Two Much!

43

It was the thought of the sleeping bag on the floor of my office that drove me at last to a reconciliation with Betty. I’d originally intended to make her stew a couple of days longer, but what the hell. Why not be magnanimous? Besides, there was no answer when I tried calling Linda Ann Margolies.

Having spent last night with Candy rather than on the northbound road toward some placid lake, I now found myself in the unlikely position of trying to get away from New York for a few days on the Thursday before Labor Day. I had no reservations anywhere, and the roads were already beginning to fill up with those maniacal death-wish families from the provinces: three adults, seven children, and a dog in a nine-year-old Plymouth doing forty on the New York State Thruway. It was really too late to go anywhere, so I might just as well stay in the city.

The hot city. The muggy city. The impossible city. It had been your typical New York City August, coming in like an armpit and going out like a mass grave. The Alfa was well air-conditioned and my office was poorly airconditioned, but that was about the limit of my options. Unless I wanted to nap ‘all day in a movie house somewhere, which I didn’t.

So, at four o’clock that afternoon, I phoned Betty. “Hello,” I said, when she came on the line, and I made myself sound properly depressed.

“Bart?”

An imp suggested to me that I be Art again, that I spend the next few days with Betty not as her husband but as her brother-in-law; but I briskly gave the imp the back of my hand — enough complexity is enough — and said, “Yes, it’s Bart.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m so glad you called.”

“I’ve been,” I said, “miserable.”

“Oh, so have I, darling.”

“I wish I could get you out of my system, Betty, but—”

“Oh, no, sweetheart, no! Darling, where are you?”

“In the office. Art’s office.” My voice trailed away a bit. “Everything is Art’s, I guess.”

“But I’m not!” she cried. “That was one mad — moment, one crazy — fling that didn’t mean anything, sweetheart, it was loneliness and self-pity and—”

“And I know how persuasive Art can be,” I said. It was time to start giving her an out.

She’s no dummy. She said nothing; she let the statement stand on its own teeny feet.

“Betty,” I said, “I want us to try again.”

“Oh, so do I, Bart, more than anything. We’ll have tonight together, and then tomorrow we’ll go out to the Island, just the two of us, no one around—”

“Won’t Liz be there?”

“She’s gone off someplace,” she said. “She was here last night, with some very very strange-looking man, and the two of them left this morning. She won’t come out to the Island, she told me so herself.”

“We could make a new start,” I suggested, tremulously, as though the thought had just come to me.

“A real start, this time. Oh, Bart, I’m so glad you called, I’ve been so unhappy!”

“So have I, sweetheart.”

“I’ll pack right now,” she said, rushing her words together. “I’ll have Carlos bring the car around, I’ll be down to pick you up in twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes?” Time enough to find a garage to stow the Alfa in; I wasn’t about to leave a beauty like that out on the street for the next five days. “I’ll be waiting,” I said.

“From now on,” she promised me, “life is going to be wonderful.”

“I believe you,” I said.