As it turned out, she didn’t have to tell him. Archer found out for himself the next day.
He left for work before she got out of bed. He returned from work just as Llona was sitting down to her morning coffee. She looked up at his unexpected return questioningly, dreading what she would see in his face.
She saw it!
“They found Hubert,” he told her grimly.
“Oh,” she said weakly. It was all she could bring herself to say.
“He was under the cushion of that armchair you were sitting in.”
“Was he?”
“Yes. He was. Llona, you knew he was there, didn’t you?”
She nodded.
“You sat on him and you knew it all along.”
She nodded again.
“And you let us go right on crawling around and looking for him!”
“I -- I didn’t—didn’t know what else to do.”
“You could have said something! That’s what E. Z. said his wife and he couldn’t forgive. The fact that you just sat there and didn’t say anything!”
“What happened?” Llona forced herself to ask the question.
“He fired me. First he gave me a long lecture about the importance of the social side of business and the part a man’s wife plays in it. Then he got soggy about how much Hubert meant to him and his wife. Then he fired me.”
“He fired you,” Llona repeated dumbly.
“That’s light. You catch on real fast this morning, don’t you? He fired me. I am out of a job. I have been fired.”
“You can get another job.” Llona tried to console him.
He stared at her for a long, uncomfortable time.
“You can get another job,” Llona reiterated.
It was the wrong thing to say!
CHAPTER THREE
That was the opening round. After it, things went from bad to worse. The battle lines were drawn and escalation commenced. The action of the marital battlefield became a way of life for Archer and Llona. The pattern of discussions turning into arguments, arguments into fights, and fights into battles where any point might serve as ammunition and the most devastating whiz-bangs might derive from the furthest removed irrelevancies—this pattern was formed and rigidified.
A typical example of how the pattern expressed itself took place one evening a few days after the incident of the mashed Chihuahua. Archer had been touring employment agencies in quest of a job all day. He had writer’s cramp from filling out applications, but he hadn’t been sent out on even one interview, hadn’t even had so much as a nibble. In the P.R. field, firms tended to look for professionals with specific experience in their own field, or at the least with an allied product. There just wasn’t much demand for a P.R. man with experience in promoting male contraceptives. So Archer was tired and edgy when he got home.
Llona’s greeting didn’t help matters. “You forgot!” She stared accusingly at his empty hands.
“Forgot what?”
“Our anniversary!” she wailed.
“Anniversary?” He looked blank.
“We’ve been married exactly one month today. It’s our first anniversary and you forgot it! I cooked a special dinner and bought a bottle of wine and —”
“We can’t afford a bottle of wine,” he observed morosely. “We have to watch every penny until I find a job!”
“I suppose it’s my fault that you can’t find a job!” Llona flung at him.
“Now that you mention it, is. If you’d looked where you were sitting instead of squashing that damned pooch—”
“And you’re going to throw that up in my face for the next twenty years, aren’t you? One little accident, and every time you do something that justifies it!”
“I didn’t do anything,” Archer protested.
“You forgot our anniversary!”
“For God’s sake, Llona, the word ‘anniver—‘ ”
“One month today we’ve been married. But it doesn’t mean a thing to you. And neither do I!”
Grimly, Archer stuck to his point. “The word ‘anniversary’ stems from the root ‘annum,’ meaning yearly. It specifically refers to the once-a-year celebration of an event. Like Labor Day, or Mother’s Day, or Teddy Roosevelt Day.”
“And I don’t mean any more to you than Teddy Roosevelt, do I? And you’re just like him, too!”
“Teddy Roosevelt was one of the greatest presidents this coun—”
“He was an imperialist and a warmonger!”
Archer defended Teddy Roosevelt hotly. “Do you know he was known as The Trustbuster because he—”
“The Truss Buster?” Llona was momentarily startled out of her anger.
“ ‘Trust,’ not ‘truss.’ You’re the ‘Truss Buster’ the way you try to run me down. Yeah, that’s what you are, Llona. You’re a castrating female!”
“I don’t have to castrate you. Your mother did that little job a long time before I even met you!”
“Leave my mother out of this!”
“If you can drag in Teddy Roosevelt, then I can bring up your mother. Her influence is certainly more pertinent to our marriage than--”
“I didn’t bring up Roosevelt. You did!”
“I did not! You were the one who mentioned Teddy Roosevelt Day.”
“Just as an example!” Archer shouted. “Like Mother’s Day and—”
“There! Now you’re the one who’s bringing up mothers.”
“I’m not bringing up mothers!” he screamed with frustration. “I’m just mentioning the day! The day! As an example of things that are celebrated annually with gifts and —”
“Aha! With gifts! Then you admit it! And today is our first anniversary and you didn’t even bring me a present.”
“A month! A month! A MONTH!” he screamed. “That doesn’t count. It’s the first year that-— ‘Anniversary’ means— The root ‘annum’--”
“Semantics! Semantics! SEMANTICS!” Llona yelled triumphantly. “SEMANTICS! . . .”
So, for the next three hours they fought over semantics. It ended with Llona slamming into the bedroom and Archer sleeping on the couch. If the first round had been Archer’s by virtue of Llona’s faux pas with Hubert, the second round was a draw.
However, Llona being female and women being women, it was the basis for Round Three. Even while Round Two was going on, she was plotting the revenge she would take in the next round. The gong sounded a few evenings later when, once again, Archer came home from his employment-seeking pursuits jobless.
“Hello, dear.” Llona greeted him sweetly at the door. Her sweetness was the opening salvo in the campaign strategy she had plotted.
Archer didn’t know this. With masculine naiveté, he thought the battle was a thing of the past. “Hi,” he said wearily. “Boy, am I bushed,” he added, sinking, into a chair.
Llona surveyed his hands and arms with grim satisfaction; concealed, but grim. She had gauged events correctly, and now she was ready to launch the attack. There had been only one chance that it might be aborted, but Archer’s empty-handedness told her he hadn’t grasped that chance. “Aren’t you going to say it to me?” she asked in a syrupy voice.
If Archer had been more alert, the ultragooeyness of her tone would have alerted him. But he was tired. “Say what to you?” he asked, yawning.
“Happy birthday.”
“Happy bir-?” A look of consternation crossed Archer’s face. “Today’s your birthday,” he said slowly. Consternation was replaced by chagrin and guilt. “Happy birthday,” he added automatically.
Llona missed not the slightest nuance of his consternation, his chagrin, his guilt. They confirmed what she’d suspected. Archer had indeed forgotten her birthday, just as he had their “first anniversary.” Llona had gambled that he would. The gamble was predicated on her recognition that she had indeed married a man with no sensitivity to occasions, a man who lacked the generosity to celebrate those occasions in ways designed to show his wife he loved her. To Llona this was a serious failing. Her plan was to correct it, to nip it in the bud of their marriage—and, not so incidentally, to make Archer suffer in the process. Now she swung into her campaign just as she planned it. “And thank you so much for the gift, darling. It’s lovely! You really have wonderful taste for a man.”