… so goodbye, Mr. Orphen …

O LET’S CALL IT A DAY AND BE glad we knew when to end things,’ ” Dennis read aloud from a cream-colored note. “ ‘I hope you realize the whole affair has been no more important to me than it has to you and certainly right now won’t break my heart any more than it will yours. So goodbye—’ ” here Dennis choked and flourished the note in the air, tore open his pajama collar to beat his chest dramatically—” ‘and so goodbye.’ I would have liked farewell here—the whole paragraph is lousy with redundancy anyway. And there’s more—dear, dear! … ‘So goodbye. You have never cared for anything but your work and apparently for that Mrs. Callingham, judging by the way you were hanging on to her the night you refused to speak to me. As for me’—always talking about herself—‘I am happily married. I love Phil dearly and should never have mixed up with you. Damn everything.’ Tut, tut, we’re losing our head a little. ‘Anyway, this is goodbye. P.S. You can keep my cold cream and apron and negligée but please return my copy of The Wind in the Willows as it was a present to me from Phil.’ ”

Dennis sat up in bed, letter falling from his nerveless fingers.

“I’ve lost her,” he cried. “I’ve lost my little Honey Bear, my little Honey Lou.”

Corinne leaned across the bed and slapped him smartly on the mouth.

“Will you stop kidding about that!” she said resentfully. “Give me that letter. I did mean it, too, every word.”

Dennis tweaked her nose.

“I apologize for reading my mail before guests. Get up and get me a cigarette, my angel.”

Corinne did not budge. She lay with arms clasped under her fine tousled head and stared sulkily up at the Gibson girl on the ceiling so cunningly devised by the leak in the little Communist’s sink. Leprous spots had appeared about the famous face and the pompadour was chipping off, flakes of the plaster snowed over the bed occasionally, and the one eye was casually spreading off toward the window in the shape of a crocodile. One of these days I will look up there, thought Corinne, and the crocodile will have devoured the Gibson girl and very likely changed itself into a hippopotamus.

“Isn’t it funny how contrary I am, Dennis?” mused Corinne. “As soon as I say something out loud I mean just the opposite. I take sides against myself. I can’t help it. I suppose it’s me.”

“Fascinating.”

“Dennis, are you happy—really happy, I mean?”

“Deliriously happy, pet.” Dennis got up to find a cigarette on the table, returned and sat on the foot of the bed and reflected that as a matter of strict fact he was happy. There was nothing in the world he wanted or any place he wanted to be but here. Happy happy Orphen, protected by azure cellophane from misery, pain, terror; nothing, no sir, nothing could destroy this bliss, this perfectly idiotic ecstatic peace. The little Communist might tear his heart out over sharecropper woes, Okie might snivel over his inability to find a wife—a wife, mind you, not a pleasing mistress—he, Orphen was at peace.

“Why?” demanded Corinne cajolingly. “Because of me?”

Dennis blew a happy little ring of smoke into the happy air. He stretched out his bare feet—beautiful arches, he observed with pleasure, and hooked the exquisitely matched toes over the bottom rung of the chair.

“Because of you, because of your undying faith in me and in my work.”

“I never said as much,” said Corinne. “I can’t even finish reading what you write. It doesn’t hold my interest somehow, darling.”

“Sweet! You’re spoiling me. Well then, I must be happy because I am young, beautiful, and rich, because I am the darling of New York, the toast of Paris, because at any moment in a million and two homes all over the world fascinated readers will be opening up their copies of The Hunter’s Wife—”

“See,” reproached Corinne. “You don’t even think of me. Only your work. I don’t see what you like about it so much. Darling, why were you squeezing Mrs. Callingham Tuesday night on Park and Sixty-fourth? Why wouldn’t you speak to Phil and me?”

“I do think of you,” said Dennis, carefully ignoring her final query. “Every day, I think—why is Corinne so hopelessly infatuated with me? Why me? Am I so wonderful? I daresay.”

Corinne sniffed.

“Well, I’m happy too,” she said. She reached for his cigarette, stole a puff and handed it back. “I have a nice husband who loves me—and I love him, too. I do love Phil, Dennis. That’s something you wouldn’t understand but it’s the truth.”

She hugged her bare knees up to her chin, looked somberly off into space. Dennis shook his head.

“I don’t see how you can possibly be happy, Corinne,” he said frankly. “You’re crazy about me—no, darling, your life is horribly botched up.”

“I’ve had a very happy marriage,” Corinne repeated and suddenly began to cry a little, drying her eyes on the edge of the sheet. “I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t. You don’t love me. I don’t even like you as a friend—how could I?—there’s not a thing about you for a girl to admire. That’s what my common sense tells me.”

“You must learn to distinguish between your common sense and your conscience,” Dennis told her placidly. “No, you’re a very, very unhappy little girl, Corinne. You’re all messed up about life. I’ve done something for you. I’ve allowed you the freedom of my apartment and furnished unstinted the beauties of my personality. But that isn’t enough, odd as it may seem. I’m worried about you.”

“Phil loves me. We’re perfectly happy together. You don’t need to go worrying about me, you big liar,” quavered Corinne. “Phil and I drive out to Long Beach every Sunday in summer. We swim—he still likes to dance with me better than anyone else he knows. We’ve had lovely times and never quarreled. I’m lucky, I tell you.”

Dennis looked at her thoughtfully. It did not seem, in fact, the ideal spot in which a happy little wife should sing of her good fortune. The cream-colored note, of course, peeping out from the tumbled folds of the comforter, was the logical voice of the loyal little Mrs. Barrow, but the plump, ivory little bare shoulders and the arms above the covers were definitely none other than Dennis’s own naughty little Honey Bear.

“When Phil saw you he said—’so that’s Orphen’s girlfriend, is it—that Mrs. Callingham?’ Because you didn’t speak to us and acted as if you were in a hurry to get away. Oh, darling, when he said it I thought my heart would break. I cried. Phil had to hold me all night.”

“Oh, really?”

Dennis jumped to his feet and began to dress quickly. Whichever one got out of bed first showed character, showed he or she at least was loftily unaffected by mere sensual indulgences. It was always a mild insult and Corinne’s face fell proportionately.

“OK, you’re happily married, then! Your husband holds you all night long, does he?” he snarled. “How about my little heart breaking, too, one of these days? Right in the middle of a Barrow family dinner, right in the middle of the salad, that wonderful goddam salad of that wonderful husband of yours … ‘Oh, Phil always makes the thalad dwething with hith own hanth!’ Why, Mrs. Barrow, is that a fact, and how perfectly delicious. How in the world do you make it, Mr. Barrow? … ‘We don’t like to tell—’ ” he mimicked the female voice, “ ‘but weally it’s a secwet. It’s not wegular winegar, it’s tarragon!’ Why, why, Mrs. Barrow! Not tarragon! Why, why, Mrs. Barrow, you don’t mean to tell me tarragon! … ‘And a dash of wokefot and sasson oil—’ oh—oh—oh, Mr. and Mrs. Barrow, what a secret, what a surprise, what a salad dressing and what a happy, happy, happy little couple. Now if you’ll just add a soupçon more bird oil, Mr. Barrow, just a soupçon mind you, while I give your dear little wife a nice little buss under the table.…”

“Stop!” screamed Corinne, leaping out of the covers. “Stop.”

Dennis stopped. He examined his belt buckle intently.

“To be absolutely honest,” he said quietly, “I haven’t the faintest idea why I didn’t speak to you the other night. I can’t tell what makes me do things—I can tell about other people but not about me. Let’s see, now, supposing I was my hero in a book … I think it was the way Effie said—‘she’s a pretty girl’ as if she’d been bitched by everyone else and by my writing that book, so that she wouldn’t be surprised to have me leave her there in the rain just like Callingham would have for any pretty younger woman. So I—well, my mouth wouldn’t open—I just didn’t say, Good evening, dear friends. I—just—didn’t—speak. So.”

“So,” said Corinne. She wriggled into her girdle. “Hand me my dress, please.”

Corinne, silent, was someone to conjure with. A little tentatively Dennis kissed the back of her neck. When she didn’t whirl around at once and fling her arms about him, when she imperceptibly moved her head away, he knew something was wrong again. She fastened her garters, eyes resolutely downcast.

“Do you understand that, Corinne? You’re so intuitive you probably do,” he said cleverly. “You know more about me than anyone, don’t you, Toots?”

Corinne looked at him with odd thoughtfulness.

“There’s something between you and that Mrs. Callingham,” she said. “I know, because this is the first time you’ve ever explained anything to me. Any other time when I ask you where you were, who she was, or what you did, you just kid me and say ‘never you mind.’ This time you explained. It shows it’s pretty serious.”

Dennis’s mouth dropped open.

“She’s used to famous men,” said Corinne. “Maybe she knows how to talk to you better than I do. I don’t mean you’re famous yet but you will be. Even Phil says so. And she probably knows what to say.”

She tied the orange scarf around her neck, fastened it to the blue wool dress with a crystal clasp with the tiny dog’s head preserved in it. Dennis watched her, wanting her to say more, but he was afraid to ask her any questions. Corinne would be sure to jump to some jealous conclusion.

“Applesauce,” he said.

“You must not be quite sure what it’s all about yourself,” said Corinne and shook out her skirt carefully. “You wouldn’t be doing all that explaining just for my benefit. It’s more for yourself. Look, is it true the book’s about her?”

“More or less,” admitted Dennis. “I exaggerated—made a real heroine of her, I daresay with a dash of malice, so they tell me.”

“You used her for a heroine then fell in love with your heroine,” said Corinne. “You act as if you were married to her, as if she came first because she was your work. You act worse than I ever did about my marriage.”

She suddenly snatched up the little white note, nestling in the blanket folds like a little white bird, and read it over.

“It is so sad, darling, isn’t it,” she said mournfully. “I did mean it all, too. I do love my husband—he’s so kind to me and you’re so beastly. What makes me act this way to him—why do I come here at all—oh, damn, damn, damn!”

She ran out of the door, handkerchief to her eyes, the note fluttering to the floor behind her, saying goodbye. Dennis went to the head of the stairs after her.

“Hey!”

He heard the front door close wheezily on its heavy hinges. She’d be back in a few minutes. He stood in the doorway waiting to click the downstairs entry door for her return, he stood several minutes but she did not come back. Dennis finally closed the door and picked up the note from the floor. “I hope you realize the whole affair has been no more important to me than it has to you.” Without Corinne beside him the words did not seem so funny, after all.

“I shouldn’t have laughed about it,” Dennis reflected uneasily. “I really shouldn’t have laughed.”

The telephone rang and he picked it up with relief. That would be Corinne saying hadn’t she been silly—would he come out for a cocktail. But it was only the publicity man at his publisher’s asking if tomorrow morning would be all right with him for photographs and an interview. And did Orphen know where they could get in touch with that Mrs. Callingham so they could get her to deny that the book had anything to do with her?

“No,” roared Dennis and hung up.