“At first,” she said, “I thought maybe it was you that was killed.”
“What would I be doing in a rich people’s place like that?” I said, and oddly enough that was the convincer. The fact was, although I had insisted on being upwardly mobile, she had remained steadfastly rooted in a social level where old tires are placed on the front lawn as planters. So she laughed over the idea of my hobnobbing with rich people, and so did I, and then we had a little chat about the subject of coincidence in general, with some drab examples from her own life and times, and finally she got off the phone and I buzzed Gloria to get me Ralph.
Waiting, trying to think of a new birthday message, I went through the accumulation of mail, trying to get back some of my former joie de milieu by repeating once-pleasant activities, but even wastebasketing final notices didn’t give me a charge any more.
And what was this? A large thick manila envelope, very like the one Volpinex had carried, the one filled with death weapons aimed at Bart. This new envelope was on my desk face down, with no identification showing, and my hands hesitated over it while the hairs on the back of my neck did little clenching things, as though holding tiny ice cubes. It looked exactly like the Volpinex envelope, which I remembered burning in the sink in Point O’ Woods, watching the yellow flames hula over the photostats.
So this was a different envelope, that’s all; why was I hesitant? I have never been a believer in ghosts or the occult or any of that mumbo jumbo. I don’t even believe Mary was a virgin. So this was a different envelope, and my reluctance to touch it was the result of nervous tension, nothing more.
Exactly. When I did turn it over, a bit more emphatically than necessary, the other side showed me my name and address typed in the middle, a gallery of canceled stamps (Eisenhower with beards and moustaches) on the upper right, and the information “L. Margolies, 37 E. 10, NY 10003” on the upper left.
Comedy: The Coward’s Response to Aggression.
Ah. Knowing more these days about aggression and the coward’s range of responses to it, I opened the envelope with the expectation of a good rousing argument to come, but was interrupted by Gloria buzzing to tell me that Ralph was home sick. “Drat,” I said. “Call him at home, then. But if a woman answers, hang up.”
“Right.”
I reached into the envelope again, and a Birthday came to me. At once I wrote it down: “Your birthday stone — is hanging around my neck.”
What? I frowned at what I had written, like a coughing romantic composer looking at blood in his handkerchief. What the hell was this? “Your birthday stone — is hanging around my neck.” Not only wasn’t it funny, it wasn’t even sensible. It didn’t mean anything. What did it mean?
I muttered aloud, “I’ve lost it, I’ve lost it, it’s all gone.” I stared at my former product on the walls, and none of it was funny. None of it was funny. Here and there shreds of meaning clung to the sentences, like meat to a well-gnawed bone, but they weren’t funny.
“I’m becoming Volpinex.” I’m afraid I also said that one aloud, and God knows what else I would have announced if Gloria hadn’t buzzed me again at that moment. I depressed the switch. “Hah?”
“Got him.”
“Who?”
“Ralph Minck. Remember?”
“Oh.” I averted my eyes from the birthday non-greeting I’d just written. “Right,” I said. Ralph: time to cool him out with twins. Rolling myself into one, I pushed the button and said, “Hello, Ralph?”
“Hello,” he said, in a voice so faint and tremulous I could barely hear him. He didn’t sound sick, he sounded suicidal.
I said, “Ralph? What’s happening?”
“I’m afraid I can’t talk to anybody right now.” Dignity tottered among garbage cans in his voice.
“Wait, wait! Don’t hang up. It’s me, Ralph, your best friend Art. What’s the problem, boy?”
A long sigh. A silence. And then: “She’s left me, Art.”
Oh, wonderful. “I’ll be right there, pal,” I said. “Don’t you go anywhere.”
Slamming the phone down, I noticed again the birthday greeting, stone and neck, and this time I took it for no more than what it was: a bummer. I’d had losers before, and I’d never turned into a six-foot cockroach. Distraction had dried the fount of my humor, it was as simple as that, a temporary drought. Crumpling the useless Birthday, I tossed it into the wastebasket, then fondly patted the envelope that was not in fact anything like Volpinex’s. “Get to you later, sweetheart,” I said.
On the way out, I told Gloria, “If my sister calls, I’m just out for a while. If anybody else calls, I’m in mourning. If we never meet again, I want you to know you’ve been a brick.”
“And I want you to know,” she said, “you’ve been a real change from Met Life.”
52
The last time I’d been in the Minck apartment was my wedding night. It looked much different now; somehow, Ralph had managed in two days to create a setting that looked as though he’d been abandoned for three months. Dirty dishes all over the living room, ashtrays piled high with horrible butts, a stink of mildew and dirt and decay in every room, and a bathroom I won’t attempt to describe.
The children, it turned out, were temporarily with some handy cousin in Queens. Candy was somewhere out in the great wild world, having left no forwarding address, and Ralph was sitting around in the kind of undershirt men haven’t worn since the draft started in 1940. “She’s gone for good,” he said.
“Did she say so? Did she, well, leave a note, a letter, anything like that?”
“Yes. She’s gone for good.”
“Yes what? She left a letter?”
“Yes.”
Oh, God. Not the famous letter I’d read at dinner the other night “Where is it, Ralph?”
“She’s gone for good, Art.”
“Yes, but where’s the letter? Her letter, Ralph, the letter she left you.”
“It’s over...” He gestured toward the planet earth.
I finally found it on the kitchen table, formerly crumpled but later resmoothed, smeared with stains of butter, coffee, tomato juice, liquor of some sort, and what might have been tears. Reading it, I found that it was and yet it was not the same letter Candy had shown me the other night. That is, it was the same letter except for me; “your dearest friend and mine, Art Dodge,” as I had been previously billed, was no longer a character in this version of the epic. The appropriate paragraphs had been rewritten, quite neatly, as follows:
Ralph, I have a confession to make. I am a woman, with the needs and desires of a woman, and in my frustration and anguish I have turned to another man. You do not know him, Ralph, I would not humiliate you or myself either by a cheap adultery with some so-called “friend.” He is a man of honesty and value, Ralph, and in his arms I have found the fulfillment that fled me within my marriage.
Ralph, I hate to cheat and lie. Desperation drove me to another, but love has kept me with him. I do not know what the future holds for he and I, but I only know I cannot go on as before. I had hoped against hope that you and I could somehow make a go of it, but this summer at Fair Harbor has convinced me that it cannot happen.
You will find a better woman than me, Ralph, I am sure. All I want is the children and child support, you know I would never be greedy. And try not to think too harshly of me. I have loved you, in my fashion.
Hail and farewell,
I went back to the living room, carrying the letter. It was sticky, rather like my apartment après-Feeney. “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad, Ralph,” I said cheerily, and plopped into the cleanest chair I could find.