“I assume, sir, that she spent it with a friend.”
“Precisely, Edith. There is no doubt in the world that she spent the night with a friend. Can you tell me what a friend is, Edith?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh, come, now. Surely you can. Is a friend someone you have known well for a long time, or is it possible for a friend to be someone you merely meet in the course of a night and decide to be friendly with?”
“I don’t know, sir. I’ve never had a friend.”
“Edith, Edith, I adore you. I really do.” He laughed softly, a sibilance with no sound of a vowel. “Go away, Edith. Please do. You have been perfect, absolutely perfect, and if you stay another moment you are liable to say something that will spoil everything.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
She went away, and he poured himself a second cup of coffee and glanced at a morning paper while he drank it. He was hardly aware, however, of what he saw. He was savoring, instead, the aftermath of Edith, and the aftermath, constantly recurring, was the substance of anticipation. He was a rich man, incredibly rich to the cold and avaricious bitch who served his table and told him tales, and it amused him enormously to see how she served him and cultivated him in the design and expectation of an eventual expression of gratitude. It would be a truly delectable pleasure when he decided to make it plain, in due time, that he had despised her all along as much as she had ever been despised by Charity, or by anyone else.
He allowed himself a half-hour for dressing and a half-hour for breakfast. At nine, he left the table and walked through the living room and the foyer to the door. Edith, who knew his schedule perfectly, was waiting at the door with his hat. He took it and put it on his head while she opened the door to let him out. On the way into the hall, just before the door closed behind him, he said, “Good morning, Edith,” and she said, “Good morning, sir,” and the last word, the subservient sir, was amputated in the air by the door’s closing. It was always this way. This way exactly.
At the elevator, he pushed the button and stood waiting briefly with indiscernible impatience as the car climbed its shaft in response to his summons. He was not impatient because he was in a hurry or had any place to be at a certain time, although it was part of his schedule to be certain places at certain times, but simply because he felt that his waiting was somehow improper and unnecessary, and that the car should have been waiting, instead, for him. He arrived at the elevator at this minute of the hour five mornings a week, give or take thirty seconds at the most, and it was in effect a personal affront, a deliberate indifference to the reservation he had made of time and space, that the operator did not wait with the car as Edith waited with his hat.
When the car arrived, its door slipping open with a soft gasp after its breathless ascent, he stepped inside and said, “Good morning,” in the identical tone he always used at this time to greet the operator, and the operator said, “Good morning, Mr. Farnese. Beautiful day outside,” and this was an example of another minor irritant that had acquired the cumulative quality of a threat from being repeated so often. The operator always seemed to find it necessary to append a comment to the simple greeting, which would have been tolerable if it had been regularly repeated, but it wasn’t. Sometimes it was a comment like this one, pertaining to the kind of day it happened to be, and sometimes it was something altogether different, pertaining to a current event or something of the sort, and it was impossible to anticipate with any accuracy what it would be on any given morning, and this was disturbing. People who performed repeatedly the same services should say repeatedly the same words and should look consistently the same way. When they did not, it was a violation of the order of things and therefore threatening.
Leaving the building with a word for the doorman, he found that his black Imperial had been brought around from the garage as usual. Getting behind the wheel, he drove by a particular route to the office he maintained in a building on Fifth Avenue, and it was, when he got there, a particular time. Crossing the outer room, he said, “Good morning, Miss Carling,” to the woman he called his secretary and who was actually nothing necessary at all, and went into the inner room and sat down at his desk, and after that there was nothing especially to do.
He didn’t need the office. He didn’t need to go there. Except that the office and his going there were necessary to the survival of the flesh and blood and bones and nerves that existed in the unique identity of Oliver Alton Farnese. Some of his mail was directed there, and this he opened and read and disposed of, and sometimes he even dictated to Miss Carling a reply to one or more of the letters. Now and then he made or granted an appointment with someone, and these appointments were scheduled as strictly for definite times as if he had a full agenda. If a person who had an appointment arrived early, he was kept waiting until the scheduled hour, and if he arrived late, he was advised by Miss Carling that he could not be seen and would have to make another appointment, if he wished, for another day.
Much of the time, after and between the mail and the appointments, if there were any of either, Farnese passed in reading selected newspapers and magazines related to investments and industry and certain sports. He did not handle his investments, nor did he engage in industry or games, but some attention to these matters seemed appropriate to his position, and they bored him somewhat less than art and literature and politics and social affairs. The truth was, he could not possibly have survived the pressures and tensions of any competitive activity whatever, and his father had recognized this and had left him the bulk of a huge family fortune so legally restricted and secured that he really had very little to do with it, except to sign documents occasionally and live richly off the income.
He had practically nothing to do that had to be done, and there was practically nothing that could have been done that he wanted to do, but it was essential to his survival to be constantly committed, if not genuinely occupied. All his life he had lived in private terror under the perpetual threat of personal disintegration. He shored himself with the minutiae of a self-imposed and obsessive regimentation. He substituted rigidity for strength, cruelty for courage. In the observation of the infliction of pain, he took an almost orgiastic pleasure. He was monstrously vain.
Miss Carling, who usually did all her day’s work in thirty minutes and frequently in no minutes, was expected, nevertheless, to be present for seven hours. She arrived at nine and departed for the day at five and took an hour for lunch between noon and one. Farnese lunched between one and half-past two. He went regularly to his club, where he received from the head-waiter a copy of the planned luncheon menu a week in advance, which enabled him to plan his personal menus in advance also, and so he always knew exactly what he would eat on any day, exactly what he would drink before and after the meal, and almost exactly how long it would require to do it. His schedule was rarely disturbed by the claims of other members on his time, for he was not understood or liked, and he usually drank and ate alone. At any rate, he was inevitably at his desk in the office at two-thirty, and often he sat there for the rest of the afternoon and did nothing at all.
This afternoon, however, he had an appointment at three o’clock with a private detective. The detective arrived six minutes early and was compelled to wait in the outer office. He was a grossly obese man whose swollen body with its narrow shoulders and heavy mammae and broad, tremulous hips and rump gave him, in spite of his size, a womanish appearance. His head was bald, his scalp scored and pocked by some kind of skin infection he had once had, and his face was gray and soggy. His name was Bertram Sweeney, and for more than a year it had been his job to shadow Charity McAdams Farnese and report regularly on her activities to Oliver Alton Farnese, her husband.