“Jesus Christ,” Gordon said, sweating.
“All this fuss simply because I said ‘Mexico’ in a perfectly ordinary tone of voice. I’m sure I’ve got nothing against Mexico. Of course I’ve heard it’s terribly dirty. You can’t drink the water at all without boiling it, and you have to be awfully careful about the food, cholera and things like that.”
Elaine could, with a few well-chosen words, reduce anything to its lowest common multiple. Having deflated Gordon and crushed Mexico, she went to work with undiminished fervor on vacations in general and Gordon’s in particular. It was a funny thing, Elaine said, that men took vacations every now and then while women went right on year after year without any kind of rest or holiday at all. Anyway, did Gordon really think it was wise to leave right now?
“After all, dear, you’ve got your family to think about. It isn’t as if you were in some business that could carry on without you. I mean, every day that you’re not at the office and don’t keep your appointments, you’re losing money. You have your overhead, and Hazel’s salary, and you know how many new dentists, all of them veterans too, are opening up offices here. After all, you’re in a competitive profession. If you’re going to be away from the office half the time your patients are going to feel that they can’t depend on you.”
In one short speech she had managed to convey to Gordon that he was a shirker who hadn’t helped win the war, as well as lazy, impractical, thoughtless, incompetent and irresponsible.
Elaine considered herself a true gentlewoman. She never raised her voice or swore, and even when driven into a corner by fate she used only legitimate womanly weapons like her children, her bed and soft words strung on steel. She had betrayed Gordon on the day she married him by telling her mother that she knew Gordon had a weak character and that she would have to be strong for both of them. Elaine often recalled this speech, which she termed “realistic,” and which she considered remarkably shrewd for a girl so “young” — she was twenty-seven on the day she was married. Not six months later, she told Gordon of her speech to her mother. Gordon was shocked, not by her malice, which she had already revealed in many small ways, but by the fact that she despised him. She made it clear that it was only her own iron will and determination which kept Gordon on the straight and narrow and confined him to his office twelve hours a day. Gordon was thirty then, and working very hard to build up a practice so that he could buy Elaine a new house. He was quite surprised to find out that he was a weak character, and inexperienced enough to take the criticism seriously. In the end, after Elaine had given him a gentle heart-to-heart talk, Gordon was convinced that he was indeed weak and that it was Elaine’s personal power that turned the drill and kept him confined in the magnetic circle of office-and-home.
With this new self-knowledge inflicted on him by Elaine came a gradual change in personality. He began to doubt himself and his motives. He was grateful to anyone, man or woman, who paid him any attention. He was awed by his three children, who seemed to despise him as much as Elaine did.
“Gordon,” Elaine told her friends with a tolerant little smile, “is not the fatherly type.” Above the smile her eyes added a personal little message to Gordon alone: You’re a very poor father, admit it, dear.
Gordon walked through the years in a kind of numb bewilderment.
In the early summer of his thirty-ninth year, in the lobby of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, a young woman asked him for a match.
She had dark hair and a thin, pointed face. The first thing Gordon noticed about her was her underdeveloped jaw. There wouldn’t be room for a normal set of teeth there, Gordon thought, and he wondered whether her teeth were exceptionally small or whether some of them had been removed to prevent overlapping.
“Sorry,” he said, patting his coat pockets automatically. “I don’t smoke.”
“Oh. Well. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She added, with a self-conscious little laugh, “Honestly, I don’t smoke either, only about once a year. But I was supposed to meet a certain party here and I’ve been waiting so long, I just thought a cigarette would help.”
They sat side by side under a potted palm tree, Gordon with his newspaper on his lap, and Ruby fingering the clasp of her purse.
“All I’m afraid of is that I missed my party,” Ruby said. “The lobby is so crowded, there must be a convention or something.”
“Dentists,” Gordon said.
“Oh, that’s it then. I wondered. Well—” She closed her purse with an air of finality and put on one of her gloves. “Well, I guess my party must be afraid of dentists or something—”
Gordon laughed. “Everybody is.”
“Well, I don’t blame them! I shiver every time I think of a dentist.”
“Are you shivering now?”
Her eyes grew wide. “Why?”
“I’m one.”
“No!”
“I am.”
“Gosh, and to think I’ve been sitting beside you all this time without a single shiver! But you don’t look a bit like a dentist. You look like, a lawyer or a doctor, maybe.”
Gordon was flattered. He had belonged for years to a club for professional men, but he had never got over the feeling that the doctors and lawyers among the members were superior to him, and that dentistry was the poor country cousin of medicine and law. Elaine lent her aid to this feeling. When the club held its monthly Ladies’ Night, Elaine was ostentatiously self-effacing, as if to remind everyone that she was, after all, only a dentist’s wife and had no right to open her mouth. She sometimes said as much to the other wives. “Of course it’s different with you, I’m only a poor dentist’s wife.” This remark caused acute embarrassment among the other women who found themselves forced to belittle their husbands and their husbands’ professions to make Elaine comfortable, or else to extol the art of dentistry: Where would we all be without dentists, I’d like to know. My goodness, dentists are terribly important.
The fact was that dentists were very important, and after two days of the convention Gordon was beginning to feel proud that he was a man who was doing hard and important work for the welfare of humanity. He was a little afraid for his new pride, though. It was too precious and fragile a thing to survive the journey home, and God knew, he’d never get it past the front door of his house.
He thought of Elaine, not bitterly, but with a kind of helpless pity. Whatever Elaine had wanted and expected from her marriage — great wealth? social position? an idyll of romance? — she hadn’t got it and he was unable to give it to her. She was, in the long run, worse off than he was. He had his job, he could become so absorbed in his work that he sometimes didn’t think of Elaine for two or three hours. He knew that Elaine had no such respite, that she was always conscious of him as she would have been conscious of a continuous nagging toothache.
He hadn’t, come to think of it, remembered Elaine once all day until the girl in the chair beside him asked him for a match. What had the girl said? — that he looked like a doctor or a lawyer. Some answer was expected of him, he must play the game, whatever it was.
“Appearances,” he said with ponderous humor, “are deceiving.”
“Aren’t they just!” She laughed, and he saw that her teeth were very small and even, like canine incisors. “Still, I always say I can tell a nice character by his face, I really can too. Look, isn’t that someone waving at you, over there by the cigar counter?”
Gordon turned, and recognizing a colleague of his, he waved back.