58.6. The night I left Texas, back in Aransas Pass, Bob got drunk, into a fight, and disorderly. Arrested, he was sentenced to thirty days — all of which he explained to me in a call the next morning, while, in just my undershirt, standing by the kitchen window, I nodded sleepily into the phone.
Marilyn was out when he called.
Later, when she got back, she phoned down to Texas — and actually got to speak to him in the small-town hoosegow.
Over his protests, Marilyn wired him down two hundred dollars for bail — I borrowed a hundred of it, wired from my cousin in Los Angeles, and Marilyn made another through a couple of hours’ work from a connection left over from Artie.
A day later a plane ticket was waiting for Bob at the Houston airport under the name “Alfred Douglas.”
58.7. On a drizzly night, sometime during the depths of the A.M., Marilyn met Bob at the airport and, instead of bringing him back to our Sixth Street apartment, took him up to the Ansonia Hotel, on Seventy-third Street and Broadway, where I met them on the corner, just outside the doors of the Seventy-second Street subway kiosk. But by this time, even Bob was willing to admit that seeing Joanne again here was just not the best thing for either of them.
Marilyn wrote:
A foggy summer sprinkle fell on and off throughout that whole night. It had just stopped again and the streets were still wet, when Bob, with his arm around Marilyn, came out the subway kiosk doors at Seventy-second Street and, seeing me standing across on the corner, grinned and waved. I kissed Marilyn while my hand rested on his shoulder. She looked totally exhausted and very happy. The three of us walked up dark Broadway together to the Ansonia.
I’d decided I’d leave Bob and Marilyn alone together for what was left of his first night back. There were things I knew she wanted to talk to him about, to ask him about. She’d been away from him much longer than I had. And she’d been very upset by the last turn of events.
We took the elevator up to our room.
And Marilyn wrote:
Back down to Sixth Street was where I went.
And went to bed alone. And rose the next day, made coffee for myself, and sat at the round oak table, thinking. I’d already seen Joanne a couple of times. Once I’d gone up to the Bickford’s on Twenty-third Street where, in her yellow smock with the white handkerchief pinned to her shoulder, she worked behind the counter at night. Over the free cup of coffee she’d given me, I’d told her of Bob’s doings up till the time I left. I suspect I saw her that day as well — and marveled at how easy it was to keep up the ordinary conversation that we did, now about her job, now about how bored she was here in the city with nothing except her job to do, without my mentioning that Bob had been in jail and was now out, that he was back in New York, that he was in a hotel room up on Seventy-second Street. I went out and walked around a bit. And, later, I went back up to the Ansonia.
Marilyn had taken the day off to be with Bob. But when I got there, they were taking a nap together. In the dim room with its obligatory torn shade, I talked to Bob, who sat now, naked, cross-legged on the bed up near the pillow, while Marilyn sat on the edge in her slip.
What, I wanted to know, was he going to do about Joanne?
“What am I supposed to do about her?”
“Are you going to see her?”
“Nope,” Bob said. “I don’t even want her to know I’m in the city.”
“When you brought her up here,” I told him, “you said there were some things you wanted to work out together. You got anything more to work out?”
“Shit,” he said. “That was the dumbest thing I ever done. There ain’t nothin’ more between us.”
“You have anything more you want to say to her?” I asked again.
“Nope.”
I took a breath. “All right, then. Why don’t you let me send her on back to Florida. She doesn’t like it up here. She misses the kids — ”
“You think she’d go?”
“I think in about a week I could convince her. We’ll buy the ticket for her. And that’ll be it.”
“It’s fine by me,” Bob said. “If you think you can do it.”
“You mind paying for another airline ticket?” I asked Marilyn.
She took a breath, too; and shook her head.
It didn’t take a week — only three days. I didn’t tell her Bob was back. And when I offered to buy her ticket, I brushed aside her protestations of the expense: it was some extra money that had just come in to me from one of my books. She could pay me back whenever it was easy for her. If she couldn’t, she didn’t have to. … But to reconstruct those persuasive conversations with the woman who still thought her husband was in Texas would be as difficult for me as recreating my meeting back from Texas with Marilyn. All memory holds to are those moments when her dark eyes would brighten at the thought of her kids: “Oh, God, Chip, I do miss those children. You just don’t know how much. …”
And I’d say, “Then why don’t you go home to them?”
But that’s all.
Conveniently.
One morning around ten-thirty, three days later, I took Joanne (on the Carey bus) to Kennedy — and ran with her luggage, out the door and across the tarmac to the baggage cart, when, for a moment, it looked as if she might be too late. Then I stood in the sunlight, waving and watching as she climbed into the plane, blinking as the plane rolled away and, minutes later, runways away, rose. …
In the glare I narrowed my eyes and wondered how all this had happened.