An Empty Shell

In networks where the money is old the gossip might not be loud but the grapevine is longer and, since the leisure class has time for such things, the broadcast is even more inevitable. Sarah’s confessions blacken her name, as well as her husband’s.

Even the devil-may-care playboy is disturbed over the inappropriateness of Sarah’s disclosures to the ladies who lunch. After Gloria and Laudette are in bed he calls his wife down to the parlor to speak to her.

“I caught hell at the club today, Cupcake. Both E. L. Lilywight and Morgan Chandler were passing along what they got from their wives … need I say more? I realize that they’re stuffy old bags, but you didn’t need to embarrass me. I know all the dirt my sister dug up on you is true, you don’t have throw it in my face.”

Sarah glares at him. “It’s my right to express myself,” she says, “that is, if equal means anything?” She says the word “equal” emphatically, as if it were a word in another language. “Men define what equal means … and women wonder why they suffer from depression.” She turns to walk away from further trouble.

The idea that his wife had done for other men, old goats no less, what she will not now do for him is very irritating. And while Harry has never been a snob, he enjoys going out in society. Now that they’re crossed off the lists of Bay City people of fashion, he feels dislocated. Why would she make such confessions when there was no pressure on her to do so? It’s part of the heavy weather that surrounds her, he thinks, more evidence that his Cupcake is cracked in the head.

“Before you go to lock yourself in your room and have relations with whatever skeletons you have in your closet—” He seizes her by the hand to get her attention. “You never know who or where Hilda’s spies are. You’ve got to have more of a grip on yourself.”

She rises a bit from her gloom, frees her hand and fights for herself. “As I understood it, your father’s will, as it assumes decay of your moral character, specifies nothing about your bride’s past. These affairs I had are all in the past. Finished. Period. You had your share of affairs before we were married. Come now, don’t be a hypocrite.”

“That’s not the issue. I don’t think it’s wise to go adding fuel to the fire, do you? A story like this going around town only makes Hilda dig deeper. And, yes, what about my feelings? Men can have them too. No man likes to hear that his wife has been to bed with half the men in his club, especially when she will not see to his own needs at home.”

A mild rebuke, and a reasonable one. Nor does her bad reputation stop Harry from trying to make an honest woman of her. He holds her by the shoulders gently. The lady is a tramp but the playboy, put in his place after his unsportsmanlike conduct, shooting in the Dark Continent, does his best to be a gentleman.

“We’ve been back for over four months and I haven’t tried to force myself on you again, have I? You set me straight on the honeymoon and I respect that. But I love you, Cupcake, really I do, and I want to know what’s wrong so we can fix it and get together, happy ever after again.”

Sarah, however, is not in a very uniting spirit. His glorious obsession is her, and she is not up to sharing it. The truth is, there is no love anywhere in her heart. She hates herself, hates being married; she hates the Lord God, her father, Harry, and all living male-kind.

“When it says in the Carte Blanche that all men are created equal,” she says to Harry, “and have certain inalienable rights, I presume in that case ‘men’ is being used in a common sense to signify ‘people’. Why is it that it took until our lifetimes for women to acquire the right to vote? Aren’t women people? Slaves were given their suffrage over fifty years before women!”

The playboy does not want to argue about politics and history with a beautiful woman. He is happy to hear her talk. “Yes,” he says agreeably, “legislation lags behind principles.”

“And it’s more than just voting, more than just smoking in public, it’s about being brought up to think we could be doctors or lawyers or presidents, or be able to cuss and drink, or be as sexually passive, aggressive, inert, perverted, reverted, or twisted as we damn well feel like.”

Harry would humor her even if she proposed sending women into combat if he thought it would improve his chances of getting that bedtime story he’s after. He would certainly never argue about their rights to be in the foxholes of sex. He blends his voice with hers enthusiastically. “Yes, my dear. You’re quite right. What’s fair is fair. You know I’m hardly closed to the idea of women’s rights for those women who want them, especially when it means they get their share in bed. I wouldn’t mind having a door opened for me once in a while.” He smiles thinly to let her know it was only a joke. Sarah is not amused.

He proceeds with his admonishment gently, suggesting that good sense and their common financial interests might be reason enough to stifle the need for true confessions. “All I was saying, especially in our well-scrutinized situation, discretion is the greater part of love affairs, even if they are in the past, for either of us. Why make waves?”

“Because you’re a jellyfish, Harry. You’d agree to anything if you thought it would get you on base with me.”

Harry smiles. He has no argument with that. “I can’t see what’s wrong with trying to be pleasant to the woman I love.”

“Damn you, Harry, you just sound as if you’re fair-minded. You say ‘fifty-fifty’ and ‘equals’ left and right, but you don’t mean it. This morning while you were out at the club, butting heads with those old goats, you had a call from back east. It was a real estate agent, a Miss La Salle. Need I say more?”

“No, you needn’t.” Rats, thinks Harry, what a bad time for this to come up, just when I thought she was warming up. “I admit it. I have been making inquiries about a place for us to live in the Big Apple.”

“You did more than make inquiries, Harry Swan. She said your offer was accepted. What does she mean?”

The will of Senior Swan is clear. “Junior,” it reads, “within a year of the reading of this will you will find one place and call it home or else you forfeit your inheritance.” Old Swan figured that if Hilda had to keep a private eye on the playboy it would help to have him in one place.

Harry’s pick of the barrel is the Big Apple. Big, the Empire City in the Empire State, the Apple, the a-number-one home of the most tempting women on the entire Freeway. For Junior, should his wife actually prove unseduceable, the great Metropolis with its throngs of pedestrians and traffic seems one of the hardest places for his sister’s watchdogs to keep close tabs on him.

Sarah is used to looking for the buck in all those familiar x, y and z places. She has no desire to bite the apple of any bigger city experience. “You’ve gone behind my back again, Harry, making decisions that affect me without consulting me first to see what I wanted.”

“Well, I was planning to keep it as a surprise, an Xmas present. Don’t you think it’s time we both took off our vagabond shoes, eh, start this whole thing over with a clean slate? Besides, after what you did, shooting off your damn mouth at the MAAMA luncheon, I think it’s wise we give this city a rest. With all the talk we can hardly show our faces.” Then he adds, “I should think you would welcome the chance to go back east and see your old friends. You do have some friends, don’t you?”

Of course they both know that the story about her being from the Hub has as many holes as the big loaf of Emmenthaler cheese they brought back from their honeymoon. “No, please,” she says hollowly, haunted by the familiar. “I want to stay here, Harry.”

“But you’re miserable here, Cupcake. It’s obvious. Is there something holding you here?”

There is nothing she can say. Retaliation, Sarah knew it, more artful than the heelishness of some men she’s known, but vengeance just the same. Harry uses her lack of openness to him as a goad to keep her in line. And if she’s not going to be an in-house whore she’s going to have nothing to say about the external trappings of their home life.

“I know something is rotten in the Bay Area, Cupcake, but I’m not sure what.” Going fishing again, he uses the name he heard that night in Mondo Banco as bait. “Is it something about … ‘Corn Dog’?” He drops the name as if it were a bomb and waits to see her reaction.

The name that sent Laudette scurrying strikes a chord of alarm, turmoil, and surprise in Sarah. Her eyes wiggle with agony. How did he know? But she stiffens her lips, and raises her eyebrows, masking her confusion at the sound of the buck’s name, and trying to look ignorant. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“I heard you that night in Mondo Banco calling for someone by that name. Gee Bee’s father, maybe? He’s dead, isn’t he? Is that it?”

No reaction. But behind the smooth stone facade, the inner Sarah is crumbling. She must go back upstairs to her room. “I don’t have to listen to you,” she says and tries to exit.

When he sees prying will get him nowhere, the playboy eases up, but again stops her from going. “I’m sorry, Cupcake,” he says, looking into her zombie eyes, feeling haunted by her. “But it’s hell on me just standing by and watching you ruin your life by hoping for something that hasn’t got a ghost of a chance. If the boy is dead, let him lie. There’s nothing you can do.”

Her nerves jangle, the snakes in the pit of her stomach writhe, her heart spins like a weather vane in a cyclone, but her face remains a stone wall.

“Oh, Cupcake, come on,” he says, “you know you’re the apple of my eye. The Big Apple is exactly where you belong. When the most beautiful women in the world come in, you’re at the top of the heap.”

Sarah, Sarah, quite contrary, is nothing but contradictions. Her fickle life is built around a core of emptiness, not the full primal and final selfless void that The Poongi Book of the Dead celebrates, but a personal kind of nullness, an abandoned, vacuous grandiosity, that is the very soul of vanity. As thorny as she is about physical affection, tortured by these moving plans, she nevertheless can be gulled by flattery.

“Go on, you’re just saying that. We’re going because you think that in the Empire City women like me are a dime a dozen. You don’t really think I’m the world’s most beautiful woman, do you?”

“Yes, my dear. And not only that, you grow creamier by the month.”

It is true. Nothing can take polish like an empty shell. Beautiful Sarah has such an eccentric streak in her conceit that any inkling of self-love makes her despise herself more, just as she despises Harry for loving her, and admiring her beauty.

“Trust me,” he says, shaking her shoulders gently.

Yes, she nods, defeated. Unable to trust herself, she will follow him.