Girl on the Best Seller List (10 page)

• • •

Now, with Gloria Wealdon’s book published, it was as though everyone else could look too; look and point and make fun. Fern Fulton might have been able to convince Gloria Wealdon that she and Jay were having an affair, but most everyone else suspected the truth. Even Freddy Fulton had laughed at the idea. Freddy had said he wished Jay
would
have an affair with her.

Fulton puzzled Jay Mannerheim. From all he could gather, Freddy was never unfaithful to his wife, yet Fern confessed that up until about eight months ago their sexual activity had been only spasmodic for some six years. Now it was resuming with surprising frequency. Mannerheim supposed Fulton had either been neurotic in some unknown area, or guilty about whatever he imagined was
his
contribution to their child’s eye condition. The latter, most probably. Many times people displaced guilt and punished another by withholding love. Still, how had Fulton overcome it, and had the novel Gloria Wealdon wrote had something to do with it? It seemed unlikely. Fulton was too sharp a man for such a glib likelihood; at the same time, he always seemed so easy-going and content, not like someone wrestling with some inner conflict so sexual in its nature. Jay could always see him in his mind’s eye laughing with his head thrown back, standing that way he did with his legs apart, rocking on his heels, his slight paunch poking out in front of him, holding a drink with the ice melting in it (because he wasn’t a fast drinker). Freddy Fulton, philosophical in a sort of kind and cynical way (like a much older man who’d known great love, passion or some kind of adventure). A nice guy, laughing, grinning, winking, saying something too wise and quite clever. He was very much like Milo Wealdon, in a stronger way; Milo was a weak sister to a Freddy Fulton, yet in both there was some uncanny spark, a look in the eye, a spring in the walk, something different that made you like them for a reason you couldn’t honestly fathom. You just liked them, that was all.

• • •

Fern Fulton had said in her last session, “I wish Freddy would think we were having an affair! If there were only some way I could make him believe it!”

“Why do you want him to believe that?” Jay had said, even though he knew the answer, even though for her sake he, too, almost wished Freddy Fulton wouldn’t laugh it off.

• • •

Then, there was Virginia Fulton’s telephone call yesterday afternoon:

“I’d like to come and see you, Doctor.”

“Well, Virginia, how are you?”

“Did you know Gloria Wealdon is back in town?”

“Is she?”

“I’d like to come and see you on business.” “I wouldn’t worry about Gloria Wealdon, Virginia.” He supposed Fern had been making the same threats at home as she did during her analytic hour. He added, “She can take care of herself, don’t you think?” chuckling. “Perhaps.”

“How have you been, Virginia?” “All right.” “And your dad?” “He’s fine.”

“Gloria Wealdon can take care of herself, honey.”

“I’m sorry if I bothered you…. It was just — ”

“You didn’t bother me at all. In fact, I’m just about ready to go and play some golf, get the kinks out.”

“Yes,” said Virginia Fulton. “Well, goodbye.”

But it was not Freddy Fulton’s family alone who were affected by the novel. Jay could think of others, and that noon he thought of two in particular. One person was Roberta Shagland from the high school.
She
was attempting to cope with an altogether different sort of threat — the threat of an intense attraction to Milo Wealdon. It had come over her while she was reading his wife’s book.

“I just feel so sorry for him, Doctor,” she had told Jay. “I know that woman is mean to him, mean as anything! Every time I think of it, I just hate her! I can’t concentrate on another thing but him, do you know? I mean, I’d like to make him feel wanted, do you know? Then I start this hiccuping I was telling you about. Doctor, I get hiccups.” She was always twisting a wet hanky in her hand during her hour. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“I don’t think it’s so serious,” said Jay. “I don’t think we have to worry a lot about it.” “But what can I do to stop it?” “We’ll work it out.”

“I’m just so pent up, do you know? I even dream about him.” “I know.”

“And I feel like crying all the time, Doctor.”

Miss Shagland was Mannerheim’s newest patient. She had begun her consultations (the doctor was convinced that was all they would amount to, that she would hardly need continual treatment) immediately after reading
Population 12,360.
There was another who had done the same, though he had started a week or two before Miss Shagland. He was the second person Jay Mannerheim thought of — Louie Stewart.

Louie did not cry, and he refused to stretch out on the couch. He sat soldier-straight in the armless, leather high-back chair, opposite Jay’s desk, and pared his nails with a squeaky silver clip. At some sessions, Louie said very little. After long silences, he would announce in flat, deep, staccato: “Hate!”

“Hate who?” Jay would say.

Louie’s answers varied.

“I am not as quixotic as you may think,” he said once, ignoring Jay’s question. “I have hidden, vitriolic potential!”

Another time, he said, “It’s a huge joke!” “What is?”

“A surreptitious undertaking of mine, which I am not at liberty to think about fully at this time.”

When he was voluble, he concentrated on the mechanical and grammatical errors in Gloria Wealdon’s novel.

“On page 232,” he would say, “there is a typo! Words run together!” His face would get very flushed, and he would lean forward in his chair and crack his knuckles, gripping his hands together so tightly the knuckles went white. He would complain that the pronouns and antecedents in the novel did not agree, that prefixes were not solid with their stems, that there were infinite bromides and redundancies.

“Aren’t you dwelling too much on the book itself?” Jay would ask him. “What’s really bothering you, Louie? What she wrote about some character in the book?” Silence … then: “Do you think you’re in the book, Louie? Is that it?”

Louie would give no indication he had heard the questions.

“She said ‘feeling ran high’ eighteen times,” he would answer. “Eighteen times!”

Jay Mannerheim was deeply concerned about Louie Stewart. The boy (and no one in Cayuta ever thought of him as a young man, though he was well into his thirties) had always been mixed-up and sissyfied. But now, it was quite another story. Jay was pretty certain that Min Stewart’s son was not even a neurotic, but a full-blown certifiable psychotic. This afternoon, during Louie’s session, Jay was going to decide whether to continue treatment or to recommend to Min that Louie be examined by the physicians at the Cayuta Retreat.

• • •

The credit was not Gloria Wealdon’s for all of this, not by any means. In all cases, she simply touched off something that would have gone off sooner or later anyway; she was the catalyst. But the less serious irritations, the minor embarrassments many in Cayuta had suffered since the publication of
Population 12,360
she
could
take credit for. For her portrayal of Virginia Fulton, for that of her hero, Milo, for the thinly disguised characterization of Min Stewart. For these, the blame rested fully on her, and for some others, probably — smaller ones, where there was only a sting instead of a full punch to the stomach. She had made war on Cayuta, New York, and there was no doubt that there were battle scars and casualties, no doubt either that there would be law suits. Out of it all, Jay felt mostly sorry for Milo Wealdon; yet again, why was that thought always followed by the thought that probably Milo did not need his sympathy? It was an enigma.

Jay himself had minded only one thing about Gloria Wealdon’s portrayal of him, and that was her emphasis on the fact that he was not a medical doctor. It had angered him, in fact. All of his patients understood that he was a psychologist and not a psychoanalyst, and in the county he really had no competition. So his anger was not inspired out of any feeling that she had exposed him, or driven potential patients to an M.D. in the same area. It was rooted primarily in two sentences of conversation in the novel, when two women were discussing entering analysis:

Neither had a good many people in Cayuta thought of that, Mannerheim knew; neither had the local tax inspectors. It had probably never occurred to them to notice this very technical but terribly damaging fact. Jay was a perfectly legitimate psychologist, but the tax exemption rules could not be clearer. Only last week at Tuesday’s Rotary, Bill Farley, one of the county government men, said, “That’s a Ph.D. you’ve got, eh, Mannerheim.”

“Yes,” Jay had said. “Why?”

“I just got to get all these D’s straight,” Farley’d smiled. “Ph.D., M.D. — just try to sort them out.”

“Sure,” Jay had said. “That’s your job.”

“ ‘At’s right.” Farley’d clapped him across the back, chewing his half-smoked cigar. Then, unnecessarily, he’d added: “I got nothin’ against either, mind you. It’s just that I gotta keep ‘em straight.”

• • •

Remembering it, Jay shrugged. She was a bitch, all right, he thought, boy she was a bitch! He turned west on Genesee Street, and as he did he spotted Stanley Secora idling on the corner. It reminded him that the front windows of his office needed cleaning, and he slowed to call the boy over to the car. Even Secora was not unaffected by Gloria Wealdon’s novel, Jay mused, as he waved at the young fellow, though how Stanley Secora managed to squeeze himself into the confusion, Jay couldn’t figure out. He supposed Secora just had a good case of celebrity worship. The last time he had done the windows for Jay, her picture, cut from a newspaper, had fallen out of his trousers’ pocket as he had reached there for a rag to wipe dry the panes.

A
FTER
he had been dropped off at the high school by his wife, Milo stopped by the tennis courts to watch little Mickey Lewis practice for the term play-offs.
A
few of his students were also watching, a scattering of them on the white benches behind the high rails. He waved at them and then thought what he was always thinking lately — they were talking about him. He had an idea that what they said was favorable. He knew there were jokes around about Gloria’s book, and he knew that a few of his pupils even called him Miles behind his back, but he also knew that for the most part everyone wondered why he stayed with Gloria, why he didn’t divorce her because of the book. He knew he was well-liked, but he knew lots of the boys in his classes wanted to ask him the same question Mickey Lewis had asked him last week:

“Mr. Wealdon, sir, why don’t you divorce her?”

It had just popped out of Mickey’s mouth, and his quick gesture of clamping his palm across his lips had not saved the moment for Mickey.

“She’s my wife,” Milo had answered. “You know, Mickey, it’s a little like a ball team, a marriage is — smaller, but still a team.
A
good team sticks together, even when someone on it doesn’t do right by the team. You have to have a lot of patience and understanding. Remember a couple of days ago when we were talking about Ken Boyer with the Cardinals?”

“I remember,” said Mickey. “They almost traded him in ‘58.”

“That’s right, and now it looks like he’s going to be the same kind of heavy-handed slugger that started with Rogers Hornsby and went from there to Bottomley, to Medwick, to Mize — ”

“Right up to Musial,” said Mickey. “I suppose I get your point. I’m sorry I said it.”

“Don’t be sorry, Mickey,” Milo had said. “Just keep in mind that responsibility toward the members of a team can sometimes make that team, when nothing else can.”

Milo knew that if Gloria had been witness to his comparison of her with a third-baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals, she would have burst with that particular brand of Gloria Wealdon mocking hilarity. Yet a sense of responsibility was instinctive to Milo, no matter how poorly he had put it to Mickey Lewis. Whether or not Gloria could pay her own way now (and she could), so long as she was alive he was obliged to care for her. To care about her. The fact that some people thought him an utter ass to persist in this under the circumstances did not deter him. He felt no need to defend his philosophy of life beyond explaining it. The only thing that really annoyed him about his situation was the surreptitious pettiness sneaking up on him and showing in his own actions. The satisfaction he had gotten from hitting her with the car keys a while ago, his sarcasm as he had slammed the door of the car. (He had said, Remember your stomach pill, pet….) There was no need for that. She would have taken the pill and that would be that; there was no need for the remark. It was small, piddling. His reactions to her lately were very much like hers to him, and he was embarrassed for himself.

• • •

He very nearly decided to go home for dinner in the evening, to go home and change his clothes and play the proper husband — meet this literary agent of Gloria’s and serve as host for the dinner she had planned. Perhaps, under the circumstances, it was the least he could do. Yet if he were to change his plans, he would have to alter his course of action, and he had planned that for too long,put it off too often. He must see his plot through in every detail, or it might not work.

At the end of Mickey’s set, Milo walked over to the fence where the youngster was picking a hand towel up off the ground to rub away his perspiration. Mickey was nearly sixteen, but he was barely five feet tall and Milo had known him since he was a kid of ten, when Mickey hung around the Y courts, eager to learn about tennis. Because he was so small, Milo had taught him a two-forehand technique which would give him more power and more reach, and by the time Mickey entered high school he still did not use a backhand. Milo never tried to make him learn it. The youngster was naturally ambidextrous. He wrote left-handed, and threw a ball right-handed, and in the back court during a game he switched his racket from one hand to the other so swiftly and easily that the lack of a backhand went hardly noticed.