“I don’t think that’s nice, George. Shall I run your tub for you?”
“Yes, will you please?”
“Wait till I put something on,” she said. “Mary wanted to know if everything was all right between Pen and Wilma. I said as far as I knew, yes. Then she gave me a sort of a patronizing look and I said well, I was just a hick from the country, but I couldn’t pry any more out of her. Is there something I’m supposed to know? I didn’t notice anything when I had dinner there, but I wasn’t looking for anything.”
“What kind of thing was she talking about?”
“Well, naturally I inferred that Wilma had a beau or Pen had a lady friend. One or the other.”
“Mary threw the match in the gas tank and ran.”
“But Mary doesn’t usually gossip, unless there’s something.”
“Well, I was with Pen today, and he happened to say he didn’t have any problem, so it isn’t Pen. And if Wilma has a beau it must be somebody like old Rancid Martin.”
“Ransome Martin.”
“And at seventy-eight he’s relatively harmless. No, you go back and tell Mary to give you more particulars or shut up. Not too warm, my tub. Just make it half and half.”
“It is half and half. Your shirts are back from the laundry.”
“Why do you tell me that? Was anyone talking about shirts?”
“I thought I’d say something to get you in a different mood. You’ve been very captious since you got here, and I don’t enjoy that.”
“I’m very sorry, Geraldine.”
“I had too many years of every time something went wrong, I bore the brunt of it. I didn’t marry you to go through that all over again. And I won’t, George. Please make no mistake about that.”
“You’re really cross?”
“No, dear, I’m not cross. That’s not saying I might not get cross. But let’s have it understood that when I’m trying to be pleasant, which is most of the time, I don’t like being snapped at. I loved every minute of last night and felt wonderfully all day. But you can make me unhappy, too. You can be very distant at times.”
“I’m sorry, my dear. It’s been one thing after another the past day or so.”
“Have your bath, and then maybe you’ll decide that it’d be nice to have dinner here and not go out. I’m perfectly willing to do whatever you’d like to do.”
“We’ll see after I’ve had my bath.”
“You’re the most attractive man I ever knew.”
“Am I?”
“You know you are.”
“After two years of marriage?”
“You’ll always be attractive. I suppose I ought to thank those hundreds of women before you selected me.”
“There was nothing like hundreds of women, Geraldine. A few, but not hundreds.”
“Well—I’m just as much of a woman as any of them, although God knows I never knew that until three years ago. Maybe that’s why you’re so attractive, George. Any dull woman could be the wife of Howard Buckmaster, but I know they’re all saying, ‘What does George Lockwood see in her?’ What shall I tell them?”
“You can tell them that I find you anything but a dull woman.”
“Well, I would have gone on being one if you hadn’t been so bold. ‘Try me, sometime.’ Who would think that a simple little remark like that could change my entire life?”
“The moment was right. I decided that you must be getting ready to try someone.”
“That was really it. You read my mind before I was aware of what I was thinking. I was awful, wasn’t I? I was so stupid. So embarrassed.”
“No you weren’t. You were yourself, not trying to be anyone else or anything else but what you were. That’s the whole secret, you know. The stupid one was Howard.”
“Oh, Lord. Poor Howard. Well, you go take your tub.”
“And you’re over being cross?” he said.
“I have to assert myself once in a while,” she said.
They dined on antipasto and spaghetti at a speakeasy in Chelsea, where they were joined by a Princeton classmate of George Lockwood’s. It was a family-owned restaurant, a single, long narrow room with both walls painted to depict a street scene in a small Italian town. Over the murals was placed latticework of white wood, in the hope of suggesting the illusion that the street scenes were being observed from inside a garden. The painting was so bad that no illusion was created, but the colors were bright, the latticework was spotless, and the artistic failure mattered less than the joyful intent of the proprietor and the artist. The Chianti had a slight metallic taste, indicating that it had reposed in an iron vat before being decanted into the straw-bound bottles; but the food was good and the service was kind. No one left before eleven o’clock, and only one young couple remained after twelve. Joe, the proprietor, stood behind the waiter whenever a dish was being served, supervising every last detail, then nodding and faintly smiling at the customers and leaving them to themselves. The clientele was largely middle-aged, built on the patronage of men who had once known Joe as a waiter at the Club de Vingt. They were men who were not unaccustomed to wine at their meals in the days before the Eighteenth Amendment, and they were orderly and solvent. Joe’s political connections were excellent, and no police officer below the rank of lieutenant was ever seen in the place.
“George, the talk around town is that you’re going to be asked to give a new dormitory,” said Ned O’Byrne.
“What?”
“And call it Carlton-MacLeod,” said O’Byrne.
“Oh,” said George Lockwood.
“Or Carburetor Hall,” said O’Byrne. “Why couldn’t you have let a dear friend and classmate in on a thing like that?”
“No friend or classmate in his right mind would have gone into it when Pen and I first heard of it,” said George Lockwood. “You’re all so busy buying and selling stocks that you never even see. Pen and I nursed that thing along, you know, and the lawyers’ fees would have paid for—well, a few tennis courts.”
“Solid gold tennis courts, I heard,” said O’Byrne. “Well, the next time you have something like that, let a fellow know.”
“I wouldn’t think of it, Ned. If it’s going to be good, I want it all myself—with Pen, that is. And if it isn’t any good, how could I ever face my dear old friends. What have you got for me?”
“Well, just to create good will, in the hope of quid pro quo in the future, I have got something in the way of a tip. It closed today at 11¼, and I’m going to hold on to it till it reaches an even 40. That should be around the middle of January, just about time to pay the Christmas bills.”
“Is it on the big board?”
“No it most certainly is not, and as a matter of fact there isn’t enough of the stock to attract a big investor like you, but I hope to make a modest fifty grand and then run.”
“And then what will you do?”
“Well, I’m a speculator. I make no bones about it. I’m letting one or two friends in on it, and I fully expect them to reciprocate when they get something. This is pretty small stuff for you, George.”
“Nothing in five figures is small, Ned. We’ve just finished building a house, and if I can get someone else to pay for it, I’ll let them.”
“Well, you’re welcome to come in.”
“No thanks, Ned. I might want to get out before you do, and if I started selling, you’d never forgive me.”
“Well, of course I wouldn’t want you to sell it all at once. You could start something that would upset my plans, so I guess you’d better stay out. But just between us, and since you’re not going in, I’ll tell you what it is so that you can watch it for the next three months.”