Gravely Haynes said, “I never listen to the radio if I can help it. I stopped listening years ago.”
Both Bob Posin and Haynes shook hands with him, told him when he could expect his check, and then went out of the apartment into the hall.
“Want a ride home?” Posin said to him.
“No,” he said.
“You look ready to give out.”
He began to close the hall door between himself and them.
“Now wait a minute,” Posin said. A slow, uneasy flush crept up in his face as he realized that Jim was going to remain behind in the apartment with Patricia—
“Good night,” Jim said. He shut the door and locked it. The bell rang instantly, and he opened the door. “What?”
“I think you better come along,” Posin said. He was out in the hall alone; Haynes was already on his way to the stairs.
“I’m too sick to come along,” Jim said.
“You’re not sick; there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just too big a slacker to do your job. You got the whole station into trouble and you’re just going to stand around slobbering in your drink—”
“Go to hell,” Jim said, closing the door. Posin’s foot came out, wedging itself in the way.
“Now look here,” Posin said shakily. “We’re grown men. You were married to Pat, but that’s over and done with; you have no claim on her.”
“What’s your name on the phone book for?”
Ted Haynes, from the end of the hall, said, “Are you coming or aren’t you?”
After a brief conflict, Posin withdrew his foot, and Jim closed the door. He locked it and then walked back into the kitchen. Somewhere he had set down his drink; the glass was lost. In the cupboard he found another to take its place.
Good lord in heaven, he thought. The things that could happen to a rational man.
While he was fixing himself another drink, Pat came out of the bedroom in a long, pale blue robe. “Oh,” she said, startled to see him.
“I’m still here,” he said. “They left.”
“I thought you all were gone,” she said.
“I’m suspended for a month. Without pay.” An ice cube skidded from his hands and onto the floor; he bent to pick it up.
“Starting when?”
“Now. Today.”
“That’s not so bad. That’s not bad at all. He must want to keep you. That’ll give you time to think it over.” She was watching him warily. The towel was gone; in the bedroom she had combed her hair out, dried it, and fluffed it. Her hair spread out against the collar of her robe, long and soft and dark.
“Nice,” he said. Then suddenly he said, “I give up.”
She went and got a cigarette. “Go home and go to bed.” Clouds of cigarette smoke billowed toward the light mounted over the sink, the plastic-hooded kitchen light. She tossed the match into the sink and folded her arms. “Or do you want to stay here?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll leave.”
Taking his glass from him, she poured the rest of the drink away. “In a month you’ll know what it is you want to do.”
“I don’t want to do anything,” he said.
“You will.” Again she was watching him, calmly, in her confident manner. “You’re lucky, Jim.”
“Because he didn’t fire me?”
Sighing, she left the kitchen. “I’m too tired to talk about it.” She went into the bedroom, put her cigarette in the ashtray on the end table by the clock, and then stretched out on the bed, in her robe, her head on the pillow, her knees drawn up . . .. “What a day,” she said.
He came in and sat down by her. “How about getting remarried?”
“What do you, mean? You mean you and me again? Are you saying that seriously, or do you just want to see what sort of reaction you’ll get?”
He said, “Maybe I’ll go up to the cabin.”
“What cabin?”
“Yours. On the Russian River.”
“I sold it. Last year or the year before. I had to get rid of it. I wasn’t using it.”
“But wasn’t that a present from your father?”
“In his will.” Her eyes had closed.
“That’s too bad,” he said, thinking about the cabin, the white boards of the porch, the tank of gas for the stove, half-buried in leaves and dirt, the host of long-legged spiders that had rushed from the water closet the first time he had gone with her to open the cabin up.
“Did you want to go away? Up in the country or something?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“I’m sorry about the cabin.”
He had met her through the cabin. In the summer of 1951, five years ago, he had wanted to rent a cabin for his two-week vacation; going through the newspaper he had come across the ad for Patricia’s cabin and had gone to see her, to find out how much she wanted.
“What do you rent it for?” he said.
“Sixty dollars a month. During the summer.”
Her family had lived in Bolinas, a fishing town set off by itself on the coast side of Mann County. Her father, before his death, was a rural real estate man, selling lots, farms, summer cabins in the resort areas. In 1951 she was working as a bookkeeper, twenty-three years old, isolated from her family. She had never respected her father; she described him as a windy, beer-drinking old man with varicose veins. Her mother, still living, was a mystic with a tea-reading shop near Stinson Beach. From that had come Patricia’s contempt for phony idealism. She lived a brisk, efficient life, rooming with another girl in the Marina, cooking her own meals, washing her own clothes; her only concession to luxury was the buying of an opera ticket or a trip on the Greyhound bus. She loved to travel. And when he had met her, she had owned a set of oil paints and did an occasional still life or portrait.
“Sixty bucks,” he said.
It seemed like too much for a cabin. She showed him a photograph of it tacked up beside the mirror of her dressing table. The cabin was on the river. The water was slow, and it spread out into the bushes and grass. In the photograph, Patricia rested with her hand against the railing of the cabin’s porch; she wore a wool, bathing suit, and she was smiling into the sun.
“That’s you,” he said.
“Yes. I used to go up there with my brother.” Her brother, she told him, was killed during the Second World War.
He asked about seeing the cabin.
“Do you have a car?” She had been hanging clothes on the line in the backyard of the rooming house; it was Sunday, and she was home. “I don’t have a car. I haven’t been up there since the forties. Somebody up there, a real estate man, a friend of my father’s, was keeping it fixed up for us.”
He drove her up the coast highway in his car. They left San Francisco at eleven in the morning. At twelve-thirty they pulled off the road to have lunch. They were near Bodega Bay, in Sonoma County, and they ate a meal of prawns dipped in batter, beer, and tossed green salad. “I like seafood,” she said. “We always had fish of some kind. Bolinas is a dairy town, and before my father was a real estate man he was in the dairy business. We used to drive at night in the fog, over Panoramic Highway to San Francisco . . . the fog was so thick he had to open the car door and look down at the white line. Or we would have gone off the road.”
She seemed a happy and bright girl. He thought she was exceptionally pretty. She wore a sleeveless blouse and a long skirt almost to her ankles. Her black hair was tied in two braids, and in each braid was—
At two o’clock they reached the Russian River. By that time they had stopped for gas and had gone into a roadside tavern, a redwood and neon place where the jukebox was playing ‘Frenesi.’ Kids, high school kids in white cotton shorts and shirts, filled up the booths, eating hamburgers and drinking Cokes. The racket was terrific. Both he and Pat had a couple of drinks. They felt good. When they reached Guerneville, on the Russian River, they stopped again at another tavern, also redwood and neon, and had a couple more drinks. By the time they reached the cabin, the time was three-thirty in the afternoon, and they were both pretty well looped.