IX

In pants and bra, Billie Hauman stood before the mirror, doing her face. Ethel Grandin, dressed, watched her from the wicker chair. She did not really hear the aimless chatter. She was thinking: Billie’s such a pretty girl, too bad she doesn’t have a better figure. Neither malice nor envy prompted this thought. Billie’s was the classic soft womanly figure so well represented in art, the curvy form which artists loved to paint but which had been scorned by women of her generation. It was not at all the mold of the modern girl, the kind of figure she herself had aspired to and achieved. Billie’s lushness may well have been the natural complement to the hard upright body of the male, but in Ethel Grandin’s eyes the hips were too wide, the waist too narrow, the thighs thick, too soft, even rather fatty.

“Oh I’m so tired,” Billie was saying. “That water just enervates me.”

“You can take a nap after lunch, if you like.”

“Funny how that word sounds different than what it means. ‘Enervate’ ought to mean pep you up, give you energy or something.” Billie was adapting herself to the wife of the college professor she could not lose sight of in Mrs. Grandin. “There’s a lot of words like that when you come to think of it. I wrote them down in a notebook once. Just for fun; you know how you do those things. I remember one of them was ‘meretricious.’ It ought to mean ‘meritorious’ or something of merit, like. But it means just the opposite. Look,” she said, pointing out the window, “there goes that Coast Guard man again. Wouldn’t you think he’d get sick and tired of the same old walk all the time?” She drew in her lips and pressed them tight together to rub the lipstick in. “They’re certainly not breaking their necks, are they? I’m starved.” She moved away from the bureau, picked up her white dress, and slipped it over her head. Then she began to work on her hair. “Goodness, the way he thrashed around this morning, isn’t it the limit? I don’t know how he does it after all he’s been through.”

“You mean Guadalcanal?”

“I was thinking of the hospital and all those months he was so sick. There was a long time when they thought he wasn’t going to live. But he comes up very fast out of anything like that. I remember once in high school he broke a few ribs in a football game and a couple of days later he was right back in school. A couple of days!”

“Have you known him long, Billie?”

“Cliff?” She gave the name a high-­pitched inflection that seemed to say it was nothing to have known Cliff long, millions of people had known him a long time, and who was he to know anyway? “Dear yes. Why I guess I’ve known Cliff, why, at least eight years.”

“You’ve gone together all that time?”

“Oh my no. I didn’t run around with Cliff in high school. I knew who he was but I didn’t go with him. I couldn’t. Lots of girls did but I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Well you see, Cliff was always kind of a—well, not a tough, but he isn’t very well bred, you know. Nice girls didn’t go with him. I remember once I gave him a date in junior year and all my girl friends just lit into me. They said I simply couldn’t go out with a boy like that and I guess they were right—then.”

“Perhaps they were jealous.” With difficulty, Ethel Grandin made the appropriate remarks, though her mind was not on this conversation at all.

“Of Cliff? No no. Not at all. Any one of them could have had Cliff any time they liked—he was dying to go with nice girls like us—but we’d have been talked about.” She opened wide the fingers of one hand, laid them on her hair, and drew them slowly together again to preserve her wave. “But I will say this for him. The first time he took me out he behaved like a perfect gentleman. He didn’t even try to kiss me. I told the girls and they all thought I was lying.”

“Then I should think,” Ethel said, “that would have made it all right for you to ‘go’ with him.”

“Well no, because you see there was always his— Well, it isn’t very nice of me, but I know you won’t repeat it: there was his family. They live in the wrong part of town, he and his father. His father’s a carpenter or plumber or something—an immigrant, of course. The Haumans aren’t very much, you know. I suppose you’ve noticed.”

“Your mother didn’t approve?”

“Mother didn’t know he existed. I didn’t approve.” She gazed into the mirror with a dreamy expression. “Funny how those things change . . .”

Automatically Ethel replied: “They must have or you wouldn’t have married him.”

“Sometimes I’m so crazy about him I can’t stand it. All last month I was; all last year. And other times I could just— But I suppose that’s life.”

Her hair set, she moved to one of the beds and half leaned, half lay alongside the footboard. She fixed the older woman with an unseeing gaze and Ethel Grandin grew self-­conscious. She knew she was in for a session of self-­revelation and she felt herself both ill equipped and unwilling to take part in it. Why did women always have to do these things, what gave them the right always to be airing their feelings? Had they no pride—had they no respect for their husbands? Love was a thing intimate and exclusive, one of those fundamentals which one did not discuss because, universal though it may be, it was personal even more. Her ten years of marriage had little to do with Billie or indeed with anyone else. What was true of herself could not be true for another, or have any meaning or interest for an outsider. Thus she had believed; not because her experience was special but because it was personal, private, and her own. “Mine is different,” she had always thought—forgetting that in this world nobody’s experience is unique.

This reticence sprang less from her natural disinclination to talk about herself than from loyalty to her husband; she could not have discussed the smallest aspect of their relationship if her life depended on it. Had her marriage been ideally happy or, on the other hand, miserably barren and loveless, she would never have mentioned it to another living soul. It was simply not in her to communicate her feelings about herself, still less about her husband. To have done so would have been a violation of love: it would have cheapened him, made him common property, removed him to the outer world of other men where (as her husband) he did not belong.

“Funny about Cliff,” Billie said dreamily, but with a kind of impatience, too. “It almost doesn’t seem to matter whether he’s around or not. I loved him just as much when he was out in the Pacific as I do now that we’re married, and maybe I even got just as much out of it. This week he’s been different than I’ve ever known him. When he comes to bed, I almost wonder whether it’s him at all, or even me. Still I guess it’s Cliff all right. I just sort of wait till it’s over and he can come back to me. The last two nights I kept thinking, oh dear, if only he’d go away so I could dream about him like I used to. But of course I don’t want him to go away either. I love to have him around so I can just look at him. Don’t you think he’s wonderful looking? But when he’s close to me, like when he makes love, I can’t see him . . .”

No, Ethel Grandin did not think he was wonderful looking. In uniform, yes, perhaps. But she couldn’t forget the impression she had got as she walked behind Cliff through the sand, returning from the beach. By comparison to the trimness and compactness of her husband’s physique, which spoke breeding, tact, and gentleness in his every move, Cliff seemed almost a creature to beware of. His feet turned in when he walked, like an aborigine’s, and the ponderous half-­closed fists at the ends of his long arms swung monkey-­like at his sides. How a girl could have fallen in love with such a man, whose physical attraction lay only in being massive, was beyond her.

“. . . At our wedding, in his dress whites,” Billie was saying, “he was the most stunning thing you ever saw. The very same girls who warned me against him a few years ago were simply carried away. At the reception everybody decided he’d turned out all right after all. A captain in the Marine Corps is different, you know—not something to be sneezed at, I mean. To see him at the reception you’d never think he came from Haag Street.” She examined her wedding ring absently, and then added: “Of course he doesn’t have his uniform on all the time. I mean there are times—” She stopped, and looked at Ethel with childlike directness. “Is this not nice to talk about, Mrs. Grandin?”

“Why do you ask, Billie? Do you think I don’t approve?”

“I mean about his coming to bed with me. But that’s what marriage is, I guess. Isn’t it?”

“Partly.”

“At least it’s what they want.” In a smaller voice, intimate now as if thinking aloud, she went on: “He’s the best fellow I ever had—to dance with, go out with, all those things. When he comes to call for me, and when I first see him standing in the door, you can’t imagine. And out somewhere, or coming home, when he puts his arms around me and pulls me up against his chest, I just die. But later, all that goes. He seems to turn into a different person. I don’t even know whether it’s me he enjoys, or just—himself. For all he knows, I might be just anybody. He doesn’t even know I’m there.”

“Of course he does. He wants you.”

“Anybody can want—that.”

“But it’s you, Billie. He married you, didn’t he?’”

“I suppose so. But what we’ve had the last two nights we could have had anyway, without being married at all. He’d have been just the same if I’d been any other girl. Marriage doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it—Cliff doesn’t know what marriage means!”

“These things take time, Billie.”

“Not for Cliff they don’t.”

“I didn’t mean Cliff, I was thinking of you. With the right man, love and love-­making become all one, after a while.”

“But he becomes such a stranger to me! He just plows ahead like I was—dirt. . . .”

“Maybe he’ll always be a stranger to you. That sometimes happens. Men and women aren’t alike. They never can be.”

“Tell me,” Billie said, “is Mr. Grandin a good husband?”

Ethel drew a pack of Camels from her pocket. “Toss me those matches on the night table, will you please? Thanks.” She lighted her cigarette. “It takes an awful lot of love, Billie, to keep a marriage going. An awful lot, all you’ve got. That’s something you’ll have to remember—for years.”

Billie gazed absently about the room. Then she said: “Which bed is yours, Mrs. Grandin?”

“By the window.”

“Why do you have twin beds?”

“We always have had.”

“Even at the beginning? Even the first few months?”

“I’m afraid I don’t remember. . . .”

“But that’s awful.”

“Awful? I don’t think so. We don’t love each other any less for”—it was hard to say it—“for sleeping alone.”

“But if you have a quarrel or anything, sleeping in the same bed makes it just that much easier to get together again.”

“There are other ways,” Ethel said, and heard the awful ambiguity.

“I want to be with Cliff all night long. Or I will want to when he calms down. I just love lying beside him. It’s beautiful then, and I feel wonderful. You know?”

Ethel Grandin could not reply.

“You’ve really been married ten years?” Billie asked.

“Does that seem so long? If you’re in love, it isn’t long enough.”

“I suppose it gets easier,” Billie said. “I guess the first few weeks are difficult for any girl. Were they with you? Did you find him hard to get used to at first?”

Much as she would have liked to help Billie, Ethel Grandin could say nothing. She remembered things she could never have spoken of in the wide world.

“I’m sorry,” Billie said. “Excuse me if you mind this. I’ve—I only want something to hang onto.”

“Hang onto your love. You did say you loved him?”

“Cliff? How could I help it!” She sighed with a real impatience. “Here they come now, I hear them in the hall,” she announced. “About time, too. Who do they think we are, I’d like to know. . . .”