‘Only that she was beautiful. You don’t remember single faces out of a crowd after so much time’s passed. Think of all the people you meet on the street every day, Theda.’
She closed her eyes. ‘If I’d only known then that I’d meet you later in life, I would have looked for you.’
He laughed ironically. ‘But you never know those things. You see too many people every week, every year, and most of them are destined for obscurity. All you can do, later, is look back at the dim movements of the years and see where your life briefly touched, flickered against another’s. The same town, the same restaurant, the same food, the same air, but two different paths and ways of living, oblivious one of the other.’ He kissed her fingers. ‘I should have kept my eyes open for you, too. But the only girl I noticed was that blond girl with the ribbon hair.’
It irritated her. ‘We rubbed elbows, we actually passed on the street. Why, on summer nights, I bet you were down at the carnival at the lake.’
‘Yes, I went down. I looked at the colored lights reflected in the water and heard the merry-go-round music jangling at the stars!’
‘I remember, I remember,’ she said eagerly. ‘And maybe some nights you went to the Academy Theatre?’
‘I saw Harold Lloyd’s picture Welcome Danger there that summer.’
‘Yes, yes. I was there. I remember. And they had a short feature with Ruth Etting singing “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” Follow the bouncing ball.’
‘You’ve got a memory,’ he said.
‘Darling, so near and yet so far. Do you realize we practically knocked each other down going by for six months. It’s murderous! Those brief months together and then ten years until this year. It happens all the time. We live a block from people in New York, never see them, go to Milwaukee and meet them at a party. And tomorrow night—’
She stopped talking. Her face paled and she held his strong tanned fingers. Dim lights played off his lieutenant’s bars, winking them strangely, hypnotically.
He had to finish it for her, slowly. ‘Tomorrow night I go away again. Overseas. So damn soon, oh, so damn soon.’ He made a fist and beat the table slowly, with no noise. After a while he looked at his wristwatch and exhaled. ‘We’d better go, darling. It’s late.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Please, Dave, just a moment more.’ She looked at him. ‘I’ve got the awfulest feeling. I’m scared stiff. I’m sorry.’
He closed his eyes, opened them, looked around, and saw the faces. Theda did likewise. Perhaps they both thought the same strange thoughts.
‘Look around, Theda,’ he said. ‘Remember all these faces. Maybe, if I don’t come back, you may meet someone else again and you’ll go with them six months and suddenly discover that your paths crossed before–on a July night 1944 at a cocktail place called La Bomba on the Sunset Strip. And, oh yeah, you were with a young lieutenant named David Lacey that night, whatever happened to him? Oh, he went to war and didn’t come back–and well, by gosh, you’ll discover that one of these faces in the room right now was here seeing this, seeing me talk to you now, noting your beauty and hearing me say “I love you, I love you.” Remember these faces, Theda, and maybe they’ll remember us, and—’
Her fingers went upon his lips, sealing in any other words. She was crying and afraid and her eyes blinked a wet film through which she saw the many faces of people looking her way, and she thought of all the paths and patterns, and it was awful, the future, David—She looked at him again, holding him so tightly, and she said that she loved him over and over.
And all the rest of the evening he was a boy in horn-rims with books under his arm, and she was a golden-haired girl with a very blue ribbon tied in her long bright hair…
Miss Appletree and I
No one remembered how it began with Miss Appletree. It seemed Miss Appletree had been around for years. Every time Nora made a bad biscuit or didn’t put on her lipstick when she came to the breakfast table, George would laughingly say, ‘Watch out! I’ll run off with Miss Appletree!’
Or when George had his night out with the boys and came home slightly eroded and worn away by the sands of time, Nora would say, ‘Well, how was Miss Appletree?’
‘Fine, fine,’ George would say. ‘But I love only you, Nora. It’s good to be home.’
As you can see, Miss Appletree was around the house for years, invisible as the smell of grass in April, or the scent of chestnut leaves falling in October.
George even described her: ‘She’s tall.’
‘I’m five feet seven in my stocking feet,’ said Nora.
‘She’s willowy,’ said George.
‘I’m spreading a bit with the years,’ said Nora.
‘And she’s fairy yellow in the hair.’
‘My hair is turning mousy,’ said Nora. ‘It used to shine like the sun.’
‘She’s a quiet sort,’ said George.
‘I gossip far too much,’ said Nora.
‘And she loves me blindly, passionately, with not a doubt in her mind or soul, wildly, insanely,’ said George, ‘as no woman with brains could ever love a shameful bumbling old drone like me.’
‘She sounds like an avalanche,’ said Nora.
‘But do you know,’ said George, ‘when the avalanche rolls away and life must go on, I always turn to you, Nora. Miss Appletree is quite impossible. I always come back to my one and only love, the woman who doubts I am a God after all, the woman who knows I put my right foot into my left shoe and is diplomatic enough to give me two right shoes at a time like that, the woman who realizes that I’m a weather vane in every wind yet never tries to tell me that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so why am I lost? Nora, you know every pore in my face, every hair in my ear, every cavity in my teeth; but I love you.’
‘Fare thee well, Miss Appletree!’ said Nora.
And so the years went by.
‘Hand me the hammer and some nails,’ said George one day.
‘Why?’ said his wife.
‘This calendar,’ he said. ‘I’m going to nail it down. The leaves fall off it like a deck of cards somebody dropped. Good Lord, I’m fifty years old today! Hand me that hammer quick!’
She came and kissed his cheek. ‘You don’t mind terribly, do you?’
‘I didn’t mind yesterday,’ he said. ‘But today I mind. What is there about units of ten that so frightens a man? When a man’s twenty-nine years old and nine months it doesn’t faze him. But on his thirtieth birthday, O Fates and Furies, life is over, love is done and dead, the career is up the flue or down the chute, either way. And a man goes along the next ten, twenty years, through thirty, past forty, on toward fifty, reasonably keeping his hands off Time, not trying to hold on to the days too hard, letting the wind blow and the river run. But Good Lord, all of a sudden you’re fifty years old, that nice round total, that grand sum and–bang! Depression and horror. Where have the years gone? What has one done with one’s life?’
‘One has raised a daughter and a son, both married young and gone already,’ said Nora. ‘And proud children they are!’
‘True,’ said George. ‘And yet on a day like this, in the middle of May, it feels sad, like autumn. You know me, I’m a moody old dog. I’m the son of Thomas Wolfe, O Time, O River, oh, the grieving of the winds, lost, lost, forever lost.’
‘You need Miss Appletree,’ said Nora.
He blinked. ‘I need what?’
‘Miss Appletree,’ said Nora. ‘The lady we made up such a long time ago. Tall, willowy, madly in love with you. Miss Appletree, the magnificent. Aphrodite’s daughter. Every man turned fifty, every man who’s feeling sorry for himself and feeling sad needs Miss Appletree. Romance.’
‘Oh, but I have you, Nora,’ he said.
‘Oh, but I’m neither as young nor as pretty as I once was,’ Nora said, taking his arm. ‘Once in his lifetime, every man should have his fling.’
‘Do you really think so?’ he said.
‘I know it!’
‘B
ut that causes divorce. Foolish old men rushing about after their youth.’
‘Not if the wife has a head on her shoulders. Not if she understands he’s not being mean, he’s just very sad and lost and tired and mixed up.’
‘I know so many men who’ve run off with Miss Appletrees, alienated their wives and children, and made a mess of their lives.’
He brooded for a moment and then said, ‘Well, I’ve been thinking a lot of hard thoughts every minute of every hour of every day. One shouldn’t think of young women that much. That’s not good and it might have some sort of force of nature and I don’t think I should be thinking that way, so hard and so intense.’
He was finishing his breakfast when the front doorbell rang. He and Nora looked at each other and then there was a soft tapping at the door.
He looked as if he wanted to get up but couldn’t force himself, so Nora rose and walked to the front door. She turned the knob slowly and looked out. A conversation followed.
He closed his eyes and listened and thought he heard two women talking out on the front stoop. One of the voices was soft and the other voice seemed to be gaining strength.
A few minutes later, Nora returned to the table.
‘Who was that?’ he said.
‘A saleslady,’ Nora said.
‘A what?’
‘A saleslady.’
‘What was she selling?’
‘She told me but she talked so quietly that I could hardly hear.’
‘What was her name?’
‘I couldn’t quite catch it,’ said Nora.
‘What did she look like?’
‘She was tall.’
‘How tall?’
‘Very tall.’
‘And nice to look at?’
‘Nice.’
‘What color hair?’
‘It was like sunlight.’
‘So.’
‘So,’ Nora said. ‘Now, I tell you what. Drink that coffee, stand up, go back upstairs, and get back into bed.’
‘Say that again,’ he said.
‘Drink that coffee, stand up…’ she said.
He stared at her, slowly picked up his coffee cup, drained it, and began to rise.
‘But,’ he said, ‘I’m not sick. I don’t need to go back to bed this early in the morning.’
‘You look a little poorly,’ said Nora. ‘I’m giving you an order. Go upstairs, take off your clothes, and go to bed.’
He turned slowly and walked up the stairs and felt himself taking off his clothes and lying down in the bed. As soon as his head hit the pillow, he had to fight not to fall asleep.
A few moments later he heard a stirring in the somewhat dim early-morning room.
He felt someone lie down in the bed and turn toward him. Eyes shut, he heard his voice groggily ask, ‘What? Who’s there?’
A voice murmured to him from the next pillow. ‘Miss Appletree.’
‘How’s that again?’ he said.
‘Miss Appletree’ was the whisper.
A Literary Encounter
It had been going on for a long time, but perhaps she first gave it notice this autumn evening when Charlie was walking the dog and met her on the way back from the grocer’s. They had been married a year, but it wasn’t often they happened on each other this way, like two strangers.
‘God, it’s good to see you, Marie!’ he cried, taking her arm fiercely. His dark eyes were shining and he was sniffing great lungfuls of the sharp air. ‘God, isn’t it a lost evening, though!’
‘It’s nice.’ She looked quietly at him as they walked toward their house.
‘October,’ he gasped. ‘Lord, I love to be out in it, eating it, breathing it, smelling its smell. Oh, it’s a wild, sad month, all right. Look at the way the trees are burning with it. The world’s on fire in October; and you think of all the dead you’ll never see again.’ He gripped her hand tightly.
‘Just a minute. The dog wants to stop.’
They waited in the cold darkness while the dog tapped a tree with his nose.
‘God, smell that incense!’ The husband stretched. ‘I feel tall tonight, like I could stride the earth, yank down stars, start volcanoes roaring!’
‘Is your headache gone from this morning?’ she asked softly.
‘Gone, Christ, it’ll never come back! Who thinks of headaches on such a night! Listen to the leaves rustle! Listen to that wind in the high and empty trees! God, isn’t it a lonely, lost time, though, and where are we going, we lost and wandering souls on the brick pavements of the surging cities and little lonely towns where the trains pound through the night? I’d love to be traveling tonight, oh, traveling anywhere, to be out in it, drinking its wildness, its sad sweetness!’
‘Why don’t we ride the trolley out to Chessman Park tonight, it’s a nice ride,’ she said, nodding.
He flung up a hand, urging on the slow dog. ‘No, I mean really traveling! Over bridges and hills and by cold cemeteries and past hidden villages where lights are all out and nobody knows you’re passing in the night on ringing steel!’
‘Well, then, we might take the North Shore up to Chicago for the weekend,’ she suggested.
He looked at her pitiably in the dark and crushed her small cool hand in his mighty one. ‘No,’ he said with grand simplicity. ‘No.’ He turned. ‘Come on. Home to a huge dinner. Three steaks, I want, a glutton’s repast! Rare red wines, rich sauces, and a steaming tureen of creamed soup, with an after-dinner liqueur, and—’
‘We’ve pork chops and peas.’ She unlocked the front door.
On the way to the kitchen, she tossed her hat. It landed on an opened copy of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, which lay under the hurricane lamp. Giving her husband a look, she ran to investigate the potatoes.
Three nights passed in which he stirred violently in bed when the wind blew. He stared with intent brightness at the window rattling in the autumn storm. Then, he relaxed.
The following evening, when she entered from snatching a few sheets off the line, she found him seated deep in his library chair, a cigarette hanging from his lower lip.
‘Drink?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘What do you mean, “what?”’ she asked.
A faint tinge of irritation moved in his impassive cold face.
‘What kind?’ he said.
‘Scotch,’ she said.
‘Soda?’ he said.
‘Right.’ She felt her face take on the same expressionless aspect as his.
He lunged over to the cabinet, took out a couple glasses big as vases, and perfunctorily filled them.
‘Okay?’ He gave her hers.
She looked at it. ‘Fine.’
‘Dinner?’ He eyed her coldly, over his drink.
‘Steak.’
‘Hash browns?’ His lips were a thin line.
‘Right.’
‘Good girl.’ He laughed a little, bleakly, tossing the drink into his hard mouth, eyes closed.
She lifted her drink. ‘Luck.’
‘You said it.’ He thought it over slyly, eyes moving about the room. ‘Another?’
‘Don’t mind,’ she said.
‘Atta girl,’ he said. ‘Atta baby.’
He shot soda into her glass. It sounded like a fire hose let loose in the silence. He walked back to lose himself like a little boy in the immense library chair. Just before sinking behind a copy of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, he drawled, ‘Call me.’
She turned her glass slowly in her hand that was like a white tarantula.
‘Check,’ she said.
* * *
She watched him for another week. She found herself frowning most of the time. Several times she felt like screaming.
As she watched, one evening, he seated himself at dinner and said:
‘Madame, you look absolutely exquisite tonight.’
‘Thank you.’ She passed the corn.
‘A most extraordinary c
ircumstance occurred at the office today,’ he said. ‘A gentleman called to ascertain my health. “Sir,” I said politely. “I am in excellent equilibrium, and am in no need of your services.” “Oh, but, sir,” he said, “I am representative of such-and-so’s insurance company, and I wish only to give into your hands this splendid and absolutely irreproachable policy.” Well, we conversed pleasantly enough, and, resultantly, this evening, I am the proud possessor of a new life insurance, double indemnity and all, which protects you under all circumstances, dear kind lady love of my life.’
‘How nice,’ she said.
‘Perhaps you will also be pleased to learn,’ he said, ‘that for the last few days, beginning on the night of Thursday last, I became acquainted and charmed with the intelligent and certain prose of one Samuel Johnson. I am now amidst his Life of Alexander Pope.’
‘So much I assumed,’ she said, ‘from your demeanor.’
‘Eh?’ He held his knife and fork politely before him.
‘Charlie,’ she said wistfully. ‘Could you do me a big favor?’
‘Anything.’
‘Charlie, do you remember when we married a year ago?’
‘But yes; every sweet, singular instant of our courtship!’
‘Well, Charlie, do you remember what books you were reading during our courtship?’
‘Is it of importance, my darling?’
‘Very.’
He put himself to it with a scowl. ‘I cannot remember,’ he admitted finally. ‘But I shall attempt to recall during the evening.’
‘I wish you would,’ she urged. ‘Because, well, because I’d like you to start reading those books again, those books, whatever they were, which you read when first we met. You swept me from my feet with your demeanor then. But since, you’ve–changed.’
‘Changed? I?’ He drew back as from a cold draft.
‘I wish you’d start reading those same books again,’ she repeated.
‘But why do you desire this?’
‘Oh, because.’
‘Truly a woman’s reason.’ He slapped his knees. ‘But I shall try to please. As soon as I recall, I shall read those books once more.’
‘And, Charlie, one more thing, promise to read them every day for the rest of your life?’