The Return of Service

The Traditional Story Returns

Too many times you read a story nowadays and it’s not a story at all, not in the traditional sense. A traditional story has plot, character, and theme, to name three things it traditionally has. The following story, which contains a soupçon of mood in addition to the three major considerations named above, is intended as a modest “rearguard action in the service of a declining tradition.”

The plot is this: a woman of good family (we won’t say just how good the family is) marries a man of means. They live together in uneventful happiness for seven years until their love runs out. Then they split up but not before some bad times that leave scars of bitterness. Afterward, the bad times remain, particularly for the woman, and the good times are dashed on the rock of negligent memory, which is one of the themes of the story. Bad times in a marriage erase all memories of former happiness. The name of the woman of better than average family is Eve. What more is there to know of her? The answer to that question is the character part of the story.

Eve was born in Asheville, Ohio, to, as I said before, though it bears repeating, a good family. (On the night she and her husband, Fairlie, separated, the Yankees lost to the Milwaukee Brewers, ending a seven-game winning streak which had catapulted them to within eight games of first place.) She had a younger brother who died as an infant, Eve five at the time. After her brother Townsend’s death, she had her parents to herself, although they were by nature busy people, occupied by one remote grief or another — I’m speaking of the mother now. The father had his work. Eve was a shy, frail, long-legged girl skittery as a deer, with a hockey mistress manner and a fierce intelligence. When nervous she talked a streak, an articulate, charming prattle song, much admired by her teachers, which, if you listened to it wholeheartedly, had a desperate pleading note. Stay with me, it said, love me. There is a princess beneath the manner and I am smart as hell and loyal and passionate and brittle as kindling. She attended a girls’ school in the East — one of the seven sister colleges, Smith or Wellesley. Smith, I think, though it doesn’t matter to the story. Wellesley will do, or Holyoke. Not Vassar, of that I’m sure. In her second year she met the man she was going to marry, a pre-law student at Amherst or Yale. At the time she was in love with someone else or, which is almost the same thing, had given her heart away. Not much is known about it. She was given to self-conscious romantic poses during that period, took entranced walks in the woods, wrote obscure poems, would break off sometimes in the middle of her own chatter and get a misty, faraway look,

She thought Fairlie Robinson “a perfect bore” when she met him, which was what she told her roommate. Eve sometimes spoke with an English accent or used old-fashioned phrases to disguise her sense of the inadequacy of language to convey the ineffable. Her roommate, who tended to sensible questions, asked Eve how come she continued to see Fairlie if bored by his company. She knew what he was like, she said with affected cynicism as if she had practiced the answer to herself in anticipation of the question. Someone else might be worse.

When Fairlie Robinson first laid eyes on Eve he liked what he saw. He was a man, even then in his fourth year at Yale, who knew what he liked. She told him, to be honest and fair with him, that he was not her type. Nor could he ever hope to be, she said with sibyl’s tongue. Fairlie liked a girl with spirit.

Eve was surprised when on their second date Fairlie parked the car and grabbed at her.

I don’t do that kind of thing, Eve said. Fairlie thought that she might make an exception in his case, but Eve said exceptions were out of the question.

Nevertheless he continued to do what he was doing and seemed to have more hands, Eve told her roommate, than an octopus.

It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, the roommate, who spoke from firsthand experience, said. And then what happened?

What did happen? I’ve heard several versions of the incident, all of them agreeing on certain details and disagreeing on others.

I let out a stream of vile invective, Eve told Allison, which I don’t wonder must have burned his ears. That’s what Eve says she said. Allison’s recollection was somewhat different. She became absolutely rigid, she told me, like an alabaster statue, which served its purpose.

What was the purpose it served?

To get him to stop, silly. What a question.

Eve loved college, though tended, her class correspondent reports, to seem unhappy, a flower pressed between pages before its time.

Sometimes it was hard not to want to scream. Although a grabber — with experience would come savoir faire — Fairlie had the reputation of being a brick. It was that she admired most in him, his brickness, no mean quality.

When he broke off with her she had a feeling of heartbreak from which she thought she would never recover.

One day they were married. The heartbreak continued, which had its reassuring aspect. It was no fly-by-night fatal wound. They had seven idyllically happy years of marriage, but afterward the bad times covered over the good like a fat kid sitting on top of a skinny and she could hardly remember one good time. He had when making love, she remembered, more fingers than a centipede.

Here the story takes a surprising turn.

The war was over. The returning soldiers lined the streets looking for work.

When Eve left her husband — truer to say they left each other — we lost sight of her.

Only scattered reports about Eve since her breakup with what’s his name. Fairlie A. Robinson, Jr.

Some notes about Fairlie’s character. It is true that in his younger days he had the habit of grabbing at women in parked cars. There was more to him than that; that wasn’t the whole story about him.

Before he met Eve, Fairlie used to ride around with a reckless friend. When in the course of their dalliance a woman (or women) crossed their reckless path, Fairlie would pull down his pants and show his bare behind. It was called mooning and had a brief vogue at eastern men’s colleges in the late fifties. Otherwise, he was kind, industrious, cheerful, thrifty, vaguely dishonest, and a moon among bricks.

During the second year of their marriage, two Jehovah’s Witnesses came to their door, one a good-looking blond man in a sport coat and tie, the other a nondescript the blond introduced as his wife. They were very polite, asked if they might come in for a few minutes to share with the Robinsons a message of the utmost importance. They couldn’t have been nicer, but Fairlie sent them packing. “We have our own religion here,” he said.

“What religion do we have?” Eve asked later when there were no Witnesses. “What religion did you have in mind?”

Fairlie was watching (at the time of Eve’s question) the NBC Game of the Week. “Idol worshipping. How’s that?”

The next time the Jehovah’s Witnesses came by, Fairlie invited them in for “a little comparative religions talk,” slapping backs to show there were no hard feelings. The Witnesses, who were former thieves, reconverted after an hour’s dull debate, bound and gagged the Robinsons and robbed them blind.

That was how Fairlie and Eve got religion if the truth be known.

They went out together as a team a few times, proselytizing in strange neighborhoods, but it didn’t seem like much of a profession for college graduates. It was on the whole more satisfying to tell the story at parties, where everyone laughed fit to be tied.

Wherever they went people would say, oh tell us the story of how you kids got religion.

Eve didn’t particularly like the way Fairlie told the story, which was one of the side effects of the incident. It seemed unfair, since it was her idea to have the Witnesses in the first place, for him to tell the story more than she got to tell it. I mention this to indicate that even during their happy times the seeds of dissension were being sown.

Shortly after they were robbed blind, Fairlie got a job with his father’s firm, clipping coupons. His mercurial rise was a legend in its own time. While he was away transacting business, Eve pursued her own interests.

One morning they woke up to find themselves in a bed of suffering married seven years. Then it was all over but the recriminations.

Eve put it down to a learning experience, though couldn’t articulate what it was she had learned that she hadn’t already known from the word go.

A record of their next to last fight follows.

Fairlie: (Striding into the room) Eve, I’d like to talk to you.

Eve: (Feeling trapped by his presence, playing nervously with her hair, moving it back and forth across her shoulder) Please don’t. If you go away for an hour, it doesn’t matter to me where you go, I’ll be gone when you get back.

Fairlie: (Offering a view of his erection in profile, wanting to grab her, graciously) Why should you be the one to have to leave?

Eve: You asked me to leave, damn it, didn’t you? (Thinking of smashing him on the head with a bat, hitting him over and over, arm weary from her labors, until his head was pulp, body looped over stiffly like celluloid.)

Fairlie: After you, Eve, it will be hard to find someone who measures up. (When the fastball is gone, you must learn deception to stay in the big leagues, changes of pace, artifice, screwballs and knuckleballs, tricks of dispassion.)

Eve: (Made ashamed by his compliment, touched to deeper rage) I’d like to finish my packing if you don’t mind.

Fairlie: (Promising himself that he will not grab at her no matter what, grabs her arm) Look.

(The end)

From another source we learn that Eve punches him in the stomach, Fairlie laughing holds her by the wrists as if two snakes in his hands, let’s go to bed, he whispers, let’s;

She would go, she thinks, if he would ask in a way that would permit her to, says under no circumstance whatsoever my god will I ever let you stick that thing in me again. Smells whisky on his familiar breath, bourbon or Irish, when he lifts her from behind and thrusts her out of the apartment without her suitcase.

I’ll make a scene, she says softly, if you don’t let me in this instant. Her breath coming heavy as it does in panic. You mucky bastard.

In her suitcase, finishing her packing for her, Fairlie finds a photo of another man. He studies it for some time. It’s not even anyone I know, he says. It seemed unfair.

Eve comes back in say ten minutes to finish the fight. At least give me my purse, she says mournfully at the door. I don’t have a cent, not a cent.

That’s your tough luck; he says.

He unpacks her suitcase looking for clues. Something about her has always eluded his grasp, not everything of course — he has known her in and out for seven years.

Eve threatens to bring the police if not admitted.

It is a forefinger of fiction that you find what you’re looking for, when not aware in advance of the hidden purpose of the quest. What Fairlie finds is an old letter — the condition of the paper indicates its age — written by Eve, apparently unsent, to someone named Harris.

Dear Harris (So the letter begins).

It is difficult for me to write your name, a totemistic superstition no doubt. I am embarrassed that you will read the “dear” as literally as it sounds in my head when I write it. I know, though I would like to be wrong, that you will think this letter indulgent, or, worse, schoolgirlish. But I want to break through to you — is there any way to do that? — to tell you who I am. God, doesn’t that sound pretentious. If one day I ceased to exist would it, dear Harris, affect your life in the slightest.

When Eve let herself in with the key she had gotten from the super she discovered Fairlie reading her letter.

Please give that back to me, she said.

He ripped the letter in half and handed it to her.

It was as if he had torn her in two. If she had had a gun, she would have killed him without a qualm. Giddy, lightheaded, she whirled around and around in her imagination on perfect point, folded the two halves in half and ripped the letter evenly in quarters, then in eighths. When it was like confetti she sprinkled the pieces at Fairlie as if blessing him with holy water. Still, some part of her, though she had never felt so light before, was deeply offended. She felt like a flower opened beyond any further opening, inviolable. Her sense of her own power astonished her. It was as if she were a laser beam and could burn him to dust (the thought itself erotic to her) by the merest touch. When she came toward him he actually flinched, putting his hands in front of his face. She grabbed him. What do you think you’re doing? he said. She tumbled him to the floor and though Fairlie was not indifferent to the opportunity, took her pleasure by force as if it were a debt he had for seven years refused to pay. Fairlie’s view of it was somewhat different. As he saw it, what seemed like mysterious behavior on Eve’s part had, like all things, a perfectly simple explanation. Eve had let herself go because he had showed her he cared for her by destroying the letter.

You couldn’t go two steps in any direction without becoming aware of the general decline in cultural standards. Where would it all end?

He thought afterward that they might make it up, but she was afraid of the violence of her feelings (or so he interpreted her behavior) and moved out some minutes after their bout of love on the floor.

Her leaving as she did — the peculiar timing of it — embittered him, made him feel cheated. He said some nasty things about her to friends, tried unsuccessfully on more than one occasion to get her to come back. She would always hold a special place in his feelings, he thought. Was there another girl in the world like her?

They had one more fight but there was no heart in it and then by accord, perhaps merely by drift, went through with the divorce.