Wives and Lovers (12 page)

Escobar was spraying the orange tree. She could see his face, among the leaves. It was beautiful and innocent, like Manuel's face looking down at her through the green feathers of the pepper tree.

Some of the African tribes live in tree houses to protect themselves from the wild animals.

I think you need a rest, Miss Kane.

8

Mrs. Freeman heard the click of the front door. She laid aside her pen and waited, with a pleasant feeling of alarm and anticipation. Doors were, in her opinion, one of the most interesting inventions of man. A closed door held a secret, on the other side there could be practically any­one: Robert returning from his travels, one of the girls coming in after an early movie, a stranger looking for another stranger, an old friend or a pen pal arriving un­expectedly. It could be a lunatic, an escaped convict, a man with a gun. Mrs. Freeman had had considerable mental practice handling these eventualities. To the convict, the lunatic, and the man with the gun, she would be very amiable; she would disarm them by kindness (food, conversation, hot coffee, and if worst came to worst, the bottle of rum she'd saved from last Christmas). Having allayed their suspicions, she would then maneuver them into the kitchen, lock the door very fast, run over to Mr. Hitchcock's place next door and phone the police. Sometimes, when she was alone in the house as she was now, she thought of possible hitches in these plans. The man with the gun might shoot her before she had a chance to be amiable to him, the lunatic might be beyond understanding and the convict, with the police on his trail, might be in too much of a hurry to dally over food and drink. There was also the fact that Mr. Hitchcock's telephone had recently been disconnected.

Mrs. Freeman was, on the whole, rather glad to see Ruby.

“You gave me a start,” she said, drawing a deep breath. “I confess, I've never gotten used to staying alone in the house. You never can tell. Look at all those sex murders down in L.A. Even a town like this, I bet you'd be surprised at the things that are going on. My advice to young girls, and I see a lot of them, running a place like this, my advice is to stay out of bars. Bars are the breeding place of crime, also they don't wash the glasses properly, I've heard, just rinse them in cold water. By the way, that Mr. Anderson phoned for you. Wait a minute, he left a number for you to call. Here it is, 23664.”

Without answering, Ruby started up the stairs.

“Aren't you going to call him?”

“No—no, I'm too tired.”

“Maybe it's about the job he promised you.”

“I don't care.”

“Well, for heaven's sake,” Mrs. Freeman said. “Yon ought to care. Jobs don't grow on trees. What's the matter with you?”

“I don't know.” She paused, leaning against the ban­ister. “I don't want to talk to him. He makes me feel crawly.”

“Crawly, for goodness sake. I thought he was such a nice man, clean-cut looking. Crawly. The way you girls talk, I don't understand you.”

Ruby merely stared at her woodenly.

Mrs. Freeman said, offended, “It's none of my business, but I can't help taking an interest and when I see a nice-looking man obviously all gone on a girl—and what with the war and so many young men being killed, girls can't afford to be too choosy.”

“I'm not looking for a young man.”

“Even so, you should be sensible. You can't have too many irons in the fire.” Mrs. Freeman shook her head in sincere bewilderment. “Here is this man, putting himself out to get you a job and you won't even call him, no, he makes you feel crawly, you put on an emotional display.”

Some of the bitter resentment Rub
y felt against Gordon spilled over on Mrs. Freeman and George. “I know it's none of your business, but I don't like him and I don't like the way he looks at me. Also he's too fat and his face is too pink and shaved-looking. And I don't like the way he talks to me as if I was a worm.”

“Even so,” Mrs. Freeman said helplessly. “Even so.”

She had no daughters of her own and so she had devel­oped a proprietary interest in the young unmarried women who came to her house. Her chief concern was to get them married. In spite of her own experience, she still believed that marriage had curative qualities and that a bad husband was better than no husband at all. She was worried by the fact that most of the girls she knew were like Ruby. They had left their homes in search of romance, and overweight pink-faced men didn't belong in their dreams.

Mrs. Freeman read the Vital Statistics in the paper every night and she was shocked by the number of di­vorces in the town. She blamed it partly on the town itself. People who saw it for the first time believed that they had reached the end of the rainbow, here between the violet mountains and the jeweled sea. And it
was
the end of the rainbow, Mrs. Freeman knew that; but she knew, too, how difficult it was to live there. The romantic postcard perfection of nature contrasted too sharply with the ordinary human existence. The stretches of beach, the parks, the bridle paths, the mountain trails—they were there, free for everybody, except the girls like Ruby who worked all week and washed and ironed their clothes on Sunday. Living beside a subway in Flatbush or in a small flat town in Kansas, they could have held on to their dreams of traveling some day to a tropical Eden. Now that they had reached Eden they were all the more discontented to find themselves leading the same old lives. The end of the rainbow was no longer around the corner; it was six miles north to the mountains and nineteen blocks south to the sea. Yet these blocks were more difficult to travel than three thousand miles across the country.

“I don't know,” Mrs. Freeman said, still with her air of helplessness. “Maybe it's true about every place, but here it's very true, people expect too much.”

“I expect nothing,” Ruby said.

“I remember once when I first came here years ago. It was in the spring and I was standing out in the yard at night. The acacia tree was in bloom and the moon was so bright that the shadows were as sharp as sun shadows and I could see the little yellow acacia blossoms like chenille. I picked a sprig and held it against my face, so soft, like a baby's fingers. The sky was full of stars, and the air wasn't just air, it was rich and thick and cold, I can't describe it. There was a bird at the top of the tree making a funny little noise, a mockingbird perhaps. I had such an odd feeling, standing there, as if anything might happen in the midst of all this beauty, something wonderful. I saw Robert's shadow against the kitchen blind, this very kitchen, and he looked as handsome as a god. Oh, the
feeling
I had.”

She paused, twisting the wedding ring round and round her finger.

“Well?” Ruby said.

“Well, then Robert flung open the kitchen window, and told me to come in, he was hungry and wanted a grilled-cheese sandwich.” She added, very earnestly, “I'm glad he did. It was a good lesson for me. Acacia doesn't last long after it's picked. I put it in water but the blossoms got smaller and smaller and finally they fell off.”

The doorbell pealed. Smoothing down her dress and adjusting her face into an expression of amiability, just in case, Mrs. Freeman answered the door.

She was agreeably surprised to see George, who was not too pink-faced or fat, merely a sturdy, healthy-looking man.

“She just came in,” Mrs. Freeman said. “Ruby, here's Mr. Anderson.”

Ruby came down the stairs slowly.

“I left my number for you to call,” George said.

“I just got home.”

“I thought you might like to go for a drive or some­thing.”

“It's a nice evening,” Mrs. Freeman said. “And too late in the year for acacia.”

She returned to her letters.

“What'd she mean by that?” George said.

“I don't know.”

“You look tired, Ruby.”

“You're always telling me that.”

“Am I? I'm sorry. I can't help paying attention to how you look. It's getting to be a habit, I guess. Will you be warm enough in that suit?”

“It's getting late—”

“You can't turn me down all the time. Anyway, it's Saturday night, and everybody celebrates on Saturday night.”

“What do they celebrate?” Ruby said dully.

“Anything.” He held the screen door open and she went out on the porch. “Are you going to be warm enough? Maybe you'd better get a coat.”

“No, I'll be all right.”

He put his hand on her elbow, and guided her down the porch steps and across the clay path that substituted for a sidewalk. She didn't shrink away from him as she usually did. She felt too remote to bother about it, as if she had had a great deal to drink and while she was still conscious of what was happening to her she had no interest in it.

George started the car. “Is there any special place you'd like to go?”

“No.”

“We'll just drive around then,”

“Where's Garcia Road?”

“What number?”

“Twenty-three hundred.”

“That'd be up in the hills. Why?”

“Nothing. I just overheard a—a customer say he lived there, that's all. I wondered what it was like.”

“We'll go and find out,” George said cheerfully. “Got to check up on our customers, see that they come from the right kind of houses.”

“No—no, I'd just as soon not. I'd just as soon drive along the beach.”

“All right.” He sent her a quick, puzzled glance. Her evasions irritated him. She had no reason to treat him as if he were a district attorney and she was accused of a crime. Yet this was actually how he felt about her. He wanted to put her on a spot and question her about her­self, find out a few things about her. Her face rarely re­vealed anything but a kind of resigned unhappiness, and it was this expression of hers that agitated him. If she had cause for her unhappiness—money troubles? sickness in the family? loneliness?—he wanted her to break down and tell him, to bawl on his shoulder the way Hazel used to do.

They drove along toward the Mesa and George thought about Hazel and the night she had said out of a blue sky, “Jesus, I feel just like bawling the house down.” And bawl the house down she did, for a solid hour, until the police drove up to the front of the house, summoned by a neighbor to stop George from beating his wife. Hazel was delighted and she brought out two quarts of beer to celebrate the unexpected company. Neither of the two policemen could drink anything, since they were on duty, but Hazel invited them to come back during their off hours. They came back every now and then, bringing a friend or two, until eventually Hazel knew the whole police department.

“It must be lonely for you,” George said, “not knowing anyone in town.”

“I get along,” Ruby said. “I—read a lot. And write letters home.”

“How are your mother and father?”

“Fine.”

“Don't you miss the big city?”

“Sometimes.”

“And your friends?”

“I'm not much for parties or things like that.”

“Maybe you should get out more, have a little fun and excitement.”

“I'd just be bored.”

“You should try it anyway.”

“I used to go to parties at school. I never had a good time. I was scared to death of the boys. I couldn't even open my mouth.”

“You still are,” George said. “Scared, I mean.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Of me, anyway.”

“No.”

“Then I wish you were. I'd like to think I rang some kind of a bell with you somehow.” He kept his attention for a minute on the narrow winding road that crept up the Mesa. Then he said, “I need a drink. How about you?”

“If you want one, all right.”

“You certainly are an enthusiastic gal tonight. Is there anything worrying you?”

“No.”

“And you wouldn't tell me anyway, I get it.” He made a right turn at the next crossing. “Here's your Garcia Road.”

“I didn't want to— Say, what's the big idea anyway?”

“I didn't believe that about ‘one of the customers.'”

“I don't care what you believe, Mr. Anderson.”

“Here's your twenty-three hundred.” George put the car in low and they went very slowly past a white frame ranch house. “Satisfied?”

She didn't even look at the house. “Yes, thank you.”

“Who lives there?”

“I don't know.”

“I can easily look it up in the City Directory.”

“Why bother?”

“Because it worries me. I think you told me a lie. Who lives there?”

“One of the customers, I don't know his name. And you can let me out of this car right now. I'll walk home. I never wanted to come anyway. You're always accusing me of things.”

Instead of stopping the car he raced the engine and they shot ahead, up the hill.

“Why should I lie?” Ruby said. “If it was anyone I knew lived in that house why should I have mentioned it?”

“Maybe you thought I was too dumb to catch on, eh?”

“You can't catch on when there's nothing to catch on to, no matter how smart you are.”