All right,” I said, “how long will it take you?”
“I won’t be five minutes,” she promised, and went into the bedroom.
When eight of the five were up, she came out again fully dressed to tell me: “Wade, what do you think? I just found a hole in the heel in one of my stockings!” This calamity leaving me unmoved, she went on: “Maybe you’d better go ahead; I have another pair drying over the steam pipe in the bathroom, but they’re still a little too damp to put on.”
“I’ll go ahead,” I decided, “and meet you down there later. Whereabouts you going to be?”
“You can wait for me in front of Gray’s Drugstore,” she said.
“Make it about one,” I told her, “we can run into the State or the Rialto and take in a show before they jack the prices up.”
“Fine!” she agreed. “I’ll be through by that time.”
“And see that you make it one,” I warned her as I opened the door, “and not three or four!”
“I’ll be there,” she sang.
I got off at Times Square and shuttled over to Grand Central first of all, and went up to the ticket office in the station to find out what the fare to the Coast came to roughly. Roughly was right, too; I nearly fell over when he told me. “Is that one person?” I gasped. “I didn’t say a caravan,” he answered tartly. “She was right when she said we ought to be sure of what we’re doing ahead of time,” I told myself despondently. “You’re blocking the window,” the ticket seller reminded me, so I asked him about New Orleans. That was pretty nearly as bad, but then, when I left the window, I looked at a relief map they had hanging up on the wall and found out that New Orleans wasn’t nearly as far away, so it seemed a much better buy and more of a bargain to pick California when the time came to leave. Also, I didn’t know much about New Orleans, but I knew that all kinds of flowers and fruits grew in California, and so it seemed to me to be the place to start life with the one you love.