How Like a God

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He turned and walked over the strip of dingy carpet to the foot of the second flight of stairs. Above was semidarkness, drifting down almost to the foot of the stairs like a threatening fog. He hesitated before it, dully, enveloped in silence. Nothing could be more ordinary or familiar to him, yet he hesitated, feeling a strange new quality in the dim dreariness.

That was the time to fight it, he told himself, so plainly that he thought it was muttered words, though his lips did not move.

Then you might have beaten it and come free...

Jane had been married nearly a year; you had decided to tolerate Victor, but you saw them infrequently, partly because you felt that Margaret and Rose were trying to use you for a good thing and you didn’t intend to stand for it. Especially Rose. Jane, trying to manage a baby and a job at the same time, was too busy to notice it.

You sat there that night in Erma’s elaborate bedroom, wondering what was up. It was her first big dinner and dance at the house on Riverside Drive, and had been marvelously successful; she could do that sort of thing so easily, almost without thought. But why had she asked you to stay after the mob had left?

The door from her dressing-room opened, and she entered, fresh and charming with no trace of the night’s fatigue, wearing a soft yellow negligee. She stroked your cheek with her hand.

“Poor Bill, you’re tired,” she said.

You were somewhat disconcerted. “Not so very,” you said.

“Neither am I,” she replied, “put your arm around me.”

You held her close, at first mechanically, like a conscientious proxy; then, approaching excitement, on your own account. A strange night that was. Like watching yourself from the top of a mountain, too far away to see clearly...

In the morning it astonished you that she arose when you did and insisted that you have fruit and coffee with her; and there, at the breakfast table, she announced her opinion that it would be a good idea to get married.

“Since we’ve known each other over twelve years,” you said, “that suggestion, at this precise moment, is open to a highly vulgar construction. I can’t think why you propose it.”

“I’m tired of being Veuve Bassot. I want to invest in a husband.”

“At least you’re frank about it.”

“You ask why, and you insist. Perhaps I’m still curious about you, which would be a triumph. Or, maybe, I merely want a screen inside my bedroom door, in case the wind blows it open...”

You lifted your coffee cup, whipped into silence by her smiling brutality; and doubtless you looked whipped, for she pushed back her chair and came around the table and kissed you on top of the head.

“Bill dear, I do Want to be your wife,” she said.

All day long at the office, and the night and day following, you pretended to consider what you were going to do, knowing all the time that it was already decided. You had supposed that she would want a starched and gaudy wedding, but it was in a dark little parsonage parlor somewhere in South Jersey, with Dick and Nina Endicott as witnesses, Erma made her marital investment less than one month later.

It was Larry who introduced Major Barth to you and Erma; brought him out one evening for bridge. There was nothing impressive about him, except his size — almost massive, well-proportioned, with a little blond mustache that looked like a pair of tiny pale commas pasted couchant, pointing outwards, against his youthful pink skin. You would not have noticed him at all, among the crowd, but for the subsequent comedy.

The big handsome major began to be much in evidence, but still you took no notice; Erma’s volatile and brief fancies in the matter of dinner guests and dancing partners were an old story to you. Then, returning home one evening at nearly midnight, on mounting to your rooms on the third floor you saw light through the keyhole as you passed Erma’s room on the floor below, though John had told you that she was out and would not return until late.

In the morning you arose rather later than usual, and you were in the breakfast room with your emptied coffee cup beside you, just ready to fold up the Times and throw it aside, when you heard footsteps at the door and looked up to see Major Barth enter, twinkling and ruddy.

“Good morning,” he said pleasantly; and added something about supposing you had gone to the office and wishing he had one to go to.

It so happened that that evening you and Erma were dining out. As usual she came to your room and tied your cravat.

“Tim interrupted your breakfast, didn’t he?” she smiled.

In front of the mirror, with your back to her, you arranged your coat.

“And is he — that is — are we adopting him?” you inquired.

She was silent. Then she said:

“Sometimes you frighten me, Bill. You feel things too well, much too well for a man. How long have we been married, a year and a half? Yes, eighteen months. We’ve had dozens of house guests, some under rather peculiar circumstances, like the Hungarian boy last winter, and you’ve never lifted an eyelid. But you feel Tim at once; you’re much too clever.”

You were now dressed, and stood by the chair looking down at her, your hands in your pockets. “And after last night I am supposed to breakfast with him and discuss yesterday’s market? Not that I’m pretending any personal torment, but when that jackass walked in on me this morning I felt like an embarrassed worm. What do you want me to do? Shall I go and live at the club? Do you want a divorce?”

“Come on,” said Erma, “we’ll be late.”

It petered out to no conclusion.

It was a few years after that you moved to Park Avenue. You had been married five years!

“I’ve never lived in anything between a hotel room and a house,” said Erma. “The word apartment has always sounded stuffy to me. If we don’t like it we can probably sell without much loss.”

“I think we may scrape along somehow,” you remarked drily, “with nineteen room and eight baths.”

The arrangement was ideal, with your rooms on the upper floor, at the rear; and the night you first slept there you complacently accepted Erma’s suggestion that all knocking should be at your door. It had already been so, in effect, for two years; this merely formalized it.

She must have spent close to half a million furnishing that apartment. More than ten years of your salary. You figured it up with her once, but that was before the hangings had come over from Italy and the pictures and stuff she bought later in London. Why? She hadn’t gone in for the big show after all; there were too many rules to suit her. You never knew who you might find when you went home to dinner — anybody from that French duke with his cross-eyed wife down to some bolshevik professor. A whole tableful. Then for a month at a stretch you’d dine at the club, preferring that to a solitaire meal at home, while she would be off chasing restlessly after something which she never found.

Nor did you; you weren’t even looking for anything. Though you did one evening see something that stopped you and set you staring in the whirling snow. After a too ample dinner at the club you had gone out for a brisk walk in the winter night and, striding along Fifty-seventh Street, were suddenly in front of Carnegie Hall. A name on a poster caught your eye: Lucy Crofts. It was a large poster, and her name was in enormous black letters.

The date was in the following week.

Twelve years ago, you thought, it seems incredible. She’s nearly thirty. Over thirty! Lucy, Lucy! Yes, call her now. If you could get her back as she was — you don’t want much, do you? Let her come in now and run up the stairs to you, and you take her up and introduce her, politely — Lucy, this is—