He watched out for a quiet, cheap-looking restaurant as he neared the station, and he found one that looked clean and had a menu in the window that featured Superburgers with all the fixings for 89c. He had a good meal there sitting at the counter and topping it off with a piece of apple pie and a cup of coffee which he dawdled over as long as he could make it last, and then he went on to the station and found his train waiting to be boarded, and he bought a News and got on and found a good seat in a smoker before the cars began to fill up.
My, but he felt good and sort of smug sitting there waiting for the train to pull out and take him back to Sunray Beach and to Ellie… and Sissy. The square box kept pressing against his chest under his coat so he was conscious of it, and he kept thinking about how Ellie’s face would light up when he handed it to her and she opened it up. He’d do it that night, he decided happily. He wouldn’t put it off until the next day. There would still be the box of chocolates that he could give her when he gave Sissy her present next morning, but the earrings were special.
They were for this first night.
Then the train started and he sat back comfortably in his seat and thought about all the others still back at the hotel, Hal and Joe and all the rest of them, getting drunk tonight and watching a smutty movie and waking up with Godawful hangovers the next morning, and he felt sorry for them because most of them didn’t have a wife like Ellie to go home to.
He knew Hal and Joe didn’t, for instance. He’d met both their wives at parties in the past, and had to admit to himself that if he were married to either one of them he wouldn’t feel like hurrying home either. No, sir. He knew deep down inside himself that he’d be staying in Miami until the last dog was hung and get as soused as a field hand on Saturday night and do his best to forget about the little woman waiting for him at home.
Little woman! He had to grin at that expression as he thought about Hal’s and Joe’s wives. Mrs. Jackson was tall and horse-faced. She looked years older than Hal, and a lot of people said that the only reason he ever married her was because she had money to put into the business which made up enough for him to go into partnership with Joe Wallis.
Well, he told himself indulgently, you pay for whatever you get in this world. Hal had got himself half-share in a thriving automobile agency, but he had to live with that woman to pay for it. It was difficult to imagine Hal and his wife in bed together. She’d be bony, and she wouldn’t like it, Marvin thought. She’d consider it was her duty, and she probably rationed poor old Hal to so many times a week.
Or so many times a month was more like it.
Joe Wallis’ wife was different, but just as bad, it seemed to Marvin, in her own way. Suzy, he remembered her name was. Round-faced and with fluffy hair that Ellie declared was dyed. And a flirt if there ever was one. Ellie often said she didn’t see how Joe could stand the way she acted, and Marvin had to agree that he didn’t either. Not that she ever did anything, likely. He’d told Ellie that, right out, and she’d sort of agreed with him, though she still had certain reservations on the subject.
But she would insist on rubbing up against a man when she danced with him at a party, and she’d sort of accidentally let her knee touch his if they sat at table together, and little things like that. And she had a way of getting a man to go out in the kitchen with her alone at their house to help make drinks at a party, and she’d drop remarks that had double meanings if you looked for them. And kissing you behind the kitchen door if you’d had enough to drink and didn’t push her away in disgust.
That had happened to Marvin once several years ago, and he still remembered it vividly and felt a little squirmish inside when he did. He never would forget the look on Ellie’s face that night when he and Suzy finally came back out of the kitchen with a tray of drinks, but she didn’t say a word to him about it right then. However, they were hardly out of the house and started for home when Ellie had lit into him, demanding to know just what he and Suzy had been doing alone in the kitchen all that time.
He hadn’t dared tell Ellie the truth. How Suzy had caught him unaware and pushed her body against him and lifted up her face with parted lips, and how something had come over him and he’d kissed her. He was heartily ashamed of the incident mostly because he had really enjoyed it while it was going on.
He had puzzled about that for a long time afterward. He just couldn’t understand how a supposedly decent man could enjoy kissing another woman while he was very much in love with his wife at the same time. That is, really like it, the way he had with Suzy that night. He knew, as honestly as he knew anything, that he didn’t really want another woman sexually. Yet, for a minute or so he had wanted Suzy. He had finally decided it had been too much liquor that was to blame. And after that he had been careful not to take more than two or three drinks in any one evening, particularly if Suzy was around.
At home alone with Ellie it was different, of course. Neither one of them were prudes about drinking or sex. Several times since they’d been married they had cut loose in the evening and got good and tight together at home, and the results had been wonderful. They had done all sorts of wild and crazy things in bed, things that a lot of people would probably call indecent, but neither of them had been the slightest bit ashamed of it the next day when they sobered up and remembered what they had done. They had actually talked about it, and agreed that it was a good thing for married couples to do once in awhile, and Marvin felt sure that if more people did it there’d be less fooling around outside the home.
It was dark outside by the time he had finished these thoughts, and the fast train was rolling smoothly up the coastline toward Sunray Beach and Ellie, and Marvin felt warm and good and smugly self-righteous when he thought about what the other delegates were doing back in that Miami hotel. The car wasn’t crowded and he had a whole seat to himself, and he opened the newspaper and glanced at the headlines, and he was dozing off a little when the conductor tapped him on the shoulder for his ticket.
He gave it to him and chuckled as he said, “Sorry to cause you so much trouble, but I guess you’re going to have to stop and let me off at Sunray.”
The conductor punched the ticket with a smile and assured him they didn’t mind stopping, and that if Marvin wanted to take a little snooze to go on and do it because the conductor would promise to wake him up personally in time to get off.
Marvin thought that was nice of him, and he did doze off some more, and the next thing he knew the conductor was tapping him on the shoulder again and the train was beginning to slow down. Marvin yawned and looked out the window and saw the big neon sign of the Sunray Motel sliding past, and suddenly he was wide awake and excited to be getting home. He got his suitcase down from the overhead rack and went back and was waiting in the vestibule for the door to be opened when the train ground to a protesting stop.
He stepped down onto the cindered walk quickly, and there was bright starlight and a little sickle of moon in the sky, and he breathed the good fresh air deeply into his lungs and it smelled good after sitting in the smoker so long.
The train just barely came to a full stop, then picked up speed and glided away and he stood there and watched the lighted cars slide past until there were just the twin red lights receding and fading into the night.
Just as Marvin had anticipated, he was the only passenger to get off the train. There was a dim light inside the waiting room and he walked up there and looked in, but wasn’t surprised to find it empty. It was well past ten o’clock and that meant that all the business places were closed up tight and all the residents were asleep or at least snugly inside their own homes.
He walked around the waiting room and there wasn’t any taxi, of course, but he didn’t mind at all. The six-block walk to his home was exactly what he needed to clean the city air out of his lungs.