Wives and Lovers

2

At twelve-thirty George Anderson walked along the wharf towards the Beachcomber, a tall, heavy-set man wearing slacks and a sport shirt and a navy blue yachting cap trimmed with gold braid.

Someone had told George once that he moved like an athlete, and ever since then he’d been extremely careful to move like an athlete at all times, eyes straight ahead, shoulders back, stomach in, chin up. This posture was no longer easy to maintain, partly because he was forty now and putting on weight, and partly because in such a position it was difficult to avoid stepping into the holes in the wharf or stumbling against the two-by-fours where it had been patched up.

The wharf was eighty years old. It had been built to last forever but even the proudest citizens of Channel City were forced to admit that it wasn’t going to make it. Some of the holes in the planks were as large as fists and when cars drove along it or when a seiner accidentally struck it while docking, the whole structure swayed and tottered and the pilings squawked like gulls.

George took a personal interest in the wharf. He liked boats and he liked money, and the wharf meant both to him since the Beachcomber was built on the end of it. Sometimes, when a particular hole got so big that there was danger of one of the Beachcomber’s customers breaking a leg, George himself would come out and repair it, equipped with a bag of nails and a hammer and any piece of wood he could lay his hands on. One of the holes George had rather impulsively mended with the favorite chopping block of the Beachcomber’s head chef, Romanelli. After an exchange of bitter words with George over the incident, Romanelli went home and sulked for two days, drinking red wine and planning hot revenge. Unable to think of anything drastic enough and rather pleasantly tired from trying, Romanelli returned to work on the third day, docile and resigned, and George bought him a new chopping block and personally burned Romanelli’s initials on the side of it with a soldering iron.

On each side of the wharf “No Fishing” signs were posted but these signs were traditionally ignored and by noon the railings were lined with fishermen of all races and ages and sizes. George nodded pleasantly to each of them because they gave the wharf local color and provided interesting characters for the patrons of the Beachcomber to watch as they dined.

He stopped behind an old woman wearing oil-stained jeans and a wide straw hat pushed back on her head. Her face was brown and lively and covered with wrinkles, like coffee being stirred.

“Hiya, Millie.”

Millie jumped, clutching at her hat. “Jees, you scared.

“I see you’ve changed places again. How’s the luck over on this side?”

“The same,” Millie said. “The same, no matter where I go. I got a jinx, George.”

“Go on. You just have to keep trying.”

“I tell you, I got a jinx. It don’t matter whether I use mussels or squid or sardines, or what I use. Listen, George, I got a proposition.”

“Nuts,” George said pleasantly.

Millie’s propositions were always the same. They were a natural result of her jinx. Other fishermen might occasionally catch a stingray, but Millie hardly ever caught anything else. She usually pulled up at least one a day, and her problem was to get rid of it. If she threw it back into the sea it might be washed up on the beach and some curious child might pick it up and cut himself on the ray’s barbed poisonous tail.

After considerable thought on the subject Millie had figured out a way to make a profit on her jinx.

“Listen, George, you cut off the tail, see, and the head, and clean out the guts and what you got left? Filet of stingray. Only you don’t have to call it stingray on the menu. Maybe just filet of ray. Don’t that sound good to eat?”

“No.”

“Hell, George, you’re getting old, your mind’s narrowing. You think maybe just because a stingray’s a mean-looking bastard he won’t taste so good. You serve swordfish steaks and swordfish are the meanest-looking bastards ever lived.”

Laughing, George put his hands in his pockets and jingled the loose change. He had every intention of some day buying one of Millie’s stingrays and taking it over for Hazel to cook.

“I never see you eating any of the things,” he said.

“I had one last night for supper,” Millie lied solemnly. “No kidding, George, it was a real taste thrill. Maybe like tuna, maybe like abalone. High class stuff.”

“I bet.”

“Or chowder. How about making it into chowder, George? Chopped up like that, who’d know the difference from clams, I ask you. Be a sport and take a chance, George.”

“Ixnay.”

Millie sighed. “Oh well, no hard feelings anyway, eh? How’s Hazel?”

“The last I heard, fine.”

“I saw her drive by a few minutes ago. She went into the Beachcomber. How about that?”

“What do you mean, how about it?”

“I figure you and Hazel—”

“You figure wrong.”

“Well, you don’t have to bite my head off.”

With haughty dignity Millie returned to her fishing. She crossed herself and gave her pole three quick jerks to discourage her jinx.

Hazel’s old blue Chevy was standing in the middle of the parking lot next to the Beachcomber. Hazel had never learned to park properly and whenever she came down to the wharf she just left her car with the key in the ignition so that anyone who wanted it moved could move it without bothering her.

George unlocked the front door of the Beachcomber and walked through the foyer into the bar. Hazel was standing at one of the open windows looking out at the sea and breathing very deeply like an underwater swimmer storing up oxygen for the next dive.

He stared at her across the room, wondering why she had come, whether she had heard anything about him and the girl.

“How did you get in?”

“Through the kitchen. Romanelli told me you’d be along in a few minutes so I thought I’d stay and say hello. So, hello.”

“Hello.” He took off his yachting cap and began rolling up his sleeves. “Nice to see you, Hazel.”

“You act overjoyed.”

“It’s too hot to turn cartwheels.”

“Think you still could?”

“Sure, I think so.” He put on his bartender’s apron, tying it very tight to minimize his paunch. “I’ve been swimming from here to the breakwater and back every day for a week now.”

“Why?”

“Keeping in shape, that’s all. How about a beer to cool off?”

“Sounds fine.” She crossed the room and perched on one of the red leather bar stools with her legs crossed. “I heard you were on another of your health binges.”

“Who told you?”

“Word gets around.”

“It seems to me a hell of a lot of words get around to you.” He drew two beers from the tap. “Here’s to crime. Someday it may pay.”

“Right.” She sipped her beer. “Gee, this is like old times, eh, George?”

He looked at her uneasily over the rim of his glass. “I guess it is.”

“Maybe we ought to drink to old times.”

“That’s for New Year’s Eve.”

“What did you do last New Year’s Eve, George?”

“I don’t remember.” He remembered too well: he’d tended bar until two o’clock in the morning and then, in one of the vilest moods he’d ever experienced, he went home and began drinking. He woke up the next morning in a house on East Wilson Street with a plump black-haired girl lying beside him making little snorting noises in her sleep. His wallet was gone but he never reported it to the police.

“I kind of like New Year’s Eve,” Hazel said. “Don’t you?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Well, what else is new besides the health binge?”

“I wish you’d stop calling it that. I’m just trying to keep fit.”

“Romanelli says you’ve been eating seaweed.”

“I don’t eat it. I sprinkle a little of it on my food.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Hazel said earnestly. “How does it taste?”

“Pretty good.”

“What’s this seaweed supposed to do for you?”

“A lot of things. It’s full of vitamins and minerals and stuff like that. Matter of fact, a fellow I know has a kelp-cutting barge and I’m thinking of going into business with him.”

“The seaweed business?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I shall be very damned,” Hazel said.

“I might have known better than to mention it to you. It so happens that scientists have discovered many new uses for seaweed.”

“Name one.”

“There are hundreds. This fellow I know that owns the barge—”

“If I were you I’d stick to the restaurant business. The day may come when we’ll all be sitting around munching seaweed but I don’t think it’s close. Remember the time you sank two thousand dollars in that vacuum cap for growing hair?”

“You’ve never let me forget it.”

“How could I? We nearly starved for a year.”

“Look, Hazel, let’s not argue. If you’re worried about whether I’m going to go broke and you won’t get your alimony every month, forget it.”

“Maybe I’m a little worried,” she said dryly. “I can’t keep the house running without it.”

“Ruth has no job yet?”

“No.”

“I thought by this time she’d be well enough to go back to teaching.”

“They’ll never take her back, you know that. Maybe she knows it too. I can’t tell.”

“Poor old Ruth.” George disliked Ruth intensely, having suffered too often from her acid disapproval, but now that he no longer had to see her, he could afford to express a little sympathy for her. “How are the others?”

“Fine.”

“Another beer?”

“No thanks. I have to get back to work pretty soon.” She added, casually, without looking at him, “Harold says he saw you downtown the other night.”

“I didn’t see him.”

“You weren’t doing much looking around, Harold said.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“You were too busy with the new girlfriend.”

George put the two empty glasses into the rinsing trough and wiped his hands carefully on his apron. “So that’s why you came—”

“No, it’s not. I gave someone a lift and—”

“—to check up on me again.”

“Apparently you need some checking up. Harold says the girl was young enough to be your daughter.”

“So?”

Hazel gazed at him in a kindly way. About some things, especially women, George was a babe in arms and Hazel sometimes had to be a little rough with him, for his own good. “Just remember what I told you, George, time and again. When some young chick pretends she’s interested in you, you go and take a good look in the mirror.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, I—”

“Then you ask yourself: is it me or is it the Beachcomber she’s batting her eyelashes at? See what I mean, George? I don’t want you to make a sap of yourself. It’d be kind of a reflection on me if you made a sap of yourself. Just don’t get carried away.”

“Well, who’s carried away?” George said irritably. “I hardly know the girl.”

“Personally, there’s nothing I’d like better than to see you married again, to some nice sensible woman, a widow, maybe, with a little something in the bank.”

“All right, all right. You find her, I’ll marry her.”

“I’ll look around. Meanwhile, don’t you forget what I told you about the mirror.”

“No time like the present,” George said bleakly, and turned and stared into the mirror behind the bar. There, between a bottle of apple brandy and a bottle of vodka, was his face, and it seemed to him exactly the same face he’d always had, no better, no worse.

“See what I mean, George? You’re no spring chicken. You’re still a nice-looking man, for my money, but you’re not going to set fire to any young girl... What’s her name?”

“You wouldn’t know her. She’s one of the new girls I took on last week, a stranger in town.”

“I thought you made it a rule not to mess around with the hired help.”

“For Christ’s sake, who’s messing around? I drove her home a couple of times, is all. Now can we drop the subject?”

“What’s your hurry? I’m just getting interested.”

George leaned across the counter. His face was very red and the pulse in his temple throbbed with the rush of blood. “You won’t be satisfied until you know all about her, will you? You can’t leave me alone, can you?”

“I just — well, I’d like to see you happy, is all.”

“Don’t kid me. If you thought I showed the least sign of being happy you’d march down here and plug me full of holes.”

“You don’t—”

“Well, I’m happy now. Hear that? — I’m happy right now! So what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” Hazel said through stiff lips. “I’m glad to hear it. Very glad.”

George turned away, exhaling a long noisy sigh like an engine standing in a station letting off excess steam because it was not yet time to move. When he spoke again his voice was quiet and resigned. “Forget what I said. It’s not true, that business about plugging me full of holes. It’s just that I’m tired, I want to forget about things, including Ruby.”

“Ruby.” She had known of course that it had to be Ruby but until the actual mention of her name she had kept hoping that it wasn’t. The girl, for all her youth, had a shifty way about her, and George, for all his experience, was as artless and as easy to deceive as a baby. “All right,” Hazel said, “we’ll drop the subject. Forget about her.”

“The point is, I can’t. She keeps cropping up in my head. I’ll be thinking of something else and then suddenly, wham, Ruby will pop up in the middle of it.”

“And do you pop up in the middle of what she’s thinking?”

“Maybe, but I doubt it.” George smiled thinly. “As you pointed out, I’m not the type to set fire to any young girl.”

“I didn’t mean that as a nasty crack. It was for—”

“For my own good, yes, I know. Well, I haven’t set fire to her, and she hasn’t to me either. She’s just gotten under my skin, is all.”

“Oh.”

“I feel sorry for her, see. She’s a lousy waitress, moves around like I was running an old people’s home, and whenever she makes a mistake she stands around for ten minutes apologizing for it. She doesn’t realize that a customer would rather have a steak than an apology... And sloppy, God, is she sloppy. Half the coffee’s in the saucer and the other half’s on the floor, and she still manages to have enough left over to splash on the customer. She’s just not cut out for this kind of work.”

“I guess not.”

“But here she is, see? — and she’s not doing her job but she keeps trying so hard and the harder she tries the worse she gets. I ought to fire her before she wrecks the joint, but I can’t. She needs looking after. If I fired her, she’d be on my conscience.”

“You’ve got a nice roomy conscience, George, there ought to be a place for one more.”

Hazel climbed off the bar stool and smoothed her uniform down over her hips. Her arms and legs felt a little heavy, partly from the beer and partly from the depression that had come over her while George was talking. Though she was no longer married to George, or in love with him, she had a deep sense of responsibility for him as she had for all her friends and relatives, and it was a little disturbing to hear George talking about looking after somebody when he was the one who always had to be looked after. George was an impulsive man, and like most impulsive people he had friends who would have been willing to cut off a right arm for him, or at least a finger, and enemies who would have liked to shoot him on sight. It had been Hazel’s duty to protect him from both. Even now, when the marriage was ended and Hazel had been relieved of her duties, she still clung to some of them, like a retired general playing with tin soldiers and toy tanks long after the war was won or lost.

She said, “Well, I’d better be getting on my horse.”

“Hazel, if you were me, what would you do?”

“About what?”

“You know — Ruby.”

“Pension her off. Put her in a good orphanage. Feed her to the sharks. How the heck should I know what to do? It’s your life.”

“That’s the point, I don’t feel it is my life any more. I feel like I’m in a box and somebody’s sitting on the lid. Or—” George stroked his chin and scowled out the window. “Or like those lobsters way out there caught in the traps. At first they don’t realize they’re in a trap, they keep going through the same motions they always did, until zip, somebody pulls them up and there they are, lobsters Thermidor.”

“George Anderson Thermidor,” Hazel said.

Blinking, George drew his eyes away from the sea, and the invisible lobster traps. “I don’t know why I’m talking like this. It will give you the wrong idea of Ruby. Actually she’s a very shy, sweet kid.”

“No traps?”

“No.”

“Then what are you worrying about? No traps, no George Anderson Thermidor.” Hazel reached over the bar and patted him kindly on the shoulder. “You’ve got another one of your crushes, is all. Cheer up. You’ll get over it, same as always.”

George stared at her gloomily. “You’re a pretty swell woman, Hazel.”

“Baloney.”

“No, I mean it. You know what we should do, Hazel? We should go out right now and tie one on, for old time’s sake.”

“We should, eh?”

“We’ll go the rounds, how about it? I’ll forget all about this joint, and Ruby.”

“We’ll go the rounds, eh?”

“Why not?”

“You figure out why not.”

She began walking toward the door, very slowly, as if she expected to be called back.

George watched her, looking a little bewildered. “Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“But I thought you and I—”

“My idea of how not to have a good time is to go the rounds with you and watch you get stinking drunk so you can forget another woman.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake.”

“You give me a pain, George. You give me a big fat pain.”

She went out and slammed the door, and a minute later he could hear her racing the engine of the old Chevy. The smell of its exhaust fumes floated in through the open windows along with the smell of kelp and dead fish and hot rolls baking in the kitchen and tar from the underwater oil wells.

George watched the Chevy bounce along the wharf and then he turned and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was the same as it always was, except that it looked terribly surprised: What did I do or say? I just asked her to go out, to go the rounds.

It seemed to George that people deliberately or maliciously misunderstood his intentions. He always had the best intentions in the world, but lately every time he opened his mouth he got into trouble, the same as he did when he was a boy. When George was eight he had swollen adenoids and he kept his mouth open a great deal of the time to breathe through. One day when he was playing in the barranca behind his house, a bee flew into his mouth, and before he could spit it out the bee stung the roof of his mouth. For a long time after his adenoids had been removed, George kept his lips pressed together very tightly and he looked like a little old man with no teeth.

George had told this story to nearly everyone he knew, to point a moral, but he never told the sequel: that he was still deathly afraid of bees and that whenever he was worried he kept his jaws clamped together and his lips compressed, and looked like a big middle-aged man with no teeth.

Breathing through his nose George crossed the foyer and the dining room decorated with yacht pennants and abalone shells, and passed through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

While the bar and the dining room were deserted, the kitchen was alive with a kind of hysterical activity. A boy in a brown apron was oiling the dish-washing machine and whistling through his teeth. This boy had a gap between his two front teeth which was bad for talking but fine for whistling so he expressed himself not in words but with a variety of whistles, like a bird. All through the day and night his whistling served as an obbligato to the other kitchen sounds: the hissing of steam, the shrill squawking of the griddle, the banging of oven doors; bursts of Victor Herbert from the pastry chef and Romanelli’s eloquent cursing; the buzz of an electric timer measuring the minutes backwards, and the spasmodic peal of Mr. Romanelli’s own special alarm clock which he set to remind himself to do all kinds of things, to phone his wife, order turkeys, bawl out the linen-supply service and have the spark plugs checked in his car. At intervals throughout the day Romanelli’s alarm went off and the boy with the gap between his two front teeth whistled his allusive obbligatos.

Romanelli put down the chicken he was singeing and came over to George. He was stripped to the waist, but he wore his white chef’s hat.

“Lousy hot,” Romanelli said.

George nodded, without unfolding his lips.

“Some lady was here. Nice lady. She brought a present to you.” Romanelli’s eyes danced and his stomach heaved in silent laughter. “On the carving table I put it. Oh my, oh my.” Though Romanelli was inclined to be irritable, he dearly loved a joke, and when he laughed he laughed all over. His head bobbed, his chest shook, his feet stamped and his eyes laughed tears. “Oh my. Such a present. Such a nice lady.”

On the carving table was a freshly caught stingray. It was not quite dead. Its barbed tail moved now and then, and on each side of its head its dull, vicious eyes stared at George.

George’s mouth opened.

“Take that goddamn thing out of here,” he shouted. “Do you hear me? Take it out, get rid of the goddamn thing!”

He turned and saw Ruby standing in the doorway, looking pale and surprised. When she met his gaze she moved her arms convulsively and two cups rolled off the table beside her. They didn’t break, and Ruby bent over hurriedly to pick them up. Her handbag fell on the floor.

“And you,” George yelled. “You over there, you’re fired, see? Collect a week’s pay and get out! Hear me? You’re fired!”

Ruby grabbed her handbag and ran.

Romanelli impaled the stingray on a carving knife and carried it out to the garbage can.

Even after the stingray was gone George could still smell it, its sharp fishy odor mingling with the odor of soap and baking pies and chicken livers and Ruby’s Cashmere Bouquet talcum powder.