Girl on the Best Seller List (2 page)

• • •

His mood that Saturday morning in mid-May was striped with rancor on the one hand, clemency on the other. Since her sudden success as a novelist, Gloria seemed to take even more pride than usual in her unkempt appearance. What was the sense in being a success if you were going to look like something the cat dragged home? That was something he couldn’t figure out. He thought somehow Gloria would return from her publicity trip with a whole new wardrobe. He expected black silk dresses, cuckoo hats with dippy feathers on them, jewelry, maybe even a fur. He should have known better. For her photograph on the book jacket, Gloria had worn the same outfit she was wearing this morning; and when he had picked up
The Cayuta Citizen
one evening three weeks ago, Glo’s picture had confronted him on page three. It was a U.P. news photo of her press conference in a suite at the Waldorf. She was wearing a mannish trench coat, over a pair of Milo’s old blue-and-white-striped Orion pajamas. Underneath the photograph there was a caption:

Milo’s fury was always arrested by certain scenes that flashed across the screen of his memory; the pitiful incidents of the past, which belied the present. He remembered how he used to fold Glo in his arms and rock her like a small child, to reassure her after she returned from an afternoon of bridge at Fern Fulton’s — usually with one of her stomach aches which overtook her whenever she felt inferior.

“I’m just not like them, Milo,” she would sob.

“Pay them no attention, honey.”

“My clothes are all wrong, my hair, everything!”

“I like the way you — ”

“I wear the same things they do, but I look — washed-out, colorless, plain!”

“Do you want to know something, Glo?” Milo would say. “When I was staking out our grounds here, I chose those hornbeam hedges because the tulips would be lost without them. The tulips need something substantial to back them up. Do you understand what I’m saying, Glo? Season after season I’ve seen the flowers come and go, but the plain old ordinary hedge stays. You can count on it; and the hedge doesn’t need the tulips, remember that. The tulips need the hedge for contrast, but the hedge doesn’t need — ”

“Oh, for the love of Christ, shut up, Milo!”

“If you’d listen, you’d see that — ”

“That I was nothing but a plain old ordinary hedge, Milo?”

It was the only way he knew how to philosophize — by talking in terms of the things in life he loved. His gardening; his collection of saints, which he sculptured out of Ivory soap and preserved with Krylon spray enamel; and sometimes, too, the world of sport, though he thought of that more as his vocation than his avocation.

He had become interested in gardening after his marriage to Gloria, but the saints had fascinated him ever since he was in the navy. A shipmate of his, Dacky Kent, a robust, intelligent comedian with aspirations for the priesthood, had entertained him through many long and perilous voyages, telling him stories about famous and infamous saints. Milo used to appreciate particularly Dacky’s ability to see the humor in many of the saints’ lives; in fact, the first soap sculpture Milo had ever done had been that of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. Dacky had told him about her during that ironic trip to the Aleutians, when the ship was carrying rations for the troops and the food served on board was stomach-crying skimpy. Through long watches when both of them yearned to break into the hold and devour the precious cargo, Dacky told how St. Elizabeth gave so bountifully to the poor that she starved her own household. One day her husband met her going out with her apron filled with something heavy, and he demanded to know what she was carrying. She had told him she was merely taking flowers to the poor — and God had converted the loaves of bread in her apron into flowers, to save the lie. Milo whittled out a meticulous likeness of the saint as he saw her, before the miracle. Dacky raved at his craftsmanship, and howled when he saw the tiny soap loaves in the saint’s apron. Before they reached the Aleutians, Dacky made tiny, intricate paper roses, so that one evening when Milo opened his locker he found his Elizabeth carrying flowers in her apron.

After that, Milo made other soap sculptures, all saints. Dacky made a bet with him that before Milo could whittle out the thirty-seven saints of diseases and ills, the eighty-three saints of cities, nations and places, and the ninety-three specialist saints for tradesmen, children, wives, idiots and children, Dacky would be back in mufti, wearing his collar backward. When Dacky was killed years later in an automobile accident, he was in his second year of study for the priesthood. Milo had just finished sculpturing Saint Blaise, saint of sore throats, number thirty-two of diseases and ills…. Now, Milo was all the way to the brewers’ saint, Florian. He had one hundred thirty-one sculptures, and he knew quite a lot about sainthood.

• • •

At first, during their marriage, Gloria had seemed to enjoy the stories of the saints. During their courtship, too, she had given the promise of sharing Milo’s hobby with him. Gloria had always been a very insecure person, and in the beginning, when they met on the Cornell campus and began going to The Ivy for beers, they had seemed an unlikely couple, even to themselves. In those days, Milo was
it.
Track star, football hero, DKE, big, smiling, handsome — he was a catch. Gloria had never made a sorority. She pretended she had chosen to be an Independent; pretended to scorn the close-knit little coterie of Kappas, Pi Phi’s, or Tri Delts, but Milo had been told by his fraternity brothers that she had gone through rush week and hadn’t made it. Milo’s fraternity brothers were always criticizing her: her looks (she was very skinny in those days, and as sloppy as ever); her rowdy “hail-fellow-well-met” personality, which soured whatever remaining semblance of femininity she had; and her almost defiant, angry mood switches, which led her to pound you heartily on the back in one turn and snarl sullenly at you in the other.

• • •

Milo himself was slightly amazed at his own persistence in dating Glo. He would tell himself that he was simply going to ask her to see a movie with him “sometime next week” (maybe because he felt she needed him: he could do
that
much, couldn’t he?) and then he would find himself actually cajoling her to be his date for the DKE hop. He, Milo Wealdon, one of the most popular men on campus, begging
her
to let him take her out! He had read once something that H. L. Mencken had written, something about winking at a homely girl if you wanted to remember him. Was it Mencken’s epitaph? Whatever it was, Milo remembered that much, and when he first saw Gloria, he was compelled to pay special attention to her. She was standing off to one side, in a crowd at Willard Straight Hall. She seemed little and left over, and terribly nervous and embarrassed, and Milo had gone over to her and begun asking her questions, telling her anecdotes, making a fuss over her. Why?

• • •

And why, after that, had he kept on calling her, waiting outside classrooms for her,
imploring
her (yes, that was what it had been) to see him? She seemed no more flattered by his attentions than the most beautiful, popular, sought-after campus queen, and probably, Milo realized, a lot less. Over and over she complained to him about her inadequacies, and yet the fact that he said repeatedly that he liked her and everything about her never seemed to make her feel better. In a very subtle way his reassurances seemed only to make him appear all the more a fool in her eyes. As though she were saying: Well, all right, I know I’m no bargain, and if you’re too dumb to see that, then you’re no bargain either.

In a way, sandwiched between their gradual getting used to one another, between the rare moments when they would laugh together, say casual endearments, and eventually neck in the back seat of Milo’s old Plymouth, there was an uncanny unfitness about them as a couple. Even physically. Their noses were always colliding in an embrace; she would laugh just as Milo was about to kiss her, and his lips would be bruised by her teeth. They were clumsy on the dance floor, though with anyone else Milo was an excellent dancer. Even alone, when they had conversation, the normal rhythm was lacking: they interrupted each other; they both paused at the same time, so that there were long silences when neither of them could think of what to say, and when thoughts did occur to them, they came simultaneously and resulted in a near-shouting head-on collision. There were other things, too. Milo felt sorry for people Gloria felt were just stupid. Milo would say, “If someone would just give him a chance,” while Gloria would say, “He’s obnoxious, he deserves to be ignored.” Milo was a liberal. He believed in racial equality, and sometimes things he read in the newspaper would make him very angry; things about a race riot, or an example of discrimination — things like that. Whenever he talked about it, Gloria would lash out at him for being in a fraternity Jews couldn’t join; she would call him a hypocrite, and a bigot, and the discussion would end with her malicious and triumphant attack on him, with the issue he had brought up forgotten. Gloria was anti-religion, anti-Republican, anti-management, anti-everything, until Milo found himself more and more reluctant to talk about such matters with her. More and more he kept silent, simply listening, except when Gloria told him about the unfair things that had happened to her — the snubs, the ridicule, all the offenses against her, which were imagined in some cases, in others real. Then Milo would speak gently, compassionately. “You’re just as pretty as other girls, Glo. You just have it in your mind you’re not.” (A lie.) “You did have a rough childhood, and you
did
come from pretty poor circumstances, but you had the guts to rise above it, didn’t you? And that’s something.” (The truth.) “You are well-liked, Glo. People like you…. I do need you, honey. Don’t say I don’t need you.” And so it went, falsehoods, truths, words pouring out of him to make her feel better — his arms locking out all the injuries, his mouth kissing away her anxieties. Why?

For a while, in the back seat of the Plymouth, Milo never tried to do more than kiss Glo. She was not particularly passionate, but she seemed to enjoy it when he was. As he experimented more and more, he realized this. He kissed her tenderly and slowly; then roughly, with a bare edge of violence in his manner. He kissed her eyes and her ears and her neck, and he let his tongue slip into her mouth. When there were no more ways left to kiss her, he began to tell her how attractive the rest of her was. She denied this, and he became all the more vehement in his protests. For a period, he seemed to dwell constantly on her lovely bosom, thinking of everything on earth he could compare it with, as he pressed her close to him. It seemed to anger her, until he felt he must prove that he meant it by fondling her. The only reason he had never tried before was that he was slightly old-fashioned. He did not think it was fair to a girl. He did not like men who took advantage of women.

Tortured by a suspicion that Gloria would never believe his well-meant compliments about her breasts until he paid her the supreme compliment of going up under her sweater in a moment of passion, Milo abandoned his moral concepts. What happened then completely shocked him. Before he knew what had happened, two pieces of foam rubber whipped him in the eye.

“Here!” she screamed at him. “That’s all you want anyway! Now for God’s sake, leave me alone!”

He was left sitting in the old Plymouth by himself, with a pair of falsies on his lap.

It was that incident which had inspired Milo’s first gift to Gloria — his sculpture of Saint Lucy. He wrote a little note to accompany the present:

His proposal was accepted.

Gloria still kept Saint Lucy under a small glass globe on the bureau in their bedroom.

• • •

After their marriage, Gloria had genuinely tried to change. She had a permanent wave, and she took care buying clothes. Whenever they entertained, she fixed new dishes and fussed throughout the evening, hurrying to empty ashtrays, refresh drinks, put pillows behind the guests’ backs, trying to say and do the right thing and look the right way. It was overdone — the permanent, the clothes, the hostessing — all of it. They lived in the town Milo was raised in, so that Glo was a newcomer. Milo had never thought of Cayuta as being an unfriendly community, but it soon seemed that way — from Gloria’s vantage point. His friends were as disinclined to accept her as his fraternity brothers had been. Her failure to win their acceptance hurt him deeply. At the same time, he wished Glo could just relax, just not try so damnably hard to be liked.

He got his wish. Eventually she stopped trying altogether. She went out of her way to dress like some kind of hoyden years younger than herself. She wore blue jeans and flannel shirts (hanging outside her pants) and she cut her hair and combed it in some crazy way that made her look as though she had been caught in a wind tunnel. No make-up. No embellishments of any kind. She was just there; take her or leave her. Milo sensed what she was trying to tell Cayuta:
I
could be attractive if I wanted to be, but I couldn’t care less — not about any of you!
It was along about this same time that she began aspiring to the arts: first oil paints, until she tired of cleaning out the brushes, only to start again at her miserable, glaringly-poor efforts; then the guitar (her fingers weren’t long enough, she complained — you have to have very long fingers); and, ultimately, writing.