The tenth month, p.8
The Tenth Month, page 8
Matthew was no Ellen, not even a Marshall Duke, but he was in love with her, or, to be properly wary of large phrases, he was falling more surely in love with her, and any news of this magnitude might jar him through and through too. It was such a fragile process, that transition from “I’m in love with you” to the simple solid “I love you.” Was it foolhardy to put it to any unusual strain so soon?
Day after day for the past two weeks she had been playing with opening phrases for the moment when she would tell him, but it had been a pleasant sort of daydreaming, with no sense of haste to prod her. Not just yet, it was too near Christmas, which he would be spending with his family; not right after Christmas either—he had promised to take his family off on a skiing weekend over New Year’s. He had told her all this with a care, as if in a wish to say “en garde” to her, do not let these family patterns distress you; they were established long before we met. She had understood, had told him that she knew why he was telling her so carefully, so far in advance, and that she liked his doing it. And she had thought, liking this too, that after the holidays were done with at last, the timing would be just right for her news, and that she also would use care and love in the telling, and then had gone on half luxuriating in imagining the moment when at last he knew.
Her hand felt again the pressure of Dr. Jesskin’s fingers, as if he were reaching out to congratulate her. I’m proud of you. She could hear the words again, but this time they were in Matthew’s voice.
She drew back. Over them, through them, around them, a shrillness sounded: You are making a terrible mistake. Terrible for whom? Terrible for everybody.
Oh yes, she had stood her ground, she had said the right things, but Ellen had won something just the same. If Ellen had not come over, would there now be this sudden anxiety about what Matthew would say? She was seeing him this evening and for a moment she wished she were not going to.
Almost automatically she turned to her desk. Work, the anodyne. The piece on Martha Litton was too long and she had been having trouble cutting it. Usually she could be dispassionate about cutting her own work, looking at each sentence with a skeptical eye that asked it, What’s your reason for existing? But this time that stern editor within her had gone fishing and a friendly defender had remained, rooting for each phrase, urging her to see its charm, if not its necessity. Now she turned on it in a violence of energy, slashing out entire paragraphs, rearranging sequences, slinging in new transitions as if she were back on the defunct Trib, on some late-breaking story, with a copyboy waiting at her elbow to rush each take down to the pressroom. When she saw that she was at last on the edge of completing the job, she telephoned the paper and told Tad Jonas she was in the neighborhood and could she drop in at four with the completed piece?
“Sure, come on. Remember—I liked it the way it was.”
By the time she got there she felt sure of herself again. She again had a sense of accomplishment, but this time it was real and it lasted. This came from work, her own work, and she knew how to do it, and when it went wrong she knew how to set about correcting it. This was not taking a good stance, striking the right note, this was her own self in operation, and despite her occasional envy of people with bigger talents, the mysterious something that might make her more than the writer of good pieces for a paper or a magazine, she found a full satisfaction in what her own self did manage to do well.
“Hi, Tad,” she greeted her editor, “I think you’ll like this better.” She opened a flat manila envelope, drew out about fifteen typed pages and laid them on his desk. “Two thousand words shorter and less wobbly.” He read the first paragraph and the last before he looked up.
“I didn’t think it was all that wobbly.”
“Maybe it’s me who’s wobbly. Or just plain stale. I think I need a vacation.”
“When are you taking off?” He sounded mock resigned to it. “Tough, not having enough dough in the bank to swing a winter vacation.”
She laughed. She liked Tad; they had worked together for years on the Trib and he had never let their friendship interfere with cutting her work when cutting was indicated. He was an editor with a built-in discontent, for he wanted either to be on a huge city daily again or else to have a fat advance from a publisher to write the novel he was always talking about, but he did precisely nothing about either desire except suffer over its denial. Despite his own failures, he was pleasant enough to work for, generous about telling you he liked something, never needling or mean-spirited about finding fault. If he disapproved of a piece of work, he said so, roundly, vulgarly, but straightforwardly to you, with his reasons for thinking so, usually cogent. It didn’t happen very often with Dori but she was good at forestalling it by behaving just as she had with the Martha Litton piece.
“Maybe longer than a winter vacation,” she said. “Tad, don’t get caught short if I do something wild one of these days. I just might.”
“Like what?”
“Like quitting.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. I thought you finally decided you liked working here on a nice slow weekly schedule.”
“I do, in that sense. But of late I seem to think of treadmills awfully often, and of getting into ruts. That means something, doesn’t it?”
“I guess it does. Maybe that you’re in love or that you’re going to write a book.”
“Heaven forfend. Forfend the book anyway.” She saw him look at her with the sudden attention that the first whiff of news or gossip commands in the human animal, especially the human animal trained to sniff out news. She slapped together the sheets of the Litton piece again and said, “Well, we’ll see. I hope you’ll agree this thing is better for all the rewrite.”
As she left, she thought, Laying the groundwork, that’s what I was doing. Write a book indeed. Poor Tad, that’s all he thinks of, so he ascribes it to me. He can’t face the fact that if he really wanted to, had to, he’d have done it years ago, the way other people have done, after hours, mornings, weekends. But me! Never.
This sounded a little defiant to her, a little dishonest, for she recognized, and had for a long time, that it was something she regretted, that her natural scope was the smaller scope of articles, that she would never be able to encompass a sustained piece of work, hundreds of pages of work, on some given subject. What if she had to write a whole book about a Martha Litton, or even about a Benjamin Spock? There must be some mechanism within the talents of other people that kept them wound up, for a longer duration of interest and energy, but that mechanism was missing in her.
Fine. It was good to know what your limitations were. Knowing kept you comfortably back from the abyss of frustration that so many people lived with. She had had her one private abyss for too many years to play around the edges of a second one. She felt superior and it was delicious. Let Tad know frustration, let everybody and anybody; for the next few months at least she was safe.
Laying the groundwork. It might be wise to follow through rather quickly, before she needed to leave the paper. She might line up one or two actual magazine pieces right now, with some actual editors and some actual deadlines; the deadlines could always be extended if enough notice was given. She could choose topics which she would have to research abroad, so when somebody said, “Where’s Dori?” the answer would be “Oh, she’s doing a piece in Rome,” or Honolulu or Africa. People accepted such answers without paying too much attention; she had done it herself, except for people who were close to her. Casual people could be gone a year and when she saw them again, she had no idea of whether it had been a month or a few weeks or a matter of days.
Matthew was not one of the casuals. Matthew would know to the week how long she had been gone, just as she would know if he were to step out of her life now with some story about a law case that would take him away from New York. That could work with Tad Jonas and the staff, with most of her acquaintances and friends—how much fewer were the people one called friends with the passing of the years and the pruning of the tree. Was that merely a concomitant of maturity, or was it a dark kind of in-turning that robbed one of companionships and parties and amusements?
She didn’t turn from anybody who mattered. Her heart thudded as she looked at her watch; in three hours, soon after dinner, she would see him. He came to her deep in the evenings usually, about ten, staying until midnight. Saturdays and Sundays, not. She knew that pattern so well; like the big holidays, the weekends were for his children. It had been that way with Dick Towson too; before Dick, she had not yet been wise enough to accept the pattern. It used to affront her that she had to spend weekends and holidays alone, and all the timeworn clichés about affairs were really true. Then for no reason that she could name, some buried good sense had struggled up through the gravelly muck and had come to her rescue with Dick, making her see without rancor or confusion that this was part of the contract one made with life if one had an affair with a man who was married. And the only men any woman was likely to be drawn to, once the carefree teens and twenties were gone, were men who were already married. Conveniently widowed men were for television serials; in actual life the only bachelors of thirty or forty were the neurotics and misfits, the mothers’ boys, the homosexuals, the cranks.
It was intelligent, then, not to be confused or “insulted” by the necessities about weekends and holidays, and Dick had remarked on the fact that she wasn’t, complimenting her for “not being a Friday squawker like most dames.” Matthew had never spoken of it, but he couldn’t have felt any unspoken pressure upon him to see her over weekends, for it was nonexistent. Nor could he have felt any pressure to tell her about his family either, for she knew better than to ask about them. He still said little about Joan; it was his children that he enjoyed telling her about, and his work. When he spoke of his life apart from his lads or his cases, he still seemed watchful and less than free. One night he had told her a little about his boyhood, but he had grown somehow nervous and hurried and had ended, “I think I was so anxious to prove that I wasn’t drawn to the law by two silver cords that I got pretty rough about it at times.”
“That sounds natural enough,” she had said.
“Maybe so. But I can be a selfish bastard—better not expect too much of me in the nobility line.”
“I never expect nobility nohow.” They had laughed, but she had listened with all her antennae out, searching for the unspoken message behind his words. Now some faraway signal seemed to say, Don’t rush, take it a day at a time, think of the right way, there are plenty of other things you haven’t decided yet either. She actually enjoyed keeping some of them in suspension; it was pleasant to leave pending the matter of where to hide out, a kind of game as if she were thumbing her way idly through travel folders, trying to choose between a vacation in Jamaica and one in Europe.
By the time Matthew came, the anguish that had begun with Ellen in the morning had disappeared and Dori felt euphoric. It was the day before the Christmas weekend and tonight they would exchange their first presents. She could give him nothing that needed to be hidden or explained at home. After hours of telephoning and scurrying around and searching out of reliable opinion, she had collected for him the best recording known of each piece of music they had heard at their first concert. Actually, though she would only tell him this later, she had bought a duplicate of each of the four records for herself, so that she too might have that same concert whenever memory and emotion combined to ask for its rebirth.
He was touched, as she had hoped he would be, and he offered her his gift hesitantly, as if it were banal compared to the thought that had gone into hers. It was a pair of earrings of smooth white coral, domed and shining, thinly outlined in gold; she loved his wanting to adorn her, loved the earrings themselves and though she did not say so, loved him for knowing that she would have been disturbed if he had brought her something that cost more than she could have spent easily for herself.
She put them on and turned toward him. “How did you know I’m mad for white coral?”
“I know things about you.”
“How did you know? You couldn’t have asked Cele.” Before he could answer, she said in a rush, “You do know about me. That I’m Victorian about things like too expensive presents, for instance.”
“Books and flowers only?”
“And something lovely like these, but—”
“Not a mink coat?”
“Not a mink coat. Oh Matthew—you know so much about me, but there are some things still that you don’t and—”
“Important things?”
She suddenly went somber, and for a moment there was silence in the room. The records lay spread on the carpet, four glistening squares of color and design, and on the coffee table the small elongated jeweler’s box in which the earrings had come. He saw her hand go to her throat as if to quiet a too lively pulse there and he said, “Don’t answer that, darling.” It was the way he said it that moved her, the offer of patience and trust. “Don’t even try until you’re good and ready,” he went on. “If ever I start cross-examining you, on anything, no matter what—”
“You weren’t cross-examining. I brought it up in the first place, and it was a perfectly natural question with anybody you’re this close to.”
“But don’t answer it anyway.” Slowly he added, “Let’s try not to make all the young mistakes, Dori. We can’t crawl inside each other’s minds and feelings, and past and present, the way kids think they can. We can’t be in the same cocoon.”
“We’d fit though.”
They made love then and later, lying beside him, curled inside the curve of his body, she thought again, We would fit. A vision flashed bright, of herself tucked in an arc within the arc of his being while, unknown to him, another being, not yet an inch long, was curving within her own.
Suddenly she felt a sweeping singing sureness that everything about this would go well, would go smoothly, would be happy and good. She turned toward him again. “Oh, Matthew, even without you on Christmas or New Year’s, it’s being the happiest Christmas and New Year’s of my life.”
It was past midnight when Matthew got home; Joan was still dressed, waiting for him, though normally she was either asleep or in bed, watching some television celebrity show or an old movie.
“You weren’t at your office,” she said. “I tried three times.”
“No. Is anything wrong?”
“The school suspended Johnny.”
“Damn it. For how long?”
“The rest of the semester.”
“Does he know?”
“I told him. He raised the roof.”
“Did he know it was coming?”
“No more than we did. A fine time for them to do it, just to make sure we had a happy Christmas. I had a lovely evening with Johnny, you can believe it.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here too.”
“You’re never here.”
She sounded bitter and he could not blame her. Not ten minutes after he had left to return to the office, she said, Mr. Garry, Johnny’s homeroom teacher, had telephoned and told her the news. A formal letter was in the mail, apparently lost in the Christmas rush, since there had been no response from the Pooles before school had closed for the vacation, and finally, though Garry had left town on his own holiday, he had decided he ought to make sure they were notified without further delay.
“Was it about the hockey?”
“That and all the other things. ‘Repeated insubordination,’ Garry said.”
His heart contracted. He had seen it coming, had talked it out with Johnny, not too insistently, not too often. The boy had been in a roil of rebellion against going out for hockey practice, just as in the fall he had refused football practice and in the spring, baseball. “All that crap about team spirit, Dad, just makes me puke.”
“Suppose everybody at school just dropped things they didn’t like—what kind of school would you have?”
“You didn’t dish out that kind of stuff up in Boston to Jim Benting—the draft makes him puke.”
Anger had flared between them, but in him admiration too. Formidable at thirteen, that kind of logic. Johnny was growing into a loner anyway, aside from his rebellion against authority in any of its forms. His abiding interests were making ship models and reading, the one unexpectedly expert and detailed, the other unexpectedly catholic and widespread. In the past two years he had raced through not only all the Hornblowers but also Lord Jim and half a dozen others by Conrad, also David Copperfield and half a dozen others by Dickens. But making friends came hard; most boys made him bridle, most girls bored him, and except for his favorite subjects, his chief comment about school was, “Forget it.” Most of his teachers he dismissed as finks. The school rebels were his heroes, and the university rebels beyond them his gods. He was never going to be anything but a rebel himself, and like all rebels anywhere in any period of history, in any milieu, he was going to be hurt. And the people who loved him and valued him were going to be hurt with him.
My turn, Matthew thought, not pausing over the phrase. All parents knew pain as well as joy through their children; he had often wondered whether there was any greater joy in the world than that which came through a beloved child; now he thought that if that was true, then the corollary and opposite must also be true.
“Let’s have some coffee,” he said to Joan, “and talk. I’m sorry you had to take this on by yourself. I didn’t dream anything like this was about to descend.”
She didn’t answer and he knew he had protested too much. He either did that in troubled times or fell silent, speaking as if to somebody he hardly knew, as if speech came hard to him, as if he were a man of monosyllables.
“When things go wrong, you just clam up.” That had become her accusation of recent years and it was true enough, particularly when a quarrel threatened. He could not stand the discussions, the explanations, the repetitions, but-you-said, but-you-never-said. The maddening paraphernalia of a quarrel stifled him, choked down his capacity to yield, to understand, and left him in stone-hard silence.
