… keep him guessing …

VERY DAY OF MY LIFE,” wrote Dorothy Dix, a kind-faced gentlewoman in the New York Journal, “girls write in to me that their boyfriends for no reason at all are turning cold to them. ‘I have loved John dearly for two years,’ writes one, ‘and have never given him a moment’s doubt of it. Yet lately he seems to avoid me and seems annoyed by my gestures of affection.’ Oh, my dears,” continued Dorothy Dix, “don’t you understand that nothing is so deadening to a man as certainty, that to keep a man mystified is the secret of holding his love? Don’t let him be so cocksure, let him sense the possibility of losing you to someone else—keep him guessing if you would hold him.”

So it was that when Dennis telephoned, Corinne put down the paper and answered that she really couldn’t say when she’d be free to see him.

“Lunch, eh?” suggested Dennis, the cocksure.

“I couldn’t possibly,” said Corinne briefly, mystifying him.

“Why not?”

Corinne’s chilly, polite silence proclaimed the insolence of such a personal question.

“You come over here at five, then,” said Dennis, but again Corinne made it clear that she had important other plans. It was the same with tomorrow and next day. In fact Corinne politely implied that she was a very busy and popular woman for the next few weeks but if any of these fabulous engagements should fall through she would be most happy to give Mr. Orphen a ring. Good-bye, and thanks terribly for thinking of me.

What’s up now, speculated Dennis, she must have seen me at Lüchow’s last night or somebody told her, and anyway where had she been? He’d called up her house a dozen times in the evening changing his voice every time he got Phil and always Mrs. Barrow was out. There was no chart to the simple but cockeyed course of Corinne’s emotions so, thoroughly mystified and even more annoyed, Dennis went back to the piece he was writing on Old Yorkville for Okie, taken from his last article on the same subject but with the tenses changed, to give it a fresh note.

Pursuing her role as suggested by Miss Dix, Corinne immediately taxied over to the Algonquin to lunch with Walter himself, just this moment arrived from three weeks in London. At least he was supposed to have been in London on business but Corinne understood and all the people Corinne knew understood that Walter had really been in Paris with Mrs. Bee Amidon. Walter’s own wife had stayed home in the beautiful Larchmont home she had heckled him into buying. Walter was Phil’s best friend but it was Walter and Corinne who really understood each other, who whispered in the kitchen over the cocktail-shaking while Phil and Mary played bagatelle. Walter knew all about Dennis and Corinne, knew all about Bee Amidon, and often Walter and Corinne stayed out all hours of the night confiding in each other the anguish of finding true love too late. For Walter had never loved as he loved Bee, and Corinne would never love anyone the way she loved Dennis. Bee Amidon had other affairs and even ran around with her husband more than was necessary and all in all made Walter miserable, while Corinne told stories of Dennis’s casualness when her own feelings were so eternal and deep. Once these mutual confessions of great love unrequited had ended up on Walter’s studio couch—he kept a room in town—but this episode was regarded as a foul and stricken promptly off the records and Corinne could not help feeling wounded when Dennis suspected her in the whistling teakettle business. Walter was always surprised that Corinne and Bee were not chums, but his confidences and expressed suspicions about his love had established such a hideous picture of the woman that he did not realize that in relieving himself of this monster he had given her to Corinne for keeps.

Nor did Walter think Dennis Orphen was anything but a big phony. He did not for a minute think Dennis gave a damn about Corinne as she herself once in a while darkly intimated. In spite of these mutual reserves, Walter and Corinne gave each other an amazing amount of reassurance. Concerning Walter’s suspicions of Bee, Corinne said, “Why, darling, you just don’t know women, that’s all. Bee’s simply crazy about you and she wouldn’t dream of that dumb lawyer you’re so afraid of.”

Privately Corinne thought Bee was sleeping with ten dumb lawyers but Walter never guessed.

“Dennis never asks me to leave Phil,” Corinne then complained to Walter. “Sometimes I think it’s because there’s someone else in his life, but really the only serious friend he has is that woman Mrs. Callingham, and of course she’s much too old.”

“He’s too decent to ask you to give up a good home for the ups and downs of a writer’s life,” Walter told her as Corinne had wanted him to, though as Walter told Mary and Bee and all the other unknown repositories of Corinne’s secrets, Dennis was really scared to death Corinne would plump herself down on him one of these days and try to trap him into something serious. As for this ‘old’ Mrs. Callingham—ha-ha—she was a damn fine-looking woman and not over thirty-four or so—not much over anyway and you could bet your sweet life a man wouldn’t tie himself up with a little nitwit like Corinne when he could get a glamorous, famous woman like this Mrs. Callingham. He’d seen her in the entr’acte of Biography and you could tell right away she was a keen person. She was with Dennis and had her arm through his, talking and laughing. Walter has just given Dennis a quiet level look as if “No, I won’t tell Corinne, you bum. What kind of a fellow are you anyway? Haven’t you any decency at all with your women?” Because, the way Walter felt was that there was a certain code about intrigue the same as anything else and Dennis didn’t measure up, though when Walter mentioned this to Bee Amidon she said men were always having very high codes for other men to follow and nobody ever measured up, but she noticed they all seemed to do about the same things.

“I met this Callingham one night at the Dôme, Bee and I did,” Walter told Corinne. “He’s a big good-looking guy. He’d flown over Persia and people were fussing over him like mad. Bee knew him. I told him there was this book being written about him. He was sore as the dickens.”

“You shouldn’t have told him,” said Corinne. “He might sue Dennis.”

She was having a pernod and having said so many nasty things about Dennis her heart was filling with love for him and a slight indignation at Walter. It was his fault she’d said Dennis was phony and shallow and insincere. Why did men let people say such things about another man?

“ ‘Who is this Orphen, anyway?’ says Callingham,” said Walter and leaving out the deprecatory description he and Bee had eagerly furnished at the time he continued, “so we told him he was a very good writer and got a prize once.”

Walter poured a brandy into his coffee the way Bee liked it. He missed Bee now but sometimes he thought it was more fun talking to Corinne about how he loved Bee than really being with Bee, for Bee never seemed to want to be alone with him, she was always asking every one else to join them. In fact the affair from her point of view was just loads of fun and that was all. She never cried or talked about divorces or any of the normal things, she just had a fine time as if it wasn’t serious at all.

“What’d Whosis say when you told him who Dennis was?”

“He said Erskine Caldwell was the only writer in America worth anything,” Walter finally recollected.

“That’s because he’s something like Callingham,” Corinne deduced.

“He said America was dead anyway,” said Walter. “He said we hadn’t really produced anything he could dignify by the name of literature since Three Soldiers. He kept saying America is dead, dead and drinking straight whisky. I say, Corinne, let’s get tight and cruise through the city all day. Mary’s coming in tonight and if I’m sober I’ll feel guilty about Bee and won’t be able to carry the thing off.”

It seemed a good idea to Corinne. That would show Dennis he couldn’t be sure of her if she spent the day celebrating with Walter. Be cool, be aloof, don’t let him be sure of you, Corinne went out to phone Dennis and show how cool and aloof she was.

“What’s up?” he said. “I’m working. Want to come over?”

“Come over? Certainly not,” said Corinne with a light tinkling laugh. “I just called to ask if you could come to our house for dinner the fifth of next month.”

Dennis was plainly astounded by such a formal message.

“Good heavens, next month? How do I know what I can do next month? I’ll let you know when the time comes. What kind of party is it anyway that I got to be asked so far ahead—a masquerade?”

“Just you alone. No party, I’m afraid,” said Corinne stiffly.

“Well, I’ll let you know when I see you.”

Corinne allowed a significant pause to take place.

“In case we don’t see each other till then I wanted to be sure, that’s all,” she graciously explained. “It’s a Wednesday. Can you make it?”

“No,” he said in tremendous disgust and the receiver banged up.

Corinne went into the ladies’ room and made up again. It was always fun making up after a few pernods because they made your face freeze so it was like painting a statue. She went back to the dining room which was rapidly filling with witty wonderful characters and they were all drinking and eating like anybody else. Walter was entering his third brandy when she got back to the table. Walter was really terribly sweet. He understood about Dennis, too, that Dennis was too fine, too decent, to ask her to give up Phil’s protection for his small earnings. Even if this new book was a great hit it wouldn’t be as much as Phil made and she loved her nice little house on Sixty-fourth Street with its little garden and Dennis wouldn’t want her to leave that particularly after she’d just fixed it all up. Walter understood how Dennis felt. It was the nicest thing about Walter, the way he understood about Dennis. She put her arm around dear Walter, standing behind his chair and pressed her mouth to his ear.

“Walter, I can’t stay,” she whispered. “I have to go over to Dennis’s right away. You understand, darling.”

Walter was, nevertheless, as mad as he could be, watching the cunning little figure in the leopard coat and green beret patter out of the room. It was all very well for wives to fail you or for your true love to fail you—they had some excuse, but for a friend—and after all he’d done for Corinne, too, fixing it up with Phil a million different times, and letting her weep on his shoulder, and not telling her all he’d heard around town about Dennis and Mrs. Callingham. After all he’d done as her one true friend the least she could have done in return was to help celebrate his return. What kind of pal was she, anyway?

Walter ordered another brandy, this time with soda, and sat gloomily thinking of all the things he’d done for Corinne, and for Bee too for that matter. After a while his mind saved him a lot of trouble by making the two into one woman, a wayward, double-crossing, lying little tramp. He wished he hadn’t bought Bee that hat, though in another way he wished she’d asked for diamonds so he could accuse her of being plain mercenary. In crises like this, being left all alone at noon in a café with all day to waste, Walter’s Michigan morality suddenly came out in full force to sustain him, and he wanted to see his wife and thank her for being a good woman. Someone you can believe in, that’s what you needed, someone you could trust—